George Higgins - A change of gravity

Hilliard's seven-year-old dark-green Mercedes Benz 300D sedan was not in the lot east of the clubhouse when Merrion parked his Eldorado coupe metallic maroon; white leather-grained-vinyl tiara roof, gold nameplates and badges, and narrow-striped whitewall tires. He was nowhere to be seen around the locker room or the putting-practice green. Running true to form: late.

For him it was like having an irregular pulse: He recognized it as abnormal but lived comfortably with it, so it was all right. Aware that his attitude angered people who had business with other people as well as with him, he considered their reactions excessive and did not become upset. "When I'm late I know sometimes people get pissed off," he said to Rev Peter Healy, a friendly priest and Grey Hills member, irritated by his tardy arrival at a communion breakfast. "I cram a lot into my life, much as I possibly can. Things sometimes take longer than I expect. Therefore I become late getting to the next thing.

Welcome to reality. I can't do much about it, unless I'm ready to start saying No a lot. In this case that would've meant I couldn't come to this affair. You would've been mad at me. Thus proving that in politics saying No to people more'n you have to isn't a wise practice; therefore I'm not ready. So what you have to do, dealing with me, is master delayed gratification. You may find that also solves that problem you've been having with premature ejaculation."

"You could call, though, once in a while," Mercy would tell him. "I don't like it, but I knew you had this problem and married you anyway.

I have to live with it. Other people don't think they do. They think the least you could do is call up. Let someone know you're going to be late. You're inconsiderate. All that matters is when you're ready to get around to doing something; never when somebody else is.

"I know," she'd say, "I know I know I know. I met Danny when he came to a freshman mixer my first year at Emmanuel. The next week we went out. A month later we were going steady. I haven't seen the beginning of a movie since I was eighteen years old. The only times I've seen the priest come out onto the altar've been the times I went to Mass by myself. When I go with Danny I'm lucky to hear the epistle; he thinks if you hear the gospel, you've been. I pretended I liked baseball when he was courting me. I didn't, but it's easy when the ballgames you see start in the fourth inning. You'd like me to break him of this habit?

Where do you live Fantasy Island?"

Legislative colleagues criticized him as difficult to work with, saying his habitual tardiness had a domino effect on their schedules, making others angry at them. Friendly TV reporters allocating regional and statewide air-time became unfriendly as he failed repeatedly to show up for interviews on time. Commentators who differed with him ideologically found sinister implications, delivering commentaries suggesting that his chronic lateness betrayed deep-seated disdain for ordinary people, scorn he expressed more subtly and harm fully in the liberal and elitist legislation he proposed and sponsored. One Globe columnist who was black printed his deduction that Hilliard's failure to show up for an interview was proof of racism, prompting a colleague who was white to respond the next day: "On the contrary, it proves his deep commitment to equal rights. Dan Hilliard runs his life like a no-appointments barber-shop; rich or poor, or black or white, everybody waits."

In the fall of 1972 Hilliard arrived an hour and twenty minutes late for a George McGovern fund-raising dinner at the Park Plaza. "No one in Boston last night probably would've minded much that the Democratic majority leader in the Massachusetts House decided to dine fashionably late," Tom Brokaw said on NBC, smiling broadly, 'if Mister Hilliard hadn't been the person scheduled on the program to introduce the presidential candidate." Brokaw's mischievous glee designating "Hilliard's gaffe' as 'one of many low-lights' in the chaotic state of McGovern's presidential campaign, 'reeling across the country from fiasco to debacle' suggested to Merrion and others familiar with Hilliard's urges that the anchorman knew very well what had deflected Dan from the performance of his duty.

Fiercely chastising Hilliard by phone, as by then he had done many times face to face, Merrion said: "Brokaw thinks you were off getting hid, for Christ sake. As I also think, and I'm not the only one, either. I think we're gonna have to get you operated on. Get you gelded like they have to do to horny race horses, get their minds off their cocks and make 'em behave, keep their minds on their business.

You're makin' yourself into a laughing stock. Wreckin' your career with your dick. Pissin' yourself. I'm your friend and I'm fuckin' ashamed of you."

Hilliard sounded miserably contrite. "Mercy's mad at me, too," he said.

"She oughta be," Merrion said. "Mercy's an intelligent woman. I'd be surprised if she wasn't. You think she believes you spend four nights a week in your Boston apartment watchin' TV and tattin' doilies? If she does, it's because she wont face the truth. And if that's it, it wont be for much longer you're makin' it too hard for her. You're embarrassin' your friends, Dan, but you're making her life Hell on earth. Everyone laughin' at you. Brokaw, for Christ sake on national TV; he probably knows her name, for Christ sake, who the broad is you're fooling around with. And your office didn't help any either, some beauty in there tellin' the Globe "something suddenly came up."

And if you try to tell me the Globe guy made it up, I'll tell you he should get an award. Next thing'll be Johnny Carson tellin' jokes about you inna monologue."

Hilliard demurred, very feebly, saying Brokaw wouldn't have any way to find out the name of the woman "I've been seeing."

"Oh put a lid on it," Merrion said, 'give me a load of that shit. What you're doing isn't "seeing." It's "fucking," "getting' blow-jobs."

Inna second place, everyone knows anything knows it's Stacy, and everyone who doesn't's going to pretty soon. Meat that fresh don't keep."

Stacy Hawkes was a twenty-nine-year-old woman who preferred to work chiefly in the newsroom as a producer for the CBS Boston affiliate; a former Miss Connecticut during her junior year majoring in history at Yale, she had started out in the business as on-air talent. She said she did her occasional award-winning special reports on state politics to keep her teeth sharp and 'make sure I can still do it."

Political reporters at competing Boston stations bitterly alleged she gained inside information by means that the males among them lacked.

The females said they would not work the way she did.

Late for golf with Merrion that August Saturday, nearly a quarter-century later, Hilliard had logged more than ten years in what he called his 'public-educator suit' since his retirement in 1984 from what he described as 'the open and gross practice of politics." Hasn't changed him a bit.

Merrion had not bothered checking the sign-up sheet on the wall of the pro shack to see whether they were still playing by themselves at 11:30 or if Dan, without telling him, had paired them with another twosome scheduled to start later. He sat contentedly in one of the puffy-cushioned light blue PVC-pipe armchairs in the dappled shade on the blue-grey flagstone terrace overlooking the first tee, at indolent peace with the summer-Saturday universe around him and all but one of the people within his field of vision in it. A mug of creamed hazlenut coffee cooled on the round white PVC table in front of him.

Over it he watched Julian Sanderson, Ralph Lauren golf ensemble artfully disheveled, set skillfully to work on the three new members.

Not that he lacked talent; what he would be doing, lightly adjusting grips and forearms; tucking left elbows in; widening and narrowing; opening and closing stances, turning torsos ever so slightly was overloading their minds, so that before they hit a ball that morning they would be focused upon doing their very best to hit it as he said.