George Higgins - A change of gravity

Merrion kept his mouth shut.

Julian had played well enough and worked hard enough in the PGA Apprentice Program during the mid-through-late-Seventies to earn the card that qualified him to enter pro tournaments for the coming year, when he was twenty-four. He was coming off a record of having finished among the top ten in nineteen New England and Canadian pro-ams.

According to Heck, Julian partially financed his first year on the road with $6,000 won from men whose professional success had made them overconfident. Mistakenly believing they'd become good golfers, too, they thought because Julian was a transient and they were scratch players on familiar home turf, they were each fifty or a hundred bucks a round better than he was. Because Julian was careful not to beat them too badly, many tried several times to disprove what was plainly so. Heck cheerfully provided the other $19,000.

From the outset Heck had agreed to provide $15,000. The additional $4,000 or so had gone to cover unexpected expenses: among them four new tires for Julian's Bronco, several disappointing pot-limit poker hands he'd drawn sitting in on a game down in Augusta, Georgia, the week before the Masters, and a flirtation with cocaine that for a few years scared the hell out of him — explaining his need for more money to Heck, he camouflaged it as a costly lesson learned in a high-stakes eight-ball showdown he'd lost in a billiard room in Baton Rouge. Heck guilelessly repeated that story to his friends.

Merrion had seen Julian playing poker and bridge at Grey Hills with some of the better-off but denser members. He had no trouble believing Julian had gotten hoovered in Augusta. Never having known Julian to wear out the felt practicing combinations in the hush of the mahogany billiard room at Grey Hills, Merrion disbelieved Heck's second-hand story of the embarrassment in Louisiana, but he didn't scoff.

When Steve Brody's kid, Mark, claimed to've seen Julian once or twice doing business with the dealer in Holyoke who had supplied Mark for about a year, until the night State Police dropped in on a buy, Merrion was not wholly convinced by Mark's story. He had no trouble believing Julian used coke, but doubted he'd use a local supplier and if he had, it was probably Steve's rotten kid. Merrion believed Mark was setting the stage to retail Julian to the cops unless his father's clout with Merrion, earned by faithfully looking out for Larry Lane, was enough to save his ass from hard time. That made Merrion apprehensive that the time'd finally come when he'd have to say something to Heck, no matter how much it hurt him. After Mark's diversion into rehab, he braced the kid for the truth about Julian. Mark rubbed his red eyes, snuffled his corroded nose and said Heck's kid had been clean for a year. Merrion hadn't told Heck.

Heck Sanderson hadn't needed that. He owned the Mohawk Printing Company on Route 2, a couple miles east of Greenfield. He claimed it was grossing $6.3 million a year, nearly double the amount it had been making in 1968 when his father left it to him, when Heck was thirty' Seven But for an unadventurous young man from a settled, comfortable family, prepared at Deerfield for Syracuse, a family tradition; excused by a heart murmur from military service; married to a childhood sweetheart from the family's Unitarian congregation in the town where he'd grown up, Heck had taken his share of punches.

His father, Haskell senior, had been a man of indisputably upright character, moral and honest to a fault. The fault was that he was a domineering, overbearing, parsimonious, 'general-purpose son of a bitch." Heck had had to subordinate his own mind and spirit all the years he'd had to work for Haskell, grimly deferring to decisions that prevented the business from growing. When Haskell died of a stealthy brain tumor undetected until three weeks before he died 'he got a headache so all-fired bad he was actually forced to spend the time and the money to go see a doctor' Heck had managed the ceremonies of committal with spare, bleak, formal dignity, and that was all.

Having come into the life that his brains and hard work had earned for him, enjoying a few reasonable luxuries like membership in Grey Hills and a ski lodge in Vermont 'if the old bastard wasn't dead, what I've spent would've killed him' Heck wife, Lisa, died at the age of forty-one.

She was felled by a cerebral aneurysm while standing in her back yard one sunny April morning, feeling very good indeed, a dark blue headband on her dirty-blonde hair, slim in her starched pale-blue man-tailored shirt, stone-washed blue jeans and white sneakers, her feet apart and her arms folded under her breasts, smiling in her certainty that she fairly sparkled.

When it hit she was talking animatedly with a handsome young nurseryman named Nick Hardigrew. He had blue eyes and wavy black hair, white teeth and the well-muscled body of a lifelong athlete, former lifeguard and outdoor worker. He had driven up from Suffield, Connecticut at her invitation to look at the property and prepare a bid on re-landscaping it, planting dogwood, cherry, silver birch and red maple trees. A certified arborist, he had earned his bachelor's degree in arboriculture at the University of Massachusetts in his mid-twenties after two years in the infantry. He had enlisted out of high school planning on a military career, but after washing out of airborne school at Fort Benning, had taken an honorable discharge. He had learned cardiopulmonary resuscitation so that he could support his family by moonlighting as an EMT while building his business.

When Lisa Sanderson collapsed he kept his head and used all of his skills on her, but nothing worked. When the Northampton Rescue Unit arrived he told the driver: "That oxygen's not going to work. There was nothing I could do, that anyone could've done. She was dead before she hit the ground."

She had died happy. When the stroke slammed her on her back, brain-dead, she'd been having considerable but very pleasant difficulty keeping her mind on trees and bushes. Having met him, she'd become convinced that her friend Nina Ealing from Longmeadow, another stylish lady on the board of trustees of the Springfield Symphony, was definitely having an affair with this young man. She had begun to suspect it when Nina blushed and became flustered, fluttering her hands as she gushed her recommendation of Hardigrew's work. And she'd become sure that he was now coming on to her, which she found charming and exciting. She had been consequently quite distracted by a fantasy in which she'd already given him the landscaping job in order to have sex with him on the green-and-white chaise lounge in the sunporch on some hot afternoon when he was sweaty and had removed his faded black tee-shirt and used it to mop his hairy chest, she having lightly and casually invited him inside with an offer of beer. She had also definitely resolved simultaneously, it seemed, and perhaps more realistically, but ruling nothing out — to ask Nina wickedly over a drink after the next board meeting whether Hardigrew's bedding skills were limited to gardening. Then her happy world and her fine girlish plans and all her laughing dreams disappeared into the last darkness.

Devastated, Heck nonetheless seemed within a year or so to have recovered his equilibrium. The following winter, 1973-74, he'd remarried quite suddenly, it'd seemed to his friends if not to his only child, then about twenty. Julian hadn't been noticeably affected by his mother's death. "Hardly seemed to notice it," Hilliard'd said to Merrion when Heck was not around. "Not that it didn't inconvenience him; I heard him tell someone that the reason he didn't play in the Berkshire member-guest was the first round was the day of her funeral.

But nothing serious."

At first the new marriage seemed happy. The second wife was young enough but not too young, and that was good, such balances being important when a new woman moves into a small and settled community as the spouse of a prominent member. Not that anyone at the club was ever really sure of her exact age; she looked to be in her late thirties, a copper-haired and very pretty divorcee he'd met skiing, up at Killington. Some thought it ominous that while her name was Alicia, Heck called her "Lisha' in their hearing, too close to his first wife's name to make them feel right about it "Lisa Two," they called her, behind her back; suggesting Heck'd seized upon her mindlessly, as a replica.