George Higgins - A change of gravity

In retrospect there seemed to have been no obvious reason why it shouldn't've worked out, anything that should have alerted Heck's friends to what was going to happen so they could have been ready to help him get through it. She was certainly pleasant enough when you met her, and by the look of it she seemed to be at least fairly well-off herself, so she didn't appear to be after Heck's money. She even took up golf, right after they were married. But then before anyone had really gotten to know her, Heck the following July put it around quietly that they'd been divorced and she'd moved back to Michigan, less than a year after they'd been married. He seemed to take it pretty well without the help of friends, though: "Just one of those things, i guess," was about all he had to say about it. "I guess some things you just never know 'til you've tried 'em, and then when you find out they weren't what you thought you don't want them around anymore. That's the way it goes, some times; just the way it goes."

The consensus was that it couldn't've been Heck's fault his business remained intact.

Heck made no secret of the pride he took in what he'd done to expand the firm, building much of it on major printing contracts he'd gone after and won from the Commonwealth. A year or so after Haskell's death, Heck had come down to Holyoke one Friday night with Carl Kuiper, a major electrical contractor from Deerfield. Carl was a big beefy man with a big stomach he shelved on the waistband of his trousers. He complained that he gained weight despite considerable exercise, snow-shoeing cross-country in the winter; in the summer rowing himself the 2.5 miles from his big stone house on Hampton Pond to his favorite fishing cove. His face was deeply red, partly from rosacea, a skin condition that his doctor said was aggravated in his case by reckless exposure to direct sunlight. "But I always wear a hat," he said, disregarding sunlight reflecting from the snow and water. His doctor also said the rosacea meant he should avoid drinking alcohol. "Ahh, all I ever drink is beer," he said. "I sweat a lot when I work out and get dehyderated. I threw up and fainted once, I let that happen to me.

Not going to again."

Kuiper's place of business was outside Hilliard's district, but his voting residence was in it and he got a good amount of business from construction companies who had big and important projects in the region. He got more from the Commonwealth, and he considered those enough reason to warrant generous support of Dan Hilliard. He was one of the stalwarts, with a regular place at the big oak table for the 'dancing-school meetings' Hilliard and Merrion held in the second-floor office on High Street. Carl introduced Heck as a kindred spirit with some darned good ideas to expand the regional industrial base. Heck always kept his checkbook with him, too, Carl said.

In due course Hilliard led Heck by the hand through the whole rigamarole of negotiating State contracts, as he made a practice of doing with many businessmen he knew from his district and nearby anywhere in the Commonwealth, really, if they came to him asking for help, because in those days he was keeping open the possibility he might want to run for Congress some day. Under Hilliard's guidance Heck tuned his pitch to the purchasing agent in the office of the Secretary of State and the Governor's commissioner of Administration and Finance. He emphasized the ripple effect that expanded light industry offering steady employment for skilled workers would have on the economy of the area, disproportionately and dangerously dependent on _ i agriculture ever since the mills along the Connecticut River shut down.

Hilliard said he meant to make that the theme of his career. "The way I see it, taking care of the voters in the district means working to improve their future," he liked to say in the Grange and Legion halls out in the dark hills after summer had receded again, the fairs were over and the nights were starting to get cold. "The future of the men and women who get up every morning and go out and do a job, come home tired at night, hoping they've done something that day that'll mean a better future for themselves and their children. A better day tomorrow, and then an even better one, the day after that. To do that we have to bring industry back here. That's the only way, and so I'm determined to do it, make this place prosper again."

"What an utter and absolute load of shit that was," Merrion said one night in Hampton Pond, fatigued and hungry but still an hour away from a drink and a meal, sliding into the driver's seat of Hilliard's car he or another worker always drove between campaign stops, so that if the candidate's car hit someone or something, no one would be able to suggest it had happened because the candidate had been speeding to his next event, negligent or drunk. It had been maybe the second or the third time Merrion'd heard him unload that particular extravagance on an audience, but the first time he'd actually listened to it. Hilliard, also dead-tired, beat, had confounded him by snarling back: "That "utter shit" I happen to believe, you fuckin' asshole. Every last fuckin' word of it. Don't you ever sneer at it again."

Merrion had subsided, knowing Hilliard did not believe it, but wanted to, because after trying it out a few times, he knew it worked.

"Sings," was the way he put it: "That stuff just sings to them."

"The way I look at politics, and how it oughta work," Hilliard would say thoughtfully when the mood washed over him again and he felt the time evangelically right, embellishing the theme that sang, 'it seems to me that it should be the man who gets the job in Boston should remember where he comes from, and he should make sure that when he gets there and while he's serving you down there, he's still listening to what's being said out here. Still listenin', and still talkin' to the people, the people who said to him: "All right, now we've heard what you said, and we're sending you to Boston. Now let's see what you can do."

"So here I am now and I'm sayin': "All right, now what else can I do?

How can your government help you? And: How can you help, what can you do, to help me make our government work better?" See, we're just getting' started here. We're not close to finished yet."

"But Jesus Mary Joseph," Hilliard would say, when they were in the office by themselves with no listeners around, when it was someone like Heck Sanderson he was teaching to dance, 'it's awful hard helping a black Protestant bastard like this. Haskell Senior was a Know Nothing.

My father told me that. No Irish in his shop. "No Irish Need Apply."

His son takes after him, too. I'd bet on it. You swallow that stuff with your mother's milk, you grow up a bigot.

"What we've always got to remember with Heck is we can't trust the son of a bitch. He didn't come down here with Kuiper that night because his heart'd leaped up when he heard me. He came down because Carl convinced him I'd be a good man for him to support, because if he did, he'd make money. And if somebody else comes along tomorrow afternoon and makes him a better offer to dump me and go with them, Heck'll drop me like hot iron. He's got harsh words to say about his old man, now that the old boy's in the ground, probably with a stake in his heart, but Heck'd join the Klan himself if they gave him sound business reasons."

But Hilliard had done his best for Sanderson just the same and his efforts worked. Heck increased his financial backing. He described himself as 'one of Dan's oldest angels." Publicly he said no one was happier than he was when the new campaign finance law went through, limiting each contributor to a maximum donation of $1,000 per candidate per primary and per general election campaign, "Saved me a ton of money." In practice Heck saw to it that each of his top ten or twelve employees and their spouses maxed out in all of Dan Hilliard's campaigns after that, at no cost to themselves. "All open, perfectly above board. My shysters looked up the law. Perfectly legal, give my fine employees a nice raise if I want, so I did. What they do with it's their business. This is still America, right?"