George Higgins - A change of gravity

"Am I being fair?" she said. "Probably not. This younger woman's been through a divorce, and she isn't thirty yet. Plenty of time yet for her to rack up a couple more husbands, before she turns forty-eight. Would that make a difference to me? Could be. But she isn't forty-eight yet, she's twenty-seven, and her having the one marriage now behind her doesn't cause me the same concern.

"It's the same thing with the other two," Mercy said. "Something on their resumes that says regardless of how articulate, personable and compassionate they may turn out to be when they come in, we're not going to want to hire them. One's a man who admits that he's an alcoholic. He tries to make it into an advantage.

Says he's been sober eight years he's forty-two now and he's counselled many other alcoholics who've told him he's got a special empathy for drunks. Maybe he has, but so've bartenders, and drunks aren't the only kind of patients we get. A lot of them, sure, but that's not enough, knowing how to get the boozers into AA and get themselves straightened out. I don't want him.

"The other one's another man who's also got something in his background that disturbs me: he got all his training from his church. It's one of those evangelical Protestant churches, and for all I know he's a very fine man. But what we're looking for here's a counselor, not a lay preacher, and I think if we hire him every priest and minister and rabbi for miles around'd be up in arms."

"ACLU probably too," Hilliard said. "Public money funding private religion paying for missionary work. Nothing like a good old little church-and-state dust-up, get everyone's bowels in an uproar. No, I think you're right about all I doubt you'll hire any of them."

"So then," she said, "I should call up the others and see if they agree that we should cancel the rest we've got scheduled? Say: "Let's hire this one we saw last night. I think she's great. She's smart and she's eager and with the alimony I assume she gets she can live on our salary. And call up the others and tell them we're sorry but we've filled the job, and we wont be talking to them."

"Rotten idea," he said. "Please don't do that." "Why?" she said.

"I'm sure it's what we should do." lYou are," he said. "The other four people on the search committee may not be. One of them may be secretly backing one of those three or four candidates you now want to brush off — or one of the others you've already seen who didn't impress you as much. Don't forget that the committee called for these statements of interest, invited and solicited those applications.

People go to infinite pains when they compose those things. Their lives and egos go on those sheets of paper. They're not going to be pleased if you now just go and dump them.

"And the instant that you try to do what you said, any member of the committee who's got a candidate's going to be dead-set against anything and everything you propose after that. No matter how great the new friend you met tonight seems to you, they'll never vote for her; you will've made her into "Mercy's candidate." Never mind how pissed-off the candidates you didn't have come in'll be, with some justification; the other people on the committee'll start hollering bloody murder.

"You're as bad's your husband, going outside the process, ramming stuff down people's throats. You're trying to railroad us; who the hell do you think you are?"

"Even though they pestered you to get involved because they know with Donna in the Fernald we're interested in mental health, and you might even know something about what a counsellor needs to be. And because they figure maybe you can sweet-talk me into getting state money for their center. And maybe you might be able to do that, if everybody plays nice. But that little scheme'll go right by the boards if they decide now you're trying to run the show for them. You try to bull something through on this, they'll turn on you like dogs. People who don't like me will oppose your choice for that reason, and people who oppose you will try to get back at you through me. Don't do it.

Scuttle the statewide phase, sure, but honor the rest of the appointments."

"I really liked her, though," Mercy said.

"I understand that," Hilliard said. "You've made that very clear. Try not to do it again, with anybody else. Don't let on yet how impressed you were. Anyone asks, be open without telling them much. Be creative with the truth; if you have to, lie discreetly: misrepresent stuff they wont ever be able to prove. Say you're determined to keep an open mind. Give all the applicants fair, impartial hearings. You may've been more impressed with one or two than you were with a couple others, but that may be just the way you happened to feel the night they interviewed. May want to change your mind before you vote. You might let it slip out you think the best so far might be this what'd you say her name is?"

"Diane Whitney," Mercy said. "Her maiden name was Crouse. She's originally a midwesterner. Came here when she was still married her husband had a job at UMass." teaching economics. She's really quite pretty; sort of freckled, reddish hair, ties it back in a bun; might have a slight problem with her weight, I'd guess, but who hasn't. I can't imagine why any man who was married to her would ever want to divorce her."

"Maybe he didn't," Hilliard said. "Sometimes it's the lady's idea."

Walter Fox's divorce from Jackie had come through in the fall of 1970, a few months after Diane's appointment as the resident counselor at the Hampton Pond Community Service Center. Early in 1971 they married, Diane prevailing upon him to sell the massive white Victorian mansion in Hampton Falls left to him by his grandfather Phil and for their wedding present buy one of the properties his agency listed. It was a beautifully kept Federal Period two-story grey wooden house with white trim and a yellow door set among the oaks and maples on the rocky knob of Pynchon Hill. Her principal motive was the sunny new kitchen shrewdly installed at great but tax-deductible expense by the previous occupants, bent upon selling quickly at a good price. But they could afford it; Diane's practice had prospered nicely, and although Walter's extremely conservative management of the Fox Agency tended to keep profits small, they were steady.

Feeling herself unexpectedly settled and secure as she approached thirty, she began to develop an interest in what she called 'really serious cooking." Sabatier knives protruded from the birch block next to the stainless-steel six-burner gas range. The Zero King refrigerator dispensed cubed and cracked ice. Diane's was the first Cuisinart Mercy Hilliard saw in someone else's home.

"And the nicest thing about all of the equipment," Mercy said, 'is the absolute magic she does with it." Mercy admired her new friend boundlessly. The nine-year difference in their ages bothered neither of them at all. They talked on the phone four or five times a week and lunched every Friday in the glass-enclosed Flower Room at Gino's Hearthside, ordering salads nicoise and drinking iced tea so as to avoid gaining weight, and also so that neither Diane's patients nor Mercy's classmates in the UMass. graduate school of education would detect alcohol on their breath Friday afternoons.

To Hilhard it seemed clear from the beginning that Diane dominated the friendship. He was uneasy about it. It was Diane's example, if not something she'd said for all the difference that made that had prompted Mercy to think about what she would do if he should decide to divorce her. Mercy admitted it to him. "It happens," she said, 'it does happen to people. People you'd never expect it to. Diane said when she married Tommy and left Wisconsin-Madison to go to London with him, she never dreamed they'd ever break up. But by the time they got to UMass. she'd decided she'd better get her degree. She'd seen a couple of their friends get divorced, so she knew it did happen, and when it did the woman was a lot better off if she had something she could do.