George Higgins - A change of gravity

"What'd she used to call him?" Hilliard said. '"Franklin Delano Roosevelt"?"

"She called him "Judge," Merrion said. "But then someone told her it was Chris; he was still living at home then, after I'd moved out that he's just the clerk. "He's not the judge. He doesn't decide anything."

"Her reaction was: "Well, what did I know, he was only the clerk?

Someone told me he worked at the courthouse. Who works at the courthouse, huh? Judges. How'm I supposed to know he wasn't one? I was never inside it, thank God none of my family was ever arrested. We always behaved ourselves. He certainly looked like a judge ought to look, always very well-dressed and so forth. Although come to think of it, kind of flashy, for a judge. But always a jacket and tie, winter, summer or fall; shoes always shined; a clean shirt and a hat, always a hat. A felt hat in the winter, straw hat in the summer. Nice camel-hair overcoat in the cold weather. Mister Lane is a very sharp dresser." '"Well," Chris tells her, "how he dresses doesn't count. It's what he does that counts. And all he does is file papers no one ever looks at, and collect the money for tickets. It's not like he can send you to jail. He don't amount to a piss hole inna snow."

"To your mother he said that?" Hilliard said. "Did your father rise up out of the grave and belt him one? Pat might've said piss hole out in back at Valley Ford, but never in front of her."

"Well, the general idea was all I meant," Merrion said. "I don't know what Chris actually said. He was just givin' the general idea. Which's what I'm trying to give to you here. I asked my mother about him. I think I can work for this guy. I think it'd work out all right. Not someone I would call, I was lookin' for a guy go out'n have a few with, no, but otherwise, I see no problem.

"And let's not get carried away with ourselves here, either, when we're discussing this thing. This job that Lane's got with nobody in it, it isn't that big a thing. "I get by on it": was what Dad used to call his job, and that's all this job is, too. I can get by on it. A steady check is what I want. I never had any ambition.

"My own mother'll tell you that, if I'm not careful. God knows she's told me enough she's always giving me that. "Second prize, the small change, the leftovers. You poor kid, you've simply got no ambition at all."

Merrion had listened many times while she low-rated him to others. "It just isn't in Ambrose's nature to put himself forward, you know? He's tall enough and strong enough and fat enough, too, God knows he should be, see the way he eats all the time. His father used to say he wasn't a bad athlete. Not that he was ever a real good athlete either that might've meant he'd stand out.

"Pat never seemed to mind, though. I think now it was because he never aimed too high himself. Pat was always careful not to make himself conspicuous. Get his name in the papers, so someone heard about him. I think he approved of that attitude Amby had. He said if Amby didn't watch out, wasn't careful, he'd get too good at something in school, and pretty soon he'd wind up going far away to some fine university or something. I used to think he didn't mean it; that was his way of pushing Amby, getting him to do something. But now I'm not so sure.

"He'd say Amby didn't want people to think he wanted something really good to happen: "Mustn't let 'em catch you aiming too high for anything in this world. You might get it. Then God only knows what could happen. People might not like you anymore. Say you went high-hat on them, something bad like that might happen. It's just not worth takin' the risk, you know?" After a while Pat had us all convinced, Chris and me and Amby both. "Chris's the one who's got his eye on the moon. What Ambrose wants is for people to like him, to be the hero's best friend, covers his backside for him. Never the hero himself."

Thirty years later Polly (Flavin) Merrion late that benign Saturday afternoon in August lay non compos mentis at age seventy-nine in the bed in the bright sunny room with southwestern exposure on a small enclosed patio overlooking a round pool with a tulip-shaped recirculattng fountain at St. Mary's on the Hilltop in West Springfield, picking at the hem on the lightweight white wool blanket, her sparse white hair neatly trimmed, set and combed, her faultless white skin clear and softly lotioned, a hint of color on her lips, her blue eyes 'as clear as Gilbey's gin," as her dear Pat had used to say, just to get her goat. It had been about three years since she'd heckled her oldest son.

"My own dear mother, Rose, now," Polly usually began, when giving him a roasting he understood it to be her way of bragging about him running on the first part of a manhattan as she had been one day in March of 1973 at a small luncheon that he'd thrown in the private dining room at Henry's Grist Mill. He'd invited about thirty people to celebrate his official promotion to first assistant clerk of the District Court of Western Hampshire (meaning: Clerk of Court-designate).

Clerk of Court Richie Hammond after stalling six months had at last formally appointed Merrion to his old slot under Larry Lane. Hammond had instinctively disliked Merrion from the first time they met, knowing on first sight he was a smart-ass. Ever since Larry Lane had died he had been forlornly hoping either that someone with more clout would become interested in the job Hammond knew that was unlikely; Dan Hilliard was in the most formidable years of his ascent or failing that, perhaps God in His wisdom and goodness would strike Merrion dead.

God had not.

Richie had stopped stalling after being credibly threatened with summary dismissal from his own place. The threat had come in the form of a menacing phone call placed by a deputy administrator in the Administrative Office of the District Court Department in Salem. He said that the chief judge had just gotten an upsetting call about the next year's judicial budget from the chairman of House Ways and Means.

The administrator had reported grimly that the chairman of Ways and Means appeared to be not only very angry but 'a very close personal friend of this Ambrose Merrion," as well, and asked Richie Hammond if he'd been aware of that fact. When Richie said he had been "Everybody out here knows they're asshole buddies; that's the only reason Merrion got the goddamned job he's got' the chief administrative clerk had said in a soft savage voice: "Then would you mind telling me, so I can tell the judge, who's practically beside himself with fucking curiosity I think it's curiosity; it may be something else exactly why the fuck it is he had to get the call he got and I have to make this call right now, to get you to do what any fucking asshole with the brain of a retarded pigeon would've known from on the first day what he'd better do right fucking off or get his fucking balk cut off? Or would you rather quit right now, and we'll give Merrion your job would you like that better?"

Hammond had soberly accepted Merrion's solemn invitation to attend the joyous luncheon, but to the surprise of neither of them suffered an attack of the Twenty-four-hour Convenient Grippe when the day for it arrived.

"When Rose was among us," Polly said, 'she had designs on my poor little Ambrose, and selfish ones at that. She'd always had it in her mind that if she ever had any sons of her own it'd be a good thing for her if one of them went into the priesthood. You know what they used to tell all the good Catholic mothers: "If you've a son a priest, your place in heaven's guaranteed." But she didn't have any, so that was a bit of a handicap for her, you see? In that respect, at least, she'd left a stone unturned.

"That was not her way at all, neglecting things. Of course she hadn't had any wayward sons, either, which'd also been known to've happened to perfectly good church-going Catholic mothers. No naughty boys she would've had to pray for, make novenas to Saint Jude for, the patron saint of the Impossible, and go and visit Sunday mornings down at the lock-up, or on Tuesdays and the weekends at county jail or something, like some unfortunate women she knew and don't think she ever let 'em forget it, either; not for one stinkin' minute did she ever do that.