George Higgins - A change of gravity

"It did mean something, though," Merrion said to him later, after he had begun to recover. "It meant a lot. It's okay to claim now that it never meant anything when they said you hadda lotta power, just's long's we don't forget it's not true. It meant a lot. It was what my father used to call "a very handy gadget." When the papers kept reminding people how much power you had, lots of people believed it.

They didn't think about how or why this should be, you seemed to have so much power. They just thought it was true. They saw it right there inna paper.

"They thought it meant that you could do something to them, something nobody else would've even known how to do. They didn't know what it was, and they didn't know anybody else who did, either, but they also knew they sure didn't want to be the ones who pissed you off so they found out. So therefore when I call, once they hear who's onna line they know you want something done; they pay close attention. They may think I'm a dummy but they're scared of the ventriloquist. They know he can cut their balls off. So they want to please me, you know? Want me to be happy. Piss me off; they got you pissed off. That they do not want to happen.

"I don't know what it was that they thought you could do to them then that you couldn't've done to them before. Maybe they just never thought about it. All I know's that when they did, I could make good use of it. All I hadda do was ask politely; right off they would do what we wanted. I liked that. It made my life easy. It was a good way to do business.

"Now I can't do that anymore. You got people laughing at you, result of you bein' such an asshole Mercy finely kicked you out. People don't jump to please guys they're laughing at. I hafta frighten them now, apply actual muscle; tell them if they don't do what we want them to do, they may be out of a job. It seems wasteful, you know?

Undignified, too, using your power every time, making people do what they should want to do, just to get little stuff done."

Other things changed in subtle ways too. Over the years Hilliard had spent a sizeable number of quietly congenial Sunday evenings at Grey Hills, maybe ten or a dozen a year, having what he called a little dinner with the lads," turning one corner of the sparsely populated dining room into a men's club for the night, washing down steaks, chops and roast beef with whatever the indifferent house-red wine was that year. Merrion could usually be counted on; a phone call to his home would fetch him if he hadn't spent the day at the club, playing golf in good weather or if rain was pouring down, unassumingly catching a few hands of modestly profitable quarter-half poker in the lounge with a ballgame in progress on the TV across the room. Usually when he stood up from his chair he was thirty or thirty-five bucks ahead. He seldom lost, and never more than ten dollars; he quit early when he encountered a run of second-best hands. He refused side-bets on the ballgames, saying: "No, I play cards because I know what cards will do.

I don't know what people will do."

Rob Lewis's wife belonged to The Opera, Theater and Museum Society in Springfield; each year between Labor and Memorial Days it offered members eight completely-packaged long-weekend travel-tickets-meals-hotel excursions to New York. Indulging her passion for the visual and performing arts, all of which Rob detested, Lena took all of the trips "Four thousand bucks a year and worth every damned penny; I'd sooner rub shit in my hair'n sit through another damned opera." He was around at least seven or eight Sundays a year.

Heck Sanderson and six or seven other male members, widowed or divorced themselves both, in Heck's case long before Hilliard's travails began had for years on and off been at loose ends around the club at dinnertime, much gladder of Hilliard's company than he'd ever dreamed until he learned the hard way how much he'd come to value theirs.

"Get a good close look at this guy, fellas," Heck said one evening late in June of that year to Merrion, Ralph Flood and Bobby Clark who was as usual quietly and purposefully drinking exactly as much Haig amp; Haig Pinch as he would need to stay moderately, comfortably drunk until it was time for the twenty-minute, three-mile drive home to bed when Hilliard had become particularly lugubrious, 'this's a very rare bird we've got with us here tonight. This here's the first man in North America who's ever gone through a divorce. He was married for years and then all of a sudden, one sunny morning, he woke all by himself first one in the entire history, this republic. We got us a real curiosity here: when he dies we're gonna get him stuffed and put him in a glass case in the lobby on display. Members'll be able to look at him free, charge the public a quarter to see him."

Then he had clapped Hilliard on the shoulder, hard, and guffawed. "Aww, maybe I'm being too hard on him here. Being as how he's a Catholic and all, he most likely wasn't prepared for it. Catholics're much better'n the rest of us. Catholics don't get divorced, see, so he thought he had a guaranty. Never could happen to him."

Merrion made a mental note to lose any and all future requests Heck made to Hilliard through him, and to make sure that if Heck's kid ever did get in trouble in the Canterbury jurisdiction, the case would go to Lennie Cavanaugh. Cavanaugh would do whatever Merrion suggested; Heck would not get many laughs out of what he had in mind to do if the day ever came when he could do it. Once when asked what he did for Hilliard after he'd left the Holyoke office to become a court clerk, Merrion said: "Well, Danny's sort of kind-hearted. It's a weakness of his; he suffers from compassion. He also tends to forget things. So if somebody does something to him that they shouldn't do, sticks a shiv in his back, say, he's likely, you know, to forgive the treacherous bastard. Say "Oh, he didn't mean it. I'll give him another chance." Or else forget he even stuck him inna first place.

"Danny knows he's this way, and he knows he shouldn't be. But he also knows that I am not I am not like that at all. I am different. I don't forgive and I never forget. So what I do for him, I'm in charge of grudges. I collect all his grudges for him, make sure they're put away in a safe place, water 'em and keep 'em fresh and moist. And then when payback day comes 'round, as we know it always does, I have the right grudge to settle, and whammo, we pop the guy. I'm the guy who makes sure that the guys who hurt Danny get nailed, big-time, paid back at least double for whatever they did to us."

Hilliard had been too humbled to get mad at Sanderson. He conceded the point. "You begin to see things a different way, once something like this happens to you, I guess, huh?" he said. Heck, perhaps finding something disturbing him in Merrion's expression, cleared his throat and said placatingly, somewhat nervously, that he knew he certainly had. Merrion, mindful he had trouble maneuvering Heck into bad bets for much money at cards, noted the hasty contrition but deferred judgment as to whether it was merely tactical or sufficiently sincere to save Julian from what he had in mind some good wholesome time in jail.

For Hilliard until his own disaster those Sabbath dinners had been mere felicitous accidents, irregular pick-up things that just happened; low-key, casual occasions of camaraderie for him and therefore the other men who'd been around for dinner and sat down at tables with him, connoting no unhappiness, dislocation or decline. Without ever thinking about it, he'd assumed that the explanation for their presence was the same as his: they were temporarily on their own and did not choose to cook. Until the winter of 1980-81, he had been at the club on Sunday nights in the dead of winter because in '73 Mercy and the kids had started spending February school vacations with her folks at their new chalet at Bolton Valley, skiing every day. February was a busy month on Beacon Hill, and Hilliard, who'd never skied well and found time spent with Florence and Bud Hackett 'not a garden of earthly delights," had long since given up on both the sport and his in-laws.