George Higgins - A change of gravity

He's an adulterer. He didn't keep his promises to his own wife. She found out she couldn't trust him. Finally she reached the point where she went to court and proved she couldn't trust him. What makes you think you can?"

"The man I was married to made a fool of me. Let's see how he likes hearing that on the late news, what he did to me."

Therefore the libel in Hilliard vs. Hilliard alleged 'open and gross adultery." Most of the male reporters who covered the State House, having made compassionate sounds within earshot of Hilliard, once out of his hearing licked their chops and hoped cooler heads would not prevail before the case came to trial. Like Mercy, they had a beef with him. It had festered all the years it had taken Mercy to overcome her disinclination to believe that Dan away from home had trouble remembering his marriage vows. Long before she reached full boil, most of the reporters had known he was playing road games; many of them disapproved.

Their motives were professional, not moral. Soon after Hilliard's meanderings had commenced around Labor Day in 1971, green-eyed, blonde-haired, petite Stacy Hawkes of Channel 3, then twenty-six, coming up with time-dishonored but mutually pleasurable ways to celebrate Hilliard's ascent in the House hierarchy her professional rivals on the State House beat had begun to get heavy pressure from their editorial desks. The incidental time she and Hilliard spent with their clothes on, before and after the time they spent in her bed in her Beacon Street apartment, gave her many more quiet opportunities than her competitors enjoyed to talk informatively with him about newsworthy developments in Massachusetts politics. Stacy's reports from the Hill therefore regularly scooped those that her competition filed, and they did not like it. Several whose sexual advances she'd coolly rebuffed one of them another woman were also fiercely jealous of Hilliard, correctly perceiving the reason she granted him privileges denied to them. They alternated between smouldering anger and bitter laughter, calling her a whore behind her back and coming close to it face-to-face by curling their lips and sneering "Yeah, and how'd you get that little tidbit?" when she goaded them delightedly with allusions to developments that she'd predicted on the air two nights before.

Their subtle inflation of Hilliard's public importance reflected their impotent envy. Unable to publish what they knew to be the actual reason why she would fuck him, and not one of them, they employed the word powerful as code for their perception that Hilliard's legislative authority unjustly comported a droit de seigneur to bed the fairest female among them. Wishing to see him rebuked, they exaggerated the extent and rancor of his opposition on the Hill, hoping each new challenger would manage to stymie him, casting so much doubt upon his abilities and fitness for authority that his steady progress toward becoming Speaker would be impeded if not halted. And if that happened it might do more than just rebuke what they perceived as his excessive ambition; it might prompt Stacy to reappraise his value to her and stop fucking him.

Long after Stacy Hawkes had departed for New York, their envy and resentment persisted, kept alive in part by their observation of Hilliard's effortlessly insulting ease in replacing her repeatedly.

Without really having fully thought it out, they continued to enlarge his public image in order to magnify the story of his ignominious demolition later. They had not necessarily contemplated the collapse of his marriage in their wistful projections of potential causes of his eventual downfall, but when it occurred they hoped it would serve the purpose. They would see to it, in fact, if Mercy would be good enough to make the details of his sexual shenanigans publishable by proving them to make her divorce case. They sat poised at their keyboards wearing the happy expressions of dogs hearing the grinding sound of the electric can-opener; even those who liked Hilliard had to agree that life in the news business now and then could be good.

Banished from his home; under seige where he worked, Hilliard was under orders also not to seek the kind of solace that had gotten him in trouble, the kind he had reasonably come to expect to find without much difficulty evenings after work in Boston. His lawyer, Sam Evans, had forbidden it. The joke in Franklin, Hampshire and Hampden County Probate Courts was that any divorce involving a well-known person or marriage property in excess of one hundred thousand dollars was not valid unless Sam Evans, the Butler, Corey partner specializing in divorce, had represented one of the unhappy parties.

Evans had assessed Mercy's allegation of adultery as true and accurate, but flimsy, perfectly fine and entirely understandable as an expression of rage but wildly out of proportion to the little circumstantial evidence she had to prove it.

"Gossip," Evans told Hilliard, 'as I'm sure you learned in law school, isn't evidence. Not unless what you propose to prove is that people gossip. Which if that's their purpose, we will stipulate: "Indeed people do," will be our reply, and a lot of it's been about you. But sheer quantity of rumor does not make it into proof. Innuendo and insinuation don't amount to evidence.

"Now, that doesn't mean I doubt for one moment that you've been a bounder, a cad and a tosspot, and treated your good wife very badly.

The judge isn't going to doubt it either, because when Geoff Cohen takes your deposition, he's going to ask you if you misbehaved, and since perjury isn't a tactic that prudent men use, you're going to admit that you did. And then if he makes you take the stand you're going to repeat it, and say that you're sorry, and try as hard as you possibly can to look like you really mean it. Be contrite, and confess you're a bastard, and give him no names at alV "Can I do that," Hilliard said, 'refuse to tell him the names of my girlfriends?"

"Yup," Evans said. "Judge Hadavas's a bit of a prude. If I know him he's already displeased with Geoff for letting your wife charge adultery. He's also not the brightest flame in the candelabra. He probably shouldn't be on any bench, but if he has to be some kind of judge, he certainly ought not to be in probate. He doesn't belong there. He's not really in favor of divorce. He'd much rather married couples tried a little harder to get along with each other, like he and Vera always have, instead of coming into his court all the time on what he sees as the slightest provocation, whining and complaining how unhappy they all are. Those of us who've seen how Vera treats him when they're out and can imagine what a royal pain she must be at home, well, we're inclined to think James must try very hard indeed, if he gets along with her.

"I was in his session one day, waiting to argue a motion, and this poor woman was on the stand. She'd brought a motion for an order to increase her alimony and child-support payments. Apparently this'd become something of a hobby of hers it wasn't the first time she done it. So she was being cross-examined, and her husband's lawyer was showing her no mercy, really bearing down on her. Finally he came right out and challenged her, dared her to admit that she was doing this again because she'd found out her ex-husband and his new girlfriend were going to get married, and she was bound and determined to do everything she possibly could to stick a wrench in the gears, disrupt their plans as much as she could and if possible of course get all his money. He said: "This's fun for you, isn't it, Mrs. So-and-so.

This isn't a matter of need we've got here; this is a case of revenge.

You enjoy doing this to my client, don't you you're having one whale of a time."

"And she just wailed at him; I thought sure she was going to break down and bawl: "No, I am not. I'm not having fun. I'm unhappy all of the time." And Judge Hadavas said: "Huh, so's everyone else who comes in here. What makes you think you're so special? Think maybe you can tell me that? Spend all your time thinking up ways, come in here and call attention to yourself. What you ought to's go out and find yourself a steady job, support your self. Get something on your mind besides yourself. That's all you ever think about, of course you're going to be miserable; just stands to reason. Deserve it, too, you ask me." Then she really did cry."