George Higgins - A change of gravity

We're also pals, we get a kick outta each other. A man should have pals; a man's gotta have pals. And even though I know you don't care much for Amby, pals're what we're gonna stay."

She said she knew he needed to have friends and if he wanted to consider Amby one of them, that was fine by her. She said whether she liked Amby or not had nothing to do with what she was talking about, which was his 'habit of getting absolutely sloshed every time Amby comes here to dinner. Every single time he comes, you two wind up getting plastered. Don't you worry about him driving home when you've gotten yourselves in that condition, you say you're such friends.

Aren't you afraid something'll happen to him? That he'll get hurt or maybe arrested?"

Walter had laughed. "How many cops around here you think're gonna go and arrest the clerk of court? They know him too well. They'd never do that to him, never charge him with drunk driving. They did pull him over, they wouldn't arrest him. All they'd do's make him move over and let one of them drive him home, and the other one follow, the cruiser."

"He still could get hurt, though," she said. "Or he could hurt somebody else. He shouldn't be driving that way. If you think I don't want him around, well, I'm telling you, that's the reason. It's because of the drinking you two seem to do whenever you get together. I get so I don't want to invite him, even though you like him, he's your friend. "Cause I know what'll happen: You'll both get rip-roaring drunk."

Walter refused to concede her point. He said. "Amby and I have a good time together. That's what friends're for. Having fun with them, the short time we're all on the earth. One of the things, anyway. If anything ever happened to me, even though I'm sure he knows you don't like him all that much, if something ever happened to me, other guys we know'd forget all about you, but Amby'd take care of you."

Walter seemed very certain when he said that and it stuck in her mind.

So after Walter died, even though she believed his long uproarious evenings with Merrion had hastened his death, she went to Mernon and asked him what he knew.

He told her she would most likely be surprised when she fully understood what Walter had been up to, as in fact she was. She'd been startled to begin with when an appraiser pegged the market value of the Fox Agency at $830,000, about $200,000 more than Walter several years before had casually guessed it might be worth, but the price had been duly and unhesitatingly paid by the real estate subsidiary of a nationally advertised real estate conglomerate making it the western Massachusetts satellite in its linkage coast' to-coast. Her share of that sale was a little over $556,000, good for an annual income of slightly over $50,000. To her that was a lot of money and it made her feel a little guilty for having yelled at Walter what she now recalled as 'a few times' when he'd gotten on her nerves.

When she learned that those mixed stock and realty trust investments Walter had airily described amounted to just under another $192,000, she was mortified. Combined with the interest from investment of her two-thirds share of the proceeds from the sale of the agency, it would give her an income of nearly $73,000 a year before she brought home any pay from her practice. She had lived with Walter only for about eleven years and she was beginning to fear that soon people would find out she really hadn't known him very well at all. But then, as Merrton had reminded her, they couldn't very well say she'd married Walter for his money; she'd never dreamed he had it.

"Or his cockeyed politics, either," she said.

Merrion laughed and told her Walter's conservative politics had been 'irrelevant. Walter always made me laugh." He said that Dan Hilhard really had hated Walter's views and meant it when he sometimes said he couldn't stand the man. "Some of the things that Walter said absolutely infuriated him. If he was pissed off when he left your house Saturday night, he'd still be pissed off when I saw him on Monday. Took me days to calm him down."

He said that if Diane 'hadn't become such a wonderful cook you never would've seen Dan. Never would've laid eyes on the man. And he would never've put up with Walter. Of course Dan can be a major toothache too, he gets started on something. There were lots of times I thought that if Walter didn't finally say something that'd make Danny haul off and hit him, then what'd happen'd be Danny'd do it, say something that'd get Walter so mad he'd hit Danny in the mouth."

He said he had told Hilliard many times that he habitually carried his insistence on political orthodoxy too far, especially when the cost of it would have been good times and laughs. Merrion told her Hilhard said this attitude proved Merrion lacked principle. "Politically speaking, Danny says, I'm an easy lay. He's probably right. Compared to him, at least. But when he let Walter get on his nerves, Walter took it as a challenge. They deserved each other."

Walter often said he had voted five times 'enthusiastically' for Richard M. Nixon, three of them as president of the United States. One night he said Nixon had been one of the two best American presidents to serve in the 20th century. Hilliard said he assumed Walter's other favorite was Herbert Hoover. Walter had blinked and said, actually, no, his other nominee was FDR. "The litmus isn't which party the guy belongs to; it's how he reacts to the problems that the country faces while he's president. The third best may've been Gerry Ford. He gave us rest when we needed it."

"That happened at your house," Merrion said to Diane. "You were feeding us this gorgeous fillet of beef. I forgot what the wine was Walter opened. It was red and I had a lot of it; that much I know.

When Walter said that, Danny was astounded. The idea that Walter might actually have something serious and reasonable to say about politics astonished him."

Walter also knew lots of local gossip and had a fund of dirty, racial, ethnic and religious jokes that he told with practiced elan. He followed and discussed professional and collegiate sports with discernment; ate and drank hospitably; and was as ready to denounce a blowhard on his own side as he was to ridicule a fake on the other.

Those assets, together with his regular and unabashed reports of fresh misfortunes and new humiliations he had suffered on the golf course, had twice inspired Merrion to suggest that he allow Merrion to sponsor him to fill a vacancy left at Grey Hills by the death of a member (Hilhard, getting wind of Memon's first offer, said he'd blackball Fox if it came to that, and Merrion had been concerned enough to remind Hilliard how he'd gotten into Grey Hills, and tell him if he did spike Fox, "I'll get even with you'). But each time Walter after giving the invitation some thought had declined, citing the comfort-level of his second-generation old-shoe status at the Holyoke Country Club, and his 'pagan's apprehension that taking a dead man's place could be dangerous,

just asking for trouble. Might tempt the ever-present faraway fellow in the bright nightgown, you know? "Goddamnit, if Fd've wanted that slot occupied, I wouldn't've snuffed Harold now, would I?"

So Merrion had been genuinely saddened when he heard of Walter's death, and had meant it when he told Diane that he was sorry. She had patted his hand and said she knew he had been one of Walter's favorite bad companions, and expressed her opinion 'that if he only hadn't had quite so many friends like you, or enjoyed them quite so much, he might still be alive today." But she said she didn't bear Merrion any grudge: "He was a big boy, after all. He knew what he was doing."

In her reconfiguration of herself after Walter's death, Diane became convinced the house provided spiritual strength. That was definitely something new for her. Walter at her urging had acquired it, a Fox Agency exclusive listing, as their wedding present to each other. He was quite aware its splendid kitchen was not the only reason why she preferred it to the house in Hampton Pond he had inherited from Phil.