George Higgins - A change of gravity

Except when he was being truthful, as he did not often allow himself to be once or twice with Cavanaugh, who looked incredulous, suspicious that Merrion was putting him on; several times with Hilliard after a good round of golf, a dinner and some drinks Merrion always led that cheer and acted convincingly as though he believed it. But on those other occasions he said: "But I guess in fact I don't, really, believe that. As silly as I know this sounds, Dan, except maybe to you, there have been times in that courthouse when I think I may've done someone some good.

I'm not saying now I think I've saved people. Nobody saves other people. Only idiots think they can do that; only bleeding-heart assholes'd even try. But maybe I've managed to actually grab some poor kid or some poor strugglin' bastard and help him pull himself up out of the mud. Give him a break, maybe first one he's had, see if he gets just that one break, maybe he can save himself.

"More'n a few of 'em have, Danny-boy, and that as you say, 's a true fact. Some nights I get reckless, I can't get to sleep, I got too many things on my mind, something I'm worried about. And then when that happens, that's when I start thinking: "Hey, why can't I sleep? What the hell am I worried about? If I wake up tomorrow and I find out I'm dead, I did some good things, I was here. I figure I rescued a person a year, each year I been on the job; that's over eighteen people by now, otherwise might've ruined their lives. Not that these've been real dramatic cases; not saying that at all. Just saying that some fairly ordinary people that you've never even heard of managed to get themselves straightened out, so they've had quiet, ordinary, maybe even fairly happy, lives. Instead of the exciting kind you would've heard about if they hadn't turned themselves around, because they would've been in big trouble. They would've been making headlines.

"And that's what I've always figured's really been the kind of thing that down on the ground is what the two of us've been doing all these years in politics. What we've always thought the whole thing has been about, getting you elected, getting me into my job. Making it so that when something good needed doing down in Boston, or in the courthouse out here, there'd be someone there who would see the need and make sure it got done. And so that's what I think I can say I have done. So I usually sleep pretty good."

Merrion required quiet to encourage contemplation and reflection. Then he could enjoy intellection, and think he did it well. Silently reveling therefore in the Saturday luxury of it, he pondered what Janet had said about routine. As he had on several previous occasions, he once again concluded he completely believed her, and knew her to be sincere.

Nevertheless, Merrion was not encouraged. He did not share Janet's confidence in routine as a safeguard of virtue, and he knew dolefully that Janet's best effort to do anything was unlikely to be very good.

He gazed steadily at her but did not make any comment.

The quiet did not soothe Janet LeClerc as it comforted Merrion. So to fill it she told him again that she had devised her routine on the basis of deductions that she made from her observations that many of the other residents of the eighteen-unit building where she lived appeared to have routines. "Not that I'm minding their business," she said, 'or anything like that. I wouldn't do nothing like that. But you know how it is: When you're around all day long, you see things.

Can't help it."

She said that from what she had seen, most of them were single, as she was. She presented her data earnestly, as though she had been commissioned to carry out a poll producing the results. Merrion thought: Survey figures released today show that fifty-nine percent of those living in the same building with]anet have daily routines. The remainder said either that they have no opinion or else they don't give a shit. That was television; it had taught her that if she noticed something in her idleness it meant something data must mean something; the mass had been collected, hadn't it? People wouldn't go to all the trouble of finding out all of this stuff and then putting it on TV if it wasn't important. Janet believed in TV. All the TV that she watched, day after day, when she'd had nothing to do: she didn't like many of the things she saw and heard on it, but TV itself as pure will and idea enjoyed her full and complete confidence.

"Sort of between marriages. It seems like they've probably been married, most of them, one time or another. They're all really that young, you know? Like most of the people are who've never been married, usually are. Just looking around, for somebody else, somebody else to be with. They're exactly like me, marking time. Except they've already all got their routines, the same ones they had back when they were married. It's not like they got divorced from their jobs, when they got divorced from their wives. Or their husbands, either. They just used to be married in the morning, when they went to work, but now they aren't that anymore."

Janet had never been married. Merrion knew she wanted very much to be married, or at least to get married, so that then, if it didn't work out, then at least she would have been married. "Because that way it would be better. It would seem more like normal, you know? Like everything was normal. Because lots of people've been married, and then they got divorced, and so people understand that. So they're used to that, and they don't think it's so strange."

She had told him all about it the second or third time he'd called her in for a conference, back when they were first getting acquainted back around the turn of the century, it seemed like, when he was still only just beginning to find out she was another one, still able to resist the unpleasant discovery that he'd gone and done it again, let himself in for it once more, in the early autumn of 1994. "Always been a big ambition of mine, to get married," she'd told him, looking down at the ring finger embarrassingly naked on her left hand in her lap, twisting the skin of the knuckle with her right thumb and first two fingers. "I think most people do, expect it'll happen, think they'll get married some day. It wasn't the only thing that I thought I'd like to do, but it was the big one."

He reported that conversation to Louella Daggett in the regional office of the Commonwealth's Department of Social Services. Daggett was a short stocky black woman in her early sixties. She had arthritis in her knees that made it very difficult for her to get around. She cited it to justify her irritable disposition, but Merrion had known her years before she'd ever mentioned arthritis and she'd always had a lousy disposition. Merrion thought it was probably attributable to the kind of people and problems she encountered in her work. But believing that frustration made her irascible did not impel him to tolerate her surliness; their discussions about individuals whose behavior had attracted the attention of the court as well as DSS tended to be acrimonious.

Louella had been Janet's caseworker since she had gone on welfare in 1986. She said 'when Janet first came on the reason that she gave us was that she'd had a husband and he'd left her, run away. We took it at face-value, we always do, their stories, but we also check them out.

We couldn't find no husband. There'd never been one. The husband who'd left her, "Wayne" she said his name was: he'd never existed.

"Harvey," we called him, "Harvey, the bastard." She was apparently the only living person who'd ever been able to see him. No one else ever had. Deserted by a phantom husband; can you beat it? Wish-fulfillment, but a lousy job of it. Here she'd gone and dreamed the guy up, gone to all that trouble, and then he turns out to be no good. You'd think if you made up your own husband, well, he might not be a good provider but at least you'd think he'd be a fairly faithful companion, at least around when you needed him. Not Janet's make-believe husband. Janet couldn't lay sod right-side up.