A change of gravity

by George V. Higgins

  Even those who had been most boisterously demonstrative in the corridors spoke cryptically and softly, never assertively, once alone in those conferences. Averting their eyes from the persons pressing questions on them, they shook their heads a lot, shrugging their shoulders and rolling their eyes; saying "Myunoh' for "Mmm, I don't know' to indicate they lacked sufficient information to say where they had gotten the narcotics or the stolen property the police had found on them, or when they were asked to account for the whereabouts of some fugitive habitual associate or the gunshot wound of some hostile competitor.

  If the person talking to them was a probation officer they evaded answering because they believed their only hope of deliverance from jail lay in preservation of the officer's considerable ignorance of what they had been up to. The hazard for those under questioning by DYS caseworkers was similar: removal from the street and commitment to DYS custody. So they too were uncommunicative. The probation and DYS officers knew this and it frustrated them. When the recalcitrance of their clients prevented them from deciding with assurance whether the young person could be safely left at liberty or should be locked up usually, again their annoyance at being thwarted and the same perception of risk that made judges uneasy about letting batterers go free prejudiced the officers in favor of commitment.

  Young offenders conferring with counsel appointed to defend them, mistrusting their free lawyers' willingness, ability and intention to do a good job for them, accordingly felt entirely free to mislead them or lie to them, as suited their moods. Knowing this, and having a great many cases, the Mass. Defenders therefore tried to ascertain as efficiently as possible whether this client like virtually all their others was unable or refusing to assist in his own defense, and therefore must be pleaded-out to the best deal the defender could get.

  The defenders customarily did not ask their clients to say whether they were innocent; attorneys and clients alike proceeded on the tacit understanding that the defendant in question, no matter how many times he might ritually, vehemently deny it, had in fact committed the offense alleged against him.

  Most of the clients were black or Hispanic, either undersized, short and gaunt, or broad and grossly overweight, but of average height. The frowning or tearful brusied young mothers with pacifier-sucking infants in their arms or small children riding on their vast hips seldom seemed to be comforted by what went on in the courthouse, but the young males in unguarded moments often appeared at least cheerful, if not actually happy, at ease, hanging out among friends in familiar, shabby surroundings.

  From time to time this insouciance bothered the judge. "It's almost as though this's their real goddamn home," Judge Leonard Cavanaugh mused one day to Merrion at the bench, having gavel led the courtroom quiet for the fourth time that morning. He was almost keening, cupping his left hand over the microphone that rose up on the flexible gooseneck to capture what he said for the recorder that preserved everything it was allowed to hear in the courtroom.

  Later in the judge's chambers, Merrion demurred. "More like their real school," he said, 'not so much their real home. When we were about the same age as these little maggots are now, we weren't doing drugs and ambushing other kids we didn't like. We were driving teachers nuts; we were driving our parents nuts. The principals of our schools called us "You-again." But we were not bugging the cops all the time, and the people who worked in the courthouses then never laid their eyes on us.

  Most of us didn't know where it was."

  "Yeah, well, it's not that way any more," Cavanaugh said. "It's not as though it's someplace they should never have to come; their parents're gonna kill 'em when they get home. They're not afraid or embarrassed. This's normal for them, just an ordinary thing; that's what's so frightening. Get collared selling drugs or breaking in or stealing cars; get yourself arrested; this's where you come. Routine.

  Just another stop on their regular routes, another place where they go.

  They actually live part of their lives here. Where they validate them, really authenticate their existences. It's really frightening."

  The young people expanded, seeming somehow to take up more room than had been enclosed by the roof, cellar hole and exterior walls of the courthouse. On weekdays especially Mondays, when the mornings yielded up the weekends' ripe harvests of police operations in Hampton Pond, Hampton Falls and Cumberland, the other towns within the Canterbury jurisdiction they sat and stood along the walls, sat and crouched upon the stairs, hunkered in the corners and bunched up on all the maple benches. Endlessly but slowly they went into and came out of the elevator that plied up and down between the basement and the first and second floors, distributing them among the corridors leading to the offices and conference rooms and courtrooms; never coming to rest even when standing still or seated and admonished to be silent in one of the three trial sessions. As they moved about they had much to say to one another about the inexhaustible variety of things to do in the great tempting, yielding, wide world outside; before, after, during or instead of, days and weeks and months and years spent or to be spent in the other spacious world inside, in jail, together or with absent friends or strangers. They had so much to talk about that they never seemed to finish saying it, and so were never quiet. They held endless discussions at their normal outdoor-hailing conversational volumes that accumulated, reverberating and combining to make a ceaseless, unintelligible, unrelenting din like the noise of an assembly line building heavy machinery; noise that broke like surf against the walls and surged along the floors, echoing against the ceilings of the corridors and stairwells and restrooms, booming, wearing and abrading and eroding the tender surface of the mind and nerves.

  Most of the young people left the courthouse each day before noon. Those not led away tearfully or broodingly in handcuffs trooped out the side door (the ceremonially wide front doors at the top of the broad crumbling concrete steps Barrows Construction having used too much sand in the mix, sand being cheaper than calcined clay and limestone being locked and blocked for reasons of security), shuckin' and jivin'; genially menacing; waiting for the twilight and the dark to come; untied black and white high-top basketball, cross-training and workout shoes flapping, a hundred, two hundred dollars a pair; oversized black pants billowing, unfastened and un zippered black sweatshirts and hooded jackets sliding off their shoulders, jostling and shoving one another as they passed the metal-detector archway that had screened their entrances.

  But noon was too late to soothe Merrion's mind; by the end of each morning it had become raw and inflamed, so that by the middle of any weekday while he would have been willing to concede that calm reflection and assessment might once more be possible, he would be in no mood to attempt it. Once during his ninth or tenth year on the job, by then as first assistant, Richie Hammond had said to him after a brutal day: This's an awful job, you know, a really awful job." And he had said to Richie, slowly and distinctly, meaning every single word:

  "There are days when this can be the worst fucking job in the world."

  It had passed into standard usage in the Canterbury courthouse. "Okay, altogether now, kids: what kind of job is it today?" "The worst fuckin' job in the world." And then everybody would laugh, and think to themselves that this laugh in defiance of the fact that there was absolutely nothing to laugh about would be what would get them all through the day on the job.

  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.

  "Completely serious about it, though. Couldn't talk her out of it.

  Claimed she'd actually been married not divorced, just married and the only reason that she had to be on welfare was that her no-good husband'd run off someplace no one could find him and make him pay support. Fact there was no marriage license in the records in Springfield didn't faze her a bit; maybe it was Chicopee, or maybe Holyoke. Couldn't find a record of her marriage there, either. We checked with the State House, Secretary, State. No record there. We told her that.

  "Didn't miss a beat. "Then it must've been somewhere else. Maybe we went to Vermont and got married. My memory's never been good. It was all quite a few years ago." Could not talk her out of it, no matter how you tried.

  "This went on for two or three years. Then after a while she stopped remembering him. Harvey went off the screen, disappeared without leaving a trace. My guess is she thought she had to be a deserted wife in order to get a check and then someone convinced her she didn't. Or maybe she just finally forgot it. She's not all there, you know, poor thing. In addition to never having been what you'd call extre
mely bright, she does not have all her marbles."

  He could remember how Janet had looked when she had first talked about marriage. She had shaken her head, making the dark tendrils of the dull, dark-brown pageboy-haircut she was wearing then flick around her ears and the corners of her eyes. Daggett snickered at Merrion when he'd suggested that maybe she could persuade Janet to 'get herself cleaned up some, you know? Do something with herself? Wash her goddamned greasy hair, for starters. No one's going to hire her back, only thing she knows how to do, wipe tables up in restaurants, clean up the cafeteria in some hospital or school, if we send her up and she comes in looking like she does now, needs a wiping-down herself."

  "You're still sort of new at this, aren't you," Louella'd said to him.

  "Been at it now, what, only twenny, thirty years? And you still haven't quite got the hang of it. You courthouse guys, you make me laugh. You're all alike. You're all so cut-and-dried. You all think it's all so simple. All you political types. You trip over one of these people like Janet and you think the reason she's miserable's because no one else ever noticed her before, took a hand in her life.

  If you'd run into her six months or ten years ago you'd've gotten her all straightened out long before this — but never mind; you'll take care of it now.

  "Nuts. You know why it says in the Bible that we'll always have the poor with us? Because it's true: we always have and we always will.