A change of gravity

by George V. Higgins

  "Now, with the shit birds that don't know this, you might as well teach 'em. Sooner they find out, the better. The way we do things in this place. We have to get rid of some bastard, which we have to do every day, well, that's what we do: We get rid of 'em, fast as we can.

  Sometimes we make mistakes, but that's all right. We back each other up. All the way up, and then back down the line. We make it stick.

  That way the thing works for us, instead of us workin' for it."

  Merrion had never uttered Lane's mantra, but he had applied the tactic, furtively at first; time and time again he had seen it work. It always worked.

  He looked at his watch. It was coming up on 10:00 A.M." forty-five minutes to his regular tee-time at Grey Hills. Janet had taken enough of his morning. Saturday was his day off. He cleared his throat.

  "Right," he said. "Well, there I can't help you. Help you get along with the other tenants. I don't run the building. You got a complaint there, you see Mister Brody. If he can, I'm sure he'll help you out.

  But that's not why I wanted you in here.

  "The reason you're here is you're seeing a man name of Lowell Chappelle, and letting him stay overnight." She opened her mouth and he held up his hand. "Don't even bother," he said on a rising inflection. "I wont tell you who told me, I don't have to tell you, and I'm not going to tell you. If you try to tell me it isn't true, I'll call you a liar, which you will be. And it will upset me, Janet, if I find I have to do that. You haven't lied to me yet, that I know about and if you ask around, people will tell you: I always know, when somebody tries to lie to me as I didn't think that you would when I gave you a break. That's the reason why I've been able to try to help you out a little. Because I know you've always told me the truth. Just like I've always told you the truth. So, when I tell you that something about you's started to disturb me, as I'm telling you something is now, you know I'm telling the truth.

  "What's disturbing me is that what I hear's been going on in your life is not good. It's a very bad thing in fact, what I hear, and I know very well that it's true. So, since the only thing that you can really say to me is that it's not true, and that will be a lie, which would be a very bad mistake, the best thing you can do right now is just shut up and listen to me."

  She closed her mouth and looked scared.

  "Good," he said, 'that's much better. Mister Chappelle is a convicted felon. Mister Chappelle's been convicted seven times. I've been around long enough to know what went on when he got sentenced. The first two or three times he was young and looked scared, just like you're looking right now, so the judges went easy on him. They were in hopes that he'd mend his ways. He didn't. So the judges started giving him time, in the hope that might straighten him out. His third or fourth trip on the merry-go-round, he got two years and did one. But that didn't do the trick either. Apparently he still wasn't convinced that the lawful life's the best one.

  "When he came out, he stayed out for less'n two years, probably not being good, but being careful or lucky. Doing bad things but not getting caught. Probably went to his head; maybe made him a little bit cocky. Alas and alack, his good luck ran out as good luck has a way of doing. He slipped up and he got caught again, did another bad thing someone could prove.

  "So this was his fifth trip, let's say. He still got off easy, considering his history. The judge gave him five in the jar. He came out after he'd done three, still having learned very little. People're starting to think: "He's had all these chances, all this instruction; and still he doesn't behave. Maybe he's not a good kid. Less'n a year and he's back in the gravy. Gets ten-to-twelve and does most of the ten.

  "So when he came out, his next-to-last trip, he'd been in the courts on six offenses fourteen years in the slammer. Even allowing for the fact that he got an early start he was seventeen, he first made himself known to the authorities after six convictions for doing bad stuff, he's no longer an innocent kid. He'd used up his slack. So when he got grabbed the seventh time, and he had a machine gun with him, people were convinced he was a bad actor, very bad boy indeed.

  "So they said to him: "Okay, Mister Chappelle, now we get the idea. You don't seem to get the idea. Here's your program: Twenty years to be served, FCI McNeil Island, 'way out there in Washington State. This time you're doing hard time."

  "This gentleman caller of yours, Miss LeClerc: Leaving aside the obvious fact that at age fifty-seven he's kind of old for you, twice your age, he is not the kind of fellow we like to see refined young ladies under our care and supervision hanging out with all the time. Much less shacked up with in respectable apartment buildings we got them into, and which we've been paying the rent on. So we want you to break it off with him. As of now, this very minute, Mister Chappell is off-limits to you."

  "But I like him," she whined, pouting her lower lip. "I'm a normal woman, and I need a man, and he always treats me real good." She paused and pouted, lowering her head so that when she looked at Merrion she had to look through her eyelashes. "I like doing things for him," she said, 'and he likes having me do them. He says that's the only reason he's ever had any trouble with a woman, was because she wouldn't do the things he wanted her to do. But I like to do them, and so therefore we're fine."

  Merrion sighed and stood up. "Uh uh," he said, "I don't care to hear it. You've got the word. I just gave it to you. Quit entertaining Chappelle at your place, and don't see him any other place, either. You do, and I'll hear about it, and when I do, I'll do something about it.

  Furthermore, I will do it to you.

  "You wont like it. The first thing I'll do, I'll pull your case out of the file which I can do since I'm the one who put it in there and I will tell the judge what you've been doing. Screwing Lowell Chappelle, a bad actor and known felon. Not at all the kind of person we want hanging around with defendants who've got cases on file here in this court. This to Judge Cavanaugh will mean the same thing it means to me: that the deal we made — I would place your case on file; you'd behave yourself and do as you're told that deal isn't working out.

  "I know what the judge'll do, just in case you don't. What he'll do is tell me to take your case out of the file and mark it up for hearing, any old day I like, and that's exactly what I'll do. Then, come next weekend, I'll send a couple of cops and a matron over to your place and catch you flopping around in bed with Mister Chappelle, as you've been told not to do. They'll put you in the lock-up for the rest of the weekend.

  "On Monday the judge'll have me call your case, and before you can so much as catch your breath and call me even one bad name, he'll make a finding of guilty on that old charge of grand larceny. To which, you'll remember, you've already admitted facts sufficient to prove guilt. And then he will send you to jail. You'll do a year down in MCI Framingham, Janet, okay? Mister Chappelle wont be on your list of approved visitors, just like he isn't out here any more, now that we've had our nice little chat, but you'll hardly notice.

  "There'll be so many other things for you to dislike, you'll probably forget all about Lowell. You'll lose your nice little apartment we wont keep it vacant for you, while you're gone, and we wont get you a new one when you get out again. You wont have any privacy, or your freedom to do what you like, as little as that has been. No indeed, Janet, once you get down there, all day long you'll do just as you're told. And you'll be told plenty, my dear. Now, is that what you want me to do?"

  She looked at the floor and shook her head No. "Aloud," Merrion said, 'answer me."

  She looked up with fear and shook her head again. "No," she said, 'please don't do that to me."

  "I don't want to," he said, making statements. "But I will, if you make me. You know that. You wont make me now, will you, Janet?"

  "No, I wont," Janet said. "I'll be good."

  FIVE

  Three-eighths of a mile back from Route 9, facing southwest at the foot of Mount Wolf in Cumberland, the pale grey three-story clubhouse at Grey Hills that Saturday morning stood impeccably white-shuttered in green Augu
st shade, the lofty old maples and oaks flanking the drive bowing and rustling in a variable northwest breeze. Jesse Grey had started the sixteen-month process of building it in 1896 as the thirty-six room manor house and centerpiece of his 332-acre estate, suitable for the new life as a country gentleman he had in mind to crown his success in the paper-milling business on the Connecticut River.

  "Success that came right out of the hides of the poor devils working for him. Drove his people unmercifully, full double-shifts, sixteen hours a day in the mill, five and a half days a week. For twenty or thirty cents a day," Larry Lane said, recalling Grey with dutiful second-hand malice. "They tended to die young one of 'em was an uncle of mine, Uncle Eddie; was dead before I was born. Before they got to be twenty-five. Bastards like Jesse just worked them to death. What did they care? When the morning came someone didn't show up, or did but collapsed on the job, Jesse had 'em waiting in line to replace him.

  "No one around here at the time really knew the whole extent of what Grey'd had done up there, woods he'd had cut down and the pasture he'd had turned into lawns," Lane said. "He brought in all his own foremen from outside. He hired local labor to improve Wolf River and the South Brook for trout fishing, make them run faster with deeper pools; clear the brush and put up the fences, white board like you see on TV, the horse farms in Kentucky on Derby Day; lay out the bridle paths and build the tennis courts and pool. The house and barns and stable; the quarter-mile exercise track.

  But all anyone really knew enough to speak of was the part of the job that he did; that the bathrooms were all Italian marble; the size of the big crystal chandeliers. They knew it was grand and elegant, sure, but just how grand and how swell didn't come out 'til years later.

  "Then when it did almost no one was interested. One of those WPA writers FDR put to work in the Depression went back and dug up the history of the old place, to go with some pictures they had taken of it for a book about the valley. They put copies in all the libraries around here. For all the good that did; nobody read the damned thing.

  Well, I did, but you never could go by what I did. Nobody else ever read it.

  "What this WPA guy did was track down the ledgers with the accounts of the money Grey'd sunk into that place. It came to about nine hundred thousand dollars and this was at the turn of the century. Be eight or ten million today."

  Thirty-five years later, two years into the Depression, Grey's heirs had found themselves too short of money to maintain the estate, and had been forced to put it up for sale. Lane had seen it as it was then.

  "Still used to go and fish there. The fact the place was all neglected didn't mean the trout'd all packed up and gone away, or that Grey and his fine fancy friend's caught all of them before they faded away themselves. What'd always been there was still there; you could catch a nice fat two-or three-pound rainbow, or a good-sized brown down by the Ox Bow. The streams were still okay; just the place'd gone to hell."

  Lane had not been exaggerating. The photographs that the auctioneer had commissioned in the mid-Thirties for use in the brochure to advertise the property to potential bidders far away without success, as it turned out were on display in the card-room of the Grey Hills clubhouse. The sepia-toned eight-by-ten glossies showed the rolling lawns overgrown; the gardens gone to seed. The two-by-fours that had tautly. framed the block-U-shaped chicken-wire enclosures at the ends of the two clay tennis courts had fallen down. Six deep slatted wooden lawn-chairs with arms broad enough to serve as trays stood bleached and rotten by the courts, four abandoned at odd angles along the sidelines of one, the others together near the westerly baseline of the second.

  Merrion imagined their occupants in better days rising slowly with tennis sweaters draped over their shoulders, the men in long white flannel pants, the women in long white tennis dresses going away from the chairs and up across the lawn toward the great house, the windows lighted golden in the blue twilight of some early autumn Sunday evening, '28, or '29, the future growing dark and closing in around them, the carefree people innocent, unaware it was one of the last weekend gatherings they would have together there, a rich contented family, with wealthy handsome friends.

  In the old photographs weeds had reclaimed the playing surfaces. The buildings still barely standing then were dilapidated, all their window-glass long since shot out, needing much more than paint. The mews off behind the northeast corner of the house, where the pro shop now stood, had burned in lightning-started fires in the spring of 1930.

  They had never been rebuilt; in the pictures two charred vertical beams stood in the rubble. Most of the tiles a watercolor done by some Grey family guest showed them to have been azure had fallen into the vast swimming pool, exposing the white mastic that had dried on the cement underneath. The beams and the shingled roof of the four-room cabana and verandah lay collapsed on the edge of the apron on the southerly side. The house had tilted off at a slight angle to the east, its three massive chimneys leaning toward the center of its sagging rooftree, by then almost buckled. The barn, since demolished, in the photograph retained the double doors, large and small, up and down, each of them securely latched when Herbert Hoover was still in the White House, claiming to see better days just ahead for the nation. But the auctioneer's photographer had set up his view camera to take the picture from dead center at the front; Mount Wolf was clearly visible behind it through the gaps in its siding.

  "The wonder was that all of it hadn't been torched, right to the ground," Lane said. "Only reason it wasn't was because by the time Grey's heirs sold it, they were just as down-and-out as everybody else.

  Not worth envying and hating any more. Besides, hardly anyone still alive by then ever knew them. Few oldtimers who were still around who hated Jesse couldn't do much to hurt him; he was long and safely dead. Got himself thrown by a horse, I recall, before FDR came in. You could call Jesse lots of names, but you couldn't fault his timing, came to knowing when to clear out.

  "Anyway," Larry Lane said, 'at that point taking pictures of it was a total waste of time, no matter if it was the WPA was throwing away taxpayers' money to make a book no one'd read or the auction house trying to see if they could scare up a buyer someplace in the world.

  They couldn't. The whole shebang was worthless, likely to stay that way. We look back now at the Depression and we nod to each other and say how bad it must've been then; took a world-war-economy boom to get us out of it, ten, eleven years of hopelessness and then five, six more of being afraid no matter what the president said. But from here we can see that it come to an end. From there, the point of view of people living through it, out of work, no money to buy food, it looked different, like it'd never end.

  "That's why Jesse Grey's estate was worthless; not because it wasn't still beautiful property but because no one had any money to buy it. So no matter what it'd cost to build it and equip it, it was worth nothing. And hopeless because there's no hope in this goddamned world for any one or any thing that isn't worth some kind of money.

  "So, since it looked hopeless, just as you would've expected, if you'd thought about it at all, the Catholic fucking Church bought it. For chump change, of course, its usual price. What it generally pays if it doesn't get what it wants as a gift, absolutely for free. A hundred-ten-thousand dollars, all told, dirt-cheap even back then. Back taxes, of course, and about sixty grand in bank notes some overconfident Grey or other'd borrowed from some unusually stupid banker when the family fortune'd started to melt away meeting margin calls, month or so after the Crash. One cockeyed optimist going deeper into debt with another one, still convinced the rich kid's playground could be saved.

  "A hundred-and-ten-thousand dollars. For three-hundred-and-thirty-two acres of prime land. Three-hundred-and-some bucks an acre. Bad news for the Grey family, of course, already up to its hips in bad news, but bad news too for the town of Cumberland, which didn't need any more either. That was the single most valuable parcel of property in the whole town, and just like that, it was off the a
ssessment rolls, no longer a taxable asset. Even if and when the economy came back, as of course it did, that property wasn't going to be any use to anyone unless they had enough bucks not just to buy it but then spend rebuilding it. No one could afford to let an investment that big sit idle unless you count the Catholic Church.

  "God bless the Roman Catholic Church," Larry Lane many times said, always seeming to marvel, laughing and shaking his head, as though he really had been at once utterly baffled and completely amused. "As surely He must've, a great many times, to explain what it's gotten away with. Year after year; decade after decade; the century after the centuries before, the Catholic Church marches on.

  "The bishop in the Thirties here McLaughlin was his name, that much I am sure of; Francis McLaughlin, I think apparently shared the predominant view of the men who run his church that a bishop can't have too much land. Or too many buildings, as far as that goes, even if they're all fallin' down. So when Jesse's remaining heirs or their lawyers, I dunno, whoever all those people were down in Phil-la-dci-phy-ay when they put his great estate up for sale here, the only bidder in sight was the diocese of Springfield.

  One-hundred-and-ten-thousand American dollars. I've got no idea how or where his sacredness came up with the money. He never confided in me.

  Or what on earth he planned to do with the ramshackle place. Most people thought he didn't, either. Just get it first, and then, bye and bye, think about what you're gonna do with it. You've got plenty of time. "Forever's a very long time'; that's the way the people think in Holy Mother Church. They've got the keys to forever."

  In 1948 eighteen wealthy men of the Pioneer Valley formed a real estate trust and negotiated the purchase of the property from the diocese. The deed recited that price for the transfer of the property to the Grey Hills Association, a non-profit organization newly-established by documents drawn up by one of their leaders, Warren Corey, of Butler amp;. Corey, was 'one dollar and other valuable consideration, receipt of which is hereby acknowledged." The actual price was not disclosed. "Three-hundred-odd-thousand was the price you heard quoted," Lane said, 'just under a thousand an acre. But no one outside the deal knew."