A change of gravity

by George V. Higgins

  "But then again, you never know. Maybe Sunny's the way she is right now because this's how she is right now. And when she's gotten it out of her system, maybe she'll be more like us. You can't be so hasty about people, you know, cookie. Just because when we were the same age that the two of them're now, we were already married and that was the right thing for us, with me runnin' for office and all that, that doesn't necessarily mean it's always gonna be the right thing for everybody else.

  "But be that as it may, I still think it's time now Amby should get started on becoming an adult, makin' a real life for himself. So I'm gonna start kicking him out of the nest, see if I can shake him up a little. I owe it to him as a friend."

  SEVEN

  In 1964, when he won his second term on Beacon Hill, Hilliard felt his political future was secure enough to warrant borrowing money for the long-term rental of good space for a district office. Merrion found space on the second floor of a three-story brick building on High Street in Holyoke, last occupied by a businesswoman named Condon. "It's awful big, but except for that it looks good. I think it could work,"

  Merrion said. "The Carneses own the building. They've had trouble rentin' it lately. The third floor's vacant, too. There's a tenant on the first floor but there might as well not be Saint Vincent de Paul Society runs a second-hand store there. Old clothes and used furniture. Only open weekends. Otherwise nobody's down there, makin' noise and leavin' food around, draw the rats. It's a very nice building. Old but very solid. Well-built, you know?"

  Hilliard was familiar with it. He had been there many times, he said, 'but never once willingly. Lillian Condon's dancing school. Or, to be more precise: "Miss Jocelyn's Studio of the Dance." Jocelyn was her maiden name. She called it' he made his voice falsetto '"my stage name. I went under it during my career in the theater." We all called her the Dance Lady. "Hafta go the Dance Lady tonight."

  "She was kind of a pathetic case, not that I thought that when I was a kid. My father said in the Twenties she used to quit her job in Condon's Drugstore every spring, travel up to Maine and spend the summer working as a chorus girl in summer-stock in one of the resort towns up there along the coast. Bar Harbor, Boothbay; someplace like that. Did it for three or four years.

  Hoping for an offer that'd get her to New York; either get a job in theater or some rich guy who'd keep her on the side. And every September, she came back to the drugstore. Finally she got discouraged. Gave up on the bright lights of Broadway and came home, convinced what God wanted her to do was spend her life with her legs together, standing behind the counter.

  "After a couple years I guess she decided it'd be all right with God if she made a slight exception and married Condon's son, Jimmy. He took after his old man; he had a degree from the Mass. College of Pharmacy and his lower jaw receded. Maybe his thing did, too. He didn't give her any kids. Or else one of the stories about her was true: she couldn't have any kids. Rumor was that one of those summers she'd had to have an abortion. Not that anyone really ever knew it for sure, so far's I know might've just been one of those nasty little secrets people like to make up about other people, put a little color in their own lives. No law says they have to be true.

  "Anyway, Jimmy backed her financially when she started her dancing school. A couple years later he died. Maybe her being over there all the time giving lessons made him feel neglected or something."

  The space had been perfect for Miss Jocelyn's gatherings. In the early afternoons, little girls in leotards and pink satin slippers chewed their lips intently as they pirouetted, whirling dust motes through the sunlight slanting through the big two-paned windows looking west over High Street. Late afternoons and weekday evenings, passersby heard the clatter of high school girls learning to tap-dance, making them smile.

  Hilliard remembered the Friday evenings and Saturday nights: small crowds of older children ungainly and uneasy between the ages of seven and fourteen. The boys wore blue blazers and thin grey worsted trousers outgrown in the five or six weeks since their careful purchase one or two sizes too large, and ties clipped off-center to their collars. They huddled in a bunch and studied some openly, and boldly; most furtively, surreptitiously and apprehensively the girls across the room. Whispering excitedly and squealing in groups of five or six, in high-necked, short-skirted chiffon versions of long strapless gowns, the girls were learning to gossip. They were already covetous for future nights when they would have proms and they desperately both hoped and feared beautiful bodies and big swaggering boyfriends with half-curled upper lips and pants bulging at the crotch, begging urgently to feel them up; real adventures to tell and tell on one another.

  "I guess the Dance Lady was fairly happy, though, with what she'd ended up with. She must've been; seemed like any time of day that you went by you could hear the music up there. She ran it about fifteen years.

  Not the brilliant career she'd originally had in mind, but still, that's what life's about: making the best deal you can. If you end up the widow of a sterile chinless husband, with nothing to look forward to but teaching sullen little kids how to dance, instead of as a rich man's plaything named "Mitzi," you live with it.

  "My mother's idea was I needed a gentleman's polish and old Lil'd give it to me. It was my idea of torture. Once a week, every week, during the school year. Friday afternoons, when I was seven. Saturday nights when I turned eleven. Until I finally turned thirteen and got parole.

  Outlasted both of them, the one who made me go and the one who tried to teach me I still couldn't dance."

  The space had stood vacant for three years since the dance lady's death at seventy-six. Hilliard remembered how she'd looked presiding over it: the brassy gold hair and the rail-thin body; the small breasts under the gold lame bodice sometimes askew, and oddly-shaped built-up, the girls reported knowingly, with wadded facial tissue but as high as they had been when she was seventeen. Either her imperial bearing required accompaniment or she feared quiet; she kept the room echoing with music, pounding out tap-practice tunes on an out-of-tune Chickering upright piano; cranking up an old Victrola that used steel needles to scrape Swan Lake, Les Sylphides, Tales of Vienna Woods and vaudeville tunes from her extensive collection of scratchy shellacs, proudly turning up the suitcase-shaped, grey tweed Columbia portable record-player. It remained 'our new, hi'fi, diamond' needle record-player" the six years he attended, groaning out ballads sung by Vaughn Monroe, Teresa Brewer, Vic Damone and Patti Page, the Singin'

  Rage, for ballroom instruction.

  "It's a pretty big room, though," Hilliard said. "Do we really need all that space? And can we afford it?"

  "It is a lot of space," Merrion said, 'and we probably don't really need it. But we can afford it. It's not only more space'n we need; it's more space'n anybody in these parts right now seems to need.

  Carnes people aren't giving it away that'd be against their religion.

  But they also know that if the dancing-school lady doesn't come back to life or they cough up what it'll cost to partition it, they might not ever find someone who'll rent it. The room is just too fuckin' big."

  "I wonder who it was originally built for," Hilliard said. "Wasn't for a dancing school, for sure. What'd someone want all that space forV "The agent said he thinks it was a meeting hall," Merrion said.

  "Catholic Order of Foresters, something like that; one of those fraternal groups the new immigrants used to join. Organized to sell themselves insurance. Hire someone to teach them all altogether how to learn English, take the exam for citizenship." He snorted. "Kind of newcomers we got comin' up now could use that kind of ambition, you ask me. But then of course they've already got the right to vote, not that they use it. And speaking English don't interest them a lot. Don't need to speak English, get welfare."

  "How much a foot?" Hilliard said. "You'll notice how I tactfully pretend I didn't quite hear what you just got finished saying, toward the end there."

  "Yeah," Merrion said, 'you may not hear it, and you'll never s
ay it; but you think it, pal; I know that. You think the same way as I do on that. You keep it all to yourself all the time, and deny it when you're out in public'

  Hilliard sighed. "Some day I've really got to set some time aside, close the door and figure out how we reform you," he said. "It's something that we got to do. Otherwise some night you'll start showin' up for one of my debates wearing a sheet and a hood, calling yourself the Grand Kleagle. People'll start thinking I must have something wrong with me, I've still got you around, killin' time between lynchings. Definitely have got to do that, and I will, too, some day, right after I finish rebuilding the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

  "But in the meantime, let's see if we can't talk about something less troublesome. How 'bout we start with the rent what're they asking for this place?"

  "The agent's saying two-fifty," Merrion said. "I know he'll take two-twenty-five."

  "What's that work out to, about?" Hilliard said. He liked strutting his mathematical skills. He had taught algebra, trigonometry and calculus during the six years preceding his election to the House. He looked forward to public budgetary debates; his calculating ability enabled him not only to show off but sometimes to intimidate his fellow aldermen and later on his colleagues in the House. "About twenty-five hundred bucks a year?" In private he played down his talent a little, deliberately only coming close to exact answers.

  "About that," Merrion said, 'twenty-four-seventy-five."

  "Two hundred a month and change," Hilliard said. "Let's see how he likes the sound of one-seventy-five. That'd bring it in under two grand, nineteen-and-a-quarter, one-sixty a month — quite a bit closer our speed.

  "In fact," he said, 'more I think about this, what we ought to be saying's one-fifty. Sixteen-fifty a year, just under one-forty a month. We're going to be paying to heat the place. What do they burn there, anyway oil or coal?"

  "I think the agent said oil," Merrion said.

  "Good," Hilliard said. "Probably means the heating system's newer; wont be breaking down all the time. Tell him I'm terribly busy on the Hill and I wont have time enough to take a look at it until sometime next week. In the meantime, find out all you can, so when I do go over there, the two of us know more about the place 'n Carnes's fuckin' agent does.

  "We're the ones doing the favor. Without us he's stuck with that space. Old Roy should be moistening his lips, getting set to pucker up and kiss me on the ass, I'm willing to be nice enough to take it off his hands."

  The landlord's agent, Brian Fontaine, looked to be in his late forties.

  He had reddish-blond hair that he combed back, and) rather sharp features. He shifted a lot in his clothes, as though confined in them. He spoke softly and admiringly to Hilliard and Merrion about the building's many advantages, as though he had been calling their attention to subtleties of composition in a fine painting. Their conversation reverberated in the empty building.

  Citing the fact that Hilliard's older or less able constituents would have only one flight of stairs to climb when they came for appointments, Fontaine pointed out that the broad wooden staircase was equipped with a pipe handrail in the middle as well as those fitted to the walls. He said the sturdy fixtures to hold onto with both hands would make older visitors feel secure while using the stairs. Hilliard remembered climbing those steps, treads worn even then, as slowly as he possibly could, and then after dancing school was over, vaulting down them two and three at a time, using the handrails as exercise bars.

  "Yes," Hilliard said, 'there's that. But they'd feel even better if there was an elevator, so they wouldn't have to lug their old bones up two flights, holding on for dear life with both hands."

  "One flight," the agent said. "You'd be on the second floor."

  "Two flights," Hilliard said. "One flight up to the landing. Then, after you catch your breath, you've got to climb another flight — making two to reach this level."

  "The staircase was built that way to save floor space in the building," the agent said with weary testiness. "It's one floor above the ground floor only one flight of stairs."

  Merrion nodded. "That sounds right to me, Mister Hilliard," he said obsequiously, as though as anxious to ingratiate himself with Fontaine as he was to please Hilliard. "It's a reasonable thing that he's saying. You could have two landings, three landings, four, you didn't mind how narrow and steep they hadda be. Still only the one flight of stairs."

  Fontaine took that as vindication. He let the reaction show on his face, sneaking a glance at Hilliard. Hilliard nodded and looked thoughtful.

  "In fact," Merrion said, the conciliatory tone vanishing, 'the only problem I still have is do you think your elderly constituents, the ones with the cardiac conditions, pains in their chest all the time; ones who're all crippled-up and lame, need to use a cane; and in wheelchairs, even do you think they're gonna find Mister Fontaine's explanation as reasonable as I do?

  "Or are they maybe gonna say: "Hilliard'! Second-floor Hilliard? He doesn't want to hear from me, what I need to have him hear. He said he did, when he was runnin', but that was to get elected. Now he's not mnarested anymore. Next election he's gonna find out something from me: I'm the one not innarested. I'm voting whoever the other guy happens to be." I'm afraid that's what those voters'll do, Mister Hilliard. You know how demanding they are.

  They think we ought to cater to them."

  Fontaine had to work his facial muscles to dispel the expression of chagrin that displaced the look of victory on his face, but he did his best to agree smoothly, pointing out the availability of similar space on the second floor of another brick building nearby, owned and managed by the Carnes family. "It's almost identical space, except that it's newly renovated and refurbished. Brand new Westinghouse elevator's just one of the many improvements. Best one they make, four-man car, top-of-the-line but very compact; so you don't lose that much of floor space where you put in your shaft. And at the same time it operates almost silently, very nice, and quiet. Most of the machinery's down in the basement. So that means you don't hear it start grinding and banging away up there over your head on the roof, every time someone enters the building or leaves. Be equally glad to show you that. Take you over right now, in fact. Got the key with me, right here.

  "But I have to warn you: That machine wasn't cheap. Neither were the other renovations and improvements. We've had to raise the rent. It'll cost you a dollar a foot more for it'n Mister Merrion here told me you could afford which as I'm sure you realize isn't that great a deal for us. If the figure that he gave me, around two dollars a foot or so's all you can see your way clear to paying, well, that does limit what I can show you. But now if what you're telling me's that you think you may be able to go a bit more to get what you've got to have, we've got what you want."

  Hilliard scowled and started to say something, but Merrion held up his hand. "Danny," he said, 'if I could get a word in here? I may be getting a little confused. It might help if I could get things cleared up here a little."

  Hilliard shrugged. "Anything you think might help move this thing along."

  "I must've given you the wrong impression, Brian," Merrion said. "I never said two-bucks-a-foot was the most we could afford. I never gave you any dollar-figure. When you showed me this space last week I said it looked pretty big. Maybe double what wed had in mind. And when I asked you how big it was, you said you'd have to check "but around a thousand feet, I think, eleven hundred feet." So I just did the easy thing, took the thousand-foot guess and multiplied it in my head, using two-bucks-a-foot as the number. Just trying to get some idea of what that would work out to be. Dollars-per-square-foot doesn't mean much to me; what I want is how-much-a-month.

  "So when I said to you: "At two bucks a foot that'd work out, something in the neighborhood of two hundred bucks a month." And then: "Who pays for the heat?" that really was all I was doing. Just getting an idea, you know? Then you said you thought Mister Carnes'd say you couldn't let it go for less'n two-fifty, as though I'd just offered two, wh
ich I hadn't. I never gave you any figure at all, or anyway, never meant to.

  I was just thinking out loud."

  The agent looked bored and annoyed.

  "And wouldn't my friend Roy'd say that since it's me," Hilliard said, 'who'd be renting this other space with the elevator, you should charge me the old rent? Roy's my campaign finance director. His office keeps my records. He knows how strapped for cash I am. Don't you think he'd want you to give me a break?"

  "Mister Hilliard," the agent said, grinning, "I'm absolutely sure he wouldn't, and I'll tell you why that is. After Mister Merrion'd called and told me he was representing you, I decided maybe I'd better see Mister Carnes and fill him in. Because I know that Mister Carnes and Roy Junior, his son, and his brother, the Senator, all think very highly of you.

  "I remember when you ran the second time for alderman Mister Carnes then told me when I went to vote for Roy Junior, for rep — his brother Arthur may've been running that year too, re-election to the senate he hoped not only that I'd vote for them but also vote for you. He said you were a very nice guy, and an excellent candidate all the Carneses were behind you.

  "Well, if Mister Carries says it, that's enough for me. I took his suggestion, and not only did I give you my vote but I made sure my wife, and my sister, and father and mother, I asked them to vote for you, too. And I think they all did it, too, and every time you've run since then too. Which would mean, if they have, you've gotten five votes from our family every time you've run, ever since Mister Carnes said that to me. Although maybe not from my father, the first time. He went to school with Mister Gilson that may've swayed him the other way.

  "So as soon as I found out who was interested in this space, I thought that maybe Mister Carnes'd want me to give you some sort of a discount which in this case would mean taking a loss. But seeing as how it was you, he might want to give you special treatment.