"Dad said it to him once when he had him in the chair. Said: "Tell me, Chassy, aren't you just the tiniest bit afraid now? Doesn't it make you nervous to be sitting helplessly here in the chair with a bib on, and me standing over you with this high-speed electric drill I'm about to shove into your mouth? I could hurt you with this thing, if I'm not careful. I should think you'd want to do everything within your power to make sure you're in my good graces so I'm going to do my best not to hurt you."
"Dad and Chassy were in high school together. Most of my father's patients're like that: people he's known all his life. So it's okay for him to talk to them that way, and they can talk that way to him.
"The judge opens his eyes he's like most people, my father says, closes his eyes so he can't see the drill or the needle sits up straight in the chair and he asks my father what the hell he's got on his mind. And Dad puts it to him: "People say you make a lot of money in the market.
I believe them. Mind telling me how come you never see your way clear to letting me in on the deal?"
"Judge sits back and closes his eyes again. "Don't mind at all," he says. "I've made some money in the market, as have many. I've also lost some money in the market, as many others have as well. All of my profits have come from investing my own money well, mine and Delia's.
I've risked it to increase it. When my risks have paid off, I've had profits, been happy. And when they haven't, I've had losses. Then I've been unhappy. I always try to buy stocks that are going to go up;
I can't claim I always succeed.
"If I recommend you buy a certain stock, and you do it and make money, you'll be happy. You may even call me up and thank me. But you'll expect to keep the profit as you should; it was your money that you risked. If you lose money, though, as you very well might, then you'll be unhappy. And even though of course I know you wont expect me to make good your loss, you certainly wont call me up and thank me. In fact you'll probably secretly blame me for your loss, because if I hadn't put it into your head to buy that stock, you wouldn't've lost your money.
"So, when I come in here for a filling after that, what you'll remember wont be that you solicited the recommendation that caused you to lose money it will be that you lost your money because you did something that I told you to do. And therefore you might decide that instead of trying very hard not to hurt me, or hurt me as little as possible, you wouldn't mind hurting me at all, because I made you lose your money. So it would probably be best for me if I found another dentist.
"I don't want to do that. You've been a good dentist. I've been coming to you for years. I've got you all trained. I'm too old now to break in a new one. I think much too highly of your dental skills to risk having to do that, by giving you market advice that makes it so I don't dare to come in here anymore.
"Now having said that I must warn you: If you hurt me now, and I decide you did it on purpose because I refused to make you rich, I'll have to have you arrested and put in jail for battery."
"My father told Chassy he thought his explanation sounded reasonable and he'd do his best not to hurt him with the drill. He said what he should've said at that point was that if Chassy didn't start paying his bills on time instead of making him wait ninety days, he'd have him arrested, judge or not, and thrown in jail as a deadbeat. Spring family always took their sweet time paying their dental bills. But he didn't. Basically my father likes Chassy all right; just doesn't like having to wait to get paid for fixing his teeth."
"Okay then," Merrion said, "Spring hasn't got a horse in this race.
Judge Cavanaugh: Has he got a family? I don't know."
"The Boy Judge," Hilliard said, chuckling. "Fuckin' Freddie Dillinger? That's what he called Lennie Cavanaugh, his appointment was first announced ever since then, too, every time he's been in the news.
It's really a wonder, nobody's ever horsewhipped Fred; just beat the old-fashioned shit out of him, some of the things he's put in that column Nineteen-fifty-nine that was, when Lennie got that job; remember because that was the year Mercy and I got married. He was pretty young, though not even thirty, I recall. So that'd make him now, what, thirty-five, thirty-six? Nah, no kid of his'd be old enough. Might have a relative out there someplace, though, who's had trouble dressing and feeding himself. We wouldn't know."
"Yeah, he could," Merrion said. "He could also have trouble digesting fried fatty foods and we wouldn't know that either. Look, I don't want to sit around with you and do our damnedest to dream up a hundred good reasons why I can't get this job. What I want to do is figure out how we can do the same thing for me that the two of us've done for so many other people, nowhere as deserving as I am: figure out some way so that I can get this job that's what I want to do."
"I'm sorry," Hilliard said. "I'm so used to doing what we do when we get a job-hunter in here, I guess I must've forgotten who I was talking to."
"Yeah," Merrion said. "Well, this one time I'll overlook it. I did what you said, got some background on Lane. Since according to you he seems to be the chief hurdle standing 'tween me and the job. He's got a whole bunch of kids, eight of them. But only two of them don't already have jobs, and both of them're married daughters that don't even live around here. One of them lives in Japan or some other place nobody ever heard of. Her husband's with the State Department. The other one's married to some guy who works for a paint company. All the others've got jobs."
"How'd you get this?" Hilliard said.
"Turns out my mother knows him," Merrion said. "His wife I guess isn't a very good cook. He gets all their pies and cookies from Slade's Bakery. You know the one I mean. Used to also be a cafeteria, back when we still had the trains coming through. Ma says he's a regular bear for the cookies, oatmeal raisin, chocolate chip. Goes through couple dozen a week, half a dozen or so at a time. Monday nights, Wednesday nights, then a dozen he comes in on Friday. Plus a loaf of the brown bread, for Saturday night I guess him and the wife have baked beans. He's never in a very big hurry, Ma says, always got plenty of time to chat. He calls her "Polly," like all her friends do, and she calls him "Mister Lane." Now."
"What'd she used to call him?" Hilliard said. '"Franklin Delano Roosevelt"?"
"She called him "Judge," Merrion said. "But then someone told her it was Chris; he was still living at home then, after I'd moved out that he's just the clerk. "He's not the judge. He doesn't decide anything."
"Her reaction was: "Well, what did I know, he was only the clerk?
Someone told me he worked at the courthouse. Who works at the courthouse, huh? Judges. How'm I supposed to know he wasn't one? I was never inside it, thank God none of my family was ever arrested. We always behaved ourselves. He certainly looked like a judge ought to look, always very well-dressed and so forth. Although come to think of it, kind of flashy, for a judge. But always a jacket and tie, winter, summer or fall; shoes always shined; a clean shirt and a hat, always a hat. A felt hat in the winter, straw hat in the summer. Nice camel-hair overcoat in the cold weather. Mister Lane is a very sharp dresser." '"Well," Chris tells her, "how he dresses doesn't count. It's what he does that counts. And all he does is file papers no one ever looks at, and collect the money for tickets. It's not like he can send you to jail. He don't amount to a piss hole inna snow."
"To your mother he said that?" Hilliard said. "Did your father rise up out of the grave and belt him one? Pat might've said piss hole out in back at Valley Ford, but never in front of her."
"Well, the general idea was all I meant," Merrion said. "I don't know what Chris actually said. He was just givin' the general idea. Which's what I'm trying to give to you here. I asked my mother about him. I think I can work for this guy. I think it'd work out all right. Not someone I would call, I was lookin' for a guy go out'n have a few with, no, but otherwise, I see no problem.
"And let's not get carried away with ourselves here, either, when we're discussing this thing. This job that Lane's got with nobody in it, it isn't that big a thing. "I get by on it": was what
Dad used to call his job, and that's all this job is, too. I can get by on it. A steady check is what I want. I never had any ambition.
"My own mother'll tell you that, if I'm not careful. God knows she's told me enough she's always giving me that. "Second prize, the small change, the leftovers. You poor kid, you've simply got no ambition at all."
Merrion had listened many times while she low-rated him to others. "It just isn't in Ambrose's nature to put himself forward, you know? He's tall enough and strong enough and fat enough, too, God knows he should be, see the way he eats all the time. His father used to say he wasn't a bad athlete. Not that he was ever a real good athlete either that might've meant he'd stand out.
"Pat never seemed to mind, though. I think now it was because he never aimed too high himself. Pat was always careful not to make himself conspicuous. Get his name in the papers, so someone heard about him. I think he approved of that attitude Amby had. He said if Amby didn't watch out, wasn't careful, he'd get too good at something in school, and pretty soon he'd wind up going far away to some fine university or something. I used to think he didn't mean it; that was his way of pushing Amby, getting him to do something. But now I'm not so sure.
"He'd say Amby didn't want people to think he wanted something really good to happen: "Mustn't let 'em catch you aiming too high for anything in this world. You might get it. Then God only knows what could happen. People might not like you anymore. Say you went high-hat on them, something bad like that might happen. It's just not worth takin' the risk, you know?" After a while Pat had us all convinced, Chris and me and Amby both. "Chris's the one who's got his eye on the moon. What Ambrose wants is for people to like him, to be the hero's best friend, covers his backside for him. Never the hero himself."
Thirty years later Polly (Flavin) Merrion late that benign Saturday afternoon in August lay non compos mentis at age seventy-nine in the bed in the bright sunny room with southwestern exposure on a small enclosed patio overlooking a round pool with a tulip-shaped recirculattng fountain at St. Mary's on the Hilltop in West Springfield, picking at the hem on the lightweight white wool blanket, her sparse white hair neatly trimmed, set and combed, her faultless white skin clear and softly lotioned, a hint of color on her lips, her blue eyes 'as clear as Gilbey's gin," as her dear Pat had used to say, just to get her goat. It had been about three years since she'd heckled her oldest son.
"My own dear mother, Rose, now," Polly usually began, when giving him a roasting he understood it to be her way of bragging about him running on the first part of a manhattan as she had been one day in March of 1973 at a small luncheon that he'd thrown in the private dining room at Henry's Grist Mill. He'd invited about thirty people to celebrate his official promotion to first assistant clerk of the District Court of Western Hampshire (meaning: Clerk of Court-designate).
Clerk of Court Richie Hammond after stalling six months had at last formally appointed Merrion to his old slot under Larry Lane. Hammond had instinctively disliked Merrion from the first time they met, knowing on first sight he was a smart-ass. Ever since Larry Lane had died he had been forlornly hoping either that someone with more clout would become interested in the job Hammond knew that was unlikely; Dan Hilliard was in the most formidable years of his ascent or failing that, perhaps God in His wisdom and goodness would strike Merrion dead.
God had not.
Richie had stopped stalling after being credibly threatened with summary dismissal from his own place. The threat had come in the form of a menacing phone call placed by a deputy administrator in the Administrative Office of the District Court Department in Salem. He said that the chief judge had just gotten an upsetting call about the next year's judicial budget from the chairman of House Ways and Means.
The administrator had reported grimly that the chairman of Ways and Means appeared to be not only very angry but 'a very close personal friend of this Ambrose Merrion," as well, and asked Richie Hammond if he'd been aware of that fact. When Richie said he had been "Everybody out here knows they're asshole buddies; that's the only reason Merrion got the goddamned job he's got' the chief administrative clerk had said in a soft savage voice: "Then would you mind telling me, so I can tell the judge, who's practically beside himself with fucking curiosity I think it's curiosity; it may be something else exactly why the fuck it is he had to get the call he got and I have to make this call right now, to get you to do what any fucking asshole with the brain of a retarded pigeon would've known from on the first day what he'd better do right fucking off or get his fucking balk cut off? Or would you rather quit right now, and we'll give Merrion your job would you like that better?"
Hammond had soberly accepted Merrion's solemn invitation to attend the joyous luncheon, but to the surprise of neither of them suffered an attack of the Twenty-four-hour Convenient Grippe when the day for it arrived.
"When Rose was among us," Polly said, 'she had designs on my poor little Ambrose, and selfish ones at that. She'd always had it in her mind that if she ever had any sons of her own it'd be a good thing for her if one of them went into the priesthood. You know what they used to tell all the good Catholic mothers: "If you've a son a priest, your place in heaven's guaranteed." But she didn't have any, so that was a bit of a handicap for her, you see? In that respect, at least, she'd left a stone unturned.
"That was not her way at all, neglecting things. Of course she hadn't had any wayward sons, either, which'd also been known to've happened to perfectly good church-going Catholic mothers. No naughty boys she would've had to pray for, make novenas to Saint Jude for, the patron saint of the Impossible, and go and visit Sunday mornings down at the lock-up, or on Tuesdays and the weekends at county jail or something, like some unfortunate women she knew and don't think she ever let 'em forget it, either; not for one stinkin' minute did she ever do that.
"Those poor unfortunate creatures with those terrible crosses to bear, the poor things."
"But that still didn't give her one to bake the cookies for, and send down to the seminary, either, and she couldn't let herself forget that.
I don't think nuns counted in that bounty-hunt and they didn't take young ladies in the priesthood. If they had, I think she would've thought nothing of wrapping me up and sending me along, "see what you can do with this one. Not much to look at maybe, but good with pots and pans, and she knows how to do a wash. Send her back if it looks like she isn't going to work out for you." But the choice wasn't available.
"So you could see what she was thinking, the minute he was born and we knew he was a boy. She thought maybe Ambrose might become a priest, if she took a hand in it as she generally did everything that happened within a mile or two of her, and played her cards right, of course.
Wasn't his namesake a famous bishop? And a saint? The bishop who baptized Saint Augustine, by God? Well, didn't that tell you something? Meaning that if the vocation didn't come naturally to our little boy, if the Holy Ghost didn't give him a good bat on the head and tell him what he ought to do, well then, she might get involved herself in working out the matter. Since she was pretty sure she knew what would've been God's will, if He'd only just spent the time and taken the proper interest in it. If you know what I mean. Bashfulness was not a thing that troubled her.
"So for a while then, after Pat and I were first married and Amby'd come into the world after only the bare decent interval, there, I'm sure she had her eye on him. Not that I'd want you to think, for even one moment, that my dear mother Rose actually had a thing to be concerned about where getting into heaven was concerned. Far from it butter wouldn't've melted in her mouth, not in that one's. No, it was just that she was always one to believe that where salvation was concerned, you couldn't be too careful. If now a grandson was the closest she could come to meeting the requirements, well, that was the best she could do. Couldn't ask for more than that. At least 'til I told her I didn't think grandsons counted, met the tariff for admission to Jerusalem, the holy city, the same way that sons do. And so that more or less cu
t down her zeal.
"It really was all for the best. If Ambrose'd gone into the church, you know, none of you here in this room or even at this table would've ever heard of him at all. He'd most likely be the curate in a small parish 'way up in the State of Maine someplace, up there on the forty-fifth parallel, on the Canadian border. And he'd be perfectly happy, you know? Completely at peace with the world. My boy's a humble man."
"At least she didn't say the celibacy stuff would've been no trouble for you," Mary Pat Sweeney had said to him that night in the apartment he'd been renting then in Hampton Pond. "If she had then I'd've known for sure I'd come to the wrong funeral after all." Mary Pat had kept about a hundred-fifteen pounds in what seemed like constant merry motion back in those days, and not just in her office down in Springfield at Massachusetts Mutual, or at the evening and weekend county Democratic meetings, either.
Mary Pat was well-known far and wide "Oh sure, both ways, north and south, up and down the river," as she used to say herself, 'good-time Mary Pat' for being the one person that you had to sign up before you could be really sure that what you had in mind to do would be a success. Merrion admitted cheerfully that her reddish hair and greenish eyes were the sights he first looked for when he walked into a room, 'just like everybody else does. Everybody else."
She believed in realism, just as he and Dan did. While Sunny was around but stationed far away from home, he 'always seemed to get along real good with Mary Pat," as Polly said from time to time, with some insistent wistfulness, the closest that she ever came to declaring her preference for Mary Pat among his girlfriends that she'd met. That was fully close enough for him to implying her somewhat-less-than-full approval of then-Lieutenant later Captain Geraldine Keller, USAF. Mary Pat in those days without discussion understood and apparently accepted the fact that she was his second-best girl and probably always would be no more than that. She appeared to believe that the reason was timing: he'd met Sunny first, at UMass." and because he was a loyal man, Sunny would remain first as long as they lived. Many times without wishing Sunny any ill Mary Pat therefore sincerely and coolly wished her dead.
A change of gravity Page 22