A change of gravity

by George V. Higgins

  Nothing happened, so I never asked you. What the hell did you do? How the hell did you pull that one off?"

  Hilliard shrugged. "It took a while before it got back to her," he said. "The kids were still at home and in school, keeping her busy.

  She wasn't out that much with other people, especially people who knew what was going on. And when she was out with those kind of people, she was out with them with me. We tend to forget this, guys like you and me, but you have to be pretty deep on the inside to know most of the stuff that goes on. Not too many people are. Those who do know don't tend to tell their wives too much of it; they got secrets of their own they don't want me telling my wife, 'cause the next time she sees their wife she might tell her a thing or two. So they don't tell their wives I've got something on the side, and I don't tell my wife what they're up to. No one ever tells you this; you figure it out on your own. It's something we all understand.

  "So even though everybody on the Hill's giving me the business, the story didn't make it out this way until Mercy's fuckin' mother picked up something in the wind, she's out flyin' around Weston on her broom, and then I had myself a problem."

  "I'm curious," Merrion said. "What'd you do?"

  Hilliard shrugged. "I saw it as a political challenge. If I'd never gone into politics, I never would've fucked Stacy. I never would've seen her, not in person anyway, and if I ever had've somehow, well, she wouldn't've looked twice at me. So I treated it as a political problem. I resorted to time-honored tactics: I stood up like a man and I lied."

  "And Mercy believed you?" Merrion said. "Amazing. I never would've."

  Hilliard bloused his cheeks out. "Of course you wouldn't've," he said.

  "The Charlie Doyles of this world wouldn't've. None of you would've had to. So therefore I wouldn't've told you that story; you would've laughed in my face. But she had a weakness, so she couldn't laugh; she had to believe me. And so she made herself do it." He shook his head.

  "If your next question's whether I'm disgusted with myself, the answer is: I am now, but I wasn't then. Then I was proud of myself, and that makes me feel even more disgusted."

  "And maybe even more ashamed?" Merrion said.

  Hilliard looked at him. He pursed his lips and swallowed. "Goin' for the full skin, huh, Amby? Not just for the scalp?" Merrion nodded.

  Hilliard said: "Well yeah, that too then, pal of mine: even more ashamed."

  FOURTEEN

  As Merrion had foreseen, once Mercy decided to act she came on like a locomotive. Urged on by Diane Fox, she convinced herself that even though she had collaborated in her own deception and assisted at her own resulting martyrdom, the humiliating pain her husband had caused her warranted retribution along with divorce.

  For some reason of random malevolence, those days for Hilliard were also a season of especially fierce battles on the Hill. Hilliard summarized it as a period of 'hand-to-hand politics, but I was grateful for it. The war in the House was child's play, comic relief, compared to the one that was going on in my private life."

  At last angry enough to file Hilliard was impressed, describing her admiringly to Merrion as 'madder than a hornet' Mercy categorically refused sound advice from her lawyer, Geoffrey Cohen, to cite 'cruel and abusive treatment' as her seemly choice of grounds for seeking the divorce. "No, Mister Cohen," she said, deferring acceptance of his invitation to address him as "Geoff until she was certain that he fully understood whose wishes were to govern their dealings, "I've already spent far too many years of my life living in the land of make-believe.

  I'm going to spend the rest in the real world, calling things by their right names. Adultery's the reason I told him to get out. Separation hasn't changed it. Adultery's the reason that I'm going to give the judge."

  Geoffrey Cohen liked to describe the four-lawyer practice that he ran from the second floor of the restored two-story white-shuttered brick building he owned on North Main Street in South Hadley as 'just an ordinary, quiet little country law firm with a rather boring probate practice' leaving it to clients and their chastened former spouses to promote his reputation as one of the most relentless advocates anyone could ever hope to find to extract money and exact revenge, 'which in most cases where you represent the wife amounts to the same thing."

  He deliberately did not look the part. He kept his chestnut-brown beard carefully trimmed van Dyke style, and with studied nonchalance subtly adapted the New England college-town uniform: good tweeds (lapels rolled, not pressed) and flannels (never baggy, rumpled or frayed, always sharply creased), with lightly starched (custom) shirts, striped or neatly patterned ties woven of heavy gauge silk, and highly polished leathers. This made it possible for him to commute with faultless ease among his appearances in the courthouses; his regular engagements as adjunct professor and guest lecturer on regional colonial history at the several colleges in the area; and his performance as the cellist of the Sebastian Quartet of Amherst, giving evening concerts of music of the Renaissance in the tidy small Congregational and Unitarian-Universalist churches of Western Massachusetts. "It really would be more discreet, you know, if you did it the way I'm suggesting," he demurred, not giving up, when Mercy first wearily rejected his suggested neutral phrasing of the divorce libel.

  "I'm sure it would be," she said. "But I still want to do it my way. I don't have much appetite for discretion these days. Dan's discretion's what enabled him to make a plain fool out of me all these years, and my sense of propriety, along with my cowardice, enabled me to help him do it. It was supposed to make me feel good, but it hasn't, so now I've reached the point where I want to try something else. I want to go ahead and tell the actual truth, see how that makes me feel."

  "Yes, but this would be judicious discretion," Cohen murmured. "In court you can gain valuable brownie-points for it. Voluntary self-restraint. When you have this kind of case: parties well-known; the name is familiar, prominent, even; judges get nervous. They get jittery before anyone utters a word in court. They see potential for big trouble in a case like this. So some obvious self-restraint can pay big dividends. If they see you're doing everything you can to make it as quick and painless as possible for everyone else who doesn't necessarily want to be involved but has to be, they appreciate it."

  "Cruel and abusive' was the customary summarizing euphemism collusively employed in those days, before 'irretrievable breakdown' or 'irreconcilable differences' were officially recognized as serviceably sufficient grounds for legal, collusive termination of marriage. It indicated that each of the parties had become completely fed up with the other one, usually with more than adequate reason on both sides.

  "C and A-T' meant there would be minimal public indignity. In fifteen minutes or less the wife and a relative or friend could provide all of the evidence needed. The wife would be sworn to tell the truth. She would duly falsely say that her husband had once thrown an ashtray at her, missing her by several feet but frightening her and causing her to become sad, so that she had cried. The corroborating witness would testify that while she had not observed the actual trajectory of the ashtray, the wife had called her immediately after the incident and between sobs told her that the husband had thrown an ashtray at her.

  The defense would waive cross-examination. The court would accept the plaintiffs evidence as prima facie proof that the marriage should be dissolved. The defense would not offer any evidence. The prima facie proof would become conclusive.

  To insure that everything would go smoothly and the bland but arrant falsehoods would go uncontradicted by the husband, his counsel would have strongly advised him that since his presence would add little to the charade, everyone would be more comfortable if he did not attend it. Consequently he would be nowhere near the courthouse the day the case was heard, thus avoiding even the possibility that he would become noisily incensed upon hearing practical lies told about him in a good cause which he supported when calm and throw some kind of a fit, disrupting arrangements.

  "So, why do that,
drag it all out in the open?" Cohen said soothingly to Mercy. "The sentiment's already solidly in your favor. Everyone already knows why you're making it official now, why you threw the guy out. It's not as though you really need to spread the dirty linen on the public record for everyone to know how he's mistreated you.

  "The judges feel ever so much more comfortable when you leave that stuff out, so they don't have to see themselves as somehow getting involved in the messy business. It's almost as though they seem to think that when sexual misconduct's alleged, their fingers get sticky, too, handling the case. They're kindlier toward plaintiffs who spare the sexual details. Especially when they can imagine very well indeed, as you can bet they do in your case, all the juicy things you could've said, but didn't. How thoughtful and discreet you are. It makes you look good."

  "Mister Cohen," Mercy said. "As my dear husband likes to say: "Spare me all that stuff," only stuffs not what he calls it. What you're telling me is that if I downplay to my judge why I put him out, you'll make brownie-points with all the judges because they're scared of my big bad husband. They think he'll bury their next pay-increase bill if any one of them does anything that makes him mad. But here you come now, looking out for them: You persuaded his wife to be good.

  "Danny's always said you're one slick little bugger." When he heard the adjective slick Cohen wrongly jumped to the conclusion that Mercy was sanitizing Hilliard's characterization for his benefit, and that bugger had not been the noun that Hilliard had used. Cohen began to feel a bit of bloodlust for the fray. "That's the reason I'm hiring you. But so you'll be slick for me, not on me. So, forget it. I wont play nice. If they're too dainty to read the word adultery on a piece of paper, they should try being the innocent victim. Try living with the reality of it for a while. See how it makes them feel, having people pity them; laughing at them behind their backs when they go down the street. Or else find another line of work.

  "No, now it's Danny's turn. Let's see how he runs for reelection with his behavior out in public. If this doesn't get him at least a Republican opponent, if not a primary challenge, then we'll know the opportunists must've become extinct. "How can you believe this guy?

  He's an adulterer. He didn't keep his promises to his own wife. She found out she couldn't trust him. Finally she reached the point where she went to court and proved she couldn't trust him. What makes you think you can?"

  "The man I was married to made a fool of me. Let's see how he likes hearing that on the late news, what he did to me."

  Therefore the libel in Hilliard vs. Hilliard alleged 'open and gross adultery." Most of the male reporters who covered the State House, having made compassionate sounds within earshot of Hilliard, once out of his hearing licked their chops and hoped cooler heads would not prevail before the case came to trial. Like Mercy, they had a beef with him. It had festered all the years it had taken Mercy to overcome her disinclination to believe that Dan away from home had trouble remembering his marriage vows. Long before she reached full boil, most of the reporters had known he was playing road games; many of them disapproved.

  Their motives were professional, not moral. Soon after Hilliard's meanderings had commenced around Labor Day in 1971, green-eyed, blonde-haired, petite Stacy Hawkes of Channel 3, then twenty-six, coming up with time-dishonored but mutually pleasurable ways to celebrate Hilliard's ascent in the House hierarchy her professional rivals on the State House beat had begun to get heavy pressure from their editorial desks. The incidental time she and Hilliard spent with their clothes on, before and after the time they spent in her bed in her Beacon Street apartment, gave her many more quiet opportunities than her competitors enjoyed to talk informatively with him about newsworthy developments in Massachusetts politics. Stacy's reports from the Hill therefore regularly scooped those that her competition filed, and they did not like it. Several whose sexual advances she'd coolly rebuffed one of them another woman were also fiercely jealous of Hilliard, correctly perceiving the reason she granted him privileges denied to them. They alternated between smouldering anger and bitter laughter, calling her a whore behind her back and coming close to it face-to-face by curling their lips and sneering "Yeah, and how'd you get that little tidbit?" when she goaded them delightedly with allusions to developments that she'd predicted on the air two nights before.

  Their subtle inflation of Hilliard's public importance reflected their impotent envy. Unable to publish what they knew to be the actual reason why she would fuck him, and not one of them, they employed the word powerful as code for their perception that Hilliard's legislative authority unjustly comported a droit de seigneur to bed the fairest female among them. Wishing to see him rebuked, they exaggerated the extent and rancor of his opposition on the Hill, hoping each new challenger would manage to stymie him, casting so much doubt upon his abilities and fitness for authority that his steady progress toward becoming Speaker would be impeded if not halted. And if that happened it might do more than just rebuke what they perceived as his excessive ambition; it might prompt Stacy to reappraise his value to her and stop fucking him.

  Long after Stacy Hawkes had departed for New York, their envy and resentment persisted, kept alive in part by their observation of Hilliard's effortlessly insulting ease in replacing her repeatedly.

  Without really having fully thought it out, they continued to enlarge his public image in order to magnify the story of his ignominious demolition later. They had not necessarily contemplated the collapse of his marriage in their wistful projections of potential causes of his eventual downfall, but when it occurred they hoped it would serve the purpose. They would see to it, in fact, if Mercy would be good enough to make the details of his sexual shenanigans publishable by proving them to make her divorce case. They sat poised at their keyboards wearing the happy expressions of dogs hearing the grinding sound of the electric can-opener; even those who liked Hilliard had to agree that life in the news business now and then could be good.

  Banished from his home; under seige where he worked, Hilliard was under orders also not to seek the kind of solace that had gotten him in trouble, the kind he had reasonably come to expect to find without much difficulty evenings after work in Boston. His lawyer, Sam Evans, had forbidden it. The joke in Franklin, Hampshire and Hampden County Probate Courts was that any divorce involving a well-known person or marriage property in excess of one hundred thousand dollars was not valid unless Sam Evans, the Butler, Corey partner specializing in divorce, had represented one of the unhappy parties.

  Evans had assessed Mercy's allegation of adultery as true and accurate, but flimsy, perfectly fine and entirely understandable as an expression of rage but wildly out of proportion to the little circumstantial evidence she had to prove it.

  "Gossip," Evans told Hilliard, 'as I'm sure you learned in law school, isn't evidence. Not unless what you propose to prove is that people gossip. Which if that's their purpose, we will stipulate: "Indeed people do," will be our reply, and a lot of it's been about you. But sheer quantity of rumor does not make it into proof. Innuendo and insinuation don't amount to evidence.

  "Now, that doesn't mean I doubt for one moment that you've been a bounder, a cad and a tosspot, and treated your good wife very badly.

  The judge isn't going to doubt it either, because when Geoff Cohen takes your deposition, he's going to ask you if you misbehaved, and since perjury isn't a tactic that prudent men use, you're going to admit that you did. And then if he makes you take the stand you're going to repeat it, and say that you're sorry, and try as hard as you possibly can to look like you really mean it. Be contrite, and confess you're a bastard, and give him no names at alV "Can I do that," Hilliard said, 'refuse to tell him the names of my girlfriends?"

  "Yup," Evans said. "Judge Hadavas's a bit of a prude. If I know him he's already displeased with Geoff for letting your wife charge adultery. He's also not the brightest flame in the candelabra. He probably shouldn't be on any bench, but if he has to be some kind of judge, he certainly ought not
to be in probate. He doesn't belong there. He's not really in favor of divorce. He'd much rather married couples tried a little harder to get along with each other, like he and Vera always have, instead of coming into his court all the time on what he sees as the slightest provocation, whining and complaining how unhappy they all are. Those of us who've seen how Vera treats him when they're out and can imagine what a royal pain she must be at home, well, we're inclined to think James must try very hard indeed, if he gets along with her.

  "I was in his session one day, waiting to argue a motion, and this poor woman was on the stand. She'd brought a motion for an order to increase her alimony and child-support payments. Apparently this'd become something of a hobby of hers it wasn't the first time she done it. So she was being cross-examined, and her husband's lawyer was showing her no mercy, really bearing down on her. Finally he came right out and challenged her, dared her to admit that she was doing this again because she'd found out her ex-husband and his new girlfriend were going to get married, and she was bound and determined to do everything she possibly could to stick a wrench in the gears, disrupt their plans as much as she could and if possible of course get all his money. He said: "This's fun for you, isn't it, Mrs. So-and-so.

  This isn't a matter of need we've got here; this is a case of revenge.

  You enjoy doing this to my client, don't you you're having one whale of a time."

  "And she just wailed at him; I thought sure she was going to break down and bawl: "No, I am not. I'm not having fun. I'm unhappy all of the time." And Judge Hadavas said: "Huh, so's everyone else who comes in here. What makes you think you're so special? Think maybe you can tell me that? Spend all your time thinking up ways, come in here and call attention to yourself. What you ought to's go out and find yourself a steady job, support your self. Get something on your mind besides yourself. That's all you ever think about, of course you're going to be miserable; just stands to reason. Deserve it, too, you ask me." Then she really did cry."