A change of gravity

by George V. Higgins

  That was the way Pooler wished it. He deliberately inflicted that discomfort upon everyone he talked to, speaking so softly that anyone taller would have to bow slightly to hear him. He did not look up while talking with anyone, even when he was seated and his listener was standing. He believed that the person inducing another to adopt a posture of deference dominated every situation. He sought dominance at all times, regardless of the apparent absence of any subject in contention or under negotiation.

  "That son of a bitch," Merrion said once to Hilliard, 'you know there has to be something wrong with a guy who makes people uncomfortable on purpose."

  Merrion had first met Pooler on the evening of the first Wednesday in April of 1968 at a small gathering of western Massachusetts Democratic politicians in the private dining room upstairs in a good restaurant in Springfield. The meeting had been called hurriedly by men and women with decades of gritty experience in Democratic state and national politics left puzzled and unsure of what to do in the wake of the shock they had sustained the previous Sunday evening. President Johnson's request for TV time had not been simply to announce, as feared, a further escalation of the war in Vietnam (although he had included that, to widespread disapproval). He had thunderstruck the country by mournfully and reproachfully announcing his irrevocable decision not to seek (or to accept, either, as though there'd been more than an outside chance that someone truly out of touch might call for a convention draft) their party's nomination to be re-elected 'as your prezdun."

  Incorrectly, the party elders imputed their own sad uncertainty to younger regulars like Hilliard and Merrion. They too had been startled when Lyndon Johnson publicly renounced all ambition for a second full term of his own, but Merrion had been relieved and Hilliard had been elated. He had no doubt what to do. He was so sure that he abrogated his policy of saying nothing publicly until he had first tested it aloud on himself by discussing its probable effect with Merrion — Merrion that night had been unavailable, aloft on his way home from a long weekend in New Orleans with Sunny Keller, on leave from her assignment at Lackland Air Force base in Texas. Unrestrained by Merrion's caution, Hilliard jubilantly told the first reporter seeking his reaction that evening that he was backing Bobby Kennedy for the Democratic presidential nomination, 'hammer and tongs."

  Hilliard's commitment was not new. Only his disclosure of it was. Well before Sen. Eugene McCarthy's anti-Vietnam war campaign bucking Johnson in the February New Hampshire primary had yielded a close-second-place finish, Hilliard had said he hoped that Kennedy would challenge the president, but he had not said so for attribution in the media. Rashly doing so that night, he said that LBJ's withdrawal was 'the best news the party's had in years. If he'd wanted the nomination, he would've had it for the asking. Sitting presidents are not to be denied, McCarthy or not. Anyone who thinks otherwise is dreaming. But then he would've lost. Guarantee you, matched-up against Lyndon, Nixon wins."

  "I think that maybe did not play too good," Merrion told him grimly in the immediate aftermath of the announcement. Hilliard demurred, but after two days of fielding strong reactions, he reluctantly accepted Merrion's assessment: "You've made a lot of people goddamned mad at you, all at once, without doing yourself any damned good at all. No other mistake we've ever made, and we have made some beauts, did so much damage so fast. You've pissed-off people we don't even know. They didn't know each other, until you lit them off; you're the first thing they've ever had in common.

  "First you pissed off the people who've always run the fucking party.

  Postmasters, Customs collectors, marshals, all the way up to judges and ambassadors: "First our party, then our country, dead right or dead wrong." They think Eugene McCarthy is a rotten, treacherous, party-wreckin' son of a bitch, and anyone who's with him or anybody else, like Bobby, who's against the President, is either a traitor or a Republican. Which in their books is much the same thing.

  "At the very same time you enraged the McCarthy people. They've been scheming and conniving for the past five years to mug the old farts and take the party away from them. Then lo and behold, along comes Gene McCarthy, the answer to their prayers, with the balls to stand up and say "Aw right, if nobody else'll do it, goddamn it, I'll do it myself."

  Roll the fuckin' dice, and get the movement underway, even if it does mean the end of his career they go berserk the guy, the Way, the Truth and the Light. "Peacemakers" they claim to be; Colt Peacemakers, maybe. Look like dangerous animals to me; crazy eyes, foam in their scraggliass-beards. So what do you do? Make them as screaming mad at you's they were at LBJ. You ain't got no Secret Service to protect you, and you're local; they can get in your face.

  "You think you can reason with them? Calmly tell them they just have to understand that this's how it's going to be, might as well get used to it? Bobby Kennedy's bringing all his muscle in and he's going to take it away: you got any idea how they're gonna react? They probably wont tear you limb from limb. They'll want to do that, but they wont know how. They're from good homes, went to private schools; no seminars in dismemberment. They'll practice self-restraint. Engage you in dialogue. All that passive shit, you know? Non-violent resistance. Pacificism. They'll address you in dulcet tones, probing your raison d'etre. They'll say: '"Hey you fucker, what the fuck, the nomination's his7. Like it was a fucking tricycle he now decides he wants to play with, and all he's gotta do is just come along and take it? This's something that he owns, 'cause he's a fucking Kennedy7. His brother left it to him?

  Whose fuckin' country is this ours or the Kennedys?"

  Pooler that evening in the spring of '68 was an assistant U.S. attorney in Boston. He was four confident years out of Yale and the Georgetown Law School. Immediately after they'd been introduced by Frank Snodgrass, a State committeeman who owned a lumber yard in Ware, Pooler said: "Being Hilliard's co-pilot, you're also therefore RFK."

  Merrion, nearing thirty and feeling seasoned, mature and sagacious, failed nonetheless to connect an arrogant young man named Pooler to a powerful political family named Corey at the helm of a powerhouse law firm. He was distracted; Sunny Keller by then was many thousands of miles away from home in Vietnam, and that night like most April nights in the Pioneer Valley was a little chilly. Merrion's mind at that point had been focused on his chances of getting into bed with Mary Pat Sweeney after the meeting they turned out to be good. Rather absently he said to Pooler: "I haven't really decided. But Danny's always been a strong Kennedy backer. So I suppose I will be, too." Levelly, he thought.

  Pooler said: "I suppose that means you wont give the vice president anything more'n lip-service if he gets the nomination."

  "At this point I don't think I'd been in that room more than five minutes," Merrion said many times after that evening, explaining time and time again, at Hilliard's insistence, to person after person, that he'd never had a beef with Pooler and that as far as he knew Pooler'd never had a reason, that night or any other, to have a beef with him.

  Each time word of another such recital reached his ears, Dan Hilliard privately thanked Merrion. "Since we of course both realize that that soothing declaration isn't one hundred percent true, and I know how painful you find it to dissemble, I really appreciate your willingness to repeat it so many, many times."

  The necessity for many repetitions made it clear to them that Pooler had marketed his version at every political gathering he attended, well into the mid-Seventies, long after RFK had been assassinated and Nixon had defeated Hubert Humphrey. He used it to imply that Hilliard and Merrion put personal loyalties before party loyalty, and therefore should not be entrusted with power. Merrion and Hilliard used their sanitized summary of the encounter in Springfield as evidence that Pooler was a saboteur, undermining them to promote his own veiled interests.

  Hilliard was the only person who ever heard Merrion's complete and accurate report of his exchange with Pooler. "I told him I hadn't said that, either that I was gonna be with Kennedy or I'd be sitting out. I said neither one of u
s ever refused to close ranks and I didn't like him suggesting that we would. I said you hadn't made any threats; you just said you were backing RFK. No dramatics at all.

  "Pooler told me he didn't believe me and anyway, I didn't have to say a word it was written all over my face. That sounded to me like he was calling me a liar. I asked him if he'd mind telling me what else he could read on my face, so I'd have some idea of all the stuff I didn't know I knew yet. He called me a typical country wise-ass. I guess that could've been his sophisticated Yale idea of humor.

  "If it is, his idea's wrong. He may have a very good barber razor-cut that wavy hair, not to mention an excellent tailor — he probably paid more for his suit than my whole wardrobe cost but he doesn't have a nice way of telling anybody anything. He never will. He's a natural-born prick.

  "He gets up too close when he talks to you, and he spits when he says words that have S in them. It's all he can do to keep from poking you in the chest. He's got a couple bad teeth, almost black; you can see them on the upper left side of his mouth when he curls that lip of his.

  His breath's too sweet; must be really bad before he uses too much mouthwash. He's ugly, too; he's already got jowls, at what, twenty-eight or twenty-nine? That's fuckin' indecent, too young to have jowls. But it figures; he's starting to get heavy all over. His waist's already begun to disappear. Some day pretty soon he wont have one anymore. Wake up some fine morning and find he's dispensed with it. He'll say he got rid of it because he couldn't find any purpose for it. He'll taper: Narrow at the ends, his head and his feet, and thick in the middle, his ass and his belly for ballast, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

  Thirty years or so from now, he's pushing sixty, he'll have wattles, like a turkey. And those beady little eyes like a snake, a short, fat snake that spits. A garden adder, green and black. Except I don't think those're poisonous, and he is."

  "Are adders smart?" Hilliard said. "I don't know that much about reptile IQs."

  "I dunno, why?" Merrion said.

  "Because if they're not," Hilliard said, "Pooler's no adder. I don't argue with you that the guy's a snake. You know him lots better'n I do, since I don't know him at all, but if he's a snake and adders aren't smart, Pooler's a different breed."

  "Yeah, well," Merrion said, "I called him an asshole, which he is, smart or not. I said it politely, of course. Just making an observation: "You're the biggest asshole I've met in a long time."

  "He seemed to take it personally, looked shocked and backed away, so that's where I guess we agreed to leave it. Little prick."

  Hilliard said it would be best if no one heard that part. "Bob Pooler isn't just trying to look dangerous he is dangerous. His mother's maiden name was Corey, and his daddy is a partner, along with his granddaddy, Warren, in Butler, Corey. Which means his family's got a major piece of that mammoth law firm, which makes nothing but money.

  Furthermore, it's been a big wealthy firm ever since the first Pynchon, Sam, pulled up a tuffet and sat down by the river to catch his breath, and before you knew it, he'd gone and founded a city.

  "And if plain old big money doesn't impress you, you can throw in a herd of state and federal judges, ambassadors, law school deans, and a slew of directors of operas and museums and chairmen of corporate boards. Money buys power, and power brings in more money, which in turn ac cures more power, even for obnoxious little assholes such as Bobby Pooler who get everything wrong except their choice of ancestors.

  When poor humble peasants like us go up against powerful rich assholes, the behoovin' begins. It behooves us to do our best to get along with them.

  "It'll be a damned sight better for us if everyone else who meets that kid forms his own opinion of him which'll probably be the same as yours without any assistance from you. So that when the day finally comes when Junior doesn't get what he really wants, at least a federal judgeship, he wont come gunning for us. When he gets it in the teeth, his own people'll have to tell him. "When it's unanimous that you're a little shit; everybody who's dealt with you hates your guts; you're outnumbered. There's too many of 'em to single out one or two like Amby and Danny, and get even."

  Bob Pooler still dressed beautifully but he wasn't aging well, Merrion decided happily, as the younger man with Pooler stopped at the office door nearest the reception desk, clearly eager to go in. Pooler's wavy black hair had thinned out on the top, the remainder growing grey, with a straggly end or two where the comb-over brushed the ears. His waist had all but disappeared. The obtrusive attitude had not. Pooler halted when his captive did, still holding onto him and talking, completing his train of thought.

  His conversation was full of minor visible events. He made a chopping motion with his right hand each time he wanted to drive home a point, puffing and deflating his cheeks, furrowing his brows, to vary the intensity of what he said. Merrion could read his lips; he punctuated every third or fourth sentence with "You see? You see that? You see?"

  The younger man, restless, seemed to feel obliged to nod at each gesture, as though believing that there must be some quota of obeisance which when satisfied would enable him to get away.

  Then Pooler abruptly released the elbow, frowning, staring after the other man's back, as though considering whether to become annoyed at him for leaving with his folder. He apparently concluded that to do so would be pointless; there was no hope that he would ever understand what Pooler had explained. He shook his head once, irritably, then turned toward the reception area. He saw Merrion sitting in the wing chair; recognizing him in curiously Giving no sign of having recognition, he proceeded to the reception desk; accepted a thin sheaf of pink messages; riffled through them without evident interest; put them back on the reception desk and looked up again at Merrion.

  "He looked at me the same way that you'd look at a school bus blocking an intersection where you want to make a turn. Nothing personal, you know? Just another obstacle in your way interfering with what you want to do. He really is a shabby piece of shit. I think the only reason the bastard finally did acknowledge me was the snooty black receptionist. She said something I couldn't hear, and it was like her knowing I was there to see him made it so he had to see me. That was the only reason he did it. He obviously knew me, but otherwise he would've ignored me. Gone back down to his office, no hello or anything. He must be the rudest fucker inna world. If he isn't, I hope I never meet the champ."

  Merrion uncrossed his legs and stood up as Pooler approached him, taking inventory of Merrion's apparel, head to toe: Ralph Lauren Polo blue blazer; tan twill slacks; light blue Oxford cloth shirt, open at the collar; brown Florsheim loafers. "Ambrose," he said drily, extending his hand. "What can I do for you?"

  "The same way I used to say Hello to guys I didn't like when I was at Valley Ford. Gave me some shit about a bill or they did too much complaining. After they did that just once, once was all they hadda do it whenever they brought their cars in for service, or they had something wrong with them, they hadda wait. That was Pooler's attitude toward me today," Merrion said to Hilliard.

  "You tell me, Bob," Merrion said to Pooler, shaking his hand once. "I don't really know why I'm here. Wasn't my idea to come. Danny Hilliard sent me down. He said I should see you."

  "Yes," Pooler said. "Looking at me," Merrion said to Hilliard, 'like now he knows why he thought he smelled cat shit in the building. He really hates my guts, but he's got this problem with me.

  "His problem is that he can't heave my ass out in the street. He can't get at me. Me getting that assistant-clerk slot almost thirty years ago, couple years before he even met me, much less hated me on sight: that's the only reason that he didn't do his best to stop it from happening. If he'd known me then, he would've, and probably succeeded.

  But by the time he discovered we despised each other, I was already in.

  And then four years after that, his grandfather and his father were so busy scheming how they're gonna get their paws on that racetrack, they didn't notice us getting' into Grey Hills. Otherw
ise the Big Chief and Little Beaver would've used the blackballs on us."

  "Yes," Pooler said again. "Well, I think I know what it's about." He extended his right hand to usher Merrion away from the chair toward the corridor beyond the reception desk. Merrion held back. Pooler raised his right eyebrow. "I think it would be better," he said, 'if we didn't talk about it here, but in my office."

  "Lead on," Merrion said, smiling, but not very much. "I'll toddle right along behind."

  Pooler had arranged the framed pictures and testaments on the credenza and the wall behind his desk so it appeared that once he had received his diplomas from Yale and Georgetown Law, his certificates of admission to the State and federal bars and his appointment as an Assistant US Attorney, he'd spent most of his time away from that desk standing behind lecterns, either delivering speeches, shaking hands with other people or assisting them to display laminated plaques, scrolls and certificates now interspersed among the pictures.

  "There's one picture of him shooting off his mouth in a white turtleneck under one of those crew-neck sweaters with the big white reindeer marching across his chest," Merrion told Hilliard. "Except for that the guy never seems to've gotten within range of anyone holding a camera except when he's had a jacket and tie on. I bet he sleeps in a suit. On weekends he wears his tux to bed instead of pajamas, case a charity dinner breaks out inna middle of the night."

  "He told you what's been bothering him," Hilliard said.

  "He told me what he's been hearing," Merrion said. "He said what bothers him about what he's been hearing is that he's afraid it means the feds're going to come after you in order to go through you to get at somebody else. And the way they're gonna get at you's through me."

  "That's essentially what he told me," Hilliard said. "But can you see how he thinks they can do this?"

  "Hey," Merrion said, 'that's your job, to tell me. You and Pooler.

  You're the fuckin' lawyers. All I am in this fuckin' lash-up's a poor fuckin' clerk of court. I know my part in this comedy, but that doesn't mean I've got any idea what the play is about. Doesn't mean dog-squat to me. I don't know what the feds can do. I assume it's maximum damage, of course, if they can and they want to do anything.