A change of gravity

THIRTEEN

The police station in Canterbury was the second-largest structure to be built in the new municipal complex, four buildings clustered on Holyoke Street a block north of the green. The town offices opened in 1981.

The police station was completed in February of 1982. The largest building, the new fire station, and the public library were finished in April of 1983, during Hilliard's eleventh and last term in the House.

Because he had been instrumental in the enactment of 1980 legislation granting $6.7 million in state aid to the town for the construction, the selectmen felt they had no choice but to invite him to be the keynote speaker at the dedication of the buildings as the Veterans'

Memorial Municipal Center on the afternoon of Memorial Day of 1983.

It was not a popular decision. Many who had voted for him several times now severely disapproved of him and said they would never support him again, generating considerable and vehement negative advance comment. He thought he heard someone boo when he took the lectern, but he soon made his audience feel better, using the occasion to announce to the audience of sixty-three seated on metal folding chairs before him on the broad front walk that he would not be a candidate for re-election in 1984Several women applauded vigorously, nodding for emphasis, saying "Good," and "Well, you shouldn't," giving their husbands meaningful looks; one or two even cried "Yea," in ladylike fashion.

He declined to divulge his plans. "You do," Merrion said, 'and all you do is egg them on, whet their appetites. All they want is to see you humiliated, punished for the way you treated Mercy.

Okay, let 'em have what they want. Put your tail between your legs and look sheepish; tell 'em you're not gonna run. Cringe like a dog that's been beaten a lot. Try to cower a little I realize you're outta practice, but do the best you can. That'll make 'em all feel superior and virtuous; like they've upheld the sanctity of marriage and the family, driving you out of office. You do some public penance, it wont be as much as you deserve, but it'll be enough. They'll be satisfied, forget about you and go on; find some other poor bastard to make life miserable for.

"They start thinkin' you're getting' away with something, pretendin' to be humble but sneakin' away to something even better this soft job that you invented they're liable say: "Oh no you don't; none of that shit, there. Givin' up the rep seat, pays fifty grand a year, 'cause he's been a naughty boy, and that gets him a better job, he pulls down eighty grand? Uh uh, we're not lettin' him do that."

"They'll find out if I don't announce it," Hilliard said. "Someone will've leaked it, time I make the speech. If they want to raise a stink and try to block it, they will. It'll all amount to the same thing."

"No, it wont," Merrion said. "If someone else tells 'em, that's all it'll be: something that someone else said. But if you announce it, they'll think you're laughing at them, gloating. To them it'll sound like this: "Okay, you hypocrites, I am convinced. If I run again you'll kick my ass. Well, up yours; I'm not giving you the chance. I'm not gonna let you dump me. And, I got something much better cooked up.

Pays even more and you'll never be able to vote me out of it, no matter how much I get laid. Doesn't that frost your balls, folks?"

"You know what they'll do then?" Merrion said. "They will lynch you.

If they decide you're not repenting; that you're giving them the finger, they will hang you by your fuckin' neck. They'll come to your condo and they'll drag you out the cellar where you hid and they'll march you down to Holyoke they'll have a band and everything, put on a torch-light parade. And when they get to Hampden Park they'll tie your hands behind you and rope your feet together and loop a noose around your neck. They'll make you stand on the roof of your Murr-say-deez-Benz and they'll throw the other end of the rope over the branch of a tree and tie it down good and tight to the tree trunk. And then before someone backs the car out from under you, they'll have a butcher climb up on the hood, yank your dick out of your pants and chop it off with his cleaver, and hold it up for all to see, while the bishop gives his blessing and leads the crowd singing "God Bless America."

"So I gather you don't think it would be a good idea for me to say what my plans are," Hilliard said.

"That would be the gist of it," Merrion said.

Reports of the address at the dedication said "Hilliard appeared subdued." An editorial paragraph in the Springfield Union reported that 'to many there, the personable and forceful chairman seemed chastened, no doubt by the strong public reaction to recent disclosures of his untidy personal life, almost certainly the principal reason behind his prudent decision to leave elective office." As Hilliard had predicted, the reports did include informed speculation that he expected to be 'appointed president of the community college in Hampton Pond, scheduled to formally open next year, although at first offering only night courses at the Pioneer Regional School during hours when it would normally be unused," but Merrion had also been right: no public outcry followed.

Freddie Dillinger in his Transcript column seemed a bit subdued himself. He was content to sneer, writing that the scheduled summer '84 completion of construction of the first of three new buildings planned for the HPCC campus 'will make the Hilliard Hilton the most modern shamelessly lavish, many have said — layout in the Commonwealth's entire community college system. The throne room, palmed-off in main-building blueprints as the presidential office suite, will be spacious enough for Dapper Dan to host a full-blown consistory, should the College of Cardinals ever stop by Hampton Pond and need a meeting-place. Assuming the prelates are on speaking terms with him after his pending divorce, seen by many as the catalyst for his career move." But Dillinger also seemed saddened by the prospect of Hilliard's departure from active politics. "I have no trouble saying that I've always liked Dan Hilliard. He's given us a lot of laughs, although not always intentionally, and in this often-gloomy world it's hard not to like a man who's so often brought you laughter."

"Praise from Caesar is praise indeed," Hilliard said to Merrion.

"Imagine the cocksucker getting emotional? Probably had to wipe away a tear. How insensitive I've been: All these years I've been reading the guy without ever guessing he liked me." He snorted. "Freddie must think the old saying's a commandment: Each man kills the thing he loves. Does his best to, anyway."

"I think we should give him a present," Merrion said. "How about we make a blivit, nice big bag full of fresh, soft dogshit, with a brick in it, throw it through his window on his desk."

The run-up to the withdrawal began in the spring of 1980. When Hilliard figured in newsworthy events, the identifier in the papers gradually changed; "Powerful Ways and Means Chairman' became "Embattled Chairman."

"I used to love it when they did that," he mourned to his friends, 'called me "powerful." He had begun to depend on them heavily for companionship. Weekends bothered him badly; drinks and dinner among 'my pals' Sunday nights at Grey Hills took on extreme importance.

What he called: 'my well-known downfall' began semi-privately. Mercy, on her way home from drinks with Diane Fox at Gino's Hearthside one fine evening in the spring abruptly decided that she'd had enough and determined to kick him out of their lovely new home in Bell Woods. By noon on Tuesday word of what she'd done had reached Beacon Hill. "Dja hear what happened Friday night, Danny Hilliard? His wife got home this class she's takin' up at UMass.? Threw him out. He wasn't even doin' nothing. Didn't have a fight with her or anna thing like that.

Just sittin' there, havin' a beer, watchin' the TV or something'. Had no idea anna thing goin' on; just waitin' her to come home. Make him some dinner, you know? How'd he know what she's got on her mind? But she comes inna door, says: "Okay, I've had it. Get your ass out. I'm sick of lookin' at you. We're finished." Hear he begged and pleaded her, too; prackly got down on his knees, she'd give him just one more chance. Didn't do him no good. "Nothin' doin'," she says, "I said out, I mean out. Now leave or I calla cops." He couldn't budge her.

She was stickin' to her guns, an' that was it. His ass went out on the street."

The public humiliation immediately crippled him politically. Mercy's assertion of control and his submission to it emboldened people who until then had concealed their envy of the power that made them afraid to show him any disrespect. He initially resisted acknowledging the change.

"Not that it ever really meant anything, as you know. The adjective, I mean. The job hasn't changed any since I got it. It's still either the second or third in line: Speaker; Majority Leader; and then Ways and Means. Or Ways and Means before the floor leader. I never had any more actual power'n anyone else ever did in the job. It just became part of the title: "Powerful." Like when we were growin' up, the baseball team that always stunk, where the Red Sox always went to buy the player that they needed, Vern Stephens, Ellis Kinder? No one never called them the plain old "Saint Louis Browns." Always "the hapless Saint Louis Browns." So I was always "the powerful chairman." "A sobriquet"; it didn't mean shit, but I gotta admit I did love it."

"It did mean something, though," Merrion said to him later, after he had begun to recover. "It meant a lot. It's okay to claim now that it never meant anything when they said you hadda lotta power, just's long's we don't forget it's not true. It meant a lot. It was what my father used to call "a very handy gadget." When the papers kept reminding people how much power you had, lots of people believed it.

They didn't think about how or why this should be, you seemed to have so much power. They just thought it was true. They saw it right there inna paper.

"They thought it meant that you could do something to them, something nobody else would've even known how to do. They didn't know what it was, and they didn't know anybody else who did, either, but they also knew they sure didn't want to be the ones who pissed you off so they found out. So therefore when I call, once they hear who's onna line they know you want something done; they pay close attention. They may think I'm a dummy but they're scared of the ventriloquist. They know he can cut their balls off. So they want to please me, you know? Want me to be happy. Piss me off; they got you pissed off. That they do not want to happen.

"I don't know what it was that they thought you could do to them then that you couldn't've done to them before. Maybe they just never thought about it. All I know's that when they did, I could make good use of it. All I hadda do was ask politely; right off they would do what we wanted. I liked that. It made my life easy. It was a good way to do business.

"Now I can't do that anymore. You got people laughing at you, result of you bein' such an asshole Mercy finely kicked you out. People don't jump to please guys they're laughing at. I hafta frighten them now, apply actual muscle; tell them if they don't do what we want them to do, they may be out of a job. It seems wasteful, you know?

Undignified, too, using your power every time, making people do what they should want to do, just to get little stuff done."

Other things changed in subtle ways too. Over the years Hilliard had spent a sizeable number of quietly congenial Sunday evenings at Grey Hills, maybe ten or a dozen a year, having what he called a little dinner with the lads," turning one corner of the sparsely populated dining room into a men's club for the night, washing down steaks, chops and roast beef with whatever the indifferent house-red wine was that year. Merrion could usually be counted on; a phone call to his home would fetch him if he hadn't spent the day at the club, playing golf in good weather or if rain was pouring down, unassumingly catching a few hands of modestly profitable quarter-half poker in the lounge with a ballgame in progress on the TV across the room. Usually when he stood up from his chair he was thirty or thirty-five bucks ahead. He seldom lost, and never more than ten dollars; he quit early when he encountered a run of second-best hands. He refused side-bets on the ballgames, saying: "No, I play cards because I know what cards will do.

I don't know what people will do."

Rob Lewis's wife belonged to The Opera, Theater and Museum Society in Springfield; each year between Labor and Memorial Days it offered members eight completely-packaged long-weekend travel-tickets-meals-hotel excursions to New York. Indulging her passion for the visual and performing arts, all of which Rob detested, Lena took all of the trips "Four thousand bucks a year and worth every damned penny; I'd sooner rub shit in my hair'n sit through another damned opera." He was around at least seven or eight Sundays a year.

Heck Sanderson and six or seven other male members, widowed or divorced themselves both, in Heck's case long before Hilliard's travails began had for years on and off been at loose ends around the club at dinnertime, much gladder of Hilliard's company than he'd ever dreamed until he learned the hard way how much he'd come to value theirs.

"Get a good close look at this guy, fellas," Heck said one evening late in June of that year to Merrion, Ralph Flood and Bobby Clark who was as usual quietly and purposefully drinking exactly as much Haig amp; Haig Pinch as he would need to stay moderately, comfortably drunk until it was time for the twenty-minute, three-mile drive home to bed when Hilliard had become particularly lugubrious, 'this's a very rare bird we've got with us here tonight. This here's the first man in North America who's ever gone through a divorce. He was married for years and then all of a sudden, one sunny morning, he woke all by himself first one in the entire history, this republic. We got us a real curiosity here: when he dies we're gonna get him stuffed and put him in a glass case in the lobby on display. Members'll be able to look at him free, charge the public a quarter to see him."

Then he had clapped Hilliard on the shoulder, hard, and guffawed. "Aww, maybe I'm being too hard on him here. Being as how he's a Catholic and all, he most likely wasn't prepared for it. Catholics're much better'n the rest of us. Catholics don't get divorced, see, so he thought he had a guaranty. Never could happen to him."

Merrion made a mental note to lose any and all future requests Heck made to Hilliard through him, and to make sure that if Heck's kid ever did get in trouble in the Canterbury jurisdiction, the case would go to Lennie Cavanaugh. Cavanaugh would do whatever Merrion suggested; Heck would not get many laughs out of what he had in mind to do if the day ever came when he could do it. Once when asked what he did for Hilliard after he'd left the Holyoke office to become a court clerk, Merrion said: "Well, Danny's sort of kind-hearted. It's a weakness of his; he suffers from compassion. He also tends to forget things. So if somebody does something to him that they shouldn't do, sticks a shiv in his back, say, he's likely, you know, to forgive the treacherous bastard. Say "Oh, he didn't mean it. I'll give him another chance." Or else forget he even stuck him inna first place.

"Danny knows he's this way, and he knows he shouldn't be. But he also knows that I am not I am not like that at all. I am different. I don't forgive and I never forget. So what I do for him, I'm in charge of grudges. I collect all his grudges for him, make sure they're put away in a safe place, water 'em and keep 'em fresh and moist. And then when payback day comes 'round, as we know it always does, I have the right grudge to settle, and whammo, we pop the guy. I'm the guy who makes sure that the guys who hurt Danny get nailed, big-time, paid back at least double for whatever they did to us."

Hilliard had been too humbled to get mad at Sanderson. He conceded the point. "You begin to see things a different way, once something like this happens to you, I guess, huh?" he said. Heck, perhaps finding something disturbing him in Merrion's expression, cleared his throat and said placatingly, somewhat nervously, that he knew he certainly had. Merrion, mindful he had trouble maneuvering Heck into bad bets for much money at cards, noted the hasty contrition but deferred judgment as to whether it was merely tactical or sufficiently sincere to save Julian from what he had in mind some good wholesome time in jail.

For Hilliard until his own disaster those Sabbath dinners had been mere felicitous accidents, irregular pick-up things that just happened; low-key, casual occasions of camaraderie for him and therefore the other men who'd been around for dinner and sat down at tables with him, connoting no unhappiness, dislocation or decline. Without ever thinking about it, he'd assumed that the explanation for their presence was the same as his: they were temporarily on their own and did not choose to cook. Until the winter of 1980-81, he had been at the club on Sunday nights in the dead of winter because in '73 Mercy and the kids had started spending February school vacations with her folks at their new chalet at Bolton Valley, skiing every day. February was a busy month on Beacon Hill, and Hilliard, who'd never skied well and found time spent with Florence and Bud Hackett 'not a garden of earthly delights," had long since given up on both the sport and his in-laws.

Mondays through Fridays those weeks he'd stayed in Boston in the small one-bedroom apartment that he kept on Lindall Street on the back slope of Beacon Hill (paying the rent out of campaign contributions while continuing to collect tax-exempt reimbursements for daily mileage), usually screwing Stacy three or four times until early 75, when she caught her network break and moved to New York.

He always fucked Stacy at her place. Mercy regularly came to Boston to see her friends from Emmanuel for Symphony, or to shop at Filene's Basement, staying over once or twice a month to make Dan take her to a play, or dinner with friends from the House whose wives she deemed acceptably smart and polished — she was pleasant to their 'somewhat-loutish' husbands.

Mercy'd never hidden her suspicion of his vulnerability to sexual temptation, or her apprehension that by leasing the apartment he was revealing his intention to surrender to it. Nights when he was staying in Boston he usually called her at home around ten, while she watched TV in bed; she often kept herself awake an extra hour in order to call him back after midnight, half an hour after Stacy would have finished her shift at the station, saying: "Just checking up on you, sweetie.

Making sure you're still there. Didn't suddenly decide to pop out for bread and milk right after we hung up. Also that I don't hear someone walking around barefoot on her tippy-tippy-toes, being very, very quiet, while we're talking now." She called in the morning, too, inserting long pauses in their conversations to see whether she could hear his shower running. She had sharp eyes that she used boldly, forthrightly inspecting his pad for traces of trespassing female occupancy every time she visited. "Ooh, and how is the FBI these days?" Stacy would coo sweetly, with wide eyes, when Mercy's name came up.

Saturdays and Sundays book-ending the family ski-vacations Hilliard had spent working Saturday forenoons at his Holyoke office, after 1978 luxuriating by himself in the ten-room home in Bell Woods, proprietorially watching basketball games on his forty-inch TV and snow accumulating on the field and in the pine woods behind the house where Emily rode her Morgan horse. Sunday evenings he pulled on a white wool turtleneck and a blazer before driving languidly over to Grey Hills to see who might be around for dinner.

That lazy and expansive attitude he'd had and imputed to his friends of purely optional self-indulgence had been dispelled in the days of depositions and preliminary hearings in Hilliard vs. Hilliard, Hampshire County Probate Court #82-268-D, the D denoting divorce proceedings. Living by himself in a condominium he'd sublet furnished at the splendidly refurbished Old Wisdom House overlooking Hampton Pond, he found the change of residence 'discombobulating," his mind thrown off-balance by the unfamiliarity of living in someone else's luxury. He told Merrion it was like waking up in a rented room on the road morning after morning; "It's a very nice hotel, but now I want to go home," he said. "I lie there as I'm waking up and I think: "This is really a beautiful place, but when do I get to go home?"

He had chosen to live there as abruptly as Mercy had decided she'd had enough of him. Merrion lived there, having purchased a two-bedroom unit during the rehabilitation and conversion phase of the old inn into condominiums six years before. Because he knew and liked the woman who managed the place, Glenda Rice, he could get the rental set up for Hilliard fast.

The hurry had been Mercy's creation; having taken eight years to make up her mind what she wanted done, she wanted it done at once. The day after Tax Day, Friday the 16th, she had come home from her afternoon seminar in statistics at UMass. later than usual, delayed by the unusual length of the conversation she'd had with Diane.

She'd been troubled for a week by something she had overheard in the Grey Hills pro shop the previous Saturday. She had been sitting behind the sweaters racked on the chrome trolley in the women's clothing section, trying on new Foot-Joy spikes. She was trying to decide well before the golf season started whether to order a new pair, which would be a fresh nuisance to break in, or continue to put up with the existing nuisance: her shoes occasionally gave her blisters. A man whose face she could not see and whose voice she didn't recognize came up to the counter where Bolo Cormier sat on his stool at the register, moving his lips as he read his paper and drinking coffee as he did most days between golf seasons. They had some brief conversation to which she paid no attention, but then as she hunched over to lace up the brown-and-white saddle-shoe on her right foot, dropping her head below the sweaters, she heard the man say: "Dan Hilliard been around today or's he with his new girlfriend down in Boston? I called his house and office didn't get an answer."

She had turned her head quickly to peer under the sweaters as Bolo said "Dunno, haven't seen him," but had not had the presence of mind to part them before the grey flannel slacks and the dark-brown tasseled loafers turned away from the register and left the store.

"Well, but did you really need to?" Diane said over the salt-rimmed conical glasses of margueritas in the Flower Room at Gino's, water splashing from the fountain into the low-sided kidney-shaped fire-brick pool with the Trader Vic's-type tropical-rain machine showering softly down over it. The sound system played an instrumental version of "Jamaica Farewell." "What difference would it've made if you had found out who it was? Or'd recognized the voice? The point is that it's common knowledge, out there at oh-aren't-we-elegant Grey Hills, that your husband's got a popsy on the side. It's not some chick who picked him up in a bar and he'd had a few too many drinks and he was lonely, so they had a one-night stand. This is an ongoing thing. He's having an affair, creating a new secret history with someone who lives in Boston. I mean, my God, Marcia, pardon me, but that's what I think should concern you. If you have any question here, it isn't who said he's got a girlfriend; it's: "Who is the little slut?" That's what you need to know, so you can find out where she lives, hunt her down and scratch her eyes out.

"Assuming of course, that's what you have in mind; otherwise you don't need to know anything more. Do you have any idea at all as to who it might be?"

Mercy shook her head and chewed her lip. "No," she said, 'not now, I don't. A few years ago I would've said Yes. I was sure he was having an affair with this TV reporter Stacy Hawkes. You may've seen her; I know I used to, a lot, by accident. It's very hard when your husband's honey's on network TV. You can't help it; every time you see her, even after it's over, you think: "There's the little tramp who stole my husband." I think she's still on NBC; I know I wont watch NBC news.

She got married a year or two ago; a former congressman, I think, retired to become head of some foundation. She must go for older political types. I don't know how she looks now, but back then she was very attractive. Looked a lot like me, as a matter of fact, which didn't surprise me — they say men often pick girlfriends who look like their wives. Does the fondness for lookalikes mean they have no imagination? Or because that way it doesn't seem so much like cheating?"

Diane laughed. "This's okay because it's the same, even though it's really different; and it's better because it's so different, but okay because it's the same." Maybe that is how it works."

"Assuming, of course," Mercy said, 'that didn't sound like boasting. I probably should've said she looked the way I like to think I used to look, when I was about twenty; before three pregnancies and about fifteen years. The only stretch marks this kid would've known about would've been the ones she left on the truth.

"We met her I met her at an inauguration party. I didn't think they had it planned. Dan's not the type to do that, although I suppose she might've been: "Ought to meet the incumbent wife here, see what I'm up against." It seemed as though wed just happened to bump into her, turned around and poof, there she was like a genie; someone'd conjured her up. And the instant that I looked at her, before Dan'd even had a chance to introduce us or wed even shaken hands or said Hello or anything, I had the strongest feeling wed been sharing him. I just knew it. Her expression, you know? She looked like she was smiling very well, of course, as you'd expect, all that training they get before they go on-air, so they smile perfectly. But there was something else in it. Smugness, you know? Something almost gleeful.

"You may not know who I am, dear I'm the competition."

"I looked at him, right off, but there was no sign of it on his face.

Completely pure-innocent look. Of course he's a politician; no matter what mischief he's really been up to, he always looks like he's serving Mass. And at the same time I was watching her, to see if she was glancing at him for the same reason I'd been doing. If she was, I didn't catch her."

Mercy frowned. "Not too long after that I read in the papers she'd gone to New York. So I haven't a clue as to who the current girlfriend is. The recumbent mistress."

"Even so," Diane said, 'is that really so important anyway? That you don't know who the bimbo is her name or where she comes from? You don't really care what her pedigree is; how big her boobs are; how she met him; or whether she's the same one he was fooling around with last year. Or even if she's the only one or just the main one he's screwing now. Why does that interest you? The important thing isn't who he does it with when he's not doing it with you; it's that he's doing it with someone else. And from what you've been telling me over the years, he's been doing it for a long time. You've told me several times that when you've confronted him, his stories didn't match up but you knew he had someone. You could tell he was lying."

"I know," Mercy said, "I have told you that. I've told myself, too, many times. But I've never been able to prove it, actually prove he was lying. I've never been really sure."

"Yes, you have," Diane said calmly. "Back when McGovern was running and they had that big fundraiser for him in Boston? Dan was supposed to introduce him and either he was about two hours late or else he never showed up at all? You told me then, what you heard people saying. Even your mother told you she'd heard rumors, where he'd been instead of where he should've been."

"It was that he'd been with Stacy Hawkes," Mercy said. "I got very upset. I asked him about it and he assured me, he wasn't seeing her.

He was very contrite. He said he knew it looked bad, but it really wasn't what happened. He said he got tied up in a very hush-hush leadership meeting in the Speaker's office after five, something about the strategy they were going to use to grease a tax bill through or something, and he got so involved he lost all track of time. Not only that but he also thought he probably might've let it happen, in a way; allowed it to happen, some kind of a Freudian slip, accidentally-on-purpose. Because he'd let himself get roped into making the introduction at the McGovern dinner by someone he couldn't say No to be owed the guy a favor and might need him in the future.

When he wasn't really for McGovern, anyway; he'd wanted Kennedy. He hadn't wanted to make the speech in the first place.

"I don't think I really believed him. But he said it'd also hurt him with the party bigwigs, his not showing up like that, and he knew it'd also hurt me, and he gave me his solemn promise he'd never let it happen again. He promised me he was going to shape up, stop getting himself into situations like that where that's what people thought he was doing. And I didn't say any more."

"In other words, he admitted it," Diane said. "And he promised you he wouldn't do it again. Those weren't the words he spoke to you, but that was what he was saying, and it was what you heard. You let him get away with it because you didn't want to hear him say the words he actually meant. And then you quickly made a very clear but unconscious decision: you decided you'd be better off staying with him even though you knew he'd been out fucking around on you than you would be without him, as long as he didn't do it again. That was what you said to him; he'd hurt you but you forgave him and were going to believe he wouldn't do it again. And on the strength of that you were giving him another chance.

"Those weren't the words you used, because you didn't want to hear yourself saying them. But that was what the words you did say meant, and so that was what he heard. And that was how the two of you, by working very well and carefully together, got through a major crisis.

Teamwork. If it'd been handled any differently with any less delicacy; with brutal honesty, say it would probably have meant the end of your marriage. The perfect, picture-book couple, working together to resolve the crisis but at the same time making absolutely sure neither one of you had to come to grips with what'd caused it; take a good hard look at how damage'd been done. That way you could pretend there hadn't been a crisis, or any damage. You could tell yourself your marriage was rock-solid; everything still A-okay. And he could tell himself you'd given him permission to fool around, if he'd only be discreet.

"So," Diane said, "McGovern, you said? That would've been ten years ago. Stacy's long gone, but things haven't changed. Since then there've been other times when you've told me other, but similar, stories. Not really that many, but I've never thought that was because there weren't many to tell you just preferred to keep them to yourself; that way they wouldn't seem so real."

"Oh, gee, yeah, I guess," Mercy said, shaking her head. "Sometimes it's been pretty hard."

"Hey," Diane said, 'you two did a very impressive job that night, shadow-boxing with each other. Textbook example of how two people whose marriage is in deep trouble can keep it together if they both really want to, provided they're willing to compromise and then both work really hard. You both wanted to, had a lot to lose. You, the marriage, and Dan his political career. So you reached a modus vi vendi a way to live with each other."

Mercy held the stem of her marguerita glass between the tips of the fingers of both hands and impassively met Diane's gaze with dry eyes.

"Happy?" Diane said.

Mercy snickered. "No," she said, drawing it out. Then she said: "That surprise you?"

"Yeah, sort of," Diane said, 'if you were happy living this way, I'd say the accommodation you and Dan arranged was a very good one.

Excellent, in fact. After all, the truce's held. It's worked for eight fairly peaceful years. You could even call them "contented."

You've gotten along without any major blow-outs, far as I know. Your kids've turned out well; they seem to be in good shape. Peaceful two-parent families're good for small persons; the two of you're good parents.

"Dan's been successful. He doesn't drink any more than most of the men his age that I know, including my own dear husband. That's far too much, of course, but this isn't a perfect world. He doesn't gamble and he doesn't hit you. You may not think you still look as good as you did in your twenties, and you're probably right about that so, say you now only look like about nine-hundred-thousand bucks. That still ain't chopped liver, dearie. You've got a lovely new home. You're making good progress toward an interesting career of your own.

"This's not a bad life that you two've made, not a bad little life at all. You're what, forty-two? And he's forty-six? You've been married about twenty years? Somebody did something right. Many people would look at what you and Dan have and say it looks pretty damned good.

Dan's habitual and persistent infidelity's just about the only flaw in it, at least that I can see. If he did decide now that he wanted to change, for whatever reason some philandering close friend of his were to die of AIDS and throw a big scare into him he probably couldn't do it. He's priapic. By now he most likely can't help it."

Mercy sighed.

"It isn't an uncommon problem, Marcy," Diane said. "Several of the Kennedy men seem to've suffered from it. Lots of marriages that have it survive forever, and I don't mean just royalty, either. Far more couples than most people think stay together despite incorrigible infidelity or at least until one of the spouses dies, as close to forever as we get. If you're able to be happy even though it means you'll always have to overlook his one shortcoming — maybe that isn't the right word my advice would be: Leave it alone.

"But if you were happy, or could convince yourself you were, you and I wouldn't be having this conversation. Or any of the others we've had about essentially the same subject through the years. So then, if all of that means that you haven't been happy, just unhappily sort of inert; that you're not happy now and don't really see much chance you ever will be, as long as you stay with him, for the rest of this one life you have left, then I would say: "It's over; it's dead and ain't gonna get better pronounce it. Call it quits. Kick him out."

Then the Sunday night dinners suddenly became very important to Hilliard, taking on an aspect of poignant urgency.

Merrion was compassionate. He had watched a number of people whom he knew reasonably well as they stumbled and staggered emotionally and mentally through divorces, and he was satisfied that the days and nights that they exhausted invariably brought demoralizing anguish under the best of circumstances. "But yours is going to be worsen the usual mean pissing contest, and God knows those're bad enough. This one I'm braced for."

"Oh, she's going to crucify me," Hilliard said, sharing a six-pack of Heinekens one night in the office on High Street.

"I reckon she'll try to," Merrion said.

"And you don't blame her," Hilliard said.

Merrion had prepared for that question. "Danny," he said, "I didn't say anything, you start having the one-night stands while you're staying in Boston. I think it was prolly quite a while before I begin to know about them. Mercy knew as much as I did, I think, and what I knew was nothin'. You were bein' very careful then.

"But then around me this's just around me; I don't think you've gone completely out of your mind so that you've started tippin' off Mercy it seems like you maybe start getting' a little careless. Droppin' a few hints here and there; sort of letting things slip out. I was stunned.

It was so outta character for you. Adultery wasn't like you, Dan.

"Cheating? On his wife? Danny Hilliard doesn't cheat, not on anybody.

He doesn't break his word. Dan Hilliard told you something? It's gold; you can take it to the bank." I think that's how you got away with it so long. People who'd known you a long time, including me and Mercy, we never dreamed you'd ever do a thing like that to her. We weren't looking for the signs and so we didn't see them.

"So you start givin' clues. I do my best to ignore them. If you're getting laid in Boston, well, I didn't think it was the best idea you ever had maybe get yourself a little herpes you then bring home to the bride; might be tough, explain that but then I'm not your chaperone, tell you to keep your pants zipped. You didn't hire me for that. I'm your, what, "close advisor"?" '"Confidante," Hilliard said. "That's what they call you. They think I confide in you. We've heard the chimes at midnight. Tell you what it is I've got on my mind; ask you what you think I should do."

"Okay," Merrion said, 'so I'm your "confidante" then. "Friend" would've been what I would've said, somebody asked me what I was, I was trynah be anyway, but "confidante" 's okay. Lemme see if I got this straight now: this would then mean that when you started dropping the hints you'd been fucking your brains out and I mean that here, literally you were meaning to do it. You weren't being careless at all: You were confiding in me that you were getting a lot of out-of-town pussy while you're far from your happy home, and asking me for my advice.

"Geez, I'm really sorry, Dan; I blew it. Really let you down; didn't realize that's what you wanted. If I had've, my advice would've been I didn't think it was very damned smart, fucking around on the side. In fact I thought it was fucking stupid, that is what I thought it was.

"Then I would've told you what you should've already known: "Seeing how I'm getting laid now and then, not as often's I'd like, but not bad, I know I'm not being a good example for you; but I'm not trying to be one. Being a good example's never been part of my job. If it had been, I wouldn't've taken it.

'"And furthermore," I now see I should've said when what you were after was advice about extra-curricular fucking, but I was too stupid to see it I should've reminded you of something that I would've thought you already knew, without me reminding you; I should've said: "I am not married. This is a very important distinction when what we're talking about's getting laid. I know there're people, still lots of people, who don't approve of getting laid unless the person who's in bed with you's your wife. Or if you're a woman, your husband. But nobody seems to think you should be punished for it if she isn't unless she's someone else's wife, or you've also got a wife. Then they think you should be at very least admonished heavily, like we sometimes say in the court. Some would even go so far as to say you should be booted out on your lying ass and see how you like that." And as of course we — and the rest of the population of the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts now know, Mercy belongs to that group.

"But that stands to reason. She's a wife. Wives're especially prone to this kind of thinking, or so I've been told. I do not have a wife.

Once I thought I probably would, some day, if Sunny ever decided she oughta maybe come home and slow down a little, but as you know she died first still goin' strong. Too bad. But the result is I not only don't have a wife; I never did have a wife and I never ran for office, so what I do is nobody's business. It's always been okay for me to get laid. Not always easy, but if I got lucky, okay.

"Since you do have a wife," as you did, back then, when I wasn't giving you the advice you wanted; pretty soon I now think you're not gonna, "getting laid isn't okay, no matter how big the young lady's tits are, or how hot she is for your rod. So my advice to you is "Cut it out."

"But you wouldn't've," Merrion said. "If I'd advised you to stop fucking around, you wouldn't've done it you would not've stopped fucking around."

"Probably not," Hilliard said, looking gloomy.

Merrion laughed. "Absolutely not," you mean," he said. "Never in one million years. Because when you started letting me know you had all these gorgeous women coming onto you down there, you weren't being careless you were doing it on purpose. And you weren't doing it so I would then clear my throat and give you lots of good advice you wouldn't take. You were doing it to let me know I wasn't the only guy who could get a piece of ass; even you, a married guy, were getting more, and better. What you were doing was bragging, old chum, just plain old locker-room bragging."

Hilliard looked miserable. He rubbed the knuckles of the ringers on his left hand with his right thumb, and pursed his lips. He mumbled something to himself.

"I know, Danny, and I'm really sorry," Merrion said, 'but I think you oughta hear this. You fuckin' earned it. When you were hurting Mercy, you were also putting me in a box, you started letting me know what you'd been doing. You hadda know it, too; that you were putting me in an awful position with Mercy.

"You and I both know she's never been that keen on me," Merrion said, 'not from the very beginning, I first started working for you. What I was then, and what I'll always be, at least to a certain degree, is someone who Mercy put up with. But since then as the years'd gone by, when you first started letting me know you'd been out getting strange, things'd gotten so they'd started improve a little. She still wouldn't've picked me as her sponsor for Confirmation, but now and then, I said something, she laughed. It wasn't much, but it was progress. In this world you take what you can get.

"So this is where we are, Mercy and me, you decide things're too quiet.

It's starting to get a little better with us, between me and her. I no longer have to wear a coat indoors if she's around, so I don't get a stiff neck from the chill. She still didn't like me; I'm not saying that. But I think she got to the point where she decided that you hadda have someone who can do my kind of work, cutting the balls off a guys; and who also knows what certain kinds of people aren't refined like you two are, think about what's going on. As I do, being one. And she sees that the reason that you have to have someone like me's because there's more people like men there are of you two, you want me to put it bluntly. So if you wanna run for something, what we roughnecks think is important, and you'd better have someone who can tell you. And once Mercy'd realized that, that was when things between us got better. She still thinks I'm a bad influence on you; and I know she'll never change that; but I think she's decided there has to be one, and I'm about the best one you could find.

"So at that point what we were, Mercy and me, we're partners in a small business. The plant and the product is you. Dan Hilliard Political Futures. Way she sees it or used to at least, 'fore you got your thing caught inna zipper her job is to keep you in good shape: physically, mentally, husbandly, fatherly throw in morally, too. My job's to look after the other stuff you do; make sure you're in good shape politically and publicly. We don't have regular meetings, her and I, every month or two, but both of us know what we're supposed to do. What areas we're supposed to take care of. We've both got an interest in you.

"Then, thanks to you, several years ago I begin to realize we have got a malfunction-red light flashing in the morality area. Alarms going off in the husband and father sections too. The product looks like it may be onna way to destroying itself. Something needs to be done. I know this. But I'm not in charge of those sections. I have got no jurisdiction. I'm not even supposed to go into those areas; they're off-limits to me. And I can't report the malfunction to the person in charge of those sections because while I'm very sure she'll want to make the necessary repairs, immediately, I'm afraid she'll react in a way that'll damage the product's condition politically and publicly, by taking a hammer to it making a big fuckin' stink. And when she does that, the product'll get mad at me, because the way he's gonna look at it, I damaged him confidentially and I abused his trust.

"So there I am now, right where you put me, spang in the middle: I'm fuckin' stuck; I'm helpless. All I can do is keep my mouth shut, and just hope an' pray you get over this hot spell of yours before Mercy finds out what's now become two things: one being that you've been runnin' around, which I know'll destroy you with her; and two that I knew and I didn't tell her, which'll finish me off with her, too."

Hilliard shook his head and cleared his throat, but he kept his eyes downcast and did not say anything.

"Those hopes and prayers did not quite work out as I wanted. I could see this. So when you stopped bein' coy, droppin' hints, come right out and told me you were fucking Stacy you're like a little kid with a new electric train; you're fucking Stacy Hawkes, and you two just invented sex I figured that was it; the shit was in the fan. You weren't coming to your senses; there was nothing I could do. Well, that was when I finally said I certainly hoped that you knew what an awful chance you were taking. And furthermore, I also said I'd seen some self-destructive assholes in my time but you took the cake. And you know what you said to me? Do you remember, Dan?"

Hilliard remained downcast and shook his head. He mumbled something.

Then he gulped. Merrion said: "What?"

Hilliard did not look up, but did manage to nod. "Yeah," he said, 'yeah I remember. I know what I said."

"You laughed at me," Merrion said. "Then you told me to go fuck myself. And then a week or two after that chat, you missed the McGovern dinner." He paused. "I figured that was the end of you. I had you down as totaled. History. I thought you'd never survive it.

So there I am, I'm all prepared for the bomb to go off- thanking God that at least I'd been smart enough to get my court job before you decide to commit suicide. And then weeks went by and no bomb went off.

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."