A change of gravity

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."

"Did he give her the money that she wanted?" Hilliard said.

"I don't know," Evans said. "He took it under advisement. That's another thing James likes to do: keep everybody in suspense a while.

Never decide a motion the same day it's heard. Always says he'll render his decision in writing in a week. That means: when he gets around to it. James's week's longer than yours and mine are; his runs about ten or twelve days. I think it's so the party he decides against wont be in the courtroom to holler at him when he finds out he got screwed.

"Point is, your wife's charged you with adultery. From the instant James Hadavas laid his eyes on the libel, which would've been about a minute after it was filed, he's been very uneasy. People will be watching this case, following it very closely. There'll be interest in how it comes out. There would've been some no matter what the grounds were, just because of who you are. But "adultery" gets everybody's interest. Judge Hadavas doesn't like being watched. So we know he's already anxious. The only reason he's got to be pleased at all with Geoff is that apparently he was able to persuade your wife at least not to name a co-respondent. If she had, Judge Hadavas'd then have a genuine circus on his hands. A circus he does not want.

"So, once you've admitted that you were unfaithful, I think he'll say that that's enough. There's no reason to identify your partner or partners, as the case may be, and declare Hadavas Day in the media. If Geoff tries to make you do that, which I doubt he will, I'm going to advise you not to answer and then if Geoff still insists, he'll have to go before Hadavas and see if he can get an order compelling you to answer. I doubt he'll want to do that, but if he does he'll just compound what I'm sure is already Hadavas's private disapproval of his choice of grounds. I don't think he'll get his order.

"Now this's important, Dan," Evans said, 'and not just because I assume you feel the same way as I do about publicly naming everyone who for whatever reason agreed to go to bed with you."

"Well," Hilliard said, "I like to think my natural charm and boyish good looks were at least part of the reason."

"Yes," Evans said, 'no doubt. All of us have our illusions. But still, if we can present you to Judge Hadavas as an honest penitent who regrets his sins and wicked deeds and the sorrow that he's caused his wife, instead of allowing Geoff to portray you as the unrepentant Casanova and lascivious rascal that we both know you really are…"

"Hey, take it easy," Hilliard said, "I've got a sense of humor, Sam, but I've never been that bad. All I ever did was take advantage of some situations I got into when my wife wasn't with me; that's all. It wasn't like I was ever on some kind of a campaign or something, see how many women I could go to bed with if I tried."

"I'm not joking," Evans said. "I'm trying to get you to see how Judge Hadavas will look at you, if we give Geoff half a chance to paint that kind of portrait. Because if Casanova is the portrait Judge Hadavas sees of you, it will cost you dearly, my friend. And by the way here, another thing I should ask you: Your wife's health and well-being were also involved here, along with her pride and dignity. When you were running around on her, did you always use a condom?"

"Yeah, that much I did do," Hilliard said. "It wasn't like I thought I was the first one that any of my ladies ever took a liking to. I didn't know what they might've gotten from someone they'd been with before. They probably didn't know either, as far as that goes, that AIDS stuff takes as long to develop as they're now saying it does."

"Every time?" Evans said. "Invariably?"

"What?" Hilliard said. "Yeah, I just told you that. For sure I didn't wanna bring anything home, give Mercy VD. I always used condoms, religiously. Even though I must say, I still don't like 'em."

"Yes," Evans said. "That's what prompts my next question. That matter of your religion. Did you actually have a condom available the very first time you found yourself in one of those sexual situations you mentioned? Good Catholic guy like you are? That would have been keen foresight on your part admirable or deplorable depending on your point of view. Either that or else finding yourself in that set of tempting circumstances wasn't entirely accidental. Mind telling me which one it was? Not to mention the practical aspect of where you could have kept your condom supply? Certainly not in your wallet, or at your apartment."

Hilliard sighed. "Look," he said, 'the first time I stepped off the reservation, it was with this woman who's in television news. She was young, still in her twenties, but she'd been around. And I had my eyes open too; the reason she came on to me was only partly because she had hot pants for me it was also partly, maybe even mostly, because she thought if she put out for me I'd tell her things the other reps who knew about them wouldn't tell to the other reporters. We fell in lust.

It wasn't ever love. It was sex, for both of us, along with ambition, on her part, and it was extremely good sex. And thrills, very good thrills, not cheap ones: this was a fine-looking woman who really liked being in bed with a man and would've found a man to do it with even if it wouldn't help her career. I had a good time with Stacy. I was with her for over three years."

"So?" Evans said. "Why're you telling me this?"

"Well," Hilliard said, 'because it seems to me that you've let yourself get a little behind the times about the dating game these days. I didn't have to go against my religion buying condoms before I went against it to have sex with Stacy the first time. Stacy had the condoms. Like I said, she was experienced. She got laid a lot, and she was prepared. She had a supply at her place."

"And I take it that you don't claim," Evans said, 'that your liaison with this woman, or any of the other women, however many there may have been…"

"So far, only eighteen," Hilliard said.

'"Only eighteen," Evans said. "You're quite sure of that."

"Oh yeah," Hilhard said. "I know most of us always say that there haven't been very many, or "one or two," something like that, so that we don't look like we're bragging. But we all know exactly how many and the women keep track, same as we do. If you count Mercy, I've fucked nineteen women."

"Really," Evans said drily.

"I realize that's not much of a total," Hilhard said. "I plan to add to it as soon as possible. Put my best efforts forward, you know? I've always had this tendency to fall in love, where I only have one woman at a time besides my wife, I mean. I know it's held me back. There've been times when I've actually walked away from a chance to go to bed with a woman I was strongly attracted to, because I didn't think it would be fair to my girlfriend if I did. Not because most people'd look at it as being that I would've been cheating on Mercy with both of them, then; because the way I looked at it I'd've been cheating on the woman I was cheating with on Mercy. I've been doing my best to overcome that."

"I can see where it's been complicated for you," Evans said, laughing.

"Keeping nineteen women straight. Must be quite a challenge."

"Well, but not all at once," Hilhard said. "And Mercy was sort of a constant, you know. It was her plus somebody else. So it was eighteen besides her, but usually only one of them at a time." He paused. "I'd have to say also, she was as good as most of them were, better'n several I had."

"That was what I was getting at," Evans said, 'as delicately as possible; not very. You didn't start compiling a fairly impressive life-list of sexual partners because of deprivation at home, I take it?"

"Nope," Hilhard said. "Mercy was always willing, God love her. She was a virgin when we got engaged that was a big reason why we got engaged; it was the only way I could get her pants off. But after that she was as ready as I was. Sometimes in fact, she was readier. More'n once I drove home early Friday after having nooners with Stacy, wasn't feeling all that eager, but an hour or so later, there I am, having to get it up again to give Mercy a dash in the bloomers 'fore the kids came home from school."

He chuckled. "I was younger then. Good thing for me, I guess kind of tough to explain to your wife she'll have to wait 'til bedtime 'cause you're not up to it; just finished banging your girlfriend in Boston."

Evans furrowed his brow. "And I can take it all of these eighteen women were unmarried?"

"Four of them had husbands," Hilhard said. "One of them was separated, in the process of getting divorced, so I'm not sure she really counted as married. But the other three married ones were cheating, same as I was."

"Oh, wonderful," Evans said. "That means one of the imponderables we'll have to think about here is the possibility that one of their spouses will decide to divorce them, and name you."

Hilhard shrugged. "I realize it wasn't smart," he said. "But at the time I was not engaged in being smart. I was letting my dick do the thinking. Here I've got this good-looking woman practically throwing herself at me, and I know she's married, and she knows I'm married, and this obviously makes no difference to her, so then why should it to me?

"Well, it shouldn't," says my cock, and therefore it doesn't, and the next thing I know, we're in bed. I don't know whether you've ever had that happen to you."

"Can't say as I have," Evans said. "Probably wouldn't let it anyway, even if I had the chance."

"Well, I have," Hilhard said, 'and I am here to tell you: you missed something. It's exhilarating when that happens to you. When you've just been introduced to someone that you didn't even know an hour ago, and she looks like a movie star, and you can tell right off that she's so hot to trot you could probably fuck her right there on the rug, in front of all the people, if you wanted to. All you have to do is say the word and take her by the elbow, and she'll go anywhere you want, up on the roof, if that's what you want, and help you get her clothes off and then give you the ride of your life.

"When that happens you don't think about how smart or stupid or risky it is, or how you've got a wife and kids at home, or anything else in the world; all you think about is that all you have to do is ask and you can have her. It'd be a crime not to do it. So the decision's easy: you do it.

"At least that's the way I saw it. I was never that good an athlete. I wasn't an A student either. I had no talent for music. I wasn't especially funny. My father wasn't a major-league ballplayer. My mother was a housewife. Girls never paid much attention to me. I was who they went to the prom with when they'd begun to think no one was going to ask them. They were not on the cheerleading squad. I wasn't especially attracted to them. They weren't attracted to me. We were both involved in fulfilling a ritual. It was sort of like valet-parking. We both had to Go to The Dance or Be Weird; that was all. We didn't have very much fun.

"I was astonished when Mercy came on to me, very first time that I saw her. Absolutely knocked off of my feet. Here was this really cute girl who liked me, was all over me; didn't let me feel her up, made me.

And could not keep her hands off of me. It was truly extraordinary.

The first night I met her we both came in our pants, rubbing up against each other. I knew then we were going to get married. We had to we had no choice."

"Mutual hormone storm," Evans said.

"Uh uh," Hilliard said. "I'd had those before and I've had them since.

It was a lot more'n that. This was beyond horny, this was mating."

"Well then," Evans said, 'if that was the way that you felt about her, how could you do what you did? Did the feeling you had for her change?"

"No, it didn't," Hilliard said. "I still feel about her the same way today that I did back when we got engaged, and finally we could do what a man and woman're supposed to do when they're by themselves with their clothes off. When it was finally okay. Well, not okay, really, but close enough; the Church didn't allow it, but she did. If she called me up tonight and asked me to come over and put it to her, no promises to drop this case, nothing, I would do it. I'd be over there like a shot. She wont, of course, because "What would Diane say," and of course I'm now kind of pissed-off at her so I'd probably try to make her beg for it. But if she did call and ask me, I know I would do it.

I always liked screwing my own wife. In fact thinking about it, I will go further: she may be the best lay I've ever had."

"Then why all the others?" Evans said. "The other eighteen: I don't see the logic to it."

"That's because there isn't any logic to it," Hilliard said. "Or else it's because it's the same. I didn't go into politics because I wanted to be a politician any more than I went to law school because I wanted to be a lawyer. All I knew when I ran for alderman the first time and lost and then the second time and won was that even though I was a pretty good high-school teacher and I kind of liked it, and saw that if I stayed with it I'd do all right, it was not going to be enough, ever.

There'd never be enough excitement for me. Never enough thrills and chills. I certainly didn't want the life my father had; fingers in other peoples' mouths all the time, smelling their terrible breath, looking over what's still left of what they had for dinner the past couple weeks. That's why I'd gone into teaching. I guess you could say I was restless. The only thing I could see being still left open to me was politics, running for office.

"It turned out to be the right answer. I really liked politics. I liked running for office a lot. I didn't like getting my brains beaten out, but I liked what I'd seen the first time out well enough to risk having it happen again. And then I got help, from the Carneses and Amby, and the second time I didn't get beat."

"It wasn't because you had some idea that if you put yourself into that milieu you might be able to pattern your life on what you saw the Kennedys doing," Evans said.

Hilliard snorted. "Back then almost nobody knew how much ass those guys were getting. No, I didn't run for office because I thought if I won, I'd get laid a lot. I ran for office because I Wl thought I could be better as a politician, make better use of my intelligence and my skills doing that than I'd ever be able to if I stayed a teacher. I looked at the people I saw ten or twenty years older than I was who were running for office and having a high old time for themselves, showing off and making lots of noise and so forth, and then I looked at the future that I'd probably have if I kept on doing the same thing that I'd been doing. By the time I was forty-five or so I'd have a pretty good chance of being a superintendent, or else fairly high up either in the Mass. Teachers' Association or the NEA. Not a bad life at all.

"But if I was going to do what amounted to getting out of teaching in order to boss teachers, or get them to elect me to help run their union for them, then why not make a run in honest politics? See if I was any good at that, and then if it turned out I was, then get out of teaching and go at that full-bore. So that was what I did.

"I didn't find out about the pussy until later."

To preserve what meagre strength Evans saw in Hilliard's case, he had 'strongly recommended' that his client suspend his efforts to add to the number of women he'd bedded and 'avoid being seen in public unofficially with any attractive woman, pendente lite." "Meaning," as Hilliard ruefully translated it to Merrion, 'that I'm not to get laid, except very discreetly, until the divorce case is over. This's all Diane Fox's fault, I have to go through this at my age, beating my meat by myself. Once I get this divorce shit out of the way I may have a law passed against her. Have her declared a toxic-waste dump and appropriate funds to dispose of her.

"It's surprising how hard it is to do that, get laid without anyone seeing. I never would've guessed. I'm not really sure I can do it.

You say to a grown-up woman, would she like to have some dinner, maybe relax, have a few drinks, listen to some music. She's in the mood, agreeable, she's liable to say Yes, and come along with you, good time to be had by all. Of course anyone who sees you and knows you, knows that you're not married to each other, so they also now know what it is you're leading up to. The two of you're planning to get laid. So for me, for now, that's out. I've always been discreet, which's why Mercy hasn't really got any concrete evidence she can use to bean me, but now I've got to be discreetly discreet.

"I don't know how to do that. What do I do, I see a lady I might like to jump? Slip her a note that says that I'm in room two-ten, and would she like to join me there and have some food sent up, maybe have a glass of wine and watch the ballgame on TV? Oh, very smooth. She's not gonna go for that. She's gonna laugh in my face. The best you can hope for, you pull that stunt, you don't get a kick in the balls.

"Sam says the way to look at it is that I'm being punished. The punishment for getting laid with too many women is not getting laid with any women at all for a while. He's got that part right. This getting' separated and divorced is no day at the beach. Makes it lots harder to get laid'n it is when you're still all safely married, got the wife at home and all, like all the other guys I know are who're always getting' laid all around me, left and right. I don't recommend it at all."

Merrion suspected that Hilliard had eased his loneliness by making it his business to become somewhat better acquainted with Mary Pat Sweeney, but never made any effort to find out if he was right. He did make it a point to hang around for what Hilliard had come to call the apres-golf dinners at Grey Hills on Sunday evenings; as far as Merrion could tell, they were about the only interludes of peace and relaxation 'fun," Danny called it that his best friend had all week.

But Merrion would not have chosen that word. Hilliard gave the meals an air of almost frantic desperation, trying to wring more happiness out of the hours than Merrion believed they actually contained, extending the evening with booze and then talking too loudly, too much.

"Those new buildings going up in Canterbury there? I'm the guy that built those, got the money for them. Almost seven million dollars. And what thanks I get for that? "That was two, three years ago. Whatchou doin' now?" I tell you, you get no thanks in this business."

The chief of police in Canterbury in those days was Salvatore Paradisio, the formidable uncle of self-effacing Samuel Paradisio, the federal probation officer who had come to mistrust Lowell Chappelle's intentions toward Janet LeClerc. For Salvatore Paradisio life was a serious business, always to be soberly conducted.

To his ex-officio service as a member of the police station building committee named by the selectmen, he brought strong views tenaciously held on the subject of the proper design of police stations in general and what specific modifications would be appropriate for the one to be built in Canterbury by the F.D. Barrows Construction Co." the contract having been awarded as expected as soon as the tedious business of inviting, receiving, opening and considering competitive sealed bids had been gotten out of the way.

Merrion was a member of the five-person Building Committee. By then Deputy Clerk of Court, he had been appointed without his prior knowledge or permission and when he was informed, against his wishes at the suggestion of Richard Hammond, Clerk of Courts. Hammond knew Chief Paradisio just as well as anyone else outside his family did, and therefore while he agreed with the selectmen that someone from the courthouse ought to serve on the committee, he did not agree that he should be the one.

"After all," Hammond told them, "I've got a growing family. Demands on my time. Responsibilities. I've been planning to see as much as I can of my children in the next eight or ten years the two youngest've got left before they get all grown up. If I let you talk me into serving on a committee with Sal Paradise, I wont be able to do that. They'll be planning their weddings by the time I get home from the first meeting. I'll be tied up every night until I'm sixty-five.

"No, Amby Merrion's your choice. Bachelor like he is, he's got lots of time. Besides, he's pals with Hilliard. These're Hilliard's buildings, right? Way he tells it, anyway, he's the guy that got the money. So put his sidekick on the panel. Pretty soon the chief 11 start to drive him 'round the bend, like he does everybody else who has to listen to him, and then Amby'll go to Hilliard and say: "Hey, for the luv va Christ, help me out here a little bit, willya? Get me some more State dough for Canterbury make yourself look good and at the same time, help me make the chief shut up." And Hilliard'll do it for him, contradict alia mean things that his wife's sayin' about him, 'cause he still wants to look good, 'case he decides to run again."

Chief Paradisio grounded his views of police station design, as he did his many other views, on his painstakingly careful and extensive study of human nature. "Basically what I am is a professional scientist. My field is the continuing study of human nature," he would say. "All law enforcement officers are engaged in such studies. Or we ought to be at least: it's the essence of our work." Because he habitually delivered his observations and findings in detail and at length whenever he believed that he had been invited to state and then defend any given premise 'and has such stamina," Dan Hilliard said, 'guy's a one-man filibuster; he can stay awake for days' he generally prevailed against all who initially opposed any premise he happened to advance.

"It's a universal tendency," Chief Paradisio said, 'to want to get away." He was describing without having been asked how people reacted when placed under arrest, believing he saw the inquiry implied in a statement made by someone else at an early meeting of the Building Committee.

"I think it was, Diane, Diane Fox who was to blame," Merrion told Hilliard over drinks at Henry's Grist Mill two or three nights later.

Diane's practice as a Licensed Social Worker counseling troubled young people in Hampton Pond was established and thriving. She was on the building committee as an ex-officio member of the board of selectmen, having been elected to serve out the unexpired three-year portion of her late husband's term after Walter's sudden death at the age of forty-two. He had had a heart attack while jogging.

"I got to the library and went into the trustees' room," where the police station building committee had agreed to meet, 'and I was hanging up my coat. The rest of them the chief, Diane, Maurice Belding and Gerry Porter they'd already gotten there ahead of me, and so they all were sitting down, and Diane, while they're waiting for me to join them at the table just by way of no harm sort of threw it out that she'd been afraid she was going to be late because the cat'd gotten out. And she'd thought at least 'til she found it sleeping on the hood, her car, which I guess was nice and warm, this being a cold night, because she'd just gotten home to feed the cat and let it out, expecting it'd come right back in; that was the reason she'd stopped off there that it'd run away.

"And that was what set Sal off about how come people run away. I pity people who have to deal with him every day. The guy is unbelievable."

The chief said the desire to run away was the reason behind his desire for an internal receiving area for prisoners in the new police station.

"It's just a normal human thing, I guess," the chief said, 'that when someone has you restrained; you're under his cojatrol; he's bigger, stronger, younger'n you are, most likely, and he's armed, to boot; plus there may be more'n one of him so that you're outnumbered too, and all of them're authorized to use deadly force, on you; well, it's naturally upsetting. You're probably not used to this, in all likelihood, and so it would be perfectly natural then that you would feel confined. Being as you are. And since you have been brought up in this country of ours here, as most of us have been, you have always had the notion that you are well, what else? free And you are used to that. So now this guy in uniform, or maybe it's two guys, or one or two guys in plainclothes, could be that as well, whatever, but what you know is that they're cops, he has you in custody, and you are not free to go. And why would this be, then? Well, unless someone made a mistake which we don't make a habit of doing and I want to assure everybody here of that right now on that point normally it's going to be because you did something.

"It don't matter, really, does it, though, what it was. Because the overall effect's always the same. If you're drunk or operating under, you had a fight or something, or you're beating up the wife. Or you're breaking in a building. Or maybe you had drugs in your possession that you're selling someone, right? And you know you're not supposed to do that. But you're always on the lookout, aren'tcha, for the easy buck, and now it turns out, joke's on you, guy you're selling to's a cop, badge and everything. And he placed you under arrest. So here you are now; you've been arrested. Now you're going to the lock-up.

"Now at the present time if you would like to come down to the station as it is configured, the one on Lannan Street there, any night you care to come, although there'll generally be more to see on a weekend night as Mister Mernon can tell you, having been there setting bail a good many weekend nights for people we've arrested, Friday or a Saturday.

Unless it's one of those three-day holidays it seems like we're always getting now, at least one a month, in which case Sunday night as well we will have a lot of traffic usually, that is. And the first thing you will see down there, and I will show you this myself or have a sergeant escort you, because sometimes one of these guys that we've got arrested will decide, you know, because he's drunk, he'll decide he wants to fight.

"This is also very common. A big part of our job as law enforcement officers involves fighting with drunks. If you want to be a police officer, you have to face that. It's reality. And when we arrest a guy for that, he's quite often going to get unruly with us, and we have to subdue him there, show him what the Mace is like, blast of that stuff in the face, get his mind off fighting us. And what you will then see is that when the cruisers pull up at the back door of the station, right on Lannan Street, with everybody passing by, you will have both your pedestrian and your vehicular traffic there as well. And this is where my men have to come to discharge their passengers, and not only the officers of the police department but also the State Police if this happens to be one of their arrests that they have made and they are bringing him to us. Or her, could be a woman; we do have to arrest the women sometimes too, although nowhere near as many. To be secured in our lock-up until someone can come and get this man or woman out.

"And the very first thing that you will instantly observe in virtually every single case, and virtually without exception, is that every suspect who gets out, he's got his hands behind his back account of how he's cuffed and all, the first thing that he always does, and I don't care he's drunk or sober, or he's on some controlled substance and he's higher'n a kite, but the first thing he does before he does another thing is: He takes a look around. And we all know what he is thinkin', every single time, no matter who it is. He's thinkin': "How can I get out of here?" How can he escape?"

The chief always stressed the sibilance of the initial syllable of the verb, relentlessly telling officers who mispronounced the word that 'when people hear you sayin' ex-cape like there was an X in it, which there is not, and which you just did, they think you are stupid or else ignorant, which you do not want. So therefore don't let me hear you doing it around here."

"Now of course this makes no sense at all, no question about that.

Usually the charge that we have got against you, when we bring you in, well, the fact is that you may've gotten everybody good and mad at you, doing what you did, may've even hurt someone, but the fact is still that usually it's a fairly minor charge.

"Now when I say that I don't mean you think that it's minor, that it's a minor thing. That if it's operatin' under for example, so you stand to lose your license, sixty, ninety days, a year, whatever it may be; or this time you're gonna have to take that course they give you if you've been caught for doing this, and it's therefore gonna cost you.

You not only have to go to all those lecture-sessions that they have so there goes your evenings free and you are gonna have to sit now with a bunch ah drunks that you now belong with; which you don't like thinkin' either, but you haven't got no choice now; you have proved it, you belong and look at all those awful bloody pictures that they show. As many nights as that takes, and you're gonna have to pay for them, the cost of going to them, and that's no small amount, you find. Four, five hundred bucks I guess, is what they're getting for it now. You don't like that at all.

"And we don't blame you. But just the same, it isn't like this has to be the end of the whole world for you now. You're embarrassed, sure you are, and you ought to be, whatever it is you've done. But you're not the first one, done it. You're not gonna be the last. So what you want to do is take your medicine and learn from it, learn something from this bad event. Then put it all behind you and act like a normal person, and see that from now on you behave yourself so that you don't have no more trouble, which of course is what you want. That's what we all want, all of us, just to be left alone. And if you do like you're supposed to, chances are, that's how this will all turn out.

"But if you actually do it, if you actually try to escape, get away from the officers there that've gone to all the trouble of arresting you and don't think they like doin' that, all the paperwork that that entails, and the court appearances and everything like that; they're not gonna do this unless they think they have to but now they've done all that and brought you in, and now you're gonna try to escape7. Well now if you do that, you're gonna be in one big peck of… well, a lot of trouble, anyway, and I trust you all know what it is that I'm talkin' about here.

"Big trouble. Resistin' arrest. A and B on an officer. Attempted escape, and on and on. No jokes here now. These're all felonies, and we're not gonna show you any mercy. We're just gonna multiply charges up on you; cut you no slack; give you no breaks: that's what we're gonna do. Because you went and acted stupid, and you made us take a chance of where somebody could've gotten really hurt, and we hadda go and stop you, and this always involves risk. That we do not want to have to be taking. If it turns out that nobody got hurt bad, well then, everybody was lucky, that's all. It wasn't no fault of yours.

And so now we're gonna throw the book at you and you are goin' to jail.

You didn't want that to happen and we didn't want it to happen. Nobody wanted it to happen, but you went and did what you did, and we can't have you doing that, so now you go to jail.

"You see what I'm getting at here. What I'm telling you is that now that we have got the opportunity here to design this new facility to meet the needs that we have got in a growing, modern community police department here. "Cause that is what we've got now: a community that's growing, and it's getting bigger all the time, whether we like it or not. And with all the problems that all growing towns everywhere've all got these days, people movin' to the suburbs and it's only gonna just get worse, matter what we do because that's the way it is. And I don't care where you look, we've all got the same kind of problems.

We're all doin' our best, lookin' for some way to get out of them. And that's why we need to look very carefully at this thing that we're doin' here and make absolutely sure we know exactly what we're doin'.

And one thing I am tellin' you is that from my point of view as a professional law enforcement officer, lookin' at this thing here, one thing we absolutely positively have to build into this new police facility from the start is an internal reception area for receiving prisoners and any other people that we may be bringing in who're in custody. That we have found it necessary to take into custody, danger of harm to themselves or to others, whatever the reason may be. So that the cruiser car or the wagon, whatever it is there, it just arrives from the scene and what it does then is it pulls right in, right inside the building, and the door shuts, boom, down behind it, just like that." He clapped his hands once.

"And then we open up the car doors there and we get them unloaded, and march 'em right into the bookin' desk-area there, and advise 'em and mug 'em and print 'em. And from there they go right into the cell.

Then there they have been at all times since we pulled them out the cruiser: inside of the building, in the lock-up. So they haven't had another look at being outdoors again since they got arrested, because they've never been outdoors again once they got put in the car, the official vehicle there. And they wont be outside again until they've been bailed and discharged and allowed to go free, on their way, with the date set for them to be in court. So once you've done that, see, put the reception area physically inside of the building like I said, you have now just practically eliminated here that completely human tendency and temptation they all always have now, to try to get away and escape, and with all that that entails there, and that's a completely essential thing, I think here, myself."

Shortly after 9:30 that Saturday evening in August Merrion's beeper went off while he sat cramped in a wicker chair too small for him in the now-glass-enclosed sunporch of the house in Canterbury where he had grown up, watching a taped rerun of final night of a big dog-show that had taken place six months or so earlier in Madison Square Garden in New York, trying idly once more to think of some way he could have a dog again without complicating his life beyond endurance, knowing that there was none. The number that came up on the beeper screen in faint light-emitting-diode grey was for the administrative line at the Canterbury police station. He lifted the wireless remote telephone handset from the wicker table next to his chair and punched the number in, and when he recognized the answering voice he said: "Hiya, Everett, what we got?" He listened and then he said: "My, my, that's unusual.

How many involved here?"

Once more he listened and then said: "Okay, I guess I'd better come down then. Gimme fifteen minutes. Oh, and better give Social Services a call. They may wanna take a hand in this. On second thought, no, make it half an hour. I've got the Westchester Kennel Club show on and we're judging the collies here now. I wanna wait and see who's gets the Best Bitch." He laughed. "Yeah, if it was the courthouse, it'd be no contest at all. Biggest Bitch, anyway-Joanie in Probation, win that one hands-down. Anyway, just tell 'em I'm putting my pants on and they keep their shirts on and I'm on my way; I'll be there, half an hour.

Have 'em get their money ready, and if they haven't got any, tell 'em they better either use their call to get someone who's got cash to spare, or else make friends fast with somebody else in the cell-block who's got some. "Cause this clerk makes no exceptions; otherwise it's Sunday in the slammer." He paused. "Yeah, see you at Sal's motor entrance in about a half an hour."

He hung up grateful for the call. He had hoped for it. He intended to be generous when he rotated the weekend bail-setting watch (required when the court would not sit the next day because by law no one could be held more than twenty-four hours without bail having been set) among his three assistant clerks. He told them he meant it when he said that it was only because he was being a nice guy that he was offering them the option. He said that if they chose to tie themselves down one or two weekend nights in order to augment their statutory salaries with the magistrate's bail-setting fee of $25 in each case, that would be fine with him. On the other hand, any time that it happened that all three of them preferred to have both weekend evenings free, and forgo the extra money, that would also be all right.

He had a reason. Richie Hammond had hogged the detail, seldom permitting Merrion or the second and third assistant clerks, Bobby Cooke and Jeanne Flagg, to share the extra money. That had led to some resentment and hard feelings which in turn explained why it was Richie had so much trouble finding anyone who'd pinch-hit for him when he wanted to spend an occasional weekend away. Merrion wanted no such dissension. "And besides," as he told Hilliard, "I'm single, and with what Larry left me, I don't need the fuckin' money. I just put it in my pocket until I get to the bank, put it into my account I'm saving up for when I have to buy my next car. Keep a record every dime, fuckin'

IRS thinks they're gonna grab me puttin' cash into my pocket without payin' taxes on it, they can go and think again. That's the first place that the bastards look. I'd be stupid if I did that, and I'd be just as stupid, too, I didn't, let the kids take what they want."

The weekend totals varied with the seasons. There were almost always at least four or five unlucky drivers whose dead headlights, faulty brake-lights or imperfect recognition of passing zones or stop signs justified a roving cop's decision to pull them over and require them to show their licenses and registrations, leading to arrests for suspended or missing documents, or operating under the influence of alcohol or narcotics. Documentation of their releases on personal recognizance in the amount of $100, promises of payment that would come due if they failed to appear the next day court was open to be processed and enter pleas, would yield a total of at least a hundred bucks a night. More often than not a Friday evening would produce an angrily baffled male whose frustrating week at work or out of it had convinced him that the only cure for his malaise was more beer than his ordinarily peaceful disposition could tolerate without becoming profane and noisy, frightening his wife into believing that violence would be next and causing her to call the cops. That would add another twenty-five dollars to the magistrate's net pay. Sometimes around graduation time or during the football season the State cops would break up an off-campus keg-party at a summer cottage on one of the lakes or a skinny-dipping outing at the reservoir, bagging a small herd of underage drinkers and public urinators whose releases from the lock-up in Hampton Pond would bring two or three hundred dollars. In the late Eighties the increasing traffic in crack cocaine had spawned an increase as well in the number of magistrate's fees, arrests for dealing it adding fifty to a hundred dollars a night.

It seemed to Merrion that that kind of money ought to be hard for a young parent to turn down, but surprisingly more often than he would have thought, both of the two young fathers and the young wife on his staff as well regularly passed it up, saying they wanted time with their families. And during the summer the absences of vacationing assistants usually put him on duty at least one night every week.

This night he was glad of it. On the way home from visiting his mother he had perceived himself to be in a familiar, dangerously barren mood.

Polly had not recognized him, gazing into space and glancing at him only when it registered on her that there was something else alive and breathing in her room, the evidence being bright and cheerful sounds he made when he tried to talk to her. At least she hadn't mistaken him for Chris, which still occasionally happened 'and never fails to piss me off," as he told Hilliard. "Puts me right into a fuckin' rage, even though of course I know she's got no idea what she's saying. I dunno what I want from her, expect her to do, where that no-good bastard's concerned. Fifty, sixty miles away, maybe an hour's drive? If it's even that, and he hasn't been to see her since I can't remember when.

Before she got really sick, I know, the bastard, been at least that long.

"I can't figure the little shit out. It's almost as though he holds me and her responsible for Dad dying like he did when he was still so young. Like he got gypped out of something or something, and we helped whoever did it. When he had much more of Dad's tim en I ever did because by the time he came along Dad'd made sales manager and didn't have to work so many hours had more time to take Chris to ballgames and places by then I was too old to go with them. And who the hell does he think helped Ma pay his tuition, he went to Cathedral? Helped out with his living expenses or he couldn't've gone to BU like he did, even if with his scholarship. That all seems to've slipped his mind now. She still remembers his name, though. It's my name she always forgets.

"Jesus, though, doesn't he know? You got to take care of your own. All you and I've been trynah do, all these years, the things we ever done, it's always come down to steppin' in and takin' care of other people when their own people either didn't care about them enough so they would do it, or were so totally messed-up themselves they couldn't do it, but the need was still there. Somebody had top take care of it.

And that was the way that we always saw it; that was the way we looked at it. Our job was to make sure the government picked up the slack.

That's why the damned jobs exist; that's what they're for. You always take care of your own. Like I always looked out for your best interest, and you always looked out for mine. And we're not even related. We always took care of our own.

"Chris's never done that at all. It's like he's oblivious to the fact that he should; like the shit doesn't see his obligation. He doesn't take care of his own. But it's his name she still remembers."

She seldom understood anything he said to her any more, but on good days she seemed to be pleasantly diverted by the noise he made, and liked it, the way she seemed to like the radio that the nuns had set to play soft-rock music at low volume on the table beside her bed, smiling absently and briefly from the distant world nearby where she had gone to live, if living was still what she did. He thought perhaps she had found his father, Pat, and perhaps her mother, Rose, there for company, and that maybe Rose was being nice, happier with them in that new world than she had ever been with them in the one where the three of them had lived before. He surmised that when she was off in that place she liked the sounds he made, not for their content, or the effort the producer of them made, but for what they were themselves, as a kitten likes and is amused by squeaking sounds emitted by a rubber mouse.

On not-so-good days, perhaps when she and Pat had quarreled, as they sometimes had when he had still been present where she used to live, and physically remained, or Rose was being cranky, the sounds that Ambrose made seemed to vex her, and when she verged on lucidity as she generally did, once or twice an hour, regardless of her inner state she would irritably make small, tidy brushing motions. He was fairly certain that she meant them to dismiss the noise-maker. On those days he subsided, and sat silently with her for as long as he could stand it, half an hour more or so, departing with the excuse in his head that the length of his stay no longer mattered, and the fact of it might not, either, except to the good nuns who observed in passing with approval his filial devotions.

This Saturday had been an in-between day. She hadn't really taken any notice of him or what he said. Her entertainment offering to him had been to look over vacantly and then pick tremulously at her third meal of the day sections of pink grapefruit and a small dish of canned beef soup, accompanied by a half-pint container of skimmed milk and a slice of whole wheat bread with a pat of margarine, a dixie cup of peppermint-stick ice cream, served to her on the narrow telescoping bed-table, usable when she was in the wheelchair, as she had been that afternoon. Then she had placidly looked on while it was taken away, mostly undisturbed, and a short while after that he had gone away himself.

He thought that on Monday he might call her doctor again, for no good reason except his own need to feel that he had at least tried to do something, even though he knew before he made the effort that there was nothing to be done and it would do no good to try.

The doctor he prefaced his answer to every question with "As your mother's primary-care physician' was a large slow-moving red-haired man named Carlson, in his early forties. He seemed always to be working out a complicated mathematical problem in his head. Most likely it was always the same one, Merrion believed, relating to the possibility of obtaining additional money for his services from the family estates or the insurers of the patients, without any additional or more effective effort on his part; endless, useless calculations of no possible use to anyone except him, conducted visibly so that it would always be clear to everyone that he did not and would not ever wish to be interrupted, and would regard any attempt to do so as an imposition, punishable by neglect of the patient.

That evident desire of his cut no ice with Merrion. He received regular quarterly statements from the Hightower Mutual Life Assurance Society in Fort Recovery, Ohio, reporting benefits it had paid to James N. Carlson, M.D. under Pauline Merrion's Medicare Supplement Extended Benefits Policy. If each of the forty-one other patients occupying all but three of the extended-care beds available at St. Mary's on the Hilltop had a policy or other resource remitting to Dr. Carlson, attending house physician, the same amount that he was getting from Hightower for Polly, that stolid man was pulling down $2,730 every week, $141,960 every year, for what appeared to Merrion to consist chiefly of saying over and over again that just as Merrion had thought 'there's been no change in the past um week, um um, no change that I see, at least. But her heart still seems to be very strong. Doesn't seem to be much more we can do that we're not doing already. She's, yes, she's still holding her own."

On the television screen the beautifully silky, streaming tawny and white long-haired regal dogs trotted beautifully in turn around the ring on the leashes that their nondescriptly dressed diligently trotting handlers pretended that they did not need, and Ambrose Merrion on Saturday night sat depleted by his caring, watching them compete without ever knowing why, except that they existed, and that was what they had been bred to do.