A change of gravity Read online

  "Still, his overhead's always been low. He's never been married, so he's never been divorced. If he's had any children he's had to support and send to school, no one seems to know about it. His mother's in a nursing home; I assume she's on Medicare. I assume he supports her, whatever else she needs. When she had to go into the home, he sold his condo up at Hampton Pond and moved back to the house he grew up in. So really, I don't know how he could afford Grey Hills either, when he first did it or now. It's a mystery to me."

  "Maybe he's teaching law," the judge said. "Nights or something? At Western New England."

  "I don't think he's a lawyer," Robey said. "He may be, but I don't think he is. If he had've been, I don't think he'd be doing what he is now, being a district court clerk. I think Hilliard would've gotten him a judgeship."

  "Yeah," she said, nodding, 'he probably would've at that. Well, I don't know Danny all that well, but what I know I've always liked. And now this pretty picture starts to unfold before us. I wont say I can hardly wait."

  "I can't say I'm looking forward to it much myself," Robey said. "My mother's father opened the Armstrong Tile store over in West Springfield after World War Two. Bigelow Carpet line was later. My father ran the business after Grumpy died, 'til it was his turn to retire. Your family's been living in an area, really not that large a one, doing business fifty years, going into people's homes, time and time again; whenever something like this happens you're bound to know some of the people affected by it. Not that they're friends of yours, exactly; they're just people you've been on good terms with, part of the landscape, the same social fabric. Hate to see them fall and get disgraced, get their lives destroyed like that, torn apart in public.

  In a way it's happening to you."

  "Although not saying that I think, for one instant, mind you," the judge said, 'that Dan Hilliard never did anything wrong. Something most other people probably also would've done, but still very much against the law? Sure, of course he did. He had balls. He would've done lots of slightly illegal things; shady, questionable things.

  Probably hundreds of them, over the course of the years."

  She paused and then chuckled. "Like everybody else in his line of work back then, when he was still in it. It was the custom and usage of the trade, the good old political trade. No one ever got too badly hurt."

  She reflected. "Come right down to it," she said, "I guess what I'm really saying is that I don't want to see the guy caught. Must be about sixty by now; a small living legend around here by now so I would think, anyway. Living legends should be more careful. Stay out of these little schemes and scrapes they always seem to be getting into, and then getting hurt by. Avoid doing things that'll wreck their careers, if they get caught doing them. And if they can't manage to do that for themselves, then we should look out for them, as though they were endangered species. Can't have our legends becoming extinct."

  She hesitated. "Like you say, it's funny how it hits you. Almost like you were somehow involved in whatever they had going on up there in Canterbury, and now what's happening to them is also happening to you."

  "Yeah," Robey said, 'but Cohen still wants his hearing, so I've got to call him and tell him: When do I tell him to come in?"

  She sighed. "Ahhh," she said, 'tomorrow, I guess. Tomorrow afternoon.

  Quarter of two. And this one we'll do here, in chambers. If the US Attorney wants to showboat this thing now, making public speeches and calling for Dan's head, first let him get an indictment."

  Two.

  From the very beginning Janet LeClerc, then twenty-nine, had felt threatened by Merrion. "The guy," she would say abruptly to the impersonally cheerful cashier at Dineen's Convenient where she bought her cigarettes and coffee, '1 forget his name. You know him, the one I mean; big white-haired guy down there, the courthouse; not the judge, the other one." This happened Friday mornings following the third Thursday afternoons when Corinne (pronounced "Kreen' by her fellow workers), 'the switchboard woman' called to remind Janet soothingly that she must report on Saturday for her monthly conference. "Because we know that sometimes, you, well, sometimes people who're scheduled to report, forget. These things. Everybody does they're not part of their routine."

  "I don't know what he wants me to say. And I need to do that, don't I, say what he wants me to say he could have me put in jail." Therefore every time she had to see him she told him she did her best 'to have a regular routine, you know. That's what I do." Because from what Corinne said to her, that seemed to be what they wanted. But because it never seemed to satisfy him" It like he don't believe me or he doesn't want to listen' she felt anxious each time as she did it, wanting him to believe her. Then afterwards she wasn't sure she remembered doing it.

  So at their eleventh conference in the clerk-magistrate's office of the saddeningly rundown Canterbury District Courthouse, on the morning of the third Saturday in August, she once more earnestly described to Merrion her trust in routine as a pathway to the virtuous life she believed he wanted her to lead. "I think that's how I can do, you know, like you said for me to do: to see if I can just stay out of trouble. For a year. So that other thing I did there, you can make it disappear. You know: like you said you would."

  The courthouse, closed on Saturday, was quiet. "Not so much distraction," Merrion explained to Hilliard. "Man can actually hear himself think in there if he wants to, on a Saturday. Not so many fuckin' people always callin' you, the phone, bumpin' into you and stoppin' you, asking' things and sayin' things, getting' in your way.

  "S why whenever me and Lennie decide we're gonna take on another one our projects stay outta trouble a year and we drop the charges on 'em I always see them Saturdays, when there's a chance I can think straight."

  Mornings Mondays through Fridays the beige rubber-tiled corridors and stairwells, eight feet wide, were fetidly overcrowded. The ventilation system became overloaded by nine' fifteen each day. Too little air rebreathed too often by too many nervous, sweating people became warm and moist.

  Describing his work-day environment at the shag end of a winter day to Hilliard in the dark-panelled grill room of the clubhouse at Grey Hills, the room lightly touched with the aroma of maple logs burning on the hearth, Merrion said: "When I first got into it, over Chicopee, I wasn't ready for it. Mobs of people, day after day, smelling like meat that went bad. When I was doing the substitute teaching; when I was with you and we're out campaigning, meetings and rallies, conventions and so forth: there were people around us, and they weren't all always our friends; sometimes they hated our guts. But at least you could go toe-to-toe with 'em, stand there and fight with the bastards, th out turnin' your stomach and suddenly thinkin': "Jesus, I'm gonna throw up."

  He stared morosely through the mullioned bay window at the orchard of fruit trees bare and black in snow behind the clubhouse at the base of Mount Wolf, the remaining blue light darkening into violet and black in the late afternoon. The maple wood snapped in the fire and the bartender made the bottles clink as he removed and replaced them one by one on the shelves, wiping dust from their collars and shoulders.

  "Most of the people who come to the courthouse 'cause they're in trouble: The way they stink, they deserve it. You should get in trouble for smelling like they do. They don't wash themselves or brush their teeth or even use some mouthwash. They don't change their underwear and socks, or their other clothes either. And lots of times you'd swear the person that you're talking to's never figured out why the stalls in public toilets always seem to have those rolls of paper in them. So as a result they look dirty and they stink. Their breath's foul, and it seems like there's armies of the bastards. Day after day after day they keep comin', an ill wind that blows through the world."

  "When we talk about democracy," Hilliard replied, 'they're who we mean.

  They're exercising the fifth freedom. Freedom of speech; freedom to worship; freedom from want; freedom from fear; freedom to smell like a wet bear."

  On the weekdays, worried-looking me
n between twenty-five and sixty, some heavily muscled, as many of them white as black or Hispanic, struggled front ally through the crowds of young people, using their shoulders and observably restraining strong impulses to shove others out of their way. They wore rumpled dusty suits that did not fit, under stained tan and gray raincoats with crumpled, button-tab collars that stood away from their necks at odd angles. Or they wore baseball caps and windbreakers or nylon parkas, open on plaid flannel shirts; plain tee-shirts; tee-shirts with messages extolling naked coed sports; chino pants or jeans or corduroys or warm-up pants; scuffed loafers broken-down at the counters, steel-toed yellowish-tan construction boots or heavily soiled white training shoes. They carried cardboard containers of coffee and folded newspapers, and if they were not on the way to report to Probation Intake, the room with the big gold-lettered brown sign on the right as they came in, they asked people in uniforms or men and women in civilian clothes who seemed to be at home in the surroundings how to find Room 7, 8 or 11.

  Three assistant clerk-magistrates, two men and a woman, presided in those airless eight-by-twelve-foot rooms as though they had been built-in, permanent fixtures installed along with the electrical wiring and the brown vinyl mop boards during construction of the pitted ivory-painted cinder-block walls. The first assistant, Robert Cooke, nephew of the late Most Rev. Edmund Mackintosh, auxiliary bishop of the Roman Catholic diocese of Springfield, was a thin, dour white man in his early fifties who became hostile when he knew or suspected that the person talking to him favored legal access to abortion. His wife, Mimi, had at last convinced him after many years first not to start conversations on the subject, and second not to try to attempt subtly to ascertain how others viewed the matter, because when they differed with him he became either sullen or scornful, depending on whether he considered them his superiors or inferiors. "And it hurts you, Bob, it really does. It hurts you at the courthouse and it's why almost no one wants to see us or be friends with us except people who agree with you, and so when we go out that's all we ever talk about, and that's no fun at all."

  Tyrone Thomas was the third assistant clerk, an amiable black man in his early thirties who wanted no trouble and tried to make none. In his teens he had become the protege of a basketball coach at Cambridge Rindge amp; Latin School in Cambridge who'd gone on to a second career as a state senator. Thomas avoided prejudice by ignoring it if possible and by avoiding aggressive individuals who made ignorance impossible.

  People who knew him and his wife, Carol, a tall and beautiful light-skinned black woman who worked as a field-audit supervisor for the Internal Revenue Service, believed he had married well above his station and wondered what she saw in him. He tried not to share that puzzlement and pretended not to notice or be hurt when he sensed it unexpressed or inferred it when implied.

  The second assistant was a somewhat-overweight thirty-eight-year-old white woman, Jeanne Flagg. Her father, Archie Oakschott, after eighteen years on the bench had taken senior status as a judge of the Norfolk County Probate Court in Dedham, near Westwood where she had grown up. She continued to wear the cotton and wool, light blue, light grey and light green suits she had purchased when she had gotten the job four years before she became accustomed to the court-house-ritual morning coffee breaks with pastry in the snack bar. No longer somewhat underweight, she was therefore uncomfortable in her clothes, moving carefully and slowly, aware that each change of position tested the seams to the limits.

  The assistant clerk-magistrates had to decide whether there were sufficient grounds to recommend to the judge that orders should be issued under Chapter 209A, Massachusetts General Laws, restraining the men who came before them from getting near enough to the people whom they had claimed to love, in order to harm them again. Usually the victims were their wives or girlfriends, but sometimes the men had beaten their children, or hurt their defenseless parents (men accused of sexually molesting children were processed differently). The assistant clerks grimly tried with squinting eyes to see things that could not be seen, hoping to reduce by means of narrow wariness the unreliability of the guesses that they made about whether the particular man under scrutiny was likely to lay rough hands in most instances, again on his female sexual partner; whether he would benefit from still another chance either to control his use of beverage alcohol or quit taking the illegal drugs that he thought licensed him to commit violence. Or whether instead he would soon steal away back into his addictions like a furtive animal skulking back to its kill to feed the rage that made him use his hands on her — and might some day if continued come to involve a gun or knife or club.

  Each of the visitors knew what would happen to him if the clerk-magistrate decided that he was either unable or lying to conceal his refusal to stop hitting the woman who had angered him by attempting to influence some aspect of his behavior by means other than prompt oral, vaginal or anal attention to his sexual requirements. He would have to go before a judge who would reason that he must be put in jail.

  Otherwise the judge would think himself at risk that the man who this time had beaten the living shit out of the woman he considered his chattel would kill her the next time he got riled up. If he did that then the judge would get reamed out on TV and in the papers. The men knew: that judges did not feature getting reamed out; that they themselves did not want to go to jail; and that the clerk-magistrates could seldom be appeased more than once by signs of contrition and remorse. But they also knew that if they were placed under orders restraining them from having anything to do with their scared women, or put in jail for having violated such an order, the next chance they got to get drunk or stoned each of them would know first who was to blame for putting him into this desperate, humiliating, probably hopeless, situation: the woman who had either called the cops or made enough noise while he'd been hitting her so that a neighbor had called them.

  And that secondly in that red anger each of them would know uncontrollably that she must be punished for it, more severely than before, so that she would not do it again, not ever. And each of them also would know already and exactly what form the punishment must take.

  This gave them a dim sense of inexorably advancing doom that threatened them with despair so bleak their minds cried out for a drink or a dime bag that would make it go away.

  So the men who had hit their women, filled with resentment as they were, did not try at all to hide the fact that they felt troubled and dejected and very often severely hungover, as well. Trying to conceal the resentment, they exerted themselves to appear even sadder and more miserable than they felt, forcing themselves to grovel abjectly thus making themselves feel even worse.

  The clerk-magistrates and the other people who worked in the courthouse were well aware of this tactic and its practice, and the vengeful feelings it was meant, but failed, to conceal, so they treated the batterers differently from other defendants, discounting their displays of woe, sadness, regret and remorse by sixty to seventy percent. This made it difficult for the personnel to conduct themselves in their customary courteous professional manner, dealing with the men who had hit women. The only way they could do it was by acting as though they didn't know why it was the men had come before them. This was harder for the women workers in the courthouse than it was for the men, because they had to hide fear as well as anger and contempt for the defendants. The men who had hit women found the pretense unconvincing and knew very well that the courthouse people did know that was what they had done, and scorned and despised them for doing it. The men tended to be fairly quiet, but still visibly resentful of this additional injustice they perceived against them.

  Most of the time most of the people who worked in the courthouse tried to seem sympathetic and be polite to everyone who was there because they had gotten in some kind of trouble. The defendants often found their professional solicitude condescending, and sneered at it to demonstrate contempt, but in that, too, they were mistaken; it was not feigned. The personnel felt real empathy with hard-working men an
d women who had never been in court until the morning after the night they had had too much to drink and had gotten stopped driving home at two in the morning, doing fifteen miles an hour in the middle of the road, steering by the yellow lines, had blown.18 on the Breathalyzer, ten points over the legal state of drunkenness, and had fallen down when ordered to stand on one foot. "There but for the grace of God' was a phrase they often murmured as the Driving-Unders begged futilely to retain their licenses in disregard of punitive statutes mandating revocation. When they were convinced that an injured defendant, accused of resisting arrest, had in fact been unsuccessfully attempting to defend himself against a police officer gone out of control, they saw to it that the judge handling the case became aware of the relevant facts, even if no evidence of them was offered in open court. They also often felt real pity for aimless early teenagers from dysfunctional homes whose undifferentiated fear and pent-up hostility enabled them to commit their first serious criminal offenses on the apparent basis of mere evil impulse (new personnel speedily acquired and inexpertly used the diagnostic jargon of psychology as a handy means of mental self-defense, reflexively learning early that they needed it to explain behavior they would otherwise find frighteningly incomprehensible).

  The majority of the young people crowding the stairwells and the hallways were repeat offenders, but experience did not enable them to foresee whether they would have to go into the courtroom, perhaps emerging from it with their wrists in manacles. They had been ordered to report for interviews with other courthouse personnel, either adult probation officers or Department of Youth Services caseworkers. Until the public address system raspily summoned them by name to report to Rooms 17, 18, 18A or 20, they beached themselves in the halls and clustered in the stairwells, obstructing the passageways. Some were morosely silent, but most talked, elliptically, ceaselessly asking each other for predictions that none of them could make, repeating questions none of them could answer, now and then casting wild glances outside the groups of people whom they knew, wishing to discover somewhere in the hallways someone their age who looked just like them and who therefore could be trusted but knew the answers to their questions; could tell them what was going to happen to them when the judge went on the bench.