A change of gravity

She had told him all about it the second or third time he'd called her in for a conference, back when they were first getting acquainted back around the turn of the century, it seemed like, when he was still only just beginning to find out she was another one, still able to resist the unpleasant discovery that he'd gone and done it again, let himself in for it once more, in the early autumn of 1994. "Always been a big ambition of mine, to get married," she'd told him, looking down at the ring finger embarrassingly naked on her left hand in her lap, twisting the skin of the knuckle with her right thumb and first two fingers. "I think most people do, expect it'll happen, think they'll get married some day. It wasn't the only thing that I thought I'd like to do, but it was the big one."

He reported that conversation to Louella Daggett in the regional office of the Commonwealth's Department of Social Services. Daggett was a short stocky black woman in her early sixties. She had arthritis in her knees that made it very difficult for her to get around. She cited it to justify her irritable disposition, but Merrion had known her years before she'd ever mentioned arthritis and she'd always had a lousy disposition. Merrion thought it was probably attributable to the kind of people and problems she encountered in her work. But believing that frustration made her irascible did not impel him to tolerate her surliness; their discussions about individuals whose behavior had attracted the attention of the court as well as DSS tended to be acrimonious.

Louella had been Janet's caseworker since she had gone on welfare in 1986. She said 'when Janet first came on the reason that she gave us was that she'd had a husband and he'd left her, run away. We took it at face-value, we always do, their stories, but we also check them out.

We couldn't find no husband. There'd never been one. The husband who'd left her, "Wayne" she said his name was: he'd never existed.

"Harvey," we called him, "Harvey, the bastard." She was apparently the only living person who'd ever been able to see him. No one else ever had. Deserted by a phantom husband; can you beat it? Wish-fulfillment, but a lousy job of it. Here she'd gone and dreamed the guy up, gone to all that trouble, and then he turns out to be no good. You'd think if you made up your own husband, well, he might not be a good provider but at least you'd think he'd be a fairly faithful companion, at least around when you needed him. Not Janet's make-believe husband. Janet couldn't lay sod right-side up.

"Completely serious about it, though. Couldn't talk her out of it.

Claimed she'd actually been married not divorced, just married and the only reason that she had to be on welfare was that her no-good husband'd run off someplace no one could find him and make him pay support. Fact there was no marriage license in the records in Springfield didn't faze her a bit; maybe it was Chicopee, or maybe Holyoke. Couldn't find a record of her marriage there, either. We checked with the State House, Secretary, State. No record there. We told her that.

"Didn't miss a beat. "Then it must've been somewhere else. Maybe we went to Vermont and got married. My memory's never been good. It was all quite a few years ago." Could not talk her out of it, no matter how you tried.

"This went on for two or three years. Then after a while she stopped remembering him. Harvey went off the screen, disappeared without leaving a trace. My guess is she thought she had to be a deserted wife in order to get a check and then someone convinced her she didn't. Or maybe she just finally forgot it. She's not all there, you know, poor thing. In addition to never having been what you'd call extremely bright, she does not have all her marbles."

He could remember how Janet had looked when she had first talked about marriage. She had shaken her head, making the dark tendrils of the dull, dark-brown pageboy-haircut she was wearing then flick around her ears and the corners of her eyes. Daggett snickered at Merrion when he'd suggested that maybe she could persuade Janet to 'get herself cleaned up some, you know? Do something with herself? Wash her goddamned greasy hair, for starters. No one's going to hire her back, only thing she knows how to do, wipe tables up in restaurants, clean up the cafeteria in some hospital or school, if we send her up and she comes in looking like she does now, needs a wiping-down herself."

"You're still sort of new at this, aren't you," Louella'd said to him.

"Been at it now, what, only twenny, thirty years? And you still haven't quite got the hang of it. You courthouse guys, you make me laugh. You're all alike. You're all so cut-and-dried. You all think it's all so simple. All you political types. You trip over one of these people like Janet and you think the reason she's miserable's because no one else ever noticed her before, took a hand in her life.