A change of gravity

"So that's what I mean about nurture. Everything that's happened to me's made an impact on me, made me a different person from the one I used to be. I think at least I hope I've become a better one. One who got that way because she learns from experience. What I've learned and the people I've known are parts of what I am today, because of the way I grew up."

The interview had taken place in the dramatically modern soaring field stone-and-redwood home Foote shared with her second husband, the internationally known artist, Eric Hedges. It was set on a ledge off a private road off South Street near Tillotson Hill overlooking the Cobble Hill Reservoir in Blandford. "Eric and I first met at a solo show of his at the Ainsworth Gallery in Boston, seems like it must've been a hundred years ago. Ray'd gotten involved with a group of businessmen and banking people here and down in Boston who were trying to buy a dilapidated old racetrack out in Hancock. There'd been a big scandal. Word went around the New York Mafia was behind the original deal. Some people went to jail, and those who didn't, the people who'd originally built the track, ended up going into bankruptcy. No one could find a buyer, so it ended up the town took the property for unpaid taxes. And there it sat, weeds growing all over, buildings falling apart.

"Ray and the people he was with were convinced it still could be a money maker. So their idea was to buy it cheap, rebuild it, and tiien either sell it to someone else or else reopen it and run it themselves.

Warren Corey, one of the senior partners at Butler, Corey, was involved with the group, and that year I was working for him. All of us were in Boston for something connected with it, licensing hearings or something, and after the hearing I went to the gallery. I'd always admired Eric's work, and that's how we met. I'm the only one who gained anything from that racetrack project. The deal itself fell through.

"Now Eric, he looks at things from the artist's perspective, and that's had an influence on me, affected how I see the world. And again, that's what I mean. About how we're the sum of our experience; what we are."

The text of the interview was illustrated by several photographs, one of her in a judicial robe, another of her at her desk in her new chambers, three showing her at home, casually dressed in a tawny cowled sweater and fitted jeans, her black hair in a shiny page-boy framing her slightly feline face. Eric had said she'd done a good job and should be very pleased, and she had said: "The photographer did a good job; I grant you that. But I don't think I did. Do I really talk like that, say famous things like that, to people I don't know? Cripes, I sound like such a phony there, like the way Ray used to, accepting one of his semi-annual awards for being such a wonderful house nigger."

"It does the job, though," Eric had said, and he had been correct. The profile made her seem to deserve the distinction she had achieved.

Sandy Robey opened the door and came in, a file folder in his hand, deducing from the thunk, the fact she was still seated at the table and the pleased expression on her face what she'd just done with the lunch bag "You know, Judge, you really should let us get you one of those wastebasket-backboards," he said.

Robey tried hard to be cheerful; preparing to turn forty was a sour portion for him. He believed that at one-sixty-five he was about twelve or fifteen pounds overweight. His wife disagreed -much too gaily, he thought saying he ought to lose closer to twenty. The Rogaine with minoxidil that Foote had encouraged him to obtain and apply two weeks before had not visibly arrested, much less reversed, the gradual but alarming recession of his coarse reddish hair. His dentist had admonished him to 'see a periodontist for attention to what he diagnosed as advancing gum disease that otherwise would leave him toothless before fifty, 'unless I have the good sense to die first."

"Backboard, huh," she said, 'what do I need with a backboard?

Swishers're all I put up. Now what kind of nonsense you bringin' here that's gonna get us all distracted this fine autumn afternoon from already-pressin' business?"

Robey had put the folder on the table, sat down and tapped it once.