A change of gravity

Furthermore, I will do it to you.

"You wont like it. The first thing I'll do, I'll pull your case out of the file which I can do since I'm the one who put it in there and I will tell the judge what you've been doing. Screwing Lowell Chappelle, a bad actor and known felon. Not at all the kind of person we want hanging around with defendants who've got cases on file here in this court. This to Judge Cavanaugh will mean the same thing it means to me: that the deal we made -I would place your case on file; you'd behave yourself and do as you're told that deal isn't working out.

"I know what the judge'll do, just in case you don't. What he'll do is tell me to take your case out of the file and mark it up for hearing, any old day I like, and that's exactly what I'll do. Then, come next weekend, I'll send a couple of cops and a matron over to your place and catch you flopping around in bed with Mister Chappelle, as you've been told not to do. They'll put you in the lock-up for the rest of the weekend.

"On Monday the judge'll have me call your case, and before you can so much as catch your breath and call me even one bad name, he'll make a finding of guilty on that old charge of grand larceny. To which, you'll remember, you've already admitted facts sufficient to prove guilt. And then he will send you to jail. You'll do a year down in MCI Framingham, Janet, okay? Mister Chappelle wont be on your list of approved visitors, just like he isn't out here any more, now that we've had our nice little chat, but you'll hardly notice.

"There'll be so many other things for you to dislike, you'll probably forget all about Lowell. You'll lose your nice little apartment we wont keep it vacant for you, while you're gone, and we wont get you a new one when you get out again. You wont have any privacy, or your freedom to do what you like, as little as that has been. No indeed, Janet, once you get down there, all day long you'll do just as you're told. And you'll be told plenty, my dear. Now, is that what you want me to do?"

She looked at the floor and shook her head No. "Aloud," Merrion said, 'answer me."

She looked up with fear and shook her head again. "No," she said, 'please don't do that to me."

"I don't want to," he said, making statements. "But I will, if you make me. You know that. You wont make me now, will you, Janet?"

"No, I wont," Janet said. "I'll be good."

FIVE

Three-eighths of a mile back from Route 9, facing southwest at the foot of Mount Wolf in Cumberland, the pale grey three-story clubhouse at Grey Hills that Saturday morning stood impeccably white-shuttered in green August shade, the lofty old maples and oaks flanking the drive bowing and rustling in a variable northwest breeze. Jesse Grey had started the sixteen-month process of building it in 1896 as the thirty-six room manor house and centerpiece of his 332-acre estate, suitable for the new life as a country gentleman he had in mind to crown his success in the paper-milling business on the Connecticut River.

"Success that came right out of the hides of the poor devils working for him. Drove his people unmercifully, full double-shifts, sixteen hours a day in the mill, five and a half days a week. For twenty or thirty cents a day," Larry Lane said, recalling Grey with dutiful second-hand malice. "They tended to die young one of 'em was an uncle of mine, Uncle Eddie; was dead before I was born. Before they got to be twenty-five. Bastards like Jesse just worked them to death. What did they care? When the morning came someone didn't show up, or did but collapsed on the job, Jesse had 'em waiting in line to replace him.

"No one around here at the time really knew the whole extent of what Grey'd had done up there, woods he'd had cut down and the pasture he'd had turned into lawns," Lane said. "He brought in all his own foremen from outside. He hired local labor to improve Wolf River and the South Brook for trout fishing, make them run faster with deeper pools; clear the brush and put up the fences, white board like you see on TV, the horse farms in Kentucky on Derby Day; lay out the bridle paths and build the tennis courts and pool. The house and barns and stable; the quarter-mile exercise track.

But all anyone really knew enough to speak of was the part of the job that he did; that the bathrooms were all Italian marble; the size of the big crystal chandeliers. They knew it was grand and elegant, sure, but just how grand and how swell didn't come out 'til years later.

"Then when it did almost no one was interested. One of those WPA writers FDR put to work in the Depression went back and dug up the history of the old place, to go with some pictures they had taken of it for a book about the valley. They put copies in all the libraries around here. For all the good that did; nobody read the damned thing.

Well, I did, but you never could go by what I did. Nobody else ever read it.