"And Mercy believed you?" Merrion said. "Amazing. I never would've."
Hilliard bloused his cheeks out. "Of course you wouldn't've," he said.
"The Charlie Doyles of this world wouldn't've. None of you would've had to. So therefore I wouldn't've told you that story; you would've laughed in my face. But she had a weakness, so she couldn't laugh; she had to believe me. And so she made herself do it." He shook his head.
"If your next question's whether I'm disgusted with myself, the answer is: I am now, but I wasn't then. Then I was proud of myself, and that makes me feel even more disgusted."
"And maybe even more ashamed?" Merrion said.
Hilliard looked at him. He pursed his lips and swallowed. "Goin' for the full skin, huh, Amby? Not just for the scalp?" Merrion nodded.
Hilliard said: "Well yeah, that too then, pal of mine: even more ashamed."
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."
