Therefore the libel in Hilliard vs. Hilliard alleged 'open and gross adultery." Most of the male reporters who covered the State House, having made compassionate sounds within earshot of Hilliard, once out of his hearing licked their chops and hoped cooler heads would not prevail before the case came to trial. Like Mercy, they had a beef with him. It had festered all the years it had taken Mercy to overcome her disinclination to believe that Dan away from home had trouble remembering his marriage vows. Long before she reached full boil, most of the reporters had known he was playing road games; many of them disapproved.
Their motives were professional, not moral. Soon after Hilliard's meanderings had commenced around Labor Day in 1971, green-eyed, blonde-haired, petite Stacy Hawkes of Channel 3, then twenty-six, coming up with time-dishonored but mutually pleasurable ways to celebrate Hilliard's ascent in the House hierarchy her professional rivals on the State House beat had begun to get heavy pressure from their editorial desks. The incidental time she and Hilliard spent with their clothes on, before and after the time they spent in her bed in her Beacon Street apartment, gave her many more quiet opportunities than her competitors enjoyed to talk informatively with him about newsworthy developments in Massachusetts politics. Stacy's reports from the Hill therefore regularly scooped those that her competition filed, and they did not like it. Several whose sexual advances she'd coolly rebuffed one of them another woman were also fiercely jealous of Hilliard, correctly perceiving the reason she granted him privileges denied to them. They alternated between smouldering anger and bitter laughter, calling her a whore behind her back and coming close to it face-to-face by curling their lips and sneering "Yeah, and how'd you get that little tidbit?" when she goaded them delightedly with allusions to developments that she'd predicted on the air two nights before.
Their subtle inflation of Hilliard's public importance reflected their impotent envy. Unable to publish what they knew to be the actual reason why she would fuck him, and not one of them, they employed the word powerful as code for their perception that Hilliard's legislative authority unjustly comported a droit de seigneur to bed the fairest female among them. Wishing to see him rebuked, they exaggerated the extent and rancor of his opposition on the Hill, hoping each new challenger would manage to stymie him, casting so much doubt upon his abilities and fitness for authority that his steady progress toward becoming Speaker would be impeded if not halted. And if that happened it might do more than just rebuke what they perceived as his excessive ambition; it might prompt Stacy to reappraise his value to her and stop fucking him.
Long after Stacy Hawkes had departed for New York, their envy and resentment persisted, kept alive in part by their observation of Hilliard's effortlessly insulting ease in replacing her repeatedly.
Without really having fully thought it out, they continued to enlarge his public image in order to magnify the story of his ignominious demolition later. They had not necessarily contemplated the collapse of his marriage in their wistful projections of potential causes of his eventual downfall, but when it occurred they hoped it would serve the purpose. They would see to it, in fact, if Mercy would be good enough to make the details of his sexual shenanigans publishable by proving them to make her divorce case. They sat poised at their keyboards wearing the happy expressions of dogs hearing the grinding sound of the electric can-opener; even those who liked Hilliard had to agree that life in the news business now and then could be good.
Banished from his home; under seige where he worked, Hilliard was under orders also not to seek the kind of solace that had gotten him in trouble, the kind he had reasonably come to expect to find without much difficulty evenings after work in Boston. His lawyer, Sam Evans, had forbidden it. The joke in Franklin, Hampshire and Hampden County Probate Courts was that any divorce involving a well-known person or marriage property in excess of one hundred thousand dollars was not valid unless Sam Evans, the Butler, Corey partner specializing in divorce, had represented one of the unhappy parties.
Evans had assessed Mercy's allegation of adultery as true and accurate, but flimsy, perfectly fine and entirely understandable as an expression of rage but wildly out of proportion to the little circumstantial evidence she had to prove it.
"Gossip," Evans told Hilliard, 'as I'm sure you learned in law school, isn't evidence. Not unless what you propose to prove is that people gossip. Which if that's their purpose, we will stipulate: "Indeed people do," will be our reply, and a lot of it's been about you. But sheer quantity of rumor does not make it into proof. Innuendo and insinuation don't amount to evidence.
