“So you suggested to Mr. Clancy. Er—why?”
Dow shrugged.
“I don’t know. I just feel it. The Dows are sensitive folk. Look, let’s get to the core. Father was the Dow who ran the Dalton National Bank for twenty years. Mother is an ex-president of the Tuesday Club. I’ve got an uncle who’s a bishop, and an aunt who gets blue ribbons at Cat Shows—doesn’t that sound upright and respectable?”
“It’s almost awe-inspiring/’ Leonidas said. “Particularly the aunt.”
“You still—well, let’s tackle it from the other side. Who do you know in Dalton?”
“Whom,” Leonidas said. “Whom. I know all the Meredith faculty, now that the school’s moved out there. I have good friends in the Kayes—”
“My own cousins.”
“And Cassie Price—”
Dow whooped.
“My cousin Cassie! My favorite woman in all Dalton! Wait, wait—I’ve got it, now! Last week I met Cassie in Blaine’s, buying a leather chair for someone named Bill whose new house she was overseeing! She just said Bill, not Bill Shakespeare, but it’s you— you and your house, isn’t it? There! Doesn’t that make you feel better about me, to know I’m Cassie’s third cousin, a couple of times removed?”
“It does,” Leonidas said honestly. “But—”
“Did you know her husband?”
“No. Dow, I wish—”
“He and my dad played golf, and fished—dad used to say that Bagley Price was the only man he knew whose life was never dull. Do you know, Cassie never put his socks in the same place twice running, from the time she married him till he died? She claimed she wasn’t going to let Bagley get in a mental rut, expecting the same thing, always.”
“Cassie Price,” Leonidas said, “is probably one of the more unexpected people. But suppose you tell me, Dow, exactly what—”
“How did you ever dare let her build your house?” Dow asked. “How did you dare?”
“You speak,” Leonidas said, “as though Cassie constructed it with her bare hands, laying plank on plank and brick on brick. Which, of course, is not the case. She merely kept an eye on the architect, and saw that—”
“Isn’t it crazy to think she’s a grandmother? And young Jock’s living with her this winter, too. His family’s skiing in Switzerland, and they intended to take Jock. But he pretended to break his leg again.”
“I know,” Leonidas said. “He’s broken bone after bone to escape skiing with his family. Dow, I should like to be told how it happened that you—”
“Jock adores Cassie, and she adores him. Did you ever hear—”
Without any visible pause, Dow told stories of Cassie Price till the black limousine rolled into Dalton.
“City limits,” Dow said. “And wouldn’t you know it. My God, look at the snow! Will you look at it?”
“There seems,” Leonidas said with resignation, “to be a lot of it.”
He had given up trying to work a word in edgewise.
“Good old Dalton Street Cleaning Department. That’s what we call it in our laughing way. The Street Cleaning Department. You won’t be so calm and resigned about it, Bill, after you’ve paid a batch of Dalton taxes. My mother claims that the whole Department went on the last Byrd expedition, and no one ever noticed. The Street Cleaning Department is mother’s pet topic, next to what does she pay taxes for, anyway, she’d like to know, if. You must meet mother. She’ll throw a tea— Carl, can you get through Oak to Maple, and then swing up Walnut? Then Walnut to Lime.”
Leonidas barely heard Dow’s monologue about Dalton streets and the Street Cleaning Department, as it was laughingly called. His eyes were fixed on Birch Hill, looming beyond.
The car skidded to a stop.
“Stuck, Carl?” Dow demanded.
“Not yet, but we can’t go no further. See? The road ain’t plowed through to the next street. Only as far as the last house.”
“Back up and turn around, and go back to Walnut,” Dow called out as the fear wheels churned noisily. “Try Cherry to Elm. Elm ought to be clear. An alderman lives on Elm.”
Elm, if anything, was worse.
“My God!” Dow said in disgust. “Well, go back another block, Carl. Try Pine to Poplar. We ought to be able to hit the hill road somewhere!”
Both Pine and Poplar proved to be virgin wastes of drifted snow.
“Well,” Dow said, “try Sycamore to Eucalyptus. If we can’t get through there, Shakespeare, you’re sunk!”
Sycamore differed from Pine and Poplar in that an oil truck was half buried in the drifts, but Eucalyptus outdid them all. The snow plow was buried on Eucalyptus. A small boy informed them that it had been there for two days.
“That,” Dow said to Leonidas, “is what we call the laissez-faire, or Dalton policy of city government. Let’s see, now, what did we do with that orange snow plow? Oh, that old thing? We left that on Eucalyptus way back in the blizzard of eighty-eight! Shakespeare, that’s that. You can’t get to Birch Hill. If you must build houses, you ought to build on the lowlands, with the proletariat. Or wear snow shoes. Carl, turn back to—”
“Wait,” Leonidas said. “The streets on the other side of the hill. What about them?”
“Them? Oh, they ain’t plowed!” Carl said. “Not if these ain’t.”
Leonidas looked at Birch Hill.
“I think,” he said, “we will try them. If you don’t mind.”
“Mister, there ain’t no use!”
“Still,” Leonidas said, “let us try them. Er—I wonder if you hear me, Carl?” The man’s head jerked around. “Ah. You do. Carl, let’s try the other side.”
“Honest, mister, you can see from here, there ain’t no sense trying!”
There was something about the expression on Carl’s stolid face that reminded Leonidas suddenly of the porter who had become alarmed at the howdah, and of the people who had watched him come to on the green plush Pullman seat. It was the same thing, gentle, kindly tolerance for an elderly man who had been knocked out, and whose brain, through no particular fault of his own, was
