Something—not a premonition, I assure you—urged me to ask Nigel Eglantine if anything was the matter, but I resisted the impulse. It turned out I didn’t have to ask, because Nigel came over to our table and made an announcement. There was, he reported, something wrong with the snowblower. Its engine appeared to be damaged. He was going to have a look at it, although he wasn’t terribly smart about engines, but even if he proved unable to fix it we were not to worry, because the machine wasn’t really essential. Although the snow was deep, with drifts in the yard well over three feet high, Orris was a stout fellow and had insisted he could wade through the snow clear to the bridge and across it. On its other side, of course, was the Jeep, and the Jeep, we could rest assured, was fully reliable.
When he went off to reassure another table, I said to Carolyn, “I bet the truck won’t be there, either.”
“Did I miss something, Bern? What truck?”
“Oh, it’s an ancient joke,” I said, and told her about the young Marine making his first parachute jump. He’s told how the chute will open automatically, and that there’s an emergency ripcord if it doesn’t, and that when he lands a truck will pick him up to take him back to camp. So he jumps, and the chute doesn’t open, and the ripcord comes off in his hand, and he says to himself, “Hell, I bet the damn truck won’t be there, either.”
She looked at me. “It’s an old joke, huh?”
“The old jokes are the best ones.”
“Not necessarily,” she said.
This time I didn’t hear the scream.
Not the first scream, anyway. I was in a parlor—not the East Parlour, where Lettice and I had misbehaved in front of the stuffed oryx, but in the West Parlour, where I was sitting in a wing chair with my feet up on a needlepoint-covered ottoman, reading The Portable Dorothy Parker. The whole idea of a portable Dorothy Parker intrigued me. You could take her along on trips, and every once in a while her head would pop up out of your Gladstone bag and deliver some smartass remark.
I was reading a short story about a woman who was waiting for a telephone to ring, but I wasn’t getting very far with it because Miss Dinmont kept interrupting me to ask for help with a crossword puzzle. Did I know a six-letter marsupial, the third letter an M? Could I complete the phrase “John Jacob Blank” with a five-letter word ending in R?
Why, I’ve long wondered, would anyone want help on a crossword puzzle? And how does one deal with people who ask for it? If you supply an answer it only encourages them to ask for more, but if you plead ignorance it doesn’t seem to discourage them. In fact they seem to ask everything, even the ones where they know the answer themselves, as if determined to plumb the depths of your stupidity.
What might work is to grab the puzzle out of the puzzler’s hands, fill in all the squares yourself at breakneck speed (right or wrong, who cares?), and hand it back in triumph. I might have tried it that morning—I was testy enough, even with my stomach full of kippers and porridge and toad-in-the-hole (or wind-in-the-willows, or whatever it was), but I just couldn’t be so mean to poor little Miss Dinmont. I was afraid she’d burst into tears. I’d feel terrible, and then Miss Hardesty would come along and beat me to a pulp.
So I was reading, and I’d just been interrupted for perhaps the seventh time, and I’d tried saying, “Hmmm, that’s a tricky one, let me think about that one,” and there was a scream outside, or at least a great cry.
As I said, I didn’t hear it. But Orris was not like Berkeley’s tree, and even though I didn’t hear him fall, someone else did. Millicent Savage, who was out in front of the house directing her father in the making of a snowman, heard Orris shout. So did her father. “Wait here,” Greg Savage told his daughter, and set off toward the source of the cry, walking literally in Orris’s footsteps through snow that came up higher than his knees.
Millicent, of course, did not heed her father’s command to stay put, but set off in his wake. She found it slow going, however, her precocity being cerebral rather than altitudinal, and before she could reach