There was something in Coverly’s nature—something provincial no doubt—that made this sort of lamentation intolerable and he seized Betsey’s hand and marched out of the coffee house, snorting like someone much older. It wasn’t much of a night.
Oh, Father, Father, why have you come back?
Moses and Melissa Wapshot lived in Proxmire Manor, a place that was known up and down the suburban railroad line as the place where the lady got arrested. The incident had taken place five or six years before, but it had the endurance of a legend, and the lady had seemed briefly to be the genius of the pretty place. The facts are simple. With the exception of one unsolved robbery, the eight-man police force of Proxmire Manor had never found anything to do. Their only usefulness was to direct traffic at weddings and large cocktail parties. They listened day and night on the interstate police radio to the crimes and alarms in other communities—car thefts, mayhem, drunkenness and murder—but the blotter in Proxmire Manor was clean. The burden of this idleness on their self-esteem was heavy as, armed with pistols and bandoleers of ammunition, they spent their days writing parking tickets for the cars left at the railroad station. It was like a child’s game, ticketing commuters for the most trifling infractions of the rules the police themselves invented, and they played it enthusiastically.
The lady—Mrs. Lemuel Jameson—had similar problems. Her children were away at school, her housework was done by a maid, and while she played cards and lunched with friends, she was often made ill-tempered by abrasive boredom. Coming home from an unsuccessful shopping trip in New York one afternoon, she found her car ticketed for being a little over a white line. She tore the ticket to pieces. Later that afternoon, a policeman found the pieces in the dirt and took them to the police station, where they were pasted together.
