Concerned with other issues, Leland hoped, Norma drove her late husband’s car with sureness and visible enjoyment across the county line into the city of Port Smith. The sky was black now, and the roads were still jammed with people going home to dinner. Port Smith was no place for the scant pleasures of late autumn. It was gray and damp in the days, and in the nights it became so raw that normal cold weather penetrated shoes and leather gloves and turned toes and fingers yellow-green for lack of circulation. Every patrolman in Port Smith knew the trick of ten deep breaths. The streets averaged six feet above the water table where the land was soft. Most of new Port Smith was mounted on a black glacier-scored rock, but that provided no better insulation against the weather. One of the results of the winter cold was that the people of Port Smith, a sophisticated and comfort-conscious lot, were hardier and less vulnerable than most Americans expected. At this point in his life, Leland both disliked and was concerned with this city: the cynicism that was the product of the sophistication and toughness was enough to keep the people from demanding a direction from the government, and the increase in the numbers of colored people, creating the division of rich from poor along the color line, was building a half-rational dissatisfaction that was now of subcrisis proportions. There was increasing incidence of seemingly inexplicable acts, such as the teen-age gang wars of last week. Since the beginning of history cities had built on top of themselves, layer upon layer, and Port Smith was no exception: the old maps showed streams and marshes where now stood buildings whose construction no one remembered. Port Smith was rife with citizens’ committees, study groups, and action teams composed of people who had not taken part in civic affairs before. It was Leland’s own Port Smith upbringing that made him wish them well but made him wonder about the sort of people who ran out nightly to meetings that accomplished nothing. That which he thought was most sane inside him considered those people and their meetings as the city’s best hope. Leland lived in Manitou now; legitimately none of it was his business. That most sane thing inside him had to view his concern as only an extension of the satisfaction he felt when he read that Port Smith College won a baseball game or two in the course of a full season.

Now Norma said, “What I can’t understand is why he married her.”

“That’s something we’ll never know. We’d better just forget about it.”

“He was young,” she said. “He’d just got back from the war. Maybe he needed someone.”

“Kaminsky told me that his wife thought that your husband was a terrific character. I took it to mean that he was impressive, polished, and mature. It was college, but she was twenty-two at the time. Maturity is something college women look for, I think.”