Evil Breeding

in the financial section of the New’ York Times. Not so the equally daring accomplishment of a townie classmate. But if the young B. Robert Motherway had, in fact, traveled to Montana as a guest of the Dodges, the elderly Mr. Motherway would undoubtedly have exercised brag rights by telling me so. Furthermore, he’d have used his own words instead of precisely the phrases printed in the New York Times.
    Charitably speaking, B. Robert Motherway had borrowed an episode  from the life of the young Hartley Dodge. Uncharitably speaking? B. Robert Motherway was a damned liar.
     

Chapter Twenty-one
     
    ALTHEA BATTLEFIELD is given to quotation. Her fanatical devotion to Sherlock Holmes means that her source is almost invariably the Sacred Writings. Today, however, she produced a line of verse that had not been penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. “ ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave,’ ” declaimed Althea, “ ‘when first we practice to deceive!’ Sir Walter Scott.”
    “Web,” I repeated gratefully. “A tangled Web. Exactly. You see, Althea? I knew you were the right person to consult.” I thanked her as she likes to be thanked. “ ‘The tidiest and most orderly brain,’ ” I quoted, “ ‘with the greatest capacity for storing facts of any man’—or woman—‘living.’ ” I had touched up the Great Detective’s famous description of his brother, Mycroft Holmes.
    “Tampering with the Canon!” Althea scolded. “Shame on you!”
    “If Sherlock Holmes had known you,” I insisted, “he’d have had to update his views. You are the ‘central exchange.’ You are the ‘clearinghouse.’ Your ‘specialism is omniscience.’ ”
    “Your specialism,” countered Althea, “is brazen flattery.”
    It was Wednesday morning. When Rowdy and I visited Althea, we usually sat in front of the fireplace in the living room or in the sunbathed alcove packed with rattan furniture and potted palms. Today, Althea and I were at her dining room table. Rowdy snoozed under it. The polished mahogany top was covered with manila folders and stacks of paper. In making sense of the plethora of information, Althea had a triple advantage over me. Her limited vision meant she couldn’t read most of what was printed on the material I’d spread before her; she was drown-proofed against the deluge. Because of her great age, she lacked the stamina for mental meandering; she reserved her energy for marching directly to the point. Most important, her tidy, orderly brain enabled her not only to absorb great amounts of information, but to distinguish between the useful and the useless, to ignore the irrelevant, and to sort what remained into meaningful patterns. Forced to organize and summarize for Althea, I found! myself infected by her contagious intelligence. Or maybe all this blather is simply a way of saying that Althea was a retired teacher, a martinet, I suspected, in whose presence I felt compelled to think.
    The dining room of the house on Norwood Hill, I might mention, provided a suitably Holmesian setting for the one-act play in which Althea took the role of the brainy Mycrofit Holmes, the archetypal armchair detective, who, except in the extraordinary case of the Bruce-Partington plans, walked from his rooms in Pall Mall around the corner into Whitehall, and was seen nowhere else but at the Diogenes Club, conveniently located opposite his lodgings. Indeed, with its wood-paneled walls, mahogany sideboard, ornate silver, and heavy crystal, the suburban American dining room could have passed for the Stranger’s Room, the only place at the Diogenes Club where talking was allowed. Heavy crimson velvet swathed the windows. Oil paintings hung on the walls. One showed two sailing ships about to capsize in deep swells under a dark sky. In the other, a pair of scrawny kittens took sentimental shelter from a rainstorm under an umbrella apparently made of skin as thin and translucent as Althea’s. The maudlin pictures were favorites of Althea’s sister, Ceci, whose mentality was as mushy and gushy as Althea’s was logical and sparse. It was certainly Ceci who’d chosen the frilly white summer dress and white lace shawl Althea wore today, Ceci who’d lovingly daubed Althea’s prominent cheekbones with powdery pink blusher and glossed Althea’s age-thinned lips in rose. Fortunately, cosmetology had offered Ceci the means neither to reduce Althea’s great height by six or eight inches nor to shrink Althea’s amazonian