“The bridge,” he said deferentially, opening the rear door, “is destroyed.”
“Whatever…? Oh! For heaven’s sake! You mean this—this moronic game is still going on?”
Willis peered through the car and across the eastern edge of Simmons Park to the curving façade of the “gold coast” hotels which glittered above the silhouettes of park trees. “The whole area is supposed to be totally destroyed, ma’am. Vaporized.
Minerva abruptly perceived that her aging chauffeur was not altogether sympathetic with her plight and mood. That awareness might have sent a lesser woman into a new spasm of invective; Minerva had scant tolerance for life’s negative experiences, less for impudence and none at all for frustration. Now, however, she saw that she faced total, if temporary, defeat. The next bridge over to River City was at Willowgrove Road which became Route 401 to Kansas City. At the rate traffic was moving, it would take an hour to get there, to cross, and to come back through the slums of her city to her residence on Pearson Square. For all she knew, Route 401 might also be in the area of imagined total destruction and they would have to proceeded east to the Ferndale Street Bridge.
So she did not rant or upbraid any longer. She thought.
“Willis,” she said presently, using the speaking tube, as the car budged along in fifty-foot starts and stops, “we won’t go home. Instead, I’ll phone. My guests will have to make the best of it with Kit for host. Drive to the Ritz-Hadley.”
Around and beyond Simmons Park, tall and resplendent on the proudest stretch of Wickley Heights Boulevard stood the Ritz-Hadley. Traffic along the boulevard was already hemming normal. The hotel doorman greeted Mrs. Sloan wit It a soothing word. She swept under the modernistic marquee, up the marble steps, across the red-carpeted foyer and into a phone booth. She had to come out again for dimes.
She dialed her home, grimly relieved to find the phone system had not been “vaporized.”
She told Jeffrey Fahlstead, her butler, to do the best he could with her guests, the dinner, the musicale. “After all,” she said, “they’ve been corning to my place for years. Maybe they’ll enjoy it once without me!”
“They’ll be greatly disappointed, ma’am. Very unfortunate mishap—”