The Name of the World Read Free Page B

should take the gravel shortcut to town, I thought he should stay off the fast roads. He’d been pointed toward the shortcut anyway, and now he’d turned around. “Aren’t you just heading on through to town?” “No, because of construction.” “It’s Sunday,” I told the old man, “they won’t be working.”
    Everybody knew our neighbor, General Neally, retired many years from the Air Force (and, incidentally, a widower), as a vigorous, tennis-playing, memoir-writing Southern gentleman. But lately he’d been getting frail, I thought. Once when I watched him heading in his Cadillac out of his driveway and pausing to look right and left, right and left, and again right and left, more confused, it seemed, than cautious, I wondered if he should have been operating a car. Only a couple of weeks before the accident, the General and I had met one morning at our mailboxes and he’d invited me to his kitchen for coffee. As he puttered around after the makings he grew silent and scratched his head, turned around to face me, and said in absolute surprise, “What do you want!”
    All this was on my mind as I stood beside his car, failing even to glance at my family on the other side of him—I remember that often: I might have looked one last time into their faces, but didn’t—and told the General, “Take the gravel road, it’s shorter.” “I like the big highway anyway,” he said. And drove off. I stood there with one last statement—“Take the gravel road. It’s safer”—on the tip of my tongue. On the tip of my tongue. I can still taste it in my mouth. If only I’dsaid it. Even if he’d again rejected my advice, he’d have been delayed a few more seconds during the exchange, and maybe they’d all be alive today. During the next few terrible weeks, imagination served up other things I could have done. I might have kept them home, or called them a cab, or kept our own car out of the shop another few days—it was only in for a tune-up, because of the warranty. I might have kept a second car…but we didn’t need one, I commuted to the District each day in the Senator’s limousine. So I said nothing, and they drove away.
    Five miles down the road the General came to a stop sign, applied his brakes, and floated over the ice into the path of a panel truck going forty miles an hour. (A truck from a florist’s shop. I don’t know—I didn’t view the scene—but I assume there were flowers everywhere.) At once Anne and Elsie were dead. The General survived for twenty-four hours, but never woke up. May they all rest in peace.
    This winter day exactly four years later I went across the separating court, past the tarnished sculptures, through the doors of the Fine Arts Building. Went along through my tunnel, as I had for four years now. I took each step entirely out of a dull curiosity, not as to what waited ahead, because I didn’t care, but as to whether or not I could take one more step. I hadn’t found much else to interest me along the way. At the risk of stretching the illustration, I can say I sometimes came to turnings in the darkness and wondered if this were a labyrinth.
    The Fine Arts Building was an old one, with high ceilingsthat made the halls seem narrow and proportioned for some earlier, elongated race of academics. The place reeked of oils and glues and old wood. I didn’t expect Heidi to be in. I thought I’d end up leaving a message at the office. A young man with a stubbly goatee, the rest of his head hairless, seemed to be in charge there. When I asked for Heidi Franklin he ducked behind his desk and was gone, entirely gone. “Excuse me?” I called. I stepped closer and peered over the desk to find him bent low over the floor, fiddling with the plug to his electric typewriter. “She might be at the performance,” he said.
    “Can I leave her a note?”
    He stood up and I noticed a clever touch of style in his otherwise baggy contemporary apparel: a powder-blue Lacoste alligator