Elysian Evenings

The annual Classics Dinner is in full swing. Professor Hadley MacNamara — formidable, silver-haired, sixty-five, the kind of man rooms arrange themselves around — is holding court on the veranda of the Scholar's Table above the Swan. His toast is is genuinely brilliant. It moves from Homer to the geography of joy, and the room gives him exactly the silence he deserves.Then, after the silence, something is different.He begins a sentence he does not finish. He reaches for a chair. He sits, slowly, with the deliberate care of a man whose legs have made a private decision.Three words, low, at the door as the ambulance arrives: 'I should have —' By morning, he is dead.