I.e., the Hutchinson River Parkway, which runs northeast from the Bronx to the Connecticut border, where it becomes the Merritt Parkway, which takes you, more or less, to New Haven.
This was the route Marie took when she drove me to Bleak College in Jean-Luc’s car; and it was the route I would take many years later when I drove myself from New York City to New Haven for the last time in Norman Mailer’s car. On neither occasion did I wonder why the parkway had been named for a heretic. Now that I am thinking about it, though, I wonder if anyone brought this up at the meeting where the parkway was named. I wonder who argued for memorializing Anne Hutchinson, the anti-authoritarian antinomialist dissident? Some early feminist (construction on the parkway began in 1924)? Or a clandestine, or not so clandestine, anti-Puritan, a follower of Alesteir Crowley, maybe, in a cloak? Or was it possibly some clever Winthrop partisan who understood that the parkway would not so much preserve Anne’s name as efface it—that Hutchinson would forever after lose its echo of dissent, and conjure up only this winding four-lane road cut through the Westchester woods? Was the purpose of the parkway to make Anne into the harmless Hutch?
I am possibly overthinking this.