Century Club, New York City, 2001

 

 

“Perhaps a glass of port, Paul?” Danforth asked. He’d stopped his story abruptly and now daintily touched the corners of his mouth with a napkin. “Or are you afraid it might dull your senses?”

 

I took this as something of a challenge, one I felt I should meet.

 

“I think I can handle a port,” I said.

 

“Good,” Danforth said, his smile quite bright for one who’d just related such an ominous exchange. “A port it shall be.” He summoned the waiter and ordered two glasses of a port I didn’t recognize but, given Danforth’s refinements of taste, assumed was excellent.

 

“Did Clayton do it?” I asked once the waiter had stepped away.

 

“Do what?”

 

“Hide Anna.”

 

“No, but I did tell him what Bannion had told me at the bandstand and about the conversation with LaRoche, how worried they both had been. But Clayton decided to keep to the same road at the moment. He said Anna would be headed for Europe soon anyway. Until then, he thought her quite safe. Bannion was always overstating things, he said, and LaRoche had grown ridiculously close to Anna and was acting unprofessionally. Besides, he was sure no one had caught on to the Project.”

 

“That’s all he said?”

 

“Yes, and he was very convincing,” Danforth said. “Clayton was always very convincing. And what he said was true. You can’t run an operation if you react to every fear.”

 

In order to keep vaguely to my mission, I asked a technical question. “What should you react to?”

 

“Doubt,” Danforth said. “If you suddenly feel a quaver of uncertainty, you should look closely at what caused it.”

 

“Did you feel such a quaver?” I asked. “In terms of the Project, I mean.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Caused by what?”

 

“Clayton,” Danforth answered. “He was concerned about Anna, her many guises. We were moving closer to the time when she would be sent to Europe, and so he wanted to be sure of her.”

 

“Sure of her?”

 

“Who she was,” Danforth said. “Sure of her story. Bannion had given Clayton a full account of himself. All those years he worked for the Communists. Strikes he’d been involved in. Organizing. He’d even gone to fight in the Spanish civil war. After that, his disillusionment. He’d tried to switch sides completely, become an informer against his old comrades. Clayton had checked out every detail of Bannion’s story and knew he’d told him the truth. But Anna’s past was more obscure, so he wanted to make certain of her. It’s the small lies that trip you up, so that was the place to start, he said. Her story about being on Ellis Island, for example, of being held there because she had trachoma. There would be records of something like that. It would be possible to find out of she’d actually been there.”

 

“Had she?”

 

“Yes,” Danforth answered. A mood of reflection suddenly settled over him as the waiter brought our port. “I went there many years ago,” he continued when the waiter left. “The hospital had been closed for decades by then, of course. The windows were broken and everything was open to the sea air. The room where she’d once been kept was littered with debris and there were piles of dead leaves in the corners.”

 

“You went to her actual room?” I asked.

 

“It was a ward, but yes, I went there,” Danforth answered. “She’d remembered exactly her view from her window. She was able to describe it accurately. It was rather simple to locate the room, a matter of angles.”

 

Danforth was not one for drawing word pictures, but I suddenly imagined the scene, an old man in a black cashmere overcoat, his hands deep in his pockets, alone in an abandoned hospital room, the ghostly image of a little girl no doubt playing in his mind: the child dressed in a hospital gown, sitting on the side of a bed, her skin olive, and with wildly curly hair.

 

“Everything is a matter of coordinates, Paul, of intersections,” Danforth continued. “Standing in the room where Anna had been kept on Ellis Island, thinking in that abandoned room of that little girl, knowing all I’d learned by then, it was easy to gather the coordinates of her experience. A person is like a leaf. You pick it up. You hold it up to the sun, note the veins, how they spread out from the central stem, and suddenly, it’s all there. What she was. What she did. Why she did it. Everything.”

 

He stopped abruptly, and something in his demeanor, a raw sadness, told me simply to wait until he spoke again.

 

“Anyway,” he said after a long moment. “Clayton wanted me to get to know her a little better and report back to him. And so I decided to see her under less formal circumstances. Not just in the office or at the house, but in a more ... intimate setting.” He took a quick sip of port. “Have you ever heard of Vera Atkins?”

 

I shook my head.

 

“During the war she ran a secret operation out of England,” Danforth said. “Women were smuggled into France in order to-”

 

“We were talking about Anna,” I blurted before I could stop myself; there was a sharpness in my tone that surprised and unnerved me a little. “Sorry,” I added quickly, “I just —”

 

“I’m sorry too,” Danforth interrupted, and he appeared to mean it genuinely; his discursive narrative was not a storyteller’s tactic designed to keep the hook in place but merely the tangled product of an aged mind. “It’s just that talking about Anna, it brought back how brave they were, the women of the war. They should build a memorial to them someday, Paul. A bronze sculpture in Washington or on Whitehall. Something quiet, but suggestive, to remind us of their sacrifice.” A look of utter heartbreak swam into his face. “It’s the lost we must remember, Paul. The ones who never had a chance to sit by the fire and lift their grandchildren into their laps and tell them the stories of their service.”

 

“Of course,” I said sincerely.

 

For a moment we seemed to reach another level in our understanding, not only of each other but of what was truly owed to those toward whom history had not been kind.

 

“Anyway, about Anna,” Danforth continued, then stopped. He seemed at sea in his own tale. “Forgive me, Paul, but where was I?”

 

“You said Clayton wanted you to find out more about her,” I reminded him.

 

Danforth nodded. “Yes, that’s right. But without asking her questions directly. The idea was for me to insinuate myself into her life.” Suddenly a pained smile formed on his lips, and a faint sadness came into his eyes. “And so I became a spy.”

 

“Did you find anything surprising about her?” I asked.

 

“No,” Danforth said. “The surprise was about me.”

 

~ * ~

 

Oak Bar, Plaza Hotel, New York City, 1939

 

 

She arrived exactly on time, dressed in the business clothes she’d worn to the office. In a quick aside earlier that day, Danforth had conveyed to Anna what he called “Clayton’s latest instructions”— they should be seen together in more casual settings — along with the fact that Clayton had given no reason for this. That was typical of Clayton, Danforth had added with a small shrug designed to dismiss the importance of the meetings; it was part of Clayton’s “shadowy style.”

 

Anna had nodded quickly in response, like a soldier under orders, then agreed to meet Danforth at the Plaza that evening.

 

“Hello,” she said as she took a seat opposite Danforth. She glanced about but said nothing else, though it seemed to him that she had immediately absorbed various aspects of the room — the dark paneling, the lighted bar, the older man with his young mistress — that she had made careful note and would be able to recall these things, as a musician might remember the melody of a theme heard only once.

 

“Would you like something to drink?” Danforth asked. “Perhaps a glass of wine?”

 

“I’d rather have a cup of tea,” Anna said. She drew the scarf from her head, and in the way he’d noticed many times before, she seemed momentarily uncomfortable, as if even this modest disrobing was inappropriately seductive. She reminded him of the serving girls of Ireland who kept their eyes averted even as they placed or removed plates, as if doing otherwise would somehow compromise their chastity. How old it truly was, he thought, the Old World.

 

He motioned the barmaid over to the table and ordered.

 

They talked of nothing in particular. The wine and tea came. Danforth lifted his glass in a toast. “To your success,” he said.

 

She smiled softly, touched his glass with her cup, then focused her attention on a young couple who’d taken a remote corner table, their hands locked together, their gaze intensely fixed on each other, everything else quite invisible to them.

 

“They must be in love,” she said.

 

The way she said it had an eerie inwardness to it that made Danforth recall the death of Henry Stanley, the great explorer. He’d lived near Big Ben at the end, and not long before his death, the great bell had sounded, a somber accounting that had awakened an inexpressible understanding in him. “How strange,” Stanley had murmured, “so that is time.”

 

Danforth had no idea how to say any of this, however, and so he said, “I take it you’ve never been in love?”

 

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “And you?”

 

He thought of Cecilia, with whom he’d been out only the night before, how bright her smile was, the life that sparkled in her, the happiness she offered him, everything, everything but . . . what?

 

“Yes,” he said, and put that but…what? aside.

 

“It must be wonderful,” Anna said.

 

“I’m sure you’ll know someday,” Danforth told her.

 

She nodded crisply, as if cutting off an irrelevant discussion. “I’m leaving for Europe soon,” she told him.

 

This news, coming to him by way of Anna herself, made her imminent departure more real, and Danforth felt the disquiet not only of her going but of the loss of some vital opportunity. It was as if he’d made a minimal offer on something small and precious but had lost it to a higher bidder.

 

“Would you like to have dinner?” he asked, since there now seemed little else he could give her. “We could have it in the Palm Garden.”

 

Anna considered this a moment. “No,” she said finally. “Let’s have it at my apartment. If you don’t mind leftovers.”

 

“Your apartment?”

 

“Wouldn’t you like to see where I live?”

 

In anyone else, the question might have been fraught with romantic tension, but coming from Anna it seemed only a closer adherence to Clayton’s suggestion that they be together in more intimate settings.

 

“All right,” Danforth said. “I’ll call for a taxi.”

 

“No,” Anna said immediately. “Let’s take the bus.”

 

And so they did, a long ride down Fifth Avenue, past Saks’ lighted windows filled with the clothes of the coming summer season, brightly colored bathing suits and leisurewear, the loose-fitting garb of the city’s moneyed class. The clothing would be bought and bundled up and taken out to the Hamptons or Fire Island or, farther still, Wellfleet or Martha’s Vineyard, the looming war in Europe causing the only change in this yearly migration, Paris and Rome abruptly no longer on the itinerary.

 

Below Thirty-fourth Street, the avenue darkened as they entered a landscape of closed shops, small and unlighted, the purveyors of cheap clothes and costume jewelry already home with their families in Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx and whose absence drained some unmistakably vital energy from the city.

 

The bus moved steadily southward, these same modest shops now giving way to a line of brick walkups and finally to the huddled streets of the Lower East Side.

 

Night had fallen by then, but if there was safety in numbers, these streets were the safest in New York. For here, the people resided in close quarters, the spaciousness of the outer boroughs still unavailable to them. And so they lived stacked above tailor shops and bakeries and small groceries. Here, in the evening, they crowded the concrete stoops and spoke to one another in old-country tongues and dressed in clothes that seemed to be handed down not from older sibling to younger but from one generation to the next.

 

Anna appeared as comfortable in the human current of these streets as a dolphin in the sea. Here all the world knew her and greeted her, and on the way to her apartment, she stopped many times to inquire if this child was still sick or that brother still in some far town.

 

On each of these stops, she introduced Danforth as her employer, then went on to speak awhile before motioning him down the street. During these intervals, Danforth stood, alien and aloof, waiting, sometimes impatiently, to move on and even slightly offended that Anna appeared either oblivious or indifferent to the odd position in which she had placed him.

 

The entrance to her building was over a shop whose metal staircase was covered in signs with Hebrew lettering. The shop window was filled with a curious array of objects, none of which Danforth recognized, save for the peculiar candelabrum the Jews called a menorah and that he knew they lit only for some holiday. Fringed prayer shawls were displayed on shelves, along with what appeared to be matching cases, and these too had Hebrew lettering. There was also a small table covered with silver-plated and ceramic chalices of various sizes. The entire display struck Danforth as typical of the Ostjuden, whose superstitions his father had often derided and whose tradesmen he’d scornfully dismissed as peddlers.

 

“I live on the fourth floor,” Anna said as they entered the lobby of the building.

 

From his first step up the stairs, Danforth was aware of the odors that engulfed and swirled around him. They were flat and heavy, and they gave an oily feel to the air. He’d smelled similar food in the street stalls of the Jewish quarter in Warsaw but had never eaten anything sold there. “And they call what we eat treif,” his father had said contemptuously, and with a quickening step, he’d hustled him back toward the far more stylish eateries of the city.

 

“It’s really not such a difficult climb,” Anna said when they reached the fourth-floor landing.

 

“Not at all,” Danforth told her, though he found it necessary to disguise his slightly labored breathing.

 

Anna swung open the door of her apartment, stepped inside, and turned on the light.

 

The light revealed a room that surprised Danforth considerably more than anything Anna had said or done since he’d met her. For although located in what had seemed to him a sea of Eastern European Jewishness, her apartment revealed none of the ritual objects sold in the shop below, nothing to suggest anything but a secular life.

 

“How long have you lived here?” he asked.

 

“A long time,” she answered.

 

He walked over to the window that looked out on the noisy street below, a teeming world that reminded him more of Calcutta than New York.

 

“Please, sit down,” she said.

 

He lowered himself into one of the plain wooden chairs and glanced at the small table to his right, where a lamp rested on a rectangle of cloth whose weave Danforth immediately noticed.

 

“The mat,” he said. “I saw some that looked very much like it in Istanbul. They make carpets with the same weave. They last forever, but people here don’t like the way the colors aren’t uniform.” He shrugged. “Handmade objects aren’t perfect, and customers like perfection.”

 

She offered no response to this but instead turned and disappeared into the tiny kitchen. He couldn’t see her at work, but he had no trouble hearing the clatter of pans and plates as she made dinner.

 

While she worked, Danforth surveyed the room, noting its spare furniture, all of which might easily have been rescued from the street. There was a table large enough for two, a few chairs, a small desk, a bookshelf bulging with old books, most with cracked spines, which she’d probably bought in one of the many used-book stores that lined Fourth Avenue below Fourteenth Street. It was a hand-me-down decor, every object bearing signs of long use, nicks and scratches, even an odd burn where someone years before had let a cigarette slip from the ashtray to char a wooden surface. Even so, he found that he couldn’t say for certain whether she’d furnished her quarters with such worn-out furniture because she didn’t have the money to buy anything new or out of some strange attraction to the broken and the wobbly, things cast aside or left for junk.

 

But it was the map that drew Danforth’s attention. It was spread out over the table near him, a map of Europe with small marks along the southern coast of France. Dark lines moved along the roads and rivers of this map, and near these lines there were yet more dots, some with notations. Some of these notations were in French, some in Spanish, some in German, and there were others he couldn’t read, though he recognized the letters as Cyrillic.

 

“You speak Russian?” Danforth called to her.

 

“Yes,” she said. “And Ukrainian.”

 

“I would love to study the Slavic languages someday,” Danforth said.

 

“You can go to the table now,” Anna said when she came out of the kitchen.

 

Danforth did as he was told, then watched as she set the table: two plates, one slightly cracked at the edge, mismatched utensils and cloth napkins, and two large water glasses, neither of which, he was relieved to see, was chipped at the mouth.

 

They ate a few minutes later, food clearly left over from the day before, hearty peasant food, as Danforth would have described it, and which he’d eaten during his travels when he’d been waylaid by weather or other circumstances and ended up in some small hotel that served local fare.

 

“Very tasty,” he said at one point.

 

“Good,” Anna said. She tore off a piece of pumpernickel bread and offered it to him. “Try this.”

 

From time to time, he thought he was being evaluated in some way, put through an arcane test, and for that reason found himself not altogether comfortable. The less fortunate always had a way of mocking the rich. He’d seen its various forms throughout the world, the petty signals of their ridicule. It came in halfconcealed winks and smiles, or was spoken in the shared idioms of both the idle and the working poor. The rich were always fops to them, always inept, protected from the storms of life and therefore assumed to be unable to weather them. Rickshaw pullers had guffawed at his approach, then bowed to him with an exaggeration that burned with comic ridicule. Ferrymen had done the same, and taxi drivers everywhere. It was class and ethnic war fought with smirks and muttered asides, and he wondered if this dinner might not be some version of it.

 

Then, rather suddenly, Anna said, “Does anyone know you?”

 

“What?” he asked, completely taken aback by both the frankness and the intimacy of her question.

 

“Does anyone know you?” she repeated. “At the office, no one does.”

 

Without willing it, he ran down the list of those who might be expected to know him — his long-standing social and business associates, his few relatives, and finally his father and Cecilia — asking himself which one knew him, really, truly knew him, and arriving at a single disturbing answer: No one.

 

He started to say exactly that to Anna but stopped when his eye caught the one thing in the room that didn’t appear to have been bought at a consignment shop or rescued from the street. It was a relief, made of leather. It showed a street scene, one-story buildings crowded together, almost everything in brown save for the places where the artist had carved small flowers from red leather and sewn them into tiny baskets or hung them from balconies.

 

“I’ve seen something like that before,” he said. “It’s from a famous leather shop in Córdoba that’s been there for generations.”

 

“Yes,” Anna said. She smiled. “My father used to talk about the sunflowers in Spain He said you could travel from Madrid to Barcelona and never have them out of view.”

 

“That’s true,” Danforth said. “Your family came from Spain?”

 

“Yes,” Anna said. “From Córdoba, as a matter of fact.”

 

Suddenly Danforth no longer imagined Anna’s ancestors digging potatoes from the unforgiving ground of the Pale but strolling the flowered streets of Córdoba and walking beneath the red-striped arches of its famed mezquita. In some sense, she seemed more the daughter of that sun-baked people, darker and more physically graceful than the lowly street peddlers of Delancey.

 

“Córdoba,” he said, and with that word entertained the possibility that the name Klein had been given to her, as so many names had been given at Ellis Island, and this, combined with the utter lack of any religious objects, raised an even more extraordinary possibility. “So you’re . . . Spanish . . . not —”

 

“No, I’m not Spanish,” Anna interrupted. “My father had never been to Spain. But he told me about the sunflowers because his father had told him about them, and his father before that, and so on down the line.” A single eyebrow arched, but it was enough for him to see a not altogether cheerful change in her expression. “You’d rather I were Spanish, wouldn’t you?”

 

She said this as if she were merely curious as to the arcane workings of Danforth’s mind, but he immediately understood what she was thinking and couldn’t keep back a self-conscious laugh.

 

“No, not at all,” he assured her quickly. “I was just curious about your forebears.”

 

He could tell that she didn’t believe this innocent explanation. Nor should she have believed it, he thought, because his question hadn’t come from some general interest but from the prison of his own upbringing, his father’s often stated contempt for what he called “the riffraff of the East,” by which he meant its black-frocked Jews, to his eyes so unsightly, with their white shirts and dangling curls, scattered across a thousand muddy villages or heaped in roiling masses in the ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz, a people he clearly loathed.

 

“My forebears,” Anna repeated, and let the matter drop. They moved on to other subjects.

 

But even as they talked of other things, her gaze remained intense, and Danforth felt layers of himself peeling away, the sense that she knew what he had not known about himself until moments before but that he now accepted with a piercing recognition and repeated in his mind as the night wore on: I am an anti-Semite.

 

~ * ~

 

Century Club, New York City, 2001

 

 

“It was strange to realize this particular element of myself,” Danforth said. He leaned back slowly. “Here I was, involved in a project whose mission was to thwart Germany’s plan for world conquest, opening my house to this effort, and yet all the time I was in some sense a sympathizer with at least one of Nazism’s frankly stated aims.” The tone of his voice darkened by a shade. “I wanted to make Anna something else. Something . . . anything but a Jew. Isn’t that a kind of extermination?”

 

When I didn’t answer, he smiled quietly.

 

“The human heart,” he added softly but with a searing word of warning, “is a twisty little thing, Paul.”

 

With that last remark, he returned to the thread of his tale. “I must say that, except for this rather embarrassing moment of self-disclosure, we had a nice meal, Anna and I. Very modest. Some kind of stew.”

 

He seemed once again seated in a cramped apartment, rather than in the spacious dining room of the Century Club.

 

“A humble life,” he added quietly. “There are good things about it, believe me. Good things about a small apartment with a few books, some music.”

 

I knew that something was going on inside Danforth’s mind, that he was both here, seated at our elegant table, and there, at Anna’s far less elegant one. But he was also somewhere else, beyond both places, a man standing on a bridge that joined two remote islands.

 

I let him remain there, suspended, holding to some imaginary rail. Then, cautiously, I said, “So, was this the first of many such dinners with Anna?”

 

“No,” Danforth answered. “There was no time for that.”

 

“Why?”

 

He took a step forward in his narrative. “Clayton,” he said. “He suddenly became quite worried.”

 

“About what?”

 

“That Bannion and LaRoche might have been right after all,” Danforth said. “That Anna was in danger.”

 

Clayton and he had stood under the New York Public Library’s great stone portico and stared out over Fifth Avenue, he said, the usual collection of cars and buses in a noisy metal stampede, New York at full gallop, a city, he’d naively thought, that nothing could ever make, even for a single falling instant, catch its breath.

 

“But we know better now, don’t we, Paul?” he asked.

 

“We do indeed,” I said, surprised that my throat could still grow taut at what had been done to the city, planes hurled so unexpectedly at its shining face that they’d seemed like rocks cast at us from the distant age of stoning.

 

Danforth saw my smoldering anger at this barbaric outrage, and its undiminished heat seemed to press him forward in his tale.

 

“We met at the library,” he said, like one returning a storm-tossed boat to a peaceful cove. “Looking down on those quiet lions.”

 

~ * ~

 

New York Public Library, New York City, 1939

 

 

“Thanks for meeting me,” Clayton said. “I know you have a date with Cecilia, but I needed to tell you something.”

 

Danforth said nothing. He had learned to wait.

 

“I’ve decided to move Anna to a different place,” Clayton said. “I don’t think it’s safe for her to stay where she is now.”

 

“Why the sudden change?”

 

Clayton glanced about in the way of a man being watched, then drew a single sheet of paper from his jacket pocket. “This.”

 

Danforth took the paper and opened it. Inside there was a drawing of a Star of David hung in a noose, a design he would see repeated many times over the years, in an alley in Montpelier, on a wall in Bologna, splashed inside a metro station in Madrid, where a scrawl had been added: Gracias a Isabella.

 

“It came yesterday,” Clayton said. “A pretty clear warning, don’t you think?”

 

Danforth folded the paper and handed it back to him.

 

“I’ve been rather vocal in my opposition to the anti-Semitic goings-on in Germany,” Clayton added. “This could have come from someone who heard me. It may have nothing to do with Anna, but I don’t want to take that chance, so she won’t be going to Winterset or the office anymore.”

 

“So she’s in hiding, that’s what you’re saying?” Danforth asked.

 

“Yes,” Clayton said.

 

“When will I see her again?” Danforth asked.

 

“You won’t,” Clayton answered flatly.

 

In the years to come, Danforth would relive this moment with great vividness. He would feel again, often but always as if for the first time, the hollow sensation that comes with the sudden and irrecoverable loss of something secretly held dear, cherished so secretly, in fact, that he had scarcely been aware of it himself.

 

“So,” Clayton said coolly, “I’ll be in touch.”

 

Danforth nodded, and the two men parted as unceremoniously as they’d met, Clayton back into the bowels of the great library, Danforth down its wide stairs and out onto the avenue.

 

He’d planned to meet Cecilia at the theater, a short walk from the library, and as he moved through the onrushing crowd, he realized that he now felt sidelined, like some rookie at a game. He allowed this resentment to mask the actual nature of his distress, which was the abrupt departure of Anna from his life, the emptying he’d felt at the news of her going, and as he walked, he worked to restore his equanimity before he met Cecilia outside the theater.

 

By the time he met her, his resentment at being relegated to a bit player had dissipated, leaving him with only the dull ache of Anna’s departure, an unsettled state Cecilia immediately recognized.

 

“You look quite out of sorts, Tom,” she said.

 

“I’m fine.” He took her arm and smiled as brightly as he could. “Really.”

 

The play was a farce, with much slamming of doors, and with each new twist of fate or identity, Danforth withdrew more from the action. He could hear the audience’s laughter, but he joined in it only rarely, so that he often noticed Cecilia glancing toward him, vaguely troubled by his mood.

 

After the show, they walked through the unseasonably warm night to Sardi’s. The crowd was young and loud, and terribly theatrical, and Danforth suddenly felt himself much older than these happy youths, so cheerful and optimistic despite the darkening times.

 

“What’s wrong, Tom?” Cecilia asked after they’d been seated at the table for a moment.

 

Looking at her, he thought, She knows.

 

She knows that the life he’d foreseen with her has lost its luster and now appears to him like a ruined garden, its once-bright flowers dry and shriveled.

 

She knows that she could never be a part of this other life he now imagines for himself, that no matter how vague his vision of it, how lacking in detail, she, more than anyone, remains outside it.

 

She knows that if he were to cast aside this other, half-hidden vision and once again commit himself to a future with her, he would eventually be undone by his own painful effort to pursue that life, would give himself over to drink or squalid little affairs as her father had, and that, like her father, he would awaken each morning to the smoldering regret that he had not reached for the other life that had once beckoned him.

 

She knows that she had ignored the many signs he’d given over the past few weeks and that she cannot ignore them any longer.

 

She touched his hand. “Tell me,” she said with surprising resignation, and Danforth realized that he must have long been giving off indications of whatever change had now completely overtaken him.

 

“I’m not sure exactly,” he said, knowing that this was true, that his feelings were a mixture whose disparate elements he couldn’t pin down but that he felt growing ever more volatile. He knew that he was not in love with Anna Klein, though without doubt he was intrigued by her. But love, surely, was more than curiosity, and he’d known other women who, like Anna, seemed reluctant to reveal themselves.

 

“You must tell me, Tom,” Cecilia said. “I have a right to know.”

 

He had no answer for her, and knew it, and so he said, “I committed to something a few months ago. Something that has . . . I don’t know . . . made me…unhappy.”

 

He would always remember Cecilia’s face at that moment. She had the look of a woman who believed that Danforth’s unhappiness was but the first of many unpleasant obstacles that lay ahead for her and who realized that the promises of life were merely false claims; that life itself was a carnival barker’s promising the wonders of the Alligator Man who turned out to be only a boy with a dreadful skin disease.

 

She offered him that look for only a few seconds before she rose.

 

“We should go now,” she said.

 

Danforth got to his feet, and the two of them walked back out into the night. The crowd had thinned by then, and so they were able to walk shoulder to shoulder without being jostled. They’d made the stroll hand in hand before; they were not touching now.

 

They walked across town, then swung north on Fifth Avenue. A few blocks to the south, the library gave off an eerie glow, and Danforth recalled his meeting with Clayton, the unsettling news he’d received, and felt again the strange pang he’d felt at that moment.

 

“I really am sorry,” he said to Cecilia.

 

She took him in her arms, held him briefly, then let him go, turned, and moved quickly away from him, taking with her, as Danforth would later realize, the last chance he would ever have for an ordinary life.

 

~ * ~

 

Century Club, New York City, 2001

 

 

“I saw Cecilia very rarely after that evening at the theater,” Danforth told me. “She married in 1941 and had a daughter about a year later. Then the war came along. Her husband was wounded on Guadalcanal and shipped back to the States. On the way to visit him in the hospital, she swerved off the road. They were both lost.”

 

“Both?”

 

“Cecilia and her daughter,” Danforth said. His attention seemed directed more toward an approaching object than one in the distant past. “Her name was Audrey, and I suppose you could say she was a casualty of war.” His gaze drifted back to me. “Would you say she was innocent, Paul?”

 

“Of course.”

 

“Hmm,” Danforth said softly.

 

Briefly, he looked away from me, as he might have looked away from a fact too boldly stated.

 

“Anna,” I said, to nudge him back onto the now-familiar road we were both moving down. “She was taken to an undisclosed location, I imagine?”

 

“Undisclosed?” Danforth asked.

 

“Well, wasn’t she being hidden?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“But clearly you saw her again,” I said.

 

“How do you know that, Paul?”

 

“Well, your story is about her, isn’t it?”

 

Danforth smiled. “No, my story is about treachery, and the need one can feel to kill a traitor at all costs.” His shrug suggested a coldness I hadn’t seen before. “Killing someone who deserves killing isn’t difficult,” he added. “I could do it without blinking.” His eyes sparkled with what seemed genuine purpose and resolve, and I saw that he meant exactly what he said. Thomas Jefferson Danforth was not a man who would waver in the face of villainy; a traitor in his hands would hang at dawn.

 

“But as you say, I did see Anna again,” he continued. “After only a couple of weeks, as a matter of fact.” He signaled the waiter and asked that his water goblet be refilled. “I get dry,” he explained. When the waiter had filled his glass and stepped away, he took a slow sip, then returned to the subject at the point we’d broken off. “For as it turned out, Anna’s whereabouts were disclosed to me. Bannion had been called away, Clayton told me, and Anna had to be resupplied.” He allowed himself a small laugh. “That was the word he used. Resupplied. Like a military unit.” His laughter trailed off. “Which is what I suppose she was, by then.” Again he sank back into his past, sank back fully and with such ghostly ease that time seemed only a mist through which he could effortlessly pass, carried on a carpet of memory to some long-lost door.

 

~ * ~