“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.
~ * ~
214 West Ninety-fifth Street, New York City, 1939
He knocked softly, and waited for the door to open.
“Clayton told me you were coming,” Anna said when she opened the door and saw him standing on the tiny landing. “He must trust you.” She glanced at the large bags Danforth held in his arms. “You’d probably like to put those down.” She stepped out of his path. “Come in.”
Danforth walked into the apartment, waited until she closed the door, then followed her into the small kitchen, where he placed the bags on the table by the window.
“Do you think this is all rather extreme,” Anna asked, “this hiding me away?”
“I don’t know,” Danforth admitted. “But you are . . .” He stopped because he felt a vulnerability he didn’t want her to see.
“What?”
“Valuable,” Danforth said, “to the Project.” He shrugged. “Whatever the Project is.”
She began to empty the bags. “How did you explain my leaving work?”
“A sick relative,” Danforth answered. “No one questioned it. Why would they? It’s a common story.” He drew in a quick breath. “Anyway, I’ve brought you two weeks’ worth of provisions.”
“Would you like something to drink?” she asked.
“Coffee,” he said. “If you have it.”
“I have it.”
She sent him to the front room, made the coffee, then joined him. By then, he was sitting in the chair by the window. In the distance, he could see the private school he’d attended as a child, all the boys in suits.
“You have a nice view of the children of the privileged class.” He took a sip from his cup. “You’d probably find their parents rather shallow.”
“No,” Anna said. “Just lucky.”
He wanted to tell her that the privileged were perhaps less lucky than she imagined, that for all their many advantages, they were blocked from certain of life’s core experiences. They could know great grief certainly, and great loss. They could fall victim to a thousand random horrors. But there was a desperate hunger they could not know: the shaping rigor of actual need. He was not at all sure she would understand this, however, and so what came from him was a simple “I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to leave without telling you that. I’m truly sorry.”
“Sorry about what?” Anna asked.
“That business about your being Spanish,” Danforth explained. “You must have found that very insulting.”
She shrugged.
“It would never affect what I feel about you personally,” Danforth said cautiously. “The respect I have for you, for what you’re doing.” He shook his head at the terrible inadequacy of what he was saying, how it seemed he was only digging a deeper grave for himself. “This must all sound so hollow to you.” He placed his cup firmly on the table beside him. “I respect you, that’s what I mean. I truly respect you, and I respect what you’re doing.”
She went back to the kitchen and continued to empty the bags. “You won’t have to come again,” she told him. “I’m leaving for France in a few days.”
“France?” he said, following her into the kitchen.
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“Of course.”
She continued to busy herself with the bags, but Danforth saw a quick succession of emotions flash in her eyes: first dread, then the immediate suppression of it. In that moment, she seemed carved from will alone. He could not imagine her as a child, or even as a teenager, and he sensed that during her youth, she had been aged by a hardship she had yet to reveal, aged so deeply and thoroughly that her soul was now like one of those ancient coins his father imported, so scuffed and striated no polish could ever make them shine. If she ever kissed a man, he thought, it would be beneath the Bridge of Sighs.
“Well, I should be on my way,” he said, and walked to the door.
/> “Goodbye,” she said, without offering her hand.
He lingered in a way that he thought must surely seem unaccountable to her, as if he were waiting for something to be returned.
“And thanks again,” she added. “For everything.”
Outside, Danforth stood for a moment in front of her building, glancing up and down the street, before turning westward, heading aimlessly toward Columbia. At Columbia Walk, he sat down on the stairs and peered out at the university library, the names of the great inscribed across its wide façade, Homer, Sophocles, Plato, and the like. First at Trinity and later at Princeton, he had studied them all, but it struck him that they were of little use to him now, that the choices he would make during the next stage of his life would be determined without reference to his education or what his travels had taught him or even anything he’d heard in any of the languages he spoke.
Danforth suddenly thought of the cold glint in the eye of the warlord commander of those Balkan thugs, how he must have had the same look when he’d ordered the crucifixion of that hapless man, how he must have felt nothing as he’d watched him hang there, stripped to the waist, his arms and legs and feet streaked with blood. The passengers had been herded back into the train once the thieves had stolen whatever they could find. As if boarding a train at Victoria Station, he and his father had calmly reclaimed their seats, then felt the train lurch forward. He could still remember the wave of relief that had swept over him at that instant, but now he recalled something else more vividly: that in the midst of that relief, with the train inching forward, he’d glanced out the window and actually admired the beauty of the countryside until the crucified man came once again into view. Danforth had assumed him dead, but as the train dragged past, the man had lifted his head and stared Danforth directly in the eyes.
Nothing as heartrending had happened to him since, and as he sat on the stairs at Columbia, the memory of it lingered in his mind until he noticed a tall young woman with long blond hair. She was moving swiftly across Columbia Walk, her books clutched to her breast. She would graduate and marry and raise her children in a large house, Danforth knew. She would fill her middle years with works of civic charity, and in later life be many times honored with plaques and citations. In old age, she would sit in a white gazebo and oversee her gardens, minding that the irises be thinned out in the fall and that the fountain, modeled on one she’d admired in Ravello, be each week cleaned and polished.
Suddenly Danforth felt a terrible hollowness; it did not fall away as he’d expected it to but grew as the days passed, and by the weekend he seemed to be disappearing into a vast emptiness that felt, truly, like death.
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“Regret becomes self-accusation in the end,” Danforth told me. “And the deepest accusation of them all is that you settled for an inadequate life.”
“And for you, what would that inadequate life have been?” I asked.
“It would have been to be that blond girl’s husband,” Danforth answered flatly. “When you get right down to it, that was my terror. The lights were going out all over Europe, but my chief concern was that I not end up like one of those people Fitzgerald wrote about, sitting in their clubs, setting down their drinks, dreaming their old best dreams.”
He had circled back to his first reference, a narrative trick I couldn’t help admiring.
“What did you think I was going to say, Paul?” he asked. “What did you think I was going to tell you about my motivation at that moment?”
“Oh, perhaps that you needed to prove that you weren’t an anti-Semite like your father,” I answered.
“Oedipal loathing,” Danforth said. “That’s fueled a few tales, no doubt about it. But not this one, Paul.” He shook his head. “No, my thinking wasn’t complicated. You wouldn’t need Sophocles to figure it out. It was the young bourgeois’s dread of being bourgeois.”
“The Sorrows of Young Danforth,” I added, with no doubt that he would get my literary allusion.
“A precise reference,” Danforth said. “And very German.” He laughed softly, but it was a troubled laugh. “As you are, Paul,” he added.
“Yes.”
“But an American now, with an English name,” Danforth added. “Working for our country’s good.”
I had no idea what Danforth meant by this remark, but something in his gaze alarmed me so that I suddenly retreated to the safety of my notes. “So,” I said, “you were a young bourgeois afraid of a bourgeois life.”
“Yes,” Danforth said. “As I suspect Clayton well understood when we talked at Winterset that day.”
~ * ~
Winterset, Connecticut, 1939
“Thanks for coming, Robert,” Danforth said as he opened the door.
“You made it sound urgent.”
They headed out across the wide yard, Clayton dressed in slacks and an open-collared shirt. He’d draped his Princeton sweater over his shoulders, as if he were going to the game against Yale.
“I want to go with Anna,” Danforth said bluntly. “I’ve thought it through. I’ve gone over what it means. But I want to go with her. I want to be a part of this . . . Project.”
Clayton watched as a breeze swept the end of the yard, sending a few long-dead leaves forward raggedly, like a column of deserters.
“I want to be a part of the Project,” Danforth repeated a tad more vehemently.
He would never be sure if what he’d felt at that moment was terror or elation. He knew only that the narrow stream of his life had abruptly widened.
“Did you hear me, Robert?” Danforth asked.
Clayton continued to look away, as if trying to gather his thoughts. When he turned back to Danforth, his face seemed to have lost the last vestiges of its youth.
“You don’t even know what the Project is,” Clayton said.
“I don’t care what it is.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Tom,” Clayton said. “Hard slogging’s not for you.”
Later, Danforth would recall Clayton’s remark often. He would recall it as he tramped through the mud and snow of blasted villages, and as he sat, waylaid for hours, in storm-beleaguered airports and railway stations, although those difficulties hardly compared to those that still awaited him then.
“I also feel that Anna shouldn’t go alone,” Danforth added urgently.
“But that was always the plan,” Clayton said. “She expects to go alone.”
“But there’s no reason why she should,” Danforth said. “I’d be the perfect cover, wouldn’t I? An importer with plenty of business reasons to be in Europe. And I have contacts. If things got really hot, I’d have the best chance of getting both of us out.”
“This is not a game, Tom,” Clayton reminded him. “The next step is a big one. We’re talking about an indefinite period in Europe, not a weekend lark.”
“I know,” Danforth answered. “I have people who can take over the business. I’ll tell my father that Danforth Imports is getting long in the tooth, that it needs new contacts, new sources. That maybe I need rejuvenation too.”
In later years, Danforth would hear his argument with the sad amusement of an old man confronting the young one he’d once been, and each time he did so, he would remember that Clayton had not once betrayed any feeling for Anna or given the slightest indication that he expected her to survive her mission, whatever it was. Because of that, as his mind careened from villain to villain, Danforth would forever wonder if Clayton had always known that, whether on this mission or the next, Anna would find a way to die.
“What about Cecilia?” Clayton asked.
“That’s already settled.”
This seemed genuinely to surprise Clayton but also to move him one step farther toward considering Danforth’s proposition.
“Anna is not some little spy,” Clayton said. “What we have in mind is a large effort. We’re not talking about her sitting around with a wireless, tapping out messages. T
here will be a lot of movement. Difficult logistics, once the operation is afoot.” He looked at Danforth very seriously. “You could be killed.”
Danforth realized that only a few weeks before, he would not have been able to tell if this was a genuine warning or just one of Clayton’s inflations.
“I know,” Danforth said.
Clayton studied him a moment. “I’ll talk to Bannion,” he said. “He was the one who actually thought of the Project. He has a right to have some say in what I decide.”
“I understand,” Danforth told him.