Mrs. O’Rourke, his secretary, was sitting at her desk. She handed Danforth a small envelope. “This came by messenger.”
Once in the elevator, Danforth opened the envelope and read the note: Six o’clock. Sit near the fountain at Washington Square.
He’d thought he might find Anna seated on a bench near the fountain, but she was nowhere to be seen, and so he took a seat and waited. For a time, he simply watched various Village types as they strolled beneath the bare trees: professors and students with briefcases and books, a bearded artist lugging paints and easel, two workmen precariously balancing a large piece of glass.
The man who finally approached him was short and compactly built, a little steel ball of a fellow. Danforth had noticed that he’d cruised twice around the fountain, then broken from that orbit and drifted along the far edge of the park, and then around it, until at last he’d seemed satisfied of something. That Danforth was the man he’d been sent to meet? That he wasn’t being followed? Danforth had no idea. He knew only that as if in response to a radio signal, the man had suddenly swung back into the park, walked over, and sat down.
“My name is LaRoche,” he said, then laughed. “Clayton thought I might scare you off, so I have to be nice so you will not be afraid of me.”
Danforth had no idea if this was true, but he suspected that it might be and felt himself challenged by Clayton’s evaluation of him.
“You don’t look very scary,” he said, though Danforth did find something frightening in this man, an edginess that made Danforth slightly unsettled in his presence.
“Not scary at all,” LaRoche said. “Just a round little man.”
He wore a faded derby, and his body was loosely wrapped in a brown trench coat, his hands sunk deep in its pockets. Despite the French name, he was, Danforth gathered from the accent, anything but French.
“I am to teach the woman the skills she needs,” he added.
Skills was skeels and the w in woman had not been pronounced with a German v, linguistic characteristics that made it difficult for Danforth to pinpoint LaRoche’s accent.
“Clayton says she is small,” LaRoche said. He followed a lone bicyclist’s turn around the fountain. The cyclist made a second circle, and that seemed to add an uneasiness to LaRoche’s manner. “Your house is far away,” he said.
“Yes,” Danforth said. “And very secluded.”
LaRoche nodded crisply, then looked out over the park, his attention moving from a woman pushing a carriage to an old man hobbling slowly on a cane. His expression remained the same as his gaze drifted from one to the other. It was wariness and suspicion, as if both the woman and the old man might not be what they appeared to be. “This weekend,” he said.
Danforth nodded.
LaRoche glanced toward the far corner of the park, where a man leaned against a lamppost, reading a newspaper. “I should go now,” he said.
With that, he was gone, and for a time Danforth was left to wonder just what sort of man this LaRoche was. His accent had been impossible to determine, which could only mean that he’d never lingered long enough in one place to sink ineradicable linguistic roots. There had been a nomadic quality in his demeanor as well, rootlessness in his twitching eyes and in the way he was constantly alert to every movement around him. Had Danforth known then the dark things he learned later on, he would have seen that LaRoche suffered from a paranoia of the soul, the same fear that would later be experienced by the huddled masses that were crowded into railway cars and the creaking bellies of transport ships and whose cries he would hear in many as-yet-unknown dialects.
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Dark things he learned later? Paranoia of the soul? Huddled masses? The creaking bellies of transport ships?
I couldn’t help but wonder where Danforth’s tale was headed.
“Clearly, your story doesn’t end in New York,” I said.
Danforth shook his head. “No, not New York,” he said. “We have decades to go, Paul, continents to traverse. Lots of sweep for a little parable.”
“A parable?” I asked.
Danforth shrugged. “Nothing more.”
Now my journey here truly seemed a waste of time.
Danforth saw the impatience that seized me and quickly acted to relieve it. “Tell me a little about yourself, Paul.”
“Well, my father was a professor, as you know,” I answered.
“And your mother?” Danforth asked.
“A professor’s wife,” I said. “A listener. We had faculty dinner parties, the academics always holding forth. My mother hardly ever spoke on those occasions. I think she felt inadequate.” In my mind, I saw the car swerve on the ice, tumble into the ditch. “My parents were killed in a car accident.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. And your grandparents?”
“They’re gone too,” I answered. “The last of them, my grandfather on my mother’s side, died just last year.”
Danforth’s demeanor abruptly changed. “Life can be very treacherous, can’t it?”
I assumed that he was speaking of the accident that had killed my parents, though I could sense a more obscure undertone; it seemed as if I were gazing at a painting that revealed one thing on the canvas but hid something darker beneath it.
“Yes, it can,” I agreed.
I saw the shadow of one of those dark things pass over him.
“A young man adopts a terrible ideology, and after that, there is nothing but destruction,” he said.
I wondered if he was now speaking of the young men in the planes, and for the first time I allowed myself the dim hope that his story — his parable — might offer something of value in regard to my assignment. If so, I hoped to reach it speedily.
“So, you agreed to provide a place for Anna’s training,” I said coaxingly.
Danforth nodded slowly. “A place for her training, yes.”
~ * ~
Winterset, Connecticut, 1939
LaRoche’s car was a rattling old Ford, dusty and with a badly sloping running board on the driver’s side, the conveyance of a tradesman, exactly the sort of car no one would notice. For a moment Danforth wondered if it too was part of the plan, a tiny screw in the mechanism that was apparently much more meticulously assembled than he’d thought at first.
“Good morning,” Danforth said as Anna stepped out of the car.
“Hello,” she answered softly.
“Nice place,” LaRoche said, though with little interest, as if he were indifferent to anything beyond his reach.
Anna drew an old, badly frayed coat from inside the car and put it around her shoulders so that it hung like a ragged cape. Her curls were held in place beneath a black scarf, and Danforth noticed that she now wore the scruffy shoes and black stockings he’d seen on the women of the Lower East Side. In such Old-World garb, she looked not only foreign but deeply so, a Moabite like Ruth of old, alone in alien corn.