“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.