And so the years passed, Danforth said, and his first students grew older and became fathers and mothers while he remained alone, moving through the faceless crowds as skirts shortened and hair lengthened, and the niceties of language, along with all that he had once called reticence, faded in the glare of new therapies, and the old verities of his class and kind proved insufficient to command the age.
“Do you know what Burke called manners, Paul?” Danforth asked. “The ‘decent drapery of life.’”
I smiled at the quaintness of both the phrase and the sentiment. “So you still believe in knight-errantry?” I asked.
“Well, someone has to, don’t you think?” Danforth replied. “Otherwise each generation would awaken to utter emptiness.”
This might or might not be true, I thought, but it was far from his tale. “Anyway,” I said, “you were at least released from Anna.”
I was far from a starry-eyed romantic, and yet I couldn’t help but be impressed by Danforth’s long pursuit, Victorian though it seemed in an age of e-mail hook-ups and speed dating. To feel so deeply even once in the course of life struck me as a blessing, mixed though Danforth’s had surely been.
“Released, yes,” Danforth said. “And so I settled into an uneventful middle age that might placidly have followed its course year by year until I reached old age, then further still until at last I was laid to rest. But something happened to change my course, something that wouldn’t have happened had I not been standing on the curb at Lincoln Center one evening. A cab pulled up and a passenger got out. He wore a red fez, and the driver spoke to him in Turkish, and at the sound of that language, I recalled that when I’d loved Anna, she had once spoken of Baku.” He seemed to marvel in the twists of his own mind. “For some reason, a burning nostalgia seized me, Paul. I knew what Anna was, and I no longer cared where she was or how she was being treated. And yet, for all that, I felt an overwhelming need simply to see someone she had once seen, someone who had seen her, heard her voice. By then there was only one person left in the world who’d done that.” He smiled. “LaRoche.”
“LaRoche?” I asked, surprised that he’d resurfaced in Danforth’s story.
“After the war, he’d become quite successful as a sweets wholesaler,” Danforth said. “He agreed to meet me at the same place we’d met so many years before.”
~ * ~
Washington Square Park, New York City, 1974
“Smoke, smoke, smoke,” the young man whispered as Danforth passed by, an illegal solicitation Danforth found amusing given his steel-gray hair and clean-shaven face, the conservative look of his three-button suit. Danforth was now sixty-four years old, after all, a lowly language teacher, hardly the usual customer for a park-bench pot dealer.
For a time he watched as the young man made his rounds, then, like one entering a neighborhood much changed since his youth, Danforth headed farther into the park.
This time it was LaRoche who’d arrived first, now dressed in a gray suit that couldn’t completely hide his considerably expanded waistline. He no longer glanced about, no longer seemed on edge, but instead looked almost like a member of the old burgher class, well-fed and well-heeled. But for all that, something of the dispossessed still clung to him, an Old-World melancholy that both his years and his New-World success had failed to shake. De Tocqueville had called them “the habits of the heart,” and LaRoche seemed proof that they were harder to change than one’s country or one’s circumstances.
“Hello,” LaRoche said with a smile that seemed hard-won.
“Mr. LaRoche,” Danforth replied with a nod. “It’s been a long time.”
“How did you find me? I forgot to ask.”
“You’re in the book,” Danforth said. “LaRoche Wholesalers. You specialize in Middle Eastern sweets.”
“I always had a taste for honey,” LaRoche said in an English that now bore only the hint of an accent.
They talked briefly of the old days, when Winterset was clothed in snow and, later, strewn with spring flowers.
Danforth knew that LaRoche had been told of Anna’s arrest and Bannion’s suicide, but whether he’d been told more than that, Danforth couldn’t say.
“I saw Anna only one time after Munich,” he said. “She was in Russia.”
He told LaRoche about the final encounter, how he’d tried to get some small kernel of information about a German agent the Soviets believed had betrayed them, how she’d suddenly transmogrified into the ardent Nazi she had no doubt always been, a narrative that still wounded him despite all the time that had passed.
LaRoche listened silently through it all and remained quiet for a time after Danforth finished, so they simply sat, speechless, staring straight ahead, looking curiously desolate, as if recognizing at last that all their riches had been spent.
Then LaRoche said, “And they let you go after this last meeting with Anna?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Danforth shrugged. “What would have been the point of keeping me? They must have realized that all I was ever looking for was Anna. And now I had found her. I suppose they simply had no more use for me.”
“Perhaps,” LaRoche said, his tone cautious, like one hazarding an unlikely guess, “perhaps, unless this last meeting had a hidden purpose.” He appeared quite pensive, as if turning over all Danforth had just told him.
“When you left her, what was your feeling?” he asked after a moment.
“That it was over,” Danforth said. “My quest.”
“Your quest for what?”
“I suppose you could call it my quest for Anna Klein.”
“Hmm,” LaRoche said with a slow nod.
Danforth looked at him closely. “What’s going on?” he asked. “What are you thinking?”
“That maybe she was acting,” LaRoche said.
“Acting? Why?”
LaRoche laughed. “It’s a little mind game I play with myself,” he said. “Coming up with other ways of looking at things, no matter what crazy direction it takes me.”
“What crazy direction is it taking you now?” Danforth asked.
“Well, I was just thinking that maybe Anna was forced to do what she did when she saw you,” LaRoche answered. “Maybe there was something she wanted to protect.”
“Rache is what she wanted to protect,” Danforth said bitterly.
“Unless the Bolshies were playing an old game with you,” LaRoche answered casually. “It’s one they know well and play very often.”
Danforth could see that LaRoche was playing a game of his own, offering a wild supposition for no other reason than to demonstrate the twisted world of intrigue he’d once known.
“What game?” Danforth asked, going along with him.
“It’s an old ploy,” LaRoche said. “They let you find one thing in order to keep something else hidden, something more valuable to them than what you were looking for.”
“I was never looking for anything but Anna,” Danforth told him.