His father laughed. “Count yourself lucky,” he said. “Most lasting memories are bad.”
Count yourself lucky. Danforth repeated in his mind, and he knew he should do precisely that, but he also knew that in some strange, inexpressible way, he couldn’t consider his good fortune entirely good.
~ * ~
He left his father’s apartment a few minutes later, slept uneasily, went to work the next morning. Outside his office, the file clerks and secretaries busied themselves as usual. Dear old Mrs. O’Rourke was as attentive to him as ever, filling out his itinerary, screening his calls, making the appointments she deemed necessary, handing off various salesmen and solicitors to Mr. Fellows, the office manager, or Mr. Stans, the chief shipping clerk, doling out Danforth’s time frugally, as she knew he wanted.
In that way, the week went by, the weekend arrived, and he met Cecilia at a restaurant across from Gramercy Park, not far from the corner where he’d spoken to Clayton the week before and then been left to ponder his friend’s final question.
“Snowing again,” he said almost to himself as he glanced out the window toward the park.
Cecilia unfolded the menu and peered at it closely. “I think I’ll have a Waldorf salad,” she said. “What about you?”
“Caesar salad,” he told her.
The waiter stepped up, and they selected their entrees, Cecilia her fish, Danforth his chicken.
“And to drink?” the waiter asked.
Danforth chose a pouilly-fuissé, then handed the wine list back to the waiter.
“Very good, sir,” the waiter said as he stepped away.
Cecilia reached behind her head.
Danforth knew she was checking for errant strands of hair.
“You look perfect,” he assured her.
She dropped her hand into her lap. “The Vassar reunion is on Saturday. Do you want to come?”
“Of course.”
“It’ll be the first time I introduce you as my fiancé.”
She seemed pleased and happy, and her happiness made Danforth happy too. For a moment, they smiled at each other, as happy couples do, and in that instant Danforth reaffirmed to himself his love for her, his commitment to the life they would share.
The wine came and they toasted their future together, and everything seemed perfect until Danforth glanced out the window, where he saw a young girl fling a handful of snow at a passing stranger; at that instant, he thought of the woman in the bar and found himself imagining her somewhere in the dark grove beyond the window, a lone figure moving away from him until she disappeared . . .
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“. . . into the snow,” Danforth said softly.
He paused and looked toward the window, the snow now falling a little heavier than before. “When is your flight back to Washington, Paul?”
“Not for a few hours,” I answered, though I feared that even this generous stretch of time wouldn’t be enough to finish what was turning into a much more leisurely interview than I’d planned.
“So,” I said crisply. “You were at Gramercy Park again. In a restaurant with your fiancée. You were looking out the window of the restaurant, out into the park, thinking about—”
“Thinking about myself, actually,” Danforth interrupted. He took a sip from his glass. “Have you ever read The Riddle of the Sands?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“I suppose I was a bit like Carruthers in that book,” Danforth told me. “Youth can be a cruel lash, you know. Sometimes a lash you suffer. Sometimes a lash you wield.” He looked for some response to this, but when I gave none, he continued. “Anyway, I called Clayton later that night, after that dinner with Cecilia. I told him that I was interested in the Project. He didn’t seem surprised. But I wasn’t entirely convinced, I told him. I wanted to meet with Lingua. He arranged for us to get together at one of those dimly lit grog houses they still have down on Fourth Avenue.”
“And when you met her,” I asked with a sly smile, “was she ... Mata Hari?”
“She was pretty, if that’s what you mean,” Danforth said with perfect seriousness. “But that wasn’t what I most noticed about her.”
“What did you notice?”
Danforth paused, then said, “How shall I put it?” Once again he appeared to retreat to that earlier time. “That she already seemed to be looking back at life from the bottom of her grave.”
~ * ~
Dugout Bar, New York City, 1939
Danforth arrived first and proceeded to a booth at the far corner of the bar. He’d come to have serious reservations about the meeting, along with even greater ones about getting involved with Clayton’s no-doubt-inflated idea of influencing history. What scheme could possibly do that?
But for all that, he couldn’t deny that he felt a certain anticipation with regard to this meeting; when he saw her come through the front door of the bar, he felt a quickening.
“Hello,” she said when she reached him.
She sat, drew her arms out of her coat, and let it fall behind her back, then she folded her scarf and laid it beside her on the bench, all of this done as if she thought herself alone in the booth. Her gaze was still cast down when she said, “No snow this time.”
There was an olive undertone to her skin that made her look faintly Sicilian; her features were at once delicate and inexpressibly strong, and there was a penetrating sharpness to her gaze.
“My name is Thomas Danforth,” he told her.
“Anna Klein.”
Klein, Danforth thought. It meant “small” in German, and therefore seemed quite appropriate to the woman who sat across from him. He recalled that Clayton had said she was a genius with languages, and he decided to test the waters. “Konnen wir sprechen Deutsch?” he asked.
“Wie sie wunschen.”
For the next few minutes they spoke only German, Danforth’s considerable fluency matched by hers.
“Where did you learn German?” Danforth asked her when he returned to English.
“I pick up languages very easily,” Anna answered without elaboration.
“And you speak French too?” Danforth asked.
“Yes,” Anna said. “Voulez-vous parler en Français?”
Danforth nodded and they switched to French, and after that to Spanish, and after that to Italian, and in all three cases Anna spoke with a fluency that astonished him.
“How many languages do you speak?” he asked in English.
“Nine,” Anna answered but did not list them.
“You live in the city?”
She nodded crisply. “The Lower East Side.”