Danforth fell silent for a moment, then bent forward and massaged a point just above his right knee. “In memory, most people come and go,” he said. “But a few leave parts of themselves inside you.” He released his leg and drew back. “Like shrapnel.”
There was something troubling in his recollection of this incident, of course, and I felt a distant rumbling in his tale. Still, at that moment I found myself less concerned with Danforth’s faded memories of Anna than with the Project itself, the way it was emerging as an endeavor put together by rank amateurs.
“I must say the whole thing seems rather farcical,” I told Danforth. “I mean, you didn’t even know what Clayton’s plan actually was, or Anna’s role in it.”
Danforth’s eyes glimmered with an eerie wintriness, like a streetlamp in the darkness, a metal blued by cold and laced with snow. “Farcical,” he repeated. “Yes, I suppose it could be seen that way.”
He added nothing to this but abruptly got to his feet, buttoned the middle of his three-button jacket, and waved me to the right. “The dining room is this way,” he said.
I looked at him, startled. “I didn’t know we were having lunch.”
“Come,” Danforth said. “You need nourishment.”
With some reluctance, I rose and walked beside him, the two of us moving at a leisurely pace toward a far room where tables were set, all covered with white tablecloths.
“We were at Winterset,” I reminded Danforth as we made our way to the tables. “Anna was being trained.”
At the entrance to the dining room, Danforth grasped my arm in the manner of an old man, a gesture that showed a frailty he’d concealed before.
“So to you it seemed a farce,” he said in a tone that struck me as painfully searching, like a fish striving with all its wounded power to comprehend the hook.
“But not to you, I take it?” I asked cautiously.
For a moment Danforth gave no response, merely continued forward, though now with a slight tottering, as if he were seeking purchase on a perilous ledge. Then he said, “No, but I wish it had.”
“Why?”
“Because I might have grasped the truth.”
“What truth?”
“That the question was never whether she would live or die,” Danforth answered finally, his voice sounding cracked and worn with use, like the pages of old books, “for that had been decided long ago.”
~ * ~
PART II
The Point of a Spoon
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
I had learned by then that Danforth strolled in and out of his story rather fluidly, as a man might drift from one room to another in a sprawling house. There was no fanfare attached to these transitions, nothing to signal a new chapter save a sudden play in his eyes, a tiny light going on or off. Anna seemed always a lingering presence in everything he said, a ghost that followed him no matter where he went. Or was he following the ghost, shifting here or there whenever she beckoned him with some gesture only he could see?
For all that, once we reached the table reserved for him, Danforth made no mention of her but talked of the club’s furnishings until the waiter arrived. He ordered the beef Wellington and a glass of Bordeaux. I ordered prime rib and said no to the wine.
“I need to keep my wits about me,” I explained.
“Indeed you do,” Danforth said, and added quite pointedly, “especially now.”
His words seemed darkly instructional, and he followed them with a brief speech about “desperate times” and “dangerous circumstances” that could easily lead to some rash action one might later regret, a disquisition that was quite broad and without specifics and yet still seemed intimately connected to his story. “One should never embrace a mental process that is a wall rather than a gate,” he said cryptically at one point. At another, he said, “The tragedy of human history is that it takes too long for gods to fail.”
These were windy epigrams, but I dutifully wrote them down, a gesture he noted but didn’t seem to trust.
Our lunches arrived. Danforth touched his wine to my water.
We ate with little or no further discussion of the Project. Instead, Danforth rather insistently kept our conversation on my background. He wanted to know if I spoke any foreign language fluently. None fluently, I told him. I’d taken German in high school, as I’d mentioned, and picked up a little Spanish during visits to my grandfather in South America. For a time, Danforth tested what remained of my skills, but my Spanish proved so rudimentary that he finally said simply, “Well, back to English,” and from there inquired about my studies at Columbia and the career track I saw for myself in the future. Then, rather oddly, he commented on how life seemed to be a landscape marked by what he called “moral fault lines” to whose “subtle trembling” we should remain alert.
Then, with lunch behind us, Danforth put down his fork and returned to the past.
“To love not wisely, but too well,” he said. “That’s a moral fault that has many different aspects.”
“A caution that comes from Shakespeare,” I said, rather obviously making the point that I’d read
