With that last remark, he returned to the thread of his tale. “I must say that, except for this rather embarrassing moment of self-disclosure, we had a nice meal, Anna and I. Very modest. Some kind of stew.”
He seemed once again seated in a cramped apartment, rather than in the spacious dining room of the Century Club.
“A humble life,” he added quietly. “There are good things about it, believe me. Good things about a small apartment with a few books, some music.”
I knew that something was going on inside Danforth’s mind, that he was both here, seated at our elegant table, and there, at Anna’s far less elegant one. But he was also somewhere else, beyond both places, a man standing on a bridge that joined two remote islands.
I let him remain there, suspended, holding to some imaginary rail. Then, cautiously, I said, “So, was this the first of many such dinners with Anna?”
“No,” Danforth answered. “There was no time for that.”
“Why?”
He took a step forward in his narrative. “Clayton,” he said. “He suddenly became quite worried.”
“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:
“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.
