“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 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.
They walked across town, then swung north on Fifth Avenue. A few blocks to the south, the library gave off an eerie glow, and Danforth recalled his meeting with Clayton, the unsettling news he’d received, and felt again the strange pang he’d felt at that moment.
“I really am sorry,” he said to Cecilia.
She took him in her arms, held him briefly, then let him go, turned, and moved quickly away from him, taking with her, as Danforth would later realize, the last chance he would ever have for an ordinary life.
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“I saw Cecilia very rarely after that evening at the theater,” Danforth told me. “She married in 1941 and had a daughter about a year later. Then the war came along. Her husband was wounded on Guadalcanal and shipped back to the States. On the way to visit him in the hospital, she swerved off the road. They were both lost.”
“Both?”
“Cecilia and her daughter,” Danforth said. His attention seemed directed more toward an approaching object than one in the distant past. “Her name was Audrey, and I suppose you could say she was a casualty of war.” His gaze drifted back to me. “Would you say she was innocent, Paul?”
“Of course.”
“Hmm,” Danforth said softly.
Briefly, he looked away from me, as he might have looked away from a fact too boldly stated.
“Anna,” I said, to nudge him back onto the now-familiar road we were both moving down. “She was taken to an undisclosed location, I imagine?”
“Undisclosed?” Danforth asked.
“Well, wasn’t she being hidden?”
“Yes.”
“But clearly you saw her again,” I said.
“How do you know that, Paul?”
“Well, your story is about her, isn’t it?”
