He lingered in a way that he thought must surely seem unaccountable to her, as if he were waiting for something to be returned.
“And thanks again,” she added. “For everything.”
Outside, Danforth stood for a moment in front of her building, glancing up and down the street, before turning westward, heading aimlessly toward Columbia. At Columbia Walk, he sat down on the stairs and peered out at the university library, the names of the great inscribed across its wide facade, Homer, Sophocles, Plato, and the like. First at Trinity and later at Princeton, he had studied them all, but it struck him that they were of little use to him now, that the choices he would make during the next stage of his life would be determined without reference to his education or what his travels had taught him or even anything he’d heard in any of the languages he spoke.
Danforth suddenly thought of the cold glint in the eye of the warlord commander of those Balkan thugs, how he must have had the same look when he’d ordered the crucifixion of that hapless man, how he must have felt nothing as he’d watched him hang there, stripped to the waist, his arms and legs and feet streaked with blood. The passengers had been herded back into the train once the thieves had stolen whatever they could find. As if boarding a train at Victoria Station, he and his father had calmly reclaimed their seats, then felt the train lurch forward. He could still remember the wave of relief that had swept over him at that instant, but now he recalled something else more vividly: that in the midst of that relief, with the train inching forward, he’d glanced out the window and actually admired the beauty of the countryside until the crucified man came once again into view. Danforth had assumed him dead, but as the train dragged past, the man had lifted his head and stared Danforth directly in the eyes.
Nothing as heartrending had happened to him since, and as he sat on the stairs at Columbia, the memory of it lingered in his mind until he noticed a tall young woman with long blond hair. She was moving swiftly across Columbia Walk, her books clutched to her breast. She would graduate and marry and raise her children in a large house, Danforth knew. She would fill her middle years with works of civic charity, and in later life be many times honored with plaques and citations. In old age, she would sit in a white gazebo and oversee her gardens, minding that the irises be thinned out in the fall and that the fountain, modeled on one she’d admired in Ravello, be each week cleaned and polished.
Suddenly Danforth felt a terrible hollowness; it did not fall away as he’d expected it to but grew as the days passed, and by the weekend he seemed to be disappearing into a vast emptiness that felt, truly, like death.
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“Regret becomes self-accusation in the end,” Danforth told me. “And the deepest accusation of them all is that you settled for an inadequate life.”
“And for you, what would that inadequate life have been?” I asked.
“It would have been to be that blond girl’s husband,” Danforth answered flatly. “When you get right down to it, that was my terror. The lights were going out all over Europe, but my chief concern was that I not end up like one of those people Fitzgerald wrote about, sitting in their clubs, setting down their drinks, dreaming their old best dreams.”
He had circled back to his first reference, a narrative trick I couldn’t help admiring.
“What did you think I was going to say, Paul?” he asked. “What did you think I was going to tell you about my motivation at that moment?”
“Oh, perhaps that you needed to prove that you weren’t an anti-Semite like your father,” I answered.
“Oedipal loathing,” Danforth said. “That’s fueled a few tales, no doubt about it. But not this one, Paul.” He shook his head. “No, my thinking wasn’t complicated. You wouldn’t need Sophocles to figure it out. It was the young bourgeois’s dread of being bourgeois.”
“The Sorrows of Young Danforth,” I added, with no doubt that he would get my literary allusion.
“A precise reference,” Danforth said. “And very German.” He laughed softly, but it was a troubled laugh. “As you are, Paul,” he added.
“Yes.”
“But an American now, with an English name,” Danforth added. “Working for our country’s good.”
I had no idea what Danforth meant by this remark, but something in his gaze alarmed me so that I suddenly retreated to the safety of my notes. “So,” I said, “you were a young bourgeois afraid of a bourgeois life.”
“Yes,” Danforth said. “As I suspect Clayton well understood when we talked at Winterset that day.”
~ * ~
Winterset, Connecticut, 1939
“Thanks for coming, Robert,” Danforth said as he opened the door.
“You made it sound urgent.”
They headed out across the wide yard, Clayton dressed in slacks and an open-collared shirt. He’d draped his Princeton sweater over his shoulders, as if he were going to the game against Yale.
“I want to go with Anna,” Danforth said bluntly. “I’ve thought it through. I’ve gone over what it means. But I want to go with her. I want to be a part of this . . . Project.”
Clayton watched as a breeze swept the end of the yard, sending a few long-dead leaves forward raggedly, like a column of deserters.
“I want to be a part of the Project,” Danforth repeated a tad more vehemently.
He would never be sure if what he’d felt at that moment was terror or elation. He knew only that the narrow stream of his life had abruptly widened.
“Did you hear me, Robert?” Danforth asked.
Clayton continued to look away, as if trying to gather his thoughts. When he turned back to Danforth, his face seemed to have lost the last vestiges of its youth.
