They moved along the border of the park, the snow-covered sidewalk now empty.
“The smart money had been betting that Hitler would self-destruct in some way like this,” Clayton continued. “They thought he was a buffoon and that some scandal would destroy him.” His laughter was laced with irony “But he hasn’t self-destructed . . . and he’s not a buffoon.”
They reached the eastern edge of the park just as the snow began to increase, falling in large, silent flakes that quickly outlined their coats and hats.
After a long silence, Clayton turned and looked squarely into Danforth’s eyes. “There’s going to be a war, Tom. It will start in Europe, of course, but we’ll be drawn into it eventually. And we’re not ready, that’s the point. We’re weak and disorganized. Everything the Germans aren’t. We’re going to need time to build up our war machine.” He paused, and Danforth understood that he was choosing his words very carefully. “There may be a way to get that time. Something no one has thought of. The woman in the bar can be of great help in this . . . project. But she will need to be trained in various skills. She’ll need a place for that. I was thinking of your house in Connecticut. It’s very remote. As you know, my own country property isn’t.”
They had reached the other side of the park. The snow was now falling in great curtains of white, covering sedans and settling like powdered wigs on the tops of traffic lights.
“This woman is willing to risk her life,” Clayton said emphatically. “I’m only asking for a place where she can be trained.”
They walked on for a time, then stopped again. Clayton nodded toward the lighted windows of Pete’s Tavern. “O. Henry wrote ‘The Gift of the Magi’ in that bar,” he said. He exhaled a long breath that seemed extraordinarily weary for so young a man. “What will be your gift of the magi, Tom?” he asked. “Another rug from Tangier, or a project that could help keep your country safe?”
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“That’s an odd reference,” I said. “O. Henry. ‘The Gift of the Magi.’ Are you religious?”
“Not then or now,” Danforth answered. “But we lived in a culturally coherent world, Clayton and I, a world of shared symbols and references. Old Testament. New Testament.”
“A coherence our current enemies now have in abundance,” I added coldly “But which we have somewhat lost.”
Danforth shrugged. “True enough, but would you want it back if you got the Duke of Alva with it too?”
I had no idea who the Duke of Alva was but saw no need to demonstrate that lack of familiarity, and so I said, “Meaning what?”
“That it’s easy to become what you once abhorred,” Danforth answered.
This struck me as rather windy, and probably a quote. I returned to the more relevant subject at hand. “So, Clayton had made his proposal,” I said. “What did you do then?”
“Despite the snow, I started walking uptown,” Danforth answered. “On the way, I thought about the young woman, about what she was willing to do. And I thought about myself. I even thought about O. Henry. I was still turning all that over in my mind when I got to the Plaza.”
~ * ~
Pulitzer Fountain, New York City, 1939
Danforth paused briefly at the fountain in front of the Plaza and thought over his conversation with Clayton. Something had changed and he knew it. A small door had been pried open in him. Perhaps that was Clayton’s gift, that he could sense the locked door inside you and find a key to it.
He fixed his attention on the horse-drawn carriages that slowly made their way in and out of the park. The rhythmic beat of the hooves was muffled, and yet the sound was compelling, a soft, romantic dirge. Most of the passengers were young, and Danforth supposed a good many of them were on their honeymoons. He believed the world was indeed hurtling toward cataclysm, just as Clayton had said, but it would not occur tonight, not for these well-heeled newlyweds in their romantic haze. Soon he would be among them, he thought, newly married and in a carriage with Cecilia, a settled man in a profoundly unsettled world.
He’d walked the entire distance from Gramercy Park, and as he’d walked, a little seed grew in his mind, its roots sinking down and down until he could feel its feathery tendrils wrapping around him.
Abruptly he recalled Razumov, Conrad’s dazed and fumbling revolutionary, how he’d been drawn into a deadly intrigue accidentally, his fate entering his room, he said, because his landlady turned her head. Danforth knew that he was not at all like Razumov. If he chose to be an actor in Clayton’s project, it would be his choice, not one that the blind play of circumstance had thrust upon him.
His mind shifted again, and he imagined the young woman at the Old Town in quite a different bar, a little Bleecker Street dug-out with sawdust on the floor, the woman surrounded by what he assumed must be her type of friends: would-be writers, painters, musicians, all of them young revolutionaries, probably Communists, the entire lot wriggling in the fist of hard times, talking life and art and politics, quoting Marx, Engels, Lenin while they sipped cheap beer and ate whatever the bar provided. He wondered if she was in any way different from such starry-eyed idealists, if she had remotely glimpsed the executioner’s wall through the fog of their windy dialectics, sensed, whether she’d read Saint-Just or not, that revolutions devour their children.
There could be no answer to this, of course. He’d seen only the crazy show of this young woman, and now he doubted if even the curls of her hair were real. Perhaps she was all performance, enjoying the night’s little vignette but in the end lacking the stuff needed to carry out the mission —whatever it was — that Clayton had in mind.
As if he were pushed by an anxious hand, he stepped away from the fountain, crossed Fifth Avenue, and headed toward his apartment on Park.
His father lived in the same building, and as had become his custom, Danforth looked in on him before going to his own apartment.
His father answered the door immediately.
“You shouldn’t have bothered coming here tonight,” he said when he saw Danforth. “You need your rest. You
