“Believing you know a person or can control the final outcome of your life,” Danforth said. “I certainly know what that happy ending would have been in my case: that Anna would begin to talk, tell me all about Rache, a story that would make clear that she had never been in league with him. It didn’t matter how absurdly improbable this story might be. In my romantic fantasy, I would believe it, and so would the Russians. They would be so won over by it that they would release Anna from the clutches of the Gulag, and I would whisk her back to New York, where we would grow old together, a silver-haired couple strolling arm in arm through Central Park.” He released a weary sigh. “I’m afraid that was not to be.” He looked at me quite piercingly. “Do you know what the one great fact of life is, Paul?”
“No,” I admitted.
“How easily it is wasted,” Danforth said. “All our precious little days.”
An old fury rocked him, and he appeared barely able to suppress it. A few seconds passed, and during that time an uneasy calm returned to him, after which he said, “I came home at last, but there was nothing left of my old world. Danforth Imports had limped along in my absence, but by the time I got back, it was heavily in debt. I sold it, along with Winterset, and paid off the company’s bills. I knew that I no longer had a heart or a head for business, so I took a job in a language school here in New York. I tutored students on the side.” He glanced toward the table where two places had been set, making it clear that he’d long planned to bring me here. “And I thought of Anna, of course.” A coldness came into his eyes. “But never again in the grip of a delusion, and never again with love.”
“But wait,” I said. “You didn’t get any information about Rache out of Anna, did you?”
“No.”
“Then why did the Russians let you go?”
Danforth smiled. “Ah, a chirp from the nightingale floor.”
But rather than going on to answer my question, Danforth simply shrugged and resumed his tale.
And so the years passed, Danforth said, and his first students grew older and became fathers and mothers while he remained alone, moving through the faceless crowds as skirts shortened and hair lengthened, and the niceties of language, along with all that he had once called reticence, faded in the glare of new therapies, and the old verities of his class and kind proved insufficient to command the age.
“Do you know what Burke called manners, Paul?” Danforth asked. “The ‘decent drapery of life.’”
I smiled at the quaintness of both the phrase and the sentiment. “So you still believe in knight-errantry?” I asked.
“Well, someone has to, don’t you think?” Danforth replied. “Otherwise each generation would awaken to utter emptiness.”
This might or might not be true, I thought, but it was far from his tale. “Anyway,” I said, “you were at least released from Anna.”
I was far from a starry-eyed romantic, and yet I couldn’t help but be impressed by Danforth’s long pursuit, Victorian though it seemed in an age of e-mail hook-ups and speed dating. To feel so deeply even once in the course of life struck me as a blessing, mixed though Danforth’s had surely been.
“Released, yes,” Danforth said. “And so I settled into an uneventful middle age that might placidly have followed its course year by year until I reached old age, then further still until at last I was laid to rest. But something happened to change my course, something that wouldn’t have happened had I not been standing on the curb at Lincoln Center one evening. A cab pulled up and a passenger got out. He wore a red fez, and the driver spoke to him in Turkish, and at the sound of that language, I recalled that when I’d loved Anna, she had once spoken of Baku.” He seemed to marvel in the twists of his own mind. “For some reason, a burning nostalgia seized me, Paul. I knew what Anna was, and I no longer cared where she was or how she was being treated. And yet, for all that, I felt an overwhelming need simply to see someone she had once seen, someone who had seen her, heard her voice. By then there was only one person left in the world who’d done that.” He smiled. “LaRoche.”
“LaRoche?” I asked, surprised that he’d resurfaced in Danforth’s story.
“After the war, he’d become quite successful as a sweets wholesaler,” Danforth said. “He agreed to meet me at the same place we’d met so many years before.”
~ * ~
Washington Square Park, New York City, 1974
“Smoke, smoke, smoke,” the young man whispered as Danforth passed by, an illegal solicitation Danforth found amusing given his steel-gray hair and clean-shaven face, the conservative look of his three-button suit. Danforth was now sixty-four years old, after all, a lowly language teacher, hardly the usual customer for a park- bench pot dealer.
For a time he watched as the young man made his rounds, then, like one entering a neighborhood much changed since his youth, Danforth headed farther into the park.
This time it was LaRoche who’d arrived first, now dressed in a gray suit that couldn’t completely hide his considerably expanded waistline. He no longer glanced about, no longer seemed on edge, but instead looked almost like a member of the old burgher class, well-fed and well-heeled. But for all that, something of the dispossessed still clung to him, an Old-World melancholy that both his years and his New-World success had failed to shake. De Tocqueville had called them “the habits of the heart,” and LaRoche seemed proof that they were harder to change than one’s country or one’s circumstances.
“Hello,” LaRoche said with a smile that seemed hard-won.
“Mr. LaRoche,” Danforth replied with a nod. “It’s been a long time.”
“How did you find me? I forgot to ask.”
“You’re in the book,” Danforth said. “LaRoche Wholesalers. You specialize in Middle Eastern sweets.”
“I always had a taste for honey,” LaRoche said in an English that now bore only the hint of an accent.
