Quest for Anna Klein, The

by Cook, Thomas H

  “You speak Russian?” Danforth called to her.

  “Yes,” she said. “And Ukrainian.”

  “I would love to study the Slavic languages someday,” Danforth said.

  “You can go to the table now,” Anna said when she came out of the kitchen.

  Danforth did as he was told, then watched as she set the table: two plates, one slightly cracked at the edge, mismatched utensils and cloth napkins, and two large water glasses, neither of which, he was relieved to see, was chipped at the mouth.

  They ate a few minutes later, food clearly left over from the day before, hearty peasant food, as Danforth would have described it, and which he’d eaten during his travels when he’d been waylaid by weather or other circumstances and ended up in some small hotel that served local fare.

  “Very tasty,” he said at one point.

  “Good,” Anna said. She tore off a piece of pumpernickel bread and offered it to him. “Try this.”

  From time to time, he thought he was being evaluated in some way, put through an arcane test, and for that reason found himself not altogether comfortable. The less fortunate always had a way of mocking the rich. He’d seen its various forms throughout the world, the petty signals of their ridicule. It came in half-concealed winks and smiles, or was spoken in the shared idioms of both the idle and the working poor. The rich were always fops to them, always inept, protected from the storms of life and therefore assumed to be unable to weather them. Rickshaw pullers had guffawed at his approach, then bowed to him with an exaggeration that burned with comic ridicule. Ferrymen had done the same, and taxi drivers everywhere. It was class and ethnic war fought with smirks and muttered asides, and he wondered if this dinner might not be some version of it.

  Then, rather suddenly, Anna said, “Does anyone know you?”

  “What?” he asked, completely taken aback by both the frankness and the intimacy of her question.

  “Does anyone know you?” she repeated. “At the office, no one does.”

  Without willing it, he ran down the list of those who might be expected to know him — his long-standing social and business associates, his few relatives, and finally his father and Cecilia — asking himself which one knew him, really, truly knew him, and arriving at a single disturbing answer: No one.

  He started to say exactly that to Anna but stopped when his eye caught the one thing in the room that didn’t appear to have been bought at a consignment shop or rescued from the street. It was a relief, made of leather. It showed a street scene, one-story buildings crowded together, almost everything in brown save for the places where the artist had carved small flowers from red leather and sewn them into tiny baskets or hung them from balconies.

  “I’ve seen something like that before,” he said. “It’s from a famous leather shop in Córdoba that’s been there for generations.”

  “Yes,” Anna said. She smiled. “My father used to talk about the sunflowers in Spain. He said you could travel from Madrid to Barcelona and never have them out of view.”

  “That’s true,” Danforth said. “Your family came from Spain?”

  “Yes,” Anna said. “From Córdoba, as a matter of fact.”

  Suddenly Danforth no longer imagined Anna’s ancestors digging potatoes from the unforgiving ground of the Pale but strolling the flowered streets of Córdoba and walking beneath the red-striped arches of its famed mezquita. In some sense, she seemed more the daughter of that sun-baked people, darker and more physically graceful than the lowly street peddlers of Delancey.

  “Córdoba,” he said, and with that word entertained the possibility that the name Klein had been given to her, as so many names had been given at Ellis Island, and this, combined with the utter lack of any religious objects, raised an even more extraordinary possibility. “So you’re . . . Spanish . . . not —”

  “No, I’m not Spanish,” Anna interrupted. “My father had never been to Spain. But he told me about the sunflowers because his father had told him about them, and his father before that, and so on down the line.” A single eyebrow arched, but it was enough for him to see a not altogether cheerful change in her expression. “You’d rather I were Spanish, wouldn’t you?”

  She said this as if she were merely curious as to the arcane workings of Danforth’s mind, but he immediately understood what she was thinking and couldn’t keep back a self-conscious laugh.

  “No, not at all,” he assured her quickly. “I was just curious about your forebears.”

  He could tell that she didn’t believe this innocent explanation. Nor should she have believed it, he thought, because his question hadn’t come from some general interest but from the prison of his own upbringing, his father’s often stated contempt for what he called “the riffraff of the East,” by which he meant its black-frocked Jews, to his eyes so unsightly, with their white shirts and dangling curls, scattered across a thousand muddy villages or heaped in roiling masses in the ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz, a people he clearly loathed.

  “My forebears,” Anna repeated, and let the matter drop. They moved on to other subjects.

  But even as they talked of other things, her gaze remained intense, and Danforth felt layers of himself peeling away, the sense that she knew what he had not known about himself until moments before but that he now accepted with a piercing recognition and repeated in his mind as the night wore on: I am an anti-Semite.

  Century Club, New York City, 2001

  “It was strange to realize this particular element of myself,” Danforth said. He leaned back slowly. “Here I was, involved in a project whose mission was to thwart Germany’s plan for world conquest, opening my house to this effort, and yet all the time I was in some sense a sympathizer with at least one of Nazism’s frankly stated aims.” The tone of his voice darkened by a shade. “I wanted to make Anna something else. Something . . . anything but a Jew. Isn’t that a kind of extermination?”

  When I didn’t answer, he smiled quietly.

  “The human heart,” he added softly but with a searing word of warning, “is a twisty little thing, Paul.”

  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: Gracias a Isabella.

  “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.

  “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.

  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?”r />
  Danforth smiled. “No, my story is about treachery, and the need one can feel to kill a traitor at all costs.” His shrug suggested a coldness I hadn’t seen before. “Killing someone who deserves killing isn’t difficult,” he added. “I could do it without blinking.” His eyes sparkled with what seemed genuine purpose and resolve, and I saw that he meant exactly what he said. Thomas Jefferson Danforth was not a man who would waver in the face of villainy; a traitor in his hands would hang at dawn.

  “But as you say, I did see Anna again,” he continued. “After only a couple of weeks, as a matter of fact.” He signaled the waiter and asked that his water goblet be refilled. “I get dry,” he explained. When the waiter had filled his glass and stepped away, he took a slow sip, then returned to the subject at the point we’d broken off. “For as it turned out, Anna’s whereabouts were disclosed to me. Bannion had been called away, Clayton told me, and Anna had to be resupplied.” He allowed himself a small laugh. “That was the word he used. Resupplied. Like a military unit.” His laughter trailed off. “Which is what I suppose she was, by then.” Again he sank back into his past, sank back fully and with such ghostly ease that time seemed only a mist through which he could effortlessly pass, carried on a carpet of memory to some long-lost door.

  214 West Ninety-fifth Street, New York City, 1939

  He knocked softly, and waited for the door to open.

  “Clayton told me you were coming,” Anna said when she opened the door and saw him standing on the tiny landing. “He must trust you.” She glanced at the large bags Danforth held in his arms. “You’d probably like to put those down.” She stepped out of his path. “Come in.”

  Danforth walked into the apartment, waited until she closed the door, then followed her into the small kitchen, where he placed the bags on the table by the window.