Radiance (19 page)

Joan gave Fran a look, and she hushed. Then she continued her recitation; her skin looked heavy, full of blood. “My husband, Sergeant Gordon Palmer, fought in the Philippines. He won a medal. Evelyn’s husband, Eugene, served as a radio broadcaster and signalman—”

“He saw action twice.”

“Ed Warburgh, as you know, was imprisoned for six months in a POW camp. Now, without discussing your plans with these men, whose knowledge of war is first-hand, you invited Miss Keiko Kitigawa to our neighbourhood. She is a Hiroshima victim. A victim of the bomb.”

“I know who she is.” Daisy’s voice was tart.

Joan raised her hand—a gesture from the college debating club? From another lifetime anyway. “Daisy Lawrence,” she said, “I am not here to condemn you. On the contrary, only to deliver a message. You might think that these brave men would not want to welcome Miss Kitigawa. You might think that the scars of war hadn’t healed, that your actions would open wounds—”

Daisy sighed.

“But a Residents’ Committee meeting was convened, chaired by my husband, Gordon. And it was agreed, almost unanimously, and with a great deal of feeling, that Miss Kitigawa should be welcomed to Riverside Meadows.” As she said this, her face turned an even darker red. She stopped and looked down at the crack in the linoleum.

The other women watched her, silenced: none of them had seen Joan express anything genuine before. She took a deep breath, clearly to stop tears, and it was impossible not to think of the dead brother, the one Joan missed every day, limp body carried home by the school principal. A twin brother. A counterweight to the moody Joan. But as quickly as this image formed,
Joan regained her composure. “We’ve talked it over. We’re glad you’ve done it,” she said simply.

Daisy looked from face to face. Evelyn was staring at the cracked floor, but Fran was beaming at her. “When can we meet her?” she said. “I’ve never met an A-bomb victim before. Ed would kill me.”

The kettle began to sing.

T
HAT EVENING
Walter and Daisy sat on the back steps listening to the Jack Benny show. Daisy had told him about Keiko as soon as he got home from work.

“She’s going to be fine,” she had said, sounding like Irene.

“When can we see her?”

“Not yet. She’s not seeing anyone.”

“Why is that?”

“Too weak, I think.”

Walter had nodded, accepting this.

Now they were listening to the radio together, as he and Keiko had done every night since she’d came. In this episode, Jack and his wife, Mary Livingstone, rode a team of horses into a movie theatre, a ploy to get people to go see Jack Benny’s new movie. “Now there’s a notion,” Walter laughed. “There’s something you can only get with radio. Horses in a theatre.”

Though Daisy knew this was a dig at her for wanting a television, she found herself laughing at the program, and she could tell he was pleased. And it
was
funny to picture them—all those invisible horses, white and piebald and ebony, crossing
the carpeted lobby, clipping down the sticky aisles, taking seats around Jack and Mary, snorting softly through dappled noses. Eating popcorn. Watching the show. That was the fun of radio, Walter said. That was its genius.

When it was done, Daisy told Walter about the visit from the Riverside Meadows women. “A delegation,” she said, “and not a murderous posse, which was what I’d always imagined.” He laughed as she described their desire to organize a pool party for the girl when she got back.

“They knew every detail,” Daisy said. “They could pronounce ‘hypertrophic.’ I mean, they sounded like they’d rehearsed it beforehand, but they knew the word.” She was silent for a moment. A bat flew close to them; she felt its wings near her face.

We wouldn’t want to tire her,
Joan had said
. But everybody wants to meet her, and so some kind of party is in order, isn’t it, girls?
She had said this as Daisy saw them out.

On parting, Joan had glanced back.
You’ve positively outdone yourself, I hope you know. You really are the talk of Riverside Meadows.
Then a rakish smile unexpectedly lit up her eyes.

Walter stood and stretched, his fingertips grazing the eaves. Now he would leave her, as he always did.

“You go for these walks. You walk for miles. But you come back empty-handed.”

“I’ll bring you a fish.”

“Willard’s Creek has nothing but guppies.”

“You don’t like guppy?”

“How do you think she’s managing?” Again that squiggle of guilt, worming through her.

“They say she’s recovering.”

Daisy nodded. “She’s a strange one, though, isn’t she, Walter?”

“Don’t know about that.”

“Hard to get to know, at least at first. Don’t you think?”

He shrugged. “Everyone’s hard to know.”

“I’m not.”

He laughed. “Oh now—you’re the hardest of them all.”

“But
you
think you know me.”

“Like the back of my hand. It’s taken years of close study.”

“I know you pretty well too, you know.”

“So you think.”

Later that night she woke to Walter typing. He had carried his machine into the kitchen so as not to disturb her. She lay in bed, listening: he was typing too fast to be working on a radio script, and the lines were too long; they seemed to go on for ages, and when he reached the end, he gave the carriage a hard slap with the back of his hand, and Daisy heard the satisfying ring. Again and again she heard the carriage ring. This wasn’t the hedging and despair of his usual work, the careful accrual of damning facts. He must have found a thread, and it was pulling him into his story. As she drifted in and out of sleep she wondered what he was writing. She saw molls, like the ones who turned up in
The Whistler,
wearing tight-fitting satin dresses, the green of insect wings; she saw gangs of stevedores on the wooden docks of Puget Sound, unloading their holds of brown sugar, reams of orange silk; she saw David Greenberg standing in an immense Ukrainian field—the doomed and hungry faces of children raised to him, asking for food.

She woke right up and stared at the ceiling. The clatter of the keys had shaken loose a memory. It was of the first time they had slept together, at Walter’s apartment on the West Side—how he had pounded at her with a dry need, a reckless concentration that seemed to have nothing to do with her. How exhilarating to feel him on top of her, fierce but disconnected. Afterwards he
had kissed the top of her head. The whole experience could have made her feel ashamed, but it hadn’t. She had been taken—that was how it felt—and it had left her smudged and chafed and far more worldly wise than she had been two hours before, crossing Columbus Circle in the wind, still a virgin.

She had gone to the apartment window and looked through the grating at the garbage cans and wild sumac and dilapidated fencing that filled the connected backyards. Something fierce moved beneath the surface of her skin, telling her that she had to hold on to this man, make him want her. She wanted to possess him. Funny to look back, to remember how she had felt impelled, like a salmon swimming up a stream. She had stood at the window and plotted Walter’s capture; not overtly, but still.

After she was done looking out the window, she had come back to bed and lain on her side, looking at Walter’s naked stomach, the shelf of his ribs. The vulnerability of the skin below his ribs had struck her as revealing, almost terrible. The wrinkled skin around his eyes, the stringy folds of his neck, the cracks in his heels, the shiny purple scar under his arm where a bullet had grazed him in the forest, near a place in the Netherlands called Hoogerhide—these broken, scarred and aged patches Daisy felt she could understand. But the skin below his ribs filled her with yearning and sadness. There was something childlike in that part of him, something unformed, and it seemed to indicate, in a way that she couldn’t altogether fathom, that with a different twist in the road here or there he might have turned into another sort of man altogether.

Why was this coming back to her? It just was, in waves, as Walter pounded fiercely in the kitchen under the fluorescent lights. He typed, no doubt, the way he had typed
Fall from Grace,
which he maintained he had written in just fourteen days,
writing as though words were something he had to expel, something physical in his stomach, his fingers.

What was this story burning a hole in him?

The Dark Night of David Greenberg.

And how did that story go? Could Daisy even say? She always assumed that she knew, but really she hadn’t bothered to think about it for years. Besides, he kept it so private, next to his heart, in threads of handwriting she couldn’t decipher, reams of typed pages—a rat’s nest, with a rat’s nest’s grey stink: that was how she thought of it sometimes. Often Daisy had found herself wondering if Walter was, in fact, equipped to write a magnum opus, a treasonous thought for a writer’s wife. Still, the thought had appeared so often in her mind, arriving each time all on its own, that it had become, by increments, a conviction, a certainty, perhaps the truest thing she knew about Walter.

Bit by bit he had added so many soft layers, so much stuff to the central story that it had become unbearable—to himself and to everyone. But now something seemed to have shifted. Perhaps he had found the thin line of truth, cold as a wire, running through it all. Lying in bed, remembering Walter moving on top of her, his face buried in the pillow, Daisy began to tell herself Walter’s story, as he had told it to her once, at the beginning of their relationship. She remembered how intense Walter had been, sitting on a park bench beside her, chewing gum, staring at the East River.

Imagine a man lit up by conviction.

Imagine a man with a rake’s smile and a way with women. That was David Greenberg—youngest prodigal son of a Bronx rabbi.

Walter heard him speak for the first time at a John Reed Society meeting, where David had been sent to explain the
new United Front Against Fascism. In that meeting room, where people droned on using wooden, arcane meaningless
words—functionary, bureaucratic, left-wing deviationalism—
David lit up the place with a sense of power and chanciness. When he talked about injustice, you could practically hear the storm of Cossack hooves through his father’s village. It seemed to Walter that something might even be wrong with a fellow who could talk so well. Something suspect. Something that might get him into trouble.

Brotherhood. He talked a lot about brotherhood.

Watch out, Daisy thought, lying in bed, remembering the sexy photograph of David Greenberg—brown hair swept off his forehead, a hand raised to block the sun, a stocky body, rather thick, chapped-looking lips. Watch out for a man who can talk about brotherhood like that: pretty soon he will light you on fire.

After meetings, women who were very used to scowling would go home with David, strip off their shapeless skirts and lisle stockings, and stand naked, while he traced their skin with his index fingers. Lots of them were Communist Party girls. Walter, who had a prudish streak in him, chided David, but he merely quoted from his rabbi father. More life, he said, that was the one edict given to the Jews, and David planned to follow that edict.

More life.
David’s father never dreamt his words would be used in this way by his atheist son—the son who had shamed him by striding hatless past his synagogue on Yom Kippur, whistling songs from vaudeville.
More life.
That was the promise passed from God to Abraham, the awful gift given to His people. You will suffer, but you will always know what it is to be alive.

After the meetings they went out for beer and talked for hours. Walter quoted Shakespeare, and David quoted the Torah and the
Zohar, and they both quoted Lenin. They both had liked Trotsky, and been surprised by his betrayals. They both had ideas about how to create a new society.

One afternoon Walter made the mistake of showing David some of his writing. David criticized it so severely they almost got into a fist fight. “You’ve been creating a golem,” David said. “You haven’t written a single thing that’s alive. You have to find what’s meaningful to you, puncture a vein in your arm and then write with your own blood.” Walter stormed off, but that night he wrote the first scene of
Fall from Grace.
He thought it was a short story.

Now imagine this man, David, getting drunk—six months later—with his taller, less talkative friend at the White Horse tavern. David reaches into his corduroy jacket, brings out a ticket for the SS
Batory.
He grins.

“No more shitting our time away on the sidelines,” he says. “No more Whistling Dixie. I know the Soviet Union won’t be the worker’s paradise, but it’s the closest thing we have, and I want to be part of building it.”

Come with me, David says.

Now they are really drunk, standing under a street lamp, the base moulded with black swirls, hard and sharp. David says he might end up meeting the genius Meyerhold, or driving a tractor on a collective farm, it doesn’t matter.

Come with me, he says again, but Walter distrusts David’s vision of the Soviet Union, which all night he has been likening, in his erratic way, to a fiery chariot—surely from one of his father’s rabbinical visions. No, he will not go. He refuses the call. Maybe he tells David that he will come later; Daisy doesn’t know this part. She does know that Walter feels furious that David takes such chances, seizes life so crazily, madly in love with it. If David punctured his arm, what would pour out? Chariots and
rings of heaven, an ancient struggle with a beetling old man, Rabbi Greenberg. Utopia. But what would bleed out of Walter? So far, not much.

They walk eighteen blocks to the apartment of Trixie Baxter—a girl with coarse brown hair, stubbly legs, the smell of cumin to her underarms. The skin of her cheeks is ruddy, strangely thick, though her face itself is thin. Still, she’s a sexy girl, Trixie Baxter, despite, or maybe because of, all those conflicting earthy qualities. Besides, how can you fault a girl with two
x’s
in her name? They throw rocks at her window, they howl, they jump at the fire-escape ladder, until at last she comes to the window, winding the belt of her satin night gown around her waist.