Radiance (34 page)

How did she recognize the car so quickly, when she had never seen one quite like it before? It was a station wagon, with corroded fenders, a dent in the door. Clever, she thought later, for them to enter the suburbs in a family car.

She didn’t plan to mention the car to Walter when he got home from work, but he brought it up himself.

“Are you expecting a visitor?” he said as he took off his tie.

“I don’t know—what do you mean?”

“Fellow outside. Lurking.”

“Is he?”

He smiled, tight-lipped. “Reckon he is.” He stopped to roll himself a cigarette, then walked out the front door, down the steps and across the road—observed by all the neighbourhood women. He knocked on the car’s window. Told her later the fellow was reading the funnies.
L’il Abner.

“Are you lost?”

The man, a stout fellow with boils on his neck, put his paper down and started the car in a real panic.

“Cause if you’re lost, I can give you directions.”

He bolted while Walter stood on the road and whistled under his breath—the notes that began
The Whistler.
He rubbed his palms on his trousers (the weather was still unseasonably warm), then bowed to Fran Warburgh, who let her curtain drop.

Inside, he asked Daisy questions. It was one thing to protect him when all it took was silence, but now he was after her, so she told him what Dean had said. He listened in silence, then went into the bedroom. She followed him and saw a vein moving in his temple as he undid his jacket. She thought he might go silent on her, but he hung up his jacket, then turned to her.

“Girl must be under a lot of pressure,” he said.

Daisy nodded, though in fact neither of them knew this for certain. She had been under pressure in their home—so she said—but since? Who could say? Had it been hard for her to give Walter’s name, had it come after hours of pressure, or had she sung it out brightly and blankly, as soon as she was asked? Daisy saw a cage. Inside that cage a furious animal, screaming betrayal. That was how Daisy felt. If she looked at Keiko one way, she saw a victim pushed into a corner, fighting to survive. But when she pressed the velvet nap the other way, she saw the girl giving up Walter’s secrets, as she had taken Daisy’s, without a qualm. Quite able to do what was necessary.

The agent turned out to be named Melville Shrank.

Most evenings Walter walked out to speak to him, to offer a drink or a smoke. And because Melville Shrank was a drinking man and his job was hard, he would, from time to time, accept a nip of whisky, especially after nightfall.

Once, Daisy brought out a bowl of stew.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Shrank said. “That’s right kind of you.” He took the bowl and spoon and ate it right there.

“You would think they’d be warned not to eat the stew of Communist infiltrators,” she said to Walter when she came in. But apparently not. Hunger had won out, at least for Melville Shrank. Later, she found the bowl resting on the front mat, licked clean.

He was an odd man, ugly but not unpleasant. When he sweated, his boils deepened in colour. As Indian summer progressed, they spread to the backs of his hands, and some of them developed scales.

His presence in Riverside Meadows changed everything. One morning Daisy knocked on Fran’s door to see if she wanted anything at the store. She knocked again. Fran opened the door a tiny crack and thrust a piece of paper at Daisy. It had been recently gestetnered, the pale blue ink smelling of licorice:
For the sake of national security, can you take a few minutes to answer questions about your neighbour?

“You’ve done it this time, Daisy Lawrence.” A look of pure fear contorted her face. Beyond, at the bedroom door, Daisy saw Ed wearing his brown robe. He stared at her, cold and motionless, as Fran snatched back the paper and slammed the door.

That was the beginning of the worst time. Daisy knew what the women of Riverside Meadows would do with this information: a traitor in their coffee klatches; a spy sitting by the Stricklands’ swimming pool! Imagine what the Lawrences must have done to Keiko, she pictured them saying: how they must have whispered incendiary messages in her sleep. And this time everything went the way she thought it would. The women of Riverside Meadows did not descend on her wielding golf clubs and barbecue forks, but they seemed quite ready to hate her, and as viciously as necessary. Someone left a scoop of dog shit on her doormat; a child pelted her front window with eggs. Keiko’s stay had been, it seemed, a hiatus, a truce, like the one at Christmastime in World War One, when Germans and Canadians
wandered into no man’s land, leaning up against the barbed wire, exchanging greetings, smoking one another’s cigarettes.

D
EAN ATCHITY HAD SAID
that if Daisy and Walter were silent, and never tried to see Keiko, that the FBI would not be notified, and Daisy was never sure why things unfolded the way they did. Perhaps Atchity couldn’t control the process. Or perhaps it had nothing to do with Atchity. Perhaps the FBI had managed to get hold of Walter’s old writings, the signature on the letter sent to
The New York Times,
for instance, condemning those who condemned the Moscow Trials. Or perhaps Walter had tried to see Keiko a final time—slipping off, as Daisy herself had done, to stand below Irene’s window, just to try to catch a glimpse of the girl coming or going. Perhaps Irene had looked out and seen him there, and her fury at Daisy had made her blow the whistle on Walter. For there could be no question that Irene had hated Daisy—not the lisping, insecure girl who had come to her from Sacred Heart. Not Margaret Mary—but the woman she had, briefly, become.

It was also possible, of course, that Keiko herself had done the final betraying. Certainly she had done enough of it to know how it was done. Perhaps she had stood at the window and pointed Walter out, negligently, with delicate cruelty.
Look, Miss Day, it’s Mr. Lawrence standing across the street. I wonder if he wishes to visit you.

The subpoena was brought to the house by a more official-looking fellow than Melville Shrank, a man with a fedora and
polished shoes and a cream-coloured Studebaker: Shrank’s more prosperous cousin. But it was still up to Shrank to see that Walter arrived at the hearing. That morning Daisy looked out the window and saw him sweating in his car, his neck red as a scarf from its mass of boils. She imagined ringing out a washcloth in cold water, pressing it to his skin.

Walter dressed carefully, slicking his hair so that it shone. As they left the house, he gave Melville a small salute, as though to say,
Here we go.
Shrank drove three car lengths behind them on the Northern State Parkway, close enough to pursue if they bolted. Daisy could have told him not to worry: Walter kept Shrank in his mirror the whole way, showing a gentlemanly care, even stopping midway through a yellow light and backing up so that Shrank and he wouldn’t get separated.

It was not one of the major hearings the House Committee held, sandwiched as it was between exposing Reds in high schools and Reds in unions. Walter was part of the entertainment industry, but he was no Elia Kazan, no Lauren Bacall. His appearance did not even make the television news, though it was written up in some newspapers. In the end, his refusal to name the people he’d associated with in the old days made little difference: it certainly didn’t affect national or international security. Walter Lawrence took a stand, but not every stand has an influence on history.

He stood with his back straight, hands clasped behind him, his salt-and-pepper hair dignified and sleek. The committee members tried to shame him and berate him about his radio work, his old comrades and why, as an ex–Communist Party member, he had insinuated himself into the Hiroshima Project. He was far too much of a gentleman to say that involvement in the Project had been his wife’s brainchild.

He told Daisy afterwards that he had felt sick the whole
time: the fried-egg sandwich he had eaten that morning had not agreed with him. But that was not how he seemed. A weight was gone from Walter’s body; the grey outer skin, that last self-punishing layer, was scrubbed clean. Or maybe he looked like a condemned man, the kind you see in cowboy movies: a posse had built a gallows and were about to hang him, but he stood there while they tied the rope around his neck and, for however many minutes were left to him, he yelled out every true thing he could think of.

He had a statement in his pocket, typed up on a piece of yellow foolscap. When the committee refused to have it read into the record, Walter began to read anyway, raising his voice above the banging of the gavel and the shouts of outrage.

“You can make people speak, Mr. Chairman. If you push them hard enough—you’ve shown that well enough. But you can’t get at our insides. Inside we’re all free. And the American people may go along with you now, but give them time and they’ll rise up and find their voices. Because you can’t silence the truth, Mr. Chairman. And the more you call black white, and darkness light, the more the truth just wiggles around and finds a way to get itself heard.”

The committee members had no idea he had been trying for a long time—ten years, in fact—to be able to say these things; that these few words were, in fact, his magnum opus. Nor did they know that he was speaking both to the committee and past it, to another place, another trial—that this was his final answer to the gulags, the executions, the confessions exhorted at gunpoint.

Inside we’re all free.

He was still telling the committee what he thought when they charged him with contempt and hauled him off to serve two months in jail.

D
AISY’S RETURN TO RIVERSIDE MEADOWS
was to an ominous, perfect silence. The voices of the women had been stilled; the screaming of Fran’s children had been stilled; even the howling dog in Stoney Creek had been silenced. Daisy parked the car in front of the house and walked up the brick path. Someone had thrown a rock at the window, but it had left only the smallest hole, like a puncture: the glass had not shattered. She heard the click as the door unlocked. This then was what she had feared, the whole drive home: the empty hall, the deepest quiet, how her face would look first in the telephone alcove mirror, then distorted and elongated in the toaster, then—as she prepared for bed—in the mirror above the bathroom sink.

She put on Walter’s cardigan, then sat at the kitchen table, not turning on the lights, so that nobody could walk round to the alley, peer over the back fence and see her there. She listened to the ticking of the stove clock, the creaking of the walls expanding, stared at the wallpaper with its cherries and pale stripes. She heard a movement at the side of the house. Children, she thought: another rock thrower, or egg thrower, or someone with matches. She went to the door, listened, ear to the wood, before opening it.

Someone had left a squat box on the doormat, beside the empty bottles. She took it inside, unsure whether to throw it out or open it, but curiosity got the better of her and she pulled back the lid.

It was a rhubarb pie. Daisy put her nose down close and smelled the crust, wondering if it might be filled with shit. It was fragrant. She cut it open and ate a slice with her hands, sour and stringy and soft. It needed sugar. Whoever baked it didn’t
know the trick of setting the piecrust first, by baking on an egg-yolk glaze, so that the fruit juice didn’t dampen the dough.

Next morning Daisy heard a soft knock at the door. It was Joan Palmer.

“For Christ’s sakes, let me in.”

“Do you
want
to come in?”

“Give me a goddamned break. Yes, I want to come in.”

Daisy made coffee in the kitchen while Joan sat at the table. There had been a Residents’ Committee meeting, she said abruptly. “A lot of loudmouths talking about stuff they don’t know a thing about.”

Daisy put the cream on the table.

“Don’t worry, Daisy,” Joan said. “I stood up for you. Practically got lynched.” She grinned. “But there you go. There were others too. Gerald Strickland. He said you’d obviously had the wool pulled over your eyes by Walter: the little woman was confused, that sort of thing. But it worked: you can stay.”

“And Fran?”

“She couldn’t support you, you know her—‘Ed would kill me.’ I mean, he
would,
but it’s also an excuse for her, isn’t it? For an extremely shallow woman, she does have her deep side. Anyway, Ed put his foot down and there was nothing I could do. I’ve always found her pliable, but I guess she’s been plied enough. Fair-weather friends, Daisy—all except me.”

Through Joan’s visits, Daisy got a sense of what a stir she and Walter had caused. Most of their neighbours had voted to use the “grave misconduct clause” in the residents’ agreement to kick them out of Riverside Meadows.

“Lock your door,” Joan warned.

She kept Daisy abreast of other news, too. One morning in
mid-November, Joan told Daisy that Fran had had her baby: seven pounds, three ounces. “She said she’s going to leave Ed, just as soon as the baby’s weaned, but mark my words, it will never happen.” They sat at the table, not even bothering with the formality of coffee. Joan’s lips were chapped and raw: a virus she’d had for the past week, something nobody had ever heard of before.

“Lucky Keiko isn’t here any more,” Daisy said. “She would have been blamed for sure.”

Joan snorted. “Those fools,” she said, and Daisy felt a bit ashamed that it still felt so good to be inside the circle Joan cast.

They talked about other things as well. Joan talked about her twin brother and, increasingly, perhaps spurred by Joan’s reminiscences, and how much solace she seemed to find in them, Daisy talked about her childhood in Syracuse. Mostly she talked about Sacred Heart, the rituals, for instance, curtsying in chapel when they sang Jesus’ name, and making up sins in the confessional booth, because nothing she ever did seemed bad enough. She talked about the sugar lambs they got at festivals, how careful she had always been to eat the lamb’s hindquarters first. All these memories came back to her, and she spoke of them to Joan, describing the solemn whispering of the girls, down on their knees on Lady Day, holding lilies in their sweating hands. Or on the Feast of the Sacred Heart, how they wore white and prayed to the actual heart of Jesus.
Heart of Jesus, desire of the everlasting hills. Heart of Jesus, burning furnace of charity.
This last was because Jesus had appeared to the founder of Sacred Heart in a vision. He took her heart and without a single word he placed it inside the furnace of his own chest. After a while, he had smiled at her, as if to say,
See how easy this is,
and he had taken out her burning heart and returned it to her.