Radiance (8 page)

When Daisy opened the curtains, Walter covered his face like a vampire. She started to go through his clothes.

“Don’t do that.” He didn’t move an inch, not even his head.

“I want to make sure your wool suit is clean.”

“Don’t.” He felt for his cigarettes and stuck one in his mouth.

She went into his small office—originally a walk-in cupboard adjoining the bedroom—and opened the tiny window a crack. Not much light came in, as this window, too, faced the Warburghs’ house. His study was a shambles, and stunk of cigarette butts and old bananas. Daisy was pretty sure a peel must have dropped behind the desk. On the wall he’d taped a magazine picture of the Rockies, a train whistling out of a tunnel. She looked at the clippings on his desk—a picture of Alger Hiss, looking bleak and distinguished. An article about perjured testimony. Another about Ethel Rosenberg. “
WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO MY BOYS?
” the headline asked. A good question.

Why had he clipped these from the newspaper? How did they fit with his novel? He seemed to be putting everything he could think of into his book—all of modern history—though it was supposed to take place mostly in Russia, and follow two generations of the Greenberg family. Early on he had given her parts to read–she remembered a sister chased through the corn, raped by laughing Cossacks; an old man—David Greenberg’s rabbi father—who accosted David and his friends
on a street in the Bronx, holding them with his glittering eye like the old mariner, warning them not to mess with politics. Some of these scenes Daisy had loved. Some had seemed farfetched, peculiar, the characters stock: bloated apparatchiks and Comintern bureaucrats, with names like Georgi and Sergei. In fact, much of this stuff, especially the second part of the book where David returns to Russia, read like
The Whistler
—good and evil pitted against each other in a dark alleyway. The women either good as gold, or femme fatales with pencilled eyebrows and nasty hearts.

She looked over her shoulder, but he was still in bed—she could see his long legs, corpselike, beneath the sheets. She straightened the clippings, then came out and shut the study door.

“You really must get up,” she said to his reclining shape.

She went to check Keiko’s room, something she’d done a hundred times in the last week. It had a dresser, a full-length mirror and a small desk. Depressing brown carpet, tacked down and permanent, covered the floor, but that was the room’s only real blemish. She had spread a sky-blue blanket on the single bed beneath the window. On the nightstand, beside a lamp with a pink pleated shade, Daisy had fanned out a selection of magazines—
Seventeen, Good Housekeeping.
This was the room she had planned to turn into the baby’s room. Well, now it had another purpose.

As a finishing touch, Daisy got the cut-glass vase down from a high shelf in the kitchen, then went outside in bare feet and dressing gown, a pair of kitchen scissors in her hand, to cut some laurel from the bush by the fence, create a bit of cheerful greenery. Fran was in her yard, taking down the laundry she had left out overnight, red hair shining ferociously in the morning light. It was natural, but it was also so bright, particularly against the white of her face, that it looked like something out of a dye bottle. She wore
a green-and-gold duster, the amorphous housecoat women of Riverside Meadows usually donned for housework, though this one had been jollied up with a mandarin collar. Daisy wanted to turn around and go back in, but Fran had seen her, so she came down the steps and began clipping laurel from the bush.

Fran had done a white wash the day before, underwear, brassieres, blouses, a shirt of Ed’s, and most of it looked damp from the dew. She shook her head. “Ed needs this shirt.”

“Can’t he wear another one?”

“He wants this one.”

“Why don’t you iron it?”

“He won’t wear damp.”

“Maybe it won’t be damp after you iron it.”

Fran set her laundry basket down, as though all at once the weight was too much. “Patti spat up on the first shirt Ed put on this morning. This is the only other one that’s clean.” She fingered the shirt, still on the line, and looked as though she might start to cry. She was young, just twenty-four, but already she had three children—Patti, the baby, and Junie and Jimmy Jr., the twins—and another on the way. Little things overwhelmed her. Her house was a jumble of teething rings, baseball gloves and cut-out dolls, and Ed was forever telling her to get it into shape. “He says I’m a
slattern,”
she said to Daisy once, tasting the unfamiliar word in her mouth, slyly proud that Ed had come up with it.

Now she focused on Daisy. “You’ve done something strange, haven’t you?” She said it in that blank way of hers, and at first Daisy didn’t know what she meant. “Ed read it in the papers. There’s a girl coming here. Someone Japanese.” She let go of the shirt and came to the fence, pushing a piece of hair from her face. “I was just thinking things were getting better. We were going to buy a TV.” This was the kind of illogical statement that Fran always came out with. “Everyone’s furious at you,” she added.

To have everyone furious at her was new. Daisy had always, at least until recently, been the person everyone liked. The morning light reflected off the greenhouse roof, bright, unambiguous. Daisy shut her eyes.

“Are you all right?” Fran asked.

“So what is everyone saying?” Daisy opened her eyes again. Cool, pretty spring, as far as the eye could see. Fran was watching her with interest.

“You know how Ed is. He can’t get over things.”

She meant that he couldn’t get over the place where he had been a POW. “I know everybody’s had bad things happen to them, but he’s different. He gets so mad sometimes. When he holds his breath, I think he’s going to have a heart attack. But he never hits me, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

That wasn’t true. Everyone knew that he hit her sometimes. Daisy felt a pull of guilt, as though what she had started, inviting Keiko, might squirm out of her control and ignite a brush fire.

“He’s gone to the Residents’ Committee,” Fran said.

“I haven’t broken any rules. Not one.”

“That’s not what he says. What were you thinking?” Fran gestured towards the fences, the neighbours. “They all fought.”

“I know that. That shouldn’t matter.”

“The meetings next month. Joan’s going. And Evelyn.”

“I’m sure Joan has some awful theory about me—like it’s Oedipal.”

Fran was about to speak, then bit her tongue, and Daisy knew this meant yes, that Joan Palmer had a dozen theories about her behaviour, awful theories that got at her underside, that pushed around in the cracks and crannies.

Daisy thought about the oration she had been planning: the frightening world they had entered, and how small acts, such as the taking in of a scarred stranger, were the acts that might save
them. But her skin felt icy. Besides, the idea of actually speaking such words seemed ludicrous. She was talking to Fran Warburgh across a fence, not delivering a speech at the United Nations. That was the problem with daydreams, they set up a parallel world, where people didn’t say things like:
He never hits me, if that’s what you’re thinking.
And where Joan Palmer didn’t control the hearts and minds of the women. Stalin could learn a thing or two, studying Joan’s tactics.

A child started to scream inside Fran’s house, repeating the word
pig
until it rose to a piercing crescendo. Junie, Fran’s daughter, appeared at the door. She was red-headed. Blue veins showed at her temple. She seemed quite composed, considering the screaming. “Jimmy Jr. hit me—he hit me in the mouth.”

“I did not.” Jimmy Jr. appeared at the door. “She made that up.” His hair was strawberry blond; Junie’s closer to auburn. They had named him “Jimmy Jr.” even though his father’s name was Ed, a fact that had confused Daisy at first. It seemed his grandfather, Ed’s father—a conductor on the Fifth Avenue bus—was the Jimmy for whom he had been named.

“He hit me in the mouth!” Junie repeated.

“Jimmy Jr.—that wasn’t kind.” Fran’s voice was weary, though it was still early morning. Whenever one of her children wanted anything, Daisy had noticed—discipline, a Popsicle, a ride to the store—she grew instantly listless, as though the blood had poured out of her body. “Now go and wash up.”

Junie made a face and turned to go inside, giving her brother a kick in the shins as she passed.

“See?” Jimmy Jr. said. “See what she does?” But Fran had turned from him. After another moment he too went inside. When the door closed, Fran leaned across the fence.

“Just be careful, Daisy.”

“I am being careful.”

“But is it true? It said in the paper she was hit by the bomb.”

“She’s a Hiroshima survivor, if that’s what you mean.”

Fran began to shake her head, thinking this information over.

“That’s really something, Daisy Lawrence.”

There was more screaming from her house. Fran unpegged Ed’s shirt from the line and put it on top of the basket.

“I’m going to iron it,” she said. “I really think he may not notice the damp.”

A
PPARENTLY
, R
OBERT
O
PPENHEIMER QUOTED
a few lines from
The Bagavad Gita
as the first-ever atomic bomb exploded above the white sands of Alamogordo. Daisy sometimes wondered how he had managed to have such an appropriate verse on the tip of his tongue. Had he memorized it beforehand so he could whisper it at that perfect instant? Or was it possible that he had lied, telling people that this was what he had been thinking. Maybe, like Daisy, he had let his mind wander to his shoes.

This is what he was rumoured to have whispered:

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

And as if that weren’t good enough, he had added:

If a radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of The Mighty One.

His quote was thoroughly famous in the spring of
1952
, and, like a piece of perfectly appropriate music, it swam into Daisy’s head as Keiko came across the front lawn. There she was, the scar on her cheek like the electric mauling of some terrible
beast; there she was in her gleaming patent-leather shoes, her petite hat with its two small feathers. A disturbing thought had been with Daisy all morning, ever since Fran had said,
You’ve done something strange.
Keiko had been exposed to a ghastly, bright substance that had altered her skin, her bones, her blood. As she crossed the lawn, Daisy wondered if the radiation in the girl’s skin cells could leach out, pour into her own body, affect the marrow of her bones, her womb even. Such a sick, uncharitable thought, but there it was. The breeze blew the girl’s skirt. She seemed small, yet massively potent.

Daisy stood at the picture window for one more second, half-concealed by the curtains, watching Atchity and Irene and Keiko come up the walkway. The row of plum trees on the boulevard looked itchy with new growth—hard balls of blossom that in another week or two would unfurl in the sun. She was not lurking, but if anyone had seen her behind the curtains, they would have been forgiven for thinking that she was lurking. She left the window, threw open the front door, came down the brick steps, smiling gaily, parodying a housewife greeting long-awaited guests. Being herself but also acting the part. Behind her the house gleamed with normalcy—enticing in its way, like the gingerbread house in the fairy story.

Keiko did not bow in that Japanese way they had all been expecting; she did not look up the street or down the street. She did not murmur something appreciative about the house. Instead, as they watched, Joey Palmer’s three-legged cat crossed the lawn, meowed, and rubbed itself against Keiko’s skinny leg. She bent and scratched it behind the ear, digging her fingers into its fur in exactly the spot where her own bauble-shaped keloid had been. A bandage now covered her ear.

“Well, Keiko,” Irene said. “Here it is. Home, sweet home.”

Next door the curtains fluttered. The women of Riverside
Meadows, like animals in a jungle habitat, were camouflaged except to the expert eye. Daisy took Keiko by the arm and led her along the walkway, up the steps and into her house. She sat Keiko and Atchity down in the kitchen, and then she and Irene went to collect Keiko’s things.

“I’m very angry with Dean,” Irene said as soon as they were outside again.

“What did he do?”

“If I say, you’ll just tell me I’m not nice.”

“Is that what I do?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps not.”

“Go on.”

They were standing on the brick walkway. Irene looked down, studying the herringbone pattern. “We did the press conference this morning, at the Barbazon,” she said. “Such a good spot. Everybody came. But just when things became heated, I mean at the point where the reporters were getting useable material, Dean shut it down.” She looked up. A tiny ridge of foundation rested on her upper lip, like icing. It wasn’t really unattractive; a highly attentive lover might lick it away. “It’s difficult for everyone,” Irene said, shaking her head. “But it doesn’t help just to shut things down. Where will we be then?”

Daisy asked her to explain what had happened.

There had been fifty journalists in the room, all clicking and shoving. First they asked about the hydrogen bomb, and these questions Keiko had answered nicely. “She’s got the anti-Superbomb stuff down pat,” Irene said. “She understands that our only real hope is for a test ban.” But then the questions had grown more personal.

Can you tell us where you were at the time of the bombing?

Were you knocked unconscious?

What was the explosion like?

The girl had glanced at Dean Atchity like a frightened colt.

“What then?” Daisy asked softly. The scene had a prurient appeal, she had to admit: the girl cornered by the bright lights, all those men asking what everyone wanted to know.
Describe what happened.

“He cut it off. Made a joke. ‘Now, gentlemen, no need to cross-examine her—this isn’t a House Committee.’”