A Fierce Radiance (26 page)

He took one of the shoes out of his evidence bag and compared it to the imprint in the mud. The very same. Yesterday afternoon, Friday, he’d found Tia Stanton’s high heels about ten feet away from each other in some weeds at the bottom of the cliff. They’d come off when she fell. The shoes were from Saks Fifth Avenue, according to the inside label. Presumably she cared about having nice things and could afford them.

Again he studied the mud…there was the imprint of a man’s shoe, following along beside her. Nothing unusual about the man’s shoe, and no proof that the man and woman had been together.

Kreindler looked down to the bottom of the cliff. A small crowd shifted and reshifted, people come to gape at the site of a death. Five people, then four, then six, then two. Well dressed. Young and old. Normal people. He hated the compulsion to gape at the site of a death. They didn’t have enough death in their own families, they had to go searching for it? There’d been an even bigger crowd yesterday, the gawkers combined with a dozen cops and the usual investigators who danced attendance at the scene of any suspicious death; he was among them, of course. That was his job.

From his perch high above the scene, Kreindler observed the Institute guy who collected sewage walking to the river’s edge with his bucket. Kreindler had already interviewed him and six or seven others, including an Englishman who worked both here and at a lab in New Jersey and seemed completely broken up about her.

Anyway, nobody he interviewed had seen a thing. A girl takes a lunchtime stroll, ends up at the bottom of a cliff, and nobody sees a thing. They came together to protect their own. They might all be geniuses, but it was still human nature to protect your own. The girl spent her days with mold. He’d inspected her lab and seen a lot of it—green, yellow, orange, purple mold. That was her profession. Multicolored mold. Who ever heard of such a thing?

Kreindler felt a little dizzy. Woozy. He had a problem with heights—not a predicament he ever wanted to admit to his buddies. Even Sean, his partner, hadn’t known. Just last week, Sean had signed up for the military police and was gone in a day. From Sean’s perspective, pushing thirty, no kids, his marriage not going great, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. Kreindler had had his own opportunity of a lifetime in the Great War, and he wasn’t about to repeat it.

To short-circuit his vertigo, he continued walking, following the imprints of the heels in the mud and not looking over the cliff. What the hell was Lucretia Stanton doing here, walking on a path along a cliff?

Maybe if you didn’t have a problem with heights, however, the path was no big deal. He tried to approach the issue this way. The view was terrific, he had to admit. The bridge, the river, the islands in the river, a being-on-top-of-the-world feeling. Even so, if she knew she was coming here, why didn’t she change her shoes? Was she trying to impress someone? Was she trying to impress the man with her? If in fact he was with her?

Kreindler stopped. Here was a place where the left heel scraped into the dirt crossways. The right heel dug in, deep, as if the heel itself had been trying to hold on to the path. And then it, too, scraped out
sideways. The prints of the high heels ended here. Right here, she’d lost her balance and fallen.

Where were the man’s corresponding footprints?

The man had come up beside her, stepping on top of her footprints. Then he turned, to face the cliff. Then he continued his walk.

Years ago, Kreindler’s doctor had taught him the phrase, “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” Or something like that. This was in response to Kreindler’s self-diagnosis of a brain tumor when he actually had a sinus problem from a wicked cold.

Kreindler often remembered the phrase in his work, and it applied here. Girl in high heels falls off cliff, doesn’t leave a note: sounds like an accident, nothing more or less—except for the man who might, or might not, have been with her.

Later today a security guy was coming up from Washington: Andrew Barnett was his name, and he was involved with a secret government project that her brother worked for. Judging from a long-distance telephone call this morning, the security guy was pushing to have the death declared an accident. Get it over with, quiet everything down, then figure out the truth later. Kreindler mistrusted the attitude.

Kreindler risked glancing down. The sewage guy, Sergei Oretsky, was dragging his bucket across the East River Drive. Three more people had come to gawk at the place of death.

Kreindler knew that the story wasn’t down there, at the bottom of the cliff. What had happened down there was obvious: a beautiful, brilliant girl hit the ground and died. He’d already talked to the autopsy doctor, who went into lots of detail about fractured bones and blunt impacts. Kreindler had seen the body, so he already knew this. Her long limbs, broken. Her spine, twisted. But her face never hit the ground. So her face was perfect. Haunting him.

The solution to the problem was here on the path, in what happened before she fell. In that high heel, twisting to hold on to the cliff. The man, turning to face the direction she fell. The man, walking away.

C
laire sat at the front window waiting for him, Lucas at her feet. What could she say to Jamie when he arrived? What was there to say? After Emily died, and the undertakers took her away, nothing remained to do or say. Claire and her mother sat in silence at the kitchen table drinking tea. They had family and friends to inform, chores to do, the funeral to plan, but all that could wait until tomorrow. Right then, they were utterly drained. Where was Bill? He must have been there. Without even realizing, she’d eliminated him from her memory. There was no weeping, not then, at least. Plenty of time for that later. Had she cried against Bill’s shoulder? Again she couldn’t remember. She did remember crying into her pillow so Charlie wouldn’t hear her, but she didn’t remember whether Bill was there to put his hand on her shoulder to comfort her. Or if Bill cried, and she comforted him. Bill had become invisible.

A sibling was different from a child. She didn’t have a sibling, so she couldn’t put herself into Jamie’s shoes. She’d offer her presence to him, so he could find what he needed.

There he was. So handsome. The love of her life. He looked…impassive. Steeled. His eyes were partly closed, as if he were making a tremendous effort to stay awake. Had he been up all night? She opened the front door as he walked up the steps of the stoop.

“Jamie.”

“Good morning, Claire.”

It wasn’t morning anymore, but she didn’t correct him. She hugged him when he reached her and led him inside.

“Have you eaten? Would you like coffee?”

“Breakfast would be good,” he said. “Something simple.” He paused, confused. He saw the look on her face, which told him that he’d said something odd but she was going along with it. His watch. 2:20. So it must be the afternoon. The sun was shining. He thought maybe he was hungry. “You see, I missed breakfast,” he said, to explain
to her. He wanted her to understand everything he felt, even though at this moment he didn’t have the strength to explain.

“Oatmeal?” she asked, taking his hand.

He nodded.

Her hand was so warm in his. He felt as if all the standard details of daily life had become huge and vitally important. The feel of her hand. The sunlight coming through the curtains. Lucas, pushing his nose against Jamie’s leg, staying close as they went downstairs.

He sat at the kitchen table. She made the oatmeal. He stared at the front page of the newspaper, but he didn’t fully register what the newspaper was reporting. The Japanese now controlled Burma. Where was Burma? He couldn’t remember. Well, it didn’t matter to him anyway. He didn’t talk and Claire didn’t press him to talk. For that he was grateful. No questions about what the police thought, or what happened with this or that, or what was it like, to identify Tia’s—he stopped himself from remembering that.

At the stove, stirring the oatmeal, Claire waited for him to speak, if he was going to. All the details she wanted to know were pressing inside her. But she wouldn’t ask. Not now, at least. He knew he could talk to her, when and if he wanted to.

She served the oatmeal. Put out the milk and cinnamon. She’d never made oatmeal for him. She didn’t know how he liked it. She wished she had blueberries or strawberries to add, but the season hadn’t started. Instead she brought out the peach jam. Charlie liked jam in oatmeal.

Jamie watched her do all these things. He still felt distant from himself. He knew he should eat, but actually confronted with food, he began to feel queasy. Probably if he actually ate, the queasiness would pass. And the oatmeal was mild. She was right to suggest it. What to add to it? He stared at the options. The dog was at his feet, pressing its head against his ankle.

Claire watched him. She remembered herself after Emily died,
taking one step, and then the next step, and then another. Living in an absolute present. Avoiding all thought of past and future. She felt at one with him. Closer even than when they made love.

He chose the jam. One spoon only. He ate slowly and methodically.

When he finished the oatmeal, he looked up at her. From some trick of the light, he saw himself reflected in her eyes. Did that mean she saw herself in his eyes? He wished he had the strength to ask.

“Would you like anything else?” she said. “Tea? Coffee?”

“I’d like to lie down.” Suddenly he was exhausted. He didn’t think he’d make it to the guest room down the hall without collapsing.

Again she took his hand. She seemed to lead him down the hall, even though they were side by side. The guest room was shadowed, the shades and curtains drawn. He pushed off his shoes and lay down on the bedspread, curling on his side. He sensed her watching him. Then she cracked open the window. He breathed the pleasant scents of spring. She pulled the far side of the bedspread over him, so that he’d be warm.

I
n Prospect Park, Brooklyn, a Quaker cemetery was hidden on a hillside. Claire would never have known this, even though she’d been to the park dozens of times, but for the fact that Tia Stanton would be buried there.

On Tuesday at midday, Claire and Jamie drove to Brooklyn with George Hallowell, the head of Tia’s Meeting, as the Quakers called it, for a private burial of Tia’s ashes. She had left instructions that she be cremated, and Jamie didn’t question her wishes. The urn that contained her ashes was inside a plain box that sat on the front seat next to Mr. Hallowell, like a passenger in the car, leaving the backseat for Claire and Jamie. Mr. Hallowell was a thin, long-legged man with white, wispy hair and a restrained smile.

Tia’s memorial service would be the next day, but a Quaker burial was strictly private. The Quaker customs were foreign to Claire, and she wanted to understand them, for Jamie’s sake, but without pressing him with questions. He wanted only Claire to come with him. She rubbed her palm against his leg, and he pressed his own palm against the back of her hand.

The cemetery dated from the 1840s, before the creation of the park. Quaker Hill, this area was called on the guidebook map that Claire had found at home. When Mr. Hallowell turned off the park’s main roadways, leaving behind the meadows filled with visitors flying kites and tossing baseballs on this warm, bright day, Claire felt disori
ented. Soon the trees closed in and the park became wild, as if they’d gone back to the days when it was a forest. Thick foliage that cut off the sunlight arched above the narrow roadway. A forbidding loneliness filled her, despite Jamie’s presence at her side, as if she’d entered the dark forest of a fairy tale fraught with nameless threats, the fears of childhood magnified, not diminished, by adulthood. She looked at Jamie. He seemed preoccupied, not even noticing their surroundings. Just as well. They reached an opening cut into the trees on the left. Mr. Hallowell made the turn onto a muddy dirt road. Several dozen yards along the rutted path, they reached the cemetery’s open gates.

A light was on in the cemetery office, a small stone structure just beyond the gates. Mr. Hallowell stopped, turned off the engine, and went into the office. Jamie joined him. Claire got out of the car, too.

About twenty yards in, the land rose steeply. Claire wandered for a moment while Jamie was in the office. Her heels sank into the soft earth. The scents of grass and of heavy, wet soil drifted around her. Birds were twittering, and Claire spotted the reason: a hawk sat on a high branch, surveying its kingdom. Small gravestones covered the hillside, interspersed with exotic plantings—immense copper beeches; slender tulip trees, leaves spreading at their summits; and elegant, elongated Japanese maples. The cemetery was like an arboretum.

Jamie and Mr. Hallowell came out of the office, accompanied by a black man who wore overalls and carried a shovel. This man, older, and not especially strong for the job he had, was introduced to her: Mr. Atkins.

At the sight of the shovel, Claire inwardly cringed. Claire’s mother, and Emily, were buried at the Trinity Church Cemetery on West 155th Street. Claire still remembered the services at their grave sites, the prayers of the Episcopal priest, the workmen with their shovels keeping a polite distance. She now repeated those prayers in her mind, to cover the strangeness of the ceremony, or rather lack of ceremony,
before her. Mr. Hallowell retrieved the box with the urn. They walked up the hillside to a place that had been prepared, a mound of dirt marking the site.
In sure and certain hope of the Resurrection
…she heard the other ceremonies, filling the Quaker silence.
Earth to earth
,
ashes to ashes…

Mr. Hallowell placed the urn into the burial place. “We may now speak out of the silence,” he said.

No one said anything. Jamie stared at the urn. Claire looked at the sky. She glimpsed a seagull, and then another. Long minutes passed. Claire began to feel surrounded by a kind of sacred circle of silence.

Mr. Hallowell spoke: “William Penn wrote in
Fruits of Solitude
, ‘Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still.’ This is how I remember Lucretia Stanton.”

Then it was over. The silence, which had become an invisible presence around them, dissolved. Mr. Hallowell put his hand on Jamie’s shoulder. “I’ll wait down below, son,” he said. “Take your time. I’m in no rush.”

Mr. Atkins stepped off, also waiting.

And so they were alone together. Claire studied Jamie. He continued to stare at the urn. Claire wished she’d brought flowers for the grave. She’d felt at such a loss, not knowing what was appropriate. Abruptly, Jamie turned away. He began to wander through the cemetery. Claire followed him.

“Look, Claire,” he finally said. “Look at these names.” He motioned to a row of the small grave markers, some so old they were sinking into the earth, their lettering overgrown by moss and grasses. Claire made out Mott, and Stanton. “These are probably distant relatives of mine,” he said. “Go back far enough and we’re all related, I suppose.”

“A continuum,” she said.

Ten yards behind them, Mr. Atkins carried out his job, burying the urn.

“I suppose so.” He wandered on, and Claire let him be. Then he noticed something unusual. He stopped.

Thomas Reed
,
January 14
,
1896—November 11
,
1918.

Abigail Coffin
,
April 4
,
1877—November 15
,
1918.

Jonathan Thomas
,
August 1
,
1886—November 12
,
1918.

In this section of the cemetery, one grave after another gave the date of death in November or December of 1918. These were the months of the worst of the Spanish flu epidemic. Dozens of men and women in their twenties, thirties, and forties were buried across this hillside. How many orphans did they leave behind? In his mind he saw the death cart making its way down Delancey Place in Philadelphia. He saw his mother’s body there, in the back of the cart. He hated that his mother and father were buried in a mass grave. In Philadelphia in November 1918 too many died too quickly for individual burial.

Claire joined him. Put her arm though his. Jamie gestured to show the story symbolized by these graves. The story of his own life.

W
ednesday, May 27, 1942, 11:00
AM
. Tia Stanton’s memorial service at the Quaker Meetinghouse on Stuyvesant Square.

To Claire, the square was a tranquil haven of nineteenth-century gentility, a place far removed from the jazzy glitter of skyscraper New York. The square intersected with Second Avenue between East Fifteenth and East Seventeenth streets. Its central park was surrounded on three sides by town houses and churches. Next to the Quaker Meetinghouse was J. P. Morgan’s church, St. George’s, with its Gothic Revival brownstone tower. Exuberantly decorated Victorian-era hospitals lined the far side of the Square. The park was lush with sycamores, silver lindens, and elm trees coming into leaf. Sunlight turned the yellow-green leaves translucent.

Claire spotted her father waiting for her at the corner of Fifteenth Street, as they’d planned. Jamie would be arriving with colleagues from the Institute.

“Good morning, my darling,” Rutherford said, giving her a quick hug.

“Hi,” was all she could manage.

“Difficult days, I know,” he said, squeezing her hand. She was grateful for his comforting presence.

They headed toward the Meetinghouse. The building was set back from the street, surrounded by a garden and a wrought-iron fence. According to the inscription over the entryway, the sanctuary had been dedicated in 1860, the year before the outbreak of the Civil War. Yet the Meetinghouse appeared far older. With its simple, classical lines, it felt like a church where George Washington might have worshipped. Passing the newspaper photographers gathered at the gates with their 4x5 Speed Graphics and flashbulbs, Claire looked carefully in case she knew any of them, but she didn’t. Their editors must have scented scandal, to send them here.

Claire wasn’t accustomed to visiting new places without the protective armor of her own cameras and equipment. Despite her father’s presence, she felt a touch of nerves as she made her way into the sanctuary. The plain, whitewashed room was brilliant with sunlight from the long windows. Pews on four sides faced the center. Claire and her father found a place halfway back. Once seated, she focused on the light pouring through the windows. Jamie had explained to her the Quaker belief that light led you to God. That light
was
God. In the Meetinghouse the light was blinding.

The Rockefeller Institute, the Quaker Meetinghouse, the cemetery in Prospect Park…Jamie came from a New York unknown to her, even though she’d spent her entire life in this city.

“It’s a good-size crowd,” Rutherford said. “I’m glad of that, for his sake.”

“Yes.” Jamie had told Claire that Tia was known well here. She’d attended the Meeting each Sunday. A dozen white-haired ladies sat near the front, the stalwarts of any church. Five or six women of about Tia’s age came in together. They were crying, and they comforted one
another. Judging from their stylish clothes, Claire assumed they were Tia’s college friends.

“Look, Claire, over there,” her father whispered, pointing with his chin. With surprise, Claire saw John D. Rockefeller Jr., the richest man in the world, it was said, and the president of the board of trustees of the medical institute that bore his family’s name. He sat three-quarters of the way back, an empty place on each side of him like an invisible protective cordon. He was said to be shy and self-effacing. Cushioned within his exceptionally well-made suit, his bearing was humble. Head bowed, he appeared to be praying. He devoted his life to philanthropy to redeem the sins of his father, who’d destroyed his competitors to build the Standard Oil Trust—or so the rumors went.

Finally, Jamie arrived, with a large group. He was surrounded by Nick Catalano and others Claire recognized from the Institute. Dr. Rivers. Dr. Lind. Chief Nurse Brockett. David Hoskins, Sergei Oretsky. The group included others she didn’t recognize, or recalled only from passing them in the hallways. The Institute group sat together, diagonally across the sanctuary from Claire and her father. Jamie met her gaze. She wished they were side by side.

Mr. Hallowell rose and introduced himself as the leader of the Meeting. He explained how the memorial was conducted, that anyone could rise and speak if the Spirit moved them.

To be moved by the Spirit. Most of the people in the Institute group fidgeted in discomfort.

Dr. Rivers, in dress uniform, rose, unfolded papers from his pocket, cleared his throat, and began to read from a formal speech, determined to follow his preconceived role regardless of what the circumstances required. “Dr. Lucretia Mott Stanton was a brilliant scientist and a credit to her profession. I was privileged to know her…”

From his tone, Claire judged that he was moved not by the Spirit but by bureaucratic responsibility. As the Meetinghouse became warm, Dr. Rivers methodically reviewed Tia’s life, the loss of her parents to
the Spanish influenza in 1918, her scientific training, her many accomplishments, her exceptional efforts to bring the insights of a mycologist to the field of medical research. Claire gave up trying to follow the details of his long narrative, delivered in a monotone. Finally he sat down.

After a moment, a small, elderly woman sitting near Claire rose. “My Tia,” she said brightly, clutching her glasses in her hand. The woman’s eyes were a shiny, watery blue. “My Tia Stanton. Every year for five years she helped us with the clothing drive for the poor. You never saw such beautiful uptown clothes as the clothes that Tia brought.” Tia’s college friends laughed self-consciously. “The Spirit moved within her. Gratitude fills me for her presence here.” She sat down.

A full minute seemed to pass, as the sunlight covered them. Then David Hoskins rose. “I—well, Tia was the closest friend I ever had in science. She had an extraordinary commitment to her peers…” Claire sensed the painful effort that these words required from him. The pain of his effort became a kind of pain inside her. “Her example gave us all the will to move forward regardless of temporary setbacks.” Abruptly he sat down, losing his battle against tears.

Now one of the college friends rose. This young woman, wearing a hat with a face veil and a sophisticated black suit, swaying slightly on what must have been very high heels, looked like an elongated bird. “Tia was the friend I relied on most,” she said in a surprisingly frail, light voice. “Whenever I had a problem…” The young woman spoke on through tears, making Claire realize that the bird image was all wrong, that this girl’s appearance was a facade, just as maybe Tia’s appearance had been a facade.

And so it went, speaker after speaker adding another element in the portrait of a woman Claire had never really known. The words washed over her. Claire felt somehow separate from them, isolated and alone.

What was left of a life, when death came? Emily left behind a
dozen small dresses, three pairs of shoes, the drawings she’d made of her apartment and of her baby brother. Little else. If Tia had been able to finish her work, another Emily might have survived. Claire saw a line between Emily and Tia, a kind of immortality that Tia achieved by working to save the lives of others, even though she’d been taken before her work was complete. Claire felt an inner urge to rise and speak, to express somehow what Tia’s life meant—not in terms of solving problems or testing hypotheses or donating clothes to the poor, but in terms of saving children like Emily, or fathers like Edward Reese, and all of the individuals gathered here in the Meetinghouse.

At that moment, Mr. Hallowell stood. “Thank you, all of you. Please join us now for a reception in our fellowship hall.”

Claire’s desire to speak dissolved. Jamie rose and walked out. He’d told her that there’d be a receiving line. John D. Rockefeller Jr. stood and joined the line of the departing congregation.