A Fierce Radiance (41 page)

First, Jamie checked in with Matthew Johnston. He was doing well. Then, the abdominal patient, the shrapnel wound, and the others from previous days. Jamie had twenty-two patients on the penicillin ward. Seeing them joking together, he did begin to learn their names. He followed his ritual of four-hour intramuscular injections. He changed the penicillin-soaked bandages. Lofgren took over when Jamie was in surgery. Lofgren was also responsible for collecting the
urine of the patients and extracting penicillin from it in their makeshift lab. Surprisingly, penicillin was excreted by the body, and because they had so little, they retrieved whatever they could.

Sulfa drugs weren’t suited to desert climates, British studies had shown that. The men were dehydrated from the heat, and in conditions of dehydration, sulfa drugs caused kidney damage. But the penicillin was working fine, Jamie was pleased to see. No side effects, no allergic reactions, everything going according to plan.

“Good job,” Jamie told Lofgren when they finished rounds. He’d trained his medic in everything, the tacit reality being that if anything happened to Jamie, someone else, i.e., Harry Lofgren, had to be able to carry on.

Days passed. Awake, asleep, awake. As long as he did his job, Jamie understood his place and everything was clear. When he stopped doing his job, he was disoriented.

One morning he went directly from the operating room to the penicillin ward.

“Now, what’s your girl’s name, soldier?” A nurse was sitting at the bedside of a boy who’d lost his right arm. She was writing a letter for him.

“Her name’s Betsy.”

“Okay.
Dear Betsy
, that’s a good way to start, isn’t it?” the nurse asked. “What’s next?”

The boy looked confused and didn’t respond. Jamie put himself in the boy’s place: how could he even begin to explain to Betsy back home? The minarets and palm trees. The whitewashed buildings. The desert scrub. The tanks and bombs and strafings. And the right arm, gone.

Have I written any letters? Jamie asked himself. He actually couldn’t remember. Everything except the tasks directly in front of him became a fog. He hoped he had written to Claire. Probably he hadn’t. He should. What would he say? I’m here, I’m alive. Nothing to worry about. He wouldn’t write anything more than that, because
no words could explain the truth of what was going on here, and the truth wouldn’t get by the censors anyway.

One day he saw a calendar. A requisitions officer came around to check on their supplies, and this guy had a calendar. Only two weeks had passed since Jamie came ashore here. Two weeks. If asked, he’d have figured that two months had passed at least. Two years. The kid with half his abdomen burned away, the kid with his left leg blown off, the kid missing half his face. Penicillin could stop infection from setting in—that’s what he had to keep his focus on. Not whether or how the patient would go back home, would live and function at home, without a leg or a face. Saving the life was what mattered. Stopping the infections. Fulfilling the protocols of the clinical trial. Getting the boys who could return to battle out to the front lines: penicillin, a weapon of war.

Then one day, he saw a suppurating thigh wound, with the telltale red marks up and down the leg. This wound had seemed like nothing when the patient came in. Shrapnel in the thigh—that was next to nothing. But now Jamie was looking at gangrene.

He pointed it out to Lofgren. They nodded but said nothing. Didn’t want the boy to know. Penicillin was supposed to work for gangrene, right? Jamie doubled the dose. He felt as if everything had slowed down inside himself. If penicillin turned out
not
to work against gangrene, well, that would be a blow. He took this personally now. He sat down and wrote every single detail in the chart. If the gangrene became worse, the boy’s leg would have to be amputated.

Jamie recalled a colleague at the Institute who’d been a field doctor in the Great War. Told him that he’d kept two dogs at his field hospital in France to lick and purify the wounds. Canine saliva had antibacterial qualities. Did a dog’s saliva work better than penicillin? Could a dog stop gangrene? Lucas Shipley would have made a good companion here.

Another visit to the café, after lunch at the hospital canteen. Nurse Nichols across the table from him.

While they drank their coffee in what had become a companionable silence, a truck came in from the front. The wounded on stretchers. And then another truck arrived, for the dead, the bodies laid out, covered.

He thought back to when he and Tia were young, how he’d turned her head away from the bodies piled in the horse-drawn cart. Now he and Nurse Nichols watched. His life passed before his eyes, the way people said it happened during the unfolding of a serious accident. His own life would end here, he knew suddenly and without doubt. He tried to make his peace with it. So much unfinished. His love for Claire. The family he, they, might have had. The hard truth of Tia’s death. Whether penicillin and the cousins would change the world. All this, unknown to him.

He studied Nurse Nichols, who studied the nurses and orderlies organizing the wounded. She was off duty today. Her first name was Alice, although he’d never called her that. He’d never see Claire again. The young soldiers, the eighteen-and nineteen-year-olds, they believed nothing bad could ever happen to them. A good thing, when you’re ordered to rise out of a dugout and walk into machine-gun fire. Jamie was old enough to know otherwise.

And different rules applied when so many were approaching death’s door. Mueller was also off duty this afternoon, so there’d be no calls for Jamie to go to surgery. The hospital had four surgical teams, and Jamie worked only with Mueller. The penicillin research put Jamie on duty every day, but he didn’t have to return to the ward for two hours at least.

He reached out his hand. With his index finger, he caressed the side of her left hand from her thumb to her wrist. Alice. She turned her head slowly to look at him. She nodded, an eighth of an inch, no more. That was all she needed to do, to whisper
yes
.

I
t was easy, comfortable, and good, like the passing flings he used to have with married women back home. Afterward, he couldn’t let himself fall asleep or even rest. He had to get to the ward. Alice was
asleep, her long, thick hair spread across the pillow. Even naked in her sleep, she looked like a pinup. Rita Hayworth. She hadn’t disappointed him. He’d quietly put Claire’s photo under some papers when they came in. Alice had pretended not to notice. Probably she had someone at home, or in some distant war zone, too.

The sun was out. The sun enveloped her. He didn’t feel anything for her but a stirring appreciation of her beauty. He had no idea what she felt for him. He hoped it wasn’t much. He wanted them to be only what they’d been before. At the same time he desperately wanted to fuck her again and again, to keep himself alive.

I
t was the next day. Or the next week. He’d lost track. He’d been trying to gauge the passage of time by how often Alice came to his room, but even that he couldn’t keep track of. Her visits were like a massage that stayed with him through nights or days.

When they weren’t together, she’d pretend she didn’t know him. No more tête-à-têtes at the café, no more hints about walks among the olive trees. Good. They wanted the same from each other. He wished he could ask her, though, if she felt the same frisson through the day and night that he did after their times together, but they never talked about the personal or the intimate. If they did talk, they talked about the patients. Or rather, she talked about the patients and he listened. Strange, to be most intimate, and yet never speak of anything that mattered to themselves, to their lives at home, or their thoughts and hopes and wishes. Nothing.

Mueller was on duty today. First case, an ugly abdominal wound. Of every type of military surgery—head wounds, shrapnel in the neck, arms blown off, amputations—Jamie hated abdominal surgery most. Even after all these days, abdominal surgery still made him queasy, though he managed to hide it. Maybe Mueller was queasy, too. Even Alice. They were all doing what they needed to do, pushing themselves through.

“Where you from, soldier?”

The soldier, Keith Powers, drifted in and out of consciousness. He didn’t respond.

“I’m from Oklahoma.” Alice had told Jamie that she was certain the boys could hear her whether they were able to respond or not, so she kept up the conversation. “You don’t know what hot is like until you’ve been to Oklahoma in the summertime. Don’t you worry, soldier. With our Dr. Mueller, you’ve got the best surgeon in the entire United States Army devoting himself to you today.”

Perforated intestines, bullet hole in the stomach, blood pouring everywhere…. Good Lord.

And now, right in the middle of their work, literally adding insult to injury, bombs started falling. The screech, the explosion, the rumble in the earth, the electricity flickering.

“God damn it,” Mueller said as the table shook.

The electricity went out.

“Fucking hell,” Mueller added for good measure.

An orderly turned on the flashlight. The planes were getting closer, what sounded like a battalion of them (even though planes didn’t fly in battalions), almost overhead. These abdominal surgeries took a long time and always seemed to coincide with electrical problems and bombing raids. The planes were now on top of them.

Jamie felt like he was being sucked into a vacuum, the oxygen suddenly exhausted around him. With great clarity he thought, I’ve heard about this, this void, from friends who’ve survived raids.

And then he experienced exactly what had been described to him: the vacuum, the power of the blast overwhelming him, lifting him, rendering him weightless. The deafening sound of the explosion, and then the eerie, dark silence.

T
his way to the remains,” a bulky police office shouted to the group waiting in line.

Remains
was a better word than
bodies
, Claire thought, following the group into the stone-vaulted, makeshift mortuary. Men in rubber aprons lined up the charred bodies in rows of fifty or more, covering the floor. The workmen left pathways between the rows of corpses. Stopping, staring, stepping onward, stopping, staring, stepping onward, the living walked up and down the rows and searched for the bodies of their loved ones. The Allies had invaded North Africa three weeks earlier. Claire felt she was witnessing the aftermath of war right here.

Boston, Massachusetts, Sunday, November 29, 1942. The day after the Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire. On Saturday night, the club had been packed with a raucous crowd, rumored to be a thousand strong, celebrating the upset victory of the Holy Cross football team over Boston College. A busboy holding a match for guidance while changing a lightbulb had set an artificial palm tree aflame. At least that was the story the newspapers were giving. The fire spread with astounding speed, and in the panic, dozens were trampled. Bodies were piled six feet high behind the blocked entrances. Hundreds were dead, hundreds more injured.

The camera was Claire’s shield. Most of the dead no longer looked human. They looked like ancient, blackened tree branches fallen in
a forest. Or like heaps of misshapen, molten metal. You spotted two parallel shapes with dark bands at one end and realized that you were looking at legs, and that the bands were the tops of stockings. Or you noticed a twig covered with a curling imprint and realized you were looking at a hand and forearm clad in a long lace glove. In this forest of the fallen Claire suddenly came upon a body that was perfect, a pale young woman who might have been asleep, lipstick in place, blond hair brushed. She was like a blessed saint amid the wreckage.

Seeing Claire pause, a mortuary attendant offered gruffly, “Asphyxia.” The attendant was muscular and ruddy. The rubber apron barely concealed his broad chest. “Smoke eats lungs,” he added. In the space beside the saint, he arranged a heap of charred fabric into a shape that could almost pass for human.

Claire first learned about the fire at six that morning, when she answered the phone at home and heard Mack’s voice. “You’re going to Boston. Stop at the office for what you need, then get to the airfield.” Along the way, she read the newspapers with the first reports.

By the time she reached Boston, in a torrential rain, the area around the nightclub was under martial law. The civil defense authorities were using the incident as a dress rehearsal for dealing with a German bombing attack. She showed her ID and gained access to the cordoned-off blocks teeming with fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars. She showed her ID again to get into the ruined, smoldering club. Volunteers were still bringing out the dead, piling up bodies in the backs of trucks and in empty storefronts. Ambulances came and went in a blaring stream, taking survivors to hospitals. The reek of smoke and ash filled the air, choking her. She wrapped her scarf around her nose and mouth as a filter. Inside, firefighters searched the wreckage, tossing chairs and tables into a corner. On the bar, clean glasses stood at the ready, waiting for avid patrons to sidle through the Saturday-night crowd to order a drink. The scene became disconnected, like a dream. Shoot it like a disconnected dream, Claire told herself, an im
age here, an image there, because if you try to take in the entire scene, the horror will be overpowering and the reader will turn away. A
Life
writer was with her, but she stayed out of his way and he stayed out of hers. Claire took her own captions.

In the afternoon she had come to this makeshift mortuary. The real mortuary had been overwhelmed by the bodies. She knelt down to the level of the dead to photograph the faces of the living as they searched for their loved ones. One small token of identification, that’s what the families looked for. A gold bracelet. A diamond ring. An emerald brooch. A St. Christopher’s medal. Military ID tags. Any distinctive item that hadn’t melted or been disfigured by the flames. The stench was overpowering. The living covered their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs. At first the stench had made Claire gag. But she got used it. She didn’t know which was worse, the gagging or the getting used to it.

After five hours, she felt she was going blind, no longer able to focus the camera. She had to take a break, smoke a cigarette, drink a cup of coffee—anything to escape. On her way out, in a corner of the mortuary’s vaulted entrance hall, she saw one more shot: a four-foot-high pile of hats.
ALL HATS FOUND AT THE SCENE
, a handwritten note read. Gray felt with a black band. Naval dress. Coast Guard. Magenta velvet with black face veil. Red felt with a sweeping gray feather charred at the tip.

Hats without owners, reeking of blood and smoke and burned flesh.

She sent the day’s take back to New York with the writer. Mack instructed her to stay in Boston to await developments. On Tuesday, a bellhop knocked at the door of her hotel room after dinner with a telegram from Andrew Barnett. “Proceed to Massachusetts General Hospital, meet Catalano.”

Hearing from Barnett reminded her of their last conversation. After the ransacking of her home, Claire had gone on with her work,
but she’d felt vulnerable, especially now, when she was traveling and Charlie and Maritza were home without her. Whenever she put her key in the front door, she felt a flash of hesitation. Her home had always been her refuge. The place where she felt safest. Now she had doubts. Her only choice, however, was to move forward, and that’s what she did.

So Nick was covering for Jamie. She’d been doing a good job, she thought, of not worrying about Jamie. She hadn’t heard from him in weeks. She assumed…well, she had to assume that he was doing his job. She hoped he was in North Africa, part of Operation Torch, rather than Guadalcanal or New Guinea. Either way, he wouldn’t be at the front lines. Clinical testing for a new medication would take place
behind
the front lines—wouldn’t it? In a secure place where patients and doctors could be safe, day after day. Wasn’t that right?

She didn’t know. The front lines could be fluid, moving back and forth as different groups, different commands, made progress or retreated. She refused to allow herself to worry. Obviously he didn’t have time to write. Or the mail wasn’t working properly. But Nick’s taking Jamie’s place brought her up short, making Jamie’s absence more immediate and more frightening.

When she arrived at the hospital, Claire discovered that no one at the front desk knew Nick Catalano’s name. No one had a record of Claire’s name, either. She was barred from going upstairs to the burn ward. She was already on edge, and this roadblock made her angry. “I’m here under official orders.”

“Sorry, ma’am,” explained the well-dressed receptionist, her white hair in a stylish perm. “I don’t know what to tell you.” She was probably a volunteer, Claire realized.

“Call the hospital director.”

“I have my rules.”

“I need to speak with your supervisor.” Was there another entrance, on the other side of the building?

A slight, round-faced man in a bow tie approached her. “Is it Mrs. Shipley, by chance?”

“Yes.” She didn’t make herself polite.

“Ah, good. I was told to be on the lookout for you. I’m Dr. Chester Keefer.”

He put out his hand. Claire had no choice but to shake it. She’d heard his name in meetings with Barnett. Keefer was in charge of the national clinical testing program for penicillin, under the auspices of Vannevar Bush’s operation. He was a prominent physician here in Boston. He carried himself with a studied diffidence that made him look more like a professor than a clinician.

“The medication is arriving by ambulance,” he said, overly composed. He turned to the receptionist. “It’s all right,” he said to her.

“Mrs. Shipley is with me. I’ll vouch for her.”

“Thank you, sir,” the woman said.

Claire took a deep breath. She calmed herself. Had she sounded so angry with the receptionist that Dr. Keefer now felt a need to pacify her? Apparently so.

“Shall we wait for the medication together?” he asked.

“Certainly.” She forced her voice to match his tone. “Thank you for asking.”

“Don’t mention it.”

She felt they were in a pantomime of politesse. In the grungy waiting room, they sat side by side.

“Did you know that the medication is being brought from the Merck Company in Rahway, New Jersey?” Keefer asked. “Thirty-two liters, in a metal container. The ambulance is traveling with a police escort on the Boston Post Road. And through this driving rain. How difficult for the drivers. Terrible. Who knows if the medication will be efficacious when it finally arrives? Of course flying would have been even more risky, no doubt about that.”

“You’re right.”

“Well, tonight we’ll see if our medication can help burn victims. I do hope so. The medication has never been tested on burn victims. Staphylococcal infection. That’s what we need to protect our patients from.”

He never used the word
penicillin
, she realized. Always he used a code word.

“In military attacks,” he explained, “burn victims are everywhere. At Pearl Harbor…well, I have trouble bringing myself to speak of the hundreds, the thousands, of burn victims after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor…”

As he spoke on, without waiting for her response, Claire comprehended that for all his diffidence, and despite his unfalteringly kind-hearted and soothing demeanor, he was filled with worry. He expressed the worry by talking. Talking and talking, as if he were in a lecture hall, or a confessional.

“Burns…if the patient survived the initial event, infection was the killer,” he said. You had to seal the skin immediately.
Staphylococcus aureus
was the most common culprit. Tannic acid was the treatment. Pouring tannic acid across gaping flesh. Horrifically painful. You gave the patient morphine before you started. A good deal of morphine. You needed several trained assistants for each patient. To hold the patient still. Because of the pain. If the patient survived the treatment, the burned area formed a thick protective coating.

They had to find something better than tannic acid. Maybe this medication would be the answer.

He turned to Claire, a peculiar expression on his face. His everyday mask of teacher and physician was gone. “Have you heard that I’m in charge of clinical trials for this medication? For the entire nation?”

“Yes, I have heard.”

“But do you know what that means?” He didn’t wait for her to guess. “It means I have to decide who receives the medication and who doesn’t. Every day telegrams come to me. Dozens of telegrams.
Every day. From physicians across the country. Begging me for access to this medication. Telling me about this patient or that patient, this mother or son or husband who will die without it. Life stories, in telegrams.” He stopped. He studied the floor. Rubbed his forehead. When he spoke again, his tone was slower. Quieter. “But there’s so little medication to go around, Mrs. Shipley. Whatever we have, it’s not enough. And it’s supposed to be for the military only. But at the same time, it needs to be tested, on a variety of diseases. More diseases than we can locate in the military at any given time. We have to test it on civilians who have the particular conditions we’re interested in, to find out if it will work. Mrs. Shipley, the system is set up so that I have to decide who will receive the medication and who won’t. I, Chester Keefer, have to decide who will live and who will die.”

“I’m sorry,” Claire replied. What else could she say? It was 3:00
AM
. She felt herself swaying from lack of sleep. He, too, must be reeling from fatigue. His defenses were gone.

“How can they expect me to play God?”

He seemed to want an answer from her.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Will God forgive me?”

She wasn’t a confessor. How could she offer him absolution? In her middle-of-the-night daze, she, too, felt God’s judgment upon him.

He turned away. He was silent for a long time. Then, “I wish James Stanton were with us. He would help me with this.”

Of course he would, thought Claire.

“On a few occasions over the past months, when I couldn’t be reached, he was the one who had to play God.”

“Tell me about him.” She wanted to see Jamie through Keefer’s eyes.

“A great man,” Keefer said. “One of the great unsung heroes of the war. Well, someday this will all come out. A tragedy. When I heard—”

“What tragedy?” she interrupted.

Keefer gazed at her in confusion. Slowly the confusion turned to comprehension. “Oh, my dear, of course you had no way of knowing. Were you and Dr. Stanton acquainted?”

What was he trying to say? “Yes, we were. We are. We’re close.”

“Oh. I’m so sorry.” He stopped, clearly thrown and unable to go on. “I…” He put his hand on her shoulder, offering his sympathy.

Was he saying that Jamie was
dead
? It wasn’t possible. She would have sensed it, felt it, inside herself. She would have known. She didn’t believe it. “What are you talking about?” she asked softly.

He stared at her, seeming to question whether he should go on. Then, soothingly: “As far as we’ve been able to find out, it was a bombing raid on a hospital. Communications have been intermittent since then. My understanding is that there were no survivors.”

No survivors
. That didn’t refer to Jamie.
No survivors
was never a phrase that would apply to Jamie. “It’s not possible. I don’t believe you.” And she had her proof: “I never received a telegram.”

Gently, Keefer said, “Are you listed as his next of kin?”

Was she? She didn’t know. She couldn’t say. Who would he have put down as next of kin, if not her?

“Maybe officially he’s listed as missing in action,” Dr. Keefer said.

But if a man was missing in action, a telegram arrived from the War Department saying so.