A Fierce Radiance (44 page)

C
laire and Charlie spent their Saturday afternoon doing chores around the neighborhood. They went to Bigelow on Sixth Avenue between Eighth and Ninth for a few pharmacy items. Using their hoarded ration allotment, they bought new shoes for Charlie, who’d outgrown his old ones, at the kids’ shoe store on Eighth Street. They went to Wanamaker’s on Broadway at Ninth, where Claire bought a new lipstick. On their way back, they made a stop at the Marshall Chess Club on West Tenth Street to pick up a schedule of classes for children. Charlie wanted to learn to play, and his grandfather was considering signing up for the kids’ class, so they could learn together. As always on Saturday, Claire and Charlie went to Zito’s on Bleecker Street to buy bread, a long, crispy loaf whose yeasty aroma wafted up from its wrapper. Bleecker between Sixth and Seventh was lined with pushcart vendors selling vegetables. Not too much variety at this time of year, but Claire stocked up on onions and potatoes. Crossing Seventh, they continued down Barrow, a quiet, tree-lined street with narrow sidewalks. They stopped beneath the windows of the Greenwich House Music School to listen to a violin class for children.

“Would you like to learn to play the violin?” Claire asked.

“No!” Charlie said adamantly. Horrified, he turned and walked away, as if the merest hint of an interest in music would condemn him to years of lessons. Claire loved him so.

When they reached the corner of Bedford, they turned right. A
perfect afternoon, Claire thought as they continued along past the town houses and small tenements. The bright sun melted the snow at the curbs, creating a dirty gray slush—but a thin coating of clear water flowed from beneath the curbside slush and seeped over the street to make it shimmer and glow.

Seeing the light upon the street made her want to set up her darkroom again, to create prints that captured that shimmer of sunlight. After the ransacking of her home, the cleaning crew sent by Miss Thrasher had done a terrific job, but a cleaning crew couldn’t put everything back to the way it had been. Now, finally, she was feeling ready to make things whole again.

Claire and Charlie reached the corner of Grove Street and turned onto their block.

Charlie saw him first.

J
amie had a key, but he didn’t feel he had a right simply to unlock the door and let himself in. He’d been out of the country for almost three months. He hadn’t seen Claire in six months. He’d had an affair with a woman who died beside him. He’d seen things he could never bring himself to recount. He didn’t doubt for a moment that Claire waited for him. And yet, he felt he needed to be invited in. He knocked on the door. He heard Lucas barking within, in greeting or warning, he couldn’t tell.

No one answered his knock. So he sat down on the cleanly shoveled front stoop. Dirty snow was piled along the sidewalk. It was the weekend. Maybe she’d turn up. Even if she didn’t, he was content to stay here for a while and get his bearings. There wasn’t really anywhere else he wanted to go. His residence rooms awaited at the Institute, so he had a place to sleep, making him luckier than most, in view of where he’d come from. The day was cold, but he wore the army-issue winter coat he’d worn through North Africa, where the days were hot and the nights frigidly cold. So he was lucky on that score, too: he had a warm winter coat.

The clinical trials in North Africa were complete, because the penicillin supply was used up. Rather than send more, Dr. Bush had opted for the next trials to take place in the Pacific, under conditions of jungle warfare. Nick would be in charge. Jamie would consult with Nick for the next several weeks, then Nick would travel to San Francisco and ship out to the battle islands of the Pacific. As Jamie was packing up in North Africa, his main concern had been for Lofgren. He’d tried to get him into a training program for physical therapy, or at least into a supervisory position, but North Africa was seeing fierce fighting now and medics were needed at the front, so that’s where Lofgren was sent. Jamie had given the young man his address and asked him to be in touch, in that probably far distant day when the war would be over.

Jamie had written to Claire a half-dozen times, although he didn’t know if she’d received the letters. He’d received none in return, which might mean only that the military mail service hadn’t been able to find him.

Maybe if he’d been in North Africa longer, he would have become accustomed to broken bodies that had once been filled with the strength and glory of life. Recently, he’d been having memory flashes of the bombing raid. He wished he still had amnesia, a lesser evil than the memories: the screaming, the begging, the moaning, maybe his own. The rusty smell of blood. The taste of explosives.

He propped his duffel against the wrought-iron banister and rested his head against it. At least his headaches were gone. His hearing seemed normal. His ability to concentrate was gradually returning. Sometimes his shoulder ached, especially when he carried his duffel. He couldn’t believe how tired he still was, even after all the sleeping he did on the boat. He didn’t even go up to the deck when he heard the others cheering at their first sight of the New York skyline and the Statue of Liberty.

Lucas had stopped barking. The dog was probably curled up asleep just inside the door. Waiting for Claire, just like he was.

C
laire stood where she was, immobile. In the past months, she’d learned to let the events of the world wash over her. Amid the chaos and confusion, she could control so little beyond herself and Charlie. Her dear Jamie…the shock of understanding that he must be dead. The shock of the first letter showing he was alive. His presence now. One shock after another, even as she knew this was the story of families all through the neighborhood and the city and the nation. Still, these were her shocks. She’d received two letters from him, each of which she answered. Then, nothing. Now he was sitting on her front stoop. This was the way it was, this had been written about in the newspapers: moms and girlfriends and wives looked up from their cooking or reading or sewing, or returned home from their war jobs in the factories, and there, standing before them, were the men they loved.

She moved slowly toward him.

Charlie was prodding Jamie to get up. “Why are you sitting outside in the cold, Uncle Jamie? Where’s Lucas? Don’t you have a key? I thought you had a key.” Charlie didn’t stop for answers to these questions. “Did you lose your key?
I
have a key! My mom told me you weren’t dead anymore.”

Now the door was open, and Lucas burst out, jumping on Jamie.

“What ship were you on, Uncle Jamie? Where were you in Africa exactly? Will you show me on the map? Did you see my father? What kind of planes did you see? Did you see
Germans
?”

Now Claire stood at the bottom of the front stoop. Jamie, Charlie, and Lucas were on top of the stoop, five steps above her. Claire was grateful for Charlie’s hundred questions: the grilling filled the space between herself and Jamie, letting her gradually take him in, feel his presence, understand and sense him once more, before they were alone together.

Jamie turned to her. “Hello, Claire.” He thought she looked older. Worn down. Her eyes not as bright as he remembered. He didn’t want
to think about how he looked; he was certain he looked awful. “Did you receive my letters?”

“Two letters.” He looked too thin. His skin was gray.

“I wrote a lot more than that.”

“I’m sure they’ll turn up eventually.” She gave him a tentative, encouraging smile.

C
harlie had an overnight birthday party to attend at his friend Joey’s, over on Bank Street. Claire and Jamie walked with him to the party at 6:00
PM
, along Grove to Bleecker, and Bleecker to Bank. Jamie was glad to be among the oddly intersecting streets, the small cafés and bookshops, the cobblestones, and hundred-year-old town houses.

“Bye, Mom. Bye, Uncle Jamie.”

Charlie bounded up the steps to the vestibule of the building where Joey and his family lived, a tenement on Bank Street between Waverly and West Fourth. Joey and Ben waited at the doorway, the steep, dimly lit stairway up to Joey’s fifth-floor apartment visible behind them.

“See you tomorrow,” Claire called.

“Have fun,” Jamie said.

“My Uncle Jamie just came home from North Africa!” they heard Charlie telling his friends. “He was bombed by the
Germans
!” Suitably impressed, Joey and Ben peered out the doorway at Jamie.

Claire took Jamie’s arm. “I thought we’d have dinner tonight at the Charles,” she said. “Over on Sixth between Tenth and Eleventh. That’s the elegant French restaurant that just happens to share its name with my son. My treat. In honor of your return.”

She pressed to go out for dinner before he could ask to stay home, because she felt nervous to be alone with him. She wanted to talk to him, but she didn’t know what to say or where to begin. After imagining this moment so many times, she was now at a loss. Nothing seemed adequate. Her everyday concerns seemed petty compared to
what he must have seen and experienced. And what about Nick? She had resolved to keep that from him. But what if Nick himself said something to Jamie about what had happened in Boston? That would be worse.

For his part, Jamie felt months of tension slowly ease in her presence. They walked on Bank toward Greenwich Avenue. He relived the walk they’d taken through these Village streets on the night of their first dinner together, over a year ago. Already then, he was in love with her. Now, as they crossed Seventh and walked east on Eleventh Street, the slush turned slippery at the crosswalks. The temperature was dropping. How could he ever tell her about Alice, and Pete? About Harry Lofgren? Or his patients? About the whitewashed colonial buildings and the palm trees and the breezes from the Mediterranean? He couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t tell anyone. The memories were too painful. Best to start afresh, telling nothing. Asking nothing. Simply grateful to have made it back, to pick up where they’d left off.

Turning right on Sixth Avenue, Claire looked up at Jamie with a measure of anxiety and found him scrutinizing her. He stopped walking. He kissed her on the lips.

The future would take care of itself, she decided, returning his kiss. No confessions were needed. For tonight, at least, the future would take care of itself.

1
:00
AM
. At home. Claire drifted in and out of sleep. They lay pressed together with their faces so close that she felt the warmth of his exhalations on her chin. She breathed the very air that he breathed. As she felt herself settle deeper into sleep, she turned. She faced away from him, his arms wrapped around her, their legs intertwined. Having him here, she felt safer than she had in months. She positioned his hand on her breast. He rested his face on the back of her head.

He cradled her against his body, his chest against her back, the now-soft part of him pressed against her flank, legs against legs.

This was love, he thought as his body and his usually teeming mind eased into sleep. The thought seemed like a revelation to him. Here was love.

A
t 3:10
PM
on the third Thursday in February 1943, Charlie was on his way home from school when he felt a catch in his throat. The week had been strangely warm, a February thaw, his grandfather called it. Charlie decided to take the long route home, via Christopher Street, with its small shops and groceries. He had some change in his pocket, but he didn’t have enough for the candy at Li-Lac. Li-Lac was expensive. He stood at the window, peering in at the candies he would have bought if he’d had a few more pennies, and then he turned toward home.

On Bedford Street, purple crocuses were pushing out from the dirty snow in one of the window boxes. The houses on this block of Bedford were older than his house, almost as old as the Revolutionary War, and their sidewalks and front stoops tilted at odd angles. Halfway down the block, a black-capped chickadee poked around in a flower pot amid the curled and dried remains of a geranium. The chickadee found a treat and flew off happy, with a sharp beat of its wings. Then without warning Charlie felt the catch in his throat. He expected to feel pain, but he didn’t.
Catch
exactly described what he felt.

At dinner, he had trouble swallowing. He concentrated on the mashed potatoes. His mother was away, doing a story in Vermont about cows. She’d be home in a few days. Uncle Jamie arrived in time for dessert, homemade applesauce with raisins. After dinner, they
played chess. Because of Uncle Jamie being with him, Charlie completely forgot that he was having trouble swallowing. But later, when he was lying in bed after turning off his light, it came back to him. He realized also that his eyes and nose were watery, and his muscles ached. He had a headache behind his eyes.

He didn’t want to tell Maritza that he was sick. If he did, she’d put hot mustard plasters on his chest and make him go to school wearing garlic or a ball of camphor in a bag around his neck. Even though he wasn’t the only sick kid at school with garlic or camphor, and although maybe it even helped, he hated it. When he had scarlet fever, she put onions on the windowsill. Thank goodness no one had been allowed to visit him.

The next morning, his head felt too heavy to lift from the pillow. When he didn’t go down to breakfast, Maritza came upstairs to find him.

“Where are you, Charlie?” As usual, she wore a flower-printed skirt and blouse with patterns that didn’t match. She made all her clothes, and some of his, in her sewing room downstairs. She filled the doorway. Her white hair was covered with a blue scarf, and the blue matched her eyes. Her face was round and wrinkled, her voice gentle.

“Still in your bed?”

He nodded. She pressed the back of her wrist against his forehead and made a noise like “stzaw.” She kissed his forehead to confirm her findings. “Poor baby.”

He didn’t like being called a baby, but when he was ill, he did enjoy being treated like one, so he felt resentment and appreciation simultaneously.

“Stay.” She left him. Sometimes she spoke to him as if he were Lucas. Today he didn’t object.

Soon he heard Jamie’s step on the stairs. When he arrived at Charlie’s door, his hair was still wet from his shower. He was dressed in his uniform. He carried the medical bag he stored, locked (as Charlie and
Ben had discovered one afternoon when they tried to open it), in the corner of Charlie’s mother’s bedroom closet. “So, young man. Maritza tells me you have a fever. How do you feel?”

“My legs ache. And my back. My nose is stuffed up. My eyes are watery. And I can’t lift my head.”

“Interesting.” Jamie examined him. Charlie noticed that Jamie blew on the stethoscope to make it warm before listening to his heart. Dr. Crawford never did that, and the stethoscope got icy cold in the winter. “Do you have a headache?”

“Sort of. Behind my eyes.”

“Sore throat?”

“Mmm…no, I guess not.”

“Details, please.”

“Kind of uncomfortable. But not sore.”

Jamie examined his throat, felt for swollen glands, looked in his ears. He took his temperature. “It’s 103.2. Impressive.” He cleaned the thermometer, put everything away, snapped his black bag shut. “Well, my Charlie, you have influenza. Not much to be done about that, except spend the week in bed. Think you can manage to get through a week in bed?”

Charlie considered this. He’d miss shop, which he really liked, especially now that his class was making models of German and Japanese planes for the air force recruits to study. But he had a spelling test on Monday and this would be a good excuse to get out of it. “Okay.”

“Good.” Jamie gave him a long slow smile that said, don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right, being sick can be fun if you approach it the right way. “I’ll tell Maritza to look after you.”

“Tell her no mustard plasters or garlic.” The strength of his protest brought Charlie up to sitting. “And no camphor.” He fell back from the effort. “Please, no camphor.”

“Maritza has her own tried-and-true way of doing things, and far
be it from me to interfere. Where she grew up, they didn’t have doctors or proper medicines. Apparently garlic, hot mustard, and camphor did just as well. A fact I try to bear in mind every day.”

C
laire returned from Vermont on Saturday to find Charlie still running a fever above 103. She told Mack that she needed to take some time off to stay home with her son. Reading aloud to Charlie, playing card games with him…the days passed quickly. Jamie was in Washington, hoping to return soon. Maritza brought Charlie juice and made him soup.

At first, his illness followed the expected pattern. For two days he felt worse, then for one day he felt truly terrible, and then gradually he began to improve. His fever receded. Claire consented to the removal of the mustard plaster and the bag of garlic. She’d already gotten rid of the camphor, which, she’d told him secretly, she didn’t like, either. Soon he could sit up in bed and focus his eyes. He regretted admitting this when Claire had him start the homework his teacher had dropped off.

On the following Saturday at 10:20
AM
, the expected pattern fell away. Claire always remembered that moment, the dividing line between before and after, although there must have been signs, if only she’d recognized them. Looking forward to a midmorning cup of tea, she happened to glance at the clock on Charlie’s bedside table. 10:20
AM
. Charlie began to cough, a raw, brutal cough that sounded like it would burst open his insides. When the cough finally calmed, he wheezed to catch his breath.

Within a few hours, his fever spiked to 104. With Jamie still in Washington, Claire phoned Dr. Crawford. At six, he arrived. Dr. Crawford’s appearance always surprised Claire. He was built like a jockey, small, thin, soft-spoken, with a hard edge of determination. Dr. Crawford had announced his retirement last year, but with younger doctors heading to the war zones, he kept up his practice in their ab
sence. Dr. Crawford had always been generous to Claire and Charlie, and Claire regretted the three flights of stairs he had to climb to reach her son.

Dr. Crawford listened to Charlie’s chest, asking him to breathe in and out, in and out, until another coughing fit interfered. Claire wished she could plug her ears to block out the sound of his coughing. Stethoscope held upright, Dr. Crawford waited patiently. When the coughing stopped, he continued the examination. He tapped between Charlie’s ribs and listened carefully for reverberations. He pressed the side of his hand against Charlie’s ribs and asked Charlie to breathe. He was testing for fluid in the lungs.

“Step into the hall with me for a minute, would you, Mrs. Shipley,” Dr. Crawford said calmly, as if nothing were amiss. He walked as far as the guest room, and she followed. He took a deep breath, and gave a long exhalation. “Pneumonia,” he said. “In both lungs.”

The word hit Claire like a punch. Pneumonia could be fatal. Often it was. The Old Man’s Friend, it was called, because it brought death. It was never called the Young Man’s Friend. Never the Child’s Friend. “Should we take him to the hospital?” Claire asked.

“We can take good care of him here,” Dr. Crawford reassured her.

“Better, in fact.”

That’s what Emily’s doctor had said. Those words exactly.
We can take good care of her here. Better
,
in fact.

“I’ll arrange for a nurse. I assume that’s all right? Mrs. Shipley? Claire?” He demanded her attention, when her daughter filled her thoughts: Emily’s eyes, hair, cheeks, Emily running, jumping, sleeping, all of this pressing into Claire’s mind.

“Yes. A nurse. Yes.” Claire wouldn’t ask questions about details and cost. If Dr. Crawford wanted Charlie to have a nurse, he would have one. Claire would ask her father to pay. She wouldn’t stand on pride now. Her mother had paid for Emily’s nurse.

For the next days, Claire entered a kind of suspended animation as
Charlie’s condition became worse and worse. He became the beginning and end of her world. Everything else dropped away.

Dr. Crawford treated Charlie with sulfapyridine, but days passed, and it had no effect. He drew a blood sample, took it to St. Vincent’s Hospital for testing, and returned the next day with a serum treatment.

The serum, too, had no effect.

Claire tried to reach Jamie, but Vannevar Bush’s secretary said he was visiting research labs in the South. She didn’t know his exact schedule, but would try to get a message to him.

Claire sent a telegram to her father, who was in Cincinnati on a business trip.
Charlie has pneumonia
, the telegram said. Rutherford cut short his trip and returned home. He was shocked when he saw Claire on the stairs, her hair uncombed, her clothes unkempt. He was even more shocked when he saw Charlie. He’d visited just six days before, when Charlie had appeared to be on the mend. They’d played tic-tac-toe. Now Charlie was lying upon three pillows, propped up to keep fluid from accumulating in his lungs. His skin was white. Deathly white, as the saying went. His fingernails were a strange bluish black. Rutherford glanced sharply at Claire and was about to ask her if she’d noticed the color, but she looked dazed.

“You should lie down, Claire,” he said.

“I’ve been telling her to lie down all day,” said the officious nurse, coming into the room with warm washcloths to bathe Charlie. “I’ll need to ask you to leave now, so I can wash the patient.”

“What is your name, nurse?”

This question seemed to offend her. “My name, sir, is Cynthia Burns, but you may call me Nurse Burns.”

“Very good, Nurse Burns. You can bathe my grandson later,” Rutherford ordered.

“I beg your pardon—”

“Later.” He dismissed her with a wave of his hand.

With an exaggerated sniff and toss of her head, as if making a record of her displeasure in case her abilities were ever challenged, the nurse left them.

Rutherford turned to his daughter. “Claire, I want you to lie down.”

Claire dutifully followed her father’s instruction, acquiescing without a word, retreating to her bedroom on the second floor.

Rutherford watched her go. How had the situation reached this awful state, he wondered. Someone needed to take charge here. And yet, as he sat in the rocking chair at the foot of Charlie’s bed and watched the boy thrashing and twitching, as he listened to Charlie’s wheezy, rattling breathing that came so very fast, Rutherford understood that this course of events was beyond anyone’s control. No one could take charge, because no one could control what was unfolding within Charlie’s body.

But it was impossible that his grandson would die. Rutherford wouldn’t allow it.

He placed his hand on Charlie’s ankle. He rubbed the boy’s foot.

Without speaking, Charlie moved his foot toward Rutherford’s hand, to tell him he liked it, to ask him to keep doing it. Rutherford felt tears coming. He fought against them, because he wouldn’t allow Charlie to see or hear him cry.

P
enicillin. Obviously. It wouldn’t have worked against the influenza (caused by a virus, not bacteria), but against the pneumonia that had now set in, it
would
work. Rutherford should have thought of this the moment he received Claire’s telegram. His fears had overwhelmed him. And he wasn’t accustomed to this option. Who was? Certainly not old Dr. Crawford. Penicillin was new, but it was there waiting, and it would cure Charlie.

Bursting with his idea, he called to the nurse, who’d been sitting in the guest room reading the
Daily News
. “Watch the boy.” He went
downstairs, and found the phone extension in Claire’s study. He sank into her desk chair with a weary thud. Stanton, wherever he was, still hadn’t been in touch with Claire, so Rutherford had to act on his own. First he called his office, demanded of his secretary a list of phone numbers that he then wrote down in his meticulous print on the small pad he always kept in his jacket pocket.

“What are you doing?” Claire said behind him. She swayed on her feet. She’d been in a deep sleep and had been woken by her father’s voice on the phone.

“Saving Charlie.” His first call was to his own company, Hanover. He asked for the chief penicillin researcher: “Get me Dr. Bryant,” he said to the switchboard operator.

“May I ask who’s calling?” she said.

“Edward Rutherford. His boss.”

“I’ll connect you, sir.”

Rutherford waited what seemed like a long time. Finally: “Bryant here.”

“Dr. Bryant, my grandson has pneumonia.” Hit him hard and fast, Rutherford decided, before doubts set in. “I need you to pack up some penicillin for him. I’ll send a messenger for it in an hour.”

A pause. Then Bryant spoke in a whisper: “I don’t have any stockpiled, Mr. Rutherford. Only enough for the current experiments.” He stopped. “I’m talking from the phone in the lab, sir. The MPs are patrolling.” Pause. Rutherford could imagine the scene, which he’d witnessed often enough: the young MPs following their orders and standing over the penicillin scientists one by one. “Okay, they’re on the other side. Look, I could start putting something aside. A small amount tonight, a little more tomorrow. Maybe by the end of the week there’d be enough to start treatment…”