Radiance (10 page)

She turned down the chicken, then excused herself and went down the hallway to the bedroom. She stood for a moment listening: no typing, or scribbling of pencil on paper; but there was not, on the other hand, that most depressing of sounds, the shifting of bed springs. She knocked lightly, then went through the bedroom to Walter’s study. He had already changed into a tartan shirt and his pale blue cardigan, and he was leaning back on his chair. The metal ashtray on the desk was full to overflowing with the butts of rolled cigarettes. Sometimes when he ran out of tobacco, he smoked them. She felt a dry despair looking at him.

“Dinner is ready. Please come. And please behave.”

“Behave like what?”

“Like someone nice. Like my husband.”

He laughed.

Daisy was prickly with anxiety. “Won’t you be a nice host?” she said, hating the tone in her voice. She was hearing the hum of dark wings: one part of her was standing in the doorway, pleading; the other part was watching to see if he could, in fact, turn from her, and from the girl in the kitchen, resume the sorting of papers and clipping of articles that constituted so much of his writing life. They were standing on a bridge, and if he turned away she would know who Walter was once and for all. She would see his shrunken heart.

He leaned back in his chair, bounced a couple of times.

“Don’t do that.”

He lit a cigarette, blew out. He never smoked with his left hand; it drew attention to the stub.

“She’s out there now. I’m sure she finds this very strange.”

“Go then.”

“I don’t see how you can object to what we’re doing. You’re the one who’s always been so sold on brotherhood.”

He rested the tips of his fingers on the desktop, and Daisy thought he was going to push himself up and walk out through the front door, along Linden Street, towards Willard’s Creek. Gone. Instead, he gave her one of his looks—as though if she didn’t know what was happening, he wasn’t going to explain: she’d just have to figure things out for herself.

“Don’t give me this you-know-better-than-me crap,” she said.

“I’m not giving you anything,” he said. They both stared at the words, and then she went to take the biscuits out. They were hard. Keiko had brought out one of the magazines from the bedroom and was leafing through it at the table. She looked up briefly, then returned to the advertisement she was examining—a page-wide spread for Lux soap. A woman who looked like Myrna Loy floated like a genie above a pile of laundry.

Daisy went back to Walter’s office. He was staring at the wall, leaning back in his chair. She resisted an urge to reach out and
straighten it. After a second he let his weight bring the front legs forward. He stubbed his cigarette out, then picked up the ashtray and dumped it into the trash can under his desk, banging it twice to dislodge all the butts. A gum of tobacco held them to the bottom.

“You asked me why I don’t like the Project, and I’m going to tell you, so you know, and you won’t ask me again. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Well, here it is: I don’t like using people as guinea pigs.”

“But how am I doing that?”

“Maybe you’re not.”

“I’m not.”

“You said I could finish. Maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re as innocent as spring.” Daisy saw something she wasn’t expecting: warmth in his blue eyes. “But I guess you’d say I have a new principle, Daisy, something I picked up after a few years bashing my head against a wall—and here’s what it is. You don’t use people to make political points.”

“We’re not.”

He smiled, an upturn of the lips with no mirth in it at all. “You’re not,” he said. “But mark my words, they are. Atchity is. Ray Carney is. Your dear friend Irene Day certainly is: she’s incapable of doing otherwise.” He stood up. “But that’s the Project. And as you point out, she’s here now. So I’ll be civil, and come for dinner, because that’s what you want. That is what you want, isn’t it?”

Daisy nodded, watching his eyes.

“Just don’t fool yourself, Daisy,” he said. “You’re not like them—I’d never think that of you, but you and I both know why you’re doing this.”

“We do?”

“Sure we do. Sure we do.” Then he did something surprising. He reached out to touch her hair. Daisy pulled back as though he meant to hurt her. “You’ve got a bit of ash there,” was all he said.

The feel of his hand on her hair made her want to cry. “I didn’t really mean to badger you,” she said.

“Yes you did. But it doesn’t matter.”

“I was trying to be mean.”

“I probably deserved it.”

“Oh, Walter!”

He picked out the last bit of ash from her hair, and they went together into the kitchen.

H
ER DREAM IS REOCCURRING
. There is a train. Faces she cannot see. She travels towards the city, which is laid out on a grid, dark and light, the lit parts pulsing, the dark places thick and porous and mottled, as though saturated in syrup. Always the city comes to her like this—taking the form of a cross, with the northern edges, near Harlem, touched by snow; the Lower East Side filled with boxy rooming houses, where sometimes for hours, for days, she tries to find a place to live; the heavy mass of West Side brownstones weighs the city in place.

In her dream, children of ten, eleven, twelve run beside the train. She asks, first politely, but then with growing concern, if anybody has seen the conductor. She thinks he ought to stop for the children. It is unsafe, their bare feet close to the tracks, some of them running, jumping up, thumping their hands against the glass. It is a game at first, a child’s game, though sometimes right from the beginning it is more serious: the children are sick, and in increasing desperation Daisy turns from passenger to passenger, trying to find someone who can share her alarm. Her
voice comes from far away, or she has forgotten how to form words, or she describes what is happening and everybody turns to the window, but nobody can see the silent figures but Daisy herself. They are pale and skinny and green, their palms against the window as translucent as the inner sheaths of grass blades.

Once, just after she and Walter had moved to Riverside Meadows, she stayed up late, listening to the testimony of Treblinka survivors on the radio. That night she woke standing on the bed, trying to keep the ceiling from caving in. Walter took her hands from the ceiling, coaxing her to lie back down. That time there had been a long line of people waiting for the train: children and mothers. They rode towards the city for hours, everyone aboard, but at one steep curve the train ran off the rails and turned upside down, which was why she was pushing at the ceiling. She was trying to get out.

The testimony she had heard on the radio had been about children in the Warsaw ghetto. The SS stopped them on the street and offered them candy—
Close your eyes, open your mouths.
When each child did as he was told, opening wide, the SS officers had inserted their pistols and pulled the trigger.

After each nightmare Daisy reached for Walter. As she woke she knew, as she didn’t at other times, that he understood her grief, its thickness and heat, the emptiness at her core. But when she woke up on the night of Keiko’s arrival, Walter wasn’t there.

She sat up. Daisy heard a door softly close. Now that was strange. It was the spare room door, Keiko’s bedroom: she could tell by the way it brushed the carpeting. She heard the bathroom door close, the flushing of the toilet, then the shuffle of Walter’s slippers down the hall. The bedroom door opened and clicked softly behind him. He pulled back the covers.

“What’s up?” Her voice came out surprisingly loud.

“Nothing.”

“Where were you?”

“Kitchen.”

“But why?”

“I heard Keiko.”

“Oh—you should have woken me. What happened?”

“She got up to go to the bathroom, and then I saw her bedroom light was on. I figured she might be hungry.”

“But she ate dinner.”

“Just a thought. I offered to fry her an egg sandwich.”

“But she’d eaten.”

“Look—I thought she might be hungry again. Anyway, she wasn’t.”

A pause.

“That was good of you.”

“Do you think so? I was hungry myself.”

“But the dinner was good, didn’t you think? I mean, she seemed to like it.”

“Really good, Daisy.”

“I think this is going to work out.” Daisy said this quietly.

He took his time before answering.

“Could be,” was what he said.

T
HE REMAINDER OF
A
PRIL
was a whirl of activities, or so it felt to Daisy. It was a swirl of busyness, a veritable blitzkrieg of appointments and outings, sightseeing and lunches. This was a campaign, after all, albeit one for peace, and Irene Day and Bertha Atchity and the other Hiroshima Project organizers
intended to carry it out with the same unstinting effort with which they had organized rubber and tin drives during the war.

Keiko was already something of a celebrity: her picture getting off the plane—taken by that insistent photographer from the wire services—had appeared in almost every newspaper in America; and so the Project did its best to make sure that she got celebrity treatment.

Irene, Bertha and Daisy whisked Keiko here and whisked her there—to a cocktail party at the Japanese Cultural Association, to dinner at the Hawaiian room of the Hotel Lexington, where girls in grass skirts served them drinks in coconut shells. She lunched at the Rockefeller Center roof gardens, paddle-wheeled to Coney Island and shopped at Bergdorf’s, where Daisy felt moved to spend far more than she could afford on a lambswool scarf for the girl. Keiko thanked her nicely, yet Daisy felt in retrospect that there had been something stilted in her response. Something ungenerous. Her thank you passed every rule of etiquette, but it lacked the spark at the core. Later, lying in bed, Daisy even wondered if perhaps Keiko had wanted the plum-coloured cashmere scarf she had been fingering. But surely she knew how much cashmere cost! Irene could afford it, and Bertha Atchity probably had a sweater set for every day of the week, but Daisy did not own a single article of cashmere.

The mystery of Keiko’s response was solved the next morning when she appeared in the kitchen with a package wrapped in violet tissue paper, held in place by a bit of ornamental straw. Inside was a handkerchief embroidered with a small pink rose. Daisy exclaimed over it, while Keiko gave a closed-lipped smile: clearly, her sense of obligation had been removed.

As promised, Keiko was introduced to Eleanor Roosevelt in her offices at the newly opened United Nations building, where
Mrs. Roosevelt was the head of the International Human Rights Commission. It was an event to which Daisy was not invited. She understood why that had to be—not everybody could squeeze into Eleanor Roosevelt’s small office—but still she was hugely disappointed. It didn’t bother her that Keiko got to meet Mrs. Roosevelt (though she clearly had no idea who she was), but it did irritate Daisy to see Irene waltz across the United Nations plaza wearing a black beret and elbow-length gloves, looking like a French intellectual. The only thing missing was a copy of
Being and Nothingness
tucked under her arm. “I’ll just scoop Keiko up and whisk her away,” she said, and while Irene scooped and whisked, Daisy walked to Penn Station and took the train back to Riverside Meadows.

Keiko heard the Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, rode a Circle Line steamer around Manhattan and saw Frank Sinatra on stage at Radio City Music Hall. (What she made of the besotted teens in saddle shoes and rolled-up jeans, screaming
Frankie, Frankie
and bursting into tears, Daisy could not say.) Keiko tasted borscht at the Russian Tea Room and rode through Central Park in a carriage with yellow spokes. She raised her eyes to look, with polite interest, at the terror of Picasso’s
Guernica,
which filled an entire wall of the new Museum of Modern Art. Daisy felt a thrilled horror as the picture sank in to the full degree, and she waited, holding her breath, but she needn’t have worried. After a minute or so, Keiko merely pulled down her glove to look at her small, blue-strapped watch. The crying mothers hadn’t swooped from the wall, wailing and screaming; the multi-eyed babies hadn’t caused her to flee in tears. She listened carefully as Bertha explained that the fat fingers and the many-sided faces were the Parisian method of showing emotions simultaneously. The girl was seamless. She gave nothing away.

They ended up seeing sights that Daisy hadn’t seen in years, not since arriving in the city a decade before, to take her stenographer’s job at Porter and Peck. Only once, for instance, had Daisy gone up the Empire State Building. Standing on the observation deck, Daisy wondered what it must be like for Keiko to look across the whole city, seeing both the Hudson and the East rivers, and the Statue of Liberty, and so many bridges, not to mention the black and gold and silver spires of downtown, the Singer Building and the Woolworth Building and others Daisy couldn’t name, rising up all around them like enormous cliff faces. While every other major city in the world had been smashed up by the war—Berlin, Paris, London, Tokyo (and Hiroshima, of course)—here was New York, looking so finished, so monumental. Far beneath them, gliding soundlessly past the Flatiron Building, candy-coloured cars glinted in the afternoon sun.

Who is she, who is she, who is she? Daisy wondered as Keiko stood with one gloved hand on the limestone balustrade, her eyes raised politely to view the skyline. After a long moment, Daisy could bear it no longer.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“It is very nice.” Keiko met Daisy’s question with the usual cool façade, the blank look. Though it wasn’t blank, not really. Daisy thought she could detect the tiniest amount of alarm on the girl’s face, as though, quicker than quick, some deeper aspect of herself scurried for cover. Like a spider freezing in someone’s shadow, the best disguise being to remain still. An idea, and not a bad one—Daisy had felt this way herself.

What did Keiko think of the Empire State Building, with its signage indicating
The Longest Uninterrupted Elevator Ride above the Earth’s Surface?
What did she think of the gargoyles of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, each dangling a massive street lamp
in its teeth? Or the castle bulk of the Plaza, the Italian grocery stores brimming with wine barrels and pecorino cheese rounds? What did she think of the deep whistle of the
Queen Mary,
heard on every street corner, as it slid from its berth on the Hudson? What did she think of the lions guarding the library, the Camel cigarette man blowing fifteen-foot smoke rings across Times Square? Was she astounded? Was she glad to see it all? Or did she wish everyone dead?