Radiance (2 page)

“Miss Kitigawa—we need a girl who is prepared to speak to the American people.”

“I can describe what I remember.”

“And in return we will remove the scar. I believe we can. It looks
eminently
removable.”

They asked her more questions. They took notes. She told them things she had not spoken, ever. She told them about Grandfather, and Mama, and Mr. Takahura, all dead. She didn’t tell them everything, but it was enough.

After the interview Keiko returned to her surrogate family: to her uncle who did not love her; to her aunt who was jealous of her. She told them that she had been chosen to go to America. Yoshiko decided to make a fuss. “Keiko-chan—when will we see you again?”

“Perhaps never,” Keiko said coldly—thinking this thought for the first time, realizing how much she wanted it to be true.

Now she knelt before the shelf of her ancestors. This was the last chance she would have, perhaps ever, to kneel like this. She knew that the dead were blaming her, that her mother was pinching her lips together, even as she offered up every excuse for her daughter’s conduct. It was wrong to hold on to life as she had. She knew this.

She prayed for a long time, then stood up, put out the wick and turned her back on the shelf that held her mother’s spirit.

Keiko stared from her airplane window at the frozen sea, its tiny, immaculate pattern of waves. For a while, she thought, she would not be herself. She would have to be what she had said she was to the doctors; to the kind Mr. Atchity, the head of the Hiroshima Project; to the handsome but foul-smelling Dr. Carney, with his plump, hairy knuckles. She would have to be everything they wanted her to be. She would have to be nothing. But that was all right. She had received the highest marks ever on graduating from the Hiroshima Prefectural High School. She was good at what she attempted. Now she would hold her
breath and count on her instinct—that instinct she must always ask forgiveness for—to tell her how to survive.

That was Keiko on the day of her arrival.

T
HEY DROVE FROM THE AIRPORT
in Daisy’s sky-blue Chevrolet, Keiko up front, Irene in the back, leaning forward to talk. Keiko sat up very straight in a dress with layers of tulle beneath black and mauve seersucker. It crunched when she moved. She wore the hat, the gloves. In the trunk was her small but impressive collection of luggage. Daisy had imagined that the girl might arrive with a straw basket, a birdcage and a beaten leather trunk—immigrant luggage—but she came with a pearly set of matching Samsonite cases, a gift from the Japanese end of the Hiroshima Project. Daisy herself owned nothing so chic in the way of luggage.

How strange things must have looked to the girl, Daisy thought. Everything so glancing and bright, yet overprinted by extreme fatigue. Irene pointed out some Jersey cows in a field, their hindquarters bony, and Daisy assured Keiko that most American cows were fatter, a patriotism that embarrassed her immediately; this was the sort of thing that Walter, her husband, always mocked her for.

How unpleasant, too, to have to keep answering Irene’s questions, what an effort to draw aside, with each response, the curtain of exhaustion. That was why she chose to say little, beyond introducing herself as Keiko’s host. “Homestay mother” was how the Project liked to describe her. Meanwhile, Irene
ploughed ahead with her welcoming comments, pointing out the shape of the city in the distance, explaining the next week’s worth of activities.

“Eleanor Roosevelt. You know who she is, of course. Remarkable woman. She wants to meet you. I’ve made those arrangements, but not tonight. Tonight there’s to be a party at my apartment, just the editors of the
Sunday Review,
and Daisy Lawrence here—you’ll be staying with her next week, right after your first operation. Oh, and Dr. Carney will be at the party, of course—you’ve met him—and Dean Atchity, our fearless leader.” She continued relentlessly. It seemed to Daisy that if Irene hesitated, even for a second, she would be forced to take in the reality: this quiet girl in the front seat who, turning slightly to acknowledge Irene, had no choice but to present her left cheek, with its massive atomic scar.

The only reason Daisy was in the car at that moment, hurtling towards the overcast city, doing something so bright and shocking that she felt dizzy, the only reason she was there at all was because she had run into Irene on Fifth Avenue five months before.

“Daisy Parker—not really!” Irene had leaned forward and kissed Daisy’s cheek, a dry, papery touch that for some reason had made Daisy feel homesick.

“You haven’t changed at all,” Daisy said.

“Oh, I’m infinitely older. Ancient. But look at you.
Margaret Mary Parker.
We used to call you that, didn’t we?”

Yes, her college friends had, spurred on by Irene, who had delighted in the arcane sound of Daisy’s full name—the toning of church bells, the smell of incense. Daisy’s gentle father had chosen it in a moment of religious enthusiasm following her birth, one of the rare moments he had put his foot down; Daisy’s mother had shortened it immediately. Only one or two of the
sisters at Sacred Heart, where Daisy went to school, had insisted on using the full name—and Irene, of course.

They had been quite close in college and then fallen away during the long war years, when they had little in common. Daisy had become a stenographer at Porter and Peck, while Irene had married and divorced twice. The second marriage had ended disastrously two weeks into the honeymoon. “He kept making passes at the ship’s steward,” Irene had told Daisy. “Imagine my discomfort. I had to bunk in with friends to give them time to be alone.” Sometimes Irene made her life seem like a series of glittering events that had happened to somebody else.

“But look at you, Daisy,” she said. “The suburbs must suit you. And how’s that dishy husband of yours? Still writing?”

When Daisy mentioned that Walter was writing for radio, Irene rolled the word around in her mouth, as though to detect, by mouth feel, whether it was glamorous or outdated. “How wonderful! Shows I know?”

Daisy mentioned a few.

“A clever man, your Walter. And of course I think
Fall from Grace
has a seminal—absolutely seminal—place in American theatre.”
Fall from Grace
was the play Walter had written many years before, before Daisy had met him. It had had a decent run off Broadway; one reviewer had even said that it was as good as something Clifford Odets would write. Then the war had come, and Walter had broken ties with all his old progressive friends, and come back changed. He had married Daisy, moved to the suburbs and written nothing important since.

“I was sorry—” Irene stopped.

Daisy had forgotten this side of Irene: how she could lower her voice, look you in the eyes, come gently to the point. In college, Daisy had sometimes felt that Irene represented the exact centre of the universe.

“Thank you.”

“You told me about it last time we met. I wondered, you know, if I had listened properly.”

They were talking about Daisy’s miscarriage, her first one (Irene didn’t know about the second), and the discussion they had had about it almost three years before. No, Irene had not listened properly. She had given herself over to the subject with rapt enthusiasm, offering condolences, providing theories—too many theories, some of them Freudian—about Daisy’s depression.

“You were fine. You were wonderful.”

Then all at once Irene looked sharply at Daisy, really looked at her. She took her by the arm, pinching her skin—such was her enthusiasm. “I have an idea,” she had said. They walked up Forty-second Street to Schraffts, in the Chrysler Building, and ordered cheeseburgers and Coke. There, amid the hubbub of shoppers eating their creamed soup and burgers and hot fudge sundaes, Irene told her about the Hiroshima Project. It was backed by the
Sunday Review,
Irene’s magazine, and it had all been going swimmingly until the Quaker woman chosen to be Keiko’s host had backed out, afraid of the effect of atomic radiation on her children.

“Quakers are awfully difficult to work with,” Irene sighed. “So passive. So
silent.
A most trying people.”

Daisy glanced across the table at her friend, taking in the flat chest, French-manicured nails, thin nose that twitched as she spoke, a foxy mannerism that Daisy had briefly attempted to imitate in college. Irene’s dark hair was pulled back into a chignon; her pale face was powdered; her lips were fire-engine red; a highly becoming veiled hat covered one eye, green beads sewn onto it, gleaming like flies’ wings.

“What do you think, Daisy?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

“It’s so seldom”—Irene leaned forward, holding the last nibble of cheeseburger in her hand—“so very seldom, in these terrible times, that any of us gets to play a role in history.”

And Daisy had met her friend’s eyes and said yes—just like that, on the spot—because the very idea of playing a role in history had made her feel electric.

D
AISY WAS UNDERDRESSED
for the party at Irene’s apartment; she hadn’t brought a change of clothing, and so she had on the same gabardine suit she had worn to the airport. She was worried that she smelled, ever so slightly, of wet dog. In the bathroom she combed her sandy hair and applied powder to her soft, freckled cheeks, then stepped back to take a look. She still had a good figure, though it was a far cry from the one she had had in college. Nor was her face quite what it had been. Back then some of the girls had said she looked like a china doll, because she was sweet-faced and compact and blond. Now, at thirty-four years of age, if she was a china doll, she was a swollen one, plumped out so that she had barely been able to fit into last fall’s cinch-waisted fashions. She was still pretty, but bigger, wobblier, and prone to tilting her head and smiling too brightly when pictures were taken—an eager show of normalcy that made her seem afraid.

She came out of the bathroom and looked around. The apartment was just beginning to fill, with journalists from the
Sunday Review,
Hiroshima Project organizers and some others (“notables,” Irene had called them): funders, senators, people from city hall.

The apartment was part of Irene’s first divorce settlement. She had ruthlessly sold off the contents—Louis Quinze mirrors, leather-bound books, collections of rare blue butterflies—and redecorated with a stark boxy sofa, zebra rug and black leather and chrome folding chairs. In tribute to her Village days, or perhaps because old habits die hard, she had stuffed a wine jug full of bulrushes and set it by the entrance to the kitchen.

Daisy went to the window and looked out over the filigree of wrought-iron palings, with their repeating pattern of pine cones, over window boxes in which Irene, characteristically, had placed nothing. Looking west she glimpsed Central Park, the flash of taxis between limbs of black trees. She took a deep breath, then turned, preparing to socialize. Keiko seemed to be managing. She sat on the white sofa, wearing a cobalt-blue dress with a stiff piqué collar and a pair of gloves with petal scallops at the cuff. On her head was a blue velvet cocktail hat, a teensy bit of a thing with two blue feathers poked into the top. Two young men sat with her—one on a low, tufted ottomon—and they were both asking questions, nodding every time she spoke.

And how do you like America so far?

Will you be going up the Empire State Building?

They ignored Keiko’s scar. But there it was, Daisy could see it clearly now—the left side of the girl’s face was towards her.
Don’t look into my eyes,
that scar seemed to scream.
Don’t look at my pretty cobalt-blue dress, or speculate on the immense effort it took to make this hat—look, instead, at the exact surface of my skin, the bubbles, the ridges, the bulbous keloid behind my ear.

The scar covered the left side of her face, fat at the top, tapering to a point near her chin, like the outline of South America. It even had bubbles and gritty rifts resembling the ridges and chasms of mountains and canyons. And there, dangling behind her left ear like a strange adornment, was a shiny bauble
of red-brown flesh: the keloid. No flesh should grow hard and round like that, Daisy thought, and a feeling of fascination, almost of desire, moved inside her—a muddy slurping inside the skin and bones of civility.

The girl was so young, that was the thing. Beneath her hat her hair looked soft, like baby bird’s down, and it was cut around her face in a fey pixie style. Her beauty, if you could call it that (even with the scar she was very attractive), was of the gamine, boyish variety, so different from the blowsy women popular at the moment—the Jane Russells and the Marilyn Monroes. So different from Daisy herself. But the most startling thing about Keiko was her eyes. Daisy had noticed them at the airport. They were light brown, very clear, without any noticeable marks or striations. A milky circle surrounded each iris. Keiko looked up—a flash of those eyes—and Daisy quickly turned away. She didn’t want to be caught staring like some rube at a carnival.

The room was certainly full of interesting people, just as Irene had said. Dean Atchity stood by the baby grand, hands shoved deep into his jacket pockets, talking in a low voice to one of his colleagues. The mutter of professionals. He was the senior editor and founder of the
Sunday Review,
and the head of the Hiroshima Project. More like the king, actually, that was how people treated him, a benign potentate. He certainly looked aristocratic, with his high polished forehead and intelligent, long-fingered hands (saved from being too feminine by the hairs above each knuckle). When Daisy had joined the Project she had lunched with him and his wife, Bertha—soufflés at Voisin. Up close he smelled warmly and pleasantly of cherry pipe tobacco, as though, en route from Fairfield County, he had breezed through a smokehouse.

By the punch bowl was the chief surgeon, Dr. Raymond Carney. Daisy hadn’t yet met him; he had been in Japan when she joined the Project. Dr. Carney was a minor celebrity: for
several years he had been on the radio with a show, highly rated in the Five Boroughs, called
Ask a Doctor.
Daisy had heard that he had plans with NBC to move the show to television. He was handsome, short, with bushy hair, and his radio voice was certainly attractive, though he seemed to be a bit of a showman. He had donated his surgical talents to the Project, pro bono.