Radiance (27 page)

Daisy could see his darkened eye sockets. He snapped his jaw twice, blowing two perfect smoke rings. “I thought you’d get it,” he said.

“I do.”

“We were lit up,” he said.
Lit up.
A pause.

“We burnt,” he added, “with righteousness.”

“Will you put these things in your book?”

He shook his head. “No, Keiko,” he said gently. “I don’t think so.”

He was hunched forward now—doing what? Pressing his fingers to his forehead, digging the nails in hard. He spoke so softly Daisy could barely hear. Neither could Keiko, because a second later, he spoke again, more loudly.

“I knew I was lying.” His mouth was turned down bitterly at the edges. “Some part of me always knew—but I told myself that lying was important, that twisting the truth was part of what we did, the price we paid—gladly, we paid it gladly. It was our biggest contribution, you might say. They were shooting our comrades by the thousands, in back alleys, while here in New York, I signed a letter, a letter published in
The New York Times,
condemning another fellow who had dared to say that the trials were a frame-up.”

He reached into his back pocket, flipped open his wallet and took out the photograph. He handed it to Keiko the way, years before on the park bench, he had shown it to Daisy—David, a swath of brown hair across his forehead, a tight-lipped grin, sleek eyes, almost like slits.

“Your friend.”

“They said he was a Trotskyite ring leader.
Zhid. Zhid.
They kept saying that, over and over, as they beat him with rifles.”

“How do you know these things?”

He smiled, close-lipped. “Girl we knew, Trixie Baxter, was with him. She wasn’t killed—she hid on the fire escape.”

“I am so sorry.”

“They made him confess first.”

He looked at the stars, holding his breath, and the girl, who had listened in such a calm way, like a slice of the moon, leaned forward, put out her hand, touched his knee.

“Had him kneel on the floor. Confess he had exhibited individualistic tendencies. That he was a Trotskyite, an enemy of the working class, a foreign spy. He had to repent every crazy fool idea that had sprung from that mouth of his.

“David was always a good talker, I can only imagine how he must have talked that night—trying to save his life.”

At four o’clock in the morning, Daisy was woken by Walter moving around in the backyard. He was making a lot of noise. She knew he must have been drinking, just by the number of crashes and bangs of garbage lids or other things with percussive metal sides. Daisy put on her quilted housecoat and went to the back door and looked out. He had a stack of his papers in a wheelbarrow, and he was throwing pages into the incinerator—a metal can by the back fence—pouring a bottle of rum on the contents, watching them burn. He was laughing and talking to himself and whistling too: the five piercing notes of
The Whistler.
Then he started to sing,
“Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy-divey.”
Daisy knew the song. It sounded like nonsense, but slowed down it was:

Daisy grabbed a bucket from under the sink, filled it half full, then ran with it down the steps and across the lawn, flinging water into the incinerator, which made the manuscript both burnt and sodden. Still, she tried, while he stepped back groggily and looked at her, tsk-tsking, as though she didn’t understand what was happening, but give her time and the truth was bound to hit. Then he lay down on the lawn.

Daisy stood looking at him. The moon poured down, full as anything. “You’re going to regret this,” she said at last, hating the parsimonious tone in her voice.

Walter appeared not to be breathing.

“You told the girl things you never told me.”

Again no response.

“I’m sorry he’s dead.”

“You knew.”

“Not everything.”

“Enough.”

He stopped looking at the stars and looked at her face. His was lit by the moon, but hers was in shadow.

“Was it every page?” she whispered. “Every page in the incinerator?”

“Think so.”

“Because you told it to the girl—and that was enough.”

He laughed, a sharp bark. Then he made a grab for her ankle. But she dodged away.

His face, lit by the moon, looked both old and young—his eyes were young, but his chin was covered in a glint of salt-and-pepper bristles. He wore a small, goofy smile, which Daisy
remembered from way back. Always pleasant when drunk, that was Walter. He wasn’t one of those angry drunks.

“I’ll tell you everything,” Walter said. “Just come over here.”

She knelt beside him.

“C’mon.”

She sat. The lawn felt surprisingly warm against her legs and buttocks, in her light cotton nightgown.

He pulled her down next to him, head to his chest, then stroked her hair. They lay in silence for a while. A few orange sparks floated up from the incinerator.

“You know,” he said, “I knew a playwright once who had the misfortune of also being a teacher. A student came into his class one morning, said he’d burnt his novel—all three hundred pages. So his teacher said, ‘That’s the best bit of work you’ve done all year.’”

He gave her a dry kiss on the top of her head. “I’ve missed you,” he whispered. “Miss Daisy, I’ve missed you something fearful.”

T
HREE DAYS UNTIL THE BANDAGES WERE REMOVED.

Walter prepared for work—pale, sober, smelling of hair tonic and last night’s debauch. As he ate his poached egg, Daisy asked how he felt.

“Never better.” He pushed back his chair. She thought he looked raw, unprotected, without the massive buttress of his manuscript holding him up. What must it feel like, nothing but air all around him? She would have liked to tell him he was brave, but she was afraid to focus his mind on the enormity of what he’d done.

At the door she stood on her toes and kissed him hard. He looked at her like she was kidding, a twisted smile on his mouth.

“What’s that for?”

“Don’t know. Just felt like it.” She kissed him again, too hard, feeling her teeth against his. “There’s more where that came from,” she said, knowing it was a corny line, something from
The Whistler.
He seemed to think so too, because he lifted his eyebrows and gave a low whistle between his teeth. Then he raised his hat, stepped out the door and was gone.

Daisy knocked on the girl’s bedroom door. Keiko had had her shower and was lying on her neatly made bed, leafing through the Mary Marvel comic book Daisy had given her at the hospital. She looked up at Daisy. Such pretty fragile fingers, holding the comic book. Those were the fingers, the parched little palms, that had reached out to touch Walter’s knee as he confessed, his face contorted, grim and miserable.

“You were up late.”

“Yes.” She sat up and placed the comic book neatly on top of the lace doily on the bedside table. “I was talking to Mr. Lawrence.”

There—she had said it plain as plain.

“You like him, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes.”

Daisy couldn’t really read her expression, because of the bandages. All she could do was guess, based on her eyes.

“He’s a good man,” Daisy said.

“Oh yes. I think he is very good.”

A pause. There seemed to be nothing more to say. She was a child. He had confessed to a child—and now that child sat looking up at Daisy, wanting, no doubt, to be left alone.

“Would you like to come to the store with me?”

“Thank you, Mrs. Lawrence, but I am tired.”

Please,
she wanted to say.
Please come. We can lean over the bridge. You can tell me about being like your mother.
“Are you sure? We could pick up Popsicles.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Lawrence, I will stay. I will do the dishes.”

“Don’t worry about them.”

“I would like to.”

After all this time, they were still so formal. Now Daisy had to go to the store alone, knowing that Keiko was avoiding her.

“You’ll be all right on your own?”

“Yes, Mrs. Lawrence, thank you.”

Daisy came close to her, to remove the water glass from beside the bed. Keiko smelled of the sandalwood soap that Daisy kept in the medicine cabinet. A gift from her mother, sent from California. For a second this small betrayal shocked Daisy. Keiko must have taken that soap from its box, a long box with a picture of a steamboat on the outside, removed the paper seal, unwrapped the tissue from a virgin bar, seeing, as she did this, the imprint of the honeycomb perfectly etched on the face of the soap. Then she must have rubbed the bar all over her skin, on her hands, under her arms.
Daisy’s
sandalwood. Perhaps she had had that gentle fragrance on her skin the night before, talking to Walter. Daisy had been saving that soap! She left the girl alone.

As she walked down the path to the store, she thought about Keiko. She could still smell the bitter, slightly powdery scent of the soap in her nostrils, and wished she had checked, before she left, how much of the pattern had been washed away. But the soap wasn’t important. Nor, in the end, was Keiko’s closeness to Walter. Daisy remembered how he had lain on the grass, drunk, then reached for her ankle and pulled her down beside him. No, what mattered was something deeper, to do with the three of them. That by doing the right thing, again and again and again—tiny acts of love or belief or contrition—they seemed able to
reach towards each other. Daisy was definitely closer to the girl than ever, though their communication, at least in the daytime, was based more on how they stood, heads inclining towards each other when they were in a group, or how Keiko’s light fingers might touch Daisy’s as she handed her a dish she had dried. It was, Daisy thought, as though people’s souls had shadows, and Daisy had slipped inside of Keiko’s, or perhaps Keiko had slipped inside of Daisy’s—neither of them meaning to, both of them fighting it, especially at first.

As Daisy walked, a bubble of an idea came to her, though in truth it had been there for some time. Why not have Keiko stay with them, not just for this short time, but actually stay, settle in Riverside Meadows, go to college even? She could take the commuter train in the morning. Daisy imagined saying goodbye to both Keiko and Walter at the front door, wiping her hands on her apron, bustling off to clean up after breakfast. Neither of them were particularly neat. She would talk to Walter about this, but already she was sure he would agree. He was, as she had said to the girl, a good man.

The plum leaves hissed as the wind passed through their branches. They seemed to be speaking an alien and interesting language, echoed by the murmur of the poplar windbreak on the other side of Old Middle Road. She saw the stark image of three crows on the line. Joan waved from her window, and her face seemed alive, the pores of her skin made of something shiny. Not that her skin wasn’t pouched and reddened: it was aging and prone to wrinkles, as everyone’s was; but it looked radiant too, in its way, as she raised her feather duster and waved it at Daisy.

At Strickland’s, Daisy leaned over the freezer, trying to decide between lime-or grape-flavoured Popsicles. Lime seemed the best choice. As she straightened up, clutching the Popsicles, she glimpsed a streak of white in the parking lot. It was Fran, scuttling
crabwise between the parked cars, past buggies, slapping the door open with the palm of her hand. It rang violently, startling Gerald Strickland from his crossword. “Easy on my door, Mrs. Warburgh,” he said.

“Have you seen Daisy Lawrence?”

Fran’s pregnant belly stuck out in her red stretch pants and short white blouse. She saw Daisy and rushed down the aisle. “Come right away,” she gasped, taking her arm. “It’s Ed—Ed and Keiko.”

They tore out of the store, through the parking lot, and they were on the corn path before they slowed down and Fran spoke again. “He says he’s had enough of our highjinks. He’s gone to talk with Keiko. I said no, he couldn’t, but he said he wasn’t going to stand for her being here any more. It’s because of the sickness.”

“What sickness?”

“Oh God.” Her face was red from the running. She bent over, hands on her knees, panting.

“Tell me.”

“I’m so sorry, Daisy.”

“For what?”

“It’s just a misunderstanding,” she said. She was a hundred per cent to blame. “I ought to have stood up to him—but I was scared.”

Ed had stayed home from work because he felt sick. He was lying on the sofa when Junie came out of her bedroom, where she had been playing with cutouts from the Sear’s catalogue. “Look at my feet,” she had screamed. “Look at my feet!” She pointed to a slough of red dots between her first and second toes. “I have what Keiko has,” Junie shrieked, “I have the A-bomb disease!” Then she doubled over, squirming as though something live were wriggling through her guts. A stream of yellow vomit forced itself from her lips.

“Like pee,” Fran said to Daisy. “That colour.”

Fran ran to call the doctor, but she couldn’t find the number. Jimmy Jr., eating Shreddies in the kitchen, began to search the backs of his arms for red dots and knocked his bowl to the floor. Then Junie threw up again. Fran rushed to Patti in her playpen. Her forehead was burning. Fran stripped off her bibbed rompers and discovered a mass of red pustules on her bottom. Ed thundered about quarantine, A-bomb disease and then Patti threw up too—a real projectile vomit, hitting the fridge with a splat.

“Not regular throw up—it was corn-coloured. Well, I took a hard look at Patti’s rear end, and then I said to Ed, ‘They’re chicken pox, that’s all. Look,’ I said to him, ‘the only person who has to be scared of chicken pox is me, cause I’m pregnant, but I’ve had them before. So there’s no risk.’ But Ed wasn’t listening any more. He said it was time he and the Jap girl next door had a conversation. I couldn’t stop him, Daisy, I’m so sorry.”

Later Daisy will not remember crossing the second field, only the sound of her feet on the bridge, three hard steps. She easily outdistanced Fran, sprinting up the embankment and through the playground, where some teenaged girls were lighting bits of grass on fire. A premonition was pumping through her blood, as though beneath all her good plans, she had been waiting for this moment. She ran up the front path, threw open the door, calling out for Keiko.