Radiance (3 page)

There were also some congressmen in the room, a senator and a lot of junior-type female staff from the
Sunday Review.
The women dressed in stovepipe skirts that hobbled their knees, their faces powdered like vampires, their lips painted chilling shades of maroon and crimson.

For a moment Daisy felt a surge of her old jealousy. Here she was, in this glittering company, and all she could say for herself was that she was a housewife. And not just any kind of housewife: she was that most pitiable of God’s creations, a housewife without children. Meanwhile, in the years since college, Irene had sailed into the stratosphere with her own column in the
Sunday Review.
It was called “The Women’s Circle,” perhaps not the most glamorous name, but it had a large readership. Daisy always leafed to Irene’s page first, read her article top to bottom, then derided it meanly. “Oh, God,” she would say to Walter, throwing the magazine down on the table. “Just listen to Irene. She’s going on about the price of butter again.” Or “Who could have guessed that gelatine was such a versatile substance?” But the truth was that given the stiff limitations imposed on her, Irene often managed to broaden her themes—exposing the plight of the grape-pickers, for instance, while explaining what wine to serve for dinner; exploring the changed world of the Chinese peasant while giving recipes for deep-frying egg rolls. She did everything, in short, that Daisy might have dreamed of doing if she had had the job. Which she didn’t. Not by a long shot.

In college, and since living in Riverside Meadows, Daisy had harboured a secret wish to write. She wanted to write quite desperately at times, with lust and indignity and shame attached to the desire. Perhaps that was why she had married Walter: sublimated desire, as people loved to say. Yet whenever Daisy tried—sneaking in to sit at Walter’s greasy old typewriter, typing out her story ideas—she felt humiliated by how tiny her observations turned out to be. By the time she had written and rewritten a single paragraph, it was just terribly filigreed and dead, as though she had applied layers of Byzantine gilding to a corpse.

Irene swooped down on her now. Her cocktail pyjamas were made of a clinging, draping duplon-type material; they could have gone through the apocalypse without a wrinkle. She wore an interesting and, to Daisy’s mind, extremely unbecoming turban.

“I do hope I’m doing everything right,” she whispered, a whiff of crab pastry on her breath. “We don’t have much of a precedent, do we?”

“Everything looks beautiful.”

“Well, I hope so. One must do one’s best.” She leaned close and Daisy had the impression of lightweight undergarments beneath her rustling pyjama suit, perhaps nothing more than a silk chemise. “I want you to see something. Look out the window. There.” Irene pushed up the sash and both women put their heads out. Four floors down, on the sidewalk beside the green awning, Daisy saw a figure foreshortened—bare red head, overcoat, polished brown shoes. “It’s that photographer from the airport—the one who started our stampede. He wanted to come up, and I rather thought it might be a good idea, but Dean said no. He doesn’t want the press here tonight—all that’s to start after the first operation. Still, one must admire the man’s tenacity.”

They peered below, and the man glanced up, freckle-faced and rosy-cheeked. He beamed when he saw them, and seemed
about to wave, or call up even, but Irene pulled Daisy back and shut the window. “He’s wasting his time tonight. Still, she’ll be good with the press. Her English is wonderful, isn’t it? So there won’t be a language barrier.” They were facing the room again. Irene lowered her voice still further. “Of course, her story is harrowing, Daisy.”

Daisy felt her heart beat faster. “I’m sure it must be.”

“When Raymond and Dean interviewed her in Hiroshima, Dean wept, that’s what I heard.”

“I can’t imagine.”

Irene shook her head. “Neither can I. Neither can anyone. That’s why we need to hear her tell it, in her own words.”

Daisy nodded. They stood for a moment in silence, listening to the hubbub around them, the girl at the centre—so poised—eye of the storm. Daisy remembered the feel of her palm, dry and papery, when they shook hands at the airport.

“So the first press conference is scheduled for a week today,” Irene continued, “the day she gets out of the hospital. I’d like her to share the stage with Oppenheimer—you must know that he’s come out against the Superbomb?”

“Yes, I’ve heard.”

“But even he, with all his connections, doesn’t know when they’ll test the thing. Though he suspects it’s nearly ready—they really are a set of bastards.”

It was hard to tell exactly to whom she was referring, but Daisy knew it was the bastards in the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, the ones secretly advocating the development of the hydrogen bomb, refusing to respond to public calls for a ban on the weapon. A ban on
testing
—that was what the Hiroshima Project advocated, a wise distinction that Dean Atchity had written about at length. For it was not conceivable that the nation, at this dangerous juncture, could or even should stop
development of a fusion bomb, not with the Soviet Union at work on one. But if there were a complete ban on testing, the Project suggested, then neither side could successfully develop new bombs. So a ban on testing was really just as good as a ban on creation. As for the Superbomb itself, it was rumoured to be terrible. Daisy got confused by kilotonnage and megatonnage, but the Superbomb was supposed to be a hundred, or two hundred, or even three hundred times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

“Of course, I’m keen to get moving, the support for a test ban is growing like mad. But I think that Dean is right. One step at a time.” At that moment, Atchity beckoned to Irene, and with a kiss on Daisy’s cheek she rushed away.

Daisy let herself take in the strangeness of the situation. There was Dean Atchity, senior editor of the
Sunday Review,
waving Keiko’s empty punch glass at Irene, while Irene fairly blew across the room to take it from him. All of this for a girl who seven years before had been their sworn enemy. Seven years was not such a long time, and yet in other ways it was an eon. At that time, in that other world, the newspapers had been full of horrifying stories about the Japanese. They had killed American boys in horrid, fetid jungles. They had imprisoned and tortured them, then sent them back, after the war was over, scrawny and malnourished, ravaged by yellow fever and malaria. They had broken every article of the Geneva Convention. And in retaliation they had been bombed into defeat and submission. Yet here everyone was, gathered in Irene’s apartment, attempting with all the goodwill in the world to atone for what had happened.

She could hear more polite questions being put to Keiko, while she sat looking picturesque and almost varnished, ankles crossed, gloved hands holding her glass. Daisy heard the girl’s voice, oddly pure:
Thank you, yes, my flight was pleasant. Long, yes,
but pleasant.
Daisy marvelled at her poise—though it was more than poise, it had to be. It was, at the root, a deep self-confidence. How else could she do all this? Be picked from among so many girls, all eager to come to America. Daisy remembered what she’d read: top marks at high school, an interest in fashion, dress designing, languages. Keiko was from a wealthy, established family—the memo had said “ancient.” Daisy wasn’t sure what ancientness meant in Japanese terms. She pictured a samurai grandfather, a grandmother wearing a flowing silk kimono, squatting on a tatami mat, serving tea. She set these images against the pattern of her mother’s old willowware platter, remembering the curious collection of items in her mother’s lacquered cabinet. “My chinoiserie,” her mother used to call these things—fans and wooden dolls with bobbing heads, a porcelain tea set with crackled glaze.

Daisy made her way to the punch bowl and scooped some of the cherry liquid into her glass, spilling a drop onto a white stripe of the zebra carpet, where it spread like watery blood. The patter of voices was all around her: names of writers she didn’t recognize, writers who had eschewed first names in favour of initials; the language of Freudian psychology: neuroses, psychoses; “What do you do when the fellow living right next to you has a nervous breakdown?” Nervous breakdowns were increasingly common, Daisy had noticed with some alarm. Joan Palmer, her neighbour, talked in dire and knowing terms about an old school friend who had attached a vacuum cleaner hose to the exhaust pipe of her car and asphyxiated herself in her garage while her children watched
Howdy Doody.
Daisy prided herself on never having come close to a nervous breakdown. The only time she had felt near to one at all was after her miscarriages. Then she had let herself go terribly, into a place that it hurt to think about now. For a long time, a very long time, she had felt sealed behind glass.

She added a second splash of punch then took a sip. It was better not to think about such things, marooned among people she didn’t know, or the ache could open up again, as though it were a hole in the fabric of the world, a hole she couldn’t see, because it was tilted up on one edge. Sometimes it opened up at the oddest moments, blossoming with darkness.

People beside her were talking about the McCarthy Hearings. “A charlatan,” she heard. “A blackguard.”

“And yet,” a girl with red lips was saying, “there are Reds in the State Department. Not two hundred and five. Not fifty-four—but some. We
know
this.” Whatever else she said was lost in a mumble of voices. This was why Walter hadn’t come: he hated people who talked like they knew everything. Blatherers, he called them. Poseurs. Only he didn’t pronounce it in the French way. He said
posers,
with the accent on the first syllable. Like it was a solid word from the western United States—a word from Puget Sound, perhaps, from the woods where he had grown up, where men had no truck with French pronunciation.

D
R.
C
ARNEY SLID NEXT TO
D
AISY
as she stood beside the punch bowl. Up close the skin beneath his eyes was puffy. Now that he stood next to her, she had the impression that Carney might be a heavy drinker: he had the flamboyant flush, the wet eye.

“You must be the host mother.” His tone was light, disparaging.

Daisy straightened her back. “No,” she said, “as a matter of fact, I’m a journalist with the
Sunday Review.”

He laughed.

“What?”

“Not in a million years.”

“Perhaps I write for ‘The Women’s Circle.’”

He shook his head and offered her a cigarette, which she took. He lit a match and Daisy, bending, breathed in the smell of his hands. He had clean nails and stubby, unsurgeonlike fingers. There was a plumpness at the base of his thumb that she found erotic.

“She
writes for the
Sunday Review,”
he said, gesturing with his chin at Irene, who had thrown back her head to laugh at something Dean Atchity had said. “And
she
—” He pointed to a woman dressed in a black turtleneck, leaning against a wall, talking to a man in grey. “But you–” He looked her up and down, at her pointed breasts in her gabardine suit jacket, at her tightly cinched waist (when she took off her girdle later that night, her stomach was imprinted with leaves and flowers). “You put on your best suit,” he said, “nothing too showy, but flattering, and you drove here. Commuted.”

“Couldn’t I have taken the train?”

“Unlikely,” he said. “Got yourself a car, a station wagon, I’d guess. And you like to use it.”

“And where did I commute from?”

“Long Island,” he said promptly. “Or possibly New Jersey.”

“And how do you know all this?”

He bent so close that she could feel his lips against her hair. She half expected him to bite her earlobe, or thrust his tongue suddenly and thickly into the whorl of her ear, but he merely said, in a hot voice: “It shows.” Then he stood back and laughed. “But there’s nothing wrong with that. You lovely ladies are what keep the world turning.”

Daisy placed her glass on the table. “You happen to have misread me completely.”

He dipped into the punch bowl. “As a matter of fact, Irene has told me quite a bit about you. Said you were just right to host our visitor. Please don’t take offence.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

She nodded goodbye to Dr. Carney and made her way through the crowd to the bathroom, where she locked the door and splashed cold water on her face. In the mirror she looked blurry—and bloated too, from eating too much at night after Walter had shuffled away from the supper table, his slippers on the hall floor sibilant and gritty. She would stand in the cool of the Frigidaire, eating beef stroganoff, using up precious energy—energy that was badly needed in Germany or Japan, in restructuring France or still-conserving Britain. She took her spoon, or even Walter’s spoon if it was close, and shovelled the creamy wine-flavoured noodles into her mouth. She hardly chewed, just took the food in as snakes do. She had read somewhere that they could swallow an animal three times their size by relaxing a muscle deep in their throats.

When Daisy returned to the living room, Irene was calling for everyone’s attention. “Dean would like to say a few words,” she said. “Nobody move!”

Atchity had taken up a position by the front door, where he could address everyone. His ears were backlit by one of the sconce lights on the wall behind him, to unfortunate affect: they shone pink in a rather distracting way. “I do have a few words,” he said in his thin, practical voice. “Possibly more than a few words.” He cleared his throat and then began to speak.

“For the past year,” he said, “I have had the honour to work with a team of dedicated doctors and philanthropists, both here and in Hiroshima. Our goal has been nothing less than to bring victims of the atomic bomb to New York City, to Mount Sinai
Hospital, so that their faces can be operated on by the best plastic surgeons in the world. Sometimes it looked as if this project might not even get off the ground. At other times we were full of hope and anticipation. Tonight, we see the first fruits of our labours. We welcome you, Keiko Kitigawa, to Manhattan and to the Hiroshima Project. It is our dear hope that you will be only the first of many visitors from Hiroshima to come to our city for restorative surgery. This is the beginning—only the beginning.”