A Fierce Radiance (12 page)

Claire shivered. She crossed her arms, making herself into a fortress against the wind. By the time she reached her father’s building at Fifth Avenue and Eighty-first Street, across from the Metropolitan Museum, she felt numb from the cold. The building was renowned for
its monumental entryway, a glass and steel marquee that made anyone who walked beneath it look and feel small.

“Good afternoon, ma’am,” the white-gloved doorman greeted her. He called upstairs on the house phone to announce her. His similarly white-gloved colleague operated the elevator and nodded at her with detached formality. Charlie knew their names, knew the names of everyone who worked here. He had serious discussions with them about topics of concern to him alone, such as the relative speeds of the passenger elevator upon ascent and descent. He used his grandfather’s stopwatch to make the comparison.

Claire felt like too much of a stranger to memorize the names of the staff. By committing their names to memory, she’d be committing herself to her father, when she still didn’t trust him. At any moment, he might disappear for another thirty years. Her visits here might turn out to be only a temporary aberration in her life.

Edward Rutherford, her father. In the appearance-bound era before the Great War, Claire’s mother, Anna Rutherford, née Reed, daughter of a family that summered in Newport, deserted him to run off with Dr. Daniel Lukins. Unlike the self-made Rutherford, Lukins was a man of Anna Reed’s own background: the Lukins family of Portland, Maine, with a tradition of Groton, Harvard, and the Johns Hopkins Medical School. Sometime during his medical training, his family lost its money. Daniel (so the rumor went) was so shocked by this turn of fortune that he decided to use his high-flown education to labor in the settlement houses on the Lower East Side and in Greenwich Village. He willingly served immigrants and the poor when the finest families would have welcomed him as their physician. He lived off the dwindling personal fortune of his mistress, then wife, Anna Reed Rutherford.

Making this scandal even worse, Anna Rutherford took young Claire with her on her escapade from Fifth Avenue comfort to Greenwich Village Bohemianism. She refused to let her estranged husband
see their daughter. Instead of fighting for her, Claire’s father gave her up. Dr. Lukins adopted her. His surname became hers.

How and why did this happen? Whenever Claire asked her mother, Anna smiled wanly with a turn of her head that indicated the topic was inappropriate. For all her Bohemianism, Anna remained oddly bound by propriety, especially in regard to her daughter. She even sent Claire uptown to Brearley for high school.

By the time she was eleven, Claire had learned to stop asking for explanations. Nowadays she wondered if a child could ever reach a full understanding of a divorce. Something always remained incomprehensible. What did Charlie think about his parents’ divorce? He wasn’t asking questions about it. But if tomorrow Charlie began asking, what would she say? She wasn’t prepared to answer him honestly, to share with him the anguish she’d experienced. She didn’t want to destroy whatever love Charlie had for his father.

Not surprisingly, Anna’s silence transformed Edward Rutherford into an intriguing figure for Claire, a man of mystery and glamour. As she reached adulthood, she searched the business pages of newspapers and magazines, looking for references to him. In the early 1930s, she’d come across a profile of him in
Fortune
. She learned that his specialty was taking over unknown companies, backing new ideas that were on the cusp of the possible, and providing the necessary infusion of cash (his own and that of his investors) to make these companies and their innovations successful. He followed his hunches wherever they led, from fisheries to adding machines, from railroads to farm implements. He sounded brilliant and gutsy. Claire nurtured a stockpile of impressions and facts about the fantasy figure she’d made of him.

For Claire, the 1930s was a decade of death—Emily, her marriage, her stepfather, and finally her mother. Soon after Anna’s death, Claire felt a compelling desire to contact Edward Rutherford. With her mother and stepfather both dead, her husband gone, she yearned for a family, not just for herself but for Charlie, too. She debated the
proper approach and opted for the most straightforward. She wrote him a letter:
Dear Mr. Rutherford
,
I am your daughter
,
Claire. Perhaps you remember me.

Within a few days, he’d invited her and Charlie to dine with him. That first evening, as she studied his gestures across the dining table and saw herself in him, Claire was taken aback by the anger she felt. She’d come prepared to admire him, but instead, faced with the reality of him, she felt wounded by the decision he’d made years before, cut to the quick by the years they’d lost. Several times, she’d been on the verge of asking him why he’d given her up, but—as she watched him laughing at something on the radio, enjoying seconds on dessert, playing checkers with Charlie—she couldn’t summon the courage.

Charlie became the buffer between father and daughter. He regarded the apartment as a wonderland and investigated every room. Watching him rush through the hallways and up and down the stairs, Claire realized that Charlie found nothing odd about meeting a grandfather he’d never known. Charlie lived in the here and now. He demanded explanations of the present, not of the past. After the losses of the past years, Charlie needed a grandfather even more than she needed a father. Bill’s parents were both dead, and his sister lived in Nebraska and was seldom in touch. For Charlie’s sake, Claire struggled to pretend that she’d outgrown her distress.

That first dinner led to more invitations, as Rutherford embraced Claire and Charlie. He’d been married and divorced again. Claire was his only child. She sensed in him a need for family that was similar to her own. Charlie became his future. They’d be together for Christmas this year. And yet…unasked and unanswered questions charged the interactions between father and daughter, a subtext they both expended energy avoiding.

The elevator opened directly into the apartment. Claire thanked the elevator operator, stepped out, and listened to the elevator door closing behind her. The pseudo-Gothic front hall, with its wood paneling and
vaulted ceiling, was silent. Tapestries decorated the walls, scenes of youths and maidens frolicking in sylvan glades. The apartment was a combination of museum and mausoleum. The silence pressed against her ears. She remembered standing in this hallway when she was four or five, her nanny adjusting her hat and scarf as she waited for her father to take her for a walk in Central Park.

Claire took off her coat and folded it over a carved, medieval-style chair. She rubbed her hands together, trying to warm them. “Charlie?” She didn’t call for her father. “MaryLee?”

There was no response. Maybe Charlie and her father weren’t back from the zoo yet. MaryLee, the housekeeper, would have answered the doorman’s call, but the apartment was rambling, and she could be working anywhere.

Because she was alone, Claire began to explore, searching for memories. At the far end, the hallway opened into the dining room. Here the curtains were drawn, the dining room kept dark to protect the drawings by Watteau and Fragonard that covered almost every inch of wall space, in the style of an artist’s salon. In someone else’s house, she’d consider herself privileged to see such exquisite drawings so intimately displayed, but here she felt outrage. These drawings should be in museums, not decorating a rich man’s dining room.

In frustration, she moved on to the arched entryway of the room her father called “the parlor,” his idea of a joke. The archway opened onto a balcony, eight steps leading down to the vast space below. The so-called parlor was done up in stonework like the banqueting hall of a castle. The six windows were double-height and double-width, as if the apartment’s owner had invited the sky in as a guest. Paintings by Claude Lorrain covered the walls, wide vistas of seductive lakes and valleys. The flamboyant marble mantelpiece, with its baroque carving, had been brought from a castle in Bohemia. The painted coffered ceiling was from an Italian palazzo.

Suddenly Claire remembered…playing hide-and-seek in the bare
fireplace on a summer afternoon, her father pretending to search for her when surely he could see her hiding behind the fire screen. With the eyes of an adult, she saw that the fireplace wasn’t much beyond normal size, but to her child self, it had been enormous. A tunnel, a cave. Her father had swept her up and hugged her when he found her, and she’d buried her face against his linen jacket. His shoulder was solid and curved perfectly to fit her cheek. She breathed deeply the scent of his cigars. She’d been scared, within her hiding place, and he’d rescued her.

Claire tried to conjure what her father looked like at that moment. His eyes, his chin, the curve of his brow…she couldn’t re-create his face. She remembered him in disconnected details: his wide hands. His firm stride. His beautiful shoes, the leather buffed and tender to her touch.

The memories brought a wave of sadness for all they had missed. He wasn’t with her on her first day of school, or when she graduated from high school or college. He wasn’t with her when she got married. He’d never met her husband. He’d never met Emily. He and Emily had the same eye color, a dark greenish blue.

She turned away from her memories. The entrance to her father’s bedroom was on the opposite side of the hall. Stepping out, revealing a glimpse of French provincial décor as she opened the door, was MaryLee. She’d been the housekeeper here when Claire was a girl, in her thirties then, in her sixties now. She was a petite black woman, slender to the point of frailty. Her white apron was clean and starched, but the red sweater she wore beneath it was threadbare at the elbows—“It’s my favorite,” she maintained—revealing the sleeves of her calico-print dress. She never wore a uniform. She held a bucket crammed with cleaning supplies, the handle of a toilet scrubber sticking out above the rest.

“Good afternoon, Miss Claire.” Her voice was lilting. She’d come to New York from South Carolina many years ago. She lived in. On her days off, she visited her sister in Brooklyn.

“And good afternoon to you, MaryLee. You’re looking well.”

“Thank you. Seeing that boy of yours always perks me up. He’s a charmer, that one. Brings the house to life.”

“That’s kind of you to say.”

“First thing this morning, before leaving for the zoo, he comes right into the kitchen and says, ‘Would you make a fudge cake for
me
, Mary
Lee
?’ Making it rhyme like a poem. So of course I did. But I told him we couldn’t eat it until you were here. Make a little party.”

“You’re very generous.”

“Thank you indeed.” Graciously she nodded her head in acknowledgment.

“Are they back yet?”

“For sure they’re upstairs on the terrace waiting for you.” With her bucket, she urged Claire up the staircase.

“Thank you.”

The stairwell was lined with early Italian Renaissance paintings of the Holy Family, Cimabue, Duccio, Giotto, a line of golden halos accompanying Claire up the stairs. A stained-glass window graced the landing, a Tiffany scene of a river meandering into an emerald landscape. Claire turned at the landing and glimpsed MaryLee below opening a door camouflaged to blend into the wall. The hall lavatory. It was papered with hand-painted reproductions of the murals of Pompeii. In this apartment, time had slowed and then stopped. The apartment bore no relation to the fraught and throbbing city outside.

At the top of the stairs, she entered the penthouse solarium. Willowy trees filled the room, a tamed bamboo forest reaching toward the ceiling. The solarium’s marble floor was laid in the intricate pattern of a Renaissance maze. Small Roman sculptures of charioteers were perched on the ornate mantelpiece. The French doors leading to the terrace were stuck, as usual, and she pulled hard to open them, the glass trembling within its lead squares. Outside, a warmth radiated from the flagstones after their day baking in the sunlight. Before her
rose the gleaming spires of Midtown. The skyscrapers had transformed the staid New York of Claire’s childhood into a futuristic fantasy that brimmed with energy. A sense of hope and possibility washed over her. Upon the Empire State Building, vertical lines of metallic decoration glowed golden in the lowering sun.

On the Fifth Avenue side of the terrace, facing Central Park, a boy in a long navy blue winter coat stood on a crate next to the five-foot-high stone balustrade. Reaching up, he rested his elbows on the balustrade’s wide upper railing to steady himself as he used large, cumbersome binoculars to study three birds circling above the park’s Belvedere Castle.

Charlie.

Had her father actually left him out here alone on the terrace, fifteen stories above the street? She hurried forward, rage mixing with fear. “Charlie,” she called as calmly as she could, willing him to get down from the crate.

He turned, happiness lighting his face. “Mom! Grandpa gave me binoculars for Christmas.”

“Step down from the crate, Charlie.”

“Ah, Claire. Welcome.” Her father was sitting in a window embrasure, out of the wind, but right next to Charlie. How quickly she’d assumed the worst about him. Charlie was safe, she realized as she reached him. Her father rose, and she accepted his awkward embrace. Even bundled against the cold, he was suave and sophisticated.

“Mom, look.” Charlie’s head was at the height of her chin. He held out the binoculars. From their size alone, she knew they were expensive, more than she could afford. She wished her father had waited until Christmas to give them to him. “He got me this pad, too, see, with a pencil attached to it, so I can make notes about the birds.” He held up the pad.

“That’s terrific, Charlie. What are you looking at?”

“Hawks.” The wind tousled Charlie’s hair. As usual, he refused to
wear a hat. The long coat made him appear younger than eight. “Did you know that the buildings in New York City remind hawks and falcons of mountains?”