A Fierce Radiance (8 page)

“What you see is a lie.” Tia looked at Claire in sudden anger, a torrent of words couched in a whisper. Claire realized that Tia’s beautiful clothes, the perfect makeup, the objective attitude, were nothing but
a front. Tia was in torment. “You can use all that equipment of yours to take pictures of the outside of him, but you can’t see the inside. The bacteria can hide for days or even weeks and then come back like the far side of a hurricane. I don’t know if his immune system is strong enough to fight back. I can’t figure out how to produce the medication faster, no matter how many experiments I run. Forgive me. This isn’t your concern, but—” Cutting off her own thought, she strode across the room, put her plate on the counter, and left.

Claire stared at the family before her. Ned and Sally were splitting another chocolate cake, negotiating who would cut it in half and who would choose the first piece. Mr. Reese studied their every move, and Patsy Reese studied him. The scene was completely transformed. Ineffably sad. Ned and Sally could be her children. She could be Patsy, in love with this handsome, kind-hearted man who had been brought back from the dead. Claire resumed her job, her only choice, grasping other people’s lives and portraying their stories.

“All right.” Patsy came to the side of the bed and clapped her hands to get Ned and Sally’s attention. “Homework.”

Without complaint, more agreeable than Charlie would have been, the children retrieved their work from their book bags and reclined upon their father’s bed with pencils, books, and notebooks.

Mr. Reese gazed at his children and smiled. With effort, he raised his hand to touch Sally’s hair, but he couldn’t reach her. Absorbed by her homework, she didn’t notice. That was the image Claire caught: Sally’s bursting health and independence, and her father’s adoring face, his hand reaching across the hospital bed but never able to touch her, she was growing up so fast.

With the faith of experience, Claire knew it was the perfect shot, because the entire story was there.

B
y noon on Friday, Edward Reese’s fever was 102.8. Tia and David had no more medication to give him. They hoped to have enough
for one injection by Saturday morning, if he lived that long. Nurse Brockett told Patsy to cancel Friday’s planned visit with the children.

By four, his fever was 103.5. At 4:30, the winter sun was beginning to set, turning the windows of Queens across the river a flaming orange. Mr. Reese began to shiver and call for blankets. His hands shook from cold. Nurse Brockett piled blankets on him, but they didn’t make him warm. His body trembled. Without asking permission from the doctor or the nurse, Patsy got into bed with him. Dr. Stanton and Nurse Brockett observed her impassively, as if her action were part of the experiment. She placed her body over his, careful not to touch his leg, swollen huge once more. But even the warmth of her body couldn’t calm his shivering.

Without warning Mr. Reese became hot. “Off, off,” he cried to Patsy, tossing himself back and forth to dislodge her, thrashing to rid himself of the blankets. The bacterial level in his blood was up to 20 per milliliter.

Patsy slipped out of the bed and faced the wall. From the stooped curve of Patsy’s shoulders, from the way she hugged her arms around herself, Claire sensed her humiliation and despair. Claire turned away.

After five minutes, Patsy was at Claire’s side. “Why doesn’t the doctor give him more medicine?” Her whispered words came fast, her fear barely held in check. She gripped Claire’s wrist and squeezed it, as if this would compel Claire to grant her an answer. “He was fine yesterday. Why did the doctor stop giving him the medicine?”

Claire stared into Patsy’s pleading eyes. How could this be, that Claire knew more than the man’s family? Was James Stanton, was the hospital, entitled to do this experiment? Was a human being really no different from the mice in the cages downstairs? Who was to decide? The patient? His family? The doctors? The researchers? Would Patsy have chosen this treatment, if she’d been told the limitations?

What would I have chosen, Claire wondered, if Emily had been lying upon the bed?

To try the medicine, no matter the result. Claire knew this beyond doubt.

“You need to ask the doctor.” That was all Claire could tell Patsy. She was here to record the story, not to shape it. She needed to be close, and to follow Capa’s injunction to take sides, but she wasn’t a friend. She was here to do her job. Claire felt like an opportunist, pursuing her own agenda while a man lay dying. Patsy kneaded her hands together and stared at James Stanton.

The doctor sat at the desk, reading the afternoon newspaper. He held the paper open to catch the light. The headlines blared. Yesterday, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States and the United States declared war on them. The death toll at Pearl Harbor was now reported as over 2,700. The Japanese were sweeping through Asia, continuing the massive bombardment of the Philippines, invading Burma. Guam had fallen. Wake and Hong Kong were hard-pressed. The West Coast of the United States prepared for a Japanese attack.

“You’re right,” Patsy said. “I’ll ask him.” She made no move to approach him.

What the two women didn’t know was that James Stanton immersed himself in the newspaper in order to maintain his distance from them, as well as from Nurse Brockett and the orderlies, even from Tia, who would soon be upstairs to confirm that no, there wouldn’t be enough medication for an injection tonight, despite their best efforts.

Stanton’s worst fears had been realized. Yet he couldn’t let himself wallow in failure. He had to look ahead. Next time, they’d do better. They’d increase the dose, double the first dose, somehow they’d have more medication to work with. The experiment was a success, even though the patient was going to die. They’d proven that penicillin could suppress staphylococcal blood infections. Some of his colleagues might say he was free to leave the battlefield now, to let Nurse Brockett take over for these final hours. He disagreed. The experiment was his, and he possessed the courage and honor to follow through to the end.

Once again he reassured himself: the experimental subject would have died anyway, would have been dead by now, if they hadn’t tried the medication. This was the justification that he clung to as he read about the destruction of the United States fleet at Pearl Harbor, and about the dozens of United States aircraft lined up wing to wing at Luzon in the Philippines, destroyed in a single raid.

He thought of the first patient he’d lost, years ago. It must have been 1927 or ’28, the heady years before the Crash. He’d had a girlfriend who’d fancied herself a flapper, complete with short skirts and bobbed hair. It was a different era. The patient’s name was Natalia. He could no longer remember her family name, he was ashamed to realize. She was nineteen years old, born in Latvia, flaxen hair spread across the pillow. From Latvia to Philadelphia. Bacterial meningitis. He’d become an infectious disease expert to save people. To save Natalia. In those days, the wealthy most often received medical treatment at home. Hospitals were for those who weren’t wealthy, like Natalia. When he faced her parents across the hospital bed, he didn’t know what to say. He could do nothing to help her. Even so he held himself responsible for her death. Shockingly, her parents didn’t blame him. “Thank you, Doctor,” her father said. Her father was a low-level shipyard worker; he’d come to the hospital directly from the docks. His clothes were stained from sweat, and he gave off the sour odor of hard work. “Thank you.” He tried to say more, but his English wasn’t good, and the words eluded him. “Thank you,” he repeated. The mother said nothing. Too abruptly, Stanton had left the room, to save himself from breaking down.

Would Patsy Reese ever tell him “thank you”? Despite the years, what a short line it was from Natalia to Edward Reese. Waiting for death. Stanton remembered the first time he’d waited for death. His own mother. During the influenza epidemic of 1918. He was fourteen. That was the moment he’d decided to become a physician. To bring his mother back, by rescuing others. Almost twenty-five years later, he was still trying.

At 5:15, the darkness was complete. Looking out the window,
Claire saw a cityscape of lights more brilliant than stars. The newspapers were speculating that soon the lights would be dimmed to protect the city from enemy bombers and from attacks by German U-boats off the coast. Claire thought how beautiful the city would look tonight to a U-boat crew surfacing in the outer harbor. How glorious, the glowing, misty lights of New York City, an arc of radiance against the horizon. She stared at the Queensboro Bridge. It wasn’t the most beautiful bridge she’d ever seen. In fact it was hulking and awkward. But the enemy would be delighted to destroy it.

James Stanton joined her at the window. He, too, stared at the starscape of city lights. He’d given up on the newspapers, and he could no longer bear the weight of his memories. She wore a scent that drew him. Standing close beside her, while they spoke privately, the scent enveloped him. His residence rooms were close by. He imagined pushing her down sideways across the bed. Edward Reese would die before midnight, but he and Claire Shipley were alive. The more time he spent with the dying, the stronger his compulsion to cleave to the living.

“You must be concerned about your husband signing on with the military,” he said as a polite way to begin a conversation.

“No.” Belatedly she realized she sounded callous. Now she would have to explain. “We haven’t been together in a long time.” This circumlocution was easier than using the word that represented the truth.
Divorced
was a word that generally brought Claire looks of pity and condemnation. She wondered how much of this reaction came from people who’d decided to remain in loveless marriages to avoid the societal judgments that she now absorbed.

Stanton was surprised by her revelation. He’d noticed that she didn’t wear a wedding ring, but he’d assumed this was because of the equipment she worked with. He passed no judgments, but the information changed his perception of her. Opened an unexpected line of possibility. A leap from imagination to reality.

“What about you? Are you married?” Claire asked. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, but most men didn’t.

“No.” He laughed with a slight embarrassment. Thirty-eight years old and never married. He didn’t want to appear abnormal, or like a guy who wasn’t interested in women. Far from it. So he had to tell her something, and her manner encouraged confession. “I was engaged once, but it didn’t work out.”

He said nothing more. She sensed his awkwardness but couldn’t tell if he was still upset about the engagement. She waited for him to continue, and when he didn’t, she let the issue drop, feeling that she didn’t know him well enough to have the right to press him.

Meanwhile he was reminiscing to himself. Ellen, his fiancée. He had met her after he stopped dating the flapper. His friends had teased that he’d managed to find the only attractive physician-in-training at the Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia. Ellen caught tuberculosis from a cadaver during an autopsy. A common enough story. Three of his colleagues at Penn had caught TB from conducting autopsies. Ellen went to Saranac to recover. He visited her there steadfastly—until, on a walk during a glorious autumn afternoon, the sugar maples flashing yellow and orange in the sun all around them, he realized that she had recovered. In fact Ellen had recovered months earlier and yet remained there. And she would remain indefinitely, treating others, conducting research, drawn in by the seduction of tuberculosis in that self-contained village that constituted a world unto itself. Likewise, a story that was common enough. Ellen didn’t have to explain. He understood from her contentment and from her refusal to return either his gaze or his touch.

Since then he’d found physical fulfillment, at least, through the tried-and-true method practiced among his peers: lighthearted affairs with otherwise happily married women. He wasn’t proud or ashamed of this; it was standard procedure. He’d let his work absorb him, taking the place of wife and children. Nonetheless, as he reached his late
thirties, and with the war putting into even higher relief the close boundary of death, he’d found himself yearning for love and for family. Yearning was not an emotion he was accustomed to.

He decided that when this experiment was complete and the notes were compiled, he would ask Claire Shipley to dinner. Despite death looming before them, life continued. Love, hate, friendship, all of it continued. Countless other patients would arrive here by ambulance. Someday, one of them would be cured. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he knew this was true. One of them would be cured and would walk out the hospital doorway, onto the path under the arching trees, past the fountains and the birdbaths, through the stone gates and into the city’s teeming, rushing splendor.

“You have children?” he asked, thinking as he was of the future, of the life that pulsed around them even as one man reached and crossed the edge of death.

“I have a son. He’s eight.”

“I like children.”

“My daughter died of a blood infection when she was three.” Her tone carried a trace of accusation, which she regretted but couldn’t control, as if all doctors bore the blame for her loss.

Stanton closed his eyes. He breathed deeply. Once he’d had a very young patient who’d died of septicemia. By then he’d stopped counting the number of his patients who’d died; he could no longer even remember each one. But this one he remembered because she was so young. Eighteen months old. He reached for her name. It was something simple. Common. Beth. Betsy. Bonnie, that was it. Dead in her crib. The mark of the Catholic last rites upon her forehead. Life will go on. He couldn’t remember the faces of her parents; they were shadows across the crib.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said to Claire, a denseness in his voice as if he were speaking to Bonnie’s parents also.

Easy words, in her experience, offered with little or no thought:
I’m sorry for your loss. Yet Claire sensed that James Stanton truly was sorry and wished that he could make amends, too late though it was. “What about you,” she said more kindly. “You waiting to be called into the military?”