Radiance (12 page)

Daisy turned to Keiko. She was looking down at the pastries behind the glass. Daisy was about to say all sorts of things—apologizing for the woman, apologizing for society, for America, for the bomb—when Keiko breathed out gently. “I have never tried a Napoleon,” she said.

“Then I will buy you one.”

That was how that incident was resolved. Keiko spoke with
extreme calm, and Daisy answered calmly. Only out in the street did Daisy allow her voice to rise, to carry a ring of indignation. “I can’t imagine why that woman would say such things,” she said. “You’re not our enemy, Keiko.” She
had
been outraged, but her voice now sounded false, even to herself, as though she were a cousin to the woman in the mink stole. Something stopped her from sounding genuine. And Keiko knew.

Daisy thought, She likes Walter because he’s real. She does not like me, because I am not real, with my bright, cheerful smiles, my indignation. I am not real. And when she thought that, she blushed and felt judged.

They walked down First Avenue together. To their left was the East River, a quarter-mile of aching blue. In front of them a glass building shaped like an immense soapbox reflected the cloudless sky with blank, tropical splendour. This was the new United Nations building. It was too four-square for Daisy’s taste, though she liked the idea of the six hundred delegates inside, turning the spanking new dials on their desks, selecting the languages of their choice. The building represented hope, and though it looked ugly and almost menacing, glinting in the afternoon sun, Daisy was attached to the idea of it.

In the UN plaza, they ate their pastries perched on the edge of a cement planter, beside a Henry Moore statue of a nude woman whose breasts seemed to protrude from her back. Across the pond flags from every country caught a breath of wind, straightened, flapped, then fell back against their poles. Daisy was tired of pussyfooting around, of being found wanting. It never seemed to end.
Margaret Mary Parker,
always trying to be a good person, but always ending up being a parody—a parody of goodness. That was how Irene made her feel, and that was how she felt now, having breathed her outrage to Keiko, only to be—as always—subtly rebuffed. It was pretty awful to be judged by Irene, but to
be found wanting by Keiko—a Hiroshima victim, for God’s sake, surely the paragon of victims—well, that was beyond anything Daisy had imagined. But then judging other people was obviously quite easy for Little Miss Was-Honoured-to-Get-Top-Marks.

“Keiko,” Daisy took a last bite of her éclair, swallowing quickly. “I wish you’d tell me a little about yourself. I wish I could know you better.”

Keiko breathed in and then she stopped breathing altogether—a signal that Daisy had cornered her. Daisy could have stopped, but a dark instinct told her to keep digging.

“I know it’s painful to speak about the past. I feel that too. But perhaps you could tell me just a little. About your mother, for instance. Or your grandfather. You lived with him, I’m told—I mean, before …”

Keiko watched two ducks on the round pond. They looked out of place in the concrete plaza. One of them shook its feathers, then sailed on, the other following in its smooth wake. Daisy waited for her to speak, and then—after perhaps a minute—realized that Keiko simply did not intend to. There would be no answer. The girl watched the ducks until the question itself seemed to have stopped ringing in their ears, until its trail was gone. Then she lifted her wrist, that limp gesture Daisy knew profoundly, and checked her watch—not the new gold one, but the blue wristwatch with stitching, the one she always wore.

Keiko not answering seemed, all at once, to answer a number of questions. Daisy saw what she was up to. Keiko planned to get her face fixed, using the latest American surgical techniques, then ship out at the other end with not a ripple to disturb things. It was hard to explain how Daisy saw this in the smooth surface of a pond, two ducks, the girl’s inexpressive face, bandaged near the ear, but there it was—a
small, dark revelation. There would be no press conferences, no anti-Superbomb speech, no fundraising efforts. The girl would not give much of herself. Not for any of them. And they—being the perpetrators of the bombing, the mighty victors—would accept whatever she did.

T
HAT AFTERNOON,
after Dean and Irene had arrived, and they had delivered Keiko to the office of the Norwegian representative (an elderly man keen on meeting a Hiroshima survivor), Daisy told them about the incident at the Éclair Bakery. She didn’t mention her new theory about Keiko. Nor did she say what else she suspected—that men were taking an interest in Keiko because of her atomic disfigurement. This was just too morbid a subject to broach with Dean Atchity. He might think it was a product of Daisy’s overactive imagination, a reactive sickness all her own. No, there were some people who were too kind and wholesome for what the world had to offer, and so you shielded them instinctively, the way you might shield children. Irene acted this way sometimes towards Daisy—but really it wasn’t true. If anything, Daisy thought, she was picking up more than her share of disagreeable thoughts, and they were making her feel sticky all over, like a lint brush.

Meanwhile, she noticed, neither Carney nor Irene had told Dean about the fellow, Tom Orley, who had accosted them in the hospital lobby. Too strange, it had been, too
fantastical,
as Irene put it. “Such a queer intensity to the fellow.”

They were standing in the plaza, preparing to part ways. As
Daisy finished describing the woman in her mink stole, Irene rolled her eyes in dismay. “The stupidity of mortals,” she said.

“But not,” Dean said, “altogether unforeseen or unexpected, given the circumstances.”

“Not unexpected perhaps,” Irene said, “but completely irrational.”

“I wouldn’t say
completely
irrational. Remember the circumstances.”

“But unwarranted …”

“Definitely.”

“And unwanted.”

“Indubitably.”

Irene looked relieved.

Dean propped a foot on the cement planter. He lit his pipe and threw the match into the newly turned dirt, between clusters of hyacinths. “We must remember that none of this is simple,” he said. “I myself have been questioned by members of the press, even by my own daughters, about why I’m engaged in this project. And I’m often at a loss as to what to say. I know I want to help humanity, but that answer often sounds too altruistic, too superficial, though the desire to help humanity is anything but.”

Daisy sat down on the planter near his foot. How good it would be to fall in line with Dean’s judicious but slightly distant way of seeing things. He was the famous Father of the Project, after all, and his words seemed to possess an extra depth—to be letterpressed rather than hastily stamped. Daisy could almost see the mark they were making on history. For a moment she wished that she could tell him all the sorrows and self-recriminations that had preyed on her since the Project began.

“The war is only recently over,” he continued. “So I think it is quite natural for people, especially those who have suffered huge
losses, to take a while to understand that our terrible enemy is no longer there.”

That made sense. Daisy remembered a poster she had seen on a street corner towards the end of the war, depicting Tojo as a worm, with crossed eyes, round glasses and many teeth in a fleshy-lipped mouth. He looked venomous—a crawling creature with a lethal sting, something you’d want to squish beneath your boot. Other times, in newspaper cartoons or in magazine ads, he had been drawn as a rat, or a snake, or even a tiny mouse with Oriental whiskers. Daisy had been sure that the man had huge ears, enormous buck teeth, a hideous squint; she was astonished, during the Japanese war crimes tribunal, to see pictures of a grave, good-looking gentleman. With their hate they had transformed him. And what had they done with that hate since? Daisy doubted that it had disappeared.

And what about the Japanese? What about the Rape of Nanking? What about bayoneting babies, shooting surrendering soldiers in the head? Where had all the other side’s hatred gone? Was this something everyone could turn on and off like a light switch—or was it still all there? She remembered the chill she had felt at Irene’s party, as Keiko turned away, aloofly dismissing her smile of goodwill.

Yes, it’s still there, she thought. Buried, but still there.

Irene was surprisingly quiet through Dean’s speech. But when she and Daisy were strolling down Forty-second Street (Dean had taken charge of Keiko for the afternoon), Irene got down to business.

“How go things with the girl?” she asked. “Have you managed to draw her out?”

“I’ve encouraged her,” Daisy said.

They were at the corner of Third Avenue. Behind Irene, almost obscured by the criss-crossing shadows of the El, a bootblack was
packing up his brushes, his back a wild diamond pattern of light and shade.

“What have you said?”

“Not much. But I’ve encouraged her.”

Daisy described her hunches about Keiko, while Irene listened carefully. She took Daisy’s arm and they crossed the street. “Carney will be interested to hear this—he’s very keen on her psychology. Perhaps you’ve seen that. Dead keen. And he’s quite sure others will be keen on it too.” Daisy detected a note of bitterness.

They were silent for a while, except for the clicking of their heels on the sidewalk. “That journalist was strange, wasn’t he?” Daisy ventured.

“He was fascinated by her. And not just because she’s a pretty eighteen-year-old. I’m sure the scar has a lot to do with it.”

“Yes,” Daisy said—relieved to hear Irene voice it. “I thought so too.”

They were nearing Grand Central Station and Daisy could feel the rumbling of the trains beneath her feet. “Why did you get involved in the Project?” she asked suddenly. She had never thought to wonder before. The Project seemed such a natural outgrowth of Irene’s left-wing college enthusiasms, which had always felt charged with electricity. Charged but empty.

Irene took her time answering.

“Well,” she said at last, “I suppose I have conscious reasons and unconscious ones, just like everyone. Consciously I want to make the world safer, and a large part of my motivation stems from that. I think it’s a load of poppycock to believe we are only motivated by our ugliest repressions. A lot of people do things for quite simple, altruistic reasons—just as Atchity says—such as caring about the world, not wanting it to blow up.”

Daisy looked at her friend. This was the side of Irene she
loved—how she could expand suddenly, showing a dignity you didn’t expect.

“And the unconscious reasons?”

“Well, I think it’s just the opposite, at least according to Freud. On an unconscious level I don’t give a damn about humanity, and neither do you, for that matter. On that level it’s all about our need to expiate our guilt, or some such thing.”

This was nearer the heart. In another moment, if they followed this course, perhaps Daisy could bring up her itchy skin, and that atomic taste in her mouth, like pennies, which never seemed to go away. Then there were Keiko’s silences, which seemed so potent. She wished she had paid more attention, in college, to the lectures in comparative literature. She was sure that Professor Campbell, in his dear way, had said something about silence in the Noh Theatre: how it got colder and more still until, at the climax, nothing at all happened. And then you just wept, or so she remembered, because the ghosts flooded out.

“On an unconscious level,” Irene continued, “you and I—in fact all of us in the Project—are struggling to expiate our guilt for having used the bomb. We don’t admit it, but there it is, or so Freud would have it. Though he’d probably throw in a dash of the death wish, for good measure.”

“That sounds grisly.”

“Grisly doesn’t begin to describe it. We all want to die, according to Freud, or at least experience what death feels like, and what could be grislier than that? Except, perhaps, what he’d have us doing with our fathers in the meantime! Let me tell you, Daisy”—she took her friend’s arm again—“my psychiatrist tells me there are nothing but
urges.
Obsessive, repressed, selfish urges.” Her heels clipped cheerfully on the sidewalk. There would be no confiding in Irene today, Daisy thought. Just when
you thought you were getting somewhere, she slipped blithely away, like water through a sieve.

They stopped to stare at a rubbery beige girdle in a store window. A sign above it read,
Ladies—This girdle will do all the work!

“Heavens,” Irene exclaimed. “How marvellous! You know I’m in favour of delegation.”

D
EAN AND
B
ERTHA
A
TCHITY
’
S HOUSE
was an hour and thirty minutes northeast of the city, in Fairfield County, beyond the tight grid of suburbs that had recently devoured Rocklands and Westchester. The homes in the Atchitys’ neighbourhood were much older than those in Riverside Meadows. Most had been built before the first war. Some were Cape Cod homes from the previous century, and a few old salt boxes dated from colonial times. Behind the Atchity house an acre of lawn and forest dropped to a small brook; in front another half-acre of lawn stretched invitingly, rimmed by a split-rail fence. Standing on the front porch, ringing the doorbell with Keiko beside her, Daisy could hear the mature birches shuffling their thousands of leaves in the wind. A Dalmatian ran around the house, barking.

This was the original prototype of the suburb, the Eden of suburbs. Everyone else was confined to the proverbial East, eking out their living in what seemed, comparatively, to be the dust. This was what they were all striving for: to live in gentle civility in a haven such as this, out of which you could make forays to express outrage (or rather civilized concern—Bertha would never express outrage) at the direction humanity was taking:
those
disturbing
hearings, that
concerning
H-bomb. Life would be so easy, Daisy thought, if everyone were given three acres of prime Connecticut real estate, a Dalmation and a split-rail fence.