Radiance (20 page)

Come to Moscow,
David calls up.
Trixie. I love you. Come to Moscow with me.

It seems impossible, yet it is true. The next morning, in the pre-dawn light, Trixie and David stand awkwardly together on the deck of the
Stefan Batory,
arms not quite touching, David still drunk but beginning to feel his hangover, Trixie unable to conceal the bare, humiliating sheen of love on her face. They call down fond curses at Walter, which are lost in the crying of the seagulls, then off they go, up the Hudson, accompanied by the sad booming whistle of the SS
Batory,
which shakes the dock.

Off to find more life.

T
HERE WAS A FINAL VISITOR
that week. A knock on the door, and standing there, beaming, was the photographer from the wire services. He looked like an illustration from a Mabel
Lucie Attwell book Daisy had been given as a child—children feeding ducks with plump, dimpled hands, apple cheeks so rosy they seemed almost offensive.

“Hello, ma’am,” he said gently, taking off his hat.

The man was about thirty, Daisy supposed, not so boyish up close, fine pale lines radiating from the corners of his brown eyes. His skin, too, had lost the gloss of youth. Still, his open manner made him seem boyish. He took a blue airmail envelope from his inside breast pocket. “You’re Mrs. Lawrence, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“I’m Tom Orley.”

“I know who you are—you’re the man who gave Keiko that watch.”

“Yes,” he said. “You’re right about that.”

Daisy took a hard look at his round face, his ridiculous, springy red hair. “What do you want?”

The man took a while to respond, clearly thinking this over. “Guess you could think of me as a well-wisher.”

Daisy snorted.

But he shook his head, carried on. “You see, I’ve been writing to her, sending my letters to
The Sunday Review.
But I’m not so sure she’s been getting them, so I thought I’d deliver this one myself—for when she gets out of the hospital.”

“Why do you think she wants a letter from you?” It felt good, Daisy realized, to say something cruel to this cheerful, freckle-faced man. “You don’t even know her.”

“That’s true, ma’am.” He still smiled. “Though I did see her at the hospital, two days ago.”

“You saw her?”

“I did, ma’am.”

“Nobody’s supposed to.”

“I know that. Nurse chased me off. Still I saw her, and we sat together, maybe twenty minutes, all told.”

Daisy shook her head. “That’s against every regulation.”

“Reckon it is.” There was a pause. “Anyway,” he continued, “after they chased me off, I decided I’d come to see you.”

“Why?”

Again he seemed perplexed by the question. An easily perplexed man. He sighed. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I’ve not been too clear about why I do any of what I do lately.” He smiled at her. He was used to winning women over, you could see that. Used to giving a little smile, having them melt. Daisy imagined a doting mother, perhaps a doting aunt as well. People who had listened to his every word indulgently. This irritated her.

“I’m sorry, Mr.—”

“Orley. Tom Orley.”

“You’ve come a long way for nothing. As far as I’m concerned you have nothing to do with this project, and if I see you skulking around here I’ll call the police.”

He shrugged and looked at his feet. “I don’t think you’d do that to me,” he said.

“And why wouldn’t I?”

“Because you seem like a nice person.”

For Christ’s sake, Daisy thought. Why did everyone assume she was nice? How had this happened? What simple benignity was stamped on her face?

“I have to go,” she said. “Good day,” and she closed the door in his face.

She went into the kitchen, began to clear away the dishes. Through the back window she saw the top of Ed’s greenhouse roof. Beside it, hidden by the fence, was the fallout shelter, deeper by the day.

There was another knock.

“Go away,” Daisy called out, but then she answered the door anyway. The man was still holding the letter, his hand raised to knock again. Two doors down, Daisy saw Joan watching, a dust shammy in her hand. Oh God, Daisy thought, I don’t need this Midwestern well-wisher standing at my door, one more thing for the neighbours to gawk at. The shiny pleasantness of his face, bright and seemingly devoid of ill intention, struck her as deeply perverse. Wasn’t he just like the others—the men who crept close to Keiko in the subway, on the street, wanting to be inside the magic circle of her affliction?

“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry—Mrs. Lawrence. Maybe I didn’t introduce myself right.”

“How did you even get here?”

He scratched his forehead. “I took the train—”

“There is no train to Riverside Meadows.”

“I took the train to Stoney Creek. Then I walked across the fields. I can’t get the cab on Fridays. They don’t let me.” He was silent. Obviously this encounter was not going as he’d planned. He looked like a child who tries to do right but finds himself blamed by adults. “At least could you give her the letter? I mean, when she gets back?” Again he gave her his open smile. So hopeful. In truth he wasn’t much like those other men, Daisy had to admit it. Something different was lighting him up. His mouth was a bit fleshy, lips loose, but overall he didn’t seem like a bad person. His shirt smelled of Ivory Snow.

“All right,” she said. “Give it to me.”

He handed it over and even gave her a little bow. “You won’t regret it,” he said.

“I’m regretting it already,” Daisy said.

He wiped his hands on his jacket. “Thank you,” he said.

“It’s all right. Goodbye.”

He turned and walked down the steps, then crossed the lawn and continued up the street. Daisy watched him, and Joan from her side of the street watched too. When he reached the bend in the crescent he raised his hat and saluted Daisy with it.

When he was gone, she tore open the envelope and skimmed the contents. The first part seemed to be about a Mrs. Gordienko and the Dial-a-Cab Company. The second was all about his sister, Emmy, who wore her hair in braids and seemed to have died of polio. Last years of her life in an iron lung. (How dreadful!) A long paragraph described how she had trained her chickens to jump from hand to hand. Another described a rabbit, Clover, that had been her favourite, before she got sick….
At first I thought you were a lot like Emmy,
he wrote
. But now I’m thinking you’re probably different in a thousand and one ways. It’s just you kind of hit me that way at first.

Already he seemed to treat Keiko—a near stranger—as a willing recipient of rambling stories. So like a man, Daisy thought. The next part was about his mother, who lived with a Mrs. Cullard, above the dress shop in town.

She flipped over the page, read the end of the letter.

Daisy dropped the letter into the trash can, pushed it deep down, beneath the shells of Walter’s egg, some scraps of toast. It was just so strange, this man—freckle-faced but quite good-looking—taking one look at Keiko and deciding—deciding what? That he could help her. That she was like his sister, Emmy.

Emmy—a trainer of chickens, a keeper of a white rabbit. Emmy—the sister he couldn’t help. An image formed in Daisy’s mind of this girl, with two stiff braids, a pale know-it-all face, skinny arms. And then that awful end, trapped in the iron lung. Tom, her older brother, looking through the glass at her inert body. Like the prince staring down at Snow White in her glass coffin.

“H
AVE YOU HEARD ANYTHING
about when she’s coming home?” Fran leaned over the back fence. She was slower than she had been a month ago, and bigger too, but Daisy found that her eyes could go to Fran’s belly. She even let herself imagine the sensations: by now the baby must be kicking—delicate kicks like bubbles escaping from a bottle.

“I’m expecting a call soon.” This wasn’t true. But Fran didn’t need to know.

Ed’s bomb shelter was five feet wide now and as deep as a man. “I don’t know why he had to dig his hole directly under the clothesline,” Fran said. It was true: Fran had only a small patch of grass near the back porch from which to launch her clothes. She pulled a pair of Ed’s underwear from the enamel pail she used for wet laundry, pinned them on one side, then the other, then gave the line a hard yank, sending the underwear to drip into the fallout hole.

“How’s Ed doing?” Daisy asked.

“Same as ever. He’s so crabby. He keeps acting as though she—you know—Keiko,” she said the word gently, as though it were valuable, “as though Keiko is his number-one enemy.”

“Maybe he’ll settle down after he meets her.”

“I doubt it. He never does settle down about things—just gets worse and worse until he explodes.”

Fran took another pair of underwear and wrung them out, then hung them with pegs and launched them over the hole. “You know what it is, Daisy?” she said. “He’s afraid. I’ve seen it on his face. He watches the television, he sees that stuff, you know the stuff, the stuff from the bomb—”

“Radiation.”

“And he gets frightened.”

Like me, Daisy thought. That was how I was at first. And she felt a pang of sympathy for Ed Warburgh.

Fran frowned. “I just wish he’d stop being so moody. When do you think she’s coming home?”

Daisy shook her head. “You asked me that already.”

“I did, didn’t I? I can’t think any more. Listen, it said in the paper that she used to work in a hair salon. I have about a million copies of
American Hair.
Do you suppose she’d like them? I mean, to read at the hospital.”

“Sure. That would be nice.”

“I just hope Ed doesn’t notice they’re gone. But if he does, I’ll just say they’re mine. I have a right.”

Daisy smiled. “Does he keep close track of your hair magazines?”

“Oh well, you know. There’s nothing I wouldn’t put past him.” Fran knelt down and pulled up a sheet. It was sopping—her wringer was clearly not working. She hung it doubled over the line, but it was so waterlogged it touched the edges of the hole, picking up dirt. Daisy could see Fran moving around behind the sheet, a watery shadow with two edges. Daisy walked quickly to the end of the fence, slipped through the gap and crossed the Warburghs’ lawn. Fran had her face against the sheet, cooling her cheeks.

“I get so hot,” Fran said. “And look at my feet.” They were badly swollen. “I don’t know why that’s happening.”

“It’s just the pregnancy.”

“He doesn’t ever hurt me, Daisy, if that’s what you’re thinking. He’s just trying to do what’s right.”

“But you
don’t think he’s right.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Yes it does.”

“I don’t see how.”

“It just does, Fran.”

“How do you know?”

Daisy shook her head. “I don’t know. I just do.”

Fran looked at her through watery eyes, then she gave Daisy a quick hug. It was a feathery gesture, done quickly, regretted instantly. She picked up the enamel bucket and turned to go inside, but then stopped when she reached the porch steps.

“I’ll leave the magazines at your back door.”

“Put them on the chair.”

“Ed will have no idea.”

D
AISY STOOD INSIDE
K
EIKO’S BEDROOM.
What was she looking for? Clues, that was all: she wanted clues to what this girl was. The anger, the malevolency that poured so potently from the top of her head, the small but perfectly constructed lie she had told on the bridge.
I can’t remember a thing about the bombing. Help me, Mrs. Lawrence.

No, the girl had not said
help me.
That was something Daisy
had added, going back over the memory. The movement of the stalks of muddy grass, the girl’s head, luminous in the plastic bonnet.
Help me.
Then that unexpected gesture, the one that seemed destined to undo Daisy, the small hand clutching the chestnut in her pocket.

Her chest of drawers was littered with gifts: presents from the Atchitys, from Dr. Carney, from Irene, even, foolishly, from Daisy. So many gifts from so many well-wishers. People trying to right the infernal balance. There were gifts from all of the Project members, but also from total strangers: handkerchiefs, cards, pen and pencil sets—all sent through the mail, and from whom? From old ladies in the suburbs of Palm Beach, or housewives in the badlands of Alberta; from handsome men who’d seen the wire-service photo of her getting off the plane; from schoolchildren prompted by their excitable teachers. Gifts of goodwill, items Keiko had stacked on her desk, some of them still in their wrapping. Daisy picked up a set of three cotton handkerchiefs, still in their gold box, folded between pieces of white tissue. A note was attached:

Beside the handkerchiefs was a Hiroshima Project folder. Daisy undid the elastic string. Inside were a dozen children’s
drawings sent by a Mrs. Cora Wysebrook, from Mt. Holly Elementary School, Georgia. Children with faces zealously coloured yellow, pink, brown, holding hands, circling a globe; children dancing; children in a playground, swinging on swings. Mrs. Cora Wysebrook had obviously edited the drawings: there were no crayoned pictures of bombs falling, no rivers clotted with corpses—just children, dancing their dance of reconciliation.

This made Daisy angry.
Don’t throw your sweet, syrupy emotions all over her. At least get it right.

Not that she had got things right. She’d been as crazy as everyone else, turning Keiko into—into what? Someone through whom she could prove herself. Irene had once said that Daisy needed to be the nicest person in the room. Wanting to be good, now that was a murky desire if you saw it in a certain way; especially if it meant force-feeding Keiko with that goodness.