Radiance (24 page)

“Everybody knows about the malaise of the suburban man, but what about the college-educated suburban woman, wiping Jell-O from her baby’s face and quietly contemplating suicide? What about pill popping? Drunkenness? Promiscuity?”

It was as though she’d let out a massive burp across his desk, spraying the bust of Whitman. Dean even took out a handkerchief and wiped his hands. Then he told her gently, and paternally (that fatherly part of him never wavered), that the readers of the
Sunday Review
would never be interested in such issues. He didn’t say that she was imagining things, but he somehow managed to imply that her vision of the world was skewed, warped by the dizzying vertical of her twice-divorced state.

And so she had written yet another column about Keiko.

She placed a hand on the telephone, willing it to ring, willing it to be Raymond on the other end. She held her palm against the cold curve of the receiver, but no: nothing. He had pulled back over the last month, giving no reasons. The things that had held them together—the pleasures of sex, and of planning the Project—had been put on hold while the girl lolled around Riverside Meadows and healed.

It was Keiko’s fault that Irene no longer understood Raymond. He was obsessed, and the form his obsession had taken was of a patient suitor, arriving at Daisy’s house with flowers, speaking of a thousand things, but never of the bomb. He wasn’t recording her story, or recording how she avoided telling her story—he was enjoying her company, changing her bandages. When she had asked him, he had said that he was waiting, but she wasn’t so sure.

“What on earth are you up to?” she had said to him last night, after a week of not seeing him, not sleeping with him. They were in his bed. He’d been silent, quite unlike the old Raymond, until at last she pestered a reply from him.

“I’m not up to anything.”

“You’ve changed.”

“Have I?”

She felt like kicking him. “You know you have.”

“If you say so.” After a while, he added: “If we proceed with care, I believe Keiko will give us what we want. I’m putting my trust in your gentle friend.” That was what he had said:
Your gentle friend.
Her gentle friend. The words fell like burning shards of stone. She stood up and went to the bathroom, looked at herself in the mirror and saw Irene Podborsky. All the effort, the voice she used these days, that sounded, even to herself, faintly British, not to mention the pinching shoes, the fine vertical lines between her eyebrows—all for what? So that Raymond Carney could put
his trust in Daisy Lawrence. Oh, she should never have brought Daisy into the Project. She went back and sat at the end of the bed, putting on her shoes. She couldn’t say another thing or she’d show how much she cared, and that wasn’t part of their bargain.

After a while he spoke again. “Keiko’s tremendously complex.”

“I know.”

“I’ve realized that we can’t force her, Irene. She needs to come to us on her own.”

A pause.

“I suppose Keiko has a soul,” Irene added. That old game.

He’d looked surprised, as though she’d asked him a question he had been brooding about. “Several,” he answered after a pause.

“Oh, she’s got me beat then. I can’t compete with that.”

Several.

A world of souls.

It was then, standing at the end of the bed, fastening her shoe, as Raymond lay in bed looking out the window, that Irene had realized she hated Keiko. She hated her slender wrists and her tiny feet and her smooth voice. She hated her way of listening as though she understood. She hated the burning city that drew them all in, like moths. But what she hated most were the happy pleasures everyone had managed to find in one another’s company, midsummer, in the suburb of Riverside Meadows.

T
HE POOL WAS THE PALEST TURQUOISE:
the turquoise of oceans in Bermuda, the turquoise of the sky over the Gulf Coast, the turquoise of chlorinated water at its very best. Just
behind Daisy, Gerald Strickland was mixing drinks while flirting with Evelyn Lithgow. One of his concoctions rested beside Daisy on the glass-topped patio table. The smell of charred steak swept across the patio from the brick outdoor barbecue. True to tribal tradition, all the other men had gathered around the flames, preparing to give Gerald advice on his technique. Walter had on a new short-sleeved shirt, covered in thick red and white vertical stripes, like a barber’s pole. He glanced across the Stricklands’ pool to where Keiko sat on a deck chair with the women.

“On the hottest days,” Keiko was saying, “you could smell snow. This is what my grandfather said.”

The women leaned in, mesmerized by the city Keiko could conjure up, the delta carved by seven rivers, the sacred shrine of Miyajima with its
torii
gate floating in the water. All obliterated—all gone.

“When you hear the word
Hiroshima
—you always think of the bombing,” Joan said. “You never think of what was there, before.”

“How tall was the bamboo?” Fran asked. “The bamboo you saw from the train window.” She already knew the answer.

“Taller than an elephant. Taller than this house. It was the old bamboo of Hiroshima Prefecture. It got cut down to feed the boilers during the war. Women and schoolchildren were sent out to cut it down, then to cut the pieces into lengths to be shipped north.” She got up and went to the edge of the pool and put her foot in the water. “Excuse me,” Keiko said. “I would like to swim now.”

The Stricklands lived in Stoney Creek, where the yards were much bigger than in Riverside Meadows. Gerald and Ella had a vegetable garden in the bottom left corner of the backyard: there was corn and lettuce, radishes and carrots, yellow beans and scarlet runners. Along the east wall, near the garage, Gerald
had espaliered three pear trees. They looked splayed and captured, a few green pears dangling from thin limbs. Artie Shaw was on the record player, mellow arcs of clarinet.

“You won’t mind visiting the neighbours?” Daisy had asked Keiko. Every day Keiko seemed to grow more talkative, lighter. Now it was a week until the bandages were to be removed, and she seemed almost buoyant. Less like her real self, Daisy thought, then stopped herself, wondering why she felt she knew that self so deeply.

“I don’t mind going,” Keiko had said. “I like to swim.” As though the issue at stake was merely whether, like any teenager, she would look good in a bathing suit.

“You’ll have to make sure your bandages don’t get wet.”

“You’re a long way from home,” Gerald had said to Keiko, greeting them at the front door, then added, “Just how old are you?” When Keiko had told him her age, he said, “You come on back and meet my girls.”

Now Keiko was sitting a stone’s throw from these girls at the edge of the pool. Joey Palmer floated on his back. He was a plump, dark-haired boy of seven, with overlapping front teeth, and skin that tanned rather than burnt. He kicked water at the girls and then went under. When he came up he was a foot from Keiko. “What’s that on your face?” he said.

“Bandages.”

“Joey,” the Strickland girl said. “That’s rude. I’m telling Mom.”

“That’s okay,” Keiko said. “It’s to cover my skin graft.”

Joey thought this over. “My mom says you’re an A-bomb victim,” he said. “We’re supposed to feel sorry for you.”

“Joey Palmer!” Joan sprang up from her chair, reached the pool in two steps and yanked her son from the water by one arm, scraping his side against the concrete edge. His whining
was drowned by her staccato bark: “You! Joey Palmer! You’ll get a hiding!”

“No I won’t!”

“And a bad one!”

She dragged him around the side of the house and everyone could hear the hiding going on: Joey’s cries, and then the hard
flack, flack, flack
of her palm against bare skin. Soon Joan emerged, leaving the humiliated Joey at the side of the house.

“I’m so sorry,” she said to Keiko.

“Oh, I don’t mind him asking, Mrs. Palmer.”

“Joan. Call me Joan.”

“I don’t mind.”

One of the Strickland girls felt moved to add, “We’re real sorry about what happened to you.”

And Keiko smiled. “That’s okay,” she said, as though it were a little thing, done yesterday, a slight that was already forgotten.

The hospital had changed Keiko. Daisy had felt this before, but seeing her in Stoney Creek, alien territory, brought the changes home. How altered the girl was now, how light—as though, by making herself the currency of air, she could become what every person wanted, and thus escape them. It made Daisy want to weep to think of it—how faceless the girl could make herself, like the fox in the fairy tale. The bakemono. Keiko had told that story to Daisy one night, while Daisy sat at the foot of her bed, rubbing her feet.

Keiko talked a lot now—that was the other change: she talked about Hiroshima, though never about the bombing. She talked beneath the bombing, around the bombing, describing the city as it had been to a child of ten. She told Daisy of the shadow-dappled hallway leading to the kitchen of her grandfather’s house, the shrines he recorded, in minute writing, in his black
leather notebook—a tracery of notes to describe a tracery of secret places. She spoke often of her grandfather, and Daisy imagined his gentle, wizened face, substituting the bespectacled, mustached face of her own dead father.

Near midnight, at the Stricklands’, there were only a few people left—Keiko, Joan, Ella and Gerald (asleep in his chaise lounge) and Walter and Daisy. Walter sat quietly smoking. It must, Daisy thought, be a nice relief for him to be away from his typewriter; to let whatever he thought float away, unrecorded, like smoke from his cigarette. Keiko sat between him and Daisy. We’ll need to get her home soon, Daisy thought. It’s long past bedtime.

Joan said something about mosquitoes coming out, and for some reason this made Gerald sit up on the chaise lounge and shout, “Fuck it!” Then he lay back down and everyone laughed. But Ella didn’t like it—it interfered with her sense of decorum. “Stop it, Gerald,” she said severely. “You’re having a nightmare.” And then to the rest of them, “He thinks he’s back at Omaha Beach.”

He must have heard through his sleep because he shook all over like a dog. Ella went inside and fetched a blanket, then spread it over him.

“He’ll sleep out here till dawn. There’s no moving him.”

“Lucky it’s warm out,” Joan said.

Ella lit a mosquito coil. The scent filtered through the air. Daisy watched the ash forming at the end of the coil, growing longer every minute. They sat breathing in the dusty, sweet smell, hearing traffic on the turnpike, just a car every two minutes or so. The smell of cut grass filled the night air. The sprinklers were on, and every now and then Daisy felt a faint mist against her face.

Later Daisy was not able to remember how the story began, or to understand why Joan chose to tell it. The pool lights were off, and they might have been sitting beside any body of water, in
ancient Egypt or Israel perhaps, any place where people gathered to tell stories in low voices, while drunken soldiers like Gerald snored in nearby tents. Daisy never remembered afterwards what got Joan started, perhaps it was because earlier that afternoon Joey had put his head too close to the chlorine filter, but all at once she was in the middle of it, describing how she and her brother had loved to synchronize their movements under water. A game they had. “He’d do a back somersault,” she said, “and I would do the exact mirror, all of this at the lake. We thought we were bloody magnificent. We thought we should run away and join the circus—only they don’t have water acts in circuses, not something we spent a lot of time thinking about. The details, I mean. Course it was all my idea—synchronized swimming! What boy would think of that?” On she went, directing her comments to Keiko’s bandaged profile. She told about how she had stayed home sick from school one day and seen, through the front window, Mr. Wren, the principal, carrying her twin brother down the street, cradling his head. The principal was dressed in black like a preacher, and behind him came a procession of children. “Mr. Wren was too distraught to tell them to get back to school, so they just followed behind.” A dozen children, looking important and full of harm, and almost out of control, though they were silent. Some of them, as is the way with children, almost dancing with the terribleness of it. They came down the street, beneath the orange leaves, figures in a silent film.

She told this story, and everyone pictured it exactly: the limp boy in the man’s arms, the procession of children, the mother throwing down her rake, not running, just standing on the lawn, while inside Joan peered through the picture window angry, because she thought her brother had hurt himself, and she was supposed to be the sick one that day. It was just like him to steal the attention.
Afterwards Walter, Keiko and Daisy walked home from Stoney Creek along the silent turnpike, shoes crunching on the gravel verge. Every now and then a car came by, dimming its headlights. Keiko walked between them, her face glowing and bobbing in the darkness. In the grocery store parking lot Daisy saw their three shadows—courtly, tall man, slight girl, rounded woman—stretch across the asphalt. They found the pathway, then followed it in silence. Around them the corn sheaths spoke in their native tongue—spoke and spoke—while Daisy thought of Joan’s story, the swimming brother, the twin. Then she thought of Tom Orley, the photographer, who came often now, in the afternoons, and she thought of Walter, sitting each night on the back porch, speaking in a low whisper, while Keiko listened—all of them finding something in the whiteness of that face that suggested absolution. And yet still, the crafty side of Keiko moved and breathed beneath the bandages, and thought of what to do next, and planned her escape.

They crossed the bridge over dried-up Willard’s Creek and then walked up the slope, past the old farm foundations, towards the school, while around them the crickets sang wildly—not caring the least that any of them existed—and above, the night sky burnt with a million cold stars.

T
HEY CAME TO HER.

The neighbours came, bearing platters of lemon tarts and angel-food cake and a wobbling green-and-red tomato asparagus
aspic. Dr. Carney came, clutching, with each visit, a bouquet of pink roses, or daisies, laced with baby’s breath, his notepad tucked securely in his inside jacket pocket. Tom Orley came too, and this time Daisy asked Keiko if she cared to see him. She did care to see him. She cared quite a bit. After a long fifteen minutes, she emerged at the front door wearing a red-and-white gingham dress, holding her shell-encrusted purse.