Radiance (35 page)

When Daisy mentioned Jesus, Joan rolled her eyes.

Jesus! Now there was a name you didn’t hear much these days. Joan looked like she’d rather Daisy confess she was a Red and had given away the secret of atomic weapons, as they said Ethel Rosenberg had done, then lisp on to her about Jesus—why him?

Daisy didn’t consider herself to be brave. She didn’t believe she could spend two months in jail, as Walter was doing. Nor did she believe she could have stood up to the mad howlings of the Residents’ Committee, as Joan had done. The only real strength Daisy felt she exhibited in that bad period, when Walter was jailed, was to keep thinking about Jesus—like a zealot, Joan had hinted, but that wasn’t right, more like a woman with a secret. Yes, with one small secret left. She was childless, and Walter was gone and Keiko had fled (she shook her head when she thought about Keiko), but the nice thing about Jesus was that you could believe he was made up—all that love he was supposed to have—just a beautiful made-up construction. So she could imagine him opening his flannel robes, pointing with his delicate, bloodied palms to his flaming heart. She could imagine him resting her head against the burning furnace, showing her how easily this was done. She could imagine him loving her.

Daisy and Joan talked about Keiko a lot, sharing news of her appearances on television. Daisy braced herself to hear about every new growth in the girl’s abilities. Joan was able to discover, without probing too piercingly, that Keiko had told the Project about Walter, and that the Project, in turn, must have told the FBI.

“She fingered him,” Joan summarized.

“I don’t think she knew what she was doing,” Daisy said.

“They forced her?”

Daisy shook her head, said nothing. Just to think of all the pain Keiko had caused had its bracing effect, like so much cold
air blowing along the baseboards. The night before the pipes had frozen.

Sometimes, if Joan had news of Keiko, she started tentatively.

“Are you sure you want to hear?” she would say, though she knew Daisy wanted the news. One day she told her that Keiko had spoken to a gathering of eight hundred people at Carnegie Hall. Paul Robeson and she had sung a duet afterwards.

“Gordon and I tried to see her backstage. We waited for an hour. She wouldn’t see us.”

“Maybe she didn’t know it was you.”

“She knew all right. She trotted right by us on Dr. Carney’s arm! I called out to her, and she just looked at me blankly.”

“She may not have seen you properly.”

“Daisy, she saw me. She snubbed me.” Joan shook her head. “Oh, she isn’t what she seemed,” she said, marvelling. “I guess Riverside Meadows wasn’t good enough for her.”

Daisy shook her head too; not that she agreed with Joan’s way of seeing things, but it felt good to sit with her, to bask in the comfort of their joint reproaches. They had given her everything, that was what Daisy and Joan were telling each other—everything!—and it hadn’t been nearly enough.

“Walter bought her a TV, I guess you know that.”

“That committee of yours is going to discover, sooner or later, that they can’t trust her,” Joan said. “Mark my words.”

“I’m not so sure.”

Joan asked how she could possibly say that, after all she and Walter had been though, but Daisy decided not to answer. What she was thinking lately was that Keiko’s contract with the committee was different from the one she had with Daisy. The committee merely wanted her to speak, but Daisy had wanted to understand every silence, every moan, to follow her when she walked in the night, to stop her from crying. Daisy had felt
Keiko enter her heart’s heart. And it was from this complex place that Keiko had had to gnaw her way free—like any survivor, escaping from any trap.

W
ASHINGTON
, N
OVEMBER
2, 1952—The world’s first ever hydrogen bomb test explosion yesterday, at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands, was a devastating blast, with approximately three hundred times the destructive force of the Hiroshima bomb, according to reports by servicemen.

Vessels were scattered around the island about thirty miles from the explosion. Aboard the ships men donned protective clothing before the blast and were instructed to turn their backs, close their eyes and cover their faces with their arms.

At
7
:
14
. a.m. Eniwetok time, a voice over the loudspeaker of each ship started counting the seconds. For six seconds after zero there was silence.

The first sign of the explosion came to the men aboardship in the form of a flash many times brighter than the sun, followed by a wave of heat across their backs. It would take ten suns to equal the light of the explosion from a distance of thirty-five miles, a navigator said.

Ten seconds after zero the men on ship started turning around to face the direction of the blast.

“I could hardly believe my eyes,” one said. “A flame about two miles wide was shooting five miles into the air. Then we saw thousands of tons of earth being thrown straight into the sky. Then a cloud began to form. You could swear that the whole earth was on fire. It was really something.”

At least three eyewitnesses reported that the island on which the bomb had been exploded disappeared after the blast.

“The whole island burned for about six hours. During this time it was gradually becoming smaller,” one man said. “Within six hours a three-mile-wide island covered in palm trees and coconuts had disappeared.”

O
NE MORNING IN
D
ECEMBER
, three weeks after Walter had returned from his stint in prison, the telephone rang, and when Daisy picked it up she knew who it was right away, even before Keiko had said a word: Daisy could tell by the breathy silence.

She told Daisy she wanted to see her, her voice tentative at first, then growing harder as she spoke, more distanced, so that as Daisy put the receiver down it seemed possible that Keiko might change her mind and not arrive for their meeting at all. Hearing Daisy’s voice, hearing whatever she projected involuntarily (victimization? deep sighs of smothering love?), might have put her off entirely.

“I’m leaving on Tuesday, Mrs. Lawrence,” Keiko said. “Now that the H-bomb has been exploded, I am to go on an international tour. I hoped we could meet again before I leave.”

The idea of never seeing Keiko again ripped at Daisy’s heart, the way that old word
banishment
must have ripped at the heart of medieval townspeople. Daisy had not seen Keiko or touched her since that night in August when she left Riverside Meadows.

“You go Tuesday,” Daisy said, blank whiteness in her stomach.

“Tuesday, Mrs. Lawrence.”

“Thank you for calling, Keiko. I would like to see you one last time.”

Keiko suggested that they meet at a café not far from Irene’s apartment. “If I’m there first,” she said, “I will reserve a table. It can be crowded in the afternoons.” She said this with Irene’s exact intonation. When Daisy heard that, she felt something stir in her, an urge to reach across the distance, even after all that had happened, pin the girl down. She put down the receiver and began to wipe the counters, wondering what she could do to occupy herself until their meeting.

Walter had come home from prison looking grey and gaunt and with the beginnings, though they didn’t know it yet, of emphysema in his chest. He coughed a lot at night. His name had been added to the blacklist of people in the entertainment industry. It was a bit of a who’s who of political artists, and in later years it was considered an honour to have been on it, rather than the reverse, but it meant Walter couldn’t do a stick of work in radio again.

As Daisy drove him home that first day, he kept commenting on the view outside the window, how the pumpkin crops had done, how children looked walking on the shoulder of the Parkway, how the cows back east sure weren’t the cattle of Washington State. Near home, Daisy realized that he sounded like an old man enjoying a drive, just glad, in a simple way, to be taken around by someone charitable, shown the day. His edge was
gone, that thorny side that made him hate everybody shamelessly. In the relief to have him with her again, Daisy didn’t realize how much she would miss that caustic side—how much she had depended on that edge to point her in the right direction.

The evening following Keiko’s phone call, Walter and Daisy had a celebration of sorts, because Walter had found a part-time job as a salesman for portable heaters and air conditioners. It was Murray Kesselman who offered him the job. Murray, Walt’s old rival at
The Inner Sanctum,
had been put on the blacklist too. Always a mover and shaker, Murray had bounced back by starting a small business selling air conditioners door to door. When Walter went to see him, they had talked about all their years in the party, their old friends and enemies, and in the end Murray had offered Walter a job. He had also given Walter so many books to take home that Walter’s briefcase had been hard to carry onto the train.

“It must have riled the FBI agent that was trailing me,” Walter said elatedly when he got home. “He must have thought I had all the workings of a bomb in there.” He was still being followed, though Melville Shrank had disappeared.

He opened his briefcase and took out a black box wrapped in a thick satin ribbon. He tossed the box on the bed, along with the jacket of his suit.

“That’s for you,” he said.

“Why me?”

“I don’t know. Guess I must fancy you.”

“Really? After all this time.”

Daisy took the ribbon off and lifted the lid. There was peanut brittle inside, quite a bit of it, her favourite kind. He used to bring it to her in the early days: in some ways, she thought, she had been courted with peanut brittle. Then later, when she was pregnant, he brought it to her from town
because she had cravings for it. Daisy was thinking that he’d forgotten that, but then he came around to where she sat on the bed and stroked her hair, then her cheek, in that way he had of touching her, which she had almost forgotten about, a sort of “pet owner to dog” touch, which Daisy had never minded. She closed her eyes, the better to feel what he was doing.

He rubbed her cheek with his thumb and the palm of his hand. Then he moved his hand down to the collar of her dress. His fingers lingered on the top button, and he coughed, a raspy hack. Daisy worried that he might get distracted, so she arched her back and led his palm to her breast, clamped beneath all of its wiring and cupping. She undid her dress, big buttons sliding easily through the holes, and slipped her breast from the cup. Now he could see it completely. He had always been rather taken by her breasts, way back when, fondling them and feeling their weight in his palms. There was little chance, she knew, now that he was concentrating in his new way, gently taking in whatever was placed in front of him, that he would turn down an offer like this one.

Later, over dinner, Daisy told him that she was going to see Keiko. He was quiet, holding his fork, which was loaded up with macaroni and cheese. She saw a muscle trembling in his jaw. Then he brought the forkful to his mouth and ate it slowly. She didn’t actually know what was going through his head, what layers of feeling passed through him. Was he thinking of Keiko as the girl who landed him in jail, or as a confidante, a secret muse, a daughter—or just as Keiko—a girl with so many sides that nobody, as it turned out, could know her completely? Daisy looked at him, but she didn’t ask.

That night in bed he lay beside her, reading one of Murray’s books, sighing, laughing, groaning. Daisy looked at the title: Trotsky’s
History of the Russian Revolution.
At one point he put
down the book, astonished. “This man can really write,” he said. Just as Daisy was falling asleep, she felt him curl up behind her, kneecaps brushing the inside of her knees, fingers cupping her breast. They fell asleep like that, with Trotsky on the nightstand.

My husband, Daisy thought, tasting the words in her mouth. My husband. Walter Lawrence. Air Conditioner Salesman.

He had five good years as a salesman before the emphysema forced him to quit work. After that, Daisy went to work in the cafeteria of the new Riverside Meadows high school. A year later he would get up one morning, shuffle to the front door for the newspaper, and read Harrison Salisbury’s account of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Union, read, in all that tiny fine print covering two full pages, Khrushchev’s revelations of the secret crimes Stalin had committed—the back-alley murders, the tortures, the confessions, the gulags, the mass starvations: massive amounts of text, detailing what Communist parties around the world were still denying. “Between
1930
and
1941
, Stalin killed every single person who knew him from the past,” Walter said to Daisy. “That’s certainly one way to deal with your in-laws.”

Daisy imagined steel bars lifted from Walter’s chest. She imagined air circulating through his ruined lungs.

By the time he died, in
1968
, everything had changed once again. For one thing, some fiery new couples had moved to Riverside Meadows and they’d voted to allow black families to buy houses there. Then they voted, at one exciting meeting, to get rid of the Residents’ Committee altogether, and never to meet again. These couples set a new standard of conduct: jumping into one another’s pools fully clothed, or naked, sleeping with one another’s partners, holding consciousness-raising sessions, to which they dutifully and kindly invited Daisy and Joan. Around this time, too, there was the sudden resurgence in the left-wing
theatre scene culminating, at least as far as Daisy was concerned, in the off-Broadway revival of Walter’s old play,
Fall from Grace.
It got decent reviews, and earned the play its “seminal place” in American theatre, though Walter, who was in hospital by this time, could only read about it in the papers.

Y
OU CANNOT SAY
with certainty why things happen. If you have influence. If what you do alters a stone, a twig.