Radiance (4 page)

There was applause.

Atchity rocked back on his heels. “Even as we stand here,” he said, “united by this humanitarian cause, we must be mindful of the dangers we face. Last month, Senator McMahon, the chairman of the Joint Senate-House Atomic Energy Committee, told us for the first time, without equivocation, that the United States is indeed developing a new Superbomb. All of civilized humanity cannot help but be appalled. And as we know, the Soviet Union has also announced plans to build its own thermonuclear weapon.

“Never, in the long road civilization has travelled, have we so badly needed human voices—voices raised in protest, voices raised to condemn, voices, like Miss Kitigawa’s, that can describe, from personal experience, the devastation caused by the atomic bomb.”

A murmur of approval went around the room. Daisy, standing near the bedroom door, was only a few feet from Keiko. Her eyes were lowered, studying her punch glass. Atchity emphasized the devastating story she would soon tell, beginning immediately after her hospitalization. A surge of pity passed through Daisy. People had surrounded the girl since she had arrived at the apartment; every important person had been introduced to her. How insensitive they had been, squeezing her like an accordion, no thought to how tired she must be. If Daisy could have, she would
have sidled up to the girl now—she was, after all, hardly more than a child—and looked her right in the eye, past that disfiguring scar.
I know how it is with you.
That was what Daisy’s look might say.
I know how overwhelmed you are. Yes, I can see into you
—
a little, just a little.
Throughout the party, and even in the car from the airport, had she been waiting for this opportunity? It certainly felt that way now.

Dean was describing how a fusion bomb would alter the course of civilization. “We are on the brink,” he said, “and soon we will pitch forward into the dark unknown.” A buzz went through the crowd. They liked those words,
the dark unknown.
And it was true, Daisy thought. They were, every one of them, staring into the future, trying to make out its dread shape. The very taste of nuclear weapons was in the room—their ashen dust, their radioactive itch.

She was just a small stone’s throw from Keiko. This was Daisy’s opportunity and she decided to take it, as kind, gentle Dean began to wrap up.

“We are the children of the atomic bomb,” he was saying. “All of us, in this room. It is our dark mother. We live now and forever in its shadow. People in the world are divided in many ways—particularly in the Soviet East and the freedom-loving West—but, if I might paraphrase the words of that great thinker Bertrand Russell—whose name you will see on the Project letterhead—‘Let us but remember our humanity—and forget all the rest.’”

There were calls of
hear, hear,
and Keiko, perhaps sensing Daisy’s stare, glanced her way. Daisy smiled. It was the smile that had always done the trick in college: a tender, sweet, girlish smile that said,
I am a person of goodwill. I won’t hurt you.
In fact, when Daisy was a girl of ten she used to ride the bus smiling at complete strangers in just that way, trying to brighten their day.

Oh that scar—the large, bubbled territory—and those amber
eyes. The girl took in Daisy’s smile, the frightened edges of it, and then she frowned, just like that, and looked away. As though Daisy’s smile were a gift she had no use for. As though refusing a glass of punch.

Daisy stood frozen, blushing deeply. She had an awful complexion for showing her feelings. The room seemed to thrum, that particular thrum of birds beating their wings against a window. She must have been mistaken. Why would this girl, whom they had brought to New York at such expense, be refusing her smile?

Later she would think about that moment many times. In the spring and summer, after Keiko came to live with her, she would think about it, telling herself she must have imagined that glance of malevolence, the goosebumps rising on the girl’s arms. But later still, when Keiko was gone, she knew it was the realest image she carried of the girl. Never lose sight of your first impressions, she told herself then—they act as guides.

But now Dean was urging everybody to raise their glasses high and drink to a shared future.

To the pilot project, to the pilot project.

For a moment the air was thick with the general murmur, then they touched their glasses together—a musical tinkle, low and high, like wind chimes.

D
AISY WASN’T ONE TO THINK
about history—capital H—or progress, or even politics very much. It would have felt pretentious to start any sentence, as Irene so often did, with
Here we are,
on the brink.
Or
This terrible time that we live in.
Even the word
postwar
was laden, carrying a freight load of something-or-other that seemed clearer to everyone else than to her. Yet driving home that night, she had Dean Atchity’s words in her head: how he had called the bomb “our dark mother.” She hadn’t paid full attention, but now the words, associated as they were with the coolness of Keiko’s frown, sounded in her mind—dire and appalling, yet foreign and exciting too.

They were poised, all the men and women in the room, and soon they would pitch forward into the unknown. That was what Atchity had said. But they weren’t blind instruments of fate; they could alter the unknown, bring light into the darkness, even such a small band of people as they were. Atchity seemed to have nothing less in mind than the elimination of atomic weapons. And why not? The A-bomb had only been invented seven years before. It was a new thing. Certainly all the best minds—Dean Atchity, Albert Schweitzer, Bertrand Russell, even the A-bomb’s inventor, Robert Oppenheimer—were writing in
Life
and the
Sunday Review
that it would be utter madness to develop a hydrogen bomb. They used calm, reasonable tones, the way you might talk to a toddler who had picked up a gun. They seemed to believe that the world might still bring these weapons under the control of the United Nations. Then, working as one civilized mass, humanity could lock every thermonuclear and atomic blueprint in a vault and bury it at the bottom of the sea.

The rain had stopped and the moon was full. In the city the buildings had obscured it, but when Daisy had driven over the bridge and through the outskirts of Brooklyn, with its jumble of auto-parts shops and high-rise housing projects, each topped with its stubby water tower, there it was, large and poker-faced, smoky at the edges. Once she was well along the Northern State Parkway, she kept glimpsing it behind the stone bridges that
spanned the highway, or flashing between the scrubby hemlocks, glimpsing it and then losing it again.

The twinkling lights of housing tracts broke the emptiness of fields. Occasionally she passed an abandoned farmhouse, windows bleakly facing the four lanes of parkway, where once they had stared, probably with equal bleakness, into acres of potatoes, fields of corn. The subdivisions in Nassau County were so new that by daylight they looked outlandish, newly seeded. At the red light near Levittown, she could hear the train in the distance, heaving and screeching.

You do something, Daisy was thinking, and then you do something else, and all at once you discover you have altered the course of your life.
My friends, there is a choice.
Weren’t those Atchity’s words? In the back of her mind was a fairy tale she had read as a child. In it a Russian prince, the youngest brother, of course, is asked to find a rare and beautiful bird with wings of fire. On the way he stops on the road to feed an old woman. It is a small act, quite natural for this youngest son who, like youngest sons in all fairy tales, is blessed with an easy kindness. Later the old woman helps him with certain magical tasks: rescuing the princess, opening the cage of the firebird.

Before her miscarriage, the summer she and Walter had moved to Riverside Meadows, she had made many happy and foolish plans. They usually featured Walter, lean and distinguished, sitting beside their neighbour, Gerald Strickland’s pool, while Daisy waded with her toddler in the shallow end; Walter heading out the door, looking handsome and clever, off to the city to deliver his radio scripts while Daisy fed the baby or vacuumed or even found time to bake bread. Walter, Walter, Walter. He was at the heart of everything. He and the baby. After the first miscarriage, her family doctor said there was still lots of hope. She had a good chance of giving birth to
a perfectly healthy baby. The important thing was not to wallow in grief. He had used that word,
wallow,
and Daisy had seen herself up to her ears in mud, lavishly despairing.
Be strong, be bold
—her family doctor had said.
Take the bull by the horn,
by which she assumed he must mean Walter. This type of miscarriage—caused by a malformation in the growth of the fetus—was not uncommon.

“Thank you,” Daisy had said. “I know you’re right.”

“I am right. You’ll see.”

“Thank you.”

She had gathered herself together and left his office, feeling that she had gathered not just her purse, her gloves, but the sly, criminal side of herself that refused to budge. How could she possibly explain what she felt in her core? Something had happened to her, and she had crossed over. There was glass between herself and the gorgeous, plain streets of Riverside Meadows.

Walter had been wonderful at first—comforting her as she wept onto his tartan shirt breast. But after weeks of this he began to hint that there was something unseemly in her suffering. Something overdone. The neighbourhood wives—Joan and Evelyn and Fran—had comforted her as well, but they soon grew tired of her sorrow. Daisy had hardly been showing, and she could always try again—in the hierarchy of misfortune, hers didn’t rate particularly high. Now, getting tortured in an enemy prison for six months, as Fran’s husband, Ed Warburgh, had been—tortured so severely that you still felt terrible shooting pains in your feet and had to soak them every night in seltzer—that was misfortune. Or losing a twin brother, as Joan Palmer had done (her brother had fallen from the monkey bars and snapped his neck when she was eight)—that was sorrow. Up against these tragedies, there was no room for Daisy’s hard little ball of grief.

Eventually she did what everyone urged her to do. She tried again, becoming pregnant right away. She told no one but Walter. Shyly, despite herself, she felt a bright bubble of hope take root. As she did the dishes, as she took out the trash, there it was—an idea that made her hold her breath, burn for an instant, with wanting. This went on for a month—no more: one night she dreamed of being rocked by a huge creaking boat. When she woke and groped between her thighs, her fingers came back wet.

Her worst mistake—in her dry, indefatigable sorrow—was believing she could speak to Irene. It still made her ashamed, remembering how Irene had leaned across the tabletop at Rumpelmeyer’s, taking in every word, consoling, sighing, avid for more. When their drinks arrived she had applied herself, with equal fervour, to her strawberry float.

“Here’s the number of my shrink.” She had pressed a card into Daisy’s hand as they stood on the sidewalk, preparing to depart. But Daisy knew better. Never would she see Irene’s shrink. He would jot down his notes, pencil scratching mightily with every word she uttered, recording the darkness before it had even taken form. He would have a thousand reasons to explain what was wrong with her, and it wouldn’t just be the miscarriages. He would want her to talk about her childhood, of course—the death of her beloved father, her disinterested and noisy mother, now living in California with her second husband. He would want to know how Daisy had
really
felt, being uprooted from her home in Syracuse at the tender age of nine and sent off to boarding school. And there would be no point trying to explain that she and her mother had always been somewhat distant, and that by far her favourite memories were from those days at Sacred Heart, curtsying in chapel when Jesus’ name was sung, or reading her Who-Dun-It at lunchtime, curled up in a hole in the cypress hedge.

Not to mention what a shrink would make of Walter—Walter, ten years older than Daisy, a father figure if you ever saw one. Or of Irene, Daisy’s oldest and most detested friend. It could easily be a life’s work trying to get to the bottom of who Daisy was, and there was no way they could afford it.

Yet driving home that night she felt optimistic. The vibrations from the road rose through the steering wheel, jiggling her gloved palms, her forearms, her cheeks. The moon was full. The night smelled good. She pulled off the parkway and drove up the newly tarred face of Old Middle Road. The field to her left was tilled but unplanted. It had been corn for the last two years now, but the year before that, the year Walter and she had moved to Riverside Meadows, it had been planted with pumpkins. When Daisy rolled down the window she smelled a fertile undercurrent that reminded her of the tops of carrots. There was also the bitter whiff of dusty cement after rain. The moon hung to her left, pocked and scarred, its mouth clawed to one side. But it was luminous—white and full and luminous—floating above the line of poplars at the edge of the field, coming in and out of sight, like a signal she couldn’t read.

R
IVERSIDE
M
EADOWS WAS SITUATED BETWEEN
the Northern State Parkway and the Jericho Turnpike, on a mile-square tract of land that had once been a farmstead owned by the Willard family. Despite its name, it wasn’t built on a river at all, just a muddy stream called Willard’s Creek. But that hadn’t stopped two New Jersey businessmen, brothers with a taste for the
picturesque. As for the meadow part—the meadow was what had been ploughed under when they built the streets and houses.

All of the homes were of two styles: Cape Cods, like Daisy’s, with fake shutters and peaked roofs, or modified ranch styles, with stone cladding and adjoining carports. Each house, whether ranch or Cape Cod, had a colonial lamp post at the edge of the lawn, a brick walkway and a raised garden bed, also brick, running beneath the front windows.