Radiance (5 page)

The streets had been named after trees: Cypress, Poplar, Linden. Heading east, they ran parallel for a quarter-mile, past the site of the yet-to-be-built high school, then met the fields and petered out without warning, like the abrupt changes that take place in dreams. In the other direction they met in a crescent before straightening out to a single road that intersected Old Middle Road, with its drainage pipe that children liked to crawl through. Beyond Old Middle Road was the new elementary school, and beyond that a footpath wound down a scraggly slope, past a marsh, through two fields to Strickland’s grocery store, which was out on the turnpike. This was the path the women of Riverside Meadows took to get their groceries if their husbands had the car. A half-mile down the road from Strickland’s stood the village of Stoney Creek.

Everything seemed new. Any time of day or evening you could step outside and smell the churned dirt. Still, when you looked closely, there were traces of an older world beneath the newness of Riverside Meadows: traces in the dogwood, sticky with honey-pollen, which grew beside the creek; traces in the rank clusters of skunk cabbages in the marsh beyond the school. Snakeroot and goldenrod sprang up in the prim boulevards, as though all the growth and construction didn’t matter at all in the end, not compared to another current that flowed beneath the suburb, fertilizing the grasses and the weeds.

Daisy turned onto Linden Street and parked in front of her house. Next door, Fran Warburgh’s place was lit up like a Christmas tree. Junie was bouncing a rubber ball in the carport, practising O’Larrys even now, in the dark. She did it for hours. Other noises came from the Warburghs’—dishes being washed, loops of clarinet (Ed, Fran’s husband, loved Benny Goodman). Often Daisy heard Ed and Fran fighting, the baby crying, Junie screaming at her twin brother, Jimmy Jr., but tonight domestic peace reigned.

Keiko was coming to stay right after her first operation, and Daisy had purposefully not told the Residents’ Committee. She imagined the women of Riverside Meadows approaching the house, demanding to know why they hadn’t been consulted.
What have you brought into our midst? What heavy dose of reality? What blast from the outside world?
Well, let them be furious. They would be in the wrong; Daisy would be in the right. She would stand on her front steps and when they said,
How dare you?
she would shrug, as though to say,
My actions speak for themselves. I will not demean them with speech.
But the neighbours probably wouldn’t storm her house, that was too overt, not Joan Palmer’s style at all. More likely they would start a whisper campaign from house to house.
Have you heard what Daisy Lawrence has done? This is what happens when you have too much time on your hands.

But suppose that the neighbourhood women did appear at her door, whisks and rolling pins in hand. And suppose they didn’t accept Daisy’s beatific silence. All right then, she would talk. She would tell them about the new and dangerous time they had entered. That would surprise them, because Daisy was pretty sure they didn’t think she had a clue about politics. She would use elements from Dean Atchity’s speech, but in her own words, and talk to them about brotherhood and the shadow of the bomb, how it covered everyone like a dark mother.

We are on the cusp, she would say, light streaming from her fingertips, her eye sockets. That was how it might feel, standing on the doorstep, as though she, Daisy Lawrence, had stepped onto a geyser of bright water and it was flooding her with liquid righteousness. She had joined a fight that included Einstein, and Bertrand Russell, and Dean Atchity, so who was Joan Palmer, with her snarky tongue and gins at three in the afternoon, to try to stop her? She couldn’t, that was all. She didn’t have a prayer.

All the lights in Daisy’s house were off, which meant that Walter had gone out walking, something he did most nights. After dinner he pulled on his rubber boots and his corduroy jacket and slipped his tobacco into his pocket. If they had had a dog he would have whistled for it; instead, he simply stepped out the back door and let the screen door hiss closed. Then he walked for miles. Daisy imagined him smoking, muttering to himself, trying out lines from scripts, shaking his head, carrying on imaginary disputes. When he came back his trouser cuffs were coated in mud and grass stains, which meant that he had left the streets and wandered though the fields, and even broken away from the fields and walked trails north of the turnpike. For all she knew he may have left those trails behind too, and followed the streambeds, letting his ankles sink deep into the ooze. She wanted to know where he went, but something in how Walter was when he came home, a bruised meanness that surfaced on his walks, stopped her from asking.

I am the Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night …

That was the beginning of the radio show Walter wrote for,
The Whistler.
It was originally broadcast out of California, sponsored by the Signal Oil Company, but three years before it had gone national. Parts of the show may have leaked into Walter’s system, because he acted like the main character—slipping off in the night, lurking in backyards, smoking and walking and muttering to himself. To make ends meet, Walter also sold occasional scripts
to other nighttime programs, including
The Inner Sanctum,
which always began and ended with a creaking door, or
Lights Out,
which started with a gong, then the ominous words, darkly and evenly spaced
: It. Is. Later. Than. You. Think.
Occasionally he also wrote for soaps,
Our Gal Sunday
and
The Guiding Light.
It wasn’t too hard to sell a script to a show like that—you just had to have an in with some of the other scriptwriters, who then commissioned you to take some of their work, taking a cut along the way. But Walter’s dialogue always sounded more suited to a show like
The Whistler,
even when he was writing for
The Guiding Light:

But I love you, Sal.

I know you do, kid. Now, can you turn off the lights? I need my beauty sleep.

Daisy got some leftover stew from the fridge and ate it sitting on the kitchen stool, listening to the General Motors news hour. Lots about the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which had recently visited Baltimore to expose Communist infiltration of the education system. Some teachers had been “friendly,” confessing their role, while others had been unfriendly. She was glad when the newscaster began talking about a tarantula found by a New Jersey housewife; apparently it had stowed away in a shipment of bananas. Daisy didn’t know the whole story about Walter’s left-wing days—he had shared stories at first, but not lately, not for years. They did seem to have been quite left wing indeed. The fact that he now hated his old colleagues with a pure anger that sometimes frightened her might not help very much, though maybe it would. Still, the idea of Walter being called up to testify was unthinkable. It was like imagining Irene Day being called up (she also had had her time in the United Front, during her last year in college). And what was unthinkable, Daisy chose not to think about. She switched the radio off.

The kitchen looked ready for Keiko’s visit, though it wasn’t anything grand. The countertop was turquoise Formica. The ivory linoleum had already begun to yellow in patches, and by the back door the seam had separated, so that going outside Daisy often caught her toe. The wallpaper, which Daisy had put up when they moved in and now disliked, was a pattern of cherry clusters against a background of silver and beige stripes.

Outside, a dog in Stoney Creek howled, noticing the full moon.

She put her bowl in the sink and stood at the back door, looking into the Warburghs’ backyard. Ed was in his greenhouse. She could see his watery shape through the windows, toiling under two light bulbs. When he retreated to one end, his shadow shrank, and when he stood up it shot across the glassed roof. Through the fogged glass he held up something that looked like the bloodied head of Medusa, snakes flopping and hissing. It took a moment to realize that he was shaking dirt from a mass of lily tubers. What would he say to all of this? Ed had been locked in a cell in a place none of the neighbours could pronounce. Shamshuipo. A prisoner-of-war camp. The prisoners had been so badly malnourished they’d stolen vitamins from the Red Cross boxes in the storeroom. They’d been discovered and one of them had been kicked to death—kicked to death for stealing vitamins.

Ed wasn’t going to be pleased about Keiko. At a picnic once, eating a cob of corn, Daisy had seen him reach into his mouth and pull out an incisor before continuing to eat.

But if he made a fuss he would be wrong, and every rational being, every person in the Project, would say so.

A light flicked on in the hallway.

“Walter?”

“Yes’m.”

“I thought you were out walking.”

“I thought you thought that.”

“What were you doing?”

“Working.”

“With the light off?”

“Thinking. I was thinking.”

“Are you hungry?”

He shuffled down the hall into the kitchen, tall and gaunt. “Don’t worry about me, Daisy,” he said. He was wearing what he usually wore when he did his writing: a pale blue cardigan, cuffs dirty and faded, which stunk of smoke. Underneath he had on flannel pyjamas printed with a repeating pattern of cowboy hats. Where had those pyjamas come from? Daisy certainly hadn’t bought them for him. He must have picked them out for himself one day at Macy’s perhaps, because his old pyjamas were in rags. Sitting at the kitchen table, rolling a cigarette, he was a discouraging sight.

“You know,” Daisy said, settling across from him. “I’ve heard that many writers get dressed to work, even if their desks are in their bedrooms.”

“You’ve heard that, have you?”

“Murray Kesselman gets dressed every day, puts on his hat, and goes to his office. And he works there, nine to five.”

“Murray Kesselman!” Walter said with an ugly laugh. He was given to ugly laughs these days. “Murray Kesselman is like one of those damn monkeys you put in front of a typewriter. Sooner or later, if you’re lucky, something comes out, but believe me, it’s pure accident. Murray Kesselman!” Murray Kesselman got top dollar working exclusively for
The Inner Sanctum.
Daisy had known his wife in college. When Walter sold to
The Inner Sanctum,
he did it through Murray, and Murray took ten per cent.

Walter laid a rolling paper on the tabletop, with its constellations of gold flecks, then pinched a small mound of tobacco
onto it. The ring finger on his left hand had been cut off at the knuckle by a sawmill blade many years before, back when he worked in the woods of Puget Sound. Daisy had always loved that stump finger: she had even slipped it into her mouth once, when they were making love. It was soft at the top, like the soft spot on a baby’s head. She could tell he hadn’t liked her doing that, though he didn’t pull it away.

That stump finger reminded her of what he had been, way back when: a Walter of the western woods. He had worn a lumberjack sweater and cleated boots, and read Shakespeare at night in his bunk. When he’d been taunted by the other loggers, called The Scholar, he had been forced to bang a few heads together. It seemed that that was how debates were settled in the woods of Puget Sound. This was all years ago, before Walter had come east, become a writer, a radio man. Before the war. Before Riverside Meadows. Before Daisy.

“Anyway,” she said now, “you can’t stay in your pyjamas when Keiko comes.”

He gave her one of his looks, but all he said was, “You don’t think she’s seen worse?”

“Look, Walter, I know you don’t approve of this whole—experiment—as you call it.”

He lit his cigarette, then leaned back in his chair so that it was balanced on its two back legs.

“You know that wrecks the chairs.”

“I reckon I do by now, Miss Daisy.” He let the chair fall to rest with a thump, then sat and smoked, snapping his jaw, blowing smoke rings.

“Look,” she said. “I just want you to be nice.”

“Nice like Dean Atchity?”

“Sure. That would be a start.”

“He’s a noble guy, right?”

“I think he is.”

“Well, it’s funny, Daisy. I’ve been doing some reading about your Dean Atchity in the newspapers. You know what Dean Atchity did when he was called in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities?”

“I’ve heard the stories. It doesn’t change a thing.”

“They didn’t have stenographers who could write fast enough.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“He practically broke the goddamned machine.” Walter blew another smoke ring.

“You can’t hate everybody forever.”

“No?” Walter said, looking up. “Just watch me.”

It was true what he’d said, Daisy thought. He could hate everyone forever. It had become his gift: hating his old friends, shaking his head at their lies. Recently she had found a newspaper article in his study with the name of a friendly witness circled, the word
Liar
written above it in pencil. It wasn’t that the fellow had told what he knew. Walter hated them all—the ones who were friendly and the ones who weren’t.