A Fierce Radiance

by Lauren Belfer

  Would Patsy Reese ever tell him “thank you”? Despite the years, what a short line it was from Natalia to Edward Reese. Waiting for death. Stanton remembered the first time he’d waited for death. His own mother. During the influenza epidemic of 1918. He was fourteen. That was the moment he’d decided to become a physician. To bring his mother back, by rescuing others. Almost twenty-five years later, he was still trying.

  At 5:15, the darkness was complete. Looking out the window, Claire saw a cityscape of lights more brilliant than stars. The newspapers were speculating that soon the lights would be dimmed to protect the city from enemy bombers and from attacks by German U-boats off the coast. Claire thought how beautiful the city would look tonight to a U-boat crew surfacing in the outer harbor. How glorious, the glowing, misty lights of New York City, an arc of radiance against the horizon. She stared at the Queensboro Bridge. It wasn’t the most beautiful bridge she’d ever seen. In fact it was hulking and awkward. But the enemy would be delighted to destroy it.

  James Stanton joined her at the window. He, too, stared at the starscape of city lights. He’d given up on the newspapers, and he could no longer bear the weight of his memories. She wore a scent that drew him. Standing close beside her, while they spoke privately, the scent enveloped him. His residence rooms were close by. He imagined pushing her down sideways across the bed. Edward Reese would die before midnight, but he and Claire Shipley were alive. The more time he spent with the dying, the stronger his compulsion to cleave to the living.

  “You must be concerned about your husband signing on with the military,” he said as a polite way to begin a conversation.

  “No.” Belatedly she realized she sounded callous. Now she would have to explain. “We haven’t been together in a long time.” This circumlocution was easier than using the word that represented the truth. Divorced was a word that generally brought Claire looks of pity and condemnation. She wondered how much of this reaction came from people who’d decided to remain in loveless marriages to avoid the societal judgments that she now absorbed.

  Stanton was surprised by her revelation. He’d noticed that she didn’t wear a wedding ring, but he’d assumed this was because of the equipment she worked with. He passed no judgments, but the information changed his perception of her. Opened an unexpected line of possibility. A leap from imagination to reality.

  “What about you? Are you married?” Claire asked. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, but most men didn’t.

  “No.” He laughed with a slight embarrassment. Thirty-eight years old and never married. He didn’t want to appear abnormal, or like a guy who wasn’t interested in women. Far from it. So he had to tell her something, and her manner encouraged confession. “I was engaged once, but it didn’t work out.”

  He said nothing more. She sensed his awkwardness but couldn’t tell if he was still upset about the engagement. She waited for him to continue, and when he didn’t, she let the issue drop, feeling that she didn’t know him well enough to have the right to press him.

  Meanwhile he was reminiscing to himself. Ellen, his fiancée. He had met her after he stopped dating the flapper. His friends had teased that he’d managed to find the only attractive physician-in-training at the Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia. Ellen caught tuberculosis from a cadaver during an autopsy. A common enough story. Three of his colleagues at Penn had caught TB from conducting autopsies. Ellen went to Saranac to recover. He visited her there steadfastly—until, on a walk during a glorious autumn afternoon, the sugar maples flashing yellow and orange in the sun all around them, he realized that she had recovered. In fact Ellen had recovered months earlier and yet remained there. And she would remain indefinitely, treating others, conducting research, drawn in by the seduction of tuberculosis in that self-contained village that constituted a world unto itself. Likewise, a story that was common enough. Ellen didn’t have to explain. He understood from her contentment and from her refusal to return either his gaze or his touch.

  Since then he’d found physical fulfillment, at least, through the tried-and-true method practiced among his peers: lighthearted affairs with otherwise happily married women. He wasn’t proud or ashamed of this; it was standard procedure. He’d let his work absorb him, taking the place of wife and children. Nonetheless, as he reached his late thirties, and with the war putting into even higher relief the close boundary of death, he’d found himself yearning for love and for family. Yearning was not an emotion he was accustomed to.

  He decided that when this experiment was complete and the notes were compiled, he would ask Claire Shipley to dinner. Despite death looming before them, life continued. Love, hate, friendship, all of it continued. Countless other patients would arrive here by ambulance. Someday, one of them would be cured. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he knew this was true. One of them would be cured and would walk out the hospital doorway, onto the path under the arching trees, past the fountains and the birdbaths, through the stone gates and into the city’s teeming, rushing splendor.

  “You have children?” he asked, thinking as he was of the future, of the life that pulsed around them even as one man reached and crossed the edge of death.

  “I have a son. He’s eight.”

  “I like children.”

  “My daughter died of a blood infection when she was three.” Her tone carried a trace of accusation, which she regretted but couldn’t control, as if all doctors bore the blame for her loss.

  Stanton closed his eyes. He breathed deeply. Once he’d had a very young patient who’d died of septicemia. By then he’d stopped counting the number of his patients who’d died; he could no longer even remember each one. But this one he remembered because she was so young. Eighteen months old. He reached for her name. It was something simple. Common. Beth. Betsy. Bonnie, that was it. Dead in her crib. The mark of the Catholic last rites upon her forehead. Life will go on. He couldn’t remember the faces of her parents; they were shadows across the crib.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said to Claire, a denseness in his voice as if he were speaking to Bonnie’s parents also.

  Easy words, in her experience, offered with little or no thought: I’m sorry for your loss. Yet Claire sensed that James Stanton truly was sorry and wished that he could make amends, too late though it was. “What about you,” she said more kindly. “You waiting to be called into the military?”

  He felt grateful for the change of subject. “In a sense, I am in the military: Dr. Rivers had us sign up for the naval reserve months ago. He thought it was the best way to keep the staff together, when and if America entered the war. Plus he loves his uniform and already thinks of himself as a commanding officer.” The staff joke was that Rivers had arranged for them to sign up solely so he could be their commander. But as of December 7 and Pearl Harbor, being in the reserve was more than a joke.

  “Dr. Stanton?” Nurse Brockett held a report for him to review, calling his attention back to the battle in this room.

  At 6:00 PM, Mr. Reese’s fever was 104.2. Bacterial colonies in his blood were over 50 per milliliter.

  Dr. Stanton asked Patsy if she wanted a priest or a minister to be present. She shook her head no. He told her that “it might be best” if she asked a friend or family member to join her. Without emotion, numb, she made a telephone call. Soon a woman arrived. This woman resembled Patsy in her style and demeanor, in her pearls and cashmere twin set. When she reached the door and saw the man withered on the bed, his lips blue, she hesitated, taking a step backward. Claire sensed her talking to herself, steeling herself to do her duty. She came in. She hugged Patsy firmly. She introduced herself. She was Cindy, Patsy’s older sister. She carried herself with a forthright bearing that said, we will not show these strangers our fear.

  Mr. Reese had calmed. Only his eyes were wild, glaring with a vehemence that seemed to Claire like madness. At 7:30 PM, the children telephoned to say good night. Still alert enough to be self-conscious, he struggled to control his vo
ice. “Good night.” He wheezed the words. “Good night. Good night,” his voice escalated. “Good night,” he shouted.

  Nurse Brockett wrenched the receiver from his hand and gave it to Patsy.

  “Daddy was playing a game,” she told her children.

  At eight o’clock, the fever was 104.9. Mr. Reese’s breathing turned raspy. He sank heavily into the pillows, weak, defeated, drifting in and out of consciousness.

  Claire waited for Patsy or Cindy, or even James Stanton, to tell her to leave, but no one noticed her. She’d achieved her professional goal: she was invisible. No doubt later, Patsy and Cindy would regret that they’d allowed her to stay, would demand to review her photos before they ran, would question the permission form that Patsy had signed. In the meantime, Claire shared Edward Reese’s death. Patsy sat on a stool at the bedside, holding her husband’s hand, resting her forehead against his arm. Cindy stood in the corner, her face an impassive mask. Claire tried to maintain an emotional distance, to narrow her concern only to the technical work at hand, but she felt a dread within her chest.

  Blood tests revealed a surge in the bacterial level, over 100 colonies per milliliter. At 8:30, the fever was 105.3. Dr. Stanton tracked the vital signs every fifteen minutes. He ordered more blood tests, and when he received the results, he put the sideways figure 8 in the chart, the sign for bacterial levels at infinity. He’d made his peace with himself. He was supervising an experiment. Soon he would supervise another experiment. He would double the first dose, he would raise the other doses, somehow Tia and David would provide the medication—over and over he told himself this, and the repetition brought him comfort and hope.

  Mr. Reese looked both sunken and swollen, glowing with the heat and force of the fever, at the mercy of the infection. Gradually he became delirious. “Lights, lights, turn off the lights,” he called. The room was dim. Frantically he thrashed his head and shoulders back and forth, back and forth, to escape the nonexistent lights that cut into his eyes. His back arched. His breathing was a tortured rattle. Patsy tried to grab his hand, his shoulders, to calm him, but he twisted away from her.

  At 9:51 PM, Edward R. Reese Jr. age thirty-seven, died. His brown eyes stared at the ceiling in a vacant, frozen gaze.

  Dr. Stanton wrote on the chart and in his notes that the cause of death was staphylococcal septicemia, resistant to sulfa drugs but responsive to penicillin. He left the room to get a death certificate.

  This was Claire’s final shot: Nurse Brockett leaning across the bed, pressing Edward Reese’s eyelids firmly closed with her businesslike palms.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Claire, it’s Mack.” From the gruff voice, she knew it was Mack the moment he said her name on the phone. “I already told them it was a go,” he said to someone else. She heard animated voices in the background at his end. It was Saturday afternoon, a week after Edward Reese’s death. Claire sat at her desk at home, writing out checks to pay bills. The magazine closed on Saturday nights, and the final hours before each issue was put to bed were frantic. She wasn’t surprised Mack was at the office. “Claire. Just found out—you made the cover with the army wives story.”

  “No, I didn’t.” The cover closed several days before the rest of the magazine, so when she hadn’t heard anything on Thursday, she’d assumed the editors had gone with something else.

  “Would I kid you?” From his good-humored banter, she understood that he wasn’t kidding. With the rush of developments in the war, Mr. Luce must have delayed his decision on the cover until the last possible moment.

  “This is a surprise, Mack.” After four years on staff, it was her first cover.

  “Doesn’t it make you happy? I only called because I figured it would make you happy. If it doesn’t make you happy, I can hang up.”

  “Yes, it makes me happy. Of course it does.” She raised her voice in anger and impatience, because the news made her happier than she could let him know or suspect. A cover story represented not simply professional recognition but also job security, a little leeway in the grinding competition to hold on to her staff position. She had to conceal the tears that smarted in her eyes. She was a woman in a man’s profession, and she’d learned to keep any emotions her peers might consider feminine, like joy or sorrow, strictly to herself. Her renowned colleague Margaret Bourke-White had a reputation for using strategic weeping fits to get what she wanted from both her bosses and her subjects, but that wasn’t Claire’s way.

  The day after Reese’s death, she’d gone directly into a story about the army officers’ wives living with their children on Governor’s Island in New York harbor. This was the nature of her job: overpowering emotion, and then straight into the next story with no break to recover. Claire was supposed to keep herself distant and objective, but she couldn’t. She suspected that her work would lose its impact if she tried.

  A short ferry ride from lower Manhattan, Governor’s Island was a military base that had become a town unto itself, with acres of barracks, public schools, grocery stores, and an enclave of old mansions. The husbands of most of the women in Claire’s story were posted with the Army Signal Corps on Wake Island, under relentless attack by the Japanese. Each day, with increasingly stiff, silent despair, the wives waited for news from the Pacific.

  “Billings especially liked the shot of the wives and kids walking home after school and staring at the new recruits waiting in line to get processed at the fort.” John Billings was the managing editor. “That old innocence-versus-experience perspective. Always brings tears to my eyes.”

  “That’s what keeps you fresh, Mack. All that crying.” She was crying, too, even as she teased and bantered.

  “I don’t deny it. My personal favorite was the mom sitting in her dark living room clutching her three little kids and listening to the radio news like some kind of goddamned Madonna. How’d you get her face to glow like that?”

  “Professional secret.” She’d bounced the light off three umbrellas, including one behind the woman’s head to create a halo effect, but she wasn’t going to tell Mack. He might share the idea with her rivals.

  “However you did it, that one got a full page.”

  That shot was her favorite, too. The kids leaning against their mother’s skirt, reaching up to touch her shoulders…the composition reminded her of paintings of the Holy Family by Raphael. The woman, Rosemary Connor, was from Canton, Ohio. She’d never been to New York when she found her family transferred to Governor’s Island and a small house with a magnificent view of Manhattan. Before her children were born, she’d taught first grade. She and her husband were high school sweethearts. Most likely he was now dead, or soon would be, on the far side of the world. Of course none of this information was in the picture itself, but knowing it helped Claire to create an image that evoked something of the woman’s character. “Which shot did Luce pick for the cover?”

  “The pretty young mom standing at the railing by the harbor, holding her kid’s hand and staring at the Statue of Liberty in the distance. Sunlight sparkling on the sea, ocean breeze whipping her hair, her back straight and stalwart against the enemy, Lady Liberty leading the way. America the Brave.”

  “That’s a great shot, I have to admit.” She’d taken about forty exposures to get one that worked. The glare off the water was awful that day.

  “You’re on the A-list now, Shipley.”

  “That’s nice to hear, Mack, since I’m sitting here doing the bills.”

  “I didn’t say you were up for a raise, I said you’re on the A-list. There’s a difference.”

  “I’m positive I heard you say I was up for a raise.”

  “Don’t worry, when you are up for a raise, I’ll be the first to let you know. I already said I don’t want that,” he told someone else. “Don’t come to me with the same question twice.” She heard him shuffling papers. “Oh, Claire, by the way, the higher-ups killed the penicillin story.”

  “Now that really isn’t true.” She’d seen the final
layout the day before. “Check with production. You’re mistaken, Mack.”

  “No mistake. I got official word this morning. ‘Too dispiriting for these difficult times,’ I think is how they phrased it. In other words, the guy dies at the end. No patriotic uplift, no consolation, no moral justice.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” The layout was terrific, the story flowed smoothly from the arrival of the ambulance to Nurse Brockett’s final gesture, closing Edward Reese’s eyes. “It’s the best story I’ve ever done.”

  “I agree. It is the best story you’ve ever done. Next week you’ll have another chance to do the best story you’ve ever done.”

  “You have to fight for it.” Suddenly she felt enraged. Not for the loss of her story, but for the loss of Edward Reese’s life. She owed Reese this, at least: that his story would be told. His death, and his life, would be commemorated. She owed it to him, and to Patsy and their children. To James Stanton and Tia Stanton, even to Nurse Brockett. She couldn’t simply accept the fact that this thirty-seven-year-old man was dead from a scratch on the knee. She needed to believe that he’d died a hero in the battle to develop a medication that would save the next man and the next. A medication that would save the next Emily.