A Fierce Radiance

by Lauren Belfer

  Finally she found something. It wasn’t ideal, but it would have to do. Roll fifty-two, photo number 7/7A. From the series of Tia showing the lab to Ned and Sally Reese. The image caught Tia just after she’d finished pipetting fluid into a test tube. She’d lowered the pipette and was smiling at Sally, who stood beyond the frame. The shot showed at a glance both Tia’s work and her character.

  Claire put aside the contact sheet and its attached negatives. She closed the folder and found its proper place in the drawer.

  “I’ll refile the negatives and contact sheet later,” she called to Frieda on her way out. She took the elevator downstairs. Again she was outside, the glorious spring day hitting her in the face. The photo lab was separate from the Rockefeller Center complex, on the third floor of a honky-tonk tenement across the street at 38 West Forty-eighth Street. The Three Gs restaurant and bar, the staff hangout, was on the ground floor of the same building.

  The photographers engaged in much bitter talk about why their lab wasn’t in the Rockefeller Center building. We’ve been forgotten, was the complaint, when we’re responsible for the magazine’s success. Maybe the exile was simply a way to keep the smell of photographic chemicals away from the editors. The acrid, unmistakable odor of developer, fix, and hypo assaulted Claire the moment she entered the stairwell. It transported her to years before, when she’d first learned how to work in a darkroom, first learned how to put light onto paper to create an image. It was a smell that got into your clothes and your hair, like a perfume you caught whiffs of around yourself days after sampling it.

  The lab was divided into two sections, one room for developing negatives, the other for printing. In the print area, twelve enlargers were set up in rows of separate cubicles so the enlarger lights wouldn’t affect other stations. The chemicals were on the counter behind, each enlarger with its matching sink and counter. The room glowed from the red of safety lights. The lab was staffed in three shifts by a group of cynical guys who were brilliant at their underpaid and underappreciated work. Jerry was in charge today, and he greeted Claire from an enlarger when she came in.

  “Hi, Claire. Good to see you.” Jerry was sandy-haired and fit, his jaw pronounced and angular. He had the dense wrinkles of a man who spent too much time in the sun, which Claire never understood, because he worked long hours in the dark.

  “Hi, Jerry. Good to see you, too.” Jerry had printed her story from the hog farm outside Fort Wayne. Never had hogs been more subtly shaded, highlighted, and cropped. “I’ve got a rush for Time.”

  “For Time? They’re not closing today.”

  “They claim they need this for their layout right away. Frieda asked me to deal with it, since it’s from a story I shot a while back. Shouldn’t take long. One print. Portrait of a scientist who died, don’t even ask.”

  He laughed with understanding. Why one story became a rush and another didn’t was forever incomprehensible. “Machine number six is free. Everything’s set up, right temperatures for the chemicals, the works. Gene’s using it, but he’s at lunch.”

  “Thanks.” Machine six, she saw, was around the corner from Jerry. Good.

  “He’s due back in a half hour. You’ll be done by then?”

  “I’d better be. Any longer and it’d be a sign that I’m losing my touch.”

  “And we can’t have that, can we?” he said. “When the print’s out of the soup, I can finish the rinsing and drying and drop it off at Time, so you don’t have to wait around. I’ve got some other things going, too. And I can drop the negatives with the Admiral.”

  “Thanks a lot, Jerry. I appreciate it.”

  The guys grunted as she went by, which for them, when they were working to deadline, represented a warm acknowledgment. She said hello without recognizing them in the red shadows. But undoubtedly they knew her and her work. They knew the failings of every photographer, and they made every one look like a genius, overcoming any problems with the negatives by improving the prints until they were terrific. These guys held her career in their hands. She made sure to give them special Christmas presents every year.

  Machine six. She would do a test print first. She took the negative holder out of the enlarger and inserted the strip of film that held shot 7/7A. She blew off a few specks of dust. She inserted the negative carrier into the enlarger. Turned on the lamp. There was Tia, black and white in reverse. Putting a sheet of plain white paper in the picture easel, she framed and focused the image, moving the enlarger head up and down until she had exactly what she wanted. Claire felt tears welling, and a pressure within her forehead and behind her eyes as she tried not to let herself cry.

  She set the enlarger at f/11 to keep the focus sharp. She turned off the enlarger lamp. She took a sheet of photo printing paper from the light-proof holder on the shelf under the enlarger and put it in the easel in place of the plain paper. She set the timer for five seconds. Using a piece of cardboard, she exposed the test print, increasing the light exposure three times across the sheet. She put the print into the developer on the counter behind her, using tongs to agitate it. Slowly Tia’s face appeared. This was the moment of magic, of rapture, when a picture emerged upon a blank sheet of paper. Even now, after all these years, it gave her a sense of awe.

  When the image was complete, Claire lifted out the print with the tongs and held it sideways to let the developer solution run off. She put the print into the first stop bath, immersing it with the stop-bath tongs, and then moved it to the second stop bath. She counted to fifteen. She switched the print to the fixer, agitating once again. Since this was simply a test print, she didn’t need to do a full fix or wash the print.

  She turned on the small white light on the counter to study the print. The best exposure was the middle one, ten seconds. She stuffed the test print into the wastebasket under the counter.

  Returning to the enlarger, she placed another sheet of photo paper into the easel. She set the automatic timer for ten seconds. With a piece of cardboard, she dodged the background a bit, to create a better unity of shading around Tia’s head. The process was second nature to Claire. This time, she kept the print in the fix for a full ten minutes, so it would never fade. As she studied Tia’s face, Claire realized how similar her features were to Jamie’s. They shared eyes and cheekbones, and the line of the jaw. Not for the first time, Claire realized how lucky she was to have met him. Mack could easily have sent someone else to the Institute that morning. Yes, how lucky she was to have met him, and how quickly he could be taken away. After all, here before her was a lovely, brilliant woman, dead. Life was a delicate wire waiting to be snapped. Little Emily…

  Claire began to cry. She struggled to make the crying sound like nothing more than sniffling.

  “You okay over there, Claire?” Jerry asked as he picked up some prints from another cubicle.

  “These spring colds,” she said, trying to catch her breath despite a constriction in her throat. “Caught it from my son and now I can’t shake it.”

  “Me, too,” a deep voice said on her left, the guy at the next enlarger, shrouded in darkness. “I got a box of Kleenex here, if you need it.”

  Thank God for him. He saved her. Spring colds were everywhere. “I’m working with the fix, can’t reach for a Kleenex now.”

  “Know what you mean,” he said, sniffling. “Use your sleeve, that’s what I do.”

  “His wife just loves those snot-covered sleeves,” someone said in the darkness.

  Laughter all around.

  “Thanks for the advice,” she managed. “I’ll remember it.”

  Finally to the rinse. Claire followed her neighbor’s advice and wiped her tears on her sleeve.

  A full rinse took an hour, and then the print had to be dried. She could turn the print over to Jerry’s supervision now. But she didn’t want to leave. She wished she could develop and print her own work every day, instead of being sent on a frantic journey from one story to the next, to so many towns and villages and farmyards that she
couldn’t keep track of where she was, where she’d been, or where she was going. When she was in the darkroom, the rest of the world fell away.

  “Hey, Claire. Good to see you.” Gene emerged from the shadows, round-faced, his graying hair thick and curly. He wore his usual work uniform of plaid flannel shirt and unbuttoned vest. He was smiling, no doubt surprised and happy to find her here. He offered her a quick hug. He’d printed the Rockette story and made radiant the glittering lights of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. “What’s cookin’?”

  Now she had no choice but to leave.

  When she reached home, she phoned the Institute again, and again the switchboard operator refused to put her through. She made a cup of coffee. As she sat down at the kitchen table to drink it, the phone rang.

  “Claire, I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “Oh, Jamie, I’ve been at the office. I—” She stopped. He didn’t want to know the course of her day. “I know what happened. The magazine called me early.”

  “May I come downtown?”

  “I’m waiting for you.”

  Mud.

  On Saturday afternoon, Detective Marcus Kreindler stood on the cliff overlooking the East River and studied the dried mud on the path. There’d been some rain yesterday. Not a lot, but enough. Enough so that he could see the imprint of a woman’s shoe. A thin heel.

  In his experience, high heels slid into everything. After he and his wife put in a linoleum floor in the kitchen of their new house in Queens, her cousin, who lived in the city, came out to visit them and jammed her heels into the linoleum, not intending to do damage, but there it was, jam, jam, jam, round imprints that would last a lifetime. Or as long as they owned the house, from which they were going to take him out feet first, since he had no intention of moving. He didn’t foresee replacing the linoleum, either.

  He took one of the shoes out of his evidence bag and compared it to the imprint in the mud. The very same. Yesterday afternoon, Friday, he’d found Tia Stanton’s high heels about ten feet away from each other in some weeds at the bottom of the cliff. They’d come off when she fell. The shoes were from Saks Fifth Avenue, according to the inside label. Presumably she cared about having nice things and could afford them.

  Again he studied the mud…there was the imprint of a man’s shoe, following along beside her. Nothing unusual about the man’s shoe, and no proof that the man and woman had been together.

  Kreindler looked down to the bottom of the cliff. A small crowd shifted and reshifted, people come to gape at the site of a death. Five people, then four, then six, then two. Well dressed. Young and old. Normal people. He hated the compulsion to gape at the site of a death. They didn’t have enough death in their own families, they had to go searching for it? There’d been an even bigger crowd yesterday, the gawkers combined with a dozen cops and the usual investigators who danced attendance at the scene of any suspicious death; he was among them, of course. That was his job.

  From his perch high above the scene, Kreindler observed the Institute guy who collected sewage walking to the river’s edge with his bucket. Kreindler had already interviewed him and six or seven others, including an Englishman who worked both here and at a lab in New Jersey and seemed completely broken up about her.

  Anyway, nobody he interviewed had seen a thing. A girl takes a lunchtime stroll, ends up at the bottom of a cliff, and nobody sees a thing. They came together to protect their own. They might all be geniuses, but it was still human nature to protect your own. The girl spent her days with mold. He’d inspected her lab and seen a lot of it—green, yellow, orange, purple mold. That was her profession. Multicolored mold. Who ever heard of such a thing?

  Kreindler felt a little dizzy. Woozy. He had a problem with heights—not a predicament he ever wanted to admit to his buddies. Even Sean, his partner, hadn’t known. Just last week, Sean had signed up for the military police and was gone in a day. From Sean’s perspective, pushing thirty, no kids, his marriage not going great, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. Kreindler had had his own opportunity of a lifetime in the Great War, and he wasn’t about to repeat it.

  To short-circuit his vertigo, he continued walking, following the imprints of the heels in the mud and not looking over the cliff. What the hell was Lucretia Stanton doing here, walking on a path along a cliff?

  Maybe if you didn’t have a problem with heights, however, the path was no big deal. He tried to approach the issue this way. The view was terrific, he had to admit. The bridge, the river, the islands in the river, a being-on-top-of-the-world feeling. Even so, if she knew she was coming here, why didn’t she change her shoes? Was she trying to impress someone? Was she trying to impress the man with her? If in fact he was with her?

  Kreindler stopped. Here was a place where the left heel scraped into the dirt crossways. The right heel dug in, deep, as if the heel itself had been trying to hold on to the path. And then it, too, scraped out sideways. The prints of the high heels ended here. Right here, she’d lost her balance and fallen.

  Where were the man’s corresponding footprints?

  The man had come up beside her, stepping on top of her footprints. Then he turned, to face the cliff. Then he continued his walk.

  Years ago, Kreindler’s doctor had taught him the phrase, “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” Or something like that. This was in response to Kreindler’s self-diagnosis of a brain tumor when he actually had a sinus problem from a wicked cold.

  Kreindler often remembered the phrase in his work, and it applied here. Girl in high heels falls off cliff, doesn’t leave a note: sounds like an accident, nothing more or less—except for the man who might, or might not, have been with her.

  Later today a security guy was coming up from Washington: Andrew Barnett was his name, and he was involved with a secret government project that her brother worked for. Judging from a long-distance telephone call this morning, the security guy was pushing to have the death declared an accident. Get it over with, quiet everything down, then figure out the truth later. Kreindler mistrusted the attitude.

  Kreindler risked glancing down. The sewage guy, Sergei Oretsky, was dragging his bucket across the East River Drive. Three more people had come to gawk at the place of death.

  Kreindler knew that the story wasn’t down there, at the bottom of the cliff. What had happened down there was obvious: a beautiful, brilliant girl hit the ground and died. He’d already talked to the autopsy doctor, who went into lots of detail about fractured bones and blunt impacts. Kreindler had seen the body, so he already knew this. Her long limbs, broken. Her spine, twisted. But her face never hit the ground. So her face was perfect. Haunting him.

  The solution to the problem was here on the path, in what happened before she fell. In that high heel, twisting to hold on to the cliff. The man, turning to face the direction she fell. The man, walking away.

  Claire sat at the front window waiting for him, Lucas at her feet. What could she say to Jamie when he arrived? What was there to say? After Emily died, and the undertakers took her away, nothing remained to do or say. Claire and her mother sat in silence at the kitchen table drinking tea. They had family and friends to inform, chores to do, the funeral to plan, but all that could wait until tomorrow. Right then, they were utterly drained. Where was Bill? He must have been there. Without even realizing, she’d eliminated him from her memory. There was no weeping, not then, at least. Plenty of time for that later. Had she cried against Bill’s shoulder? Again she couldn’t remember. She did remember crying into her pillow so Charlie wouldn’t hear her, but she didn’t remember whether Bill was there to put his hand on her shoulder to comfort her. Or if Bill cried, and she comforted him. Bill had become invisible.

  A sibling was different from a child. She didn’t have a sibling, so she couldn’t put herself into Jamie’s shoes. She’d offer her presence to him, so he could find what he needed.

  There he was. So handsome. The love of her life. He looked…impassive. Steele
d. His eyes were partly closed, as if he were making a tremendous effort to stay awake. Had he been up all night? She opened the front door as he walked up the steps of the stoop.

  “Jamie.”

  “Good morning, Claire.”

  It wasn’t morning anymore, but she didn’t correct him. She hugged him when he reached her and led him inside.

  “Have you eaten? Would you like coffee?”

  “Breakfast would be good,” he said. “Something simple.” He paused, confused. He saw the look on her face, which told him that he’d said something odd but she was going along with it. His watch. 2:20. So it must be the afternoon. The sun was shining. He thought maybe he was hungry. “You see, I missed breakfast,” he said, to explain to her. He wanted her to understand everything he felt, even though at this moment he didn’t have the strength to explain.

  “Oatmeal?” she asked, taking his hand.

  He nodded.

  Her hand was so warm in his. He felt as if all the standard details of daily life had become huge and vitally important. The feel of her hand. The sunlight coming through the curtains. Lucas, pushing his nose against Jamie’s leg, staying close as they went downstairs.

  He sat at the kitchen table. She made the oatmeal. He stared at the front page of the newspaper, but he didn’t fully register what the newspaper was reporting. The Japanese now controlled Burma. Where was Burma? He couldn’t remember. Well, it didn’t matter to him anyway. He didn’t talk and Claire didn’t press him to talk. For that he was grateful. No questions about what the police thought, or what happened with this or that, or what was it like, to identify Tia’s—he stopped himself from remembering that.

  At the stove, stirring the oatmeal, Claire waited for him to speak, if he was going to. All the details she wanted to know were pressing inside her. But she wouldn’t ask. Not now, at least. He knew he could talk to her, when and if he wanted to.