A Fierce Radiance

by Lauren Belfer

  Was this how his career was supposed to end, on a stage covered with dead bodies? With murderers never convicted?

  Well, the war wasn’t over yet. He wouldn’t be retiring until it was. Until the young guys came home from the battlefields. In the meantime, his city still had a lot of surprises to offer him. He was sure of that.

  He called for the check. When the waitress came over, he told her to pack up two orders of Apfelstrudel. A consoling little bedtime snack for him and Agnes.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  It was raining. Claire sat at the breakfast table with her toast and coffee, the newspapers spread around her as usual. This afternoon, Charlie was coming home from camp. She was meeting him at the station. Again she tried to figure out what to say to him: how to tell him that his father was dead. And to break the news that they wouldn’t be spending time with his grandfather anymore. She’d refuse to explain why—just as Claire’s mother had refused to explain why she’d left her husband, Claire’s father.

  Exasperated and despairing, she turned to the Times. She spotted this headline: HANOVER & COMPANY ANNOUNCES POWERFUL ANTIBACTERIAL DRUG. The secondary headline beneath read, NEW DRUG PROMISES TO SURPASS PENICILLIN IN EFFECTIVENESS AND APPLICATIONS.

  She read the story.

  At the company’s New Jersey laboratories, Mr. Edward Rutherford, chief executive officer, and Mr. Keith Hanover, president of operations, yesterday announced the development of a powerful new antibacterial drug made from mold, Ceruleamycin. According to sources at the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Committee on Medical Research, no military restrictions will be placed on the new drug. Unlike penicillin, which remains under military control, Ceruleamycin will be available to the general public at commercial prices. It has proven effective against gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, including tuberculosis.

  Mr. Rutherford said, “Initial clinical trials have shown great success, with no side effects whatsoever in the majority of patients. As with any medication, a few patients suffer some mild side effects. Clinical trials and refinements are continuing. I expect the drug to be available for purchase within the next year or eighteen months. In the meantime, we’re telling the nation to ‘think blue’—that’s how to remember the name. Ceruleamycin. It looks like the sky.”

  The Times also reported that Rutherford was releasing the drug in honor of his grandson, who’d been rescued from a life-threatening case of pneumonia by taking the medication.

  The article continued on the inside for a half page. Hanover was a privately held company standing to earn millions from this drug, the first commercially available, systemic antibacterial, but in an act of profound and extraordinary civic generosity on the part of Edward Rutherford, all profits after expenses would be donated to a foundation for medical research.

  An accompanying article was titled A Philanthropist Is Born. This was a profile of Edward Rutherford from his youth in Allentown to his creation of the foundation that would put him, or so the paper claimed, in the same league as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and all the rest. Praise was pouring in from around the country, duly quoted. FDR himself lauded the “fine example” Rutherford provided of innovative business leadership working for the good of the nation and humanity itself.

  Ceruleamycin. Worthy of a haiku, Dr. Ito had said. A color like the brightest mountain lake. All profits after expenses to be used for the creation of a foundation for medical research.

  Her father knew that she would read the paper. Claire remembered how Charlie used to read the Trib and think that Bill Shipley’s articles were filled with messages for him. The BBC was famous for broadcasting coded messages to agents in France.

  This was her father’s message to her. He was doing all he possibly could to make amends: For Tia Stanton dying young, no matter who was responsible. For the Japanese who’d endured the clinical trials. For the violation of Claire’s home. Maybe, too, for the departure of James Stanton.

  Fleetingly she wondered if Jamie had read this news, wherever he was.

  And gradually she saw the truth, starkly. They lived in history, not ideals. This afternoon she would tell Charlie that his father was dead—dead in the war, she would explain in sign language, which was true, in its way. Charlie would want, would need, to see his beloved grandfather. She could imagine the evening playing out: They’d have dinner uptown, and maybe decide to spend the night there. Charlie and his grandfather would play chess. Charlie’s father was dead. The man who might have been his stepfather was gone, too. He needed his grandfather. Claire had no choice. She wouldn’t break apart her son’s only family.

  She went to the telephone and called her father’s office. She wasn’t ready to speak to him, but she’d leave a message with his secretary.

  “Mr. Rutherford’s office.”

  It was Betty.

  “Hi, Betty, it’s Claire. Is he in town?”

  “Yes, Claire, he is.”

  “Could you tell him that Charlie’s train is arriving at Grand Central this afternoon at 3:45? I’m sure it will be late.” They’d shared a touch of knowing laughter. “But tell him I’ll be at the station at, oh, 3:30, just to be on the safe side. I’ll meet him by the information booth.”

  They said good-bye.

  Claire felt herself awash in shades of gray.

  EPILOGUE

  LATE JUNE, 1944

  TERRE HAUTE, INDIANA

  James Stanton watched a crane take Claire Shipley from view to view. He saw her climb out of the crane platform and clamber onto the wide factory beams, fearless, to take photos of the giant vats below. How astonishing she was. He’d never met anyone like her. He wanted to be up there with her, to embrace her. To do more than embrace her. He hadn’t seen her in over a year, and she still affected him the way she had the first time he ever saw her.

  He tried to visualize the factory complex through her eyes. The gleaming steel vats holding 20,000 gallons each of fermentation broth. The row of silver scrubbing towers five stories high to clean the air used to aerate the broth. The maze of pipes leading a quarter mile in every direction. Giant tubes and filters hanging from the beams. Above all, the sky, the blue prairie sky with its floating strings of clouds. This factory was in the middle of a cornfield, ten miles south of Terre Haute, Indiana, on the Wabash River. Construction, research, and production went on simultaneously, with a Triple-A work priority, the highest possible. The factory had only a partial roof. A roof wasn’t essential for the work, so roof construction came last.

  Up on the beams, lying on her stomach, Claire saw the figure of a military man walking amid the fermentation vats. She photographed him to give some perspective on size. The vats towered over him. He walked into a patch of sunlight, the break in the factory roof.

  And then she realized. It was him. Jamie. Her heart beat fast, and she felt light-headed. She rested the camera on the beam. She wouldn’t risk moving to another place, not yet, not until she caught hold of herself. The beam itself was quite safe (she wasn’t suicidal), despite what anyone might think who was watching from below—despite what he might think. The beam was three feet wide, thick, and stable. Even so, she couldn’t let herself become distracted while she was up here. And he’d distracted her.

  In the past year or so since she’d last seen him, she’d built a front of anger over her anguish. But now, spotting him there, she felt a jolt, and a powerful yearning for him, filled with desire. As strong a desire, and as much love, as she’d felt when they were together. To her it was as if the argument at her father’s apartment was only yesterday. Suddenly she was as weak and vulnerable as she’d been at that moment, the strength draining from her limbs.

  He couldn’t see the details of what she did up above. He didn’t know that she’d spotted him. Didn’t know that she stayed in that one place because after seeing him, she didn’t trust herself to move. He continued to wander the factory, imagining it through her eyes. The scene was like a movie set for a futuristic thriller.
And the purpose of it wasn’t to destroy lives but to save them. His work was complete. When the Allies had invaded France a few weeks before, every American medic carried Pfizer-made penicillin in his kit. Jamie had witnessed, and in his own way assisted, a technological and medical breakthrough of astounding proportions…corn steep liquor, Penicillium chrysogenum from a rotten cantaloupe, deep tank submerged fermentation: these were the ingredients. The battle for penicillin was won.

  Jamie knew he’d been a fool, and a coward. Kreindler had told him about Sergei Oretsky’s confession, suspect as it was, coming through the Nazi Geckmann. As to Nick, and the theft of Tia’s discovery…well, Edward Rutherford had, in fact, set up a foundation with the profits: he’d tried to make amends. Jamie had no right to blame Claire for what had been done by Nick, or by her father.

  Shades of gray, everywhere Jamie turned. For the past months, Jamie had internally debated how to arrange a rendezvous with Claire. He’d never returned her phone calls, and so he didn’t feel he could simply pick up the phone and call her now, a year later. Or maybe he was simply too cowardly still to approach her that way; she could hang up on him, after all, and he couldn’t face that. He wanted, needed, to see her in person. Meeting here, as if by chance, was the best he could do. When Vannevar Bush mentioned that she was visiting the Terre Haute plant, Jamie scheduled his final tour of inspection to coincide with her visit.

  All right, she thought. Her heart rate had slowed. She could manage now. She brought herself to kneeling. Yes, she was fine. She returned to the crane platform, and she waved to Bob, the crane operator, to take her to the next spot. She was almost finished for today anyway. A few more shots, especially that spot by the far wall—she indicated to Bob what she wanted—because from there she could gain a high perspective of both the fermentation vats and the prairie clouds above the factory.

  After her father set up the foundation, Claire had hoped that Jamie would be in touch with her. For days she listened for the phone. Grabbed at the mail. Every time she returned from a trip, she willed that a message from him would be waiting for her. But no message, or letter, or phone call ever came. Even now, the pain of the memory made tears smart in her eyes.

  At the far wall, she went on with her shoot. She made it last longer than it had to, putting off as long as possible the moment when she would be forced to greet Jamie. But she couldn’t put off the moment forever. She gave a signal to Bob, and he lowered her to the factory floor.

  Jamie approached her. “Hello, Claire.”

  His tone itself was an apology. She heard this and recognized the awkwardness, at the least, that he must be feeling.

  “What are you doing here?” she said, masking her pain with anger. She wished she could walk into his arms and hold him while he held her in return.

  Well, not exactly the greeting he’d hoped for, Jamie thought, but under the circumstances he didn’t feel he could rightly protest. “I’m on a tour of inspection. I arrived this afternoon.”

  She said nothing.

  He tried to ignore her shocked and angry look by making a wisecrack. “I know what you’re doing here, so I don’t have to ask.”

  She disregarded the attempt at humor. “I’m finished for today. In fact, I’m leaving Terre Haute tonight.” In his presence, after these months of silence, she tried to harden herself against him once more. How dare he turn up without warning, expecting her to be ready to laugh and to forgive?

  “I’ve got a car and driver, can I give you a lift back to town?”

  This placed her in a quandary: she had to ask the factory’s military security detail for a ride whenever she needed one, a real burden for them, and so she didn’t feel she could reject Jamie’s offer.

  In silence they walked to his car. She carried her equipment, taking a step away from him when he offered to help.

  The driver saluted when they came up. He opened and closed the doors in strict military demeanor, all by the book. Not like Tony. Tony’s mother had telephoned five months ago. The moment she identified herself, Claire knew what had happened. Tony had died, in Italy, a few days before Christmas. Since he’d stopped working with her, Claire had received two letters from him, lighthearted, chatty. She sent these letters to his mother after he died. The Allies were advancing in France. In Asia, the Allied assault against the Mariana Islands had begun. In Claire’s small neighborhood of Greenwich Village, the blue-star banners of service were turning more and more often into the silver-star banners of the wounded, and the gold-star banners of death. Increased casualties were the sacrifice required for victory.

  As the military car drove along the barbed-wire fence that cordoned off the extensive acreage of what was supposed to be a secret site, Jamie made a stab at conversation. “Watching you up there on the beams, I got the feeling that, well”—he knew he was sounding foolish, but it was the best he could do—“you must enjoy photographing factories.”

  She was sitting as far from him as she could. Even so, she was alert to every movement of his body. Alert to the bending of his legs, to the way he kept his forearm against the top of the open window to catch the breeze. “Yes,” she said forcing her gaze on the scenery, flat and fertile. “I do.” Over the years she’d done some of her best work at industrial sites. The steel mills of Gary, Indiana. The hydropower dam system of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Any industrial project could be transformed into art. These past days at the penicillin plant, she’d felt a surging sense of optimism, for herself, for Charlie, for the country, the darkness and despair of the past months ebbing away from her. But these feelings weren’t something she could share easily, least of all with the man next to her. She would share them with her father when she returned to New York. She and her father had uncertainly reconciled, each trying to do better at understanding the other, trying to find a common ground between her idealism and his harnessing of the ways of the world.

  When they reached her hotel in Terre Haute, where she would retrieve her suitcase before the train, the early evening sunlight was raking over the buildings.

  “I remember from my last visit that there’s a park along the river,” Jamie said. He wanted so much to touch her face. “If you feel like a walk.”

  She considered this.

  “I’d like to take a walk with you,” he said. “I’d like us to have a chance to talk.” There. He was trying. He was inching forward. “I heard from Marcus Kreindler…” He let the implication fall away.

  “I’m not interested in true confessions.” That was mean, she realized. In fact she was interested in learning what the detective had said to Jamie.

  “No, of course not. But I’ll tell you anyway: he exonerated your father of, well, of what I accused him of.”

  Ah. That made her happy indeed. But she wouldn’t share her happiness with the man beside her. She also realized: Jamie had learned the truth, but he hadn’t contacted her to let her know.

  “Will you walk with me?” he asked.

  With the light so bright and clear, and with some, at least, of her spirit lifted by the triumphs of her workday, she really did feel like a walk.

  She left her equipment with the bellman in the lobby.

  Jamie led the way to a path along a tributary of the Wabash River. The path was framed by weeping willow trees.

  “How’s Charlie?” he asked.

  “He’s doing well.” She offered no details. He’d have to work harder than this, for details. Charlie was finishing his first year at a boarding school for the deaf. He enjoyed it. Some of his hearing was returning. Last week, he’d written to tell her that he’d heard the call of a goose over the lake behind his school.

  “I read about his father’s death.”

  “Yes.”

  “Please give Charlie my best.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.” She hated to say this, but it was true. Charlie had had enough upheaval in his life; he didn’t need James Stanton disappearing and appearing at whim.

  They came to a
rustic bridge. They stared down at the lazy river water, filled with the pale green reflections from the foliage on either side. This was the man she’d loved, Claire thought. The love of her life. Once upon a time. She stared at a tiny whirlpool in the river, a turning kaleidoscope of green leaves and brown branches. A leaf drifted onto the water and was carried gently, tilting this way and that, down the stream.

  “How about you?” Jamie said. “How are you?” The question came out as a demand, startling him. He loved her so.

  “Well enough.”

  He put his hand on her shoulder, and she stepped away from him. Not abruptly, simply in a natural way of starting to walk again, so that his arm fell to his side.

  They continued along the path. Claire concentrated on the light, the gorgeous, raking, orange sunset light. The reflections upon the river and upon the riverbank, shimmering and shining. All around her, the world had turned to a fierce radiance, giving her a sense of immediacy and perfection.

  “After what happened—” No, that wasn’t the way to start. “I’m sorry.” That didn’t seem adequate, either. “I was a coward.”

  “You did what you thought was right,” was the best she could come up with.

  After a prolonged silence, Jamie continued, “My work is finished on the penicillin project. I know Dr. Bush would like me to keep touring factories indefinitely, because it would make his job a lot easier, but I’ve realized my real work is passing me by. That evening in front of the Institute, when all those people were begging for penicillin, do you remember?”

  “Yes.” It seemed like years ago.

  “I’ve volunteered to be a physician at the front. I’ve been accepted.”

  “What?” She couldn’t take it in. She stopped. She turned to face him. Her defenses against him collapsed in an instant. The yellow light of sunset glowed around him and upon him. She wanted to grasp him and hold on to him forever. She fisted her hands, pressing her nails into her palms.