A Fierce Radiance

by Lauren Belfer

  Now, following his precepts, she took this woman’s side and photographed her staring at the bed, capturing her pathos and her tragedy. Approaching her afterward, Claire moved slowly, trying not to startle her. “Mrs. Reese?”

  Like someone sleepwalking, the woman turned toward Claire. She nodded.

  “My name is Claire Shipley.”

  “Patsy Reese.” She held out her hand with instinctive courtesy. Her palm was overwarm and damp. Nevertheless Claire shook it firmly.

  “I’m a photographer with Life magazine.” Claire paused to let the name sink in. Life was wildly popular, the most popular magazine in the country, defining and reporting on everything that was newsworthy and exciting. “We’re doing a photo essay on penicillin, the medicine they’re giving your husband. We’re hoping other people will learn about the drug and be helped by it.”

  This was exaggerating the truth, but Claire had to get Mrs. Reese’s permission to do the story. Without her permission, the story would end here. You can trust me. This was the message underlying Claire’s every professional interchange. She sensed that someone from Mrs. Reese’s background, Park Avenue and pearls, would be best influenced by an appeal to charity.

  “Do you mind if I follow your husband’s story?”

  Mrs. Reese looked confused. “I don’t know.”

  “Dr. Rivers, the director of the hospital, thought the testing should be documented.” How quickly she called upon the support of a man she hadn’t liked. Claire despised this part of her job.

  “Dr. Rivers was the man wearing the uniform?” Patsy Reese asked.

  “Yes. Would you be willing to sign a permission form?” Claire pressed. “You can change your mind later.” Theoretically this was true, although in Claire’s experience people seldom felt emboldened or entitled to retract a signature on a document. “There’s no problem with changing your mind later.”

  Patsy looked as if she couldn’t wrap her mind around the option laid before her. She concentrated on it, struggling to pin it down. “I guess it’s okay.”

  “Thank you.” From a zippered compartment in her camera bag, Claire retrieved the permission form. Placing her coat on the back of a chair, using the coat as a table, Patsy signed the form without reading it.

  “Again, thank you.” Well, that crucial task was easier than Claire had expected.

  “Ed and I read your magazine.” Patsy spoke with an extreme politeness, as if she were courting Claire instead of the other way around.

  “We enjoy it.”

  “That’s kind of you to say.”

  “I remember when Life first came out.” Her voice turned wistful.

  “Ed brought home a copy. We were the only family on our elevator bank to have one.” That first issue, November 23, 1936, just over five years ago, was famous for selling out within hours. “Our neighbors came over to see it.”

  Patsy was filling time, Claire realized. Reaching for any available triviality before she had to confront her husband on the bed.

  “That must have been fun,” Claire said soothingly.

  “It was. I made popcorn and we sat around the living room taking turns looking at it.” Suddenly Patsy grasped Claire’s hand and pressed her fingernails hard into Claire’s palm. Claire steeled herself and didn’t move. “Claire? Your name is Claire?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.”

  Patsy glanced at Dr. Stanton, engrossed in work at the desk. “Not here.” She searched the room for a safe haven. “By the windows.” She dropped Claire’s hand and crossed the room, Claire following. When they reached the windows, Patsy leaned toward Claire and whispered, “What did you say about the medicine they’re giving my husband? What did you call it?”

  “Penicillin.”

  “What’s that?” she challenged Claire, as if Claire, not the medical staff, were responsible for it. “I never heard of that. At Presbyterian Hospital, they wouldn’t tell me anything. Only that they wanted to try a new medicine, and they didn’t have enough of it there so they had to bring him here. As if I didn’t have a right to know anything else.”

  Claire said, “I’m sorry.” And she was, terribly sorry, for this unfortunate young woman.

  “When they asked me if it was all right to bring him here and to give him the medicine, I had to say yes. What else could I say?”

  “You’re right, you couldn’t say anything else.”

  “They wouldn’t even let me get into the ambulance with him. I had to search for a taxi. What if something happened to him while I was caught in traffic?”

  “Thank goodness he arrived here safely,” Claire said.

  “Tell me what you know about the medicine,” Patsy said.

  “Not very much. I read an article about penicillin in the Times. About six months ago. That’s all.” Claire couldn’t bring herself to tell Patsy Reese about stale bread and Roquefort cheese, and especially not about finicky mold and laboratory curiosities. “You should ask the doctor.”

  “Do you think he’d tell me?”

  Both women looked at Dr. Stanton. He was using a ruler to plot out information on a graph. His intent concentration made him look like the smartest student in any class he’d ever attended. The resident genius. Claire understood Patsy’s reluctance to approach him. When Claire’s mother, Anna, was dying of cancer through increasingly tortured months, her doctors refused to share any information. The physician in charge didn’t even want Anna to know that she had cancer. Anna demanded the truth, in a conversation that quickly turned hostile. The physicians’ creed seemed to be that the fewer facts patients and their families knew about an illness, the better for everyone, especially the doctors. Physicians justified their approach by claiming that patients and their families lost hope when they knew the truth.

  Patsy sighed and turned to look out the window. She pressed her forehead against the glass. She breathed deeply, taking control of herself. Her breath produced a circle of condensation on the windowpane. The reflected light was soft against her hair and cheeks. Exhaustion was layered onto her face in fine lines. Claire thought of Italian Renaissance paintings of women posed beside windows. Stepping back, she took Patsy’s portrait in profile.

  Then Claire followed Patsy’s gaze out the window. The East River was green-black and roiling. Tugboats pushed barges piled with construction beams, gravel, garbage. A police boat patrolled the harbor. Ferries labored across the blustery current. Sunlight glinted off the steel trusses of the Queensboro Bridge. Welfare Island, with its maze of dilapidated public hospitals, seemed to shine in the winter light. The tide was coming in, rolling against the embankment, tossing the small delivery boats that plied the river. The East River wasn’t a river at all, but a strait. Manhattan was a coastal island, and the sea was close by, surging and unforgiving.

  “Do you want to know what happened to Ed?” Patsy asked.

  “If you’d like to tell me.”

  “Okay.” She seemed to drift, and when she spoke again, she might have been in a trance. “It started out as a scratch. Not even. He was playing court tennis.”

  Court tennis—here was a reference that gave away this family’s social standing. Court tennis was a game played in the enclaves of the upper class.

  “Every Thursday at lunchtime Ed plays court tennis with his brother Kip. Kip is a nickname for Christopher. Some people call him Chris or even Chip, which he hates, but we call him Kip.” Her voice grew stronger, as if these meaningless details grounded her. “They play at the Racquet and Tennis Club. Well, that’s the only place you can play court tennis. In Manhattan, I mean. When we’re in Tuxedo, they play at the club there. Anyway, it was just a slip. He stumbled when his shoes stuck to the floor. You know how that sometimes happens, when you’re racing from side to side and the floor is almost sticky from so much polishing?”

  Claire nodded, although she didn’t know, had never played court tennis or squash, had never been to the Racquet and Te
nnis Club on Park Avenue, or visited the protected enclave of Tuxedo Park northwest of the city. She felt an unexpected tinge of class resentment.

  “It wasn’t even a scrape. The skin was barely broken. That’s what Ed said, at least. He didn’t remember it when he was in the shower afterward.”

  Claire saw Emily, skipping joyfully outside their apartment building on West 111th Street. She tripped on an imperfection in the sidewalk, a small edge where one slab rose above the next by a quarter inch, no more. That quarter inch killed her. Emily broke her fall with her hands. She wasn’t the type of child to scream and cry, but she moaned as she pushed herself up. Both knees were scraped. Brush burns covered her palms. But her face never touched the pavement. Her face remained perfect and lovely to the end…the full cheeks, the wide brow, her skin so smooth and soft. The day was warm for June. Emily was wearing her favorite dress, the one with smocking on the bodice. The dress was yellow with a print of green and blue merry-go-round horses. Emily didn’t want to get blood on her dress. “Mommy, hold my dress,” she said as they went upstairs to wash and bandage the scrapes. Claire bunched the skirt and held it above Emily’s knees. Four days later Emily was dead.

  Patsy continued, oblivious to Claire’s anguish. “By Sunday his knee was a little swollen and stiff, but then we heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor and he put the stiffness out of his mind. It seemed so minor compared to everything else that was going on.”

  Patsy paused, remembering that day. Claire remembered, too. Each morning when she woke up and turned on the radio news, she felt as if she were hearing about Pearl Harbor for the first time. Each day, she felt a shock like the first shock. The attack on Pearl Harbor and the destruction of the nation’s fleet were incomprehensible. Pearl Harbor was the first topic when you telephoned a friend or passed an acquaintance on the street. Where were you, what were you doing when you heard the news, people asked obsessively, as if trying to grasp that it had actually happened. Claire and her son were at home. Claire was tormenting Charlie by making him try on all his clothes so they could donate what he’d outgrown to Greenwich House, the local settlement house, before Christmas. Claire had turned on the radio, to a concert by the New York Philharmonic. She’d been looking forward to it. In the middle of the program, an announcer delivered the news.

  Claire hadn’t waited for her boss to telephone her. Immediately she arranged for Charlie to spend the rest of the day around the corner with the family of his best friend, Ben. Charlie was thrilled, especially because they simply left the clothes in a pile on his bed. Claire went to the office. When she arrived, she learned that Mr. Luce had ordered the week’s issue remade, a tremendous expense because they’d already closed and were in production. Trying to get an overview, Mack Mahoney, the photo editor, had sent photographers around the city for shots of ordinary people and their reactions.

  When Mrs. Roosevelt spoke to the nation in the early evening, Claire was outside Grand Central Station. “I have a boy at sea on a destroyer,” the first lady said in her high-pitched voice, always surprising to Claire in a woman who otherwise seemed formidable. A dozen people pressed around the open doors of a Checker cab parked in front of the station, the radio turned up loud. “Many of you all over the country have boys in the service who will now be called upon to go into action…. You cannot escape anxiety, you cannot escape the clutch of fear at your heart.”

  Along Forty-second Street in the chill of early winter, cars and taxis pulled over and strangers gathered to listen to Mrs. Roosevelt. Using a tripod and a long exposure in the misty darkness, Claire captured a rhythm of headlights, streetlamps, and silhouetted figures bundled in coats and hats. Mr. Luce admired the haunting shot and ran it as a double truck, across two facing pages, in the magazine.

  “By Monday morning,” Patsy said, “Ed’s knee was huge, and there were red streaks up and down his shin and his thigh and he could barely walk, and the pain was…” She inhaled sharply, fighting back tears. Claire touched her shoulder to comfort her, but Patsy pulled away, biting her lower lip and clenching her hands together. She stared fixedly at the river. “It happened so fast. By the time we arrived at the hospital, the infection was in his bloodstream and in his lungs and everywhere. The pain was so awful that Ed asked them to amputate his leg, but they said it was too late even for that.”

  Searching for some way to comfort her, Claire asked, “How old are your children?”

  Slowly affection transformed Patsy’s face. Her clenched hands relaxed.

  Claire wondered how she herself looked when she talked about Emily and Charlie, wondered if she revealed the same combination of joy and love that Patsy now showed.

  “Sally is eleven and Ned is nine. Sally goes to Spence and Ned goes to Collegiate,” she added, replying to a standard question, heard even when it wasn’t asked.

  “I’d like to meet them. Take their picture.”

  “For the magazine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you. I’d like that. I’m hoping they can visit Ed tomorrow.” She glanced at her husband in confusion. “If he’s not busy with the doctors, I mean.”

  If he’s not dead, Claire assumed Patsy must be thinking.

  “Maybe when the children are here, I’ll ask the doctor about the medicine. Maybe he’ll explain it to them. They’re only children, after all. We can say it’s a science lesson.”

  “That sounds like a good idea.”

  Patsy gave Claire a grateful smile, as if they were two mothers at the playground plotting a treat that was supposed to be for their children but was actually for the grown-ups.

  Patsy swayed, gripping the windowsill to steady herself.

  “Are you okay, Mrs. Reese?”

  “I’m a little dizzy. I haven’t been sleeping or eating.”

  Claire gestured toward the sofa. “The doctor said he won’t know anything for several hours. You should lie down.”

  “Yes.” Retrieving her coat, Patsy made her way to the leather sofa. Claire followed, careful not to touch her but close enough to help if she stumbled. Patsy shaped her coat into a pillow, unfolded the tartan blanket draped across the sofa’s armrest to cover her legs, and settled herself on her side. She closed her eyes. A lock of hair fell across her cheek. Claire pretended to busy herself with the equipment. After several minutes, Patsy’s breathing took on the steadiness of sleep.

  Claire used the Leica. Although she bracketed the shot, she trusted she had what she wanted on the first try: the entire scene a blur except for Patsy’s now-innocent, sleeping face.

  Edward R. Reese Jr. received the first injection of 35,000 units of penicillin at 12:04 PM, when his fever registered 105.9. He received the second injection at 4:00 PM, when his fever was 105.7. Claire confirmed these details when she reviewed the chart during one of Nurse Brockett’s breaks. His breathing was still a harsh, tortured moan.

  At 6:00 PM, Nurse Brockett ordered a junior nurse to escort Patsy Reese, who’d woken, to the dining room for dinner. An orderly brought dinner on a tray for Dr. Stanton and came back with a tray for Claire, an unexpected gift. She looked at Stanton, expecting him to ask her to join him, but he reviewed his notes while eating. Generally she shared meals with the subjects of her stories, but in this case Claire decided not to press her position by inviting herself to join him.

  At 8:00 PM, at the third injection, Mr. Reese’s fever registered 105.8. Stanton was troubled when Nurse Brockett told him this. She also gave him a report on the latest blood tests. The concentration of bacteria was down, but only slightly. Tia Stanton had rejoined them, accompanied by a colleague, a slight, white-haired British man whom she called David. The Stantons didn’t take the time to introduce David to Claire.

  “Do you think we should raise the dose?” Dr. Stanton asked them.

  “Hard to say,” David said. “We don’t know why he isn’t responding. In our experiments, the mice responded almost immediately.”

  “We need to keep our long-term treatment options open
, too,” Tia said.

  Despite all that was at stake, they gave their opinions matter-of-factly. Claire was impressed.

  “Several high doses short-term might be better than sustained doses long-term,” Stanton said. He, too, appreciated the attitude of his colleagues. They kept him steady. There was no room for overt emotion within the confines of the experiment. There would be time, too much time most likely, for emotion afterward.

  “It’s a possibility,” said Tia. “We’ll design the protocols to test the hypothesis in mice.” She noted it on her clipboard.

  Stanton thought for a long moment, considering the options. The staff waited on his decision, but he took his time. Impatience was an enemy. He had to keep his mind clear, thinking ahead to the next patient and the next. “I’ll continue with 35,000 units every four hours. We’ll use higher doses on the next patient. Next time, I’ll also use a double dose for the first injection.”

  “The mice will try that idea, as well,” David said.

  Had they already given up on Edward Reese? Claire wondered. Their attitude was part of the story, too, the professionalism reflected in the steadfast expressions and straight postures, which she duly captured on film.

  Tia and David left. After writing his notes, Stanton gave Claire an appraising glance. As attractive as she was, he wasn’t in the mood for small talk or flirtation. He retrieved a back issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Might as well use the empty hours between injections to catch up on his journal reading. He didn’t want to leave the room for any length of time until he had a clear understanding of the outcome of the experiment.

  Midnight. The fourth injection. Protect us now and at the hour of our death, the prayer came to Claire’s mind unbidden. Patsy dozed in one of the big leather chairs. Nurse Brockett took Mr. Reese’s temperature.