A Fierce Radiance

by Lauren Belfer

  Eleven-year-old Sally Reese said, “Look at these cute little mice.” Sally was broad faced and resolute, her thick curly hair overwhelming the barrettes at her temples, the tie of her school uniform askew. Her pleated skirt was too short for her, showing how much she’d grown since the start of the school year. She peered into the two cages on the table. Each cage held about a dozen white mice. Sally pressed her fingers against the bars of the cage, and a few mice hopped over to sniff, their investigation duly photographed by Claire.

  “Be careful, the mice could bite you,” Tia said.

  “I love baby mice. They would never bite me,” Sally insisted, trying to push her fingertips into the cage.

  Tia wondered, Had she been so willful when she was young? Probably.

  “You’re not going to kill them, are you?” Sally asked.

  The mice would be dead within a day or two, as Tia and David tested the questions they’d discussed with her brother yesterday. If you wanted to help humans, you couldn’t let yourself worry about mice. Tia treated them as humanely as possible, even as she recognized the contradiction of the term humane in a world in which humans were slaughtering fellow humans in the war every day.

  “Let me show you something,” Tia said, ignoring Sally’s question.

  “Come over here and watch.” Her tone was harsh, an order rather than an invitation. But every minute away from work had to be chosen wisely. The mold was unreliable. Finicky in every way. The slightest change in temperature, the slightest jarring movement, could destroy the fluid’s usefulness. Yes, her patience was frayed. Often she lost hope and wanted to give up. Yet she’d force herself to keep going just as she always had. But she hated that her anxieties made her snap at these children. Luckily they seemed quite capable of fighting back.

  Removing the cotton wool from one of the milk bottles, Tia put a pipette to her lips and drew out the yellowish fluid from the bottom of the bottle. She closed off the tube with her fingertip, then released the fluid into a test tube, which she stoppered.

  “This is the medicine that’s helping your dad. I have to clean it up a little after I harvest it, but basically, this is it. The mold likes to grow on flat surfaces, the reason for the bedpans and milk bottles. As the mold grows, it produces the fluid as a kind of waste product.” She decided to explain all this whether they cared or not. It was their father, after all, whose life was being saved. Or not saved. If they were too young to understand now, maybe someday they’d look back and be grateful. “We siphon off the fluid, purify it, and eventually end up with penicillin powder. Some strains of Penicillium produce more fluid than others. Sometimes I think I’m doing everything right, but the fluid turns out to be useless, with no antibacterial effect at all. Temperature affects the mold, and movement, and the type of food I give it.”

  “Food?” Ned said with sudden interest. “What kind of food? Cauliflower? Lima beans?”

  Tia laughed. Ned was funny, he really was. If she could approach this visit as enjoyable, it would become a relaxing break instead of a draining distraction. “Basically the mold likes to eat sugar. Molasses, chocolate, Bosco, Ovaltine.” She tried to meet the kids on their own level: “So you see, the mold has candy for every meal. What would your mom say, if you wanted candy for every meal?”

  “I do want candy for every meal,” Ned said.

  “But you don’t get it!” Sally said.

  Tia didn’t think that she and her brother had ever bickered this way. Ned strode off, unmistakably looking for mischief. “Did you really eat all this jam?” he called from the doorway leading into the next room.

  Tia joined Ned at the doorway. In the second room, jam jars filled with soil crowded the floor-to-ceiling shelves. Each jar was labeled with the place and date of collection. The wide windows faced north, overlooking the Institute gardens. Open petri dishes lined the windowsill, as if waiting to receive whatever organisms happened to blow in.

  “Although jam happens to be my favorite food,” Tia said, “my friends had to help me collect the soil to fill this many jars.”

  “It smells good in here,” Sally said.

  And the room did smell good, Tia realized. Like a field of hay. Like a walk in the woods in spring after a rainstorm, the scent moist and fertile. She was so accustomed to it, she’d stopped noticing. She was grateful for Sally’s bringing it to her attention.

  “The soil is filled with life-forms, and they create the distinctive scent,” Tia said. “I’m searching for other substances that are as effective and nontoxic as penicillin but with any luck easier to produce. Penicillin can’t be the only one. We know that, because when you put infectious bacteria into the soil, something in the soil kills it.” The kids seemed to warm to her words, or maybe they were too bored now to rebel. “Otherwise infectious bacteria would overrun the earth. But they don’t. Something in the soil kills them. My friends bring me soil samples from everywhere. A few years ago I called the Explorers Club, and they were willing to alert their members to what I needed. A friend of mine is married to an airline pilot, and he got his fellow pilots involved. Look, this sample is from Australia.” She showed them a jar containing a sandy-looking sample. “And this one is from the banks of the Mississippi River.” The soil was dark and dense. “Every sample is different. I contacted Girl Scout headquarters, and the scouts are helping me, all around the country. Do you have a backyard? You could bring me a sample.”

  “We have a country house,” Sally said. “In Tuxedo. I could bring you a sample from there.”

  “Perfect.”

  “Would you like it from my petunia garden?” asked Sally. “That’s my favorite spot.”

  “Or from where our dog Louie does his poop?” Ned said gleefully.

  “Ned, you just better watch out,” Sally said. “I’ll tell Mom. You know Mom doesn’t want you talking about poop.”

  “In fact,” Tia said, “a sample from the poop place would be perfect. Filled with fascinating bacteria and mold.”

  Ned gave his sister a smug look of victory. “So what do you do with all this dirt?” he said.

  “I take small amounts and put them on petri dishes lined with agar. Agar is a kind of food, usually made from seaweed or algae. Then I wait to see what grows. Look.” Tia showed them petri dishes filled with tufts of thriving orange, green, and purple mold.

  “I’m hungry,” Ned said. “Do you have anything that humans can eat?”

  Suppressing a smile, Claire said, “I think it’s time for the party.”

  Tia felt she’d been rescued.

  Upstairs Ned and Sally ran into their father’s room. They threw themselves on the bed, talking about mold and dirt samples and how much jam Dr. Tia must have eaten to collect so many jars, even if her friends helped. Spreading his arms, Mr. Reese tried to corral them. “Ned, Sally.” He mussed their hair. Claire rushed forward to catch the details.

  Patsy stood at the head of the bed, her hands on the metal headboard. She looked luminous in a pink sweater set, her hair perfectly waved. She rubbed the metal as if it were a substitute for her husband’s shoulders.

  On the counter, Nurse Brockett had arranged a selection of miniature apple tarts, two-inch-square chocolate cakes, and bite-size éclairs. She’d prepared hot chocolate in a porcelain pot and laid out gold-banded white china.

  Tia studied the dessert selections. She put four miniature éclairs on a plate and went to the windows on the far side of the room. As she sampled her first éclair, she closed her eyes in pleasure. To Claire, Tia was a striking image: lab coat, high heels, tight skirt, the bliss of éclairs in a hospital room.

  Nurse Brockett brought Mr. Reese a cup of chicken broth. When he finished it, he said, “I’d enjoy one of those apple tarts.”

  “Nothin’ doin,’ as my nephew would say.” The slang was unexpected from Nurse Brockett, an opening into another part of her life.

  “I’ll bring you more broth. You’ve been extremely ill, and don’t you forget it. Maybe I’ll give you an a
pple tart later. After dinner. If you’re deserving.”

  “Oh, I’ll be deserving,” he assured her. Patsy leaned over the headboard and squeezed his shoulders.

  Sally and Ned sat on the end of the bed, licking chocolate frosting from their fingers. Both looked pure-skinned and well fed, at ease with themselves and the world.

  After shooting two rolls of film, Claire took a break, joining Tia in the corner with her own plate of éclairs. “I met a very odd man this afternoon. He was collecting sewage.”

  “Sergei,” Tia said with a smile. “Once you understand the principle behind it, his research isn’t as strange as it seems at first.”

  “David Hoskins told me about it. Hoskins introduced us.”

  “Sergei’s work makes him a bit of a loner, but he’s always been very kind to me—although I’ve refused several invitations to go sewage collecting with him.”

  Claire sensed Tia’s underlying warmth and good humor.

  “David has no sympathy for sewage research, but I say, whatever works.”

  “I agree with you on that,” Claire said. “I invited David Hoskins to this party, but he wouldn’t come.”

  Tia turned serious. “Of course not.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He’s in mourning. His wife and son died in Coventry during the bombing.”

  Coventry, November of 1940. Claire remembered the newsreels. The city was virtually destroyed, the medieval cathedral reduced to ruins.

  “His family was visiting Coventry for his in-laws’ fiftieth wedding anniversary.”

  Now Claire understood the effort Hoskins made to be amusing. To pretend that all was well with his very British self.

  “We’ve been lucky in America, haven’t we,” Tia said. It wasn’t a question.

  How long would their luck last? Claire wondered but didn’t say.

  “My brother and I try to make David feel welcome.” Tia sighed. “I guess my brother’s not coming to this party, either.”

  Claire wouldn’t have asked, but she’d been hoping to see him.

  “I suspected he wouldn’t be here,” Tia said.

  “Why?”

  “He doesn’t want to get close to the family. Emotionally, I mean. I don’t want to get close to them, either, but he’s the physician.” She paused. “He’s decided not to tell them. I don’t know if it’s the right decision or not. I’m just glad it’s not my decision.”

  “Decided not to tell them what?”

  “That we’re running out of medication.” Tia spoke with the same matter-of-factness that Claire had admired during the night. “Mr. Reese might relapse, and we won’t be able to help him. It took David and me six months to make the medication we’ve given Mr. Reese so far. He might not live long enough for us to make more.”

  Claire studied Mr. Reese, obediently sipping his second cup of chicken broth and teasing his children for overeating. “He seems to be doing very well to me. A little pale, but basically okay.”

  “What you see is a lie.” Tia looked at Claire in sudden anger, a torrent of words couched in a whisper. Claire realized that Tia’s beautiful clothes, the perfect makeup, the objective attitude, were nothing but a front. Tia was in torment. “You can use all that equipment of yours to take pictures of the outside of him, but you can’t see the inside. The bacteria can hide for days or even weeks and then come back like the far side of a hurricane. I don’t know if his immune system is strong enough to fight back. I can’t figure out how to produce the medication faster, no matter how many experiments I run. Forgive me. This isn’t your concern, but—” Cutting off her own thought, she strode across the room, put her plate on the counter, and left.

  Claire stared at the family before her. Ned and Sally were splitting another chocolate cake, negotiating who would cut it in half and who would choose the first piece. Mr. Reese studied their every move, and Patsy Reese studied him. The scene was completely transformed. Ineffably sad. Ned and Sally could be her children. She could be Patsy, in love with this handsome, kind-hearted man who had been brought back from the dead. Claire resumed her job, her only choice, grasping other people’s lives and portraying their stories.

  “All right.” Patsy came to the side of the bed and clapped her hands to get Ned and Sally’s attention. “Homework.”

  Without complaint, more agreeable than Charlie would have been, the children retrieved their work from their book bags and reclined upon their father’s bed with pencils, books, and notebooks.

  Mr. Reese gazed at his children and smiled. With effort, he raised his hand to touch Sally’s hair, but he couldn’t reach her. Absorbed by her homework, she didn’t notice. That was the image Claire caught: Sally’s bursting health and independence, and her father’s adoring face, his hand reaching across the hospital bed but never able to touch her, she was growing up so fast.

  With the faith of experience, Claire knew it was the perfect shot, because the entire story was there.

  By noon on Friday, Edward Reese’s fever was 102.8. Tia and David had no more medication to give him. They hoped to have enough for one injection by Saturday morning, if he lived that long. Nurse Brockett told Patsy to cancel Friday’s planned visit with the children.

  By four, his fever was 103.5. At 4:30, the winter sun was beginning to set, turning the windows of Queens across the river a flaming orange. Mr. Reese began to shiver and call for blankets. His hands shook from cold. Nurse Brockett piled blankets on him, but they didn’t make him warm. His body trembled. Without asking permission from the doctor or the nurse, Patsy got into bed with him. Dr. Stanton and Nurse Brockett observed her impassively, as if her action were part of the experiment. She placed her body over his, careful not to touch his leg, swollen huge once more. But even the warmth of her body couldn’t calm his shivering.

  Without warning Mr. Reese became hot. “Off, off,” he cried to Patsy, tossing himself back and forth to dislodge her, thrashing to rid himself of the blankets. The bacterial level in his blood was up to 20 per milliliter.

  Patsy slipped out of the bed and faced the wall. From the stooped curve of Patsy’s shoulders, from the way she hugged her arms around herself, Claire sensed her humiliation and despair. Claire turned away.

  After five minutes, Patsy was at Claire’s side. “Why doesn’t the doctor give him more medicine?” Her whispered words came fast, her fear barely held in check. She gripped Claire’s wrist and squeezed it, as if this would compel Claire to grant her an answer. “He was fine yesterday. Why did the doctor stop giving him the medicine?”

  Claire stared into Patsy’s pleading eyes. How could this be, that Claire knew more than the man’s family? Was James Stanton, was the hospital, entitled to do this experiment? Was a human being really no different from the mice in the cages downstairs? Who was to decide? The patient? His family? The doctors? The researchers? Would Patsy have chosen this treatment, if she’d been told the limitations?

  What would I have chosen, Claire wondered, if Emily had been lying upon the bed?

  To try the medicine, no matter the result. Claire knew this beyond doubt.

  “You need to ask the doctor.” That was all Claire could tell Patsy. She was here to record the story, not to shape it. She needed to be close, and to follow Capa’s injunction to take sides, but she wasn’t a friend. She was here to do her job. Claire felt like an opportunist, pursuing her own agenda while a man lay dying. Patsy kneaded her hands together and stared at James Stanton.

  The doctor sat at the desk, reading the afternoon newspaper. He held the paper open to catch the light. The headlines blared. Yesterday, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States and the United States declared war on them. The death toll at Pearl Harbor was now reported as over 2,700. The Japanese were sweeping through Asia, continuing the massive bombardment of the Philippines, invading Burma. Guam had fallen. Wake and Hong Kong were hard-pressed. The West Coast of the United States prepared for a Japanese attack.

  “You’re right,” Pats
y said. “I’ll ask him.” She made no move to approach him.

  What the two women didn’t know was that James Stanton immersed himself in the newspaper in order to maintain his distance from them, as well as from Nurse Brockett and the orderlies, even from Tia, who would soon be upstairs to confirm that no, there wouldn’t be enough medication for an injection tonight, despite their best efforts.

  Stanton’s worst fears had been realized. Yet he couldn’t let himself wallow in failure. He had to look ahead. Next time, they’d do better. They’d increase the dose, double the first dose, somehow they’d have more medication to work with. The experiment was a success, even though the patient was going to die. They’d proven that penicillin could suppress staphylococcal blood infections. Some of his colleagues might say he was free to leave the battlefield now, to let Nurse Brockett take over for these final hours. He disagreed. The experiment was his, and he possessed the courage and honor to follow through to the end.

  Once again he reassured himself: the experimental subject would have died anyway, would have been dead by now, if they hadn’t tried the medication. This was the justification that he clung to as he read about the destruction of the United States fleet at Pearl Harbor, and about the dozens of United States aircraft lined up wing to wing at Luzon in the Philippines, destroyed in a single raid.

  He thought of the first patient he’d lost, years ago. It must have been 1927 or ’28, the heady years before the Crash. He’d had a girlfriend who’d fancied herself a flapper, complete with short skirts and bobbed hair. It was a different era. The patient’s name was Natalia. He could no longer remember her family name, he was ashamed to realize. She was nineteen years old, born in Latvia, flaxen hair spread across the pillow. From Latvia to Philadelphia. Bacterial meningitis. He’d become an infectious disease expert to save people. To save Natalia. In those days, the wealthy most often received medical treatment at home. Hospitals were for those who weren’t wealthy, like Natalia. When he faced her parents across the hospital bed, he didn’t know what to say. He could do nothing to help her. Even so he held himself responsible for her death. Shockingly, her parents didn’t blame him. “Thank you, Doctor,” her father said. Her father was a low-level shipyard worker; he’d come to the hospital directly from the docks. His clothes were stained from sweat, and he gave off the sour odor of hard work. “Thank you.” He tried to say more, but his English wasn’t good, and the words eluded him. “Thank you,” he repeated. The mother said nothing. Too abruptly, Stanton had left the room, to save himself from breaking down.