A Fierce Radiance

by Lauren Belfer

  “Look, Claire, I happen to know that the old man”—their code for Mr. Luce—“loved it, too. But in the end he said to pull it, and we’re pulling it.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a little strange? First he loved it and then he didn’t? Don’t you think that deserves an explanation?” She knew she was overreacting, but she couldn’t help herself. The story cut too close.

  “This happens all the time, Claire. You know that. Besides, you got the cover with the army wives, so forget it.”

  “The penicillin story is important.” Publicity would get more scientists involved, get more money devoted to the cause. “Lives are at stake.”

  “Claire, the world’s exploding. I’ve got more lives-are-at-stake stories than I know what to do with. Ending with a shot of a dead man when the nation’s at war isn’t the most cheery note to go out on.”

  “Tell Mr. Luce to reconsider.”

  “For God’s sake, Claire, his closest friend died of blood poisoning.”

  She remembered. Briton Hadden. They’d established Time, Inc., together. Hadden died in 1929 from septicemia brought on by a scratch from a pet cat. According to company rumor, Luce and Hadden had a complicated friendship. Hadden was charming and fun loving, Luce serious and businesslike. When he died from the cat scratch, Hadden had just turned thirty-one.

  “Story must hit too close to home,” Mack said. “That’s probably the reason Luce got interested in it and the reason he got uninterested. Thought he could save Hadden, instead Hadden died all over again.”

  “Hadden’s death makes the story even more important. Okay, penicillin didn’t save a life this time, but it almost did. If the scientists can figure out a better way to produce it, it’ll save the next Hadden.” She didn’t mention Emily. Her daughter’s death was too painful for Claire to discuss in the context of work, where she had to appear forever confident and forthright. “I’ll fight for the story myself.”

  “Do what you need to do, Claire”—a warning came into his voice—

  “but you’ll be on your own. And don’t think the old man will be happy debating this with you when he’s just given you the cover. And I hate to be blunt, my dear, but your opinion on this doesn’t count.”

  She took a deep breath and steadied herself. She was becoming too emotional, too female.

  “Okay, enough of that,” Mack said, holding no grudge. “I’ve got something new for you. A complete change of pace. I can tell you need it. Just in time for the holidays, a new Rockette.”

  “Pardon?” Claire didn’t understand him.

  “Rockefeller Center at the holidays…a beautiful Christmas tree, beautiful ice-skaters, beautiful tourists, and a beautiful new Rockette. Just when you thought everything is going to hell, here’s something nice and snazzy. Dance shots, girls in tights, star-spangled costumes, guaranteed to cheer everybody up. This girl we’re doing, you’ll like her. She’s nineteen years old, five foot eight, and I won’t mention her measurements except to say—unforgettable. Born in Waterloo, New York, of all the godforsaken places. ‘From Waterloo to Radio City,’ that’s how we’ll headline it. Her name is Aurora Rasmussen. I’m thinking she must have changed it from Audrey, but we won’t mention that. Maybe you can get another cover, a row of Rockettes with their legs up, Christmas lights shimmering behind them. Our beloved Managing Editor Mr. Billings is excited already. Research has a packet for you, explains everything. You start Monday.”

  There was no use fighting him. Life was popular in part because of its mix of stories, from army wives to Rockettes, and Claire covered whatever came her way. Her job was to use her artistry and technical knowledge to give even the most mundane stories a flair and an impact. Her only proviso was that she didn’t travel unless absolutely necessary, because of Charlie. This limited her assignments and made some of her colleagues regard her as a lightweight instead of a committed professional, but she didn’t care. She trusted she would have a long career, whereas Charlie would grow up too fast.

  “All right, Mack,” she said, resigning herself to it. “I’ll see you Monday.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  They hung up. She leaned back in her chair, frustrated and exhausted. She felt as if she’d betrayed Edward and Patsy Reese, James Stanton and Tia Stanton. They’d trusted her, opened their lives to her, and she’d taken advantage of them.

  James Stanton had phoned her twice since she finished the story. The first call was strictly business: he reported that a writer and researcher from the magazine had contacted him, and he wanted to make certain that the factual information he’d given them matched the photographs she’d taken. She’d appreciated his attention to this, and she’d corrected a few minor errors.

  In the second call, he’d surprised her by asking her out to dinner. This call had been brief and awkward, as if the invitation meant more to them both than was superficially apparent. They dealt with their discomfort by cutting the conversation short. She remembered their terse phrases, almost comically clipped, as if they were angry at each other: “How about next Friday?” “Good.” “In the Village?” “Fine.”

  What could she say to him now? “The story hasn’t been scheduled, it’s out of my hands, thanks so much for your time and effort, someone will let you know”? These were the usual excuses, and in this case, they were insufficient. She hoped the news wouldn’t destroy the tenuous bond they’d formed. Once again she remembered Edward Reese sitting up in bed, reading the Herald Tribune.

  An idea flitted into her mind. She would quit the magazine in protest. Turn freelance. Choose what she worked on. No more Christmas trees at Rockefeller Center. No more dancing girls. She would still accept assignments from Life, but she could also refuse if the proposal didn’t pass muster. She would do documentary photography, social justice commentary, like Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange, two of her heroes. Pursue assignments from the new magazine PM, with its commitment to social change. Margaret Bourke-White was already there.

  Even as she played out this fantasy, Claire knew that she wouldn’t quit. Couldn’t quit. She had friends who were freelancers. Either they had more work than they could handle, or they went for weeks with no assignments. She herself had worked freelance before Life was established. She’d managed to build up a good-size group of newspaper and magazine clients, but she’d been only too aware that her clients could drop her without warning. She couldn’t risk it again. She needed a regular paycheck. Charlie couldn’t skip dinner for a week or a month because her phone hadn’t rung. She couldn’t pretend the roof wasn’t leaking because she was having a slow season. She couldn’t expect any boss but Mack, with his own four children, to sympathize with her desire to work close to home.

  And the truth was, she loved working for Life. She had a voracious curiosity about people, about the tumultuous world and everything in it. She could indulge that curiosity at Life as nowhere else. Every assignment, even Aurora Rasmussen, presented a new challenge, required its own vision, and she wouldn’t give that up.

  She checked her watch. Three o’clock. She was meeting Charlie at four. He’d spent last night with her father. This morning they’d gone to the Bronx Zoo, arriving early to beat the crowds.

  She put the checkbook and the rest of the bills in the top drawer of her desk. She stood. Lucas, who’d been curled by her feet under the desk, stood, too, pushing his head against her leg.

  “Hello, boy.” With her knuckles, she rubbed the velvety hill from his muzzle to his forehead. He liked that, closing his eyes, pressing his head against her leg to tell her to do it again. On some days, this caress of Lucas’s head was the only warmth and consolation she felt. Remembering her last conversation with James Stanton, as stilted as it was, Claire felt a longing for companionship.

  In her line of work, she could find more than enough sexual partners, if that was what she wanted. In the six years since she and Bill separated in 1935, she’d received more offers than she could even recall, from married and single men both. She�
��d had flings with several of her photographer colleagues, with an upper-level editor at another publication, with an attorney at the firm that handled her divorce…after Bill left, these were all she could manage. She couldn’t begin to feel the trust required for a deeper attachment. Now she felt an aching emptiness inside herself, in the place where the giving and receiving of love should be. She wanted a partner in the fullest sense. She wanted passion, yet more than passion. Passion as part of a love that was emotional, intellectual, physical.

  From her desk at the back window, she had a view of the garden. The sky had cleared, and the sun glimmered against the morning’s dusting of snow. The branches of the maple tree were rimmed in white, exactly at her eye level, creating a complex abstraction. Her cameras were downstairs. She could get them. She checked her watch again. Alas, no time for abstractions now. She had to pick up Charlie.

  She made her way down the steep, narrow staircase, Lucas following. Here in the stairwell, the vine-patterned wallpaper was peeling. A telltale swelling revealed the dampness seeping through the roof. The wet plaster smelled sour. The house dated from the 1840s. Each of the floors had only two rooms, but the cycle of repairs was endless. The house needed a new boiler, a new roof, new pipes. During the worst years of the Depression, Claire’s mother couldn’t raise the cash to undertake even the minimum of maintenance.

  Sometimes Claire thought about selling the house. The neighborhood was generally considered a slum, however, and the house was in such bad condition that she wouldn’t receive anywhere near a decent price for it, the price she’d need to secure a good home for Charlie elsewhere. Besides, she owned the house outright. She remembered the bank failures, unemployment, foreclosures, and bread lines of the 1930s. It could happen again. Automatically, an echo of past anxiety, she experienced the constriction in her stomach that she’d felt after Bill left, when she woke up day after day worried about whether he’d follow through on his promised support payments, and if he didn’t, whether she could earn enough money to keep the apartment she and Charlie shared. Life magazine didn’t exist. Her mother rescued them by inviting Claire and Charlie to move in with her. Anna, too, was struggling financially after her husband, Claire’s stepfather, died, but together, they’d managed to get by.

  The house now belonged to Claire. Not simply legally or financially. It was part of her spirit, filled with memories: Her mother holding women’s suffrage meetings in the parlor. Margaret Sanger, the birth control advocate, drinking coffee in the kitchen while debating strategy with her stepfather, who was a physician. Max Eastman and other political radicals enjoying a formal luncheon in the garden while Jack Reed told stories of his days in Russia. Claire had spent hundreds of hours in the darkroom she set up in the basement, pursuing her love of photography, learning her craft before she realized it would become her career. The house was her refuge, the place she felt safest, the place where no one could tell her to leave. In the spring, crab apple blossoms filled the view from the front windows, the sweet scent drifting through the rooms on every breeze.

  Downstairs, Lucas went to a patch of dappling sunlight near the long back windows and stretched out to sleep. Tom, a local high school boy earning money for college, walked him twice a day, every day, and Claire and Maritza managed the early morning and late night walks. Seeing him settled, Claire put on her coat and set out into the day, locking the front door behind her.

  The sudden sweep of winter against her skin jolted her, making her feel as if she’d just now woken up. The street itself was in shadow, but the rooftops of the neighborhood’s tenements and town houses glowed with a precise clarity in the afternoon sunlight. Even though Claire was running late, she paused to study the light. Often Charlie teased her on their walks along the cobblestone streets for stopping to study the shifting angles of the light. She laughed with him but continued to stop, whether they were on their way to buy coffee at McNulty’s or chocolates at Li-Lac; heading to his favorite playground, on Downing Street; or enjoying hot chocolate with whipped cream at a MacDougal Street café. The ever-changing effects of sunlight upon the streets and rooftops of her city always pleased her. Some photographers she knew found inspiration in nature, in the effects of light on mountain ranges and forests. Claire found her greatest inspiration here, amid the man-made cityscape.

  When she was younger, Claire had considered herself a radical. But after Emily was born in 1931, Claire’s radicalism ended in an instant. Charlie’s birth two and a half years later confirmed the shift. In 1936, she’d had no desire to go to Spain to cover the Civil War—although she’d learned not to admit this, because among her peers it was an article of faith that a committed professional wanted to report on the horrors in Spain. Charlie gave her an excuse, or at least a better excuse than admitting she was temperamentally unsuited to running ahead of a ragtag platoon of bone-weary soldiers to grab shots of battlefield heroism and death. Bill loved that life. He seemed most truly alive when arguing about politics or racing after a hard-hitting story.

  During this new war, Claire wanted to tell the stories of the families struggling to cope at home, rather than their sons and daughters dying abroad. She hoped she would have the choice. Mack might insist that she was needed overseas, or more likely, that with so many of her colleagues at the front, she had to take on a photojournalist’s more typical burden of constant domestic travel. She felt a pang of anxiety about the looming questions of the future.

  The camera her mother gave her on her fourteenth birthday was a Brownie, a gift commonly received among her friends, but it had changed Claire’s perceptions of the world. Shaping and framing, capturing space and time, telling stories through pictures…the camera gave her a purpose, and also gave her a license, an excuse, to approach people and learn about their lives. Once her darkroom was set up in the basement, she earned money doing inexpensive portraits of neighborhood families. She put up flyers in the local grocery stores and on the lampposts. She met potential clients at their homes. Payment was upon delivery of the photos, and only if you liked them. To her surprise, everyone paid, even from the first. She remembered a few special families: Julio, Angelo, and Maria, ages seven, six, and five, who lived on Carmine Street. Every six months for two years, Claire took photos of them to send to their grandmothers in Naples. She remembered a baby, Kathleen, with bright red hair. Claire photographed her in her baptismal gown. Kathleen and her family lived on Jones Street. Claire spotted Kathleen’s mother a year later on Third Street, under the El. The woman said that Kathleen had died before her first birthday, and Claire’s photos were the only ones they had. Claire’s view of the city, and of the frailty and rewards of life, were shaped by these chance encounters. For Claire, this neighborhood truly was a village.

  During college, she had studied photography with Clarence White at the Art Students League. In those days, she’d modeled her work on the art photography of Stieglitz and Kasebier. By her twenties, however, during the worst years of the Depression, Claire became committed to the new genre of the documentary picture story. Her style moved away from art photography into realism and journalism. Nonetheless she’d spent more than a few Depression years surviving with society weddings and, when she could get it, more lucrative advertising work. She made automobile fenders gleam and refrigerators look reliably cold. Life, when it came along in 1936, was perfect for her. Mack had seen her newspaper work and phoned out of the blue to give her a try. Her first story for him, about jazz clubs in Harlem, never ran, but she was in the door.

  She continued to love the mystery of working in the darkroom, the sharp touch of the film edge against her fingertips as she rolled the film onto the reel in the dark, the recurring sense of magic when an image appeared on paper in the tray of developer. She loved the bitter scent of the chemicals that lingered afterward on her hands and in her hair, reminding her of her hours at work and of the vision she sought to create of the world outside herself.

  New York, December 1941. A black-and-white photograph o
f sunlight on rooftops in a city at war. From the date, the viewer would fill in the meaning beyond the intricate architecture and the geometric planes of light and shadow. The viewer would fill in the questions, doubts, and fears. The ancient Greek derivation of the word photography was “to write with light,” the truest description she’d ever heard.

  Centering and purpose. Passion and obsession. Nothing but an escape, Bill Shipley once said derisively toward the end of their marriage (although he never complained about the salary her escape provided), as she gave up the hard-hitting documentary work he believed in for easier work that she could manage around Emily’s and Charlie’s schedules. When her children were young, Claire was bound at home while Bill had more and more assignments coming his way. She slipped into a daze during those years, when one or the other of the kids woke her up every night. She no longer had the energy or, she had to admit, the interest to discuss politics at the breakfast table. Those were tumultuous years…the Depression, the rise of Hitler, the election of FDR. Claire couldn’t focus her attention on the outside world. At 7:00 AM, as she held Charlie in her arms and cooked his rice cereal while, from the table, Emily demanded more applesauce, the ins and outs of the latest piece of New Deal legislation made little sense to her. For his part, Bill found her home-centered concerns irrelevant. Bill became impatient with her, for myriad reasons. After Emily died, their crisscrossing guilt pushed them still farther apart. When the Herald Tribune offered Bill the opportunity to report from Europe, they both knew he had to accept, and that Claire and Charlie wouldn’t be going with him.

  When would these memories of Bill stop pushing into her mind? The memories were visceral in the way they assaulted her, shaking her into hesitation and self-doubt even though they’d separated six years ago and she hadn’t even seen him since the war began in Europe in 1939. Sometimes she felt as if he were still beside her, watching her, passing judgment upon her.