A Fierce Radiance

by Lauren Belfer

  “I will.” The postponement only increased his desire for her. “It’s not an idea I’m likely to forget.”

  “I should hope not.”

  It was 10:30 PM, and Edward Rutherford was alone. He was a multimillionaire enjoying, to all appearances, a quiet evening at home, relaxing in his library with the Wall Street Journal, sipping a cognac. The library was silent. The sound of Fifth Avenue traffic never intruded, not even during rush hour. His library…wood paneling, drinks cart, leather-bound books kept dust free within their glass-doored cabinets, and over the mantel a Constable landscape of sheep and shepherds with an endless horizon. Here he could relax. He could never relax in the parlor with its Bavarian-castle atmosphere, although it was a terrific place for entertaining men as rich or richer than himself, especially when he was trying ever-so-subtly to convince them to invest their money with him.

  The clock on the mantel was ticking. Was he really listening to the sound of the clock ticking? Yes, he was. At least he’d convinced Claire and Charlie to stay for an early dinner. Ever the trooper, MaryLee had managed to add to the meal she’d planned for him alone, and they’d brought the dining room to life with jokes and teasing. How he loved the sound of their voices in the apartment, the thump of Charlie’s feet as he raced up and down the stairs, Claire helping MaryLee with the dishes.

  Claire and Charlie had changed his life, no doubt about it. Once even the dog, Lucas, had come for a visit, much to Charlie’s pleasure. Rutherford hadn’t encouraged a repeat of the dog visit: with his exuberant rolling around on his back, Lucas had left tufts of fur imbedded in the parlor’s Persian carpets. MaryLee was still vacuuming up dog fur weeks later. Nonetheless, the annoyance was more than worth the sight of Lucas chasing Charlie around the apartment and vice versa. If Claire and Charlie came to live here, he’d get accustomed to dog fur. He’d buy MaryLee a new vacuum cleaner or better yet commission an inventor to design a better one. A specialty vacuum, with a dogfur attachment and an artist’s rendering, Norman Rockwell-style, of Charlie and Lucas side by side. A boy and his dog, in profile. No dog-owning prospective vacuum-cleaner purchaser would be able to resist, not after Rutherford’s sales experts got on board.

  He sighed. He felt his loneliness most keenly at the end of their visits, this evening more than ever, since he’d confessed to Claire his hope that they would move here for the duration. At least she hadn’t rejected the idea outright. He’d try again at the next appropriate moment.

  What to do with the hours before bed? He could fill his now-empty evening by going to one of his clubs and drinking too much. Then he’d feel even worse in the morning. He could go to a different kind of club, for a woman. But he wasn’t in the mood. He’d received a few dinner party invitations for tonight, formal events where, as an unattached man, he’d no doubt have been seated between two eligible ladies, but he’d turned down the invitations on the chance that he’d have Charlie for a second night.

  When Charlie and Claire left early, he’d decided to use the time productively to catch up on his reading. For his work, he regularly reviewed at least fifteen technical journals, as well as dozens of newspapers and magazines. This was a great time to be in business. New industries were being developed overnight for the war effort. Hundreds of previously unforeseen needs had to be met, and new companies were being established to meet those needs. He was already doing deals with the navy for new types of refrigeration. The navy was building a lot of ships, and every one of those ships needed refrigeration. He was investigating a small company that was poised to become a big company by manufacturing quartz crystal oscillators, which were a breakthrough in radio transmission. On the back burner he had—

  Ah, it was useless, he couldn’t concentrate. His thoughts kept getting invaded by images of Claire and Charlie, and poor little Emily, whom he’d never known. In photographs, Emily looked like Claire at that age; once at the house downtown, he’d been looking through a photo album and had actually mistaken Claire for Emily playing in the snow in Central Park. “Look at Emily in the snow,” he said. Claire came over and glanced at the photo. “That’s me,” she said, laughing, maybe even a little proud that she and her daughter looked so much alike, but he’d been embarrassed.

  He stared at the small Turner watercolor framed and propped on the end table beside his chair. A ruined castle with three cows staring at their reflections in a lake. Very serene.

  He didn’t feel serene. He regretted that he hadn’t fought for Claire years ago. He could have, should have fought for her. Now his guilt made him nervous around her. He stumbled over his words, repeated himself. He was desperate for her approval, or at least her acceptance. He found himself second-guessing just about everything he said to her—everything important, that is. Sure, he could joke about the smaller stuff, binoculars and bird watching. But he wanted to share more than that. He was glad he’d been able to advise her on Luce and the penicillin story.

  He wanted her forgiveness. How could he earn it? What could he give her? She wasn’t the type to value diamond necklaces or sable coats. He could pay to fix her leaking roof, but that didn’t seem dramatic enough; he resolved to do it anyway, because Charlie (and Claire, too, naturally) shouldn’t be living in a damp house with a leaky roof. If there was no direct gift he could give her, maybe he could do some charitable work in her name. Who wouldn’t like that? Yes, maybe he was on to something with the charity idea. The point was, he needed Claire and Charlie so very much.

  How far he’d come. He’d been born and had grown up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on the wrong side of the river. If anyone asked, he said he was from nearby Allentown. He hinted that his people were in trade. They were actually immigrants from Croatia. He didn’t want to link himself with Bethlehem in the eyes of the world. Bethlehem meant steel. It meant hard factory labor and a way of life he’d turned his back on. Yes, his father had been a steelworker, and he’d died too young, in a mill accident. A cable slipped, snapped, and five men—five fathers—were dead. No compensation. In those days steel was a miserable, dangerous, low-paying immigrant job. Maybe it still was; he didn’t have anything to do with it, didn’t even want to know about it. He’d done well in school, and his teachers pushed him. Even when he was ten years old, he was always tinkering, taking apart pulleys and door handles, figuring out how things worked.

  After graduating high school, he’d gotten himself out of Bethlehem. Shifted his immigrant name around to something more pronounceable. He went from Rugovac to Rutherford, from evocations of the Balkans to British country estates in one stroke of an official’s pen. He found the name Rutherford in the Allentown telephone directory. A common enough story. After he got rich, he sent his widowed mother money, bought her a house. Did the same for his ne’er-do-well brother. They were both gone now, but he hadn’t neglected them, even though he never went back.

  In his new life, he watched, he listened, he learned. College had been out of the question: he didn’t have the tuition, and he didn’t want to waste the time. He got hold of books on engineering, chemistry, finance, even Shakespeare, and educated himself. His first real job was with a company that manufactured locks. He could have made a career there, designing new and better locks, but after a few years he got restless. He wanted to do more, see more. He spent some time in West Virginia working for a coal mining company, trying to figure out better methods of ventilation. Went to Texas, trying to develop new ways of searching for crude. He had a gift for technical problems, a kind of special insight. When he was young, he thought everybody had that gift. When he got older, he realized that nobody else, at least nobody he knew, could do what he did.

  He came to realize that inventors needed cash to do their work. They needed someone to say, I’ll back that new-fangled lock, I’ll support your research on that new chemical process, I’ll pay your room and board while you’re designing a revolutionary airplane engine. I’ll believe in you—for a share of the profits. A hefty share. He realized he could do even more if he
brought in other investors. He wanted to be the guy making money from the tinkering instead of the guy doing the tinkering.

  So he made himself into the kind of man he needed to be, to secure the trust of others. In those days, he was the only one doing this type of investing. Nowadays, others were in on it, giving him some competition, especially Laurance Rockefeller, the old man’s grandson. Sure, Rutherford drove a hard bargain with the people and the companies he supported. He was ruthless when necessary. Sure, he skirted the line of legality, but never so much as the big boys did, old man Rockefeller, Flagler, Carnegie, Frick, and the rest of them, lying, cheating, and exploiting their way to the top and then giving away millions (while keeping still more millions) and being hailed as heroes. He could never be as ruthless as they were, and so he’d never made himself as rich as they were.

  He was already a millionaire, however, when he set himself up in New York. Once he’d married Claire’s mother, every New York door opened to him. He had to admit it, her position in society attracted him. It was a sign that he’d arrived. What a rebel Anna was, to choose him instead of a man of her own background. They had a few happy years. Then her idealism began to get in the way. The very thing she’d professed to like about him—that he was a self-made striver—she turned against. She had a drive to rebel. As time passed, he became exactly what she was rebelling against. She objected that he devoted himself to making money instead of fighting for the poor—easy to say, when you’ve been born to wealth, when you’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy the Newport mansion of your childhood and the Fifth Avenue duplex penthouse of your marriage, all paid for by somebody else’s hard labor.

  But maybe these were just excuses. His life and his love both were his work, and she was bored and lonely. She was tired of coming in second, with little Claire third. She rebelled again. When she left him for Lukins, moving to Greenwich Village, she was the one condemned by society. Her own mother called her reckless, selfish, and immoral. He was judged the wronged party, which opened even more doors to him. For several months Anna’s mother urged him to fight for Claire, but once the shock wore off, Anna and her mother reconciled, at least for Thanksgiving and Christmas. They became just another family, muddling along.

  When Anna left with Claire, he felt—what? Some anger, of course. But truthfully, he hadn’t really noticed, at least not then. He was traveling constantly, looking ahead, not simply planning for the future but creating the future. This was his obsession, then and now: to create the future. Except in those days he was still on the trajectory upward. His life hadn’t yet plateaued. It had plateaued now, he knew, if only from the way he panted when he reached the top of the stairs.

  He needed some coffee, had to get himself back on track with his reading. Couldn’t allow himself to waste time. He set himself an immediate goal to fulfill before bed: Scientific American, American Scientist, and the Journal of the American Chemical Society. He prided himself on staying engaged, on thinking ahead. Couldn’t let himself wallow in the past, in might-have-been or should-have-done. Today and tomorrow were what counted. If he kept his eyes open as usual, he’d figure out what to do to gain Claire’s trust.

  He pushed himself out of the chair and picked up his empty cognac glass (after all these years, he still wasn’t habituated to MaryLee cleaning up after him). As he made his way through the Gothic entryway toward the kitchen, he glanced into the parlor in admiration. In his business, surface impressions counted for a lot. That was the reason he bought this apartment and filled it with art. He made certain he projected an image of measured, self-assured, highly solvent discretion. This image helped get him through the bad times. He’d steeled himself to turn the Depression to his advantage. He’d made educated guesses and invested when everybody else was running the other way. He had an iron stomach, as the cliché went. Even so, he didn’t want to repeat the experience. He didn’t relish that walking-along-the-edge-of-a-cliff feeling.

  In the kitchen, he turned on the table lamp rather than the overhead light. He could think better in the half-light. He made himself a pot of coffee in the percolator. While he waited for it to brew, he looked out the long kitchen windows toward the apartment building across the side street. He watched lights being turned on and off, and figures, silhouetted against the curtains, moving from room to room. He was fascinated by these hints of his neighbors’ lives.

  When the coffee was ready, he went to the refrigerator to get the milk. This new business opportunity with the navy, improving refrigeration on ships heading to the Pacific Ocean—Lord, his job was fun. No matter what was going on in his private life, he had fun every day, just doing his job.

  How would he describe his job, if ever some young guy looking for a career asked him about it? He’d describe it like this: imagine that every newspaper or magazine you saw at a newsstand, every radio program you happened to tune in to, every snippet of conversation overheard on an elevator or at the next table in a restaurant—every single one—had the potential to earn you a million bucks. That was his job, and there was no job on God’s good earth more exciting.

  As he reached for the half-full milk bottle, he remembered what Claire had told him about scientists growing mold in milk bottles to make medicine. Searching the soil for cures for disease.

  Incredible.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Legs. Mack didn’t need to specify legs for Claire to know what he and Managing Editor Billings wanted. After all, virtually every issue of Life featured a starlet posing in her underwear. What they wanted was a line of legs clad in flesh-colored tights, seams straight, heels high, legs topped by well-endowed female torsos clad in identical, curve-hugging, red, white, and blue costumes. Thirty-six girls, seventy-two legs—a glittering, giggling gathering of Rockettes.

  “Perfect!” Claire called to them. They were outside at Rockefeller Center, skyscrapers soaring around them. She’d arranged the Rockettes in the lower plaza, around the golden statue of Prometheus, pretty girls draped over the statue’s arms and shoulders, the poses outrageous and charming at once. The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree rose on the upper plaza behind them, lush and colorful. Claire was shooting both black and white and Kodachrome, with three Leicas around her neck. On one, she put a filter with a crisscross of thin white lines to make the Christmas tree lights sparkle in starbursts of blue and green, red and yellow. The scene was guaranteed to make Life readers in Indiana and Iowa smile despite the awful war news in the front sections of the magazine.

  The temperature hovered just below the freezing mark, but the girls chose not to notice. Today’s assignment was a major shoot, and Claire had two assistants to handle crowd control, another to deal with captions, and three more to maneuver lights to fill in the shadows and to position ladders for the girls to climb into position.

  “How’s this?” asked Aurora, in the middle of the group, draping her arm around the statue’s shoulders. At least Claire assumed it was Aurora. After four days of shooting, Claire still had trouble recognizing her from a distance. With her dark hair pulled up, Aurora was lithe and lovely and looked like…a Rockette. Especially when they were in costume, the Rockettes looked alike. Variations in their hair and facial features retreated into the background. They were hired specifically to look alike. Winsome expressions, high cheekbones, long legs. Sweet kids, one and all—at least that was the impression they were required to create. No room for cynicism here. Each girl was the girl next door, having fun acting glamorous but never a glamour girl, never crossing the line from innocent-attractive to experienced-seductive.

  “Wonderful!” Claire said, encouraging Aurora, keeping up her spirits in the cold. “Everyone else, move into line,” she directed. She motioned to her assistants for what she wanted, and they helped guide the group into place.

  Rockefeller Center: twelve buildings on twelve acres, decorated with modern art, filled with shops, theaters, restaurants, cafés, gardens on skyscraper terraces. The complex was still new. John D. Rockefeller Jr. had driv
en in the final rivet only three years before. To Claire, the atmosphere was startling and exhilarating. This was the center of New York, and New York was the most glorious city in history. She felt the wind upon her, heard the conversations of tourists around her, the click of their cameras as they took their own photos of the Rockettes. She inhaled the scent of roasting chestnuts.

  In the past four days, Claire had photographed Aurora and her fellow Rockettes being fitted in the wardrobe department, resting between shows in their dormitory, putting on makeup in the dressing rooms. She’d followed them home, in this case to the one-bedroom apartment Aurora shared with two other Rockettes. She’d photographed Aurora and her parents visiting the top of the Empire State Building. Watching today’s shoot from the sidelines, Mr. and Mrs. Rasmussen took photos of Claire taking photos of Aurora.

  “Okay, next, let’s try a kick line in front of the statue,” Claire called. The girls arranged themselves. They set the rhythm and began the dance they were best known for: legs kicking high, in perfect unison.

  Claire thought, this story is pure showmanship. Mack was right, when he said she needed a change. This was fun, this was star-spangled glamour, and it did make a difference to daily life, it did cheer you up, especially after her stories about Edward Reese, and the army wives. A magazine required balance, so that it became a complete book of, well, life each week. No one could survive long dealing with gloom and doom every moment of the day. There had to be room for dancing girls, too. She knew it sounded hokey, but Claire’s faith in the magazine and her place in it was renewed.

  The Rockettes gave several performances a day, and they needed to get back to the theater. Claire had to work fast. She saw that the two forklifts she’d ordered (Life had that kind of power and budget) were being moved into position: she wanted a shot of Aurora placing a crystal star, donated by Waterford, atop the Christmas tree.