A Fierce Radiance (25 page)

All at once Claire imagined herself as Tia, slipping from that cliff. Not jumping. Never jumping. How does it feel, to see the land rushing up against you? Or do you fall too fast for feeling, seeing, screaming, regretting?

Claire got off the train at Rockefeller Center and walked to the lower-level concourse of the RCA Building. Shops and restaurants lined both sides of the concourse. Bustling during weekday lunch hours, they were quiet on Saturday morning. Sandbags were stacked in corners to stop fires during bombing raids. Instruction sheets for electrical blackouts were posted at regular intervals. She reached Rockefeller Center’s sunken plaza with its outdoor café. Waiters cleaned the tables, preparing for tourists, and military men with their dates, to arrive for an outdoor lunch.

Claire took the escalator up to the street level. She stepped out of the RCA Building into the glory of Rockefeller Center in the springtime. The Channel Gardens were lush, green, and bedecked with multicolored flowers. The golden statue of Prometheus, where she’d posed Aurora Rasmussen and the Rockettes just six months ago, gleamed in the sunlight. Claire felt herself drowning in sunlight as she crossed the plaza to the Time & Life Building, Forty-ninth Street and Rockefeller Plaza.

Now she was upstairs in the maze of offices that constituted
Life
magazine. “Hi, Frieda.” She was acting normal. Gripping on to normality as if it were the handrail on the subway. Duncan Daily might be in today. He often noticed what others didn’t. She needed to move along quickly.

“Hi, Claire.” Frieda was a tireless, petite woman who dressed demurely. Today she wore a plain shirtwaist dress with pearls. She was always moving, her swivel chair a command center from which she completed eight tasks at once while balancing two phones.

Mack was on the phone in his office behind Frieda. Claire waved to him. He acknowledged her with a wink. He was a small, beefy man,
and he, too, could never sit still, reviewing piles of prints, filling out order forms, approving layout boards, taking calls.

“You’re an angel, Claire,” Frieda said. “Here’s the story number.”

Frieda passed Claire a slip of paper, but Claire already knew the story number. She’d unconsciously memorized it. She went to the archive room, where the negatives, contact sheets, and caption notes from the past two years were filed in rows of wooden filing cabinets, well dusted and shiny from furniture polish. The perfectly ordered files were supervised by Miss Robbins, called Admiral Robbins behind her back by the photographers because she prided herself on running what she called a tight ship.

Miss Robbins was at her desk, labeling folders. “Good morning, Miss Robbins,” Claire said as cheerfully as she could manage. Miss Robbins wore a navy blue suit. Her brown hair, touched with white at her temples, was twisted into a bun at the back of her head. “Frieda’s got me pulling an obit negative for
Time
.”

“I’ve been informed.” Miss Robbins didn’t look up. Her glasses, which she didn’t need for reading, dangled from a chain around her neck. “Put the story number and your name on the clipboard. You know the drill.”

“Thank you, Miss Robbins.” She completed the paperwork.

Claire searched the cabinet labels for the story number. When she found it, she was grateful the cabinet was out of Miss Robbins’s vision. Claire didn’t like being scrutinized. The heavy file drawer screeched on its hinges as she pulled it out. She found the folder for the Rockefeller Institute story, thick with contact sheets, negatives, and notes. She placed the folder on top of the cabinet and flipped through the contact sheets. This was how her colleagues did it. This is what Miss Robbins expected her to do. Claire felt as if she were watching herself from a distance. She used a magnifying loupe when she reached the sheets with potential. She mulled over the alternatives. She realized she had an opportunity to prove a point, to show a
woman scientist both feminine and committed to her work. A fitting memorial to Tia.

She was limited in her choices, however. An obit shot couldn’t be overly emotional, couldn’t be part of a picture story, because there was no context to explain the emotion. An obit shot had to stand alone. She wished she’d taken a standard, clichéd photo of Tia holding up a test tube to the light, the type of shot Mack had warned her against, perfect for an obit.

Finally she found something. It wasn’t ideal, but it would have to do. Roll fifty-two, photo number 7/7A. From the series of Tia showing the lab to Ned and Sally Reese. The image caught Tia just after she’d finished pipetting fluid into a test tube. She’d lowered the pipette and was smiling at Sally, who stood beyond the frame. The shot showed at a glance both Tia’s work and her character.

Claire put aside the contact sheet and its attached negatives. She closed the folder and found its proper place in the drawer.

“I’ll refile the negatives and contact sheet later,” she called to Frieda on her way out. She took the elevator downstairs. Again she was outside, the glorious spring day hitting her in the face. The photo lab was separate from the Rockefeller Center complex, on the third floor of a honky-tonk tenement across the street at 38 West Forty-eighth Street. The Three Gs restaurant and bar, the staff hangout, was on the ground floor of the same building.

The photographers engaged in much bitter talk about why their lab wasn’t in the Rockefeller Center building. We’ve been forgotten, was the complaint, when we’re responsible for the magazine’s success. Maybe the exile was simply a way to keep the smell of photographic chemicals away from the editors. The acrid, unmistakable odor of developer, fix, and hypo assaulted Claire the moment she entered the stairwell. It transported her to years before, when she’d first learned how to work in a darkroom, first learned how to put light onto paper to create an image. It was a smell that got into your clothes and your
hair, like a perfume you caught whiffs of around yourself days after sampling it.

The lab was divided into two sections, one room for developing negatives, the other for printing. In the print area, twelve enlargers were set up in rows of separate cubicles so the enlarger lights wouldn’t affect other stations. The chemicals were on the counter behind, each enlarger with its matching sink and counter. The room glowed from the red of safety lights. The lab was staffed in three shifts by a group of cynical guys who were brilliant at their underpaid and underappreciated work. Jerry was in charge today, and he greeted Claire from an enlarger when she came in.

“Hi, Claire. Good to see you.” Jerry was sandy-haired and fit, his jaw pronounced and angular. He had the dense wrinkles of a man who spent too much time in the sun, which Claire never understood, because he worked long hours in the dark.

“Hi, Jerry. Good to see you, too.” Jerry had printed her story from the hog farm outside Fort Wayne. Never had hogs been more subtly shaded, highlighted, and cropped. “I’ve got a rush for
Time
.”

“For
Time
? They’re not closing today.”

“They claim they need this for their layout right away. Frieda asked me to deal with it, since it’s from a story I shot a while back. Shouldn’t take long. One print. Portrait of a scientist who died, don’t even ask.”

He laughed with understanding. Why one story became a rush and another didn’t was forever incomprehensible. “Machine number six is free. Everything’s set up, right temperatures for the chemicals, the works. Gene’s using it, but he’s at lunch.”

“Thanks.” Machine six, she saw, was around the corner from Jerry. Good.

“He’s due back in a half hour. You’ll be done by then?”

“I’d better be. Any longer and it’d be a sign that I’m losing my touch.”

“And we can’t have that, can we?” he said. “When the print’s out of
the soup, I can finish the rinsing and drying and drop it off at
Time
, so you don’t have to wait around. I’ve got some other things going, too. And I can drop the negatives with the Admiral.”

“Thanks a lot, Jerry. I appreciate it.”

The guys grunted as she went by, which for them, when they were working to deadline, represented a warm acknowledgment. She said hello without recognizing them in the red shadows. But undoubtedly they knew her and her work. They knew the failings of every photographer, and they made every one look like a genius, overcoming any problems with the negatives by improving the prints until they were terrific. These guys held her career in their hands. She made sure to give them special Christmas presents every year.

Machine six. She would do a test print first. She took the negative holder out of the enlarger and inserted the strip of film that held shot 7/7A. She blew off a few specks of dust. She inserted the negative carrier into the enlarger. Turned on the lamp. There was Tia, black and white in reverse. Putting a sheet of plain white paper in the picture easel, she framed and focused the image, moving the enlarger head up and down until she had exactly what she wanted. Claire felt tears welling, and a pressure within her forehead and behind her eyes as she tried not to let herself cry.

She set the enlarger at f/11 to keep the focus sharp. She turned off the enlarger lamp. She took a sheet of photo printing paper from the light-proof holder on the shelf under the enlarger and put it in the easel in place of the plain paper. She set the timer for five seconds. Using a piece of cardboard, she exposed the test print, increasing the light exposure three times across the sheet. She put the print into the developer on the counter behind her, using tongs to agitate it. Slowly Tia’s face appeared. This was the moment of magic, of rapture, when a picture emerged upon a blank sheet of paper. Even now, after all these years, it gave her a sense of awe.

When the image was complete, Claire lifted out the print with the
tongs and held it sideways to let the developer solution run off. She put the print into the first stop bath, immersing it with the stop-bath tongs, and then moved it to the second stop bath. She counted to fifteen. She switched the print to the fixer, agitating once again. Since this was simply a test print, she didn’t need to do a full fix or wash the print.

She turned on the small white light on the counter to study the print. The best exposure was the middle one, ten seconds. She stuffed the test print into the wastebasket under the counter.

Returning to the enlarger, she placed another sheet of photo paper into the easel. She set the automatic timer for ten seconds. With a piece of cardboard, she dodged the background a bit, to create a better unity of shading around Tia’s head. The process was second nature to Claire. This time, she kept the print in the fix for a full ten minutes, so it would never fade. As she studied Tia’s face, Claire realized how similar her features were to Jamie’s. They shared eyes and cheekbones, and the line of the jaw. Not for the first time, Claire realized how lucky she was to have met him. Mack could easily have sent someone else to the Institute that morning. Yes, how lucky she was to have met him, and how quickly he could be taken away. After all, here before her was a lovely, brilliant woman, dead. Life was a delicate wire waiting to be snapped. Little Emily…

Claire began to cry. She struggled to make the crying sound like nothing more than sniffling.

“You okay over there, Claire?” Jerry asked as he picked up some prints from another cubicle.

“These spring colds,” she said, trying to catch her breath despite a constriction in her throat. “Caught it from my son and now I can’t shake it.”

“Me, too,” a deep voice said on her left, the guy at the next enlarger, shrouded in darkness. “I got a box of Kleenex here, if you need it.”

Thank God for him. He saved her. Spring colds were everywhere. “I’m working with the fix, can’t reach for a Kleenex now.”

“Know what you mean,” he said, sniffling. “Use your sleeve, that’s what I do.”

“His wife just loves those snot-covered sleeves,” someone said in the darkness.

Laughter all around.

“Thanks for the advice,” she managed. “I’ll remember it.”

Finally to the rinse. Claire followed her neighbor’s advice and wiped her tears on her sleeve.

A full rinse took an hour, and then the print had to be dried. She could turn the print over to Jerry’s supervision now. But she didn’t want to leave. She wished she could develop and print her own work every day, instead of being sent on a frantic journey from one story to the next, to so many towns and villages and farmyards that she couldn’t keep track of where she was, where she’d been, or where she was going. When she was in the darkroom, the rest of the world fell away.

“Hey, Claire. Good to see you.” Gene emerged from the shadows, round-faced, his graying hair thick and curly. He wore his usual work uniform of plaid flannel shirt and unbuttoned vest. He was smiling, no doubt surprised and happy to find her here. He offered her a quick hug. He’d printed the Rockette story and made radiant the glittering lights of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. “What’s cookin’?”

Now she had no choice but to leave.

When she reached home, she phoned the Institute again, and again the switchboard operator refused to put her through. She made a cup of coffee. As she sat down at the kitchen table to drink it, the phone rang.

“Claire, I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Oh, Jamie, I’ve been at the office. I—” She stopped. He didn’t want to know the course of her day. “I know what happened. The magazine called me early.”

“May I come downtown?”

“I’m waiting for you.”

M
ud.

On Saturday afternoon, Detective Marcus Kreindler stood on the cliff overlooking the East River and studied the dried mud on the path. There’d been some rain yesterday. Not a lot, but enough. Enough so that he could see the imprint of a woman’s shoe. A thin heel.

In his experience, high heels slid into everything. After he and his wife put in a linoleum floor in the kitchen of their new house in Queens, her cousin, who lived in the city, came out to visit them and jammed her heels into the linoleum, not intending to do damage, but there it was, jam, jam, jam, round imprints that would last a lifetime. Or as long as they owned the house, from which they were going to take him out feet first, since he had no intention of moving. He didn’t foresee replacing the linoleum, either.