A Fierce Radiance (7 page)

“You were in Mr. Reese’s room last night.”

“An aberration. I had to attend the impromptu conference.” Again Claire saw the expressiveness around his mouth. She had an impression of him as an actor struggling to make the best of imperfect lines.

“I do appreciate your asking, however. Very kind, indeed.”

They said good-bye, and he continued his walk, heading south, a silhouette in the sunlight.

Y
uck!” Nine-year-old Ned Reese grimaced as he examined a milk bottle filled with fluffy green mold. Then he removed the cotton wool stopper and tried to maneuver his fingers inside.

“Don’t touch!” Tia knew she spoke too angrily, but there was no taking it back and she didn’t regret it anyway. “The mold doesn’t like touching,” she added with what she hoped sounded like equanimity. Children in the lab: one of her brother’s worst ideas. She had to play along because Claire Shipley was photographing them. Patsy Reese had brought the kids down and simply left them here, presumably so she could enjoy the time alone with her husband. Tia didn’t appreciate
being treated like a babysitter. David Hoskins had known better: he’d made himself scarce after Jamie arranged the visit.

Ned’s brown eyes were large and wide, like his father’s. His nose was covered with freckles. In his school uniform of blazer, tie, and knee-length gray trousers, Ned looked very proper, at least from the front. From the rear, his shirttail was hanging out and not as clean as it might have been. Ned’s dark hair was cut short on the sides, but wayward locks fell across his forehead and into his eyes, a sophisticated haircut gone astray. In short, he was a mess.

“It’s disgusting!” Ned said. Clearly this realization made him want to touch the mold more, not less.

Tia took a deep breath and steeled herself to patience. “You’re right. There’s a very high ‘yuck’ level in my kind of work.” In theory Tia liked children. She wanted to have children of her own. At least she’d always thought she did. Faced now with two actual children, she wasn’t so sure. Before their arrival, she’d had a vision of herself presenting her scientific investigations to two receptive and respectful youngsters and thereby changing their lives forever. Instead she’d become a police officer standing guard so they didn’t destroy anything.

Claire worked around them, staying out of their way. Tia tried to imagine what the lab must look like to an outsider like Claire: a high table in the middle of the room held a typical array of scientific equipment, including microscopes, beakers, and a Bunsen burner. Everything else was atypical. In the extreme. In racks from floor to ceiling, hundreds of milk bottles were stacked on their sides. Each bottle, stoppered with cotton wool, contained a thick layer of green mold growing on the bottom. Yellow droplets dotted the surface of the mold and pooled underneath. The droplets were the fluid that became the medicine called penicillin. Covered bedpans were piled upon the floor in stacks four feet high;
Penicillium
mold grew in these, too. The mold grew best on flat, covered surfaces. Bedpans and milk bottles were the most practical containers Tia and David could find.
In the corner was the big counter-current machine, rows of turning, glimmering tubes that purified the fluid before it could be used.

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.

U
pstairs 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 apple 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.”