Radiance Read Online Free Page A

voice, oddly pure:
Thank you, yes, my flight was pleasant. Long, yes,
but pleasant.
Daisy marvelled at her poise—though it was more than poise, it had to be. It was, at the root, a deep self-confidence. How else could she do all this? Be picked from among so many girls, all eager to come to America. Daisy remembered what she’d read: top marks at high school, an interest in fashion, dress designing, languages. Keiko was from a wealthy, established family—the memo had said “ancient.” Daisy wasn’t sure what ancientness meant in Japanese terms. She pictured a samurai grandfather, a grandmother wearing a flowing silk kimono, squatting on a tatami mat, serving tea. She set these images against the pattern of her mother’s old willowware platter, remembering the curious collection of items in her mother’s lacquered cabinet. “My chinoiserie,” her mother used to call these things—fans and wooden dolls with bobbing heads, a porcelain tea set with crackled glaze.
    Daisy made her way to the punch bowl and scooped some of the cherry liquid into her glass, spilling a drop onto a white stripe of the zebra carpet, where it spread like watery blood. The patter of voices was all around her: names of writers she didn’t recognize, writers who had eschewed first names in favour of initials; the language of Freudian psychology: neuroses, psychoses; “What do you do when the fellow living right next to you has a nervous breakdown?” Nervous breakdowns were increasingly common, Daisy had noticed with some alarm. Joan Palmer, her neighbour, talked in dire and knowing terms about an old school friend who had attached a vacuum cleaner hose to the exhaust pipe of her car and asphyxiated herself in her garage while her children watched
Howdy Doody.
Daisy prided herself on never having come close to a nervous breakdown. The only time she had felt near to one at all was after her miscarriages. Then she had let herself go terribly, into a place that it hurt to think about now. For a long time, a very long time, she had felt sealed behind glass.
    She added a second splash of punch then took a sip. It was better not to think about such things, marooned among people she didn’t know, or the ache could open up again, as though it were a hole in the fabric of the world, a hole she couldn’t see, because it was tilted up on one edge. Sometimes it opened up at the oddest moments, blossoming with darkness.
    People beside her were talking about the McCarthy Hearings. “A charlatan,” she heard. “A blackguard.”
    “And yet,” a girl with red lips was saying, “there are Reds in the State Department. Not two hundred and five. Not fifty-four—but some. We
know
this.” Whatever else she said was lost in a mumble of voices. This was why Walter hadn’t come: he hated people who talked like they knew everything. Blatherers, he called them. Poseurs. Only he didn’t pronounce it in the French way. He said
posers,
with the accent on the first syllable. Like it was a solid word from the western United States—a word from Puget Sound, perhaps, from the woods where he had grown up, where men had no truck with French pronunciation.

5.
    D R. C ARNEY SLID NEXT TO D AISY as she stood beside the punch bowl. Up close the skin beneath his eyes was puffy. Now that he stood next to her, she had the impression that Carney might be a heavy drinker: he had the flamboyant flush, the wet eye.
    “You must be the host mother.” His tone was light, disparaging.
    Daisy straightened her back. “No,” she said, “as a matter of fact, I’m a journalist with the
Sunday Review.”
    He laughed.
    “What?”
    “Not in a million years.”
    “Perhaps I write for ‘The Women’s Circle.’”
    He shook his head and offered her a cigarette, which she took. He lit a match and Daisy, bending, breathed in the smell of his hands. He had clean nails and stubby, unsurgeonlike fingers. There was a plumpness at the base of his thumb that she found