The Shining Girls

Willie ^{15 OCTOBER 1954}

The first nuclear reactor went critical under the University of Chicago’s overgrown football stadium in 1942. It was a miracle of science! But it didn’t take long for it to twist into a miracle of propaganda.

Fear festers in the imagination. It’s not fear’s fault. That’s just the way it’s made. Nightmares breed. Allies become enemies. Subversives are everywhere. Paranoia justifies any persecution, and privacy is a luxury when the Reds have the bomb.

Willie Rose makes the mistake of thinking it’s a Hollywood thing. Mr Walt Disney testifying to the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals that commie cartoonists want to turn Mickey Mouse into a Marxist rat! How absurd.

Of course she’s heard about the ruined careers and people blacklisted for not taking the oath of loyalty to the United States of America and all it stands for. But she’s no Arthur Miller. Nor Ethel Rosenberg, for that matter.

So it’s a shock when she gets into work on Wednesday at Crake & Mendelson, third floor at the Fisher Building, to find the pair of comics sitting on her drafting table like an accusation.

Fighting American: Don’t Laugh –-They’re not funny! POISON IVAN and HOTSKY TROTSKI. A superhero dressed in the American flag and a golden boy sidekick prepare to take on the hideous weirdo pinko mutants creeping out of a tunnel below. On the cover of the other comic, a handsome secret agent wrestles a gun-wielding dame in a red dress while a Russki soldier with a big beard bleeds to death on the carpet. There’s a snowy landscape hanging above the fireplace with a streaked red sky and the silhouette of distinctive minarets visible through the window. Admiral Zacharias’ Secret Missions: Menace! Intrigue! Mystery! Action! The woman looks a bit like her, same pitch-black hair. Hardly subtle. Risible. Except it’s not.

She sits down in her swivel chair with the loose wheel that cants precariously to the side, and flips through the comics, looking serious. She half-spins in her seat to catcall at the giant with the thinning hair in the blue shirt with the white collar watching her from the water cooler. Six foot eight and all asshole. The same guy who told her the only reason they hired a woman architect was so that she could also answer the phones. Number of times she’s answered the phone since she started here eight months ago: zilch.

‘Hey, Stewie, your funny books aren’t funny.’ She dumps them dramatically in the waste-paper basket at her feet, two-handed, as if they weigh a ton. The tension she didn’t even know was there breaks, and several of the guys chuckle. Good old Willie. George fakes a one-two punch at Stewart’s jaw. K.O. The asshole puts up his hands in mock defeat and everyone more or less gets back to work.

Is it her imagination or are things slightly out of place on her desk? Her .25 Rapidograph is on the right of her T-square and the slide rule, but she usually leaves it on the other side because she is left-handed.

For God’s sake, she’s not even a socialist, let alone a member of the Communist Party. But she’s artistic. And these days that’s bad enough. Because artists socialize with all kinds of people. Like blacks and left-wing radicals and people with opinions.

That she finds William Burroughs incomprehensible and all the brouhaha over the Chicago Review daring to publish his over-the-top pornography equally so is beside the point. She’s never been much of a reader. But she has friends down at the 57th Street colony – writers and artists and sculptors. She’s sold her sketches down at the art market. Female nudes. Friends who pose for her. Some of them more intimately than others. It doesn’t make her red, dammit. Even if there are things she’d prefer not to come out in the wash. To most people, it’s all equivalent anyway. Pinkos. Subversives. Homos.

To keep her hands from shaking, she fiddles with the cardboard model she’s been working on for the new Wood Hill bungalows. She’s done fifty sketches of the same, but she finds it easier to imagine in three dimensions. She’s already built five of them based on the most promising ideas, in varying degrees from the original concept sketch George gave her, trying to find the opportunity. It’s hard to have an original thought when you’ve been briefed very specifically by the firm’s principal. Can’t reinvent the wheel. But you can put your own spin on it.

They’re working-class homes, part of an insular development blatantly based on Park Forest and its self-contained downtown, with a bank and a Marshall Field’s. He’s letting her handle it on her own, down to cabinetry and lighting fixtures. She won’t get to present, but he’s said she can manage the project on site. It’s only because the rest of the office is tied up with office blocks for the government project they’re pitching on that everyone is treating very hush-hush.

Wood Hill is not to her personal taste. She’d never give up her Old Town apartment, the hustle and vibrancy of the city, or the ease with which she can smuggle a beautiful girl up the stairs. But she finds it fulfilling, designing these utopian model homes. In an ideal world, she’d want them to be more modular, in the Kecks’ style, so you could switch things up and make them different, with a flow between the interior and exterior spaces. She’s been looking at books on Morocco recently, and she thinks an enclosed central courtyard might work with Chicago’s brutal winters.

She’s got ahead of herself and already done a watercolor artist’s impression of her favorite of the designs. It’s filled in with a happy family, mom and dad, two kids and a dog and a Cadillac in the driveway. It looks cosily uncomplicated, and is it her fault if the dad seems a little fey, with high cheekbones?

When she started here, she was peeved that she was having to make modifications to these shake’n’bake homes. But Willie is a woman who has come to terms with her ambitions. She’d tried to get into Frank Lloyd Wright’s colony and been rebuffed. (Rumors were he was broke anyway and was never going to finish another building, so boo to him.) And she was never going to be a Mies van der Rohe. Which was probably a good thing, because Chicago has a surplus of would-be van der Rohes. Like the Three Blind Mies over the way. Not her description. That Wright’s a funny, bitter old guy.

She would have liked to do public buildings. A museum or a hospital, but she had to fight for this job like she fought to get a place at MIT. Crake & Mendelson were the only firm who invited her back for a second interview, and she made it count, wearing her tightest pencil skirt, armed with her brassiest humor and a portfolio that showed she was more than that, even if they hired her for those other reasons. You take whatever advantages nature and wile afford you.

This latest stuff is her own fault. Running off her smart mouth about how suburban developments are going to transform the lives of working-class families. She likes that they’re building communities around people’s workplaces, that blue-collar guys can have white-collar dreams and get to move out of the city where ten families are squashed into an apartment meant for one. She can see now how that might be seen as being pro-worker, pro-union. Pro-commie. She should have just shut up about it.

Anxiety poisons her, like too much coffee. It’s the way Stewart keeps darting her little wounded looks. She’s made a dreadful mistake, she realizes. He’ll be the first to put her up against the wall. Because that’s what people do now. Neighbors twitching curtains, teachers ratting out the kids in their class, colleagues making statements on subversives one desk over.

It’s because she laughed at him when they all went for drinks in her first week and he got a little tipsy and followed her into the ladies’ room. He tried to kiss her with those thin dry lips, pressing her against the sink with its gold-plated faucets and black tiles, trying to hike up her skirt while reaching into his pants. The ornate nouveau mirrors reflected endless iterations of fumbling. She tried to push him away and when he didn’t give, she reached into her purse, propped on the sink because she’d been applying a fresh coat of lipstick when he’d come in, and grabbed her silver-and-black deco cigarette lighter – the present she bought herself on getting into MIT.

Stewart screeched and pulled away, sucking at the blister already rising on the knobbly bone on the back of his wrist. She didn’t tell the other guys. She might have a fast mouth, but occasionally she knew when to keep it shut. Someone must have seen him coming out, still burning with humiliation, because word got around. Ever since, he’s been dead set against her.

She works through lunch, so she doesn’t have to run into him on the way out, even though her stomach is growling like a tiger. Only when Stewart goes into a meeting with Martin does she grab her bag and head for the door.

‘Not lunchtime now?’ George says, affably checking his watch.

‘I’ll be so quick, I’ll be back at my desk before you see me leave,’ she says.

‘Like the Flash?’ he says. And that’s it right there. Good as a confession.

‘Just like,’ she says, even though she’s never read the darn comic book. She gives him a heavy, saucy wink and sashays out the door, across the shimmering mosaic tiles that look like fish scales to the elevator with its ornate gold doors.

‘You all right, Miss Rose?’ the doorman at the front desk says as she steps out, the dome of his bald head as polished and shiny as the fixtures.

‘Dandy, Lawrence,’ she replies. ‘And you?’

‘Got the flu, ma’am. Might have to pop out to the drugstore later. You look pale. Hope you’re not coming down with it too. It’s a bad ’un.’

On the street outside the Fisher Building, she leans against the arch of the doorway, feeling the ornately carved dragon fish pressing against her back. Her heart is thudding in her chest like it’s trying to bash its way right out her chest.

She wants to go home and curl up in her unmade bed. (The sheets still smell like Sasha’s cunt from Wednesday night.) Her cats would be delighted to have her home in the middle of the afternoon. And she still has half a bottle of Merlot in the fridge. But how would that look, taking off in the middle of the day? Especially to George.

Act normal, for God’s sake, she thinks. Get yourself together. She’s already drawing stares and, worse, kindly intentions. She launches herself away from the archway before the interfering old lady with wrinkles cutting down her neck can come over to ask if she’s okay. She walks purposefully up the street, heading for a bar several blocks away where she’s unlikely to run into any of her colleagues.

It’s one of those basement numbers, where all you can see from the window are people’s shoes going by. The bartender is surprised to see her. He’s still setting up, taking the battered chairs down from equally battered tables. ‘We’re not open—’

‘Whiskey sour. Neat.’

‘I’m sorry, miss—’

She puts a twenty on the bar. He shrugs, turns to the cluster of bottles above the bar and starts mixing her drink, more laboriously than necessary. ‘You from Chicago?’ he says, grudgingly.

‘She taps the note on the bar counter. ‘I’m from where there’s more of that if you shut the hell up and make me my drink.’ In the thin slice of mirror behind the bar, she watches reflected legs go by. Black brogues. Tan Mary Janes. A girl in bobbysocks and lace-ups. A man on a crutch shuffling past. It triggers something in her memory, but when she turns to look, he’s already gone. And so what? At least her drink is served.

Willie downs it and then another. By the third, she’s feeling like she’s ready to go back. She slides the twenty across the counter.

‘Hey, what about the other one?’

‘Nice try, champ,’ she says, and swims back to the office through a pleasant floatiness. By the time she reaches the door of the building, the light-headedness is turning queasy. It weighs down, like a thunderstorm gathering right on top of her. She can feel the barometric pressure rising with each step, so that it takes every ounce of willpower to turn on a happy face when she opens the door into the office.

God, how could she have been so wrong about who her enemies are? Stewart looks at her with concern, not contempt. Maybe he knows he was out of hand that night. She realizes he’s been nothing but a gentleman since. Martin is irritated that she wasn’t here when he was looking for her. And George… George grins and raises his eyebrows. Like, What took you so long? And also: I’m watching you.

The plans on the vellum are blurry in front of her. She jabs angrily at the kitchen walls with her blotting powder; they’re all wrong and will need to be reconfigured.

‘You all right?’ George says, putting a hand on her shoulder, overly familiar. ‘You look a little out of sorts. Maybe you should go home.’

‘I’m just peachy, thanks.’ She can’t even come up with a witty retort. Dear George. Cuddly, furry, harmless George. She thinks about the night they both stayed late working on the Hart’s project and he broke out the bottle of scotch Martin kept in his office, and they sat up talking until two in the morning. What did she say? She scours her brain to remember. She talked about art and growing up in Wisconsin and why she wanted to become an architect, her favorite buildings, the ones she wished she’d built. Adler and Sullivan’s soaring towers and sculpted details. Which got her on to Pullman and how the workers who lived in his housing were forced to live by these ridiculously patronizing rules. And he said barely a word, just let her ramble. Let her incriminate herself.

She feels paralyzed. She could wait it out. Stay at her desk until everyone else has gone home for the day and she can try to make sense of this. She could go back to the bar. Or straight home to destroy anything deviant and subversive.

Five o’clock comes and goes and her colleagues start peeling away one by one. Stewart is one of the first to go. George one of the last. He hangs around, as if waiting for her.

‘You coming or should I leave you with the keys?’ His teeth are too big for his mouth, she notices for the first time. Great big slabs of white enamel.

‘You go ahead. I’m going to crack this bastard if it kills me.’

He frowns. ‘You’ve been working on that all day.’

She can’t stand it any more. ‘I know it was you.’

‘Huh?’

‘The comics. It’s stupid and it’s not fair.’ To her fury, her eyes are welling up. She keeps them wide, refusing to blink.

‘Those things? They’ve been circling the office for days. Why you so wound up about it?’

‘Oh,’ she says. The sheer enormity of how wrong she’s been crashes down on her and takes her breath away.

‘Guilty conscience?’ He squeezes her shoulder and slings his briefcase over his arm. ‘Don’t worry, Willie, I know you’re not a Red.’

‘Thank you, George, I—’

‘Pink at most.’ He’s not smiling. He puts the keys down on the desk in front of her. ‘I don’t want anything coming between the firm and this government project. I don’t care what you do in your private life, but you clean up after yourself. All right?’ He cocks his finger like a gun at her and slides out the door.

Willie sits there, stunned. You can bury your radical magazines and tear up your sexually perverse sketches and burn your sheets. But how do you erase who you are?

She’s startled nearly out of her skin by knuckles rapping on the door. She can see a man’s profile through the fluted glass hand-lettered with the name of the firm. She’s ashamed that her first thought is FBI! Which is ridiculous. It has to be one of the guys, probably forgotten something. She glances round the office and sees Abe’s jacket hanging on the back of his chair. Just Abe. His wallet is probably in it, with his bus pass. She unhooks it from the chair. She might as well leave at the same time.

She opens the door to find that it’s not Abe standing outside, but a horribly thin man leaning on a crutch. He turns the corners of his lips up around the wires between his teeth and screwed into his jaw in something that is supposed to be a smile. She pulls back in revulsion and tries to close the door on him. But he jabs the rubber foot of his crutch in the gap and shoves through. The door slams into her, bouncing off her forehead and cracking the glass. She falls backwards against one of the heavy Knoll desks. The metal edge catches her in the small of her back and she slides down onto the floor. If she can make it to Stewie’s desk, she could throw the big lamp at him…

But she can’t get up. There’s something wrong with her legs. She whimpers as he limps in, grimacing around the wires in his mouth, and closes the door softly behind him.