Black & White (11 page)

“No, I’m not, I—”

He barreled right over her, interrupting—something he almost never did.

“I can’t keep doing this.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that something’s got to give. Either come home now or let me tell Sam why you’re away.”

“No!”

“Will you stop it already?”

She could picture Jonathan—the look on his face—one she had seen only a few times in their years together. He rarely got angry, but when he did it transformed him. His handsome, craggy face became at once hard and vulnerable. She couldn’t bear the thought of it.

“Please, Jon—”

“No. It’s enough.” His voice was devoid of all sympathy for her. “I’m hanging up now.”

Peony has just come into the kitchen. She’s carrying a batch of photographs encased in large manila folders—back to being the photography intern she was meant to be.

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t know you were in here!” she says. “I was just going to make myself a fruit smoothie. Do you want one?”

“No, thanks,” Clara says. The girl is always apologizing.

Peony’s wearing three tank tops, one layered over the next over the next. White, gray, black. A red grease pencil is stuck behind her ear and she smells familiar, slightly musty—she’s been in the archives, Clara realizes. A photograph is peeking from the top of the folders, revealing the top of a shiny dark head, a slice of white forehead. Without even knowing what she’s seeing—a fraction of an image, taken out of context, it could be anything, couldn’t it?—Clara draws in her breath.

“What are those…Why are you…?” she stammers.

“Oh, these?” Peony hugs the folders to her chest, gently caressing them. “Ruth wanted to edit them this afternoon. She’s not getting out of bed much now, and—you know. For the book?”

“The book?” Clara repeats.

A dark-skinned woman in a purple satin blouse, several lengths of gold chain wrapped around her neck, bustles down the hallway.

“Good morning, Rochelle,” Clara says. The hospice nurse, arranged for by Dr. Zamitsky’s office. A real pro—and, unlike the home aides, no behavior of Ruth’s is going to faze her.

“Your mother’s resting comfortably,” says Rochelle. “No changes. I’ll stop back in a few days.”

A few days? What does she mean, a few days? And what’s this about a book? Clara’s head hurts. She can’t make sense of anything and finds herself suddenly, improbably, wishing that Robin were here. Robin would know what to do. She would break each thing down into small manageable bits.

“She’s great, the hospice nurse,” Peony says, after Rochelle leaves. “I don’t know how these people do it, going from apartment to apartment where everybody they take care of is—”

She stops abruptly.

“It’s okay, Peony. You can use the D word,” says Clara. She’s still staring at the corner of the photograph, the slice of white skin, the shiny dark hair.

Peony looks at her blankly.

“Dying,” says Clara. “I know my mother is dying.”

Peony ducks her head to the side, the color rising in her cheeks. Clara has a flash of sympathy for the girl. Of all the well-known photographers in New York, of all the studios where she might have picked up a few tips, maybe found herself a mentor, she had to wind up here—in the house of craziness and death.

Down the long hall leading to the bedroom wing, Clara hears a door creak open, then shut with a solid click. Ruth’s door. A childhood sound, the sound of her mother, restless, tiptoeing past Clara and Robin’s bedroom in the middle of the night. Back then, Ruth would wander into the kitchen, fix herself a cup of tea, then pad quietly into the studio. There were so many closed doors between Ruth and her daughters—her bedroom door and theirs, the studio door, the darkroom—each one another kind of barrier.
Where’s Mommy? Let’s go and find Mommy.
Ruth was always, finally, in the darkroom, blue light seeping from beneath the crack.
Don’t open it!
Ruth’s sharp voice. They knew she didn’t mean to sound angry.
Ssshhh, Mommy’s working,
they whispered, holding hands as they made their way back to their rooms.

But wait—Clara pulls herself out of the quicksand of the past. What is Ruth doing out of bed?

A small red-haired woman wearing the gray uniform of a hospital orderly approaches them. Not Ruth, of course not. Had Clara been hoping that her mother might have improved these last few days? That perhaps those pesky tumors had taken a look around, realized that they were in Ruth Dunne’s brain, and dissolved out of respect for her artistic genius?

“Marcy, this is—” Peony begins.

“I’m Ruth’s daughter,” Clara interrupts. “Clara.”

“Yes, we spoke on the phone last night,” Marcy says.

“Oh, of course.”

The new home aide—sent to replace yesterday’s.

“Well,” Clara says faintly. “How’s everything going so far?’

“The nurse gave her some morphine—put her out cold,” says Marcy. “But she’s been agitated on and off—thrashing about. I told your sister I think we need to order a hospital bed.”

“Why’s that?”

“The railings, hon. So she doesn’t fall out and break a hip.”

“I’ll get on it,” Clara says. That is, if Robin hasn’t already checked it off her list.

“Where’s the incinerator?” Marcy asks.

“Out in the hallway, to the right.”

Please, God
—Clara doesn’t ever pray, but lately she’s found herself offering up these silent beseechments—
let this one work out.

Marcy heads into the outside corridor, carrying a white plastic trash bag stuffed with God-knows-what. Meanwhile, Peony straightens the edges of her folders, the stray photograph—the sliver of pale skin—disappearing from view.

“I’d better get these back into the archives,” says Peony. “Until Ruth feels up to working on the book.”

What book?
The question screams through Clara’s head. But she doesn’t want to play her hand. Peony has no idea how little she actually knows.

“I’d like to take a look at them,” she says coolly. Surprising herself.

“Oh, yeah—of course.” Peony hands her the pile of folders. So easy—just like that. Who, after all, would argue with Clara’s right to see them? She tries not to tremble. There must be a dozen in all.

Slowly, Clara walks down the hall to Ruth’s room. She turns the knob and opens the door soundlessly; she knows exactly how to keep it from creaking. Ruth is lying on her side, curled up in the fetal position. She appears not so much to be sleeping as to be in another, more altered state:
out cold.
Sedated, resting comfortably, agitated, thrashing: What does any of it mean? It seems the language of dying has its own code that Clara has yet to begin to crack.

She stands by the bed, looking down at her mother. She can’t remember a time in their shared lives when she has ever been able to simply watch Ruth—with no static interference, nothing in the air between them. Now, she takes it all in: the bony still-beautiful face, the elegant profile, the shadow cast by her long lashes, a delicate blue-green vein throbbing along her temple. She is so human. Stripped, for the moment, of her gaze. Her eyes shut, lids fluttering as if, even now, with all the morphine in the world pumped into her system, she still can’t turn off the pictures in her mind.

No chance she’s going to wake up—not from this stupor. Clara sinks into an armchair by the corner window, the pile of folders in her lap. Now that she has extracted them from Peony, she isn’t sure she has the nerve to look at them. For so many years, she’s avoided the possibility of stumbling across her mother’s work. No visits to museums. No gallery-hopping in any city she has ever visited. Once, on a trip to Portland with Jonathan and Sam, they were browsing through a Barnes & Noble when she caught a glimpse of a familiar image—it appeared to her like a fragment of a remembered dream—on the cover of a photography magazine misplaced among stacks of
People
and
Newsweek.
She quickly rounded the corner, her throat thick with panic.
Let’s get out of here,
she had said to Jonathan, pulling at him.

Ruth’s breathing is labored—from illness, drugs, deep sleep, or a combination thereof, Clara isn’t sure. She listens to the uneven rhythm of her mother’s breath, willing herself to have whatever it takes—courage, hubris, a wild overestimation of what she can bear—to open the folder.

The phone next to Ruth’s bed rings. Ruth stirs, flinging one arm up over her eyes as if shielding them from the sun. The sound is more of a purr, actually, fancy phones with intercom systems and caller ID being Ruth’s only concession to modern life. Clara understands her mother’s need to screen calls—she has the same need herself—and leans over to see
KUBOVY WEISS
spelled out on the small lit-up screen.

Kubovy. Well, she won’t be answering that call. In an almost reflexive gesture, more of a tic than something carefully considered, Clara opens the first folder. There, as she suspected, is the first image ever taken of her, the one that started the whole ball rolling:
Clara with the Lizard.
The wet shiny hair, the sliver of forehead—how had she known? The bit she had seen peeking from the top of Peony’s folder could have been from any one of dozens of photos of her. Her hair was often slicked back off her face, her forehead smooth and pale as milk glass. But she did know—she did—because those images have always been more vivid and immediate to Clara than anything she might actually be seeing. Each one a vast bottomless whirlpool into which everything surrounding it is sucked in and drowned.

But wait. There are more photographs in these folders than Clara had originally thought. Each folder contains several photographs, separated by thin, archival tissue.
Clara in the Fountain. The Accident. Clara and the Popsicle.
As she studies the images, she crosses her legs tightly, pressing them together, cutting off her circulation. Pins and needles. Half of her is numb.

Interspersed among the familiar photographs are a few she’s never seen before. Each is encased in vellum; a yellow Post-it is attached to the vellum on which is written, in Ruth’s shaky hand,
never shown or published.
Clara, curled up on the sofa in the living room in Hillsdale, a patchwork quilt crumpled on the floor next to her. Clara, standing framed by a doorway—she must be eight or nine—her hip bones as fragile as bird’s wings. She doesn’t remember these pictures being taken. Not a glimmer, not a flash. It is as if these moments never happened—but here they are. She was there.

She skips the middle batch for the moment and flips all the way to the last folder, the final series of images. She has a hunch, a quick flood of feeling—terrible, foreboding, but also impossible to stop now that she has begun. She is shaking—the paper itself is shaking—as she opens to the final picture,
Naked at Fourteen.

Naked.
Ruth had used the word purposefully when she titled the photograph. Not
nude
—an artist’s word—but
naked.
Stark and absolute. No bullshit about it. As if to say, Let’s call this what it is.

Her own eyes stare back at her, angry, vulnerable, accusatory.
How could you?
Her pubescent body, breasts already forming above the rib cage, a shadow darkening between her legs. Arms crossed defiantly, hips cocked to one side. Clara reaches back—she grasps at the past—but it is like she is in a free fall, clutching at the air. There is nothing to hold. No memory. Only this.

“What time is it?” A hoarse voice—Ruth’s voice—nearly makes Clara jump out of her chair. Her mother has rolled over and is now lying on her side, facing Clara. How long has she been watching her?

“Tell me about these,” Clara says quietly.

“Sorry, dear?”

Clara holds up a few of the photographs.

“Careful with those—my God, Clara, your fingerprints!”

Ruth’s all there, all right. Plenty of
compos
in her
mentis.
Over the past few days, Clara has wondered if her mother has started to mentally lose it—but no. Clara is overtaken by a violent, intense desire to rip the pictures in two, all of them, one by one—as Ruth lies there, a prisoner on her bed. She wants to do it—but she is paralyzed. She feels as if she’s floating, hovering above herself and Ruth. Are the photographs hers to destroy? Her mother’s days in the darkroom are over. Each of these prints are the last ones in Ruth Dunne’s possession. The last that will ever be made.

“Why are you looking at these, Mother? Why has Peony taken them out of the archives?” Clara asks. She sits on her hands—literally sits on them—to stop them from shaking, to stop herself from doing something she can never take back.

Ruth flinches slightly.
Mother.
Clara has spoken with such disdain, such sarcasm, after these weeks of increasing kindness and sympathy. The old feelings rush back—nothing has changed between them.

“Would you mind calling Peony, darling? I need some help—”

“That’s no longer Peony’s job, remember?”

Ruth’s nose wrinkles.

“But these women from the agency are so…I don’t know…I can hardly carry on a conversation with them,” she says.

“They’re here to help you, not to provide intellectual stimulation.” Clara finally snaps. “Stop avoiding my question.”