Black & White (24 page)

Sammy lets out a little half giggle. Poor kid. She’s self-conscious, not sure how to behave. Nothing in her preteen magazines has prepared her for this. She starts fiddling with her hair, a sign that she’s getting overwhelmed.

“And Jonathan—it is Jonathan, isn’t it?” Ruth now looks behind Sam—Jonathan hasn’t moved an inch—and something hardens slightly in her gaze.

“Yes,” he says quietly.

“My daughter tells me you own a shop of some kind. You’re—what is it—a jeweler?”

Ruth trots out the word
jeweler
with a flourish, leaving it to hang limply in the air. As if to be a jeweler—in the bedroom of Ruth Dunne, under the watchful eyes of Man Ray and Berenice Abbott—is so absurd that nothing more can possibly be said on the subject.

“That’s right,” says Jonathan.

Clara moves from the center of the room so that she’s standing just behind Sam, next to Jonathan. She puts her arms around them. Her family. A tight little unit. Jonathan blinks, his shoulders tense.

“I work more with semiprecious stones,” he says softly. “Topaz, freshwater pearls, tourmalines.”

“Interesting,” says Ruth. “Do tell us more.”

“Please, stop it.” The words escape Clara’s lips before she realizes that she’s spoken out loud. She feels like she’s hallucinating.

“What’s the matter?” Ruth looks directly at Clara for the first time.

Clara shakes her head. She feels the warmth of Jonathan, next to her. Breathes in her husband and daughter, trying to hold on to what matters.

“Nothing.”

“I should think not,” says Ruth. She smiles weakly, looking around the room. “Here we are—here we all are.”

More footsteps in the hallway now. Did Marcy close the door behind her? Clara almost doesn’t care. A burglar would be welcome relief.

Peony pokes her small dark head inside Ruth’s bedroom door, and they all turn to look at her. As usual, an array of folders is tucked beneath her arm.

“I just wanted to check to see if you need anything,” Peony says, taking in the crowd in Ruth’s room without expression.

“Not at all, darling.” Ruth waves her away. “My family’s here. I have everything I need.”

Chapter Eight

T
HEY WORKED FOR A WHILE
, Nathan Dunne’s threats.
No more photographs, Ruth. No more—or else.
He never said exactly what would happen if Ruth went against him, but it was clear from the tone of his voice, the thin, determined line of his mouth, that Nathan meant business.

Clara’s father had never so much as raised his voice to his wife, but after what was referred to around the Dunne household as
the incident at Brearley,
or
that thing in the
Post, it was as if something had been unleashed in Nathan. A fatherly fury that was stronger—for the moment—than his fear of Ruth. Or love. Or awe. Or whatever it was.

He came home every night at six. No more four-star dinners out with clients. No more occasional men’s poker nights with other attorneys, from which he tiptoed in, cigar smoke clinging to his suit. Weekends, he took Clara and Robin to the park, where they tossed a softball around for so many hours that the girls would beg him to stop. No, Nathan had determined to be around. He had finally figured out that the only way to really understand what was happening in his family was to be there in person. Every day.

And so, for a while, their family life at the Apthorp was similar to the lives of those surrounding them: other Upper West Side families with a couple of kids in private school. They went to Ollie’s for Chinese food and stood in line to see
Flashdance
at the Loews on 84th Street. They piled into their Volvo wagon and made the two-hour drive to Hillsdale, where they spent entire days in pajamas and Nathan cooked his one specialty, challah French toast.

Ruth still spent time in her studio, of course. She produced a series of strange still-lifes: a cracked bowl on a kitchen counter, a bed stripped down to its old stained mattress. The photographs were technically magnificent—the silvery precision of Ruth’s darkroom technique was unmistakable—but to this day they are seen as a failed experiment and can be had at auction for a fraction of her typical prices.

When she wasn’t in the studio, Ruth floated around in a dream world of her own making. She moved more slowly than usual, her lips curved into a half smile. She even did normal things like normal mothers: she went to the gym, picked up clothes at the dry cleaners, arrived home with shopping bags from Fairway filled with fresh vegetables and Italian cheese. It was as if Ruth were acting out a role in a play.
See?
she seemed to be saying.
I can do this. I can be like everyone else.

How long did life proceed like this? In Clara’s memory it is a blink, a flash, nothing more. In reality it may have been eight months, maybe nine. It spanned the entirety of Clara’s fourth-grade year. She was the same age as Sam is now. But when she reaches back into her childhood for a foothold, for memories she can feel and touch and taste in her mouth, the year her mother left her alone is blank, like a skipped page in a notebook. A mistake.

It has been picked over by the critics, this gap in Ruth Dunne’s Clara Series. Oh, what they have made of it! Whole academic papers have been published on the subject. Clara’s personal favorite, “The Interrupted Gaze,” written by a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, is a psychoanalytic meditation on Ruth’s work.

The mother—in this case overshadowing the artist—has taken what appears to be a conscious step back, in order to consider the effects of her work on her daughter, a prepubescent girl. Having interrupted her gaze in order to look inward, Dunne then reemerges with an even more powerful assertion of her work, as if her explorations have given her further license, both as an artist and as a mother—or perhaps a renewed acceptance that the two are indistinguishable.

What a load of nonsense. Nathan had to go away on a business trip, is all. Three days in London—and Ruth was suddenly free. Had she always known the day would come when she’d have Clara to herself again—that wild containment in her eye, that aliveness like none other?

“Wake up, sweetheart.” The voice, a whisper.

Clara slowly blinks her eyes open. She knows before she knows. This is how it has always been, since that very first day, six years earlier, when she put the lizard in her mouth. She wonders, sometimes, whether somehow she has asked for this, whether she has brought it upon herself—her mother’s attention. After all, Ruth has never tried to photograph Robin. Not even once.

“Let’s go, Clara.”

She stumbles out of bed, rubbing her face. What time is it? The glow of the orange digital clock reads 11:47. It’s almost midnight!

“Where are we going?”

“Quiet…. We don’t want to wake your sister.”

Robin. They can’t leave Robin alone in the apartment. Surely Ruth knows this. Surely she’s thought it through. The inside of Clara’s head is a jumble of words, like a game of Scrabble. Nothing is forming, nothing makes sense. As they creep by Robin’s door, which is cracked open, Clara catches a glimpse of her sleeping sister. Robin is lying on her stomach, her legs scrunched under her like a turtle tucked into its shell. Through the window, the light of the moon illuminates the long curve of her spine.

Clara wants nothing more than to climb into Robin’s bed and curl around her sister’s warmth. She can almost feel the slow beating of Robin’s heart, her sweet midnight breath.

“Mommy, please, let’s not—”

“Ssshhh.”

Together, they tiptoe down the rest of the hall to the foyer. Ruth has Clara’s denim jacket all ready to slip on over her cotton nightgown. The camera bag and tripod are by the front door.

Finally, Clara finds her voice.

“Mommy, we can’t leave Robin alone. What if she wakes up and can’t find us?”

The months of not being photographed has given her this bit of strength. She’s ten years old now, and she thinks she knows right from wrong.

Ruth stops gathering her equipment for a moment and turns to look at Clara.

“What kind of mother do you think I am?”

“I just—”

“Look in the living room,” Ruth says. “Go on, take a look.”

Clara peers around the corner into the living room. There, sleeping on the sofa under one of the extra blankets, is Ruth’s newest intern, a girl from Pratt.

“Okay?” Ruth whispers harshly. “Are you satisfied?”

Clara is silent. Strangely ashamed. She should have trusted her mother—she should have known better.

The elevator ride takes forever, descending an inch at a time. The wood-paneled interior, the small bench—it reminds Clara of a scene she saw in a recent movie, of a priest in a confessional. And even though she’s half-Jewish, even though she’s never so much as set foot in a church, she wishes—right now she wishes—that a panel would slide open in the elevator and a priest would be on the other side.
Tell me, my child. Tell me what brings you here.
A warm fatherly voice to whom she could spill everything inside her, washing herself clean.

They’re on the fifth floor before Clara speaks again.

“Where are you taking me?” Her voice is small.

“To the park.”

Isn’t it dangerous?
The words ricochet, remain unsaid. They pass the fourth floor, then the third.
Just put yourself in your mother’s hands.
Whose thought is that? Who is speaking in Clara’s head?
Give in to this, give in. You have no choice.

The doorman doesn’t react as they walk past him, onto the desolate street at this hour—as if a mother and her young daughter lugging heavy photographic equipment down Broadway at midnight is in the order of usual business. Clara tries to make eye contact with him as they leave. If anything happens to them, she wants him to remember. So that he can tell the police.

Ruth turns west on 78th Street.

“I thought we were going to the park,” Clara says.

“We are going to the park. Riverside Park.”

Could she say no?
You have no choice.
That voice again in her head.

“I’m scared,” she says.

Ruth stops right there in the middle of 78th Street. She leans her tripod against a building, then crouches down so that she’s looking up at Clara.

“Would I ever let anything happen to you?”

Clara remembers her shame from just a few minutes earlier. Ruth is a good mother. Ruth loves her—
so much,
as Ruth would say,
so much,
her thin arms crushing her into a breathless hug.

“No,” Clara says quietly. She shakes her head for emphasis. “I know that.”

“Okay, then. I’m glad that’s settled.” Ruth straightens up. “Because now we have work to do.”

The park looms before them, black and empty save for the street-lights, their bluish-white halos shining in the misty air like luminous planets. A man in a windbreaker walks a small dog along the edge of the park, his shoulders hunched against the darkness, a small plastic bag in his hand. Clara looks up at the windows of the tall stately buildings along Riverside Drive, searching for signs of life. A white flicker of a television screen. The glow of a bedside lamp, a dining-room chandelier, the end of a very late dinner party. If people peered out their windows, would they see Ruth and Clara, two small figures entering the park? Would they see Ruth move swiftly to the location she has already chosen, just inside the stone walls, where the gnarly roots of an old tree have emerged from the ground?

“Right here, Clara,” Ruth says, pointing to the mound of earth between the roots. “This is the spot.”

Ruth is breathless from carrying all that equipment—no assistants tonight—and rests for a moment on her tripod as if she’s an old woman and it’s a cane.

“What do you want me to do?” Clara asks. She can hear the strain in her own voice. Can’t her mother hear it too?

“I brought something,” Ruth says, pulling a thin white blanket from her tote bag. “Here. Wrap yourself in this.”