Black & White (28 page)

Wait. An image hovers just around the edges of Clara’s consciousness. An old village square. A vineyard. A small café table beneath an arbor, and herself—on the other side of Ruth’s lens. Clara had fallen and wound up with a black eye, and Ruth had shot a close-up of her that way: eye swollen shut, looking like a prizefighter. Clara had forgotten where all of that had taken place: upstate New York, the Italian countryside—what difference does it make?
Clara and the Black Eye
is all that remains.

“We must stop in to see Barbara,” Ruth says, pointing to the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Barbara Gladstone Gallery.

“I really think we shouldn’t,” Clara says.

“Really, Clara, we must.” Ruth sits up straighter. “I want to introduce her to my granddaughter.”

Clara wheels Ruth inside, across the cracked cement floor. Dread spreads its cold black waters inside of her.
This—she can’t—what will Barbara—the comparisons—not not not—Sammy—

A young woman, dressed in—could it be?—two layers of black cashmere, is seated behind a small desk displaying the usual catalogs and price list.

“Excuse me,” Ruth says.

The young woman, her dark hair slicked back into a chignon, slowly raises her swanlike neck and blinks at Clara and Ruth through angular black-framed glasses.

“Can I help you?”

“Is Barbara in?” Ruth is erect in her wheelchair but, even so, her head doesn’t come quite to the top of the high desk. The young woman looks down at her. In the bright whiteness of the gallery, her black silhouette is as sharp as a pencil drawing.

“No, she isn’t.”

She says this as if the question itself is absurd, somehow brazen.

The price list on the polished desk has tiny blue dots next to each piece. It’s a Richard Prince show, and it appears to be entirely sold out.

“When do you expect her?” Ruth asks. A slight edge—undetectable to anyone but Clara—has crept into her voice.

“Mom, would you like to look at the work?” Clara asks quickly. She wants to wheel Ruth away.

“I have no idea,” the girl says.

Clara begins to pull the wheelchair back. In the center of the loftlike main room, a sculpture of what appears to be a car’s hood rests on a wooden block, paint dripping down the sides.

Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it.
Clara silently begs the back of her mother’s head. She knows what’s coming, what has to be coming.

“You don’t know who I am, do you?” Ruth asks. Petulant and incredulous as a child.

A pair of perfectly arched eyebrows rise above the tops of the black-framed glasses. The girl is perhaps twenty-one. The year she was born, Ruth was nearing the end of the Clara Series.

“I’m sorry. Should I?”

“Ruth Dunne.” Each word bitten off. “When Barbara gets back from Umbria, or from having her pedicure, or wherever the hell she is, please tell her that Ruth Dunne stopped by.”

Ruth’s shoulders are shaking. She sits there, waiting for the slow dawning of recognition on the girl’s face. A sign that she’s screwed up. That she’s in the presence of unexpected greatness. Something. Anything.

“Ruth Dunne.” The girl slowly writes the name on a message pad. “Is that spelled
D-O-N
?”

“
D-U-N-N-E
,” Clara chimes in. Please, not this. Not now. Not in front of Sammy. “The photographer.”

The girl looks up, pencil poised, her face as smooth and placid as a lake at dawn.

“Fine. And what may I say this is regarding?”

Ruth reaches up for Clara’s hand and squeezes it. Sam is standing close to her grandmother, close enough to see her trembling. Ruth’s palm is clammy and cold. Does she whisper the words or merely think them?

Please, Clara. Take me home.

Chapter Nine

“W
HERE ARE WE GOING NOW?”
Sammy is exhausted, no doubt from the morning of gallery-hopping. Showing herself—finally!—to be a nine-year-old child. She’s been acting altogether too mature since they got to New York. She probably needs to put her feet up and watch reruns of
Full House
for a couple of hours. Or go on Ruth’s computer and e-mail her friends back home.

Instead, they are standing in the vast lobby of the Museum of Modern Art—the size of a European train station—the sounds of foreign languages echoing all around them as they trudge up a long flight of stairs.

“Do we have to do this?” Sam goes on. “I’m so tired.”

It may not be the best timing, but timing is not on Clara’s mind. Something is propelling her, something cold and hard against her back. From the moment they left the galleries, Clara knew what she had to do. First, she took Ruth home and straight into bed, no arguments there. Gave her an afternoon cocktail of Ativan and morphine, pulled the bedsheets up around her. Ruth fell asleep almost instantly, still in her caftan and white scarf. Then Clara found Jonathan, just back from a run in Central Park and still slightly out of breath in his sweatpants and T-shirt. She wanted the two of them to take Sam to MoMA, she told him. Right then—not later. He began to question her, but in an instant he understood. Sam at MoMA. Of course.

The museum of Clara’s childhood, while not exactly a cozy place, has been replaced by this staggering open space that makes her dizzy. The art itself is immense. Rodin’s Balzac rising like a mountain in front of the sculpture garden. And here—on the second floor—four enormous Twomblys, magnificent in their chaos of color and scribbles. Clara can hardly bear to look at them. They feel like the inside of her head: random words, hard to make out. Everything just slightly out of reach.

“I know you’re tired, Sam,” Clara says, “but you’ll see.”
Trust me,
she wants to say. But she isn’t sure she’s earned the right to say it. And she doesn’t want to see that look crossing Sammy’s face, the look that says,
I can’t.

Arrows point in every direction:
ELEVATOR. ESCALATOR. STAIRS.
She isn’t sure which way to go, but Jonathan leads the way. Jonathan, who has always been able to make himself comfortable in any environment, from the docks of Southwest Harbor to the concrete caverns of high art. As they slowly rise on the escalator to the third floor, Clara sees a sign for the Edward Steichen Photography Galleries.

“Mom?”

Clara quickly looks at Sam. Does she get it yet? Does she suspect?

“I’m hungry. Can we go to the café downstairs?”

It’s all so elemental: exhaustion, boredom, hunger. Why would Sammy have any idea, especially after this morning? Nothing exists in Sammy’s world, up until now, that would make her even consider the possibility that her grandmother’s pictures might be hanging on the walls of this museum.

“Maybe in a little bit, Sam. There’s something I need to show you first.”

The Steichen galleries are in a space more intimate than the lower floors, a warren of rooms that begin with what Ruth would refer to as
the granddaddies.
Steichen, of course. The streets and churches of Walker Evans. A small group of tourists are standing in front of a whole wall devoted to Weston nudes.

Sammy’s eyes widen as she sees the nudes.

“Isn’t that one in Grandma’s apartment?” she asks, pointing to one in a series called
Nude on Sand.
An elegant nude—one Clara has always loved—facedown, her long legs open, feet slightly pigeon-toed. Her head resting on crossed arms, a tangle of dark hair.

“Yes, it is,” says Clara. She’s distracted. Looking around. MoMA has such a huge permanent collection—they rotate it constantly—she isn’t exactly sure where Ruth’s work is hanging. Clara scans what she can see of the next room, but most of it is out of view. Jonathan has walked ahead of them, already there.

“Let’s keep going, Sammy.”

Clara leads the way, taking in one image at a time. The room seems to be arranged in some sort of chronology. Here, Diane Arbus’s twins. There, Warhol’s
Chelsea Girls.
The photographers who came of age in the sixties and seventies, one generation before Ruth. Clara’s gaze revolves slowly around the room: she is like a bodyguard, a sharpshooter, looking everywhere for danger. She sees unfamiliar images: a crisp wartime photograph of a boy lying on his side. A single tree rising up from an otherwise desolate field, like a hyperkinetic Ansel Adams. And then—Jonathan is standing in front of them—three photographs, grouped together. Ruth Dunne, accorded nearly the same amount of wall space as the Weston nudes.

She clenches and unclenches her fists. Repeats the motion several times as if trying to get her blood moving, remind herself that she is made of flesh. The images are a blur so far; she has not determined which of the Clara Series is hanging, only that they are there. The unmistakable silvery prints. A hint of wild grass, open sky. A sliver of skin. A mass of wavy hair.

A lone young woman with a bandanna tied around her head—an art student, most likely—is standing beside Jonathan. Her head is cocked to the side, appraising. From the back, she looks like every intern who has ever worked for Ruth. There is awe in her very posture. It’s all Clara can do not to rush at her, knock her away.
Stop staring!
And Jonathan? She knows Jonathan has seen all these and more. From the very beginning, he made it his business to see the photos—to understand her. But she has never
seen him seeing.
This is the man who has made love to her a thousand times. Who has held her head when she’s vomited. Who has stood and watched as she pushed a newborn into the world. Why does she feel so exposed?

Two guards stand in the wide arch between the two rooms, guarding against—what? Bombs? Art thieves? What about Clara’s Angels? Do they still exist, or have they grown old and retired? Maybe they’ve moved to the suburbs. As far as Clara knows, it’s been a long time since anyone has thrown a bucket of paint at a photograph of Ruth’s.

“Mom? Hello?”

Sam is looking at her strangely.

“What, darling?”

“You’re talking to yourself.”

Snap out of it, Clara.
She has forgotten—for a long dreamlike moment, the glimpse of the photographs has made her forget—her purpose in being here. How long has she been standing frozen in the middle of the room?

“Come with me.”

She pulls Sammy over to the photographs. Quickly, quickly. Moving next to Jonathan. Their tight little family huddled together in front of the huge prints.

“Excuse me,” she says to the art student, who is standing too close.

She moves slightly to the side, and Sammy looks up at the first photograph, then the second, and then the third, moving across them as if they are movie stills. As if they might tell a single story.

“What are these?” Sam asks, the words becoming rhetorical even as they form and hang in the air. Clara watches her carefully. She watches as the images sink in.

“Who am I looking at?” Sam asks again.

Evocative.
Clara looks at the first photograph.
Unforgiving.
Her mother’s highest praise. And then, that terribly shaky voice:
Don’t you know who I am?

“Who is that?” Sam’s voice rises above a whisper in the quiet of the gallery. Too loud. The art student moves away from them, focusing now on the Warhol.

Clara bites her lip to keep from speaking. She wants Sammy to come to it on her own. And besides, Clara doesn’t trust the way her own voice might come out: strangled, the tendons in her neck tight with tension.

Jonathan puts his arm around her, creating a shelter.
Clara with the Lizard
is the first of the three photographs, which are hung close together, almost like a triptych. In the middle is
Clara in the Fountain.
And finally—as if some curator’s idea of creating a narrative—
Naked at Fourteen.

Sam stares for a long moment at the middle photograph, the one Clara would say, if asked, is the most bearable. She is naked, yes—she can still feel the cold water of the fountain, the pennies beneath her bare feet—but
Clara in the Fountain
is one of Ruth’s few photographs that doesn’t make her feel ill.

Sammy takes a few tentative steps over to where the plaque is affixed to the wall. Clara moves over to Sammy—she can’t stand to have her more than arm’s distance away—and reads along with her.