Black & White (30 page)

Jonathan is standing there, a big stack of old pale-pink
New York Observer
s in his arms.

“Let’s start with those.” Clara eyes them.

“Are you sure?” Jonathan asks. “We can just—”

“Oh, I’m sure,” says Clara. Suddenly she feels a high degree of certainty. No, more than that: a near-euphoric clarity. This, at least, she can do. She can purge her mother’s apartment of all that is unnecessary. She can remove every single unessential thing.

They march out of the dining room—the three Brodeurs—past Peony, who has just come in from some no-doubt urgent errand, carrying her ever-present black portfolio.

“What are you guys doing?” she asks.

Clara searches Peony’s tone for an edge, a hint of judgment.

“Throwing out some of these old papers and stuff,” Clara says. “They were really piling up.”

“Don’t you think we should…” Peony trails off.

“What?” Clara asks sharply. There it is—she knew it—that reflexive loyalty to Ruth. Peony, who doesn’t have the slightest idea. Peony, the champion of All Things Ruth.
She wasn’t your mother!

“I mean,” Peony falters, “don’t you think we should use the recycling bags?”

“Oh,” says Clara. “Right.”

She shifts the pile of magazines she’s carrying to one hip, then uses her free hand to open the door. The garbage room is only a dozen steps or so down the corridor. Five trips—each of them carrying as many teetering piles as they can handle—and the dining room actually begins to resemble a place where a family might eat dinner.

Robin, Ed, and the kids show up a little after seven o’clock, carrying two bulging plastic bags full of Chinese food. Harrison and Tucker are still in their tennis whites, fresh from their weekly lesson, and Elliot is wearing her Brearley jumper.

“Sorry we’re late,” Robin says.

“You’re not—”

“General Tsao’s chicken,” says Ed, walking with the bags into the kitchen. “Sesame noodles, crispy orange beef, and that stuff with the pancakes, what do you call it?”

“Ed.” Jonathan shakes Ed’s hand. “Good to see you.”

Sammy stands next to Jonathan, her eyes darting from one cousin to the next to the next. Who are these children and how can they be—how can they possibly be—related to her? Something around the eyes, the shapes of their faces; they look familiar. They have the same grandmother. And they had the same grandfather, though none of them ever knew him. This, at least, they share.

“Harrison, Tucker, Elliot,” Robin says, “this is your cousin Samantha.”

One by one, Robin’s kids shake Sammy’s hand as if she’s a bride on a receiving line. Clara’s stomach churns at the formality of their gesture. In another life, these children might have played together every weekend: Frisbee in Central Park, movies on Sunday afternoons. And holidays—all the holidays: Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween. As it is, it’s taken days to arrange this visit. She’s practically had to beg Robin.
She wants to meet her cousins. Please, Rob. Whatever’s between us, let’s not infect our children with it.
Clara shuts her eyes for a second. She should have reached out before. All these years—there must have been a way, but which she had never found, to give her daughter some piece of her family. And now, here is Sammy, already her own little person, trying to make sense of the fact that there are three of them and one of her. Never has she looked so small and alone.

Clara is about to swoop in, try to make it better, when the oldest, Tucker, says, “Hey, do you guys want to play Monopoly? I think Grandma has a game in the other room.”

“Okay.”

They all troop out, Sammy swept up in the group. She has a look on her face that Clara recognizes. The thinnest veneer of pride. She has cousins now.

Robin is rummaging through the refrigerator. From behind, in her low-slung jeans and cashmere sweater, she looks like she could be sixteen.

“So what’s going on with Ruth?” she asks.

“She woke up once,” Clara says. “She was in a lot of pain. I gave her more morphine.”

“Did you talk to her about the help situation?”

“She wasn’t in any shape to discuss it.”

Robin turns to the Chinese food. She places the white paper cartons on the kitchen counter, lining them up according to size. Clara can see a small vein in her temple throbbing.

“We should have ordered from Shun Lee,” Robin says.

“It doesn’t matter,” Clara says.

“Of course, it doesn’t matter. I’m just saying.”

The kids voices rise and fall; Clara strains to hear Sammy. They’re in the living room. It seems that Clara and Robin’s old Monopoly board, amazingly still intact, is the great equalizer. The language of Boardwalk and Park Place, Short Line Railroad and Jail—
No, I want to be the banker!
—sliding them easily past any awkwardness.

“Can I get you a drink?” Clara hears Ed ask Jonathan, as if Ruth’s apartment is his own. They’re with the kids in the living room, next to the liquor cabinet, which probably hasn’t been opened in years.

“Excellent idea.” Jonathan’s voice, sounding forcefully cheerful. The bonhomie of men with nothing in common—just like the children—looking for a way to connect. Snatches of conversation drift into the kitchen, where Clara and Robin are setting out the plates and silverware, buffet-style.
Are you a bourbon man? She has some Knob Creek in here.
Clara expects they’ll be talking about sports next.

“Robin.” Clara takes advantage of a moment alone with her sister. “We need to make some sort of schedule.”

“Aren’t we using chopsticks?”

“There aren’t enough.”

“Be sure to put out a plate for Peony,” Robin says.

“Of course,” says Clara. Peony’s entrenchment has gone a step further, from glorified assistant to member of the family.

Did Robin not hear her?

“A schedule,” Clara says again.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, maybe switching off nights staying with Mom—”

“Not possible.”

“What do you mean?”

Robin crosses her arms, as if prepared to make a closing statement.

“I have three children. And an incredibly demanding job.”

“I didn’t realize this was a contest,” Clara says. She tries to keep her voice mild, her face expressionless.

“Believe me, I’m not competing with you, Clara. I’m just stating the facts.”

Despite the best efforts of cosmetic dermatology, small areas of Robin’s face show signs of stress: the ever-present throbbing in her temple, a small, almost imperceptible twitch below her left eye.

“So you expect me to stay here every night with Sam and Jonathan?”

“I don’t expect anything. I’m just telling you what my limits are.”

“Then we need to find somebody,” Clara says. “I’m not going to be able to—” Her voice cracks. “I mean, there’s no way I can handle it.”

There, she’s said it.

“No way,” she repeats, for emphasis.

“I can help.” Peony appears—as she always seems to—out of nowhere. She has floated into the kitchen on her little cat feet.

“No!” Clara blurts out. “I mean, it’s not your job.”

“I don’t mind.”

“That’s very kind of you, Peony,” says Robin. “But it’s not appropriate. Clara’s right. We need to get the agency to send someone.”

“Mom’s not going to stand for it,” says Clara.

“She’s not going to have a choice,” says Robin. She rolls her neck from side to side, trying to release tension. “Anyway, pretty soon it won’t matter. She won’t know the difference.”

“That’s true.” Clara pauses. “How long before that happens, do you think?”

“How can you talk about her like that?” Peony’s cheeks have turned bright red, the first time Clara has seen her betray any emotion whatsoever.

“Excuse me?” Robin turns to her.

“How can you talk about Ruth like she’s just some…I don’t know…some piece of garbage?”

Robin and Clara stand shoulder to shoulder. Clara can feel a force field of heat around her sister’s body.

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that,” Robin says.

“No, hold on a minute,” says Peony. “Do you both realize what an amazing—I mean, she’s a role model for a whole generation of—”

“A role model,” Clara repeats.

“Yes.” Peony seems to have grown two inches taller. She squares her shoulders, buoyed by the full force of her self-righteous indignation.

“She was—she is—our mother,” says Robin. She’s speaking very softly now, as if to a young child.

“That’s what I’m saying!” Peony cries out. “How can you not understand how lucky you are?”

T
HE
K
UBOVY
W
EISS
G
ALLERY
—in the dead center of the 1980s—was on the Rolodex of every Wall Street investment banker and bond salesman looking for a creative way to spend whatever was left over of his year-end bonus after buying the Porsche and the house in the Hamptons. Clara sometimes wondered what would have happened to Ruth’s career if she had been working in a different place and time: Nebraska, say, in the 1950s, or Paris at the turn of the century. Would the strange, explosive confluence of subject matter, art form, and marketplace have come together some other way to turn Ruth into a star?

No, of course not, and a silly game to play, though still she plays it:
What if?

What if there hadn’t been so much money floating around New York just as Ruth was immersed in the Clara Series?

What if Kubovy hadn’t known exactly how to stoke the egos of young bankers: accompanying them to auctions, commending them on their good taste, inviting them to candlelit dinners at his SoHo loft that were then written up in
Vanity Fair
?

And what if—speaking of
Vanity Fair
—Ruth hadn’t been quite so beautiful, quite so alluringly photogenic herself?

If it is possible to pick a moment, a single moment when the balance tipped forever in the life and career of Ruth Dunne—another useless exercise—it might very well be the long-anticipated opening of Ruth’s new work at Kubovy Weiss.

It’s a sultry night in early summer. Town cars and limos are lined up outside of Kubovy’s new space—he has moved a few blocks north to a huge loftlike gallery on West Broadway between Prince and Spring—and there are photographers, paparazzi types, lurking outside the glass doors, waiting to see who’ll show up. Rumor has it that Ruth Dunne has become a bit of a Hollywood darling, collected by studio heads and actors. Dennis Hopper owns at least three Dunnes, and Angelica Huston recently bought
Clara with the Lizard
at auction.

Kubovy, of course, has milked Ruth’s year of vanishing for all it’s worth. Ruth’s newest photographs in the Clara Series have come, according to the press materials,

out of a deepening sense of the fragility of motherhood. Witness the centerpiece of this series,
Clara in the Shroud.
The photograph—technically masterful—has an ominous, otherworldly glow, and the child is presumed to be dead. Is this a parental nightmare? A terrible fantasy? We are left to ponder multiple layers of meaning which have grown exponentially during Dunne’s time of pulling back and reflection.