Black & White (2 page)

It took her four days to decide to come to New York. She went about her daily routine in Southwest Harbor—driving Sam to school in the morning, taking Zorba for long walks along the waterfront, doing Jonathan’s invoices at his shop—but all the while, accompanying every step she took was a thrumming, ceaseless refrain:
she’s sick, she’s sick, she’s sick.
Somehow, with a stubborn, self-protective naïveté, Clara never imagined that Ruth would ever fall ill. What
had
she thought? Certainly, that her mother would live well into her nineties, in perfect mental and physical health. By the time Ruth was failing, Clara would be an old woman herself, in her seventies. Maybe, by then, she’d be able to face Ruth without the fear of crumbling—the fear that the stuff she was made of was simply not strong enough. That her life, this life she’s built for herself, would disappear—
poof
—and only she and Ruth would be left. Mother and daughter, just the way it had always been.

She’s sick, she’s sick, she’s sick.
Clara awoke on the fifth morning and began calling the mothers of Sam’s classmates to arrange for Sam to be picked up at school and delivered to ballet, swim practice, jujitsu. She prepared a grocery list for Jonathan as if she were planning to be gone for weeks. All the way to the Bangor airport, she told herself that she could change her mind. Even on the flight to New York, she was unsure. Her feet have carried her here. Her heart is numb—except for the occasional skipped beat, hard against her chest wall, letting her know how terrified she is.

She stops in front of the Apthorp. The building takes up the entire block between Broadway and West End. She hesitates for a single second. If someone is watching her from a window up on the twelfth floor, they will not notice the faltering. She walks through the high arched gates leading to the center courtyard. A nanny sits by the empty fountain, taking advantage of the last moments of daylight with her charges: a boy and a girl. The boy looks to be five or so, and the girl, Clara thinks, is nine—the same age as Sam. This one is much more of a city kid, though, with long straight hair and a lime-green down vest that Sam would probably kill for.

Clara has not so much as brought a single photograph of her daughter. She thought of it as she was leaving home this morning. As the taxi honked outside, she removed the picture of Sam she carried in her wallet: Samantha’s third-grade class photo, grinning against a sky-blue backdrop, her long hair shiny and braided. Clara slipped the photo into the kitchen drawer, under the phone book, where it would stay safe until her return. She might otherwise have been tempted. In normal circumstances—in some other family—it would have been the most natural thing in the world.

The doorman in the booth, a young guy, doesn’t recognize Clara. Why would he? He’s new. He was probably still in grade school the last time she set foot in this courtyard.

“Can I help you?” All business, with a slight professional hint of suspicion. Clara doesn’t look like she grew up in this building. Maybe she doesn’t even look like someone who might be visiting. She stuffs her hands into the pockets of her old down jacket, wishing, for a moment, that she had worn a nicer coat.

“I’m here to see Ruth Dunne.”

“Who may I say is calling?”

Her daughter.

“Clara,” she says softly.

He picks up the intercom phone—also new—and punches in a few numbers. She could still get out of here. She could take a taxi back to LaGuardia and wait for the next flight home.

“There’s a Clara here to see Ms. Dunne,” the doorman says into the receiver. She wonders who he’s talking to. It occurs to her that Robin could be there. No. It isn’t likely. Clara had left Robin a message at her office, letting her know she was coming. Robin would stay far, far away from this particular mother-daughter reunion. She would treat it like a toxic event. Besides, it’s a workday.

“You can go up,” the doorman tells her, gesturing to the set of elevators in the northeast corner of the building, as if Clara doesn’t already know, as if her feet aren’t already leading her there like a sleepwalker.

“Twelve A,” he calls after her.

The elevator. When she and Robin were children, the elevator was still run by an ancient pneumatic system, water pushed through pipes, and to travel to the top, from the first floor to the twelfth, literally took minutes. Sometimes several minutes, with stops. A small bench had been built into the ornate wooden car. She used to sit there, listening to the sound of rushing water, her mind pleasantly blank, empty of all thought, as she often felt when arriving or leaving home.

Now, she barely has time to remember this. The elevator doors close efficiently, with a modern
ding,
and she is pulled quickly up, up, up. Hardly any time at all to remember her mother’s voice, that surprisingly whispery little-girl’s voice, saying,
I could read all of
Magic Mountain
in this elevator.
Once, when she was in high school, Clara actually tried. She carried a paperback in her book bag, whipped it out during every ride. She got to the part where Hans Castorp meets Herr Settembrini and gave up. It was easier just to float along, watching as one floor number slowly gave way to the next.

The door slides open on 12. She can still turn around. She can press the lobby button and head back down. Past the doorman, who would call
Miss? Miss, did you find everything okay?,
and out the gates. Gulp the air outside, filling her lungs. She should have brought Jonathan with her, for moral support. But she couldn’t. Jonathan, here? It was an impossible thought.

Keep on marching. Out of the elevator and down the hall, the wide hall with just a few doors on each side. Many of these apartments have been combined over the years to accommodate growing families, or maybe just growing bank accounts. The walls are freshly painted, pale and glossy, the color of milk. The grungy carpet that Clara remembers is gone, long gone, replaced by something dark gray and forgiving.

She can hardly breathe.
You need to come home.
And here she is. Clara no longer uses her maiden name, hasn’t since she married Jonathan. Clara Dunne no longer exists, at least not as a living, breathing person. Clara Dunne is only a flat black-and-white series of images, frozen in time: a toddler, a little nymph, a prepubescent creature, a teenager—hanging on the walls of museums and galleries, sold at auction to the highest bidder. She shakes her head hard. Not those thoughts. Not now.

She presses the buzzer on the side of the last door in the corridor. The sound is the same: a shrill high-pitched ring that could wake the dead. No chimes for Ruth. No melodious chords announcing visitors. Clara has been gone nearly half her life. She has truly believed that a moment like this would never come. Her past has fallen away. She has scrubbed and scoured, rubbed herself raw, until nothing of her history remains.

She flexes her fingers as she stands, waiting. Clenches her jaw, then releases it. If only she had a mantra, something she could repeat to herself right now, over and over and over, a calming phrase to hold on to if all else fails. She sees herself, convex in the mirrored peephole of the apartment door. She looks gnomic. A circus version of herself.

A rustling on the other side, and then the door is opened by a girl of eighteen or so. She’s tall and reed-thin, wearing faded ripped-up blue jeans, a black tank top, black boots that look like they must weigh five pounds each. Two long dark-brown braids snake down her shoulders. Possibly an intern from ICP. Or maybe a very lucky Pratt student.

The girl cocks her head to one side.

“Clara,” she says. “Robin said you might be coming.”

Clara steps into the foyer, which is exactly as she remembers it: the pile of mail, the stacks of magazines.
The New Yorker, Harper’s, People, The New York Review of Books, Vogue, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek,
the odd
National Enquirer
—her mother subscribed to every newspaper and magazine, from the highbrow to the low. It looks possible that not a single magazine has been thrown out since Clara left. They are piled waist-high on the console table and on the floor, teetering, threatening to fall over.

Above the console, the same Irving Penn nude, a woman curled around herself, her pale expanse of belly exposed, a single mole dotting her fleshy hip. It had been a gift from Penn, given to Ruth on the occasion of her first gallery show. There was hardly a great photographer who had not made a gift of his or her work to Ruth Dunne at some point over the years. Without even looking, Clara knows the rest of the photographs hung in the public areas of the apartment: the Cindy Sherman self-portrait, the Berenice Abbott nightscape of Manhattan, the series of Sebastião Salgado images of war.

Where the hell is Ruth?

The girl with the braids is still standing there like some sort of sentry. A last shaft of dusty light from a west-facing window slices across her body. There is something in the steadiness of her gaze, her self-possession, that is making Clara even more uncomfortable than she already is.

“My mother—” she says quietly, more a statement than a question. She is angry, she realizes.

“She’s resting,” the girl says, looking at Clara curiously.

Clara has no idea what this means.
Resting.
Ruth never rested. She slept four, maybe five hours a night, tops. Clara remembers wandering into the kitchen once—it must have been three in the morning—looking for her mother. And there was Ruth, slumped over the kitchen table, her head resting on her folded arms. The only light in the room was the glow cast from the city outside the window.
What are you doing? Why are you sleeping here?
she asked her mother. The look in Ruth’s eye when she raised her head—it was as if she were staring straight through Clara, as if she were seeing someone else entirely.

“Is she in the studio?” she asks the girl.

“No. Her room.”

Why is the girl here? She’s acting like she knows things—important things. Ruth has always done this with all her little acolytes, these willing servants who think that somehow to be in the same room as greatness means they’ll absorb it.

“Listen, I—” the girl starts.

“What’s your name?” Clara interrupts.

“Peony.”

Peony. Of course. It couldn’t be a normal name.

“I guess you haven’t seen your mother in a while,” says Peony.

“You could say that.”

The girl keeps staring at Clara while pretending not to stare—another trait endemic to New Yorkers that Clara has forgotten over the years.

“I wouldn’t recognize you,” the girl finally says. “I mean, from the photographs.”

Clara feels this like a physical shock. Like someone has come up behind her, grabbed her around the waist, clamped a hand over her mouth. She waves a hand in the air, quickly trying to make the whole thing go away.
Not that. Anything but that.
The flood of images—she closes her eyes for a moment, a trick she learned a long time ago, and shuts them out.

“I’m going to see my mother now,” she says. Her voice is thick. She doesn’t sound like herself. She
isn’t
herself, here in this apartment.

Peony nods. As Clara starts down the hall to Ruth’s bedroom, she can feel Peony’s eyes on her back, watching her.

Clara knocks softly. Is Ruth sleeping? For so many years, she tried to turn the doorknob without a sound, little feet padding across the hardwood floor.
Quiet as a mouse,
Ruth would laugh in the morning, opening her dark eyes to find Clara curled into a ball, tucked against her.

“Wait a minute,” Ruth calls from the other side of the heavy door. Fourteen years, and these are her mother’s first words. Clara stands still. She is surrounded by all the ghosts of her former selves that have ever occupied this space. The toddler dragging a red crayon down the length of the freshly painted hallway molding; the first-grader racing around the apartment, desperate to find her mother; the teenager sneaking in, avoiding the floorboards that creaked on her way to her own room. She tests her memory now, pressing one foot down on a slightly warped piece of the parquet. It groans, a low, almost animal sound, just like it always did.

“Come in,” she hears Ruth say.

Clara’s stomach lurches. The last thing she ate was a protein bar at the airport. Her intestines squeeze and rumble in protest against the combination of too much anxiety and too little sustenance. She imagines herself perched on the edge of a high craggy cliff, like a diver she once saw in Portugal when she was a kid. Arms raised high, back arched, and then that moment—it looked to her like faith—of slicing purposefully, cleanly through the air. She pushes the door open.

Ruth is sitting in a wheelchair by the window. No lights have been turned on, not even a bedside lamp. In the fading purple-gray dusk she is in shadows.

“Hi, Mom,” Clara says. The word slips from her mouth, a lozenge, leaving behind the distinct taste of a young and bitter fruit.

“You’re here,” Ruth says. Even bundled into black sweatpants and a thick fleece sweatshirt, she is all bones. Her face, angular to begin with, looks sharply etched, like a pencil drawing. A brightly colored scarf is tied around her small head like a turban.

Clara’s eyes sting. She looks around the room at the medical paraphernalia: the dull aluminum gleam of a walker, an ivory-tipped cane propped against the wall, a portable commode on the floor near the bathroom. Orange plastic prescription bottles litter the bedside table. Robin was right. Clara couldn’t believe it until she saw it with her own eyes. Ruth is very sick. Ruth is—