Black & White (34 page)

The hysterical Peony.

“She’s not in pain,” Rochelle says. She assesses the situation in Ruth’s bedroom, then says to Peony, “Come. Come with me.”

“But—”

“We need to leave these good folks alone,” says Rochelle.

“Sam, go with Rochelle,” Clara says.

“Mom? Dad?”

“Come, Sam.”

Rochelle quickly takes Sammy by the hand and leads both her and Peony out of the room. Clara can hear them as they move down the hall.
Where are we going?

“Am I doing the right thing?” Clara turns to Jonathan. “Should Sammy be with—”

“There is no right thing,” Jonathan says quietly.

“I don’t think Sam should—”

“Then that’s your answer.”

The choking sound worsens. There’s no break in it now, no pause between gulps of breath. Just that endless rattle, like nothing Clara has ever heard.

“I’m here.” Robin bursts into the room: breathless, sweaty, her blouse hanging from the waistband of her skirt. “The traffic—I ran all the way from the Sixty-fifth Street transverse.”

She walks to the foot of Ruth’s bed and looks down at her.

“Oh,” she says.

“Come here.” Clara turns to her.

Without another word, Robin kneels next to Clara on the floor. They hold hands the way they haven’t since they used to cross the street together as little girls.
Quickly! The light is turning red!
They feel the warmth of each other’s bodies as they watch their mother fight for air. Jonathan stands behind them, just outside this small closed circle of Dunne women.

“I don’t know what to say, Clara,” Robin whispers.

“Say goodbye,” Clara says softly.

She wonders if her mother can hear her. There is no movement behind her eyes, no crease between her brows. The choking stops.

“Goodbye,” Clara says, again and again.

Chapter Eleven

“I
T’S BEEN TAKEN CARE OF,”
says Kubovy.

He paces the living room near the windows overlooking Broadway. He has not stopped moving since he walked through the door an hour ago: raking his fingers through his hair, folding and unfolding his arms, shrugging his shoulders. If he were to be still for a moment, he might fall apart. He pulls a pack of clove cigarettes out of his jacket pocket.

“Do you mind?” he asks.

“Yes,” Robin snaps. “Our mother just died of lung cancer, for God’s sake.”

“These don’t cause cancer,” he says.

“What do you mean, it’s been taken care of?” Clara asks. Can they just stay on one subject?

“My dear,” says Kubovy, “I called the
Times
months ago.”

“How—”

“We want a proper obituary. They like to have a heads-up whenever possible. And the best news, really, is that Roberta Smith wrote it—”

“You called the paper in advance?” Clara asks. Everything is coming slowly to her, as if through a scrim. An obituary has been sitting in some drawer at
The New York Times,
just waiting for Ruth to die?

“What’s an obituary?” asks Sammy. She’s curled up next to Clara on the sofa. She’s said very little since Robin, Clara, and Jonathan emerged from Ruth’s bedroom. Since the emergency medical technicians came and carried Ruth out in a zippered plastic body bag.
Where are they taking her, Mom?
Clara wanted to cover Sammy’s eyes with her hands. A nine-year-old shouldn’t be this close to death. A nine-year-old shouldn’t hear the squawk of emergency radios or see the impassive faces of the men who do this for a living.
To the funeral home, darling.

“It’s sort of a short biography,” Clara says.

“Only very important people get written about in the
Times
when they die,” adds Jonathan.

There it is, the fame thing again. Why does he do this? Frustration and incomprehension rise like a wave inside her, but just then Jonathan’s earlier words come floating back. Clara feels them with the force of a revelation:
The worst thing you can do is keep her from knowing you—really knowing you.
And Clara is—no matter how hard she has tried not to be—the famously photographed daughter of a famous mother. Of a famous dead mother. Her mother is dead.

“That’s true,” she says softly. “Kubovy, do you know if they’re running a picture?”

“I would imagine,” says Kubovy.

“Which one?”

“We have no control over that.”

“She would want a good picture.”

“We’ll see tomorrow,” he says. “It may even make that little box at the bottom of the front page—depending on who else died today.”

“Frank Campbell’s?” Robin asks, holding her cell phone. “Have we agreed on Frank Campbell’s?”

“It’s the only place that makes sense,” says Clara.

“But Dad’s funeral was at Riverside. Don’t you think their funerals should be at the same place?”

“Dad was Jewish.”

“It just seems weird, that’s all.”

Clara feels as if she’s floating. None of this seems real. It’s as if they’re all actors in a stage play, reciting the lines they’ve rehearsed. She gets up off the sofa, goes over to the windows, and cranks them open. The smells in the apartment are suddenly unbearable. The dizzying mixture of disinfectant, peroxide, plastic, metal, and the vaguest hint—perhaps she is imagining it—of decaying flesh.

Below, an ambulance screams by, siren wailing.

Kubovy stands by an open window now, lighting up.

“I thought I asked you not to—” Robin starts, then stops. She closes her eyes for a moment, then shakes her head. A small smile crosses her lips. Clara knows what’s going through her sister’s mind: Who the fuck cares, really, at a time like this?

“So what else needs to be done right now?” asks Jonathan. He moves behind Clara and hugs her. She very nearly collapses into him.

They all want to
do something.
Anything but stand around here and stare at one another. If they just keep busy with their checklists and phone calls—Robin has already contacted the rental agency to pick up the hospital bed and wheelchair—then they won’t have to think. Much less feel.

“I hope she wasn’t in pain at the end. I hope she didn’t know what was happening.”

Peony—who can always be counted on to go straight into the black heart of the matter—has walked out of the kitchen, where she made herself a cup of tea. She blows into it, steam rising around her face.

“I can’t believe I wasn’t there,” says Sammy from the sofa. She says it with a childish naïveté, as if talking about missing the good part of a movie.

Kubovy clears his throat. “There is much to discuss,” he says. “The eulogies—we must call Matthew, and James Danziger, and the galleries in Europe—”

“We’re not going to have that kind of funeral, Kubovy.” Robin’s voice is firm.

“What do you mean?” Kubovy blows a thin stream of smoke out the window. “But we must—”

“We’ll have a memorial service later on,” says Clara. She and Robin have discussed this and are in complete agreement. There will be no line of black town cars blocking traffic on Madison Avenue. No chic art-world crowd who barely knew Ruth using the funeral as a see-and-be-seen occasion. No air-kissing in the aisles.

“Your mother would have wanted—”

“Our mother isn’t here,” Robin says.

“Didn’t you discuss—”

“She never wanted to talk about it,” Clara says.

“She didn’t think she was going to die,” says Robin.

“Ah,” says Kubovy. He leans out the window and stubs out his cigarette on the newly pointed brick. “That’s where you’re wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ruth discussed matters with me at great length,” says Kubovy.

“Listen,” Robin snaps, “we’re not having a circus of a funeral, and that’s that!”

Kubovy blinks at her slowly, like a sleepy reptile.

“I wasn’t talking about the funeral, my dear.” He crosses the room and sinks into the wing chair by the fireplace, finally exhausted. “I was talking about the way your mother left things.”

“Her will? She’s been dead for two hours, Kubovy,” Clara says. “Could we please just—”

“What?” Robin interrupts. All attorney. “What were you going to say?”

Kubovy colors slightly as he looks around the room at all of them—Peony, Jonathan, Robin, Clara, Sam—as if it has just occurred to him that perhaps this isn’t the moment to start talking business.

“Never mind,” he says. “We have plenty of time.”

“No, Kubovy. You can’t just come out with something like that and then drop it.”

“Robin,” Clara says. “Robin, let’s not—”

“I want to know,” Robin says. She stares at Kubovy, her chin quivering. “How badly did she screw us?”

“Robin! Not in front of—”

Kubovy shakes his head sadly, as if he’s observing this from a great distance and feels sorry for the whole lot of them.

“With all due respect, you have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says.

“Then tell us.”

Clara feels a queasy embarrassment on Robin’s behalf. Why is she fixating on this? Why now, when their mother’s body isn’t even in the ground?

“We will make an appointment to talk about it,” Kubovy says. “After the funeral.”

T
HERE WAS A
BEFORE
, though she hardly remembers it: before
Clara with the Lizard,
before every breeze sounded like a whisper, before a strange harsh light descended upon the Dunne family, capturing them forever in its glare.

An autumn weekend in Hillsdale. Clara is not quite three. Weekends are distinguished from the other days of the week, in her preschooler’s mind, by the fact that both parents are home from work. Nathan is not at the office until midnight, trying to make partner. Ruth is not racing out the door, her canvas tote bag heavy with equipment and books, late to catch the train to her teaching job at Bard. For these two short days, Clara and Robin have their parents all to themselves.

But not today. Today, Clara is playing with her Legos—was she building a birdhouse?—when she hears her father say something about company coming over.

“Oh, no, Nate!” her mother says. “Please, not another one of these goddamn business lunches.”

A quick shared glance at Clara, playing there.
Whoops.
They’re not that kind of parents, the kind who curse in front of their children. Except Clara is so young. Clara doesn’t say much, and certainly any small household tensions are bound to go over her head. Ruth and Nathan are both in their twenties, practically still kids themselves. They can be forgiven for not understanding that Clara absorbs every word.

“It’s not like that, Ruth.”

Ruth’s hands are busy. She has taken to baking on the weekends—pastries, breads, cookies, pies—and right now her palms are covered with flour as she kneads a piece of dough. She lets out a huge sigh. Clara doesn’t know how her mother can have that much air inside of her.

“You don’t get it. You just don’t get it. I have nothing in common with these people.”