Black & White (21 page)

Okay, sweetheart. Just this once. I’ll sit right here on these steps.

Ruth showed her how to turn the lens to bring everything into crisp focus.

Be careful!

Clara looked through the lens at her beautiful young mother, sitting in her frayed jeans and tank top on the splintery steps of their country house. Ruth’s hair hung in a long braid over one shoulder and she was completely unadorned, not a ring, not a bobby pin. Just plain Ruth. Clara pressed her finger on the button and heard the shutter click, just as Ruth had done thousands of times.
Click. Click. Click.

Okay, that’s enough.

Ruth, laughing. An anxious, trilling sound.

Just a few more, Mommy?

No, Clara.

Please?

No!

A sharp, almost frightened note entered her mother’s voice.

That’s quite enough.

“Here’s your grandmother.” Clara hands Sammy the photograph, which is curled around the edges. The only one of its kind. Probably worth a fortune: the camera turned, for once, on Ruth Dunne. Sam holds it gingerly, as if it might disintegrate, and stares for a good long minute at the image of her grandmother. The lean legs in the faded jeans, the skinny arms, the high cheekbones and huge eyes. Clara’s waiting. She knows what Sam is going to say.

“She looks exactly like you, Mommy.” Sammy puts the photo back in the box and smiles, her first real smile in many days. “She looks exactly like both of us.”

Clara reaches for Sammy and wraps her in her arms. Rocks her the way she hasn’t since she was a little girl. Back and forth, a silent lullaby. Tears are streaming down Clara’s face. Seeing this—her daughter looking at the photograph of her mother, her daughter and mother together at least in this way—has unleashed something she doesn’t understand.
Please don’t be dead.
There is only one reason. Only one thing left to do.

“Sammy?” She holds Sam’s small chin, turns it so her child is looking right at her. “Sammy, do you want to go to New York?”

Chapter Seven

O
N
C
LARA’S SECOND DAY
of fourth grade, she gets off the bus a few steps after Robin, who dashes into school without waiting for her. Robin’s been doing this more and more lately—making sure there’s distance between herself and Clara, making absolutely certain that everyone knows her mother doesn’t take pictures of
her.
The woman who approaches Clara as she gets off the school bus has a round sweet face and short gray hair. Clara’s always been told not to talk to strangers, but this woman looks like she might be someone she knows.

“Clara?” The woman smiles. She’s holding a book bag from the Metropolitan Museum, and she has a couple of pens tucked into the breast pocket of her shirt. “Can I speak with you for a moment?”

The controlled chaos of drop-off at Brearley. The small yellow school buses from the West Side and downtown, idling curbside. The Upper East Side moms who have walked the few blocks to school with their girls, now standing in clusters. The girls themselves, their long shiny hair pulled neatly back in headbands and ponytails. Clara’s friends from the bus scatter. The first bell is in five minutes. She clutches her favorite notebook to her chest—spiral-bound, covered with decals of flowers, her name written in the top right-hand corner:
Clara Dunne, Fourth Grade.

“I was wondering,” the gray-haired woman begins, “if I could just ask you a couple of—”

“I have to go,” says Clara. She feels suddenly scared—not scared like the woman is going to hurt her or try to kidnap her or anything. Scared like she just wants to get away before another word escapes the woman’s sweetly smiling lips.

“Wow, your mom’s pictures are causing lots of excitement, aren’t they?” the woman continues, trying a different tack.

“What are you talking about?” Clara asks. She inches her body away from the woman, moving toward the school’s entrance. “Who are you?”

“Beth Klinger,” she says. She digs into her shirt pocket and hands Clara a business card.
NEW YORK POST
is printed in big bold type above her name. “We’re doing a story on what happened at the gallery yesterday—”

Blood pounds in Clara’s ears. What happened at the gallery? Why is this woman at her school? Why does she want to talk to her? She takes a few steps back—she isn’t sure what to do—and bangs right into one of the mothers of a girl in the next grade up.

“Clara! Are you all right?”

Clara is afraid if she speaks she’ll start to cry. She hands the mother the business card, all crumpled from her fist. The mother scans it, then quickly looks up at the gray-haired woman, who is still standing at the curb.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” The mother says loudly. Clara doesn’t understand what’s going on. The noise in her head is deafening. She holds her notebook even closer, as if it might shield her.

“She’s just a little girl!” The mother moves toward the woman. “Get out of here—before I call the police!”

The police? Clara lets out a small whimper. Everyone is looking at her. And everyone seems to know something she doesn’t know. She’s about to miss the first bell.

“Come on, honey.” The mother leads Clara into school, glancing backward to make sure the reporter isn’t following them inside.

That afternoon, the phone calls don’t let up. The headmistress calls Ruth. Ruth calls Nate. Nate has one of the partners in his law firm make a threatening call to the
New York Post.
Ruth calls Kubovy. Kubovy calls the
Daily News
—without telling Ruth, of course—and places a blind item about the questionable reporting practices of a certain rival newspaper. The Brearley mother calls a half dozen of her Brearley mother friends.
Bound to happen.
The murmurs swell.
Lovely child. Who knows what’s going to become of her?
The eighth-graders talk to the seventh-graders, who tell the sixth-graders, and so on down the line.

“So I heard someone threw a bucket of paint on your mother’s pictures of you,” one of Clara’s friends says at recess, “and wrote some bad words and stuff.”

Was that it, what the gray-haired lady had been talking about? Clara looks around the playground for Robin and spots her on the far side, with her back turned. She’s talking to some older girls. Is Robin avoiding her?

“That didn’t happen,” Clara says. She reaches her arms up and grabs the monkey bars. She wants to kick her friend. She feels, all of a sudden, like someone has just thrown paint all over
her.
Black, cold, dripping down her face, suffocating her. The playground hangs over the East River, separated only by a wire mesh fence. Clara wants to climb up and over the fence—to dive into the polluted water and let the current carry her away.

“Oh yes it did,” another friend chimes in. “My mother told me. It’s in the newspaper.”

At the three-o’clock bell, the girls of Brearley depart for their various after-school activities. The West Siders and downtowners board their yellow buses once again; the nannies or mothers—sometimes the nannies
and
mothers—pick up the young ones and take them to piano lessons, golf lessons, aikido, karate, jujitsu. The limos and town cars arrive, and drivers hold doors open for girls who scramble inside, disappearing behind dark tinted windows.

And Clara—she is supposed to be getting on the school bus, as she does every day. She should be climbing the three steep steps and moving to her usual spot in the back, her knapsack bumping against the sides of the seats. But she can’t face the bus, not today. She looks up at the windows, the faces of her classmates looking down at her. If she gets on the bus, she’ll be trapped with their questions—questions she can’t answer. Instead, she waits until she’s pretty sure no one is looking and slips away, walking down the street just behind a small group of mothers and some first-grade children she doesn’t know.
Do you want to get some ice cream, Molly? Taylor, do you want to come with us?
The mothers have long burnished hair and are carrying identical purses—the size of doctor’s bags, fastened with small gold locks.

When they reach Second Avenue, Clara peels off. No one looks twice at a fourth-grade girl in a Brearley uniform walking down the avenue. Some parents let their kids walk home alone, though usually in groups. Clara knows where she’s going: the newsstand on the corner of 81st and Second. Inside, past the gum and Life Savers, the Tic Tacs and candy buttons, there is a long wall of every kind of magazine. And under the magazines, piled on the floor, the newspapers.

She picks up the
New York Times
and begins to leaf through, newsprint already smudging her sweaty hands. Which section would it be in? Certainly not the front. Metro? The Arts? She can’t find it, and the guy behind the counter—the one with the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth—is watching her. She almost loses her nerve, then spots it—in the upper right-hand corner of the front page of the
New York Post:
F
OTO
F
RENZY
! And then, in smaller type:
FAMOUS FOTOG GETS BLASTED FOR KIDDIE PORN.
Porn. Clara doesn’t know what the word means, but it sounds ugly to her. Like something spit out—a curse.

“You look, you buy,” says the dangling-cigarette man.

Clara digs all the way to the bottom of her knapsack and finds a quarter and a dime. She can’t bring herself to look at the man, who seems to be leering at her, like he knows some joke she doesn’t. She walks out of the newsstand and heads west. She’s never done anything like this before; she’s going to be in big trouble. Robin must be wondering what happened to her. She crosses Third Avenue, then Lexington, Park, Madison. The
Post
is folded and tucked into her knapsack, between her notebook and her American history homework. She’s waiting for a place where she can sit quietly and read the newspaper; she really needs to focus. Nobody’s going to tell her what’s going on—she knows that much. She’s on her own.

Three-thirty in Central Park. She feels suddenly small. Too small to be here in this vastness alone. She isn’t supposed to be in the park by herself, but what’s one more broken rule? A Rollerblader balancing a boom box on his shoulder whizzes past her—too close. Packs of moms speed-walk toward Fifth Avenue, pushing the baby joggers that have become all the rage. Somewhere, someone is playing a trumpet.

Clara locates a bench out in the open and sits down next to an elderly couple feeding the pigeons out of a brown paper bag. She pulls the
Post
from her knapsack and opens it to page four. The paper rustles in the warm breeze, part of it almost flying away. She straightens it out. She’s afraid to look—but she does. She looks. And there she is, staring back at herself. A gray, grainy newsprint version of
Clara, Hanging,
Ruth’s most recent work. Her own arms reaching up, muscles straining. Her legs flopping as she dangles from a thick rope swing—except, wait a minute. A black strip, the size of a piece of tape, blocks out her private parts. And another bisects her flat childlike chest. Her chest! She rubs at the paper. Maybe something is stuck to the page? Slowly—everything is a little blurry, hard to read—she makes out the beginning of the article below the picture:

Is it art? Or child abuse? These are the questions dogging famous lenswoman Ruth Dunne. Last night, at the trendy Kubovy Weiss Gallery, a group of women calling themselves Clara’s Angels took matters into their own hands, splattering several quarts of paint over Dunne’s latest artwork—if you can call it that, which Clara’s anonymous angels sure don’t. Clara, Dunne’s daughter—

Clara closes her eyes, tries to go inside of herself. She doesn’t understand everything, but she knows enough to be frightened.
Angels.
She doesn’t want angels. She doesn’t want to be someone who needs angels, strangers who think they can help her.

“Young lady?”

She looks around, startled. The old man on the bench is watching her with the unbridled curiosity endemic to either the very young or the very old.