Black & White (37 page)

“She wanted to do right by you, my dear,” he says.

The plane back to Bangor rumbles down the runway. Clara—sitting in the middle seat—holds Sammy’s hand, counting the seconds until takeoff:
five, four, three, two…
They rise quickly above the runway’s wavery heat. Home. They’re going home. Clara leans her head against Jonathan’s shoulder, finding the spot just above his collarbone where she can rest and think about normal things: How they’ll pick up Zorba from the kennel. How the roses will be in bloom—that is, if they’ve survived the weeks of neglect. How their house, in all its creaky paint-chipped comfort, will be waiting for them just the way they left it. Jonathan’s pajama bottoms still on the bedroom floor. Dirty coffee cups on the kitchen counter.

Sammy extricates her hand from Clara’s.

“You doing okay, sweetie?”

Sammy nods.

“Anything you want to talk about?”

She shakes her head.

Clara pushes through the silence.

“Do you miss Grandma?”

Sammy’s quiet for a minute.

“I don’t exactly miss her,” she says. “Mostly I feel—lucky.”

“Lucky?” It’s the last word Clara was expecting.

“Yeah. That I got to know her.”

Jonathan’s listening to this exchange. Clara wishes she could turn to him and say
Don’t be thinking what you’re thinking. I get it. I know that it isn’t over. The waves will come—one crashing after the next and next.
But instead, she says, “Me too.”

“Me too, you miss her?” Sammy asks.

A pause. “Me too, I’m glad you got to know her.”

Clara orders a glass of airplane wine, trying to switch gears. City to country. Past to present. It feels like they’ve been gone for a long, long time. Everything is different now. Ruth—no longer in the world. Secrets—no longer necessary. Money—for the first time in their marriage, she and Jonathan will be without the constant weight of financial worry.
How are we going to pay the bills this month? Much less save for Sammy’s college fund?
All that—gone. Gone forever.

“Things are so…” She trails off.

“What?” Jonathan prompts her.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Strange.”

“Which part do you mean?”

“Ruth being gone,” she says, surprising herself. Hasn’t her mother been gone—as far as Clara has been concerned—for all these years? But no, she can sense it now. Some important piece of her, a vital organ, has always been shut down. She had never experienced its absence, but now, the rush of feeling, the absolute
presence
of…what? She hardly knows how to describe it: aliveness? Fullness?

“What about how Ruth left things?” Jonathan asks.

“What about it?”

“How does that make you feel?”

“I don’t know, Dr. Freud. How does it make
you
feel?”

She tries to make light of it—her old way of dealing with things—but the new Clara doesn’t seem capable of just brushing difficult thoughts away.
She wanted to do right by you.
Kubovy’s words float through her mind. What did Kubovy mean by that?

Clara takes a sip of sour wine. She looks over at Sammy, who has curled up in her seat, sound asleep, her mouth open.

“I don’t know if I’m wishing this or if it’s actually true,” Clara begins slowly, piecing an idea together. “But I think—finally—Ruth
knew.
She knew what all of it—”

She breaks off. Suddenly choked up.

“What it did to you,” Jonathan finishes her sentence. “How it hurt you.”

“Then why didn’t she stop?” Her own voice sounds, to her ears, like a child’s.

“She couldn’t stop,” Jonathan says.

“That’s bullshit!”

Jonathan smiles softly, almost sorrowfully.

“Maybe,” he says. “It’s hard to say.”

“But why did she leave me with all of it?” Clara goes on. “The photographs, the incredible responsibility—” She stops.

Ruth’s face, that afternoon—in the dim light—watching as Clara flipped through the dozens of photographs.
It’s not about you. It was never about you.

“What?”

“She wanted me to have control,” Clara says, “over the work. The pictures of myself. The book.”

Jonathan looks at her, unfazed. He’s already figured this out—he’s just been waiting for Clara to arrive at it herself.

“It’s up to me,” she says, as if she can’t quite believe it. “She left it all in my hands.”

She imagines Ruth, propped up in bed. Nearly too weak to sign her own name.
Are you sure you know what you’re doing?
Kubovy must have asked. And Ruth—ignoring him—moving her pen slowly, deliberately, across the page. Focusing hard.

The plane banks to the left, beginning its initial descent. The jagged coastline of Maine is spread out beneath them, the islands dotting the sea.

She loved me.
The thought—until now, for all these years, unbearable. She feels her veins expanding, making room to receive it.
She loved me.
Because it never mattered—because it wasn’t enough. Because it was too much.
She loved me.
Clara stares out the window, feeling herself drift slowly down to earth.

Epilogue

T
HE GLASS DOORS
of Jonathan Brodeur Jewelry are open to the sidewalk, people spilling onto the street despite the snow flurries in the bitter December air. Inside, the place is so hot and crowded it’s hard to move. The bar is in back, bottles set up on a long jewelry case. Jimmy Scanlon, who runs the school cafeteria, is the bartender tonight, doling out plastic cups of white wine. Some of the high school girls are passing around trays of cheese cubes stuck with toothpicks.

Everyone is here. The parents from Sammy’s school, a healthy mix of artists, construction workers, acupuncturists, social workers, and attorneys. Laurel Connolly, who has brought her daughter Emily; Emily and Sam are in the back office, stringing beads that Jonathan has set aside for them. Oh, and there’s George Odlum from the hardware store. And Nancy Tipton, Sammy’s piano teacher. And Ginny and Dave from the lobster shack. It seems like the whole island has shown up.

“How’s my beautiful wife?” Jonathan’s hand on the small of Clara’s back, steadying her. A habit, really, since she doesn’t need steadying tonight.

“Great,” Clara says.

“That guy is here,” Jonathan says. “From the
Times.
”

“Okay.” Clara looks around the room for someone who looks like he might be a
New York Times
reporter. She spots him. The shirttails hanging from beneath his jacket are a dead giveaway. The men in Southwest Harbor tuck their shirts in.

“Do I need to go talk to him?” Clara asks.

“Not right now.” Jonathan surveys the scene. “Hey, check out Kubovy. He looks like he’s wandered onto the wrong stage set.”

Clara spies Kubovy in the far corner, standing next to a case displaying Jonathan’s new collection. She laughs. Of all the people, he’s caught in the net of old Mrs. Reynolds, the retired school crossing guard, who is shaking her finger at him. He may have a nervous breakdown any minute.

“I’d better go rescue him,” says Clara.

“Oh, but why? It’s so much fun to watch him squirm.”

Just as Clara starts to make her way through the crowd toward Kubovy, Robin, Ed, and the kids come through the gallery doors.

“You made it!” Clara hugs her sister close. “I wasn’t sure, with all the snow—”

“Oh, please,” Robin says. “But I’ll tell you, these streets aren’t made for walking.” She lifts up one foot, examining a scuffed three-inch heel.

“Where’s Sam?” Harrison asks.

“In back, making a necklace. Do you want to join her?”

He makes a face.

“So where is it?” Robin shrugs off her shearling coat.

“Hot off the presses. We have tons of them,” Clara says. “They sent like six cartons.”

Robin pulls off her kids’ down jackets, stuffing their mittens into the pockets.

“I want to see,” she says.

The crowd seems to part for Robin—something about her New York energy. She walks over to a jewelry case on which a pile of books is stacked in a pyramid. She picks up the one from the top. Gazes at the cover for a good long minute. The blurred close-up. The black paper band around it. The letters cut out: CLARA.

She opens the book, fingering the thick glossy pages.

“To Clara and Robin,”
she reads on the dedication page.
“Without whom.”
Robin pauses, squinting at it. “Without whom what?”

“Fill in the blank,” says Kubovy. He has managed to ditch Mrs. Reynolds and find his way over to the only people in the whole room he knows.

“What do you mean?” Robin’s voice gets edgy. It takes almost nothing for Kubovy to annoy her.

“Without whom none of it would have been possible,” Kubovy says. “That’s what she meant.”

“How do you know?”

“Could we stop?” Clara asks. “Please?”

Robin does. She stops and takes in Clara. Beautiful in the black dress from Barneys. Her lips outlined in red.

“You’re getting some use out of that thing,” she says.

“Well, you know. Funerals. Book parties.”

“Speaking of which,” Kubovy says. “I would like to have an event celebrating this publication in New York.” He pauses. “And L.A.”

He looks at Clara, as if waiting to be challenged.

“That’s fine,” she says faintly. “Whatever’s best. This party here—this is the only one I care about.”

She looks once again around the room. Sammy’s cousins have found her and brought her back into the crowd. Sammy’s drinking a cup of soda and wearing a necklace of bright blue beads strung onto a piece of leather. She looks—Clara’s throat thickens with something like joy—she looks proud. Her face is lit with pleasure at this moment. Her grandmother’s book. Her mother in the center of the room. Her family surrounding her.

Robin slowly turns the pages of the book. The silvery unmistakable images caught in the tiny spotlights dangling over their heads like stars.

“Steiffel did a great job,” she says.

“Yes, they did.”

“Did you think about stopping them?” Robin asks. “You could have, you know.”

Kubovy leans slightly forward to better hear the answer.

“Of course I thought about it,” Clara says.

She catches a glimpse of herself, reflected in a tall mirror behind one of the display cases. Her hair pulled back. Her mouth red. The black dress. Her own young daughter out there in the crowd. The past, rushing up to meet her. And Clara does the only thing—she understands this now—the only thing possible. She turns to face it, head-on.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For support and sustenance, I would like to thank the good people of the Mayflower Inn in Washington, Connecticut, who kept me caffeinated and made me feel at home while I scribbled away in their midst. Lisa Hedley, Jack Rosenthal, and Jeanette Montgomery Barron were early, invaluable readers. Jane Tawney provided me with an insider’s view of Mount Desert Island. Marion Ettlinger has always inspired me from both sides of her lens. Jordan Pavlin, Sonny Mehta, Leslie Levine at Knopf, and Jennifer Jackson at Anchor—thank you for being everything I could hope for in a publisher. Thanks also to Sylvie Rabineau and Andy McNichol. Jennifer Rudolph Walsh—you’re spectacular and I adore you. And finally—to my husband, Michael Maren, whose influence and love are reflected on every single page of this book.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dani Shapiro's most recent books include the novel
Family History
and the best-selling memoir
Slow Motion.
She teaches at Wesleyan University, and her work has appeared in
The New Yorker, Granta, Elle,
and many other publications. She lives with her husband and son in Litchfield County, Connecticut.