by Dani Shapiro
Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Also by Dani Shapiro
Copyright
For Jacob
Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.
—Walker Evans
Chapter One
IT HAS BEEN YEARS since anyone has asked Clara if she’s Ruth Dunne’s daughter—you know, the girl in those pictures. But it has also been years—fourteen, precisely—since Clara has set foot in New York. The Upper West Side is a foreign country. The butcher, the shoe repair guy, even the Korean grocer have been replaced by multilevel gyms with juice bars, restaurants with one-syllable French names. Aix, Ouest. The deli where Clara and Robin used to stop on Saturday mornings—that deli is now some sort of boutique. The mannequin in the window is wearing blue jeans and a top no bigger than a cocktail napkin.
This is not the neighborhood of her childhood, though she can still see bits and pieces if she looks hard enough. There’s the door to what was once Shakespeare & Co. She spent hours in that bookstore, hiding in the philosophy section, until one summer they gave her a job as a cashier. She lasted three days. Every other person, whether they were buying Wittgenstein or Updike, seemed to stare at her, as if trying to figure out why she looked familiar. So she quit.
Shakespeare & Co. is now an Essentials Plus. The window displays shampoos, conditioners, a dozen varieties of magnifying mirrors. A small child bundled up in winter gear is riding a mechanical dinosaur next to the entrance, slowly moving up and down to a tinny version of the Flintstones theme song.
Since the taxi dropped her off at the corner of Broadway and 79th Street, she has counted five wireless cellular stores, three manicure parlors, four real estate brokers. So this is now the Upper West Side: a place where people in cute outfits, their bellies full of steak-frites, talk on brand-new cell phones while getting their nails done on their way to look at new apartments.
It is as if a brightly colored transparency has been placed over the neighborhood of Clara’s memory, which had been the color of a sparrow: tan, brown, gray as smudged newsprint. Now, everything seems large and neon. Even the little old Jewish men who used to sit on the benches in the center islands in the middle of Broadway, traffic whizzing around them in both directions—even they seem to be a thing of the past.
She crosses Broadway quickly, the DON’T WALK sign already flashing. Outside the old Shakespeare & Co., a man has set up a tray table piled with books. A large cardboard sign announces PHILIP ROTH—SIGNED COPIES!!! Above the sign, a poster-sized photograph of Roth himself peers disapprovingly over the shoppers, the mothers pushing strollers, the teenagers checking their reflections in the windows of Essentials Plus.
She has brought nothing with her. No change of clothes, no clean underwear, not even a toothbrush. She’s not staying, no way in hell. That’s what she told herself the whole flight down from Bangor. Ridiculous, of course. She’s going to have to stay at least overnight. Broadway is already cast in a wintry shadow, the sun low in the sky, setting across the Hudson River. Her body—the same body that spent her whole childhood in this place—knows the time by the way the light falls over the avenue. She doesn’t need to look at her watch. It’s four o’clock. That much—the way the sun rises and sets—has not changed.
She’s been circling for an hour. Killing time. Down Columbus, across brownstone-lined side streets, over to West End Avenue with its stately gray buildings, heavy brass doors, uniformed doormen just inside.
A man in an overcoat hurries by her. He glances at her as he passes, holding her gaze for a moment longer than necessary. Why does he bother? She looks like a hundred other women on the Upper West Side: pale, dark-haired, lanky. A thirtyish blur. She could be pretty if she tried, but she has long since stopped trying. Clara stares back at the man. Stop looking at me. This, too, she has forgotten about the city: the brazen way that people size each other up, constantly weighing, judging, comparing. So very different from the Yankee containment of Maine, where everybody just minds their own business.
The phone call came at about eleven o’clock, a few nights ago. No one ever called that late; it was as if the ring itself had a slightly shriller tone to it. (Of course, this could be what her memory is supplying to the moment now—now that she is here.) Everybody was asleep. Jonathan, Sam, Zorba, the puppy, in his crate downstairs in the kitchen.
Jonathan groped for the phone.
“Hello?”
A long pause—too long—and then he reached over and turned on the bedside lamp. It was freezing in their bedroom, the bed piled with four blankets. One of the windowsills was rotting, but to fix it meant ripping the whole thing out, which meant real construction, which cost money, which they didn’t have.
Jonathan handed her the phone.
“Who is it?” she mouthed, hand over the receiver.
He shook his head.
“Hello?” She cleared her throat, hoarse from sleep. “Hello?”
“Clara?”
With a single word—her own name—her head tightened. Robin almost never called her, and certainly not at this hour. They talked exactly once a year, on the anniversary of their father’s death. Clara sank deeper beneath the pile of blankets, the way an animal might try to camouflage itself, sensing danger. Her mind raced through the possibilities. Something had happened, something terrible. Robin would not be calling with good news. And there was only one person, really, whom they shared.
“What’s wrong?” Clara’s voice was a squeak. A pathetic little mouse.
“I’m going to tell you something—and I want you to promise me you won’t hang up.”
Clara was silent. The mirror over the dresser facing the bed was hanging askew, and she could see herself and Jonathan, their rumpled late-night selves. Through the receiver, on Robin’s end, she heard office sounds. The muted ring of corporate telephones, even at this hour.
“Don’t hang up. Promise?”
How like Robin to want to seal the deal, to control the situation, before Clara even knows what the situation is.
“Okay.”
“Say ‘promise.’”
Clara squeezed her hands into fists.
“Christ! I promise.”
“Ruth is…she’s sick. She’s—oh, shit, Clara. It’s bad. She’s very sick.”
“What do you mean?” Clara responded. The words didn’t make sense. She was stupid with shock.
“Listen. I’m just calling to say that you need to come home,” Robin said.
There it was. Fourteen years—and there it was. Home. She was home, goddammit.
“I’ve made myself insane, going around and around in circles.” Robin paused. “My therapist finally said it wasn’t up to me—that you had a right to know.”
“How long has this been going on?” Clara managed to ask.
“Awhile,” Robin said. She sounded tired. Three kids, partner in a midtown law firm; of course she was tired. Clara couldn’t imagine her sister’s life.
Clara climbed out of bed and walked over to the window. She was suddenly suffocatingly hot in the freezing room. The lights from the harbor beckoned in the distance.
“Look, the truth is—I can’t deal with this by myself,” Robin sa
id. Never, in Clara’s memory, had Robin ever admitted such a thing. She was the queen of competence.
“I have to think about it,” Clara said. Her sister was silent on the other end of the phone. Clara tried to picture her, but the image wasn’t clear: round brown eyes, a tense mouth. “Okay, Robin? This is—I never thought I would ever even consider—”
“I know,” said Robin. “But please.”
After she hung up the phone, Clara climbed back into bed and twined her legs around Jonathan’s, her hands on his belly. She closed her eyes tight and burrowed her face into the crease of his neck. He was asking her something—What are you going to do?—but his voice sounded muffled, as if suddenly there were something, something thick and cottony, separating her from her real life. She breathed Jonathan in, fighting the avalanche of thoughts.
She rounds the corner from 78th Street to Broadway. The wind is whipping, stirring up the litter. A flyer attaches itself to her thigh; she picks it off and glances at it: the opening of a new yoga studio. It has always been blustery right at this spot, only two blocks from the river, where the wide cross street meets the boulevard of Broadway. But now Clara feels the wind differently. After more than a decade of winters on an island off the coast of Maine, she has toughened up. Her skin is thicker now; she is not as fragile, not as easily blown around—or so she hopes.
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 fl
exes 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.
