by Dani Shapiro
They walk slowly down the wide dark corridor. Sam’s eyes dart everywhere, seeing whatever there is to see: children’s galoshes outside of 12B, a note for the dog walker tacked to the door of 12C. Someone has hung a museum poster—a cheaply framed Balthus—on a long stretch of wall. As they approach Ruth’s apartment, Clara sees light spilling from the open door. Why is the door already open? They haven’t been announced. And there seems to be something—it’s hard to tell what it is from here—piled in the hallway. The shape of the pile comes into focus. Suitcases. Two battered suitcases and a knapsack.
“Here we are,” Clara says.
She pushes the door farther open.
“Hello?” She pokes her head inside the foyer. No one seems to be nearby. She leads the way in, holding Sammy’s hand.
“Why’s the door open?” Jonathan asks.
“I don’t know.”
Sammy stops and stares at the nude hanging in the foyer.
“Did Grandma take that picture?” she asks, pointing.
“No, that photograph was taken by a man named Irving Penn,” Clara says. Her head is buzzing, humming, full of infinite noise. The piles and piles of magazines. The dusty beams of eastern light filtering in through the windows. The ink stain—nearly thirty years old—on the edge of the oriental in the foyer. Her childhood and her daughter’s, colliding.
She watches Sam’s hungry gaze travel around the apartment, or at least the part of the apartment visible from where they stand. What can Sam possibly make of all this? The iconic photographs. The nineteenth-century Turkish rugs. The free-form walnut console, a gift to Ruth from George Nakashima. To Sam, it’s all just stuff—her grandmother’s stuff—though Clara sees Jonathan taking it in, his eyes widening as he recognizes the Nakashima.
“Where’s Grandma?” Sammy whispers.
“I’m sure she’s in—”
And then, piercing the deadness of the apartment, the sound of voices screaming behind a closed door. Ruth’s voice. Ruth’s door. Clara’s throat constricts, her fingers tingle. She looks around for a heavy object, or something sharp, to use as a weapon. As she moves closer, she hears the voices more clearly.
“You’re fired!” Ruth screams.
“I told you already, I quit!”
Marcy’s voice. Marcy, the nurse’s aide Clara had hired.
“You’re a hideous person!” Ruth screams. “You have no empathy! I don’t know how you can look at yourself in the mirror!”
Ruth’s door flies open and Marcy comes racing out, looking behind her as if Ruth might follow. She’s wearing her usual baggy gray uniform, which she is frantically unbuttoning as if it’s choking her. Her eyes are wild and wet, and two red blotches have appeared on her cheeks, making her look a bit like an incensed Raggedy Ann doll.
“In twenty-five years of doing this,” she says without missing a beat, as if she had expected Clara to be standing there, “I have never walked out on a job. But she’s a nightmare. You have no idea.”
“I have some idea.” Clara’s voice breaks. She feels a wild surge of energy, impossible to contain. Like she might just slam her fist into a wall. She can’t do this. Not now. She had run through every possibility in her mind, every way Sam meeting Ruth might go, but she hadn’t considered the nurse’s aide quitting in the middle of it. Christ. Her hands are balled up at her sides.
Sam has sidled up to Clara in the hallway. She stands behind her mother, shielding herself. Jonathan plants himself firmly next to both of them.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Ruth shouts weakly from her bed. “There’s a word for people like you! Traitor! Deserter!”
Marcy stuffs her uniform into a tote bag. Then she looks once again at Clara.
“She makes me say things I could never—” She cuts herself off, shaking her head, her reddish hair glinting in the thin light spilling into the hall from Ruth’s bedroom. “My whole life, I’ve tried to take good care of people.”
“We need to—I can’t really talk about this right now,” Clara says. Trying to end this. For Sam not to witness another moment of it.
“I’ve called the agency,” Marcy says. “And I called your sister too. She’s on her way over. I didn’t want to leave Ms. Dunne by herself, even though—”
She shakes her head again.
“Okay,” says Clara. Slightly desperate now. Robin’s coming? She’s not ready for all this at once. She’s not ready—and she has no choice.
Marcy registers Samantha, standing behind Clara.
“Oh, my goodness, don’t you just look like—”
“What’s going on out there?” Ruth’s voice. Weakened from all that shouting. “Who’s there?”
“We need to go in and see my mother,” Clara says.
Marcy just stands there, as if waiting for something.
“So I guess you can go—if you’re going to go.”
“I’ll need my check,” says Marcy. “Your sister usually takes care of it.”
Jonathan clears his throat.
“I have a checkbook,” he says. “In my bag. Out there.” He gestures to the front of the apartment.
Marcy follows Jonathan down the hall, leaving Clara and Sam standing alone outside Ruth’s bedroom. Sam is pressed up against Clara’s leg, cleaving to her mother the way she used to as a very little girl when she needed comfort or protection.
“Are you ready, Sammy?” Clara asks.
A small tentative nod.
“Listen. If you start to feel weird or bad—if you want to leave at any time—all you have to do is say so.”
Sammy straightens up. Rising to the occasion.
“Okay, Mom. I get it.”
Clara takes Sam’s hand and walks through Ruth’s bedroom door, softly knocking as they enter. Ruth is lying on her back on her hospital bed, covered only by a thin white sheet. Stripes of light from the wooden venetian blinds bisect her body. Her head is turned toward the door—no turban, no baseball cap. Just stark knobby baldness.
At the sight of Sam, Ruth tries to lift herself up. She struggles onto one sticklike forearm, then collapses.
“Raise my bed,” she instructs Clara.
Clara strides quickly forward. Her fingers grope for the cord with the controls for the bed. She fumbles, nearly knocking over a lamp. She’s shakier than she thought.
“Where the devil—oh, here it is.”
The bed creaks upward.
“Okay. Enough.”
Ruth’s spine can no longer hold her upright. She tries to sit straight, but she lists to the side. She’s wearing one of Nathan’s old pajama tops, misbuttoned. Her clavicle juts out, a thin ledge of bone. All the while, she stares at Sammy, who is standing motionless between the door and the bed.
“My God,” she finally says, her sunken eyes like murky pools of water. “She’s you, Clara.”
“No, Mom.” Clara is swift, a blade slicing this away. They’re not going in this direction. Not over her dead body. “She’s not.”
“You could have let me know.” Ruth keeps staring at Sam, drinking her in. “So I could have been a bit more prepared.”
She reaches out a hand toward Sammy.
“Come here, darling. Let me take a look at you.”
Clara checks for any signs that this is too hard for Sam—her fists might be clenched, she might be picking at her lip or twirling her hair around and around—but no. Sammy actually seems fine. Peaceful, almost. She shyly walks over to the side of Ruth’s bed.
“If I had known you were coming, I would have put on my party dress,” Ruth says.
Sam looks at Ruth quizzically. Is she joking?
“And heels!” Ruth says. “Now come closer.”
Sammy giggles—so easily won over. Of course it’s easy. What does she know? She bends forward and allows Ruth to stroke her cheek. She doesn’t seem at all afraid of the signs of illness around her. The shape of Ruth’s skull, her gray pallor, the bag of bones her body has become—none of this fazes Sammy. All she sees is h
er grandmother. Finally, her grandmother. It is this—Clara realizes with unbearable clarity—it is this that she has been most afraid of. Not that Sammy might be frightened. Not that Sammy might be traumatized. No. That Sammy might be seduced. Taken in by the all-powerful Ruth Dunne.
“So.” Ruth hasn’t even glanced at Clara, who has stepped back, as if pushed away by the force field around Ruth’s bed. “Tell me something about yourself.”
Sam blushes and shrugs. She shifts from side to side, suddenly awkward.
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll bet…you’re in fourth grade,” Ruth says.
“Yeah,” Sam says. Chewing on her lower lip. Clara is ready to move toward her. To rescue her. Does she need rescuing?
“And I’ll bet…you really like school. Do you like school?”
Sam nods.
The sound of heavy footfalls in the hallway. Jonathan’s boots. And another voice—Christ, it’s Robin. Jonathan and Robin; they have met only a handful of times over the years—and now they fill Ruth’s doorway. Jonathan’s wild gray hair, his worn jeans and flannel shirt, and Robin, straight from the pages of the Bergdorf Goodman catalog in a trim little shift dress and pointy-toed shoes that must be killing her.
“Looks like there’s a party going on,” Robin says.
She walks into the room as if it’s a boardroom, taking it over. She scans the situation, coolly assessing. Her eyes graze over Clara like she’s a piece of furniture, pausing only long enough for Clara to read her expression: You left me to deal with this, you fucking bitch.
“Samantha,” she says, reaching down to shake Sam’s hand. “I’m your aunt Robin.”
“Ah, and here’s the husband,” Ruth says weakly. She extends a hand to Jonathan. Limply. Like a queen.
“Nice to meet you, Ms. Dunne.”
“Please.” Ruth sits slightly straighter, and some color has returned to her cheeks. “Call me Ruth.”
“Mother, what’s this about firing Marcy?” Robin asks.
She bustles around to the far side of the bed and begins straightening the dozen or so plastic prescription bottles on the bedside table. She lines them up perfectly so that they appear to be a row of small able soldiers.
“That awful woman,” says Ruth. “Goodbye and good riddance.”
Robin nods slightly, humoring Ruth. The last couple of weeks have taken a toll on Robin. She looks ragged. Dark circles under her eyes—onto which she has patted too much concealer—make her look like a raccoon.
“Well, that awful woman, as you put it, has been changing your bedpan for the past two weeks,” Robin says.
Jonathan has moved behind Sam, his hands resting protectively on her shoulders. They look out of place here, in this sickroom high above Broadway, as if they had wandered onto the wrong stage set. Come on—Clara fights the urge to grab them and run—let’s get out of here. She thinks of their house in Southwest Harbor—the empty rooms awaiting their return. The dirty coffee cups they left in the kitchen sink. The unmade beds, rumpled sheets still left with the impressions of their bodies. Home—their home.
“She wasn’t doing a very good job of it,” Ruth is saying. “She watched soap operas all day long.”
“So what?”
“So I don’t want to spend my last days on earth watching television for imbeciles. Such stupid people. Who could create such crap?”
Robin crosses her arms, and Clara can suddenly imagine her in court, arguing a case before a judge. She is all angles: elbows and sharp chin; she could hurt you if you don’t watch out.
“Who do you think is going to take care of you now?” Robin asks.
“You girls, of course,” says Ruth.
“Excuse me, but what the fu—” Robin stops herself, with a quick glance across the bed at Sam. “What are you talking about?”
“In African cultures, there are no nurse’s aides,” says Ruth. “Families take care of their own.”
“Well, we’re not in Africa,” Robin says, very carefully.
And we’re not a family. Doesn’t it go without saying?
“Could we not fight about this? Marcy’s gone, and that’s that,” Ruth says.
“You bet she’s gone. You made sure of it,” says Robin. She walks over to the foot of Ruth’s bed and grabs hold of the metal footboard. She looks like she’d like to rattle and shake something—anything.
Clara wishes she could see Sammy’s face from where she stands. She’s standing straight, her posture perfect. Witnessing more ugliness in the last five minutes than she’s seen her whole life.
“Samantha.” Ruth focuses once more on Sam. “This is quite a way for us to meet, isn’t it?”
Sammy lets out a little half giggle. Poor kid. She’s self-conscious, not sure how to behave. Nothing in her preteen magazines has prepared her for this. She starts fiddling with her hair, a sign that she’s getting overwhelmed.
“And Jonathan—it is Jonathan, isn’t it?” Ruth now looks behind Sam—Jonathan hasn’t moved an inch—and something hardens slightly in her gaze.
“Yes,” he says quietly.
“My daughter tells me you own a shop of some kind. You’re—what is it—a jeweler?”
Ruth trots out the word jeweler with a flourish, leaving it to hang limply in the air. As if to be a jeweler—in the bedroom of Ruth Dunne, under the watchful eyes of Man Ray and Berenice Abbott—is so absurd that nothing more can possibly be said on the subject.
“That’s right,” says Jonathan.
Clara moves from the center of the room so that she’s standing just behind Sam, next to Jonathan. She puts her arms around them. Her family. A tight little unit. Jonathan blinks, his shoulders tense.
“I work more with semiprecious stones,” he says softly. “Topaz, freshwater pearls, tourmalines.”
“Interesting,” says Ruth. “Do tell us more.”
“Please, stop it.” The words escape Clara’s lips before she realizes that she’s spoken out loud. She feels like she’s hallucinating.
“What’s the matter?” Ruth looks directly at Clara for the first time.
Clara shakes her head. She feels the warmth of Jonathan, next to her. Breathes in her husband and daughter, trying to hold on to what matters.
“Nothing.”
“I should think not,” says Ruth. She smiles weakly, looking around the room. “Here we are—here we all are.”
More footsteps in the hallway now. Did Marcy close the door behind her? Clara almost doesn’t care. A burglar would be welcome relief.
Peony pokes her small dark head inside Ruth’s bedroom door, and they all turn to look at her. As usual, an array of folders is tucked beneath her arm.
“I just wanted to check to see if you need anything,” Peony says, taking in the crowd in Ruth’s room without expression.
“Not at all, darling.” Ruth waves her away. “My family’s here. I have everything I need.”
Chapter Eight
THEY WORKED FOR A WHILE, Nathan Dunne’s threats. No more photographs, Ruth. No more—or else. He never said exactly what would happen if Ruth went against him, but it was clear from the tone of his voice, the thin, determined line of his mouth, that Nathan meant business.
Clara’s father had never so much as raised his voice to his wife, but after what was referred to around the Dunne household as the incident at Brearley, or that thing in the Post, it was as if something had been unleashed in Nathan. A fatherly fury that was stronger—for the moment—than his fear of Ruth. Or love. Or awe. Or whatever it was.
He came home every night at six. No more four-star dinners out with clients. No more occasional men’s poker nights with other attorneys, from which he tiptoed in, cigar smoke clinging to his suit. Weekends, he took Clara and Robin to the park, where they tossed a softball around for so many hours that the girls would beg him to stop. No, Nathan had determined to be around. He had finally figured out that the only way to really understand what was happening in his family was to be there in person. Eve
ry day.
And so, for a while, their family life at the Apthorp was similar to the lives of those surrounding them: other Upper West Side families with a couple of kids in private school. They went to Ollie’s for Chinese food and stood in line to see Flashdance at the Loews on 84th Street. They piled into their Volvo wagon and made the two-hour drive to Hillsdale, where they spent entire days in pajamas and Nathan cooked his one specialty, challah French toast.
Ruth still spent time in her studio, of course. She produced a series of strange still-lifes: a cracked bowl on a kitchen counter, a bed stripped down to its old stained mattress. The photographs were technically magnificent—the silvery precision of Ruth’s darkroom technique was unmistakable—but to this day they are seen as a failed experiment and can be had at auction for a fraction of her typical prices.
When she wasn’t in the studio, Ruth floated around in a dream world of her own making. She moved more slowly than usual, her lips curved into a half smile. She even did normal things like normal mothers: she went to the gym, picked up clothes at the dry cleaners, arrived home with shopping bags from Fairway filled with fresh vegetables and Italian cheese. It was as if Ruth were acting out a role in a play. See? she seemed to be saying. I can do this. I can be like everyone else.
How long did life proceed like this? In Clara’s memory it is a blink, a flash, nothing more. In reality it may have been eight months, maybe nine. It spanned the entirety of Clara’s fourth-grade year. She was the same age as Sam is now. But when she reaches back into her childhood for a foothold, for memories she can feel and touch and taste in her mouth, the year her mother left her alone is blank, like a skipped page in a notebook. A mistake.
It has been picked over by the critics, this gap in Ruth Dunne’s Clara Series. Oh, what they have made of it! Whole academic papers have been published on the subject. Clara’s personal favorite, “The Interrupted Gaze,” written by a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, is a psychoanalytic meditation on Ruth’s work.