Free Black & White by Dani Shapiro Page A

looks. An older man in a dark overcoat. The bald girl in her twenties. Ruth’s name may be known, but physically she is anonymous. She is rare among photographers for never—not ever, not even once—having taken a self-portrait. It is Clara whose face is known. As she pushes Ruth’s wheelchair through the waiting room, she keeps her head down. No one would think it, anyway. She has lost her girlhood face, along with its Ruth-like softness. No one will ever again look twice at her in confused recognition. Samantha is the one. The uncanny likeness passed down from one generation to the next. My dear, you’re the spitting image of that girl in Ruth Dunne’s early photographs. The daughter. What was her name? Not Sammy. She can’t think about Sammy now.
    The nurse leaves them in an examining room. What is there to examine? The X-rays Ruth has brought with her, large manila envelopes tucked into an aqua blue Metropolitan Museum shopping bag, should tell the whole story. Clara looks around the small, brightly lit space. She’s never been good at small talk, but all she wants to do right now is keep the conversation with Ruth skimming along the surface of things. She searches for a subject. The weather— Cold out there, isn’t it? —the news— Did you read about those two guys who were arrested at JFK? Anything to keep Ruth from pushing harder, probing deeper.
    But there’s nothing much to see, nothing to distract. No piles of well-worn magazines in here, no hardy plants, no striped neon fish swimming madly around faux-coral reefs. Only a life-sized diagram, tacked to the wall, of the human body. An acupuncture chart. In the sinew, the muscle, the nerve endings from the crown of the head to the tips of the toes, hundreds of small red dots are shown, each one illustrating a particular pressure point. Crisscrossed lines run throughout the diagram, linking one pressure point to the next and the next—patterns of energy. The arm bone is connected to the leg bone after all.
    “So tell me about seeing this guy on TV,” Clara finally says, filling the silence. The low buzzing of the fluorescent light overhead could drive a person crazy.
    Ruth wraps the blanket around her shoulders, even though the room is already warm, the clanging radiator emitting a dry oppressive heat.
    “It wasn’t so much Dr. Zamitsky as some of his patients,” she says. “He cured one woman of pancreatic cancer, using green tea colonics. And another woman, with the same kind of lung cancer as me—she’s been in remission for six years now—he sent her to Mexico, where they use a special mud—”
    “Special mud?” Clara repeats.
    “They heat it up, like a compress,” says Ruth.
    Clara tries to keep her face expressionless. What does she know? Green tea. Special mud. Anything is possible. Particularly when it comes to Ruth, who has spent her whole life defying the odds.
    A knock on the door, and then immediately the door opens, and Abraham Zamitsky, M.D., walks into the examining room. He’s holding Ruth’s paperwork in his left hand, his right hand outstretched.
    “Mrs. Dunne,” he says.
    “Ms.,” Ruth says faintly.
    Clara can’t tell: Is Ruth insulted that the doctor clearly has no idea who she is? To him, she’s just another Upper West Side lady with cancer, or perhaps a housewife from Larchmont who has driven into the city after seeing him on TV. He’s the famous one in this room. Illness, the great leveler.
    “This is my daughter Clara,” says Ruth. As if Clara is not thirty-two years old. As if she weren’t about to introduce herself.
    Zamitsky shakes Clara’s hand. She’s not sure what she had been expecting. She’s surprised by how young he is. In her mind, a holistic oncologist would look something like Abbie Hoffman, with a curly mane of hair, a bushy beard, maybe an amulet strung on a leather cord around his neck. But Zamitsky is maybe thirtyish, wearing a good suit. He’s bald—his head shaved in sympathy for his