Chapter 20: The Locket, Repaired
One year later, on the first Saturday of October, Sinclair House opened its doors under a name that would have given Charles Sinclair apoplexy and gave half of Charleston, to its own surprise, considerable pleasure: the Rose & Thomas Gallery.
Clara stood in the entrance hall in the hour before the opening, in a blue dress the colour of the one in the portrait, and surveyed what a year of honest work had made of the house of her childhood's silences. White walls, tall light, and everywhere the work of the overlooked: women painters of the Lowcountry, local artists the established galleries had turned away, and the photographic archive she had built from attics and grandmothers' shoeboxes β the faces of Charleston the official portraits had left out. Over the second gallery's door, in plain gold letters, the founding principle of the place, from Rose's diary: Every woman in this city had a life. It deserves a wall.
Among the first works hung was a harbour scene by a painter named Odessa Grant, eighty-one, who had been refused by every serious gallery in two counties for half a century and had arrived at the hanging with her grandson and a cake tin of her own shortbread, as if an opening were a church occasion. She stood before her canvas for a long time, one hand pressed to her mouth. "Your mamma tried to buy this in 1994," she told Clara, "from my porch. Your granddaddy sent it back by a driver, with a note about standards. I kept it under my bed through four hurricanes."
"You're doing the look," said Priya, arriving with a clipboard and a general's bearing. "The my-whole-life-was-a-lie-but-it-built-something look. Stop it. The caterers need decisions, the mayor needs seating, and your father is in the garden refusing, with enormous dignity, to come in until the doors open, because he says the public should see the work before the painter gets in its way."
The Rose Room was the heart of it: her mother's diary under glass, open at the Savannah pages; the marriage certificate beside it, unhidden at last; and above them, Thomas's life-sized portrait of Rose laughing in blue, with paint on her cuff, restored by his own scarred hands over a winter of evenings while Clara read to him from archive boxes and learned, at thirty-three, the ordinary sacred skill of being happily in a room with her father.
The portrait had resisted them all winter. Twice Thomas had declared it finished and twice he had telephoned Clara at midnight β a habit she had stopped minding by November β to say that the laugh was wrong, that he had painted the sound and not the woman. "Your mother laughed from the stomach," he said, "like a person who had decided the joke was worth it before she heard the end. Society taught her to laugh with her mouth shut. This roomβ" he gestured at the studio above the river, where Clara sat with archive boxes at her feet and her shoes off like a daughter, not a guest, "this room is the only place she never learned." In February he had telephoned at six in the morning, triumphant and exhausted, and said only, "Come and see her before I touch it again."
"She is in the front row," Clara said, and took his hand, which a year had made the most natural geography in the world to her. Noah had not been rushed, and neither had she; they had done it properly, in the open β dinners and deadlines and long walks, his reporting on the Crane trial concluding with a rigour that cost him two sources and earned him a prize, her learning to be loved by a man who had seen her at her most disgraced and had not once reached for a telephone. In the spring he had moved his desk into the gallery's attic, officially for the archive project, unofficially because the light, he said, was better there.
Henry had sent flowers. He sent them every month now, from the rehabilitation residence where he lived quietly, testified fully, and was learning β his letters said, in a hand that leaned but endured β to be a smaller man than Judge Bennett, which he reported, with something almost like wonder, to be harder and better work. Clara wrote back, most months. The letters were not forgiveness. They were a door left the width of a letter wide, and both of them, at last, understood doors.
Silas Crane had pleaded guilty in February. His statement, read in a courtroom where Clara sat holding her father's hand, had been complete and without varnish, and his sentence β tempered by age and cooperation β would nonetheless end in prison, which he had entered, the newspapers said, without complaint. She did not think of him often. When she did, it was of an old man saying God forgive me into a telephone, and she let the thought pass as one lets weather pass.
Thomas stood at his easel by the camellia hedge, in the good jacket Priya had bullied him into, with a smudge of cobalt already on the cuff, painting the opening-day crowd beyond the railings β not the dignitaries, Clara noticed, but the caterers, the schoolchildren from the archive programme, and a very old woman in a hat who had arrived first of all Charleston, because she had known Rose Sinclair at school and had waited seventy years for somebody to ask her about it.
Her name was Miriam's contemporary only in spirit; she was called Miss Althea Pinckney, she was ninety if she was a day, and she had been at school with Rose for exactly one year, 1974, a fact she delivered with the precision of an archivist and then undermined beautifully by adding, "and dearest friends for fifty-one, which school had nothing to do with." Clara fetched her a chair, a glass of lemonade, and β before the doors opened, while Thomas painted and Priya conducted caterers β her archive recorder. Miss Althea talked for forty minutes: about Rose's handwriting, Rose's temper, Rose's unbeatable poker face and beatable poker. "Every archive in Charleston has your grandfather's speeches," she said, thumping her stick gently on the new floorboards. "I am the first one anybody asked about your mother's laugh. Mark that down, Clara Wren. That is the whole history of women in this city in one sentence." Clara marked it down. It went into the archive that week as Item One, ahead of the speeches, where it remains.
"Dad," Clara said β the word had taken eight months to stop startling them both, and now landed between them with the softness of long practice β "it's time. I have something for you first. Us, rather. In the hall, when they open the doors."
In the hall, with the first guests beyond the glass doors and Priya's hand raised like a conductor's, Clara took from her pocket the locket.
In the winter Clara had taken the locket to an old jeweller in Savannah β the same street, by pleasing chance, as the registry office β and had it repaired at last: the broken hinge remade, the clasp strengthened, the silver cleaned to a soft, living brightness. It no longer hung shut like a kept secret. It opened smooth as a book. Inside, on the left, Thomas had painted at miniature scale Rose as she was in his portrait β laughing, in blue. On the right was a photograph, new that spring: Clara and Thomas in the studio above the river, paint on both of them, caught mid-laugh by Noah. Two pictures. One locket. A marriage and a daughter, facing each other at last, in the light.
"We're opening the doors now," Clara said to the gathered staff, the artists, the schoolchildren, the very old woman in the hat β and she fastened the repaired locket around her neck, where it belonged, over a heart that was entirely and unremarkably her own. "Welcome to the Rose & Thomas Gallery."
Later β much later, when the speeches had been survived and the last schoolchild extracted from the archive room with a biscuit β Clara stood alone for a moment in the Rose Room, before her mother laughing and her own spring photograph small in silver at her throat, and thought about the sentence she had carried through the whole ruinous, luminous year: the locket that broke her life. It had. She blessed it for it. It had broken the false life β the dutiful fiction of the Bennetts, the marriage arranged over her head before she was born, the love that loved her only when she was convenient β the way ice breaks on a river in March: not destruction, but the first sound of water moving. Her true life had been underneath it all along, patient and hers, waiting for the crack.
"Ready?" Noah asked.
"Ready," said Clara Wren, and went out to meet her life.
The End