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“Nancy?” Beatrice called. “We’re losing the light.”
“I’ll try to make this go fast. You’ve made me feel super important, which is good, because Bea is always saying I have to ‘inhabit my accomplishment’ on camera.” Nancy clapped Yangchen on the shoulder. “Come over with me, we can talk until Bea kicks you out of the shot. It’s not every day the woman who climbed Everest seven times comes to Manitowoc.”
They walked off, Nancy’s blue eyes sparkling, Yangchen glowing, leaving Rosemary with the feeling she’d just witnessed the first meeting of soul-twins.
Kal handed her a paper cup of coffee. “How’d it go with your kid?”
“Fair to middling.”
“Is that her with the rainbow hair?”
Rosemary looked at her daughter. She wore a ratty pair of track pants, a too-tight T-shirt that said MR. PIBB, and discount-store flip-flops. Her lower arms were bare, adorned with colorful flower tattoos that Rosemary had previously seen only on the screen of her phone. Beatrice leaned over her camera, squinting into the lens as she harangued a meek-looking girl wearing red lipstick who clutched a clipboard to her breast.
Rosemary didn’t think she’d ever seen her looking so raffishly beautiful.
“That’s her.”
“Talk about a spitting image.”
“People have always said so, but I’ve never thought we were alike.”
Kal lifted his hand to her neck, brushed her hair aside, and planted a kiss against her skin. He kissed her again, behind her ear. “I’m not sure you have a clear idea what you’re like.”
Flushed, pleased, she could only say, “Shall we sit?”
“Sure.”
They found a bench against the wall and sipped their coffee side by side, watching the film crew do their work. The morning light was filtered and soft. Nancy and Yangchen talked animatedly until Beatrice was ready to begin filming and she booted Yangchen out of her shot—politely, to Rosemary’s relief.
The interview unspooled slowly, in fits and starts. Beatrice asked and re-asked the same questions several times, then interrupted Nancy’s answers for reasons she rarely explained. Nancy took it in stride, good-natured about being ordered about by a nineteen-year-old English girl.
Kal put his arm around Rosemary’s shoulder. She liked its weight, his smell, and especially that he seemed not to have given a moment’s thought to whether it was something he ought to do.
They had so little time left.
Beatrice walked Nancy through the story of how she’d met Justice, how she’d come to work for him from Manitowoc, and how their artistic relationship had deepened in secret over years as he became famous and Nancy received no credit for her work, not even in her own family. “Did you ever just feel like shouting?” Beatrice asked. “When you saw the stories in the art journals or the magazines, did you ever want to yell, you know, ‘That’s mine. I did that.’?”
Nancy took a moment to respond. “Yes. Of course I did.”
“Why didn’t you ever do it?”
The green light on the camera blinked. She’d set up her tripod at chest height, so she had to bend over it to look through the viewfinder. The crew held perfect silence as the seconds ticked by.
Nancy brought a coffee mug to her mouth, but she didn’t drink. She lowered it to her lap. “I think it was mainly feeling…I didn’t want anyone to take it from me. What I’d done. I knew what I’d done. I knew how much time I put in, over how many years, trying to figure out how to order the right fabric in the right amount to drop down over Lady Liberty, or what kind of fasteners we’d need, sitting in the pickup line at my daughters’ elementary school.” Her features had sharpened, focused off-camera at some moment in her past. “I had this recurring fantasy of walking into the newspaper office one day when it was quiet and sitting down in front of whatever reporter I could get to talk to me. I was going to tell him everything, the way I’ve told you.”
“But you didn’t.” Bea’s tone was challenging.
“No, because I knew if I did that, what would happen was he would write a story, and other stories would follow, but it would be, right away, all this shock. The story would be how unlikely I was. Just this mom, this boring woman, claiming to be responsible for the success of someone important like Justice.”
Nancy’s voice had found a new register—confident—and a thrill coursed through Rosemary. The thrill of something important. “There would be stories about whether I’d done as much as I claimed, casting doubt on how important I was really, and those sorts of things. The woman behind the important man. Which just makes everyone look at the important man.” She paused to take a deep breath, then leaned toward the camera slightly, looking right at Beatrice. “I felt possessive of my work. I didn’t want it taken from me like that. It was mine. It was the most important thing I had.”
Beatrice stood up straight, and Rosemary realized the green light had gone orange. She’d stopped filming. Beatrice’s eyes were wide and excited when she looked at the young man holding the boom. “Right?” she asked.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s exactly it.”
Rosemary felt she must have managed to do something right as a mother, to teach her daughter something, if Beatrice could capture a moment like this on film—if she could understand that it mattered, and why it mattered, to put this ordinary-seeming American woman on camera and ask her all the right questions to make her dig into the meat of her own importance, her life’s work.
This unlikely woman who’d changed modern art forever. Beatrice had seen her and known how to tell the story. She’d been willing to labor hard for months because she wanted to get it right, to make it perfect for film festivals and audiences and the world’s attention.
