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Starting with the end: I didn't think it was ambiguous at all; Irene pushed Clare. After I'd finished the book, I went looking for commentaries and analyses, and was taken aback that others found ambiguity. I read the end again, and again it's clear in my mind that Irene pushed Clare. I will allow that a reader can make a case for uncertainty, just as a reader can make a case for Irene's sexual attraction to Clare, but I think such an analysis is forced. I think Irene was just the sort of character who would refuse to admit, even to herself, that she did actually push Clare. She's fundamentally dishonest. Her life is a lie just as much as Clare's is.
Irene seems to want to exist in a little bubble--she has a husband who provides her with a nice upper-class life, she won't abide any discussion of sex and violence and racism, she passes when passing is convenient, she avoids confrontation. I don't see her fascination with Clare as having any sexual component; I think it was simply Irene saw Clare's life as the road not taken, the life Irene might have had if she'd been willing to take chances.
We don't get much of what drives Clare--while Irene wants to protect her comfortable life, Clare seems not to care about blowing up her own life, or anyone else's. I wish we'd learned more about her--actually, I would have preferred to learn more about many of the characters, instead of just the snippets. Why did Brian (Irene's husband) hate America and his life so much? He, like all the black characters in this book, seem to be in their own safe upper-class world. What was he really looking for?
The character I especially would have liked to know more about is Irene's maid.
I kept thinking of Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life as I was reading. If you haven't read it, or seen one of the movie adaptations, it's about two women, one white, one black, and their two daughters; the black woman's daughter is light-skinned and from childhood tries to pass as white, which means that ultimately she must reject her mother. It was written in 1933, so it's more or less contemporaneous with Passing. I wish Passing had a bit more of the emotional wallop that Imitation of Life has.
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