You would love to paint here. I wish you could.
I wish I didn’t worry so. Pamela’s success has been extraordinary—bewildering, really—I worry that when I see her again I shall find her somehow altered by it all, though I know she isn’t. It is terrifying to see one’s children make giant leaps—to places that one has dreamed of but somehow never reached. I feel that while Pamela and Cecco are growing up, I remain steadfastly stuck as I am.
And Francesco—I hardly know what to tell you except that he is so wildly excited over Pamela—it’s as if he himself were the artist. It’s all fine at the moment, but of course I can’t help worrying about the other end of things—you know what I mean, Jimmie. I have never forgotten your real help and friendship in those days of his illness many years ago—I feel in a way you are the one real friend that we have, either of us.
I don’t know whether we are to move back to London someday, or what we are going to do— Francesco maintains a lofty silence on all such trivial matters. But I hope so.
pamela
When I left San Remo it was to go to a new home, in London. Daddy had rented a place for us in Chelsea—a comfortable home, larger and airier than what we were used to. A host of pets padded about our flat and in the little patch of garden out back. Besides Caxton (the dog Daddy had bought for my mother when he sold a rare Caxton edition) and Narcissus and Charlemagne, there were cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, and hedgehogs. Once again I painted and drew in the quiet company of my mother. Cecco ran in and out with neighborhood boys. In the evenings, when Daddy came home from his bookstore, he was whistling. When I asked him, all serious, if he thought he might send me away again soon, he laughed and drew me to him. “No, cara Pamela, I order you to stay at home!”
My family was intact. Golden circles of happiness wound round and round me until I was all one bright piece again.
part two
???
The Letter: January 11, 1977
428 Lafayette Street
New York City
......................................
It’s raining. I must get out.
From her third-story window, Pamela can see that the rain has caught many by surprise. A man scurries past, holding a newspaper over his head. Others, with nothing to protect them, clutch their coat collars, hunch down into themselves.
She puts on coat, hat, boots, then goes to the window to check again—is it still raining?—and sees the postman. He’s just turned right off Astor Place. He lowers his head, tugs ineffectually at his cap. The rain has not let up. She is glad.
He’ll be here shortly, she thinks, but the fact holds no interest for her. She doesn’t care about the mail. It’s never anything, just bills.
There’s just enough money in her pocket for some canned soup—chicken noodle, or perhaps split pea—and those soda crackers she likes. Her errand is a brief one, a few blocks to the grocer on East Third Street. But, once outside, she decides to take a walk first. To the old neighborhood. Macdougal Alley. Washington Square. These days the park is always so crowded, so full of noisy, scruffy-looking young people. But today, in this weather, it will be quiet. More the way it used to be.
She’ll pick up the mail when she gets back.
As the postman approaches No. 428, he sees a small, bright figure leaving the building. An old woman, a tiny woman, in yellow rain boots and a huge floppy yellow rain hat. He cannot help smiling at the sight, a dandelion bobbing about in the gray rain of the city.
He reaches the last entrance on Colonnade Row, enters the lobby, stamps his feet on the rubber mat that says Welcome. He knows the history of this building, once one of the grandest addresses in Manhattan, home to Astors and Vanderbilts. But thoughts of the past register only in ghostly fashion, in the way a commuter’s thoughts waft by at certain signposts along the way, too insubstantial and too repetitive to ponder.
His rubber-soled shoes squeak as he crosses the marble floor. The lobby is wide. Shadowed. Bare. Four mailboxes on the right wall. Against the left wall, a black enamel table holds a Chinese vase with a few tall silk flowers. White lilies, now pale gray with dust. The mirror behind—a towering piece of glass etched with art deco lines—doubles the arrangement.
Under the mailbox for Apartment 4, Bianco is typed on a little rectangle of paper framed in brass. Into this box the postman puts a meager handful of mail—the flyer he’s put in all the boxes that day (Macy’s is having a furniture sale), a bill from Con Edison, and a letter, addressed by hand. At the top left of the envelope: “R. Schlick,” written with a bold artistic flourish, the last downstroke of the R swooping down, underlining almost the whole of Schlick. Inside the faint-blue circle at the top right: Portland, Oregon, Jan. 8, 1977.
He has no idea that the Pamela Bianco whose name is on those few pieces of mail is the old woman in the yellow hat and boots. He has no idea that once she was an artist famous on both sides of the Atlantic. A young girl hailed as a “child miracle.” A child of gold.
The postman has done his job. He has protected the mail from the elements, transported it safely. But what has he really done, what has he orchestrated? He moves on, oblivious. He will never know the import of a letter shoved through a slot. Words pushed into the tunnel of a dark box.
The envelope is thin. Just two brief pages, but they contain secret folds that open like an invisible fan. Pamela will see them immediately, the encrypted images: the jazz and glitter of old Harlem, the gilt of a seaborne Madonna, the filigree ring sinking into the Hudson River, and all the rains of Oregon.
???
September 1, 1944
9 Livingston Place, Stuyvesant Square
New York City
(Midday)
margery
This morning sun is lovely, yet now I find myself wishing for rain. A good, hard rain to clear away this stifling air.
I’d turn on the radio, get the weather report, but I don’t want to wake Pamela.
Rain. That’s what we need.
We—all of us—are rain people. You won’t find us running inside when the skies open, to sit all safe and dry in our parlor.
Pamela, especially, has always loved the rain.