Well, I suppose I’ve done the talking. Francesco has been mostly silent on the subject. He’s glad, of course, that Pamela’s stronger. At least she seemed to be. But—he won’t say this to me, I know—he’s dying to get her painting again. Would strong-arm her if he could.
I put the tea things down, talking all the while about Lorenzo’s visit, his plans for the weekend. The only response from Pamela was a slight nod. She stared at her teacup with that serious thinking expression of hers, her eyebrows drawn together in a way that, since she was a child, has always made us exclaim, “There, Pamela’s at it again!” Only now it’s a bit harder to read. She always had strong, dark eyebrows that almost met over her nose and now they are gone. Completely erased. I do wish she hadn’t shaved them off. It gives her such a fixed look, a false sophistication.
I will say this, though, the penciled lines are beautifully done. If anyone can draw in a perfect eyebrow, it’s Pamela.
She started up again about painting. I must try . . . I want to . . . I can see the images so clearly . . . my childhood. And somewhere amongst all the talk she wondered aloud, as if it were something she’d just thought of, something that had never occurred to her before, that she supposed her childhood had ended that day in Turin. Yet another bad sign, that ancient story. I had no energy for it. We had both, in our own ways, returned to it too many times.
And so I smiled and went over to hug her, and said something like, “Well, here we are now, and I suppose we must concentrate on what’s in front of us.” Some such platitude, meant to be comforting. And meant to change the subject. After all, she’s a grown woman now, and I did not want to revisit the past. Not that particular past, at any rate, a time when I may have let her down—I will never know, not really—and a time when Francesco and I turned a corner and could not look back.
How easily, in the end, I gave in to him. I try not to think of it. But there it is, it’s inevitable. I feel the quick clenching of my stomach, the twinge of guilt running through me even now. It’s simply wearying.
The fact is that when Pamela started in on that subject, my first thought was not a comforting platitude at all. The mind goes where it will. I’ve learned to forgive myself its quirky meanderings. We are all the same, aren’t we? The most angelic among us must sometimes have thoughts that are mean or vengeful or idiotic or perverse. Just yesterday I was shopping at Balducci’s and came across an elderly couple huddled in the aisle. They were examining the pudding boxes. And what should spring into my mind but a picture of them naked in bed. I even heard the man groaning. Wretched, horrid thought. I went back to hunting down the Colman’s.
I do wonder, though, about these thoughts that fly into our minds from God knows where, shocking our decent and amiable selves. I suppose it must be a filtering mechanism of sorts, sanity’s system of checks and balances.
At any rate, I confess that my immediate thought when Pamela talked of her childhood ending was, “I’m afraid, my dear, it never really has.”
Now here she is, and not a thing I can do.
I hear nothing. The door to her room is shut, there is no sound of movement. She’s utterly quiet, as if she’s not here at all— yet somehow she fills the apartment so that I feel there is no room for me in this place.
pamela
I had to come over to Mam’s, I just had to, I couldn’t stay at home another minute. All that pacing, it’s no good. I know what it means. Up and down the hallway, over and over. Picking things up, putting them down, not thinking what I was doing. Lorenzo’s room . . . his desk. . . I stood there forever, moving his things about. His beloved Socony pen with the flying red horse floating in oil, the pack of Black Jack gum, the tin dish full of Cracker Jack prizes. I held the pen a long while, tilting it this way and that, the winged horse gliding back and forth, back and forth. I lined up Lorenzo’s treasures. The pen, the tiny tin battleship, the pack of gum, the plastic green soldier, the skull charm. Lined them up in a neat row. Picked up the pen, went back to pacing.
Up and down the hallway, I couldn’t seem to stop. My shoes on the wood floor. Tap. Tap. Tap. I kept thinking it was rain on the roof though I knew perfectly well that it was sunny outside. Tap. Tap. Tap. Faster. It was rain, I was sure of it.
I flipped the Socony pen. The little red horse slid downwards ever so slowly.
Flipped it again. Upwards. Downwards. I don’t know how long I stood there. I had to put it back. Lined it up with the other things on Lorenzo’s desk. Walked out the door, headed to Mam’s.
They followed me, though. I looked up and there they were, a flock of horses in the sky, red wings beating, beating. There were so many of them, racing sunward. Hundreds. Then out from behind a cloud another horse emerged, a different sort of beast altogether, huge and white. . . .
He flew earthward, toward me, so that I could feel the wind, his great wings beating the air. When I looked up past him I saw that all the red horses had disappeared. It was just the white one now. He hovered above me, looked at me with ancient black eyes. Eyes both sad and deeply kind. I reached up, but he shook his head, tossing his mane, and off he flew, into the high white clouds over the city.
I know that horse and his black eyes.
My mother’s horse. I drew him.
An illustration for Mam’s book. The Skin Horse. The story of a boy who lies dying in the hospital and the toy horse he loves—a worn-out leather horse with a wobbly leg and just five bare nails on his back where his mane used to be.
And later, that other horse, the huge one with wings that flies to the boy’s bedside. . . .
I drew the child and the white winged horse, but I didn’t draw the empty bed.
Some people didn’t like the book, they didn’t understand. They said that the story was too sad for children. But Mam knew better. Children can deal with sadness, she would say. Death is natural to them.
But, of course, I didn’t really understand, either. At the time I never thought a thing about it, never thought that my mother was talking of herself.
I had to come over here. I didn’t know what else to do. It’s safe here in my old room, the door shut, Mam just down the hall.
I run my hands over the ridges of the old chenille bedspread, the soft tufts outlining white daisies. One by one, I touch the little buds that make up the oval pattern, over and over. Like a rosary.
I want to talk to Mam, but I can’t seem to formulate what I want to talk about because, really, it’s just everything. What’s wrong? I want to ask her. Something is wrong with me, everything is wrong with me, and I want my mother to tell me what it is, but how do you have a conversation when I don’t want to talk about this or that. I just want to say to Mam, I’m tired of everything.
How can I tell my mother such a thing?