Panic overwhelmed me.
I excused myself, said I’d forgotten something. I tried not to run as I left the card table. But as soon as I found the stairwell I raced up and up, up to the sea air.
The fog had traveled with us. Even the sea was invisible from the high decks. The only sights to be seen were the hazy yellow circles of the ship’s lights. I found the darkest place I could and stood against the railing, staring into the void. I thought of my parents. Watching them across the room I had seen a part of them that had nothing to do with Cecco or me or writing or old books.
I thought of Diccon. Would a child of ours ever watch us across a room and think, Ah, there’s that, too . . . ?
Why were we leaving England, leaving Diccon? What were we doing here, on this ship, rushing to New York across this sea of fog, hurtling blindly into the unknown, leaving behind everything and everybody that was familiar?
I wanted to turn the ship around, go straight back to Chelsea.
It’s all because of me.
The thought sickened me.
And what if . . . what if the Americans didn’t like my art, what if no one bought my paintings?
New York City—what was New York City? A vast nothingness. I squinted into the blackness, trying to conjure up a gay life in a golden city. My efforts backfired.
A nightmare galloped through my mind, horrible and absurd. Like a decrepit mansion, a towering gallery loomed in the dark. Inside, my pictures were hung in warren-like rooms, too high to be seen properly. I stood alone at the end of a bleak corridor. Giant Americans—men, women, children—were pointing up at the walls, scoffing at my drawings, jeering at me. They turned towards me and crowded around me and lifted me up, crying, Who does she think she is? She’s no good, no good at all—take her away! They carried me up stairs and more stairs and locked me in the attic just like that madwoman in Jane Eyre. I called out for Mam and Daddy and Cecco, but I knew they couldn’t hear and I knew it was the end, that I would never see them, that I would live in darkness and never paint or draw again.
I gripped the ship’s rail, telling myself how silly it was, just a string of bad thoughts. But it was no good. I panicked.
I spun away and ran from the ghostly night back to the gay rooms I’d been so desperate to leave. As I flew down the stairs, my shoes clanging wildly on the metal, a single thought repeated itself over and over.
Everything, everything—everything is because of me!
margery
When Diccon found out about Gertrude’s offer, that we were planning to sail to New York, he tried to talk us out of it.
“Perhaps for a few weeks or so, for Pamela’s exhibition, but to stay? You’ll despise it. Bloody Americans. They can’t produce any decent art or literature on their own—who’s there been since Hawthorne? They have to import it, like Pamela. What will you do there?”
It wouldn’t be bad, I said, I had my mother and Cecil and her family. And it would be a great adventure, wouldn’t it?
As the time for leaving came near, Diccon brought flowers. Every day. There were so many arrangements in the house it began to feel as if we’d had a death in the family. One day he brought an armful of bachelor’s buttons. He sat by me in the kitchen as I arranged the blue flowers in a milk-glass vase.
“They’re beautiful, Diccon, but you really must stop! We aren’t having a funeral here, you know, we’re only going to New York. . . .”
“It is a funeral, then,” he said.
Pamela made Diccon promise to come see us in the summer. “You absolutely will come, won’t you, cross your heart?” Diccon groaned, but he promised.
At the end of February, he came to Liverpool to see us off. We’d told him he needn’t bother, but he’d held up his hand and shaken his head as if to say, I won’t hear of it. We were like family, he said, “And doesn’t one always see one’s family off on an ocean voyage?”
At the pier he shook hands with Francesco and Cecco, and kissed Pamela and me on the cheek.
“I fear I shall be quite lost without you.”
This was not the usual wry, arch Diccon speaking. He actually did look quite lost.
“Oh, it’s not for very long!” Pamela cried. “We’ll see you this summer!”
We all waved to him from the deck of the Carmania. Pamela blew him kisses. In the city he’d traded his Welsh country cap for a fedora, and he was waving it back and forth like mad. I looked at his lone figure and saw the little boy who’d lost his father and brother and sister. We were his family now, and we were deserting him. It did seem rather cruel.
The seamen flung the massive hawsers to the deck, and the ship eased away from the pilings. Unseasonably warm air had spawned a fog that erased the land almost before we left the dock. There was no watching Diccon get smaller and smaller until he was a speck and then only a mirage. In the blink of an eye, he simply vanished.
Pamela looked up at me, her changeable eyes turned gray.
“But—we’ll be coming back to England soon, won’t we, Mam?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “But I should think so.”
We drifted down the Mersey, out to sea.
part three
???
The Letter: January 11, 1977
428 Lafayette Street
New York City
......................................
Before she enters the lobby, Pamela stamps her feet, shakes the rain from the yellow sou’wester, and searches in her pocket for the keys. She is halfway up the first flight of stairs when she stops and turns around, remembering the mail.
Why do I bother? she thinks as she draws out the thin pile. Still, she stands a moment to see, exactly, what she has retrieved. It never seems to matter how many days go by with only the most mundane, the most impersonal communications filling the mailbox—with every delivery there is just that bit of hope raised, the promise of something.
And now, here is something.
Pamela reads the Oregon postmark, but she has already recognized the handwriting.
She stands still a while, just looks at the envelope. This is what she sees: the gray of the East River, the gold ring, that last letter of Robert’s in her hand. But it no longer resembles a letter at all. It is transformed, ready to carry out its final mission.
Why?
It’s all she can think. Why on earth is he writing to her now? What possible reason could he have, after all these years?
Perhaps I simply won’t open it at all, she thinks as she heads back up the stairs, though even as she has the thought, curiosity shoves it aside. She will open the letter of course, see what Robert has to say.
The cat, Byzantine, hears the apartment door opening. He stretches himself across the couch, his usual greeting.