“Hello, you old thing,” Pamela says. And Byzantine is old. Sixteen in the spring. She fingers Byzantine gently behind the ears, strokes him.
She hangs her coat and hat on the doorknob to let them dry before putting them back in the closet, then walks over to the table heaped with haphazard piles of bills and coupons and flyers she’s never bothered to throw away. She throws her handful of mail on top.
“Hungry?”
She opens the cabinet under the sink, takes out a box of Tender Vittles. She picks up the heavy green bowl from the floor, opens the pouch of cat food. New! Seafood Flavor! It smells like sweetened manure to her, but Byzantine seems to think it’s all right.
Pamela watches the cat as he tentatively approaches the bowl. He will not finish his serving, she knows. Age has diminished his appetite.
She sighs. Is it a sigh for Byzantine? Or for the weariness that descended on her when she saw the letter from Robert? Or is it just an old woman’s sigh, for nothing in particular?
She may be tired, but underneath, she feels it. The bit of adrenalin stirring.
Why does he write? What can he possibly say?
She returns to the table full of papers, retrieves the envelope.
It’s awfully thin. He doesn’t have very much to say, it seems.
???
September 1, 1944
9 Livingston Place, Stuyvesant Square
New York City
(Early Afternoon)
margery
I’ll go check on her. In just a bit.
Look at me. What am I doing? Wrapping my hands around my arms, hugging myself as if it were freezing in here. God.
And this awful headache. I suppose it’s all these memories pushing and clamoring their way to the surface of my brain. They rush in like schoolchildren, breathless, tumbling, unstoppable.
All that excitement over Pamela when we arrived . . . !
When I think of that icy wind when we sailed into New York Harbor—well, I almost can believe that it’s cold in here. The snow may have been half-hearted, just bits blowing about, but the wind was quite serious. Low whitecaps rolled across the steely gray water as the RMS Carmania nudged up to the dock.
It seemed ages before we were allowed to disembark, but at last we got the signal. Edging our way down the gangplank, we jostled for position among the crowd of passengers. We were perhaps halfway down when we caught sight of the men on the dock. They were holding up huge dark boxes. Bulbs began to explode.
People looked around, craned their necks. Who was the celebrity, everyone was wondering. Was there someone we had we missed on board—Mary Pickford? Charlie Chaplin?
Then, the shouting. Reporters’ voices rising into the air.
“Miss Bianco, over here! Miss Bianco!”
“Good God, Pamela,” Francesco said, “They’re after you!”
pamela
My fears about New York quickly vanished. So many glorious things were happening in those early months, one after another. My exhibition, the glowing articles in all the papers, my photograph in Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair. And meeting all the artists in Macdougal Alley and around the Village.
Now I try to string the days together, try to make a whole of it. A geometry of jewels, as ornate as a queen’s coronation necklace. But just like such a necklace it is too much, really. As soon as it is put away, you are no longer sure of its design.
Yet the centerpiece is solid. It shines just as brightly in my mind now as it did then.
The studio. My studio.
At first, all I could do was follow the feather.
Gertrude moved about the rooms with a rapid efficiency, pointing out features—closets, hidden storage areas, the light. Her hat, a soft gray turban with an ornate pewtery clasp, sprouted a long, thin, curling feather that whipped about as she moved. It left trails in the air, like wisps of smoke.
I couldn’t focus on what she was saying. My mind buzzed with incomprehension. This is not all mine, surely . . . ?
In all those days crossing the sea, I had tried to envision the new studio Gertrude had promised. I’d dreamt of a well-lit room, big enough to comfortably hold a drawing table, easel, and all my supplies. Room to paint and draw, but also room to breathe in, that was what I’d hoped for. But this! I could have a tea party—no, a ball—in this place. The space was truly luxurious: thirty-foot ceilings, a huge latticed skylight, a workroom three times the size of the parlor in our Chelsea flat.
There was even a tiny kitchen, a dining room, and an upstairs loft.
Gertrude handed me the key.
Just come see me if you need anything, Pamela, dear . . . don’t hesitate. . . .
Through the skylight I watched a bank of steely winter clouds slowly steepening. Absentmindedly, I ran my hand over the great oaken worktable, covered with the fine dust of old clay and mottled by the gouges and nicks of previous artists. A cool, earthy odor still hung in the air. The walls were bare except for an abandoned charcoal sketch of a nude and an old Provincetown Players schedule someone had tacked by the front door.
I envisioned canvasses filling the studio, paintings like the one I’d imagined in Gertrude’s suite at the Ritz in London.
A frisson of purest joy ran through me.
This space, this gorgeous studio, was all mine.
I raced up the stairs to the narrow loft—already thinking, what treasures would I store up here?—and down again to the little strip of kitchen where a dented black tea kettle sat atop a two-burner stove. It was, far and away, the dearest tea kettle I had ever seen.
But there was no time to luxuriate. The exhibition at Anderson Galleries was only a few weeks away.
margery
Gertrude had installed a telephone in our new home in Macdougal Alley. It rang all the time. The reporters could not get enough of Pamela. Someone was always calling up to ask for an interview. They all wanted Pamela to talk about her earliest drawings, the bunnies and children. They wanted to know what she thought and did when she was six years old. What could she say? She was like any little girl, she’d tell them. But she never had to say very much. Francesco was always with her. I was happy to have him take over. I had enough to tend to, just trying to take stock of this new world we inhabited.
New York. Greenwich Village. I had no idea.
Before our arrival, my idea of the city was a collage of postcards. A park, not so very far from our neighborhood I’d figured, that had pagodas and dome-topped structures all lit with thousands of electric lights: Luna Park, in a place called Coney Island. Fashionable women with giant fur muffs and feathered hats strolling in snow-covered Central Park. And pelicans and monkeys and bears just a tram ride away at the New York Zoological Park—I could hardly wait!