It wasn’t much of a peace, really, but I would stick to it. I would never let the issue come between us again. Pamela, I understood, had been concerned only for me. She had always turned herself over to Francesco willingly.
No, in those days if Pamela looked distracted or concerned or wistful, I could be quite sure it had nothing to do with her father or her work or her future. Her mind was fixated on Diccon.
Quite a natural thing, I thought. What young girl does not dream of romance, crave romance?
I’d seen the pile of dime novels under her bed. Verdict of the Heart, Dotty’s Dilemma, Wife in Name Only. And The Dark Heart of Kitty LaRue—I’ll admit I thumbed through that one. What a nasty, calculating creature, stealing another woman’s husband. But she paid for it, of course, she was sorry on her deathbed. As she should have been. . . .
What on earth did Pamela learn from these books? What ideas filled her head? She was—she still is—terribly gullible. Lord, I can still see the look on Pamela’s face that time at Old House when Agnes started talking about how she met Gene.
Well, the fact is that Agnes had us both mesmerized. It was quite a tale.
At twenty-four, she’d published a few novelettes and some of her short stories had appeared in pulp magazines. She had ambitions, big dreams. She yearned to go to New York City, where every street corner held promise. In October of 1917, she left her family behind at Merryall and rode the milk train from the Housatonic Valley into New York. It was a noisy ride—she was accompanied the whole way by the clanking of the metal milk cans in the boxcar. As she gazed through the train window at the trees ablaze with red and yellow, she thought with some sadness of the country winter she would miss—the frozen fields, the icy woodpiles, the wind that could almost knock her flat as she came round the corner of the barn.
But her fit of nostalgia didn’t last very long. Not with the shiny adventure of New York just ahead.
In the city, Agnes took a small room in Greenwich Village at the Brevoort. She called up an acquaintance, Christine Ell, who’d told her about a possible job—a factory job, but she could work short shifts and it would be steady money. Christine gave Agnes instructions to meet her at ten thirty at the Hell Hole, the back room of a bar called the Golden Swan, on the corner of Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue.
Agnes was uncomfortable as she waited alone in the dark, beery room strewn with beat-up wood tables. Christine was late.
“I lit a cigarette. Then I noticed a man sitting across the room. He was dark and still, and he was staring at me. . . . I could feel a sadness in his look and . . . there was a hardness, too. I thought he was probably someone not to be messed with. Then Christine showed up, and the first thing she did was greet the man who’d been watching me. She brought him over and introduced him, said his name was Gene O’Neill and that he wrote plays.
“Then Gene’s brother, Jamie, turned up. He was wearing a black-and-white checked suit and a bowler, and greeted everyone with a cheery ‘What ho!’ He was walking painfully slowly, and he sat down in the booth carefully like an old man. The Hell Hole wasn’t the first bar he’d been in that day! He did most of the talking. Gene never said a word. Christine leaned over to me and whispered that Gene’s not drunk enough to really talk . . . you should hear him when he does. He hardly ever talks when he’s sober. Anyway, after an hour or so Jamie and Christine headed off to another bar.”
Agnes leaned towards us dramatically, to make sure we were paying close attention.
“Gene walked me back to the Brevoort . . . never said a thing. When we got to the hotel door, I politely offered my hand to say good-bye, but Gene just stood there looking at me with those sad eyes. I felt horribly awkward just standing there, so I just said, ‘Well, good night, then!’ Then . . . very slowly and clearly . . . Gene said the first words he ever said to me.
‘I want to spend every night of my life from now on with you. I mean this. Every night of my life.’”
Pamela was motionless. She just stared at Agnes. I thought perhaps she might never move again.
pamela
No, Old House was not new to me. Now the house emanated the same mixture of warmth and safety laced with sorrow that it had so many years before. I’d almost forgotten. I was so small, then.
It wasn’t long after the dinner party with Pablo Picasso that Cecco and I knew something was wrong. Daddy was quiet a lot of the time. He just sat with a book on his lap, not reading. If we tried to talk to him, he’d pat our heads absentmindedly. We heard our parents whispering in a different way. We mostly couldn’t catch the words, but once, as I quietly approached the kitchen, I heard Mam quite clearly. There was the scrape of a chair, and the sound of a china plate set on the porcelain sideboard. Then my mother’s low voice.
“You’re not well, Francesco . . . we must do something. And that is all I can think of to do.”
There was only silence after that. I tiptoed away and found my brother upstairs.
“Daddy’s sick,” I told Cecco.
Mam was sad-eyed when she explained to us about Daddy. Not to worry, darlings, he’ll be shipshape soon, but I must stay here to care for him. She told us that Cecco and I were going away to live with her sister, Cecil. She would accompany us on the voyage over. She said we’d love America; we’d love Aunt Cecil and Uncle Teddy and all the girls. Teddy painted landscapes, and I could draw with him. The Connecticut countryside and the New Jersey coast had lovely open places to explore.
What Mam said was true, but it’s certainly not the landscape or even Cecil, whom I did grow to love, that I remember from that time. It’s loneliness, mainly. And how much I hated automobiles. The shiny Model T parked near the pier that would take me, unwilling, to a strange world. The jalopies that would roar up to Old House, waiting for sixteen-year-old Agnes to run out the door and hop in the back, off to have loads of fun with her friends. And this, most vivid of all: Mam driving off with Uncle Teddy to go back to New York, to get on the ship that would take her back to Daddy. I see her bright face haloed by the lemon scarf she’s wrapped round her head. She turns and waves until she is out of sight. Cecco waves, too, yelling over and over, “Bye, Mam, see you soon! Bye, Mam, see you soon!” Cecco’s house is made of brick, but mine is made of straw, collapsing in the slightest wind. I don’t wave. Why should you wave when your heart has been ripped out?
For weeks I kept hearing motors, and dashed to my bedroom window hoping to see Mam rolling up the driveway, but of course she never did.
margery