Pamela watches Byzantine slowly eating his way through the soft pellets. Poor old Byzantine, he never gets outside. The cat lives on the sofa. Once it was a beautiful emerald green, but now it’s more like faded camouflage, mottled green and gray and white, covered with a silky film of cat hairs. Pamela looks around the place, and the usual litany of shoulds go around in her head. I should get the vacuum out. I should tend to the litter box. I should do something about all those dishes piled in the sink. Soak them, at least. I don’t want Lorenzo finding them, feeling he has to clean up after me.
The letter she is trying to avoid centers itself in her mind, plunks itself down like an unwanted guest.
Why did he write? What’s to be gained?
I suppose I must open it. Lorenzo, she thinks. It must be about Lorenzo. Does he imagine that I will be the intermediary? What does he expect me to say? Oh, Lorenzo, you’ll never guess who I heard from—your father! Isn’t that nice, dear?
Well, I won’t help. Why should I? If Robert had wanted to find his son he could have. At any time. It would have been no trouble at all. In all these years, we’ve never moved beyond a mile radius of Greenwich Village. All he had to do was to call long distance information. How many Lorenzo Schlicks are there in Manhattan?
Still, I can’t help asking myself over and over, why?
All I can think is this: Robert must be dying. I try to picture the situation, try for just a minute to put myself in his place. He is ill. He putters around his house in the rainy woods of Oregon. Time is running out; he regrets the past; he wants his son to forgive him. He wants to make amends. Amends! I see what he’s dreamed up, it runs like a bad play in my head. A frail and hoary old man, leaning on a cane, sees his son for the first time. The cane drops, and the men embrace. The son’s bewildered wife and children stand in the background. The son, wet-cheeked, turns to his children. Come meet your grandfather. . . .
God. It makes me cringe. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if something like that is just what he’s imagining. Robert always was dramatic.
Pamela studies the handwriting on the envelope. It is still vigorous, not the shaky script of an old man. No, the man is not dying.
She crosses the room to her writing desk, picks up the mother-of-pearl letter opener that her father brought with him from Italy. Such a pretty thing, it always gives her pleasure to hold it. Even now.
The knob on the spindly floor lamp has always been reluctant, but she finally gets it to turn. She settles herself in the chair, runs the silver blade through the top of the envelope.
???
September 1, 1944
9 Livingston Place, Stuyvesant Square
New York City
(Midafternoon)
pamela
The arrow flew silently, without mercy, across the ocean. It lodged in my chest.
A letter from Diccon, to tell us about a girl he’d met.
Nancy Stallibrass. Nancy was blonde and serene, he said. Something about the eyes of a fawn. He was quite fond of her, he said, and we’d adore her—she was a poet.
Adore her? I hated her.
It wasn’t fair, it really wasn’t fair. How could it be fair when I was stuck in New York and she was over there, with him?
Well, he’d only just met this Nancy person, it wouldn’t last. If only Diccon and I could just be together again, it would all happen the way it was supposed to. He’d see that the child he remembered had disappeared. Our relationship would be quite different, now.
I scrutinized Diccon’s letter. I decided to ignore it. It wasn’t important. He never wrote that he was in love or anything like that. I shoved the idea out of my mind.
I buried myself in work, but it wasn’t the same as it once had been. Daddy’s business was slow, and he was bored, I suppose. He kept coming up with commissions for me that paid well. There was lots of extra work, illustrating and posters. It seemed important to him. But there was no time for painting what was inside of me. The dreams. What seemed most real.
Two more letters from Diccon arrived.
The first one made me laugh, at first. He mocked Nancy’s mother, the very proper Philippa Stallibrass who thought Diccon an unworthy suitor for her daughter. He said that Philippa was aghast that Nancy had fallen in love with a writer, a man with no decent income. And to top it all off, he had the ridiculous idea of living in some hovel off in the wilds of Wales, it wasn’t civilized, not natural at all. Philippa said that Nancy could never be induced to lead that sort of life.
But Diccon admitted that he wasn’t entirely sure himself about what Nancy would make of the rough living conditions, and he’d come up with an idea—he thought it imperative that Nancy spend a week with him at Ysgol Fach, to be sure she could take the isolation. And Mrs. Stallibrass had agreed, provided that Diccon’s mother went along as chaperone. She is, naturally, convinced Nancy will run straight home in horror. . . .
Diccon’s reach was longer than I could have imagined. He picked up my heart like a teacup and hurled it against the wall.
Nancy was going to spend a week at Ysgol Fach. My Ysgol Fach! It could not be. I would not let that pale London girl have any of it—not the high grass and hollyhocks blowing in the wind, not the furred dunes, not the lazy sails, not the lacey shadows of apple trees down the hillside, not Diccon’s hotcakes!
It wasn’t right, it made no sense. Diccon—and Wales—were mine.
The second letter was brutal, too. But, in the end, it contained a gift.
Diccon was full of outrage. He wrote that he and Nancy wanted to become engaged, but that her parents, in their ridiculous and stupid way, had made him agree to a six-month separation. He thought it quite absurd, said that all it would prove was the obstinancy of their emotions. Philippa’s idea was that they were not even to hear about each other. Diccon said that such an idea was something only a person as crass as herself could conceive.
He was furious, but he had seen no alternative but to agree.
I couldn’t believe it. I had to read it many times to be sure.
Diccon was coming to New York.
pamela