I wonder . . . is Pamela dreaming?
Well, no matter. Sleeping dreams are fine, you can pay attention to them or not. It’s more the waking ones I worry about.
Everyone says dreams are wonderful things. Hang on to your dreams, people say. But that’s not always good advice, not when the dreams you’re clinging to are no more than a pretty bunch of balloons, with nothing at all inside.
I don’t know why it is but sometimes you have to get quite far ahead before you can look back and see clearly how things were. Now I look back and there’s Pamela, a young girl clutching a handful of ribbons, ribbons rising up to the sky, to a host of bright balloons. She runs everywhere with these balloons, and if one should slip away . . . well, she finds another somehow. She has to keep her dreams intact.
When I think how she must have collected dream upon dream, storing them up in her mind, sure that she would have Diccon in the end. . . . Well, it’s no wonder she shattered so completely.
pamela
I mustn’t bottle things up inside, I know it, Henry taught me that, at the hospital. But that night I never thought of Henry. I was simply too far gone.
I’m smaller than the smallest ant. Someone should go just ahead and step on me. I’d feel better then. I’m nothing, nothing at all.
Was that what I was thinking when I ran out in the rain? I can’t remember. Probably. I remember feeling that way most of the time.
It was a hard rain. How it rattled on the skylight in my studio! Insistent. Tapping out messages to me. It would not let up.
I ran out in the rain because my painting was wrong.
I ran out in the rain because of the money.
I ran out in the rain because of Daddy.
I ran out in the rain because of Diccon.
I ran out in the rain because I was eighteen and I was crazy.
I ran out in the rain because my painting was wrong.
Daddy had arranged for several shows that year—in Los Angeles and Chicago, and at the Knoedler Gallery in New York. They drew good crowds. Critics referred to me as an “established” artist. Perhaps the reviews were less exuberant than they once had been. Well, I was no longer something new and extraordinary. The child prodigy had grown up.
My pictures sold reasonably well, I think. I never really kept track. Whenever I got a check from a gallery I just signed it over to Daddy. I could see he was not as happy, though, as he had been in the early days. I suppose he wished for exactly what I didn’t want—that I could be a child prodigy forever.
That day, he came into the studio, gave me a hug, said he was proud of me, did I know that?
I nodded. I even believed him.
He went over to the Victrola. He bent down to the stack of records, running his finger down until he found his favorite Puccini. Madama Butterfly.
I made tea, and we sat together on the sofa.
Un bel di. One beautiful day . . .
Poor Butterfly! She imagines her love returning to the harbor. She will wait for him on the hill, and he will appear, calling her the old names. Little one. Dear wife. Orange blossom. But he never comes. More than anything I wanted to be happy sitting there with Daddy, but the music and Butterfly’s tragic story filled me with an ineffable sorrow. All I could think of was Diccon. Diccon, who couldn’t even manage to leave the Catskills to see me. I tried to stop from thinking how it all might turn out.
I think there is no sadder tale than Butterfly’s.
Daddy tried to get me to sing with him as we often did, but I just couldn’t. When the first side of the record ended, Daddy didn’t turn it over. He lifted the needle off the disc and set the arm down ever so gently, with the same great care he took when he turned the pages of his beloved, ancient books. He kissed my forehead and left. I didn’t say a thing.
I think he’d wanted to talk about my work, give me some advice. I pictured him telling Mam he was going over to my studio, heard her say, Why don’t you just spend some time with her, forget her art for a while. It was just a feeling I had.
I ran out in the rain because of the money.
My father was restless a lot in those days. He was always so full of ideas, I couldn’t keep up with them all. He’d come banging through the studio door, and I’d wonder—what would be on his mind this time? A commission he’d found, or an exhibition he wanted me to see. Come along, Pamela, just to get a few ideas, a new track, perhaps? And off we would go.
He kept talking to me about what the public wanted, which were the most prestigious galleries, who was selling what. I want to show you what Joseph Stella’s doing these days, Pamela . . . the color. . . . His talk made me uneasy. I knew he dreamed of big sales. I suppose it troubled me more than I knew at the time. I didn’t want to talk of sales, I wanted only to paint as I wished. But . . . the money . . . I never could shake off the idea. And it didn’t help that Gertrude had dropped by the previous week and mentioned, all nonchalant, that one day in the coming months, she wasn’t sure when, there was a young artist from France coming over with his family and he’d need a place to stay, so we’d be wise to keep an eye out for apartments, to think about our next move.
Daddy and I never, ever talked of it, the money. But it was always there, trembling in the air between us, and when he left the room it hung over me, then dropped, catching me as a net.
I ran out in the rain because of Daddy.
It’s true I would have done anything to feel again as I did that time after the exhibition in Turin, when the soldier came to the door with the box, the letter from d’Annunzio inside. Daddy, holding that letter as if he were Moses just handed the Ten Commandments. And when he put it down at last he beamed at me. Then he held his arms out to me, and it was just then, as my father lifted me high overhead, that I saw the brilliant icon. I painted it in my mind: a child stands surrounded by a myriad of golden rays—Mam and Daddy and Cecco, awash in the brilliant light, turn towards me; beyond my family are shimmering circles of admiring strangers—a great expanding halo.
I clung to this icon for years, carrying it with me everywhere, wearing it as a locket round my neck.
The icon was false. Gold shines forever, but I was not made of gold.
I ran out in the rain because of Diccon.
Diccon had deserted me.
But . . . I would not believe it.
Why would he never see what was right in front of him? Why was he so stubborn? I didn’t understand one thing.
Diccon didn’t love me. He loved Nancy.
Nancy! Why did she have to exist?
He was going back to England. She would have everything.
I would have nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
margery