That summer when Diccon came back to New York to spend his enforced six-month separation from Nancy, Pamela may have been eighteen, but she remained very much a child.
Still, by the time Diccon arrived, I was sure she understood. Diccon was engaged. There was no question. We had all discussed it. It suppose it was foolish of me, but I did think she had accepted that Diccon had found a girl he wanted to marry. She seemed to. She seemed quite fine to me. In fact, just before we left the Catskills, when we had that campfire dinner over at Diccon’s, she was as jolly as I’d ever seen her.
Then Diccon came back to the city, and it was a horror. That dinner at our place. Pamela losing control, as if a great hand had given her a turn, and she went spinning like a top across the table, right over the edge. No one was quick enough to catch her. Screaming about hotcakes and acrobats! What on earth did she mean by that? She was not herself at all, she was a girl possessed.
It only went downhill after that. Blackness churned inside her for months, unrelenting. There was nothing I could do.
You could almost feel it yourself, the heaviness.
I watched over her, but nothing I did seemed to help. Then one day I got a call, and thought I saw a possible way out, a tiny light in all the darkness. Anne Carroll Moore, the children’s librarian at the New York Public Library—a good friend of mine ever since The Velveteen Rabbit was published—called to say that her old friend Bertha Mahony, the proprietress of a children’s book store in Boston, was having a series of artists’ exhibitions . . . and, well, she said, it seemed natural to ask me if I thought Pamela would consider participating. Anne had no idea of Pamela’s trouble. She couldn’t have known that to me the idea seemed a gift from the gods. Something, anything, to get the girl going in the right direction.
pamela
Iran out in the rain because I was eighteen and I was crazy.
It is a very dark time. Shadowy arms reach out, and I brush them away at first, but then they seize me, and I know they won’t let go. I am not myself. The pain pulls me under.
For days, I can’t seem to work. Instead, I pace around the studio. I’m in a muddle, I can’t understand anything. I feel so terribly low. I feel not much of anything at all.
Late one afternoon, as night descends, I pace and pace. I don’t turn on the lights.
The rain taps out messages. Tells me things. Stop all this. Leave it. You are nothing, nothing at all. Just give it up. Leave it all.
I listen to the voices. I have no choice. I cannot explain it.
A strange headiness overcomes me, almost a dizziness, like when I smoked my first cigarettes. The feeling expands in me, filling me, lifting me.
I think that I can fly.
With no thought in my mind I grab the money I’d stashed in the little kitchen drawer and run out into the night.
The wind hits when I turn onto Macdougal Street. Automobiles run through rivers at the side of the road, pushing curtains of water onto the sidewalk. The rain slams into me, my overalls are wet and heavy against my body. My braid flops like a dead fish down my back. The lights of the city are all in a blur.
Under a streetlamp I see the mass of color. I head straight for it. Flowers! I buy bunches and bunches of flowers.
I walk fast, careful to give other pedestrians a wide berth. I’m crazy with worry, terrified that my stick-out handle might knock into people, push them down. I have to be so careful! I am quick, jumping to the left or right.
The words in my head are all crackly. I don’t think I say them aloud.
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
I shove flowers at people who speed towards me. Some take them, some turn away from me and the flowers fall down to the wet pavement.
Fear seizes me. Fear of the darkness that chases me, that has nothing to do with night.
I walk eastward, faster and faster, until I have to stop. My eyes hurt. I put my hand up in front of my face to block out the network of lights flying across the Brooklyn Bridge, dropping into the river. To block out the steel cords like giant harp strings curving up to the sky, up and down again like a roller coaster. The dizziness returns.
I have to turn away.
I lie on my side, crouched, all taut. Mam rubs my head with a towel.
“Better now?” she says, quietly. It’s almost a whisper. “Let’s just get you out of these wet things.”
She has trouble prying open my hands that press up in fists under my chin. She loosens my fingers, and I breathe in the cool and earthy smell of smashed stems.
I sleep fitfully for days, the dreams repeating themselves, all of rabbits and children and sunlit meadows and Diccon holding me, and they sound like good dreams, but they aren’t.
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
I put my hands over my ears.
margery
Pamela had no interest in the children’s bookstore. She was extremely reluctant, just as I’d expected. But in the end she gave in. It was only to please me, I knew that, but still I hoped it might pull her out of her trouble.
In January, we took the train to Boston.
It was a frigid Sunday morning. We battled icy winds and slippery sidewalks as we made our way to Boylston Street. Bertha welcomed us into her bookstore, pride lighting up her face. It was a very pleasing face, rounded and soft with that delicate flushing that is so attractive. She wore her warm brown hair piled loosely on top of her head, and her brown eyes almost closed when she smiled, like Alice’s Cheshire Cat, but more cuddly, so that you immediately felt she was a friend. She looked to be just about my age.