And then it was time to leave. Pamela was stoic. Or, more truthfully, she was like stone. We hugged her, smiling, assuring her that she’d be ever so much better and that we would write all the time and see her whenever we were allowed.
I was shaky as I walked to the car. Francesco fumbled a bit with starting the engine. We were both silent.
Eighteen, I kept thinking. She’s just an eighteen-year-old girl and how has she ended up here? How have we all ended up here? I could not stop thinking that somehow I could have prevented this from happening.
I did not have a grip on my feelings. We’ve abandoned her, it’s like leaving your dog at a shelter. What have we done. . . ?
The tension we’d felt on the drive up now turned to sadness, and I rolled the window down a bit to let some out. Hills and long driveways and stone walls and almost-bare trees rolled by as my throat tightened. The tears came.
I would have said, I don’t cry. I never did cry. Not even on that gray afternoon when the carriage came for Daddy and I watched, dry-eyed, from my bedroom window. Or later, at the cemetery. I kept my eyes down, studied the laces on my boots when I heard that terrible sound, the thud, thud, thud. The dirt falling on my father.
But now I found I could not stop myself, and before I knew it I was sobbing. I just couldn’t stop. Francesco had to pull over. He’d never seen me like that. He put his arms around me, held me tight. It was the only thing to do, Margery.
pamela
I was crazy.
Running out in the rain all night, talking to pictures, ranting at poor Sara and her friends, talking for nine hours.
What could they do but send me away?
There were no patterns on the walls at Four Winds, no pretty paper to occupy me. Just the mark on the ceiling—a stain like a sepia-ink drawing spread out from the far corner. It looked like a sailboat heeling in a strong wind.
I lay on my bed, imagined myself on the boat, sailing, sailing away to someplace I’d never been. Greenland. Tahiti. The coast of Africa.
I stood at the window, watched the seasons change.
Sometimes I’d venture out to the glassed-in porch, hold a magazine or book in my lap. I tried to read, to write letters, even to draw, but I could do none of those things.
One day I got a letter from Daddy.
My own dear Pamela,
I think of you so often and wish you were back home.
I know you will be back with us soon enough!
So many people ask about you, and the proposals
for your artwork sit here gathering dust. Mr. Sell at
Harper’s has sent along an especially interesting idea
for you to do a poster for him. There is quite a lot
of money in that sort of work, if you should feel like
tackling it without any strain to yourself—it would be
an amusing job with quite a few greenbacks attached. I
am enclosing his letter so that you can ponder it.
I didn’t read the letter from Mr. Sell. I folded it up along with Daddy’s letter and put them both in the drawer of my bedside table.
I felt a pain at the back of my head that traveled down, clenching my neck and shoulders. I curled up on my bed. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to forget the letter. I tried to name the regents of England in chronological order, then the Presidents of the United States. I didn’t do a very good job. I looked out the window, and thought of nothing at all.
After a while I felt a little better. I was beginning to read some things, a few magazine articles. One day I found a new issue of Harper’s on one of the wicker tables on the porch and idly thumbed through the pages. I stopped at a story by D. H. Lawrence called “The Rocking Horse Winner.” The title caught my attention. I thought of Blue, our old rocking horse in Paris. I settled back on the sofa and read.
But soon I was sitting forward, all stiff. The story was horrid. I wanted to throw the magazine down, but I just couldn’t. I felt ill.
And so the house came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase: There must be more money! There must be more money! The children could hear it all the time though nobody said it aloud.
I gripped the magazine, powerless to stop. I read, horrified, as the boy on the rocking horse rode to his death. I sat there rigid and blind and deaf. My mind went black.
What happened next I don’t remember. I suppose a nurse— perhaps it took two of them—brought me to my room.
I spent days and days in bed. I don’t know how many. I wept. Terrible, improbable images plagued me. Huge rocking horses threatened to crush me, red-and-black-checked lumber shirts flew through the air, stacks of money soaked in puddles of paint. The sheets tormented me; I thought they were made of paper or canvas, and I clawed at them, tearing them into strips, tearing the strips into squares.
When I wasn’t hallucinating, I just stared at the ceiling, paralyzed by a ceaseless drone of painful thoughts.
All the same thought, really: I am nothing. It was a wretched chorus. I am a failure. What good am I to anyone at all? I can’t do it all; I can’t do anything. I’ve never been anything, not really. I’ve let everyone down. I hate the way I am.
Dr. Boardman was in charge of my case. He told me to call him Henry. I wasn’t very helpful to him, not for a long time. He asked many, many questions.
Tell me why you’re here, Pamela. What happened on the porch, can you try to remember? Your mother—are you close to your mother? How about your father, can you tell me a bit about him? Let’s talk about your childhood for a moment, shall we? What is it like being a celebrity, how do you feel about that? What can you remember that made you happiest? Saddest? Is there someone you feel has hurt you in some way?
There were long stretches of silence between Henry’s questions; he always waited patiently for me to answer. It must have been very trying for him. I would look into his eyes and then beyond. It wasn’t that I hadn’t listened, I knew what he was asking me. Speech was simply too difficult for me. So I was silent. Or worse, out of the blue I’d go off on a rant on the bloody ridiculousness of Prohibition, or the life of Buddha, or some other crazy thing.
Over time I developed a fondness for Henry, with his avuncular manner, his silver hair decorating his head like crimped tinsel, and his habit of removing his glasses to clean them, then looking straight at me as if he could see me better. But it wasn’t true, was it? I’d think. Why did he wear glasses at all, then? While he talked to me I’d study his eyes, eyes that seemed vulnerable, unhappy that their owner had exposed them so abruptly. But they were warm eyes, almost black, and they pulled me in.
I found my voice again, and began to answer Henry’s questions. He asked me about my friends, what sort of friends I had. I explained that I’d never been to school so I didn’t have friends in the ordinary way. I told him about the group of artists over at the Whitney Studio Club on West Fourth Street.