As soon as Pablo came through the front door that night with his girlfriend, Fernande, he handed me a little wooden goat. It fit in the palm of my hand. It was a real-looking goat, but rough-hewn—the nose a bit too fat, the ears a bit too long.
“For the children. I did it with this,” he said, pulling from his pocket a simple one-bladed jackknife.
“It’s a lovely little goat! It was quite thoughtful of you, Pablo.”
Pablo nodded at Fernande, a smoldering young beauty, taller than Pablo, with a roll of dark hair crowning her head.
“I take no credit. It was her idea.”
Fernande smiled at me and shrugged. “Pablo forgets that some people actually do have children.”
Pablo looked around the apartment approvingly. He said he felt right at home, and I believed him. Some, though, might have thought our apartment was a bit of a mess. Books were everywhere, piled precariously—heaped up on tables, pushed against the sofa, spilling out from under the stairs. Charlemagne, the canary, was flitting from room to room, and Narcissus, our pet white rat, roamed free.
We settled in the front parlor with vermouth in the little green glasses, and after a while I left to check on the dinner. According to Francesco, they were talking about Apollinaire and Chagall, who had just arrived in town, when Pablo went over to the fireplace and tossed in his cigarette. That’s when he picked up Pamela’s drawing on the mantelpiece—a small piece of paper, postcard-size, resting among the photographs.
“Who did the cobayo . . . what is the French, Fernande?”
“La mème chose—cobaye.”
“In my language it’s cavia,” Francesco said, and looked up with amused triumph in his eyes as I returned to the room. “Guinea pig to you, Margery. Pablo was just asking who drew the picture.”
“Oh! The little guinea pig. Pamela did that this morning.”
“Pamela? Your daughter? But no . . . she is only . . . I’m sorry, I can’t remember these things. How old did you say she was?”
“Four.”
“Quatre! It cannot be so . . . do you have anything else to show me that this four-year-old has done?”
Pablo studied the drawings that Francesco proudly handed to him.
“Incroyable! Such command for one so young . . . impossible, I think.” He went through the drawings again, then looked up at me with an intensity that I felt was almost hostile. “I think I would like to have a visit with your little daughter.”
“Oh, I don’t . . . she’s just getting ready for bed . . . now, do you mean?”
“Yes, I wish to see her now.”
I called to Pamela as I headed up the stairwell.
“Come downstairs for a bit, Pamela . . . our friend Pablo is asking for you . . . bring your drawing board. . . .”
Pamela looked as though she couldn’t believe her luck. A summons downstairs! To where the fire was blazing, where grownups were talking and laughing and drinking. Where everything was happening. I held her hand and led her down the narrow, unlit stairway. She was in her nightgown, barefoot.
When we entered the parlor, she leaned into me, suddenly shy.
Pablo was seated cross-legged on the floor.
“Come! Sit here next to me, Pamela.”
She obeyed. As she sat close to him, I wondered what she thought of the rather odorous dark-haired man at her side. He smelled of many things—tobacco and sweet smoke and something sharper, like old soup, or Narcissus’s cage.
“I’ve heard you like to draw animals . . . well, so do I! I am an artist, did you know that?”
Pamela nodded. She had heard us talking about Pablo and his paintings.
“I thought you and I might draw one picture together before you go to bed, would that be all right with you? How about a picture of this little goat that I made?”
She nodded again. Pablo set the goat down on the rug.
Pamela knelt over her drawing board. She worked fast, the way she always did, rarely picking the pencil up off the paper. But Pablo finished first, and watched as Pamela drew.
She stopped a moment and looked up at him.
“Is it a girl goat or a boy goat?”
Pablo laughed.
“Hmm, a girl goat, I believe.”
Quickly, Pamela drew a collar of flowers around the goat’s neck, and put down her pencil.
Pablo said, “You must sign it now.”
She printed in neatly rounded letters on the bottom right: Pamela.
“And now I’ll sign mine.”
Pablo scrawled his name in capitals: PABLO.
“Shall we trade?” he asked.
Pamela nodded and handed her picture to the man with the wild black hair falling over his forehead.
Before he left that night, long after Pamela was asleep, Pablo asked to see her again. Francesco always says that I looked terribly startled then, and Pablo had roared. “No, no, don’t worry . . . I won’t wake her. I won’t make her draw again!”
In monkish silence all four of us tiptoed up the narrow stairs. We stood around Pamela’s small bed like shepherds watching over the Christ child. A rectangle of pale moonlight fell across her face.
“Incroyable,” Pablo muttered again.
pamela
When Daddy came home, we were still standing in the kitchen with my drawings spread across the table. He immediately grasped the situation.
He flung himself down before my mother, wrapped his arms around her legs, pressed his face to her belly.
“Margery . . . Margery . . . Margery.” He always put the emphasis on the second syllable, as in frittata or bongiorno. He looked up at her, pleading.
“It will be good, very good, you will see. Forgive me, please, Margery. . . .”
The words somehow came out as a poem from his lips. Mam looked into his dancing, begging eyes and shook her head. But she didn’t seem as angry as I had thought she would be.
“Get up, Francesco,” she said, and glanced at me, even managing a smile, as if to say, He’s right, you know, it will be all right. But her attention turned to Daddy and I was quite forgotten. That was fine with me. I cared only that there was peace between my parents.
I realize now that what they had that day was not a true peace. That would have to come later. Mam’s gesture of forgiveness was put on for my sake. Still, I think now that something shifted in my mother that day. She saw the way it was, the way it would be. She decided simply to free herself up. Mam’s always been magnificent that way, she can simply go forward, not holding grudges or anything. I’m afraid I’ve never gotten the hang of that.
When Daddy had recovered, he read the letter carefully. He laughed.
He turned to me.
“So,” he said, “they think you are a ‘mature’ artist? We will show them.”