On New Year’s Eve, 1930, I turned twenty-four.
It was a somber birthday, despite Mam’s efforts at cheer—the frosted angel cake with yellow roses, the presents wrapped in tin foil. Mam, Cecco, and I walked to Times Square to watch the ball drop. Daddy stayed at home.
The truth was it felt good to get away from him for a while, to join the anonymous crowd. Daddy was in trouble. He seemed to have shut down.
I thought of how much my father had changed since he’d had to close his bookshop. He no longer moved impatiently about the house. He sat still for hours, holding a book, staring across the room. Even the gramophone was silent. It was the money. It had to be the money. Everyone had lost so much in the Depression. Eventually we were forced to leave our lovely home on Waverly Place. Still, we were lucky to have a roof over our heads.
Daddy was mostly silent. When he did talk it was scholarly gibberish, nothing to do with our life. More than once he called me over as he pulled out his most precious possession from his old steamer trunk. A Papal Bull. It was extremely old, extremely valuable. He would never sell it, though.
He spoke in a flat tone. He was expressionless, not his real self at all. He had simply faded altogether. He’d already lost most of the hair he’d been so proud of, and though he still dressed well, the details were overlooked—the folded handkerchief in his jacket pocket, the perfect shine on his shoes. My father, the man Diccon had once called a butterfly of a man, had folded his wings.
I looked at him as he sat hunched in his chair and felt a terrifying stab, a realization that so very much time had passed and so much of the good had gone.
“1511, Pamela. Pope Julius II inviting the Lateran Council. Look at this seal, the wheel pattern.” Dutifully, I looked at the dull, half-dollar-sized circle dangling at the bottom of the ancient document. “People are ignorant, they ask if a Bull has a bull’s head on the seals. Not one that I’ve seen.” He ran his finger absentmindedly over the parchment. He droned on as if he were reading from a text.
“You know what the word ‘Bull’ comes from, Pamela.”
Yes, I did. I had heard it all a hundred times. “Bulla—air bubble—such as rises in water during ebullition . . . also any small object of globular shape such as those gold or silver bosses that were worn for ornament on a string around the neck. The leaden seals appended to Papal Decrees were of just such a shape and, therefore, were called bullae. . . .”
He would look up to assure himself that I was still there. Daddy didn’t care if I responded or not. And I did not respond, just stood by his chair. Patted his shoulder.
I was devastated by this phantom father. It was painful to see him, and I didn’t like thinking about the reasons for his depression. There were the money problems, of course, but all I could think was, was it just as much . . . disappointment in me? Was I to blame for my father’s illness?
It hurt too much to be around him, and I began to avoid him, hiding in my studio for days at a time. But I did little work. I paced and paced, uselessly going over and over the events of the last few years.
I’m to blame. I handle everything so badly!
Mam held steady, maneuvering her way around all the dark shadows of our home. She continued to write, books with happy endings. In 1929 she published The Candlestick, the story of an old wooden candlestick who’d been feeling rather useless and forgotten, then burned brightly one stormy night to lead a fisherman safely home. Now she was almost finished with The House that Grew Smaller, about a lonely, abandoned house who finds happiness shrinking first to playhouse size so that children will inhabit him. Then, abandoned again, he becomes even smaller, ending up a beautiful bird house, delighting all who pass by.
Now I see another truth, a sad truth, about that time. Mam continued to write her books not just because she was so steady in her nature, and not just because she had wonderful stories in her head and she knew they would give pleasure to so many children. Perhaps more than anything, she wrote to escape the madness that pressed in on her.
The noxious cloud of misery—Daddy’s illness, the constant lack of money, my failure with Diccon—was suffocating. I was desperate to shake it off.
There was a glimmer of a hope to cling to, a possible way out. At the Whitney Club, everyone was talking about the Guggenheim Fellowship. Why not? I thought in a rare moment of optimism. I’d try for it—it would be the answer to everything.
I worked hard on my application. Gertrude agreed to write a recommendation. I had no confidence, though. And it turned out there was a great hurdle to overcome: I had never completed the process to become a citizen of the United States, and I couldn’t get a passport until I did. I forced myself to do the necessary work, make the calls, fill out the paperwork. It would all be worth it, though.
If I could get the grant, I’d have the money to stay for months—maybe a year, even—and do whatever I wanted, paint whatever I wished. It would be just as in was in the old times.
If only I could go back to Italy . . . well, things would be all right then. It would be heaven.
When I got the congratulatory letter from the committee, the good news washed over me, a fresh and beautiful torrent. God, I thought, it won’t be long now, I can’t believe it.
Soon, I would be back in my beloved Italy!
Six weeks, I figured. I could manage to be ready in that amount of time.
margery
Pamela’s wedding. Well, I wasn’t there. I wouldn’t know. Pamela said it was quite the scene.
But I’d rather not think of Robert right now. I’d just as soon forget him altogether, though that’s impossible, of course—he is always here, hovering about somehow. We can never lose him. One simply cannot get around the fact that he is Lorenzo’s father.
How infuriating it is. How is it that a person can trot into one’s life for a brief second, then trot right off again and, when he is gone, everything is changed? So many people’s lives that man affected, and off he goes whistling into the sunset. And not a thing we can do about it.
Poor Lorenzo. How he must wonder about his father. So many times I’ve thought perhaps we should track him down, try to get him together with his son. But I’d have to go behind Pamela’s back. Whenever I’ve mentioned it to her, she would have none of it. Anyway, I’m sure she’s right—if the man has made no effort to see his boy in all these years (and what kind of man is that?) then no good could come of forcing the issue. Surely it would make things worse.
Best to leave it alone.