At any rate, today of all days would not be the time to talk of Lorenzo’s father. All I want is to be sure Pamela is all right, that’s she not falling down one of those rabbit holes she stumbles into now and then. I’d just like to make sure she’s herself, and send her on her way.
So any talk of Robert will have to wait. It could so easily set her off track. For ages after he left, Pamela was fragile. So detached from everything.
You would have thought that having a child would bring her to her senses, but she really could not care for Lorenzo, it did not come naturally to her. He was an easy, happy child, but he seemed to perplex his mother. She found it hard to know just what to feed him; she said it seemed to change all the time. Or I’d come home and there he’d be, asleep under the coffee table, Pamela reading or drawing in another room, and I’d realize she’d forgotten about naptime, about putting the baby in his crib. It was alarming.
All I could think to do was to get her and Lorenzo to Merryall. Out to the country, to ride it out. I have no idea, really, if being in the country had anything to do with it—it was such a long haul—but she did, finally, recover. She finished the drawings for The Little Mermaid before the deadline. At the end of November 1935, we returned to New York.
We weren’t home long before a strange thing happened, something that hadn’t happened in years. Pamela got a telephone call from a reporter. Someone from The New Yorker.
pamela
I did not leave for Italy in six weeks.
My American citizenship still was not finalized. I was very anxious. How long would it take? Would I ever leave New York? The more I tried to look on the positive side—it will all work out if only I can be patient—the more morose I became. It was cold in my studio. My artist’s tools sat untouched. I even began to fear the journey: the idea of crossing the ocean loomed up dark and treacherous. I thought I simply couldn’t handle it even if I ever did get my passport. It wasn’t going to work after all.
But . . . if I didn’t go, I’d still be in New York with nothing changed, and that was hell, wasn’t it? Wherever I turned, whatever I imagined, it was hell.
I can’t make things work. I always make a mess of things. Nothing I do turns out right.
Every day I wandered around the city, walking hundreds of blocks, taking notice of nothing. I knew only that I was cold, I was hungry, winter was hell. I felt a huge emptiness. I walked without purpose. Nothing seems anything, I kept thinking. People brushed by me. I heard the rattling rush of cars, the splattering of slush.
Nothing seems anything. Nothing seems anything. Nothing seems anything.
The thought repeated itself endlessly, I couldn’t close my ears to it, couldn’t stop it. An idea began to make its way through this painful chorus. It would be simple. It would be the end of the pain. I would focus on one thing. Taxis, I thought. Taxis. I’ll just walk out in front. . . . I would be free, then. It almost made me happy to think about it.
For several days I implemented my plan.
I would wait by the side of the street. Once it was a Brown and White. There were a few Checker Cabs, I think. I stepped off the curb when I was sure they were too close to stop. But they would dodge me. Brakes screeched, the taxis careened away.
Once or twice some kind person led me back to the sidewalk. “You all right, Miss?” The kind person would try to get me to talk. I couldn’t talk.
It all meant nothing to me, except failure.
I had failed even in that.
pamela
I muddled through the days. The brightness of Italy faded.
Daddy rallied, though. He began to make the rounds of all the best galleries, to find out what was selling. One day he waltzed into my studio, confident and beaming. “Still lifes,” he declared, “that’s what people want today!” .
And so I worked on still lifes, and my heart grew heavier still. The paintings in my studio did not please me. Something was terribly wrong.
I thought of how Daddy hovered around me sometimes, trying not to tell me what to do, but then telling me anyway and squeezing my shoulder and looking sheepish as if to say, Oh, you don’t have to listen to me, of course, you must listen to yourself. But always I listened to him, I couldn’t help it.
Everything overwhelmed me. I simply wasn’t able to deal with the most ordinary chores and obligations that faced me every day. I couldn’t seem to get out of bed until noon at least. My thoughts were gloomy, and the familiar fog of despair thickened around me.
Still, there were the periods when I thought I was all right. Then I worked and worked, though not in a good way. The large, geometric canvasses of dreams and childhood and even fear rattled around in my mind, but I couldn’t start on them yet. Not feeling the way I did.
I mixed cobalt violet, purple madder. The bright, rich paints on my palette hurt my eyes. White, I thought, and mixed it in to dull the hurt, working fast, driven—not by muses or by the welcome rush of brain and heart rushing to my fingertips, directing the brush, but by the fear that if I stopped painting, the painful thoughts would engulf me, drown me, as I lay in bed or tried to talk to people or to do anything in the ordinary way.
The colors didn’t feel right, but I went ahead anyway and filled my brush with paint. Are you angry about something, Pamela? Are you angry with someone? Henry’s voice whispered in my ear. I gripped the brush hard, as if I thought it would fly from my fingers. I painted in short, angry strokes. The studio filled with lots and lots of small, cramped paintings: flowers and fruits, fruits and flowers.
At Christmastime, I took to my bed. I remember Mam coming in, talking about Anne Carroll Moore—something about an anniversary at the library—and wouldn’t I like to write her a note?
I couldn’t think if I wanted to write a note or not.
From my room I could hear Lorenzo shouting a poem he’d just learned.
The camel in the gloaming
No sheet for his bed
The little lord Jesus
Lay down at their head!
I heard Mam’s laughter.
“Isn’t it ‘candles’ in the gloaming, Lorenzo?”
But Lorenzo was certain he had it right. “No! Camels with a hump!”
I wanted to be out there with them, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t move.
Perhaps I don’t really remember those things. Mam probably told me later.
Daddy came in to my room, holding one of the still lifes I’d been working on. He said he hadn’t realized there were so many—he thought he’d bring some of them round to a gallery or two. I said perhaps shouldn’t we wait a bit. “Wait for what?” he asked, and I had no answer.
margery