The loud ringing startled me, and I hurried to the telephone table in the hall. A man identified himself as Eddie O’Toole, a reporter from The New Yorker. He asked to speak to Pamela. When I told her who it was, she shook her head and gestured with her hands to let me know she didn’t want to talk. But I held out the receiver—she had to deal with life once in a while, I thought—and beckoned her over.
Pamela agreed to see the reporter, but immediately regretted it. Francesco, on the other hand, was elated. He still had hopes that the old days would return. Why, I can’t imagine. Francesco’s hold on reality often seems not so very much greater than Pamela’s.
My own feeling was that I simply wanted her to get on with her life, and I thought perhaps talking about her work to someone outside of the family might jog her a bit, get her started again.
None of us knew what to think, really. Things had been so quiet for so long, we’d almost forgotten the days when the telephone never seemed to stop ringing, when there was always someone who wanted to find out what Pamela was up to.
Is that all that Mr. O’Toole wanted, to find out what she was up to?
pamela
Daddy had luck with the still lifes. In February they were hung at Ferargil Gallery as part of a group show. I was meant to go to the opening, but I didn’t feel well.
The show was reviewed in the New York Times. The article opened with a long and complimentary review of another artist, followed by a brief paragraph.
In another room at the Ferargil you will find flower and fruit paintings by Pamela Bianco, who some fifteen years back was a child prodigy in her earliest teens. These rather tight and hard and unyielding little canvases of hers are decorative, but they are not prodigious. Much that is unsatisfactory seems to lose vitality through a too facile rhythmic scheme or a too frequent use of mauve. They are clever, but that seems about all.
“Bloody critics,” my father said.
Some of the fruit-and-flower pieces were still in my studio, stacked on the floor against the wall. One by one I put them on the easel, covered them methodically with fat brushfulls of white paint. They stared back at me, hurting my eyes, mocking me. We’re all the same. Stilled life. Stilled heart. No good.
I was quite ill. I went right back to bed. I stopped eating.
My mother and I talked.
We agreed that it would be best if I went back to Four Winds for a while.
pamela
Henry rescued me once again. The unbearable weight cracked and crumbled and fell away. I floated about, weightless. I breathed the spring air of the Village with joy.
I had forgotten that I could feel that way.
And so when I met Robert, he could never have guessed that I had just emerged from hell. It’s not what he saw at all, he only saw me flying high. I had burst through all the clouds. I was ecstatic just to feel alive. To paint again.
I’d tacked the letter from the Guggenheim people on the wall next to the studio door. Soon I would be free—to draw and paint whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I could do anything at all. I was even optimistic about love, and daydreamed endlessly about falling in love with an Italian artist, or a baker, I didn’t care. I’d live in Italy forever.
It would not be long now. I’d booked a berth for July.
Robert appeared at the end of April, an early spring flower. A daffodil, all stalky and new and hopeful.
It was late afternoon, unseasonably warm. The gentle rain that had been falling all day had stopped, and the sky hung low and soft, a blanket of dove-colored clouds. I was scrutinizing Woman with Grapes, trying to decide if it was absolutely finished. I dragged a lamp over to the easel and stepped back. Illuminated, the painting stood as a beacon in the middle of the room. Under a dense arbor, the nude figure glowed all alabaster as she reached up to pluck some fruit. The grapes glinted in the foreground, splashed by sun, begging the viewer to touch them. I couldn’t help but be enchanted, seduced by my own work. I stood a long time, pondering. Perhaps a bit more shading there, under the leaves. . . . But I was happy. It was a good painting.
I heard laughter outside, and went to crank open the window. The sun was just beginning to break through the clouds. In the alleyway, neighbors were setting out chairs, lanterns, plates of food, and jugs of wine. I thought I’d join them. I was hungry, and it was a good time for a break. But then bits of the conversation reached my ears— Garbo and Anna Christie—and suddenly I didn’t want to go outside at all. Everyone was talking about the new movie. How amazing it was. Greta Garbo had her first talking part, and she was electrifying the world. Garbo talks! Garbo talks!
I wasn’t interested in taking part in that discussion. I was quite familiar with Gene’s old play, Anna Christie. And everyone knew that my cousin Agnes had married Eugene O’Neill—I didn’t want to go out there and talk about him, or his damned great success, or anything else to do with him. I despised him. The outside chatter wafted in, and I saw Agnes’s pale face as she pushed that awful letter across the kitchen table. I saw Agnes in the shadowy dawn at Peaked Hill Bars, falling to the ground like a doll in the sea grass.
I certainly had many reasons to dislike Gene. Still, all this talk of the movie made me remember the time, years earlier, when my opinion of him softened somewhat. It was just days before Anna Christie was to open on Broadway. I happened to run into him—it was only a few minutes or so, but I saw a bit more of what made up the man, then. I thought that maybe he was all right.
On a dark, chill afternoon, threatening winter, I was walking down Broadway, heading home from the horse’s veterinarian Mam had charmed into looking at our pets when they were sick. He didn’t usually tend to small animals, he’d said, but who could look Mam in the eye and say no? I’d taken our white rat, wheezing, oozy-eyed Narcissus III—or perhaps he was Narcissus IV, I’m not sure which. The doctor had given me a small bottle of camphor oil and said it might make breathing easier.
It wasn’t the best day to be out—a fine mist that hadn’t quite decided to be rain was dampening the city. I was just a few blocks south of the Vanderbilt Theatre, daydreaming about the series of Greenwich Village roofs I was working on. At the corner ahead I noticed a man leaning against the lamppost, smoking. A very thin man, the kind that look all bony even in a padded wool blazer like this man was wearing. His hat was pulled low against the weather, but he kept looking up at the hotel. There was a clock on the roof, and I wondered if he was meeting someone. When I was almost upon him, he turned towards me, and I realized who it was.
“Gene!” I called out, reflexively, and instantly regretted it.
The eyes that turned upon me were as cold and menacing as a mobster’s gun. But almost worse was that beyond the hostility there was such a pleading look. Don’t come near me, it said. No one could feel comfortable with those dark eyes upon you, eyes overflowing with pain and anger and disdain. When Gene looked at me all I could think was: How does Agnes live with him?
But Gene’s hostility, unmistakable as it was, melted away when he recognized me.