Robert talked and talked, but it was all about Copenhagen, and about how well Roy was doing, how the Danish people seemed to look upon him as a god. We never spoke about our own life, about what we might do when we got back to New York. He asked little about what I had been doing or what I was thinking about. He did admire my Madonna. He said the colors were gorgeous.
I’d look at him in the morning, splayed across the sheets, and wonder so many things. Who are you? Do you love me? Do I love you? Are you glad we got married? What will we do when we get back to New York? But I never really asked him those things, I wasn’t brave enough. Besides, I told myself that maybe love didn’t matter right now, that love was what would happen when we finally got around to living together. But it was all foolishness, and among these thoughts the truth intruded, startling me. The words might as well have been shouted through a megaphone. There was no escaping them as I stared at the naked man on my bed.
Here lies another disaster.
Robert was gone before the week was out. He said there was a book festival in Copenhagen he had to attend.
I knew then I’d been fooling myself, that none of it was Real at all.
And I was what I’d always been, a rabbit with no fur, no hind legs, nothing more than a sewed-up sack of sawdust. I couldn’t move properly. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair at all.
At the end of December, I booked passage home.
I hadn’t planned on returning to New York so soon. I had hoped to stay in Italy until spring, but I knew now it couldn’t happen.
I’d been to see a doctor.
I wrote to Robert; it seemed that he ought to know.
I wrote to Mam and Daddy that I was coming home, but I didn’t say anything about the baby. I thought that everything would get sorted out once I was in New York.
margery
Oh, lord. What was true then is still true today. Francesco has never wanted to let go.
When Eddie O’Toole came calling, Francesco thought that things would change, that people would sit up and take notice. I told him that Eddie had asked me if I thought Pamela would have another exhibition, and he looked at me as if to say, What an odd question, of course she will, you’re not doubting that are you? He was quite emphatic, he told me Pamela would have another exhibition soon. It would be brilliant, he was sure of it.
A few days after Eddie’s visit, the second call came. Another reporter from The New Yorker, somebody named Kinkead. He said he just had a few more follow-up questions to ask. Could he drop by for a few minutes?
Francesco took it as a good sign. They must be really interested. It would be a big story. I wondered what more there was to ask. Eddie O’Toole had been quite thorough, I thought.
Mr. Kinkead was nothing like young Eddie O’Toole. He was exceedingly self-assured. Late thirties, perhaps, with the physique of a boxer. His face was soft and ruddy—a grown-up Campbell Soup boy—but his eyes were sharp and black. I suppose he was what you would call a “seasoned” reporter, all no-nonsense and questions one after another, rat-a-tat-tat. He made us all uncomfortable. He kept asking Pamela questions about money all the time. How much did she make on this exhibit or that exhibit? He asked about her social life—was she part of the wild party scene that Greenwich Village was so famous for? He wasn’t rude, exactly, it’s just that he managed to ask rude questions in a polite sort of way.
Worst of all, he kept asking Pamela how she felt about no longer being famous. Well, it didn’t make any difference at all, she said. I didn’t paint to be famous. It was all the same to me.
But Mr. Kinkead didn’t seem to believe her. He kept pressing. But do you feel you’re living up to your promise, to what all those people like Augustus John and John Galsworthy said about you? It was rather amazing, how his face could look rather kindly with words like that coming out of his mouth.
Francesco and I tried to step in. We tried to explain that Pamela was born to be an artist, that nothing could take that away. But he simply wouldn’t drop the subject.
We were very relieved to see him go.
When we heard nothing from The New Yorker for months, Francesco called the magazine. The story was on hold, they said. There were many considerations of space when putting together a magazine. If he wished, they would call him when they had more information.
There never was a call.
The New Yorker Memos
Winter 1935–1936
Outside, Stuyvesant Square Park was gray and indistinct in a blur of rain. A young woman of small stature and calm features entered the room with a lively little boy of three and a half who had a shock of red hair and an ingratiating kid’s grin.
Back in New York after three years of silence, she is hoping to take up her painting again as soon as she can do some illustrating and “get on her feet again.” She and her husband have separated, and he has gone back to his people in the West. She does not talk about that, but it is quite apparent from the strength underlying her features and her quietly smiling admission that there have been many problems to meet, that the last few years have not been easy to pass off lightly.
“I will never give up painting,” she said. “At first I hope to get some illustrating to do until I can get back on my feet again. Then I want to paint from life—portraits, landscapes, nudes, everything until I am absolutely sure that I know how to draw everything as it is found in life. Then when I am sure I know how to draw, I want to paint things I imagine myself, things that I don’t have to look at in life but will be right. . . . I want to do much larger paintings than I have ever done before.”
From an interview with reporter Eddie O’Toole
December 1935
_____
Mr. Ross:
This Where-Are-They-Now report on Pamela Bianco, the child wonder painter, is an excellent example of muffed and incomplete facts. If I rewrote it, people would say, ‘Well, just where is she now, and for God’s sake where has she been?’. . . In short, the story of Pamela Bianco’s great drop from world fame to motherhood in New York is not at all told herein. What has happened to her and her great promise since 1921, when she hit this town like a comet? That is the only story we want.
Memo from James Thurber, chief rewrite man, to editor Harold Ross
December 1935
_____
She knew most of the artists down in Greenwich Village, she said, but in response to a blunt or specific question most of the time Miss Bianco could only raise her eyebrows, or look puzzled. She didn’t live a very gay life, she said.
From an interview with reporter Eugene Kinkead January 1936
(The story was killed in the spring of 1936.)
pamela
The crossing was rough, and I was wretched. I had been feeling nauseous even before I’d stepped on board. I hardly ate, and mostly stayed in my cabin. I must have looked a forlorn, starved ghost when I got off the ship—Mam’s alarm as she looked at me was palpable. She clasped me to her.
“Oh Pamela, you’re awfully pale! Let’s get you straight home.”