Nothing changes. Mam just lies there.
Her eyes remain shut. It can’t be true, I keep saying to myself, Mam’s eyes must open, they must. Please just one more time.
But I am so afraid that they never will and what could be worse than that, whatever could be worse than never again seeing how my mother loves me.
margery
III
September 3, 1944
Cecco . . . is that Cecco’s voice?
No . . . no, that is a man’s voice. Cecco is a little boy.
There he is, I see him through the window, in the backyard. What a perfect day to be outside playing—all that lovely sunshine!
He’s with Pamela, they’ve made a little castle, a heap of stones, and now they’re digging a moat, jabbing at the dirt with rocks and sticks. I’ll just bring them some soup spoons. . . .
pamela
IV
September 4, 1944
Mam’s eyes do not open.
Three days after she enters the hospital, she is gone.
A cerebral hemorrhage, the doctor tells us.
Cerebral hemorrhage.
I imagine the beautiful circuitry of my mother’s brain, all blue and green and yellow loops, red blood flowing without a hitch. But then I see them—the insidious black tendrils of my illness, of Daddy’s illness, winding their way through that humming place, choking off a bit here, a bit there. . . .
......................................
May 1945
Francesco descends the dark stairwell at the subway station on Christopher Street. It is eight months after Margery’s death.
He is disoriented, unused to the place, and he puts his nickel into the turnstile with the hesitancy of a tourist. On another day he might have admired the blue-and-amber mosaics on the walls, but this is not another day. He has left his hat at home. He moves to the far left, stands close to the platform, looks northward for lights.
The conductor of the train sees something ahead. Something all conductors dread. Jesus! he calls out, and shoves the brake switch as far and as fast as he can.
pamela
Spring and Summer, 1945
I have to call Cecco, he has to know.
It was a dizzy spell, I tell him.
Cecco takes the train north once again, this time to sit by Daddy’s bedside. Francesco will surely recover, the doctors say, but he is not a young man, and with the all the fractures and the broken collarbone it’s bound to take a while.
Daddy gets better, a bit. But he isn’t the same. Francesco, the charmer, the most social of all of us, can bear to see no one. He barely seems to tolerate his own children. When he’s well enough to travel, Cecco brings him back to Washington, hoping that there, with a change of scenery, with no memories of Margery in every corner, he’ll get his strength back.
Cecco calls me often. Daddy seems to make an effort at first, venturing out to the living room, chatting with Cecco and Barbara, and his grandchildren. But then something happens, lethargy sets in. He will not leave his bed.
“It’s as if he’s turned his face to the wall,” Cecco tells me.
Daddy fades rapidly. He rarely speaks. He refuses to eat. Cecco says he thinks that Daddy has made up his mind. That I should prepare myself.
I am calm when Cecco calls to tell me the news. I have been waiting for this call. The official cause of death is bronchial pneumonia, but Cecco and I agree that bronchial pneumonia had little to do with it, that Daddy died of grief.
We are just saying good-bye when Cecco remembers something.
“Oh—Pamela, he left a book for you, his old Yeats. I’ll send it to you straightaway. And there’s a letter.”
And there’s a letter.
I’ve worried so that I could not be with my father when he died. I’ve imagined how it would have been. I would have held his hand, and told him how I’d always loved him. But what would he say to me? I could never imagine that part.
The package arrives from Cecco. I tear off the brown paper. And there it is, Daddy’s old clothbound book of poems, the green faded almost to yellow in places. So lovingly worn. I see it in my father’s hands.
The envelope is small, a single page inside. The handwriting is shaky, nothing like the beautiful, bold script that I remember.
Cara Pamela,
Be not afraid of greatness.
That is what I wish to tell you, though
Shakespeare said it first.
That is the simple part, something I hope you already know. Now, here is what keeps coming to me, as I lie here day after day.
I see you clearly, Pamela, such a bright little girl, in your linen dress and sturdy brown shoes. You stand in the parlor in Chelsea, reciting “The Host of the Air.” All of it perfectly! I was a stern taskmaster, wasn’t I?
I hope not too stern. I always thought we understood each other, you and I?
Yes, Daddy, we did.
At the end of the letter, Daddy wrote, I send you my love, dearest girl.
I hold the letter to my breast, press it to my heart.
? ? ?
My parents are dead.
How can I believe it, that they are truly gone? That I’ll never hear their voices again?
Yet . . . I hear them all the time.
Now you are famous . . . now all Italians are happy to claim you as one of their children!
Pamela . . . you know that this . . . this craziness won’t last forever?
People are ignorant, they ask if a Bull has a bull’s head on the seals. Not one that I’ve seen.
Listen to this dress, Pamela! ‘French blue silk crepe blooming with a copper and gold floral design, a tracery of metal lace. . . .’ Gorgeous, don’t you think?
Bloody critics . . .
Sometimes I walk to Stuyvesant Square, stand in front of my parents’ old apartment. I see Mam at her writing table, Daddy engrossed in a book. They know I’m there, though, and they look up at me. Their eyes are full of concern.
I am in a bad way, as it all sinks in. I dream of putting stones in my pockets, slipping down into the gray waters of the Hudson. The peace. How I long for peace! But inevitably, when I let my thoughts drift in that direction they always run aground.
Lorenzo.
Lorenzo, though he will never know it, saves my life. He gives me the gift of his existence, the only reason I can find to stay with the world. I will not allow myself to find solace in the cold river water, I will not. Lorenzo can afford to lose no more. The boy has never seen his father. Now, his only grandparents are gone. I will not take his mother away from him.
part six
???
And [the Fairy] held the little Rabbit close in her arms and flew with him into the wood.
It was light now, for the moon had risen. All the forest was beautiful, and the fronds of the bracken shone like frosted silver. In the open glade between the tree trunks the wild rabbits danced with their shadows on the velvet grass, but when they saw the Fairy they all stopped dancing and stood round in a ring to stare at her.
“I’ve brought you a new playfellow,” the Fairy said. “You must be very kind to him and teach him all he needs to know in Rabbit-land, for he is going to live with you for ever and ever!”