Cecco jumps up, grabs the canvas book bag off the back of his chair. He calls out his good-byes over his shoulder as he rushes out the door. I sit, still and gloomy, feeling just as if that’s it, he’s gone, he’s gone off to England and left me here.
Daddy pushes his chair back and announces that he is going to the gallery to “check on things.”
Mam turns to me, ignoring the panic on my face, and smiles.
“Shall we go to the park in a bit?”
At Valentino Park, Mam and I speak in French as we wander among the gardens. She points out weeping willows (saules pleureurs) and, by the riverbank, tulips (tulipes) and mallards (colverts). I hardly think of it that way, but I am having a lesson. A few years before, I’d trotted off with Cecco to the Istituto Bracco, but I’d had a bad time. I was horribly shy, and never made any friends. I might have survived that, but I couldn’t survive Suora Ignatia. She rapped my knuckles when I drew rabbits at the end of my addition columns! I can still see her fat forefinger tapping my paper as she warned me to never again draw on my school papers. Her words made me feel empty. Not draw? The rabbits caused no harm, they didn’t interfere with my rows of sums. Why did she tell me I couldn’t draw? Even though a classmate came up to me in the playground later and told me she really liked my rabbits and she hated Suora Ignatia, I didn’t feel better. I didn’t answer. I was simply too paralyzed.
After one year at the Istituto, I declared that I’d never go back. There was no argument over it, my parents readily agreed—they could teach me all I needed to know. It would be better that way, they said, my mind could develop more naturally, and there would be time for art whenever I wished. At eight, my formal education had ended.
My parents taught me English and Italian and French, math and history. They took me to the Pinacoteca where I’d race to the Botticelli room to admire the angels and slender nymphs in diaphanous dresses. They took me to the ancient churches whose shadowy walls were lit by votive candles and hung with small oil paintings of Madonna and Child. I loved all the fat, naked babies, the serene faces of Mary, and the gilt halos—some like dark copper, some flashing pale gold in the candlelight. I drew and drew and drew.
Mam and I wander by the beautiful squares of gardens and find a bench near the river. I tear pages from my drawing notebook so that we can make paper boats. My mother is a wizard at paper folding. When Cecco and I were too small to make the folds ourselves, we’d watch fascinated as she took pages from her own hand-sewn manuscript book of shiny yellow paper and made perfect swans, two-seated boats, and tea kettles. When we were old enough to learn, she taught us to make the same object over and over, ensuring that our folds were precise, that we pressed ever so carefully with our fingertips, until we could do it perfectly all by ourselves.
We set our boats loose upon the Po. They bob and separate, abandoned orphans bravely heading out to sea. Soon they are no longer boats at all but only glints of white in the water. I watch them disappear, and suddenly I am overcome with a feeling I have never had before, and I have no name for it.
Today I can put a name to that feeling, with no trouble at all.
Melancholy.
Mam, of course, can read my face. She leans in close to me and speaks gently.
“You know, Pamela, I suspect you’ll have great fun at the gallery tonight. It will be your special time with Daddy, he’ll be at your side every minute, and you know how he is—he’ll have everyone quite entranced in no time!”
margery
Some nice English tea. And a biscuit.
There. That’s better.
I’ll just make myself as comfortable as I can, put my feet up on the chair Pamela abandoned.
I see her face across from me still.
It’s not her real face, not the face of my Pamela. Good lord, those eyebrows. . . . Such a shock when she first shaved them off. And before long, another shock. When she dyed her hair blonde, it had rather terrified me, the way it changed her. But—well, it was 1932, and half the young women in America were walking around trying to look like Jean Harlow. Garish, to my eyes anyway. Still, it was an odd thing for Pamela, who’d never followed fashion. She’s a Williams bohemian through and through. One thing, she didn’t cut off her hair. I think at that time she was the only female in the city under forty whose hair wasn’t short and sleek and waved. Pamela stuck to the style she’s worn since she was fifteen, long braids wound in spirals round her ears.
What did any of that mean? I’m not sure. The transformation came right after Robert left, and perhaps that explains it all. Robert . . . he was so . . . so what? He was a flash in the pan. A charmer. Not a dependable sort, that much was obvious. It was hardly a great surprise when he left. Well, at least not to Francesco or me.
It all happened so very fast. If only I’d had time to talk to Pamela a bit, perhaps she would have been less impetuous. But there was no time—what was it, a few months? We only saw the boy two or three times. I liked him well enough. I do have a special affection for poets. And he was quite a good-looking poet. Easygoing, friendly. Not the brooding sort. But I never had a proper conversation with the boy. He always traveled about with an entourage, his literary friends from Harlem.
But there was something . . . I never could put my finger on it. Something about the look I saw that passed between his friends one time. Robert was talking to me, and he put his arm around Pamela, and I happened to see one of the boys look at the friend next to him with . . . how can I put it . . . a sort of arch amusement. It seemed to say, There he goes again, what’s he thinking? I don’t know how it is I read it that way, but sometimes you catch the barest glimpse of someone’s expression and immediately a feeling registers and somehow you are sure that you know just what that person is thinking. You have no doubt at all.
Even so, what on earth could I have said to Pamela?
When Robert’s letter came, she was silent. Catatonic, more like. She can get like that, she simply shuts down. You just have to wait it out. All she told us was this: Robert’s gone back to Oregon.
At any rate, when she changed herself so drastically I tried to think it meant that she was hopeful again, that she wanted to start anew. After all, she’d just emerged from one of her black times. A particularly bad one. Things had truly begun to unravel right after Lorenzo was born. Even in the beginning, it was all Pamela could do to care for the child. Soon she wasn’t capable at all.
In the end we’d all agreed it was best if I took them both to Merryall, my sister Cecil’s house in Connecticut. The quiet of the countryside would calm her, was the thought. But her recovery, if it could be called that, was slow beyond imagining.
pamela
Not long after my father knelt on the kitchen floor in Turin, begging my mother’s forgiveness, Daddy and I walked together out into the spring air and headed to the exhibition at the Circolo degli Artisti.