The Velveteen Daughter Read online

  Praise for

  The Velveteen Daughter

  “The Velveteen Daughter seamlessly weaves fiction into reality, and reality into fiction, quickly merging to become one truth that vividly reveals Bianco’s secret heart. This book is not only mesmerizing to read but of great importance, bringing Pamela Bianco as an artist to find her rightful place in the history of art.”

  —GLORIA VANDERBILT

  ““. . . the novel fascinates. . . . Huber’s reliance on primary sources, coupled with her luminous prose, creates an unforgettable sojourn into the lives of early 20th-century artists. . . . fast-paced and difficult to put down.”

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “Huber’s richly textured language is a wonder to behold, her prose every bit as luminous, inspired, and wise as either Bianco’s or Williams’s own work.”

  —FOREWORD REVIEWS

  “Huber excels in depicting . . . complex family dynamics, and her subject is strikingly original. Combining the elegance of literary fiction with realistic period atmosphere and an emotional openness reminiscent of personal memoirs, the prose is entirely immersive. A compelling read. . . .”

  —BOOKLIST

  the velveteen daughter

  Copyright © 2017 by Laurel Davis Huber

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

  Published 2017

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-63152-192-8 pbk

  ISBN: 978-1-63152-193-5 ebk

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016961869

  For information, address:

  She Writes Press 1563 Solano Ave #546

  Berkeley, CA 94707

  She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

  Cover design by Julie Metz, Ltd./metzdesign.com

  Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

  Cover: Pamela in her studio, age 17, photograph © The Vassar College Archives and Special Collections Library, Louise Seaman Bechtel Papers, Folder 5.63

  Rabbit drawing by William Nicholson (for the original cover of The Velveteen Rabbit) © Desmond Banks

  To the memory of my parents,

  Marcia Cady Davis and

  Gordon Delano Davis

  ‡‡‡

  And to the memory of my first-grade teacher at Lincoln School, Florence Chaplin, who gave me Beginning with A

  Margery and Pamela, c. 1917

  contents

  PART ONE

  September 1, 1944 (Late Morning)

  PART TWO

  The Letter: January 11, 1977

  September 1, 1944 (Midday)

  PART THREE

  The Letter: January 11, 1977

  September 1, 1944 (Early Afternoon)

  PART FOUR

  The Letter: January 11, 1977

  September 1, 1944 (Midafternoon)

  PART FIVE

  The Letter: January 11, 1977

  September 1, 1944 (Late Afternoon)

  PART SIX

  1946-1965

  PART SEVEN

  January 1977

  Endnotes

  Questions for Discussion

  Acknowledgments

  Resources

  Books by Margery Williams Bianco

  Books Written and Illustrated by Pamela Bianco

  Pamela Bianco Solo Exhibitions

  About the Author

  “What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day. . . . “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stickout handle?”

  “Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

  “Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

  “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

  “Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

  “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. . . .”

  ‡‡‡

  From The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams Bianco

  part one

  ‡‡‡

  ‡‡‡

  September 1, 1944

  9 Livingston Place, Stuyvesant Square

  New York City

  (Late Morning)

  margery

  It’s a lost day, I’m afraid. Pamela’s here. I hadn’t counted on that.

  Just one look at her this morning and despair flew into my heart. She had the look I dread, her eyes overbright, shining with that queer mix of euphoria and terror. And she talked incessantly, a very bad sign. She was going to start painting again, she said, and went on and on about the large canvasses she seems to have had in her head for so long. I encouraged her, naturally, but I knew by the way she was acting that it was only talk, that she wasn’t near ready. If she really meant it, we wouldn’t see her at all, she’d disappear. She’d be too busy painting.

  When she stopped talking it was midsentence, her thoughts trailing off into a dramatic yawn. She was awfully tired, she said. Did I mind if she just lay down for a while? I didn’t need to answer, though of course I said, “Certainly, darling!”

  She gave my shoulder a squeeze as she passed by. But I didn’t look up. I find every way to avoid it, but the truth will look me right in the face: there is madness in my daughter’s eyes.

  This heat’s unbearable.

  The fan blowing back and forth across the ice hypnotizes me with its jerky rhythm—the faint scriiitch as it hesitates at every rotation, the cool breath of air across my face. My manuscript sits in front of me on the kitchen table, but I know I won’t touch it. The desire to work has fled, it ran off down the hallway along with Pamela. Worry occupies me now, and the same questions roil in my brain: Will it be a bad one? Will it go away of its own accord? Or—God forbid—will we have to bring her to the hospital again?

  When Francesco left for the printer’s studio at dawn, saying he’d be back by suppertime, I was quite glad to have the day to myself, all the time in the world, I thought, to do a final reading of Forward, Commandos! A nice, long stretch of solitude. . . .

  I suppose you could say I’m alone now, here in the kitchen, but somehow it’s not the same, not with Pamela just a few feet away, asleep in her old room. We heaved a sigh of relief when she moved into an apartment of her own a few years ago, but her “independence” has been tenuous at best. Little has changed. Her place is only a stone’s throw away. Inevitably, she shows up on our doorstep when she is feeling not quite herself.

  She’ll sleep the day away, I can count on that. Another bad sign. There’s trouble ahead when the little genius takes to bed.

  The little genius. Why on earth did that pop into my head? We haven’t called her that in years. . . . I suppose it was Pamela’s attempt to discuss the past, her childhood. I had to cut her off.

  Thank God there aren’t any of those minefields to navigate with Lorenzo. Still, I should have realized that my hopes for a day alone would be futile when he appeared first thing this morning— I should have known that it was only a matter of time before his mother showed up.

  Lorenzo burst into the apartment, vibrating with that matchless energy of youth, and planted himself in my kitchen. A bright pinwheel, spinning even when sitting still. His mother didn’t feel like cooking, he said, she’d told him he could help himself to some Wheaties. He looked at me sheepishly then, not wanting to ask. “Scrambled eggs and cinnamon toast sound okay?” I said, and he grinned. While I fixed his breakfast, he chattered about his great plans. It’s the start of Labor Day weekend today—naturally, he’s determined to cram in all the last-minute adventure he can before school begins.

  It’s a miracle that Pamela produced such a solid, uncomplicated child. He shows none of the fragile jumpiness of his parents. Not that I ever knew Robert very well, but he was a type. And Lorenzo is not at all that type. He’s blessedly normal. He likes the sorts of things most boys his age like, sports and model airplanes and listening to Boston Blackie on the radio. And roller-skating. “It’s swell, Grams, you should try it!” he tells me. Well, I’m tempted. With the gas rationing going on, the streets aren’t nearly so busy these days as they used to be. Lorenzo goes down to the financial district on weekends, when it’s all but abandoned. He and his friends can skate right in the middle of the road all the way from Wall Street and Broadway, past the New York Stock Exchange and Broad Street, and never have to dodge an automobile!

  Lorenzo finished his breakfast and ran off to meet his friends for a swimming party at McCarren Park. He seems to have a great many friends. They all call him Larry, or sometimes “Red,” which irritates Pamela no end. But what twelve-year-old boy—what boy at all—wants to be called Lorenzo?

  When Pamela showed up a few hours later, I sighed inwardly as I told her, all cheerful, that I’d make us some tea, thinking, How does this happen? She’s seemed so much better in the
last year or so. I was sure it had to do with the fact she was out in the world for a change—doing her bit in the war effort, volunteering at the Department of Censorship. It’s the perfect job for her, translating letters in the Italian Division. Francesco and I’ve often talked about how good it’s been for her, for her confidence, to see that she’s needed, that she has skills to offer that have nothing to do with art.

  Well, I suppose I’ve done the talking. Francesco has been mostly silent on the subject. He’s glad, of course, that Pamela’s stronger. At least she seemed to be. But—he won’t say this to me, I know—he’s dying to get her painting again. Would strong-arm her if he could.

  I put the tea things down, talking all the while about Loren-zo’s visit, his plans for the weekend. The only response from Pamela was a slight nod. She stared at her teacup with that serious thinking expression of hers, her eyebrows drawn together in a way that, since she was a child, has always made us exclaim, “There, Pamela’s at it again!” Only now it’s a bit harder to read. She always had strong, dark eyebrows that almost met over her nose and now they are gone. Completely erased. I do wish she hadn’t shaved them off. It gives her such a fixed look, a false sophistication.

  I will say this, though, the penciled lines are beautifully done. If anyone can draw in a perfect eyebrow, it’s Pamela.

  She started up again about painting. I must try . . . I want to . . . I can see the images so clearly . . . my childhood. And somewhere amongst all the talk she wondered aloud, as if it were something she’d just thought of, something that had never occurred to her before, that she supposed her childhood had ended that day in Turin. Yet another bad sign, that ancient story. I had no energy for it. We had both, in our own ways, returned to it too many times.

  And so I smiled and went over to hug her, and said something like, “Well, here we are now, and I suppose we must concentrate on what’s in front of us.” Some such platitude, meant to be comforting. And meant to change the subject. After all, she’s a grown woman now, and I did not want to revisit the past. Not that particular past, at any rate, a time when I may have let her down—I will never know, not really—and a time when Francesco and I turned a corner and could not look back.

  How easily, in the end, I gave in to him. I try not to think of it. But there it is, it’s inevitable. I feel the quick clenching of my stomach, the twinge of guilt running through me even now. It’s simply wearying.

  The fact is that when Pamela started in on that subject, my first thought was not a comforting platitude at all. The mind goes where it will. I’ve learned to forgive myself its quirky meanderings. We are all the same, aren’t we? The most angelic among us must sometimes have thoughts that are mean or vengeful or idiotic or perverse. Just yesterday I was shopping at Balducci’s and came across an elderly couple huddled in the aisle. They were examining the pudding boxes. And what should spring into my mind but a picture of them naked in bed. I even heard the man groaning. Wretched, horrid thought. I went back to hunting down the Colman’s.

  I do wonder, though, about these thoughts that fly into our minds from God knows where, shocking our decent and amiable selves. I suppose it must be a filtering mechanism of sorts, sanity’s system of checks and balances.

  At any rate, I confess that my immediate thought when Pamela talked of her childhood ending was, “I’m afraid, my dear, it never really has.”

  Now here she is, and not a thing I can do.

  I hear nothing. The door to her room is shut, there is no sound of movement. She’s utterly quiet, as if she’s not here at all— yet somehow she fills the apartment so that I feel there is no room for me in this place.

  pamela

  I had to come over to Mam’s, I just had to, I couldn’t stay at home another minute. All that pacing, it’s no good. I know what it means. Up and down the hallway, over and over. Picking things up, putting them down, not thinking what I was doing. Lorenzo’s room . . . his desk. . . I stood there forever, moving his things about. His beloved Socony pen with the flying red horse floating in oil, the pack of Black Jack gum, the tin dish full of Cracker Jack prizes. I held the pen a long while, tilting it this way and that, the winged horse gliding back and forth, back and forth. I lined up Lorenzo’s treasures. The pen, the tiny tin battleship, the pack of gum, the plastic green soldier, the skull charm. Lined them up in a neat row. Picked up the pen, went back to pacing.

  Up and down the hallway, I couldn’t seem to stop. My shoes on the wood floor. Tap. Tap. Tap. I kept thinking it was rain on the roof though I knew perfectly well that it was sunny outside. Tap. Tap. Tap. Faster. It was rain, I was sure of it.

  I flipped the Socony pen. The little red horse slid downwards ever so slowly.

  Flipped it again. Upwards. Downwards. I don’t know how long I stood there. I had to put it back. Lined it up with the other things on Lorenzo’s desk. Walked out the door, headed to Mam’s.

  They followed me, though. I looked up and there they were, a flock of horses in the sky, red wings beating, beating. There were so many of them, racing sunward. Hundreds. Then out from behind a cloud another horse emerged, a different sort of beast altogether, huge and white. . . .

  He flew earthward, toward me, so that I could feel the wind, his great wings beating the air. When I looked up past him I saw that all the red horses had disappeared. It was just the white one now. He hovered above me, looked at me with ancient black eyes. Eyes both sad and deeply kind. I reached up, but he shook his head, tossing his mane, and off he flew, into the high white clouds over the city.

  I know that horse and his black eyes.

  My mother’s horse. I drew him.

  An illustration for Mam’s book. The Skin Horse. The story of a boy who lies dying in the hospital and the toy horse he loves—a worn-out leather horse with a wobbly leg and just five bare nails on his back where his mane used to be.

  And later, that other horse, the huge one with wings that flies to the boy’s bedside. . . .

  I drew the child and the white winged horse, but I didn’t draw the empty bed.

  Some people didn’t like the book, they didn’t understand. They said that the story was too sad for children. But Mam knew better. Children can deal with sadness, she would say. Death is natural to them.

  But, of course, I didn’t really understand, either. At the time I never thought a thing about it, never thought that my mother was talking of herself.

  I had to come over here. I didn’t know what else to do. It’s safe here in my old room, the door shut, Mam just down the hall.

  I run my hands over the ridges of the old chenille bedspread, the soft tufts outlining white daisies. One by one, I touch the little buds that make up the oval pattern, over and over. Like a rosary.

  I want to talk to Mam, but I can’t seem to formulate what I want to talk about because, really, it’s just everything. What’s wrong? I want to ask her. Something is wrong with me, everything is wrong with me, and I want my mother to tell me what it is, but how do you have a conversation when I don’t want to talk about this or that. I just want to say to Mam, I’m tired of everything.

  How can I tell my mother such a thing?

  I can’t explain it to myself, not in words. If I tried to talk to Mam, I know the way she would look at me and it would be too much for me to see in her eyes the love and the worry and, worst, the knowledge that she can’t help me, not really, not ever.

  There is nothing and no one else in the world when my mother fixes her gaze on you that way. I’ve never seen such eyes on any other person. You could say they were large and blue and it would be true but also meaningless because so are Doris Day’s and so are my downstairs neighbor’s, yet their eyes might as well be from another species entirely. Mam’s eyes are vast almond-shaped seas, liquid navy, flowing with an endless depth of understanding and compassion. When she listens to you, she takes you in and you can’t help it, you simply give yourself over to her. Everyone does, I’ve seen it time and time again.

  You have to turn away or you will tell her everything.