The Velveteen Daughter Page 2

  margery

  Well, here we are now, and I suppose we must concentrate on what’s in front of us.

  What is in front of me? This very minute?

  There is this bit of sunlight, and I am grateful for it. I always gravitate to the kitchen, settle in like a cat. In the other rooms I feel the weight of darkness. I’ve done what I can in the parlor, but I’m no magician. There’s only one window and it faces south, so the room never quite brightens up properly. Just last week, I pulled down the velvet maroon curtains—heavy, ugly things—and put up those new cloth blinds they’ve been advertising at Gimbels. It made me feel better for a bit, but it didn’t really help very much. At night, though, the parlor’s transformed. Then it’s a fine place, with the lamps and wall sconces illuminating Pamela’s paintings. Her Guggenheim Madonna blazes in beauty, all reds and golds.

  I shouldn’t complain about this place, I know we’re lucky to have a roof over our heads. The Great Depression didn’t spare us, and why should it? Even before Francesco had to close his bookstore, I knew a move would be inevitable. But the truth is, I miss our home on Waverly Place more than I could ever have imagined.

  Funny . . . it’s the Kelvinator I miss most of all. All that shiny white porcelain, the door shutting with a satisfying, luxurious thud, the food magically cold. But now it’s back to a peeling old icebox with bad hinges, back to chasing the iceman down the street. And there’s no end in sight, not with another war on. . . . The papers say that the war has bolstered our economy, but its benefits seem to be dispersed elsewhere.

  So pretty, how the sun lights up the china cabinet, piercing the little green glasses from Turin, casting emerald halos over the white dinner plates.

  Sunshine dances over the glass and china like the flickering of a silent film, calling up fragments from the old days. The family dinners in Turin with Nonna and Uncle Angelo. And all those nights in London and in Harlech. . . . A velvet skirt pulled flirtatiously over a crossed knee, a spilled drink, a game of charades gone a bit risqué, bursts of laughter. How we would go on and on, talking of poetry and sea voyages, of the strengths and weaknesses of PM Lloyd George. Of bookbinding and opera and Welsh history, and who was doing what in the Royal Academy.

  The green light hovers and shimmers. Another old film unreels.

  Paris.

  Our flat on the Rue Mayet. A fire blazing in the hearth. The mantelpiece crowded with photographs. And wafting throughout, the enticing fragrance of blanquette de veau simmering on the stove.

  A little wooden goat.

  Pablo Picasso has come to dinner.

  Francesco and I had had a little disagreement that morning. A minor affair, yet. . . .

  In those days Francesco was head of the rare books department at Brentano’s. It was a coveted post. Signore Brentano himself had interviewed him. All starched and bespectacled, was how Francesco described him. There was no question that Francesco was thoroughly qualified for the position. Signore Brentano had sent a long and formal letter ahead of the interview emphasizing that erudition was vital, but just as critical were good manners and impeccable grooming. Well, Francesco surely fit the bill. In his finely tailored Italian suits—he has always been choosy about these—he has the manners and bearing of a Medici. As for erudition, it sounds ridiculous I know, but . . . well, he does seem to know just about everything. He can translate from Latin and Greek; he’s fluent in five languages. He knows scads and scads about poetry, opera, and architecture.

  Oh—and this: he is the expert in Papal Bulls.

  At the conclusion of the interview, Signore Brentano asked Francesco if he had any further questions. Francesco’s response was typical. “Yes,” he said, I have one question: “Are you going to hire me? Because if you do not hire me, you will not sell so many books!”

  Francesco laughed, and then Signore Brentano laughed, too, his starch suddenly gone all limp. My husband could charm anyone, it seems.

  Even Pablo Picasso.

  The young Spanish painter came in to the store one day to browse, and ended up talking to Francesco for hours in a mixture of French, English, and Spanish. It would have been quite natural for Francesco to extend an invitation to his new friend.

  “Come to dinner, Pablo! And bring your Fernande. You must meet Margery.”

  And of course the painter said yes. Who can say no to Francesco?

  Pamela and I spent the morning of Pablo’s visit in the kitchen. She dragged in great long pieces of brown paper and made herself at home at my feet, drawing ducks and rabbits. I was preparing the blanquette de veau, cutting pieces of meat, dredging them in flour, and dropping them into a fluted dish. Sometimes a sprinkling of flour would fly from the table, dusting Pamela’s pictures, and she would laugh.

  A tiny skylight let in some rare Parisian sun that splashed over the red-tiled floor, the cobalt-blue table, and the white porcelain sink.

  Francesco came in, holding a sheaf of Pamela’s drawings, and the atmosphere shifted. You always know when something is on his mind. He doesn’t exactly charge into a room, but it seems as if he does. He stood just under the skylight and a shaft of sunlight lightened his red hair to copper.

  He’s a bit vain about his hair—or was, I should say. I’m afraid it’s rather deserted him these days. Soon after we met, I made the mistake of calling his hair red. “Not red, Titian,” he corrected me, then laughed at his own absurdity.

  The first time I saw Francesco it was at Heinemann’s, the publisher. I was twenty, a string bean of a girl in a long tweed skirt and loose sweater, clutching my mother’s moth-eaten carpetbag. Moth-eaten, but distinguished just the same, for Mother had glued a large enamel swan to the clasp—an old brooch with the back pin gone missing. Why waste such a pretty thing? she’d said. The bag held my manuscript for The Price of Youth, and I had an appointment with Mr. Heinemann himself. Just as I started down the main corridor, a young man emerged from a dark hallway off to the side. When he stepped round the corner and saw me, he stopped.

  A few years earlier, in America, I had crossed paths with a moose in the woods of Maine. It was winter. A few inches of snow brightened the ground. I heard a crashing through the trees, and before I had time to think what it was the moose had leapt right in front of me, across the path into a clearing. He stopped and just stood there, dark and huge, looking at me, his warm breath rising from his nostrils. He simply stood, solid and calm. But I could feel it like waves washing over me, how he was throbbing with life.

  There was nothing of the animal in Francesco’s looks, it wasn’t that. He was well-dressed and polished. Elegant, even. But the vision of the moose came to me straight off. A feeling of something . . . feral. I felt even then his pulsing energy, his intelligence. This was someone out of the ordinary, I knew it at once.

  He asked if he could help me. A deep voice, Italian. He fixed his blue eyes on me, and something ran straight through me, I can’t describe it. But all I did was tell him thank you, I knew my way.

  “Well, then . . . may I help you with . . . anything else?” And he grinned that grin that will disarm you no matter what has come before. He nodded in the direction of my carpetbag. “Allow me to guess, you have a first novel in there.”

  When I told him, unable to disguise my pride, that it was my second, I saw his surprise. “Ah,” he said, and I saw that I had risen a notch or two in his estimation. He said he was the poetry editor, and added, very formally, that he would be delighted if I would stop by for a visit when I was done with my appointment. He pointed in the direction he’d come from. Second door on the left, he said.

  “Francesco Bianco,” he said, and offered me his hand. When I gave him mine, he kissed my fingertips. It sounds rather silly and old-fashioned now, I suppose, but there’s no pretending that it didn’t thrill me utterly.

  Poetry Editor. Well, that was a bit of wishful thinking. More like poetry editor in training. The first door on the left had a little plaque—Hingham, or Higby, it said. And, underneath, Poetry Editor. The second door was quite blank.

  At any rate, there he stood, sunlit, holding out Pamela’s pictures as an offering.

  “Pablo would be interested in these, don’t you think?”

  It took me a moment to answer.

  “Oh, Francesco . . . no . . . I don’t think so . . . I mean, yes, I’m sure he’d like to see them, one day. But perhaps not tonight . . . not the first time he comes over here. . . .”

  Francesco was quiet, staring at the pictures. Then he shrugged.

  “You may be right, not tonight . . . but . . . I don’t know . . . it does seem someone ought to see these besides us, Margery.”

  pamela

  I came over here, really, just to hear my mother’s voice. To reassure myself that she exists. And to stop doing what I was doing. I really don’t want to talk at all, but I can’t stop my thoughts from boiling up, and when I got here, of course, I couldn’t stop talking, but it was about nothing.

  I’ll study the wallpaper, that always calms me.

  A spray of lavender flowers, bunches of two or three or four. I focus on the pattern, how it slants upward and I can go right or left, up to the molding, then down again. Zig. Zag. I count them though I’ve counted them hundreds of times before. Eight up, nine down. If I keep counting, keep running my hands over the daisies, I’ll be fine.

  The flowers on the wall are not lilacs. They are some sort of wildflower, I don’t know the name.

  Still, I smell them, just as I did that morning. Lilacs.

  Turin.

  The bedroom on the second floor. The wallpaper that’s rich and red like dark wine and soft as chenille. I can’t help touching it.

  I am eleven years old. It is early in the morning and I lie in bed waiting for the sounds of Signora Campana
ro emerging from her kitchen. My daily ritual. I can count on her—the old landlady is as predictable in her movements and as unchanging in her appearance as a painted clock figurine. Idly, I trace the velvety flocking of the deep-claret-colored wallpaper with my finger. The gorgeous geometries of the pomegranates, the whorled leaves. I love the repeating patterns and often copy the designs into my sketchbook. Sometimes I work them as a border to my pages.

  A door groans, and I jump up from the bed to stand by the casement window. A cool breeze, the scent of first lilacs. Below, in the courtyard, Signora Campanaro appears in her heavy black dress, a faded striped dishtowel in her hand, and pads across the ancient flagstones to the henhouse. As she heads back, the warm eggs wrapped in the towel, she looks up and gives an almost imperceptible nod. The signal. I smile and wave, and just at that moment, a jolt of memory strikes and I remember that today will not be like every other day. My hand drops. I close the window.

  I never thought to show my art to the public, to anyone at all. Why should I? But my father thought of it.

  When one of the galleries in town advertised for entries for a children’s art show, my father took it upon himself to enter my work. He never said a word to anyone.

  I was with Mam when she found out. We were in the kitchen, assembling the ingredients for grissini torinese, the breadsticks seasoned with rosemary that Daddy loves so much. We heard knocking. Someone was at the front door, banging the old boar’s head knocker in an official sort of way.

  A messenger stood on the doorstep, a young boy wearing a blue wool cap. His bicycle lay against the curb.

  “Bianco?” he said, and when Mam nodded, he gave her the large portfolio he had under his arm. A letter was attached to the portfolio, secured with string. It was addressed to me.

  The imprint on the back flap of the envelope said Circolo degli Artisti. I recognized the name of the gallery, we passed by it often. The black portfolio was new. I’d never seen it before.

  “Well, let’s get it to where we can look at it properly,” my mother said in an unnaturally subdued voice, and we made our way back to the kitchen. I untied the black ribbons. Mam and I stood there, looking at my drawings. She was quiet for ages. Something was very wrong, but I wasn’t sure just what it was. I reached for the letter, looking at my mother for approval.

  She nodded. “Yes . . . you’d better read it, I suppose.”

  I read it to myself. It was a polite letter of rejection explaining that the gallery was looking not for mature artists who drew children, but for child artists. They were quite sorry, they said, these were beautiful pictures, but there had been a misunderstanding.

  “I don’t understand . . . ,” I said, though somehow the image of Daddy was already forming in my mind. I gave the letter to my mother.

  She held it for a long time without looking at me.

  “I should have known when I saw all the posters and your father never mentioned them once. I should have known,” my mother said softly, mostly to herself, still looking at the letter.

  margery

  As soon as Pablo came through the front door that night with his girlfriend, Fernande, he handed me a little wooden goat. It fit in the palm of my hand. It was a real-looking goat, but rough-hewn—the nose a bit too fat, the ears a bit too long.

  “For the children. I did it with this,” he said, pulling from his pocket a simple one-bladed jackknife.

  “It’s a lovely little goat! It was quite thoughtful of you, Pablo.”

  Pablo nodded at Fernande, a smoldering young beauty, taller than Pablo, with a roll of dark hair crowning her head.

  “I take no credit. It was her idea.”

  Fernande smiled at me and shrugged. “Pablo forgets that some people actually do have children.”

  Pablo looked around the apartment approvingly. He said he felt right at home, and I believed him. Some, though, might have thought our apartment was a bit of a mess. Books were everywhere, piled precariously—heaped up on tables, pushed against the sofa, spilling out from under the stairs. Charlemagne, the canary, was flitting from room to room, and Narcissus, our pet white rat, roamed free.

  We settled in the front parlor with vermouth in the little green glasses, and after a while I left to check on the dinner. According to Francesco, they were talking about Apollinaire and Chagall, who had just arrived in town, when Pablo went over to the fireplace and tossed in his cigarette. That’s when he picked up Pamela’s drawing on the mantelpiece—a small piece of paper, postcard-size, resting among the photographs.

  “Who did the cobayo . . . what is the French, Fernande?”

  “La mème chose—cobaye.”

  “In my language it’s cavia,” Francesco said, and looked up with amused triumph in his eyes as I returned to the room. “Guinea pig to you, Margery. Pablo was just asking who drew the picture.”

  “Oh! The little guinea pig. Pamela did that this morning.”

  “Pamela? Your daughter? But no . . . she is only . . . I’m sorry, I can’t remember these things. How old did you say she was?”

  “Four.”

  “Quatre! It cannot be so . . . do you have anything else to show me that this four-year-old has done?”

  Pablo studied the drawings that Francesco proudly handed to him.

  “Incroyable! Such command for one so young . . . impossible, I think.” He went through the drawings again, then looked up at me with an intensity that I felt was almost hostile. “I think I would like to have a visit with your little daughter.”

  “Oh, I don’t . . . she’s just getting ready for bed . . . now, do you mean?”

  “Yes, I wish to see her now.”

  I called to Pamela as I headed up the stairwell.

  “Come downstairs for a bit, Pamela . . . our friend Pablo is asking for you . . . bring your drawing board. . . .”

  Pamela looked as though she couldn’t believe her luck. A summons downstairs! To where the fire was blazing, where grownups were talking and laughing and drinking. Where everything was happening. I held her hand and led her down the narrow, unlit stairway. She was in her nightgown, barefoot.

  When we entered the parlor, she leaned into me, suddenly shy.

  Pablo was seated cross-legged on the floor.

  “Come! Sit here next to me, Pamela.”

  She obeyed. As she sat close to him, I wondered what she thought of the rather odorous dark-haired man at her side. He smelled of many things—tobacco and sweet smoke and something sharper, like old soup, or Narcissus’s cage.

  “I’ve heard you like to draw animals . . . well, so do I! I am an artist, did you know that?”

  Pamela nodded. She had heard us talking about Pablo and his paintings.

  “I thought you and I might draw one picture together before you go to bed, would that be all right with you? How about a picture of this little goat that I made?”

  She nodded again. Pablo set the goat down on the rug.

  Pamela knelt over her drawing board. She worked fast, the way she always did, rarely picking the pencil up off the paper. But Pablo finished first, and watched as Pamela drew.

  She stopped a moment and looked up at him.

  “Is it a girl goat or a boy goat?”

  Pablo laughed.

  “Hmm, a girl goat, I believe.”

  Quickly, Pamela drew a collar of flowers around the goat’s neck, and put down her pencil.

  Pablo said, “You must sign it now.”

  She printed in neatly rounded letters on the bottom right: Pamela.

  “And now I’ll sign mine.”

  Pablo scrawled his name in capitals: PABLO.

  “Shall we trade?” he asked.

  Pamela nodded and handed her picture to the man with the wild black hair falling over his forehead.

  Before he left that night, long after Pamela was asleep, Pablo asked to see her again. Francesco always says that I looked terribly startled then, and Pablo had roared. “No, no, don’t worry . . . I won’t wake her. I won’t make her draw again!”

  In monkish silence all four of us tiptoed up the narrow stairs. We stood around Pamela’s small bed like shepherds watching over the Christ child. A rectangle of pale moonlight fell across her face.

  “Incroyable,” Pablo muttered again.