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 Campanaro 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