Her father was a stockbroker, not a gangster. He took the train into the city every weekday morning, was home for 6:30 cocktails and 7:15 dinner every night. Her mother was a Connecticut matron, a genuine beauty often described by admiring friends as “swanlike” who spent her days on charitable committees, gardening clubs, Daughters of the American Revolution activities, and vodka tonics.
Pam’s big brothers, Bradley and Patton, lettered in lacrosse and hockey at their private boarding schools, carefully made gentlemen’s B’s and nothing higher, sailed Long Island Sound, and were protective of their little sister.
Not that she required much protection, not from boys, anyway.
She wasn’t an especially pretty child. Going into middle school, the kindest description of her was “plain.” If her mother was, indeed, a swan, Pam was the ugly duckling, and she felt her mother’s poorly hidden disappointment keenly.
Pam resisted all efforts to pretty her up—the makeup, the dresses, the dance lessons to improve her grace and posture—preferring to stay in her room and read. After Montessori elementary school, she was shipped off to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, whose alumnae included—in addition to her mother—Barbara Hutton, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Jackie Kennedy Onassis.
She certainly wasn’t the richest girl there, nor the poorest, but somewhere in the lower middle. The cruelty of that age gifted her with acne and the inevitable comparisons to a pizza. The sadism of schoolgirls knows no bounds—they attacked her for her complexion, her awkwardness, her lack of interest in boys. Word was joyfully passed that she was a lesbian, that she harbored secret crushes on several of the prettier girls, who had, of course, summarily spurned her.
“If I was going to the Y,” one of her alleged targets said, sticking her tongue between her index and middle fingers, “I’d go to a much prettier Y.”
Her freshman year, she fled home almost every weekend, holed up in her room, variously crying, reading her books, and dreading Sunday nights, when her parents would drive her back to Farmington, lecturing all the while on the importance of making friends and participating in the social life of the school.
Pam didn’t tell them about the taunts.
She was too ashamed.
Pam thought about running away from school, running away from home, killing herself.
Something happened between Pam’s sophomore and junior years.
She blossomed.
The family had a summer home in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, twenty-five minutes but still a world away from Goshen, and Pam got up one morning ready for another day of hiding beneath a sun bonnet at the beach club.
It would be an exaggeration to say that it happened overnight, but it seemed to have happened overnight. Looking into the mirror to scrub her face, she saw skin that was almost clear, as if some compassionate goddess had come during the night and stripped her of her shame.
The summer seemed to do the rest. Over the next few weeks, the sun turned her skin a clear tan, baked her body into fine marble, bleached her “mousy” hair to a golden blond, her eyes an oceanic blue.
One rainy morning that wasn’t a beach day, Pam asked her mother if they could go shopping.
Not for books—for clothes.
Janet Davies was ecstatic—she finally had a daughter.
They went shopping, first in Watch Hill, then over in Newport, later on Fifth Avenue. Davies complained about the credit card bills but was secretly pleased, happy for both his wife and daughter.
It would be easier now.
It wasn’t.
What had been a mother’s pity became a mother’s jealousy.
As Pam transformed into a young woman of exceptional loveliness, friends, family, even people sitting at tables next to theirs in restaurants started to remark on Pam’s beauty and charm. The swan began to see the wrinkles in her own elegant neck and compare them unfavorably to her cygnet’s alabaster skin.
The mother withdrew.
Not physically, Janet was always there physically, but she removed herself emotionally. Had she been asked, she would have denied it indignantly. She probably didn’t realize it herself—mirrors reveal so little—but she left her daughter to undergo and try to comprehend the unanticipated metamorphosis.
Pam learned the wrong lesson: that if she was suddenly, for the first time in her life, valued for her beauty, her beauty was her only value.
So when the best-looking boy at Hotchkiss spotted her at a mixer and moved in fast, Pam was as defenseless as an orphaned fawn and found herself in a Farmington motel room looking over his shoulder at a cheap painting of a sailboat.