Camilla Read online

  I said, “Well, I don’t really know him very well. He isn’t very easy to talk to.”

  “But what does he talk to you about?” my father asked.

  I took up my glass to take a sip of vermouth cassis and it was empty; there was only a little pale ice water in the bottom. I finished the ice water and it tasted stale and made me feel a little sick. I’ve never had a proper conversation with Jacques. When he is there I am in my room doing homework; sometimes I don’t even go into the living room at all.

  “Oh, well—I talk about school,” I said. “Luisa and I almost got into awful trouble last week for something we did. Frank—he’s Luisa’s brother—was reading Plato and he found a sentence for us and we copied it and got to school early and hung it on the classroom door. It said, All learning which is acquired under compulsion has no hold upon the mind. When Miss Sargent came she said that it could be the work of nobody but Luisa Rowan and Camilla Dickinson and she kept us after school.”

  But my father did not want to change the subject as I had hoped that he might. He said, “Do you and Rose and Nissen have tea together?”

  “Oh—sometimes,” I said. I wanted to stick my fingers in my ears, partly to shut out my father’s words and partly because my ears were buzzing and felt the way they sometimes do in the subway.

  “Sometimes? What about the other times?”

  “He really doesn’t come so very often,” I said.

  “Is your mother usually in when you get home from school?”

  How often does “usually” mean? Some days mother is home and some days she isn’t and just hurries in a few minutes before time for my father to get home. So I really could say either that she’s usually home or that she’s usually out, so I said, “Usually, I guess.” I pressed my cold fingers against my hot cheeks and prayed, Oh, make him stop. Please make him stop.

  Then my father said, “Let’s not beat around bushes anymore, Camilla. You’re old enough to be asked a straight question. Does Nissen come to see you or does he come to see Rose?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You’re not a fool, Camilla. Tell me the truth.”

  “I have to go to the ladies’ room,” I said. “I have to go quickly. I’m going to throw up.” And I pushed my chair back in such a rush that it fell over and then I ran between the tables to the door marked LADIES and just reached the toilet in time to throw up. A big woman in a white uniform was sitting in a yellow satin chair knitting and she got up and held my head and then when I had finished she took a clean towel and wet it and washed my face and gave me some mouthwash and dashed my forehead with cologne. Then she put my head down against her bosom, which was very big and firm like an overblown air cushion, and said over and over, “You poor little thing, you poor little thing.”

  It was lovely there with my face pressed against the top button of her white uniform and her big hand rubbing gently in between my shoulder blades. I would have liked to stay there but I said, “My father will be worried. I’m all right, now. Thank you very much.”

  The woman released me and I took my head away from her nice clean uniform and looked up at her and said “Thank you” again. Her face was covered with lots of white powder and underneath the powder it was as full of freckles as the Milky Way is full of stars.

  “Fancy letting a baby like you have anything to drink,” she said. “Your father, is it? He ought to know better. Sure you’re all right now, pet?”

  “Yes, thank you,” I told her. “You’ve been awfully nice to me.” I would have liked to ask her what her name was; I would have liked somehow to see her again because she was as comforting as a mountain; but I just shook hands with her and went out into the restaurant again.

  When I got back to the table my father was very worried and very sweet to me and he paid the bill and we left the restaurant. Outside it had stopped raining and turned much colder. Clouds were breaking up and racing across the sky, and the sidewalk had almost dried except for where it was uneven and the puddles lay like dark shadows in the night.

  “Shall we get a taxi or would it make you feel better to walk a little?” my father asked.

  “Let’s walk,” I said. The black shocking air felt wonderful to my hot cheeks. I looked up and through a big rip in the clouds I saw a star; and I wished. Luisa thinks it is terrible for me to wish on stars, but I know she wishes on them herself; and I like to do it even though it isn’t scientific. I think that it is good to believe in things like wishing on stars but bad to believe in things like black cats crossing your path and seeing the new moon through glass. I like wishbones, too, and wishing on the first bite of a birthday cake; and Luisa and I have always said “bread and butter” when a lamppost or anything goes between us, though I’m not sure that that is as constructive a superstition as the others.

  “Did you know that there are meteoric showers in winter?” I asked my father. “There are the Ursids and the Epsilon Arietids and the Orionids. And there are the Taurids and the Andromedids. Aren’t those beautiful words, Father?”

  “Yes,” my father said, and all the rest of the way home we did not say another word. But he held my hand in his—we both had our gloves in our pockets in spite of the cold wind—and every once in a while my father would press my hand with his strong fingers. We walked up Second Avenue for a while and then we turned west toward Third, and again an el train went by with the lights warmly yellow in the windows; it looked as though everybody inside must be comfortable and companionable and perhaps even talking together to help keep the night out of the train. But I knew that in reality they were probably tired and cross and in a hurry to get home and change into dry slippers; or perhaps some of them might have no place to go except a flophouse, or not even a quarter for that, and were waiting for a chance to spread out a newspaper on one of the seats and sleep there.

  When we got to the apartment my father asked, “Do you feel better, dear?”

  “Yes,” I said. But I did not want to go into the house. I wanted my father to go in and leave me outside to walk and walk out on the streets and maybe go into Central Park and sit down on a bench and talk to someone else who wanted to be out all night walking too.

  But my father pressed my hand again and we went upstairs. We went into the living room; it was dark there, but my father did not turn on the lights. We walked over to the window and stood looking out. From the living-room windows you can see across Central Park to the apartments on Central Park West and you can see Radio City and Essex House and Hampshire House and the tip of the Empire State Building and it is all more beautiful even than pictures of the Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon.

  “Camilla,” my father said, “Camilla, I was mad or drunk or both. I shouldn’t have—” and then he didn’t say anything more.

  I waited awhile and he just stood there beside me and held my hand so tightly that I could feel my bones creaking together, and at last I said, “It’s all right, Father.”

  “Is it, Camilla?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, and I tried to make my voice sound very firm.

  My father let my hand go then and said, “Let’s go see if your mother is awake.”

  We walked very softly to my mother’s room. It is my father’s room, too, in that he sleeps there, but the room that we call his room is his study, where he sometimes works after he’s come home from the office and where he usually goes to read his paper. The light in my mother’s room was on and she was still on the chaise longue, but she was sound asleep with her hair falling over the pillow and one hand drooping over the side so that it almost touched the floor; she looked as lovely and innocent and helpless as the princess in The Sleeping Beauty.

  “I’m going to do some homework now and go to bed,” I whispered to my father, standing just on the threshold of the room where my mother lay so exquisitely asleep. “Good night, Father.”

  “Good night, Camilla,” he whispered back, but he did not look at me. He kept on looking at my mother.

  I did homework until I was sleepy and then I got ready for bed. I did everything rather numbly, because I didn’t want to let myself think. I had just opened the window and turned out the light when there was a soft knock and the door opened and my mother stood there outlined in the light from the hall.

  “Are you asleep, darling?” she whispered.

  “No.”

  She came in and sat down beside me on the bed and began stroking my forehead gently, the way she used to sometimes when I was very small and was in bed with a fever.

  “Did you have a nice dinner with your father?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Did he—what did you talk about?”

  “Oh—I don’t know—the dinner.”

  “Did he ask you—was there— Did he mention Jacques?”

  “He asked me if I liked the doll.”

  My mother kept on stroking my forehead and suddenly she bent down and leaned over me as though she were trying to protect me from something, and whispered, “Oh, Camilla, oh, my darling baby, I do love you so much.”

  “I love you, too, Mother,” I said. “I love you terribly.” And suddenly I wanted to cry, but I knew that I must not.

  My mother sat up again and continued her stroking of my forehead. When I was a small child, the soothing repetitive motion used to lull me to sleep, but now it seemed to make me wide-awake and tense, and it was my mother’s voice as she spoke that sounded sleepy.

  “Most people don’t realize that love can be killed,” she said in a soft drowsy voice. “When someone tells you he loves you, you don’t expect him to reject it when you offer him your love in return.”

  I lay rigid in bed and the cold air from the open window blew against my hot cheeks and my mother in her rose velvet gown shivere
d. “You really do love me, darling, you really do?” she asked.

  “I love you, Mother,” I said, and I had to close my eyelids down very tightly to keep the tears inside.

  “I wish—” she said softly, “I wish Mama were alive. I wish I had somebody to talk to. Tod, or even Jen.” Uncle Tod and Aunt Jen were her brother and sister, who lived far away from New York. “I wish— Mama used to worry about me. She always thought I was a fool in a—in a nice sort of way.” Then she let out a long shivering sigh. “Are you happy, darling?” she asked me. “Is everything all right? Are you happy at school?”

  “Yes, Mother,” I said.

  “Are you sleepy?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not—you’re not worried about anything?”

  “No, Mother.”

  “That’s all right, then. I thought you seemed—I thought maybe something had happened to make you upset at school.”

  “No. Everything’s fine at school,” I said.

  2

  THURSDAY MORNING I had not quite finished getting dressed when the telephone rang and it was Luisa saying, “Camilla, let’s have breakfast together at a drugstore, please?” Her voice quivered with urgency.

  “Okay, where?” I asked, and I was glad that she had called. My mother usually has breakfast in bed, but my father and I eat breakfast together, and I felt that it would be easier for me to talk to him if I didn’t have to see him till evening.

  My mother came out of the bedroom just as I was putting on my hat and coat. “Camilla, where are you going?” she demanded. She did not look like the Sleeping Beauty or a princess in a fairy tale this morning. Her face looked white and all the lines in it were dragged down by tiredness and anxiety and other things I was not able to read, and she held her dressing gown around her as though she were cold.

  “I’m going to meet Luisa for breakfast.”

  “For breakfast! Why?”

  “I think she’s—disturbed—about something,” I said.

  “Are you—are you all right, darling?” my mother asked.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Are you—are you coming right home after school?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess so.”

  “But you won’t be late?”

  “No,” I said. “I have to go now, Mother. I promised Luisa I’d meet her right away.”

  I kissed my mother and left, and I felt terribly isolated and the way I imagine a stranger in a foreign country would feel, because I did not know what to say to either my mother or my father. Talking to them had become like talking to strangers, where you have to search wildly for something casual and unimportant to say.

  I took Jacques’s doll with me and left it in the coatroom at school for Luisa, because I couldn’t bear to leave anything at home that would remind me so continually of Jacques. I used to pray desperately that he would not come to our apartment. Now I did not ask for quite as much; I asked simply that my father should never come home early and see Jacques with my mother again. And then I wondered: Why did Father come home early yesterday afternoon?

  So I left the doll in the coatroom for Luisa and went to the drugstore around the corner where she was waiting for me. There was a cup of coffee and a glass of orange juice, almost exactly the color of her hair, on the counter before her. “I’m so upset I can’t possibly eat another thing for breakfast,” she exclaimed as I climbed up on the stool beside her. “Anyhow, I’m broke.”

  “I can lend you fifty cents,” I said. “What’s the matter?”

  “Oh, them again, of course, Mona and Bill.” Luisa always called her parents by their first names.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “Oh, they had a fight last night when they came in. At first they tried to whisper so Frank and I wouldn’t hear, and they whispered louder and louder and finally they yelled and Mona ended up throwing a whole Beethoven symphony at my father, record by record. From the number of crashes it sounded like the Ninth.”

  She took a big swallow of coffee and then made a face. Luisa’s mouth moves more than any other mouth I have ever seen when she talks or even when she just listens. Whenever I try to describe it, it sounds ugly and perhaps taken by itself it would be, but in her face it doesn’t give the effect of being ugly at all. It is a long mouth, almost as though someone had taken a knife and made a slash across her face; and the lips are narrow but because they are so flexible you don’t get any impression of thinness or sharpness. Frank calls Luisa ugly, but the thing I like about her face is that it is like a windy morning with lots of clouds moving rapidly across the sky, all lights and shadows; and though she has red hair her eyes are not green like mine, but are like bright chinks of blue. And her face is very white, with as many freckles as the woman in the ladies’ room of the restaurant.

  “I don’t see why they couldn’t have had their fight before they came home,” Luisa said. “The worst part was when people stuck their heads out of windows and told them to shut up.” She finished her orange juice, holding the glass very tight with one of her nice bony hands. Her hands are very strong; she can open the tightest bottle of ink. “How’re yours?” she asked me.

  “Oh—all right, I guess,” I said.

  “That means all wrong,” Luisa said. “Can you really lend me fifty cents, Camilla?”

  “Sure.”

  “But you know I can’t pay it back.”

  “Oh—someday when we’re both famous you will.” I get twice the allowance Luisa gets—or twice the amount she’s supposed to get. Sometimes I don’t think she really gets any.

  “I’ll have a minced ham sandwich,” Luisa said. “What’s yours, Camilla?”

  “Lettuce, tomato, and bacon.” A nice thing about Luisa and me—we both like sandwiches for breakfast and we like cereal before we go to bed at night.

  “I suppose that Jacques Nissen was there yesterday,” Luisa said.

  “Yes.” The funny thing is that even before I told Luisa anything about how I feel about Jacques, when he first started coming, she knew just how I felt and she knows every time I have come home from school and found him there.

  “You know,” Luisa said, pouring sugar into her coffee, “you’ve changed a lot since we’ve known each other.”

  “Have I?”

  “Yes. Matured. I mean about Them. It’s a funny thing, Camilla. I always thought I couldn’t bear it if anything bad happened to you, but I feel ever so much closer to you just because of your mother and Jacques and your being unhappy and everything.”

  “Oh,” I said. I told the man who was making our sandwiches, “I’d like a chocolate milkshake too,” and then I just sat there with my elbows on the counter and remembered when I first met Luisa over a year ago. She came into school about three weeks late. Her parents were having a vacation on Fire Island and they just didn’t bother to come back to New York in time for Luisa to get to school. I didn’t have much of a chance to talk to her the first week; she wasn’t shy and everybody liked her right away and she always seemed to be with a group of people. But one afternoon when I went over to the Metropolitan Museum I met her.

  Last year was my first year without a governess, the first year I was allowed to go to school or anywhere I wanted to alone; and sometimes I used to take my books over to the museum and study. My mother hadn’t met Jacques then so it wasn’t because of that; it was just that it was the first chance I’d ever had to be really by myself. Anyhow the museum with its enormous echoing rooms and great glassed roofs has always been one of my favorite places. When I was little and Binny, my nurse, used to take me to the park to play, I always made her walk with me through the museum. I loved the Egyptian tombs especially, and the mummies; and I loved the great halls hung with embroidered flags and shields and swords and filled with suits of armor in which I liked to imagine real little knights. How tiny men must have been in those days; my father couldn’t anywhere nearly get into the largest of the suits of armor. Maybe Jacques could, but it would be a tight pinch even for him. Somehow, and this is a strange thing, I can imagine both my father and Jacques being knights riding off to the Crusades with their ladies’ handkerchiefs as a talisman: it’s the only way I can imagine both my father and Jacques at the same time.