Camilla Read online

  On Thursday—the afternoon of the day after I saw Jacques and my mother kissing and I knew that I could no longer pretend that Jacques really wasn’t important—I came straight home from school after all because Luisa was going to the movies with Frank. They asked me to go with them, but it was to a revival of a Boris Karloff horror picture on Forty-second Street and they always terrify me.

  When I got home I could tell from the doorman and the elevator boy that Jacques was not there. Upstairs the apartment was very quiet. I could hear Carter and the new cook talking out in the kitchen and I thought that perhaps my mother was out with Jacques. That was bad but it wasn’t as bad as having Jacques in the apartment. I went out to the kitchen for a glass of milk, and Carter and the cook stopped suddenly as I appeared. The new cook seems very nice; at any rate I like her better than Carter. Carter is like a fish. I think if you cut her open her blood, like a fish’s, would run cold.

  “Is Mother out?” I asked, and then wished I hadn’t asked it.

  But Carter said, “No, Miss Camilla. I think she’s in her room.”

  If Mother is home and not in the living room with Jacques she usually comes hurrying to meet me when I get back from school, and we have tea together, or cocoa, and talk; so I gulped down my milk and went to her room and knocked on the door.

  There wasn’t any answer, but just as I raised my hand to knock again, my mother’s voice called, “Who is it?” Her voice sounded thick and as though she were talking through a bad cold.

  “It’s me, Mother,” I said. “Camilla.”

  “Oh,” my mother said. “Come in, darling. I think I’m catching a cold.”

  But when I went into the room and looked at her I knew she was not catching cold. She lay in a little heap on the bed with all her clothes, even her shoes, still on, and her face was all blurred and blotchy and looked as though she had been crying for hours and hours, the way Luisa says Mona does.

  “Camilla darling,” my mother said. “Be a sweet angel and throw my blanket over me, I’m freezing. Winter’s really here, isn’t it? I hate to see summer over and even autumn—though there were some nice warm days in October. I do hate the cold. How was school? Did you have a nice breakfast with Luisa?”

  “Yes, thank you,” I said.

  “Camilla, come here, come here quick,” my mother said, holding her arms out to me. I went over to the bed and she put her arms around me and pulled me down beside her and I could feel her tears spilling over onto my cheeks. “Oh, Camilla, don’t hate me. Don’t hate me too much,” my mother wept.

  “I don’t hate you,” I said quickly, and I kissed her with little gentle kisses as though she were the baby and I the mother; but for the first time as she lay there and wept she looked much older than I, really old enough to be my mother.

  One thing that always pleases her when we go out someplace together is when people think we are sisters, or say, “And which is the mother and which is the daughter?” But now she had deep blue circles spreading out under her eyes like fans and her face seemed somehow to have puffed and sagged and I wanted to take her into my arms and hold her against me to protect her so that she would not see her face in the mirror.

  “Oh, Mother, I love you,” I said over and over. “I love you so much.” And we clung together and rocked back and forth until at last my mother stopped crying and lay back against the pillows again, gasping and hiccuping like an exhausted baby. I went into her bathroom and wrung out her washcloth in cold water and bathed her eyes, and then I took some of her eau de cologne from her dressing table and rubbed it gently over her forehead, and she lay there with her eyes closed, saying, “Oh, that feels so good, Camilla, that feels so wonderful,” and I felt old.

  And then she said, “Oh, darling, I know I’m not very mature, but how can you please a person when you seem to be the very opposite of everything he wants? I don’t have a brilliant mind the way he— All I have to offer him is my love. And when it seems to me he doesn’t want—when he congratulates me because I’m less loving—oh, he doesn’t use those words, of course, he calls it being more mature, but that’s what it means—then it’s as though he thrusts a knife in my— Once he even congratulated me on being more cold—to him. That hurt me more than— But I love him. I—I even tried to be less affectionate—but I couldn’t kill the need for warmth that’s in me.”

  She stopped talking then, with a sort of little gasp, and put her hand up to her mouth in a quick, childish gesture. Then she added in a whisper, “If only I had Mama to talk to—but I have to talk to someone. I can’t help it, I’ve always had to talk. If only one didn’t have to grow up, Camilla! If only one could always be a child! I’m not strong enough for—oh, Camilla, God help me, God help me!” And she began to cry again, and through her crying she said, “He’d murder me if he ever really knew—he’d murder me—Rafferty’s a violent man, Camilla, you don’t know how violent!”

  “Why would Father want to murder you, Mother?” I asked, and my voice was suddenly as cold and as hard as a slab of marble.

  She stopped crying suddenly then and sat up and held out both her hands to me. “Oh, dear God, Camilla, what have I done to you? What have I said? Of course he wouldn’t want to murder—I’m just hysterical. I’m getting the flu and I don’t know what I’m talking about. Call for the doctor, Camilla. I want to see Doctor Wallace. Call him for me.”

  I called the doctor and he said he would come by later in the evening; and I wanted to ask my mother, “Does everything you’ve been saying mean you love Jacques now and not Father?” And I wanted to say “How can you love that horrible little slug?” But I just covered her up with the blanket again and left the room and closed the door quietly behind me.

  I went into my room and I did my homework. I forced my mind into a vacuum and then I filled that vacuum with the things I was supposed to learn or prepare for school the next day. I had never done my homework so quickly before. Then I went into the kitchen and told the new cook that I had been invited to have dinner with Luisa and I was sorry I hadn’t mentioned it to her before. I am not supposed to go out in the evenings alone and Carter knows this, but she didn’t say anything, and I went downstairs and walked to the BMT. I didn’t know whether Luisa would have come home from the movies yet or not, but I thought I would go down to Ninth Street and see; and if worse came to worst I could go to a movie myself and then to her apartment afterward.

  Someone was home when I rang the bell under the Rowan mailbox because the latch of the red front door clicked almost immediately. I pushed the door open and began to climb the brown carpeted stairs and from above I could hear Mona’s English bulldog, Oscar Wilde, barking ferociously. As I started the last flight Mona leaned over the stair rail and called down, “Who is it?” and Oscar stuck his head through the banisters and growled. Oscar always looks as though he intends to eat you up when in reality all he wants is to sit in your lap and have his head scratched.

  “It’s Camilla Dickinson, Mrs. Rowan,” I said. “Is Luisa home?”

  Mona is very small and very thin with red hair cut almost as short as a man’s, and she wears glasses with heavy black frames, and black suits and spike heels and hats from Lilly Daché, and I am always uncomfortable around her. When I go down to Luisa’s I’m always glad when Mona isn’t home because I feel that she thinks Luisa’s friends are a bore and a nuisance, cluttering up her apartment.

  “No, Luisa isn’t home,” she said. “Why didn’t you call before coming all this distance?”

  “Oh, I was coming down here anyhow.” I lied for no reason except that, as usual, she rattled me so, I didn’t know what I was saying. “Tell Luisa I’ll call her later.” Now Oscar began to announce with an even louder voice that he wanted to see me, and he began jumping up and down and yipping with excitement between his barks. “Get inside and shut up, Oscar,” Mona said, and, taking him by the collar, she flung him into the apartment. “I’ll tell Luisa,” she said, and slammed the door.

  Well, I suppose I
’ll have to go to a movie, I thought, and I didn’t like the idea because I’d never been to a movie alone. I turned around and had started down the stairs again when the door of the Rowan apartment opened and Frank stuck his head out, shouting, “Hey, Camilla Dickinson, is that you?” and came pounding down the stairs after me.

  “Oh, hello, I thought you were at the movies with Luisa,” I said. Frank made me feel uncomfortable, though in a different way from Mona, and I didn’t know why. Perhaps it was just because he was a boy and I didn’t know much about boys except the ones at dancing school, and I didn’t like them.

  “I got bored, so I came out early. Where are you going now?”

  “I don’t know. Just for a walk, I guess.” My voice trailed off as I thought of having left my mother there, worn out on the bed from weeping, waiting for Father and Dr. Wallace to come and make everything all right. I thought that perhaps I should go home and then I thought that it might be better if Father came home and could be alone with Mother.

  “Why don’t I walk with you for a while?” Frank asked.

  “Do you want to?”

  “Yes. I’d like to see you once without Luisa.”

  As we started to walk, the streetlamps came on suddenly and the early winter night seemed to settle down between the houses.

  “Where shall we go?” Frank asked.

  “I don’t care. Wherever you say,” I said.

  We walked over to Washington Square; above the arch we could see the first star pulsing and throbbing against the last cold streaks of light.

  Washington Square has always seemed to me to be a much more grown-up park than Central Park. Perhaps it’s because I used to play in Central Park when I was small and I’ve only really known Washington Square after dark when Luisa and I have walked Oscar Wilde around and around and talked. I felt very grown-up walking with Frank and almost as though I were an NYU student on a date. The park was emptying as we reached it. A few remaining mothers rolled up their knitting or closed their books with cold fingers and started pushing their baby carriages toward home, and a gang of boys was still bouncing a ball against the hard stone of the arch and shouting at each other with harsh, hungry voices.

  “You know, Cam,” Frank said, “Luisa monopolizes you. You shouldn’t let her do that.”

  “She doesn’t monopolize me,” I said.

  Frank picked a stick up off the sidewalk and threw it across the grass. “I suppose we should have brought Oscar Wilde with us. That dog would never get out if Luisa and I didn’t see to him. Of course she monopolizes you. And you do whatever she tells you to do, meek as Oscar when he’s chewed up one of Bill’s shoes. And the funny thing is, I bet you’ve really got more guts than Luisa. Listen, Camilla Dickinson, do you believe in God?”

  Frank looks very much like Luisa. His hair is a darker shade of red, but he has the same blue eyes and long arms with the naked wristbones always showing below his sweater and making him look younger than he is. And I saw now that he talked like Luisa, too, because that was the kind of question Luisa was apt to ask anybody new who interested her. She asks that sort of question partly because it shocks people and partly because she doesn’t believe in God and she really wants to know what other people think. I think perhaps she feels that if she finds enough people who really believe in God, maybe she’ll believe in Him again too.

  It’s the only thing we’ve ever really fought about—I mean a real fight, not just a spat. Luisa has to have a spat at least once a day. But about this all she’ll ever say is “You’re just a dope to believe in God, Camilla,” with such scorn that I seem to shrivel and curl all up inside though I am determined to go on being a dope if that makes me a dope.

  So now I said “Yes!” to Frank almost as though he had raised a whip over my head.

  “That’s very refreshing,” Frank said, “very refreshing indeed. Do you know, oddly enough, so do I.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s just a reaction because of Mona and Luisa. But I doubt very much if my God is the same kind of God you believe in, Camilla Dickinson.”

  “I don’t believe in an old man in a night gown and long white whiskers, if that’s what you mean,” I said rather sharply.

  “Tell me about your God,” Frank demanded. “What kind of a God do you believe in?”

  We walked around the park and I didn’t say anything because I was trying to think the kind of God I believe in into words. God wasn’t anything I ever thought about at all before I met Luisa. He was just something that was always there, the way Mother and Father were before Jacques. And when Luisa talked to me about God it didn’t make me want to think about Him; it just made me stubborn. But Frank made me want to think.

  We paused for a moment to watch two old men wearing wool caps and big woolen scarves sitting on a bench with a chessboard between them. They sat as still as statues, almost as though the chill November air had frozen them. We waited until finally one of them reached out a hand in a gray woolen glove and made a move and then Frank walked me over to a bench and pushed me down on it and we sat there and a brown leaf dropped from the tree behind us and drifted down onto the sidewalk.

  “Well,” I said at last, “I don’t think it’s God’s fault when people do anything wrong. And I don’t think He plans it when people are good. But I think He makes it possible for people to be ever so much bigger and better than they are. That is, if they want to be. What I mean is, people have to do it themselves. God isn’t going to do it for them.” And at the same time that I was saying this and believing it, I was thinking, But why did God let Jacques come?

  Frank said, “I like that, Camilla. I like what you said. Sometime I’d really like to have a good talk with you—if Luisa’ll let me tear you away.”

  Again, when he talked about Luisa and me like that, it made me mad, and I said, “That’s up to me.”

  “Well, will you, then, Cam?” Frank asked. “There are so few people in the world anybody can talk to. I mean about things that matter. Most girls your age—well, when you go out with them you know they’re always kind of thinking about being kissed. I mean it’s all so kind of new to them, that sort of thing, and it makes them kind of one-track-minded. But with you—if anybody notices the way you look in your sweater, it’ll be me, not you. And we can talk. Usually a girl you can talk with isn’t—doesn’t have any—but you do. You sit there and you talk about God and you look just beautiful.”

  When Frank said that it was as though something warm and lovely had exploded right in the middle of my stomach and, like the sun, sent rays of happiness all through my body. All my misery about Mother and Father and Jacques disappeared from even the darkest corners of my mind, pushed away by the lovely warmth, and I couldn’t keep a smile from starting in my eyes and then spreading all over my face the way the warm feeling had spread all over my body.

  When I was little I had often heard people say (when they thought I couldn’t hear), “What a pity that Camilla looks so like her father instead of Rose.” And people were always talking about how beautiful Mother was, but they had never called me a beautiful child. I had thought during the past winter that I must be getting prettier, partly from my own mirror and partly from the way Mother looked at me, pleased, and at the same time wistful and unhappy, as though my changing from the ugly duckling must somehow be taking something from her. But to have Frank say it out loud for me, that I was beautiful, made me dizzy with pleasure.

  And then Frank said, “Luisa’s ugly as a mud fence, isn’t she?”

  I stood up furiously and cried, “She is not! She’s the most nice-looking person I know!” And I wanted to fly to wherever Luisa was sitting by herself in the movies and put my arms around her and protect her from Frank’s words.

  “What a little tiger,” Frank said. “I didn’t mean any harm to your precious Luisa. After all, she’s my sister and I’m fond of her even if half the time I’d like to kill her. You should hear the things she says about you sometimes.”


  “What does she say?”

  “Oh—she talks.”

  “About what?”

  “Your mother, for instance.”

  “What does she say about Mother?”

  “Well, I suppose it’s true,” Frank said. “We seem to love our parents no matter what they’re like, even when we hate them.”

  “But what does Luisa say about Mother?” My voice was fierce.

  “I shouldn’t have started this,” Frank said. “But I don’t like people who start things and then back out. She just said once that your mother seems—well, foolish and childish, and that she thinks she must always have been that way, and not just lately. Of course, Cam, you know Lu wouldn’t talk about anything like this to anybody but me. We fight a lot but we talk too.”

  “I guess Mother’s always been childish,” I said slowly, still thinking over his first words. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Well, just that Luisa doesn’t understand how you used to adore your mother so.”

  “I’ve told her,” I said to Frank with angry patience. “I’ve told her again and again. We used to have such fun together. Like two kids. I think it was because Mother was childish that we had so much fun. She really liked playing with me, tea parties and make-believe. She was really more fun, she could think of more things to do, than other kids. And we’d tell each other all kinds of things. Now it’s different. When we talk to each other it’s different. We tell each other different kinds of things. We’re not the same people.”

  “Luisa says she’s very pretty.”

  “That’s changed too,” I said. “She used to look like a princess in a fairy tale, and now that’s gone. I suppose she’s still beautiful, but it’s different.”