Camilla Read online

  “I’m not any different,” I said. I didn’t know whether I was telling the truth or a lie.

  Luisa took her fingers out from under the edge of the desk lid and held them in her other hand. “I’m sorry if I sounded nasty about Frank.” It was the first time she had ever apologized about anything. “But he really isn’t good for you, Camilla. He’s too old for you anyhow. He’s seventeen. I know about people and you don’t. He isn’t good for anybody. He’s let the Mona-Bill business make him awfully neurotic. Sometimes I think boys take things much harder than girls. And he thinks he’s such a brain. He thinks he knows everything. And then his moods. He gets into the most gosh-awful glooms. Black as thunder for hours. But I suppose if you want to go on seeing him it’s up to you.”

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “But it won’t make any difference with you and me.”

  “No.” Luisa sounded sad. “I suppose it won’t.”

  “How’re Mona and Bill?” I asked, because I knew she wanted me to ask her.

  “Being polite again. Honestly, Camilla, Bill’s an awful fool. I think one reason I’m so fond of him is he’s such a fool. But I really don’t see why he and Mona ever married. He hasn’t the slightest idea what Mona’s about. Mona’s an intellectual and Bill’s just an overgrown athlete who thinks he’s an intellectual. But actually he’s just all brawn and no brain. You know, all biceps and muscles and nothing else. Biceptual.”

  She looked in her desk and pulled out Silas Marner, which we were doing in English, and handed me a piece of paper that was stuck in between the pages. “It’s from Frank,” she said reluctantly.

  I read the note and it said, “This is Friday so you don’t have school tomorrow, so you don’t have to do homework this afternoon. Let’s continue yesterday evening’s conversation. My school doesn’t let out till after yours so come on down to the apartment with Luisa and I’ll pick you up there.”

  And suddenly as I read the note I remembered my telephone conversation with Jacques that night before. I could not meet Frank because I had to go to Jacques’s. I wanted to go to Frank’s. I did not want to go to see Jacques, but I knew that I must; and at the thought that I had to see him my heart flipped over inside me like a pancake. I had to see him for Mother, so that I could tell him never to call again, never to come to the apartment again, so that I could tell him that everything was all right with Mother and Father, and Mother didn’t care about Jacques anymore.

  Before I could stop myself (so strong had the habit of telling Luisa everything become) I blurted out, “I can’t see Frank because I have to go see Jacques.” And then I wished I had bitten off my tongue. I knew that no matter how many questions Luisa asked me I couldn’t ever tell her about Mother, though I knew that if Mona tried to cut her wrists Luisa would tell me.

  I wished I hadn’t said anything about Jacques. Now Luisa would ask me questions, questions. She might even want to go along with me, and Luisa is the hardest person in the world to put off with any evasion.

  Her blue eyes darkened the way they always do when she is excited, and she cried, “You’re going to see Jacques!”

  “Yes,” I said, and just then the bell rang and Miss Sargent came in.

  At recess there was a gang of girls around us, and I laughed and talked and acted like a kid just to avoid giving Luisa a chance to get me off into a corner. I even listened while Alma Potter, a girl I don’t like, tried to show off and make everybody think how grown-up and sophisticated she was.

  “Well,” she told us, “I wore my new wine-colored coat this morning and on the bus a cop sat down beside me. He was kind of cute but awful old, of course. And I kept noticing his arm.”

  “What about his arm?” Luisa asked.

  “Well, it kept creeping around me. Well, after all, I’m not going to take that kind of thing from a cop. So I said to him, ‘The arm of the law may be long,’ I said, ‘but it can reach too far.’ “

  I laughed with the other kids, but all the time I was thinking nastily, I wonder where she heard that?

  Anyhow it helped to keep me from having to talk with Luisa. I was afraid that if I did I might blurt out about Mother as I had blurted out about Jacques, and I knew that if I did that I’d hate myself forever. Somehow it’s never embarrassed me when Luisa’s talked about Mona, but I always find myself wishing she didn’t know about Jacques.

  But after school I was not able to escape her and she cornered me and said, “I’m going with you.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t.” I tried to keep my voice very quiet and firm.

  “Oh, I won’t go in with you or anything. I just think someone ought to go along with you and wait for you, in case anything goes wrong.”

  “What could go wrong?” I asked.

  “With someone like Jacques, you never know,” Luisa said. “Gosh, you’re innocent, Camilla. Where does he live?”

  Then I realized that I had no idea where Jacques lived. “I don’t know,” I said blankly. “I said I’d go to his apartment, but I don’t know where it is.”

  “Then we must look it up in the phone book.” Luisa sounded brisk and businesslike. “Come on.”

  In the coatroom there is a phone booth with a phone book, and Luisa dragged me to it and began leafing through the unwieldy pages of the book until she came to the N’s. “Nissen, Edward; Nissen, Frances; Nissen, Hans; Nissen, Jacques,” she said. Then she looked up at me and grinned. “I wouldn’t mind going to see him myself.”

  Jacques lived on West Fifty-third Street, near the Museum of Modern Art. Somehow I had never imagined him as living in that neighborhood, and I must have passed his house many times when I went to the Museum of Modern Art to study an exhibition for an art class in school or to go to one of the movies with Luisa.

  “Well, let’s go,” Luisa said.

  I did not want to go. I wanted to meet Frank.

  “We’ll take the subway,” Luisa said.

  “No. We’ll walk.”

  “It’ll take much longer,” Luisa warned.

  “I can’t help it,” I said. “I’m going to walk.”

  So we walked. As we walked we passed an apartment building under construction and on the wooden hoarding it said RAFFERTY DICKINSON, ARCHITECT, and my heart swelled with pride, and I said, “This is one of Father’s apartments.” I wondered whether he was at the office today or whether he was there, right this minute, and whether if we waited I might see him.

  But Luisa hurried me on. “We shouldn’t have come by here. It would be terrible if we saw your father.” When we got to the Museum of Modern Art she asked, “How long are you going to be?”

  “I don’t know. Not long.”

  “More than half an hour?”

  “Oh, no!” I exclaimed, because I knew that what I had to say to Jacques would not take more than a few minutes.

  “Well, I think I’ll just go in the museum and look around,” Luisa said. “I’ll check in the lobby every few minutes and if you’re not there in half an hour I’m coming for you. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, and watched her go into the museum. I wanted to go in with her and look at the picture of the two old ladies picking coal off the railroad tracks and the picture that is called White on White, but I walked west until I got to the house where Jacques lived.

  This is the house where Jacques lives, I thought. This is the door to the house where Jacques lives. This is the elevator inside the door of the house where Jacques lives. This is the button that says sixth floor in the elevator inside the door of the house where Jacques lives.

  I kept on talking to myself like that as though everything were part of a nursery rhyme. I punched the button of the elevator—and I don’t like self-service elevators; I’m always afraid they’ll get stuck—and the door of the elevator closed as though by an unseen hand and the elevator rose with a whirring noise, slowly, slowly, and somehow it was all like a frightening Grimms’ fairy tale. The elevator stopped, the door slid open, and I stepped out and the door closed behind me a
nd there I was, locked into a green-painted hall with five grimly closed doors, each with a brass nameplate over the doorbell. The first nameplate I looked at read JACQUES NISSEN and it was in a high state of polish. I stood there and I could not seem to draw my hands out of my pockets so that I could ring the bell. It was as though my hands had turned into black marble, like the legs of the prince in the fairy tale. I stood there thinking how Luisa thinks I am too old for fairy tales and laughs at me because I still read them; but I also read D. H. Lawrence and J. P. Marquand and Elizabeth Bowen, and I have also read Thomas Mann and the first ten pages of Ulysses. And lots of others.

  I have also read E. M. Forster and Isak Dinesen, I started to say in a silent and silly argument with Luisa, and then I drew my hand out of my pocket and rang the doorbell. I could hear it ring in the apartment and it didn’t sound like a doorbell ring at all, but like the chimes of Big Ben, only somehow turned all silky and effeminate.

  Before the bell had finished ringing, Jacques opened the door. I think I had for some reason expected him to be in a dressing gown or something in some way different and glamorous; but he just wore his usual dark suit; and he said hurriedly, “Come in, Camilla, there’s a good child. I’m talking on the phone,” and he moved quickly through a long dark hall to the living room. His living room was as modern as Mona’s, though in a different way. Most of the furniture was black and Chinesey instead of blond and Swedishy; the curtains were black-and-white zebra stripes. Jacques sat on the arm of a flame-colored leather chair and talked on the telephone. He said, “Of course, my darling . . . of course I understand, my beautiful brave girl . . .” And then he said, “I love you I love you I love you,” and made kissing noises into the phone; and I wondered to whom he could be talking. I was angry with him for being able to talk to anybody like that when only so short a time ago he had held my mother in his arms and kissed her the way the young men and women do on the roof of the apartment next to ours.

  He hung up and turned to me and smiled and said, “I didn’t tell her you’d come to see me. I thought it would be best if we kept this visit a secret just between the two of us.” And he stroked the telephone as though it were the person he’d just been talking to.

  “You didn’t tell who?” I asked.

  “Rose. Your mother.”

  I said in a voice as cold as icicles, “She doesn’t want to see you. She doesn’t want to see you ever again.”

  “Did she tell you that?” Jacques asked, smiling.

  “No,” I said. “But she didn’t need to tell me. I know.”

  Jacques got off the arm of the red chair and went over to a black cabinet from which he took a crystal decanter and two crystal glasses; and a lock of his blond hair fell over his forehead.

  “You’re not too young for sherry, are you?” he asked me, and without waiting for an answer, he filled one of the glasses with the beautiful amber liquid from the decanter and handed it to me. Then he filled the other glass for himself and put the decanter down on a square black table. “Camilla,” he said, “my poor sweet little Camilla,” and his soft eyes were suddenly grieving, “you’re such a very little girl in spite of your old ways, aren’t you? And you hate me very much, don’t you? And you want to go on hating me, don’t you?”

  I didn’t say anything. I held my glass of sherry in my hand and looked at him, and his face seemed very unhappy and very kind, and I had never seen it that way before and it disturbed me.

  “I don’t want you to hate me, Camilla,” he said, “so I’m going to try to explain things to you a little. What I have to explain to you is life itself, and that’s the most difficult thing in the world, so you must be patient.”

  “I can’t stay very long,” I said.

  “Then just listen for as long as you can. And let me tell you a story. A kind of a fairy story. There was once a very beautiful rose living in a garden.”

  “Mother,” I said.

  “Yes, it’s too obvious an allegory, isn’t it? Too pat, too easy. Rose’s place in life is to be herself, to be beautiful, to be loved, but not admired. Your father has always wanted to admire Rose, to worship her from a distance, but that is not what Rose needs.”

  I did not listen. I closed my ears. No matter what Jacques said it would be a lie. Even if he told the truth it would come out of his mouth as a lie. Truth is not just facts.

  His voice continued. My mind recorded and then discarded his words.

  “And what Rose needs is warmth, and tenderness, and affection. Rose must be emotionally protected. Roses grow only in cultivated gardens, and they must be shielded from the wind and the cold. Whereas your father—your father belongs on the scaffolding of one of his highest buildings, with the wind, rather than a woman’s hands, ruffling that black hair of his. Your father is basically a cold man, Camilla, and even his passion I imagine must be as cold as a flame of burning hydrogen erupting from a volcano of ice.”

  “Father is not cold!” I cried.

  “Have you ever seen your father casually put his arms around your mother and hold her?” Jacques asked me.

  “Of course,” I said. And I tried to remember. And I could not. I thought about what Jacques had said about the flame of hydrogen and it made me think of descriptions I had read of Jupiter, which is so far from the sun that its core is overlaid with thousands and thousands of miles of ice from which flames of hydrogen erupt and spill into seas of frozen ammonia; and I did not know what Jacques meant and I hated him. It was easy to hate him.

  Jacques took the decanter and poured a little more into my glass, though I had taken only a sip, and refilled his own. “I’ve done it all wrong again,” he said. “And I brought you a doll. How could I have been so stupid as to bring you a doll! And now I’ve messed it up all over again. I wanted to make you understand and I’ve just helped you to keep on hating me. But you don’t hate Rose, do you, Camilla?”

  “Hate Mother!” I cried. “How could I ever hate Mother!”

  “Then do you understand her?” Jacques asked me.

  “Children are not supposed to understand their mothers,” I said loudly. “Mothers are supposed to understand their children.”

  This was something I had believed before I met Luisa and that I now knew to be untrue, but I thought that if I said it firmly enough I might be able to believe in it again.

  “But you’re not a child any longer,” Jacques told me.

  I said, in an ice-cold voice, as cold as an outer planet, “I am a child. I do not intend to grow up.”

  “But there are compensations,” Jacques said, “I promise you there are compensations.”

  “I don’t want them,” I said.

  “Listen, Camilla.” Jacques came over to me and took my chin in his hand and made me look into his eyes, and again his eyes were as sad as a caged animal’s and his eyes made me pity him through my hate. “Listen to me. You think that if you could have stayed a child I might never have come into Rose’s life, and therefore into your life. Or that if you had remained a child you might not have understood and therefore you wouldn’t have had to be unhappy. But the trouble is that you understand only in part. There is a French saying that to understand everything is to forgive everything.”

  I moved away from him so that I would not have to keep on looking at his eyes and I said, “It doesn’t matter anymore whether or not I understand.”

  “Of course it matters,” Jacques said.

  “No. Because Mother isn’t ever going to see you again.”

  “That’s not what she gave me to understand when I talked to her on the telephone just now,” Jacques said.

  “You didn’t talk to Mother!”

  “Who did you think it was?”

  “I didn’t know.” But of course I had known, even though I had almost convinced myself because I didn’t want to know.

  “I called five times,” Jacques said. “Four times the maid answered the phone and said that your mother was out and the fifth time she answered herself.” His words
plunged like brutal stones into the waters of my mind.

  I dropped my sherry glass on the floor and I didn’t apologize or stop to pick it up but walked out of his apartment and shut his door behind me.

  I had thought that I knew what hate was when I hated Jacques, but I only knew it now that I hated my mother.

  4

  FOR JACQUES MY HATE had been like the fox inside the Spartan boy’s shirt, gnawing away at him, eating him alive. But for my mother it was like a thunderstorm and it was as physical as a thunderstorm. Everything in front of my eyes blackened, as though a huge cloud cut off the light of the sun; but the cloud was inside my head and it was my mind and not the day that was darkened. I walked down the street. I walked past the Museum of Modern Art and never for a moment thought of Luisa. I went into the subway and rode downtown and got off at Eighth Street, though I was thinking neither of Frank nor of Luisa, and when I got out of the subway I did not walk over to Ninth Street but went west to where the streets are crooked.

  I walked, turning left or right indiscriminately as I came to corners, and my body was so full of the black cloud of hate that it was almost impossible for me to breathe, and I had to stop walking and stand very still. I stood in the middle of the sidewalk, looking around me very carefully, not to find out where I was, but to find out who I was, because I was some-how no longer Camilla Dickinson. All that there was in me and around me was a whir of hideous words that buzzed about my head like a mass of hornets, so that the dark cloud seemed no longer like a thundercloud but like a swarm of filthy insects.

  A rose is a rose is a rose. That is a quote. But what is a rose? A rose is a rose is a rose tells you nothing. My mother is a rose and what is my mother?

  A skinny, mangy-looking dog flashed across the street and a truck skidded over to the curb with a screeching of brakes like the sound of my hate. The dog reached the sidewalk in safety, the truck moved on downtown, and I seemed to wake up as though I had suddenly come out of a nightmare.

  It was not that I had stopped hating my mother; but now I could say to myself, I hate my mother. I could put it into words. And I could wonder what I was going to do next. I was no longer driven about the streets like a dead leaf in the autumn wind. Now if I went home or if I went back to the Museum of Modern Art to find Luisa, or if I went to her apartment to find Frank, I would go knowing where I went. But I did not want to go anywhere. I remembered Luisa coming to my apartment and saying she didn’t want to go home. I remembered her saying it was silly when I asked her to spend the night because she didn’t want to go home, ever. Now I knew how she felt.