Camilla Read online

  I walked slowly down the street and all of a sudden piano music came pouring out of an upper window of one of the houses. It wasn’t somebody practicing a music lesson; it wasn’t somebody playing carelessly at the piano just for fun, the way Mother sometimes does; it was somebody playing the piano the way a real astronomer would go to a new telescope that might show him an undiscovered star, or the way a scientist on the verge of a tremendous discovery would enter his laboratory; it was somebody playing the piano the way Picasso must have painted his harlequins or Francis Thompson have written “The Hound of Heaven.” I stopped and listened and listened. I did not know what the music was, but it made me think of the names of stars, of the winter stars, Aquarius, Capricornus, Pisces, Mesartim, Cetus, Piscium.

  I sat down on the rough brown steps leading to the house and leaned my head against the iron railing, because suddenly I was so tired that my legs were ready to collapse under me, and I wanted my mother. I did not want Rose Dickinson who had been talking on the telephone to Jacques Nissen. I wanted my mother. I wanted my mother to come and take me by the hand and lead me home and undress me and put me to bed and rub my head and bring me milk toast and then turn out my light but leave the door open with the light from the hall shining in and then sit by my bed and hold my hand until I fell asleep—the way she did once on a night when I suddenly got a high fever and it was my nurse’s night off and Dr. Wallace said I had flu.

  But Mother was still in bed with her wrists bound in white bandages and the telephone beside her so that in the end she could not help talking to Jacques.

  And I thought, I don’t want to be beautiful. I don’t want to be like a camellia or a rose or any kind of flower. I wish I had red hair and freckles and a big mouth like Luisa’s. I wish people were still saying what a pity it is I don’t look like my mother.

  Damn beauty, I thought, and wished that God would strike me down for swearing. But that is not the kind of thing the God I believe in does. If there is going to be any striking down you have to do it yourself. God does not do it for you.

  The music stopped and suddenly the air about the street seemed empty, as though an element had been taken away from it. What elements is air composed of: oxygen and hydrogen and argon and nitrogen and carbon dioxide? And the cars in the city adding carbon monoxide. And all the smells of the street: beer from the tavern and bananas and onions from the vegetable wagon and the smell of stray dogs and cats. The air on this street had held music, too, and now it left a space that had to be filled up. But the empty place stayed, cold and dark.

  What shall I do? I thought. Oh, Mother, where shall I go? But no one answered me and the silence lay against me like a weight.

  I sat there. The day left the street, lights came on in the shops and in the windows above the shops, and people walked by in a hurry to get home to dinner. And at last I stumbled to my feet and started walking. I walked without paying any attention to where I was going, but somehow I was not surprised when I turned into Ninth Street. I stopped in front of Luisa’s house and I wanted to ring the buzzer and ask for Frank, but I was afraid that Luisa would have given up at the Museum of Modern Art and come back downtown, and I could not, I could not talk to Luisa.

  I stood uncertainly in front of the doorway and the door opened and someone came out and started to walk past me and then said in a surprised voice, “Camilla!”

  I said, “Frank,” and my teeth were chattering inside my head.

  “Cam, I’d given you up,” Frank said, and then, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I tried to say through my chattering teeth.

  “Didn’t that brat of a Luisa give you my message?” Frank asked. “I wanted you to meet me right after school.”

  “I couldn’t,” I said. “I wanted to, but I couldn’t . . .”

  Frank was bending over me, a dark shadow trying to peer into my face. “Camilla, you look as though you’d just been knifed. You’d better come upstairs with me. No, Mona and Bill are there. That wouldn’t be any good.”

  “Is Luisa back yet?” I asked.

  “Not yet. And we don’t want to bump into her. Come on.”

  “But you were going somewhere . . .” My voice trailed off.

  “Just to the library to get a book. I was mad at you because I thought you’d ditched me.” He took my arm and started walking me at such a rapid pace that I almost had to run. “I’m sorry if I’m tiring you,” he said once, “but you look so cold I thought we ought to walk fast to try to warm you up.” He did not tell me where he was taking me and somehow I was too confused and numb to wonder. All that mattered was that Frank had my arm and that he was taking care of me.

  We stopped in front of an old movie theater on a darkish street. I kept numbly beside him while he bought two tickets and took me in. The lobby was dim and hot and stale. A woman with short, straight, gray hair that stuck grotesquely out from her head was swearing at a candy-dispensing machine that would give her neither her candy nor her money back. Frank went over to her and pulled the plungers and in a moment a box of candy dropped into the tray and the woman showered Frank with blessings in a broken accent.

  The floor of the lobby had an old worn carpet and was littered with candy papers and cigarette butts and I stared down at it until Frank led me up two steep flights of stairs and we came out in the top balcony. On the screen a man and a woman were kissing passionately and I thought for a moment that I was going to throw up. Then the woman broke away from the man and screamed at him in Italian and Frank and I climbed to the very back row and sat down. The second balcony was almost deserted; a few people sat in the front rows, but Frank and I were in the back row with empty seats spreading out in front of us and on either side.

  “This isn’t a bad picture,” Frank said. “Mona took me to see it when it was uptown.” We sat looking at the screen for a moment, but I couldn’t keep my mind on it; the people on the screen seemed to be moving about in complete confusion. I could not clear my head enough to read the English subtitles and find out what the story was about. I put my head down on my knees.

  Frank said in a low dispassionate voice, “This used to be a legitimate theater once. Bernhardt played here, and Duse. It’s about to fall down and I suppose it’ll be condemned soon. But I love to come here.”

  I tried to look around me, at the faded red velvet of the small boxes, the tarnished gilt of the proscenium, the old gas jets that had been converted into dim red exit lights. Then I looked at the screen again and a woman was lying out in an open field in the rain and weeping; and I began to shiver again.

  “Listen, Camilla,” Frank said, “you’re alive and that’s the most important thing in the world. I mean, nothing too awful can happen as long as you’re alive.”

  I turned around in my seat and looked at Frank, and although I was still shivering I felt quite calm. And I looked at Frank in the darkness with his face flickering from the reflection of the moving light on the screen and it was as though I were looking at him in a dream or as though I were at the bottom of the ocean and looking at him through the weight of millions of tons of water.

  “My mother is dead,” I said, and my voice came out very calm and as though it were made of glass, like a voice in a dream.

  “What!” Frank said.

  And then it was as though I had waked up and I was terribly confused and I shook my head and said, “No, no, she isn’t dead, she—” and I didn’t know what I meant, or what I had meant to say. All the while I had been walking along the streets with Frank, waiting in the lobby while he got the candy from the machine for the gray-haired woman, sitting beside him in the last row of the second balcony, I had been thinking as though Mother were dead, and she wasn’t dead. I had been thinking it not because she tried to cut her wrists but because she talked to Jacques on the phone.

  “Oh,” I said, “oh, Frank, I don’t know what to do!”

  Sitting there beside me, Frank didn’t say anything for a moment, but stared fixedly at the screen. Th
en he asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just—oh, Frank, I don’t know what to do.”

  “Listen, Camilla,” Frank said, and then he said to me what he had already said, “listen, Camilla, you’re alive. As long as you’re alive that’s the most important thing in the world. People die, young people, who haven’t ever had any chance, and it’s awful, and they’re the ones you cry about because they’re dead and they haven’t got any more life again, ever. But you’re alive and as long as you’re alive everything’s really all right, in spite of everything else. No matter what happens, as long as you’re alive everything’s all right.”

  But all of a sudden I didn’t want to be alive. I thought that if I were dead I would not know about Mother talking to Jacques or trying to cut her wrists or kissing Jacques in the living room (and where else had she kissed him, how many other times?), and I wouldn’t be feeling as though I were in a nightmare and I wouldn’t be wondering what I was going to do. “I don’t think I want to be alive,” I said. “I think I’d rather be dead.”

  Then Frank grabbed me by the shoulders and started to shake me, and shook me and shook me until my teeth chattered in my head and I started to cry. Then he released me and flung himself back in his seat.

  “I’m sorry.” His voice was shaky with rage. “But you made me do it. You made me.”

  We sat silent for a long time then, with Frank glowering at the screen, and by and by I began to watch, too, sitting there with my hands clenched in my lap and my tears still distorting my view of the people in the picture. After a while Frank’s hand came down firmly over mine. He didn’t say anything, but I knew that it was all right between us again.

  Then all of a sudden I remembered Luisa, Luisa whom I had left waiting in the Museum of Modern Art, and I felt the blood rushing to my face in horror at the awful thing I had done to her.

  “Luisa,” I whispered to Frank. “Luisa!”

  “What about her?”

  “I left her in the Museum of Modern Art. I promised her I’d go back for her and I forgot. I forgot all about her.”

  “Don’t worry about Luisa,” Frank said. “She’ll be home by now.”

  “But—but—” I stammered. “I was—someplace—and she said if I didn’t come back in half an hour she would go for me there—and it would be awful if she did—and if she got worried and called home it would be terrible.”

  Frank sighed. “I suppose we’d better call her. Come on.” He stood up and I followed him down the stairs. A girl with a great mop of dark curly hair was standing in the lobby waiting, while a boy in a red turtleneck sweater got candy out of the machine. She grinned at Frank and stared at me and said, “Hi, Franky, honey.”

  “Hi, Pompilia,” he said, nodded at the boy in the red sweater, and hurried me out of the theater.

  The air outside was clean and wonderful and we stood breathing it for a moment. Then we walked to a cigar store where there was a telephone booth. I dropped in my nickel and dialed, and almost immediately Luisa answered, saying “Hello” in a loud voice, because she had either the phonograph or WQXR on very high and I could hear the music blaring into the telephone.

  “Oh, Luisa,” I cried in relief. “Oh, Luisa!”

  “Wait’ll I turn the radio down,” Luisa shouted, and in a minute the sound of music almost disappeared and Luisa was back at the telephone. To my relief she didn’t sound angry, just excited. “Camilla, wherever are you!” she exclaimed. “Your mother and father are having fits!”

  “You didn’t tell them about my going to see Jacques!” I cried.

  “What kind of a dope do you think I am? Of course I didn’t. Where are you? Whatever happened to you? I waited and waited and then I went to Jacques’s apartment and rang the bell. I pretended I was looking for someone I thought lived there, but I got a good enough look around to see that you weren’t there. So don’t worry, Camilla, I haven’t compromised you any with Jacques. He didn’t have the slightest idea who I was or that I was looking for you.”

  “But what about Mother and Father?” I said. “You didn’t tell them. Luisa!”

  “Listen, what do you think I am, a stool pigeon?” Luisa asked. “They’ve been phoning here ever since I got home. Mona and Bill went out after I came in and God knows where Frank’s off to, so I’ve had the place to myself, and I gave them no information whatsoever. But you’d better call them up and tell them you’re alive because your mother was weeping like mad.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll call her. Thanks, Luisa, for not telling and everything.”

  “That’s okay, but what happened and where are you now?” Luisa demanded.

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said. “Good-bye. I’d better call home right away.”

  “Well, when am I going to see you?” Luisa asked.

  “Tomorrow at school.”

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

  “Well, tomorrow sometime. Let’s go to a movie.” If we went to a movie we wouldn’t have to talk so much.

  But Luisa said, “I haven’t even a quarter for a Forty-second Street one.”

  “I’ll take you.”

  “No,” Luisa said. “I want to talk to you. You can’t get out of it that way, Camilla. Come on down to the apartment in the morning and we’ll take Oscar for a walk. He needs exercise.”

  “All right,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “Camilla,” Luisa said at the other end of the wire, “it isn’t good for you to try to keep things inside yourself the way you do. That’s the way you get inhibitions. I’ve had to absolutely guess everything about your mother and Jacques. You haven’t told me anything yourself.”

  “Well, if you guessed,” I said, “I didn’t need to.”

  “But I can’t guess what happened this afternoon and if you keep it inside you’ll get all kinds of traumas and things. I’m absolutely sure it was a traumatic experience, and if you tell me all about it, it’ll keep it from leaving scars. I wish you’d let me psychoanalyze you. I know it would help.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, what time are you coming down?”

  “I don’t know. Sometime.”

  “Camilla, I thought we were best friends.”

  “We are.”

  “Then come on down tomorrow morning first thing.”

  “Okay,” I promised, because there was no way out of it.

  “Till tomorrow, then.”

  “Okay, good-bye,” and I hung up. I opened the door of the phone booth and told Frank, “I have to call my mother now.”

  He nodded, then asked me, “Did you tell Luisa you were with me?”

  “No. I didn’t tell her where I was.”

  “Good girl,” Frank said.

  I shut the door of the phone booth again and dialed home. My father answered the phone and I said, “Father, this is Camilla.”

  Right away he called out, “Rose, it’s Camilla!” and then he said to me, “Camilla, we’ve been worried about you. Where have you been?”

  And then my mother’s voice came into the phone and I could imagine her snatching it out of my father’s hand. “Oh, Camilla, darling, darling, I’ve been frantic! Where have you—what’s happened to you?”

  I couldn’t say I’d been with Luisa because they’d been calling Luisa, so I just said, “Nothing’s happened to me. I’m perfectly all right,” in a cold voice, and felt no pity for my mother still sounding frantic on the other end of the wire.

  “Where are you—come home, come home at once!” my mother cried.

  “I’ll be home by my bedtime,” I said.

  “Camilla, what is it? Why are you talking this way? Where are you? Come home, come home,” my mother cried, and I wanted to put my hands over my ears or simply hang up to end the conversation, but I could not put the phone down on that wild voice going on and on . . .

  Then my father’s voice came again. “Camilla, I don’t know what all this nonsense is about, but you are to come hom
e at once.”

  When I heard his voice, so angry and so unhappy, I felt whipped, and I said, “All right. I’ll come.” I hung up and left the phone booth. “I’ve got to go home,” I said.

  Frank dug his gloves out of his pocket and put them on. “I’ll take you. Come on.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and my voice felt like a lead weight being dropped.

  As we got to the house Frank said, “I’ll meet you on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  “I can’t. I promised Luisa I’d—”

  “Oh, blast Luisa,” he said. “Okay, then I’ll rescue you from her clutches right after lunch.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and I thought, If only I could stay with Frank now. If only I didn’t have to leave him.

  When I got home it was as though I were a can and Mother and Father were can openers, trying to pry me open. Why had I just gone off after school that afternoon? Why hadn’t I come home for dinner? Why hadn’t I telephoned them right away? If I abused the privileges they gave me then my freedom would have to be taken away. What had I been thinking of?

  And I just kept staring down at my feet in my brown school shoes and saying, “I don’t know.”

  And when my mother, sitting up in bed with her bandaged wrists and weeping, asked me, “Oh, my darling, don’t you love us anymore?” all I could answer was, “I don’t know.”

  Then my father took me into his room and sat down in his red leather chair at his desk; I stood by his side as though I were a wayward student and he the teacher, and he said, very gravely, “Camilla, I don’t understand your behavior.”