Camilla (11 page)

“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 home 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.”

I said, “I'm sorry.”

Then he said, as though it were very difficult for him, “I blame myself for it. I shouldn't have asked you the questions I did when I took you out to dinner the other night. I was—I was not myself.”

“No,” I said. “It wasn't that.”

“Then what?” he asked me.

“I don't know,” I said.

Then he tried to explain it to me in his way, just as Jacques in the afternoon had tried to explain it in his: “Camilla, your mother is a very beautiful woman.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And Nissen is a very clever man. He flattered your mother, and perhaps he turned her head for a brief time. However, it wasn't important, and the blame is Nissen's, and not your mother's. It's all over now, between your mother and Nissen, anyhow. Whatever little there was is finished.” I looked at him and I wondered if he thought he was telling the truth or if he was just saying what he thought I wanted or ought to hear; but his face was set in the immovable lines of the statues of the Roman senators in the Metropolitan Museum and his eyes seemed almost as blind and blank as those of the statues.

But truth seemed to be changing. I had thought that truth was always simple and clear. A thing was true or it was a lie. But now, as time seemed simultaneously to stand still and to rush by me with the startling speed of a meteor, I knew that truth was as complicated as time.

Then, “Camilla,” my father said, “I know that you're at an age when things have a profound effect on you. But you must remember that the things you do also have their effect on other people. After what—what happened to your mother last night, it was not kind of you, to say the least, to run off this afternoon. I want you to go in to her now, and tell her that you love her and that you're sorry.”

I asked my father then a strange question, one that popped out of my mouth without my expecting it to, and that surprised me as much as it surprised my father.

“Father, was I an accident?”

My father sat very still for a moment; then he said, “What do you mean?”

“Did you and Mother want to have a child?” I asked. “Or did I just happen?”

“Of course we wanted a child,” my father said. “I wanted a child terribly.” But he did not look at me. He looked down at the blotter on his desk and made a group of strange markings on it with his pencil. He said, “I think you're seeing too much of Luisa Rowan. You've had all kinds of strange ideas since you've known her. Why don't you see more of the other girls at school?”

“I do,” I said. I wished I hadn't asked the question because now I knew the answer.

My father looked at me and he said, “Camilla, you mustn't be so unhappy. Everything's going to be all right.”

He put his hand on my shoulder and I wanted to hold him and tell him how very terribly much I loved him so that he would never know that the fifth time my mother had answered the telephone herself, but I just stood there under
the strength of his hand until he said, “Go in to your mother.”

I went to my mother's room. She said, “Oh, Camilla, how could you, how could you?”

I said, “I'm sorry.”

And my mother said, “Tell me you love me.”

“Mother,” I said, “are you ever going to see Jacques again?”

“Oh, of course not, of course not,” she said, moving her head back and forth on the pillow. She looked white and delicate and there were tears in her beautiful eyes. “Oh, Camilla, Camilla darling,” she said, “there was never anything to it, never anything to have made all this terrible mess. I was just—oh, my baby, tell me you love me.”

And I thought, How can I tell her I love her when I don't love her? When I look down at her little white face on the pillow and all I feel is cold, cold, as though there were an icy wind blowing into my heart? I did not even feel hate any longer, but just a cold numbness, as though I'd been given a shot of Novocain that chilled my entire body. I turned and walked out of the room. I felt that I was doing a terrible thing but I could not, I could not do anything else. I went to my room and I got undressed and I was tired. I was so tired that it was too much effort to take a bath or even to brush my teeth or wash my hands and face. I pulled on my pajamas and got into bed and lay there with the door into the hall closed tight. I tried to say my prayers. I said “Our Father,” but it didn't mean anything.

I was almost asleep when the door opened and my mother came in. I opened my eyes and stared at her through the darkness of the room and the fog of my sleep, while she
leaned against the post of my bed as though she could hardly stand up.

“I couldn't let you go to sleep without kissing you good night,” she whispered, and she bent down and kissed me. When she left me, the fragrance of her perfume stayed behind her. It was perfume she had worn for Jacques and somehow she was still dead.

I
GOT UP AND HAD BREAKFAST
with my father the next morning, but I could not talk to him and he could not talk to me, though once he said, “Camilla, somehow I should have been able to keep this from touching you.” Then, when he was finishing his second cup of coffee, he said, “Somehow it's been all my fault. I've done everything wrong. You mustn't blame your mother.” Then he said, “Well, I'm going to the office.”

I said, “Yesterday I passed an apartment house of yours, Father. Is it going well? Is it going to be a beautiful apartment house?”

My father shook his head. “No, it's not. There was to be sunlight in every room, and space to breathe, and a feeling of the beauty of the city as you looked out the window; but my plans have been taken and distorted and cramped, and now it is just going to be expensive. Very very expensive.”

“Are you working on anything that is beautiful now?” I asked him.

“Yes,” my father said. “I am designing a small private museum
that is very beautiful, and it is that that is keeping me alive.” Then he smiled at me and said, “My funny little old woman. Keep your head in the stars, my darling; you see how you can be hurt when you get involved in the things that are happening on earth.”

I wanted to tell him that an astronomer, to be a good astronomer, has to have his feet planted very firmly on the earth, otherwise what would his discoveries mean? What could he do with them? But my father got up from the table and came around to me and kissed me on the top of my head quickly, which is the way he always kisses me, and in a moment I heard the front door slam behind him.

I went down to Luisa's. Mona let me in. Oscar jumped up and down and tried to lick my face, then took up his usual place as close to Mona as possible. Even though I have never seen her do anything but scream at him, the dog worships the ground that Mona walks on, and this fact always makes me feel that Mona has more niceness in her than I have ever noticed.

It's a funny thing about Mona. She's a good-looking woman; she certainly dresses well and when I've seen her occasionally with other grown-ups she's been witty and vivacious. Yet when I think of her I always see her in my mind's eye as a woman with a scarred face. I wonder if it's because her spiritual scars somehow speak from somewhere deep inside her to somewhere deep inside me, and somehow get visualized as though they were scars of the flesh. That sounds like Luisa, but it's the only way I can express it.