Camilla (12 page)

Now Mona said to me abruptly, “Sit down and talk to me. I sent Luisa out to buy some coffee. Saturday morning and no coffee in the house. Come on. Sit down.”

I sat down on a chartreuse-covered chair and Mona sat on a very low sofa and put her feet up on the cluttered glass top of the coffee table. She reached for a half-empty glass and took a swallow and I realized that she was drunk. Not very drunk, but drunk enough to ask me to sit down and talk, something she would never have done ordinarily. Luisa had told me that sometimes on weekends her mother drank too much; I had never seen it before; I had never seen anybody I knew drink too much, and it startled me.

“Well, and how are you this morning, little Miss Iceberg?” Mona asked me. “Happy as a nasty, cold-eyed sea gull?”

I didn't say anything. I looked down at my feet and wished that Luisa would hurry back with the coffee or that Frank or Bill would appear, but it seemed that Mona and Oscar Wilde and I were alone in the apartment.

Mona poured herself another drink. “You know what Luisa, my own daughter, told me this morning?” she demanded. “You know, hah?”

“No,” I said.

“She told me she would like to die. What a thing for a child to say to her mother! Would you like to die, Camilla?”

“No,” I said, and it was true. I no longer had my desire of the night before for oblivion, and I was filled with an ache of pity for Luisa, whom I had treated so shabbily.

“No?” Mona asked. “Why not, hah? Sometimes I wonder why people value life so highly, why I haven't killed myself, put an end to the wallowing in misery like a pig in the mud. It isn't my unselfish love for my children. Frank and Luisa can both get along very well without me. Probably better than with me. What a way to bring kids up, anyhow, in
the middle of a filthy city. Kids shouldn't be brought up in the city. Kids who're brought up in the city aren't kids. They're—they're like Frank and Luisa, they know too much. Or they're cold little clams like you.”

“I'm not cold,” I said.

“Hah,” Mona said. “I was brought up with elm trees and a big backyard. That's what I should have given Frank and Luisa. Middle West solidity. Everything I had to escape from.”

The door banged open then and Luisa hurried in with a bag of marketing. “Hi, Camilla, sorry if I kept you waiting,” she said in a falsely casual voice. “I won't be a moment.” Then she turned to Mona. “I'll make you a pot of coffee in a minute, Mona. Meanwhile you might leave Camilla alone.”

She went into the closet-kitchenette and I heard her turn the water on full force and bang the coffeepot down on the stove.

Mona started to laugh, and laughed and laughed, her head flung back against the sofa, the tears of this strange mirth streaming down her cheeks. “You see,” she gasped. “What did I tell you!” Then she finished her drink, put her glass very carefully down on the table, and said in a voice that was suddenly low and sober, “Why is the fear of death so much greater than the fear of life? I'm so ghastly afraid. If I weren't so afraid, I'd have been dead long ago. Maybe it's because we realize—oh, subconsciously, subconsciously of course—that life is a tremendous gift, and we're afraid of losing that gift because—oh, hell, I don't want to be blotto. Even if I'm in agony I'm alive. Oh, how much easier a time people had of it when they had religion.”

She stopped short and said, “Luisa told me to leave you
alone. I'm not leaving you alone. Why did Luisa tell me to leave you alone? Because I might tell you that some people in this world actually live, actually feel? What would you know about it? You're one of the protected ones. No worries. Parents who wrap you up in cotton wool and guard you from life. You'll wake up someday and then you'll be hurt. It'll do you good to be hurt. Why should my kids be the only ones to be hurt?”

Luisa came in with the coffeepot in one hand and a cup and saucer in the other. She put the cup and saucer down on the glass coffee table, filled the cup, then banged the coffeepot down beside it; there was a sound like the report of a shot, and the glass top of the coffee table cracked right across.

“Damn it!” Mona screamed. “Why can't you be more careful! Get out of here and leave me alone! Both of you! Get out!”

Luisa grabbed me by the hand and we hurried into her room. She sat down on the bottom bunk of her double-decker bed. “Mona's drunk,” she said flatly.

“Yes.” I wanted to say something else but there was nothing else to say. I couldn't say she wasn't drunk, because she was; and I couldn't say it didn't matter, because it did.

“I don't know why she drinks,” Luisa said. “If she got happy when she drinks the way Bill does I'd understand it better. But she just gets like this. It never gives her a lift. And then she feels lousy on Monday when she has to go back to work. I will say for her she never drinks on a weekday. I'm sorry you had to see it, Camilla. I think if you were anybody else and you saw her this way I'd have to kill you.”

“I know,” I said, because I knew.

“I don't know what she said to you,” Luisa went on, “but
she didn't mean it. She always says awful things to people when she's drunk. If she talked to you at all it means she really likes you. She just won't speak to people at all when she's drunk if she doesn't like them. But I'm sorry.”

“That's okay,” I said clumsily. Then I said, “Luisa, if you still want to psychoanalyze me, it's okay.”

As I said this Luisa's face lit up and I knew that the gift I had offered her was the right one.

“Honestly?” she exclaimed.

“Honestly.”

“But I've been trying to get you to let me for ages and you never would— Well, come on, let's get going! What am I waiting for!”

“I don't know,” I said. “Go ahead and start.” I was not looking forward to being psychoanalyzed and I wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. I don't think all this probing business is good for people. It's just a good excuse to talk about yourself and I don't much like to talk about myself.

She got up and went to her desk and found a pad and pencil. “Well . . .” she said, and began tapping the pencil against her teeth and thinking.

I sat down and waited and looked about the room while I waited so that I would not start thinking about myself or problems.

I like Luisa's room. It's painted yellow, and around the wall of the bottom bunk of her double-decker she has pasted a frieze of postcards she's bought at various museums. Under the frieze sit her dolls. They use the bottom bunk and she sleeps in the top bunk.

But now she said, “Please get up, Camilla,” and swept up all the dolls and said, “I have come to a great decision.”

“What?” I asked.

“Well, I thought you should lie down here as though it were a psychiatrist's couch, and then I wondered what to do with the dolls. And then I decided. I am sixteen. I am a woman. If I still like dolls it must be neurotic. So I am going to send them all over to the hospital. Even the one from Jacques that you gave me. You don't mind, do you?”

“No,” I said, “of course not.” I'd be just as happy not to have to see that doll.

Now she dumped them all into the corner. “Okay, let's begin,” she said in a businesslike way, but I could tell she was excited and pleased at the prospect. “Would you mind if we pretend I'm a real psychiatrist? And you're a real patient? I mean, would you mind if we pretend we don't know each other?”

“Okay,” I told her. “Anything you say.”

She sat down at her desk then. “What is your name, please?”

“Camilla Dickinson.”

“And your age?”

“Fifteen.”

“Place of birth?”

“Manhattan.”

“Now, would you mind lying down there on the couch, please?” Luisa said, pointing to the lower bunk.

I lay down and stared at the slats and the springs of the upper bunk, and through them at the blue of the mattress ticking, and, at the sides and foot of the bunk, the tucked-in edges of sheets and blankets.

“Now, Miss Dickinson,” Luisa said eagerly, “please tell
me exactly what happened between you and Jacques Nissen yesterday afternoon.”

But this I could not, could not do. Even though I had seen Mona drunk I could not tell Luisa that Mother had talked to Jacques again after everything. I had offered to be psychoanalyzed because that was the only thing I had to offer her because of having seen Mona drunk, but I could not in turn show her my own mother naked as I had seen Mona. In any case I did not think her question was fair; I thought she was taking advantage of the psychoanalysis, so I said, “If you're the psychiatrist and I'm the patient and you've never met me before, then you don't know about Jacques Nissen.”

Luisa's eyes darkened with irritation. “Okay, then. What man has had the most influence on your life in the past few months?”

This wasn't fair either. “I don't think a psychiatrist would begin an interview like that.” I looked at one of Luisa's postcards, a Marie Laurencin lady who reminded me of Mother, and kept my eyes averted from Luisa. “But if you must know his name it's Frank Rowan.” I knew that I was making Luisa angry and the awful part was that now I was doing it deliberately. It wasn't really that I wanted to anger Luisa, because I had honestly and truly offered to be psychoanalyzed just to please her; it was as though I had a little imp sitting in my ear whispering malicious things for me to say.

“Frank isn't a grown man,” Luisa said.

“The other day you said he was,” I reminded her. “You said he was too old for me and you're always saying I'm a grown woman.”

“Okay,” Luisa said. “Let him be important to you if you
want to get hurt. I've never seen Frank stay interested in any one girl for more than a couple of months. Pompilia Riccioli lasted almost three months. That's about the longest.”

I knew, I knew she was saying this just to upset me because she did not want me to like Frank. And she succeeded; I was upset. I remembered the pretty girl Frank had spoken to in the movie lobby the night before. So I just said, staring at another in the frieze of postcards, an angel of Lauren Ford's, “If you're going to analyze me you'd better get on with it.”

“You have to cooperate,” Luisa said. “The analyst can't do anything unless the patient cooperates.”

“I'm cooperating.”

“You aren't,” Luisa said. “You're bucking me at every step. And you've got to be completely truthful.”

“I am being truthful. But I thought analysts began at the beginning. You're beginning at the wrong end. You're supposed to go back practically to—to prenatal influences,” I finished impressively.

Luisa sighed. “Okay, I'll begin at the beginning. But stop looking at the postcards. They're taking your mind off the subject. Now think hard. What is your very first memory?”

My very first memory? I had never thought about it before and I tried to turn my mind back, back, to make up to Luisa for having spoiled the beginning of her analysis. The first thing I could remember was lying in a crib at night and waiting for my mother to come in and say good night to me— no one specific night but just a vague general blur of warmth and security and lamplight and my mother wearing an evening dress and smelling wonderful, wonderful, as she leaned over and kissed me and called me little loving names.
And then she would go out and part of the wonderful fragrance would remain behind.

And then I remembered sometimes going into her room in the evening before Binny put me to bed. She would be sitting at her dressing table, and her evening dress, freshly pressed and still smelling faintly of the hot iron, would be laid out across her bed. And she would have her beautiful hair tied back with a dark blue velvet ribbon and she would be smoothing the tiniest bit of rouge into her cheeks and on her lips and touching perfume behind her ears and to the delicate blue veins on her wrists. Then she would take the velvet ribbon off and let me brush her hair, and I remembered that I felt terribly important, standing behind her at the dressing table, passing the silver-backed brush gently over her hair.

These were the first things I remembered, and I told Luisa.

She was sitting at her desk busily jotting things down. “Very interesting, very interesting indeed,” she said. “Both of those memories deal with your mother. What is your first memory of your father?”

I tried to think. “I can't decide what is my very first memory of Father,” I said at last. “When I was little he always seemed sort of somehow like God. Oh, I do remember one lovely thing.”

“What?”

“It's a Christmas memory,” I said. “I'm not sure which Christmas, but it must have been an early one because I was terribly excited about going out after dark.”

“That's nothing,” Luisa said. “You still are. I've never known anybody as protected as you, Camilla.”

“Half the kids at school, at least.”

“I didn't mean to interrupt,” Luisa said quickly. “Go on about your father.”

“Well—I remember Binny dressing me up in my best coat and leggings, and—”

“Who's Binny?”

“She was my nurse. And Mother and Father and I went downstairs and got into a taxi and drove all around New York looking at the Christmas trees.”

“Very expensive,” Luisa said.

“It was beautiful. I sat on Father's lap and he kept his arm around me, so that I felt completely safe shut out in the dark of the night, and we saw the trees up and down Park Avenue and the big tree at Washington Square and the big tree at Radio City and all the trees the driver could find. We even went to Brooklyn and The Bronx.”

Luisa nodded and wrote some more things down in her notebook. She wrote very rapidly and I wondered if she would be able to read it afterward. Even when she writes carefully her writing looks like henscratching; half the time she can't decipher her assignment book and has to call me up to find out what the homework is.