Camilla (16 page)

Then he said very softly, “Johnny was alive all the time, you see. That's what I don't understand. I don't understand how Johnny could be stopped when he wasn't ready to be stopped. It isn't fair, it isn't right! Johnny was just beginning, everything was still in front of him; he had so much that he wanted to do and he didn't get a chance to do any of it. It's wrong, Camilla, it's horrible!” His voice was very loud and excited.

Then he said more quietly, “Camilla, you're the only person I've been able to talk to about this. I couldn't talk to the Stephanowskis because of course having Johnny die was much more terrible for them than for me. It's helped to be able to say it out loud in words for you. Is it okay about going to the Stephanowskis? I mean, will you go with me?”

“Yes,” I said.

We walked slowly to the music shop and this time the silence
was all right. It was the kind of silence that you find in the country and on quiet streets in early evening, a kind of silence that is complete and full in itself and has no need to be broken because there is nothing that needs to come out of it. The silence itself said everything that needed to be said between us.

The music shop was empty when we went in and a gray-haired man and woman were sitting behind the counter. The woman came around the counter and put her arms round Frank, and just said, “Franky, Franky,” and kissed him as though she were his mother.

Frank kissed her and just said, “Hi, Mrs. Stephanowski,” and then he shook Mr. Stephanowski's hand and then he said, “This is Camilla. I brought her today because I want you to know her.”

They both looked at me and I felt somehow that what they thought of me was terribly important and I was filled with relief when Mrs. Stephanowski smiled and took my hand in hers. Some customers came in then and Mr. Stephanowski said, “Take Camilla into one of the booths and give her a concert if you feel like it, Franky.”

“Thanks, Mr. Stephanowski,” Frank said. “I'd like to.” He picked out an album and we went into the last of the small listening booths. Frank had me sit down in the chair. “Do you know Holst's
The Planets
?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No. What is it?”

“It's kind of queer,” Frank told me, “but it's kind of wonderful. I thought maybe it might be interesting to you. Of course it isn't scientific or anything, but I think it's sort of interesting to listen to a musician's conception of stars. There's
one place that sounds to me like the noise the planets must make grinding against space.”

He put the record on and it was different from anything I knew. I knew Bach and Beethoven and Brahms and Chopin and I loved them, especially Bach; but this music—it was like stars before you understand them, when you think an astronomer is an astrologer, when they are wild, distant, mysterious things. And as I listened I realized that the music had a plan to it, that none of the conflicting notes came by accident.

“Why haven't I heard this before!” I cried, and Frank smiled at me and changed the record. When he smiled, his face lit up in a way that I have never seen Luisa's light up, and he seemed to me completely beautiful.

When
The Planets
was finished, Frank said, “What next, Camilla? You choose something.”

But I shook my head. “I'd rather listen to something you like particularly.”

“Well,” Frank said, “I have a game I play. I have music for everybody. That was Johnny's idea, doing that, and now David and I do it too. I'll play yours.” He went out into the shop, where several customers were now gathered about the counter, and came back with another album.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto. Particularly the andantino. You probably won't think it sounds like you.” His voice was suddenly gruff and embarrassed.

I listened and it didn't sound to me like me, but it was as exciting and different as
The Planets
had been, and as I listened I was filled with a great tremendous excitement. Oh, I love I love I love! I cried inside myself. So many people, so many things! Music and stars and snow and weather! Oh, if
one could always feel this warm love, this excitement, this glory of the infinite possibilities of life!

And as I listened to the music I knew that everything was possible.

“I think that's enough for a start,” Frank said, and we went back into the shop. As Frank put the records back on the shelves Mrs. Stephanowski excused herself from a customer.

“Franky, you'll come for dinner tonight?”

“Sure,” Frank said. “Sure, yes.”

“And you, Camilla? Could you come along maybe? It would be a pleasure for us to have you. Maybe Franky's said something to you about Johnny, but don't let that—I wouldn't want to ask just anyone over tonight but I'd like to ask you.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I'd love to. But I'll have to ask my parents.”

She pushed the telephone over to me and I dialed. Carter answered, so I told her to ask Mother if I could stay out to dinner. There was silence and then Carter told me that my mother wanted me to come home.

“Let me speak to Mother,” I asked.

But Carter said in that voice of hers that never has any more warmth than a goldfish, “Your mother doesn't feel very well, Miss Camilla. I don't want to disturb her again. She said you was to come home and I think you'd better. It's time you learned some consideration.”

“Let me speak to Mother, please,” I said again, but she had hung up on me.

Mrs. Stephanowski put her hand on my shoulder. “If your mother wants you home you run along. Franky'll bring
you over another time. I'm glad Franky brought you in. You're a nice girl. Pretty too. Good for him. Bring her in soon, Franky.”

“I will,” Frank said. “I'll take you home, Cam. See you in about an hour, Mrs. Stephanowski.”

When we reached my apartment building Frank said, “Listen, you can get all your weekend homework done tonight, can't you?”

“Yes.”

“Then I'll meet you at the obelisk at ten tomorrow morning. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

He gave me a quick handshake and left me and I went into the apartment building. Neither the doorman nor the elevator boy said anything to me beyond “Good afternoon, Miss Camilla,” but it seemed to me from the way they looked at me that Jacques must be there and I wanted to run out of the house and race down the street after Frank.

But when I got into the apartment Mother was lying in bed looking at a magazine and she kissed me and sent for Carter to bring in some tea for us.

“Who were you with all day?” she asked.

“Luisa and Frank.”

“Frank?”

“Luisa's brother.”

“You haven't talked about Frank much.”

“I've only been seeing him lately,” I said.

“Did you come home alone?” she asked me.

“No. Frank brought me.”

“Do you—do you like him?”

“More than anybody I've ever met,” I said, and it seemed
that I was still walking through the streets with Frank instead of standing by my mother's bed. “I have to do my homework now,” I said. “Will Father be home for dinner?”

“Yes,” Mother said, and reached out for my hand. “Oh, Camilla, you're such a clam. And you used to be such a warm, affectionate little girl. What is it? What happened to you?”

“Nothing,” I said. I left Mother and went into my room and did my homework. Then I called Luisa, but she wouldn't speak to me, and I was angry with her for being angry with me. My father came home and I sat with him while he had his cocktail, but neither of us talked. And all I wanted in the world was to go to the park and wait by the obelisk till morning.

O
N
S
UNDAYS BOTH MY PARENTS
had breakfast late so I ate alone in the kitchen and then went to the park and to the obelisk. It was too early for Frank to be there and I watched some children playing Giant Steps up and down the obelisk steps. I felt terribly old. A year ago I was still sometimes playing Giant Steps with the children in the park, but now I just stood there and watched them. I knew then that I had lived longer since last Wednesday than all the rest of my life added together. You can add up the same number of days and get different answers: two and two does not make four. Even the truth of mathematics is variable. I sighed, and a sailor walked by and whistled at me.

Frank was early too. I hadn't been there long when he came up and said, “Hello, Camilla.”

I said, “Hello, Frank.”

He asked me, “How are you this morning?”

And I answered, “I don't know,” even though I was afraid it might sound like a silly answer; but I felt that I must always be honest with Frank.

He just said, “I don't know how I am, either, so that makes two of us.”

We started to walk together, not touching, but very close, and Frank asked me, “Did you like the Stephanowskis?”

“Yes,” I said. “More than I've liked anybody since I met Luisa and you.”

“They liked you too,” Frank said. “They liked you a lot. And they don't like just anybody.”

“Frank,” I said, “they've had such terrible things happen to them—I mean Johnny and the other one who was killed in the war—and they seemed so—so alive. If anything awful happens to me, then I feel dead—but they were so alive. Being alive is the only way to be happy. And they seemed happy.”

“I know,” Frank said. “I know exactly what you mean, Cam. Listen, if you look at the people walking past us here in the park, I bet more than half of them have had some awful tragedy in their lives. I don't expect you can live to be very old without having someone you love die. And all kinds of other dreadful things. And I think it's whether you go on staying alive or not that makes you what kind of a person you are. I think it's terribly important to be alive. There are so many dead people walking about, people who might as well be dead for all they care about life, I mean. Mona may be awful, but she's alive. She's never stopped caring about things. I don't think Bill cares much anymore. When Mona throws something at him he throws something back at her, but not because he really means it, just out of habit. That's why I got so mad at you in the movies the other night. I think if you can't stay alive all the way inside you, no matter what happens, then you're betraying life and you might as well be dead.”

“Yes,” I said. “You were right to be mad at me.” And suddenly I became really aware that the sun was shining on us and that the bare branches of the trees looked beautiful against the sky, and Frank was walking beside me and we were together.

Everywhere there were people walking in couples and mothers and fathers pushing baby carriages and I wondered if I ever would walk in Central Park pushing a baby carriage of my own and I suddenly felt terribly old and grown-up, maybe the way Luisa thinks I ought to feel all the time. And I thought, Alma Potter's always talking about the dates she has: I wonder if she'd think this is a date? And I wondered, too, if Alma Potter talked to the boys she went on dates with the way Frank and I talked. It couldn't be as nice, I thought, it couldn't possibly be as exciting. None of the boys I knew, at dancing school or anywhere, talked at all like Frank; but maybe if Frank went to dancing school he wouldn't talk the way he did with me in the park either.

We walked toward the zoo and Frank told me, “Mona had a friend once who came over from Africa. She stayed at the Sherry-Netherland and she thought she was going out of her mind because she was waked up every morning at sunrise by the lions crying, just as though she were still in Kenya. Mona was awfully worried about her, and tried to get her to go to a psychiatrist. Then one day they were talking about it in front of Bill and he laughed and said it was probably the lions at the zoo. And it was.”

We laughed loudly, both of us, at the idea of the woman on her vacation from Kenya being awakened each morning by the lions just as though she had never left Africa; and the
thought of being awakened by lions in the middle of New York City was somehow a wonderful thing to me.

“I told you I'd tell you how I got kicked out of school,” Frank said. “You want to hear it? It's kind of a Thing.”

“Yes.”

“I mean I don't want to bore you or anything.”

Now the sun went behind the clouds and suddenly it was cold and it felt like winter. I drew closer to Frank.

“You wouldn't bore me,” I said.

We walked through the zoo to the lion house. Most of the lions were outside, but one lay in his cage, at the very back, curled up in a tawny and miserable heap, and I wondered if such a lion calling from his cage could sound anything like a lion in the wilds of Africa, if the sound of his crying reaching the Sherry-Netherland across Fifth Avenue could sound like a cry reaching a farm in Kenya across the African veld. Or is it velds they have in Kenya? I've rather forgotten my African geography.

We left the lion house and went and stood in front of a cage of monkeys with their tragic little faces, and Frank said, “At school we used to have chapel every morning and evening and all kinds of stuff. Until Johnny died it was okay. It didn't bother me any. I mean, it didn't really mean much to any of us one way or another. The times I believed in God, I mean really, so it was important to me, was listening to Mr. Mitchell play the organ the way I told you, and then when Johnny and I went on walks, here in New York or at school, if we saw something beautiful, the way the stars look in winter when they first start to break through the daylight and the sky is that sort of greeny blue and the trees are like a
charcoal drawing—I could feel God then. Maybe it was just what Mona calls a sentimental pantheism, but it seemed to me it was more than that. When do you feel God most, Camilla?”

“When I'm working with the stars, and when I'm with you.” I hesitated a small moment before I said this last. “I've never talked about God to anybody before.”