Camilla (3 page)

Inside the taxi the floor was wet and the leather seats were slick and damp. I tucked one foot in my mother's silver shoe under me to try to get it warm. The street sounds rose up through the rain, the hissing of wheels on the wet streets and horns sounding impatient. Through the drenched windows I could see the people walking by, some with umbrellas radiating dangerous spikes—Luisa knows a girl who almost lost an eye when someone poked an umbrella spike into it— and women with newspapers over their heads and men holding umbrellas over their girls and getting soaked themselves.

We turned east and went down a dark side street where three little boys in leather jackets were trying to keep a bonfire going. A sheet of newspaper caught just as we went by and the flames rose up, bright and cheerful; I would have liked to get out of the taxi and go stand by the little boys instead of going on to dinner with my father. But then we crossed Third Avenue just as the el roared by overhead, and the taxi skidded a little on the old and unused trolley tracks so that for a moment I was afraid we were going to crash into one of the iron el posts. But my father held my arm tightly and then the taxi was across Third Avenue and the taxi driver turned around and grinned at us and said, “Almost scared myself that time.”

I looked at his name under the picture and it was Hiram Schultz. Whenever I am in a taxi I always look to see if the man in the cab is the same one as the man in the picture. Hiram Schultz was the same and he did not seem to have any neck. His head went right down into his shoulders so that the collar of his red jacket came up to the tips of his ears.

The taxi stopped in front of a small basement restaurant. My mother and father eat a great deal in restaurants, but they don't often take me and I had never been in this one before. We walked by a small bar shaped like a half moon, and on into the back of the restaurant, which was long and narrow. Small tables lined the walls and there was just a narrow passageway between for the waiters.

“Well, Camilla,” my father said, “this is the first time you've ever gone out to dinner alone with your old father, isn't it?”

“Yes, Father.”

“And since you're a big girl now—fifteen, isn't it?—
would you like to celebrate your maturity with one very small drink?”

“Yes, please, Father,” I said, and then wished I hadn't, because I remembered Luisa warning me never to let anyone get me drunk. “
In vino veritas
, Camilla,
in vino veritas
,” Luisa had told me, and since such sentiments were not taught in our Latin classes both of us were proud of being able to understand this. But since I had said I wanted a drink, I knew I would have to go through with it. My father is very formidable about people changing their minds, though my mother says it is a woman's privilege.

“What shall it be, Camilla?” my father asked. “I'm having a martini, but I'm afraid that wouldn't be a very good first choice for you.”

I thought a minute and remembered a French movie Luisa and I had seen at the Fifth Avenue Playhouse where the heroine, who was quite young, went into a café to wait for someone. And she didn't know what to order, so the waiter suggested a vermouth cassis as being something fitting for a young girl. Luisa and I sat through the picture twice in order to memorize “vermouth cassis.”

So I looked up at the waiter and said, “I'd like a vermouth cassis, please.”

My father laughed. “Well, Camilla, am I wrong? This isn't your first drink?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Except for the tastes of champagne.”

The waiter put the martini in front of my father—pale liquid with a tiny twist of lemon peel, the color of my mother's hair—and the vermouth cassis in front of me. It was in a regular water glass with a little ice in it, and looked rather like a Coca-Cola without the fizz. I took a swallow, a
very small one, because I remembered the movies where the heroine takes a big swallow of a drink, when it's her first one, and then gasps and coughs and tries to act as though she'd been drinking fire. The swallow did not burn me; it was both bitter and sweet at the same time and it tasted very warm all the way down. Most food stops tasting and feeling as soon as you swallow it, but I could feel the sip of vermouth cassis going down very warm, and somehow as comforting as sitting before an open fire on a cold night, all the way down to my stomach. I took another sip and it gave me the same lovely feeling, but I remembered Luisa saying “
In vino veritas
” and I remembered my mother's face all puckered up with fear and put my glass down and took a breadstick out of the little wicker basket in the center of the table.

The waiter did not bring us menus but stood hovering by my father's side and made suggestions in low intimate French that somehow reminded me of Jacques, although I have never heard Jacques speak anything but English. My father answered the waiter in French, but his French, instead of sounding all curves and music like Chopin or the ballet, was as square and angular as a problem in algebra. The waiter kept acting very pleased though, and when he went back out into the kitchen—where I had a glimpse of hot heavy air and copper saucepans hanging under a big copper hood, and a chef in a big white hat—my father laughed and said, “Camilla, my dear, you really must be growing up. I believe the waiter thinks I'm your sugar daddy.”

I did not like it when my father said this. It made me think of a book of Peter Arno cartoons one of the girls at school, Alma Potter, keeps hidden in her desk. My father does not look in the least like one of Peter Arno's cartoons.
But I could see that he thought he had made a very funny joke, so I laughed, too, because I wanted so terribly to keep the dark look out of his eyes. When my father gets the dark look in his eyes it is like the sky in summer when suddenly the daylight grows greeny black and you know it will be better when the thunder comes. Only with my father thunder does not come.

“Now I should offer you a mink coat and a diamond necklace,” my father said, “but I am afraid those are a little beyond my means, even for my own darling girl. Would a couple of new books for those swelling bookcases of yours do as well?”

“Yes, thank you, Father,” I said, “but you don't need to give me anything.”

The waiter wheeled a little wagon up to us filled with trays of hors d'oeuvres. I was very hungry because I usually eat shortly after I come home from school, so I let him heap a little of everything on my plate.

“When a sugar daddy gives his baby a mink coat and a diamond necklace, he usually expects certain favors in return,” my father said as the waiter wheeled the little table away. “What are you going to give me for those two promised books, Camilla?”

I looked at him rather blankly. “You know I haven't anything I could give you, Father,” I said, and took a small nervous sip of my vermouth cassis. After all, even the Christmas and birthday presents I get for him are bought with the allowance money he gives me. I have never actually earned a penny of my own in my life.

“Well, you can give me your love, for one thing,” he said, and began picking up lentils, one after the other, on one tine
of his fork. “And your complete honesty is another thing I value. You've always been honest with your father, haven't you, Camilla?”

“Yes, Father,” I said, and broke a breadstick in half so that small crumbs of it fell onto the rough white tablecloth.

“I would have liked more children,” my father said then. “A son, maybe. But I am sure that no other child could ever give me the satisfaction and joy that you have.”

My father had never spoken to me like this before. The only way I really knew that he loved me was that sometimes when I kissed him good night he would give me a rough hug that almost broke my ribs and sometimes he would bring me home a book that he had just happened to hear me mention I wanted, or a new map of the stars. “I love you very much, Camilla, do you know that?” he said now, and I wondered if this was
in vino veritas
and if it was because of his dry martini, which he had drunk very quickly and then followed with more.

I looked down at my plate and I had only eaten half the hors d'oeuvres and suddenly I couldn't eat any more and I took a big swallow of my vermouth cassis.

“Mademoiselle is finished?” the waiter asked, and took away my plate.

We had onion soup next. My father handed me a dish of Parmesan cheese and said, “Did you like the doll Jacques Nissen gave you?”

I sprinkled cheese over my soup. “No. I don't much care for dolls.”

“What are you going to do with it?” my father asked.

“I'd like to give it to Luisa if that would be all right. She still likes dolls.”

“Why not?” my father said. “It's yours to do as you please with.”

The restaurant was filling up. People were crowded about the bar and sitting on the small uncomfortable chairs just inside the door. Occasionally the door would open, letting in a gust of dark rain-smelling air, and I would look at the door because somehow I could not look at my father.

The waiter took away my soup bowl and brought me a plate with stuffed mushrooms and tiny string beans and potatoes chopped up in cheese sauce. I tasted everything and then my father said, “Nissen comes to see you fairly often, Camilla. Do you like him?”

Luisa and I play a game called Indications, in which you have to guess a person by the things he reminds you of— colors and materials and animals and painters and things like that. And I did Jacques once for Luisa. I remember some of the things he reminded me of. For an animal it was a little stripy snake coiled around a rosebush; and the flower was the berry of the deadly nightshade and the painter was Daumier or Lautrec and the music was Debussy's “Golliwog's Cakewalk.” And the weapon was a dagger or a poison ring and the method of transportation was a submarine and the drink was absinthe with lots of wormwood. I don't mean that Jacques is
like
these things, but when Luisa would ask me for instance what weapon does he remind you of, that was the kind of thing I had to answer. So what was I to say to my father?

I said, “Well, I don't really know him very well. He isn't very easy to talk to.”

“But what does he talk to you about?” my father asked.

I took up my glass to take a sip of vermouth cassis and it
was empty; there was only a little pale ice water in the bottom. I finished the ice water and it tasted stale and made me feel a little sick. I've never had a proper conversation with Jacques. When he is there I am in my room doing homework; sometimes I don't even go into the living room at all.

“Oh, well—I talk about school,” I said. “Luisa and I almost got into awful trouble last week for something we did. Frank—he's Luisa's brother—was reading Plato and he found a sentence for us and we copied it and got to school early and hung it on the classroom door. It said,
All learning which is acquired under compulsion has no hold upon the mind.
When Miss Sargent came she said that it could be the work of nobody but Luisa Rowan and Camilla Dickinson and she kept us after school.”

But my father did not want to change the subject as I had hoped that he might. He said, “Do you and Rose and Nissen have tea together?”

“Oh—sometimes,” I said. I wanted to stick my fingers in my ears, partly to shut out my father's words and partly because my ears were buzzing and felt the way they sometimes do in the subway.

“Sometimes? What about the other times?”

“He really doesn't come so very often,” I said.

“Is your mother usually in when you get home from school?”

How often does “usually” mean? Some days mother is home and some days she isn't and just hurries in a few minutes before time for my father to get home. So I really could say either that she's usually home or that she's usually out, so I said, “Usually, I guess.” I pressed my cold fingers against
my hot cheeks and prayed, Oh, make him stop. Please make him stop.

Then my father said, “Let's not beat around bushes anymore, Camilla. You're old enough to be asked a straight question. Does Nissen come to see you or does he come to see Rose?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“You're not a fool, Camilla. Tell me the truth.”

“I have to go to the ladies' room,” I said. “I have to go quickly. I'm going to throw up.” And I pushed my chair back in such a rush that it fell over and then I ran between the tables to the door marked LADIES and just reached the toilet in time to throw up. A big woman in a white uniform was sitting in a yellow satin chair knitting and she got up and held my head and then when I had finished she took a clean towel and wet it and washed my face and gave me some mouthwash and dashed my forehead with cologne. Then she put my head down against her bosom, which was very big and firm like an overblown air cushion, and said over and over, “You poor little thing, you poor little thing.”

It was lovely there with my face pressed against the top button of her white uniform and her big hand rubbing gently in between my shoulder blades. I would have liked to stay there but I said, “My father will be worried. I'm all right, now. Thank you very much.”

The woman released me and I took my head away from her nice clean uniform and looked up at her and said “Thank you” again. Her face was covered with lots of white powder and underneath the powder it was as full of freckles as the Milky Way is full of stars.

“Fancy letting a baby like you have anything to drink,” she said. “Your father, is it? He ought to know better. Sure you're all right now, pet?”

“Yes, thank you,” I told her. “You've been awfully nice to me.” I would have liked to ask her what her name was; I would have liked somehow to see her again because she was as comforting as a mountain; but I just shook hands with her and went out into the restaurant again.

When I got back to the table my father was very worried and very sweet to me and he paid the bill and we left the restaurant. Outside it had stopped raining and turned much colder. Clouds were breaking up and racing across the sky, and the sidewalk had almost dried except for where it was uneven and the puddles lay like dark shadows in the night.