Camilla

by Madeleine L'engle

  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.”

  “Not to your parents?”

  “No, not really. Not this way.”

  “For an atheist Mona talks about God an awful lot. She’s always getting me into arguments and discussions. And I think she understood how I felt about Johnny, the horrible stupid wrongness of it, more than anybody else. Bill said the only way to get on in the world is to be so that nothing, no matter how terrible it is, really matters. He said nothing really does matter in the long run, so why should we let it bother us.”

  “But if things don’t matter, then you might as well be dead,” I said.

  “Sure,” Frank said. “That’s what I mean. That’s what I mean all the time. That’s what I meant when I got so sore at you that night in the movies. Mona knows things matter anyhow. She said it was a stinking brutal waste and no God worthy of the name would let things like that happen. Well, I think she’s wrong there too. It wasn’t God’s fault the gun went off. If it was God’s fault, then we’re pulling Him down to the—to our own level. It’s like what you said, Cam. It isn’t God’s fault if we’re dopes. But that’s what I got kicked out for.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, in chapel after Johnny died the headmaster preached a sort of sermon about it. He said it was God’s will that Johnny was taken and all that kind of junk. You know what I mean.”

  I nodded.

  Again Frank’s voice rose and soared as it always did whenever he cared tremendously about something. “If I thought God made that gun go off, if I thought God willed Johnny to die, I wouldn’t believe in Him. I’d do everything in my power to obliterate His name from the face of the earth. But I don’t believe it! I’ll be damned rather than believe it. And I mean that, absolutely and literally.”

  I nodded again, and I wanted to cry out for joy, Oh, yes! Yes! We believe in the same God! And the fact that Frank and I believed in the same God seemed to clear me for the moment of all confusion and make me strong and unafraid. But how could I cry out for joy when Frank was still torn with the agony of Johnny’s death?

  “I walked out of chapel while he was still talking,” Frank said. “I got up and stalked down the aisle and slammed the chapel door. I didn’t even know I was doing it until I was upstairs in my room. I don’t expect they would have expelled me just for that. They said I was too upset to know what I was doing and they put me in the infirmary overnight and gave me something to make me sleep and it gave me a vile headache the next morning.

  “Then what happened?” I asked.

  “The headmaster called me into his office the next day and tried to talk to me. He said he was trying to comfort me. So I told him there wasn’t any point, we simply didn’t believe in the same God. And he said there was only one God and you either believed in Him or you didn’t and I said nobody knew what God was anyhow and he was trying to make God in hi
s own image instead of the other way around, the way it ought to be, and then he went on about how I was unbearably arrogant. Maybe I was. But if I had to believe in his God instead of mine I’d have got hold of that gun somehow and shot myself then and there. He went on talking a lot of bilge and I just did my best not to listen and then he said Okay, you’re still too upset about Johnny to know what you’re thinking or saying, we’ll forget the whole matter for a few weeks until you’re feeling more yourself and then we’ll have another talk. So he waited a few weeks and we had another talk and he said anybody who felt about things the way I did wouldn’t be happy in his school and he made a few cracks about my having liked Johnny too much anyhow so I walked out of his office like I did out of chapel and took the next train home. The kids all went down to the train to see me off. It raised quite a stink. What a dope that guy was. The other fellows were all okay. They didn’t go around trying to comfort me. They were just there, cracking jokes and making me laugh and getting up extra baseball practice. And Mr. Mitchell too. He went around organizing hikes and once when I went into the chapel at the end of study hall to listen to him play the organ he got up and said, ‘Come on, Rowan, and I’ll show you how this thing works,’ and gave me an organ lesson. I suppose it was all my own dumb fool fault, really, the whole business of getting kicked out. But I didn’t care much one way or another. I’m kind of sorry now. It was just an easy way out. Mona gave me hell and she was right. Johnny’d probably have had fits too. He always said I was trying to use my mind too much about God. Maybe I do, but it’s the only thing I know how to use.” He stopped and grabbed hold of the bars of the elephant’s fence. The elephant lumbered over to a bucket of mash, put in his trunk, fed himself a mouthful, and then looked at us with his tiny, ancient-looking eyes, and blew bubbles.

  Frank roared with laughter. The elephant looked at us again, batted his gray wrinkled lids in a coquettish manner, turned around and offered us his rear.

  I laughed, too, and we stood there, holding on to the bars and shaking with wild laughter.

  Then, when we had controlled ourselves, I said, “It was sort of like Galileo. You, I mean.”

  “Only Galileo recanted.”

  “He shouldn’t have. Lots of other people didn’t. Martyrs and things.”

  “I don’t want to be a martyr,” Frank said. “I just want to live forever. Don’t you want to live forever, Camilla?”

  “Yes.” The elephant moved away from us and lumbered back indoors, his gray skin loose and wrinkled and more like an artificial covering than part of a living body.

  “Oh, Frank,” I said, “oh, Frank, I’m glad you were expelled. Maybe if you hadn’t been you’d have been back there this year instead of in New York.”

  “Instead of in Central Park Zoo with you.” Frank took my arm. “I’m glad too.”

  That was a funny week, the week that came after that. I didn’t see too much of Frank. It was as though we had to have time to breathe between our meetings. I didn’t see too much of anybody except Luisa, and I felt I owed it to her. I had breakfast with Father each morning and then left for school early. And after school I either went down to Ninth Street with Luisa to do homework or she came back up with me. Mother and Father didn’t go out to dinner once that week, but twice Luisa and I went to drugstores for a sandwich and a milkshake.

  Tuesday afternoon I met Frank after school and we went to the Stephanowskis and listened to Bach. I wanted to go to the opera with Frank and to Carnegie Hall. Mother and I went to concerts often on Sunday afternoons, but I felt that the music would sound somehow different and bigger if I heard it with Frank.

  I saw Frank Wednesday on the subway but he didn’t see me. I was on my way down to Luisa’s and at one of the stops a gang of boys got on. They had their arms full of shabby schoolbooks (why do boys’ schoolbooks always look so much more dilapidated than girls’?) and they were shouting and laughing as I have seen boys do on subways and buses hundreds of times and I didn’t pay any attention to them until the doors started to close and they jammed themselves between the doors, holding them open, and shouting at an unseen companion to hurry, hurry! Then a tall skinny boy with dark red hair pushed his way, panting and laughing, through the door, and it was Frank.

  The gang of them (there were only four but they made so much noise it seemed like a gang) were horsing about. They weren’t paying any attention to anybody else in the car though they seemed to me to be conscious of having an audience; it was almost as though they were giving a performance. They pushed out ahead of me at the Eighth Street stop and I was almost glad Frank hadn’t seen me, he seemed so completely different from the Frank I so far knew, so many millions of years older than I; the Frank who talked to me about God and life and death, who taught me so much more than I already knew about music, how you can single out and listen to the different instruments in an orchestra; and how music feeds your soul when it is hungry the way food does your body. But this Frank I had seen on the subway was just a kid like any other kid.

  I went on up to Luisa’s and Mona had come home early from work and had sent Luisa to the drugstore for some aspirin. She was sitting on the sofa reading and she told me to sit down and wait till Luisa got back. It was during the week so she wasn’t drunk, though she had a drink on the table in front of her.

  “Do you like to read?” she asked me, looking up from her book and peering at me through her black-rimmed glasses.

  “Yes.”

  “Luisa and Frank read too much, too many things. I imagine your reading is more appropriate for a child, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ever read Sir Thomas Browne?”

  “No.”

  “Frank gave me this to read. Listen: ‘Man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us.’ What do you think of that, hah?”

  “I think it’s beautiful,” I said.

  “Too many of us let our suns go out.” Mona took off her glasses, looked at me without them, and put them on again. “The main thing is to care. As long as you care, your sun hasn’t gone out. Though sometimes you can care so much, you can desire so much more than you can ever reach, that your burning sun can consume you utterly. However, that seems to me to be the better fate, because I still happen to think that man is a noble animal. Do you know what I’m talking about? You ought to know. Luisa says you want to be an astronomer. Anybody who wants something ought to know what I’m talking about.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think I know.”

  Luisa came in then and we went into her room to do our homework. That night Frank phoned me and we planned that I should meet him Saturday morning down at his house.

  During that week Mother was very quiet and she looked tired and unhappy. Carter told me that the days I went down to Luisa’s after school Mother went out in the afternoon; but the days I came back from school to the apartment with Luisa she was always there waiting for us with hot chocolate and little cakes, and Jacques did not come. But I still had that dead feeling in my heart when I thought about her and when I was with her. My father was very gentle with her, and twice I saw him go up to her and put his arms around her. Oh, Father, I thought. Oh, Father. And I wanted always to keep him from knowing that Mother had talked to Jacques on the telephone.

  It’s a funny thing how it takes your emotions much longer than your intellect to realize it when some big change happens in your life. My feeling this new numb way about my parents was the biggest change that had ever happened to me and I couldn’t get used to it. All that week I’d wake up in the morning and know that something was wrong and my mind had to tell my heart that it was because my mother had talked to Jacques on the phone, because my parents were Rose and Rafferty Dickinson instead of just Mother and Father. Then my heart would try to adjust itself to unhappiness, but still it didn’t r
ealize why it was unhappy and it instinctively turned to Mother for comfort, and then my mind would say, “No, you mustn’t do that anymore.” And gradually my heart began to know what my mind had been telling it every day: that everything was changed, that nothing could ever be the same again.

  Several times during that week I caught Mother and Father looking at me in an odd sort of way and I was worried because I felt that I was making them unhappy. Once at dinner I tried to explain it by making up some sort of excuse, and of course I said completely the wrong thing and made everything worse. We were having salad and Mother was toying with a piece of lettuce on the end of her fork. She looked very lovely in the candlelight and usually when I look at Mother and she seems particularly beautiful it’s all I can do to keep myself in my seat when all I want to do is rush around the table and throw my arms about her. But this night I just looked at her and thought how lovely she was, but in a cold intellectual way. I looked at her and she pleased me, but she gave me less personal pleasure than a beautifully solved problem in mathematics would have. And then I noticed that she was looking at me again and my father was looking at me, and I said, “I guess I’m growing up, and when children grow up they don’t need their parents the way they used to.”

  My mother burst into tears and said, “Camilla, what a terrible thing to say!”

  Then I did run around to her because I’d meant to make them happier by explaining it all as a natural process and instead I’d made it worse. I put my arms around her and again it was as though she were the child and I the mother, and I hated it.

  Thursday Luisa and I went up to the Metropolitan Museum to do our homework in the Roman garden, where we had first talked. Luisa didn’t know the museum very well before she met me. She’d always lived down in the Village and played in Washington Square. I think she missed a lot, not having the Metropolitan to play in. Sometimes three or four of us would slip away from our nurses and steal into the museum and play hide-and-seek until one of the guards caught us and threw us out. The guards hated us and we used to think of them as our enemies and think of all kinds of ways to pester them. I suppose we were horrible, but it was fun and we never hurt anything. But I still feel guilty and as though I oughtn’t to be there whenever I see a guard looking at me.