Camilla

by Madeleine L'engle

My father stood there for a moment, holding my mother. Then he said, “All right, Rose. Relax. Calm down.”

  I turned and saw my mother’s face and she looked as though my father had struck her. She said, “Oh, Raff—”

  And my father said, “Okay, say it. Get it off your chest.”

  My mother said, “I’ve tried to say it so many times, and it never seems to mean anything to you.”

  I could see that my father was trying to be patient. “You’ve been trying to say what?”

  “And I can’t say it now. I can’t say what I want to say. I hold you—I—I clutch you, because I love you so desperately, and time is so short, we have such a little time in which to live and be young, even at best, and I put my arms around you and hold you because I want to love you while I can and I want to know I’m loving you, only it doesn’t mean anything because you aren’t afraid. You aren’t frightened so that you want to clutch it all while you can.”

  Now I knew that they had forgotten that I was in the room, standing half obscured by the window draperies, and I was afraid to move, because I felt that this was very big, that what my mother was trying to tell my father was terribly important, and if I moved, even the smallest bit to let them remember I was there, it might break it.

  My mother said, “Jacques is afraid. That’s why—”

  “Why what?” my father asked harshly.

  “We hold each other because we’re afraid and there’s so little time for love and comfort.”

  Now my father’s voice was rough. “You can say that in almost the same breath that you say you love me!”

  My mother gave a cry of despair. “You see, you see! I’ve tried to tell you again and you don’t understand!”

  My father turned and left the room and all of a sudden I realized that he was crying. I had seen my mother cry so many times I couldn’t count them and it always distressed me, but it didn’t rock my foundations. If my father cried then Atlas’s foot indeed had slipped.

  My mother stood very still for a moment. Then she rushed out after my father. I waited by the window for a long time, my cheek pressed against the cold glass, but they did not come back.

  9

  THAT AFTERNOON before the concert I asked my mother, “What is it Father was going to tell me?”

  “He wants to tell you himself, darling,” my mother said.

  “But I’m not going to be home this evening when he comes back so couldn’t you tell me now?”

  “Oh, no, darling, no, I can’t possibly. I shouldn’t have said anything about it this morning. Anyhow it’s—it’s really nothing to get upset about.” And she started talking about getting me some new clothes.

  They played the Prokofiev Third Piano Concerto that afternoon and I tried to pretend that Frank was sitting beside me instead of Mother, and I wondered if perhaps Mother would let Frank go with me some Sunday. Then the music caught me up and I was lost in it and somehow while I was listening, there was again the strange feeling as though I were part of a dream. This was the music Frank had chosen for my music and now it seemed to me that it was our music, because if it made Frank think of me, to me it was Frank.

  “Enjoying yourself, darling?” Mother whispered.

  “Yes.”

  Frank was waiting for us after the concert. “Mother,” I said, “this is Frank Rowan. Frank, this is my mother.”

  It was all they could do in the mob on the steps to shake hands. Frank said, “I’ll take care of her, Mrs. Dickinson, and I’ll try not to keep her out too late,” and I could tell by my mother’s smile that she liked him.

  Then we were alone and Frank said, “We’d better eat right away, Camilla. I promised David I’d bring you over early.” Then he looked at me in my dark green Sunday coat and hat. “Camilla, you look so pretty today. It seems to me every day you look prettier.”

  We went downtown to the same restaurant we had had lunch at the day before. Most of the snow was gone from the streets; the sad remnants lay in soiled piles near the curbs. Now that it was evening it had turned colder and what had been slush when Mother and I went to the concert was slippery ice.

  As we sat down in the restaurant Frank said, “Mona and Bill had another fight this afternoon. It gets so I hate to be home. I wish I could go away to college next year, but with dough the way it is it’ll probably be NYU. Not that I have anything against NYU. I just wish I could go someplace where I didn’t have to live at home.”

  The proprietor of the restaurant, who had not been there the day before, came over to us and said, “Good evening, Franky boy,” and Frank said, “Evening, Mr. Riccioli. How’s everything at your house?”

  When I heard the name Riccioli I felt icy cold. I sat terribly still as Mr. Riccioli said, “Fine, fine,” rubbing his hands together. “Pompilia, she’s asking why you don’t come around no more.”

  “I’ve been busy with school,” Frank said. “Tell her I’ll come see her soon.”

  Mr. Riccioli looked with perfectly friendly interest at me. “You got a new girl friend?”

  “Sure,” Frank said. “You know me. I get a new girl friend every week. But Pompilia’s still the queen of them all.”

  “Good, good,” Mr. Riccioli said. “My Pompilia, she’s a beautiful girl. She’s got lots of boyfriends. It’s nice for a girl to have lots of boyfriends.”

  Some other people came in then, and he went off to talk to them. I looked down at my plate.

  “I was nuts to come here,” Frank said, “but the old man usually isn’t around on weekends, and it’s as cheap as any place I know.” He sounded angry.

  “Oh.”

  “Listen, that didn’t mean anything, what I said about new girl friends. I mean, I had to say it so the old man wouldn’t think I was ditching his daughter. I’ve never felt about anybody the way I feel about you, Camilla. The others—well, I only liked their looks, their outsides. With you I like both your outsides and your insides. Pompilia and I just had a good time together. Fun. She doesn’t give any more of a hang for me than I do for her. I wouldn’t have come here otherwise. I haven’t seen Pompilia to talk to for a couple of months. Listen, how about having ravioli tonight? Or would you rather have a pizza?”

  “Ravioli, I guess,” I said. Then, “Luisa said last Saturday you were having lunch with Pompilia Riccioli,” and I knew right away that I had been idiotically stupid, that I had made Frank angry.

  “So?” he said. “Not that it’s anybody’s business, but I had lunch with David.”

  “I didn’t mean—” I started, and then finished lamely, “I’m sorry, Frank.”

  “Forget it,” Frank said. “Luisa just—oh, forget it. Tell me something about stars. I like to hear you talk about stars. What’s the difference between a star and a planet? How do you tell them apart?”

  “The easiest way is that a star twinkles and a planet doesn’t.”

  “Go on,” Frank said. “Tell me about planets.”

  “Well—Mercury is closest to the sun, then Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. Kepler thought there ought to be a planet between Mars and Jupiter, because the space between them is so much bigger than the space between any of the other planets, and that’s how Piazzi found the first planetoid, looking for a planet.”

  Frank said, “Tell me something about Saturn. Isn’t that the one with the ring?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The ring casts a big shadow. That’s why you can see it so easily, but it’s really about as thin as a piece of paper. Another sort of interesting thing about Saturn is that sometimes, if you’re in a place where stars are clear, it casts a real shadow that you can see.”

  “I never thought of stars as having shadows,” Frank said. “I wonder if anybody’s written a poem or anything about that? You really do know a lot about it.”

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t. I don’t know anything at all. Anybody could know the things I know. It doesn’t even begin to make me an astronomer. I’ll have to study all kinds of higher mathematic
s. I mean the algebra and geometry we get at school aren’t really anything.”

  “This summer,” Frank said, “we’ll have to get out in the country together somehow and look at the stars.”

  And I thought, If Frank is planning about the summer I can’t be just another Pompilia Riccioli.

  As soon as we had finished eating, Frank took me over to Perry Street. “I have to go back home and do some studying, Cam,” he said. “You give me a buzz when you’re ready to go home and I’ll come right over for you. It won’t take me more than five minutes to walk back.”

  “All right,” I said.

  Frank said good evening to Mrs. Gauss and then he left, saying, “I’ll come in and say hello to Dave when I come back for Camilla.”

  Mrs. Gauss took me into the living room. The light over the round table was warm and red in the center of the room and then went off into dark mysterious shadows in the corners. The heavy furniture seemed to repel the light and a feeling of rejection and disapproval loomed at me from the shadows. I stood by the table and Mrs. Gauss stood in the shadows looking at me. She did not say anything; she just kept on staring at me as though she were trying to find out something from my face. Then at last she said, “You’d better not stay too long, Miss Dickinson. He’s had one of his bad days. I wanted to call and tell you not to come but he insisted on seeing you.” There was another pause. Then she said, “Please don’t think I don’t appreciate your coming. I’m very grateful to you. There are so few people he’s willing to see. I get frantic because he just sits and broods and refuses to see his old friends who want to come cheer him up.”

  Then she said, “I had three sons once. David is all I have left.” She stared at me for a long moment as though she hated me. Then she said, “He’s waiting. Go on in to him.”

  I fled from the lamplit center of the room, across the edge of shadow, down the hall, and into David’s room.

  He was lying in the hospital bed. The bed was raised and he was propped up against pillows. I looked at his face; I did not look where the blankets flattened out suddenly, where his legs ended. He held out his hand. “Come in, Camilla.” He smiled at me and the smile sent an ache into my stomach.

  I went over to the bed and took his hand. I stood there looking at his face and he took both his hands and held mine. “Those eyes of yours, Camilla,” he said. “Solemn. Penetrating. What do you see when you stare at a body like that?”

  I saw only that he was terribly tired, that he was still in pain. That was something anybody could have seen. It was his eyes, I felt, that were able to look deep into me and understand things about me that I didn’t understand myself.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said. “Sure you don’t mind?”

  “No. I wanted to come.”

  “My sake or yours?”

  “For mine.” This was true. When I looked at David’s face I felt that behind the lines of pain and suffering was a knowledge of all the answers, and that perhaps if I talked to him enough, or even looked at him enough, he might be able to give me some of the answers.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “Forgive me for receiving you in bed. Had a bad day. This is less tiring than the chair. If my mother talked any rubbish about not staying too long, please ignore it. I’ll tell you when I want you to go.” He still held his hands about mine. Then he said, “Camilla, since I’m in bed this evening, been wondering about the best way to have our game. Thought, if it doesn’t bother you, if you don’t mind too much, you could push the hospital table across the bed, up close to me; then you could sit on the foot of the bed. I don’t have any legs for you to get tangled in. Would that— Is that okay with you?”

  “Yes,” I said. I drew my hand out of his and pushed the hospital table up from the foot of the bed until it was in a position where he could reach it easily.

  “Cards and chess set are in the bottom drawer of my desk,” he said.

  I got them and then I climbed up onto the foot of his bed and sat, cross-legged, opposite him. We started off with double solitaire. He taught me some new games, and I showed him a couple he hadn’t known. He was wonderful to play with. Usually when I play cards with Luisa or any of the kids at school it’s much too easy to win and they think so slowly that I get bored with the game. This year some of them have started giving what they call bridge parties; mostly they don’t play cards; they just sit and talk about the other kids who aren’t at the party, and then they have something gooey to eat. But David’s mind clicked sharp and clean. I forgot that I was sitting on the hospital bed just about where his knees ought to have been, and thought only of the game.

  After a while he said, “Talk for a while and give me a chance to rest; then we’ll try chess.”

  “All right.”

  “Look,” he said, “would you pour me a glass of water and give me one of those pills from that box? Thanks, honey. Know you’re a good kid, Camilla? Very good kid.” He looked at me and smiled. “Got to the point now where I just can’t be bothered with people who don’t interest me. Try to bother with them, I get exhausted. You interest me very much, know that? Feel you’re in the middle of a period of change, growth. All at once things that have been lying dormant in you are unfolding. Like that daffodil pushing up to spring. Right, Camilla? Suddenly waking up, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I certainly don’t feel like a daffodil. And if what I’m feeling is waking up, then it’s a terribly confusing thing to wake up.”

  “Don’t you think the daffodil’s confused, hunh? Sky and sun must seem terrifying after the dark security of being buried in the earth.”

  “I wonder why they come up, then,” I said.

  “Frank’s right. Life is more valuable than death. Jung says there’s no coming to life without pain. True for you, isn’t it, Camilla?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Like to go back to the old security if you could?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t—” I started, stumbling over my words. “It’s too— I don’t think I’m ready to grow up.”

  “You are, Camilla,” David said. “Nobody ever thinks he’s ready. Most people don’t think about it at all one way or other. Very fact you’re thinking about it proves you’re ready.”

  “I still think I’d rather be secure,” I said.

  David laughed and reached for my hand again. “First place,” he told me, “no such thing as security. Doesn’t exist. Only a feeling of security.”

  “Then I’d like to have that feeling.”

  “No, Camilla. Not really. If you were secure, things wouldn’t change, would they?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Without change, uncertainty, fear that goes with them, we wouldn’t be.”

  “What do you mean? Why not?”

  David held my hand tightly. “In order to be, honey, we must progress. Once we stop moving we die. In order to progress we must change. Part of growing up. Suppose it’s natural for you to have your old childish wish for security, but the only complete security is death.”

  “No!”

  “Yes,” David said. “Yes. Even if we fear it, as Frank does, as the complete insecurity. But somewhere in infinity opposites meet, hunh? Look at it with eyes open, life is the greatest of all arguments for insecurity. Hunh, darling?”

  How different the word “darling” was when David used it from the way it was when Mother used it and from the way it was when Jacques used it. With David it was something warm and tender and in some way a little frightening.

  “Okay,” David said. “Let’s have that game of chess. Set up the board, will you?”

  When we started to play I realized that I had forgotten a good deal, but as we played, it came back to me, though David beat me quickly and rather badly.

  But he said, “It’s okay, Camilla. Couldn’t sit back and win with my eyes closed the way I usually do. Play with me a few more times and we’ll be having real games. Try another?”
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br />   “Yes,” I said.

  But we had not finished setting up the board when Mrs. Gauss came to the doorway. “David, it’s time for you to get ready for bed.”

  “Oh, Ma,” David said in a tired voice, “what earthly difference does it make when I go to bed? Where am I except in bed anyhow?”

  “You know what happens when you get overtired—especially when you’ve had such a bad day.”

  “What time is it, please?” I asked.

  “After nine.”

  “Oh!” I cried. “Then I do have to get home. I’m supposed to be in bed early except Friday and Saturday.” I got down off David’s hospital bed and stood beside it.

  “Okay,” David said. “Call Frank, Ma. Tell him Camilla’s ready. And for God’s sake don’t worry about me. Haven’t had such a good evening in weeks. Now Camilla and I’ll talk until Frank comes for her. Then I’ll brush my teeth for you, meek as a lamb.”

  Mrs. Gauss smiled back at him then, a smile that was twisted and difficult, and left us.

  As she closed the door behind her David said, “Come again, Camilla?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  “When?”

  “I could come some afternoon after school. Or any time during the weekend. I’m not supposed to go out weekday evenings.”

  “Come because you want to? Or because you pity me and think you ought to? Don’t lie.”

  “Because I want to.”

  “Pity me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He reached out and took my hand and pulled me a little closer to the bed. “Honest with me. Thanks, honey. Of course you pity me. But on the other rare occasions when I’ve asked the question there’s been a lot of stalling. Hate pity, Camilla. If I could dispense with the pity of my so-called fellow human beings I could stand this whole damn mess better. Horrible to my mother. Make her angry to drive the pity out of her. Think you and Frank pity me less, or differently, than anybody else I know. Know you’re going to be a very beautiful woman, Camilla?”

  “People have told me that this past year,” I said.

  “Know it yourself?”