Camilla

by Madeleine L'engle

  “I know,” I said. “And it’s all right about your going to Italy. I don’t mind staying in New York.”

  “But, darling, you’re not staying in New York.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, jerking away.

  “Well, darling, your father and I—I know it’s partly my fault because I haven’t been the kind of mother I should have been, but—you have been getting out of hand—and we thought it would be best if you went to a good boarding school for the rest of the year.”

  “No,” I said, and stood up with such violence that my mother lost her balance and sat down on the carpet at my feet. She did not attempt to stand up, but sat there, reaching up to the hem of my skirt with her hand, like a little dressmaker.

  “Darling, it’s all decided. It’s all settled,” she said in a low voice.

  “Couldn’t you have consulted me?” I asked harshly.

  My mother got up onto her knees again and it was almost as though she were praying to me as she said, “At first we talked about taking you with—and then I thought it would be better if we went alone—and better for you, too, in the end, darling. And Rafferty thought so too. He thought you weren’t quite ready to come with us. And we thought you’d enjoy boarding school.”

  “I don’t want to leave New York,” I said. “I like the school I’m at now. Please get a governess or a companion or something for me and let me stay here. Please, Mother!” My voice rose in urgency and now I was praying down at her as she knelt there on the carpet.

  But she said, “Camilla, oh, my darling baby, there’s nothing in the world I can do about it. I’d like to give you anything in the world you want, you know that. But Rafferty and—it’s just that it’s all settled.”

  “You mean you’re sending me away just because of Frank and Luisa?”

  “That’s part of it—but just in general—your father and I thought it would be what you needed. We thought you’d like it. Most girls are terribly excited about going to boarding school.”

  Perhaps I might have been a year ago, or six months ago. But I hadn’t met Frank then. I hadn’t learned then what it was like to be in love. I didn’t know much about boarding schools but I didn’t think there was much place for love in them. And no place for Frank.

  My mother stood up and said, “Darling, it’s terribly late. You should have been in bed long ago, and there’s school tomorrow. You can try to talk to your father if you want to tomorrow—but it won’t do any good.”

  She was right. It would do no good. It was all settled. I would have to go. I said, “Good night,” and went back to my room.

  I undressed and got into bed and I couldn’t sleep. I lay there and there was nothing but a great ache over all of me because now I would have to leave New York and perhaps Frank would never kiss me. I got out of bed and went over to the window and the black shocking night air rushed at me and I wanted to burst into tears, to cry loudly, loudly, as I might have not so many years ago when I was still a child. But I just stood still, by the window, and then I slammed the window down and leaned my forehead against the cold glass and looked out into the courtyard. On the roof of the apartment house across the way I saw a shadow moving and then I realized that there was someone leaning against the parapet. As I became more accustomed to the dark I saw that it was a woman and she was just leaning there, quite quietly; and suddenly she flung her arms out in a gesture of despair or anger and turned around and went back in. There was an oblong of yellow light as she opened the door that led back into the house, and then darkness again as it closed behind her. I stood there a moment longer and then went back to bed. I thought, I will see Frank tomorrow.

  I lay there and I held on to the thought of Frank like someone in a boundless ocean holding on to a spar of wood. It was the only thing that kept me from going under the cold dark waters. The land behind me was gone, and I could not see the land ahead, but the knowledge that I would see Frank the next day kept me afloat.

  10

  THE NEXT MORNING Luisa was not at school. Luisa is never ill and I worried about her off and on when I wasn’t worrying about myself and my own problems. As soon as school was over I hurried down to the coatroom. Frank was waiting just outside the door for me. I jumped when I saw him though I had been hoping that possibly, possibly he might be there—even though I knew his school let out later than ours.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi. What’s wrong with Luisa?” Then I saw that Frank looked unusually solemn and my heart jumped within me in fear like a fish leaping out of water.

  Frank took my hand and we started walking down the street. “Mona kept Luisa at home today to talk to her. I don’t know just what about. But there was certainly a mess at our apartment last night, Camilla. I hope you never have to go through a mess like it. Not that Luisa and I were supposed to go through it, but when Mona and Bill have a little discussion, nobody in the neighborhood’s likely to get much sleep. Anyhow, I cut trigonometry this afternoon because I wanted to talk to you. Bill’s firm wants to send him to Cincinnati.”

  “Oh,” I said, and the fear stayed in my heart as I waited for Frank to continue.

  “I don’t know whether he’s going or not. I think it means a good raise in salary and we could certainly use it, except that it would mean Mona would have to give up her job on the magazine and she doesn’t want to do that.”

  I nodded. I knew that the magazine was more than a job to Mona; it was some kind of symbol.

  “I think Bill should go to Cincinnati,” Frank continued. “His job—well, it hasn’t been much of anything, up to now. Maybe it’s paid for food and rent but it certainly hasn’t paid for anything else. Mona’s sent Luisa and me to school; sometimes I think she’s done it just to spite Bill, so he’d feel he couldn’t take care of his own kids. Luisa and I could have gone to public school perfectly well. And Mona pays for our clothes and of course her own, and every time she buys a shirt or a tie or a pair of pajamas for Bill she lets him know he wouldn’t have a stitch of clothes on his back if it weren’t for her. That’s a lousy position to put a man in and Mona’s a fool to do it.”

  Frank spoke in a quiet, dispassionate voice, and I felt that again I was learning, that I would have to try to think about my parents with the same loving objectivity. Because there was no question about it: Frank loved Mona and Bill.

  He said, “Sometimes I think some devil in Mona just deliberately makes her do the things that will make Bill resent her most. Anyhow, I think he should go to Cincinnati and take Mona with him.”

  “What about you and Luisa?” I asked.

  “Well, I suppose we’d have to go too. I don’t want to, but I think we owe it to Bill.”

  “I’m going away too,” I said in a low voice, looking down at the sidewalk, and it seemed to me that now everything was over, over, that just as my life was beginning, everything in it that I cared about was coming to an end.

  “You? Where?” Frank asked in a startled way.

  I continued to look down at the sidewalk. “Mother and Father are going to Italy for the rest of the winter. So I’m going to some boarding school.”

  “When?” Frank asked.

  “Soon. Next week, I think.”

  Frank said what I had been thinking. “Winter’s just started and now all of a sudden it’s almost over. Or it’s been stopped and we have to start it all over again somewhere else. And I liked the way it was starting right here. I wish it didn’t have to change.”

  “So do I,” I whispered, because I was very near to crying.

  Then Frank seemed to throw his shoulders back and stand up taller. “Well, if you’re going off next week, we have this week. Let’s make it a wonderful week, Cam. Let’s see each other every day. Okay? Shall we make it the week of Camilla and Frank?”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling suddenly happy again. Even if Bill and Mona were taking Frank and Luisa to Cincinnati, even if Mother and Father were going to Italy and sending me to boarding school, Frank and I would have
a week together. And it was not only that we would have the week, but that it had been Frank’s idea. He might be leaving New York forever but I was the one he wanted to spend his last week with. I was so happy I wanted to throw my head back and sing loudly with the joy of a rooster greeting the morning.

  “What shall we do, Cam?” Frank asked me. “I haven’t got much money so it can’t be anything too terrific, but shall we ride on the Staten Island Ferry? That’s one of the classic things.”

  “Yes, let’s,” I said.

  “Do you know Edna Saint Vincent Millay?” he asked me. “I should think you might like her. I feel I’ve outgrown her but there’s one thing kind of apropos right now. ‘We were very young, we were very merry, we rode back and forth all night on the ferry.’ I like that. So we’ll just ride over and back and then think of something else to do. I wish I could take you for a ride in one of the hansom cabs in Central Park but I’m afraid I couldn’t quite swing that.”

  “I’d rather ride on the ferry, anyhow,” I said, though I would have adored to ride in a hansom cab with Frank.

  It was a gray day with misty clouds hanging low over the city and it was already beginning to get dark when we got on the ferry. One or two soft feathers of snow came dropping slowly out of the sky but it wasn’t really snowing. Frank and I went directly to the bow of the boat and stood there looking out over the water. You could somehow tell just by the look of the water that it was terribly deep, that it was so deep that great steamships could navigate in it. It was an iron-gray color and the little waves had somehow the quality of metal. A raw wind was blowing and I put the collar of my coat up.

  “Are you cold?” Frank asked me. “Want to go inside?”

  “No. No, I like it out here.”

  The ferry started moving with a jerk that threw me against Frank. He put his arm around me and we stood there that way, as the ferry pushed out into the dark gray water. As we moved, the mist thickened and we could see nothing but water and then a thick soft blanket of fog and we might have been going out into the open sea; we could see nothing ahead of us. We looked back and behind us the skyline of New York was disappearing into the fog. It was like a mirage or a city in a fairy tale put under a spell and disappearing forever into the mist.

  Frank dropped his arm from my waist and said abruptly, “You know, Cam, about God.”

  “What?” I asked, startled.

  “You know what we need is a new God.” I didn’t say anything, so after a moment he went on. “I mean, what we need is a God people like me, or David, or you, or our parents, could really believe in. I mean, look at all the advances we’ve made scientifically since—oh, well, since Christ was born if you want to put a date on it. Transportation—look how that’s changed. And communication. Telegraph and telephones and television. They’re all new and a few thousand years ago we couldn’t even have conceived of them but now we can’t conceive of doing without them. But you take God. God hasn’t changed any since Jesus took him out of a white nightgown and long whiskers. You know what I mean. Along about when Christ was born, just a few years A.D., it was time someone should conceive a new God and then have the power to give his new understanding to the world. So what we need again now is a new God. The God most people are worshiping in churches and temples hasn’t grown since Christ’s time. He’s deteriorated. Look what the Middle Ages did to the Church. All this arguing about how many angels could stand on the point of a needle. All the velvet and gold on the outside and decadence on the inside. And then the Victorians. They tried to put God back in a long white nightgown and whiskers again. That kind of a God isn’t any good for today. You can’t blame Mona for not believing in that kind of God. We need a God who’s big enough for the atomic age.”

  He stopped for a moment, staring out over the water into the fog, and then he said, “Listen, maybe all that sounds awfully arrogant. But it isn’t all mine. I mean, an awful lot of it I got from David. But I thought out something myself that I think’s kind of good, only I don’t really believe in it. If I did believe in it I think it would be the most logical kind of explanation for things. I mean, I think it would satisfy me. But just because I thought of it myself I can’t have faith in it. You know, Cam, we live on a pretty stinking little planet in a second-rate little constellation in a backwash of the universe.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said.

  “And when you think of all the millions of stars your astronomers see and then all the millions of stars that must be out there somewhere beyond the reach of even the most gigantic telescope that could ever be invented, who are we to say that there aren’t stars or planets somewhere else with life on them, and life much better than ours? Why should the Earth, which is, as I said—well, it isn’t even second-rate, it’s lower than that—why should the Earth be the only planet with life on it when you think of stars and constellations and everything going on forever and ever and ever? I mean, you take space, and space goes on and on and on. And does it end the way Einstein says it does? And if it does, what’s beyond that? So what I figured out was this: nobody ever gets a chance to finish on this Earth. And even if there’s a heaven nobody’s good enough at the end of life on this Earth to be ready to go to heaven. In the first place, we haven’t got the equipment. And I don’t think it’s fair of God to give us brains to ask questions if He isn’t going to let us answer them sometimes. So I figured that when we die, maybe we go to another planet, the next planet in the scale. Maybe we get better brains there that will make us able to learn and understand just a little more than anyone—even someone like Einstein— is able to understand on this Earth. And maybe we might get another sense. I mean, maybe before we got born on the Earth we were on another planet where no one could see. If everybody in the world was born blind, if there wasn’t any such thing as sight, we wouldn’t have the slightest idea what it was. We couldn’t conceive of it even in our wildest dreams. So maybe on the next planet there’s a new sense, just as important as sight, or even more important, but which we can’t conceive of now any more than we could conceive of sight if we didn’t know about it. And then when we’d finished on that planet we’d go on to another planet and develop even more, and so on and on and on, for hundreds and thousands or maybe even millions of planets, learning and growing all the time, until at last we’d finally know and understand everything—absolutely everything—and then maybe we’d be ready for heaven.

  “I guess when you’re ready for heaven you’re able to stop caring about being an individual. And I don’t think I could ever stop caring about being an individual unless I’d lived billions and billions of years and really did know and understand everything. I mean, then maybe I’d be ready for God.”

  “I think that’s wonderful!” I cried. “Oh, Frank, I think it’s wonderful. I could believe in something like that. I should think anyone could. Did you tell Luisa?”

  “Her?” Frank asked scornfully. “She just said she was fed up hearing me talk about the importance of Frank Rowan and thinking of a system where Frank Rowan could go on being important. I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Oh, Frank,” I said. Then I asked, “Did you—did you talk to David about it?”

  “Yes,” Frank said. “Yes. David was very nice. He liked the idea. But I could tell that he didn’t believe in it. Maybe even he thought I was caring too much about being Frank Rowan at all costs again. I don’t know. He was just very nice and—and sort of sad.”

  We were beginning to see Staten Island now, looming up out of the fog. Frank said, “I told Pompilia Riccioli and she laughed. She just sat down and laughed till the tears rolled down her cheeks. You’re the only person who seems to have cared in the right way, Camilla.”

  “I do care,” I told him. “I care awfully.”

  Now we drew into the Staten Island slip and Frank took my arm and held it very tight and we walked off the ferry into the cold damp air of Staten Island.

  “Want to go somewhere and have a frankfurter or something?” Frank asked
.

  But I wasn’t hungry. I shook my head. “No. But you go on and have something if you want to.”

  “Me, you think I could eat?” Frank turned on me and his voice was suddenly savage. “You think I could eat when the minute you’re born you’re condemned to die? When thousands of people are dying every minute before they’ve even had a chance to begin? Death isn’t fair. It’s—it’s a denial of life! How can we be given life when we’re given death at the same time? Death isn’t fair,” Frank cried again, his voice soaring and cracking with rage. “I resent death! I resent it with every bone in my body! And you think—you think I could eat!”

  He looked at me as though he hated me. He jammed a coin into the slot and pushed me ahead of him onto the New York–bound ferry and stood with his arms crossed in bitter and passionate anger. He did not look at me; he did not talk. Once when the ferry slapped into a wave and I was thrown against him he pulled away from me as though I repelled him. I had heard Luisa talk about Frank’s moods and I supposed that this was one of them, but it frightened me. I stood there beside him and as many millions of miles away from him as one of the planets he had been talking about and tried not to shiver. It was not because I was cold that I was shivering, but because of Frank.

  There wasn’t any choice anymore. I couldn’t say any longer, even to myself, I don’t think I’ll grow up for a while yet; I think I’ll be a child just a little longer. Being a child was something that I was afraid to let go of but that now I had to let go of, because I knew that if I loved Frank I could no longer be a child.

  A sudden gust of wind lifted my beret from my head and flung it into the water. Frank did not appear to notice and I knew that if I should cry out “Oh, my hat” or anything, it would anger him even more. So I just stood there beside him and let the wind push my hair back from my forehead and drive my breath back down into my throat, almost choking me. And there was Frank standing beside me consumed with rage and I was afraid.