Camilla

by Madeleine L'engle

  Then as the towers of New York began to be visible through the fog I could feel Frank slowly beginning to relax. The terrible tenseness left his body and all of a sudden he said in quite a happy voice, “You know what, Cam, there’s something awfully exciting about New York even if you’ve been born and brought up in it.”

  “I think it’s even more exciting if you’ve been born and brought up in it. I think it’s the most exciting place in the world to call home,” I said, but even though Frank had relaxed I was still caught up in the tenseness of his rage.

  We left the ferry and started to walk through the downtown streets. They were filling up now with people leaving the business district and getting ready to go home, and the next ferry would be a great deal more crowded than the one we had ridden on. A sharp wind was blowing and I wished my beret were not somewhere in the cold waters but on my cold head instead. Frank took my arm and we pushed through the streets until the crowds began to diminish and we were on a quiet street with only one or two other people walking quickly, heads bowed to the wind.

  I walked along beside Frank and my own happy mood had gone and I wanted to cry out to him, “Say something comforting!” though I did not know what there was that he could say. Frank and Luisa would be going to Cincinnati and I would be going to boarding school and everything would be over, over. And all because of Jacques, I thought, forgetting in my misery that Jacques had nothing to do with Cincinnati; all because of my father’s not—I did not know exactly what it was that my father had not done that he ought to have done, but I knew it was something; all because of my mother’s weeping and sobbing one afternoon and then trying so foolishly to cut her wrists, and why? I knew my mother did not want to die.

  “Frank,” I asked, “what would you think of someone who tried to commit suicide?” The wind blew a bitter gust and my words seemed forced back into my throat, as though they would have been better unsaid.

  Frank grabbed me by both arms. “Camilla, you’re not—”

  “No, it isn’t me,” I said. “I’m not talking about myself.”

  “But you’re talking about someone,” Frank stated flatly.

  “Well—you can’t talk about no one, can you?”

  Frank continued to hold my arms. He looked sternly down into my eyes. “I think it’s the unforgivable sin, Camilla. If God gave us life He didn’t mean us to try to fling His gift back in His teeth. Suicide is murder.”

  “You don’t think it could ever be right, ever?”

  “No,” Frank said. And then he said. “Oh, Cam, I don’t know. You aren’t talking about David, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Because I don’t think it would be all right for him, and I don’t think he does, either.”

  “I wasn’t talking about David,” I said. The wind penetrated my clothes, through my skin and into my bones. My veins seemed to be running with wind rather than blood.

  “The way Johnny’s older brother died—it was suicide in a way, I suppose. He died in order to save the rest of his crew. Oh, Cam, all I know is, there isn’t any one answer to any question. Cam, why did you ask me about suicide?”

  “I—I don’t know,” I said.

  “Cam, I don’t want ever to pry, but—but you worry me when you talk about things like that.”

  “It was my mother,” I said then, and the wind sent a shiver through me. “My mother tried to—a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Cam,” Frank said, and his fingers tightened about my arms so that they dug through my coat into my skin.

  “Frank,” I said, “I don’t understand about people when they’re really grown-up. I don’t understand my mother or my father. I see certain things—and I remember other things— and all of it’s just enough to confuse me.”

  “I know,” Frank said, “I know, Cam darling.” It was the first time he had ever called me anything except Camilla or Cam, and there was that word “darling” again, such a common, overused word, and now all of a sudden it was as though it had never been used before, as though David had never said it, or my mother, or Luisa in her sarcastic way. Now it was a completely new word, born for the first time as Frank said it out on the windy street; and it was like a caress; in spite of the cold I felt the same warm glow all through me that I had felt when David passed his hand over my hair, and I wanted to fling my arms about Frank and cry, “Oh, Frank, kiss me, kiss me.”

  But Frank took his hands away from my elbows and dug them down into the pockets of his coat and said, “Sometimes I’ve worried horribly that Mona might try to kill herself. Some nights when Luisa and I’ve heard her crying all night long I’ve thought she might just go out of her mind and do something desperate, but she never did.”

  We started to walk again and the warm glow left me, and my feet and fingers and my ears ached with cold.

  We passed a church and Frank said, “Camilla, you’re frozen, aren’t you? Let’s go in for a minute and get warm.”

  It was a small church, and inside the air smelled heavy and dusty and the light was dim, and dusty too. We walked in together, quietly, and went in to one of the pews and sat down. Being in a church with Frank was very different from being in one with Mother and Father, or Binny or the governess who had taken me when I was younger. Being in church with Frank was being much closer to God in the house of God than I had ever been before. We sat there for quite a while and I began to unfreeze and to be happy again. I don’t know what Frank was thinking, but I was thinking about what he had said about going on to different planets and learning and growing and improving, and it seemed terribly right to me, and I felt, too, oh, yes, God is here, this is God’s house.

  I looked around. Although there was no service going on, there was somehow a lingering smell of incense in the musty air, and the light came through the stained-glass windows warm and beautiful and unlike the gray air outside.

  Frank leaned toward me once and whispered, “Camilla, if people can make things as beautiful as churches why can’t they make a God worthy of a church?”

  “I don’t know,” I whispered back.

  “Maybe David has the right answer,” Frank said. “He told me once something of Montaigne’s that I’ve never been able to forget. ‘Oh, senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm, and yet will make Gods by dozens.’ But look at Jesus. I don’t think Montaigne was talking about Jesus.”

  “No,” I said. We were silent again then. Once I looked at Frank, and his face was very stern and I wondered whether or not he was praying. I didn’t really pray myself. I just kept saying over and over to God, Make it always be like this with Frank and me. Make us know each other always.

  We got up to leave and just as we got to the outside doors a gray-haired lady in expensive furs came in and she looked at me and said, “Oh, dear, you didn’t go into the church without a hat, did you?”

  “Yes,” I said, remembering my red beret drowning in New York Harbor.

  “But you know you mustn’t ever go into a church without covering your head, dear,” the lady said. “Didn’t your mother teach you that?”

  “Yes,” I said. I felt Frank stiffen with rage beside me.

  “I am so sorry,” Frank said, his voice soaring and then cracking down onto a deep note, “that you object to Miss Dickinson’s going into a church without her hat. However, I’m sure that God doesn’t object, and after all, that’s all that matters.” And he swept me out.

  Something about Frank’s wrath, so ridiculous, so rude, and so right, struck me as funny, and I began to giggle. I was afraid to look at him for fear I’d make him even angrier; and then my giggles turned into laughter and then beside me I heard Frank laughing, too, and the two of us walked down the street roaring with laughter. We laughed and laughed until the tears were rolling down our cheeks and we were staggering like drunks. And then there on the empty street Frank had his arms around me again and our cheeks were pressed together and our laughter vanished, and we stood there holding each other terribly tightly, as though we were
afraid somebody would come walking down the street to wrench us apart. We stood there clutching each other and I could feel Frank’s cheek against mine, cold and just faintly rough; and it seemed to me that if he let go of me I would fall down to the pavement and not be able to rise until he lifted me up.

  Then he said, “Oh, Cam,” and again, “Oh, Cam,” and we moved apart, very slowly, and started walking again. We didn’t talk for several blocks and then Frank said, in a numbed kind of voice, “We’ll have to eat now, and then I’ll have to take you back home or they won’t let us spend the rest of the week together. I’ll come for you tomorrow after school. If we’re going to Cincinnati it doesn’t matter if I miss a few classes now. I don’t care, anyhow. And I’m going to ask Bill for five bucks. I’ve never asked him for anything before, but I’m going to now.”

  “Frank,” I said, “I never have anything to spend my allowance on. I’ve got quite a lot saved. Please let me lend you the five dollars. I’d much rather have you borrow it from me than from Bill.”

  Frank didn’t say anything and I was afraid I’d made him angry again, but at last he took my hand in his. “Okay, Cam. Thanks. I think I’d rather borrow from you than from Bill too. But it’s just a loan. Understand that.”

  “I do,” I said. “I do understand, Frank.”

  “Tomorrow we’ll go to the Planetarium, maybe. Would you like that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I want to go to the Planetarium with you.”

  “I want to do everything in the world with you,” Frank said. “You’re the only person in the world I’ve ever felt that way about. Cam, I’ve never talked to anybody the way I’ve talked to you. I’ve never wanted to. What a lot of time we’ve wasted. We haven’t even known each other two weeks. Why didn’t we know each other before?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s Luisa,” Frank said. “Of course it’s Luisa. Luisa’s the most possessive person I’ve ever known. She’s even more possessive than Mona. Take those dolls of hers. The only reason she’s hung on to them as long as she has is that they’re her possessions and she can’t bear to part with anything that belongs to her. The way she’s always talked about you, you’d have thought she made you up. And I must say she made you sound sort of a dope. I should have known I’d have to talk to you for myself to see what you were like. Oh, Camilla. I’ll be glad when I’m twenty-one. Parents can certainly mess up our lives, can’t they? If it weren’t for parents I wouldn’t be going to Cincinnati and you wouldn’t be going to boarding school. And I don’t believe they think about us at all when they get involved in all these messes. We’re just something that has to be disposed of like their furniture or clothing. I suppose Mona’ll load all the furniture into a van and the clothes into trunks, and Luisa and I’ll be loaded into a train and that will be that. Nobody’s worrying about whether Luisa and I are having fits about leaving New York and having our whole lives disrupted. If we were just a few years older I’d say to heck with them, let’s get married; but we’re not. Here, we’ll go in here and eat and then I’ll take you home.”

  Somehow neither of us had anything to say while we ate or on the way back to the apartment. At the door Frank took both my hands and held them tight and said, “Until tomorrow, Cam,” and he left me.

  I went upstairs and I thought that it was the most wonderful day I had ever had, and when I thought of the way Frank and I had held each other there on the deserted street my legs felt all weak beneath me. It wasn’t until I was in bed that night that I remembered that he hadn’t kissed me.

  11

  THE NEXT DAY I got to school almost an hour early because somehow that seemed to bring me closer to the time when I would see Frank, and it seemed as though I could not exist until school was out. I didn’t know that a day could go so slowly. I’d read of minutes seeming like hours but until that day I’d thought it was an exaggeration; a minute was a minute even in the waiting room of a dentist’s office, and that was that. Now I realized that time has very little to do with the clock; it’s all inside you. Each minute that morning stretched out interminably; it was like walking down a long dark corridor with only a dim light in the distance to tell you it would ever end. But the times when I was with Frank an hour would slip by like a leaf dropping from a tree.

  I was stupid that morning too. I looked at Luisa’s empty desk and wondered how soon they would be leaving for Cincinnati and whether or not she was helping Mona pack, and I answered idiotically when it was my turn to recite until finally Miss Sargent asked if I was feeling well.

  The instant the last bell rang I fled to the coatroom and grabbed my coat and an old red velvet beret of Mother’s she had loaned me until she had time to get me a new one. I was out of breath when I reached the door, partly from hurrying, and partly from excitement.

  Frank was not there.

  For a moment my heart seemed to stop beating. Then I tried to control my fear, to tell myself that I was being stupid, that the day before I hadn’t hurried as much, I’d taken longer in the coatroom; Frank would be there in a moment. I looked up and down the street—I didn’t know from which direction he would approach—and I kept thinking that I saw him, but it was always someone older or younger or shorter or fatter or dark-haired or blond; it was never Frank.

  Then I told myself that perhaps he had not been able to cut his last class as he had the day before. After all, cutting classes is not an easy thing to do. Perhaps his absence the day before had been noticed and they were making sure that he didn’t get off early again. That seemed to me to be a very logical explanation of why he was not there waiting for me, and I leaned back against the side of the building to wait for him. One by one the other girls came out and started down the street, calling, “Good-bye.” “Who’re you waiting for, Camilla?” “See you tomorrow.” I called good-bye to them all, though I was scarcely conscious of my voice coming from my throat.

  “Good-bye, good-bye,” I called, and looked anxiously down the street.

  Last of all Miss Sargent came out and paused as she saw me standing there. “Waiting for someone, Camilla?”

  “Yes, Miss Sargent.”

  “Sure you feel all right today? You seemed very restless.”

  “Oh, I’m fine, thank you, Miss Sargent.”

  “What’s the matter with Luisa? A cold?”

  “No. I think her family’s going to move to Cincinnati and she’s helping her mother pack.”

  “Oh?” Miss Sargent asked. “It’s odd that Mrs. Rowan hasn’t communicated with us here at the school. She sent a note saying that Luisa wouldn’t be in for a couple of days, but that was all. Well, don’t stay out in the cold too long: We don’t want you coming down with one of those grippy colds everybody seems to be having.”

  I sighed with relief as she left me.

  I waited out on the street until my teeth were chattering. Then I went back into the coatroom and waited there by the window where I could see anybody coming up or down the street, until the janitor stuck his head in the door and said, “I’m sorry, miss, but all you young ladies are supposed to be out of the building this time of day. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

  I stood out on the street again, and at last I realized all through me that Frank was not going to come. I walked until I reached a drugstore and went into a phone booth.

  “Carter,” I cried, “has anyone telephoned me? Has there been a message?”

  “No, miss,” Carter said. “Nobody’s called at all except Mr. Nissen for your mother.”

  I hardly noticed her maliciousness. “Thank you,” I said, and hung up.

  Then I went down to Ninth Street. I did not want to go down to Ninth Street, looking for Frank, after he had left me waiting without a word, after he had not come as he had promised, but I could not help myself.

  I pushed the buzzer to the Rowan apartment and when the door clicked open I started walking up the stairs. Oscar barked and barked and no one screamed at him to shut up and no one leaned ove
r the banisters to ask who it was. The door to the apartment was open and Luisa and Mona both stood in the center of the room looking somehow lost and as though they were strangers in an alien place.

  I stood in the doorway looking at them, and they looked at me, and no one said anything until I asked, “Where’s Frank?”

  A gleam came into Luisa’s eye and when she spoke her voice sounded almost like Carter’s telling me that no one had phoned except Jacques for mother. “He’s gone,” Luisa said.

  I could only echo “Gone?” in a stupid sort of way.

  “With Bill,” Luisa said. “To Cincinnati. They left this morning.”

  “Oh,” I said. My eyes searched the room as though, if I looked hard enough, I would surely see Frank somewhere.

  I stood there, unable to move, until Luisa said, “Well, see you at school tomorrow.” And then, as though in answer to a question, “Mona and I aren’t going to Cincinnati. We’re staying here.”

  “Oh,” I said again.

  Mona turned away then, with an impatient, angry gesture, but Luisa kept on looking at me with a horrible grimacing smile until I turned and left the room and started down the stairs. I was all the way downstairs and almost at the door when I heard Luisa’s feet stampeding in a wild rush down the stairs and she flung herself at me, nearly knocking me over, and burst into tears. We stood there clutching each other and Luisa cried loudly with huge tearing sobs as though she hoped that the weeping would break her body into a thousand pieces. I stood with my arms around her while she almost screamed with sobs.

  Then the door opened and two women came in and stared at us curiously before they started up the stairs. Luisa broke from me, her sobs slapped away by the presence of the women, and ran up the stairs, pushing ahead of them. I stood there in the hall until I heard Oscar bark as Luisa banged on the door; and then the bark was silenced as the door slammed behind her.