A Live Coal in the Sea

by Madeleine L'engle

  With her head tucked underneath her arm

  She walked the bloody tower,

  With her head tucked underneath her arm

  At the midnight hour.

  Dad sang along with it. He has a pretty good voice, actually.”

  “Go on,” Camilla said. Instinctively she pressed her hand against her chest.

  “He kept repeating—”

  “What?”

  “The sentries think that it’s

  A football that she carries in …”

  “Yes …”

  “They think that it’s Red Grange

  Instead of poor old Anne Boleyn …”

  Camilla closed her eyes.

  “… with her head tucked underneath her arm.”

  Raffi’s eyes were demanding. “Grandmother?”

  “Yes, Raffi.” Yes, Raffi. What else was there to say? Why does the camera see upside down? Why do we?

  Raffi continued, “I asked Dad who Red Grange was, and he said, ‘A football player,’ and Mom told him to stop playing that idiotic song, and I could tell she was furious. And upset. And nobody would explain why. I mean, actually, I thought the song was kind of funny, but it obviously had a hidden meaning for them, and I want to know what it’s all about.”

  Camilla folded her hands together, whitening the knuckles. “This still doesn’t explain your first question.”

  The green of Raffi’s eyes (who else had green eyes?) was suddenly brightened with tears. “I said something about you, Grandmother, and how glad I was about being accepted here at your college, not so much because it’s such a good one as that you’re here, and Dad said”—her voice broke for a moment—“he said, ‘Keep your illusions that she’s your grandmother,’ and Mom slapped him. I’ve never seen her hit him before, but I think their marriage is lousy, and I want to know what it’s all about.” Now the sobs came and she put her head in Camilla’s lap and wept.

  When Raffi’s sobs had dwindled to an occasional hiccup, Camilla patted her gently. “Let me get supper on the table. I have a small group of seniors coming over at eight for a seminar.”

  Raffi sat huddled on the bench, staring into the fire, while Camilla put food on the table, poured water into silver goblets (wedding presents), lit candles. Raffi stood up, a little stiffly. “I’m sorry. I haven’t been any help.”

  “There’ll be other times.”

  “Grandmother, are you going to tell me?”

  Slowly, carefully, Camilla heaped Raffi’s plate. “Yes. Under the circumstances, I think … But it goes back a long way. To when I was in college.” She looked at her watch. “It’s nearly seven.”

  Raffi paused with her fork halfway to her mouth. “We have an hour.”

  “It’s a long story, Raffi. It’ll take more than an hour.”

  “You can at least start.”

  “You’ll have to be patient with me.”

  How much to tell? How much of the truth was truth? Whose truth? Upside down? Surely Taxi’s truth would be radically different from Camilla’s. But the beginning of the story went much further back, to long before Taxi was born.

  Camilla was a senior in college. It was winter, and the bare branches of the trees were stark against a snow-heavy sky. Camilla, walking across campus, blinded by tears, crossed Elm Street and almost ran into a young man who was coming out of a grey stone building with a blue door.

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘Oops! Sorry!’ They spoke simultaneously.

  He held out a hand to steady her. ‘What’s up? Can I help?’ He took her firmly by the elbows and steered her along the path.

  ‘Nothing,’ she replied automatically. ‘I’m sorry—’ She choked on a sob.

  He gave her a quick, appraising glance. ‘You look half frozen, if nothing else. There’s coffee within. Come along and I’ll warm you up before you go on to wherever you’re going.’

  Where was she going? Almost as though she were sleepwalking she followed him in through the blue door, along a long hall lined with doors to offices on either side, many of them with half doors opened at the top. He spoke casually to several people, said to an older man in a turned-around collar, ‘I’ll be down in the kids’ room for a few minutes if you want me for anything.’ Then he led Camilla down a flight of stairs, and into a big room made comfortable by a rug, a chintz-covered sofa, some shabby but comfortable chairs. There was one picture on the wall, a silk screen of a Rouault clown. It was a picture she knew and liked. Through another open door she saw half a dozen cribs, and some small round tables with low children’s chairs.

  Not caring who the young man was or where she was, she struggled for control. He went through a door, calling out to someone, and returned with a mug of coffee which steamed in the chilly room but smelled strong and stale. He put it in her automatically outstretched hand, then sat cross-legged in a sagging armchair, a slight, dark-haired young man with bright eyes partly veiled by long lashes.

  ‘If you don’t want to say anything it’s fine,’ he said. ‘But you’re obviously terribly upset. Do you want to talk about it?’

  She was outraged to the point of bursting: ‘My mother, at this moment, is fucking my once favorite astronomy professor.’ There was no word she could use which would be vulgar enough for what she felt. They were certainly not making love. Rose, Camilla’s mother, did not, she thought, know what it was to love. To be loved, yes; not to love.

  She hugged her arms about herself, holding in a deep shudder. The young man did not reply. She looked at him as he sat quietly in the overstuffed chair with sagging springs and rips in the red slipcover. His expression was alert and interested, and she did not feel that she was being judged, or found wanting. After a while he broke the silence. ‘I’m really sorry. That’s got to hurt a lot.’

  She got up and walked aimlessly about the shabby room, trying to pull herself together. He waited until she returned to her chair. She said, ‘Sorry. Sorry.’

  ‘Hey, you’ve got plenty to be upset about. Puts my own problems into proportion. Where do you live? Where’s home?’

  ‘I grew up in New York.’ Her voice steadied. ‘Then Italy. Now we live in Chicago.’

  ‘But your mother’s here?’

  ‘She always comes East to buy clothes, and she likes to hop up here and be taken for my sister.’ She added, ‘She’s very beautiful.’

  He nodded, as though absorbing. ‘I’m Mac. You?’

  ‘Camilla.’

  Suddenly the name sounded strange to her. Camilla. Camilla Dickinson. Where was her mother, who was making her so incoherently angry? In some motel, she supposed, like someone in a bad novel. Tears welled up again, streamed down her cheeks. She knew what would happen in the morning. There would be promises, promises that it would never happen again. It was her father who was the only man in Rose Dickinson’s life. Why did her father put up with it?

  She closed her eyes, suddenly overwhelmed with exhaustion and sleep. Her mother couldn’t manage without Rafferty Dickinson. It’s an illness, that’s what the shrink had said.

  She opened her eyes. This was no place to fall asleep. ‘Well. I’ve taken enough of your time, almost knocked you down, drowned you with my tears and my talk—’ She stood, putting the untouched mug of coffee on the table.

  He stood up, too. Shorter than she, but nicely built. ‘I’ll walk you back to your dorm.’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘It’s still sub-zero out there, and I have a feeling that if I let you go now I’ll never see you again.’ He helped her into her coat, pushed into his jacket.

  When they got outside, she shivered, looked around. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Just outside the Church House.’

  She hadn’t taken it in. Now she saw that the grey stone building was next to a church, which was across the street from the campus. She had hardly noticed it. Her dorm, her classrooms, were mostly at the other end of the campus. ‘Oh.’ Her voice was still brittle as ice; it could crack at any moment. Then she said, ‘Thank
s for rescuing me.’

  ‘You’re a very nice person to rescue,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you needed rescuing, but I’m glad I was there.’ They walked the rest of the way across the campus in silence. The night was brutal. Occasionally a branch would snap in the cold with a loud crack. Ice crunched under their feet. The old buildings seemed to reflect cold. The sky was white.

  At the entrance to her dorm building he said, ‘I don’t mean to pry, but what are you going to do about your mother and your professor? Not that it’s any of my business.’

  She stopped. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do. This is the first time she—she’s crossed my orbit.’

  He pulled her into the vestibule, which was steamy hot, smelling of snow and wet wool. ‘Will she come back to the dorm?’

  ‘Not tonight.’ Her face hardened. ‘I’ll send her back to Chicago.’

  ‘Will she go?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Camilla, this is a lousy situation. What about your professor?’

  ‘I have a three o’clock class with him tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing. Nothing. I’m certainly not going to refer to it.’

  ‘Will that make it go away?’

  ‘No. But it may make him give me an A.’

  ‘Cynicism doesn’t become you.’ His voice was gentle.

  She shrugged. Laughed. ‘I’d get an A anyhow.’

  ‘Will you have a cup of coffee or something with me tomorrow?’

  A group of girls shoved into the vestibule, laughing, brushing past them. ‘I’d like that.’ She glanced at the girls, grateful that none of them was one of her particular friends. No one who would say, ‘Oh, wow, who’s your boyfriend, Camilla?’

  She walked slowly into the hall, still feeling caught in pain, said hello to four girls at the card table in the smoker, playing their interminable game of bridge and piling up cigarette butts in the ashtray. If they ever studied, they kept it a secret. And yet they were seniors, ready to graduate in the spring.

  She climbed the stairs. She had to pass Luisa Rowan’s room to get to her own, and she shook her head, willing Luisa’s door to be closed. Luisa was her oldest friend, her only school friend from New York, sharp of eye, quick of mind, insatiably curious and, where Camilla was concerned, possessive.

  The door was open. Luisa was on the floor, breathing into an open notebook filled with diagrams of the various parts of the equine brain. Luisa was on full scholarship and studied wherever she was, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, long slugs of ashes dropping onto the pages. When Camilla commented on her nicotine-stained fingers Luisa replied that she had to have one vice, and when she got to medical school she probably wouldn’t be able to afford more than one pack a month. Smoking was still more a matter of morals than health, and Luisa liked to make her statements as clear as possible.

  Of course Luisa looked up to see who was passing. ‘So where’ve you been?’

  ‘I went for a walk. Where’s Nan?’

  Nan was Luisa’s roommate. At least Luisa had the sense not to want to room with Camilla.

  ‘Can’t you hear her?’

  She had not been listening, automatically isolating herself from sound. She let her ears open and heard the clear notes of the piano in the living room downstairs. Nan would be at the upright piano, her left leg stretched out to the side in her typical position (Luisa nagged her about it, saying that it would never do in a concert hall), her right foot hovering over but not touching the damper pedal. She was playing a fugue. As far as Nan was concerned, she and Scarlatti were alone in the living room.

  ‘Well?’ Luisa demanded.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘She gone? The Rose of Sharon?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning.’ Thank God, she thought, Luisa did not know about Rose Dickinson and the astronomy professor. Luisa’s concerned curiosity burned like flame on an open wound. ‘I’m going to take a bath.’ Camilla fled. She could get away from Luisa. She could not get away from her mother.

  And that, it seemed, was true for all her life, Rose’s shadow thrown darkly across it, even after her death. Even now, Camilla thought as she sat in the pleasant living room of her campus house with Raffi, even now Rose’s presence was there. Genetically she was visible in neither Camilla nor Raffi. Camilla’s hair had been black, her skin clear and very fair; Rafferty Dickinson had had some Welsh forebears. Raffi looked like Raffi. Perhaps her triangular face with high cheekbones came from her mother, Thessaly, but her bright hair and eyes were uniquely her own. Her eyes were hidden now as she took her fork and ran it idly around her empty plate.

  Camilla said, “My mother was so beautiful artists kept wanting to paint her.”

  “Some did, didn’t they?” Raffi asked. “Isn’t there one by Carroll at MoMA?”

  Camilla nodded.

  “She was—what’s that word I just came across in a novel? She was—ravishing.”

  “Yes. And, as far as she knew, that’s all she was. That was her only sense of herself.”

  Raffi scowled. “At least I don’t have that problem.”

  “Most of us don’t,” Camilla said. “And believe me, it is a problem. She believed that when her beauty went she would be nothing. She needed constant affirmation.”

  “That could be a bore,” Raffi said.

  “For my mother, ordinary affirmation wasn’t enough. She needed the affirmation of many men. She had an affair with one of my favorite professors when I was in college.”

  “Ugly.” Raffi looked sharply at her grandmother.

  “Very ugly. But it’s also how I met your grandfather.”

  Camilla took their plates out to the kitchen, gently removing the fork from Raffi’s fingers. She did not need to tell her, not yet, that the professor was Grantley Grange, nicknamed Red after the football player.

  Someone had had to explain to Camilla who the original Red Grange was. Football, basketball, baseball, meant nothing to her. She had been in an Italian convent school during high school. When she came to college her friends laughed at her and told her to keep her head in the stars.

  She had been confused. ‘So there was another Red Grange?’ she asked one day after astronomy class.

  One of her friends had answered patiently, ‘Yes, Camilla. There was the real one, a famous football player.’

  ‘So what about Professor—’

  ‘Professor Grange has red hair, and he just borrowed the nickname. Wanted to be named after somebody famous, maybe? though I can’t imagine Professor Grange with a football.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about football.’

  ‘Relax. It’s okay. Our Red Grange, the professor, is a top-notch teacher, and if he wants to call himself Red I don’t suppose it does any harm.’

  —Naïve, she thought.—I was unpardonably naïve.

  She left Luisa’s room, and climbed the final flight of stairs to her own room and closed the door, leaning against it with a sigh of relief. She loved her room, a cubbyhole under the eaves, one of the few singles in the house, with dormer windows, and the bed pushed against the slant of the roof. Luisa had called it an Emily Brontë room.

  She undressed, took towel and robe, and went to the washroom with its long rows of basins and showers and, thank heavens, one ancient tub. She lay back in the water, relaxing until she was pink except where her knees rose above the surface, suddenly surprised because the face of the young man who had taken her in out of the cold and given her coffee (undrinkable but hot) had for a moment superimposed itself over her mother and Professor Grantley Grange. She shivered, determined to keep her mother’s present infidelity from Luisa. She was so angry that she was completely caught up in her own head and could not get outside it, as had happened once when she’d had a bad case of flu and was nothing but a mass of aching bones and burning fever. That was similar to the present psychic pain in which she was trapped.

  If this was not her mother’s first affair, it was the first one in which Rose
had encroached on Camilla’s own territory. Camilla was, or had been, Professor Grantley Grange’s favorite student. Now she never wanted to see him again, even while she knew she would be in her place when he taught his next afternoon’s class.

  The door to the bath cubicle was pushed open and Luisa stuck her head in. ‘Oh, good, it’s you.’ Of course she hadn’t knocked.

  ‘Go away, Lu, I’m relaxing.’

  ‘You won’t relax until you wave your mother off. She been making waves again?’

  ‘She’s always making waves.’

  ‘Thank God my mother never comes to visit, and if she did, she wouldn’t be taken for my sister. The school of hard knocks shows in her face. Something’s up. I haven’t seen you this tense in a long time.’

  ‘I’m always tense when my mother’s here.’

  ‘Not this tense.’

  ‘Get off my back, Luisa.’

  Luisa perched on an old stool, once white but now with much of the surface paint chipped off, revealing layers of blue and green underneath. ‘Listen, old pal, I care about you, that’s all.’

  ‘I know. Thanks, Lu.’ She lay back in the tub and closed her eyes.

  Luisa was not central to the story Raffi wanted Camilla to tell. Neither was she peripheral. Luisa had been part of Camilla’s life it seemed forever, an irritant, like that grain of sand in the oyster shell. Camilla pulled herself back from the past of her own college days to the present, to her comfortable house, to Raffi sitting opposite her at the marble-topped table, to Raffi’s unexpected and disturbing questions. “You know my friend Luisa Rowan?”

  “Dr. Rowan, the shrink. Sure, I like her a lot. Does she have something to do with all this?”

  Camilla sighed, then stood up as the doorbell rang. “Here comes my gang.”

  “You can’t stop now.”

  “I can’t go on, with a room full of students.”

  “When, then?”

  Camilla sighed again. “Tomorrow. I don’t have anything on tomorrow evening. Come and we’ll eat together.” Why did it seem that opening old wounds, old but never completely healed, would be easier over food?

  “I’ll go out the back door,” Raffi said. “I still look like hell.”

  Raffi let herself out the kitchen door and went across the campus to her dorm. She was in one of the old Victorian brick buildings, six storeys high.