Camilla

by Madeleine L'engle

  I turned and left the apartment and started walking toward Sixth Avenue. I would have liked to cry as Luisa had cried, but whatever it is that governs one’s control would not release its hold. My eyes stung, they were so dry, and the sharp December wind blowing in from the Hudson burned my face.

  I didn’t know what to do or where to go. I could not go home. Mother thought that I was out with Frank and I knew that I could not bear her questions or, what would be infinitely worse, her pity. Finally I went uptown, to Central Park, to the obelisk where I had met Frank. It was almost dark. A few mothers and nursemaids were taking children home to dinner; a few kids were still playing around. The sky was that color that is partly blue and partly green and that seems lit from inside by a special radiance; and the bare branches of the trees were delicate and lacy against it. In the few puddles at the sides of the walks a thin black lace of ice was forming.

  Then I thought of David. Perhaps David would help me.

  But when I got to Perry Street I almost didn’t ring David’s bell. I felt now that I couldn’t talk to anybody in the world. And then, just as I had decided that I would go away, that I would just walk and walk until my mind cleared, I raised my hand and pushed the bell.

  After a moment Mrs. Gauss opened the door and she did not seem pleased to see me. She stood in the doorway, saying nothing, staring at me with unfriendly eyes, until I asked, “May I see David, please?”

  “I think you’d better not,” she said. “He isn’t expecting you, is he? He didn’t say anything to me about it.”

  “No,” I said, “but—”

  “It’s very hard on him when people come unexpectedly,” she said. “He likes to know beforehand.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and turned to go.

  But David’s voice called, “Ma, who are you talking to?”

  “It’s just the superintendent,” she said. “Now, don’t you worry, Davy boy.”

  I looked at Mrs. Gauss, my mouth open with indignation. “But—” I started.

  David called. “If it’s Mrs. Tortaglia I want to see her.”

  “She can’t come now. She’s very busy,” Mrs. Gauss called back.

  “Send her in!” David called, his voice full of angry command.

  Mrs. Gauss started to push me toward the door, but I was filled with sudden anger, and I broke away from her and ran past her into David’s room.

  David was in his chair and when he saw me he said, “Mrs. Tortaglia, eh? I thought so.”

  Mrs. Gauss had followed me to the doorway and stood there behind me, glaring. I was frightened, but my anger and my need to talk to David were still greater than my fear.

  “Okay, Ma,” David said. “Never were any good as a liar. Camilla isn’t going to tire me. Go in the kitchen and have a glass of wine and cheer up.”

  She shot me another angry look and left us.

  “Sorry, honey,” David said. “Don’t let her upset you. Thought she was keeping you away for my good. After you left on Sunday, had what I suppose you’d call a relapse. Got into a depression she thought would drive me out of my mind or kill me outright. Just crawling out of it, and since it happened after you were here, she blames it on you. Sorry she was rude to you. But don’t judge her too harshly.”

  “I shouldn’t have come,” I said. “I just—”

  David shut the book he had been reading and put it down on the table by him. “Loves me too much, that’s all,” he said. “Wants to protect me. Can’t get it through her head the last thing I want is protection. Glad you came tonight, Camilla. Won’t be bad for me. Won’t get into one of my gruesome glooms. Wasn’t really you, anyhow. Just me, myself, and I, one of the lousiest trios I know anything about.” Then he looked at me sharply. “What’s the matter? She frighten you?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not that.”

  “Something’s happened to upset you. What is it?”

  “It’s just—” I started, but I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t tell him that Frank had gone, and without a word, without a word.

  And then David said, “Upset about Frank’s leaving? It’s too bad, but it was inevitable. Not so much the Cincinnati deal, but that Mona and Bill should break up. Frank got over for a few minutes this morning to say good-bye. All pretty sudden, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I must have looked as though David had slapped me, because he asked, very gently, “Camilla, didn’t Frank say good-bye to you?”

  “No.”

  David reached out and took my hand and pulled me toward him and I dropped to my knees by his chair because my legs would not hold me up. He pulled me even closer to him so that my head rested against the hardness of his chest, and he said softly, “Camilla, don’t judge Frank harshly. Everybody sometimes behaves in ways that are completely unexplainable, even to himself. Frank would never have hurt you deliberately.”

  But I knew now that nothing David could say would comfort me. Now I remembered Pompilia Riccioli and the little Italian girls, and that Frank had found time to say goodbye to David, but he had not cared enough about me to say good-bye to me.

  Then David pressed his lips against my hair and then he raised my face and kissed my mouth, but this time I felt no lovely warmth flowing through me, only a deep numbing ache that seemed to paralyze my whole body.

  David sighed. “Can’t help you, can I, Camilla? Can’t help you at all.”

  I shook my head and struggled to my feet.

  David said, “You’ll get over it. Know that, don’t you, Camilla?”

  “No,” I said.

  David said, “Right now you don’t want to get over it, do you? But whether you want to or not, you will. That’s the hell of it.”

  “I have to go now,” I said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know. Just somewhere. To walk.”

  “Camilla,” David said, catching me by the hand and pulling me toward him again, “you know Frank was just the first one for you, don’t you? Believe me, believe me, it’s best this way, without bitterness. Had a beautiful thing together, you and Frank; now it’s ended, through neither of your faults, so you’ll always have it. No one can take it away from you.”

  But there is bitterness, I thought. There is bitterness. Frank left and he didn’t say good-bye to me. He didn’t care enough to say good-bye.

  “It’s when someone you’ve loved tries to make the beautiful thing there’s been between you into nothing, tries to deny it, that you lose it. You and Frank will always possess what you’ve had together even if you never meet again. Probably more if you never meet again.”

  “Good-bye,” I said.

  David sighed again. “Okay, honey. Know you can’t listen to me. Come and see your old Uncle David soon, will you?”

  “Yes,” I said, though I knew that seeing David would always hurt because he was somehow part of Frank, and also because it was with Frank and me the way David had said it wasn’t. By not caring enough even to say good-bye to me Frank had destroyed everything. All I wanted now was to forget him, though I knew that wasn’t possible. And now I was glad I was going to boarding school.

  I left David and walked over to the Stephanowskis’ music shop, but there were several people standing around waiting to be helped. Mrs. Stephanowski excused herself from a man in a derby hat and hurried over to me, taking both my hands in hers.

  “So Franky’s left,” she exclaimed, “and your little heart is sore. I know, darling, I know.”

  “Do you?” I asked. “David thinks I’m too young to have it really matter.”

  “Of course you’re not too young,” she said. “Of course it really matters. I wish I could talk to you now, but look at all these people . . .” Mrs. Stephanowski looked at me with a worried expression. “Will you come to dinner tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Franky came by this morning to say good-bye to us. It’s a bad thing he’s going through.”

  “Yes,” I said, bu
t I had no room in me for pity for Frank. Had he said good-bye to Pompilia Riccioli, too, and all the others Mona preferred to Camilla Dickinson because they were at least human?

  Mrs. Stephanowski had to go back to her customers. I stood there for a moment listening to music pouring in a confused blur of sound from the listening booths; then I turned and left the shop.

  I stood there for a moment on the street, and finally I started to walk uptown. Night was all about me and the city was ugly to me and dirty and I felt as though my heart inside me were bleeding and if it would only bleed enough I would die and I could think of nothing more beautiful than to die. And I thought of how angry Frank would be, of how he had shaken me when I said in the top balcony at the movies that I wanted to die, and then I walked several blocks doing nothing but keeping myself from crying openly on the street.

  I wanted to walk all the way home. I thought that if I could walk all the way home there would be nothing left in me but tiredness, and I would be able to get into bed and sleep. But it was too far. My legs began to buckle under me, so I took a subway.

  I knew when I got home that Jacques was there with my mother. I knew and I didn’t care. The doorman said, “Good evening, Miss Camilla,” and smiled at me with the eager and curious smile that no longer had the power to make me writhe inside.

  I stepped into the elevator and the elevator boy said, as though he had something exotic-tasting in his mouth, “Good afternoon, Miss Camilla. You have company upstairs.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “That Mr. Nissen is upstairs. He asked especially if you was in and then he said he’d go upstairs and wait for you.”

  So the elevator boy looked at me with that giggly look and let me out on the fourteenth floor, which is really the thirteenth floor. I pulled my key out of the pocket of my navy blue coat and let myself into the apartment. I could hear their voices in the living room. My mother came out to meet me.

  “Camilla,” she said, “we’ve been worried.”

  “Why?”

  “Luisa’s waiting in your room for you.”

  “I don’t want to see Luisa,” I said. “I don’t want to see anybody.”

  “Oh, my darling,” my mother said, “I know how unhappy you are about Frank’s going to Cincinnati, but think how much worse it is for Luisa and Mrs. Rowan. After all, to lose a son or a brother is—and you’re so young, darling. Just wait till you get away to boarding school and start having fun with the other girls. Darling, you’ll get over it. I promise you. You always believe Mother when she makes a promise, don’t you?”

  “No,” I said.

  A sudden darkness flickered over my mother’s face. Then she drew herself up. “Darling,” she said, “Jacques is here to say good-bye. Surely you’ll let me at least say good-bye to him? Surely I owe him that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I have nothing to do with it.”

  “Camilla,” my mother started, and then she changed her mind about whatever it was that she had been going to say, and said instead, “Go in and say good-bye to him. Tell him I’m waiting in the hall for him. Then go in to Luisa.”

  It was a long time since I had heard Mother speak with such authority, and I obeyed her. I went into the living room. None of the lights were on and Jacques stood by the window looking out over the city.

  “I’ve come to say good-bye,” I said.

  Oh, good-bye, good-bye, oh, Frank, good-bye.

  He turned around and held out his hand. “Good-bye, Camilla, darling. This business has been hard on you, too, hasn’t it?”

  I did not answer.

  He looked very sadly into my face and for the first time I didn’t have it in me to hate him. “It’s a very difficult thing to realize that your parents aren’t the completely perfect human beings that parents ought to be, isn’t it?” he said. “And I include your father in that statement as well as your mother. As for me, I’m not your parent, so there wasn’t ever any reason for me to be perfect, was there? Well, good-bye, Camilla. Till we meet again, if we ever do.” He dropped my hand then and went out to my mother in the hall. There was no place for me to go except to my bedroom, where Luisa was waiting.

  Luisa was standing, as Jacques had been, by the window, only she had turned on all the lights; and if she was seeing anything out the window it must have been through and beyond the reflection of the room in the black glass. When I came in she handed me a letter. “Here,” she said. “Frank told me to give this to you. I wasn’t going to give it to you at all. I was going to throw it away. But then I— Here it is.”

  I took the letter without saying anything and turned my back to her and opened it.

  “Camilla,” it began starkly. “Bill and Mona are busting up. I’m going with Bill to Cincinnati. Luisa’s staying with Mona. So that’s that. I can’t say good-bye to you. Do you know why? You’ll just have to know. I can’t write what I feel, either. You’ll just have to know that too.” He had signed it, “Love, Frank,” and the “Love” was written in a hurried, shaky way, as though it was a difficult word for him to write.

  I folded the letter and put it back in the envelope.

  “Frank told me to take the letter up to you at school,” Luisa said. “He said to be sure I got it to you before school was out.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry,” Luisa said. “I guess I wanted you to be unhappy too.”

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow at school.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “Do you think you could get there early? I mean if you’re going away soon too—”

  “All right,” I said again.

  “I have to go back to Mona now. She needs me. She didn’t want me to leave at all but I said I had to bring you Frank’s letter. Well—good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” I said.

  I turned out all the lights and I went over to the window. Lights were on in most of the windows across the court, and above the buildings the sky was dark and clear and a single bright star was throbbing against the blackness. I did not wish on it because at this particular moment there wasn’t anything left to wish. I held Frank’s letter in my hand, and I knew that I would always have it to look at and to keep, and that now I did not have to try to forget him.

  But I knew I could not read it again yet, and that for a while at any rate I would not be able to think of him.

  I looked at the roof of the smaller building, but there was no one there, no lonely woman leaning over the parapet, no one to stand there to watch the moon rise over the broken edges of the city, no one to kiss there in the dark the way I had seen my mother and Jacques kiss.

  I looked back at the star and it pulsed and throbbed with living light and all of a sudden my eyes filled with tears and my chest was choked with sobs.

  No, I said to myself sternly. No, Camilla.

  Betelgeuse, I told myself with anger, Betelgeuse is in the constellation of Orion, the Hunter. It is the first star whose diameter was measured. It is three hundred million miles in diameter and it is five hundred light-years distant.

  I told myself these facts and the tears retreated and I knew that I would not have to cry.