Camilla (2 page)

This was the first time I had ever heard my father be rude to anyone, and it startled me. I said, “It's in my room. I came back to get the box.” I looked at Jacques and then at my mother and then at my father. My father is a very large man. He is tall and broad and his body is as solid as a stone. His hair is as strong and definite as black marble and the streaks of white that touch his temples are like the markings in marble. His shoulders are as broad as the shoulders on the statue of Atlas on Fifth Avenue near Rockefeller Center, the one who is holding up the world and looks as though he is slipping off his pedestal from the weight of it. But my father's foot would not slip.

“Fix you a drink, Nissen?” my father asked.

“Thanks—no,” Jacques murmured. “I must be going. I have an appointment downtown.”

I did not wait to hear him say good-bye but slipped out of the living room and went back to my room. I turned off the light. At first I could not see anything; for a moment it was like being blind, but then the light came in through my window from the lighted windows of the apartments across the court. I pushed the curtains aside and looked out. When I was much younger I used to think that living on the court was like living partway down the rabbit's hole in
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
. Sometimes Luisa and I will stand by the
window and watch it grow dark and tell each other things about the people who live in the other apartments. Or I will try on clear winter nights to show Luisa the stars. You have to lean far out and look up through the rabbit's hole of buildings to see them, but when it is very cold and clear I can point out Aldebaran and Betelgeuse, Bellatrix and Sirius, the Pleiades and Perseus.

Three sides of the court that form the rabbit's hole are made up of the big apartment house in which I live. The fourth side is a smaller, lower apartment house, and I can see the roof where there is a big tank with a ladder going up to it, but which I have never seen anybody climb. It is across this roof that I can find the most stars. Sometimes on warm days young women will come up onto the roof in bathing suits and spread blankets out and lie in the sun, and in the evening they will come up with young men and watch the moon rise above the broken edges of the city and kiss the way I saw my mother and Jacques kiss. The rooms in this smaller building are different from the ones in our house. They are more cluttered and the people don't bother to pull down their shades or close their venetian blinds as often and there are fewer maids turning on lamps and lighting candles on mahogany tables and bustling around kitchens in the evenings. There is something very comforting about kitchens. It always cheers me up to stand by my bedroom window and watch dinner being cooked and imagine things about happy families with lots of children.

I stood there at my window after I had left my mother and father and Jacques saying good-bye, and looked through the veil of falling rain into a big kitchen in the smaller house
where a whole family, mother and father and four children and a grandmother, too, were sitting around a big blue kitchen table eating scrambled eggs and bacon for supper. Then my door opened and I heard my father's voice.

“Camilla.”

I turned around and he was standing, almost filling up the doorway, outlined in warm yellow light from the hall.

“Here I am, Father,” I said.

“What are you doing all alone in the dark?”

“Just looking at the rain.”

“That's a melancholy business,” my father said. “Turn on your light and put on one of your pretty dresses and come out to dinner with me.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Your mother has a headache,” my father said, “so she's going to bed to have tea and toast, and I thought it might be fun for us to go out cavorting together. How about it?”

“Fine.” I moved away from the window and turned on the light by my desk, blinking against its sharpness.

“I'll give you half an hour to primp in, and then we'll go.” My father gave me a clumsy pat on the shoulder and left me.

I went into the bathroom and took a shower and brushed my teeth. Brushing my teeth is a nuisance because of my braces, though it's easier now that the outside ones are off and I just have them on the inside. While I was brushing my teeth my mother came to the bathroom door in a rose velvet negligee and said, “Camilla darling, when you're dressed, come to my room and—heavens, darling, you've got toothpaste all over your face—and I'll fix your hair for you and you can use some of my makeup.” Her face was puckered
with anxiety and her eyelashes were just a little damp and stuck-together-looking, as though she had started to cry and then decided against it. Her pale hair was tumbled about her shoulders and it looked softer and more luxuriant than the velvet of her gown. “All right, Camilla darling?”

“All right, Mother,” I said, and started to put the top back on the toothpaste. It slipped out of my fingers and rolled like a little round black beetle down the slippery sides of the washbasin and into the drain, where I had to fish and fish for it with my fingers; and all the while my mother stood there in the doorway, looking as though she was about to burst into tears, and watched me.

“You can use my tweezers, darling, to get that nasty top if you— Really, they're lots easier than your fingers.” But just then I got the top out and rinsed it off and put it back on the toothpaste.

My mother turned to go, saying as she left, “Do hurry now, darling, and don't keep your father— Rafferty hates to be kept waiting.”

I washed my face again to make sure I got all the toothpaste off and went back to my room and dressed. I put on the sheer smoky stockings my mother had given me for my birthday and which I had never worn before and a dress she had bought me that is neither silver nor green, and that changes color as you move in it. It is a very beautiful dress and the one dress-up thing that I have that I really like and don't feel strange and uncomfortable in. Luisa gets annoyed at me because I care about clothes, but I love pretty things when they seem right for me.

When I went into my mother's room she was lying on her chaise longue with a soft blanket over her knees, but she got
up as I came in and stood looking at me. And her face was suddenly very sad.

“Yes,” my mother said, “you look very—oh, yes, Camilla darling, you look lovely!” And she pushed the sadness out of her face and wrinkled up her eyes in a smile at me, the way she used to when I was very small.

“Now,” she said, “let's—here, put this on, darling,” and she handed me a little plastic makeup cape to tie around my shoulders. Then she took her brush off the glass top of her dressing table and started to brush my hair and as she brushed she talked. “Your hair is as black as Rafferty's, Camilla. You look like a little elf, with that solemn peaked face and the black hair and thick bangs. It's too bad your forehead's so high, but then the bangs cover— And those green eyes are very interesting. Did you like the doll Jacques brought you? He came this afternoon just to bring you the doll. Of course you're old for dolls, but then it's such a special— And then he wanted to talk to me because he's terribly unhappy. That wife of his, the things she—oh, I could never tell you, not till you're older, but the life Jacques lived with— And what an unattractive woman, too, so angular and brusque— And now with the divorce and everything—so of course I had to comfort him. Those shoes don't really go with that dress, Camilla. You haven't any that do, though, have you? I must— How would you like to wear my silver shoes tonight? The odd thing is that Jacques thinks I'm so strong. Now that
is
odd, isn't— He doesn't know me the way you and Raff do. But he keeps telling me: Rose, you're the strong one, so I have to pretend to be strong, as though he were a little boy, you know.”

I thought of the young men and women on the roof in the
summer and on the mild winter nights and I thought of the way my mother had held her arms around Jacques that afternoon. I didn't say anything.

My mother stopped brushing my hair and selected a paintbrush from a bouquet of paintbrushes in a little vase; she twirled it in a small jar of red and painted on my mouth, drawing first the outlines of my lips and then filling them in with quick careful strokes. And she took a little round sheepskin powder puff and brushed it over my lips and then she took the paintbrush and made the shape of my mouth again.

“If Rafferty asks you—” she started, and then she went to her big closet and brought me her silver shoes, “of course I don't know why he would,” she said, and took her rabbit's foot, touched it to her rouge, then rubbed it over my cheeks and the very tip of my ears and the tip of my chin. “But if he does,” she said, “I know you'll—” She took a string of pearls and hung them around my neck, lifting up my hair in back to fasten the clasp. “But of course I know I can always trust you, my own darling Camilla, because you're a big girl now. You're really grown-up. But if—” and then the telephone rang. She ran to answer it quickly before Carter could get to the extension in the hall. “Hello!” she cried into the mouthpiece. “Oh, hello!” And then her face dropped again into the look of a sad small flower and she said, “It's for you, Camilla. It's Luisa. But don't talk too long because Rafferty—you mustn't keep him waiting.”

I went to the telephone and said, “Hello.”

“Hello,” Luisa said. There was a buzzing on the line and it sounded as though she were calling long-distance instead of from downtown on Ninth Street. Well, Greenwich Village
is
almost a different world from Park Avenue, more exciting, and a little frightening. Luisa's voice came distantly through the buzz. “I guess you're not alone where I can talk to you.”

“No,” I said.

“Oh, blast. Well, can you come down? Have you had dinner? What about your parents? Mine are both out and Frank and I had a fight and he ate up all my share of the food. Come on down and we can go somewhere and have a hamburger and a milkshake.”

“I can't,” I said. “I have to— I'm going out to have dinner with my father.”

“Oh, blast,” Luisa said again. “Well, are you all right? You sound funny.”

“I'm okay.”

“Well, listen, are you going to get to school early tomorrow?”

“Yes,” I said. “I'll have to. I don't think I'll be able to get anywhere near all my homework done tonight.”

“Okay,” Luisa said. “I'll get there early too.”

“Okay,” I said. “Good night.”

I hung up and turned around and my father was standing waiting by my mother's dressing table and my mother was sitting on the dressing-table stool and looking at him.

“Don't keep Camilla out too long, Raff,” she said. “She's still just a baby.”

“A very elegant baby, then.” My father smiled at me. He looked down at my mother again. “Headache any better?”

She nodded, but carefully, as though it would hurt her head to move it with a jerk. “A tiny bit. But come home to me soon, Rafferty, don't—” She took a bottle of perfume and touched her fingertip to its crystal lip and dabbed a drop behind
each of my ears and at my wrists. “Come home to me soon, Raff,” she repeated, pleading like a child.

My father kissed her on top of her head, brushing his lips briefly against the softness of her hair. Then he said, “Get on your coat and hat, Camilla. I'll meet you in the hall.”

I put on my Sunday coat, which is dark, dark green with a little silver squirrel collar and has a little squirrel muff; and I put on my hat, which is the same green as the coat and has two little squirrel pompons on it, and pulled my white gloves out of the pocket where I had stuffed them the last time I wore the coat. Fortunately they were clean, so I put them on and hurried out to the hall to meet my father. He took my hand and drew it through his arm; his arm felt strong and protecting, as though it ought to have the power to keep things from going wrong. When we got into the elevator, because I was with my father the elevator boy didn't leer at me but just said, “Good evening, Miss Camilla. Good evening, Mr. Dickinson.”

Out on the street it was still raining. The rain fell down between the buildings and made a haze about the streetlights and splattered on the sidewalks, and in the streets it lay in rainbow puddles of oil. The sky sagged down between the buildings and I stood there wondering why it is that when it rains at night in New York the sky is a much lighter color than it is on a clear night, and there is always a sickish pink tinge to it.

The doorman had on a slicker and carried an umbrella; when my father and I came out he put his whistle to his lips and blew for a taxi. Taxis came by but they were full; the people in them kept glancing at us standing there on the wet pavement just in the shelter of the building and seemed to be
congratulating themselves that they were warmly seated in a taxi while we were standing there in the dark and cold. The canopy that was usually out in front of our apartment building was down to be mended or painted or whatever it is they do to those canopies when they take them down, and the rain poured through the wet, gleaming frame. The doorman kept blowing his whistle and taxis kept rushing by.

“You aren't dressed for walking in the rain, are you, Camilla?” my father asked me.

“Oh, I don't mind. I love to walk in the rain. Luisa and I walk miles in the rain,” I said.

My father looked at my little fur muff and collar and the fur pompons on my hat and said, “But not in those clothes. Rose—your mother would be very angry if I let you ruin your brand-new winter outfit.”

So again we waited and again the doorman blew his whistle and again taxis rushed by and I was just about to say, “Oh, please let's walk, Father,” when a taxi drew up and a man in top hat and tails bent forward and paid the driver and then went flying into the apartment house and my father pushed me into the taxi and climbed in after me.