Camilla (20 page)

“No,” I said.

“Not—repulsive to you?”

“No,” I said.

“Sure? Could wear my imitation legs if it bothers you, seeing me like this.”

“No,” I said.

“Since there's no hope of my ever being able to use real prosthetics and they're just for looks, don't see much point in wearing them. Always depresses me to put them on. Understand that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Bring your chair up closer where I can see you better,” David commanded. “There. That's fine. Don't mind being close to me?”

“No.”

“If I could paint I'd like to do your portrait. Why hasn't Frank brought you around before?”

“We've only really known each other for a little while.”

“New discovery, hey? Exciting discovering somebody new, isn't it? Camilla, Camilla, glad Frank brought you over this morning. Been—God, been all the way through to China this morning, I've been so low. For some reason you've brought me at least back to limbo again.”

Frank came in then with a pot of coffee and some cups on a tray. “I don't make as good coffee as Mrs. Gauss does,” he said, “so if it isn't any good you can gripe at me. Dave and I like ours black. How about you, Cam?”

“I'll have it black too.” I'd never had coffee black before. Mother doesn't like me to drink coffee and I always have cocoa for breakfast or sometimes tea; the few times I've had coffee it's been with plenty of sugar and cream, or French fashion, with half hot milk. This tasted awful.

“How about some cookies, Frank?” David asked.

“Okay.” Frank went back on out. I noticed how long his legs were. They seemed extra long because of David's having
no legs. Long and thin and awkward as he walked. I am tall for my age, but Frank is much taller than I am.

“Oh, yes, Camilla,” David said as soon as Frank had left the room. “By far the nicest of the girls Frank has brought to see me.”

“Has he brought other girls to see you?” I asked. “I mean besides Luisa?”

David looked at me and raised one of his dark, peaked eyebrows. “A few. Very pretty, most of them. But without any importance whatsoever. Glad Frank found you. Better if you were ten years older, but child or not, I'm glad he's found you. Didn't care for that little Italian girl he was going around with. What was her name? Yes. Pompilia Riccioli. No, you're better for Frank than Pompilia, ewe lamb though you are.”

I was beginning to hate the name of Pompilia Riccioli. Riccioli of Bologna named most of the craters on the moon, and I wished I could banish Pompilia to one of them.

Frank came in then with the cookies and he and David started talking about the country, about the world. Somehow the things we learn in Current Events at school aren't any closer to me than the things we learn in history. The French Revolution seemed far closer to me than what was going on here or in Europe. But as Frank and David talked it began to become something much nearer to me; it was no longer required reading for school; it was something that had to do with me, personally, Camilla Dickinson. It was something that might affect my entire future life.

I remembered then what Frank and I had talked about in the park, how to be alive is to be happy. I remembered it because
right at this moment I felt more alive than I had ever felt before, and I felt terribly happy.

I wonder why it is so much easier to describe sorrow than it is to describe happiness, even happiness so great that it can make you forget sorrow. I couldn't ever put into words the happiness that I felt whenever I was with Frank, and that I felt that morning talking with Frank and David, even though the things talked about weren't happy. Perhaps it wasn't right to be filled with joy while Frank and David talked about tragic things and with David himself a symbol of these things, but I couldn't help it.

The atmosphere of the room, though they were talking about death and destruction, seemed to me to be full of life and construction. These were the kind of people who belonged to life, to the kind of world I wanted to grow up into; and it was people like my mother who did not like to talk about the war or the future or anything unpleasant who belonged to death and the past. I must have looked very solemn thinking these things because Frank broke out of a long speech and said, “I'm sorry if we're distressing you, Camilla, but I think when you come to the end of a civilization you ought to be aware of it.”

But sitting there, listening to Frank and David, civilization seemed for me not to be ending, but to be beginning.

And now the amazing thing was that while they were talking about the war, and about hate and evil and love and life, I suddenly stopped hating my mother. It wasn't that I felt about her the way I used to, the old secure uncomplicated way; but now I no longer resented her being Rose Dickinson. Sitting there and being excited because I was Camilla Dickinson and alive, I knew suddenly that I would be able to put
my arms around my mother and kiss her good night again with love. I could love her in spite of Jacques. Then I tried not to hate Jacques, but the best I could do was to make my mind a gray blank about him. I turned my mind back to Frank and David and the things they were talking about, and I asked David, “Is there going to be another world war?” And I forgot my mother and Jacques and began to shiver inside myself.

David looked at me and there was dark rage in his eyes. “What do you think?”

“I—I don't know.” I held myself very still in my chair because I didn't want either David or Frank to see my fear.

David looked at me for a long moment and his mouth was very tight with pain, but I could not tell whether it was his body that was paining him, or his heart. “Always another war,” he said. “Always has been, always will be. Frank will go off to it and he'll come back looking like me, or he'll come back blind, or without hands, or arms. Or not at all. Or perhaps I am being optimistic. Maybe there won't be anything to come back to. Just a gaping hole in the universe to show where our particular brand of fools lived and committed suicide. I shock you, Camilla? I make you unhappy? Can't help it. You're old enough to realize these things.”

“Yes,” I said.

“No man can participate in mass murder and not lose his understanding of the value of human life. But it has a value, Camilla. Even a life like mine. Life is the greatest gift that could ever be conceived, but before any of us ever were born those who had gone before us had already deprived it of half its value. A daffodil pushing up through the dark earth to the spring, knowing somehow deep in its roots that spring and
light and sunshine will come, has more courage and more knowledge of the value of life than any human being I've met. Model yourself after the daffodil, Camilla. Have the courage to push your head up out of the darkness.”

Frank said with a grin, “I told Camilla her education had been neglected. You're making up for it even faster than I'd expected, Dave.”

“Too much for you, Camilla?” David asked.

“No,” I said, and this was true. I was frightened, but I felt also a tremendous grateful awe that they should be talking to me in this way, that they should be taking the trouble to try to educate me. David had said that all the other girls Frank had brought to see him were completely unimportant. Did that mean that he thought that I was not unimportant?

“After the last war,” David was saying, “I mean the one before mine, there was the lost generation. Difference was that then everybody was so conscious of being lost. They
wanted
to be lost. Enjoyed it. Weren't really afraid. Still had a future. We're the ones who're really lost. Don't mean me, or anybody else who was personally ruined by the war, but all the kids today. You, Camilla. Frank. You don't want to be lost.”

“No,” Frank said.

David held out his empty cup. “Pour me another cup of coffee.” And as he took a sip out of his fresh cup and put it back on the table he said, “Do you suppose God feels about his creation—world and its people—the way a writer feels about his work? Same joy of inspiration, and then the horrible depression when it goes wrong, when it loses its nobility of conception? Wouldn't blame him for ripping this one out of the typewriter and stuffing it into the incinerator.” Then he looked sharply at me. “Nothing to say, Camilla?”

I shook my head.

“Very rare quality in a woman,” he said, “the ability to keep quiet when you have nothing to say. Is she always like that, Frank? Or is it just my influence?”

“She's always like that,” Frank said.

Suddenly a strange look came to David's eyes, as though he were moving far, far away from us. His eyes seemed to go back and back, and the lines cut in his face seemed all at once to grow deeper. He reached for a small box on the table by him and took out a pill. Frank got up quickly and poured him a glass of water from a pitcher that stood on the table and as David reached for it I could see that his hand was shaking. He swallowed the pill and drank some water and leaned his head back against the chair, his lids drawn tightly over his eyes. Frank waited until at last the eyes were open again, and then said, “We'd better go now, Dave.”

David smiled, but it was a difficult smile; it was as though it took a great deal of muscular power for him to pull the corners of his mouth upward; and the smile scarcely came into his eyes at all. “Okay,” he said. Then he looked at me and said slowly, with difficulty, “When will you come play . . . chess with me, Camilla? Can you . . . come tomorrow? It's Sunday.”

I was going to a concert with my mother in the afternoon, so I said, “I could come tomorrow evening after supper.”

“All right,” David said. “Thank you.” He closed his eyes again and his voice, too, seemed to go off into the distance. Frank and I left him. As we passed what I guess must have been the living room, Frank called out good-bye to Mrs. Gauss, who had the radio turned on very low to some woman's program as she sat there sewing. It was an odd sort
of room to me, like the living rooms in some of the foreign films Luisa and I had been to, dusty and dark in color, with a round table covered by a long brown velvet throw, and a hanging lamp over it with fringe on the shade.

Mrs. Gauss came to the door with us. “Good-bye, Frank. It's good of you to come so often.”

“I like coming,” Frank said. “This is Camilla Dickinson. I don't think I introduced you when we came in.”

Mrs. Gauss and I both murmured how-do-you-do and good-bye and Frank and I left. We went down the elevator in silence and we walked slowly along the street and then Frank said, “You don't mind going back tomorrow night?”

“No.”

“Did you like David?”

“Yes. I—”

“What?”

“Oh, Frank,” I said, “it's the first time I—oh, I knew there was a war and everything, I even saw about it in the newsreels, I was scared of it, but none of it—I didn't know. I didn't realize. Frank, I don't think most people do.”

When I was first getting to know Luisa I felt that she was giving me glimpses of worlds I'd never seen, almost as though she were giving me a telescope to look through at the stars; but I realized now that Frank's telescope was much stronger than Luisa's; or perhaps it was only that it was more suited to my eyes.

“Hungry?” Frank asked me then. “Ready for lunch?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think I am.”

“The paper says it's going to snow tonight.”

“Good. I hope it does,” I said. “I love snow.” And I
thought how wonderful it would be to walk about the streets in the snow with Frank, to feel the snow feather-soft on our faces and hands, and to walk along the quiet streets that somehow seem so much narrower, so much more intimate, during a snowfall.

We ate spaghetti in a small Italian restaurant that Frank said was owned by the parents of a friend of his, and all the time we ate we talked, talked, talked. It seemed as though if we talked forever we would never finish saying all the things we had to say to each other. After lunch we walked. We weren't walking anywhere in particular, just wandering slowly along the streets and talking, and the sky was gray and full and heavy, and one or two flakes of snow drifted gently down.

“It's starting to snow,” Frank said.

“Yes.”

“David doesn't ask many people to come see him. There are one or two people who come quite often, but not many. And he doesn't like strangers. I'm glad he liked you.”

“I am too,” I said.

Frank pulled his hand out of the pocket of his overcoat and took my hand. When he had taken my hand once in the park, other times when I had touched his fingers, it had seemed quite natural and unimportant. Now I was terribly conscious in each finger, in my palm, in every bit of the skin of my hand, of the contact between us. I could feel it somehow not just in my hand but all over me. It was such a big feeling, such a strange one, that we walked for quite a while and I hardly heard anything that Frank was saying because the feel of his hand seemed to fill my ears too.

Then I heard him still talking about David. “You know,
Cam, I've always been terribly—proud—somehow, that David has cared enough about me to want me to come see him. I mean he—I mean, I must seem just a kid to him, and he really talks to me as though I were—” Then he broke off and looked at me and said, “Gee, Camilla, you look pretty today! That color you have on. I was noticing it at lunch. It sort of goes with your eyes . . . There's a good movie on at the Eighth Street. Let's go, hunh?”

We sat together in the darkness at the movies and it was a good picture, but I was too conscious of Frank sitting there beside me really to keep my mind on it. Afterward I remembered I'd promised to call Mother, so we went to a phone booth and I called my mother to tell her I was all right, and for a moment I was no longer all right because the line was busy and I was afraid she might be talking with Jacques. But when the line was cleared and I talked to her, her voice was clear and casual and I went back out to Frank and forgot about her and was with Frank, all of me. It's a funny thing how sometimes your body can be in a room with people, but you yourself won't really be there; you'll be with someone else who isn't in the room at all. But all of me was with Frank and I kept thinking, I wonder if I will ever be as happy as this again.