Camilla (28 page)

“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.