Camilla by Madeleine L'engle

Author:Madeleine L'engle
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780374310318
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

Podge took my hand and then we slipped back upstairs. Podge never said anything about what we had heard, and neither did I. Indeed, until the time that Uncle Tod moved out West, Podge and I were always awkward and shy together, and I wonder if the eavesdropping was why. The rest of the week the Wildings were with us that summer in Maine, they all played and swam and ate huge meals on the extended dining-room table and it seemed as though Podge and I must have dreamed the bad things that happened, because my mother and father seemed happy and not as though they had said those terrible things to each other.

But I knew it had not been a dream.

Aunt Jen got married and went to Birmingham, Alabama, to live; and after Grandmother died Uncle Tod moved out to California and we hear from them mostly just at Christmas and birthdays.

So there were the two memories and I would have given anything in the world if I could have kept them hidden where they had been for so many years, deep, deep, back in my mind. For now Father was different in my feelings too. Now Father, like Mother, was no longer just my father. He was Rafferty Dickinson, as complete and separate a person as Camilla Dickinson. When I, on that faraway time of my birthday, woke up to the fact that I was Camilla Dickinson, I hadn’t waked up to the fact that my parents weren’t created especially for me, that they were separate people, too, as separate as the people across the court; and it had taken me all this time to realize it and the realization was a deep aching pain. It is a much more upsetting thing to realize that your parents are human beings than it is to realize that you are one yourself. I lay on the bottom bunk of Luisa’s bed and it seemed as though a heavy weight were pressing down upon my chest and slowly crushing my heart.

Then in the living room I heard Mona saying, “And what about Frank? Don’t you even care that he spends half his time with those cheap Italian girls?”

“What about the Dickinson child?” Bill asked in a bored voice. “I thought she was the new one.”

“That spoiled little snit? I’m not sure I don’t prefer the Italians. At least they’re human.”

Luisa looked up from her pad and said deliberately, “Frank went over to Pompilia Riccioli’s for lunch. He’ll probably stay for supper too. He usually does.”

Lying there on her bed, I felt, Oh, no! Life is too difficult, too terrible; how can anybody endure it? And I turned my face to the wall.

“I’m sorry,” Luisa said then. “I’m sorry, Camilla. I shouldn’t have told you that.”

“I don’t care,” I said.

“And don’t mind about Mona. She doesn’t mean it. Truly.”

“I don’t care,” I said again. What difference did it make? What difference did it make what Mona thought, or Bill, or Luisa, or

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