Camilla Read Online Free

drink, I knew I would have to go through with it. My father is very formidable about people changing their minds, though my mother says it is a woman’s privilege.
    â€œWhat shall it be, Camilla?” my father asked. “I’m having a martini, but I’m afraid that wouldn’t be a very good first choice for you.”
    I thought a minute and remembered a French movie Luisa and I had seen at the Fifth Avenue Playhouse where the heroine, who was quite young, went into a café to wait for someone. And she didn’t know what to order, so the waiter suggested a vermouth cassis as being something fitting for a young girl. Luisa and I sat through the picture twice in order to memorize “vermouth cassis.”
    So I looked up at the waiter and said, “I’d like a vermouth cassis, please.”
    My father laughed. “Well, Camilla, am I wrong? This isn’t your first drink?”
    â€œOh, yes,” I said. “Except for the tastes of champagne.”
    The waiter put the martini in front of my father—pale liquid with a tiny twist of lemon peel, the color of my mother’s hair—and the vermouth cassis in front of me. It was in a regular water glass with a little ice in it, and looked rather like a Coca-Cola without the fizz. I took a swallow, avery small one, because I remembered the movies where the heroine takes a big swallow of a drink, when it’s her first one, and then gasps and coughs and tries to act as though she’d been drinking fire. The swallow did not burn me; it was both bitter and sweet at the same time and it tasted very warm all the way down. Most food stops tasting and feeling as soon as you swallow it, but I could feel the sip of vermouth cassis going down very warm, and somehow as comforting as sitting before an open fire on a cold night, all the way down to my stomach. I took another sip and it gave me the same lovely feeling, but I remembered Luisa saying “
In vino veritas
” and I remembered my mother’s face all puckered up with fear and put my glass down and took a breadstick out of the little wicker basket in the center of the table.
    The waiter did not bring us menus but stood hovering by my father’s side and made suggestions in low intimate French that somehow reminded me of Jacques, although I have never heard Jacques speak anything but English. My father answered the waiter in French, but his French, instead of sounding all curves and music like Chopin or the ballet, was as square and angular as a problem in algebra. The waiter kept acting very pleased though, and when he went back out into the kitchen—where I had a glimpse of hot heavy air and copper saucepans hanging under a big copper hood, and a chef in a big white hat—my father laughed and said, “Camilla, my dear, you really must be growing up. I believe the waiter thinks I’m your sugar daddy.”
    I did not like it when my father said this. It made me think of a book of Peter Arno cartoons one of the girls at school, Alma Potter, keeps hidden in her desk. My father does not look in the least like one of Peter Arno’s cartoons.But I could see that he thought he had made a very funny joke, so I laughed, too, because I wanted so terribly to keep the dark look out of his eyes. When my father gets the dark look in his eyes it is like the sky in summer when suddenly the daylight grows greeny black and you know it will be better when the thunder comes. Only with my father thunder does not come.
    â€œNow I should offer you a mink coat and a diamond necklace,” my father said, “but I am afraid those are a little beyond my means, even for my own darling girl. Would a couple of new books for those swelling bookcases of yours do as well?”
    â€œYes, thank you, Father,” I said, “but you don’t need to give me anything.”
    The waiter wheeled a little wagon up to us filled with trays of hors d’oeuvres. I was very