Too Much Happiness

Up until the last minute that was what she thought she would do, and then she decided, no. She would go ahead and have the baby.

All right, he said. He would pay her way back to Chicago, and from then on, she was on her own.

She knew her way around a bit by this time, and she went to a place where they looked after you till the baby was born, and you could have it adopted. It was born and it was a girl and Nina named her Gemma and made up her mind to keep her.

She knew another girl who had had a baby in this place and kept it, and she and this girl made an arrangement that they would work shifts and live together and raise their babies. They got an apartment that they could afford and they got jobs-Nina’s in a cocktail lounge-and everything was all right. Then Nina came home just before Christmas-Gemma was then eight months old-and found the other mother half drunk and fooling around with a man and the baby, Gemma, burning up with fever and too sick to even cry.

Nina wrapped her up and got a cab and took her to the hospital. The traffic was all snarled up because of Christmas, and when they finally got there they told her it was the wrong hospital for some reason and sent her off to another hospital, and on the way there Gemma had a convulsion and died.

She wanted to have a real burial for Gemma, not just have her put in with some old pauper who had died (that was what she heard happened with a baby’s body when you didn’t have any money), so she went to Mr. Purvis. He was nicer to her than she had expected, and he paid for the casket and everything and the gravestone with Gemma’s name, and after it was all over he took Nina back. They went on a long trip to London and Paris and a lot of other places to cheer her up. When they got back he shut up the house in Chicago and moved here. He owned some property near here, out in the country, he owned racehorses.

He asked her if she would like to get an education, and she said she would. He said she should just sit in on some courses to see what she would like to study. She told him that she would like to live part of the time just the way ordinary students lived, and dress like them and study like them, and he said he thought that could be managed.

Her life made me feel like a simpleton.

I asked her what was Mr. Purvis’s first name.

“Arthur.”

“Why don’t you call him that?”

“It wouldn’t sound natural.”

Nina was not supposed to go out at night, except to the college for certain specified events, such as a play or a concert or a lecture. She was supposed to eat di

“So how would he know if you did go out?”

Nina got to her feet, with that little personal sound of complaint or pleasure, and padded to the attic window.

“Come over here,” she said. “And stay behind the curtain. See?”

A black car, parked not right across the street, but a few doors down. A streetlight caught the white hair of the driver.

“Mrs. Wi

“What if she went to sleep?”

“Not her. Or if she did and I tried anything she’d be awake like a shot.”

Just to give Mrs. Wi

I wanted to see if I could check out a copy of The Scarlet Letter, which was required for one of my courses. I could not afford to buy one, and the copies from the college library were all out. Also I had an idea of getting a book out for Nina-the sort of book that showed simplified charts of history.

Nina had bought the textbooks for the courses she was auditing. She had bought notebooks and pens-the best fountain pens of that time-in matching colors. Red for Middle-American Pre-Columbian Civilizations, blue for the Romantic Poets, green for Victorian and Georgian English Novelists, yellow for Fairy Tales from Perrault to Andersen. She went to every lecture, sitting in the back row because she thought that was the proper place for her. She spoke as if she enjoyed walking through the Arts building with the throng of other students, finding her seat, opening her textbook at the page specified, taking out her pen. But her notebooks remained empty.

The trouble was, as I saw it, that she had no pegs to hang anything on. She did not know what Victorian meant, or Romantic, or Pre-Columbian. She had been to Japan, and Barbados, and many of the countries in Europe, but she could never have found those places on a map. She wouldn’t have known whether or not the French Revolution came before the First World War.

I wondered how these courses had been chosen for her. Did she like the sound of them, had Mr. Purvis thought she could master them, or had he perhaps chosen them cynically, so that she would soon get her fill of being a student?

When I was looking for the book I wanted, I caught sight of Ernie Botts. He had an armful of mysteries, which he had picked up for an old friend of his mother’s. He had told me how he always did that, just as he always played checkers on Saturday mornings with a crony of his father’s out in the War Veterans’ Home.

I introduced him to Nina. I had told him about her moving in, but nothing, of course, about her former or even her present life.

He shook Nina’s hand and said he was pleased to meet her and asked at once if he could give us a ride home.

I was about to say no thanks, we’d get a ride on the bus, when Nina asked him where his car was parked.

“In the back,” he said.

“Is there a back door?”

“Yes, yes. It’s a sedan.”

“No, I didn’t mean that,” said Nina nicely. “I meant in the library. In the building.”

“Yes. Yes, there is,” said Ernie in a fluster. “I’m sorry, I thought you meant the car. Yes. A back door in the library. I came in that way myself. I’m sorry.” Now he was blushing, and he would have gone on apologizing if Nina had not broken in with a kind, even flattering, laugh.

“Well then,” she said. “We can go out the back door. So that’s settled. Thanks.”

Ernie drove us home. He asked if we would like to detour by his place, for a cup of coffee or a hot chocolate.

“Sorry, we’re sort of in a rush,” said Nina. “But thanks for asking.”

“I guess you’ve got homework.”

“Homework, yes,” she said. “We sure do.”

I was thinking that he had never once asked me to his house. Propriety. One girl, no. Two girls, okay.

No black car across the street when we said our thanks and good nights. No black car when we looked through the attic window. In a short time the phone rang, for Nina, and I heard her saying, on the landing, “Oh no, we just went in the library and got a book and came straight home on the bus. There was one right away, yes. I’m fine. Absolutely. Night-night.”

She came swaying and smiling up the stairs.

“Mrs. Wi

Then she made a little leap and started to tickle me, as she did every once in a while, without the least warning, having discovered that I was extraordinarily ticklish.