Too Much Happiness

Beverly and Kay had both gone home for the weekend, so I ran downstairs to see if Beth had any information.

“I’m sorry,” said Beth, whom I never saw sorry about anything. “I can’t keep track of all your comings and goings.”

Then as I turned away, “I’ve asked you several times not to thump so much on the stairs. I just got Sally-Lou to sleep.”

I had not made up my mind, when I got home, what I would say to Nina. Would I ask her if she was required to be naked, in that house, if she had known perfectly well what sort of an evening was waiting for me? Or would I say nothing much, waiting for her to ask me? And even then, I could say i

I could just let her wonder.

Now that she was gone, none of this mattered. The focus was shifted. Mrs. Wi

The same when I told her that I had no idea where Nina had gone. “Are you sure?”

I asked her not to phone again till morning, because of Beth’s rules and the babies’ sleep, and she said, “Well. I don’t know. This is serious.”

When I got up in the morning the car was parked across the street. Later, Mrs. Wi

I was still in my pajamas, writing an essay on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and drinking Nescafé.

Mrs. Wi

“If you know anything it would be better to tell us,” she said. “Anything at all.”

Then as she started down the stairs she turned and said in a voice that was less menacing, “Is there anybody at the college she was friendly with. Anybody you know?”

I said that I didn’t think so.

I had seen Nina only a couple of times at the college. Once she was walking down the lower corridor of the Arts Building in the crush between classes. Once she was in the cafeteria. Both times she was alone. It was not particularly unusual to be alone when you were hurrying from one class to another, but it was a little strange to sit alone in the cafeteria with a cup of coffee at around a quarter to four in the afternoon when that space was practically deserted. She sat with a smile on her face, as if to say how pleased, how privileged, she felt to be there, how alert and ready to respond to the demands of this life she was, once she understood what they were.

In the afternoon it began to snow. The car across the street had to depart to make way for the snowplow. When I went into the bathroom and caught the flutter of her kimono on its hook, I felt what I had been suppressing-a true fear for Nina. I had a picture of her, disoriented, weeping into her loose hair, wandering around in the snow in her white underwear instead of her camel’s hair coat, though I knew perfectly well that she had taken the coat with her.

The phone rang just as I was about to leave for my first class on Monday morning.

“It’s me,” said Nina, in a rushed warning, but with something like triumph in her voice. “Listen. Please. Could you please do me a favor?”

“Where are you? They’re looking for you.”

“Who is?”

“Mr. Purvis. Mrs. Wi

“Well, you’re not to tell them. Don’t tell them anything. I’m here.”

“Where?”

“Ernest’s.”

“Ernest’s?” I said. “Ernie’s?”

“Sshh. Did anybody there hear you?”

“No.”

“Listen, could you please, please get on a bus and bring me the rest of my stuff? I need my shampoo. I need my kimono. I’m going around in Ernest’s bathrobe. You should see me, I look like an old woolly brown dog. Is the car still outside?”

I went and looked.

“Yes.”

“Okay then, you should get on the bus and ride up to the college just like you normally do. And then catch the bus downtown. You know where to get off. Campbell and Howe. Then walk over here. Carlisle Street. Three sixty-three. You know it, don’t you?”

“Is Ernie there?”

“No, dum-dum. He’s at work. He’s got to support us, doesn’t he?”

Us? Was Ernie to support Nina and me?

No. Ernie and Nina. Ernie and Nina.

Nina said, “Oh, please. You’re the only person I’ve got.”

I did as directed. I caught the college bus, then the downtown bus. I got off at Campbell and Howe and walked west to Carlisle Street. The snowstorm was over; the sky was clear; it was a bright, windless, deep-frozen day. The light hurt my eyes and the fresh snow squeaked under my feet.

Now half a block north, on Carlisle Street, to the house where Ernie had lived with his mother and father and then with his mother and then alone. And now-how was it possible?-with Nina.

The house looked just as it had when I had come here once or twice with my mother. A brick bungalow with a tiny front yard, an arched living room window with an upper pane of colored glass. Cramped and genteel.

Nina was wrapped, just as she had described herself, in a man’s brown woolly tasselled dressing gown, with its manly but i

She grabbed my hands, which were stiff with cold inside my gloves. Each of them had been holding on to the handle of a shopping bag.

“Frozen,” she said. “Come on, we’ll get them into some warm water.”

“They are not frozen,” I said. “Just frozen.”

But she went ahead and helped me off with my things, and took me into the kitchen and ran a bowlful of water, and then as the blood returned painfully to my fingers she told me how Ernest (Ernie) had come to the rooming house on Saturday night. He was bringing a magazine that had a lot of pictures of old ruins and castles and things that he thought might interest me. She got herself out of bed and came downstairs, because of course he could not go upstairs, and when he saw how sick she was he said she had to come home with him so he could look after her. Which he had done so well that her sore throat was practically gone and her fever completely gone. And then they had decided that she would stay here. She would just stay with him and never go back to where she was before.

She seemed unwilling even to mention Mr. Purvis’s name.

“But it has to be a huge big secret,” she said. “You are the only one to know. Because you’re our friend and you are the reason we met.”

She was making coffee. “Look up there,” she said, waving at the open cupboard. “Look at the way he keeps things. Mugs here. Cups and saucers here. Every cup has got its own hook. Isn’t it tidy? The house is just like that all over. I love it.

“You are the reason we met,” she repeated. “If we have a baby and it’s a girl, we could name it after you.”

I held my hands round the mug, still feeling a throb in my fingers. There were African violets on the windowsill over the sink. His mother’s order in the cupboards, his mother’s house-plants. The big fern was probably still in front of the living room window, and the doilies on the armchairs. What she had said, in regard to herself and Ernie, seemed brazen and-especially when I thought of the Ernie part of it-abundantly distasteful.

“You’re going to get married?”

“Well.”

“You said if you have a baby.”

“Well, you never know, we might have started that without being married,” said Nina, ducking her head mischievously.