Alice Munro - Too Much Happiness

“And I’m afraid it’s time to send you home.”

He opened another door, into the hall I had seen so long ago, at the beginning of the evening, and I passed in front of him and the door was closed behind me. I may have said good night. It is even possible that I thanked him for dinner, and that he spoke to me in a few dry words (not at all, thank you for your company, it was very kind of you, thank you for reading Housman) in a suddenly tired, old, crumpled, and indifferent voice. He did not lay a hand on me.

The same dimly lit cloakroom. My same clothes. The turquoise dress, my stockings, my slip. Mrs. Winner appeared while I was fastening my stockings. She said only one thing to me, as I was ready to leave.

“You forgot your scarf.”

And there indeed was the scarf I had knit in Home Economics class, the only thing I would ever knit in my life. I had come close to abandoning it, in this place.

As I got out of the car Mrs. Winner said, “Mr. Purvis would like to speak to Nina before he goes to bed. If you would remind her.”

But there was no Nina waiting to receive this message. Her bed was made up. Her coat and boots were gone. A few of her other clothes were still hanging in the closet.

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 innocently that I’d eaten Cornish hen and yellow rice, and that it was very good. That I’d read from A Shropshire Lad .

I could just let her wonder.

Now that she was gone, none of this mattered. The focus was shifted. Mrs. Winner phoned after ten o’clock-breaking another of Beth’s rules-and when I told her that Nina was not there she said, “Are you sure of that?”

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. Winner rang the bell and told Beth that she had been sent to check Nina’s room. Even Beth was quelled by Mrs. Winner, who then came up the stairs without a reproach or a warning being uttered. After she looked all around our room she looked in the bathroom and the closet, even shaking out a couple of blankets that were folded on the closet floor.

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

Mrs. Winner said that she had had to phone the hospitals, to see if Nina had been taken ill, and that Mr. Purvis had gone out himself to check on several other places where she might be.

“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. Winner.”

“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 innocent Ernie-smell of shaving lather and Lifebuoy soap.

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.