Alice Munro - Too Much Happiness

You not there .

The poem didn’t depress me. In some peculiar way it seemed to back up the decision I had made by that time, not to sell the property, but to stay.

Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.

Of course I know that if I had spotted Nancy-on the subway, for instance, in Toronto-both of us bearing our recognizable marks, we would in all probability have managed only one of those embarrassed and meaningless conversations, hurriedly listing useless autobiographical facts. I would have noted the mended nearly normal cheek or the still obvious wound, but it would probably not have come into the conversation. Children might have been mentioned. Not that unlikely, whether she was mended or not. Grandchildren. Jobs. I might not have had to tell her mine. We would have been shocked, hearty, dying to get away.

You think that would have changed things?

The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.

I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am. I can remember when the streets of the town I lived in were sprinkled with water to lay the dust in summer, and when girls wore waist cinches and crinolines that could stand up by themselves, and when there was nothing much to be done about things like polio and leukemia. Some people who got polio got better, crippled or not, but people with leukemia went to bed, and after some weeks’ or months’ decline in a tragic atmosphere, they died.

It was because of such a case that I got my first job, in the summer holidays when I was thirteen. Young Mr. Crozier (Bruce) had come safely home from the war, where he had been a fighter pilot, had gone to college and studied history, and graduated, and got married, and now he had leukemia. He and his wife had come back to stay with his stepmother, Old Mrs. Crozier. Young Mrs. Crozier (Sylvia) was going off two afternoons a week to teach summer school at that same college where they had met, about forty miles away. I was hired to look after Young Mr. Crozier while she was away. He was in bed in the front corner bedroom upstairs, and he could still get to the bathroom by himself. All I had to do was to bring him fresh water and pull the shades up or down and see what he wanted when he rang the little bell on his bedside table.

Usually what he wanted was to have the fan moved. He liked the breeze it created but he was disturbed by the noise. So he wanted the fan in the room for a while and then he wanted it out in the hall, but close to his open door.

When my mother heard about this she wondered why they hadn’t put him in a bed downstairs, where they surely had high ceilings and he would be cooler.

I told her that they did not have any bedrooms downstairs.

“Well, my heavens, couldn’t they fix one up? Temporarily?”

That showed how little she knew about the Crozier household or the rule of Old Mrs. Crozier. Old Mrs. Crozier walked with a cane. She made one ominous-sounding progress up the stairs to see her stepson on the afternoons I was there, and I suppose no more than that on the afternoons when I was not there. Then another, as necessary, when she went to bed. But the idea of a bedroom downstairs would have outraged her as much as the notion of a toilet in the parlor. Fortunately there was already a toilet downstairs, behind the kitchen, but I was sure that if the only one had been upstairs she would have made the climb as often and as laboriously as necessary, rather than see a change so radical and unnerving.

My mother had an idea of going into the antique business, so she was very interested in the inside of that house. She did get in, once, during my very first afternoon. I was in the kitchen, and I stood petrified, hearing her “yoo-hoo” and my own merrily called name. Then her perfunctory knock, her steps on the kitchen stairs. And Old Mrs. Crozier stumping out from the sunroom.

My mother said that she had just dropped in to see how her daughter was getting along.

“She’s all right,” said Old Mrs. Crozier, who stood in the hall doorway, blocking the view of antiques.

My mother made a few more mortifying remarks and took herself off. That night she said that Old Mrs. Crozier had no manners because she was only a second wife picked up on a business trip to Detroit, which was why she smoked and dyed her hair black as tar and put on lipstick like a smear of jam. She was not even the mother of the invalid upstairs. She did not have the brains to be.

(We were having one of our fights then, this one relating to her visit, but that is neither here nor there.)

The way Old Mrs. Crozier saw it, I must have seemed just as intrusive as my mother, just as cheerily self-regarding. On my very first afternoon I had gone into the back parlor and opened the bookcase and stood there taking stock of the Harvard Classics set out in their perfect row. Most of them discouraged me, but I took one out that might be fiction, in spite of its title in a foreign language, I Promessi Sposi . It appeared to be fiction all right, and it was in English.

I must have had the idea then that all books came free, wherever you found them. Like water from a public tap.

When Old Mrs. Crozier saw me with the book she asked where I had got it and what I was doing with it. From the bookcase, I said, and I had brought it upstairs to read. The thing that most perplexed her seemed to be that I had got it downstairs, but brought it upstairs. The reading part she appeared to let go, as if such an activity was too foreign for her contemplation. Finally she said that if I wanted a book I should bring one from home.

I Promessi Sposi was heavy going anyway. I did not mind putting it back in the bookcase.

Of course there were books in the sickroom. Reading seemed to be acceptable there. But they were mostly open and facedown, as if Mr. Crozier just read a little here and there and put them aside. And their titles did not tempt me. Civilization on Trial. The Great Conspiracy Against Russia .

And my grandmother had warned me that if I could help it I should not touch anything the patient had touched, because of germs, and I should always keep a cloth between my fingers and his water glass.

My mother said leukemia did not come from germs.

“So what does it come from?” said my grandmother.

“The medical men don’t know.”

“Hunh.”

It was Young Mrs. Crozier who picked me up and drove me home, though the distance was no more than from one side of the town to the other. She was a tall, thin, fair-haired woman with a variable complexion. Sometimes there were patches of red on her cheeks as if she had scratched them. Word had been passed that she was older than her husband, that he had been her student at college. My mother said that nobody seemed to have got around to figuring out that since he was a war veteran, he could easily have been her student without that making her older. People were just down on her because she had got an education.

Another thing they said was that she could have stayed home and looked after him now, as promised in the marriage ceremony, instead of going out to teach. My mother again defended her, saying it was only two afternoons a week and she had to keep up her profession, seeing she would be on her own soon enough. And if she didn’t get out of the old lady’s way once in a while, wouldn’t you think she’d go crazy? My mother always defended women who were working on their own, and my grandmother always got after her for it.

One day I tried a conversation with Young Mrs. Crozier, or Sylvia. She was the only college graduate I knew, let alone being a teacher. Except for her husband, of course, and he had stopped counting.