Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [29]
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 dinner and lunch at the college. Though as I said, I don’t know whether she ever did. Breakfast was Nescafé in our room, and day-old doughnuts I got to take home from the cafeteria. Mr. Purvis did not like the sound of this but accepted it as part of Nina’s imitation of a college student’s life. As long as she ate a good hot meal once a day and a sandwich and soup at another meal he was satisfied, and this was what he thought she did. She checked what the cafeteria was offering, so she could tell him that she’d had the sausages or the Salisbury steak, and the salmon or the egg salad sandwich.
“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. Winner,” said Nina. “She’ll be there till midnight. Or later, I don’t know. If I went out she’d follow me and hang around wherever I went and follow me back.”
“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. Winner some practice, as Nina said, we left the house one evening and took a bus to the city library. From the bus window we watched the long black car having to slow and dawdle at every bus stop, then speed up and stay with us. We had to walk a block to the library, and Mrs. Winner passed us and parked beyond the front entrance, and watched us—we believed—in her rearview mirror.
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