Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [35]
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