Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [65]
My mother took a deep breath.
“I am—not—yelling—my—head off. I just want to tell your cruel child she will never be welcome in our house again. She is a cruel spiteful child to mock my little boy for what he cannot help. You have never taught her anything, any manners, she did not even know enough to thank me when I took her with us to the beach, doesn’t even know how to say please and thank you, no wonder with a mother flaunting around in her wrapper—”
All this poured out of my mother as if there was a torrent of rage, of pain, of absurdity in her that would never stop. Even though by now I was pulling at her dress and saying, “Don’t, don’t.”
Then things got even worse as tears rose and swallowed her words and she choked and shook.
Nancy’s mother had pushed the wet hair out of her eyes and stood there observing.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “You carry on like this and they’re going to take you to the loony bin. Can I help it if your husband hates you and you got a kid with a messed-up face?”
My mother held her head in both hands. She cried, “Oh—oh,” as if pains were devouring her. The woman who worked for us at that time—Velma—had come out on the verandah and was saying, “Missus. Come on, missus.” Then she raised her voice and called to Nancy’s mother.
“You go on. You go in your house. You scat.”
“Oh I will. Don’t worry, I will. Who do you think you are telling me what to do? And how do you like working for an ole witch with bats in the belfry?” Then she turned on Nancy.
“How in Jesus’ name am I ever going to get you cleaned up?”
After that she raised her voice again to make sure I could hear her.
“He’s a suck. Look at him hangin’ on to his ole lady. You’re not ever going to play with him again. Ole lady’s suck.”
Velma on one side and I on the other, we tried to ease my mother back to the house. She had stopped the noise she was making. She straightened herself and spoke in an unnaturally cheerful voice that could carry as far as the cottage.
“Fetch me my garden shears, would you Velma? While I’m out here I might as well trim the glads. Some of them are downright wilted.”
But by the time she was finished they were all over the path, not one standing, wilted or blooming.
All this must have happened on a Saturday, as I said, because Nancy’s mother was home and Velma was there, who did not come on Sundays. By Monday, or maybe sooner, I am sure the cottage was empty. Perhaps Velma got hold of my father in the clubhouse or on the greens or wherever he was, and he came home, impatient and rude but soon compliant. Compliant, that is, about Nancy and her mother getting out. I had no idea where they went. Maybe he put them up in a hotel till he could find another place for them. I don’t think Nancy’s mother would have made any fuss about leaving.
The fact that I would never see Nancy again dawned on me slowly. At first I was angry at her and did not care. Then when I inquired about her, my mother must have put me off with some vague reply, not wanting to recall the anguished scene to me or herself. It was surely at that time that she became serious about sending me away to school. In fact I think that I was installed at Lakefield that very autumn. She probably suspected that once I got used to being at a boys’ school the memory of having had a female playmate would grow dim and seem unworthy, even ridiculous.
On the day after my father’s funeral my mother surprised me by asking if I would take her out to dinner (of course it would be a case of her taking me) at a restaurant some miles along the lakeshore, where she hoped there would be nobody we knew.
“I just feel I’ve been penned up in this house forever,” she said. “I need some air.”
In the restaurant she looked around discreetly and an nounced that there was nobody she knew.
“Will you join me in a glass of wine?”
Had we driven all this way so that she could drink wine in public?
When the wine had come, and we had ordered, she said, “There is something I think you ought to know.”
These may be among the most unpleasant words that a person