Too Much Happiness

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 a book out for Nina-the sort of book that showed simplified charts of history.
    Nina had bought the textbooks for the courses she was auditing. She had bought notebooks and pens-the best fountain pens of that time-in matching colors. Red for Middle-American Pre-Columbian Civilizations, blue for the Romantic Poets, green for Victorian and Georgian English Novelists, yellow for Fairy Tales from Perrault to Andersen. She went to every lecture, sitting in the back row because she thought that was the proper place for her. She spoke as if she enjoyed walking through the Arts building with the throng of other students, finding her seat, opening her textbook at the page specified, taking out her pen. But her notebooks remained empty.
    The trouble was, as I saw it, that she had no pegs to hang anything on. She did not know what Victorian meant, or Romantic, or Pre-Columbian. She had been to Japan, and Barbados, and many of the countries in Europe, but she could never have found those places on a map. She wouldn’t have known whether or not the French Revolution came before the