Too Much Happiness

First World War.
    I wondered how these courses had been chosen for her. Did she like the sound of them, had Mr. Purvis thought she could master them, or had he perhaps chosen them cynically, so that she would soon get her fill of being a student?
    When I was looking for the book I wanted, I caught sight of Ernie Botts. He had an armful of mysteries, which he had picked up for an old friend of his mother’s. He had told me how he always did that, just as he always played checkers on Saturday mornings with a crony of his father’s out in the War Veterans’ Home.
    I introduced him to Nina. I had told him about her moving in, but nothing, of course, about her former or even her present life.
    He shook Nina’s hand and said he was pleased to meet her and asked at once if he could give us a ride home.
    I was about to say no thanks, we’d get a ride on the bus, when Nina asked him where his car was parked.
    “In the back,” he said.
    “Is there a back door?”
    “Yes, yes. It’s a sedan.”
    “No, I didn’t mean that,” said Nina nicely. “I meant in the library. In the building.”
    “Yes. Yes, there is,” said Ernie in a fluster. “I’m sorry, I thought you meant the car. Yes. A back door in the library. I came in that way myself. I’m sorry.” Now he was blushing, and he would have gone on apologizing if Nina had not broken in with a kind, even flattering, laugh.
    “Well then,” she said. “We can go out the back door. So that’s settled. Thanks.”
    Ernie drove us home. He asked if we would like to detour by his place, for a cup of coffee or a hot chocolate.
    “Sorry, we’re sort of in a rush,” said Nina. “But thanks for asking.”
    “I guess you’ve got homework.”
    “Homework, yes,” she said. “We sure do.”
    I was thinking that he had never once asked me to his house. Propriety. One girl, no. Two girls, okay.
    No black car across the street when we said our thanks and good nights. No black car when we looked through the attic window. In a short time the phone rang, for Nina, and I heard her saying, on the landing, “Oh no, we just went in the library and got a book and came straight home on the bus. There was one right away, yes. I’m fine. Absolutely. Night-night.”
    She came swaying and smiling up the stairs.
    “Mrs. Winner’s got herself in hot water tonight.”
    Then she made a little leap and started to tickle me, as she did every once in a while, without the least warning, having discovered that I was extraordinarily ticklish.
    One morning Nina did not get out of bed. She said she had a sore throat, a fever.
    “Touch me.”
    “You always feel hot to me.”
    “Today I’m hotter.”
    It was a Friday. She asked me to call Mr. Purvis, to tell him she wanted to stay here for the weekend.
    “He’ll let me-he can’t stand anybody being sick around him. He’s a nut that way.”
    Mr. Purvis wondered if he should send a doctor. Nina had foreseen that, and told me to say she just needed to rest, and she’d phone him, or I would, if she got any worse. Well then, tell her to take care, he said, and thanked me for phoning, and for being a good friend to Nina. And then, having started to say good-bye, he asked me if I would care to join him for Saturday night’s dinner. He said he found it boring to eat alone.
    Nina had thought of that too.
    “If he asks you to go and eat with him tomorrow night, why don’t you go? There’s always something good to eat on Saturday nights, it’s special.”
    On Saturdays the cafeteria was closed. The possibility of meeting Mr. Purvis disturbed and interested me.
    “Should I really? If he asks?”
    So I went upstairs, having agreed to dine with Mr. Purvis-he had actually said “dine”-and asked Nina what I should wear.
    “Why worry now? It’s not till tomorrow night.”
    Why worry indeed? I had only one good dress, the turquoise crepe that I had bought with some of my scholarship money, to wear when I gave the valedictory address at the high school commencement exercises.
    “And anyway it doesn’t matter,” said Nina. “He’ll never notice.”
    Mrs. Winner came to get me. Her hair was not white, but platinum blond, a color that to me certified a hard heart, immoral dealings, a long bumpy ride through the sordid back alleys of life. Nevertheless I pressed down on the handle of the front door to ride beside her, because I thought that was the decent and democratic thing to do. She let me do this, standing beside her, then briskly