Too Much Happiness

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 ever has to hear. There is a pretty good chance that whatever you ought to know will be burdensome, and that there will be a suggestion that other people have had to bear the burden, while you have been let off lightly, all this while.
    “My father isn’t my real father?” I said. “Goody.”
    “Don’t be silly. You remember your little friend Nancy?”
    I actually did not remember, for a moment. Then I said, “Vaguely.”
    At this time all my conversations with my mother seemed to call for strategy. I must keep myself lighthearted, jokey, unmoved. In her voice and face was a lurking sorrow. She never complained about her own plight, but there were so many innocent and ill-used people in the stories she told me, there were so many outrages, that I was surely meant, at the very least, to go off to my friends and my lucky life with a heavier heart.
    I would not cooperate. All she wanted, possibly, was some sign of sympathy, or maybe of physical tenderness. I would not grant that. She was a fastidious woman not yet contaminated by age, but I backed off from her as if there was some danger of insistent dreariness, a contagious mold. I particularly backed off from any reference to my affliction, which it seemed to me she especially cherished-the shackle I could not loosen, that I had to admit to, that bound me to her from the womb.
    “You would probably have known about it if you were around home much,” she said. “But it happened shortly before we sent you off to school.”
    Nancy and her mother had gone to live in an apartment that belonged to my father, on the Square. There in the bright early fall morning Nancy’s mother had come upon her daughter, in the bathroom, using a razor blade to slice into her cheek. There was blood on the floor and in the sink and here and there on Nancy. But she had not given up on her purpose or made a sound of pain.
    How did my mother know all this? I can only suppose it was a town drama, supposed to be hushed up but too gory-and that in the literal sense of the word-not to be related in detail.
    Nancy’s mother wrapped a towel around her and somehow got her to the hospital. There was no ambulance at that time. She probably flagged a car on the Square. Why did she not phone my father? No matter-she didn’t. The cuts were not deep and the blood loss was not so great in spite of the splatters-there was no cut to any major blood vessel. Nancy’s mother kept berating the child that whole time and asking was she right in the head.
    “You’re just my luck,” she kept saying. “A kid like you.”
    “If there had been social workers around at that time,” said my mother, “no doubt that poor little thing would have been made a ward of the Children’s Aid.
    “It was the same cheek,” she said. “Like yours.”
    I tried to keep silent, pretending not to know what she was talking about. But I had to speak.
    “The paint was over her whole face,” I said.
    “Yes. But she was doing it more carefully this time, she cut open just that one cheek, trying the best she could to make herself look like you.”
    This time I did manage to keep quiet.
    “If she had been a