Too Much Happiness

boy it would have been different. But what an awful thing for a girl.”
    “Plastic surgeons can do remarkable things nowadays.”
    “Oh, maybe they can.”
    After a moment she said, “Such deep feelings. Children have.”
    “They get over that.”
    She said she did not know what had become of them, the child or her mother. She said she was glad I had never asked, because she would have hated to tell me anything so distressing, when I was still young.
    I don’t know what bearing it has on anything, but I have to say that my mother changed completely in extreme old age, becoming ribald and fanciful. She claimed that my father had been a magnificent lover and that she herself had been “a pretty bad girl.” She announced that I should have married “that girl who sliced up her face” because neither one of us would be able to crow over the other about doing a good deed. One of us, she cackled, would be just as much a mess as the other.
    I agreed. I liked her then quite a bit.

· · ·

    A few days ago I was stung by a wasp while clearing out some rotten apples under one of the old trees. The sting was on my eyelid, which rapidly closed. I drove myself to the hospital, using the other eye (the swollen one was on the “good” side of my face), and was surprised to be told I must stay overnight. The reason was that once I was given an injection, both eyes had to be bandaged, thus avoiding strain on the one that could see. I had what they call a restless night, waking often. Of course it is never really quiet in a hospital, and just in that short time without my sight it seemed that my hearing grew more acute. When certain footsteps came into my room I knew that they were those of a woman, and I had the feeling that she was not a nurse.
    But when she said, “Good. You’re awake. I’m your reader,” I thought that I must have been mistaken, she was a nurse after all. I stretched out an arm, believing she had come to read what are known as the vital signs.
    “No, no,” she said, in her small persistent voice. “I’ve come to read to you, if that’s what you would like. Sometimes people like it; they get bored lying there with their eyes closed.”
    “Do they choose, or do you?”
    “They do, but sometimes I sort of remind them. Sometimes I try and remind them of some Bible story, some part of the Bible they remember. Or a story from when they were children. I carry a whole batch of things around with me.”
    “I like poetry,” I said.
    “You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”
    I realized that this was true, and I knew why. I have some experience of reading poetry aloud, over the radio, and of listening to other trained voices read, and there are some styles of reading I find comfortable, and some I abhor.
    “Then we could have a game,” she said, just as if I had explained this, when I hadn’t. “I could read you a line or two, then I stop and see if you can do the next line. Okay?”
    It struck me that she might be quite a young person, anxious to get some takers, to be a success on this job.
    I said okay. But nothing in Old English, I told her.
    “‘The king sat in Dunfermline town-’” she began in a questioning voice.
    “‘Drinking the blood-red wine-’” I chimed in, and we proceeded in good humor. She read well enough, though at a rather childlike, show-off speed. I began to like the sound of my own voice, now and then falling into a bit of an actorly flourish.
    “That’s nice,” she said.
    “‘And show you where the lilies grow, / On the banks of Italie-’”
    “Is it ‘grow’ or ‘blow’?” she said. “I don’t actually have a book with that in it. I should remember, though. Never mind, it’s lovely. I always liked your voice on the radio.”
    “Really? Did you listen?”
    “Of course. Lots of people did.”
    She stopped feeding me lines and just let me go ahead. You can imagine. “Dover Beach” and “Kubla Khan” and “West Wind” and “Wild Swans” and “Doomed Youth.” Well, maybe not all of them, and maybe not right through to the end.
    “You’re getting short of breath,” she said. Her little quick hand was laid on my mouth. And then her face or the side of her face, laid on mine. “I have to go. Here’s another just before I go. I’ll make it harder because I won’t start at the beginning.
    “‘None will long mourn for you, / Pray for you, miss you / Your place left vacant-’”
    “I’ve never heard that,” I