Too Much Happiness

wanted it out in the hall, but close to his open door.
    When my mother heard about this she wondered why they hadn’t put him in a bed downstairs, where they surely had high ceilings and he would be cooler.
    I told her that they did not have any bedrooms downstairs.
    “Well, my heavens, couldn’t they fix one up? Temporarily?”
    That showed how little she knew about the Crozier household or the rule of Old Mrs. Crozier. Old Mrs. Crozier walked with a cane. She made one ominous-sounding progress up the stairs to see her stepson on the afternoons I was there, and I suppose no more than that on the afternoons when I was not there. Then another, as necessary, when she went to bed. But the idea of a bedroom downstairs would have outraged her as much as the notion of a toilet in the parlor. Fortunately there was already a toilet downstairs, behind the kitchen, but I was sure that if the only one had been upstairs she would have made the climb as often and as laboriously as necessary, rather than see a change so radical and unnerving.
    My mother had an idea of going into the antique business, so she was very interested in the inside of that house. She did get in, once, during my very first afternoon. I was in the kitchen, and I stood petrified, hearing her “yoo-hoo” and my own merrily called name. Then her perfunctory knock, her steps on the kitchen stairs. And Old Mrs. Crozier stumping out from the sunroom.
    My mother said that she had just dropped in to see how her daughter was getting along.
    “She’s all right,” said Old Mrs. Crozier, who stood in the hall doorway, blocking the view of antiques.
    My mother made a few more mortifying remarks and took herself off. That night she said that Old Mrs. Crozier had no manners because she was only a second wife picked up on a business trip to Detroit, which was why she smoked and dyed her hair black as tar and put on lipstick like a smear of jam. She was not even the mother of the invalid upstairs. She did not have the brains to be.
    (We were having one of our fights then, this one relating to her visit, but that is neither here nor there.)
    The way Old Mrs. Crozier saw it, I must have seemed just as intrusive as my mother, just as cheerily self-regarding. On my very first afternoon I had gone into the back parlor and opened the bookcase and stood there taking stock of the Harvard Classics set out in their perfect row. Most of them discouraged me, but I took one out that might be fiction, in spite of its title in a foreign language,
I Promessi Sposi
. It appeared to be fiction all right, and it was in English.
    I must have had the idea then that all books came free, wherever you found them. Like water from a public tap.
    When Old Mrs. Crozier saw me with the book she asked where I had got it and what I was doing with it. From the bookcase, I said, and I had brought it upstairs to read. The thing that most perplexed her seemed to be that I had got it downstairs, but brought it upstairs. The reading part she appeared to let go, as if such an activity was too foreign for her contemplation. Finally she said that if I wanted a book I should bring one from home.
    I Promessi Sposi
was heavy going anyway. I did not mind putting it back in the bookcase.
    Of course there were books in the sickroom. Reading seemed to be acceptable there. But they were mostly open and facedown, as if Mr. Crozier just read a little here and there and put them aside. And their titles did not tempt me.
Civilization on Trial. The Great Conspiracy Against Russia
.
    And my grandmother had warned me that if I could help it I should not touch anything the patient had touched, because of germs, and I should always keep a cloth between my fingers and his water glass.
    My mother said leukemia did not come from germs.
    “So what does it come from?” said my grandmother.
    “The medical men don’t know.”
    “Hunh.”
    It was Young Mrs. Crozier who picked me up and drove me home, though the distance was no more than from one side of the town to the other. She was a tall, thin, fair-haired woman with a variable complexion. Sometimes there were patches of red on her cheeks as if she had scratched them. Word had been passed that she was older than her husband, that he had been her student at college. My mother said that nobody seemed to have got around to figuring out that since he was a war veteran, he could easily have been her student without that making her older. People were just down on her because