He chose a chair in front of the bookcase, facing me.
"Now-"
"On Wenlock Edge the wood"s in trouble-"
Familiar words and rhythms calmed me down. They took me over. Gradually I began to feel more at peace.
The gale, it plies the saplings double, It blows so hard, "twill soon be gone: To-day the Roman and his trouble Are ashes under Uricon.
Where is Uricon? Who knows?
It wasn"t really that I forgot where I was or who I was with or in what condition I sat there. But I had come to feel somewhat remote and philosophical. The notion came to me that everybody in the world was naked, in a way. Mr. Purvis was naked, though he wore clothes. We were all sad, bare, forked creatures. Shame receded. I just kept turning the pages, reading one poem and then another, then another. Liking the sound of my voice. Until to my surprise and almost to my disappointment-there were still famous lines to come-Mr. Purvis interrupted me. He stood up, he sighed.
"Enough, enough," he said. "That was very nice. Thank you. Your country accent is quite suitable. Now it"s my bedtime."
I let the book go. He replaced it on the shelves and closed the gla.s.s doors. The country accent was news to me.
"And I"m afraid it"s time to send you home."
He opened another door, into the hall I had seen so long ago, at the beginning of the evening, and I pa.s.sed in front of him and the door was closed behind me. I may have said good night. It is even possible that I thanked him for dinner, and that he spoke to me in a few dry words (not at all, thank you for your company, it was very kind of you, thank you for reading Housman) in a suddenly tired, old, crumpled, and indifferent voice. He did not lay a hand on me.
The same dimly lit cloakroom. My same clothes. The turquoise dress, my stockings, my slip. Mrs. Winner appeared while I was fastening my stockings. She said only one thing to me, as I was ready to leave.
"You forgot your scarf."
And there indeed was the scarf I had knit in Home Economics cla.s.s, the only thing I would ever knit in my life. I had come close to abandoning it, in this place.
As I got out of the car Mrs. Winner said, "Mr. Purvis would like to speak to Nina before he goes to bed. If you would remind her."
But there was no Nina waiting to receive this message. Her bed was made up. Her coat and boots were gone. A few of her other clothes were still hanging in the closet.
Beverly and Kay had both gone home for the weekend, so I ran downstairs to see if Beth had any information.
"I"m sorry," said Beth, whom I never saw sorry about anything. "I can"t keep track of all your comings and goings."
Then as I turned away, "I"ve asked you several times not to thump so much on the stairs. I just got Sally-Lou to sleep."
I had not made up my mind, when I got home, what I would say to Nina. Would I ask her if she was required to be naked, in that house, if she had known perfectly well what sort of an evening was waiting for me? Or would I say nothing much, waiting for her to ask me? And even then, I could say innocently that I"d eaten Cornish hen and yellow rice, and that it was very good. That I"d read from A Shropshire Lad A Shropshire Lad.
I could just let her wonder.
Now that she was gone, none of this mattered. The focus was shifted. Mrs. Winner phoned after ten o"clock-breaking another of Beth"s rules-and when I told her that Nina was not there she said, "Are you sure of that?"
The same when I told her that I had no idea where Nina had gone. "Are you sure?"
I asked her not to phone again till morning, because of Beth"s rules and the babies" sleep, and she said, "Well. I don"t know. This is serious."
When I got up in the morning the car was parked across the street. Later, Mrs. Winner rang the bell and told Beth that she had been sent to check Nina"s room. Even Beth was quelled by Mrs. Winner, who then came up the stairs without a reproach or a warning being uttered. After she looked all around our room she looked in the bathroom and the closet, even shaking out a couple of blankets that were folded on the closet floor.
I was still in my pajamas, writing an essay on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and drinking Nescafe.
Mrs. Winner said that she had had to phone the hospitals, to see if Nina had been taken ill, and that Mr. Purvis had gone out himself to check on several other places where she might be.
"If you know anything it would be better to tell us," she said. "Anything at all."
Then as she started down the stairs she turned and said in a voice that was less menacing, "Is there anybody at the college she was friendly with. Anybody you know?"
I said that I didn"t think so.
I had seen Nina only a couple of times at the college. Once she was walking down the lower corridor of the Arts Building in the crush between cla.s.ses. Once she was in the cafeteria. Both times she was alone. It was not particularly unusual to be alone when you were hurrying from one cla.s.s to another, but it was a little strange to sit alone in the cafeteria with a cup of coffee at around a quarter to four in the afternoon when that s.p.a.ce was practically deserted. She sat with a smile on her face, as if to say how pleased, how privileged, she felt to be there, how alert and ready to respond to the demands of this life she was, once she understood what they were.
In the afternoon it began to snow. The car across the street had to depart to make way for the snowplow. When I went into the bathroom and caught the flutter of her kimono on its hook, I felt what I had been suppressing-a true fear for Nina. I had a picture of her, disoriented, weeping into her loose hair, wandering around in the snow in her white underwear instead of her camel"s hair coat, though I knew perfectly well that she had taken the coat with her.
The phone rang just as I was about to leave for my first cla.s.s on Monday morning.
"It"s me," said Nina, in a rushed warning, but with something like triumph in her voice. "Listen. Please. Could you please do me a favor?"
"Where are you? They"re looking for you."
"Who is?"
"Mr. Purvis. Mrs. Winner."
"Well, you"re not to tell them. Don"t tell them anything. I"m here."
"Where?"
"Ernest"s."
"Ernest"s?" I said. "Ernie"s?" "Ernie"s?"
"Sshh. Did anybody there hear you?"
"No."
"Listen, could you please, please get on a bus and bring me the rest of my stuff? I need my shampoo. I need my kimono. I"m going around in Ernest"s bathrobe. You should see me, I look like an old woolly brown dog. Is the car still outside?"
I went and looked.
"Yes."
"Okay then, you should get on the bus and ride up to the college just like you normally do. And then catch the bus downtown. You know where to get off. Campbell and Howe. Then walk over here. Carlisle Street. Three sixty-three. You know it, don"t you?"
"Is Ernie there?"
"No, dum-dum. He"s at work. He"s got to support us, doesn"t he?"
Us? Was Ernie to support Nina and me? Was Ernie to support Nina and me?
No. Ernie and Nina. Ernie and Nina Ernie and Nina.
Nina said, "Oh, please. You"re the only person I"ve got."
I did as directed. I caught the college bus, then the downtown bus. I got off at Campbell and Howe and walked west to Carlisle Street. The snowstorm was over; the sky was clear; it was a bright, windless, deep-frozen day. The light hurt my eyes and the fresh snow squeaked under my feet.
Now half a block north, on Carlisle Street, to the house where Ernie had lived with his mother and father and then with his mother and then alone. And now-how was it possible?-with Nina.
The house looked just as it had when I had come here once or twice with my mother. A brick bungalow with a tiny front yard, an arched living room window with an upper pane of colored gla.s.s. Cramped and genteel.
Nina was wrapped, just as she had described herself, in a man"s brown woolly ta.s.selled dressing gown, with its manly but innocent Ernie-smell of shaving lather and Lifebuoy soap.
She grabbed my hands, which were stiff with cold inside my gloves. Each of them had been holding on to the handle of a shopping bag.
"Frozen," she said. "Come on, we"ll get them into some warm water."
"They are not frozen," not frozen," I said. "Just frozen." I said. "Just frozen."
But she went ahead and helped me off with my things, and took me into the kitchen and ran a bowlful of water, and then as the blood returned painfully to my fingers she told me how Ernest (Ernie) had come to the rooming house on Sat.u.r.day night. He was bringing a magazine that had a lot of pictures of old ruins and castles and things that he thought might interest me. She got herself out of bed and came downstairs, because of course he could not go upstairs, and when he saw how sick she was he said she had to come home with him so he could look after her. Which he had done so well that her sore throat was practically gone and her fever completely gone. And then they had decided that she would stay here. She would just stay with him and never go back to where she was before.
She seemed unwilling even to mention Mr. Purvis"s name.
"But it has to be a huge big secret," she said. "You are the only one to know. Because you"re our friend and you are the reason we met."
She was making coffee. "Look up there," she said, waving at the open cupboard. "Look at the way he keeps things. Mugs here. Cups and saucers here. Every cup has got its own hook. Isn"t it tidy? The house is just like that all over. I love it.
"You are the reason we met," she repeated. "If we have a baby and it"s a girl, we could name it after you."
I held my hands round the mug, still feeling a throb in my fingers. There were African violets on the windowsill over the sink. His mother"s order in the cupboards, his mother"s house-plants. The big fern was probably still in front of the living room window, and the doilies on the armchairs. What she had said, in regard to herself and Ernie, seemed brazen and-especially when I thought of the Ernie part of it-abundantly distasteful.
"You"re going to get married?"
"Well."
"You said if you have a baby."
"Well, you never know, we might have started that without being married," said Nina, ducking her head mischievously.
"With Ernie?" I said. "With Ernie?" Ernie?"
"Well, why not? Ernie"s nice," she said. "And anyway I"m calling him Ernest." She hugged the bathrobe around herself.
"What about Mr. Purvis?"
"What about him?"
"Well, if it"s something happening already, couldn"t it be his?"
Everything changed about Nina. Her face turned mean and sour. "Him," "Him," she said with contempt. "What do you want to talk about him for? He never had it in him." she said with contempt. "What do you want to talk about him for? He never had it in him."
"Oh?" I said, and was going to ask what about Gemma, but she interrupted.
"What do you want to talk about the past for? Don"t make me sick. That"s all dead and gone. It doesn"t matter to me and Ernest. We"re together now. We"re in love now."
In love. With Ernie. Ernest. Now.
"Okay," I said.
"Sorry I yelled at you. Did I yell? I"m sorry. You"re our friend and you brought me my things and I appreciate it. You"re Ernest"s cousin and you"re our family."
She slipped behind me and her fingers darted into my armpits and she began to tickle me, at first lazily and then furiously, saying, "Aren"t you? Aren"t you?"
I tried to get free, but I couldn"t. I went into spasms of suffering laughter and wriggled and cried out and begged her to stop. Which she did, when she had me quite helpless, and both of us were out of breath.
"You"re the ticklishest person I ever met."
I had to wait a long time for the bus, stamping my feet on the pavement. When I got to the college I had missed my second as well as my first cla.s.s, and I was late for my work in the cafeteria. I changed into my green cotton uniform in the broom closet and pushed my mop of black hair (the worst hair in the world for showing up in food, as the manager had warned me) under a cotton snood.
I was supposed to get the sandwiches and salads out on the shelves before the doors opened for lunch, but now I had to do it with an impatient lineup watching me, and that made me feel clumsy. I was so much more noticeable now than when I pushed the cart among the tables to collect the dirty dishes. People were concentrating then on their food and conversation. Now they were just looking at me.
I thought of what Beverly and Kay had said about spoiling my chances, marking myself off in the wrong way. It seemed now it could be right.
After I finished cleaning up the cafeteria tables, I changed back into my ordinary clothes and went to the college library to work on my essay. It was my afternoon free of cla.s.ses.
An underground tunnel led from the Arts Building to the library, and around the entrance to this tunnel were posted advertis.e.m.e.nts for movies and restaurants and used bicycles and typewriters, as well as notices for plays and concerts. The Music Department announced that a free recital of songs composed to fit the poems of English Country Poets would be presented on a date that had now pa.s.sed. I had seen this notice before, and did not have to look at it to be reminded of the names Herrick, Housman, Tennyson. And a few steps into the tunnel the lines began to a.s.sault me.
On Wenlock Edge the wood"s in trouble I would never think of those lines again without feeling the p.r.i.c.kles of the upholstery on my bare haunches. The sticky p.r.i.c.kly shame. A far greater shame it seemed now, than at the time. He had done something to me, after all.
From far, from eve and morning And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither-here am I.
No.
What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those?
No, never.
White in the moon the long road lies That leads me from my love.
No. No. No.
I would always be reminded of what I had agreed to do. Not been forced, not ordered, not even persuaded. Agreed to do.
Nina would know. She had been too preoccupied with Ernie to say anything that morning, but there would come a time when she would laugh about it. Not cruelly, but just the way she laughed at so many things. And she might even tease me about it. Her teasing would have in it something like her tickling, something insistent, obscene.
Nina and Ernie. In my life from now on.
The college library was a high beautiful s.p.a.ce, designed and built and paid for by people who believed that those who sat at the long tables before open books-even those who were hung-over, sleepy, resentful, and uncomprehending-should have s.p.a.ce above them, panels of dark gleaming wood around them, high windows bordered with Latin admonitions, through which to look at the sky. For a few years before they went into schoolteaching or business or began to rear children, they should have that. And now it was my turn and I should have it too.