Part 6 (1/2)
”Not her. Or if she did and I tried anything she'd be awake like a shot.”
Just to give Mrs. Winner some practice, as Nina said, we left the house one evening and took a bus to the city library. From the bus window we watched the long black car having to slow and dawdle at every bus stop, then speed up and stay with us. We had to walk a block to the library, and Mrs. Winner pa.s.sed us and parked beyond the front entrance, and watched us-we believed-in her rearview mirror.
I wanted to see if I could check out a copy of The Scarlet Letter The Scarlet Letter, which was required for one of my courses. I could not afford to buy one, and the copies from the college library were all out. Also I had an idea of getting a book out for Nina-the sort of book that showed simplified charts of history.
Nina had bought the textbooks for the courses she was auditing. She had bought notebooks and pens-the best fountain pens of that time-in matching colors. Red for Middle-American Pre-Columbian Civilizations, blue for the Romantic Poets, green for Victorian and Georgian English Novelists, yellow for Fairy Tales from Perrault to Andersen. She went to every lecture, sitting in the back row because she thought that was the proper place for her. She spoke as if she enjoyed walking through the Arts building with the throng of other students, finding her seat, opening her textbook at the page specified, taking out her pen. But her notebooks remained empty.
The trouble was, as I saw it, that she had no pegs to hang anything on. She did not know what Victorian meant, or Romantic, or Pre-Columbian. She had been to j.a.pan, and Barbados, and many of the countries in Europe, but she could never have found those places on a map. She wouldn't have known whether or not the French Revolution came before the 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 fl.u.s.ter. ”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 blus.h.i.+ng, 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Sat.u.r.day nights, it's special.”
On Sat.u.r.days 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 scholars.h.i.+p 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 b.u.mpy 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 opened the back door.
I had thought that Mr. Purvis must live in one of the stodgy mansions surrounded by acres of lawns and unfarmed fields north of the city. It was probably the racehorses that had made me think so. Instead, we travelled east through prosperous but not lordly streets, past brick and mock-Tudor houses with their lights on in the early dark and their Christmas lights blinking already out of the snow-capped shrubbery. We turned in at a narrow driveway between high hedges and parked in front of a house that I recognized as modern modern because of its flat roof and long wall of windows and the fact that the building material appeared to be cement. No Christmas lights here, no lights of any kind. because of its flat roof and long wall of windows and the fact that the building material appeared to be cement. No Christmas lights here, no lights of any kind.
No sign of Mr. Purvis either. The car slid into a bas.e.m.e.nt cavern, we rode in an elevator up one floor and came out in a hall dimly lit and furnished like a living room with upholstered hard chairs and little polished tables, and mirrors and rugs. Mrs. Winner waved me ahead of her through one of the doors that opened off this hall, into a windowless room with a bench and hooks around the walls. It was just like a school cloakroom except for the polish on the wood and carpet on the floor.
”Here is where you leave your clothes,” Mrs. Winner said.
I removed my boots, I stuffed my mittens into my coat pockets, I hung my coat up. Mrs. Winner stayed with me. I supposed she had to, to show me which way to take next. There was a comb in my pocket and I wanted to fix my hair, but not with her watching. And I did not see a mirror.
”Now the rest.”
She looked straight at me to see if I understood, and when I appeared not to (though in a sense I did, I understood but hoped to have made a mistake) she said, ”Don't worry, you won't be cold. The house is well heated throughout.”
I did not yet move to obey, and she spoke to me casually, as if she could not be bothered with contempt.
”I hope you're not a baby.”
I could have reached for my coat, at that point. I could have demanded to be driven back to the rooming house. If that was refused, I could have walked back on my own. I remembered the way we had come and though it would have been cold to walk, it would have taken me less than an hour.
I don't suppose that the outside door would have been locked, or that there would have been any effort to bring me back.