Too Much Happiness

“Dor-thee?”

“She’s in the sunroom,” I told her again.

“I know, I’m just kidding her. Now maybe you don’t know about getting a massage, but when you get one, you got to take off all your clothes. Not such a problem when you’re young, but when you’re older, you know, you can get all embarrassed.”

She was wrong about one thing, at least as far as I was concerned. About it not being a problem to take off all your clothes when you’re young.

“So maybe you should skedaddle.”

This time I took the front staircase while she was busy with the hot water. That way I got a glance in through the open door of the sunroom-which was not much of a sunroom at all, having its windows on three sides all filled up with the fat leaves of catalpa trees.

There I saw Old Mrs. Crozier stretched out on a daybed, on her stomach, head turned away from me, absolutely naked. A ski

I sat on the top step and listened to the sounds of the massage. Thumps and grunts. Roxa

“Stiff knot here. Oh brother. I’m going to have to whack you one. Just kidding. Aw, come on, just loosen up for me. You know you got a nice skin here. Small of your back, what do they say? It’s like a baby’s bum. Now I gotta bear down a bit, you’re going to feel it here. Take away the tension. Goody girl.”

Old Mrs. Crozier was making little yelps. Sounds of complaint and gratitude. It went on for quite a while and I got bored. I went back to reading some old Canadian Home Journals that I had found in a hall cupboard. I read recipes and checked on old-time fashions till I heard Roxa

Upstairs. I slid the magazines back into their place in the cupboard that would have been coveted by my mother and went into Mr. Crozier’s room. He was asleep, or at least he had his eyes closed. I moved the fan a few inches and smoothed his cover and went and stood by the window twiddling with the blind.

Sure enough there came a noise on the back stairs, Old Mrs. Crozier with her slow and threatening cane steps, Roxa

Mr. Crozier had his eyes open now. Beyond his usual weariness was a faint expression of alarm. But before he could pretend to be asleep again Roxa

“So here’s where you’re hiding. I just told your stepmom I thought it was about time I got introduced to you.”

Mr. Crozier said, “How do you do, Roxa

“How did you know my name?”

“Word gets around.”

“Fresh fellow you got here,” said Roxa

“Stop fooling around with that blind,” Old Mrs. Crozier said to me. “Go and fetch me a drink of cool water if you want something to do. Not cold-just cool.”

“You’re a mess,” said Roxa

“Yesterday,” he said. “I handle it myself as well as I can.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Roxa

That was how Roxa

“I’m not going to pound on you like you must have heard me doing to Dorothy-doodle downstairs. Before I got my massage training I used to be a nurse. Well, a nurse’s aide. One of the ones do all the work and the nurses come around and boss you. Anyway, I learned how to make people comfortable.”

Dorothy-doodle? Mr. Crozier gri

Roxa

“Dorothy, you’re a liar. You said you had a sick man upstairs and I walk in here and I think, Where’s the sick man? I don’t see a sick man round here. Do I?”

Mr. Crozier said, “What would you say I am then?”

“Recovering. That’s what I would say. I don’t say you should be up and ru

I thought this flirtatious prattle insulting. Mr. Crozier looked terrible. A tall man whose ribs had shown like those of somebody fresh from a famine when she sponged him, whose head was bald and whose skin looked as if it had the texture of a plucked chicken’s, his neck corded like an old man’s. Whenever I had waited on him in any way I had avoided looking at him. And this was not really because he was sick and ugly. It was because he was dying. I would have felt something of the same reticence even if he had looked angelically handsome. I was aware of an atmosphere of death in the house, growing thicker as you approached this room, and he was at the center of it, like the host the Catholics kept in the box so power fully called the tabernacle. He was the one stricken, marked out from everybody else, and here was Roxa

Inquiring, for instance, as to whether there was a game in the house called Chinese checkers.

This was perhaps on her second visit, when she asked him what he did all day.

“Read sometimes. Sleep.”

And how did he sleep at night?

“If I can’t sleep I lie awake. Think. Sometimes read.”

“Doesn’t that disturb your wife?”

“She sleeps in the back bedroom.”

“Un-huh. You need some entertainment.”

“Are you going to sing and dance for me?”

I saw Old Mrs. Crozier look aside with her odd involuntary grin.

“Don’t you get cheeky,” said Roxa

“I hate cards.”

“Well, have you got Chinese checkers in the house?”

Roxa

So I was sent down to look and came back with the board and the jar of marbles.

Roxa

I remembered Young Mrs. Crozier, Sylvia, saying to me in the car that her husband did not welcome conversation. It tired him out, she said, and when he was tired he could become irritable. So I thought, If ever there was a time for him to become irritable, it is now. Being forced to play a silly game on his deathbed, when you could feel his fever in the sheets.

But Sylvia must have been wrong. He had developed greater patience and courtesy than she was perhaps aware of. With inferior people-Roxa