Too Much Happiness

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 running around, I’m not so stupid as all that. I know you need your bed rest. But I say recovering. Nobody sick like you are supposed to be ever looked as good as what you do.”
    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 Roxanne trespassing on his ground with her jokes and her swagger and notions of entertainment.
    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 Roxanne. “Are you up to cards?”
    “I hate cards.”
    “Well, have you got Chinese checkers in the house?”
    Roxanne directed this question at Old Mrs. Crozier, who first said she had no idea, then wondered if there might be a board in a drawer of the dining room buffet.
    So I was sent down to look and came back with the board and the jar of marbles.
    Roxanne set the board up over Mr. Crozier’s legs, and she and I and Mr. Crozier played, Old Mrs. Crozier saying she had never understood the game or been able to keep her marbles straight. (To my surprise she seemed to offer this as a joke.) Roxanne might squeal when she made a move or groan whenever somebody jumped over one of her marbles, but she was careful never to disturb the patient. She held her body still and set her marbles down like feathers. I tried to learn to do the same, because she would widen her eyes warningly at me if I didn’t. All without losing her dimple.
    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-Roxanne was surely an inferior person-he had made himself tolerant, gentle. When all he must want to do was lie there and meditate on the pathways of his life and gear up for his future.
    Roxanne patted sweat off his forehead, saying, “Don’t get excited, you haven’t won yet.”
    “Roxanne,” he said. “Roxanne. Do you know whose name that was, Roxanne?”
    “Hmm?” she said, and I broke in. I couldn’t help it.
    “It was Alexander the Great’s wife’s name.”
    My head was a magpie’s nest lined with such bright scraps of information.
    “Is that so?” said Roxanne. “And who was that supposed to be? Great Alexander?”
    I realized something when I looked at Mr. Crozier at that moment. Something shocking, saddening.
    He liked her not knowing. I could tell. He liked her not knowing. Her ignorance woke a pleasure that melted on his tongue, like a lick of toffee.

· · ·

    On the first day she had worn shorts, as I did, but the next time and always after that Roxanne wore a dress of some stiff and shiny light green material. You could hear it rustle as she ran up the stairs. She brought a fleecy pad for Mr.