“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 skinny streak of pale flesh. It didn’t look so old as the parts of her that were daily exposed-her brown-freckled dark-veined hands and forearms, her brown-blotched cheeks. This usually covered length of her body was yellow-white, like wood freshly stripped of its bark.

I sat on the top step and listened to the sounds of the massage. Thumps and grunts. Roxanne’s voice bossy now, cheerful but full of exhortation.

“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 Roxanne say, “Now I’ll just clean this stuff up and we’ll go upstairs like you decided.”

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, Roxanne running ahead, and calling, “Look out, look out, wherever you are. We’re coming to get you wherever you are.”

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 Roxanne burst into the room.

“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, Roxanne.”

“How did you know my name?”

“Word gets around.”

“Fresh fellow you got here,” said Roxanne to Old Mrs. Crozier, who now came stumping into the room.

“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 Roxanne to Mr. Crozier. “Who gave you that shave and when was it?”

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

“That’s what I thought,” said Roxanne. And to me, “When you’re getting her water, how’d you like to heat some up for me and I’ll undertake to give him a decent shave?”

That was how Roxanne took on this other job, once a week, following the massage. She told Mr. Crozier on that first day not to worry.

“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 grinned. But the odd thing was that Old Mrs. Crozier just grinned too.

Roxanne shaved him deftly. She sponged his face and neck and torso and arms and hands. She pulled his sheets around, somehow managing not to disturb him, and she pounded and rearranged his pillows. Talking all the time, pure teasing and nonsense.

“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 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.