And so no tears came to my eyes when I saw them at home. Seeing me with Berry immediately raised everyone's hopes for my marriage. Despite my mother's reputation for breaking up relationships?the most blatant example being a Thanksgiving years before when, after dinner, she'd announced to my spinster cousin's beau that "Now it's time for you and me to talk turkey, Roger," and she'd stayed locked up in they den with him for an hour, and after she got through with him no one ever saw Roger again?she started right in on me. I was forced by fatigue to take a nap, and I excused myself from all their questions and lapsed into vivid daytime dreams. I awoke from that deep sleep that has you cheek to cheek with your owns drool on the pillow, and at dinner my mind was soil coated with sleep. I'd been up all night in the E.W. too often the past several nights, trying to deal with the ocean of humanity rolling and surging under my eyes. My mother resented my having taken a nap and my being tired, but Berry's being there diluted my mother's raging attention, and the yell level stayed at mezzo .

After dinner, things began looking up. The 18 1/2 minute gap on the latest White House tape had just been revealed, and what pleasure it gave us all! Four generations of Baschs buzzed with the news of the Rose Mary Reach. Spurred on by the news photos Rose Mary Woods spread?eagled between the foot pedal of her tape recorder and the phone behind h as if awaiting a quick roll in the hay with Nixon, we laughed and chortled together that now, finally, Nixon was going to get his. Good for us! Good for America! From the very tiniest Basch, my brother's four?year-old daughter, who was learning to play with her toy phone by picking it up and spread?eagling herself and screaming RO?MARY REACH RO?MARY REACH, my brother, who seemed to despise Nixon even more than the rest of us, past my father, who was interested in the technical aspects of the erasure, foreshadowing the panel of experts who would show, beyond shadow of a doubt, that "there were four to nine consecutive manual erasures" and who'd conclude that "the event could not have happened by accident," and finally, to my grandfather, the only one of his generation left, who smiled a wise smile and said only, "After all these years, to see this, is a wonderful thing."

During a lull in the conversation my grandfather stood up and said to me, "Well, now, Doctor, now I get free advice. Let's go."

We went into my room and sat down, and he said, "Nah, I don' wanna talk with you about advice," and he pulled his chair up opposite me and leaned over the way old men do, and I remembered his wife, perenially sitting in back of him, an echo over his shoulder, now dead.

"So you know," he said, "you're the oldest grandchild, and I remember the day you were born. I hoid the news in Saratoga. I was president of the Italian American Grocers of Manhattan. We had our convention dere dat year."

"A Jew as president of the Italian American?Grocers?"

"Yeh. The whole t'ing was Jews. You're an educated man, I'm asking you?would you buy from an Italian? They bought their spaghetti from us. After Polish and Yiddish, next I Joined Italian. Den English. Basch's Italian American Grocery, that was me, then. I got 'black hand' letters from the Mafia, the works. Even in Kolomea in Poland, we were grocers. My father made all his money during the war with Japan: he bought up hides, and people said to him you're crazy what you buying these hides for, and he said never mind, and when war came, they needed them hides."

"What for?"

"Boots for the soldiers. To get to Japan. Ah, my healt's not too bad?a little trouble with the legs. But I want to know if I got something bad, 'cause dese days, dey can cure. I knew dis Italian?Ninth Avenue, nice boy. Oiy did dey cut him?a scar here to here, and here to here. But den, he ran around like a chicken. Not like some people?a little growt, and what do they say? Too busy, too busy. And den bang, dead. I'll fight like hell to live." He paused, and moved closer, until his knees almost touched mine and I could see the little clouds of cataract smothering his eyes. "Dat goil of yours she's a nice goil, isn't she?"

"Yes, she is."

"So what are you waiting? You don't got another one, do you?"

I tried not to let on that I had another one. r

"So why wait? Be a mensch! I never waited. Sure, you couldn't wait den, but you know your grandma never wanted to marry me, never? You know what I did? I got a gun, and held it to her head, and I said, Geiger, marry me or I kill you. How about dat, eh?"

We chuckled, but then he got sad and said, "You know, in all dem years with her, I never went with another woman, never. Believe me, chances I had. In Saratoga. Chances plenty."

I felt bad about what I was doing with Molly.

"You're a smart fella. You see people from the Noising Homes all the time, in your hospital, right? Dey bring dem dere?"

"Yes, Gramp, they do."

"I never wanted to leave Magaw Place, never. I had my Club, my friends. When Grandma died, your father forced me to leave, to dis Home. A man like me in a place like dat. Sure, it's not bad in some ways-people to play poker, the shul right dere, it's all right."

"It's safe too," I said, remembering how he'd gotten mugged:

"Safe? What do I care safe? No, dat don't worry me. Never did. It's no good. The noise?we're in flight path to Kennedy, would you believe? Dey treat you worse den a dog! All I did, all my life, and now dis. People die every day. It's a terrible, terrible . . ."

He started to cry. I felt desperate.

"It's a bad t'ing, dis. Who visits? Talk to your father, tell him I don't want to stay dere like an animal. He'll listen to you. I loved Magaw Place. I'm not a baby, I could have stayed?there myself. You remember Magaw Place?"

"Sure, Gramp," I said, my mind filled with plush purple couches in a dark vestibule and the creaking metal?slatted elevator and then the childhood thrill of running down the long peculiar?smelling corridor toward Gram and Gramp's door, which would be thrown open and filled with their embraces. "Sure."

"And your father forced me to move out. So talk to him?dere's still time for me to move from dat home. Here?a little gels from me, for your office, Dr. Basch."

I took the ten?dollar bill, and sat there as he got up. I knew how terrible it was. My father, adrift with the question of how to handle a single elderly parent, had found his solution in the standard middle?class ethos: "ship them to the gomer homes." Cattle in boxcars. I was mad. At the time he'd done it, I'd asked him why, and all he'd say was, "It's the best thing for him, he can't live there alone. The home is nice. We saw it. There are a lot of things there for him to do, and they take care of them there pretty good." How much my grandfather had gone through, and how little was left for him now. He would turn into a gomer. I knew, even better than him, where the ride from the nursing home would end. An ominous thought came to me: as he began to get demented, I'd visit him in the home, a syringeful of cyanide like a bar of candy in my pocket. He wouldn't be a gomer, no.

We rejoined the others. Things were cheery and bright. My mother, sensing my ambivalence about medicine, marched out a story: "You're never satisfied, Roy. You're like my great?uncle Thaler, my father's father's brother. The whole Thaler family were merchants in Russia?solid steady work, selling cloth, food, I think they even had the whiskey license in the town. But my great?uncle wanted to be a sculptor. Sculptor? Who ever heard of that? They laughed. They told him to be like all the rest. And then once, in the dead of night, he snuck into the barn, stole the best horse, and rode away, and no one ever saw or heard from him again."

Several hours later Berry deposited me again outside the doors of the E.W. of the House. As I entered the waiting room at midnight and said hello to Abe, I gave thanks that during Thanksgiving with my family I'd been able to get some sleep.