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
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.
The policemen were sitting at the nursing station, as if awaiting my midnight arrival, and Gilheeny boomed out his opener: 'Happy holiday greetings to you, Dr. Roy, and I expect that in the lap of your family, with your girlfriend in the lovely red Volvo, you have had a wonderful time.'
I found myself relieved that they were there. I asked whether they'd had a good Thanksgiving as well.
'Red is a fine color,' said the bushy redhead. 'There is a continuity to the unconscious processes, at home, at play, at work, according to Freud and resident Cohen, and the continuity of the red of the Thanksgiving cranberry and the potential red of human bloodshed we observe nightly on our beat is pleasing to our senses.'
'This Cohen is talking to you about the unconscious?' I asked.
'As Freud discovered and as Cohen points out,' said Quick, 'the process of free association is liberating, enabling the darkness of the child?policeman light up with the understanding of the adult. See this lead billy club?'
I saw it.
'The crack of this lead stick on the elbow is a more sure and fail?safe blow, much to the consternation of those writing TV thrillers,' said Quick. 'To crack an elbow with the understanding of the childhood unconscious is almost free of guilt.'
'He have only Cohen to thank,' said Gilheeny, 'for teaching the technique of the free association.'
'Cohen and that master of the Jewish race, Freud. And we have high hopes for you, Roy, for like a racehorse, your track record is among the best.'
'You are a man who looks great on paper,' twitched Gilheeny, 'humane yet athletic. The Rhodes will of 1903 says, I do believe, to choose 'the best men for the world's fight,' does it not?'
We were interrupted by a shriek from the Grenade Room:
GO AVAY GO AVAY GO AVAY . . .
My heart sank. A room?116 gomere. Even to put on the semblance of a BUFF before TURFING upstairs was, at that point, too much.
' 'Do not presume,'' said Gilheeny, ' 'one of the thieves was killed; do not despair, one of the thieves was saved.' '
'Augustine, of course,' said Quick.
