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deep. And I was thinking of Daisy, too, of course, and how I'd ever begin to explain myself if she found out, and was just in fact planning a delicate extrication when Pop walked in and caught me and Patricia Murphy, duly arrayed. He could have been angry, certainly, or at least repelled, but he simply looked at her, and then at me, and said like it was quarter to four in the afternoon on a job already running a day behind, "Let's pick it up here, Jerome."

Pop has never mentioned that night, not even in these recent months when it's just that kind of best-forgotten off-color item exclusively crowding his memory, and which he'll tell you all about, over and over again: the time he was playing golf on the Costa del Sol and caught the future King of Spain hocking a loogey in the water cooler on the fourteenth tee, or when he got the clap from a hooker in Kansas City and was afraid to touch Ma for three months, or the time he was out on a big job in North Hills and saw the lady of the house naked in the kitchen, brushing her nipples with salad oil, for no reason he could fathom. He'll tell you his awkward stories of all of us, of his cousins and employees and people on television and especially the politicians he reads about in the stacks of ultraright and left-wing newsletters he subscribes to, the power plays and conspiracies to cover up what he believes runs through everything and everyone, which is corruption, total utter corruption, of heart and mind and of the soul. Only Bobby, no surprise, is not subject, which is fine by me, and maybe even appreciated, because if Pop were exposing him, too, I'd wonder what light or verity was left to him.

For Pop, unlike Bobby, isn't so unconcerned about dying. Sure he talks about having me dive-bomb
Donnie
into this place, or bribing the nurse's aide to sneak him a couple bottles of
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Sominex, or dropping the next-door-suite lady friend's curling iron into his bathwater, but in fact he's as death-averse as any striving red-blooded man of his generation (or mine, for that matter), and would always prefer to cling to life forever, even if it meant constant physical misery and a near-vegetative mental state, not to mention the utter depletion of the Battle family reserves. The thing to remember about Pop is that despite the de-nuded superego and messy accidents there is nothing really too wrong with him; his blood pumps at more pacific pressures than mine and his bad cholesterol is lower and he still eats (and normally shits, he assures me) like a draft horse, and as long as he has someone helping him up and down steps and out of loungers and beds so he doesn't fall and break a hip, he might well preside at my funeral, part of me suspecting how it would give him a peculiarly twisted tingle of accomplishment, this last, last patriarchal mumble over his sole surviving issue, finally succumbed.

A soft triple tone goes off in a minor key, like you'll hear over the public address in many Asian airports, which immediately wakes Pop out of his slumber; it's the call for chow in the dining room for those who aren't otherwise being served a tray in bed. Pop points to his robe and I help him with it as he tucks his pontoon-like feet into his slippers. He's unshaven as usual and his oily silvery hair smells like warm beeswax, and though we're the same height he's seeming ever-shorter to me now, the hunch in his shoulders growing more and more vulturesque with each visit.

"How do I look?" Pop says to me, the one thing he'll always ask in earnest.

"Like a man with a plan."

"I'm seeing a woman, you know."

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"You mentioned that last time. Who is she again?"

"A looker named Bea. But don't ask me anything else, because I don't know the first thing about her. It's just a lot of hot sex."

"That's great, Pop."

"Don't be such a wiseass, Jerome. At least your old man is getting his share in here. It's the only thing that makes this place bearable. That reminds me. Next time you come bring a bottle of that Astro Glide, and not a dinky-sized one, either. Get the one with the pump."

"Got it."

"That stuff is a miracle. They ought to make it taste better, you know."

"I said I got it, Pop."

"You'll see, when it's your turn. You'll want your whole life lubed up."

"I'm sure I will," I say, thinking how maybe I don't want to wait. "Listen, don't you want to throw on a shirt for dinner?"

"Bea's no uppity broad."

"All right. How about some real pants?"

"Forget it. Let's go, I'm starved."

Down the hallway we go, Pop holding tight on to my arm, and it shocks me to see how unsteady he is. Maybe it's that he's still somewhat sleepy, or it's just part of his well-honed act of late (Decrepitude on Ice), but it is frankly alarming to feel the dire vise-grip of his fingers on my elbow joint, the tremolos of each heaving step, and then to hear the wheezy cardiacal mouth breathing that is all too typical around here at Ivy Acres, these once exuberant smokers and whiskey drinkers and steak eaters now sitting down to three mostly color-free meals a day, easily eaten with a spoon.

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The dining room is actually pretty nice, if you like pastelly framed harborside prints and bleached oak tables and chairs and piped in Lite FM (a Grateful Dead song actually came on once, freezing me and the staff, though only momentarily), the decor done right along the lines of Kissimmee Timeshare, which I'm sure is no accident. The ambience around here is meant to evoke the active vacationing life, which for most of these folks is exactly what they remember best and most fondly, not sweet youth so much as those first dizzying years of their retirements, twenty-five or thirty years ago, when all their spouses were still living or vital and they still could walk every side street of San Gimignano and dance all night in the cruise ship disco and didn't mind in the least a three-city routing on the way to the Marquesas Islands, so they could live (just a little) like Gauguin. (This is what Rita and I should be doing, rather than painting ourselves into recriminatory corners with love's labors lost, the fact of which depresses me all the more, knowing that I might not have such memories when it's my turn to be thoughtfully assisted into oblivion.) It seems a good quarter of the folks here in the dining room are wheelchair-bound, maybe half of those requiring help from the nursing aides to put spoon to mouth, and Pop leads us to the back of the room, far from the entrance, where the more able-bodied (if not -minded) types take their accustomed chairs.

Bea, Pop's object of affection, if that's what she is, is already eating her dinner of cut green beans and roasted turkey and mashed potatoes, and says, "Good evening, Hank," to him as we sit down, sounding uncannily like my- mother. He says hello back with no great passion, and introduces me to her again, for perhaps the fifth or sixth time. Bea has a little trouble with her short-term recall, which I don't mind because there's not much A I, 0 F T

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to talk about and so it's good to get acquainted over and over again. She is usually pulled together and face-painted for dinner or the evening movie, and then decked out in a strictly nautical/maritime style, with the sign of the anchor featured on every last piece of her clothing, even her little white socks, ap-pliqued and stitched in and printed on, repeated enough that it has begun to read like some ominous Occidental ideogram, this admonitory vision of the two-sided hook. I could go further into this imagery a la Theresa, how it suggests my own guilt about "placing" Pop here and my attendant anxiety about being dragged along with him (now in mind, later in body), but I won't, because despite the fact that this is the most socially acceptable means of getting back at him for all those years of his being a pigheaded domineering irascible bull in the china shop of life, your typical world-historical jerk, I still 110 percent respect the man, even if I can't love him, which I probably do anyway, though I would never ever say.

What Bea sees in him I'm not exactly sure, but maybe at this stage and locale it's enough for a man to have any bit of spirit left, any whiff of piss and vinegar, to make the ladies swoon.

There is, as Pop purports, more action going on around here than anyone cares to imagine, and it's not what we'd like to think is just some smoothy doe-eyed cuddling in the dayroom.

Bea isn't looking terribly right this evening (or afternoon, as 4:45 is the first dinner seating), for she's also wearing her bathrobe and slippers, and her shoulder-length hair, which I recall being thoroughly warmly blond, is now white for an inch at the roots (has it been that long since I last visited?), and not brushed. With no makeup on her face I can hardly recognize her, her eyes seeming that much sleepier, sunken, the unrouged skin of her cheeks so sheer as to seem transparent, her faintly
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purplish lips dried and cracked. Maybe I'm old-fashioned and don't mind being duped by a deft hand with the Maybelline, but I don't think I'm overstating things when I say that if she weren't otherwise eating with some gusto and sitting upright I might say poor Bea was about to kick the bucket.

"Jerry, are you Hank's brother or son?" Bea asks me, like she's asking for the very first time.

"He's my son, sweetheart," Pop tells her. "He's the one who put me in here."

"Then I should thank you," she says, "for sending me my sexy companion."

"Please don't use that word," Pop says.

"Sexy?"

"Companion."

"Why not?"

"It sounds fruity."

"So? You are fruity. Fruity with me."

"Yeah, but I don't want my son to know."

Bea grins at me, with her perfect set of porcelain choppers, a speck of green bean clinging to her incisor.

The nursing-aide-posing-as-waiter approaches and tells us what's on the dinner menu, which is just what Bea is working through, save the option of fish instead of the turkey. Pop asks what kind of fish it is and the fellow says a
whitiskfish,
of course meaning he doesn't know or care. Pop says we'll both have that, and I don't fight it. He's always ordered for everyone, even the guys on the crews when the lunch truck came by (he made a point of buying lunch whenever he was around), because he's proud and he's a bully, and he'll be buying dinner for as long as his triple-tax-free munis hold out. The other folks at the table, two men and a woman, appropriately clad, all order the turkey, A L O F T

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and while we wait for our plates to be delivered I check out the rest of the room, now nearly filled up with most of the residents of Ivy Acres, whose mission is to serve those, according to its glossy brochure, "moving between self-sufficiency and a more needs-intensive lifestyle," meaning of course the heading-downhill-fast crowd. What strikes me is that there's never as much conversation as I think there will be, there's just this se-date bass-line murmur to accompany the piped-in easy-listening format, because as much as I'd like to believe that these old-timers can hardly contain their accrued store of tales and opinions and observations, the truth of the matter is they would rather talk to anybody else but their Ivy Acres brethren, wishing to be a part of the chance daily flow again, the messy unknown arrays of people and situations that you and I might consider bothersome or peculiar or annoying but to the institu-tionally captive are serendipitous events, like finding a ten-dollar bill in the street. So I feel it's part of my duty whenever I visit to eat with Pop and listen to whatever his tablemates have to say about their neglectful families or their lumbago, and nod agreeably to their shock at the price of a gallon of gasoline or a three-bedroom house in Centerport, and patiently discuss their views on abortion and the right to bear arms. Bea usually tells me about her divorced eldest daughter, the one who has a son who is a junkie and a daughter who is already a lesbian ("at the age of thirteen!") and who asks her for monthly counseling money for all three, which Bea knows she uses instead toward a lease on a new Infiniti sedan.

Across from us sit Daniel and his fraternal twin Dennis, who ran a family bakery in Deer Park, and are decent enough fellows, though one of them is hard of hearing and so they both talk way too loudly, and both spit a bit doing it. They like to
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argue with each other about the Middle East crisis, one of them approvingly Zionist in the conservative American Gentile tradition and the other something of an anti-Semite, inevitably bringing up the idea of Jewish conspiratorial influence in Washington and Hollywood and on Wall Street. They can sometimes get quite angry at each other—one of them might even slap the table with a big loafy hand and leave red-faced—

but Pop assures me that they hardly speak when visitors aren't around, and just get up together at 3 A.M. out of lifelong habit and play Hearts to kill time until coffee is served in the Sunrise Room.

There are, of course, a number of residents that you never see, who are housed in a special wing of the complex called

"Transitions" (though informally known as "The Morgue," as it is situated, in a somewhat unfortunate attempt at an expensive contemporary look, behind a massive pair of polished stainless steel sliding doors). This is the unit where the living isn't so much
assisted
as it is
sustained,
and while I've been invited multiple times of late by the executive administrator to take a tour of its specialized facilities and meet its staff I've not yet done so, the reason, I think, being not exactly denial of the coming reality but my feeling that I'd rather be cathartically jolted by shock and dismay and surprise by what Pop requires than have to ru-minate too much now on all the grim complications and possibilities. Maybe that's a sneaky form of denial, too, but it's what I can do.

Our dinners are brought to us and it's no stretch to say that Pop gravely misordered. The fish on our plates is an unnaturally rectangular fillet of meat, grayish and bluish and not nearly whitish enough, with veiny streaks of brown running through the engineered block. A glum slice of lemon is steam-A L O F T