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head. They were activities that, when all was said and done, might make a person no better a companion than an empty samovar.
    All day long she sat beside it, staring steely-eyed out the window, her puckered face in the hand-painted babushka like a pitted prune in a sling. In the evenings she rose briefly as Mama turned her chair to face the living room. But beyond the necessary, beyond her involuntarily blurted “Feh!”s and her spontaneous gestures against the evil eye, she never stirred.
    Then there was the business of her odor. Nobody could say exactly when it had started, so long had the odor pervaded our household, but it was generally agreed that it dated from around the time when Grandma Zippe sat down for good. So maybe it had attached itself to her back in her ambulatory days, a stray aroma that had followed her home from the market. It had found in her once bustling person (for reasons who could say) the perfect host, and invaded the somber privacy of her shirtwaist. It had hung its wreath so heavily about her shoulders that she gave in at the knees.
    For a while the smell seemed impersonal and unlocalized. It was possibly something rotting in the icebox, which Mama scrubbed as she did everything else, in a deodorizing passion. But as the reek became stronger, it left no doubt as to its point of origin; and unlike my grandmother’s forbidding presence, her fishy smell was not so easy to ignore. You might almost have said it had a personality all its own.
    Naturally we learned to live with it, but every time you adjusted to the latest level of fetor, it seemed to have been turned up a notch or two. Full-bodied and dense, with a richness that brought tears to the eyes, it scented our clothing and flavored our meals. It caused otherwise decorous guests to hold their noses and whisper “Pee-yoo.” It soiled the air with an olive cast and filtered into your sleep, giving you troubled dreams of stagnant seas. While every measure was taken to ensure that my grandmother was antiseptically cleansed and disinfected, nothing worked. No amount of sitz bathing the old lady in aromatic bath salts or soaking her garments in lye, no rings of pink-smoking germicidal smudge pots—nothing had succeeded in purging our apartment of her odor.
    It was hoped that she might lose it during our move to the South; she might leave it where she’d found it in our old neighborhood by the sea. This was a point that Uncle Morris had had the doubtful taste to raise more than once. But the odor had traveled well. In fact, owing perhaps to the oppressive humidity, it had become even more exquisitely intense. And now that it was nearly unbreathable, we understood how it had been all along the smell of her dying.

Three
    By the close of the weekend the rain had sown its wildest oats, settling down into a permanent pelting gray monsoon. It was a fitting accompaniment to the prevailing gloom of our apartment. The silver-haired Dr. Seligman, a little vague as to actual causes—“At her age it’s always a combination of things”—had assured us that my grandmother’s passing was only a matter of time. At this stage of her illness the hospital would be a needless expense, he’d said. Why put the old lady through the ordeal when she could be made so much more comfortable at home?
    Over corn flakes on Monday morning Papa told me not to bother coming down to the shop after school. Business was going to be slow thanks to the weather, and I could make myself more useful at home. But I surprised myself by arguing that I would rather go to work; in the apartment I would only be in the way. Already the place was filling up, somewhat vulture-like, with Mama’s friends from the local synagogue auxiliary. Offering a token assistance invariably diverted by gossip, they doted more on the visiting doctor (a bachelor) than on the failing patient herself.
    Meanwhile Grandpa Isador, a tallis draped over his head