Two successive rainy days in midsummer, a rarity, left the Palms in a somber mood, so that when the tertulia assembled there was little inclination to discuss anything of significance. Ral Jimenez, reminded of a day like this at a resort in the Colombian mountains, said: 'I was fifteen, just awakening to the world outside Medelln, when the Spanish ambassador to Colombia came to the resort. He was such an imperious but impressive man, slim, erect, wearing an expensive uniform laden with medals, that I saw in him the grandeur of his homeland.'

'What effect did this have on your thinking?' Ambassador St. Pres asked.

'It made me realize for the first time that I was an heir to all the greatness of Spain. I was not only a loyal colombiano but also a Spaniard whose roots went far back in the history of Iberia. I was a Spaniard, something to be proud of, and the discovery changed my life-certainly my attitude toward life.'

'Did you speak to the ambassador?' St. Pres asked, and Jimenez gasped: 'At fifteen? Me go up and speak to an official like him? Never! I admired him from afar and made believe that someone like him had been my great-great-grandfather back in Spain. For me it was a noble day, one when I suddenly saw everything in a different light. I'd like to live it over again, that intensity of feeling. As we grow older we lose the capacity for such emotion, and it's a shame.'

Senator Raborn, who had listened intently to Ral's story, said: 'I had a day like that, and it too was in the mountains. When I was a young officer I was stationed in Peshawar, now in Pakistan, at the gateway to the Khyber Pass. I was bitterly disappointed at not being able to see the Khyber, even more famous then than now, but I was never sent on the scouting expeditions that went into it because I was detailed to a joint British-American exploring team that was visiting three former provinces of the British Empire: Swat, Dir and Chitral. What a fantastic adventure that was! We traveled in little airplanes, rickety helicopters and Land-Rovers that broke down on the ancient mountain roads. And the natives! Their standard of living was like that of people even before the time of Christ. But what a glorious experience it was to be there among the high mountains of the Hindu Kush and the turbulent valley streams.

'We were in Chitral, talking to old-timers who had fought against the British in the siege of 1895, and one of them told me: "We'd have defeated the Englishmen if the Russians had given us the help they promised," and in that moment I caught the full meaning of the struggle that had been under way in these mountainous passes for the last two thousand years. It had been constant warfare.'

'And especially during what came to be called the Great Game in the 1740s,' St. Pres said, 'when England held back repeated attempts by Russia to burst through the mountains and capture India-'

'Exactly!' Raborn said. 'I suddenly saw it all, and that insight has determined my attitudes on foreign policy ever since.' He smiled at Jimenez and concluded: 'I'd like to have a moment of insight like that right now. To foresee what's going to happen to the former Soviet empire. Almost the same kind of country. Swat, Dir and Chitral.'

In the lull that followed, the men looked first at St. Pres and then at President Armitage, but it was the ambassador who accepted the challenge: 'My story is nothing world-shaking but it's about an emotional time for a seventeen-year-old at a summer resort on Long Island. There was going to be an end-of-season gala dance, and I was hoping that a girl of heavenly beauty-her name was Rosamund-would agree to be my date. What dreams of glory I had! But everybody else wanted to invite her, too, so my chances were not good. Then we heard that she had accepted an invitation from a smoothie from Yale, twenty-two years old with his own car, and we were heartbroken, me especially.

'But then what seemed a miracle happened. She actually came over to me-my heart was thumping, let me tell you-and said: "Richard, you're one of my best friends. I wonder if you'd do me a favor about the dance on Saturday." I thought she was going to ask me to take her, and I must have turned purple, but she placed her hand on my arm and said: "A cousin of mine is coming to town, and I wondered if you'd be real sweet and take her to the dance?"

'I mumbled, "Yes," and the cousin turned out to be drab and homely and while I was pushing her around the floor I could see Rosamund dancing with the Yalie. I was in agony.' He shook his head and said: 'I'd like to have another summer like that, when everything was lived at such an intense level. Incidentally, years later I saw Rosamund and her cousin at the same summer resort, and Rosamund had gained weight and looked dumpy, but the cousin had matured into a lovely woman.' He banged on the table with his fist and repeated: 'The intensity! The years pass and we lose the intensity! It's the same in politics. I'm ashamed to say that in the last election I didn't really care who won, Bush or Clinton.'

'Whom did you vote for?' Raborn asked, and St. Pres said: 'Bush. I liked Barbara better than I did Hillary.'

Henry Armitage, while listening to his friends reminisce and wondering what he could talk about that would be at all interesting, looked out the window at the rain and was swept back to another rainy day in Hartford, Connecticut: 'I'd had my Ph.D. for three years and had taught at a big public university, so I was doing well. On a day much like this I applied for a major job at Trinity College, one of the best in America. In those days to get a job in Hartford was about as high as I could hope for. I reported to the building where the faculty committee was interviewing young scholars from the top universities. There were four faculty members on one side of the table and me alone on the other. When they started to question me, I seemed to become paralyzed. All the fine things I could have said about myself, like the fact that I was a serious scholar, ended as mumbled yes-no responses. When I left the interview I knew I had blown it. The letter saying I was out of the running for the job arrived three days later. They didn't waste time on niceties.'

'Why was it so important?' Jimenez asked. 'I've taught at six different American colleges, and if you're a bright student with a fine professor, one school's as good as any other. Of course, the chances of getting a great professor at Chicago or North Carolina are better than average, but I'm not sure it makes much difference.'

'Oh, it did to me! If I'd won that professorship at Trinity, I'd probably have remained in that circle of powerful private colleges and universities all my life. And ultimately I suppose I'd have been president of one of them. Failing to gain entrance into that charmed circle at that point, I was branded as being good enough only for big public institutions and I've always resented the classification. It was wrong, and I brought it on myself.'

Senator Raborn sniffed at this confession: 'You mean you hold schools like Wisconsin and Texas in contempt?'

'No, no! You can get a fine education in any of them. It's just that I had hoped to spend my teaching years in one of the more rigorous schools.'

'Are you essentially a rigorous educator?' Raborn asked, and Armitage replied, in a low confessional voice: 'I realize now that I wasn't really as rigorous as I thought. Had I been I'd have nailed down that Trinity job. And when I didn't get it, I could have gone home and written the scholarly studies I had in mind. Had I been powerfully self-motivated I could have written my books in South Podunk State Teachers College.' He stopped, fearing that he was revealing too much, then added: 'But I was a good administrator. I found my level and even became a president, as I had hoped, but not at one of the great schools, the prestigious ones.'

The rain continued. The men fell silent, each recalling significant moments in the past, until Jimenez surprised the others by saying: 'I wonder if women have such regrets.' He suggested that the senator invite his wife and Seora Jimenez to join them while he signaled to Reverend Quade that she too should draw up a chair.

They were now a group of seven, filling the corner of the room, and Ral explained: 'We were reminiscing about old times-about special moments when we were young men and saw things so clearly and felt so intensely.'

Raborn broke in: 'And we were regretting that we no longer had such moments. Do you girls-'

'Stop right there, Stanley,' Reverend Quade said. 'We do not use the word girls any longer to indicate mature women-'

Mrs. Raborn interrupted: 'And we certainly are mature.'

'You're acting like girls right now,' Raborn said. 'Men call each other boys from time to time.'

'But you men determine who is given respect,' Mrs. Quade said. 'You can call each other boy and not lose status. We have to fight for status.'

Ral banged on the table and spoke harshly: 'Ladies-'

'You can't use that anymore, either,' the Reverend said. 'It's condescending. The only phrase in which it's allowable to use lady is "lady mud-wrestlers." For the rest, use women.'

Jimenez was not deterred: 'You muchachas often ask why we muchachos meet together in our corner. No ladies allowed usually. It's because we can conduct a serious conversation with an implied set of rules. Argue the idea, not the personality. Pause frequently so the other men can jump in. And control your temper. You muchachas disrupt orderly discourse, make it impossible.'

'Say what you were going to say, Ral.'

'You've ruined the ambience. Wouldn't make any sense now.'

'Ral!' his wife cried. 'You're being petulant. Now just carry on like a good little boy.'

When he proved unable to do so, for the spirit of the discussion had been shattered for him, President Armitage took over: 'The rainy day reminded Ral of an experience in Colombia, when he saw for the first time the imperial dignity of Spain in the shape of the Spanish ambassador with his medals. He was sixteen at the time, if I remember.'

'Fifteen,' Ral said. 'It was an explosive moment. Spain became a real place to me, home of my ancestors.'

'Stanley had his flash of insight in the Himalayas. Saw the great battle of wills between Russia and England.'

'In the church,' Mrs. Quade said, 'we call such moments "epiphanies," when the vision of Christ or the godhead becomes clear. In the nature of my work I've had several. The first was when I saw that women could become priests, that this woman could do it. And the second when I saw that neither this woman nor any other in our day was going to get very far, even if we did get in.'

This observation was so personal that none of the men wished to comment, so Mrs. Raborn said: 'I had a true epiphany. Raised in a liberal eastern family, I began to fall in love with this western cowboy here, as conservative as they come, and I appreciated the pickle I was in. Stanley and my father had violent arguments and, with more gentility, so did my mother and Stan. All three of us considered him quite hopeless, but one day my mother made a simple observation: "I'll say this for your Neanderthal, Marcia. Sometimes in the kitchen it's better to have a bristly scrub brush than a limp dishrag. Your young man has the courage to say what he thinks," and in a flash it became clear. Better a hardhitting, hard-working conservative than a liberal wimp who vaguely wants to get things done. On the basis of my mother's comment, I married this bristly cowboy and have never regretted it.'

Seora Jimenez said, in her excitable way: 'I had a vision, but it came late. When Ral received so many death threats that getting out of Colombia seemed the only sensible thing for him to do, I faced a terrible problem. I came from a large family, so many aunts and uncles, people of substance, important people, some of them. I did not want to leave all my friends, my family. But one day as I looked at Ral in our garden in Bogot, the sun shone on him in a certain way and I saw him as something bigger than I had realized, and the thought came to me: This one is worth keeping alive, and that week we flew to safety in your country.' Deeply moved by this recollection, she seemed about to break into tears: 'Now we are alone, no aunts and nieces, but we are free and we are alive.'

No one spoke, then Ral said: 'When people move into the Palms they spend the first period as new arrivals, listening and learning. Then, when we feel safe and feel at ease, we engage in an exploration of our own ideas and those of others. That's the stage we're in now. That's why we talk so much. And then, gradually, subtly, without ever being aware of it, we prepare ourselves mentally and emotionally to make our departures. It's on rainy nights like this, when the air and the world are heavy, that we see the progression so clearly. I like your word, Helen. Epiphany, the moment when we see things.'

Muley Duggan took delight in telling a mixed audience at the Palms: 'The two sorriest days in a man's life in this joint is when his wife dies and when he has to give up his driver's license. Not necessarily in that order.' When Dr. Zorn asked why men of good judgment made such a fuss about surrendering their driver's license, Krenek explained: 'When you're here awhile you'll get used to the trauma men experience when that fateful day arrives. In their early eighties they begin to wonder: Should I quit driving? And if their wives cry out at a traffic light: "You drove right through that red light. You'll get us killed!" they resent her interference, but when they're off by themselves they admit: That was a near one! and they begin to think seriously about giving up driving. Some of our men have told me that's how it works.'

'Who makes the decision?' Zorn asked. 'Us? The wife? The doctors? Or is there a government agency that tracks these things?'

'For sure we don't. We'd have a revolution on our hands. And the government is very lax. None of their people want the hassle, so the old folks keep driving until you read about it in the paper: WOMAN EIGHTY-SEVEN KILLS THREE ON SIDEWALK.'

'Well, somebody makes the decision.'

'It's cumulative. A close call-the wife says nothing at the time. Later she points out to her husband that a friend on the first floor has given up driving. The husband makes no response. Then somebody on the second floor surrenders her license. The husband still refuses to follow suit. So the next week he has a real close call, and the wife comes to me: "Please beg him to stop driving," and I have to do it.

'From here on it'll be your duty. It'll be tough, and when you find you're having no success, you have to quietly inform the medic that the old man has about had it. And the doctor will try to convince him that the old eyes and reflexes just aren't up to driving. If he still won't budge, you have to call the Florida Driver's License Division (you can do it anonymously), and they'll launch an investigation. And then the anguish begins.'

'Is it that bad?'

'Andy, if you told me right now that I couldn't drive any longer, I do believe I'd go nuts. I'd feel my manhood had been attacked. The force that keeps me going would have been depreciated. I'm damned if I know what I'd do.'

'But you're just in your early fifties. To you it would be important.'

'When I'm in my eighties it will be twice as important. At that time things are slowing down. A muscle here, a tooth there, stronger glasses. And there's the overriding knowledge that death is growing closer. Our old men, God bless 'em, they never admit that, and hiding it is also a burden. Judicious men don't brood about death, but it does creep into their thoughts. Especially when the obituary page contains ten men in their sixties or seventies: My God! I'm fifteen years older than those guys, they think. And then comes the inescapable shock, an outside judgment that can't be ignored. The license taken away. That's too much to bear.'

Andy smiled at his assistant: 'They taught you something at NYU. You planning to write a book?'

'The men here write it for us, every week.'

'Looks as if we may have to crank up the machinery to persuade Chris Mallory to give up his license. Several people have complained to me about his driving.'

'The dancing man! It'd kill him, he's so proud of his ability to keep going.'

'What do you recommend?'

'Let me ask around. Has his wife spoken to you?'

'No. She seems to be the kind that would rally around to defend her husband.'

'What kind of car does he drive? That sometimes makes a difference. I've noticed that a man will surrender his Ford but fight like a fiend to keep his Cadillac.' His prediction proved accurate, for when Andy took Mrs. Mallory aside and asked: 'Do you think the time may be coming when Chris should consider stopping driving? He is ninety, you know,' she replied: 'He'll want to drive our cars as long as he can use his legs to work the brakes. Besides, I'm eighty-seven and I can drive now as well as I ever did. So forget it.' Since Andy knew her to be what his mother had called 'a well-bred lady,' he recognized that in rebuffing him so forcefully she must have thought his inquiry was either intrusive or insulting, and he expected no help from her.

A few days later, however, while Mr. Mallory and his wife were driving back from the mall on Route 41, he made a last-minute left turn onto 117th Street that forced a traffic cop coming the other way to veer sharply to his left to avoid hitting the Cadillic. This sudden swing placed the officer in jeopardy from cars coming in the other direction, because it thrust him into their lanes. Only his skilled driving enabled him to avoid a crash, and when he was able to turn around and pursue the Cadillac, Mr. Mallory was carefully parking it at the Palms, unaware, like his wife, that he had done anything wrong.

The officer overtook the Mallorys just as they were about to walk into Gateways, and when he saw how old they were he refrained from yelling at them. Quietly he asked: 'Sir, may I please see your driver's license?' Chris, who took pride in always carrying it in a special leather case, presented it with the innocent question 'Did I do something wrong?' and the officer was astounded to see that neither Chris nor his wife realized how close they had been to causing a major pileup.

'I think we'd better step inside,' the officer said, and as the three entered the reception area Mr. Mallory asked in true bewilderment: 'What's this about?' and the officer said: 'I think we'd better speak to the manager.'

When they were in Dr. Zorn's office, the policeman said very carefully: 'I'm afraid, Doctor, that your man here ought to be warned against driving-at his age. How old is he?' and Mrs. Mallory snapped: 'Ninety and perfectly competent.'

'We can let the License Division decide that.'

'You mean, you're arresting him?' Mrs. Mallory asked. 'He did nothing wrong.'

'He made a left turn off Route 41 that drove me into the oncoming traffic. Could have been a huge smashup.'

'You must have been driving carelessly,' she said, for she was sure that he was lying.

'Doctor, it would be easiest if you can persuade this gentleman to surrender his driver's license without me having to alert the License Division to launch an investigation. As a favor to everyone, I'll be back tomorrow to, I hope, pick it up.'

When Dr. Zorn was left alone with the Mallorys he observed that Mr. Mallory, abetted vigorously by his wife, was not going to surrender his license: 'Unthinkable! I'm as good a driver as I ever was,' and his wife agreed.

So Zorn, rather cravenly he knew, turned the matter over to Mr. Krenek, who was certain that the traffic cop had made a proper intervention, one that could in the long run save lives: 'Mr. Mallory, it really is time you considered seriously turning in your license. Many men have to face that decision. Your friends know that your reflexes, and maybe your eyes too, have slowed down. It's for his sake, Mrs. Mallory, please help us convince him.' When she dismissed that suggestion with a wave of her hand, he called Dr. Zorn on the phone: 'Did the officer say he'd be back tomorrow? Well, that sort of solves it, doesn't it?'

Mrs. Mallory, who could deduce the tenor of Zorn's reply, said: 'It solves nothing. That officer can't simply take Chris's license, not without a full investigation, which Chris would pass with flying colors.'

Krenek attacked the problem with a tactic that had proved helpful in other cases. He invited two other couples whose husbands had been forced to give up their licenses. Both of the men were much younger than Mallory, so that when they testified that it had been the proper decision he had to listen, and the wives assured Esther Mallory that she would not regret what all four of them now knew-that it had been the proper decision.

That night Andy saw that Mr. Mallory was listless at dinner and that he walked with a slow tread and downcast eyes as he left the dining area. What Zorn could not see was that when the former executive reached his quarters, he took from his safety pocket his leather case with its driver's license and placed it on a table where he could see it. That night he did not watch the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour and the eleven o'clock news, and when he went off to bed he mumbled: 'When you grow old, they do cruel things to you.'

Surprisingly soon after he had taken careful measurements, the orthopedic technician was back with a pair of temporary legs for Betsy. Each consisted of three parts. At the top was the plastic socket into which the stump would fit: 'It'll fit more precisely next week after we take casts of your stumps, but it's already close enough to get you started.' At the bottom was a large, flat-soled shoe. And in the middle came the more important part, the mechanical leg itself, and this would be permanent, regardless of what form the perfected socket took. 'This is the heart of your recovery, just the raw metal substructure for the moment. The imitation flesh to enclose it and make it look like a leg comes only when we're sure everything's working.' The mechanic adjusted the fitting of the remarkable skeleton leg to the socket and explained its marvels: 'It's called a Blatchford Leg, after the company in England that makes them. It doesn't weigh much, but it contains a score of control points that enable you to do almost everything you did before. The bottom will last you a lifetime, but the upper socket changes month by month, year by year, as your leg and its stump change.'

While Betsy was fitting this new companion to the remnants of her leg, Yancey left the room and returned with the couple that Betsy had dined with that first night, the dancing Mallorys. She supposed that they had come to watch, but that was not the case, for Yancey announced: 'The Mallorys volunteered to bring some friends they met at the dances in town.' Mrs. Mallory signaled in the direction of the door, whereupon a fine-looking, athletic, gray-haired woman in her fifties appeared, took Mr. Mallory by the arm, and as a pair they executed a series of professional-quality dance routines.

Betsy was bewildered, could make no sense of such an exhibition, until the woman suddenly stopped, held on to Mr. Mallory's arm, pulled up her skirt and showed that she had one mechanical leg, which she could move about as if it were actually flesh and bone. 'We wanted you to see what can be done,' Yancey explained.

'But she has one good leg,' Betsy pointed out, and Yancey said: 'But this one hasn't,' and he signaled for Mr. Mallory to bring in a marine veteran he and his wife had also met on their dancing outings. He was in his early forties, a lean, tough-muscled man who walked up to the gray-haired dancer, took her by the hands and swung her into position beside him so they could do a soft-shoe routine as he whistled the old tune 'While Strolling Through the Park One Day.' At the end of their performance he reached down and pulled two zippers at the bottom of his trousers to reveal two Blatchford legs, exact duplicates of the ones leaning beside Betsy's chair.

The marine, a likable man from the New Orleans area, came over to Betsy's chair: 'I was hit by a land mine in Vietnam. Thought I'd never walk again, let alone dance and play basketball, but you can see I made it.'

'What was your secret?' Betsy asked, for her intellectual adventure with climbing into the chair had convinced her that her recovery was primarily a matter of using her brain to direct her body to perform in new ways, and the marine confirmed this. 'You got to believe you can do it, and you have to visualize yourself doing it. And in the first weeks when you fall down, you have to get right back up and do it correctly.'

'Do you go around demonstrating what you can do?' Betsy asked and he said: 'Yes, I work for the Veterans Administration. I earn a fair living and I have a great time showing others. That's how I met Mr. Mallory.'

'Do you and your team ever fail?'

'One in twenty, maybe. But the losers have convinced themselves before we ever get to them they'll never be able to do it, and they refuse to walk, just to prove they were right. We think it may be a psychological fixation that imprisons them in the first hours after the incident. It's so powerful it can't be overcome, so we too are powerless.' He looked at Betsy, squeezed her shoulder and said: 'They tell me you don't have any of those mental negatives.'

'For four months I did.'

'Oh my God! You wasted all that time?'

'I had to collect myself ... get the pieces together. Now I'm a free woman ready for the job.'

'Ma'am, may I kiss your hand?' and as he did he whispered: 'The fight's nine-tenths won. I'll be back in three months and then it's you and me doing the dancing.' He stepped back and bowed formally: 'Now, Miss Tennessee, do you want to try on your new legs, and make-believe walk with me so you get the proper mental pictures right at the start?' She looked at Yancey and the prosthetist and they nodded. So for the first time in her new life, Betsy had her new legs fitted snugly to her stumps, and when she had worked her thighs back and forth to adjust what seemed like tremendous lumps immobilizing her legs, she indicated to Yancey that she was ready to try standing. But he cried: 'You're not going to stand. We're going to hold you six inches off the floor, and you're to imagine you're standing. Nurse Nora, fetch that big mirror,' and when this was done the men held Betsy aloft and moved her about, feet clear of the floor, as if she were walking. In the mirror she could see that her new feet looked like feet, shod in sensible shoes. But then the experiment fell apart, for as she tried to move her legs they did not respond, and Yancey and the marine felt her go limp in their arms, so they quickly set her down. The men were afraid she might have been near fainting, but Nora said reassuringly: 'This one won't faint. What's the matter, little queen?'

'I could not feel them. They were not a part of me. It was frightening,' but Yancey reassured her: 'It often happens that way. But they were a part of you, and I'll prove it. Stand up again,' and he and the marine brought her to her feet as he shouted across rehab to a newcomer to the room: 'Dr. Zorn! Just in time to take my place. Help hold her up, I have to kneel.' When Zorn came over to his star patient and placed his right arm firmly about her waist, everyone could see that now she felt secure.

Then Yancey, on the floor and taking control of her right foot, began tapping it on the floor while the left dangled, and soon he was hammering the right foot down against the floor and mumbling in time to the rhythm of 'The Blue Danube.' Finally he started shouting: 'This foot belongs to Miss Betsy Cawthorn. It is the right foot of Miss Betsy, and it's a damned good foot.'

When he rose, he stood before Betsy as he told the two men holding her to relax their grip ever so slightly ... more ... more ... more until at last they were holding her upright merely with their fingertips, while Yancey remained alert to catch her if she should fall. When she was for all practical purposes standing alone, he gave her a tremendous smile that filled his face and ran up to his red hair: 'Now, Miss Betsy, does that foot belong to you? Is it attached to the rest of your body in any way? Are you now standing on it, full weight? Could you, just perhaps, move it forward, just an inch or so?' When she did, he gave her a huge hug, banged her right leg smartly just above the knee and announced to the hall: 'This right leg now belongs to Miss Betsy Cawthorn, but we aren't sure about the left one. We'll test it tomorrow.' And Dr. Zorn, keeping his arm around her, lifted her back into her chair.

Yancey, the prosthetist. Betsy, Nora, Dr. Zorn, the Mallorys, their visiting marine and the woman with one leg missing had lunch together in Zorn's office, and the talk was exclusively on the problems of rehabilitation in which prosthetic devices were used. The prosthetist said that he had studied with the great Dr. Rusk in New York, from whom he had learned that there was no movable external part of the human body that could not be replaced by a mechanical device if it was properly engineered, fitted and intelligently introduced to the user: 'Providing always that the patient is intelligent enough to appreciate what he is getting and how to adjust to it.'

'Even knees?' Betsy asked, and the man said: 'Yes. Not right now, but very soon we'll have a knee that can twist and turn in every way a natural one can. Hips we have, fingers, wrists, and wonderful arms with articulated hands and fingers. And my experience has been that ten years from now, Miss Betsy, you'll have a pair of new-generation legs that will let you perform even more miracles.'

'Why can't I have them now?' and he said: 'Because it takes geniuses, teams of them, working day and night for a decade to develop the next level of equipment. Right now we're down here six inches off the floor. In twenty years we'll be up there near the ceiling. Miss Betsy, before you die you'll have legs that operate electronically on thought messages relayed from your brain to your thighs and knees, instructing them what to do next. Of that I'm sure.'

When the lunch ended after its lively exchange of ideas, the others departed, but Betsy stayed behind to talk further with Zorn: 'I was surprised to see what you looked like when I arrived. I remembered you as a miracle man who had saved my life, but had no recollection at all of what you looked like. I wasn't even sure you were real.'

Andy said, rather clumsily: 'Same with me. You were a girl with mangled legs. I paid more attention to them than I did your face.' Hesitantly he added: 'You're quite beautiful, you know.'

She blushed and changed the subject. 'You have a splendid place here. Rooms are pleasant, food's pretty good and the atmosphere is great. You should be proud.'

'Are you finding rehabilitation tedious? Yancey can be pretty relentless.'

'I'm finding it frustrating, to be honest, but not because of him. I enjoy his toughness. Brings me down to reality. But I used to be a really good tennis player, nowhere near top-drawer but I could smash that ball and run after shots. Now that will never again be possible.' Andy could see she was feeling sorry for herself, so he said something that would later amaze him: 'I think most of us face tremendous defeat at some point in our lives. You've lost the ability to chase tennis balls. I lost my entire profession,' and he confided in her how dismal he had felt when he lost his clinic, his job and his place in the medical life of Chicago.

When he finished, they sat in silence for some time, he on one side of the table, she on the other. After their talk, a new and quite different bond seemed to bind them together, two wounded people, each in need of rehabilitation.

For Betsy, Dr. Zorn's active part in her rehabilitation made a tremendous difference. In her drab surroundings and unimaginative therapy in Chattanooga, there had been none of the uplifting promises she heard in the Palms, no agile fellow amputees to inspire her, and no one with the enthusiastic supportiveness of Bedford Yancey, Nora and now Dr. Zorn. When it had been decided in Chattanooga that in obedience to her wishes she would be brought down to Florida and Dr. Zorn's care, she had not dared to hope that he would take a personal interest in her recovery. That he would be in charge would be enough. Now that he had shown a deep interest in her care, she felt sure that her recovery would be quick and complete.

That afternoon she asked to be taken again to Rehab, where she asked to have her legs attached to her stumps. When they were in place, with Yancey looking on, she used two hands to grab her right leg and jerk it up and down, roughly, so that her new shoe could tap on the floor, and when she had done this for some minutes, smiling at the results, she shifted to her left leg, repeating the process, and after a thorough test she looked approvingly at Yancey and said: 'It seems to belong, too, and now if you please, Maestro, a few bars of that waltz again,' and while he hummed 'The Blue Danube' she shifted from thigh to thigh, tapping her new shoes and even roughly keeping time to the music.

One day Dr. Zorn was helping a newly arrived widow from Vermont move her furniture into one of the single-bedroom units on floor three of Gateways. While he was shifting pieces around in one room he overheard a young fellow from the trucking company ask an older man: 'Who lives in these rooms? They must cost a bundle!' and the answer was 'A bunch of used-up old geezers who sit around waiting to die.'

Andy did not rebuke the man but he was irritated by several of the words he had used that were grossly inappropriate: 'Used-up? The people I see are brimming with energy and enthusiasm. Look at Judge Noble. Old? The four men who sit around that table arguing certainly don't think of themselves as old, nor are they. Waiting to die? The ones I know are too busy living and participating in life to waste their time brooding about death-those like Reverend Quade and her counseling work, and our women who volunteer to work with the people in Extended Care.'

All this led him to ponder a phenomenon that had been brought to his attention by Nurse Varney: 'Boss, have you ever noticed how many of our people who finally die are written up in The New York Times because they made such important contributions?' And when she helped him compile a list he was astounded at its richness. Inspired by the three most recent clippings, he sat at his typewriter and dashed off a message for inclusion in the next edition of Palm Fronds, a newsletter he had initiated: Have you noticed how many famous Americans have shared quarters with you at the Palms? The other day I listed the names of our former residents who, when they died, were written up in The New York Times because of their notable contributions to our national life.