Last Thursday evening, after Bob Packwood resigned, I tried to phone Gertrude in Oregon, where she was visiting some old friends. But it was still afternoon out there, and after six or seven rings (don't retirees have any use for answering machines?) I gave up. So I missed hearing what my relative, whose name isn't really Gertrude, thought of the disgrace of her former boss.

Ours, actually. Gertrude had left Packwood's employ shortly before I finished high school in 1973. But on hearing that I was at loose ends that summer, which wasn't strictly accurate (I'd made plans to read and masturbate), she got Bob on the phone and swung me a job as a summer intern. Packwood was happy to do Gertrude a favor, and why not? They were quite fond of each other, after all.

I very much doubt that I feature in either the authentic or the doctored version of Packwood's diaries, unless they include a stray complaint about having the worst -- dressed intern on Capitol Hill. But I'm pretty sure Gertrude's in them somewhere, and so, with some rueful amusement, is she. She's elderly now, but she was a vivacious woman in her early forties when she joined his staff. I don't know how long their involvement lasted, because she's always been coy about the details.

Gertrude, incidentally, is not among the complainants in the Packwood case. Besides liking her boss, with whom she stayed friendly for many years, she also, as far as I can tell, enjoyed the glamour of the situation, with its beach -- reading trappings -- the basement office, the ardent senator. Since the scandal broke, she's been, I think, privately tickled by her inside angle on the news -- it's a little like having been with Napoleon on the advance to Moscow. This spring, at the request of Packwood's lawyers, she wrote a letter for the committee's files that affirmed -- in all honesty, so far as I know -- that she's never seen him force himself on anyone. But totting up his conquests as of 1993, which for a man in his sixties is a revealing bit of delayed adolescence -- aside from compulsive Lotharios, how many people are still notching the Johnson by then? -- he claimed liaisons with 22 staffers and 75 other women. From my own memories of working in his office over two decades ago, I have no trouble believing that tally.