Millard Salter's Last Day

by Jacob M. Appel

  He afforded Pastarnack a moment to savor her victory before revealing his artifice. “For the record, Miss Noguerra wasn’t a marathon runner,” he said. “She’s a special ed teacher. With a devoted boyfriend, I might add, who has never been hit by a fire truck—at least, as far as I know. And there’s no reason to think she can’t have as many children as she’d like . . . .”

  Now that flummoxed the girl. “So you made that all up?”

  “I wanted to see how strongly you’d defend your case—and I give you a lot of credit. If psychiatry doesn’t work out, there’s always law school.”

  At once, like a punctured Bobo doll, the cheer slackened from Pastarnack’s face.

  “That was a joke,” said Millard. “So where were we? That’s right, we were discussing your letter of recommendation . . . .”

  “I can write the first draft myself, if that’s helpful,” offered the girl.

  She hadn’t meant to be impertinent, he knew. Many of his colleagues had embraced this shortcut. To Millard, the idea exemplified lunacy—like having criminal defendants serve as their own jurors. “That won’t be necessary,” he said. “But I do want to get a sense of your knowledge base if I’m going to write you a letter. Do you think you’re up to answering a few more questions? Nothing about beer, I promise.”

  Pastarnack’s entire body, without moving, seemed to uncoil like a spring. Answering questions was what she’d been trained to do all of her life. “Sure,” she agreed.

  What choice did she have? He wouldn’t have held a refusal against her, at least consciously, but she had no way of knowing that.

  “First question,” said Millard, channeling his internal game-show host. “Can you name the Seven Sisters?”

  A look of bewilderment took hold of the girl’s delicate features. “I’m sorry, Dr. Salter. I’m not sure what you’re asking. Do you mean from Walt Disney?”

  Brilliant! She thought they were cartoon characters, maybe the brides of the Seven Dwarfs. He recalled there’d been a soppy musical, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers starring Howard Keel and Jane Powell, but he didn’t think that was Disney—and anyway, if she knew nothing of Eisenhower, she probably also didn’t watch obscure films from the ’50s.

  “Let’s try again. I imagine you’re familiar with all eight Ivy League schools,” said Millard. He ticked them off on his fingers: “Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, and the University of Pennsylvania.”

  Pastarnack nodded, wary.

  “My challenge for you is to name the Seven Sister schools—the Women’s Ivies, if you will. I’ll give you a hint to start. You might be tempted to guess Pembroke, because it was affiliated with Brown, but Pembroke was not a Seven Sister.”

  The young woman eyed him as though he’d walked off the moon. Clearly, Pembroke had not been on the tip of her tongue. “I really have no idea,” she stammered.

  “You were expecting a question about neurotransmitters, I suppose.” He’d tried to sound sympathetic, but feared he had come across as smug. “Give it the old college try . . . . You must know some all-girls schools . . . .”

  “I don’t know . . . . Barnard?”

  “Very good. That’s one.”

  “And the one in Massachusetts. That Hillary Clinton went to. Mount Holyoke?”

  “Kind of. Mount Holyoke is one of them, but Mrs. Clinton went to Wellesley, which is also a Seven Sister,” replied Millard. “I’m feeling generous, so I’ll give you credit for both. Four to go.”

  Lauren Pastarnack’s lips pursed, but she shook her head.

  “I’m sorry. I just don’t know.”

  “Very well. Three out of seven isn’t so dreadful. If you were a baseball player, you’d make the Hall of Fame. Ready for your next question?”

  “I guess.”

  “What field did Jimmy Durante make major contributions to?”

  Again, the girl’s expression faltered. He recalled the first puppy he and Carol had adopted for Lysander, a dopey schnauzer, his eyes beset with perpetual dejection. Of course, the girl’s gloom was entirely his own fault. Seconds passed, each moment like a boulder struggling to squeeze through the throat of an hourglass. “Do not squander time, Dr. Pastarnack,” he warned. “It is the stuff from which life is made.”

  “If I had to choose, I’d say pharmacology.”

  “In a way,” Millard said. “To the degree that pharmacology is a form of stand-up comedy.”

  He glanced at his wristwatch. What compulsion kept him tormenting this gifted young woman, when he ought to be consoling Rabbi Steinmetz, was impossible to articulate. “A final question, Dr. Pastarnack?”

  Now the girl merely looked at him with incredulity.

  “Who composed the song ‘This Is the Army, Mr. Jones’?”

  Millard realized that a bystander might interpret this quiz as a manifestation of sadism, but he suddenly understood that his motives were actually masochistic: He was reminding himself how obsolete he’d become, how irrelevant his knowledge was to a woman in the prime of life. Yet his victim couldn’t be aware of that. Anguish stewed in the girl’s limpid eyes and Millard’s face flushed with shame.

  “These questions aren’t fair,” said Pastarnack—timorously, as much an appeal as a statement. “Honestly, I was expecting questions about neurotransmitters. Or, at least, medicine . . . .”

  So she’d called his bluff. Kudos to the kid. “Of course, they’re not fair,” he agreed. “I was waiting to see how long it would take you to say something . . . .”

  “Oh.”

  “If you see something that doesn’t make sense to you in the hospital, there’s a good chance it doesn’t make sense to anyone else either—only they’re all afraid to express anything. You could save somebody’s life by saying, ‘This isn’t fair’ or ‘That’s unreasonable.’ ”

  “Wow. I thought you were being serious . . . .”

  Millard beamed, pleased with himself. This was likely to be the last lesson he ever taught, even unwittingly, so he was delighted that it had gone so well. But writing the girl a recommendation, no matter how talented she might be, would require time, time that he didn’t possess. And yet, the notion of her talents being squandered at a community hospital in Milwaukee, or wherever, genuinely pained him. Not that there was anything wrong with Milwaukee—if you were looking to open a brewery or locate a television sitcom.

  “Now about that letter of yours,” he said. “I’ll make you a deal. I’m going to be out of town for a while, but if you send me the link to upload your recommendation today, I’ll do it before I leave . . . .”

  She actually clapped her hands together at first—like seal flippers—then clasped them in front of her as though he’d answered a prayer.

  “Thank you, Dr. Salter—Millard—Millard Salter,” she spluttered.

  “But make sure you get the link to me by five o’clock.”

  “I’ll do it right now,” she promised.

  “And in case you’re wondering, Irving Berlin composed ‘This Is the Army, Mr. Jones.’ ”

  “I won’t forget that.”

  As though she had any notion who Irving Berlin might be.

  “Now I have patients to see,” he added, “and you have lynxes to avoid.”

  She looked at him puzzled again, eyebrows raised in doubt, so he pointed to the flyer on a nearby pillar, styled like a wanted poster out of the Wild West in carnival font with sepia lettering: ESCAPED LYNX CUB. “You’re not joking,” she said, surprised.

  “Occasionally, I do say something serious,” he replied. “For variety. Now please go send me that link before I forget who you are . . . .”

  The girl thanked him again and vanished into the elevator. He strolled in the opposite direction, toward the bone marrow unit, where Rabbi Steinmetz lay imprisoned in an immunological bubble. Steinmetz would likely be his final patient (ever!), and at the rate the clergyman’s fever had progressed, he might prove Steinmetz’s final doctor. Lost in his reverie, Millard sudde
nly realized that he was humming—“This Is the Army, Mr. Jones”—and he checked himself abruptly.

  He retrieved disposable gloves and a mask from a cart beside the rabbi’s door. Inside, he found Ezra Steinmetz seated at the window, alone, gazing down at the traffic below. The young chaplain—he was closer in age to Maia than to Lysander—wore a cozy royal purple robe with a shawl collar; the Post’s sports pages lay scattered across the tangled sheets. On the bedside table, the checkers board from their Friday morning match stood intact, men and kings standing in scattered ranks as though arrested by a neutron bomb. Steinmetz flashed Millard a smile, but his visage quickly retreated back to a look of fatalistic despair.

  “How are you?” asked Millard.

  “Honestly, scared scriptless, as they say. I think I’ve run out of words.”

  “You don’t have to talk.”

  Millard had brought along the checkers board the previous week; in his experience, tangible challenges like checkers or chess provided a soothing alternative to reflection. Half of his job, he’d once said to Isabelle, entailed throwing sets of backgammon.

  “I don’t mind talking,” said Steinmetz. “I just don’t think there are words to express how I feel. Reality is kicking in. I’m going to die.”

  “Are the doctors saying that?” asked Millard. “Or are you saying that?”

  “The doctors are saying that I’ve got a good chance of pulling through. They’re oncologists—they always say that. They’ll be saying that at my funeral . . . . ‘If only we give him one more round of chemo . . . .’ ” Steinmetz smiled at his own macabre humor, but his lips quickly flatlined. “I try to sound optimistic, for the sake of Janice and the girls, but I can read the writing on the wall. My goose is cooked.”

  “You’ll outlive me yet,” said Millard.

  “No, I won’t.” The rabbi rose from his chair with considerable effort and shuffled to the bed. He poured a few sips of club soda from a miniature bottle into a plastic cup and swallowed, his Adam’s apple stark against his skeletal throat. Only once the rabbi had settled onto the bed, frail as a relic on a concrete slab, did Millard realize that he’d done this act selflessly, to vacate a seat for his guest.

  “There’s nothing special about dying,” said Steinmetz. “It’s one of those few universals. Even dying at thirty isn’t so unusual. I keep thinking of those lines from Ecclesiastes: A living dog is better than a dead lion, for the living know that they will perish, but the dead know nothing . . . . Nevermore will they have a share in anything done under the sun . . . .” The rabbi wiped the crook of his eye, rapidly, as though hoping not to be seen. “I thought I’d be at peace—and I’m not. I’m scared, Doc. I didn’t expect to be scared, but I’m terrified.”

  “Of anything specific?” asked Millard.

  Steinmetz shook his head. “That’s just it. I can’t even articulate what I’m afraid of. Not of pain—that’s well-controlled . . . and even if it weren’t, pain is merely pain. And Janice and the girls will be provided for. Her father’s quite well off, you know.” The rabbi adjusted his pillows beneath his corroded spine. “The closest that I can get to what I’m afraid of is some nebulous uncertainty—not the unknown, not the afterlife, not the olam ha-ba, if there even is one—just an aching feeling of insecurity. Does that make any sense?”

  “As much sense as anything.”

  “In the Book of Job, we are told, So man lies down, and rises not: till the heavens be no more, he shall not awake, nor be raised out of his sleep . . . . What happens after that, of course, has kept sages far wiser than myself awake at night for many centuries . . . .”

  Millard listened as the rabbi quoted various Biblical passages. The only one he recognized came from the 146th Psalm: “Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans come to nothing . . . .” What puzzled Millard wasn’t Steinmetz’s fear—that made perfect sense. What unsettled him was his own lack of trepidation. He had somehow arrived at an inner peace. Maybe not the serenity of swamis and mystics, but a matter-of-fact acceptance of what was to come. If he feared anything, it was the physical act of asphyxiation—he intended to souse himself with Courvoisier and Valium before he stepped into the bathroom—but not the great nameless maw beyond. Death wasn’t an evil, not at his age. It was a neutral. Like Dr. Davin’s beer. Unnecessary suffering—now there lay the true iniquity.

  “What’s most amazing,” said the rabbi—and Millard realized with guilt, like a scribe at a medieval deathbed, that he’d lost a crucial portion of Steinmetz’s final testimony—“is that people think I’ll be cheered by their own bad news. Well-wishers actually say things like, ‘If it makes you feel any better, my sister-in-law also has myeloma.’ Now how could that possibly, under any conceivable circumstances, make me feel better?”

  Steinmetz readjusted his pillows, but his ongoing discomfort was obvious. “What I really want—I probably shouldn’t be saying this to a psychiatrist—is to get it over with. Not that I’m planning anything, but I wouldn’t mind if someone lit a fire under God’s ass.” The rabbi balled up a sheaf of newspaper and lobbed it toward the wastepaper basket; it fell several yards short of the rim. “I don’t really mean that. But there are moments when I find myself thinking, either let me live or let me die, but don’t keep toying with me. Don’t keep toying with my family.” The rabbi added, “When I’m alone, I use a much stronger word than toying.”

  Millard glanced out the window. On the avenue, the morning sun blistered the grime coating the tops of ambulances and delivery trucks. Children cavorted in the schoolyard opposite: Tag? Kick the can? Some novel amusement? One could not tell from this height. How recently, it seemed, his brother, Lester, had been stickball king of 177th Street.

  “You’re not listening,” said Steinmetz. “You have that same polite, glazed look I sometimes fall into when a sick person starts rambling.”

  “I’m sorry. I got lost in my own head . . . .”

  “Who could blame you?” asked the rabbi. “Don’t worry. I’m not offended. It was helpful to talk things out . . . .”

  Before Millard had an opportunity to apologize further, the nursing assistant arrived to check Steinmetz’s vital signs. “Saved by the thermometer,” said the rabbi.

  “I don’t want you to think . . .”

  “Think what? That you’re also human? That you have worries of your own?” He extended an emaciated hand and shook Millard’s with surprising vigor.

  “If I’m still around tomorrow,” said the rabbi, “you’ll make it up to me by letting me beat the pants off you at checkers.”

  Millard understood that any further expression of contrition at the moment would do more harm than good. Disheartened with self-reproach, he retreated into the corridor. His watch read ten o’clock. Already, he’d fallen behind schedule.

  A midmorning lull had settled over St. Dymphna’s. Interns and residents, pre-rounding complete, sipped coffee in the atrium and waited for their attendings. Visiting hours remained a gleam on the day’s horizon. An overhead page announced a Code 1000—a cardiac arrest—in a distant corner of the hospital, but the fluorescently lit walkway beneath Madison Avenue remained as still as the nave of an abandoned cathedral. Alas, even here some fastidious retainer had pinned up warnings about the missing lynx cub. Clearly, the hospital’s risk management and legal departments—the twin powers behind the throne—were taking no chances, although Millard didn’t see how warning people of the escaped lynx absolved anyone of responsibility. Once you saw the signs, after all, you’d already reached the zone of danger. Shutting down the entire facility until the animal was recaptured might shield the institution to some degree, but he had no doubt that the bean counters and actuaries had already weighed the odds of calamity against the costs of precaution and found them wanting. So here he was, on the day of his death, vigilant for a feral feline.

  That’s when a crazy thought tickled his mind.
There was no lynx. Most likely, the whole enterprise would prove a social psychology experiment of some sort, an assessment of how people in public settings responded to low-grade threats. Ingenious—if true! Of course, he’d never know for sure, but even if he’d lived to see a panel of investigators announce their results, even then one couldn’t truly be certain. After all, maybe they had concocted the study as a cover to hide their negligence in permitting a dangerous cat to enter a medical clinic. Who could say? He was reminded of Oedipus’s warning: Count no man happy until he is dead. While he mused on the purpose of the lynx experiment, his feet carried him toward his office, navigating the pipe-lined passageways of the hospital underbelly, where crossbeams and open ducts might conceal packs of truant panthers and ocelots. Here whirred the institution’s most essential—and least glamorous—departments: dining services, housekeeping, maintenance. Only now housekeeping was known as “environmental amenities” and maintenance had been rebranded “plant operations”—a challenge for a geezer who still thought of flight attendants as stewardesses. Opposite Millard’s office, a workman in paint-mottled coveralls was in the process of taping a pristine drop cloth along the tile while his colleague lounged against a nearby trestle ladder. Millard’s secretary, Miss Nickelsworth, had stepped away from her desk—a note read “Will return in 15 min”—and, as a stickler for protocol, she’d secured his door during her absence. Millard had the key in the lock when Hecuba Yilmaz rounded the corner like a damp breeze.

  “Precisely whom I was looking for,” Yilmaz bellowed in her Turkish accent, pointing the end of her severed index finger at him. Coarse hairs protruding from the mole atop the bridge of the woman’s fleshy nose, glistening like barbs. The embossed fleur-de-lis print of her ill-fitting blouse recalled nineteenth-century upholstery. “I have been searching for you.”

  “Who hasn’t?”

  Yilmaz frowned as though deciding whether his remark was insulting.

  “I don’t have time for you today, Hecuba.”

  Millard had never personally had a run-in with this egocentric creature, but that likely made him a minority of one. Stan Laguna, who despised the young woman, alternately called her “The Royal Embellisher” (because she claimed direct descent from King Priam of Troy) and “The Beauty Queen of Sycamore Hill,” (not in tribute to her appearance, which resembled a well-fed aardvark’s, but with ironic reference to the location of the second-rate satellite hospital—a St. Dymphna’s affiliate on Sycamore Hill Boulevard in Queens—where she ran a methadone clinic). Her much older husband, the outside hospital’s chief operating officer, was a former insurance company litigator who bore a striking resemblance to vintage character actor Karl Malden, and had been a chum of the dean’s during his Andover years. That had led Laguna to remark, too loud, at last year’s Christmas party, “Apparently screwing Mr. Snout gives her license to screw the rest of us.” And once, when a colleague observed of the peculiar couple that “every pot has its lid,” Stan had pointed out that the correct quotation from Balzac (and when had Stan Laguna ever been the sort to read Balzac?) read: “There is no pot, however ugly, that does not one day find a cover.”