Millard Salter's Last Day

by Jacob M. Appel

  “Please, Dad. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  Millard tore a page out of Elsa’s book and plunged forward. “I was talking to your mother this morning,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “Doesn’t that surprise you?”

  Lysander remained impassive. “Not really.”

  “It should. Your mother and I haven’t spoken in twenty-seven years.”

  The boy’s attention drifted to the dogs, then across the street toward the Superette.

  “I’m glad you’re speaking again,” he said. “If you two both are, that is . . . .”

  Millard could have put his fist through the tabletop. He finally understood the frustration that had prompted Khrushchev’s shoe-pounding tantrum at the United Nations. “We were speaking about you. About your future. What do you have to say to that?”

  “Not much. I guess it depends what you said.”

  Lysander glanced at the restaurant doors, then held his water glass over the side of the railing and let Onion lap at the contents. Next he seized Millard’s glass, without asking, and dribbled the contents onto Puddle’s tongue. “That should tide them over,” he said. A trio of female medical students watched through the plate glass; one of them was Lauren Pastarnack. Millard elected to let the episode pass.

  “I want to speak to you openly, father to son,” he said. “Your mother and I aren’t going to live forever, and quite frankly, we’re afraid that you’re off-track . . . .”

  In college, his son had owned a T-shirt that read Not all those who wander are lost. When your son was a sophomore at Wesleyan, a slogan like that was clever.

  The waitress arrived with the second and third of Millard’s entrées. Also a cup of brown rice. Lysander requested another glass of water. “Let me try it a different way,” said Millard. “What do you plan to do with the rest of your life?”

  That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? Everything else was secondary—water under the bridge, so to speak. Even at this age, if the boy made good, all of his past blunders would be forgiven. Nobody described Harry S. Truman as a former second-rate haberdasher, did they? With a few years of effort, the boy could yet find himself in the same place as Lauren Pastarnack.

  “Candidly, Dad,” replied Lysander. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  So there they stood: at an impasse. Even at this late juncture, he could cut the boy off, of course, write him out of his will—but that would just increase his son’s disappointment, not his productivity. Besides, withholding his inheritance from the boy would serve no practical purpose, because Carol could be counted upon to make up a good portion of the difference. She expected less of Lysander, so she avoided Millard’s aggravation. It was enough, as the saying went, to make you want to kill yourself.

  “Am I allowed to leave yet?” asked Lysander.

  “In a minute,” said Millard—but he wasn’t sure how to proceed.

  A blustery greeting sliced through his thoughts like a handsaw. Denny Dennmeyer. The deputy finance director carried a stack of manila envelopes under one arm.

  “Just dashing across the street to mail a few items, Dr. Salter,” he said—as though his every moment outside the hospital had to be accounted for. “Why wait for the clerk to send them out tomorrow when I can drop them off today?”

  “Sure. Why wait?” agreed Millard.

  He considered introducing his son to the junior administrator, but didn’t.

  “How’s that report coming, Dr. Salter? Any progress . . .”

  “You have my word.” And it’s the only damn word you’ll ever get out of me, he mused. “As long as I’m still breathing tomorrow morning, it will be on your desk . . . .”

  “Good enough for me,” said Dennmeyer. “We’re counting on you, Dr. Salter. There’s this widely held belief that the future is unpredictable, but this is only true to a very limited degree. Much of the future is highly predictable. Let’s say I walk across the street to mail these envelopes. I know the post office will be where it was yesterday, that the government will accept my currency, that the mail carrier will make an effort to deliver my letters. All predictable. But in order to anticipate the future, what is required is data regarding the present . . . . And so far, in your division, I’m afraid that such data has been sorely lacking.”

  “I swear you’ll have it,” replied Millard. “On my life.”

  “Oh, no need to swear. I have full faith you’ll do your duty.” Dennmeyer chuckled at an unvoiced joke. His bolo tie glistened a blinding turquoise. “Everyone gets their report in eventually. The system guarantees that. Sometimes, it just takes an added push.”

  “You have a lot of confidence in your system,” observed Millard.

  “All of it well-founded, Dr. Salter,” he said. “Enjoy your lunch.”

  The financial officer ducked into the street, jaywalking. Lysander pushed his empty rice bowl toward the center of the table. “Say, do you smell something?”

  Millard sniffed. It was hard to tell.

  He glanced across the avenue, to where Dennmeyer was about to enter the post office, when a gust of sizzling air tore over the asphalt, followed by the clatter of pelting debris. Pedestrians dove for cover behind mesh garbage cans, gutted phone booths. A pregnant nurse, whom Millard recognized from the TBI unit, took cover behind their table. Denny Dennmeyer staggered toward them from the remnants of the post office, an ugly laceration slashed across his forehead. On the avenue, a box truck had toppled upon its side, crushing a bicycle rack. Screams rose like flames from the disintegrated storefront of the Superette.

  Shock waves from the explosion had shattered the window beside Lauren Pastarnack and sent Millard’s duck breast soaring into its dangling shards. Millard checked to make certain his own body remained in some degree of working order, then looked up to find his son, seated calmly, hands toying with his napkin ring. The dogs, equally unfazed, lounged like seals on a beach.

  “I knew I smelled something,” said Lysander.

  PART 2

  MIDDAY TO NIGHTFALL

  8

  Miss Nickelsworth studied Millard through her pince-nez, simultaneously sympathetic and displeased, as though he were a songbird dragged in by her cat.

  Millard’s secretary—technically his “executive associate”—had claimed various titles from “senior clerk” to “administrative director” in the offices of six department chairmen, including the ill-fated Norm Schumaker and Clyde Terwilliger, during her first thirty years at St. Dymphna’s, until joyless David Atkinson had traded her in for a gloomy young Welshman who typed one hundred ten words per minute. During those three decades, she’d defended the corner office on the twelfth floor of the Hapsworth Annex like a Praetorian guard shielding her emperor, but her reward had been a perch deep in the entrails of the “Old Hospital,” where the consultation psychiatry division shared a suite with the department of medical records and the deaf-mute Korean who processed death certificates. She arrived at her desk every winter morning in the same oatmeal-hued duster coat with the faux fur collar that she’d worn on her first day at St. Dymphna’s, when Dwight Eisenhower was concluding his final weeks in the Oval Office, at a time when a hospital-wide ban on frontal lobotomies for intractable cases remained three years away, and the site of the Luxdorfer Pavilion, then opposite the main hospital complex, had housed a live poultry market frequented by Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe. Her bubble-cut coiffure remained unchanged as well, although her natural auburn locks had turned a synthetic henna. Above her left breast she displayed one of five brooches, among these a tin parrot and a rhinestone octopus, which she rotated systematically in tune with the days of the week.

  “Your daughter Maia phoned,” said Miss Nickelsworth. “Consider yourself reminded that you’re meeting her at seven thirty at Grand Central. Under the clock.”

  That was news to Millard. Highly unwelcome news. “Tonight? Are you sure?”

  “I’m just the messenger,” said Miss Nickelsworth. />
  Millard retained absolutely no memory of making plans with his daughter. Could he really have agreed to such an appointment? On this of all days? Clearly, she’d mangled the dates on her end, although that was so out of character for his youngest, who’d coordinated a schedule of sixty-two credits—allegedly a university record—during her junior year at Yale. More likely, he reconsidered, this was self-sabotage. He could hear Hal Storch ascribing this flub to his subconscious, a sign of a latent “life instinct” wrangling with his manifest desire to die. Storch relished tales of patients undermined by such psychodynamic snares: the adulterous husband who billed his mistress’s abortion to a joint credit card; a band of armed robbers who realized, too late, that they’d planned their heist for a bank holiday. To Millard, all of this psychobabble was utter bunkum: No purported field of science other than Freudian analysis operated without the benefit of systematic study and double-blind testing. For years, he’d shared a good-natured disagreement with his friend regarding the merits of exploring the unconscious, taking jabs at Storch’s relentless interpretation of dreams and parapraxes, while Storch derided headshrinkers who downplayed talk therapy as shills for the pharmaceutical industry. But how could he explain an engagement with Maia of which he possessed absolutely no recollection? Hal Storch, undoubtedly, would have laughed like a madman until he choked on his cigar.

  “Also, there’s a woman in your office,” said Miss Nickelsworth, eyes narrowing like an opium fiend’s. “Not a patient. Says she’s an old friend of yours.” Her look exclaimed, at two hundred decibels: You naughty old codger, you! An instant passed in which Millard imagined that Delilah had achieved a miraculous recovery and had come to surprise him with the good news—but he understood this was just wishful fantasy. “I couldn’t let her wait out here in the corridor with them painting like that. All that lead would be the death of her.”

  Millard inhaled through his nose, but his nostrils detected nothing beyond the usual St. Dymphna’s must. Miss Nickelsworth, who was only four years older than Millard, still dwelt in a universe where paint contained toxic minerals, and soda cans were manufactured with tin, and the mercury harvested from thermometers made safe, entertaining toys for children. She was his chronological contemporary, but psychologically belonged to his aunts’ generation: In fact, after they’d passed away, Millard had discovered a hoard of lead-based Dutch Boy paint in his aunts’ cupboard, alongside a leather case of stale, cork-tipped cigarettes and a Royal Dansk cookie tin filled with the complimentary playing cards from defunct airlines.

  “But you’re immune, Miss N.?” asked Millard.

  “I’m paid to take risks,” replied Miss Nickelsworth—without a trace of irony. “You’ll forgive me for saying this, but you look like you’ve survived the Dust Bowl.”

  “It’s nothing. Only a minor explosion on Ninety-Fourth Street . . . .”

  He’d attempted to spruce himself up in the washroom, but some damage couldn’t be remedied: an ember-sized hole had perforated his sweater and the left shoulder of his jacket wore a badge of soot like an epaulet. Not that it mattered: Soon all of his clothing, and even what little remained of Isabelle’s, would belong to indigent strangers. At least the wounds had been confined to his attire. Denny Dennmeyer had required nine stitches above his eyebrow. Two people, a Superette manager and a second-story tenant, reportedly died at the scene. Lysander and his dogs had emerged entirely unscathed.

  “You should really be more careful,” urged Miss Nickelsworth.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m paid to have an immunity.”

  He left Miss Nickelsworth to her anxieties and steeled himself for whatever unwelcome surprise awaited him inside his office. Yet the woman seated opposite his desk, casually perusing the personal calendar atop his desk blotter, appeared relatively harmless: a soft-curved creature on borrowed time with features like lumpen clay. She sported cat-eye sunglasses, a gauze kerchief, and a drab checkered wrap that recalled Greta Garbo in decline. At first, Millard took her for a patient, or a patient’s relative, but when she looked up, there was no mistaking her static right eye and saddle nose: Virginia Margold! He hadn’t seen her since his fortieth Hager Heights reunion, although she called religiously on his birthday—like a mechanical toy gone berserk.

  “Salty Salter!” she cried. “As I live and breathe. You don’t mind my dropping in like this. I was in the neighborhood . . . and I realized it was your big day . . . so I figured, why not . . . ?” It took him a moment to realize that she’d meant his birthday, not the opposite.

  “Well, actually—”

  “I can only stay a few minutes,” said Margold, holding up a palm to silence him. “You heard the news, I’m sure. Whit Kendall passed on . . . .”

  Millard had a vague recollection of Whit Kendall as someone very unlike himself—the sort of overconfident fellow who rode crew at Princeton and swiveled in a partner’s chair at a white-shoe law firm. But maybe he was merely holding Whit’s uber-WASP name against him.

  “I’m in town for the funeral,” she continued. “Or I was in Connecticut, rather, but from Spokane it’s practically the same . . . .”

  “So you came all the way down from Connecticut?” asked Millard.

  “Not far. Darien. Less than an hour by train.”

  Millard glanced at the clock on the bookshelf behind his guest. Already 1:15. He had to phone Maia to cancel their supposed plans before she went out for the afternoon.

  “You’ve caught me at an awkward moment,” he ventured.

  “Don’t worry. I can’t stay long,” repeated Margold, who looked as settled as an encampment of squatters. “But I do have a few things I want to show you. You don’t mind, do you? It’s not every day I get to reminisce with Salty Salter.”

  She reached into a paper shopping bag, the sort that usually contained groceries or a pipe bomb, and produced a shoebox. Across the top, in blue marker on masking tape, was lettered: M. SALTER. Millard wondered if his classmate possessed a similar receptacle for each of their Hager Heights comrades, a cohort that must have once numbered close to three hundred. Even thinned out by heart disease, and cancer, and a newsworthy murder-suicide in the 1980s, the survivors likely still merited a good two hundred such containers. Poor Virginia and her mementos. She’d married late, probably to the first male who actually took her seriously as a woman. A nearsighted Moroccan archaeologist, affable if not talkative. Millard had shared an hors d’oeuvre table with the leather-skinned chap at a reunion. As surprised as he’d been to learn that Virginia had married at fifty, he’d been even more shocked to hear that the husband had left her, a decade later, to shack up with an Andean tribeswoman he’d met on a dig. “It makes sense,” Isabelle had observed. “At least, she won’t drag him to any high school reunions.” Later, after lovemaking, she teased, “Maybe that’s what you need next, Mil. An Inca.” But as much as he and Isabelle had once mocked Virginia Margold and her ubiquitous scrapbooks, he now felt genuinely sorry for her.

  “Take a look at this, Salty,” said Margold. “September 12, 1954.”

  She’d spread out a handful of photocopied articles from the Hager Herald on his blotter. One quoted a fourteen-year-old Millard, who’d just moved to suburban Westchester County from the Bronx, on starting at a new school; another catalogued his victories in an eleventh-grade Latin competition. “And here’s a piece you wrote for the school paper: ‘Millard Salter Reviews In the Court of Public Opinion by Alger Hiss.’ ” Alger Hiss! Now there was another name to run past Lauren Pastarnack. How passionately, in his review, Millard had pleaded for the official’s innocence. Alas, history had cast a far harsher light on the folk heroes of his liberal Jewish childhood—not just Hiss, but Harry Dexter White and Julius Rosenberg, who really had passed secrets to the Soviets. Now even the Soviets were gone.

  “It’s amazing what you can find on the Internet, isn’t it?” observed Margold.

  “I suppose,” said Millard. “If you’re looking.”

  “
Oh, I’m always looking,” chirped Margold. “I was talking with Whit’s widow—the third Mrs. Kendall—I’m not sure you’ve met her—and she was telling me how she went online and found clippings in the Daily Pennsylvanian archive from Whit’s old shell races.”

  “Close,” muttered Millard. “So close.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing. I was just thinking how close we all used to be. You and me and Whit . . .”

  A bit of dissembling never killed anyone. In his mind’s eye, he had no trouble imagining himself and Margold and Whit Kendall sauntering arm in arm through the hushed streets of Hager Heights, or taking a sunfish out on Long Island Sound, or even skinny-dipping illicitly after hours at the municipal swimming pool. None of this had happened, of course. But Whit was dead, and he’d soon be dead, and then Margold could spin any yarns she wished with absolute impunity. So why not speed her fantasies along if that made her happy? History did not necessarily belong to the winners; it belonged to the last witness off life support.

  Margold sighed. “Do you remember that time I came to your house?”

  Was this woman serious? These days, he hardly remembered where he’d left his bifocals. Last year, he’d mistakenly given the Armenian doorman two checks for Christmas. How was he supposed to recall a trivial event that might—or might not—have occurred while he was a teenager?

  “It’s been a long time,” he said.

  “Not so long,” rejoined Margold. “But I do have a memory for these things. It must have been our junior year, because I was going door-to-door, raising funds for the marching band. For our annual spring trip to the national competition—that year was Saratoga Springs, I think . . . . Or maybe Nantucket. And I remember it must have been late October, or November, because you and your dad were on your way to the garage to have the snow tires mounted on his DeSoto.”

  Millard wasn’t sure whether to pity his classmate or to envy her. She seemed genuinely content living on the fumes of an unpopular adolescence. He’d entirely forgotten his family’s DeSoto, or even the days before all-weather tires. Everything was “year-round” now: patio furniture, electoral campaigns, windows. He recalled—with some fondness—the annual autumn ritual of installing the storm windows in the upstairs bedrooms at his parents’ place. And digging up tulip bulbs each October, for storage under mulch in the basement, before Burpee began stocking varieties that could endure a New York winter. To Lauren Pastarnack’s generation, mounting storm windows or winterizing tulips was as alien as shoveling coal—which his aunts had actually done by hand, well into the 1960s, before they finally splurged on a boiler.