Millard Salter's Last Day

by Jacob M. Appel

  “It was a Firedome, right?” added Margold. “A hard-top sedan with turquoise trim.”

  Unbelievable, thought Millard. Just unbelievable.

  “You looked so handsome that afternoon. And quite the rebel too with those white buckskin shoes.” Margold laughed—a nervous twitter. “You don’t mind hearing that from an old lady, do you?”

  “Did I really wear white buckskin shoes?”

  “Indeed you did. And a boar’s tusk necklace. And a beaded belt too . . . .”

  Millard shook his head. “Impossible.”

  “Very well. Have it your way,” conceded Margold. “But there’s no denying how handsome you were. If you’d tried to kiss me, I swear I would have swooned.”

  Millard’s neck muscles tensed up. He didn’t understand how the notion of his kissing Virginia had entered the conversation, but that struck him as a sound place to stop. “I’m glad you dropped by,” he said with an air of finality. “Thank you for the birthday wishes.”

  Margold looked flustered. Possibly tearful. “I do have a few more things I wanted to show you,” she said as she rummaged inside the shoebox. “Here we are . . . .”

  She produced a yellowed extract from The New York Times: MISS SUCRAM TO MARRY M. K. SALTER. What struck him most was how beautiful Carol looked with her sharp cheekbones and schoolgirl bangs; what had a woman like her seen in a drip like him? Needless to say, when he’d remarried, he hadn’t sent an announcement to the papers.

  “Two hundred eighty-three graduates in our class,” she reported. “Two hundred ninety-seven marriages. At least, those are the ones I’m aware of . . . .”

  How tempting to wed Delilah in secret—even now—to muddle Margold’s numbers.

  “All but thirty-two married at least once,” she continued. “But that includes openly gay classmates like Tom Truett and ‘Goldy’ Bernard . . . . Also the ones who died young. Did you realize Harriet Klein was only twenty-four when she overdosed?” Margold’s lips tightened to emphasize the gravity of this realization. “Of course, Gina Tucker is now on her sixth hubby—she’s actually Gina Tucker Sanford Delahanty Weisberg Krauss St. James Polk now—say that five times fast!—so these things even out, I suppose. In the aggregate. Sometimes I think there should be a law against changing your name more than once, or at least once a decade. Same with countries. I bought my great-niece a globe for Christmas a few years ago, and half the nations don’t exist anymore. South this and east that and whatnot. Did you know there’s an actual country named Djibouti?” Margold shifted her head, focusing on Millard with her good eye. “We had a wine and cheese reception at our community college last month and somehow I ended up asking a visiting professor of African Studies if he’d ever been to Rhodesia. My great-uncle had been stationed there before the war. You’d have thought I’d ordered the man to pluck the eyes from horses.”

  Had it really come to this? Discussing Rhodesia with Virginia Margold.

  “It must take a lot of effort to keep track of all those marriages.”

  “I suppose,” said Margold. “By the way, I’m sorry about Isabelle.”

  Now Millard just wanted the woman to leave. “I am too,” he said.

  “That was a rough year for wives. Cal Edwards and Jimmy Van Dale lost theirs on the same day. August 16. Tammy Van Dale was much younger too—not even sixty.”

  “Life can be unfair,” said Millard. The clock on the bookshelf read 1:25. Overhead, an orderly was jangling a stretcher or a meal cart along the tile, producing a familiar earthquake on the ceiling. Virginia Margold thumbed through her clippings, organized in divided rows like coupons.

  Millard stood up. “I wish we had more time . . . .”

  “Do you really?” replied Margold, taking his words entirely at face value. “Because I meant what I said about you being so handsome. I confess I even had a little crush on you . . . .”

  “Nothing like puppy crushes,” said Millard, striving to sound indifferent. He walked to the door and opened it. The painters had returned from their lunch break and the corridor smelled of volatile chemicals. A fine dust of plaster—or chrysotile asbestos—hung in the air. It didn’t matter: Not even asbestos was a danger to him anymore.

  “The truth is, Salty,” continued Margold, “I still have a little crush on you . . . .”

  She held her thumb and index finger together, miming the size of her affection.

  Millard had seen this coming, yet like a pedestrian who spots the headlights of an oncoming vehicle, identifying the threat was not the same as circumventing it. And he had stood in Virginia Margold’s shoes before, albeit not since high school, when he’d been rebuffed by a varsity tennis player named Stella Vann—Stella Vann, who accounted for two of those marriages, one to a conservative congressman from Virginia and the second to a retired female horse trainer who’d taken three colts to the Preakness. He’d run into her at the fortieth reunion—but he’d found middle-aged Stella pleasant, and a tad insipid, rather than alluring. So he did not want to sound unkind to Virginia. At the same time, Margold was the last suitor he wished to encourage.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Millard. “Trust me. You don’t have a crush on me. You have a crush on some handsome kid who wore white buckskin shoes and a beaded belt.”

  Margold appeared unfazed. “Goodness, Salty, you do sound like a psychiatrist.” She smiled, a glassful of hope. “I swear you could still make me swoon.”

  “Which is why they pay me the big money,” he said. “But as much as I enjoy chatting with you, I really do have patients to see . . . . I’m sorry . . . .”

  Millard stood at the open door, an awkward usher, as Virginia Margold gathered her belongings with a deliberate sluggishness—like a malingerer leaving the hospital after exposure. One by one, she tucked her treasured clippings into various envelopes and pouches, finally shutting the shoebox so firmly, and with such resignation, that the cardboard seemed to release a faint groan. Millard could have showered and shaved in the interval required for the woman to fasten the safety pin on her wrap. In the time she took to shuffle to the door, clutching her bag to her chest as though cradling an infant, he might have walked halfway to Boston. This, he thought, is how eternity must feel. For an instant, as she approached, Millard feared his visitor might peck him on the cheek, but she merely paused and asked, “Can I stop by again tomorrow? Maybe for lunch? My flight’s not until the evening . . . .”

  Goodness, how the tables had turned. Hal Storch claimed that any man over seventy with his own natural teeth and a motor vehicle could choose his women like rabbits at a state fair, but even without a car—Millard had given up his license after Isabelle’s death, tethered as he was to Manhattan—he suddenly found himself an Adonis among elderly hens. Not that Virginia Margold was exactly a catch. But Carol certainly was, and the notion that his ex-wife still wanted him—that she might take him back, after all that he’d done—seemed as unjust as it did astonishing. And hadn’t that fern-obsessed coed he’d dated before Carol phoned him after her second divorce—from the same man—to ask if he were single? What was that wisecrack of Storch’s: “At seventy, all the women you lusted after in high school will finally want to date you. And at ninety, they’ll think they did.” Unexpectedly, Millard felt a sudden tenderness for Virginia, whose only romantic prospects had evaporated in the Andes.

  “Why don’t you call me tomorrow? In the morning,” he offered. “We’ll see how much I get done this afternoon.”

  The expression on Margold’s loose-fitting face could only be compared with those of office girls hugging sailors on V-J Day—or possibly the joy his granddaughters had displayed when he’d brought them a life-sized grizzly from FAO Schwarz.

  “Tomorrow it is,” she agreed.

  And then she did plant her damp, moribund lips on his cheek. He had to wait until she was safely past the trestle ladder and around the bend before brushing his sleeve across his skin. Miss Nickelsworth, who had obviously witnessed the entire exchange, kept her eyes glue
d to the penguin-shaped tape dispenser on her desk, and said nothing. But what did he really care if his prim secretary remembered him as a Casanova? At least, he was alone now! Gloriously alone. Not that he even wanted to be alone—just away from the Virginia Margolds and Denny Dennmeyers and Hecuba Yilmazes who encroached upon his sanity. His strongest desire was to phone Delilah—or to show up at her apartment, unannounced, armed with another bouquet—but he’d promised to leave her in peace until five o’clock. The more time he spent with her at this late juncture, after all, the more time he’d still yearn for—and they’d both suffer. So better a quick, loving farewell at the end of the workday. Besides, Delilah also had her own loose ends to tidy up. “We’re starting a tradition,” she’d jested. “Like not seeing the bride before the wedding.”

  Millard shut the door of his office, turning to face the tower of journals that would never be read and the stacks of reprint requests that would go unanswered. He’d already taken home any effects of sentimental value: his autographed copy of Erikson’s Young Man Luther, photographs of himself posing with Carl Rogers and B. F. Skinner, a thank-you card he’d once received from Abraham Maslow in return for a reprint; also an amethyst geode he’d been given by his very first patient as a paperweight. Whatever remained in his office, he suspected, would be carted away with belongings left behind by unidentified patients and the used plasticware from the hospital’s cafeteria. So be it. Yet deprived of these treasures, and his pincushion cacti, which he’d donated to a local nursery, the office felt bare as a padded cell, its deficiencies—sagging plaster, uncovered heating vents, a patch of mold above the baseboards—all the more discouraging. A jagged floor-to-ceiling crack cleaved the far wall like a seismic threat.

  His failure with Lysander hung heavily upon him. Not even an explosion, and the ten-alarm blaze that followed, managed to shake his son from his sloth. He’d considered telling the boy, point-blank, that he was wasting his life, but he hadn’t marshalled the courage. It was one thing for his receptionist to remember him as a letch, quite another to stamp his son with a permanent badge of disapproval. When they’d hugged, it was like embracing a convict facing the gallows. Adding another blow to his drubbing, Lysander hadn’t even remembered his birthday.

  Millard returned to his desk, loosened his tie, and kicked his feet up on a makeshift hassock fashioned from milk crates. The notion of phoning Carol tempted him for a moment. She’d already fought this battle, after all. But he sensed any discussion of Lysander—of his failure with Lysander—would bring him to tears, and his first wife, for all her many gifts, hardly offered a shoulder to cry upon. And if he didn’t want Lysander to remember him as a critic, he certainly didn’t want Carol recalling him as a sniveler.

  Instead, he dialed Maia’s apartment.

  His youngest daughter still did not carry a mobile phone. She’d read a study on the incidence of glioblastomas in Finland, which reported a four percent increase in gray matter pathology among “intense, chronic cellular phone users,” and concluded that even casual use would give her a brain tumor. It’s a silent epidemic, she’d chastised. Wait until we’ve had cell phones for as long as we’ve smoked cigarettes. No meta-analyses to the contrary could persuade her. So much for four years’ tuition at Yale and a PhD in the hard sciences.

  You have reached . . . replied the voicemail.

  Millard still recalled the days of answering services, of renting your home phone from Ma Bell at fifteen dollars a month. He’d never forget how he’d mocked Hal Storch for shelling out $400 to have a fifteen-pound PhoneMate Deluxe answering machine built into the wall of his study. Now Maia was the only person he knew under sixty who couldn’t be reached while on the toilet.

  Maia’s voice was followed by a mechanical warning: This mailbox is full.

  He dialed again. You have reached . . .

  As Einstein said, insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results—but that didn’t stop people from trying. He’d known a guy from college who’d been dumped by the same woman five times, and, more somberly, a couple who’d had three consecutive babies afflicted with Tay-Sachs disease. Again: This mailbox is full.

  The last thing Millard wanted to do was leave his daughter waiting for him in a public railroad station, but he simply couldn’t meet her at seven thirty. Or ever. He’d already telephoned her the night before and subtly conveyed his love. And not once, as he reflected, did she mention a word about meeting him the next day.

  You have reached . . .

  He hung up for the third time.

  Millard flipped on the radio and logged into his email. The explosion dominated the news at the top of the hour. Terrorism cannot be ruled out, reported a “bureau chief” with a Polish name and a nasal voice. But my sources tell me that an intentionally detached gas line in the cellar appears the likely cause. Millard’s attention drifted. He had innumerable messages reminding him to complete his annual training in patient confidentiality, which he’d already done, and blood-borne pathogens, which he never handled. The word suicide riveted him back to the broadcast. That information is preliminary and unofficial, declared the reporter. But my sources affirm that the tenant had attempted to kill herself multiple times in the past. The unidentified woman has been taken to St. Dymphna’s Hospital, but is expected to survive. Millard flipped away from the station with irritation. That was why the public needed suicide training courses rather than suicide prevention. People who were set on killing themselves were going to do it—one way or another. But keeping them from massacring innocent other parties in the process—from driving station wagons onto railroad tracks or putting first responders at risk—was another matter entirely.

  The link for Lauren Pastarnack’s recommendation appeared on his computer screen. He genuinely liked the girl—a lot—even if she existed in a world where Bing Crosby and the Beatles belonged to the same generation. In all fairness, she hadn’t been the most impressive student ever to rotate through their service. She didn’t conduct any clinical research, as he recalled. And her facility with paperwork had proven adequate, at best. But since this was his final recommendation ever, what did he have to lose? Who gave a rat’s patootie about his long-term credibility? For one day in her career, he decided, Lauren Pastarnack would be the Linus Pauling of residency applicants. He wrote:

  Dear Committee on Admissions:

  I have written over five thousand letters of recommendation in my nearly fifty years as a clinical psychiatrist.

  That wasn’t exactly true—not by a magnitude—but who could disprove it?

  I have written good letters and great letters, but no letter as enthusiastic as this one, because Lauren Pastarnack is the most talented medical student ever to rotate through our service, and probably any psychiatric service in this country, in those five decades. Her range of knowledge is expansive—when you interview her, I urge you to ask her to name the Sister Seven schools or to identify the composer of “This Is the Army, Mr. Jones.” Whether you ask her about neurotransmitters or comedian Jimmy Durante, she will know the answer. Because she is brilliant and personable, and if I sent one of my own relatives to a psychiatrist, I would want it to be someone just like Ms. Pastarnack—only, I suppose, someone already in possession of a medical degree. Judging by her paper record alone, one might let her slip away, allow her to end up training at a community hospital in Milwaukee. But that would be a tragedy, as she is destined to become the Linus Pauling of psychiatry residents, the Jonas Salk of psychiatry residents, the Alexander Fleming of psychiatry residents. She combines the genius of Marie Curie with the compassion of Albert Schweitzer with the diligence and drive of a thousand Manhattan Projects. In short, she is the best of the best. Sincerely & etc . . . .

  There you go. Now he’d made up for all of his badgering.

  Millard slid the recommendation out of the printer and tucked it into an envelope. The process had left him a bit giddy, pseudo-manic. While I’m at it, he decided, I might as wel
l leave Denny Dennmeyer something to remember me by. So he typed:

  MEMO ON STAFFING NEEDS: CONSULT-LIAISON PSYCHIATRY SERVICE

  To Whom It May Concern:

  The history of Western civilization is a narrative of brave, off-kilter people moving westward—first across the steppes of East Asia to Greece and Rome, then following Claudius and William the Bastard into Old Albion. From there came Emma Lazarus’s waves of teeming refuse, first the uptight Puritans with their bawdy secrets, the Irish barmaids in search of potatoes, and, in their wake, the swarthy Italians and Slavs and Greeks and Jews who peddled from pushcarts, and set pins at manual bowling alleys, and ran numbers rackets along Stanton Street.

  He paused for a moment, almost tearful, thinking of his own grandfather—Meyer Wolff, for whom he was named—arriving in steerage at the age of eleven, alone, and making his way in the cigar business.

  Far from a representative sample, these west-bound migrants were the outcasts, the troublemakers, the young men and women mad with a desire to see a world beyond Pinsk and Patras and Palermo. And then those immigrants and their offspring plowed farther westward—in Conestoga wagons, and in jalopies along Steinbeck’s Route 66—

  Millard realized he was taking a few historical liberties here, but he doubted Dennmeyer could place the two world wars in chronological order.