“They really don’t exist?” asked Millard—incredulous that two people he’d never even heard of until minutes before were a sham.
“Celebrities don’t ride in cabs these days. They take limousines,” said Konnie. “Sorry.”
“And you recorded me? Without my permission?”
“It’s part of the project.” She pointed at a Lilliputian microphone affixed to the rim of the overhead light. “Now do me a favor and sign a waiver so I can use your voice. There should be a clipboard with forms in one of the seat pockets.”
Sure enough, Millard found a boilerplate waiver behind the passenger’s seat. According to the document, her project was called: “Why Men ‘Know’ More: Gender Differences in False Assertions of Familiarity.” Now he got it. Sort of like Gloria Steinem meets Candid Camera.
“So women don’t pretend to know things they don’t?”
“That’s the hypothesis,” said Konnie—without a hint of self-consciousness for exposing him. “I’ll tell you for sure in eleven months.”
No, you won’t, thought Millard. Thank heavens for that.
“What I can tell you is that I’ve done about fifty of these recordings so far, and I’ve had men pretend they’ve heard of nonexistent planets and states—and one guy even bragged he’d had a great-grandfather who’d fought under Colonel Sanders and General Mills during the Civil War.” The girl briefly ground the tires along the rumble strip, possibly for effect. “So far, not one woman has taken the bait.”
“And what if I won’t sign the waiver?” Millard asked.
Konnie turned for an instant—while sailing at seventy miles per hour in moderate traffic—and flashed him a look that warned, Don’t fuck with me, old man. “What if I leave you at your wife’s grave and go home?”
“How did you know I was visiting my wife?”
The girl sighed. “People your age don’t visit their parents. And if you’d lost a child, you’d have already told me—said something like, ‘You remind me of my dead daughter’ or ‘My son would be almost your age if he hadn’t drowned.”
“And what about a close friend?”
“Who visits the graves of close friends?! Jesus Christ. Once you kick it, you’re down to your immediate relatives. Everyone else jumps ship. Don’t take this the wrong way, mister, but you’d think you’d have realized this by now . . . .”
“Know-it-all.”
She did know a lot for a girl roughly one-quarter his age, for someone born during—Millard did a rough calculation in his head—the first Bush administration. She knew a lot, yet she also knew nothing: What did she understand about watching the woman whose bed you’d shared for two decades melt away as quickly as snow on a spring afternoon? Or what it meant to see your own adult son, hearty and broad-shouldered, yet fit for absolutely nothing? Or of making a mistake that cost a fellow human being his life? Millard had done that: Shortly after his internship, he’d cleared a patient for discharge from the psych ward—a professor of Old Church Slavonic, a brawny, goateed refugee from Dubček’s Prague Spring—who took a cab straight from St. Dymphna’s doorstep to the Triborough Bridge for a lethal plunge into the Hell Gate’s current. Fortunately, that had been during an era when physicians didn’t testify against one another, and when patients sued their doctors only rarely, usually out of malice. (It helped that the Czech’s closest relative was a stepsister in Vancouver.) What could his driver, clever as she might be, know of survivor’s guilt, of having been entrusted with another’s life and failed? You had to live through certain cataclysms to appreciate their horror. If youth, as they claimed, was wasted on the young, then the wisdom of experience was squandered on the old.
Yet the girl had a point: Would anyone ever visit him at Mount Hebron? Maia would, at least at first, especially since Isabelle’s final demand—possibly her sole true demand, ever—was that they be interred side by side. Sally and Arnold might appear with their families, once, for the unveiling. As a courtesy. But that was that. After all, when was the last time anyone other than he or his daughter had visited Isabelle? Millard affixed his name—both printed and signed—to the waiver with his fountain pen and passed it over the divider.
“Thanks, Mr. Millard Salter,” said Konnie, reading from the form. “Is that your real name?”
“Yes, it is, as a matter of fact,” he said. “Why shouldn’t it be?”
He didn’t mention that his grandfather had plucked the name from a gentile’s apothecary shop, Salter’s Drugs on Rivington Street—that back in the Ukraine, in a bare-earth shtetl where his ancestors had circumcised and worshiped and mourned for generations, a village that was now an industrial suburb of Lviv, the Salters had been Zarakowskis. That was just what you did in those days—nobody walked around with their Ashkenazi names on their sleeves like the Maccabees. Eddie Cantor had been Edward Iskowitz. “Uncle Miltie” was born Mendel Berlinger. So what?
“I don’t know. It just sounds made up.” She yawned—as though indicting his conversation skills. “Do you mind if I listen to some music?”
That was chutzpah for you—deriding his name and then changing the subject.
She flipped on the radio without waiting for his answer. The vehicle filled with a rhythmic pulse, deep and cacophonic, with no discernable melody. Millard had read that the FBI blasted similar sounds through loudspeakers to flush out hostage takers.
“This is music?” he asked.
“Hogtie and the Pentacoastal Five, man,” said Konnie. “Aren’t they awesome?”
“Awesome,” echoed Millard.
The meter read $55.00; they were still a good three miles from Mount Hebron. And then a small miracle transpired: the hostile vibrations trailed away for the news at the top of the hour.
Two are now confirmed dead and sixteen injured, led the anchor, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in a blast that our sources confirm was a suicide attempt gone awry A thirty-five-year-old woman has been taken to St. Dymphna’s for third-degree burns, and is now listed in critical but stable condition. She is likely to face criminal charges. . . . In other news, animal control officers continue to search for an escaped lynx cub—
Konnie turned down the volume. “Idiot,” she said. “If I’m going to kill myself, I’m going to make sure I do it right.”
“Maybe it’s harder than you think.”
“How hard can it be? I’d down a couple of shots of hard liquor and then I’d take this baby up to about ninety miles per hour and go straight over the Palisades.”
“Not everybody drives a car.”
“Whatever. There’s like a billion skyscrapers in New York City. Bridges too. How difficult can it be to find one to jump off?” As though to emphasize the ease of suicide, the girl accelerated through a yellow light into an illegal left turn. “I know you’ll say I’m crazy, but I think the government should offer suicide lessons—so that people who really want to die don’t end up doing things that jeopardize the lives of others.”
Millard had long propounded this heresy in private—but he wasn’t particularly interested in engaging. The girl’s ‘whatever’ had reminded him of his misunderstanding with Maia.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I have to call my daughter.”
Once again, no luck: You have reached the voicemail of Maia Salter . . . .
If he couldn’t reach Maia, or leave a message, he’d have no choice but to leave her waiting: another setback on a day that seemed haunted by misfortune—a day on which he’d encountered Elsa Duransky, Hecuba Yilmaz, Virginia Margold, and Denny Dennmeyer. Meeting any one of these unfortunate creatures was enough to dampen his spirits; all four in one morning was like appearing on the satanic version of This Is Your Life. On top of all that, his tête-à-tête with Lysander had accomplished nothing. Nada. Gornisht, as his mother used to say—the only Yiddish she ever used—while holding up empty hands to the dog. As long as the boy didn’t view his lifestyle as problematic—and why should he with Millard footing his bills?—any effort to offer soluti
ons was as futile as hosing water onto a volcano. Not that Millard didn’t have answers. He did: concrete, step-by-step plans to get his son back on course. All Lysander had to do was ask. Or merely open himself up to the possibility of advice. But the boy was a slick wall of indifference. How could one realistically expect that a catastrophe four decades in the making might be remedied over a sashimi lunch? He had been a self-deluding fool to hope it. Still . . .
The cab jolted to a halt, nearly launching Millard’s skull into the divider.
“Here we are,” announced the girl. “Home sweet home.”
They’d pulled up before the wrought iron gates of Mount Hebron. A metal chain secured the entryway, but a nearby postern in the brickwork allowed for the passage of pedestrians. Beyond that rolled the phalanxes of headstones—a few limestone markers dating from the 1890s, families of marble and granite fixtures of more recent vintage, and then the sharp curve around a mausoleum with a gambrel roof to the original Salter plot. He’d first hiked that hill at the age of eleven, following his Grandma Minnie’s cortege. Then came his grandfather’s sister, Esther, squat as a potbelly stove, and then Meyer Wolff himself, done in at seventy by his own cigars. Each trek to Mount Hebron bracketed an era in Millard’s life—and now this would be his last visit, or rather his penultimate, as he still had one final journey ahead of him. How strange to be among the dead during the heat of July, he thought. Somehow, it seemed, his kin had always succumbed during the bitterest of winters, the branches above bare and without pity.
“You’ll wait for me?” he asked. “I won’t be long . . . .”
“Take as long as you want,” said Konnie. “It’s your dime.”
“Thirty minutes. Tops.”
“No rush,” she said. “And I am sorry about your wife. Really.”
Her sympathy caught Millard off guard. “Me too.”
He passed through the postern and followed the slate path. A shirtless laborer mowed the slopes of a nearby ridge; the scent of fresh-cut grass tickled his nostrils. Ahead of him, enough graves to populate all the synagogues of Europe. The scene always recalled his grade-school assemblies on Armistice Day, when anointed students recited those haunting lines of John McCrae’s: In Flanders fields the poppies blow / between the crosses, row on row . . . Ironic, too, because there wasn’t even a single cross at Mount Hebron, which had started off as a German-Jewish resting place, in the era of burial societies and tontines, only later to expand to accept tribesmen of all customs and factions. (You could even be buried here with a tattoo, he’d learned—Maia, bless her soul, had actually called to check before inking a ringed Saturn on her ankle.) A Who’s Who of obscure Jewish performers were interred at the site: vaudeville comedians Willie and Eugene Howard; Myron Cohen, that second-rate staple of The Ed Sullivan Show; Buster Kimmel, once hailed the “Victor Borge of the accordion.” But Mount Hebron also contained its fair share of physicians and accountants, bookkeepers and card sharks, nobodies and no-goodniks—as well as a large number of ordinary working stiffs. As long as you don’t have a foreskin or a heartbeat, Millard’s father had once joked, they’re glad enough to take your money.
The cemetery had in former times been three separate burial grounds. One of these, Beth-El, had been swallowed up long before Millard’s first arrival, but he remembered Eden Gardens, previously separated from Mount Hebron by a service road, but now conjoined in a morbid economy of scale. Each cemetery claimed its own “street” grid—not perfectly aligned—so “Elm Lane” became “Locust Crossing” on his way to the older headstones. Millard knew the turnoff, opposite the four ledger stones of the Sinkoff brothers and their wives, precisely because his father had missed it without fail, regularly trekking all the way to the end of the row and back. Dear Papa, he thought—who’d introduced him as “my son, the doctor,” from the day of admission to medical school. Millard stepped into the deep grass of the Salter plot, careful to avoid the stones. Coniferous hedges had overgrown several of the adjacent graves: Bernard Levinson, a devoted father and grandfather; Mollie Gruber, orphaned among Levinsons and Salters, who’d died at seventeen, “beloved and cherished,” in 1932. He knew these neighbors like old friends, denizens of a district long filled to capacity; he still recalled when Grandma Minnie and the Levinson matriarch had been the only two residents, like housewives on opposite sides of an air shaft.
On his last visit, at Isabelle’s unveiling, he’d taken a penknife to the yew shrub suffocating Mollie Gruber’s headstone, pruning enough foliage to render her name visible. It was a start—even if Maia had discouraged his labors, afraid he might stab himself. Now, such efforts seemed futile. There was nothing left he could do for enigmatic Mollie Gruber, who had stood beside him, so to speak, during his life’s harshest trials. As a teenager, he’d wondered: Had she been pretty? Later, as a medical student, he’d speculated on her premature death. In middle age, when he’d buried his own parents, he’d reflected on her grieving mother and father, if they had survived her—how cruel it must be to lose a child, and how fortunate he’d been to have his progeny outlast him. He thought of Jackie Kennedy mourning her infant, Anthony Quinn’s toddler drowning in W. C. Fields’s fish pond, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans losing their daughter to mumps, not to mention Art Hallam’s granddaughter, who’d perished from a one-in-a-million dental complication, or Hal Storch’s niece, who’d overdosed on a cocktail of barbiturates. Even an indolent directionless screwup of a son like Lysander—there, he’s said it—was better than no son at all.
Millard paused for a moment before his aunts’ graves: Fannie, shy and studious, who’d worked in a pharmacy, and Doris, stern but generous—and, he now recognized, queer as a wooden nickel. Let the associate dean hear him say that! But it was true, he sensed, and he loved the old spinster all the more for it. What characters his aunts had been—was there any other word for it? He could hear Doris warning, Starve a cold, feed a fever, and he could practically feel the soothing sensation of Fannie painting Mercurochrome on his scrapes and gashes. These were women who kept hats in milliners’ bandboxes and warned against ptomaine poisoning, who whispered “cancer” under their breaths, even as it gnawed away at their loins, who called World War I “the Great War” well into the Nixon administration. After they died, he’d found a dozen double eagle gold pieces in their joint safe deposit box, wrapped in a velvet-trimmed case that also contained four silver mezuzahs and a pair of well-worn phylacteries. He never learned to whom the religious paraphernalia belonged. In addition, the dear women had preserved a deed—in Polish—to a half-acre lot in Lemberg that had once belonged to his grandfather’s father; Millard had shelled out $20 translating the document.
Behind his aunts lay his older brother, Lester, who’d made a killing in the wholesale raincoat business and frittered most of it away on alimony and child support. One of Millard’s nieces ran a tanning salon in California; the other was a tattoo artist turned organic wool farmer in northern Vermont. Alpacas, he thought. Or maybe vicuñas. He hadn’t spoken to either woman since Lester’s funeral—six years ago now—and they rarely, if ever, entered his thoughts; his sister, Harriet, touched base with them annually around Thanksgiving. For a while, in the 1970s, he and Lester too hadn’t spoken—not estranged, merely distant—having little in common beyond shared DNA and a congenital proclivity for childhood ear infections. Lester had been an athlete: rugged, competitive. Able to launch a rubber Spaldeen two long city blocks with the swing of a broom handle. Also hot-tempered, capable of exploding over a late thank-you card, over an excess of salt in his consommé. A bit too much steam for Millard’s kettle. But then Papa had died, a routine gallbladder procedure gone awry, and they’d reconnected over the memories of their lost, largely imagined youths. Millard retrieved a pebble from a cairn on a nearby marker—his back wouldn’t let him pluck one from the ground—and placed it atop his brother’s headstone. (The other fellow would hardly miss it, he reassured himself. What was one rock among dozens?) He vaguely recalled that he was suppos
ed to place the stone with his left hand, although he couldn’t remember whether this was an authentic Judaic tradition, or merely one of his aunts’ many superstitions.
And then came his parents. Even at seventy-five, Millard couldn’t help tearing up before the forty-year-old marker with its serpentine scalp. Papa had gone first, still at the tail of his prime. Millard and Carol had visited him at Beth Israel before the operation—he’d insisted upon a “Jewish” hospital—and he’d regaled them with stories about his recent sales trip to Arkansas and Missouri. He’d brought along a slide tray, hoping to display his inventory of knockoff mink coats and fox stoles to buyers in the Ozarks, but carousel projectors were still a novelty in the early 1970s, and his trip coincided with several high-profile hijackings to Havana, so “those dim-witted storm troopers”—that was how Papa described the airport security team in Little Rock—mistook his equipment for a weapon. He’d had to conduct a demonstration slide show with a heavy-duty flashlight before they let him board the plane. “Thank God for that,” Solomon Salter had said. “Otherwise they’d be cutting my kishkas open in some backwater goyish hospital.” But then Dr. Silverstein, the vice chair of surgery at the esteemed Jewish hospital, had accidentally nicked his bile duct. Ironically, Beth Israel was now St. Dymphna’s-South, one of the many excellent community hospitals chewed over and swallowed by Millard’s employer.
Millard’s mother, Shirley, had lived another decade, but in a diminished widowhood where her social circle grew narrower and her forays outside the apartment increasingly rare. Her osteoporosis worsened. When she shopped, she carried the bag behind her in both hands, hunched forward, as though cuffed for arraignment; later, she’d loop her cane between the handles of the bag, dragging it like a plow. Eventually, her memory faded. He’d ask her the names of her grandchildren, and she’d say Lester and Millard. When he’d inquired who he was, if Lysander was Millard, she’d said—with remarkable confidence—“Grandpa Avram.” By the end, she thought she was a seventeen-year-old pieceworker in Greenpoint again, and she kept demanding Millard bring her to the sweatshop so they wouldn’t risk starvation. Death had come none too soon—not a blessing, but a painful necessity.
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