Millard Salter's Last Day

by Jacob M. Appel

  Millard stepped back and absorbed a panoramic view of the Salters. Or at least the few who’d made it across the Atlantic. Most of the deceased Salters—still Zarakowskis—lay somewhere in the Pale of Settlement, their corpses trammeled by Cossack hooves and panzer tracks, a heritage truncated and razed. Not that Millard had any romantic illusions about his forebears in their Ukrainian shtetl. Their lives hadn’t been the quaint, quirky ideal depicted in Shalom Aleichem stories and Fiddler on the Roof. No, there was no Tevye the Dairyman among his ancestors. Rather, he came from a rigid, misogynistic, xenophobic tradition—people who survived on root vegetables and harsh punishments, whose law forced the husbands of rape victims to divorce their wives and forbid illegitimate children from marrying. His grandfather, Meyer Wolff, had educated him on the ways of Haredi Judaism: how the women worked bone-crunching hours and the children went hungry while the men studied Torah all day in the bitter cold. And yet, in spite of all that, he’d sent Arnold and Sally to Hebrew school on Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings. Lysander had refused to go—and he hadn’t pushed. By the time Maia’s turn came, he no longer cared.

  “Farewell for now,” Millard said to the stones. “See you soon.”

  He stretched his back—he could feel his spinal cord festering—and set off toward the newer portion of the cemetery, where Isabelle lay halfway up a sun-swept hummock. On either side, at his most recent visit, the plots had stood vacant, patches of lawn waiting to be filled. A few yards back, a family named Bloch had erected an enormous headstone for their father. Out of proportion for the neighborhood is what Carol would have said, one of her cherished objections to development when she’d served on Community Board Eight’s zoning committee. But Isabelle had remained calm and served up no objections. Millard recalled how, on the way to bury his wife, Grandpa Meyer Wolff had appeared jovial. At the time—Millard was only nine—he’d wondered how his beloved grandfather could laugh at a moment of sorrow. But when Isabelle had passed, he’d been seized with a desire to tell jokes at the cemetery. Did you hear the one about the rabbi who goes golfing on Yom Kippur and hits a hole in one? he’d said to Maia. But who could he tell? Only later did the grief—the icy permanence—sink in.

  His stroll to Isabelle’s grave took him past a festooned monument to the Jews killed in combat during the Second World War—not a grave, but a quixotic memorial commissioned by a former owner of the cemetery. The design was by Walter Hancock, cast in bronze. It was supposed to depict a brigade storming the beachheads at Normandy, but as a child, Millard had mistaken the soldiers for figure skaters, and the charging army still reminded him of the Ice Capades. He paused here for a moment, steeling himself for Isabelle. Visiting his wife’s grave was always hard for him and he felt himself at a loss. No words seemed adequate for the occasion.

  Talking to the dead didn’t make rational sense. Either Isabelle was looking down upon him, omniscient, and he’d be telling her what she already knew, or she wasn’t looking down upon anyone, because she’d long since become a clod of worm-pierced mulch. And yet he felt the compulsion to tell her things: Lysander got himself booted from the Overlook this morning. Damn son of a bitch brought his dogs to lunch! Or he might say: Don’t make dinner plans for tomorrow night. I’m on my way. Or possibly: I did what you told me to; I fell in love again. But Delilah is a supplemental blessing, not a replacement. You believe me, don’t you? He wasn’t even sure that he believed this himself. How could he? He loved Delilah, after all. He’d even considered having Isabelle’s body relocated to a plot that could accommodate three bodies. One of his former patients had done this so his father might be interred between his mother and stepmother. Yet somehow that had seemed a betrayal of Isabelle—that when she’d insisted they be buried together, she’d meant together and alone, not in a harem. Delilah, he knew, planned to be cremated, her ashes scattered over Point Loma at sunset, so the issue of eternal resting places had never caused conflict between them. Maybe love defied the laws of matter and energy: One could love two women completely, treasuring each conditionally without harming the other. Why not?

  Millard felt his shirt matted to his chest, the bow of Isabelle’s ring against his sternum. He’d grown so accustomed to the memorial pendant that, except when he showered, he noticed it no more than his underwear or socks. The ring, which featured three identical diamonds, had also been his mother’s engagement ring, and he still remembered sliding it off the old woman’s finger on the evening of her final stroke. His father’s watch and cuff links had gone to Lester, and probably sat in the safe deposit box of one of his nieces—or under a mattress, for all he knew; Grandma Minnie’s china had ended up in Tucson with his sister. (How strangely, how haphazardly property was ultimately divided!) During their marriage, Carol had insisted on keeping her jewelry in the freezer, as a safeguard against burglars. But his first wife hadn’t wanted an engagement ring or a wedding band. (For what? So the world can know I’m married? Why not just brand me with a hot poker? she’d objected.) On that final autumn night in the hospice, as Isabelle’s breath faded, he’d removed his mother’s ring, but left in place his beloved’s white gold wedding band and the opal-studded Hamsa amulet she’d worn around her neck.

  A scorching stillness had settled over the cemetery. What heat! What a day to die! Visitors placed lilies at the base of the Hancock sculpture every Memorial Day—what his aunts had called Decoration Day—and their stalks now lay desiccated in the high grass. Overhead, a turkey vulture soared between patches of buttermilk clouds. Maybe a bad omen? But Millard had spent seven decades rejecting omens, so he wasn’t about to start fretting over them now. That way lay madness: Today one worried about a circling buzzard, tomorrow one hired a haruspex to inspect the entrails of sheep or preached a second Star of Bethlehem. No, buzzards were rare in northern New Jersey, but not unheard of—and one had to situate this raptor in the context of things he hadn’t encountered that afternoon: ravens on the telephone wires, owls in daytime, flickering lights at meals. His aunts had carried such nonsense with them from the Old World: covering mirrors during mourning, turning over the table and chairs on which a coffin had rested. Millard’s childhood often seemed like one long taboo, his adolescence a series of apotropaic maneuvers. God forbid one lit three cigarettes off a match, placed hats on beds, drank water that had reflected the moon. Once Fannie had caught him rocking an empty chair, and you’d have thought he’d sent his allowance to Cardinal Spellman. Yet rational empiricist as he was, Millard occasionally rubbed his late wife’s ring—not for good luck, not exactly, but for reassurance. He did so now, tracing the outline of the silver through his sweater. Who could fault even the most balanced of scientific minds for such a primal, uxorious gesture? He looked up again: The buzzard was gone.

  Millard drew a deep breath and rounded the curve that led toward Isabelle’s resting place, toward the eight foot by five foot by three foot patch of earth where he’d soon spend eternity. To his amazement—for his first reaction was shock, not horror—the soil in front of the headstone appeared freshly disturbed. In fact, a heap of excess earth lay nearby, scorched brittle in the heat, a shovel still protruding. On the headstone, a presumptuous engraver had even carved a date of death: June 12, 2015. Someone had usurped his grave!

  On any other day, he’d have taken this error—for it had to be an error, rather than some divine gag—in stride. But on the day of his suicide, such a mistake was, as his aunts used to say, “decidedly unacceptable.”

  Millard’s watch read half past two. Konnie was waiting for him. But what did that matter? Let her wait—it was his dime.

  He yanked the shovel from the mound and heaved it into a privet hedge. Why Millard did this, he couldn’t explain. He’d often done the same with orange traffic cones placed prematurely beside his tires in anticipation of the ad hoc no parking zones created for VIP funerals and movie filmings. The motion sent a jolt of pain through his bad disc and into his upper thigh. On his hike to Mount Hebron’s office, he found h
imself favoring his opposite leg.

  The cemetery headquarters occupied a half-timbered Tudor-style cottage that seemed more suited for an English village than a Jewish graveyard. In a different location, Millard could have imagined charlatans hawking it as the birthplace of Milton or Bunyan, or a community theater using the structure to stage Hansel and Gretel. Orioles and grackles congregated at a birdbath out front; a flag hung limp above an eternal flame. The husk of a pay phone, sans telephone, stood to the left of the door, and to the right, adjacent to a louvered shutter, a sign listed regulations: No fireworks, skateboards, etc. Who in God’s name brought a skateboard to a memorial park? But someone probably had, because rules stemmed from transgressions. (Similarly, ice-pick wounds, in addition to gunshots and knifings, were reportable to the New York State Department of Public Health, he’d once read—presumably because an epidemic of high-profile ice pickings must have occurred around the time that the regulations were codified.) When Millard crossed into the stuffy office, a tiny bell jangled above the door hinge.

  A chubby woman of about twenty greeted Millard; when she smiled, she exposed braces across both rows of teeth. “Good afternoon and welcome to Mount Hebron-Beth-El,” she said. The atmosphere smelled of musty ledgers and unwashed carpets.

  “I’m not sure if you’re the right person to speak with,” said Millard. “There seems to be a problem with a grave . . . .”

  “Well, let’s see how we can help you today,” said the girl. “Do you know the row and plot numbers?”

  “Grave G60-B #14 and grave G60-B #15,” said Millard. “It’s a double.”

  The girl plugged the numbers into an ancient computer. “Here you are. Millard K. and Isabelle Salter. Both occupied. What seems to be the problem?”

  “The problem,” said Millard, “is that I’m Millard Salter.”

  The girl glanced down at the computer screen and back up at Millard.

  “Oh,” said the girl. “Shit.”

  “So I’m not sure how I go about rectifying this, but it does need to be rectified.”

  “Certainly,” agreed the girl—but there was nothing certain about her tone. “Excuse me for one moment, Mr. Salter.”

  She disappeared into a back room and he heard her phoning her boss. About three minutes later, she returned with a husky Russian woman. The supervisor sported a heavy cake of rouge from her ears to her chin—which she must have believed made her look girlish and attractive, but actually suggested the malar rash of lupus; her clump of hair—for there was no other way to describe her coiffure—matched the mauve pastels of her blouse. The woman’s voice contained all the sympathy of the Kaiser authorizing an execution. Her underling retreated into a far corner of the office, like a chambermaid waiting for the royal bedpan.

  “I hear a rumor,” said the Russian woman, “that you are having some difficulty with one of our locations . . . .”

  “It is not a rumor,” said Millard. “Someone is buried in my grave.”

  “You are sure of this?”

  “There’s a mound of soil next to it,” he said. “And there’s a date of death on the stone.”

  “Then you are not sure of it. Maybe a misunderstanding.”

  “Maybe a lawsuit,” answered Millard. “I’m telling you there’s someone else in my spot. Ask her!” He hated to involve the office girl, but he had little choice. “She tells me I’m dead.”

  “You don’t have the row and plot numbers, do you?”

  “Grave G60-B #14 and grave G60-B #15.”

  The Russian woman punched the data into her keyboard. “Yes, it does say you’re dead. You don’t recall the date of death on the marker.”

  He held his composure. “June 12, 2015.”

  Again she punched away at her machine. Its innards wheezed under the exertion.

  “Problem solved,” said the woman. “We buried a Myron Slater on June 12. Similar name. Somehow, he found his way to the wrong location.” She waved her hand dismissively. “See, just a minor mistake.”

  She frowned at him—her thin lips and painted eyebrows accusing him of raising a fuss over nothing, of wasting her precious time. Overhead, a ceiling fan swatted the stagnant air.

  “But the problem is not solved. There is still someone else’s body in my grave.”

  The supervisor didn’t appear perturbed. “Not a difficulty. We can offer you an exchange—at a discount. I have some excellent locations near the mausoleum. Those are premium spaces on account of the quiet. We can cut thirty percent off the base price . . . .”

  “I don’t want an exchange,” said Millard. “My wife is buried in that grave.”

  “Oh, your wife is already deceased?”

  “Check your computer, dammit,” he snapped. “Now I need you to take him out so that you can put me in. Capiche?”

  “All right. We can do that.”

  She sounded grudging, as though he’d made an unreasonable demand.

  “How long will it take?” he demanded.

  “Usually only a few days . . . a week at most.”

  “I don’t have a week. This is an urgent matter.”

  The woman nodded with indifference. “I understand. We’ll take care of it.”

  “I don’t mean to give you a hard time, ma’am,” Millard said. “The thing is, I may not look it, but I’m critically ill. Dying. Arrivederci Sayonara Auf Wiedersehen, comrade.” He did not know how to say goodbye in Russian. “Honestly, I could keel over at any moment,” he added, snapping his fingers. “Poof.”

  “Poof?” she asked.

  “Poof.”

  To emphasize his warning, he removed his handkerchief from his back pocket and feigned a violent cough—something between the bark of croup and the hack of tuberculosis. The Russian woman stepped back from the counter and shielded her face with her sleeve.

  “I’ll bump this work order up to priority,” promised the supervisor. “We can dig them up fast if we have to.”

  “That’s reassuring, I suppose,” said Millard. “I’ll be back tomorrow to check.”

  10

  Konnie was waiting with the cab where he’d left her. A gust of cold air hit Millard’s face as he entered—and he welcomed it—although it came with another dose of the girl’s noxious music. His watch read 2:58. According to the meter, he was in the red for $140.50. She turned down the volume on the radio and said, “It took you long enough.”

  “I thought it was my dime,” said Millard.

  “Whatever. I was just afraid you’d gotten buried alive.”

  Millard considered revealing his switcheroo with Myron Slater, but he suspected the girl wouldn’t care. “Not exactly,” he said. “I’m sorry I kept you waiting.”

  “No worries. It gave me time to work on the Riemann hypothesis.”

  “The what?”

  “The Riemann hypothesis. It’s one of the six unsolved Millennium Prize Problems in mathematics. If you figure it out, you win $1,000,000.”

  “Bullshit,” said Millard. “Whatever you’re talking about doesn’t exist.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Once bitten, twice shy,” he said. “I’m done being a guinea pig in your experiment.”

  “It’s not an experiment. It’s an art project.”

  The girl retrieved her phone from the dashboard and her thumbs whirled like eggbeaters over the tiny keys. An instant later, she handed the device across the divider. On the homepage of the Clay Mathematics Institute, the Riemann hypothesis was listed as an unsolved conundrum, immediately between the Yang-Mills mass gap problem and the Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. “You win,” he said, returning the phone. “Did you solve it?”

  “No. I wasn’t trying.”

  “But I thought you said—”

  “I lied. I’m terrible at math. I can hardly balance my checkbook.”

  That was too much for Millard. He folded his arms across his chest—determined not to speak to the girl unless absolutely necessary. But the cab remained stationed in park, idling, beads o
f sweat forming on the windows. “Well? What are we waiting for?” demanded Millard.

  “We’re waiting,” replied Konnie, “for you to tell me where to go.”

  “Back to the hospital,” he ordered. Wasn’t that obvious? But the girl hadn’t even shifted into drive when another idea hijacked his thoughts. It was only three o’clock. He wouldn’t be meeting Delilah until five. “Change of plans,” he said, satisfied with the calculations in his head. “Do you know how to get to the Grand Concourse?”

  “Not really,” replied the girl. “But the magic lady does.”

  A moment passed before Millard realized she meant the GPS navigator.

  “Can this magic lady get us to the Grand Concourse and One hundred and Seventy-Seventh Street?”

  “She can get us anywhere.”

  Konnie activated the device and soon their guide was serving up commands: Turn right on Bergen Avenue. Then take your second left onto Parkland Drive. Millard remembered Maia telling him all about the corporeal form behind “the magic lady,” who was actually in her late twenties and had lived in the same residential dorm with his daughter at Yale. Apparently, the previous voice—of a didactic middle-aged woman from Dayton, Ohio—reminded male drivers too much of their wives, so they ignored her directions.

  Konnie turned on the music again, its volume low but menacing.

  Millard cleared his throat. “Would it be all right if we kept the radio off?”

  The girl responded with an exaggerated groan. “What is wrong with you, Millard Salter? This is my favorite band.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “We Left the Puppy in the Microwave,” said the girl. “I go to all of their concerts.”