Millard Salter's Last Day

by Jacob M. Appel

  How Millard regretted Delilah wasn’t with him! He had so much he wished to tell her—to show her. He’d even have considered dropping by his old apartment, or what remained of it, as he’d learned from a housing cop on his previous visit that the penthouse had been split into three smaller railroad flats. On that earlier excursion, he’d wanted to take Maia to see his childhood bedroom, but Isabelle had objected. “It’s intrusive,” she’d said. “It would be different if you grew up on Sutton Place, but these people will take it the wrong way. Honestly, I’d be insulted too if I were in their shoes.” So that had been that. Besides, he’d consoled himself, the neighborhood was still too rough to explore with an eight-year-old. Yet today, if he’d been with Delilah, he’d have sought a brief glimpse. What harm could it really do to ask?

  Millard ambled around the rear of the building, where enormous metal dumpsters collected the day’s trash and recyclables. On his prior visit, he’d made a U-turn here in his Oldsmobile, interrupting what was most likely an act of prostitution; fortunately, Maia had been too engrossed in her biography of Clara Barton to notice. Now, the area stood quiet as a synagogue on a Sunday morning—nary a pimp nor a dealer, nor even an innocent bystander, in sight. What the occasion really called for, Millard reflected, was a bout of heroics. Since he was going to die in—he checked his watch—less than six hours, this was his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to prevent a strong-arm holdup or a sexual assault. What did he have to lose? The worst that could happen was that he died a few hours prematurely, a hero’s death on the streets of the Bronx. Under the circumstances, he figured, Delilah would certainly forgive him. Yet for all the violent crime in New York City, it seemed that none surfaced when you actually wanted it.

  He looked up into the branches of the honey locusts, the patch of blue beyond as close as he might ever reach to the heavens. Dear God, he said, half in jest, I’m not asking for the Great Train Robbery, but would a minor mugging cost you so much? He put up his dukes and mimed his fighting potential, aware that he more resembled the Cowardly Lion than Rocky Marciano.

  As though on cue, Millard glanced at an object charging at him in the corner of his eye. That “object” turned out to be a young African American male in an orange do-rag and sleeveless Knicks jersey. A woman wearing a sequined skirt chased after him on a broken heel, shouting: “Stop! My purse!” The thief was within yards of Millard before he noticed him—and then, with one swift motion, Millard tripped the fellow. The sound of the youth’s skull colliding with the pavement reverberated across the asphalt and stopped Millard’s breath.

  He suspected that he had killed the man, but the fellow stumbled to his feet, disoriented, blood trickling from his temple down to the crook of his jaw. Before Millard had an opportunity to render assistance, other young men emerged—seemingly from nowhere—and surrounded him, encroaching as he inched backwards toward a wire fence. When the woman in sequins arrived at the scene of his heroics, she did not retrieve her purse. Rather, she tended to the wounds of the staggering perpetrator. “Are you crazy?” she shouted at Millard.

  “I don’t understand. He stole your purse.”

  “You fool,” she cried. “We’re filming a video . . . .”

  Sure enough, one of the men who’d encircled him had a portable camera mounted on his shoulder and another carried a Lehman College athletics bag. They looked—at a second glance—like film students, not street thugs. “Call an ambulance,” pleaded the woman. She’d knelt down beside her assailant, who’d once again sprawled out on the concrete.

  For a moment, Millard considered apologizing and offering restitution—maybe if he paid the fellow’s healthcare costs, they’d call it even. Then embarrassment overcame him. And downright shame. Sure, he’d made an honest mistake—but that’s not how the media would portray it. No, he’d be categorized with those trigger-happy white cops who shot unarmed black civilians, which might not be so far from the truth. If he’d seen an identical woman running after a white teenager along Park Avenue, would he have stuck out his foot? He couldn’t be sure. Not that these kids weren’t partially to blame: How was he supposed to know they were filming a video? Nobody, he was sure, would give him the benefit of the doubt. And while dying a hero had its appeal, committing suicide with a cloud of violent racism hanging over his head was another matter entirely, not a fate he was willing to risk. One of the videographers advanced toward him—possibly to detain him until the police arrived. What made the most sense rationally, as well as ethically, was to identify himself as a physician and render first aid. Millard sensed the adrenaline coursing into his neck, his temples. On impulse, he made a break for it.

  Millard ran and fell, scraping his palms and knees. He could feel tiny pebbles under his flesh, but he launched himself forward and continued running, as though charging the cliffs at Omaha Beach or the Union lines at Gettysburg. He dared not look back, but he sensed the film crew close on his heels. Then he heard one of the men shout—from a good distance away—“He’s an old man! Let him go!” When he finally rounded the front of the building, his breath felt trapped in his lungs, as though his throat had been jammed with a stopper. Half-running, half-hobbling, he thrust himself into the waiting cab.

  “What happened to you?” demanded Konnie.

  “Drive,” Millard tried to say. “Please, drive.”

  When he realized no comprehensible sound was coming out of his mouth, he pounded the back of the driver’s seat. She peeled away from the curbside.

  Slowly, Millard’s breath returned, in harsh barks, as though he were recovering from whooping cough. He spoke from firsthand experience: He’d overcome pertussis, and scarlet fever, and German measles. Not to mention chronic bouts of otitis media. His brother, Lester, had suffered a bout of polio that left portions of his throat and uvula paralyzed; for his entire adult life, the man had been forced to carry a small bottle of ipecac in his trousers, to help him throw up in case of a poisoning or accidental ingestion. His second cousin—Great-Uncle Lou’s oldest daughter—had succumbed to diphtheria at five. Now toddlers were vaccinated against chicken pox. Chicken pox! What a cozy life these kids led. But if he’d overcome whooping cough, he could handle a brief chase across a parking lot.

  He assessed his wounds: some abrasions on his palms, a laceration below his left thumb; more concerning, he’d shredded his right pants leg and lost a patch of skin above the knee. On top of that, his bad disc was kicking like an infant. All of his limbs moved; he had full range of vision in both eyes. He’d survive. His sweater, a fisherman’s knit that Sally had given him for his sixtieth birthday, appeared unsalvageable; he removed it and used the white wool of the cardigan to stanch the wound on his palm.

  While he conducted this corporeal inventory, Konnie eased the cab to the curbside and shifted into park. A solid thirty seconds passed before he noticed.

  “Why are we stopped?” he asked.

  “Because I don’t know where we’re going,” said Konnie. “I figured you didn’t want me to keep driving straight ahead forever.”

  He nodded. Not unreasonable of her. They’d stopped opposite a FedEx warehouse, where a handful of uniformed workers smoked cigarettes on the exterior steps.

  “So?” she asked. “Where to?”

  Millard’s initial reaction was to retreat to his apartment—to shower, disinfect his wounds, wrap bandages around his knee and hand. But on further reflection, he decided to return to his office for a final once-over: to make sure he’d left behind nothing of great personal value. Moreover, he wished to leave Miss Nickelsworth an early Christmas present, because he knew her well enough to recognize she’d feel cheated if he didn’t, and also to pen a brief note to the chairman recommending Stan Laguna as his replacement. In addition, he had a handful of instructions for his colleagues on the locations of various documents, the timing of certain reporting deadlines, etc. Although Millard didn’t plan to leave behind a tidy red notebook like Isabelle had done for him, he did wish to pass along some modicum o
f order.

  “Just take me back to St. Dymphna’s,” he instructed. “Fast as you can.”

  They drove back to Manhattan in silence. Millard tried phoning Maia again, but her mailbox remained full—which was highly out of character. He almost started to worry, but checked himself: There’d be little he could do for her, even if she were in distress, and she was a brilliant, sensible adult woman capable of looking after herself; moreover, his subconscious reason for worrying about her was likely Hal Storch’s so-called life instinct. He’d be looking for excuses not to hang himself, and he couldn’t allow that. Konnie took him at his word and drove the vehicle at full throttle, wending between slower traffic with the dexterity of a fish. She covered half a block on the sidewalk to circumvent a wide delivery van. For a brief stretch of the Willis Avenue Bridge, she drove in the oncoming traffic lane. They pulled up in front of St. Dymphna’s awning at 3:40. The meter read $205.85.

  Millard reached into his wallet. A quixotic notion entered his mind and ricocheted around like errant grapeshot: He could write Konnie a check for $1,000,000. Didn’t lonely old men do that all the time for their swan songs? Every night the evening news seemed to conclude with a tale of a truck driver who consigned a homely waitress in Iowa his winning lottery ticket, or a college freshman from rural West Virginia who discovered the disabled miner next door, that harmless fellow she’d bought groceries for a few times, had died and bequeathed her enough in savings from his Social Security checks to fund four years of tuition. So why not Konnie? With a few strokes of a pen, he could set her up for life.

  But he didn’t. Somehow, his sensible instincts kicked in—the same instincts that saw him save pennies by ripping napkins in half or shelling his own walnuts. He’d grown up with parents who’d survived the Depression. He was generous, but not deranged. Such an act of extravagance would raise too many questions, even add an unseemly tinge to Millard’s suicide. Besides, these acts of so-called selfless beneficence always rubbed Millard’s dander crossways, because he sensed something sexual, if not downright sinister, in such posthumous gestures. How could it be otherwise? You never read about lonely truckers and homebound lumberjacks giving their savings away to striving young men.

  He tipped her $100 on a $205.85 fare. Forty-eight percent. “Go make some art,” he said, winking.

  “Thanks,” said Konnie. The five crisp twenties did not appear to impress her.

  Not too long ago, he wanted to tell her, $100 was a good month’s salary—my mother furnished an entire kitchen for $150, including a Philco refrigerator with a monitor top. But he didn’t. You had to have lived through something to truly believe it.

  “Don’t spend it all at once,” he said, and shut the door.

  11

  Traffic currents ran heavily against Millard as he passed through the revolving doors and up the main stairs into St. Dymphna’s resplendent glass-framed piazza. The nursing shifts on the medical units turned over at three o’clock, perpetuating a delayed but collective stampede for the exits—not as dramatic as at the post office or the Department of Motor Vehicles, but strong enough to generate a pedestrian tide. Millard strode quickly toward the service elevators, ashamed of his frayed trousers, hoping to make quick work of this office pit stop, when a familiar voice arrested his progress.

  “Millard,” called the speaker, in an idiosyncratic, patrician tone that Eleanor Roosevelt might have used to summon Franklin. “A word with you!”

  Few sights could have proven less hospitable to Millard. Congregated around a café table opposite the hospital’s coffee bar—once a mom-and-pop operation, now contracted out to Starbucks—sat the hospital’s brass. Millard recognized most of these bigwigs: Kneeson, the chief information officer, whose round-rimmed spectacles recalled Joseph Goebbels; Nursing Director Edith Lane Kirk, wearing her gunmetal hair in a flipped-up bob; his own chairman, Van Doren, alongside the heads of medicine, orthopedics, and radiology; and, at their helm, Harvey Bloodfinch, president and CEO of St. Dymphna’s, sporting his trademark handlebar mustache above his inscrutable, calculating frown. The council appeared to be breaking up; the Fates, or possibly the Furies, had scheduled Millard’s arrival to facilitate an encounter with his boss.

  Van Doren hailed Millard with a wave. The chairman crossed the lobby on his long, loping legs, nimble and stealthy as a gazelle, still holding his Styrofoam cup and the remains of a chocolate cruller in one hand, his breath strong from coffee.

  “Ideal timing, Millard,” said Van Doren. “But before that. Are you all right? Forgive me, old boy, but you look like you’ve been wrestling feral cats.”

  “There was an explosion earlier,” replied Millard. “My son and I were dining nearby.”

  “Oh, that. I’ve heard. How unfortunate. Your son wasn’t hurt?”

  “Far from it,” replied Millard.

  “I don’t believe you’ve mentioned your son before. Is he in medicine?”

  Millard had in fact mentioned his sons, both Arnold and Lysander, on multiple occasions, but his boss registered nothing. Van Doren, he’d realized after numerous encounters, approached every human interaction as though it were an initial therapy session, posing heartfelt, nonjudgmental questions designed to build rapport rather than to glean knowledge.

  “Not exactly. Not yet. He may apply to veterinary school.”

  “Nothing wrong with that. We can’t all be psychiatrists.” Van Doren chuckled at what had apparently been a joke; he placed his hand on Millard’s shoulder. “Though I tell you, my wife took our new puppy to a behaviorist and the fellow charges more per hour than I do, so maybe we’re in the wrong field, after all. Your boy might be onto something.”

  “Maybe,” agreed Millard. He did not wish to discuss Lysander’s career with his boss. “And you?” he inquired, diverting the conversation. “Dare I ask what nefarious purposes bring together the power brokers of St. Dymphna’s?”

  “Nothing nefarious,” replied Van Doren.

  He steered Millard toward the far corner of the pavilion, where a row of monuments paid tribute to former St. Dymphna’s benefactors and board members. One of them, a lantern-jawed banker named Elihu Morton, had been the psychiatry chairman’s father-in-law; another luminary, Lucinda Van Doren, had married a distant cousin. Above the parade of worthies, none of whom, Millard relished pointing out to the medical students, had been physicians, a monitor warned: ESCAPED LYNX. IF SIGHTED, PLEASE REPORT IMMEDIATELY. They’d even posted a feline mug shot. The cub didn’t appear particularly menacing, but reminded him of the surly Maine coon that Maia’s roommate, an acne-scarred physics major obsessed with quilting, had kept in their dorm suite one summer at Yale.

  “I don’t think there’s any harm in me telling you this,” continued Van Doren, as though delivering a fireside chat, “although it won’t be public until the end of the week.” He drew a deep breath and his eyes met Millard’s with sympathy, as if he were about to reveal the death of a loved one. “They’ve decided to tear down the hospital.”

  “Which hospital?” asked Millard, dumbfounded. “Not St. Dymphna’s?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid. St. Dymphna’s.”

  “They’re closing St. Dymphna’s? That’s insane.”

  “Not closing. Moving.” Van Doren bowed his head slightly, a tonsure of hoary hair ringing his speckled scalp. “Four blocks north. They’re planning to knock down a block of tenements and a parking garage between 103rd and 105th Streets and to rebuild the entire hospital up there—they already have a donor and permission from the city. Then they’re going to take a wrecking ball to this place and sell the land to developers. It is park-front real estate, after all.”

  “Amazing,” said Millard. “They’re paving paradise to put up luxury condos. I didn’t think even Bloodfinch was capable of that.”

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” replied Van Doren. “The plan makes solid financial sense. We’re going to have state-of-the-art facilities . . . . Aren’t you always complaining that your team has to me
et in a visitors’ lounge? Well, soon you’ll have your own conference room.”

  “I doubt I’ll live to witness the day . . . .”

  “It’s a five-year plan. You wait and see.”

  Millard wished he’d died in blissful ignorance. Soon his treasured St. Dymphna’s—with its drafts, its wheezes, its cracked porcelain urinals and decaying spruce rafters—would disappear down the architectural vortex that had claimed the Ziegfeld Theatre and the old Produce Exchange, the Singer Building and the Hanover Bank Building. As a teenager, he’d accompanied his father to witness city work crews dispatch a wrecking ball through the gold-domed New York World headquarters, clearing space for the express ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge. To Papa, demolition was progress, architectural Darwinism—“history in the making.” Papa, as only Papa could, had squeezed between two Jersey barriers, intended to shield onlookers from danger, in order to congratulate the demolition crew. He insisted on shaking each and every workman’s hand. That night, Millard had curled up fetally under the bedcovers and sobbed himself to sleep. Even strolling past the soulless husk that had replaced Penn Station, or a photo of Ebbets Field on a steakhouse wall, proved enough to strum a dirge on his heartstrings. So he was grateful that he’d be long dead before they took their hammers and soldering irons to St. Dymphna’s. Did Thatcher Van Doren really believe that he could buy his support with a new conference room?