Millard Salter's Last Day

by Jacob M. Appel

  “Thanks for telling me,” said Millard. “In any case, it’s good to run into you . . . .”

  He started for the elevators, but Van Doren detained him.

  “That’s not what I wanted to discuss with you, Millard,” said the chairman. “It’s another matter entirely. Something I’m trying to puzzle out.” Van Doren rested his brow on the balls of his fingertips, as though actually trying to solve a riddle.

  “I’m afraid to ask . . . .”

  “This succession plan you proposed to Hecuba Yilmaz,” said Van Doren. “I’ll confess that I’m somewhat stupefied.”

  Van Doren’s remark hit like a shank to the groin. “Excuse me?”

  “I just don’t see Hecuba as the right person for the job. Quite frankly, old boy, she rubs many people the wrong way. I was thinking we might do better with Stan Laguna. Or that young Oriental woman who’s always on maternity leave.”

  “You mean Gabby Lu,” said Millard. “She’s absolutely excellent.”

  Millard felt entitled to joke about pygmies, or to call his dear Aunt Doris queer as a three-dollar bill, but he didn’t appreciate Van Doren dismissing one of his most gifted attendings in similarly cavalier terms.

  “Then forgive me, old boy, but why Hecuba?”

  “Why Hecuba?” echoed Millard, throwing his arms in the air. “Forgive me, Thatcher, but I have no goddamn idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Hecuba said you and she had agreed—”

  “I’m going to stop you right there. Hecuba and I have agreed on absolutely nothing. I doubt we could agree on the color of the sky. Either she’s delusional or she’s lying . . . .”

  “So you didn’t tell her you were recommending that she take over as director of the consult service when you ultimately step down?”

  “No, I did not,” said Millard.

  “Maybe she misinterpreted—”

  “The woman did not misinterpret anything. And the fact of the matter is that if I were to step down—or if something were to happen to me unexpectedly—my vote would be for Stanislaw Laguna, although I wouldn’t fight you if you preferred Gabby Lu.”

  “Well, I’ll be pickled,” muttered Van Doren. “It’s hard to know what to make of this.”

  “I wouldn’t make anything of it. It’s just Hecuba being Hecuba,” said Millard. “Now if that’s all, I’ve still got miles to go at the office before I sleep . . . .”

  “Don’t mean to hold you up, old boy.”

  Thatcher Van Doren shook his hand vigorously. “A good egg,” Millard’s father might have called the chairman, or, more likely, “A good egg for a goy.”

  MISS NICKELSWORTH’S FLINTY eyes were capable of staring down a firing squad, or possibly a division of German tanks, so Millard did not relish having his secretary’s full fury trained on his injured knee. “Hell’s bells. First an explosion and now a purse snatching. Really, Dr. Salter, this is too rich,” she observed, her fingers still resting on her keyboard. He’d edited the film crew out of his afternoon’s adventure, leaving only a silhouette of his heroics. “You’re far too old to be playing cops and robbers, if you don’t mind me saying. You’re going to get yourself murdered.” Her genuine concern for his welfare, hectoring as it might be, touched him.

  “Point taken, Miss N. It won’t happen again.”

  “I should hope not,” she said. “Oughtn’t you see a doctor?”

  He couldn’t resist a bit of pushback. “I am a doctor.”

  Miss Nickelsworth uttered an indignant humph. “I’m glad you see humor in this—this escapade, Dr. Salter,” she said. “Would you please do me the courtesy of making certain you don’t have any hidden injuries? I had a cousin, you’ll be happy to know, who was always poking his nose into other people’s business. Do you know what became of him?”

  “He was kidnapped by pirates,” suggested Millard.

  “He stepped on a nail and died of tetanus,” retorted Miss Nickelsworth. “He didn’t know he’d been wounded because he had the diabetes.”

  “I’ll take that as fair warning,” pledged Millard.

  Ever since he’d known her, his secretary had spoken of the diabetes and the asthma, and she still referred to her back pain as the lumbago. How could you help admiring a woman like that? The only comparison he could conjure up was the reverence he’d felt for Winston Churchill as a boy, when on the radio, the British prime minister had cited the United States in the plural. Dear Churchill, the jolly warrior, that unflappable son of a gun, now there was a grammatical imperialist who intimidated even Isabelle with his amongsts and whences. As for Miss Nickelsworth’s cautionary tale, Millard knew better than to question her reasoning.

  “While you were away,” his secretary reported, “Dr. Pineda from oncology telephoned. Three times. He said to please return his call before you leave.”

  She passed Millard a pink chit with a number.

  “And you have two people waiting for you,” she continued. “They’re out by the elevator bay. Facilities management has carted off our benches because they’re waxing the floors tonight.”

  Millard hadn’t even noted the missing benches until then. Gone too were the magazine rack, the low-slung wooden coffee table, the sprout floor lamp. He’d managed to avoid his visitors by taking the service elevator, and now he considered retreating via the same route—but even in extremis, he couldn’t shake his Hippocratic superego.

  “I told them you might be gone for hours, that there was a distinct possibility you would not return until the morning, but they insisted upon waiting,” said Miss N. Her tone carried a disdain heavier than words, as though she’d pinched soiled clothing between her thumb and forefinger and was searching for a hamper. “Shall I retrieve them?” She might as easily have been asking: Shall I order them guillotined?

  “No need,” said Millard. “I’ll do it.”

  He hobbled to the end of the corridor, favoring his good knee, his shredded trousers dancing at his ankle like a hula skirt. The two creatures seated in opposite armchairs, separated by a metal recycling bin, welcomed him with the warmth of Scylla and Charybdis: Hecuba Yilmaz, her unshaved chin jutting like the prow of a ship, and low-featured Jack Cappabucci, undisputed tsar of deceit, raja of fraud, suzerain of malfeasance, and heavyweight malingering champion of the world. Millard would have preferred a violent death on the Concourse.

  “There you are!” exclaimed Hecuba. “I knew you’d try to sneak off.”

  She buttonholed him by the sweater sleeve before he could mount a retreat. Her breath, only inches from his nostrils, carried a sour, fermented odor that recalled the bowels of a brewery.

  “Hey!” objected Jack Cappabucci. “I was here first.”

  Cappabucci had the audacity to appeal to Millard with an indignant look.

  “I’m sorry,” said Hecuba. “But Dr. Salter and I have urgent medical matters to discuss.”

  She pushed past Millard in the direction of his office, unstable on chartreuse pumps she’d somehow convinced herself were fashionable; he had little choice but to follow. As he passed his secretary’s desk, he turned to her for aid, but Miss Nickelsworth refused to look up from her keyboard; she was punishing him for his reckless antics in the Bronx.

  Hecuba entered the office ahead of him and settled onto the leather sofa—although he’d have been none too shocked had she circled behind his desk and kicked up her heels on the blotter. Millard remained standing.

  “I knew you were going on vacation,” said Hecuba. “I could just sense it. It’s lucky for both of us I caught you before you took off.”

  Once Hecuba fixed upon an idea, no quantity of evidence could shake her. At first meeting, she’d decide that a junior resident was either “superb” or “unsatisfactory,” often based upon how the trainee responded to her frère et cochon overfamiliarity—and she interpreted every future interaction with this individual through the lens of their first encounter. Nobody, to her thinking, was ever merely mediocre, competent, run-of-the-mill. Either he
r colleagues ranked somewhere between Gandhi and Raoul Wallenberg in the pantheon of virtue, or their very existence threatened to undermine the commonweal, and possibly all twenty-five hundred years of Western civilization, with such vices as “woeful ineptitude” and “treacherous iniquity.” In Millard’s nearly five decades in medicine, Hecuba remained the only physician he’d ever heard refer to a coworker—in this particular case, a social worker who hadn’t processed a patient’s nursing home application with sufficient speed—as “an enemy.”

  Nor was her clinical care immune from intransigence. One story, which had circulated among the house staff for years until it acquired an air of legend—although Millard knew several impeccable sources who swore to its veracity—involved a patient, a community college student, whom Hecuba, upon initial evaluation, determined to be faking weakness in her left leg. “Classic malingering,” she’d announced to the medical team. “She’s likely sitting for exams soon and she’s trying to shirk.” Two days later, when the patient’s laboratory results came back with conclusive evidence of multiple sclerosis, including lesions in her white matter and oligoclonal bands along her spinal fluid, Hecuba refused to accept defeat. Her oft quoted defense had become a mantra among her detractors: “Just because the woman has multiple sclerosis now doesn’t mean she wasn’t malingering then.” For months, Stan Laguna had entertained the consult fellows with variations on this theme: Just because this patient has multiple sclerosis today doesn’t mean he didn’t have polio yesterday; Just because the heart sits on the left side this afternoon, doesn’t mean it wasn’t on the right this morning . . . . Millard had shared the story with Isabelle, anticipating a laugh, but his wife, ever the nurse, had instead asked: Why do you think she’s like that? He’d known enough not to reply, Because she’s a narcissistic bitch.

  The psychiatrist in Millard recognized that Hecuba’s conduct stemmed from forces beyond the woman’s control—possibly a traumatic childhood superimposed upon a genetic predisposition. Yet the same could be said, in one guise or another, for pedophiles and jihadi terrorists and the squad of SS officers who had gassed his mother’s cousins at Treblinka and Majdanek. Comprehension wasn’t the same as compassion. One of the conclusions Millard had reached, after far too many years of broad-hearted liberalism and nonjudgmental regard, was that when you opened your mind too much, you risked having your brain ooze out your ears. Ambling about in another fellow’s shoes long enough, à la Atticus Finch, you could trick yourself, at least fleetingly, into sympathizing with anyone’s conduct—Bull Connor turning hoses and dogs on civil rights protestors in Birmingham, the Khmer Rouge bashing the heads of infants against Chankiri Trees, even Stalin and Hitler. If only Hitler had been loved adequately—hugged more as a child, encouraged as a painter, given sufficient praise for his carnal prowess—he might have embraced a humanistic impulse or, later, stepped back from the abyss. But that was a bullshit way of viewing the world. Bull Connor had been a thug and a troglodyte, Pol Pot a genocidal maniac. Hitler deserved to be burned alive, for eternity, on a pyre of human ash. No higher law of morals or decency demanded that Millard sympathize with everybody equally, or even at all. So what if Hecuba Yilmaz acted without volition, if she had likely cultivated her egocentric carapace to protect a vulnerable girlhood psyche! Her presence still made him want to retch.

  “Could you give me a second?” he asked. “I have a pressing call to return.”

  Augusto Pineda, the chairman of the oncology department, wasn’t a man to cry wolf. If he said his business was an urgent matter, you could take him at his word.

  “I am sorry, Millard, but I really don’t have time to spare right now,” insisted Hecuba. She held her knobby wrist to her face, displaying the marcasite-encrusted sliver of her wristwatch. “You’ve already kept me waiting for two hours.”

  Millard dug his fingernails into his palms and said nothing. What was that pet expression of Lyndon Johnson’s: Don’t wrestle with a pig because you get dirty and the pig enjoys it. The same applied to arguing with Hecuba.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of sharing a transition plan with Thatcher Van Doren,” she said.

  “It was a liberty,” he replied.

  “I figured that since we were both on the same page,” continued Hecuba, “there was no reason not to get the ball rolling.”

  The plank that was Millard’s restraint had buckled to the point of snapping. “I can give you one reason,” he said. So high were his hackles, so inflamed his exasperation, that a tremor coursed through his arms. In spite of reason and good sense, he felt himself about to tell Hecuba Yilmaz how violently he loathed her—holding no punches. The words crouched somewhere between his frontal lobe and his glottis when, inches from Hecuba at the opening of the uncapped ventilation duct, he spotted a pair of inflamed yellow eyes. Two onyx pupils, arcane dilated ovals, pierced from the irises to the depths of hell.

  The “baby” lynx proved far larger than Millard had envisioned: closer in size to an adult hyena than to a domestic cat. Spots dappled its coat, except for sock-and-mitten patches of black on its limbs and the crests of its pitched-tent ears. Whiskers sprouted rowdily from the hollows of the creature’s nostrils. When it opened its slender lips—a threat? A yawn?—canines jutted from its upper jaw like alabaster stalactites.

  Millard held up his hand to silence Hecuba, nodding in the direction of the cat. Then he spoke through clenched teeth as a ventriloquist might to empower a dummy. “If you make a sound, Hecuba, she’ll rip your throat out,” he warned. He had absolutely no idea whether this were true, but he issued the threat with conviction—a technique which usually worked. He’d learned this strategy from Horace Lardner, an otolaryngology fellow he’d met in residency, who followed the surgeon’s creed of “sometimes right, but always certain.” History brimmed with such confident falsehoods: Han van Meegeren’s fake Vermeers, the diaries of Konrad Kujau, Titus Oates’s fabricated plot against Charles II. Nixon denied a cover-up; Reagan “couldn’t recall”; Clinton had “never inhaled” or “had sex with that woman.” So Millard staked his safety on the certitude of his admonition. And if she doesn’t tear your throat out, he thought, I will. Fortunately, even Hecuba had the sense to defer to a savage carnivore.

  The lynx pawed the carpet as though she might charge. Millard suspected that one leap could take her across the room, into his chest. He dared not shout for help. By the time Miss Nickelsworth heard his cries and a security detail arrived, the feline could easily have eviscerated his abdomen. No, the only feasible approach to the animal was persuasion—a mild tone of voice, lulling gestures—in short, an attempt at lynx psychology. Not that Millard possessed any great insights in this arena. As he was always telling the vice president of his co-op board, Mrs. Lewinter, who pestered him about safe blood sugar levels for her Pekinese, he was a human psychiatrist, not a veterinary endocrinologist, but this particular occasion justified—in the language of his insurance company—a deviation outside of his practice area.

  “Here, kitty, kitty,” he said, inching forward. “That’s a good girl . . . .”

  He tried to channel what he knew of large cats—which derived largely from Tarzan films and Frosted Flakes commercials and a Siegfried & Roy show he’d attended with Isabelle many years earlier when the psychiatry meetings took place in Las Vegas. Across the room he tiptoed, careful not to show the creature the palms of his hands or the back of his neck—although he couldn’t say whether this was myth or wisdom. “That’s a good girl,” he said. “Let’s just slide back into that tunnel, all right? You just go straight in there and we’ll leave each other alone . . . .” His technique appeared to be working: The lynx lowered her head like a penitent. “There you go,” said Millard. “Almost done. Now turn around and climb into the shaft . . . .” He dared not glance at Hecuba, but he hoped she’d had the sense to dial 911 on her cell phone.

  The lynx did not move, but her posture had turned submissive. He climbed down to the carpet, thinking he might give her a gentle n
udge. “I’m just going to give you a little push, a baby push,” he said. “Nothing unfriendly.” Millard prodded the animal with the tips of his fingers, tenderly tapping her rump and left shank; she didn’t budge. He tried a harder shove—firm, but not violent, and she stumbled toward the open duct. The blister of contact tingled through his hand. “Please, kitty,” he said. “That’s a good kitty.”

  And then the animal hissed—a fierce, guttural, sizzling hiss—and shot toward him, scraping her claw across his cheek. Her paws clung to his chest, while his arms wrapped over her back in a toxic hug. The beast’s hostile eyes gawped only inches from his own. On instinct, Millard found himself squeezing the creature, deflecting, striking, clutching at hunks of fur. Most remarkable, for a man who planned to kill himself within hours, he found himself thinking, God, don’t let me die! A boiling drive for life enveloped him, boosting his strength like a shot of absinthe or PCP, and in one herculean thrust, he staggered forward toward the ventilation shaft and shoved the beast backwards into the darkness. On the way into the chasm, the lynx ripped the pocket from his breast, and much of the underlying fabric from his shirt.

  Millard shoved a metal filing cabinet in front of the aperture. A moment later, the creature started rattling the makeshift portcullis, keratin clawing against steel. What followed was a short cry, somewhere between a howl and a bark, not of pain—Millard was certain of that—but of mammalian frustration . . . and then silence.

  Millard took a wad of tissues from his desk, always at hand for a sobbing patient, and compressed the talon print on his right cheek. He dared not look in a mirror. Hecuba Yilmaz, for her part, had scooted to the far end of the couch and held a Yoruba woodcarving—a souvenir of one of Hal Storch’s forays into artistic imperialism—extended like an épée. She lowered the sculpture and returned it to its rightful perch atop the end table.