Millard Salter's Last Day

by Jacob M. Appel

  “You left it at the bus stop.”

  “Thanks,” said Millard.

  Thanks for nothing, he sniped to himself—but that was unfair. He had assumed the worst of this young man, banked on his indifference to a stranger’s lost property, and the kid had responded with the benevolence of the best Samaritan. Similar episodes stood out in his memory, reminders that humanity was not beyond redemption: a churlish Vietnamese waiter whom he’d under-tipped, but who’d later returned a wallet left at the register—hand-delivering it after his shift; an ex-boyfriend of Sally’s, an ad executive with a venal streak, who’d died trying to rescue an elderly woman from a houseboat fire. Isabelle had once dialyzed a homeless crack addict who’d later donated $1000 to the renal clinic with money raised from salvaged soda cans. Yet these were the rare exceptions, low-frequency occurrences that might make one conclude—mistakenly—that one’s cynicism was not a reflection upon the state of the world, but upon oneself. Years of consult psychiatry had schooled Millard otherwise: Leave someone an opportunity to disappoint, and, almost inevitably, they would.

  The kid spun the wheels of his skateboard.

  “Say, mister, you have any spare change?” he asked. “I could use some food.”

  So Millard hadn’t been completely off the mark. What you could use is a hard potch on the tuchus, he thought, or maybe a sound drubbing with a barber strop Or some basic, old-fashioned parenting. Since when did middle-class white kids start panhandling on the public streets?

  “Not today,” said Millard. “Sorry.”

  The boy scowled, bearing menace. “How about a reward?”

  Millard didn’t want trouble, so he reached inside his pocket and handed the kid the first bill he could find—an ink-stained fiver, the Lincoln Memorial discolored to a glossy blue. His fountain pen had exploded inside his pocket, tinging both his wallet and his slacks, another blemish on a day of disfigurement. At this rate, he’d hang himself with stigmata on his palms.

  “That’s one nasty bill,” said the kid—but this didn’t stop him from pocketing the cash.

  Millard picked up the duffel and hauled it into the post office. The zipper hung open, he noticed; his Great Samaritan had clearly rummaged through its contents. Rather than irking Millard, the boy’s greed delighted him—his faith in his own lack of faith was restored.

  He joined the long line at the teller’s window. (Not a teller, he could hear Isabelle reminding him. A clerk. Tellers work in banks.) Although early evening was likely a peak business hour, only one clerk was on duty: a mousy, elfin-eared woman who worked at the pace of a garden snail. Millard wondered how his father, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat who believed deeply in the ability of Uncle Sam to overcome all of humankind’s challenges, would have responded to a government that did everything ass backwards. Not just the post office—although FedEx could ship your package faster and for less—but the Department of Motor Vehicles, the IRS, the Veterans Administration. And the agencies his patients relied upon, those countless bureaucracies that meted out food stamps and disability benefits, proved even worse. A person could die of old age while waiting for their pediatric health coverage. No wonder they shielded the postal workers these days with bulletproof glass.

  He inched forward—some customers receiving service, others giving in and leaving the line, a complex fugue that finally brought him to the counter. He placed each of Delilah’s envelopes on the scale and waited for the clerk to assess them. With painful indifference, she weighed each package and affixed a series of stickers.

  “They all weigh the same amount,” he said, hoping to speed the process.

  “We’ll see,” replied the clerk.

  Millard sensed the impatience of the customers behind him; he wished he had a way of telling them that he was on their side. Yet the delay allowed him to formulate a plan for the unwanted duffel, one that hovered on the brink of wicked genius.

  “Can I have a box?” he asked.

  “What size?”

  He patted the duffel. “Big enough for this.”

  The clerk broke off her labeling long enough to retrieve a large cardboard box.

  While she deposited Isabelle’s tapes in a canvas bin, he addressed the box to Harvey Bloodfinch at St. Dymphna’s Hospital. And then came the pièce de résistance: Knowing that the post office wouldn’t mail a package that large without a return address, he wrote in the name Hecuba Yilmaz on the lines for the sender. A sense of euphoria rose in Millard’s chest—he felt like a mortally wounded field marshal celebrating news of victory on the battlefield. Let the Royal Embellisher explain that to the powers that be. “Nothing liquid, fragile, or perishable,” he assured the clerk. She hadn’t asked a word about lethal gases or asphyxiation hoods.

  By the time Millard left the post office, it was a quarter past seven. He dared not risk a crosstown taxi again at that hour, so he hurried on foot toward Grand Central Station. His father’s first fur outlet had been on 34th Street, but he no longer recalled the precise location—and those rows of low-slung shops had long since been razed for office towers. But he remembered hiding among the furs, nuzzling against stoles of fox and raccoon and beaver. Once, his father had received a shipment of coyote jackets—for men—that sold so poorly, the term “coyote jacket” became a euphemism at their dinner table for any terrible idea. On another occasion, unless his memory was playing tricks on him, Papa had offered a special on coats of Canadian lynx. That was in the 1950s, before wearing furs around Midtown put your life in danger.

  He raced down the steps into Grand Central just as the hands on the four-faced brass clock approached the half hour. Maia waited for him on the concourse, sporting acid-washed jeans and a loose T-shirt that revealed her left shoulder. The girl took after her mother, full in the chest and the hips, what his own mama would have called a “child-bearing figure.” She carried a backpack over one arm like a middle-school student.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” said Millard. “Small world.”

  “Small for some people. There are 1.3 billion Chinese peasants you’ll never meet.”

  “Touché, young lady. Now what do you want to eat?”

  “I was hoping to stop by the apartment first . . . .”

  That caught Millard off guard. He hadn’t planned on inviting his daughter upstairs, not tonight, and he wondered whether he’d left out anything incriminating that she might see. “Do you really want to go all the way uptown?” he asked.

  “You are funny sometimes,” replied Maia. “That was the whole point of this visit—or, at least, most of the point. I’m going to give Mama’s nursing textbooks to my mentee from the Girls Club . . . . We talked about this last night . . . .”

  “I guess we did,” Millard conceded.

  So this was how old age happened—encroaching, insidious. You’d forget a word here, a face there, and soon nothing remained but the void. He remembered his mother at seventy, pouring Softsoap onto her pancakes, trying to pick up Lawrence Welk on the toaster.

  “I knew you weren’t paying attention,” said Maia. “I asked if you’d mind me giving Mama’s old nursing books to Nancy.”

  “Nancy?”

  “My mentee. The high school girl I’m tutoring.”

  “Oh,” said Millard. “Won’t they be out of date . . . ?”

  “It’s basic anatomy and physiology. How much can change? Besides, this is just to whet her appetite . . . .”

  “Okay, I suppose. Let’s catch the IRT.”

  She looked at him blankly; he might as well have suggested a stagecoach or a sedan chair.

  “The subway,” he said. “Let’s take the train.”

  They crossed the plaza and waited on a packed platform. A few yards away, on a wooden bench, a young girl with a butterscotch ponytail sobbed against an elderly woman’s shoulder, and for an instant, Millard mistook her for the child who’d played the piano so dexterously on the seventh floor of the Luxdorfer Pavilion—but then she looked up, revealing a disfigured jaw. On the train, a
red-faced businessman offered Millard his seat. He declined. Did he really look that poorly?

  “So I have a proposal for you,” said Maia. “Before you say no, hear me out, okay?”

  Millard smiled. “Why should I hear you out when the answer is no?”

  He already anticipated the subject; his daughter was trying to fix him up again. All of his widowed friends, of which there were an increasing number, complained that their children resisted their efforts to resume dating—or, when they did, resented their new girlfriend with unreasonable bitterness. Alas, he should only be so lucky! Except for Lysander, each of his children had embarked on a crusade to find him a new partner. Arnold emailed him the names and phone numbers of mothers of colleagues in the beer business; Sally had opened a trial account for him on an Internet dating site—without his permission. In Maia’s case, he sensed that the girl was projecting, displacing onto him her own desire for a husband and a family. For a twenty-seven-year-old with smarts and good looks, she boasted a dismal track record, a long cortege of self-absorbed, philandering boyfriends. Maybe he’d set a poor example. Maybe Lysander wasn’t the only child to fall victim to his distractions.

  “Trust me. She’s great,” said Maia. “She’s a retired professor of comparative literature. And she loves opera. German and Italian . . . .”

  “And you met her how?”

  Maia looked away. “I haven’t exactly met her yet,” she confessed. “She’s the mother of one of the temps in a coworker’s lab.”

  “Nothing like thirdhand experience,” said Millard.

  He’d succumbed to Maia’s pressure once before, so he knew the risks. That woman had been a librarian at a college in New Jersey, and quite attractive, with sharp black eyes and a regal nose that reminded Millard of a falcon. They’d met for breakfast on 23rd Street. He’d ordered eggs over easy. She’d ordered three Bloody Marys—all at the same time—and no entrée. Later, he discovered that Maia had met the woman on line at a liquor store.

  “I’ll think it over,” promised Millard. “Good enough?”

  “Good enough,” agreed his daughter.

  They climbed out of the subway at 86th Street. The last full rays of sunlight—orange, magenta—clung to the brickwork along the avenue. Couples in dinnerwear passed on the sidewalk, laughing, scurrying. An ambulance idled at the corner of 87th, where a cabbie and a limousine driver negotiated the aftermath of a fender bender. A wedding party snapped photos from inside the limo. Millard and Maia passed the 88th Street playground, heading north. Barsamian, the doorman, touched his cap as they approached.

  “It’s not even eight o’clock,” said Maia. “Let’s take a walk around the block.”

  Millard had no particular interest in an evening stroll—he was exhausted and increasingly anxious—but he also didn’t want to raise his daughter’s alarm.

  “A quick walk,” he offered. “And then we’ll get a bite to eat.”

  They advanced toward Madison. Millard recalled when three-story town houses had lined the opposite side of the street, Italianate brownstones with projecting lintels and double-leaf doors dating from the late nineteenth century. Most of them had given way to a pair of glass-and-steel towers where yuppies and starter couples sojourned on their trajectory toward the suburbs. Gone were the Sicilian cobbler who chalked your fee on the soles of your loafers and the brothers from Corfu who sold silver Judaica and religious garb. A twenty-four-hour Korean deli operated under a stone strut inscribed First Bank of Manhattan.

  “It’s amazing that it’s still light out,” said Maia.

  “Happens every year,” said Millard. “That’s the amazing part.”

  When they finally circled back to Fifth Avenue, every bone below his pelvis throbbed like ten thousand blisters. In the lobby, Barsamian greeted them with a peculiar smile—almost a smirk, encouraging yet mischievous, as though he suspected Millard’s intentions. But how could he possibly know? And did it even matter?

  The elevator glided straight up to the ninth floor, a small blessing. Millard led his daughter around the corner toward 9-G, as he’d done countless times during her childhood, and unlocked both bolts sequentially.

  He eased open the door. The apartment was dark and still, and yet—

  The lights flashed on abruptly, followed by a chorus of gleeful, cacophonic shouts.

  “Surprise!” The cries hit him like bullets. “Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!”

  14

  Millard’s eyes adjusted to the light and the crowded parlor. Everybody he knew in life appeared to have congregated inside his apartment—or, at least, everybody he liked. Arnold, fresh off the plane from St. Louis, sporting a T-shirt that read Beer Is My Friend; Sally, resplendent with pearl earrings and a chiffon gown, accompanied by her dapper architect husband in his double-breasted Italian suit; his colleagues from the hospital—Art Rosenstein, Stan Laguna, Gabby Lu with a toddler on her shoulders. Also board members from the co-op, two of his fraternity brothers from NYU, even Isabelle’s kooky girlhood friend Linda Blauer. On the whole, a geriatric crowd, a reminder of his place on the existential conveyor belt. His granddaughters raced from the maelstrom and hugged him around either leg, indifferent to his shredded pants and bloody knee.

  “Surprise, Dad,” said Maia. “Happy birthday!”

  “We love you, Grandpa,” cried Sally’s daughters.

  He had never been a fan of surprise parties, but he went with the flow. What alternative did he have? Many years earlier, practically a lifetime ago, his mother’s relatives had thrown a surprise wedding shower for Carol—with disastrous consequences. His fiancée had returned home from a long evening in her physics lab to find thirty elderly, Yiddish-speaking women jammed into her dormitory suite, not one of whom she’d recognized. So she’d done the only sensible thing imaginable: She’d phoned the police. But sorting out the confusion didn’t mitigate his ex-wife’s anger, which festered long after the guests had departed.

  A romantic dinner at a French bistro had failed to assuage her.

  “Is it such a big deal, darling?” he’d asked. “They meant no harm.”

  “You don’t understand. It’s a cruel trick,” she’d replied. “Now I can’t change my mind.”

  For Millard, the birthday gathering seemed designed to achieve the opposite effect: a ruse by the Fates to convince him that he was indispensable, that he was too well-loved to shuffle off his mortal coil so soon. Tears welled in his eyes, which his guests probably mistook for joy, but was actually grief, delayed but not forestalled, that he couldn’t share this moment with Delilah. That he could never again share any moment with Delilah.

  “Sorry about all the deception,” said Maia.

  “So this is what you were up to . . . .” He forced a smile. “We didn’t have dinner plans.”

  “Nope. While I do have a mentee applying to nursing school, Mama’s books are decades out of date,” said Maia. “But we had to get you here somehow. Lysander was the one in charge of creating a pretext, but he forgot . . . .”

  So at least he wasn’t losing his mind. That was reassuring.

  “Where is your brother?” asked Millard.

  Maia snorted with disdain. “He probably overslept.”

  A whirlwind of greetings and congratulations followed. Someone offered him a glass of champagne, and he sipped gingerly, while guest after guest shook his opposite hand and wished him variations on “another fifty good years.” Arnold apologized that his wife couldn’t attend, but no amount of filial love or Xanax could lure her onto an airplane. Art Rosenstein introduced him to a shapely redhead in her sixties, his widowed sister-in-law, who managed to mention her Tony Award nomination twice in consecutive sentences. Nearby, Elsa Duransky had buttonholed Sameer Patel, her shrill voice filling the room with tedious anecdotes: What my husband said was, ‘I already have the only little minx I need right here.’ Isn’t that just delectable? That nobody mentioned Millard’s injuries—his rent clothes, his bandaged cheek—distressed him more than the
wounds themselves, as though he’d reached the age where tattered attire and multifarious abrasions came with the territory. He jostled his way toward his bedroom. The air conditioner buzzed beneath the bay window, little match for the heat of the throng.

  “Excuse me a moment,” he said to nobody in particular. “I’m going to wash up.”

  Millard polished off his champagne and ducked out of the party, savoring the silence behind the closed door of the master bathroom. He doused his head in cold water and wrapped a fresh bandage around his knee. The laceration below his left thumb probably required stitches, but he was content to stuff the wound with tissues. His slacks went straight into the wastebasket beneath the sink. Sporting a fresh shirt and a pair of dark pants—he chose the cotton slacks with the pleated front that Isabelle had always complimented—Millard felt just refreshed enough to tolerate another round of hors d’oeuvres and pleasantries.

  He braced himself and reentered the fray.

  “There you are,” said Maia, looping her arm around his elbow. “I was afraid you’d sneaked off on us . . . .”

  While he’d been gone, his guests had rearranged the furniture. The sofa and upholstered chairs now faced a freestanding projector screen that had been set in front of the television; on an end table, mounted atop several books, rested a slide carousel. Across the screen, the text read: The Life and Times of Our Father, Millard Salter. His daughter steered him through the crowd to an open seat at the center of the sofa.

  “What is this . . . ?” he asked.

  “We’ve prepared a little show,” said Maia.

  Arnold tapped his knife against a champagne flute to silence the room. “If you’ll all bear with us, we’ve put together a tribute for the guest of honor.” He dimmed the lights. Elsa continued braying her anecdote about the minx—this time to Sally’s husband—until someone shushed her. A bowl of popcorn circulated through the audience.