Millard unknotted his tie as he entered the bedroom: an act that announced a slumber well earned after a long workday, or in this case, a life well lived. Now that Delilah was gone, his death seemed neither necessary nor unnecessary, merely inevitable—a fact, like the day of the week or the number of dimes in a dollar. So he would be dead. He wouldn’t know. Life would continue, his children growing old, his granddaughters marrying, humanity subject to countless vagaries and twists and revelations. Harvey Bloodfinch might dynamite St. Dymphna’s, Hecuba Yilmaz could wrangle his job away from Stan Laguna, but the enterprise of loving and fighting, birthing and dying, would carry on just fine without him. What were those lines that a spurned Eliza Doolittle sings to dismiss Henry Higgins? “Without your pulling it, the tide comes in . . . .” Millard hummed the bars from My Fair Lady: “Without your twirling it, the earth can spin . . . .” How true it all was. His own tide was surging in for him—and he was okay with that.
Millard set the bottle of Courvoisier on the bureau. He didn’t notice Lysander until he’d tossed his necktie over the nearest chair. His son was seated on the bedspread, arms splayed behind him to support his vast frame, shoeless feet dangling over the edge. The boy’s hobnail boots rested close by on the throw rug. Beside him, atop the silk comforter—Millard was glad he’d made up the bed that morning—lay shavings of an orange rind and a carton of sugar-free breakfast cereal pinched from Millard’s refrigerator. An empty wineglass stood on the nightstand; Lysander hadn’t thought to use a coaster, which would have upset Millard on most occasions, except a dead man doesn’t care if he leaves behind water rings on his furniture.
“Good God!” he exclaimed. “You could give somebody a heart attack . . . .”
“I didn’t mean to surprise you,” said Lysander. “But I was feeling bad.”
As much as he loved his son, Millard instantly feared the worst: Did the boy need money? Had he gotten in over his head with loan sharks? Or knocked up a girl? How fitting that his son’s crisis and his own should reach fruition on the same day. He’d help the boy, of course—even, he realized, if doing so meant forestalling his planned demise for the time being.
“Mom called me this afternoon,” said Lysander. “She says you’re worried about me.”
So that was all. Millard could already imagine the tenor of his ex-wife’s report: She’d downplay her own concerns and Lysander’s shortcomings, pinning the entire impasse on the fanciful expectations of the guilt-soaked father. It’s how your dad was raised, she’d say. All he knew from his first steps was that he’d be a doctor. Everything else you do, even if you win the Nobel Prize while walking on the moon, is bound to disappoint him. Which wasn’t true, not the way Carol meant it—yet what was so wrong with another doctor? Your dad’s also a bit neurotic, the boy’s mother would say. Impatient too. He takes after his own father.
Damn Carol! That was a bridge too far. So he had high expectations like Papa: What parent didn’t? Just because he had hopes for his children didn’t mean he was prisoner to them. All he wanted, at least at this late juncture, was for his son to become a self-supporting, productive member of society; if that meant he’d be a veterinarian, or a trigonometry teacher, or even a cashier at the Bronx Zoo, Millard could accept his choice—although vending concessions at the zoo would obviously be harder to swallow. He still remembered how Hal Storch had suffered when his daughter quit UConn to train as a hairdresser, also the schadenfreude he’d felt when his niece opened a tanning salon in Laguna Beach. But even selling cotton candy outside a monkey house in the Bronx was something. Nothing, as Lear warned, came of nothing, and Lysander had mastered the art of nothing like nobody’s business. How dare Carol cast the blame at his feet? It would serve her right when he didn’t return her phone call in the morning.
“I am worried about you,” said Millard. “I tried to tell you over lunch.”
Lysander squinted—a sheepish habit—and examined the heels of his hands.
“How can I not be worried about you?” asked Millard. “You’re forty-three years old. Art Hallam’s son in Palo Alto is two years younger than you and practically retired.”
That provoked a chuckle. “I’m practically retired too,” said Lysander.
At least the boy shared Millard’s wit. He sensed his own lips curling into a smile, but refused to be derailed. “You’re not retired.”
Lysander raked his hands through his unctuous hair. “No, I guess I’m not.”
The boy’s words settled over the bedroom like a miasma, and for the first time, Millard detected a melancholy in his son’s voice, a disappointment, such a contrast from his usual defiant indifference. A tenderness took hold of Millard, an aching, much as it had earlier, when he’d recognized the desperation behind Virginia Margold’s inane phone calls and visits. Lysander’s failures weren’t an act of rebellion, but rather a resignation to perceived inadequacy. The boy didn’t try because, at some subconscious level, as Hal Storch would say, he feared that he wouldn’t succeed. How had Millard been so blind? Comparing him to Art Hallam’s kid, or even Sally and Arnold, only exacerbated his inertia.
“Maybe I’ve been too hard on you,” said Millard.
Lysander gathered the orange peels into his palm. “What I wanted to tell you,” he said, rising from the bed, “was that you should stop worrying. I’m going to be okay. Trust me.”
They stood opposite each other, son and father, like reflections in a warped mirror. From the open window drifted the rumble of traffic on the avenue: the enterprise of life. A warm breeze ruffled the curtains, sent the lace valances line-kicking like chorus girls.
“All right,” agreed Millard. “I will stop worrying.”
Lysander took a tentative step forward, still cupping the orange peel, and wrapped his gangly arms around his father’s diminished torso. Millard patted the boy affectionately on the wings of his back. He could not recall the last time he’d hugged any of his children. He’d only embraced his own father at graduations and funerals, and once, on impulse, before his draft board hearing; hugging wasn’t the Salter way, at least, not until now.
“I’ll see you soon, Dad. Happy birthday, again,” said his son. Lysander shambled toward the doorway, his helpless languor visible in every step, and added, “I’d be an awful veterinarian, if you think about it. Can you really see me putting down injured puppies?”
A few hours earlier, Millard would have objected. He could hear his former self generating excuses, conditions: Maybe you could have a partner who’d perform the euthanizing. You wouldn’t have to put any animals down . . . . Now, almost too late, he knew better.
“No, I guess I can’t,” he said.
And then he was alone.
The thud of the foyer door underscored his solitude. Millard returned to the parlor and rummaged inside the cabinet beneath the stereo for Isabelle’s old cassette player. She’d saved recordings dating back twenty-five years: Maia as a toddler, Millard’s brother singing in Yiddish, her own mother describing the family’s escape from Horthy’s Hungary on a Portuguese passport, sharing the same sleeping car with the Gabor sisters. At one point, before her diagnosis, Isabelle had intended to curate the recordings and burn them onto CDs. In a week or two, they’d probably end up at the curbside. (Millard considered writing a note to his younger daughter, emphasizing the importance of the audio tapes—but what was their importance, really?) His fingers struggled to untangle the power cords and headphone attachments from the assortment of obsolete devices that his late wife had stockpiled: his and hers Walkmans, remnants of their brief health binge after his cardiac scare; the monitor and keyboard of a discontinued Commodore computer; a Royal LetterMaster daisy wheel printer still in the original packaging, caked in a veneer of ominous, decades-old dust. How easily he might have passed the night reminiscing over these objects, but Millard refused to let his emotions distract him. When he finally had the cassette player plugged into the wall outlet, he unsealed Delilah’s envelope and removed the tape.
The voice he’d anticipated had been his lover’s. Instead, the lustrous mezzo-soprano of Christa Ludwig filled the parlor. Massenet’s Werther. He recognized the piece instantly.
Millard hit fast-forward. The machine whirred. He released his thumb.
René Kollo in Tannhäuser. Delilah’s favorite recording.
Astounding. She’d made him a mixtape. Clearly, Delilah had been working on the project for months, because he couldn’t envision her managing the editing during her final days. Millard knew all about mixtapes from the hours Maia had spent in her room, during those hot adolescent summers, copying niche hits by groups called Silver Limpet and Roomless Elephant to woo older boys; he’d made a point of learning the names of the bands, whose music sounded interchangeable and somewhat saccharine, as though the groups might earn extra cash singing backup on commercials for long-distance telephone service. Maia’s idol at thirteen—a tambourine-toting, blue-haired Norwegian performer named Kylling Skylling—sounded like Bobby Vinton, only drunk. Contemplating how the world had progressed from Tannhäuser to Hogtie and the Pentacoastal Five left Millard reeling. Maybe that was the cue for his curtain call.
He sat on the love seat, paralyzed, absorbing the music. The last aria, Leontyne Price channeling Don Giovanni, dampened his eyes. Somehow, the ornate hands on the box clock above the mantel approached midnight. He filled a pitcher at the sink and watered the African violets on the kitchen sill, but he understood that he was procrastinating. This wasn’t It’s a Wonderful Life; no guardian angel would emerge from the ether to alter his plans, to show him how life might evolve for the worse in his absence. Nothing, no miracle or calamity, could change his course anymore. He’d best get the deed over with. What was there to be frightened of, really? Hanging, as he taught the medical students, year after year, was by far the most common method of suicide in the world. Old as Babylon too.
He retreated to the master bedroom and retrieved the shield-backed chair from beside Isabelle’s writing desk, carefully removing the assorted neckties from its arms and re-draping them over the door of the chifforobe. Carol and he had received the chair as a wedding present from his mother’s cousin, a peasant beauty who’d married into the furniture business; at one time, there’d been a second chair, but Lysander had splintered the legs while playing Batman. Most of the neckties were gifts as well: Yale Bulldogs courtesy of Maia; handmade silk souvenirs from his sister’s trip to Italy, all purchased duty-free in Milan; a jazzy batik, rather hideous, designed by a former patient who ran a boutique in Woodstock. Millard carried the chair into the bathroom and set it down inside the interior closet, Isabelle’s closet, where he’d cleared away a space beneath the central rafter; the heft of the solid oak reassured him.
Shortly after their marriage, Isabelle had carved the closet from the bathroom. She’d endured the mammoth walk-in closet off the hallway that she’d inherited from Carol for six months, then insisted upon an arrangement where she wouldn’t have to traverse the drafty master bedroom to dress. Since his beloved had rarely asked for anything of value, Millard proved more than delighted to indulge her, insisting on the finest in both contractors and wood. Some of Carol’s abandoned jetsam still gathered cobwebs on the upper shelves of the old closet, alongside Maia’s stuffed walrus and Millard’s spare fishing tackle. He’d seen his ex’s wooden tennis racket up there too, caged in its trapezoid frame, now a testament to her fling with Howard Logan. (Who could say that she didn’t have old love letters squirreled away in the crawl spaces as well?) In his fifties, he’d even installed a chin-up bar across the doorframe, hoping to improve his upper body strength. What a joke!
Once the chair was in place, Millard retrieved the Courvoisier from the bedroom; he seated himself on the toilet lid and downed two Valium, using the cognac as a chaser. Any more than ten milligrams and he risked falling asleep prematurely—waking up the next morning with a bad hangover and a bedroom chair in his closet. Many of his patients had betrayed themselves in this way. While he waited for the tranquilizers to kick in, he looped his spare belt over the rafter. Almost done, Millard, he urged. Hang in there. A bit of gallows humor.
Millard climbed onto the chair; he felt a twinge in his knee. A hint of his late wife’s scent still clung to the red cedar boards, fighting through the naphthalene and Pine-Sol. Empty hangers drooped from the dowels, a hodgepodge of foam and wire. Vestiges of his former married life crowded the corners: Isabelle’s ironing board and tailor’s ham; their folded bridge table, host to countless nights of canasta with his in-laws; the carton of her cosmetics that he’d never managed to discard. Slowly, with systematic care, Millard secured the belt to the rafter and wrapped the other end around his neck. Through the haze of alcohol and Valium, he could feel the leather hot and tight against his neck, stanching his veins, the buckle biting into the muscle, yet his eyes focused on the box containing Isabelle’s lipsticks and blushers, the name Wanamaker’s fading from the cardboard. Leaving the used cosmetics behind bothered him—a sign of disorder, negligence. He would carry them to the trash chute, he decided, and then return to his endeavor.
Or maybe he would discard the carton tomorrow. Yes, that seemed an elegant solution to the cosmetics, and to Lysander, and to everything else that weighed upon him. Tomorrow. He cradled this final word on his lips, wistful, even as he kicked away the chair.