Vivian In Red (34 page)

Alex interrupts, “And I checked my mom’s birth announcement. It was in the newspaper in 1937. It’s not like they could have time-traveled to backdate that, so she definitely wasn’t born later.” Now I can hear his voice quicken.

“Here’s the other thing, though. Grampa Milo has taken a turn for the worse.”

Alex is silent as I explain the previous night, though I skip over the part about the uncanny shriek that jarred me out of sleep. I focus instead on his lethargy, disconnection, lack of appetite.

I pause and scrunch my face, trying to hold it all in, though my throat aches with the effort. It’s like trying to swallow a rock.

Alex begins, “I’m sorry to hear that. But that makes the question even more urgent.”

“How can you say that?” I croak out, breaking the dam by speaking. “How can that be your concern right now?”

“You love your grandfather, and I can hear your heart breaking. But my mom’s heart is breaking in front of me, all the time. She’s an orphan.”

“So am I.”

“And it’s horrible, isn’t it?”

And so Alex has drawn a bright line connecting his mother and me. Both of us with absent, complicated mothers, fathers taken away too soon. I want to push back against this. It’s unfair, it’s emotional blackmail, but it also settles into my marrow the way true things always do. We are connected, Millicent and me, by circumstance at least, if not more than that.

I can’t reply to this. Alex begins again, his voice now soft. “You keep assuming this will be awful for your grandfather. What if it’s not? If it’s even true, which it might not be. I’m not saying it’s a guarantee, you know. But it’s as simple as a blood draw. I checked it all out, we could find out as soon as ten days and we don’t have to keep going in circles about it. You can even frame it to him, to your whole family, as an act of mercy to an old lady who’s been through a shock and just wants an answer.”

“A mitzvah.”

“Sure, that. What you said.”

Downstairs, someone begins playing the piano. On a normal day this would be my grandfather. This playing is regimented and by-the-book, rhythmically. Someone very careful to hit every note just like it’s on the page. I suspect it’s one of Eva’s kids who has been drilled with lessons. All the Short kids are subjected to music lessons, in case one of us is a secret prodigy. We are all merely fair to medium-good.

Yes, it’s Pachelbel’s Canon in D, I can tell now, which is nothing Grampa Milo would have picked to play, and not for nothing to fill the heavy silence with something other than impending death.

“Eleanor? Still there?”

“Yes.” I clear my throat, wipe my face with my hand. “What about the notebook? We can’t package that up as a mitzvah, to ask my grandfather if he stole this woman’s work and passed it off as his.”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” Alex replies, though I can tell from the dull tone in his voice that to him, at least, it very much does. “Vivian’s dead and gone and we can’t do anything for her. But I just want to answer my mom’s question.”

“Just? What if it turns out he is? Then what?”

“I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know. I’m sorry I got so excited before. For what it’s worth I wish Estelle had never told us anything. I wish that vicious old bitch had kept her secret to herself and we’d all lived in happy ignorance. But I can’t pretend not to know. We can’t make ourselves stop wondering.”

No, we can’t. And my grandfather can’t make himself talk, can’t make himself stop seeing a vision of this woman who knotted up his life, somehow, all those decades ago.

“I think you should come here.”

“What? Where?”

“Here, New York. Come, and bring Vivian’s things. We will think positive and assume my Grampa is only having a bad spell and that he’ll be okay. And that he’ll have a lucid, cheerful moment and through sign language and who knows what, we will ask him what he knows. We’ll tell him about the mitzvah and show him the notebook. Assuming we haven’t made him keel over from a stroke at the idea he might have fathered another child.”

“Wow. You’re serious.”

“So they tell me.”

“I can’t afford it.”

“I’ll pay for the ticket and write it off as research. My uncle owns an apartment that I think is still vacant, you can stay there.”

“I don’t want to take your money.”

“Hell, for all we know it might be yours, too.”

“Shit,” he says, stretching the word out long, half-whistling it. It sounds like he genuinely hadn’t thought about that part, that he might be entitled to a legacy, he and Millicent. Song lyrics aside, even. I’m glad to believe this of him, though I know my cousins and aunts and uncles won’t be so understanding.

“Can you get away?” I repeat. “Can someone else handle
The Sound of Music
for a while?”

“Are you sure you want me to come?”

When I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror, my color is high, my eyes shining and jaw firmly set. For a moment I think I’m seeing Naomi in the mirror. This is her face when she’s made up her mind. It’s an unfamiliar look for me.

“Yes. I’m sure. As soon as you can.”

T
he New York summer was sticking all over Milo. It pasted his shirt to him, soaked his hatband, and dripped over the paper when he bent over his notebook and tried to write. A creaky fan just moved the hot air around, but it was better than the heavy stillness when he shut it off.

Someone had let loose a hydrant outside, and Milo had half a mind to go join the frolicking kids and soak himself, clothes and all. He’d just read in the
Times
the other day that Central Park had a record temperature of 106. Ladies’ rubber heels from their shoes were getting stuck in the sticky asphalt, and some poor schlemiel had left his dentures out on the windowsill and they melted, if the paper was to be believed.

Allen’s place was shaded and a few degrees cooler, and there was a piano, but Milo had taken to working at home, and alone, more often. Something was unsettling him about being around Allen’s place so much. Dorothy almost never came to the city anymore, though she sent telegrams and letters about this or that bill to be paid or account settled. His children had been writing him letters that were forced and strained with duty. Allen griped that his wife was probably standing over them with a ruler, ready to smack their hands if they didn’t cross their t’s properly.

And yet… Milo wrestled each day with whether he should be at Allen’s side. Milo had been pretending not to notice the increase in bottles strewn around the apartment in Dorothy’s absence, and the increasingly late hour at which Allen chose to begin his day’s work.

Milo had helped Allen dry out once already, with the help of an embarrassing arrest, but how could a person keep that up forever? He couldn’t be Allen’s warden, could he? Plus he was visiting his parents all the more. Their father had taken to falling into silent miseries that lasted for days. Max wasn’t often able to visit, working so hard for his bride’s parents. Leah reported to Milo in a small, fretful voice that only Milo’s presence made the place bearable. Mrs. Schwartz used to rally her daughter’s spirits with forcefully bright chatter, but news of Hitler’s Olympics and that lunatic’s continued rise cast a long shadow all the way from Europe. New York might be relatively safe, but a person couldn’t help but worry about those Jews left behind, known personally to you or not, it didn’t matter.

“It’s like a tomb in here,” Leah had whispered to him on his last visit. Milo’s sister was not given to exaggeration.

He’d thought about giving up his apartment and moving back in with them, yes, eating up the food and taking up space, but the full force of his income could go toward supporting them. The times he tried to suggest it were forcefully rejected by Yosef Schwartz, who apparently had swallowed all the pride he could stomach already, just in accepting Milo’s assistance with rent and groceries while plying his tailoring at the kitchen table.

Allen would have to take care of himself. Come what may.

Come what may, a nice musical-sounding phrase. Would that work in the song? Milo stared at the paper, his vision swimming. He had better glasses now, along with a better pair of shoes. He’d bought new glasses the moment he could afford to. But if he worked too long on anything within arm’s length his vision would swim and his head would ache. It would be his lot, it seemed. He wished he could just speak the words onto the page, like magic.

It was the last song to complete in the show, and it might be the death of him, if this heat didn’t do the trick. It was a love song for John Garnett, whom Gordon had hooked as the male lead, no small feat as Hollywood was beckoning. No great singer was Garnett, for sure, and if you looked at him in the plain light of day you might think nothing of him at all. But the way he could put over a song was something like wizardry. And his dancing! He barely seemed to touch the floor.

Garnett was supposed to be a poor sap trying to woo a rich girl, who seemed to like him back—maybe; she toys with him all through Act One—in spite of herself. The only line Milo had yet written was the first.

You might just love me, I guess…

Allen’s melody sprinkled notes like drops in a spring rain. The tune was bright, wistful, a little slow, yet picked up in the middle, and of course the dance director was demanding Allen craft a crackerjack rapid-fire tap section. That part wouldn’t be Milo’s problem, though. No words required to watch Garnett scamper and whirl about the stage.

So many words! In Milo’s youthful ignorance, sitting around in Allen’s office making up songs on slow days, he’d never dreamed he would be cranking them out so much. On days like this, when he got more sweat on the paper than lyrics, he’d wonder if his store of words was just dried up like a spent fire hose. Other people kept writing, of course, writing seemingly forever, but he wasn’t like the others. He’d been dragged backward into lyric writing by Allen’s ambition; he didn’t belong. If he’d read the music properly at his first plugger audition he might be there still, like Finkelstein, a hired hand on the piano bench. Maybe that was all he was meant for, anyway.

After all, there was no tailor shop to go back to. Now he knew people, in fact. He was gonna get to meet John Garnett! He could plug the hell out of songs now.

He chewed on his lip and tried another line.

Though I’m not so well dressed….

The metallic shrill of his telephone nearly knocked Milo backward off his chair. He wanted to ignore it, but figured he just better answer. Could be that Leah was sick, or something like that. He wondered how people got by without phoning everyone up all the time before. Were they always showing up and banging on doors? Or did they just leave a person alone to think?

He snatched up the phone. “Yeah?”

Allen, sounding happily dissipated. “C’mon over. Let’s work. Got some beer in the icebox, and you can pick up some sandwiches.”

“I don’t know, I’m working now.”

“You’ll think better with company. Tell me I’m wrong.”

Milo sighed, defeated already. This was true. Despite it all, the words did seem to come easier when they worked side by side, and he’d already blown the afternoon on two lousy lines.

“Fine. Give me some time, I gotta catch the train.”

“Aww, c’mon, live a little and take a cab. Or buy a car, why don’t you buy a car?”

“Because my family can’t eat a car. Now shut up before I change my mind.”