Vivian In Red Read online

  It sounds wrong to me, worse than silence. I stare down at my right hand, frustrated. No one seems to get why I can barely move it. I should be able to do something or other by now, what with the therapy. And my voice, too, that therapy lady Marla keeps encouraging me to make sounds, even sing little nursery tunes like “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” but there’s nothing there. She’s trying her damndest to pretend not to be disappointed, but I’ve spent a lifetime watching people act and she’s no Ethel Barrymore.

  Some of them think I’m exaggerating somehow, or maybe just too depressed to try. I overheard my daughter-in-law Linda mention Prozac and if I could’ve, I would have laughed out loud.

  Ha, Prozac. Please, in my day you felt down you had a belt or two of Scotch and felt calmer, if maybe a headache in the morning.

  Not that Scotch is always the greatest cure, mind you, I know that from up close and personal experience.

  I drop my left hand onto the keys, a soft, pathetic, sick-sounding chord seeping into the air. They’re trying, my family. They really are. The hospital people talked them into putting a genuine hospital bed in here, as if I’m an invalid. My walking’s not so bad, thank you very much, stroke or not. My leg strength came back pretty quick in fact, which is another reason they think I might be malingering about my voice. As if I would do such a thing!

  They brought a TV in from the living room, and the old record player, so I’ve got something to do other than watch the Yankees or cable news. While still in the hospital, I saw my own collapse reported as a quick bit before cutting to commercial: Noted Broadway producer Milo Short collapsed on a Manhattan sidewalk yesterday. That made me imagine the Post headline: “SHORT NOT LONG FOR THIS WORLD?” Those schmucks can’t resist a pun.

  There’s a nurse off in the corner, a rotating clutch of them, all quiet and professional and none too chatty, of course what would I say back anyhow? I scowled and shook my head about the constant nurses, but Paul informed me the hospital wouldn’t spring me unless they knew for sure I was going to be monitored. For how long? I’d like to ask. Forever? Until I kick it? Until another stroke gets me and then I start drooling and stumbling for real, like that poor bastard Marty?

  So I guess it could be worse.

  Except it’s hard to imagine worse just now. I’m beyond mute, I’m rendered wordless entirely: speech, writing, even playing proper music, it’s all gone. Marla the therapy lady gave me a board with pictures and a pointing stick. It’s all I can do not to throw that garbage across the room; it’s infantile, something you’d give a clever chimpanzee, and yet even that seems to confound me, somehow.

  The family has begun to talk past me, over me, as if I’m deaf, for that matter. I saw this with poor Marty after his stroke. He was alert as ever—I could see the spark in his eyes—but he was so impaired they treated him after a while like a potted plant. I never was great at praying, and maybe praying for someone to die is wrong, but I did it anyhow, then. I felt like he wanted me to.

  I put my left hand on the keys again, trying something slower. I hope that he turns out to be…

  “Someone to watch… over me….” Eleanor laughs as her voice cracks over the “watch.” I turn on the piano bench to see her coming over to me. I finish the musical phrase with as much panache as I can.

  “I’m no great singer, am I, Grampa Milo?” She comes to settle next to me on the piano bench. I shrug and wave my hand side to side: eh, not bad. It’s true. All us Shorts have sturdy, serviceable voices with a range of about six notes.

  “Should I play the right hand for you? I think I can manage that.” She looks around a moment and remembers. “Oh, you always play by ear. That’s something I cannot manage, sadly. Maybe we’ll find some songbooks. I’d love to be your melody.”

  She drapes her arm around my shoulders and gives a squeeze.

  Eleanor is the last one in the family to talk to me like I might answer. Well, her and Esme.

  Ellie’s been around plenty these last days. While I’m always glad to see her, I also know it means she’s not busy, which is not so great. I remember from the night before my fall how Eva had whispered to me about her nice young man leaving her, “no reason at all that we know of,” she’d said, though from the look she shot Eleanor’s direction I figured she’d imagined a reason all her own. For Eleanor’s whole life they’d been trying to glam her up—my daughter Rebekah, my other granddaughters. They’d put her in bright colors, style her hair, do her makeup. She’d sit politely through their ministrations, then go home and wipe it all off and go back to her dark plain colors. If they would ask me—not like they ever did, or would—Eleanor doesn’t need all that stuff. All she needs is someone to make her smile. That smile, when it comes out, gleams like sunlight on the sea. No one is immune, especially not that Daniel kid, who I really thought would stick it out with her. But it’s been weeks now, so it seems he’s really gone.

  Eleanor nudges my shoulder just slightly and starts the right hand part of Chopsticks. I oblige her for a few minutes, then feign tiredness. Or maybe it’s not so feigned, I realize as Eleanor helps me stand up and we head over to my favorite chair.

  Esme pops her head in the room. “Miss Eleanor? I’m sorry to interrupt, but Mr. Paul is upstairs in the office and he’d like to see you.”

  Eleanor sighs and pats my hand. “I’ve been summoned. I’ll be back in a few, Grampa Milo.”

  And so I’m alone again, as alone as I ever am, with the nurses, of course. This one looks busy with a book or some papers, so I try to whisper to myself. I go with my wife’s name: Bee. I keep thinking the next time will work, that since it vanished so quick it will come back quick, too. No such luck, so far. I try not to mutter to myself too much, because then I look crazy instead of just mute. As it is, they’re all treating me like I’m made of dust and if they sneeze in my direction I’ll blow apart.

  I fell flat on the sidewalk and only had a bruise. That’s fragile for you.

  Thinking of the sidewalk makes me think of her. I could have sworn I saw her there, Vivian in red, just like in 1934, touching the brim of her hat, and I blink away the memory. It feels like bad luck to dwell on that time, not to mention how she ended up, poor kid.

  That’s when I notice the albums. Old photos were more Bee’s thing than mine. She’d bring them out sometimes, and we’d leaf through, have a few laughs.

  Bracing on the arm of my chair and leaning forward, I raise myself up with only moderate exertion, and begin my progress across the floor toward the shelves that hold the albums, which are next to the bay window. There’s a window seat there; that’s a pleasant place to rest, and I could see the people outside, if I cared to watch them. Yes, these here albums only begin after 1937 or so, and that suits me fine, as certain events in years prior I’m not inclined to recall. I reach for one, and it’s heavier than it looks, but I can handle it okay, even one-handed.

  When I make it to the window, what I see there makes me drop the album right to the floor.

  Vivian is sitting on my window seat. Legs crossed, cigarette in her hand. I can smell the smoke and her flowery perfume woven together, that cloud was always around her, and I’d know she was coming without even turning from the piano.

  I’m torn between crying out for help—from what I don’t know—and talking to her, my God, she’s here after all these years, how and why…? I open up my mouth, but my voice is still gone.

  That’s when Vivian smirks and shakes her head at me, just a little. It’s a look of, Not so fast, buster…

  Esme comes trotting in, and the nurse is standing here with me all of a sudden, and I point at Vivian, I point hard, I’d be poking her if I were closer.

  “Mr. Short, what’s wrong?” asks Esme, as she picks up the album and looks in the direction I’m pointing. “What’s wrong? I don’t see anything there.”

  Vivian from sixty years ago turns away from us to gaze out the window at New York in 1999. Still smoking, not making a sound.

  I allow Esm
e and the nurse to guide me back to the chair I’d been sitting in. Once settled, I raise my gaze back up and half expect her to be gone, but no, Vivian is still there, looking out the window.

  The pair of them, my tiny Hispanic housekeeper and this bland blonde nurse, start asking me questions about what I saw, what was wrong, along with the nurse checking my pulse, frowning at her watch as she times the rapid beats.

  I play it off with what I hope is a sheepish smile, something like, “Oops, silly me,” with a shrug of one shoulder, as if I’d seen a shadow that startled me is all. They ask me a few different ways if I’m okay, if I need anything, until finally they fade away to their respective posts, the nurse jotting notes in a book, no doubt recording this little incident.

  I close my eyes for a moment, knowing Vivian will be gone when I open them next. She’s just a trick of my old brain, something on the fritz up there. That same stroke that made me collapse, made me lose my voice, also made me see a person from my long ago past. That’s all.

  When I open my eyes, she is halfway across the room, sauntering toward me.

  The cigarette is gone, I notice, but the smell lingers, the way smoke always does. Vivian is swaying her hips as she walks. She always had some extra curve in her steps but this is a bit much, even for her.

  Even for her! Thinking of her as real when she couldn’t be.

  Yet my heart is thudding harder as she gets closer. I’m feeling dizzy, my heart still lugging away in my chest, and I think, oh now I’m gonna die. I was half-dead before and here it comes. I wonder why I’m seeing Vivian instead of my Bee, or my dear David, or poor Allen, all of them gone before me.

  She’s so close. If I were sitting up straight, I could touch the hem of her dress, which I now notice is different than before. It’s a chocolate brown suit, in fact, one like she would have worn to work. It ends past her knee and is in that way modest, but it hugs her body so nicely I can’t fail to notice her curves even as I’m dying. Her brown curls are pinned behind one ear, brushing under her tapered, sharp chin. She’s got that same smirk, one that says, I know something you don’t know.

  I could bawl that I won’t get to see my kids and grandkids one more time, not to mention the great-grands who barely understand what I am but that I give them candy, with their round red cheeks and giggles about anything and nothing—

  Then Paul’s heavy feet come clomping down the steps. “Hey, Pop, I have to head back to the office.”

  And she’s gone. The space where Vivian was standing, just inches from the toe of my shoe, holds nothing but dust motes winking in the sun.

  New York City, 1934

  The elevated train roared over Milo’s head, startling him into grabbing his hat, interrupting his fingers’ rehearsal of sorts on his pant leg. His right hand had been tapping out “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” with such concentration he was nearly run down by a policeman on a motorcycle as he crossed the street.

  His mother couldn’t believe what he had planned for the morning.

  “People can’t give up wearing clothes!” She’d bitten off the words hard in Yiddish, abandoning English as she always did when she grew emotional and frustrated, though newlyweds Yosef and Chana Schwartz had emigrated at the turn of the century. Rapping the wooden table in their apartment for emphasis, she leaned in and continued her harangue. “In fact, they go to a tailor more because they have to mend things when they might have bought new. Letting down the children’s hems to go another few months. Your brother says business is better this month than last! But music? It’s pretty, yes, but we don’t need new songs. We can keep playing the old songs.” She jerked her arm back toward the wireless in the front room. Milo didn’t point out that it was in fact playing new songs all the time, and someone was out there performing them, and getting paid, too.

  Instead, he sipped his watery coffee and sighed. “We need them even more now, I’d say.” Milo couldn’t help adding, “You loved it when I learned to play.”

  She threw her hands up in the air as her only response, and went back to kneading her dough. Milo’s father and brother were already at Schwartz and Sons tailor shop a few blocks away, which was where Milo would be too, if he hadn’t decided to quit kidding himself. The shop was getting along just fine without him, and whatever his mother might insist, he was doing no one any good screwing up the hems or buttons in the shop, requiring Max to fix it all. He charmed the customers, and helped with the figuring and sweeping, but he was no tailor. And whatever else Chana Schwartz might insist about the shop “doing better than last month” Milo was no dummy. He could sense the frustration rolling off his father like fog, while he and Max had whispered conversations and thumped numbers in their ledger books with rigid forefingers.

  He knew how much his father had stretched in ’29 to get them into this apartment, “just one block off the Grand Concourse” as Yosef Schwartz never tired of saying. The day they moved in, Mr. Schwartz swept his arm to indicate the shiny parquet floors, walked up and down the step into the sunken living room like it was a party trick, and kept turning the faucet in their very own bathroom like Moses himself striking the rock.

  Money was tight even then, his father shutting down fast any talk of buying their own automobile. To make their “one block from the Grand Concourse” rent, he went on mending their own clothes long past their prime, putting the kibosh on going to shows, even the Yiddish theater he loved down on the East Side. Since the Crash? It took no great leap of imagination to understand why his father grew more pensive and solemn by the day.

  Just last week at the newsstand, Milo heard men grumbling to each other about “Prosperity is just around the corner,” like Hoover kept carrying on about and had been laughable for years by now. Not that it looked like FDR was fixing everything, either, and his big campaign song was “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Milo liked to mutter new lyrics to himself while he cleaned up the shop:

  These so-called happy days, my friend

  Should like to drive me ’round the bend!

  I build my shack, line up for bread;

  These happy days just never end!

  No, it was time Milo Schwartz earned his own keep, and since tailoring wasn’t for him, he’d take the only thing he was good at and find a job doing that: he’d be a piano player.

  When he first mentioned it, his mother had gasped, grabbed the table, pounded her round, dimpled fist that her son might be playing for coins in a dirty speakeasy. Milo had reminded her ever so gently that the Volstead Act was over and done with, and everyone was getting tight respectably in public now, which truth be told, didn’t ease her mind so very much. In the end, he promised her no saloons or taverns or barrooms. Even though none other than Irving Berlin himself had started as a singing waiter at a Chinese restaurant back when he was Israel Baline.

  As the elevated rumbled away downtown, Milo tried to shake off the morning’s conversations and his mother’s objections, lest this distraction get him killed before his audition.

  Milo felt he had miscalculated by waiting until midday to head to the theater district. His shirt was so sweat-soaked under his jacket it was probably transparent, and he smelled worse than any given alleyway in the city. But he’d figured showbiz people would get up none too early. And with any luck they’d all smell just as bad and no one would be the wiser.

  The theaters and marquees loomed up ahead of him, then, and if his mother had been there he’d have said, “Look, see? All those people putting those shows on. They’re still getting paid, so why not me?”

  He sucked in a breath, puffed out his chest, and swung open the door to the 51st Street Theatre, better known to Milo just then as the home of Jerome H. Remick and Company, Music Publishers.

  After getting directions from a bored and skeptical boy at the box office, Milo huffed up the stairs, as sweat tickled a line down his back, and the din of pianos and muffled singing grew louder in cadence with the crescendo of his thudding heart.

  Inside the lobby, a few
people working in nearby half-glassed-in offices glanced up at him, but went back to their work, no doubt assessing he was no performer and therefore not worth knowing. Milo approached an office girl, a young woman tapping at a typewriter. “Miss? I’m here about a job.”

  “Mmm-hmmm,” she said, still typing.

  “Playing the piano?”

  “Yes, sir,” she answered, but hadn’t yet looked up at him, still typing. Finally she reached over and slapped the machine silly by way of slamming the carriage back. Milo jumped.

  She looked up at him and said, “So what is it you want to do here?”

  “Play the piano.”

  She moved her mouth around a little, and Milo realized she was trying not to laugh at him. She lowered her voice and leaned over her typewriter, and Milo noticed her bosom lightly depressed the keys. This tickled his funny bone somehow, so he bit his own lip to keep from laughing.

  “It’s called being a song plugger. You plug the songs for the acts. Sometimes here, sometimes around town. That’s what a piano player does here.”

  Milo would have proposed to her at that very moment. Having never been in love before, he assumed the torrent of gratitude was close enough. He cleared his throat and spoke with theatrical volume and diction. “Yes, of course, that is exactly what I meant. And whom do I see about such an important job?”

  She laughed at this. “I’ll check if Mr. McHenry will see you.”

  She leaned into an office doorway. Milo noticed several of the men stop their conversations or paper shuffling to watch the shape of her derriere as she bent slightly at the waist to talk to Mr. McHenry.

  She gestured lightly with her hand. “Go right in, Mr.…?”

  “Schwartz.”

  “Mr. Short.”

  Milo shrugged. Once he had the job, there would be plenty of time to get his name right.

  Mr. McHenry was a voluminous man melting behind a desk that seemed not large enough for him. He mopped his brow with a soaking handkerchief in a gesture that struck Milo as awfully optimistic. He jerked his thumb at the piano.