Vivian In Red Read online

  “Let’s hear you.”

  Milo nodded, and rested his hat on an empty office chair, for lack of a better place. He settled onto the piano bench, sucked in a breath, closed his eyes, and let his hands do their thing.

  His fingers danced along like they didn’t belong to him, really. They just went right ahead and had a party, and this terrific song came out, and it felt like great good luck that one of his favorite songs to play, the one he’d probably learned earliest, thanks to his mother’s frequent requests for him to play it, happened to be authored by Irving Berlin himself, and surely that would impress Mr. McHenry. He was swinging back into the bouncy refrain when he heard, “Hey, pal, I said that’s enough!”

  Milo turned around on the piano bench. “Sorry?”

  “I’ve been hollering at you for eight bars. I said thanks, I got the picture.” McHenry heaved himself up by way of planting both massive palms on his desk, and stomped over with some papers. He slapped some music onto the piano. “That was nice and all, pal, but it’s old-fashioned. Play this and let’s see how you do.”

  Milo swallowed. The marks on the page looked like ants crawling around on a white floor. With a hand nearly trembling, he pulled his glasses out of his inside pocket and used his necktie to polish off the dust.

  He slipped the frames into place, and his hands hovered over the keys. Even with the lenses, the notes wavered. The glasses were old, his eyes were worse.

  He turned back to McHenry. “You know, my eyes don’t see so well. I’m really more of a player by ear.”

  McHenry, who’d settled back behind his desk by now, raised one eyebrow at Milo. “Really. So how do you suppose that helps us here? When your job is to read the music we give you? Any music we decide? New music, that no one’s even heard yet? So that the acts and producers can put it over big and sell sheet music by the ream? Have a nice afternoon.”

  And with that, McHenry went back to scowling at the music on his desk as if Milo had fallen through a trapdoor and vanished.

  And he might’ve. He certainly wanted to. Instead he slunk back out, then back in again, to pick up his hat. McHenry appeared not to have noticed.

  He nodded to the office girl, who gave him a shrug and mouthed “sorry” before returning to her typing.

  Out on the street, he looked down the long block of music publishers and theaters and realized the same fate would greet him inside each office. His one talent was useless for anything but after-supper entertainment in his parents’ apartment, unless his eyes were magically cured, or his father received some windfall that made Milo unafraid to ask him about money for new glasses. And even then, so what? What made him so special?

  Milo was too hot and tired just then to walk back to the platform, too embarrassed to show his face at home besides. He stood in the shade of the building, and for a few moments stared down at the worn and scuffed tips of his shoes, as people with better places to be hustled past.

  What an ignoramus he’d turned out to be, not even thinking one step past his masterful playing of a song that had been first published twenty-three years ago in 1911, the year he was born, in fact.

  Milo sighed and began his hot, sticky trudge. He wondered how many suits his father and Max would have to sew, how many cuffs they’d have to make, before the shop made enough money that he could get some better specs.

  He’d missed out on all the fun before the big crash in ’29. He’d been a diligent, obedient son struggling along in the shop and going to school and doing his arithmetic, because his mother insisted he not drop out to work, like his father had done. He pounded away on their badly tuned piano at night, playing by ear the songs they heard on the radio. His wilder classmates and neighbors would swill bootleg gin in speakeasies or house parties, but Milo figured his day would come when he got a little older.

  Then he was eighteen years old, and suddenly nobody was having any fun anymore. Whatever his mother said about the Depression being good for business, he wasn’t fooled for a minute. He could see with his own terrible eyes how bad business was. No one wanted custom-made suits in fine fabrics these days. And people could make do with their own home sewing for repairs and fit easily enough. It wasn’t so hard to fix a seam for most people, and if your hem wasn’t perfect, well, who was going to complain? You wouldn’t, not if it meant more money in your pocket. And even if you couldn’t manage that, plenty of newer immigrants would take in your sewing in their homes, for cheap. Which was just how Yosef Schwartz got started a generation ago, on Orchard Street.

  Milo was a block from the train station when he saw it: a snaking gray line of men, three or four abreast. They were quiet, ordered. The bread line rocked gently as the men shuffled forward. Some wore suits and fedoras, others open-collar shirts, with flat caps pushed back over sweaty brows. They muttered a few words to one another, but mostly seemed to stare only at the collar of the man in front of them.

  Milo kept looking at the line of men as he waited for the traffic to clear with a few other men in suits. One, with a fine hat and a newspaper under his arm, observed to someone near, or maybe to anyone in earshot, “I’d jump off the Brooklyn Bridge before I’d do that.”

  “You might get the chance to test that out if things keep going the way they are,” someone else said.

  The traffic light changed, and the men continued uptown, but Milo remained on the curb. He cast a look back over his shoulder, toward Broadway, and TB Harms, Jack Mills and Company, and Jerome Remick. He stood there as people jostled around him, as somebody asked him for a dime. Stood there looking back, and thinking.

  A week later, Milo slogged through the sodden streets of Manhattan in a storm, everything below his hip pockets soaked with windblown rain, his vision obscured by the black umbrella he held low enough to keep the gale out of his face. He’d almost stormed back to Remick’s that same boiling hot day, but when he pictured facing the cute secretary again and her adorable smirk, and McHenry’s impatience, he lost his nerve. His nerve had failed him one more time at home, when he told his mother that no one had time to see him, and he was supposed to come back the next week. He assumed she’d be relieved that her younger son’s brush with the entertainment industry was over, but he thought he heard her sigh quietly before asking him to chop some onions.

  Once again, in terrible weather, he made his way toward Times Square, the rain drenching him thoroughly even in the few blocks from the 42nd Street stop of the Third Avenue El. This time he walked right past the Hollywood Theatre and picked up the Brill Building instead, home of TB Harms Music Publishers, recently acquired by Warner Brothers, and as good a place as any.

  But he hadn’t counted on having to wait very long, and his resolve was cracking with each tick forward of the second hand. Once installed in a wooden chair, Milo began repeatedly polishing his glasses like a sacred rite.

  He saw some fading vaudeville acts and hopeful dewy-eyed girls come in and out, but nobody famous came by. No Kate Smiths, no George Cohans. Of course, they probably had music pluggers chasing them all over town banging out tunes and waving music at them, why would they bother showing up at a place like this?

  The secretary this time was a stiff-backed woman with hair wrestled into a tight knot behind her head, and who was disinclined to give him any helpful hints. Milo’s confidence was thinning out by the minute, especially when he cast sidelong glances at the other piano players he could see go into nearby offices and start pounding away at the music like they were born to it.

  When the clock ticked over to three o’clock, he stood up and put his glasses back in his coat, and tried to shake out his damp pant legs for the slog back to the train. He’d head into Schwartz and Sons and help with the customers, maybe joking around enough to convince them to spend a little extra. Smiling people always did spend more; this much, at least, he’d learned at the shop.

  “Short? Is there a Short in here?” Again with the Short. It didn’t sound so bad, though, Milo thought, and went well enough with his ado
pted first name, too. He’d dropped his given name, Moshe, while still in high school, though his parents would never call him anything else.

  He whirled around in time to see an elfin-looking man with tired eyes and a necktie all askew. Milo pointed to his own chest.

  “Okay, get in here, pal. I’m not even supposed to do this, my boss is. But my boss has a hangover, see? So, lucky me. I’ve got about one minute to hear you, so go.”

  Milo summoned up his tailor shop charm. “A minute is all I need.”

  He put his glasses back on and smiled broadly, pumping the smaller man’s hand with enthusiasm. The man introduced himself as Mr. Bernard Allen, and pointed Milo to a piano in the corner. “What have you got for me to play?” Milo asked.

  Allen walked over to his desk and retrieved a piece of music. It was handwritten on manuscript paper, and Milo gulped. The pencil was soft and it was even harder to read than the printed music he gave up on at Remick’s. Allen said, “This right here is a piece of garbage. It’s the worst thing I’ve seen in this place all week and that’s saying something. But I want you to play it like it’s the greatest thing you ever heard in your natural life. Play it in a spotlight. Pretend you’re on Bing Crosby’s radio show. Get me? Now, go.”

  Milo nodded and inspected the music. It was awful, all right. Milo couldn’t say why exactly, not exactly being a learned student at a conservatory. He just knew it the same way his brother could tell a hem wasn’t straight with one quick glance, even if was off by just a hair.

  “You gonna go, or what?” Allen prodded.

  “Sure, sure.” Milo waved his hand. He squinted hard at the notes and pretended the pounding in his head at the effort was the bassist in the band, giving him the beat. By the time he put the music on the piano, he wasn’t so much seeing with his rotten eyes as picturing it in his head what the notes looked like when they briefly wavered into clarity.

  And he went for it like pigeons at bread crumbs. He smiled at Allen, he moved his hands with flourish. He almost danced off the piano stool, which was on wheels and rolled around on the floor a little. He even added a run up the keys and a tink on the high C just because, to finish it out with panache.

  He turned around and hoped to see Allen looking delighted, but he only looked more tired. Milo wanted to run all the way home and hide under his bed.

  “Yeah, okay, sure. Come back tomorrow at nine.”

  “Sure? You mean, sure I got a job?”

  “If you can put over a garbage song like that so well, you might make our good songs sound great. You looked like you actually liked that sappy mess.”

  Milo shrugged with one shoulder. “It wasn’t so bad.”

  “Sure it was, and I oughta know because I wrote it. Now beat it, I’m busy. Come back in the morning.”

  With that, Allen strode over to the piano and balled up the music in his fists as if the melody had been a personal affront to all of music history, leaving Milo blinking in stunned disbelief.

  “You waiting for me to demand an encore?” Allen said, without looking up. Milo scurried away.

  Despite the ongoing rainy onslaught outside, and the splashes from the automobiles and the wind turning his umbrella inside out, Milo caught himself whistling “Happy Days Are Here Again” as he made his way over to his father’s shop. Schwartz and Sons Tailoring was about to become just Schwartz and Son, singular, and forever, if Milo had his way.

  New York, 1999

  When Esme pulls open the door to my grandfather’s limestone townhouse—his home since the biggest Broadway hit was Kiss Me, Kate—she gives me the sad smile, complete with head-tilt.

  How I hate that look, that practiced, silent “poor you” I’ve seen my whole life. What’s wrong with just looking sad? That smile is like saying “chin up,” which is something else I hate to hear. I’ll put my chin up when I damn well please and not a moment before.

  She steps back and I pass into their foyer, making for the steps up to his office with his grand piano and his reams of sheet music dating back to FDR.

  “Miss, he’s in the parlor today.”

  Of course, I’d forgotten. This literal lowering of Grampa Milo seems irrevocable. The elderly don’t gain back freedom they’ve lost.

  I hover in the entry for a moment while Esme makes her way off to wherever she was working. I can see the back of his head over the top of a tufted, embroidered chair. A familiar and favorite melody lilts around the room: Fred Astaire’s unassuming tenor from the old scratchy record player. Someday, when I’m awfully low, I will feel a glow…

  Grampa Milo is different, and I have to be different in his presence. He is no longer the funny chatterbox who taught me pinochle, which I thought for years was spelled pea-knuckle. He used to play any song I wanted on the piano, even Top 40 songs, by listening once or twice and replaying them by ear, making like a human jukebox. It didn’t seem that long ago he was plinking out the melody to George Michael’s “Faith,” and I was giggling into my hand hearing the naughty lyrics in my head. His price for that parlor trick was for me to sit and listen to him play the sumptuous melodies of his day, all but his own most famous song. Like any proper teen-ager, I pretended to hate that part.

  He can’t do that now, and may never again. And though I’ve been visiting him all along, each time I step into his presence is akin to walking into a punch.

  I suck in a breath and push my glasses up, and walk in, eyes on the carpet for as long as I dare without being rude.

  “Hiya, Grampa.” He looks much the same as usual, except for being downstairs. This was Grandma Bee’s room, really. He looks at me with downturned eyes, too, along with a smile that’s vague and pretending. He’s happy to see me, and sad he can’t say so, and I have to look away before I weep.

  I take a seat in the other tufted chair. A table between us holds a copy of a glossy coffee table book about Broadway, the black cover faded to the gray of a foggy morning. While seated, I tug and haul the chair over the thick rug, leaving behind deep depressions.

  When I look up again, having settled closer, Grampa waves at the air around his head.

  “Yes, I love this song, too. Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields. A female songwriter was unusual back then, huh?”

  He opens his mouth to answer me, and his face crumbles as he remembers. I rush to fill in the silence: “She was a genius at making vernacular sound beautiful. ‘Awfully low’ rhyming with ‘feel a glow.’ Just perfect.”

  We both look up, as if we can see the notes unspooling into the room. Maybe Grampa is picturing Dorothy Fields. He might well have met her.

  Uncle Paul and my doctor cousin, Joel, have been worried, so I hear. Joel said the speech pathologist, Marla, seems puzzled by his utter lack of progress of any kind; he should be making some improvement with his right hand, or his voice, or even that silly pointing board with the alphabet, pictures, and a stick. After all, the strength in his right leg came right back, even more quickly than expected. Why won’t the rest of his right side catch up? Why can’t he speak, even a little? Joel thinks he doesn’t even want to try, that he’s too depressed and overwhelmed. No other explanation would make medical sense, and for Dr. Joel everything has to make medical sense.

  I don’t agree that Grampa is depressed, but I don’t bother to contradict the good doctor, as no one listens to me, anyway.

  My grandfather’s continued silence echoes like a vibrating cymbal crash. I’m not the most talkative in the Short family, which is a fact that usually drifts by unnoticed. There are too many Shorts hollering over each other and making a fuss to realize that I’m quiet. Now, I’m the only one in the room who can talk and in fact I must.

  The alternative is to look over at Grampa Milo and watch the tragedy of his situation settle over his face and weigh him down.

  I look around the room for a prompt, anything to talk about other than myself, which would be a short conversation, wouldn’t it? That’s when I see the photo albums my grandmother kept down here, in order by y
ear, on a shelf below the window seat that looks out over the park.

  I jump up and pull out the oldest one, using my cardigan sleeve to brush off dust. In walking it back to my grandfather, I notice he seems a little wary, but I’ve got the album now and nothing else to talk about, so I settle down with it and open it on my knees, turning it as close to him as I can.

  In the first photo I open to, a trim young woman is standing in front of a marquee for a revue called George White’s Scandals.

  “This must be Grandma Bee.” Of course it must be. Grampa Milo was famous for proclaiming that my grandmother had been his first and only love. “She saved me from a life of barren spinsterhood!” he’d joke, and Grandma Bee would laugh and flick her hand at him, Oh you, you’re such a card.

  Grampa Milo nods, but he doesn’t seem to be looking directly at the photo. It might be hard for him to see, of course, given that his eyesight was always poor. He never liked wearing glasses that were thick enough to work as well as they should, though now of course they make lenses so much lighter. I think he just got used to the world being indistinct. Maybe he’d find the clarity jarring, or maybe he’s just vain and doesn’t like how glasses look. To this I relate. If you lined up every person who ever told me “You are so pretty without your glasses” you could span the Brooklyn Bridge.

  A clock ticks off echoing seconds. “Funny name, ‘Scandals.’ Now a scandal is President Clinton and that intern. Can you imagine that being in the papers back then? Horrors.”

  I admire the picture of my grandmother in her demure, below-the-knee dress, gloves, and pretty hat, consider how they all went by Mrs. and Mr. then, and dressed in suits all the time, and wonder if I wasn’t born in the wrong decade.

  “Is this picture taken in what, 1940?”

  Grampa shakes his head, points his thumb down.

  “Oh, earlier.” Their fiftieth anniversary was in what year? And this must have been a bit earlier than that… “1937?”