The nurse’s invasion seems to snap my grandfather back to himself. He shakes his head hard, like a dog shaking off water, and then throws me what looks like an apologetic smile. Naomi and Paul come in to say their goodbyes; they both have an appointment at the office. I watch Naomi’s glossy assurance, how comfortable she is in the rightness of everything from her shoes to her career to her brilliant, piano-playing, ballet-dancing daughter. I can easily imagine her shaking hands with a publisher and her hand-picked author, waving away any minor concerns about Grampa Milo’s health, in fact using his health as a reason to expedite the progress.
Then this stranger would be in the parlor, and this stranger might witness Grampa Milo’s fixed stares, his throwing and dropping of objects. He’d add a chapter to the end of his book, something like “The Curtain Falls: The Sad Decline of Milo Short.” Without Grampa’s participation, the book would be nothing but a rehash of what everyone already knows, maybe some gossipy anecdotes about his stars and productions.
Paul and Naomi are talking to each other now, and to the nurse, all three of them standing up and talking over my grandfather’s head as if he’s deaf as well as mute.
I swallow hard, as if to choke down the rising sense of panic, which in fact has a voice and it goes like this: you can’t do it, you’re not qualified, what’s wrong with you, what do you know anyway, and I approach my uncle, interrupting their conversation as forcefully as I can manage, and leading him away into the foyer.
Uncle Paul looks down at me with his unruly gray eyebrows in twin arcs of surprise.
“I’m writing the book. Just tell me how we start.”
I shift in this lousy hospital bed, but every position I choose drives some sharp spike of soreness somewhere. I resent every moment in this crummy thing, which does not much help with my sleep. All the money we’ve got, and this cardboard-feeling thing is the best we can do?
Esme forgot to draw the front room curtains and the room glows silver and gold from the moon and streetlights, depending where the light falls. The night nurse is in the living room next door, reading or watching television between her stealthy intrusions to “check your vitals”; in other words, make sure I haven’t croaked.
Down in the theater district, no doubt it’s still hopping. Everyone would be out at late dinners, having cocktails. The show people would be just starting their own happy hours, those young enough to still coast on a few hours of sleep and give a slam-bang performance the next night. In here it’s so quiet I can just about hear my own heart stubbornly thumping away, paying no mind to my fouled-up brain.
Just now it looks like a well-lit set, truth be told, and it’s something like beautiful. Maybe Esme should just leave the curtains open all the time. I wouldn’t mind. Not that I could say the words, and all the charm of playing charades is long gone, never mind that damn alphabet board.
I crane around to see the edge of the stairs just outside the parlor door. It doesn’t seem so far.
A wicked idea takes hold of me. Well, why the hell shouldn’t I? It’s my damn house and my own damn body.
They have clipped this little alarm thingy to my pajamas, and the other end to the bed, all of them pretending like it’s not a dog leash, basically. “In case you fall out of bed,” Rebekah explained it, not looking me in the eye. Who was she trying to kid? However it’s easy enough, even in the semi dark, to unclip it from myself and clip it to the pillowcase.
I push the covers off and swing my legs down toward the floor. It’s a tiny jump down, but no higher than my bed upstairs. I land harder than I expected, but the thick rug makes it nice and quiet. There’s no movement from the nurse in the room next door. She was just here a few minutes ago, so likely won’t be again for a short while.
I rest a moment at the edge of the hospital bed, collecting my breath and my bearings. I’m surprisingly dizzy from being upright all of a sudden. Then I straighten up my posture as much as my creaky body lets me and just walk across the floor like it’s nothing, which it isn’t, of course. I smile to myself and try a little laugh, though all that comes out is a light cough. Still. A sound I intended to make, it’s progress of a kind.
The progress to the foot of the staircase is unremarkable. Now that I’m here, the staircase looks taller than I remembered it, before I fell. Or maybe it’s being in the dark. Everything’s scarier in the dark. Also, I left my glasses on the small table next to the bed.
Motion from the corner of my eye startles me just as I raise my foot to the first step, and I gasp and grab for the railing.
I chuckle at myself the moment I can tell it was simply headlights turning onto the street outside, which briefly glowed into the entryway. As for the glasses? I don’t want to walk all that way back and anyhow, it’s too dark to make so much difference.
It’s been a few days since a Vivian sighting, and that combined with my ability to sort of laugh-cough has got me feeling more optimistic again. Whatever has gone awry in my brain is healing over. I can picture it up there, knitting away like when Bee made a scarf and it would stretch further down her lap night after night, as she stitched.
The progress up the stairs, though, is slower than I thought. I’d conveniently managed to forget how little I used the stairs during the day. Even before my fall, I’d come down in the morning, and only go up after supper and spend the rest of my evening and night on the piano or in bed. And often, Esme would take one arm as she walked me up after dinner.
So I put two hands on the railing, my arms pulling me up along with my legs pushing. Now I’m starting to feel sleepy. Fine time for that at this point, as I reach the landing at the first bend in the stairs. I’m committed now. I might as well push on through. I imagine my soft canopy bed and push toward it like I’m climbing a mountain, which it actually feels like just about now. I guess I’m having what the grandkids call a “what was I thinking” moment.
I smell her before I see her: roses and smoke.
Vivian is leaning on the opposite stairway railing. She’s wearing a shirtwaist now, and a hat set on a jaunty sideways angle. Her arms are folded and she’s just looking at me, with that amused, slightly haughty expression I remember when we first met.
She stands up from the wall and walks toward me, growing larger in my vision, making me think she’s going to keep walking up until she walks right into me like mist.
Unspoken words are dancing around on my tongue like grease in a hot pan. All I can do is mouth them, so I do, helplessly, pathetically.
Why are you here? What are you? Leave me alone.
She has stopped in her forward progress, in a dark patch of the landing between pools of outside light, such that I have to strain to tell if she’s even there.
What do you want? My lips form the sentence, my throat choking on the words that won’t come.
That voice! It’s deeper than it should be for someone so slim, resonant like the inside of a finely tuned instrument. It’s not coming from her, though, because her, its—the apparition, vision, hallucination—the lips aren’t moving.
I just want to be heard, is what purrs into my mind, vibrating in my own chest as if I’m the one speaking. Don’t we all just want to be heard?
My legs buckle and I fold down, hitting the landing first with my knees, then my palms, then I hope to God I don’t tumble all the way down and break my neck, all for the sake of a canopy bed. As my blurred, dark vision goes all the way black I’m thinking how different it all would’ve been if only I’d bought that goddamn coat somewhere else.
New York, 1934
“Hey, Milo, you listening?”
Milo sprang upright from where he’d been resting his head on his desk. Allen’s hands hovered over the piano keys. “I’m gonna play this one time, so pay attention.”
Milo closed his eyes and let the notes wrap around him, through him. He moved his fingers across the desk, an invisible keyboard. It was hardly an elegant system, but so far it worked better than Milo squinting himself sick at the m
usic. He’d listen to Allen play it through one time, and between his memory and what his eyes could decipher, he’d lock it into his brain.
Allen had spotted him curled into a C with his pounding head between his knees after squinting at music all day.
“What’s your problem?” he’d asked. “You got a hangover?”
“Headache. My eyes aren’t great, makes the music hard to see.” As soon as Milo said it, his instincts dulled by exhaustion and the tight pain across his head, he felt a dart of fear that Allen would get him canned, make room for a piano player who could read music properly.
Allen hadn’t replied, which Milo found hardly reassuring. Instead, he began to pace their tiny office, a comical task in that box-shaped space. Then he nudged Milo’s shoulder hard enough that he almost knocked him off the chair. “So, how are you with playing by ear?” Milo squinted up at Allen, his vision wavering into focus on his friend’s smile. “Because I’ve got an idea,” Allen said.
And thus was born their partnership in keeping Milo employed.
Milo was afraid the bosses would figure it out and send him packing, soon as they realized he couldn’t actually see the music he was plugging. But no one paid him all that close attention once he got hired, and the bosses—who now answered to Warner Brothers, which pillaged the catalog for their films regularly after buying them out—had other things on their mind than whether their newest plugger could see.
So as long as Allen kept helping him out like this with the new material, things were swell. And for his part, Allen seemed fond enough of Milo not to mind so much. They all seemed to help each other out, Milo noticed. The office girls would cover answering the phones if one of them stepped out for a bite, or the fastest typist, Helen, would sometimes do some of the other girls’ work for them if they were having a tough day.
There was no acknowledgment of this. They just went ahead and did it. Milo suspected that none of them wanted to see one of their own out there on a bread line.
Milo was practicing the newest tune—sentimental slop rhyming “love” with “dove”—when he nearly jumped out of his chair. “I don’t have time for this!” bellowed the manager at Mrs. Smith, the head secretary with her brown hair slicked back on her head and pulled into a tight knot at the nape of her neck. “Get me another girl, and one that can type this time!”
He saw him stomp his way back to his office, and Milo figured it was time for a lunch break, anyhow. He paused by Mrs. Smith’s desk. She was a widow, poor thing, a waif of a creature, of indeterminate age. She carried herself with an air of weary maturity, and her hairstyle was old-fashioned, but when she flashed a rare and cheerful smile, she could be a fresh young girl of twenty.
“You okay?”
She sighed and glanced briefly up from the carriage of her Corona. “Swell. Know any girls who can take dictation, read music, and type like the wind? If so, send them my way. Miss Jones got herself engaged.”
“Another one bites the dust.”
“Poor dear found herself the last of a dying breed: an independently wealthy man who goes fishing for a wife in the steno pool.”
“I’m off to lunch. Want me to bring you back a sandwich?”
“Sure, I’ll live the high life today with a pastrami on rye.”
“Your wish is my command.”
Milo himself wasn’t going just to eat lunch. He was going to Macy’s to buy his mother a present.
He had never given his mother a proper present that he could remember, not even when the tailor shop was in the money; he never earned his own keep before, is why. And with a few paychecks now, and a few lunches skimped on and coins set aside, Milo was prepared to buy his mother something nice, something just for her, that couldn’t be given to anyone else like the last piece of brisket that she would never take.
He strode at a rapid clip through the silky cool of middle September to Herald Square. As he passed under the awning of Macy’s, he stepped into a whole other world, where the Depression didn’t exist, or everyone liked to pretend so, anyhow. And if a person pretended hard enough, couldn’t he almost make it true? After all, with those stout pillars supporting floor upon floor of merchandise, you just had to know that people were buying these things with some kind of money.
Milo had already made up his mind, so once inside the store, it was a simple matter of finding the ladies’ overcoats. His $18 weekly pay wasn’t enough to afford an extravagant item, and his mother would never wear anything too fancy anyhow, these days. Just last week the Shapiros nearly got evicted, after all, and it was only passing the hat around the neighbors that kept the locks off the doors for a little longer. It wouldn’t do to flounce around in fancy clothes, considering.
But a nice, new, warm overcoat for about $10, that much he could do, and Chana Schwartz would probably even wear it.
Soon enough, a headache gripped his face from east to west. He was standing, in all places, in front of perfumes, instead of overcoats. He suspected that he would need the elevator, but had no idea where it was.
“Who’s the lucky lady?”
“I’m sorry, miss?”
That voice chimed in him like a bell, so familiar, yet he had never set foot in the store before. He turned away from his search for elevators and brought his nearsighted gaze to the shop girl leaning on the glassy perfume counter in front of him. The posture was familiar, too, somehow…
“Who’s the lucky lady receiving a gift from a good-looking fellow like you?”
“Ah, well, my mother, if I can find the overcoats, that is. It’s getting cold soon, see…”
“How nice for her to have such a thoughtful son.” The girl stepped away from Milo and he thought that was the end of that, until she walked to the end of the counter, lifted a section on a hinge, and stepped through. An older woman behind the counter barked at her, “Miss Adair! You come back to your post, right now.”
Miss Adair paid the woman no mind, despite the other lady’s reddening outrage. Milo began to stammer, “Miss, I don’t want you to get in any trouble, I’m sure I can find—”
“Right this way,” she said, moving past him without seeming to have heard. He was able to easily keep an eye on her dark green dress, and the sway of her hips as she wound through the crowd brought more attention than just his. She paused before the elevator. “I’ll tell you a secret, Mr.…”
“Short,” Milo replied. It was already automatic to say so. He’d decided to go ahead and keep the new, American-sounding moniker that he’d gotten accidentally.
Miss Adair went on, watching the elevator doors and tucking one errant curl behind her ear. “I’m getting fired any time now, Mr. Short. I’m quite sure that the only reason I haven’t been told this news is because they need me to stand behind the counter and gush rapturously about all the various eaux de parfum until a new girl can start. In fact, I couldn’t care less if I were selling tin cans of beans, which is probably why they’re firing me.”
The elevator door slammed open, and the dark-haired Miss Adair preceded him inside. “I might as well see you all the way to your destination, wouldn’t you say?” She turned to the elevator man. “Ladies’ coats, please.”
“Please, don’t do this on my account,” Milo replied, loosening his collar and swallowing hard.
“No, no, I’m getting canned on my own account entirely, I assure you.”
At the appropriate floor—Milo didn’t even notice the number, he was too busy feeling ashamed of helping this pretty girl get sacked—Miss Adair preceded him out onto the floor. “Mr. Short? Are you coming?”
He hurried along beside her. Her low heels clicked along the shiny floor. “You see, I used to have a job I enjoyed very much. Only I had a few bad days and a boss who was none too indulgent, and so I was out on my keister and ended up a salesgirl.”
“What job was that?”
“I was a secretary at Jerome Remick. Now that was a job. Seeing the performers come in and out, listening to the pianos all day, of course I
did take more than my share of aspirin, between the typewriters and the pianos—”
“We’ve met before!” exclaimed Milo, gently touching her elbow to get her attention. She stopped indeed, looking pointedly from his hand on her arm up to his face. Milo released her arm and flushed. “I apologize. I just—I remember you. A few months ago, you were kind enough to explain to this naïve young man exactly what a song plugger was.”
She squinted at his face and Milo felt a warming flush creep up his jaw. This close, he could see she was just about the same height as him. “Oh yes. I should have remembered: Mr. Short. What an interesting name.”
“Used to be Schwartz.” Milo did not elaborate on the circumstances of the change.
“I see, Mr. Used to Be Schwartz. You didn’t get the job, alas.”
“No, but I got another one down the block. I’m plugging for TB Harms.”
“Well. Good for you. Now, the girls up here can help you find the perfect coat, and I’m off to resume getting fired.”
“Thank you, Miss Adair. I hope you don’t get fired.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t waste your hope on that. Because I don’t think I mind at all.” She’d begun to walk backward, though this meant the shoppers had to scatter out of her way as she went. “And you may call me Vivian, just in case we happen to see each other again someday.”
Back at TB Harms, Milo presented the sandwich to Mrs. Smith with a flourish and a bow, then slammed his office door shut and about knocked Allen right off his seat with the shock of it.
“Watch it, would you? A fella can’t even think.”
“Sorry. Guess I decided to be extra energetic today.” Milo propped the coat box in a corner, his mind replaying that backwards walk of Vivian the perfume girl, the dame sauntering away with the faintest smile playing over her lips.
Vivian In Red Page 6