Vivian In Red

by Kristina Riggle

  I turn toward a bench facing the glassy stillness of Conservatory Pond and flop down.

  Daniel settles down on the bench next to me with a strange, unnecessary level of care. “All I’m saying is that you’ll be great at whatever you want to do, Ellie. Whenever you figure that out.”

  I lack the energy to argue. It just ends up in this crazy loop where I say things about myself meant to be reality checks, and he keeps marshaling his ninny optimism, until I’m painting myself as a drooling nincompoop and he’s awarding me the Pulitzer. I suppose it’s meant to be nice, but you know what else would be nice? If someone listened to me.

  I lean back on the bench and bump into Daniel’s arm, which had been stretched along the back. He lifts his arm out of the way, crosses his arms over his chest. Not so long ago he would have wrapped that arm around me, stroking my shoulder with his fingers.

  I watch a mother pick up her crying toddler. She covers the child’s sore elbow with tiny kisses like bird pecks. My mother may have missed years of my falls and scrapes and mishaps, but I know who was there to pick me up, alongside my dad. My Grandma Bee, and Grampa Milo. I take in a deep, fortifying breath and then beam out a prayer of sorts to the memories of my grandmother, my dad. I’ll be good to him, I promise. I’ll do my very best.

  “Hi, Grampa.”

  Grampa Milo looks up and waves at me, with his fingers opening and closing like a child who doesn’t quite know how to do it yet. He seems downcast and frail, even more than he’d been right after his collapse.

  When Esme let me in, she warned that “Mr. Short is not feeling in spirits today,” and raised her dark eyebrows in an ominous look.

  In the corner of the room sits one of the day nurses, reading a book. I’m hoping she’ll step out and give us privacy, but she doesn’t even seem to have noticed me.

  I settle in the other embroidered chair, which remains in its new, closer position to Grampa’s chair. The rug still holds depressions from the chair’s former position, after all this time. “So, Grampa, did Uncle Paul explain to you about the book?”

  His gaze appears to be on the floor ten inches in front of his feet, which are in slippers. He’s always worn shoes in the house, and nice ones, too, having often said that his first purchase for himself after his first big hit was a decent pair of shoes. I’m about to repeat my question, when I detect a slow nod.

  “I hope it’s okay. I promise I’ll do a good job. People are interested, you know. Why should we keep all those great stories to ourselves?” I had already decided to leave Naomi and her less-sensitive plan out of the picture. Grampa loves her, too, I know. Every brash, ambitious inch of her.

  He turns his head slowly to face me, then gestures to his face. He shrugs, and turns his gaze back to the same spot on the carpet.

  “Oh, I know, Grampa, but your voice will come back. Meanwhile, we can do a lot with yes or no, and gestures, don’t you think? And Uncle Paul gave me a list of people to start with, you know, your friends who are still… I mean, those who… Oh hell, this is off to a flying start, isn’t it?”

  I’m rewarded with a sly smile.

  I hadn’t phrased it right, anyway. It wasn’t a list of not-dead-yet friends. It was a list of relatives of those friends. Nephews and sons and grandsons. Most of the primary sources had gone ahead of Grampa to whatever there is after death. Of course there were younger people who had worked with him, but everything about the far past, the parts of his life that Grampa Milo always waved away with a grimace and a shrug? All of those people are already pushing up the daisies.

  “I know you weren’t always crazy about this idea, but I won’t do a bad job, honest I won’t. I’ll be respectful.”

  No reaction. Maybe a nod, I can’t even really tell.

  “Excuse me a minute, Grampa. I have to go get something I’ll be right back.”

  When I hustle across the entry, I interrupt Esme in the kitchen. She startles and turns away from the window, and that’s when I notice a cigarette in her hand, near the cracked kitchen window. “I’m sorry, miss. I know I’m not supposed to. Just once in a while, when I feel worried… I felt so bad the other day when Mr. Paul said he smelled it. It must have been in my clothes.” She stubs it out in the sink and closes the window.

  “What did you mean when you said he’s not in spirits?”

  Esme sighs and bites her lip. “He had a burst of good mood last week, where he was working hard with the therapist on his words, and smiling at the nurses. He brightened up at Mrs. Linda’s plan to let him sleep in his old bed again. But one night he seemed to get frightened, then very agitated, and tried to … push something. But just the air. There was only air. I was bringing him a drink while the nurse was in the restroom, and I was glad it was just me.”

  “Why is that?”

  Esme looks over both shoulders, then leans across the kitchen island. “I’m afraid Mr. Short might be seeing things. And I’m afraid if Mr. Paul sees it, or the nurses, they will think he needs to be in the hospital. And I think that would suck the last of the life out of him, to be away from his home, from Mrs. Bee’s home.”

  She straightens back up. “He has not done that again that I have seen, and no one else has noticed. But ever since, he has been sad and quiet and won’t work with the therapists anymore. It’s like something is vexing him, something even more than the not speaking.”

  “And he can’t explain it to anyone. How terrible.”

  A chill crawls across my neck, though the apartment is stuffy in the summer heat that creeps in each time someone opens a door. It’s more than terrible, it’s eerie. Like a curse.

  “This is ridiculous to do a book now. I must be out of my mind.”

  “What book, miss?”

  “Oh, never mind, I’m just mumbling to myself. Thank you, Esme. For telling me this.”

  “And miss, please don’t tell anyone what I saw Mr. Short do. With the pushing air. I’m worried for him to end up in the hospital, and of course Mrs. Linda would be upset with me if she knew I saw but did not say. I would speak of course if I thought the hospital would help. But I think… I think that it would not.”

  “Well said. I think that it would not, indeed.”

  “And I’m so sorry about the smoking. I promise I won’t do it in the house again.”

  “Well, it’s not my house, so I don’t much care as far as that goes. But it’s probably wise, for the sake of your lungs if nothing else. I won’t tell, don’t worry.”

  I step into the foyer, where I can see the back of Grampa Milo’s drooping white head. I’ll have to wait for the interviewing. Another day, when perhaps he is “in spirits.”

  As I say goodbye to Grampa Milo—I can’t help but wonder each time if it will be the last—a worry squirms into the back of my mind. What if he was “pushing air” and pushed something else and was hurt? What if he became a danger to himself, if he’s getting agitated at nothing? Was he hallucinating?

  What if a terrible thing happened, and I helped it happen with my silence? Though, if I told Aunt Linda, she might fire Esme for not saying anything earlier.

  If I’ve learned nothing from my aborted career as a journalist, I know this: the way forward is only obvious if you blind yourself to half the facts. When you fully think through both sides of an issue as a reporter should, when you can actually understand and believe all of the arguments for going one way or another, decision-making becomes impossible. After all, either path could lead to disaster. Maybe half-ignorance is where bliss truly lies.

  I let myself out and realize I’ve left my carefully packed bag behind, with its useless recorder and fresh clean pad of paper. It hardly matters; they are props for a charade, and I’ll have to resume the charade another day.

  I spend the next weeks dutifully going around to apartments around the city, and sometimes borrowing Uncle Paul’s town car to motor out to the suburbs, visiting with those who had a touchstone with the past. When I can blot out the strange circumstances, I can almost
enjoy these interviews.

  Then someone will make a remark, like how very much I looked like my grandfather, and it crashes back over my head.

  Uncle Paul was right about one thing: there is an advantage to my family name. Everyone is forthcoming to Milo’s granddaughter, telling anecdotes and sharing remembrances, and digging out old photos. In talking with a frizzy-haired twenty-three-year-old about her grandfather, they forget that their words will be typed up in a manuscript and printed thousands of times. That’s always when the good stuff shows up.

  On a late August day when a cool wind whips up some early withered leaves amidst the usual street trash blowing around, I take the subway to SoHo, to meet the son of my grandfather’s old songwriting partner. He might help me solve a mystery of sorts: why Grampa Milo stopped writing after his one huge hit show, to devote himself entirely to producing. He always said it was a matter of not ever being able to capture lightning in a bottle again, and not wanting to follow up his best work with a flop. That was the Milo Short line on the issue, and I’d never had the opportunity—in fact, never had the urge—to pry before.

  The subway crowd spits me onto the sidewalk, and I consult my scrawled directions to the loft apartment of Jerry Allen, son of Grampa Milo’s long ago composing collaborator, Bernard Allen. Jerry’s building is a former cast iron factory now built into trendy loft apartments.

  Jerry himself answers the door, a pink silk scarf draping casually over the shoulders of his unremarkable white dress shirt. “Well, if it isn’t the Short family scion, do come in.”

  “Hardly a scion, and hello, it’s nice to see you again.”

  “I’m not sure how I can help you exactly since I’m not my dad, but I will do my best to assume his persona while we speak. Which means I should be two and a half sheets to the wind and wobbling on the piano bench right about now. But I’m trying to cut back on my drinking while the sun is up, so we’ll have to fake it, what do you say?”

  “I say that suits me fine. Great place, here.” The ceilings are high, the wood floors gleaming, and two walls of windows drown the room in sunlight.

  He waves his hand as if to dismiss its existence. “Eh, it’s not bad. My partner prefers it down here, but I’m old-fashioned and mostly just old, and I’d rather live uptown. … Have a seat over there, if you would.”

  He points to a modern white couch that looks like it’s folded from stiff paper, but is surprisingly comfortable when I perch on the edge of its pristine surface.

  “Tea?”

  “Sure,” I answer, just to give myself a minute to organize my thoughts, though I’m afraid to stain the couch with tea. I always accept when a beverage is offered at an interview. It makes a pleasant bridge into the business of the day, and it creates a small domestic bond, if only for a few minutes.

  There’s a grand piano near the window, and I am drawn to the photographs propped on its glossy surface. As I grow closer, I can see that rather than the show-off celebrity photos I would have imagined—Liza Minnelli, Patti LuPone—they are all intimate candid shots of friends and family.

  And there’s Grampa Milo, looking his usual dapper and gregarious self. In the picture, he’s laughing, a three-quarter view of a great guffaw, standing next to Bernard Allen and a large broad-shouldered woman who might be Mrs. Allen; I’m guessing the picture is from the ’50s or so. He looks comfortably middle-aged here, fortyish, with merry crinkles by his eyes and only the faintest glints of gray in his hair. The dapper look, I know, is entirely a function of his clothing, which was always finely made from the day he could afford it. Coming from a family of tailors, he knows the value of a good suit. But without the suit, if one should happen to catch a glance of him, he’s actually a funny-looking fellow with features a bit large for his face and his hair never quite behaving, no matter how often he has it trimmed.

  “Ah. You’ve seen my gallery, there. I’ll get you a copy of that picture.”

  “Oh, that would be wonderful, thank you.”

  We get through the usual pleasantries, Jerry asking after Grampa and promising to visit, then we move back to the couch and chair.

  Jerry is all charming host, but he’s stiff and won’t look me in the eye.

  My recorder has got plenty of batteries and a fresh tape. With that in mind, I put away my notebook and pen, and angle toward him like we’re two pals having a nice chat. He relaxes right off, as I figured he would, once I put the pen and pad away.

  Jerry is telling some story about his dad that had little to do with Grampa Milo, but I’ve got nothing else to do this afternoon, and I’m in no hurry. In a lull, though, with Jerry gazing out over his piano, but not focused anywhere in particular, I blurt my question.

  “Why did they stop writing? Together, I mean?”

  “Well, my dad drank himself to death, one reason.”

  I blink hard, and shift on the couch.

  “I meant before that. There were many years before that.” Poor Bernie Allen. He could never get back the success of his one big hit, try as he might. Hollywood ate him alive and he fled back to New York, where he wrote flop after flop for the stage.

  Jerry doesn’t answer, and goes to his little rolling bar cart. “You want something?”

  I shake my head and purse my lips to keep from filling the empty silence. That’s one of the few tricks I’ve picked up: don’t fill the silence. Let your source do it.

  “You’re going to sweat this out of me, eh?”

  I laugh, but it comes out high-pitched and nervously girlish.

  Jerry shrugs, walking back with the ice clinking in his amber drink. “I don’t know for sure. But something happened way back then, I’m sure of it. Something between your grandfather and my dad that made them both quit. I mean, they could have found other writers if they didn’t want to work together. Look at Richard Rodgers, going from Larry Hart to Hammerstein, and he did okay. It happened all the time. Except maybe for the Gershwins, God bless ’em. But that’s brothers, and there’s not much that can break up brothers, short of a brain hemorrhage, and hell even then, Ira kept writing.” He raises his glass, toasting the poor young George Gershwin, cut down in his prime.

  “So you think it was a breakup, then. Not just that Milo didn’t want to write anymore.”

  “Who doesn’t want to have a second success? You know any baseball players that quit after winning one World Series? Any opera divas who decide one perfect aria is enough? It makes no sense.”

  “But that’s what he always said.”

  “I know that’s what he said. But I don’t believe him.”

  “Are you saying he’s lying?”

  At this Jerry settles back in his chair, crosses one knee over the other, and looks at me wearily, down his aquiline nose. “Are you writing a book, or are you writing an ode to his greatness?”

  I flinch away from the judgment in Jerry’s expression.

  “Hey, look, I didn’t mean to sound so tough. I know he’s sick, and you love him, hell, we all do. Everyone loves Milo. And they should. Even my dad never stopped being his friend, even though they couldn’t work together, but listen, if you’re going to write a book you have to hear it all, not just what makes you feel good. And now I’m treating you like a child. Your dad, rest his soul, would probably kick me in the keister.”

  I glance at my dad’s watch on my wrist with its big, friendly numbers that he never had to squint at, even when he wasn’t wearing his glasses. “He’d probably agree.”

  “So, you want to hear my theory, or what?”

  “That depends. You going to fix me a drink after all?”

  “Now you’re talking, toots.”

  At this I laugh. “Toots? Really?”

  “I was watching some old movies and maybe the lingo is in my head. Your call made me feel nostalgic. Some of Dad’s Hollywood stuff wasn’t so bad, really. He just couldn’t take it out there, the way they acted like songwriters—the songs themselves—were nothing.”

  “Grampa didn’t like
it there, either, I remember. I think he only went once, and didn’t even finish the movie.”

  “Well, and he had that sick sister. That didn’t make it any easier. If they had to hurry back for a problem, can you imagine? Days on a train.” Jerry walked back with the drink. “Cheers to the bygone days of Allen-Short.”

  I raise my glass again. “Tell me what you remember, then. Tell me what you think.”

  Jerry takes a long pull of his drink and plunks it down. “Okay. I’m a rambler, so bear with me.

  “After The High Hat, my God, were they flying. I was only a pipsqueak then, but I remember my father coming in late from these parties where he was schmoozing all the famous people. I remember moving uptown, and crying because I was going to miss my friends down the block. My mother used to tell me all the time how my father would twirl through the door, right through the door like frigging Balanchine, grab her by the waist and spin her around to music only in his head. But then Milo only wanted to produce other shows, instead of writing their own, and as you well know he was pretty damn good at sniffing out a hit. Somehow he just knew, as the great ones always do. Anyway, as I got older, I saw my dad around home more and more, but it was like he grew into the piano. He was sitting there when I left for school, and sitting there when I got home, his ashtray overflowing and a bottle beside him growing more and more empty. The angle of the sun when I got home used to light up those bottles and for a while I thought it was pretty, because I didn’t really get what was happening.