Vivian In Red

by Kristina Riggle

  Then Vivian is right next to Eleanor’s chair. She’s looking down, even, as if she’s reading what’s on the paper. The fright of this apparition so close to my granddaughter fills my head with a screaming white noise.

  Don’t touch her! I want to holler, though I’m not sure why that scares me so.

  Vivian is wearing a brown wool suit, and a hat with a little piece of net coming off of it. She bends down to adjust her stockings, the net of the hat almost brushing Eleanor’s cheek.

  Eleanor looks up to me and I force myself to snap my gaze away, toward the piano. I pretend to be thinking, then cup my hand to my ear, waving my hand at her.

  She pulls a sweater out of her bag, remarking lightly that she feels a sudden chill.

  She repeats her last question, which I still didn’t hear. I sink deeper into my chair. My breathing is fast and shallow, and the effort of trying to act normal while a ghost or hallucination or demon is hovering near my darling granddaughter is only making my old ticker pump harder.

  A voice, that smoky voice, drifts into my mind: I used to depend on you, Milo. And look what happened to me.

  I told you not to quit that job. I didn’t ask you to follow me around.

  “Grampa?”

  Vivian perches on the arm of the chair now. If Eleanor were to sit back, she’d bump right into her. Through her? I’ve never seen the Vivian apparition get so close to another person. I have no idea what might happen—maybe not anything, since I’m probably just losing it, a stroke-damaged brain coughing up stuff just to make me crazy.

  Vivian’s voice again, purring: You loved the attention.

  When you were nice, sure, who wouldn’t?

  That word, “nice.” Seems to me it’s usually used to describe a quiet girl, who will do whatever you like, without question. Like a loyal, devoted worker bee…

  Don’t. Don’t you start. Leave her out of this.

  “Grampa!”

  I jerk my attention back to Eleanor, and that’s when I realize I’d been staring just over her left shoulder, at the space where until one split second ago, there was Vivian. A movement out of the corner of my eye makes me startle violently. In an instant she’s in the window seat, without ever seeming to have crossed the room. Well, why should she—it—have to walk?

  “Grampa, you look terrible. Are you not feeling well? Can you hear me?”

  I pantomime headache, fatigue. I grip my head, grimace, wipe my brow with my good hand, and in doing so notice I’m genuinely sweaty.

  By this time the nurse is at my side, today a male nurse named Alejandro, who is taking my pulse.

  “His pulse is rather fast,” he says. “Were you talking of anything upsetting?”

  “No, just boring stuff, like what year his first show was produced, double-checking the names of the co-stars… All stuff he’s heard a thousand times.”

  “It’s not your fault. I was just wondering.”

  Eleanor hugs herself tight. I’ve seen that gesture pass down from my children now to their children. My daughter Rebekah used to be famous for it. She’d told Bee that she started doing it on her first day of kindergarten because her mommy wasn’t there to do the hugging.

  Poor kid Eleanor never really had a mother for that, lousy woman taking off like she did.

  Focusing on Eleanor, my flesh-and-blood, vulnerable granddaughter, seems to have distracted my mind from its own hallucinating. My pulse is calmer, I know, without Alejandro saying so, though he does.

  He brings me fresh water. When I dare look up to the window seat, it is nothing but a lovely frame around a city scene: the fading green of early autumn, and pedestrians strolling by in hats and smart jackets.

  I take in another deep breath and puff it out audibly, glad I can at least make noise of a sort. I snap my fingers so Eleanor will turn around and look at me again. I make a “sorry” face, and beckon her back.

  “Grampa, were you really okay? I wasn’t upsetting you, was I?”

  I shake my head, hard as I dare.

  “I’m tired of this for now,” she says, dropping her notebook into her bag. “How about we just sit for a while?”

  At this I nod, and smile. Alejandro has returned to his corner. He appears to be working diligently on something. Paperwork? Night school? Maybe he’s writing up a detailed account of my attack of sorts.

  I resolve to be master of myself next time the Vivian-thing appears. After all, what is it but a vision? She’s not even real, and by this point I should not be surprised so much. If I keep reacting like this, I’m going to land myself in some kind of hellish combination of bug house and nursing home, not to mention upsetting every loved one I have who happens to witness my distress. Hell, there are worse things to see than a vision of a pretty girl. And don’t I know it.

  Eleanor gets up to wander across the room, and as I follow her progress toward the stereo, my gaze passes over Vivian striding toward me now. Same brown dress. No hat, though, and her lipstick looks a little blurred, like a photograph that didn’t turn out right. Eleanor bends to look through some records stacked on a low table, and I turn my stare back to Vivian now, raising my chin.

  I am also gripping the arm of my chair harder than I need, but what of it?

  So you can look me in the eye after all.

  Her eyes are green, a deep gold green. People used to say she could be in pictures but until color movies were a regular thing, a person in a theater would never fully appreciate what she looked like, would never see those eyes the way God meant them to be seen.

  I steal a look at Alejandro. He’s still bent over his work, chewing on the end of his pen.

  I lift one eyebrow at her.

  See? It’s not so bad having me around.

  Flash of memory: she said that once, in the New Amsterdam Theatre, out in the house seats. Back then I was writing the lyrics, trying to keep Allen dry long enough to write the tunes, all with the director breathing down our necks to work faster, faster, more songs, more songs…we had to throw out half of what we wrote. My stomach curls up in a pretzel just to think about it. All the while my father running out of money and trying to pretend like we didn’t all know…

  Vivian crosses her arms and stares up and away, like she’s watching a performance beyond my head in the far corner of the room.

  They’re writing songs of love, but not for me… swirls into the air. Eleanor stands up from the record player and walks across the room. I nod to her; good choice. She’s walking back to her chair, and that’s when I see that Vivian is sitting in it. She’s got her legs crossed, and she’s smiling at me with a kind of playful, nasty glee I’ve come to recognize in these last weeks.

  My resolve to play it cool is fading away with each step Eleanor takes. I can’t explain why this panics me, but it does, and I make to stand up out of my chair, stop her, save her, and because Eleanor sees me start to stand, and so does Alejandro, they snap to attention like good little cadets and go right to my side.

  An earthy chuckle, only for me.

  I thought I wasn’t real. Then what are you so worried about?

  Go to hell, Vivian.

  Beat you to it, Milo Short.

  I point with my chin toward the piano. Eleanor and the nurse walk along next to me, each set of hands resting lightly under my forearms, until I reach the bench and they pull it out for me.

  Eleanor switches off the music, and I apply my good hand to the keys. It’s awkward like this; my left hand is used to harmony. But it’s probably the only thing I’ve improved in the weeks since my fall: left hand melody. I play the first tune that leaps to mind, which happens to be the song that got me into the whole mess to begin with: Herbert Hoover said he knew our bleak Depression wouldn’t last… But of course I can’t sing the words. It’s only Allen’s jaunty melody that spills out of the old upright, filling up this tall, narrow room that’s all too crowded lately, if you ask me.

  New York City, 1999

  The name beams up at me from the screen, the gl
owing pixels piercing my tired eyes. I take off my glasses, rub my face and the bridge of my nose, then put them back on. A long moment passes before the letters to sharpen back to clarity.

  This record came to me via genealogy research, helped along by a slight white lie that I’m researching the Adair family tree for a friend. My source, a lady named Joan from Springfield, Illinois, was overly apologetic she didn’t know more, because this branch of the family was tangential to her own father’s Adairs. Still, it was more than I had before: Vivian Adair, born 1909 in Chicago, died 1938 in some town in Michigan called Ludington.

  Vivian never married.

  One sister, Estelle Mann, née Adair, also settled in Ludington, who had one child, name of Millicent, who married and had one child, Alexander Mann Bryant. The records have little information about Estelle, other than that she recently died, and almost nothing on Millicent, either.

  I do the math and note that Vivian hadn’t even made it to thirty years old. “So young,” I whisper. I didn’t realize how much I’d hoped to find her still alive until I saw that death date, and drooped under the weight of my disappointment.

  Mrs. Dorothy Allen had been unnerving in her venom on the subject of Vivian Adair, all these years later. When I’d gone to interview her in the upscale nursing home in Connecticut, I’d imagined a doddering wisp of a creature, covered in papery wrinkles, tiny hands gnarled by arthritis. After all, Bernard Allen had been older than Grampa Milo, so his wife must have been older yet than my eighty-eight-year-old grandfather.

  As I rounded the corner into her private room, I saw I was only partly right. Papery skin, yes, gnarled hands, somewhat, but broad and thick. Mrs. Allen, despite a slight stoop in her upper spine, cut an imposing figure, even from a wheelchair. She fixed me with a stare over the top of her glasses as I came in. She had knitting in her lap.

  “What do you want?” she demanded.

  I raised my chin and tried to remember Daniel’s patronizing advice about exuding confidence. I told her I was writing about Milo Short, and that her son had told me something about a woman in Milo’s life, around the time he quit writing lyrics.

  “Vivian Adair,” she’d sneered, drawing out the last name in particular, biting off the “R” hard instead of letting it fade softly away, as one might imagine for a Continental-sounding name. I asked her how to spell it, but this aged woman snatched my notebook right out of my hands and demanded my pen.

  In penmanship that once was impeccable, now made shaky with age, and perhaps indignation, she wrote Vivian’s name, with an added note: “Sister. From Chicago.”

  She thrust the notebook back toward me with the force of a dagger. Curiosity had swallowed my nerves by then. “You sound like you can’t stand her. Why?”

  “My husband”—she also sneered the word husband, I couldn’t help but notice—“seemed to think she had something to do with why he and Milo never worked together again. He’d get drunk and rant and rave, and say things… I can’t remember what things now, so don’t ask me.”

  Her eyes seemed clouded, and I had an urge to reach out with a handkerchief and wipe them for her; they were leaky. All the same, those eyes bored into me, daring me to challenge her. I did not, in fact, challenge her to recall these rants. But there were a couple of other questions that needed asking.

  “At the risk of offending you, I have to ask. Did Vivian and your husband have an affair?” I spit it out and held my breath, waiting for outrage.

  “Ha!” she barked. “No.”

  “Or…” I tapped my pen in my notebook. “Maybe she and Milo…?”

  “How the blazes should I know? Like I kept track of that rat’s love life.”

  I straightened my spine at the “rat.” I’d given Mrs. Allen my name when I made the appointment, with the aid of staff at the nursing home. I figured it was equal chance that she’d forgotten I’m his granddaughter, or just didn’t give a rip.

  Either way, I was none too disappointed to get out of there, and spent the drive back to Manhattan, in the back of Uncle Paul’s borrowed town car, wondering what the hell all this meant.

  My phone rings now, its metallic bleat so shrill into my quiet apartment that I yelp out loud, then chuckle at myself. I glance at my watch and blanch. I had plans with my old roommate Jill, who’d emerged from her law school torpor to make a happy hour date. I was a half-hour late already.

  “Hi,” I answer, “I’m sorry I’m late…”

  “Oh, got a hot date, do you?”

  Daniel. I should join modern times and get caller ID. “Oh, sorry. A hot date with Jill, if you count margaritas in Midtown as hot.”

  “Oh. I was just checking on you, and your grandfather.”

  I find myself rolling my eyes in impatience, wanting to get back to my computer and my notes. I can hear my dad’s voice reminding me: He’s being kind. You should appreciate it. Dad was so good at reminding me to consider others’ good intentions. And it’s true: breakup or not, Daniel was showing he cared.

  I gave him a quick update, wondering if Jill had a cell phone, wondering if I should bother calling the restaurant to get a message to her.

  “Hey,” Daniel says. “You hungry? I could get Chinese at our usual place and bring it up.”

  Not once since the breakup has he suggested setting foot in this place again. I am hungry, I realize suddenly. Famished. I’d been so lonely in the immediate aftermath of the split, I’d have invited him up, tossed aside the food, and ripped off his clothes. A girl has needs, and I miss having wrinkles on more than just my side of the bed.

  But I’m wearing a ratty Columbia shirt, pajama pants, and my breath smells like the onion bagel I had hours ago. Besides that, his sudden interest in spending time with me outside his ex-boyfriend mercy mission to support me in Grampa’s stroke and recovery strikes me as a complication.

  “No, thanks. I’d better catch up with Jill.” It’s easy to lie on the phone, even to him. I don’t intend to see Jill, either. I’m going to order in and get back to my keyboard.

  “Oh,” he says, his voice rich with wounded surprise. I choose not to notice and hang up as soon as I’m able.

  Back at the screen I reread the email from my genealogy source. Born in Chicago in ’09. I wonder at the odd gaps in Mrs. Allen’s memory. She knew this name, knew the spelling, but claimed not to know if Vivian had been dating her husband’s best friend. She remembered Vivian had a sister in Chicago, but nothing else about her. In my last few questions before I gave up and left, I’d pressed her to elaborate on their connection, on the specifics of what actually happened. She could not, or would not, say. The most I could get from her was: “I don’t think she did anything but cause trouble, and that’s all I needed to know.”

  I was prepared to leave it alone, after asking Grampa Milo and getting answers some way or another—charades, yes/no questions, that alphabet board—and then moving on to more pertinent biographical details, like how exactly he landed that first revue gig, the Hilarity one.

  But then Grampa Milo acted like he never heard of this girl. How could this be, when she was remembered so clearly, and with such venom, by his best friend and writing partner?

  I was deciding, in the parlor yesterday, whether to question Grampa further on this point, when he seemed to have a kind of attack, staring at different points in the room, growing pale. I abandoned the interview at the time, but my train of thought since has hardly wavered.

  Esme saw him “pushing” things. I’ve seen him several times now staring at nothing, especially yesterday, when talking of Vivian. Vivian, whom he seems not to remember.

  I sit back in the desk chair, letting the screen blur in my vision, as I idly unfasten and refasten the strap on my father’s watch. There’s something about Vivian that disturbs my grandfather enough to pretend she doesn’t exist.

  New York, 1999

  I duck out of the dining room into the gleaming white kitchen, breathing easier in the brightness of the space. Grandma Bee had redone
the kitchen in the year before her heart attack. It’s like she knew whoever used it next would want it updated with the latest appliances and bright, new finishes, though she herself was merrily accustomed to her comfy, outdated things.

  I miss the old kitchen, much as this space feels more spacious and airy. I miss it because I could easily conjure Grandma Bee in here, smiling at me and kneading the challah. This new kitchen she barely got to use.

  Esme has the night off; Aunt Linda and Eva have done most of the cooking. In other years I’ve enjoyed Rosh Hashanah. A new year in the fall has always made sense to me. Refreshing cool air, starting school. I relish the apples in honey, get chills at the sound of the shofar in the synagogue, and even enjoy the festive family dinners.

  But tonight, I’ve had to endure pitying or interrogating looks from my cousins and Aunt Rebekah, having run into Daniel at the service. I nearly collided with him, in fact. I’d been looking down to my left, chucking the chin of one of Joel’s twin baby girls. Daniel must have been watching my approach as he stood there on the sidewalk. “Shana tovah,” he told me, and I clumsily replied, “You, too,” so quietly he had to ask me to repeat myself.

  My heart was still aching with the absence of Grampa Milo in the synagogue—having been deemed by the aunts and uncles as too frail to come—and so my farewell was distracted, and sounded pained, and I think my cousins have all interpreted this as enduring heartbreak. There was maybe some of that, too. It was strange, in any case, how avid Daniel’s greeting was, his presence there at all. It was jarring in the midst of my melancholy about Grampa Milo’s absence tonight presaging his absence forever.

  Here now, at dinner, my grandfather is restless and sullen. He refuses to use the alphabet board, and grows impatient with our attempts to understand his gestures. A few minutes ago, his “good” left hand not particularly dexterous, he’d fumbled his wine and spilled it all over his lap. Eva was the fastest to get to him and begin mopping him up. I think I was the only one who saw the rough way Grampa Milo rubbed his face, so he could wipe away a tear without anyone seeing.