Eva barges into the kitchen hip first through the swinging door, hands full of red-stained cloth napkins. “Help me out here, El.”
I wordlessly take a wad from her, as she heads for the fridge. “Is there club soda in here?”
I shrug, though her head and shoulders are in the refrigerator and she can’t see me. It doesn’t matter, anyway. She’s only thinking out loud. She emerges with a can, holding it out to me. “Would you, hon? I just got my nails done.”
I oblige with my short, unadorned nails and together we stand at the sink, pouring and rubbing. This is not a two-person job, not really, but I sense Eva is none too excited to go back in there, either.
“It’s so hard,” she says, scrubbing with fervor now. “I mean, he’s almost ninety, it’s not like he’s gonna live forever, but…” She props her hip on the counter, and with her forearm pushes her frizzy curls out of her eyes. “Is it awful to say I’d rather he have just died in his sleep, rather than live out his life without control over himself?”
“No.”
“You think it’s awful.”
“No, I don’t. I’m just tired.” People are forever thinking I’m mad at them, or critical, or depressed, when all I am is tired.
“And you poor thing, bumping into Daniel, that must have been a shock. I didn’t even know he went to Emanu-El.”
I smirk at this, as I set aside one mostly clean napkin. “He rarely does. He also called me up offering to bring me takeout the other night.”
“Huh. This is a good thing?”
“It’s a complicated thing and I don’t want to deal with it.”
“Relationships are complicated,” she intones gravely, catching my eye. I catch her subtext clearly: You just don’t want to bother.
After we have scrubbed every last napkin—and really, I’m sure we could have afforded new ones—Eva and I prop the club soda cans to fully drain in the sink and give each other a fortifying glance. Back into the fray.
Before we push through the doors, Eva grasps my elbow, her manicured nails pinching me a bit and forcing me to stop.
“And hon? Listen, he’s a good kid, Daniel. If he comes back to you and says he made a mistake, will you give him a chance? People make mistakes all the time. If we could never correct our screw-ups, how grim would that be?”
Before I can answer, she grabs me around the shoulders, and for the first time tonight it occurs to me she’s a little drunk. “Shana tovah, Eleanor.”
Back in the insulated quiet of the Midtown apartment, I stare at the dark computer. I should go to sleep, I’m so tired and full and a little buzzed. But checking my email will only take a few minutes, and there’s something I’m hoping to see.
It’s been a couple of days since I looked up Alexander Mann Bryant online, and found him right away, where he’s the director of a local community theater in Ludington. I printed a newspaper article, which stares up at me now from my desk surface. The muddy black-and-white printing shows a serious-faced young man staring meaningfully into the camera, a funny contrast to the obvious canned quotes in the article about how excited he is to be bringing The Sound of Music “once again” to the good people of Ludington. He hardly looks thrilled to be urging angel-face cherubs to chirp “Do-Re-Mi.”
The theater website listed an email, and I figured, what could it hurt to ask? I’d sent something simple along the lines of, “Dear Mr. Bryant, I’m writing a biography of my grandfather, and it seems he may have known Vivian Adair, who I believe is related to your family. Do you know much about her? Eleanor Short.”
I’ve checked my email more often in the last few days than I had in the previous month. I’m not sure what I’m waiting for, exactly. What would he know about a great-aunt who died more than half a century ago?
As I’m waiting for the modem to log on, I sort through my paper mail. There’s a note in here from Uncle Paul. I frown at it, confused.
Dear El,
Listen, I’m not worried about the rent money. I know your freelancing is in a dry spell, and now without Daniel chipping in things might be tight. You’re doing me a favor taking care of the place, it’s an investment property anyway, like I always said. Hang in there, kid, and I know you’ll do a great job on the book.
Paul
He’s enclosed my September rent check, uncashed. I groan; he had to have known if he’d tried to refuse my rent check in person, I’d have refused his refusal. None of the Short kids coasted on our family money, at least, once we got our educations. I don’t intend to be the charity case of the crowd. That’s why he mentioned the book, obviously. A reminder that I’m not a freeloader in the long run. The advance money should be coming along soon, now that we’ve hammered out the fine points of the contract.
But as has been true all along, Uncle Paul could be raking in rent on this place from a proper tenant. For people who know me so well—who know I’d bristle about the returned rent check—they understand me so little. What I want most is to be taken seriously by them as a real grown-up person, not as their pet misfit. Poor Eleanor. Poor nothing; I’m plugging along, aren’t I?
The Internet connection shrieks to life at last. Spam messages, goofy email forwards, political harangues, an exasperated note from Jill about me standing her up… Ah! [email protected].
Eleanor,
The timing of your email is rotten, because Estelle, who was Vivian’s sister and just about the only living person who would have known her, just died a couple of weeks ago.
But the timing of the email is also kind of spooky, because of what Estelle told my mother, Millicent, before she died. My mom spent her whole life raised by Estelle—in order to speak nicely of the recently departed I’ll just say that their relationship was ‘difficult’ and ‘distant’—but it turns out poor old dead Aunt Vivian was her mom. See, Vivian was alone, and as Estelle put it, “It was a different time.” Since Estelle and her husband didn’t have any kids, they took my mom in and raised her. They found a friendly local doctor to put their names on the birth certificate and avoid public shame, and no one ever knew. At least until Estelle was about to meet her maker and maybe thought better of a lie that lasted longer than sixty years. Personally, I wish she’d just kicked it before she had the chance to throw my mom’s whole life into the air like confetti, but we don’t always get what we want. Obviously.
So anyway, that’s the Vivian story. Single mom, gave up the baby to her sister, and died young. No one who knows the details is alive anymore. That’s not helpful to you I’m sure. Good luck.
Alex
I seize my papers and start rustling through them, looking for the genealogy printout, searching out Millicent’s year of birth.
There! Millicent was born in 1937, when my grandfather would have been twenty-six years old, the year before he married Grandma Bee.
I look back at the email. Despite his belief that he was no help to me, Alex had typed his phone number, a few carriage returns after the sign-off.
The phone is in my hand, my fingers dialing before I even think to check the time. Eleven o’clock. Even on a Friday night, that’s pushing it for a call to a stranger. Wait, what time is it in Michigan? Well, not earlier enough to matter.
I pace the apartment, pausing before the floor-to-ceiling windows, for lack of anything else to look at. I stare down at the glowing parade of headlights clogging the streets; shows are just getting out, couples are heading out for late drinks. Millicent doesn’t know her father. Vivian was alone in Michigan, no man in sight.
It might not be the same person, I remind myself. All I’ve got is batty old Mrs. Allen’s word that Vivian’s family came from Chicago. There might be nothing more than a coincidence of name and approximate timing, assuming Vivian was close to Grampa’s age.
So, why is my heart pounding?
I know now sleep isn’t coming, not for hours at this rate. I waste twenty minutes channel flipping before I retreat to my bed with an earlier biography of Milo Short. I’ve been working thro
ugh it, marking up facts and stories to confirm or correct, noting areas of his life I might explore in a different way, so I don’t just copycat what’s been done.
It’s painstaking, and could very well settle me down. Instead of picking up where I left off, though, I instead flip to the glossy photograph pages, at intervals in the book.
There aren’t many pictures from the thirties, but I study what ones there are, thinking back to my grandfather in the earliest days of his career, when he was not much older than I am now.
I’ve learned so far that he lucked into a job writing songs for a revue called Let’s Live on Hilarity, when other songwriters failed to deliver. I’ve learned that it was mostly Bernard Allen’s contacts that got them the gig, contacts he made through his job managing and composing at TB Harms. What remains a mystery is why my grandfather quit writing lyrics. I’ve got the songs from Hilarity, though not a script, and no recordings. Not even any still photos of that show survived. His songs are funny, sharp, the rhymes amusing and inventive. The lyrics don’t age well, with all their references to Herbert Hoover and automats and such. But there’s a liveliness that I recognize in my grandfather even today; well, until he collapsed.
Speaking of liveliness, as I turn past photos of the exteriors of buildings where my grandfather worked, and the Orchard Street tenement where his father first emigrated and where he’d have spent his youngest years, I smile at a picture of Grampa Milo and Bernard Allen in their prime. Allen’s got one arm slung around my grandfather, and they’re both holding drinks with their free hands. Allen’s got that unfocused, woozy look of the tipsy, though I might be projecting, based on his reputation. The caption says it’s a gathering at the Stork Club of people working on Let’s Live On Hilarity.
I trace Grampa Milo’s face with my finger, as if in a caress. Another picture from the same night shows him alone at a table, gazing at some point across the room, relaxed and pensive. I turn the page, then something makes me turn back and look at the photo again.
A woman with wavy dark hair is in the background of the photo, one arm across her chest, supporting the opposite elbow. In that hand she’s got a cigarette balanced in her fingertips with the nonchalance of an era long before the Surgeon General’s warning. A man in a suit leans in for conversation with the woman, but I can’t imagine she heard a thing he said. She isn’t even looking at him. Her expression is curiously intense. Her jaw seems clenched, her eyes slightly narrow. And she’s staring straight at my grandfather.
New York, January, 1935
“Geez, will you get a load of this place?” Milo took in the draping on the walls, and the vertical mirrored panels, but mostly, he was looking for famous people.
Allen jabbed him with an elbow. “Close your mouth, what’s wrong with you?”
Vivian squeezed Milo’s arm. “It’s out of this world. Oh! I think that’s Ethel Merman!”
Milo could barely keep his feet under him he was so tired, but back at the New Amsterdam, Allen had insisted that he show his face, since their producer, Max Gordon, wanted to treat them to drinks. Allen had hissed into his ear as Milo slumped over a music stand near the rehearsal piano, “Half of staying afloat in this business is staying in front of people’s faces, people that matter. So they think of you later when they have work to give. Now look alive, Milo”—at this he raised his voice and slapped him on his cheek just lightly enough to be considered playful—“because we’re painting the town.”
Vivian had heard this last part and asked to come, too, and what could Milo say? Allen’s face had pruned up when he saw Milo walking up to him with Vivian on his arm.
In the club, having deposited their coats and hats with the check girl, Vivian excused herself to find the powder room and fix her hair, because the breeze from the walk over had disturbed her curls. Allen whirled on Milo. “Why is that dame here? They almost didn’t let us in out there because Max had only put in a good word for us two. They don’t let nobodies into the Stork Club unless a somebody wants them here.”
“Because she wanted to go and I’ve got nothing against a pretty girl on my arm, and apparently the man with the golden rope out there didn’t mind the pretty girl, neither.”
“She’s got no business being around this show at all. She’s distracting.”
“Oh, go on. And why are you talking to me about distracting? I gave you the words just yesterday for the torch song and I’m still waiting for the melody for that dance number they added. I can’t write the words if I don’t even know how many beats to a phrase. Can you give me that much, eh? How many? Seven and a rest? Gimme a hint, I’m begging you.”
Allen snorted. “I just don’t understand why she’s got to be underfoot all the time. Even that chorus girl who took a shine to you doesn’t follow you around half so much. I should be so lucky.”
“You’re a happily married man, now straighten your tie, you look like you got dressed in the dark.”
Allen turned to one of the many mirrors and yanked the knot into place. “I did. I was in a rush.”
Vivian was approaching them now, sashaying along in her silky dress that seemed expensive for an errand girl hanging around their rehearsals. Milo had gone to the director and asked if they needed help somewhere on the show for his friend. The man had taken one look at Vivian from afar and told Milo he didn’t have the budget “to be giving jobs to everyone’s piece of tail.” Milo had let fly with his indignation and said he hadn’t so much as kissed her hand, but that he’d been “sorta responsible” for her losing her last job. The director raised one eyebrow on his tired, unshaven face and declared that if she could make herself useful he could probably pay her a little, “but if she intends to be ‘discovered’ as a singer or a dancer, or goes around batting her eyes at the talent…” He made a slicing motion across his throat. “Don’t think I haven’t seen girls try to get on stage all kinds of ways. She’s not hanging around you for your good looks, pal.”
Max Gordon waved them over from his table, so Milo, Allen, and Vivian began to wend their way through the crowd as the band played a foxtrot, and the glittering crowd swelled to and fro like waves.
Max beckoned them to sit down, and launched the evening with a toast to “the newest Rodgers and Hart!” If he was put out at having to rustle up an extra chair for Vivian, he did a fine job of acting like he wasn’t.
At one point, Allen grabbed Milo around the shoulders and pointed him at a camera, which flashed painfully in his eyes. “If we were somebody that’d be in Winchell’s column tomorrow, and everybody’d be talking about us.”
“Was that him taking the picture?”
“What are you, a moron? He sits at his table and watches all the beautiful people and writes it up the next day, and everybody in the city hangs on his every word, for good or ill. Ill, often enough. Nah, what we saw just now was the Stork Club’s own photographer. Billingsley will have all the pictures of the famous people in all the papers tomorrow. J. Edgar Hoover’s here somewhere, I bet.”
Gordon shouted, “Hey, Short! Dance with your girl here, or I might have to.”
Milo swallowed a golf ball in his throat. “I’m not much of a dancer—”
Gordon shrugged as if to say, then I guess it’s up to me, and rose. Milo remembered the director’s warning about Vivian tangling with the fancy people and figured the producer of the whole show would count in that forbidden group.
He stood up so fast he bonked the table and spilled his martini. A passing waiter swooped in with a cloth, and Milo bobbed in the tide of his embarrassment.
Vivian rose and accepted the hand that Milo had started to offer before the spill. “I’d love to dance.”
She all but dragged him onto the dance floor, where the tune was a slow, lulling rendition of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Milo relaxed by a degree; he could get by with shuffling in a rough square shape rather than actually dance. He held Vivian at a respectful distance for a moment, but she stepped so close she could bite him on the nose.
“It’s too crowded to take up so much space,” she said to him, her eyes level with his. “That would be quite rude, don’t you think?”
“Sure,” he replied, and then looked over Vivian’s shoulder because to look straight in her greenish-gold eyes was like to give him a stroke. He’d never seen a gal stare so hard before.
“Why don’t you like me?” Vivian asked him, raising her voice to be heard over the band.
“I like you fine, Vivian. You’re a swell girl.” Her curls were almost tickling his face. In her shoes they were the same height.
“You don’t take me out anywhere.”
‘I don’t take anyone out anywhere. I’m too busy writing and rewriting an entire show in just a few weeks. Allen tells me a chorus girl liked me and I didn’t even notice.”
“Oh well, chorus girls,” she said. “You should take a night off and take me to a show. Or even a picture, if you want to save your pennies. A picture and a soda, how about it?”
Vivian tried to pull away to get a better look at Milo’s face, but he continued to hold her close so he could look past her shoulder. It was easier, that way, to say it. “I don’t think your family would like it if you were seeing a Jew.”
“My family is a thousand miles away and if I cared what they thought I wouldn’t be in this goddamn city.”
“But my family’s just a short ride on the El.”
Vivian froze in place, and pushed back away from him. “You won’t take me out because your family wouldn’t like it?”
“No one would like it. We should either dance or move, we’re blocking up the floor here.”
Vivian whirled on her heel so fast she stumbled, and began to carve a path on a diagonal to the other side of the floor. Milo tried to keep up with her without knocking people down, keeping up a stream of “Excuse me” and “pardon” as he tried to keep Vivian’s glossy brown hair in view.
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