If you don’t have … a mink?
Take my advice and please heed it, get out while the getting’s good
Together we’ll just be defeated; do what pretty rich girls should…
So you still love me … it seems
We’ll make the strangest … of teams
Come take my hand, let’s make our stand
And live the grandest … of dreams!
“Grampa.” Eleanor is next to the piano now, standing as if she were a torch singer, leaning on its side. “You never play that song, much less sing it.”
“I’m feeling sentimental about old times, I guess.”
“I have to tell you something.”
“Yeah?”
“Alex called. The mail is here.”
I nod my understanding. Eleanor says, “Maybe we’ll look at it up in the office? It’s private there. Alex is bringing it over because I had it mailed to the Midtown apartment.”
“I might need a hand going up the stairs.”
“You’ve always got my hand, Grampa. All the hands I’ve got to give.”
We begin a halting progress, grandfather and granddaughter. It’s not that I’m so weak, just out of practice. As we go up the bend in the stairs, I flash back to one of the apparitions that scared me so bad it all went black, but today the sun is bright and the room is well lit and it’s just a patch of floral rug.
“You okay, sweetheart?” I ask her, patting her hand where she’s got it crooked in my elbow, steadying me, and maybe I’m steadying her back, just a bit.
“Sure.”
“You seem so quiet. Quiet even for you.”
“Someone I know is mad at me, and I can’t fix it.”
“Why can’t you fix it?”
She’s quiet for a few more steps. I know she heard me, so I’m patient.
“Because he wants me to do something I can’t do. I even think he’s probably right to ask me, but I can’t do it.”
“Is it something awful? Morally wrong?”
“No, nothing like that. Just something that’s beyond me.”
“For the record, I think very little is beyond you, but I’ll give you this for the sake of argument. Can you tell him that? What you just said. You even think he’s right, but you can’t.”
“It won’t matter.”
“You’d be surprised. Not saying things always seems like a better idea in the moment, until you don’t say it once, and you don’t say it a hundred times, and the fact of your not saying it grows so big it gets bigger than everything else.” We have reached my office doorway. “Listen to me on this, sweetheart. I know from secrets.”
I settle into my office chair, at this desk now blanketed in unfamiliar paper, Paul’s paper. Eleanor goes to stare out the window at the street, watching for Alex and his mail, no doubt. And so we wait in our own private silences.
I know that Alex is approaching when I see Eleanor move away from the window and take a seat in a chair opposite the desk. We both turn toward the doorway, and I startle just a tiny bit at Vivian leaning there, inspecting her deeply red fingernails. She’s wearing a gown now, a sweeping lilac-colored thing that has a deep V-neck, small waist, and fluttery sleeves. A jewel pattern decks out the shoulders. It’s more glamorous than what I ever saw her wear, because mostly in our time together we were working, so she’d be wearing a suit or day dress.
We all, even Vivian, turn toward the office door when Alex comes in, escorted by Esme, who gives us all a significant look of concern before she closes it behind her. I almost call her back to hear it the same time with us, seeing as how she helped us get this all arranged.
Alex proffers the envelope. “I didn’t look yet.”
I let Eleanor take it. Her hands visibly tremble, though I don’t know what she’s so afraid of. If she thinks the truth is scary, she should try being haunted by a dead ex-lover from six decades ago.
She frowns at it, squints, looks the page up and down.
“Excluded,” she says, her voice breathy with wonder. “Excluded as biological father.”
For a minute, I think we all forget how to speak the language, we’re all silently defining “excluded” for ourselves, until Alex says it out loud in plain English.
“You’re not the father. It wasn’t you.”
I can’t help it; I look at Vivian. She stares back at me, coolly, inscrutable, in this fancy dress of hers, like something she might have worn to a fancy party with the likes of…
“Mark Bell,” I say.
“What?” Eleanor asks. “Bell? What bell?”
“No, it’s a name. Well, sort of, his real name was Marco Rubellino. He was, well, seeing Vivian at the time as well.”
Alex shakes his head and looks out the window at the next white townhouse across the side street. He says, “Or Estelle was right and Vivian didn’t know herself because she slept with men in Michigan, too. As family lore goes, her behavior was strange and outrageous after she came back. The timing still works if she got right down to business. I’m sorry to have taken up your time, and well, your blood, Mr. Short. It was kind of you to put our curiosity to rest. And I’ll get out of your way now.”
Eleanor rises from her chair, dropping the paper on the desk. “Alex, wait.”
“I have to go call my mother and put an end to her suspense.”
“Your jacket. Let me at least get your jacket.”
I stand up behind my desk, drawing their attention in doing so. I draw on whatever gravitas I might have based on age alone and the fact that I’m dressed up in a shirt and tie today, so sick I was of deathbed pajamas. I adjust this tie, in fact, and decide I might wear one every day until I kick, just because I can.
“Jacket or no jacket, there’s something else I need to tell you, and it’s about the song.”
This brings them both to the chairs opposite the desk, without my having to even tell them to sit down. Eleanor looks sick, and Alex is trying not to look like he’s voraciously interested, but he is, he’s near about to leap across the desk.
As I settle back down to my desk and look back up, I find myself staring straight at Vivian, who is looking back at me as she always used to look: haughty, pleased with herself, but now I can detect a shining in her eyes that could be triumph or tears, who can say?
I keep my eyes on her as I continue. “Vivian and I spent a night together once. She was a wonderful girl, but sick in ways we didn’t know how to help back then. I’m ashamed because I knew that she liked me, and was hoping for what I couldn’t give her, and spending the night together was only going to confuse her more. But I pretended not to know that. Milo Short was dumb like a fox and pretended to be too innocent to know why he was going to her apartment that day. If I’d been a decent man then, I’d have steered well clear of her, knowing what I knew, no matter what comfort I thought I needed.
“Comfort me she did, and more than that, she helped me write, too. I was stuck, see, and this was the last song for the show. My eyesight is not so good, you know this. And I was a little drunk, too, and Vivian was a good secretary, so it only made sense for her to hold the pen. But she didn’t just take notes, she helped me. Yes, with the song. Trouble is, you two, I can’t say how much she helped. She was taking dictation, and adding her own ideas, and it’s all a jumble. It wasn’t so strange to have people throw in rhymes, see, and not expect to get writing credit. But if I’m being honest, and honest is what I’m being finally, she did help me quite a bit. Fact is, I couldn’t write the damn song until that night, and with her I wrote it.”
Vivian is more still than I ever saw her in life. She’s not sweeping around the room, lighting cigarettes, tossing her hair. She’s holding her own hands, elbows bent, like a little girl in a choir.
“You know,” I go on, “it wasn’t so strange for songwriters to cut people in on credit for no real reason. I’ve seen it done as an outright favor to somebody who didn’t know a C-sharp from a car horn. I’ve seen it done for publicity. So I could have cut h
er in on the credit. Allen would have pitched a fit, but then again, there was a lot eating at Allen back then and one more thing or another wouldn’t have made a difference. I was wrong, and I knew it even then. Which is why I helped send her away on that train, even though she didn’t want to go. Because when she disappeared on that train, so did everything else I’d done. It’s too late now, but I’m sorry even so.”
The sight of Vivian striding toward me should fill me with terror, given recent history. But it does not, even as she approaches on a trajectory that will brush her right between the chairs of Eleanor and Alex. In fact, to my great wonder—and I know from wonders—she looks at Alex as she grows nearer, and brushes over his shoulder with her hand, casting him a look that speaks of pride, regret, and pain, before turning her attention back to me.
My desk disappears, as does my office. It’s dark around us, like on a dance floor, and she’s in spotlight. An orchestra strikes up a tune, and it’s a big band version of “Love Me, I Guess,” Allen’s melody but no words at all, just horns and clarinets and some drums and a piano tinkling away. As she gets right in front of me she doesn’t stop, she puts a hand up by my face like she is going to stroke my cheek, but then walks past me. As she recedes, she looks back over her shoulder with a small soft smile, until the sheen of her dress and the glitter of her eyes fade into the velvety dark.
New York, 1999
I’m in my bright office again, the sun gleaming off the piano, dust motes dancing to the fading strains of melody quieting in my ears.
I sit myself gently back down. I don’t feel dizzy, or frightened, or like I might black out, but I know enough about being eighty-eight that no matter what, you don’t go throwing yourself down in chairs.
“So there you have it now. And put it in the book if you want to. I’ll call my lawyer tomorrow about putting her name on the song. I don’t know what that means financially, but it might mean something and seems only fair.”
Alex seems to snap awake. “Mr. Short, that’s not why I came here. We don’t want money.”
“Sure you do and nothing wrong with that. I’ve both had it and not and I can tell you, young man, having it is better.”
“I don’t want it anyway. Whatever work she did it was hers, not mine.”
“Well, son, it might not be up to you. Your mother is Vivian’s daughter and she might have something to say about it.”
Alex sighs. “This was never about money, none of it was. It was just about knowing. And now we’ll never get to.”
“Well,” interjects Eleanor, not looking Alex in the face. She stares instead at the corner of my desk. “What about Rubellino? Is he still alive?” At this I answer no. He died in the 1980s, having caught AIDS back when people thought “safe sex” meant not getting a girl in trouble. Eleanor goes on, “He’s got living relatives, probably? Maybe the DNA would work that way.”
I clear my throat and try to put it delicately. “He was with Vivian for a period of time. It might be worth a try.”
Alex shrugs and begins to stand, taking a phone out of his pocket. “Whatever. I have a phone call to make, anyway.”
Eleanor says, “Take it into my room. It’ll be private.”
He nods. “Right, okay, I might as well get it done with.”
“Then come on downstairs and Esme will make you a good stiff drink.”
He smiles cheerlessly and allows Eleanor to lead him out. She comes back in mere moments, her room here not being far from this office.
She sits down again and stares at Alex’s empty chair. “You know, I was assuming he was my cousin all this time.”
“I’d started to think it was true, too.”
“Was it only…the one night?”
“Only the one night that mattered to the blood test. But we were friends, she and I. After how things ended up, though … She wrote me later and sounded agonizingly lonely, though her sister forbade her from writing. She had to sneak the one she sent.”
“She wrote you? Do you have…”
“No. I’m sorry to say I did not keep it. Fact I burned it.”
“Oh. So was Jerry Allen right? That you gave up songwriting because she messed you up?”
I shake my head, considering what to say. “No, see, it’s not so simple. I know you’d like me to give you easy cause and effect. I could say it was my sister dying, I could say that Hollywood took it out of me, I could say it was because the whole High Hat show was all knotted up with bad memories, I could say it was because I just didn’t have the words anymore, that I felt all dried up. I could say the producing opportunity fell in my lap. I could say that something happened between me and Allen that had nothing to do with Vivian. And those would all be sort of true.”
“What happened between you and Allen?”
“That’s between me and Allen, rest his soul.”
“And here I thought you were telling all your secrets.”
“Not today.”
Eleanor frowns down into her lap. She frowns so much, this girl. “You said something about needing comfort, when you went to Vivian. Comfort from what?”
“Don’t we all need comfort sometimes?”
At this Eleanor smiles down at the big watch on her wrist, David’s watch. “Grampa, don’t be mad at me, but I don’t want to write the book.”
“I would never be mad, kid, but why not?”
She looks me square in the face. “I only did it so that you’d be protected from some stranger prying into your life. If they gave it to me, it meant nobody else would do it. But now look at you, strong as ever. You don’t need me.”
“Oh, honey, you don’t know the half of it. Without you and Alex here refusing to accept my brush-offs…”
“Well, you don’t need me now. Not anymore, not for this. More to the point, Grampa Milo, is that I don’t want to be a journalist. I never did. Aunt Rebekah and the cousins decided that part. I was happy as could be making copies at Short Productions, learning how it all worked behind the scenes, and by that I don’t mean the meetings and pinstripe suits. I’m never going to be a super executive woman like Naomi, but I always loved the family business.”
“Sweetheart, if you don’t want to be a reporter, then don’t be a reporter.”
“You won’t think it’s a waste?”
“Nothing that makes you happy is a waste to me. We’ll find something for you at the office without a pinstripe in sight, I’m sure, something that really suits you. And I’ll tell Paul that you’ve thought better of the book.”
Eleanor shakes her head, straightens in her chair, and shoves her glasses firmly into place on her nose. “No, I’ll tell him. It’s about time I do my own talking, wouldn’t you say?”
The office door opens, and Alex fills the doorway. “I think I’d better get a flight home. She didn’t take it so well.”
I raise my finger to him. “I’ll have Shelly get you a flight as soon as she can, first class so you don’t have to sit there with your chin on your knees, and I won’t hear a word of argument. Eleanor, go find this young man his jacket you mentioned and help him get his things together at the apartment. I’ll have Shelly call your cell phone, Eleanor, when she has the flight.”
Alex nods, helpless against the force of an old man’s decisiveness.
“But I want to ask you one thing before you go, young man.”
“Sure.”
“How did Vivian die, exactly? I only know that she died young. After your mother was born, obviously.”
“I only know the family story, and you know how those are, Mr. Short. But I remember it well because it was a cautionary tale in the whole family. She walked on the pier in a storm and got swept away. There was a lighthouse out there she liked. Estelle used to say she was a good swimmer going back to their days growing up in Chicago, but even a good swimmer can’t fight the lake in a storm. My mother told me that all the time, whenever the waves kicked up high. ‘Even a good swimmer can’t fight the storm.’”
Alex and Elea
nor trail out of the office, and I lean back in my chair, picturing Vivian on that last day. I can just see her, shoes dangling from her fingers as she watched the lake explode onto the shore and she dug her toes into the sand.
She’d want a better view, sure she would. She always did like a front row seat in life. So she’d drop her shoes and walk closer, closer yet, until the waves leapt up and soaked her knees.
Then she’d look out at the end of the pier and see the surf surging, mist leaping high as the lighthouse. That would be amazing up close, so she’d turn and walk out on the pier. Was it wood? Concrete? It wouldn’t matter, she’d go out as far as she could, never one for doing things halfway.
Was she scared? I wonder, as the wave reared up over her, did she know it would sweep her away? Did she think of her little daughter in those last moments on the solid, strong pier?
Or did she throw her arms back, tip her head to the sky, and let it come?
New York, July 1, 2000
The young girl’s face bursts with delight when she opens the stage door and finds me on my way in. I put a finger to my lips, shhhh, it’s a secret, and she giggles behind her hand, letting me past.
It’s hard for an old man to sneak around, this I know, especially me, especially here, because everybody knows me, even if I weren’t wearing my old favorite fedora.
I think that girl is in the chorus, but then again, it’s an easy guess.
The house lights are dim, and this is convenient for me, for sure. I wend my way toward the back rows, so that I’m well clear of the dim halo of stage lights. I don’t want to make anyone nervous, see, but I really did want to be here today. This particular day.
The director is a new guy who looks more than a little like Nat King Cole, and has a boyfriend who he likes to bring to the house for dinner. They’re a hoot, those two. I always forget the director’s name—oy, my memory these days—so I think of him as Nat. Lucky I don’t have to call him by name too much.
Nat is talking to a pretty girl by name of Minerva-Something, and our star, Anthony Tremain, which I’m positive is a stage name.
Vivian In Red Page 31