I find the suitcase and haul it up onto the unmade bed. Daniel’s message is next on the machine, which is not surprising, given the takeout dinner call and the surprise appearance at temple.
Ellie, hi. We haven’t talked in a while. It was great to see you the other night, but you looked sad and I’m concerned. Check in, okay? I’ll buy you a drink. Bye for now.
I walk over to my dresser and start tossing underwear into the open suitcase, not bothering to remove the half-used bottle of sunscreen and the magazine with sand stuck to its pages.
Hello, Eleanor Short.
I stop, stock-still with a bra in my hand.
This is Alex Bryant. Sorry I didn’t return your call right away, things have been busy taking care of my grandmother’s estate. Estelle’s estate. Whatever. You know what I mean. Anyway, sure, we can talk. I’ve been looking some stuff up online, and also doing some math with birthdates, and it’s interesting. I have to work tonight but you can—
The machine cuts off with a shriek. He’d either run out of time, or my machine took this moment to conk out. The message had come in yesterday, he said he was working then. Would today be okay?
I decide that as it’s business hours, he’s probably at the office. I’d scrawled the number to the community theater offices down the side of the printed out article, and this is what I fish out of my papers now.
He answers himself, briskly: “Alex Bryant.” I can hear typing in the background.
“Hi. This is Eleanor Short.”
“Oh? Huh? I mean, oh. I hadn’t remembered giving you this number.”
“You didn’t. The Internet did. I’m so sorry, this is intrusive a bit. Curiosity was getting the better of me and I figured you’d be at work. You could always hang up on me, but of course I hope you don’t.”
“Um, okay. Hang on a sec.”
Eleanor heard him change positions in the room, then some background noise quieted as he must have closed an office door.
“OK, so I’m back. So, speaking of curious, I got curious, too. I looked you up, and found your grandfather Milo Short. Then I popped down to the local library to read up.”
“Really? And what did you learn?”
“I learned he’s a ‘noted Broadway producer and one-time lyricist.’ And what’s interesting is that my mother suddenly doesn’t know who her father is. And Vivian, who you say ‘knew’ your grandfather, gave birth to a child not naming a father. But here’s the really good part.”
“Yeah?” Journalism classes and magazine writing have trained my pulse to speed up with excitement at times like this. However, the doting granddaughter in me, the one who imagines her sainted grandfather could never have abandoned a pregnant lover, feels nauseated and dizzy.
“I asked my mom a bit more about Vivian. So the story goes, she went off to New York in a snit when she was young. She was a wild one, Estelle always said. Their parents died young and Vivian just said to hell with bossy old Estelle and took off for the big city. But she came back ‘in a bad way,’ which was the nice way to say she was nuts. That part we always knew, by the way, about her being nuts. She was that relative, you know? Every family’s got one that gets talked about all hushed.”
“Do I ever.” No one even speaks my mother’s name.
“And now it turns out that some months after returning from New York, she has my mom. And here you come calling. Interesting, as I said.”
“Do we know when exactly she left New York?”
“That we don’t know. Estelle might have known more exactly, but too late now.”
“So the father could have been someone in Michigan, after she got back.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Alex adds, his voice thick with skepticism. “But if she was so determined to get out from under her big sister’s thumb when she left for New York, what made her suddenly come back? Some kind of crisis, right? And what’s more of a crisis in 1936 than being knocked up by someone who doesn’t want you?”
I’m glad he can’t see me flinch at his phrasing. This picture he’s painting, of Grampa Milo fathering a child, then disavowing it and his girlfriend, it turns my stomach. All the while, Grampa always telling us Grandma Bee was his one and only, his whole life. Making such a production out of it.
“Maybe he didn’t know…” I say out loud, cross-legged among the contents of my closet. I’d forgotten what I was doing.
“So you think it was him, too?”
“The timing would work.” I say nothing about my grandfather pretending not to know Vivian, about how the mention of her name disturbs him.
Alex’s voice, which had been cautious and consciously casual, brightens. “So let’s get a DNA test. I checked. It’s a simple blood test for your grandfather, my mom, and boom. We know for sure.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Why not? It sorts everything out.”
“I didn’t say this before, but my grandfather’s not well. He’s had a stroke.”
“Oh. Wow, sorry. Is he…will he recover?”
“I don’t know.”
I hear the creaking of a chair, tapping on a desk. Then Alex spits out, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but all the more reason we should check.”
“Before he dies? Thanks a lot for your compassion.”
“And thanks for yours, too, because remember how I said my mom just found out her parents weren’t her parents? She and Estelle never got along that great, but she loved her father to the ends of the earth. Poor guy died in the Korean War. And now she thinks that doesn’t count.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but my sick grandfather would be a poor replacement. If we find out it’s true, is that going to make her feel better?”
“At least we’d know.”
“Or we wouldn’t, because we find out it’s not him, and I put him through the stress of thinking he had fathered some child he didn’t know about—”
“Or knew about and ignored.”
In calling Alex, I’d hoped for an investigative ally, someone who’d look for clues with me as to the details of Vivian’s life. But he and his mother have already decided that my grandfather jilted this lady, who might have just been screwing around in Michigan for all we knew. Hell, I might have had the wrong Vivian Adair from the start and this whole thing is a huge distraction from what I’m supposed to be doing. How much work have I not done on this book that my family is counting on?
“Alex, listen. Let me try to find out more. I can look up city directories and the census and such, now that we know Vivian was here in approximately what years. Maybe I can find where she worked, figure out her connection to him. I mean, to think about it, all we really know is some lady as old as Methuselah told me that Vivian knew Grampa Milo. That’s really all we know for sure. I just can’t go barging up to my sick, aged grandfather who by the way can’t even talk since his stroke, and demand this of him.”
“So why did you want to talk to me? Why did you ‘go barging’ into our lives?”
My pause for an answer stretches too long for Alex’s patience.
“Let me know if you change your mind.” He bangs his phone down.
I sit on the floor, my thumbs tracing the phone’s keypad, wishing I could call him back, but not having any idea what I would say.
A knock at the door startles the phone out of my hand.
I swing the door open to find Daniel, looking at me through his fringe of dark hair, hands jammed in his pockets. “Hey, Ellie,” he says, then cocks his head, confused, at the suitcase behind me on the floor.
I suppose I wasn’t so nice to that Marla girl, but I’m so tired of her damn flashcards. I’d like to tell her where to put the flashcards, but the alphabet board doesn’t have a picture for that one. She gave up on me quick today. She might be about as sick of me as I am of not speaking.
I’m so bored, and nervous so much it’s like I’ve had twelve cups of coffee. I keep trying to act like I don’t care if Vivian pops up, but how could I not? Apparently ha
llucinations are not something a person gets used to at eighty-eight years old.
I perch on the window seat, though it’s an awkward angle and no comfortable way to spread out, but at least this way I can see normal human life flow by, the dog walkers and nannies and ladies going out in their smart suits.
This way I also get to see who’s coming, and look! Eleanor! Terrific. She gets out of the town car, and wouldn’t you know but there’s that Daniel fellow with her. Just when we’d given him up for lost.
Daniel was always all right in my eyes because he never tried to weasel an acting gig out of me, unlike every other actor I ever met. Not that I blame them, mind you. If not for weaseling I’d never have gotten any Tin Pan Alley job in the first place, mostly down to Allen’s finagling. So I don’t criticize a kid for chutzpah, but boy if it wasn’t nice just to have a nice young man come to dinner without trying to audition for me over the brisket.
They’re lugging in boxes and so is the driver, but it doesn’t take them so long. Eleanor was never much for being a packrat. About the only thing of David’s she kept was that watch, and a few pictures.
I come around the corner to find Eleanor and Daniel standing almost toe-to-toe, and they don’t notice me right off. He’s bent down by her cheek but I’ve come upon them in the act of her leaning away. His forehead crinkles up and then he turns away, too fast to be kind, and is out the door, nearly knocking over the driver bringing in the last box.
Eleanor gives me a weak, fake smile and comes over for a hug.
“How are you feeling?”
I waggle my hand. So-so.
“I brought my notes and things. Is it okay if I leave them on a table down here? Seems like we always talk in here, and it would save me lugging it all up and down all the time.”
I nod, sure. Eleanor plops into what I now think of as “her” chair, and I give a nervous glance around. We’re alone.
I take my careful little old-man steps to the chair nearest hers, and sink down carefully. Oh to be young and careless and flop one’s body around like it’s nothing. You forget to enjoy these things while you can do them.
Eleanor slouches down and rubs a temple. “You know, when he first left me… It hurt, of course it did. But now he keeps showing up again, just when I’m rearranging my life around his absence. I don’t know what he wants from me now. How is it different? Isn’t he just going to get tired of me for the same reasons? Eva says I’m supposed to take him back, but isn’t he supposed to leave me alone now that he dumped me?”
There’s so much I would say to her if I could. She takes off her glasses and pinches her nose, looking so much like David I’d like to cry. Sweetheart, who cares about supposed to? If you’re irritated, be irritated, and tell him so. Tell him to shove off if you want. Life is short, except when it’s long, and then you have so many more years to regret.
Eleanor’s eyes are still closed, and she dangles her glasses from her hand, loosely over the side of the chair. “He’s a good guy. A mensch, right? He’s kind, and nice, and supportive. He laughs at my jokes and knows me better than anyone.”
Not anyone, kid.
She goes on, “You’d think I’d go flying back to him.” She shoves the glasses back on, taking two tries because the stem gets stuck in her hair. “It doesn’t matter. I’m sure I’m just grumpy. I’ll get over it.”
Eleanor leafs through some of her papers. “Can I ask you about where you worked back then? Your first Tin Pan Alley job, I mean, the plugging. What a funny name for it…” She continues leafing through the papers, though it doesn’t look like she’s really seeing them. She shoots me a sideways glance and asks, “Do you remember people you worked with? You know, secretaries and whoever, Grampa?”
Yes, do you remember…Grampa?
Her voice shimmers with mockery. I don’t even look around because I don’t want to know where she is.
I point to a box marked “books” in magic marker, and Eleanor looks at me confused, but drags it over. Sure enough, these are research books. I figured my studious granddaughter would have them handy. I fold over in my chair and flip through until I find just the one.
Eleanor helps me pull it out of the box. The dusty old book from the ’70s with the gaudy, bulbous typefaces so popular then, has a picture of my face on the cover. I can see Post-it notes sticking out of it.
Eleanor has come closer to my chair and is crouching next to me as I flip pages.
I’d last looked at this picture fifteen years ago, and slammed the book shut right away.
Now, my knobby, spotted finger lands on Vivian’s chin, in the background of a candid shot taken at the Stork Club one night, before I was famous, before all that came later. I nod at Eleanor, and then I mime typing.
“Oh!” she exclaims, lighting up. “Is that Vivian? Oh, you remembered! And she was a secretary, then?”
Eleanor bends down over the picture so far that her curls obscure the page from me.
I spot her in the middle of the room, wearing the same dress she has on in the picture. That’s a pretty picture of me, even though it’s not of me, is it. I’m just in the background, accidentally caught in the frame.
Now you’re not a secret anymore. Go away.
“Grampa, did you two ever…date, or anything?”
I shake my head.
Now, now, Milo.
Those weren’t dates. We worked together, you and me, and half the time Allen was there. What kinda date would that be?
What about—
We did not date, Vivian. We were not an item.
“What in the world did Bernie Allen have against her?” Eleanor isn’t looking at me as she says this, lifting the book from my lap to carry it back to her chair. “He said she was crazy, so his son said.”
Oh, crazy, was I? Allen, calling me crazy? That’s a laugh. He was so pickled most of the time I’m surprised he didn’t try to ride a pink elephant right onto the stage at the New Amsterdam. Remember Boston?
No.
Oh, yes you do.
“So she worked for Harms? I wonder if I can find her in some old records. I wonder if they keep files back that far.”
She’s not gonna let this go. When did Eleanor get so tenacious? Ellie was the type to shrug something off and curl up in a corner and read a book. This is more Naomi’s style, to worry something until she’d broken it down and conquered it. If Naomi’s mother had bailed out, she’d have unleashed the hounds to find her, I’m sure of it.
“She’d have worked there in what, 1934? ’35?”
I make four fingers.
“Thirty-four. Right. Let me grab a notebook.”
Your memory is improving for someone who can’t remember the Boston tryout.
Eleanor flops back down again. “Right, so thirty-four to…. How long was she there? Well, you weren’t at Harms much longer after that, though, because you were working on Hilarity… But here in this picture, she’s obviously there with the other people in the show. Did she follow you to work on the Hilarity show somehow? Was she in it?”
I shake my head, miming stenography now.
Careful, Milo, you might accidentally tell her the whole story.
“So she was a secretary for the producer or something?”
I touch my chest, and also lean across to point at Allen, round-faced and flushed in that picture, and fully in his cups, and draw a finger around the whole bunch of us at the table.
“For everyone? For the show in general, like an assistant?”
I nod. I just want this to go away. When will she know enough to let it go?
“And how long did she work with you? Show me the years, on your fingers, like before. Thirty-four to what?”
Thirty-five, I show her.
I’m looking down at the patterned, faded carpet, and I watch those round-toe shoes come into view as she moves closer. Bile rises, and my heart thuds away more slowly than it seems like it should.
“So not very long. I wish you could tell me why she l
eft. Maybe I can guess? Did she quit? Maybe to get married? Married women didn’t work much back then, did they? Grampa Milo, can you hear me? I’m trying to figure out why she left.”
Yes, Milo, why don’t you tell her why I left.
Eleanor, why does it matter? Why do you have to know?
Before I can help myself, my eyes travel up Vivian’s stockings, past her hem, her short fur jacket—I always wondered how she afforded that jacket—up to her smirking face.
Leave me alone, Vivian.
You’re assuming I have a choice in the matter.
“Grampa? Do you see something? Is something there?”
I hear Eleanor get up. I want to look at her, smile, shrug, dance on the carpet, anything to tear my eyes away from this impossible dead girl in front of me and convince my granddaughter everything’s fine, really, it’s just “expressive aphasia.”
Eleanor’s hand is on my arm, and she crouches down. I can smell the raspberry shampoo she’s liked since she was a teenage girl. Oh, Eleanor, I don’t want to scare you but I can’t turn away.
“Grampa, you’re scaring me. What’s going on?”
A tear winds down my cheek and it feels cold, to me, a little trail of ice.
Eleanor’s voice wavers. “You see something, don’t you?”
She stares into what must be empty space, for her, or at least I hope to God, Vivian, don’t haunt her, too.
She says, voice barely over a whisper. “It’s not something. It’s someone, isn’t it?”
She must be guessing by the way I’m staring at Vivian’s face, a person’s height off the floor. These kinds of things Eleanor always notices.
I grit my teeth for her to start screaming, to call the hospital, her uncle, the men in the little white coats. Off to a rubber room for me. Can’t you just kill me, Vivian, is that what you are, the angel of death? Then do it already, don’t let me get locked up in a bughouse, unless that’s what you want. You’re trying to make me crazy, too, are you? Did you hate me that much?
Eleanor squeezes my arm. “It’s okay, Grampa. I’m here. Nothing’s going to hurt you.”
Vivian In Red Page 15
