Vivian In Red

by Kristina Riggle

  “Will you look at me, Ellie?”

  I glance up at the squared off chin, with its leading-man cleft I always teased him about.

  “My eyes, Eleanor.” He puts his finger on the underside of my chin.

  In the movies, this is adorable. The shy, reticent heroine just needs this small nudge of encouragement to gaze at her beloved, and her face blooms like a flower, the string section crescendos, and they live happily ever after. It is beneath him to try this cliché with me.

  My chin stays down so that his finger is pushing, and I have to resist with my neck, and I feel like a stubborn child, but so be it.

  He lets go and his hands drop to his sides.

  “You know I don’t like looking people straight in the eye.”

  “I’m not ‘people.’ Or at least, I’m not supposed to be in the same category as the landlord, the guy at the bodega.”

  “I couldn’t look at Nathan Lane full in the face, either.”

  “I’m supposed to matter more than Nathan Lane, too. You do look straight at the people you love, I’ve seen you do it.”

  “I’m not going to play this game.” I turn away from him and start striding back to the house. “I’m not going to perform some stupid test to determine our whole future. If you go, it’s because you want to. Stay if you want to. I don’t care.”

  “You don’t care?”

  At this I stop. There was pain in his voice. Not the intentional wounded-dove voice of someone inducing guilt, no, this was genuine. I feel it too, just then, the slicing sensation across the chest.

  I turn to him, and look at the buttons of that birthday-gift shirt. “I didn’t mean that. I didn’t. I just want to go home.”

  “So we’ll go home.”

  We finish the rest of the walk in silence, not touching. I have my arms folded, he’s got his hands in his pockets. It’s a thing he’s been scolded for on stage, always going for the pockets. It’s his failsafe, what he does when he doesn’t know what else to do.

  “I’ll head home from here,” he says at the doorstep.

  “You’re going to throw me to the wolves alone?” I rejoin, grasping for our old banter.

  “Good night.”

  I can sense him searching for eye contact, so I look up, make myself look, but the intensity makes me glance away, too fast.

  “Good night.”

  I step into the darkness of the doorway and watch him go, disappearing in the dark and reappearing in the streetlights, until he rounds the corner, where he’ll descend into the subway and be whisked back home.

  New York, 1999

  I hate to be tucked in like a baby, but I never mind a few more moments with my granddaughter.

  She’s handed me my medications and a glass of water, which she is now setting carefully on a coaster on the nightstand. She has already pulled the dusty curtains at the windows, switched on the light in the hall as a kind of nightlight. She switches on this receiver gizmo next to the bed, telling me it’s one of Eva’s old “baby monitors” and she’ll be able to hear in her room. There’s a little bell so I can ring it into the monitor if I need her. With Eleanor moving in, and the nurses having so little to do—my not speaking is nothing they can help with their sitting around—the twenty-four-hour staff is gone, leaving Eleanor’s presence plus this monitor contraption to keep watch. This is some kind of improvement—fewer strangers, anyhow—but a baby monitor?

  She reaches down to pull the comforter up higher, which would be tricky for me one-handed. I use my good hand to reach out, and try to lift her chin a little, so I can see her better, but she flinches. Actually flinches! As if I was about to hurt her, as if I could ever do such a thing. I draw my hand back like it’s stung.

  She notices. “I’m sorry, Grampa, I’ve had a long day and I guess I’m easily startled right now.”

  I try to get in her line of sight with my “what’s wrong” face.

  She looks around, over both shoulders, before she answers. She looks me in the eye and I notice then how blue the skin is under her eyes. “It’s Daniel. He wants me to … He wants something I can’t give him, and if I don’t, he’ll move three thousand miles away and I’ll never see him again.”

  I can feel my sad face mirror hers. I do this a lot now, I notice, in lieu of speaking my sympathy. What is it she won’t do for him? What does he want from her?

  “Do you have everything you need, Grampa?”

  I nod, settling back on the pillows. A soft yellow light glows from the lamp next to me. A small table holds the water, my glasses, and a couple of books.

  “It was nice tonight, wasn’t it?” she says.

  She’s just making conversation. It wasn’t nice for her, I could tell the whole time, from Joel’s gooey toast to his love for Jessica and his presentation of a gaudy necklace as anniversary present to the political fights to Eva pinning her in a corner, and then whatever came after…

  Not so great for me, either, considering one unwanted guest.

  I won’t stay if I’m not wanted.

  Ha, since when do you wait for an invitation? Haunting me all through dinner wasn’t enough for you? I hope you didn’t come back for dessert because the great-grands ate it all.

  “Good night, Grampa.” Eleanor kisses my forehead and walks with a step heavier than natural for her, a young woman, out into the hall, then slowly to her room.

  At dinner, Vivian had been in the chair catty-corner to me at the dining table, making her usual series of infuriating cryptic comments, when everyone was ignoring me for people who could actually have cocktail chatter. It made me wish I was a real drooling invalid who would not notice or care. One of those desiccated old upright corpses you see dragged out by family members from time to time.

  That’s right, I talked to you when no one else would. I can’t see well out in the dark outside the lamplight, but I think she’s on a low bench at the end of the bed, where Bee used to sit to put on her stockings and shoes.

  Fine, talk to me. Knock yourself out.

  Were you surprised when I died?

  I sense a change in her position, as if she’s stood and is approaching my small circle of light next to the bed.

  I wouldn’t think it would surprise you, considering. You always said I was reckless.

  You were. Always dashing off alone, in a tizzy about something. Not safe for a young woman, so we always had to chase you. Is that what you liked? The chase?

  You assume I calculated every move. That’s Allen’s game. Not mine.

  You didn’t act for no reason. Nobody does that.

  I didn’t say it was for no reason.

  Nothing you ever did made sense. How many times did you lose a job in the Depression? Or almost lose it?

  I was unwell, you know that. Not that anyone cared.

  I cared! I covered for you in Boston. Told them a sympathetic story so you wouldn’t get canned. I helped you plenty of times.

  Until you didn’t.

  That’s not fair. You were asking for something I could not give you.

  Could not? Or would not?

  I’m not going to keep this up. What’s the point? You want your own personal Day of Atonement? Well, see if you can turn back time, then. I mean, you can come back from sixty years ago to haunt me, so why not that, too? Of course you can’t. You’re just a trick of the brain torturing me until I die, well, hurry it up already. I’m eighty-eight years old and I can’t talk, and no one pays attention to me anymore but Eleanor and I can’t help her either when I’m like this. I’m worm food in a few years regardless, so God or the devil or whatever demon you are, just kill me off right now already.

  Take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them.

  What nonsense are you talking? What’s Hamlet got to do with it?

  Bet you didn’t know I loved Shakespeare. I played Ophelia in high school.

  She steps forward from the shadows, into the light of the side-table lamp. I gasp aloud at the sight.

 
She’s drenched, as if she’s been bathing or swimming, but she’s fully clothed, including a wool coat and kid gloves. That’s not what makes me scream inside my head, no. It’s the unnatural blue pallor of her skin and lips.

  My mute screaming reaches a zenith right about the time she stretches out a cold wet glove and closes it around my wrist.

  New York City, April, 1936

  “Hey, Jailbird, got a dummy lyric for me on that Act One song?”

  Allen squinted at the manuscript paper on the piano. “Yeah. How about ‘Milo Short is a nincompoop, short of finesse.’”

  “I like that well enough I may leave it as is. Think Gordon would mind if I wrote myself into the show?”

  Milo reclined on the settee, tapping out the rhythm on his leg with a pencil. He could make up his own dummy lyrics to help him remember Allen’s melody and phrasing, but he liked to hear his partner’s version. Allen’s wit was back in fine form since he decided to lay off the hooch finally, his stint in a Boston jail sufficiently humiliating him, not to mention everyone involved in the show. For days afterward, he’d sweated that the news would get back to Winchell, though Milo reassured him frequently they were not nearly important enough for that. They weren’t, at the time.

  But they were edging closer to that day when they might be important enough to take down in the society columns. Which was not so much a blessing, in Milo’s view.

  Hilarity had straightened itself out just in time and had run 350 performances, topping even Cole Porter’s Jubilee, which the critics had worked themselves into raptures about. Rightly so, Milo thought, having seen the show and goggled at Porter’s wit and musicality.

  “Just goes to show what the critics know and nuts to them,” Gordon had bellowed at El Morocco, where they all clustered after the New York opening. Milo and Allen had left early that night; Allen because he couldn’t stand not to get himself fried to the hat with everyone else guzzling champagne, and Milo out of solidarity and to make sure he wouldn’t detour into another club. Vivian and Mark Bell had resumed their romance with the grudging approval of the stage director, because Bell was performing better than ever. Milo had been startled to hear him declare, “That dame must be good for his vocal chords.” When they left Elmo’s that night, Vivian was in Bell’s lap and his lips were wrapped around her earlobe.

  Still flying from defying the early critics, Gordon hired Short and Allen immediately to write The High Hat, based on some British play involving star-crossed romance, reversal of fortune, and a dash of class satire.

  Allen half-turned on the piano bench. “Hey, Short, want to grab a bite tonight? Head out to 21 or something, see what’s doing.”

  “It’s Passover tonight, I’m heading over to my parents’ for the Seder. Word has it that Miriam has invited a friend. Oy.”

  “What’s ‘oy’ for?”

  “They want I should get married, now that Max has stomped on the glass.”

  “Oy, then.”

  “That is the strangest sound coming from you.”

  Milo was gritting his teeth to go into his parents’ tiny apartment. He couldn’t walk into that shriveled up little space without thinking of their first Bronx apartment with its gleaming parquet floors and sunken living room and the pride that Yosef Schwartz took in having raised his family out of the teeming tenements.

  Returning from Boston, Milo had approached the family apartment with an engulfing sense of dread, seeing from a distance a pile of furniture out on the street and dark figures hovering near it. Having walked back from the train station even in the snow, the better to save cab fare, he’d been treated to a long trek of gradual and painful discovery. His father hadn’t been making rent and they got evicted; apparently a wealthier cousin had been helping before, but either could not or would not send him another cent.

  Max and his father were taking shifts guarding their things on the sidewalk and sleeping in the tailor shop, while Leah and his mother had moved in with sympathetic neighbors, sleeping on the living room floor since the Kleins themselves were all full up with family. They’d tried to send him a telegram in Boston, but it must have arrived only after he left.

  Milo had taken what earnings he’d managed to save from Hilarity and found the family a new apartment. Smaller, and farther yet from the Grand Concourse to which his father aspired, but it was a roof and they could afford it. Leah slept on a cot in with their parents, and Milo and Max took turns on the living room sofa or floor, though like as not Max would stay over in the shop and Milo would end up staying at Allen’s place if his wife was staying in the country, which was often enough.

  Milo’s father had taken to stalking around with a hunted look. It was as if the reeking, cramped, dark tenement life was about to pounce on him. Mr. Schwartz had always been fond of pronouncing their family had gone “from the ghetto to the Grand Concourse!” though they never lived closer than a block away from that most favored of Bronx addresses.

  Then the contract came in for The High Hat, and instead of feeling like a success, Milo felt his stomach turn over watching his father have to accept his son’s money just to get by. Max’s bride’s family had given him a job in their chain of dry-goods stores, and he and Miriam were able to set up housekeeping in a snug little room on the West Side, so they did all right for themselves. Milo moved out into his own place just a few blocks away, to give his family breathing room, but he knew the specter of his father’s failed business took up as much space as he himself ever did. Mr. Schwartz did what tailoring work he could drum up right there in the apartment, for their Bronx neighbors. He talked often of “when I open the new place” but not a one of them believed it would ever happen.

  “Why don’t you?” Allen asked through a pencil he’d stuck between his teeth, at the piano, between scribbling down notes.

  “Why don’t I what?”

  “Get married. People tend to do that, even a lousy sot like me.”

  “And it’s made you blissfully happy.”

  “Hey, I got kids. I like my kids.”

  Milo sat up and rubbed his temples. “I’m just too busy working to think about girls. I’m supporting my parents now, and Leah, and we’ll all end up in the gutter if we flop. Aren’t you worried about that, too? Flopping?”

  “Sure I am, but the wife’s family has money.”

  “So that’s why you married her. Very romantic.”

  Allen jumped up from the piano bench and stomped across the room to grab his smokes off the coffee table. “Gimme some credit here, of course not. I can’t say it wasn’t a bonus, but I’m not some…gigolo.”

  “You’re not exactly the picture of romance, is all. So what did you do it for?”

  Allen gestured to his body with his lit cigarette. “Do I look the part of Adonis to you? I liked Dorothy fine, and she was the first girl I knew who’d say yes. And like I said, it’s what people do. I bet I know why you don’t get married.”

  “Do tell.”

  “You’re stuck on that Vivian girl.”

  “Stuck nothing. First, she’s not Jewish. Second, however long she hung around me, and however pretty might she be, she is not my type. I hardly see her anymore since Hilarity ended and the stage director wouldn’t hire her again.”

  “And good riddance, says me. That girl was trouble.”

  “Listen to you, Jailbird, talking about trouble.”

  Allen turned to the window overlooking Fifth Avenue. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “And I don’t want to. So we gonna get to work, or what?”

  “Yeah, yeah, let a fella have a smoke.”

  “When’s the missus back from the country anyway?”

  “Next week, she says. So there’s no need to give you the bum rush. You can bunk over here if you want.”

  “Nah, I told you, the Seder? Plus if I’m spending rent money on my own place I might as well use it.”

  “Get a piano and we can work there, too.”

  “I’m saving up, I can’t jus
t go off and buy a piano, and I’m not taking the one from my parents’ place. My mother tried to give it to me and you should’ve seen the look on Leah’s face. Like to break my heart.”

  “I know, cheapskate. Even without Passover you wouldn’t have gone out to 21.”

  “You bet. I don’t have a rich absent wife with money, so I’ve gotta assume every penny I earn from this showbiz gig is the last I’ll ever see.”

  “Well, cheer up, Mr. Milo, and maybe you’ll find a rich and available Jewess at tonight’s dinner.”

  “Shut up, will ya? I’ve gotta think of some words here.”

  Allen finally shut his trap and Milo sank back down to his best thinking position, which looked just like sleep but had been his good luck charm since they started working on The High Hat.

  Milo Short is a nincompoop, short of finesse…

  This was for a lively waltz duet between the two leads, who would spar with hate-you-love-you electricity for the whole first act.

  Milo hummed the phrasing and his mind spun with words.

  I’m a smart girl who knows when to give it a rest…

  He smiled a little as he lay. Not bad as a start. He imagined the man’s rejoinder.

  But without all your chatter, I’ll feel just bereft!

  No. “Just” was a mere filler, and “bereft” wasn’t much of a rhyme. Plus one could never count on the singer to deliver a sarcastic line with, well, sarcasm. The stage director on Hilarity had rapped him for that trick, saying it all had to be there in the music, and it was a lazy writer who depended on the singer to do his job for him.

  “Hey,” Milo said to the air, his eyes still closed. “Can I have more beats in that phrase? It’s too short.”

  “No, you can’t. That’s how the music goes.”

  “C’mon. Couple more eighth notes or something.”

  “You deaf, too? I said no. You can do it, genius. Write me some more ‘sparkling’ words.”

  Milo cringed. The reviews had focused more on his words than the melodies in Hilarity, which were written off with faint praise like “hummable” or “passable.” Milo had tried time and again to point out to Allen that the reviewers were talking through their hats because anyhow, they condemned the show as boring in Boston, and look what happened.