Vivian In Red (18 page)

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.

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it updated with the latest appliances and bright, new finishes, though she herself was merrily accustomed to her comfy, outdated things.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.

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 through 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.