Vivian In Red (24 page)

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 left. 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.”

Oh, kid, if only that were true.

Vivian drops her casual smirk. Thunderclouds pass over her face; I recognize the look and my body blasts with sweat at the memory, and seeing it now scares me more than anything this impossible Vivian has yet done.

T
he actor stomped downstage and peered into the house seats, his hand shading his eyes. “I can’t sing the note like that, I need another one.”

Milo put his hand over Allen’s forearm, gripping hard with a warning shake of the head.

Allen whispered back, “He could sing it if he wanted to, he’s just a lazy guinea.”

“Change the note, it doesn’t make much difference now.”

Allen snorted.
Hilarity
was in Boston for its first opening night, and word backstage was that it was gonna flop here, which meant it wouldn’t even open in New York and Milo’s lyricist career would be over before one note was even sung on Broadway.

Allen yanked his arm hard away and stomped over, Milo holding his breath like he did ten times a day that Allen was about to get them fired.

Milo put his hand half over his face, peeking through his fingers. He saw his friend snatch the music right off the rehearsal piano, and scribble ferociously on the manuscript. He slammed it so hard back on the piano that the instrument groaned a deep, echoing thud.

The rehearsal pianist, a pint-sized man named Finkelstein, cleared his throat and looked sideways at the actor, Mark Bell, who was born Marco Rubellino and slipped into his accent when angry.

“Well?” Bell demanded, and Finkelstein played the new phrase, with a lower note. Bell repeated it beautifully, and without a word of thanks to Allen, barked to take it from the top.

Allen flopped down next to Milo, again grumbling insults under his breath. Milo’s specialty was the words, so he couldn’t have said exactly why Allen’s original music was better, but it had been. The new note was singable, but conventional. Dull, like the hundred Tin Pan Alley ditties they’d banged out at Harms.

Allen was squirming in the seat, cursing that if the show failed it would be all “that dago Rubellino’s fault.”

It made Milo squirm, too. If he made Allen mad enough, would he become “that kike Schwartz”?

Not that Bell was any kind of sweetheart. He’d demanded changes to every song he sung like he was Caruso and everyone had to fall at their feet in tribute to his greatness, when in fact his voice was strained and thin at the high notes, and he had to throw them out of his mouth almost.

Milo tipped his head back on his seat as he listened to Bell squawk through the new version of their song, a comic number about rival apple cart salesmen. It was supposed to be a duet with another man, but Bell had insisted he deserved a solo performance and the director had caved. Milo thought the bit lost its spark without someone to play off, but what did he know from Broadway?

He had been excited to go to Boston with the show, and his sister had squealed about it, too, begging their father to buy a camera so Milo could bring back photographs. Their father was about to say no, his face all screwed up like he was biting something rotten, when Milo jumped in to say he wouldn’t have time for that anyhow, and didn’t know how to work a camera besides.

Camera or no, he hadn’t time to even set foot outside, and they would be heading out of town the minute the sun came up the day after the preview run, or earlier, if it flopped hard enough. The older hands on the show told him there were always changes last minute, but when pressed they admitted that it seemed like more than usual this time. Milo felt like he was always rewriting a lyric, or a new rhyme.

The only thing that hadn’t changed a bit was
Let’s Live On Hilarity.
He’d tinkered with it a little that first day with Allen but after that, Max Gordon insisted they not change a word. The torch song, a ballet number, a jazz tune, the big splashy number just before final curtain, all of it had been rearranged and disassembled and sometimes the original lyrics put back.

The fella writing the dialogue—Milo learned this was called “the book” even though it wasn’t a real book and in fact wasn’t much of a story, just an excuse for a bunch of numbers and some talking over scene changes—wasn’t faring much better.

“I’m not feeling so good,” Allen said, burping into his hand. “I’m gonna go lie down. Come get me if they need me again. Or better yet, just tell them to fix it themselves how they think it should go. What do I care anyhow? I’m paid either way.”

He supported himself on the backs of the theater seats, and continued to use the backs of the seats to hold himself up as he drifted up the aisle to the back of the house. The sight of him like this made Milo swallow hard. If Allen spent much more time fried to the hat he’d be well and truly useless, and then what would become of their team?

On his other side, he smelled Vivian before he saw her.

“If I have to type another article for another lousy press agent I’m going to demand they pay for a new manicure,” she said, holding her slim hands before Milo so she could inspect her chipped red polish.

“You wanted to come, right?”

“I know, I’m just teasing. It’s interesting, being here.”

Milo looked up at the inside of the ornate theater with its curlicue décor far overhead and rows of balcony boxes staring haughtily down. “Funny thing is, this theater could be in New York and it’s just as cold outside as home. If not for the train ride I wouldn’t think I’d left.”

“I think any place has a different heart, don’t you? New York is like a wild flapper chorine, dancing her fringe all over. Boston seems like a grand lady to me, wise and serene.”

“Serene? You been in the same city as me?”

“Well, no one’s serene around here, true.”

“So what’s the heart of where you come from? You told me once you moved here, and we got interrupted.”

“Chicago. It’s like…a big muscular boxer. Tough, you know? Not in a bad way, not always. But it’s out on the prairie, really, and the winters are hard. I think even the women go around with a certain toughness, because otherwise they’d freeze to death.” At this she laughed lightly, but Milo knew enough by now to realize she didn’t mean it. When she laughed for real, she doubled over and cried real tears right down her face, like when Allen had dolled up in the lead actress’s hat and gloves and sang her torch song in a falsetto. It was nice not to see them hate each other for a few minutes, but of course Allen didn’t know she was out there, even, just hamming it up in general.

“Is that why you left, then, the winters? If so, you shoulda looked at a map.”

“I’m not tough, is why I left.”

“Coulda fooled me.”

“Apparently I have fooled you. No, I’m not tough at all.”

“Why here, though, seriously? New York might be a dancer or whatever you said but it’s not the softest place to land, seems to me.”

“Are you disappointed I came?”

“’Course not. Just asking.”

A voice came out of the wings while Bell was sitting down on the edge of the stage, conferring with the director. “Adair! Mabel needs you to go get some stockings for the chorus girls. There are a bunch that are ripped.”

“Duty calls,” Vivian said with a sigh, and pushed herself up from the seat like she was a hundred.

“I’ll go with,” Milo decided, standing up too. “I need to get out and see this serenity you’re telling me about.”

Milo didn’t get halfway down the row of seats when the director hollered at him, “Hey, Milo! Where you going? We might need you again, you gotta stick around. You need anything, that girl can get it, right, honey?”

The director didn’t wait for an answer, and Milo shrugged. “Sorry, Vivian. Maybe next time.”

But she was already turning away from him, striding fast enough out of the seats she stumbled and had to right herself on a seat back. It was her long, angry stride that Milo had seen a time or two since she’d joined
Hilarity
.

Milo moved closer to the director, figuring he might as well get a better view of the stage, though by now he knew the songs—all the versions he’d written—so well he could have sung the entire show himself backward.

“Sorry, Milo,” the director said, staring at a clipboard and frowning at whatever he saw there. “I know you like that girl, but she didn’t come for a tea party.”

“No one said she did.”

He looked up at Milo over the tops of his glasses. “Says you. Mabel tells me she’s been making up excuses not to work since she got here. Headaches.” He tapped his head with his pencil. “I’ll give her a headache. Anyhow, stick around, we’re about to run through the
Hilarity
number, orchestra, costumes, and everything. Enjoy it, Milo.” He allowed a rare smile. “This is when it gets fun. Trust me.”