Vivian In Red (33 page)

“Grampa! It’s me! Are you sick?”

Without his glasses he looks vulnerable and sick, just like he did in the hospital. He trembles. I put my hand on his forehead and it feels cool and normal, though his hands in mine are clammy.

“Take deep breaths,” I command him. “Try to sip in the air slowly. Does anything hurt? Point to what hurts.”

He doesn’t seem to be hearing me, and I understand, oh, maybe this is what an old man’s death looks like. I’m not ready to lose him, I don’t care how old he is, how infirm, I’ll never be ready, he should stay with me forever. I squeeze his hand tighter. “I’m here, don’t be afraid,” although he might have reason to be—I sure as hell am, my heart is galloping and I’m shaking— but this is what you say to the vulnerable. This is how you talk to children, to your father who is riddled with tumors, to your aged grandfather. You don’t say,
you might be dying.
You lie, because that’s the right thing to do.
Don’t go, Grampa Milo, please not yet
, but I only say that in my head, keeping up the façade of being calm and strong.

His trembling eases, and his breath slows, but not in a scary, shallow way. No, this is the breathing of someone calming down. His eyes search out mine at last, and he nods, as if just registering my presence,
oh yes, Eleanor.

He stretches one arm over to the table and fumbles around it. I hand him his glasses and he scoots his way slightly up the pillow. I help him prop up.

“I’m going to pull up a chair. Stay put.” An idiotic thing to say. Where would he go?

I bring in the vanity stool from my room for lack of anything else handy, and draw it up close to his bed, taking his hand again. His knobby bones protrude; I could almost read them, like Braille. I think of the many tunes he’s played, the songs he’s written, the contracts he’s signed bringing plays and musicals to life. The times he’s patted my hair as a girl, or when he’s tickled one of his great-grands. So much has passed through these hands.

“I know you can’t tell me what happened,” I say, and he rests his head back, closes his eyes. “But I’m going to ask you some yes or no questions.” He nods his understanding. I ask him a series of questions about physical symptoms that Joel said could indicate heart attack, or another stroke. He shakes his head no for each one. “Was it a nightmare?” He doesn’t answer right off, and at first I think he’s asleep. But then he looks me straight in the eye, still not replying. “You saw it again, didn’t you?” Tiny nod, and a darting look over my shoulder that sends a shiver down my back. I can’t help but look, too, though there’s nothing there at all, of course.

He leans forward then, and strokes my cheek with his good hand. It’s shaking again, whether from fear, or adrenaline, or just because he’s old and tired, I can’t say. But the look on his face sends tears spilling down my cheeks. This is a look of goodbye. I ought to know because I’ve seen it before. I’ll call Joel, he’ll know what to do, if this might really be the end, or maybe he can reassure me, if he has any reassurance to give.

I grab Grampa Milo’s hand and bring it to my lips for a kiss. I don’t speak either now, because what does a person say?

He tugs his hand slightly, and so I let it go. He closes his eyes, wearing the small sad smile of one who grieves.

The morning finds me not having slept any more that night. Esme lets herself in, and nearly jumps out of her shoes as I approach her. I apologize for scaring her, and then explain our evening. Joel had come over late, hair still rumpled from his pillow, and checked him over, declaring Grampa Milo no worse than he had been the day before, though of course he couldn’t give me the guarantee I’d been childishly hoping for. “El, I wish I could promise you a life expectancy but I can’t do that,” he’d said, and folded me in a tight hug.

After Joel left, I sat curled in the chair next to Grampa Milo’s bed most of the night, except for when I paced anxious circuits around the room, checking his chest constantly for rising and falling. I tried to talk myself back into bed many times, reasoning that there was no actual indication that he would die in the night, and even if that were to happen, my sitting next to him would hardly prevent it.

Now that Esme has arrived, I choose this moment to shower and change out of my thin nightgown. By the time I come back downstairs, I am faint with relief that he is awake. Still in bed, but awake.

He’s got a tray across him on the bed with some coffee and toast. I force a smile to bloom up through my worried frown that he’s eating in bed. He’s always managed to get to the eat-in kitchen, and just last night was in the dining room having his whiskey and soda at our lively dinner.

Esme explains, “Mr. Short is feeling tired today, perhaps because of his nightmare last night.” She and I share a glance. We have something in common, we two. We’ve both witnessed him seeing things and behaving strangely, and have hidden this from most people. We are also, I suspect, both ambivalent about having made this choice. Here we are, both still keeping our secrets.

The use of the word “nightmare” pricks my memory. I sink down onto a low bench at the end of the bed, remembering that scream. A real, loud scream from my mute grandfather.

Grampa Milo catches the look on my face and he tilts his head, questioning. I shake my head and wave my hand as if to say “it’s nothing,” forcing another smile.

Grampa Milo eats only a hard-boiled egg for lunch, and has only gotten out of bed long enough to dress, before he has climbed back in. By this time, family members have begun trooping in and out of the house, holding whispered conferences on the stairs, in the kitchen, in the upstairs library.
He’s getting weaker. He’s frail. He’s sleeping so much. Maybe it’s just a bad day. Maybe it’s the end. Should he go to the hospital?

Dr. Joel checks him out once more. He’s as fine as his mute eighty-eight-year-old self has been for the last several weeks, aside from the lethargy. Uncle Paul asks my cousin if he thinks Grampa Milo is going to die soon, and Dr. Joel says maybe. The best he can say is maybe, or maybe not. And Joel looks briefly angry as he glares down at his shoes, as if his medical degree and all those excruciating hours as a resident have failed him in answering simple questions.

All the while I’m hovering at the edges of the Shorts that flow in and out, as I usually do. I hate to do so, but I tear myself away during one of Grampa Milo’s long naps that day and go to the library where I scroll through microfilm records of telephone directories, city directories, and old census data, looking for Vivian Adair. The census data is not helpful at all. She came to and left New York between the years of 1930 and 1940, and that much we knew already.

I see listings for her—at least, I think it’s her—as late as 1936, which leaves him a plausible father for Millicent’s approximate 1937 birth. It seems possible that someone would accidentally get left out of a directory, but accidentally added when they had left? Less likely.I turn the switch hard on the microfilm so that it winds itself so fast around the spool I bet it would cut me if I touched the edge with my finger.

I will have to call Alex and tell him I can’t rule out Milo, but I’ll also have to tell him my grandfather may be dying, and I cannot now accuse him of fathering a bastard child.

As I step into the parlor, I see Grampa Milo sitting up, awake, and I’m delighted, but mad at myself for being gone and missing these precious minutes of alertness.

“Grampa! I’m so glad you’re up. I hope you’re feeling better.”

He smiles but his eyes seem dull, clouded somehow. He nods, though I haven’t asked him anything.

“Would you like me to put on some music for you?”

Another nod.

“Ella Fitzgerald, perhaps?”

Eva’s daughter, Olivia, blurts from across the room, “Look what I found!”

In my rush to Grampa Milo’s side, I hadn’t noticed her there. Eva must be in residence, somewhere around, probably bossing Esme in the kitchen. Olivia kneels in front of a cardboard box of old records someone must have dragged out. My little cousin is a sprightly seven who reads well beyond her years, as Eva will tell anyone who stands still long enough to listen, and now she brandishes a 45 rpm record. I wonder if she even knows what that thing is. She does know what it says, though, and announces it to all of us. “Look! It’s ‘Love Me, I Guess’! Play that!”

Grampa Milo shakes his head violently, again and again, so much that for a moment I think it’s a seizure, then he sinks down into the chair like a sullen child, glaring into midair.

I glance back at Olivia, who has put down the record, and even from this far I can watch shiny tears trembling in her wide eyes.

“Honey, Grampa Milo isn’t feeling well, would you go find your mother, please?”

Olivia leaps to her feet and tears out of the room. I understand how she feels. I found the elderly terrifying too, once upon a time, even when all was normal.

Esme, Eva, and I try, but we can’t get Grampa Milo to respond after this. With reluctance I head up the stairs to my room, to make the call I’m dreading.

In my journalism days—I’m thinking of these days as long past, already, though it was only a few weeks ago when I melted down—I would sometimes rehearse my perfect version of how an interview would go, before picking up the phone. Sometimes this was counterproductive, if it all went south. All the same, it was my form of pep talk, helping me get over that hurdle of picking up the phone to call a stranger and ask prying questions, something I never could get used to. I marvel now that I ever thought I could make a whole career of doing that, for decades on end.

He picks up immediately. “I was just going to call you,” Alex says, voice bright with excitement even over the crackly cell phone connection. “I found something else.”

“Oh?”

“Song lyrics.”

I sit up from my hunch on the bed. Across the way in the vanity mirror I can see the worry run furrows across my forehead.

“Lyrics to ‘Love Me, I Guess.’ In Vivian’s writing.”

I swallow hard. “How do you know it’s Vivian’s?”

“Because of other notes she left behind. She kept a scrapbook of sorts and would write captions for the things she pasted in. It looks like she even tried her hand at a couple poems, about the lake. It took a while to get back to that box between work, and cleaning out the boring stuff from Estelle’s like dishes, but anyway, when I finally did I found this old steno pad I almost pitched out but I happened to open it. I recognized the lyrics from the movie.”

“Well, she was a secretary.”

“You don’t understand, this isn’t just copying down, there are scratch-offs, and rewordings. It’s a real live work in progress. What if she wrote that song? What if it really was her work?”

I stand up off the bed so fast I’m dizzy. “Are you calling my grandfather a thief? First he impregnates and abandons Vivian and now he stole her work and claimed it as his? What kind of people do you think we are?”

“I didn’t mean that… I just… If you could see what I’m looking at. It does not look like taking dictation. It’s not in shorthand or something.”

“I can’t talk about this now.”

“Then why did you call?” His voice has grown sharp with irritation.

I’d almost forgotten I was the one who initiated the call. “Fine. Two things. First, if I’m looking at the right Vivian Adair—a secretary of that name who was living in Manhattan in the 1930s until she left sometime after 1936—I cannot say for sure that my grandfather can be eliminated as a candidate.”