Vivian In Red (44 page)

An hour later, Milo was wearing a path in the living room rug. Vivian had hardly moved, about as human and warm as a piece of furniture. Milo had finally drunk the lukewarm coffee rather than waste it, nearly performing a spit-take because his mother had made it so strong.

Chana Schwartz had gone to the market to buy the night’s dinner, and other than the telephone ringing once (Max, asking after Leah, who was at the pictures with a neighbor) the apartment was so quiet that Milo could faintly hear conversations of people going by in the street.

Somehow he kept ending up alone with this dame.

The only time Vivian spoke was once. She turned over on the sofa, curled on her side like a child, to face Milo. “I could stay with you. We could write more songs? Help each other? I promise to be good. I know I’m not always good.”

“You are good,” Milo answered, sitting across from her, where he’d been tapping out rhythms from the show on the arm of his chair. He made his voice hard, imitating his father. “But you can’t stay with me. It’s time you went home.”

“You don’t want me.” This was part challenge, part question. Milo couldn’t bring himself to answer.

Vivian raised herself on one elbow. “Then say so. Say you don’t want me, or I won’t believe you.”

“C’mon, kid…”

“Say it.”

Milo made himself look at her straight on. “No. I don’t want you.”

Vivian pulled back as if bitten, then melted gradually back down to a prone position, her eyes unfocused, staring at nothing.

When there was a quiet knock at the door, Milo yanked it open and he could have kissed Mrs. Smith, if she’d have stood for such a display. He’d never have imagined the prim head secretary back at TB Harms would be coming to his aid now. He never even thought he’d see her again after that day Keenan canned him. He never even went back to visit, or bring her a pastrami sandwich like the old times. And yet here she was, answering his call, bringing her brisk efficiency to bear, no questions asked.

“I’m not sure how much I can help, but I’ll try,” she said, stepping past Milo without waiting to be invited, crisp and secretarial as ever.

She walked with erect, proper posture to the girl’s limp form, and sat carefully on the edge of the table. She reminded Milo of a tiny bird, perched the way she was. She reached out a slim hand with red nails and stroked Vivian’s arm.

“Vivian? It’s me. Beatrice.”

Beatrice. Milo had never heard her first name during the time they worked together. She seemed to prefer the formality of “Mrs.” Or maybe that was just his assumption, since she always seemed as reserved and controlled as her hair knotted on the back of her head.

Mrs. Smith turned to look over her shoulder at Milo. “Mr. Short, would you give us a minute?”

“Sure, of course.”

Milo scampered out of the apartment and down the steps, all too happy to let Mrs. Smith do whatever she would.

He rested on the stoop and watched the Bronx parade by as he lit a cigarette. From his view he could see the Majestic Theatre, likely where Leah had gone. It was showing an Astaire picture,
Follow the Fleet
. Some songwriters had been heading out to Hollywood, and Allen had been pestering him about it, too, saying the money was better, what with theaters shutting down all up and down Broadway, turning into movie houses. “They still need music, Short,” Allen had implored, but Milo had shook his head quietly, concentrating instead on watching the final dress rehearsals for
The High Hat
.

Milo had heard the old hands in the business telling gleeful old stories about the older shows, about pranks played on each other in the cast, about stage mishaps that must have been horrifying at the time but in the retelling, having all survived, became hilarious anecdotes, more so when greased by free-flowing booze. Milo would like to tell stories like that, but his two shows thus far both were all tangled up with Allen and Vivian, two wretches who’d taught him more about life than he ever wanted to know.

He squinted down at his cigarette and wished he’d have been good with a needle after all, stitching away at the Schwartz and Sons tailor shop. Vivian had come to the city for excitement, so it would seem, but Milo didn’t think so much was wrong with boring. Max was doing just fine with his pretty little wife and a good job.

Milo turned as the apartment building door opened gently, knowing right off it was Mrs. Smith.

She lowered herself down next to Milo on the stoop, holding out her hand. Milo handed her the cigarette and she sucked in a long, unladylike drag. When she handed it back, a ring of red lipstick was imprinted on the end.

“Well,” she said, in a puff of smoke. “I told her I’m contacting her sister, which I will do momentarily.”

“How did she react to that?”

“About the same. Inert.”

On the telephone, Milo had told Mrs. Smith everything, nearly everything anyway, leaving out the reason he’d gone running to Vivian’s apartment in the first place that one sweaty afternoon. A good girl like Mrs. Smith didn’t need to know about Allen, this much he knew.

“How’d you even know about the sister?”

“Oh, us girls in the typing pool have plenty to talk about. It won’t be hard to get a telegram to her, now that I’ve got out of Vivian that the sister married one Howard Mann and moved to this little town in Michigan named Ludington.”

“Michigan? She’ll freeze to death.”

Mrs. Smith turned to regard him with one eyebrow raised. “Mr. Short, it’s no farther north than New York. Did you flunk geography?”

“Call me Milo, I beg you. We don’t work together, you don’t have to act like I’m important.”

“Fine, then. And you may call me Beatrice.”

“It’s a nice name. I once knew a Jewish girl who went by Beatrice.”

“Well, now this makes twice.”

Milo’s mother came up to the sidewalk, and he trotted over to take her bags. He rushed through introductions while the trio went up the steps.

As they entered, he realized Vivian was nowhere to be seen. All three of them wordlessly began searching the apartment’s few rooms with alarmed energy.

It was Milo who bumped into her emerging from the bathroom. Vivian took a cold look at Milo’s face and deadpanned, “A girl can’t freshen up without a search party?”

Mrs. Smith smiled at her with a tilt of her head. “You look so pretty, Viv. Now tell me, where can we get the address of your sister? We really need to get in touch with her, don’t you think?”

At this, Vivian sat heavily into the nearest chair, a marionette with cut strings, staring at the floor between her stockinged feet.

A
llen’s face lit up yellow with the flare of his match, lighting a cigarette. “What’s eating you? This is the greatest night of your life and you look practically dead. What’s with the crepe-hanging?”

In the balcony seats at the theater, they were flanked by Max Gordon and his wife, Mrs. Garnett, Allen and his wife Dorothy, and of all people, Mark Bell and his missus. The orchestra was warming up, and the theater was packed to the rafters. Their first big show, hired on their own merits, not as stand-ins for other writers who washed out. This should have been, as Allen put it, the greatest night of his natural life.

But his parents refused to come, on account of it being the Sabbath and all, and his mother especially made it known how displeased they were that their son’s wonderful career would make regular observance next to impossible. The proximity of Allen and his glowering, large wife, not to mention Bell and his prim, pretty wife, were cranking Milo’s nerves. And through it all, his mind was torturing him with nightmare visions of Vivian throwing herself under the wheels of a train, with no one to keep an eye on her between New York and Michigan. What was to stop her from getting out in Pennsylvania and carrying on with what she started?

Well, all the drugs helped. Mrs. Smith had called a doctor and gotten Vivian tranquilized plenty tranquil, and Estelle Mann was on her way to Detroit to pick up Vivian at the station. It was all copacetic. In theory.

A sharp jab roused him. It was Allen. “Stop looking like that, like someone shot your dog. You’ll curse the show.” After a lifeless pause, Allen turned in his seat and leaned close to his ear. Milo used all of his force of will not to lean away from his whisper.

“It’s that broad, isn’t it? Bell told me she got her hooks in you. Didn’t I say she was trouble? Well, she’s gone, Short. Out of your life and not your problem. So snap out of it. Soon as this show gets going, I got a job for us in Hollywood.”

Milo crinkled his forehead at him.

“Yeah, Hollywood, did you think I was just telling stories before? It’s where the money is, and it’ll get your mind off that dame if you get out of the city. Now shut up and look alive before Gordon decides you and your long face are ungrateful.”

The house lights dimmed, and a wave of excited murmurs blended into the overture.

Milo tried to let himself bob along on their excitement. The darkness helped: here he could pretend no one else was around. All those months of writing, sweating, rewriting, worrying… And here it was, a crackerjack cast belting out his words and the crowd lapping it up like honey, he could sense it. It was there in the hushed attention, in the easy laughter bubbling down the rows, in the spontaneous explosions of applause, sometimes catching the actors by surprise, such that they had to make some stage business, pacing from place to place maybe, or fiddling with a prop as the crowd simmered down.

As the melodic opening notes of “Love Me, I Guess” struck up, with the two leads gazing at one another across a pool of yellow light, Milo’s throat closed up in excitement and fear.

He needn’t have worried, though, because they knocked it straight out of the park and halfway to New Jersey. John Garnett was tender, Marianne West’s faux-demure reactions were a hoot, the dance direction was perfect for the number. Garnett liltingly, charmingly, exquisitely professed his growing love, just in time for riotous and improbable second act complications.

As they danced their way into the release, Milo relaxed, at long, long last, and tears pricked his eyes. He almost didn’t notice Allen’s hand squeezing his knee.

Milo batted that hand away just as the curtain fell on the first act, and the audience roared its hearty approval.

He excused himself with just a curt nod at Gordon, racing down the balcony steps.

In the throngs of the lobby, he heard snatches of talk, like
wonderful,
and
so much fun!
and
wasn’t that song just gorgeous?

And Milo was glad he wasn’t famous like Irving Berlin, because he didn’t want to talk to any single person who knew him.

“Mr. Short! I thought that was you.”

And there was Mrs. Beatrice Smith, smiling up at him, and Milo admired her hair loosened at last from its bun, though the tight little curls around her round face were controlled in their own way. Milo didn’t know from hair, but he imagined it took her a good while to fix it like that.

“Well, hello… Beatrice. Gonna take me some practice saying it. And please, call me Milo.”

“I guess I need practice, too.”

The crowd around them pushed them together. Milo noticed how tiny she was; even in her shoes she barely reached his chin.

“What brings you here?”

She smirked. “I’m not exactly selling tickets, am I? I’m watching the show, Milo. I saw
Hilarity
, too. Well done. I can really tell these words are yours; even if no one had told me you wrote it, I would still know.”

“Awww, gosh, thanks. People seem to be liking it.”

Small talk ensued, during which Milo found out that she had intended to come with a girlfriend, but her friend had ditched her at the last moment to go out for dinner with a man she was sweet on.

Finally, she fixed him with a canny, glinting look. “See, I shocked you the other day, didn’t I?”

“How do you figure?” Milo thought,
boy, you don’t know from shocked.

“When I told you I was Jewish.”

“Well, it did come as a surprise, a bit,” Milo allowed, inwardly cringing that he might have noticed plenty about the efficient and businesslike Mrs. Smith, if he’d cared to talk to her about more than work and the weather.