Vivian In Red (7 page)

He turned around and hoped to see Allen looking delighted, but he only looked more tired. Milo wanted to run all the way home and hide under his bed.

“Yeah, okay, sure. Come back tomorrow at nine.”

“Sure? You mean, sure I got a job?”

“If you can put over a garbage song like that so well, you might make our good songs sound great. You looked like you actually liked that sappy mess.”

Milo shrugged with one shoulder. “It wasn’t so bad.”

“Sure it was, and I oughta know because I wrote it. Now beat it, I’m busy. Come back in the morning.”

With that, Allen strode over to the piano and balled up the music in his fists as if the melody had been a personal affront to all of music history, leaving Milo blinking in stunned disbelief.

“You waiting for me to demand an encore?” Allen said, without looking up. Milo scurried away.

Despite the ongoing rainy onslaught outside, and the splashes from the automobiles and the wind turning his umbrella inside out, Milo caught himself whistling “Happy Days Are Here Again” as he made his way over to his father’s shop. Schwartz and Sons Tailoring was about to become just Schwartz and Son, singular, and forever, if Milo had his way.

W
hen Esme pulls open the door to my grandfather’s limestone townhouse—his home since the biggest Broadway hit was
Kiss Me, Kate
—she gives me the sad smile, complete with head-tilt.

How I hate that look, that practiced, silent “poor you” I’ve seen my whole life. What’s wrong with just looking sad? That smile is like saying “chin up,” which is something else I hate to hear. I’ll put my chin up when I damn well please and not a moment before.

She steps back and I pass into their foyer, making for the steps up to his office with his grand piano and his reams of sheet music dating back to FDR.

“Miss, he’s in the parlor today.”

Of course, I’d forgotten. This literal lowering of Grampa Milo seems irrevocable. The elderly don’t gain back freedom they’ve lost.

I hover in the entry for a moment while Esme makes her way off to wherever she was working. I can see the back of his head over the top of a tufted, embroidered chair. A familiar and favorite melody lilts around the room: Fred Astaire’s unassuming tenor from the old scratchy record player.
Someday, when I’m awfully low, I will feel a glow…

Grampa Milo is different, and I have to be different in his presence. He is no longer the funny chatterbox who taught me pinochle, which I thought for years was spelled pea-knuckle. He used to play any song I wanted on the piano, even Top 40 songs, by listening once or twice and replaying them by ear, making like a human jukebox. It didn’t seem that long ago he was plinking out the melody to George Michael’s “Faith,” and I was giggling into my hand hearing the naughty lyrics in my head. His price for that parlor trick was for me to sit and listen to him play the sumptuous melodies of his day, all but his own most famous song. Like any proper teen-ager, I pretended to hate that part.

He can’t do that now, and may never again. And though I’ve been visiting him all along, each time I step into his presence is akin to walking into a punch.

I suck in a breath and push my glasses up, and walk in, eyes on the carpet for as long as I dare without being rude.

“Hiya, Grampa.” He looks much the same as usual, except for being downstairs. This was Grandma Bee’s room, really. He looks at me with downturned eyes, too, along with a smile that’s vague and pretending. He’s happy to see me, and sad he can’t say so, and I have to look away before I weep.

I take a seat in the other tufted chair. A table between us holds a copy of a glossy coffee table book about Broadway, the black cover faded to the gray of a foggy morning. While seated, I tug and haul the chair over the thick rug, leaving behind deep depressions.

When I look up again, having settled closer, Grampa waves at the air around his head.

“Yes, I love this song, too. Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields. A female songwriter was unusual back then, huh?”

He opens his mouth to answer me, and his face crumbles as he remembers. I rush to fill in the silence: “She was a genius at making vernacular sound beautiful. ‘Awfully low’ rhyming with ‘feel a glow.’ Just perfect.”

We both look up, as if we can see the notes unspooling into the room. Maybe Grampa is picturing Dorothy Fields. He might well have met her.

Uncle Paul and my doctor cousin, Joel, have been worried, so I hear. Joel said the speech pathologist, Marla, seems puzzled by his utter lack of progress of any kind; he should be making some improvement with his right hand, or his voice, or even that silly pointing board with the alphabet, pictures, and a stick. After all, the strength in his right leg came right back, even more quickly than expected. Why won’t the rest of his right side catch up? Why can’t he speak, even a little? Joel thinks he doesn’t even want to try, that he’s too depressed and overwhelmed. No other explanation would make medical sense, and for Dr. Joel everything has to make medical sense.

I don’t agree that Grampa is depressed, but I don’t bother to contradict the good doctor, as no one listens to me, anyway.

My grandfather’s continued silence echoes like a vibrating cymbal crash. I’m not the most talkative in the Short family, which is a fact that usually drifts by unnoticed. There are too many Shorts hollering over each other and making a fuss to realize that I’m quiet. Now, I’m the only one in the room who can talk and in fact I must.

The alternative is to look over at Grampa Milo and watch the tragedy of his situation settle over his face and weigh him down.

I look around the room for a prompt, anything to talk about other than myself, which would be a short conversation, wouldn’t it? That’s when I see the photo albums my grandmother kept down here, in order by year, on a shelf below the window seat that looks out over the park.

I jump up and pull out the oldest one, using my cardigan sleeve to brush off dust. In walking it back to my grandfather, I notice he seems a little wary, but I’ve got the album now and nothing else to talk about, so I settle down with it and open it on my knees, turning it as close to him as I can.

In the first photo I open to, a trim young woman is standing in front of a marquee for a revue called
George White’s Scandals
.

“This must be Grandma Bee.” Of course it must be. Grampa Milo was famous for proclaiming that my grandmother had been his first and only love. “She saved me from a life of barren spinsterhood!” he’d joke, and Grandma Bee would laugh and flick her hand at him,
Oh you, you’re such a card.

Grampa Milo nods, but he doesn’t seem to be looking directly at the photo. It might be hard for him to see, of course, given that his eyesight was always poor. He never liked wearing glasses that were thick enough to work as well as they should, though now of course they make lenses so much lighter. I think he just got used to the world being indistinct. Maybe he’d find the clarity jarring, or maybe he’s just vain and doesn’t like how glasses look. To this I relate. If you lined up every person who ever told me “You are so pretty without your glasses” you could span the Brooklyn Bridge.

A clock ticks off echoing seconds. “Funny name, ‘Scandals.’ Now a scandal is President Clinton and that intern. Can you imagine that being in the papers back then? Horrors.”

I admire the picture of my grandmother in her demure, below-the-knee dress, gloves, and pretty hat, consider how they all went by Mrs. and Mr. then, and dressed in suits all the time, and wonder if I wasn’t born in the wrong decade.

“Is this picture taken in what, 1940?”

Grampa shakes his head, points his thumb down.

“Oh, earlier.” Their fiftieth anniversary was in what year? And this must have been a bit earlier than that… “1937?”

Grampa smiles and puts a fingertip on his nose. Bingo.

“She’s so pretty. Her hair’s so long, I thought everyone bobbed the hair back then.”

Grampa Milo shrugs, and I can read in his face:
what do I know from hair?

Minutes pass like this, with me trying to retell the anecdotes he’s told me down through the years, though that meant stretching my memory back a decade or more, using the pictures as a prop. Grampa, I can tell from the corner of my eye, leans on his elbow in the chair and closes his eyes. I’m about to take my leave and let him rest when he snaps up, staring fixedly at the corner of the room near a wooden globe on a stand.

“Grampa? Do you see something?”

He reaches over to the coffee table book and sweeps it onto the floor with a quickness I couldn’t have imagined. I set the album down on the floor and put my hand on his knee, but he turns away as far as the chair will allow.

Esme sweeps in then, as if she’d been waiting in the wings this whole time, scooping up the album and the book. A nurse I’d almost forgotten about appears as well, checking over my grandfather, who submits to this investigation with a droopy, sulky acquiescence. This nurse is a man, with dark skin and an Afro-Caribbean accent which trills musically along as he narrates what he’s doing for the sake of my grandfather, or maybe for me. I wish I knew his name and I’m embarrassed that I don’t, but can’t rouse myself to ask.

Esme speaks up. “Mr. Short, I will make you a whiskey and soda, it’s just about cocktail hour anyway. Miss Eleanor, your uncle wanted to speak with you, could you come please?”

I mumble a goodbye and follow Esme as she leads me from the room with a big, confident stride.

In the kitchen across the entry, I sit down at a counter stool and Esme busies herself making two drinks. Her dark braid has fallen over one shoulder and I wonder that it doesn’t bother her like that. I give my own ponytail a self-conscious pat, and feel it frizzing out, bristling under my hand.

“It’s difficult,” Esme says, filling the quiet with her own thoughts as I’d tried to do for my Grampa just minutes ago. “Sometimes he is in spirits, then he gets frustrated. He uses up all patience. I think he enjoys it for a time, like that game? What’s it’s called? Where you act out something and people guess?”

“Charades.”

“Yes, that one. But then he gets tired of the game and boom, something hits the floor, or maybe he just slumps. Oh, nothing valuable. He would never ruin anything Mrs. Bee had picked out.”

Esme pushes the drink across the counter to me. “Now, there you are. Cheers.”

“You should have one too, for a proper ‘cheers.’”

“No, miss, this is not for me.”

“Oh, Grampa wouldn’t mind, he’d probably make you one himself.”

“No, I mean I drink nothing more than communion wine.”

“Good for you, then. L’chaim.” I down half the drink and it slams into my chest. “Does Uncle Paul really want to see me, or was that an excuse to get me out of the room?”

“No, he does. He’s in the library.”

I sneak a glance into the parlor as I ascend the stairs. Grampa Milo is leaning on one hand again and if he noticed me walk past him in the foyer he didn’t acknowledge it.

Grandma Bee decorated the library in red and gold to look like the inside of a theater. The grand piano in the corner bounces the stark August sun into the room, and Uncle Paul, rubbing his temples behind Grampa Milo’s desk, looks so much like his dad that I could be back in time with two braids holding back my frizz and the taste of grape Popsicle on my tongue.