Vivian In Red (22 page)

I
startle awake, my mind scrambling to understand where I am.

Oh, Grampa Milo’s house. I flop back onto the overfull pillows as the benefit comes back to me in flashes. The pity, the staring, Grampa for some reason freaking out and spilling his drink all over that girl. And there I went, on my third glass of champagne, thinking it was a great idea to move in.

It felt so right at the time. He could use the company, and I don’t need that apartment, not really. We can work on the book much more efficiently if I’m here anytime, and can grab him at cheerful moments.

But this also means packing up my things and closing the door where Daniel and I… Well. Perhaps all the more reason to move.

I’ll have to go back to the apartment today. My computer is there, most of my notes. I should check my home answering machine, too, in case Vivian’s grandson called me back. I’d called him the next day after his email, but so far, no response. The silence, after he’d freely given his number, has only made my curiosity burn hotter.

I swing my feet off the side of the huge bed. Lace-edged flannel tickles my ankles. I’d scrounged up an old nightgown of Grandma Bee’s last night for lack of anything else to wear besides the party dress, and used a new toothbrush we’d picked up with a quick stop at Duane Reade on the way home. Once we got back, the nurse and I helped Grampa Milo to his upstairs room—he pointed happily at his old canopy bed, indicating how glad he was to sleep there again—and we hovered in the hallway as Grampa Milo readied himself for bed. As we did so, I couldn’t help but think how he was getting physically stronger, while his words remained stubbornly absent, his dominant hand stubbornly limp.

The nightgown is so soft that I believe I’ll keep it, patterned as it is with rosebuds and bows. It felt odd at first, wearing my late grandmother’s nightgown. Then as I pulled the bedspread up around my chin, I decided that she’d have insisted I wear it, had she been here to do so. And it’s as cozy as Grandma Bee herself always was.

While I’m waking myself up, I make a mental list of what else to do today. Call Uncle Paul and tell him I’m giving up the apartment. Get the essentials I’ll need here. Arrange for storage for things like that brown leather couch, my bed.

I give up on combing the tangles out of my hair with my fingers, instead wrestling it into a fat braid with an elastic that I always keep in my purse, just in case. A corona of frizz frames my forehead. I use a bar of soap I find in the shower to wash my face.

The smell of coffee wafts up the stairs as I step into the hall. I’m smacked by a retroactive wallop of loneliness. No one makes coffee at my apartment for me, because there’s no one there to do it. I’d forgotten about the simple joy of having a cup already waiting.

In the kitchen, I find Esme bustling around and a full plate of eggs and toast in the center of the butcher block island.

My delight at the coffee fades as I see that Grampa Milo isn’t in here. Instead we have a woman I don’t know with rings of shoulder-length curls, sitting in front of a breakfast plate. She gives me a genial smile and I fidget with my flannel nightgown. I didn’t expect to be in my pajamas in front of a stranger.

“Good morning. Where’s Grampa?” I ask Esme.

“Good morning, Miss Eleanor. He only ate a piece of toast and went back to lie down. I think he is overtired. This here is Ms. Marla, the therapist helping Mr. Short with his words.”

“Hello,” she says. “I’ve met most of the grandkids. You must be David’s daughter?”

“Yes, David was my dad.” I swirl the creamer into the black coffee, and keep swirling, just for something to do.

“I’m sorry he passed.”

“Thank you.”

“I saw a picture the other day in the parlor and it must have been him. Lots of dark curly hair, just like you.”

“We all have dark curly hair,” I answer.

“Not just that, but just the look of him, the shape of your face, I just knew. Do you favor your mother, too? I’ve got two little towheaded blondes, because of my husband, but their eyes are dark like mine. Quite a mix.” Marla sips her coffee and looks at me with her eyebrows up, waiting for me to chime in with my mother’s physical attributes.

Esme clears her throat and offers Marla more eggs.

I put on what I hope registers as a serene smile. “My mom left a long time ago. It’s hard for me even to remember what she looked like.”

Marla gasps and puts her hand to her chest. “Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t know. Thoughtless of me to pry, I hope you forgive me.”

“No, it’s fine. You couldn’t know.”

At this, the conversation curls up and dies. A siren outside breaks the silence at last, and Marla informs us she’s going to check with “dear Milo” one more time before officially abandoning today’s therapy session. I’m grateful that she doesn’t throw me pitying looks, or continue with stammered apologies. She clears her own place before Esme has a chance to do it and slides out through the swinging doors. Esme follows her, no doubt attending to her work elsewhere in the house.

I notice I’m breathing fast when little ripples appear in the surface of my coffee as I raise it to my face. This agitation is not Marla’s fault, nor was it anyone else’s any other time this has happened. Why shouldn’t they ask? Everyone has a mother; everyone came from somewhere.

I know too little about my mother, and also too much. What I know for sure is she was a gentile girlfriend my father had, name of Charlotte, who was always reserved and cold in public, but my dad assured me was a laugh riot when it was just the two of them. I have to take his word for it, because she left before I went off to nursery school. My father’s fumbled explanations were along the lines of “she couldn’t handle it” and “wasn’t ready,” never defining what “it” was supposed to be. My child-self filled it in the way all children do, by nature self-centered. “It” was me. She wasn’t ready for me.

My Aunt Rebekah unknowingly filled in the blanks. She got tipsy one night and got into it with my father when we were all out at the Hamptons house. They were sitting around the embers of a bonfire, and I’d gotten bored playing Monopoly with Naomi and Eva, and Joel was on the Atari. So I figured I’d come out to the fire and look at the stars. I didn’t know that my dad and Aunt Rebekah were the only ones out there, until I got so close I could hear every word of their conversation.

“You owe that child a mother,” was the sentence from my aunt that froze me in place.

“What are you talking about?” my dad had answered, his voice more weary than indignant or angry.

“She’s growing up weird, and it’s your fault there is no feminine influence in her life.”

“There’s so much wrong with that I don’t even know where to begin. Feminine influence? If she’s lacking that, look in the mirror, Bekah. You barely talk to her, and you’re the closest thing she’s got to a mother. And anyway, our mother is doing a wonderful job picking up your slack there, lucky for Eleanor. She is not weird, she’s shy. And anyway…my fault? How is it my fault that Charlotte left us? I gave that woman everything.”

“You got her knocked up is what, and talked her into keeping it. That’s what she told me.”

“That ‘it’ is my daughter, and you better shut your mouth right now.”

“She never wanted a baby, but you convinced Charlotte to go through with it and play house, and what did you think would happen, huh? That she’d squeeze the kid out and she’d be magically transformed into Mother of the Year? Honestly, it’s a wonder she didn’t run for the hills the first week, my God. And now the poor girl is so screwed up having been abandoned like that, and you haven’t done a single thing about getting remarried to give her something like a normal life.”

“I’m getting up right now before I … Don’t talk to me again. Ever.”

It was easy not to be noticed. My dad wasn’t looking for me, and it was so dark away from the fire. He headed off for the house like he was shot from a bow. I stared at Rebekah, and then watched her put her head down and start shaking. It took a minute for me to tease out the sound from the rush of the surf; she was crying ragged sobs.

They didn’t speak for a month, and it was me who begged Dad to make up with her. I never let on what I knew, but I couldn’t stand the tension and the pain the two of them wore like branded skin in each other’s presence, knowing it was all because of me.

I clung to the notion that my father had fought for me as a way to blunt what I’d learned, and finally just put that knowledge away in the dusty attic of things you know but don’t need, next to the quadratic equation and verb tenses in French.

Aunt Rebekah and I never did manage to be close. But I had Grandma Bee, and my dad was as sweet-natured and soft with me as any mother would have been.

I slurp some more coffee and feel guilty about leaving the eggs behind that Esme made, but I have no appetite now. A chord of sympathy for my grandfather vibrates in me, at having someone pry into your past.

I shove open the door to the Midtown apartment and I wish I could turn back out and leave again. Just buy all new clothes, new toiletries, new books. I’d like to just throw open the doors with a sign that says “Free, take it” and start over.

But this is not what one does, so I start with the obvious and listen to my answering machine while I dig out my suitcase from under the bed.

A few messages are from book sources, and I’ll have to listen again to write those down.

I find the suitcase and haul it up onto the unmade bed. Daniel’s message is next on the machine, which is not surprising, given the takeout dinner call and the surprise appearance at temple.

Ellie, hi. We haven’t talked in a while. It was great to see you the other night, but you looked sad and I’m concerned. Check in, okay? I’ll buy you a drink. Bye for now.

I walk over to my dresser and start tossing underwear into the open suitcase, not bothering to remove the half-used bottle of sunscreen and the magazine with sand stuck to its pages.

Hello, Eleanor Short.

I stop, stock-still with a bra in my hand.

This is Alex Bryant. Sorry I didn’t return your call right away, things have been busy taking care of my grandmother’s estate. Estelle’s estate. Whatever. You know what I mean. Anyway, sure, we can talk. I’ve been looking some stuff up online, and also doing some math with birthdates, and it’s interesting. I have to work tonight but you can—

The machine cuts off with a shriek. He’d either run out of time, or my machine took this moment to conk out. The message had come in yesterday, he said he was working then. Would today be okay?

I decide that as it’s business hours, he’s probably at the office. I’d scrawled the number to the community theater offices down the side of the printed out article, and this is what I fish out of my papers now.

He answers himself, briskly: “Alex Bryant.” I can hear typing in the background.

“Hi. This is Eleanor Short.”

“Oh? Huh? I mean, oh. I hadn’t remembered giving you this number.”

“You didn’t. The Internet did. I’m so sorry, this is intrusive a bit. Curiosity was getting the better of me and I figured you’d be at work. You could always hang up on me, but of course I hope you don’t.”

“Um, okay. Hang on a sec.”

Eleanor heard him change positions in the room, then some background noise quieted as he must have closed an office door.

“OK, so I’m back. So, speaking of curious, I got curious, too. I looked you up, and found your grandfather Milo Short. Then I popped down to the local library to read up.”

“Really? And what did you learn?”

“I learned he’s a ‘noted Broadway producer and one-time lyricist.’ And what’s interesting is that my mother suddenly doesn’t know who her father is. And Vivian, who you say ‘knew’ your grandfather, gave birth to a child not naming a father. But here’s the really good part.”

“Yeah?” Journalism classes and magazine writing have trained my pulse to speed up with excitement at times like this. However, the doting granddaughter in me, the one who imagines her sainted grandfather could never have abandoned a pregnant lover, feels nauseated and dizzy.

“I asked my mom a bit more about Vivian. So the story goes, she went off to New York in a snit when she was young. She was a wild one, Estelle always said. Their parents died young and Vivian just said to hell with bossy old Estelle and took off for the big city. But she came back ‘in a bad way,’ which was the nice way to say she was nuts. That part we always knew, by the way, about her being nuts. She was that relative, you know? Every family’s got one that gets talked about all hushed.”