Vivian In Red (6 page)

After getting directions from a bored and skeptical boy at the box office, Milo huffed up the stairs, as sweat tickled a line down his back, and the din of pianos and muffled singing grew louder in cadence with the crescendo of his thudding heart.

Inside the lobby, a few people working in nearby half-glassed-in offices glanced up at him, but went back to their work, no doubt assessing he was no performer and therefore not worth knowing. Milo approached an office girl, a young woman tapping at a typewriter. “Miss? I’m here about a job.”

“Mmm-hmmm,” she said, still typing.

“Playing the piano?”

“Yes, sir,” she answered, but hadn’t yet looked up at him, still typing. Finally she reached over and slapped the machine silly by way of slamming the carriage back. Milo jumped.

She looked up at him and said, “So what is it you want to do here?”

“Play the piano.”

She moved her mouth around a little, and Milo realized she was trying not to laugh at him. She lowered her voice and leaned over her typewriter, and Milo noticed her bosom lightly depressed the keys. This tickled his funny bone somehow, so he bit his own lip to keep from laughing.

“It’s called being a song plugger. You plug the songs for the acts. Sometimes here, sometimes around town. That’s what a piano player does here.”

Milo would have proposed to her at that very moment. Having never been in love before, he assumed the torrent of gratitude was close enough. He cleared his throat and spoke with theatrical volume and diction. “Yes, of course, that is exactly what I meant. And whom do I see about such an important job?”

She laughed at this. “I’ll check if Mr. McHenry will see you.”

She leaned into an office doorway. Milo noticed several of the men stop their conversations or paper shuffling to watch the shape of her derriere as she bent slightly at the waist to talk to Mr. McHenry.

She gestured lightly with her hand. “Go right in, Mr.…?”

“Schwartz.”

“Mr. Short.”

Milo shrugged. Once he had the job, there would be plenty of time to get his name right.

Mr. McHenry was a voluminous man melting behind a desk that seemed not large enough for him. He mopped his brow with a soaking handkerchief in a gesture that struck Milo as awfully optimistic. He jerked his thumb at the piano.

“Let’s hear you.”

Milo nodded, and rested his hat on an empty office chair, for lack of a better place. He settled onto the piano bench, sucked in a breath, closed his eyes, and let his hands do their thing.

His fingers danced along like they didn’t belong to him, really. They just went right ahead and had a party, and this terrific song came out, and it felt like great good luck that one of his favorite songs to play, the one he’d probably learned earliest, thanks to his mother’s frequent requests for him to play it, happened to be authored by Irving Berlin himself, and surely that would impress Mr. McHenry. He was swinging back into the bouncy refrain when he heard, “Hey, pal, I said that’s enough!”

Milo turned around on the piano bench. “Sorry?”

“I’ve been hollering at you for eight bars. I said thanks, I got the picture.” McHenry heaved himself up by way of planting both massive palms on his desk, and stomped over with some papers. He slapped some music onto the piano. “That was nice and all, pal, but it’s old-fashioned. Play this and let’s see how you do.”

Milo swallowed. The marks on the page looked like ants crawling around on a white floor. With a hand nearly trembling, he pulled his glasses out of his inside pocket and used his necktie to polish off the dust.

He slipped the frames into place, and his hands hovered over the keys. Even with the lenses, the notes wavered. The glasses were old, his eyes were worse.

He turned back to McHenry. “You know, my eyes don’t see so well. I’m really more of a player by ear.”

McHenry, who’d settled back behind his desk by now, raised one eyebrow at Milo. “Really. So how do you suppose that helps us here? When your job is to read the music we give you? Any music we decide? New music, that no one’s even heard yet? So that the acts and producers can put it over big and sell sheet music by the ream? Have a nice afternoon.”

And with that, McHenry went back to scowling at the music on his desk as if Milo had fallen through a trapdoor and vanished.

And he might’ve. He certainly wanted to. Instead he slunk back out, then back in again, to pick up his hat. McHenry appeared not to have noticed.

He nodded to the office girl, who gave him a shrug and mouthed “sorry” before returning to her typing.

Out on the street, he looked down the long block of music publishers and theaters and realized the same fate would greet him inside each office. His one talent was useless for anything but after-supper entertainment in his parents’ apartment, unless his eyes were magically cured, or his father received some windfall that made Milo unafraid to ask him about money for new glasses. And even then, so what? What made him so special?

Milo was too hot and tired just then to walk back to the platform, too embarrassed to show his face at home besides. He stood in the shade of the building, and for a few moments stared down at the worn and scuffed tips of his shoes, as people with better places to be hustled past.

What an ignoramus he’d turned out to be, not even thinking one step past his masterful playing of a song that had been first published twenty-three years ago in 1911, the year he was born, in fact.

Milo sighed and began his hot, sticky trudge. He wondered how many suits his father and Max would have to sew, how many cuffs they’d have to make, before the shop made enough money that he could get some better specs.

He’d missed out on all the fun before the big crash in ’29. He’d been a diligent, obedient son struggling along in the shop and going to school and doing his arithmetic, because his mother insisted he not drop out to work, like his father had done. He pounded away on their badly tuned piano at night, playing by ear the songs they heard on the radio. His wilder classmates and neighbors would swill bootleg gin in speakeasies or house parties, but Milo figured his day would come when he got a little older.

Then he was eighteen years old, and suddenly nobody was having any fun anymore. Whatever his mother said about the Depression being good for business, he wasn’t fooled for a minute. He could see with his own terrible eyes how bad business was. No one wanted custom-made suits in fine fabrics these days. And people could make do with their own home sewing for repairs and fit easily enough. It wasn’t so hard to fix a seam for most people, and if your hem wasn’t perfect, well, who was going to complain? You wouldn’t, not if it meant more money in your pocket. And even if you couldn’t manage that, plenty of newer immigrants would take in your sewing in their homes, for cheap. Which was just how Yosef Schwartz got started a generation ago, on Orchard Street.

Milo was a block from the train station when he saw it: a snaking gray line of men, three or four abreast. They were quiet, ordered. The bread line rocked gently as the men shuffled forward. Some wore suits and fedoras, others open-collar shirts, with flat caps pushed back over sweaty brows. They muttered a few words to one another, but mostly seemed to stare only at the collar of the man in front of them.

Milo kept looking at the line of men as he waited for the traffic to clear with a few other men in suits. One, with a fine hat and a newspaper under his arm, observed to someone near, or maybe to anyone in earshot, “I’d jump off the Brooklyn Bridge before I’d do that.”

“You might get the chance to test that out if things keep going the way they are,” someone else said.

The traffic light changed, and the men continued uptown, but Milo remained on the curb. He cast a look back over his shoulder, toward Broadway, and TB Harms, Jack Mills and Company, and Jerome Remick. He stood there as people jostled around him, as somebody asked him for a dime. Stood there looking back, and thinking.

A week later, Milo slogged through the sodden streets of Manhattan in a storm, everything below his hip pockets soaked with windblown rain, his vision obscured by the black umbrella he held low enough to keep the gale out of his face. He’d almost stormed back to Remick’s that same boiling hot day, but when he pictured facing the cute secretary again and her adorable smirk, and McHenry’s impatience, he lost his nerve. His nerve had failed him one more time at home, when he told his mother that no one had time to see him, and he was supposed to come back the next week. He assumed she’d be relieved that her younger son’s brush with the entertainment industry was over, but he thought he heard her sigh quietly before asking him to chop some onions.

Once again, in terrible weather, he made his way toward Times Square, the rain drenching him thoroughly even in the few blocks from the 42
nd
Street stop of the Third Avenue El. This time he walked right past the Hollywood Theatre and picked up the Brill Building instead, home of TB Harms Music Publishers, recently acquired by Warner Brothers, and as good a place as any.

But he hadn’t counted on having to wait very long, and his resolve was cracking with each tick forward of the second hand. Once installed in a wooden chair, Milo began repeatedly polishing his glasses like a sacred rite.

He saw some fading vaudeville acts and hopeful dewy-eyed girls come in and out, but nobody famous came by. No Kate Smiths, no George Cohans. Of course, they probably had music pluggers chasing them all over town banging out tunes and waving music at them, why would they bother showing up at a place like this?

The secretary this time was a stiff-backed woman with hair wrestled into a tight knot behind her head, and who was disinclined to give him any helpful hints. Milo’s confidence was thinning out by the minute, especially when he cast sidelong glances at the other piano players he could see go into nearby offices and start pounding away at the music like they were born to it.

When the clock ticked over to three o’clock, he stood up and put his glasses back in his coat, and tried to shake out his damp pant legs for the slog back to the train. He’d head into Schwartz and Sons and help with the customers, maybe joking around enough to convince them to spend a little extra. Smiling people always did spend more; this much, at least, he’d learned at the shop.

“Short? Is there a Short in here?” Again with the Short. It didn’t sound so bad, though, Milo thought, and went well enough with his adopted first name, too. He’d dropped his given name, Moshe, while still in high school, though his parents would never call him anything else.

He whirled around in time to see an elfin-looking man with tired eyes and a necktie all askew. Milo pointed to his own chest.

“Okay, get in here, pal. I’m not even supposed to do this, my boss is. But my boss has a hangover, see? So, lucky me. I’ve got about one minute to hear you, so go.”

Milo summoned up his tailor shop charm. “A minute is all I need.”

He put his glasses back on and smiled broadly, pumping the smaller man’s hand with enthusiasm. The man introduced himself as Mr. Bernard Allen, and pointed Milo to a piano in the corner. “What have you got for me to play?” Milo asked.

Allen walked over to his desk and retrieved a piece of music. It was handwritten on manuscript paper, and Milo gulped. The pencil was soft and it was even harder to read than the printed music he gave up on at Remick’s. Allen said, “This right here is a piece of garbage. It’s the worst thing I’ve seen in this place all week and that’s saying something. But I want you to play it like it’s the greatest thing you ever heard in your natural life. Play it in a spotlight. Pretend you’re on Bing Crosby’s radio show. Get me? Now, go.”

Milo nodded and inspected the music. It was awful, all right. Milo couldn’t say why exactly, not exactly being a learned student at a conservatory. He just knew it the same way his brother could tell a hem wasn’t straight with one quick glance, even if was off by just a hair.

“You gonna go, or what?” Allen prodded.

“Sure, sure.” Milo waved his hand. He squinted hard at the notes and pretended the pounding in his head at the effort was the bassist in the band, giving him the beat. By the time he put the music on the piano, he wasn’t so much seeing with his rotten eyes as picturing it in his head what the notes looked like when they briefly wavered into clarity.

And he went for it like pigeons at bread crumbs. He smiled at Allen, he moved his hands with flourish. He almost danced off the piano stool, which was on wheels and rolled around on the floor a little. He even added a run up the keys and a tink on the high C just because, to finish it out with panache.