Read Vivian In Red for Free Online Page A

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