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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