The Little Shadows

ACT TWO





5.

A Change of Management




MARCH-MAY 1912

The Babcock, Billings

The People’s Hippodrome, Butte

The Parthenon, Helena

There is no keener psychologist than a vaudeville manager. Not only does he present the best of everything that can be shown upon a stage, but he so arranges the heterogeneous elements that they combine to form a unified whole.

BRETT PAGE, WRITING FOR VAUDEVILLE





When Aurora opened their pay envelope that Saturday night, she sent the placard boy straight to the telegraph office with a message to Mama in Helena: ONE HUNDRED PER STOP GENTRY PRINCE STOP QUIT JOB STOP WILL SEND MONEY. In the ten-word reply, which Aurora had sensibly paid for, Mama answered: WILL QUIT TOMORROW STOP NEW WAISTS STOCKINGS BUTTE STOP THOUSAND PER NEXT.

New clothes would be tomorrow’s task. Tonight’s was supper. The girls had been managing on bread and milk both morning and evening, their only meal at noon (usually beans), to make their few dollars last till payday. Now they ordered a magnificent supper at the Palace Hotel, roast chicken and ice cream, such a blowout that Bella feared her skirt might not do up next day.

Mama felt she must stay out her notice at the Pioneer, and so missed their week in Billings. They played the Babcock, which had replaced the burned-down Opera House: it was plain brick, elevated only by columns with floral carving, and already dingy on the inside. But with their newfound wealth they stayed in a lovely hotel, and their superior room had two beds. At first they argued over whose turn it was for the single, but after one night each alone, Clover and Bella let Aurora have the narrower bed in lonely state, and slept tangled up together as usual.

The Babcock playbill remained the same, but for Victor, who had a month booked with Sullivan–Considine, and was travelling from Spokane down to San Francisco. He was replaced by Zeno the Human Calculator, a silent man sunk in apathy save when he stood onstage and dazzled the crowd by naming the day of the week in response to their shouts of birthdates from various years over the last century. It was a very dull show compared to Victor’s extravagant glory. Clover retired into herself again, but lived in expectation of the letters Victor had promised faithfully to send; he had left her with such reassurance of his affection that she was not troubled. It was the vaudeville life to be separated, and vaudeville people did not repine.

Bella lived in a state of dread because of the Tussler. The bruise on her cheek faded from purple, to brown, to yellow. Aurora and Clover quietly helped to conceal the damage. The Tussler grinned when he could catch Bella’s eye, happy to see her worried.

The reunion with Mama in Butte, the week after, coincided with their third real payday. At the dressing table Aurora opened their packet almost fearfully, imagining that Gentry had changed his mind without telling them, but there it was again, a short stack: ten blessed ten-dollar bills.

They were together again, and in the money.


Past Life

When the company returned to Helena in late March, the snow was gone, and so was Gentry Fox. On the train, Flora described her visit to his dingy rooms: ‘Only feature, a dreadful shame, to be cast on the charity of a relation—he has so much pride! And so much to be proud of, but all in the past now, poor man.’

Flora was keyed up almost to giddiness with the overwhelming relief of their raise in pay, which over the last month had made every difference to their lives. She had been able to purchase silk taffeta to make plaid sashes that swooped over their shoulders and down their white skirts, and had added a graceful swinging reel for the girls too, of which she knew Gentry would have approved. Danny Boy made her boo-hoo every time, tears seeping through her fingers, even if her girls only sighed at her.

The first rains of spring had muddied Helena’s streets and sent occasional sprinkles like sneezes chasing them from street to street as they hurried from the train station to the Parthenon on Sunday afternoon—they’d been told to attend at the theatre for a company meeting on first return. Flora had spent the whole train journey from Butte in gossiping conjecture with Sybil as to what the news might be. It was whispered that Drawbank was out of the picture too, along with Gentry.

At the theatre a Pierce-Arrow car gleamed under the portico, which sported a glittering new white-lettered PARTHENON sign. Inside, Flora felt a pleasant hum of change—apparent immediately in the immaculate polished brass and spotless lobby floor.

The girls stepped lightly down the incline of the aisle, as Flora strained her eyes here and there, gathering clues to the mystery of what might happen next. The company sat assembled in the first rows, murmuring as if repeating rhubarb, rhubarb to each other the way theatre crowds are told to do. A new Diamond Dye olio drop was down in two, with a view of mountain ranges; the stage looked freshly painted.

As Flora seated herself beside her girls, there was a disturbance behind them. The assembled heads turned. Julius frankly gawped, rotating his huge upper body and poking a vast finger at Sybil: ‘Mayhew!’ he hissed, far too loudly.

Mr. Fitzjohn Mayhew, that well-known impresario, fresh from the East, from haunts of Keith and Albee, made his way down the aisle with the backward-leaning gait the incline forced.

Flora exclaimed softly. She’d missed his visit to the roadhouse, of course, but had heard various versions of that evening from the girls and Sybil and Julius. This was lucky—Mayhew was known to her of old. He’d been a dashing fellow in the ’80s, although not at that time in a position of any importance, merely an assistant to Mr. Beckwith, the manager of the Rialto in Chicago. She and Sybil had been friendly with him again at Proctor’s Criterion in ’87. Flora felt a tickle of pleasure at the sight of his face: older, of course, and with that distinguished streak of grey now, but still handsome. He had liked her very well in the old days.

She gave him a sparkling smile of pleased recognition. Knowing him would help her daughters now—which just showed how foolish Arthur’s fears had been, that her past life might taint their prospects.


A Showman

Clover turned to see Mr. Mayhew, as Aurora had turned too, tilting her hat and chin carefully to the angle that made her neck’s ivory column very long. Clover set herself back slightly, to serve as a dark foil to her bright sister.

Mayhew was nicely turned out again today, Clover saw; nothing but the best in men’s suiting. As he ascended the moveable steps to the stage and turned to survey the company, she watched Aurora give him a welcoming, acknowledging, second-degree-of-warmth smile, which he returned with a nod, oddly shy for an instant. Aurora had made a good start with him at the roadhouse; maybe they were safe after all.

Regaining his showman’s poise, Mayhew stood cocksure on the forestage, chest proud and knees locked backwards in a kind of strut. His vicuña coat was magnificent. The company clustered in the front rows sat rapt, as if at a performance, Clover thought: a tableau vivante—assumption of the throne by the new king.

‘The Ackerman–Harris Company will not maintain a theatre that is not paying its way,’ Mayhew announced, a trumpet voluntary kind of opener. His hat this morning was a tan fedora, brand new or immaculately brushed. ‘Well, they can’t! I’ve been asked to sweep in, a new broom, and I can tell you now, I’ve done the job in spades. As of today, Mr. Drawbank’s services are surplus-to-requirement at this establishment.’

None of the assembled artistes had liked Drawbank, but there was general silence all the same. Houses had never been more than half full at the Parthenon—Clover had not understood till they went to Butte how sparse the audiences here in Helena had been—but things could not have been that bad?

Julius Foster Konigsburg stood and raised the question they all feared to ask: ‘And what, my dear Maestro, has become of Gentry Fox, our long-time comrade and the artistic vision behind this fanfaronade?’

‘Well, he’s gone too,’ Mayhew said. ‘But not with any stain on his noble escutcheon, as you might say, Mr. Foster.’

Julius shuddered visibly.

‘Recall that Mr. Fox was well along in years—in fact it was he who wrote to Mrs. Ackerman suggesting she have a second look at the books here—no tinge of criminal suspicion, but merely to ascertain whether full benefit of box office was being rendered.’

Satisfied, or at least muzzled, Julius settled himself again beside Sybil.

Mayhew gathered himself into a nobler pose and deepened his voice. ‘In fact, at this time I’d like to pay a tribute to our pal Mr. Gentry Fox, late of this theatre, who has gone to what we all know is bound to be a rewarding retirement off the boards, down Montreal way. A legend in modern vaudeville, who sounded the depths and the rarefied air above the clouds of theatredom; the general of many battles, often in an army of one. As they say of the great ones, he cried for the griefs of others—for himself he chuckled. A great man of the theatre, and of the world!’

And that was all the fare-thee-well Gentry got: gone and only semi-besmirched. Clover felt a stab of pity, or perhaps anger.

Turning to practicalities, Mayhew expatiated on the seismic changes to come, growing particularly lively on the subject of the Press, and of Advertising, the Key to Success in Modern Polite Vaudeville. He dropped tantalizing hints about publicity stunts and gimmicks, and urged the company to greater efforts. ‘Don’t tell me that you killed at the Palace—do it here! I’ll tell you this for free: the audience is never wrong. If a performer fails to get across, it’s the material or the manner of presentation—don’t let me hear you blaming the rubes for not getting something. This is a discriminating audience here in Helena and in all our theatres, and we play to them and respect them.’

Which Gentry never had, Clover thought. He was a dreadful snob and elitist, but it was deeply kind of him to leave their pay increase on the books—for Mayhew to assume, it turned out. They had better be worthy of their hire.

Mayhew stepped down from rhetoric and into details: ‘First off, we’ll be papering the house for the next two weeks. No more playing to empty seats. We’ll take advantage of the community friendliness here, oil the water and find you some good audiences.’

New acts would be arriving to fill out the bill that Gentry had gradually reduced. Mayhew extolled their magnificence in such a naive, hucksterish way that after a little while Clover gave up listening. Maintaining an outward appearance of attention, she secretly pictured the back of Victor’s head, the tender hollow between two tendons at his neck.

Her attention was called back when a large curtained easel rolled out, with red-tasseled drawings displayed on it, and—she gave a gasp of pleasure—a beautiful photo of Victor Saborsky. New playbills were distributed among the company as Mayhew sang the praises of Thierry & Thierrette (magic/terp team), The Royal Cingalese Dancers in picturesque national costumes, Victor Saborsky the Eccentric (guaranteed back by audience demand), and the rest of the company, including Julius (listed alone, and praised by Mayhew as Our Celebrated Protean Raconteur, which made Sybil mutter to Flora that she was ‘nobody’s excess baggage’), East & Verrall—and to Clover’s surprise, themselves in a new guise: ‘Les Très Belles Aurores, renowned Paris Casino favourites, a trio of charming prima donnas famous for their personal beauty and their delightful, angelic voices.’

This was news. Her sisters had come to attention too. What did Mayhew intend? They’d done very well with sentimental ballads, wearing demure dresses and plaids. Casino girls would not wear tartans; they’d require more revealing garments—and what would they sing, Au Claire de La Lune?

Onstage, Mayhew was winding up to a rousing finish.

‘We have to engage in a spirited campaign, boys, and dear ladies. From this day forward, the Parthenon Company is on the move!’

There was a burst of applause from the performers, and the meeting was over. Clover was impressed, a little against her will, to see how Mayhew had shifted the mood from glum to anticipatory.


A Dozen Dozen

Aurora stood with Clover in the lobby waiting for Mama—and saw with some pleasure that they seemed to stand among a dozen dozen pairs of pretty girls, refracted in the repeating gilted mirrors.

Emerging from the theatre, Mayhew found them there. ‘Today being dark—’ he began, putting his hand on Aurora’s elbow to speak more privately with her, as the rest of the company streamed out into the noontime sun.

Dark is the wrong word for today, Aurora thought. Light flashed on the marble floor and the glass and rebounded along the mirrors, almost hurting the eyes.

‘I mean to say—no shows today, I hope I may treat you girls and your dear mother to lunch—talk about this French Casino angle. The name gave me the idea, you know. When I saw you sing, before.’

In the bright lobby, Aurora let herself look into Mayhew’s eyes for the first time. Pale blue, with yellowing whites, a bit lost in his large face.

At the roadhouse he had been smooth, even glossy. In this light she saw that Mayhew was not so dapper, but slightly frayed around the edges. His moustache raggedly trimmed; his nails, which bent over the tips of his fingers, yellow and not quite even. The skin sagged at his eyes and ears. Around the pointed beard, white stubble had formed on his jowls after his morning shave; she saw the cracked edge of a half-healed snick. His hair was like stiff straw. Seeing these things, oddly, made him more real to her.

He looked searchingly at her own face, his eager heart on display, and she was sorry for him. She smiled, to see him liking her, and understanding leaped between them. So much that he stood taller and breathed in loudly. ‘Well!’ he said, patting his chest, maybe not even conscious of that. She could have laughed at what she did to him, but that would hurt his dignity.

‘Well!’ he repeated. ‘Mademoiselle Aurora.’

Bella clattered into the lobby, Mama behind her. At the sight of Mayhew, Bella stopped short, making Mama stumble.

Mayhew moved quickly, to help her regain her balance. Aurora liked that in him too, his awareness of other people. ‘Dear Flora,’ he said, clasping her hand and shaking it strongly. ‘Or rather, Mrs. Avery I must call you now! To make your acquaintance again! What joy.’

‘So pleasant to see—after too many years—and you not looking a moment older!’

‘Nor you, my dear,’ Mayhew said, as he could hardly help doing. ‘I have been arranging with your girls, to carry you all away to luncheon. We’re booked at the Placer, where I have my suite. It is the newest and the best: their atrium lobby is a thing to behold. Come now! The chariot awaits!’


Hot-house

Over lunch Mayhew outlined his vision for Les Très Belles: ditch the sentimental ballads, move along to a whole new act—‘the French thing,’ as Mendel had said long ago at the Empress. Starting with familiar folk-songs ‘in demure old-country garb,’ then, after a rural tour through Florian’s Song, a quick change for some Parisienne flounce-skirt dancing—nothing risqué, this was family vaudeville—a pert, uptempo rendition of Plaisir d’Amour; one last change, into spectacular (here Aurora caught the overtone of ‘seductive’) costume for (and this he was proud of) the Flower Duet from Lakmé.

‘French as you please,’ he said. ‘Saw it in Boston last fall, it brought down the house. Had to reprise twice! High reach, but voices just like yours,’ nodding to Aurora and Clover.

Aurora glanced at Bella, who was apparently to be left out of that one, but Bella was finishing her oysters Rockefeller in a philosophical way.

Mayhew ate in great bites between spates of talk; his lunch was over and done with before theirs, even though he talked the whole time.

‘Do you plan to return to New York, dear Fitz?’ Mama asked, no doubt trying to discern the future.

‘Vaudeville’s all sewn up out East,’ Mayhew said, shaking his head. ‘But here and in the North there’s opportunity, and I intend to seize it. I’ve got an option pending on a brand-new two-a-day house up in Edmonton. I call it The Muse. There’s a venture in Calgary I’m looking at—fill you in on that later. For now at the Parthenon, we’ll mount a melodrama. I wonder—’ He turned to Aurora and tapped her thoughtfully on the forearm. ‘I wonder if you’ve ever thought of acting? I saw a short play in Chicago as I went through—it strikes me that it might adapt well for you.’

Aurora still found his partiality for her slightly shocking. But not unreasonable, she supposed; it was the response one worked for, after all. ‘I would love to act,’ she said, smiling for him. Her hand went to her wineglass. She loved champagne, loved being in vaudeville, loved being the object of Mayhew’s attentions. Mama and the girls were happy too, and the lunch was magnificent! Oysters and lamb chops, meringues with hot-house strawberries, every kind of careful service from three hovering waiters. She was so happy. Glorious golden-yellow roses massed in a bank on the table—in April!

Mayhew touched her arm again, his fingers warm through the voile, then turned and made certain that Mama had had enough, offering to call up more meringue. She demurred, but Bella said she could manage another. Mayhew laughed and gestured to one of the waiters, who vanished and reappeared like an Arabian djinn, a new plate in hand piled high with meringue and fruit and cream.

‘These darling girls need fattening up!’ Mayhew said. ‘You’re going to need a new set of photos, new placards—we’ll get cracking on it all right away and aim to introduce the new act in a week or two.’

The abacus in Aurora’s mind clicked: cloth, lace, new slippers and other necessities.

‘An increase in pay, of course,’ he told her solemnly, as if this was a sad consequence, and added to Flora, ‘And in view of the expense of these costumes I’m demanding, we’ll work out an advance, dear madam, that will amply cover your outlay.’ Inwardly, Aurora sighed with relief, and wondered exactly how great an increase. She decided that her role here was to be an innocent girl, and leave it all to Mama.

And indeed, Mama was claiming Mayhew’s attention, in an effort to draw him out about himself, asking if he had created acts himself in Ziegfeld’s operation. He laughed. ‘Oh ho! You don’t create around Flo! He takes care of the direction—I mined the raw materials. I’ve always had an eye for remarkable talent. Well, didn’t I say, my dear Flora, that you had a gift for enchantment, in those old days at Proctor’s?’

Her nostalgia appealed to, she gave a great heart-shaped smile, blushing a little in happy confusion. ‘You did, dear Fitz, and I’ve often remembered that over the years,’ she admitted. ‘But the girls don’t need to waltz down memory lane with us!’

‘Beauty and grace,’ he said, almost turning serious. ‘That’s what the vaudeville stage can never have enough of. And with a voice and a face like your daughter’s, my dear—well, these girls are going to go far.’


We Need the Eggs

Bella thought about Mayhew as she sat on the hotel counter in the wings, waiting for East and Verrall’s sketch during their first show back in the saddle in Helena. She did not mind him, but he had no value for her or Clover except as Aurora’s appendages. And he thought her a child, which she was not.

The stagehands rolled the counter on and she fluffed her skirt higher. The curtain parted and there she sat, knees jauntily revealed, and here was East, coming on to book a hotel room. Laughter rolled from the audience at the sight of her perched on the counter, and again at East’s admiring double-take. It was much better to be playing to full houses—Mayhew had got that right.

‘This is where my wife and I spent our wedding night!’ East told Bella, while they waited for Verrall to answer the ping of the desk bell. ‘Only this time I’ll stay in the bathroom and cry.’

Her job here was to be dumb-Dora, and look fetching while the audience laughed.

‘It is a little difficult to travel these days,’ East said. ‘My wife thinks she’s a chicken.’

‘Goodness! You should take her to the hospital!’

‘Well, I would,’ East confessed. ‘But we need the eggs.’

‘I think it’s mean,’ Bella said, very shocked. ‘Your wife ought to be your soulmate!’

‘Well, she was my cell-mate—that’s where we first met, in pokey.’

‘How romantic,’ Verrall said, popping up from under the hotel desk as if he were climbing the stairs from the basement—he did that false climb so brilliantly that every time Bella had the urge to check behind her for the trap door.

‘You again!’ he said, when his head was high enough to see East. ‘No room till we see the colour of your money! ’

East looked ashamed. Since he could not pay—and still owed Verrall for his honeymoon visit—East was shanghaied into a job as waiter in the hotel restaurant. The desk spun round and disgorged a café table complete with red-checked cloth, and Julius already seated at the table in a black wig, the only customer, with a full roster of complaints and problems, from the first fly in his soup to the last corn on his toe, set to be stomped on by East’s extra-long boot. More ridiculous nonsense, plates of soup and flying loaves of bread and egg-juggling (by everyone but Bella, who simply could not get the hang of it, try though she had). From time to time Julius’s patently false black toupée would be dislodged by East or Verrall—and set back in place, so delicately that Julius continued in blissful self-satisfaction whether it was backwards, forwards, or drenched in soup.


She was Julius

After the intermission, Clover joined Bella, Mama and Sybil at the back of the house to watch Long Chak Sam, a copy-cat Chinese magician Mayhew had booked in for the week before Thierry & Thierrette. Myriad three-named Chinese magicians worked the circuits—this one, at least, was truly Chinese. A silent, unsmiling man, he had a little daughter who spoke no English, but carried a document swearing she was sixteen. It was obvious to anyone with an eye that she was ten or twelve.

The daughter’s name was Xiang, Bella whispered, and she had discovered the name’s meaning also: cloud. Her own name meaning beautiful, she said in Clover’s ear, under cover of the tinkling Eastern music, was nothing but a joke these days: there were horrible spots popping out on her face and the pudge around her middle had stayed even when there was not enough to eat. She hated herself, she said, but Clover squeezed her hand and told her to be patient, and she would be the most beautiful swan of all of them.

Clover did not like the magician’s act, in which he swallowed a long length of thread followed by a bristling quiverful of sewing needles. She could feel the needles entering her own mouth and throat, and had to close her eyes. At his command, his daughter-assistant began drawing the long thread from his mouth, and there, suspended at regular intervals, were the needles, all threaded, on it. It made Clover shudder. She did like when he turned a child’s dollhouse on a lazy Susan to reveal a tiny Chinese doll standing in the inside rooms. He twirled the house again, and the doll inside had grown much larger, straining at the rooftop. At the next turn, the doll was Xiang, and she rose through the roof to jump into his arms.

Julius Foster Konigsburg was up next, by himself, in full Protean mode with his Voices of Kipling medley. He began in a great mysterious cloak with If, using the cloak (wire rigging built into it) to mask his gyrations as he changed costume for each new poem. He ended in a torn and stained Indian army uniform, for Gunga Din; the cloak, dropped, formed a muddy battlefield.

‘Ah, this brings back memories,’ Sybil whispered, with a sentimental squeeze of Clover’s hand. ‘Julius used to do Gunga Din regular, you know, he was famous for Kipling.’ She gave a quick quiet laugh. ‘As they say, I don’t know, I’ve never Kippled!—but he only does it now out here in the sticks, because Clifton Crawford has been doing it in Boston and New York and Albee asked Julius to stop. Asked, don’t make me laugh! As if he’d have a choice, when Albee asked!’

‘But this isn’t even an Albee theatre!’

‘As you say! Except that now, whenever he does the bit, someone is sure to come up and accuse him of copying Crawford, and you know there’s nothing sooner puts poor Jay in a rage than being accused of any kind of stinginess of spirit like imitation.’

‘No wonder—it is entirely unfair!’

Sybil squeezed her arm and cozied a little closer. ‘You’re a dear girl, Clover. We never had a daughter, but if we had had, I’d have liked her to be just like you.’

Clover was abashed. She could not imagine being Sybil’s daughter.

Julius had come to the end and shouted the last line, ‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!’—then ripped his uniform away and stood in Gunga Din’s filthy linen wrap and shawl, bandy legs brown and bruised—which worried Clover until she realized it was only his dreadful ochre makeup. Then there was a terrifying blast of artillery fire and a vile puff of smoke, which drifted off into silence to reveal the linen clout, empty on the floor.

The audience applauded with moderate enthusiasm, but one lady in the front row, in a great black hat with red feathers and a veil, kept clapping wildly, and jumped up crying, ‘Do it again, Sonny, it’s great!’ Her escort tried to quiet her, and the people close by shhed, but she would not be silent. She announced in a forte voice, ‘I paid my money, and if I want to encore an act I’m going to do it.’

By this time the audience had become interested. Mattie stepped out from behind the proscenium arch and asked the woman not to talk so loud, as she was stopping the show.

‘I don’t care,’ she shouted. ‘My money is as good as anyone else’s, and I mean to have that handsome quick-change man on again. He’s the best thing in the show!’

‘Behave yourself, madam,’ Mattie warned. ‘Or we will send for the police!’

With a banshee shriek the woman brangled down into the orchestra pit and took three wild leaps—piano bench, keyboard with a reverberating dischord, piano lid—and then hopped up onto the stage, where she began to wrestle Mattie, bringing whoops and shouts for the manager from the audience.

She got the poor boy into a headlock, but he wriggled around like a greased pig and managed to tear the hat and veil off the lady—

And she was Julius.

‘If you can’t amuse ’em, amaze ’em,’ Sybil whispered to Clover. Under cover of the renewed applause they slipped out the back.


Not Pity Alone

Mayhew, standing to watch at the back of the house, followed the women down to the dressing rooms. He was thinking about girls and women, as he often had in a long life spent in theatres of one kind or another. Sybil, that old warhorse; Flora. Game old girls, a sad life behind each one. But pity was not everything, not anything much at all. Not pity alone.

He was not affected by Clover or Bella. It was all Aurora for him: the soft rounding of her chin, the eyes. And the mouth—at odd moments her mouth would look like she’d been hit, and must be shielded. It was the frailty that caught at him. How they were not quite professional, no matter how they twinkled and light-stepped. That was the charm of Les Très Belles Aurores—it would translate especially well if they were foreign waifs. He could make something of them …

He knocked at the door of their dressing room.

Aurora had taken down her mass of pale hair and was brushing it out, silk tatters, silk ribbons, dark yellow, paler yellow and gold, black brush sliding through the silk over and over. Smooth-spun floss, curving feathers at the ends. Black velvet ribbon down the back of her neck where the knobs of bone showed too clearly—and yet the softness of the line!

At first she did not see him; then she did. She did not turn around, but remained at her table, brushing her hair, watching him in the mirror. A self-conscious ploy. Her idiotic youth tore him open. Anxious fingernails bitten to the quick, beneath the pretty net gloves. Her mouth’s betraying softness that no hard expression could control. Her eyelashes were black against the white lids, thickly mascara’d. Yet he had seen her without stage makeup and knew them to be genuinely dark, set delicate as mink paintbrushes in the porcelain eyelids.

He had not thought like this for so long. He had not thought he ever would again.


Contagious

Flora and the girls were invited again, with East and Verrall, Julius and Sybil, to an early dinner on Sunday, a special feast prepared by the Placer chef. Mayhew held forth on the future of vaudeville as they waited for the first course to be served. ‘The Parthenon circuit is going to get a tremendous boom from this new stagehand expense deal in the big-time. Big-time acts will come to us where they can play in decent houses at smaller salaries, but with consecutive bookings and a family atmosphere behind the curtain as well as out front.’

One arm draped along Mayhew’s chair-back, the other occupied in draining a large brandy and soda, Julius had merely to raise an eyebrow to encourage the flow.

‘But that does not mean,’ Mayhew said, ‘any diminument in our loyalty to the faithful medium-time acts which have stood by the company in times past.’

Verrall choked, then quickly asked whether there might be holes in the big-time, at this rate. Mayhew thought there might be, for a suitcase outfit that could travel without sets or stagehands. ‘It will be contagious on you to take every advantage of the situation,’ he said.

Flora did not mind the occasional miswording; she basked in Mayhew’s golden spotlight. He’d been a jumped-up boy in the old days and was much the same now, with a patina of prosperity overlaying his familiar charm.

At the end of the evening, while the party was fetching wraps from the cloakroom, Mayhew managed to lead Flora apart from the others into the lee of the shining oak staircase.

‘Thought you’d like to see this,’ Mayhew said, showing Flora a yellow telegraph form he’d pulled out of his inner pocket. The manager’s report from their last week in Billings:

BELLE A’S: AS SQUARE AND HIGH-TONED A LITTLE TEAM AS EVER CAME ROUND THE CIRCUIT. IT’LL BE A PLEASURE TO READ THEIR NAMES ON THE BOOKING LIST AGAIN. ON THE JOB TO THE MINUTE, STRAIGHT HOME AFTER THEIR ACT, EACH ONE A LADY AND NOT ONE A QUEEN.

‘You can be proud of those girls, Flora,’ he said.

Flora did not speak, but nodded. Each one a lady. That was what mattered, that’s what she’d been able to give them. She and Arthur between them, give him his due.

Mayhew looked at her earnestly. ‘What a job you’ve done! No time just now, but—’

She looked up, dashing wetness from below her eye.

‘Could you grant me a few moments alone, my dear Flora? Perhaps tomorrow, right after the first show goes up? I’ll take you to tea,’ he said. ‘It’s a delicate matter.’ He seemed to hover between smiling and embarrassment.

Flora stared at him for a moment. Then he reached out and squeezed her hand, and she saw that his eyes were—beseeching was the word that sprang to her mind. She returned his smile, and the pressure of his hand. ‘I’d be very happy to have tea,’ she said, gently taking over. ‘I’ll be in the lobby as soon as the overture begins.’

She would wear her new dove-coloured walking suit. And the pheasant-wing hat, and her locket, which she’d been able to redeem. It was time to re-enter the world, her period of mourning done.

But that night Flora woke in a panic from a dream: kneading bread in the summer kitchen at Paddockwood, watching Arthur walk over the field from the schoolhouse—her hair unpinned, arms floured to the elbows, the apron loose around her middle, which was big with Harry. Arthur walked in, lifting her easily up onto the dry-sink edge to kiss her without ceasing, bundled belly and flour and all. He did not speak, did not need to, only enveloped her, loving her for her true self, as she did him. The girls were singing in the parlour and she was beloved and the bread would rise and Harry would be born—

Not Harry. She struggled awake and put that aside. Travelled backwards in the dream and found Arthur again walking across the field and the shape he made against the pale sky and the full-carved shape of his mouth after love, and how she had loved him.

Mayhew was nothing to her. A dynamo of a manager, pleasant company.

But she ought to accept his proposal, whatever it might be, for the sake of the girls. She ran her hands down the bodice of her nightgown to her child-bagged belly. How could she bear to? When she was so old. But people did. You often heard of late marriages. Or late arrangements of convenience.

Flora pushed the covers aside and fit her feet into her house-shoes. She let herself out, leaving the door on the latch, and made her way to the privy through the darkness of the yard.


Wafting Like a Ghost

When Clover heard Mama come inside again, she pushed past the panel of the hall curtain and went towards her.

‘Oh, Clover!’ Mama whispered. ‘You took ten years off me, wafting like a ghost!’

‘I heard you get up,’ Clover said. ‘I heard you weeping.’

‘No, no, no need. I just had a dream.’

Clover was shivering. Mama wrapped her arms around her and the shawl about them both. ‘I’m to have tea with Mr. Mayhew tomorrow, during the first show, and I will try to let him down as easy as I can. Your father’s memory is sacred to me.’

Clover looked down at the floor, at the parting line between the drugget carpet runner and the whitewashed floorboards. Snow on the front yard. Her father sprawled, snow on his black back and legs, red underneath him. Only a body, though, nothing left of himself. She trembled a little and her mother tightened the arm around her.

‘I am sorry,’ Mama said. ‘Never mind it. Forget what I said. He loved us so.’

Clover wished she could erase the parts of her memory that did not tally with Mama’s sweet remembrance. ‘I thought it was Aurora that Mr. Mayhew wanted,’ she said, pretending to be puzzled—the only way she could think to save her mother from humiliation.

‘Aurora! She is thirty years younger than he!’

Clover went down the hall, feeling indeed like a ghost, one who could not make people listen.


Permission

Flora stayed in the dressing room after the girls had gone up, giving her skin a lustrous glow with just a very little ivory 5. The least suspicion of mascara under the shading black velvet brim. She looked very well, she thought. A dash of powder. There. He understands this world, that is the great thing, she thought. She would not have to justify the frippery nature of theatre, or patiently soothe fears of licentiousness, as she’d had to do even after fourteen years with Arthur. Outrageous, since he had been so wild himself: but it was no wonder, once Chum had put the bee into his bonnet … Fitz understood you had to set preference aside from time to time, to secure a place. It was a business.

She pinched her cheeks but did not add rouge. Arthur had not liked too high a colour.

The car was waiting, but Mayhew said, ‘Will you walk? It’s a lovely evening.’

The five o’clock sun was still striking the bright windows of the city. He took her arm as they walked up the length of State Street to the Grandon, which surprised Flora a little, knowing that the Placer was his favourite. The route took them past Gentry’s building and she could not help a pang—how pleasant it would have been to form a partnership with him, odd as he was. She’d always had a soft place for Gentry.

At the Grandon, Mayhew settled her into an easy chair in the tea-lounge. A small bustle of waiters, then a lovely pot of tea steaming, and a tray of nice things to eat. It would be like this, to be married to Mayhew. All the superficial things would be delightful.

She excused herself, and went to the ladies’ powder room, where she carefully washed off the 5 and dabbed her face back into plainness. Because Arthur—

All the superficial things—but beneath that, the immovable rock of memory. The silence in the night when Arthur was outside and she’d known he was out there and unable to bear his life. He’d been infinitely more to her than any other could be, and it was her fault that he died. It was her fault that Harry died.

She leaned on the marble counter, then pushed herself away and stood straight. In the mirror she saw a very tired older woman, with a stricken face and a long past behind her. A bundle of lies she’d told her beloved husband and a package of make-believe she’d sold her daughters, and with all that, she could not bring herself to take on Fitz Mayhew.

‘I’m sorry, your tea must be growing cold,’ she said, gliding back to the table.

‘Neither the tea nor my heart!’ His humour a little ponderous as always.

‘Oh!’ Then she was at a loss. She poured a cup of tea.

‘I don’t know how to begin,’ he confessed, looking up with a frank expression of hopeless vulnerability. ‘It’s caught me late. I’m not used to this!’

She truly did feel sorry for him.

‘You’ve probably seen how it is for me,’ he said. ‘I’m head over ears, but I wasn’t sure how you—’

She began to stop him, but he broke in.

‘Oh, Flora, just tell me, can I have your dear girl? I would keep her very well.’

She looked up then, suddenly, into his eyes. Pale blue and staring, straw-coloured lashes standing stiff out from them, faint blueness under the skin around the eyes. So old! For a brief instant she stared. Then she lowered her eyelids, and then her face, and bit the inside of her cheek till it bled.

He leaned forward. ‘I see you are not prepared for this.’

She shook her head, rapid, almost furtive. Eyes still downcast to her hands, twined in her lap.

‘Maybe you don’t like to think of your daughter—’

Up came her eyes again, and he stopped.

They sat without speaking for a moment.

‘Flora, I think you have got the wrong end of the stick.’ He shifted a little in his cretonne chair, yanked it slightly off its line, put his stiff hands on the armrests. ‘I’m not—I’m not suggesting anything you wouldn’t like, you know. I want to marry the girl.’

She was unable to make herself speak.

Fitz leaned back again and gave a gusty sigh. A waiter zoomed to his side. ‘A whiskey,’ Fitz ordered. ‘And the bottle.’

The locket around Flora’s throat was choking her but she did not think she could make her fingers undo the catch. Such deep shame had bloomed in her belly and groin that she was afraid she might hemorrhage. A wave of heat poured upward from there, up her chest and throat. She must be a hideous colour but could not for the life of her manage to breathe, to get rid of the shame of it, of thinking it was she—

Fitz poured himself a whiskey and she reached for the bottle and poured a slug into her tea. He laughed. He knocked back his, and she took a good sip of hers.

‘You’ve surprised me,’ she said. ‘You are right. I—a mother …’—try again!—‘She was my little girl, you know, for a very long time.’ Clover! Clover had known, last night. She took another drink of tea, wishing she’d poured a more generous dot from the bottle.

‘Oh, Flora, I know.’ She knew he was going to say it, and then he did. ‘But you will not be losing your daughter,’ he said. Some lightning must have alerted him in her eyes. ‘Or gaining a son! Hardly that! We are contemporaries and must always be!’ His arm flew out and the waiter was there in a trice, and back again in another with a second glass.

Mayhew poured a couple of fingers and handed the glass to her. ‘You can’t drink that in tea.’

Then she could laugh and drink her shot. They laughed together and he poured another for each of them, and the worst of the shame receded, heat borne backwards on that wave of reliable warmth. There was some consolation in being pole-axed by someone who could afford a very good whiskey.


The Old Soldier

Mama had been drinking. She flitted around the dressing room, hanging clothes and tidying, an agitated moth brushing against things, her cloud of soft brown hair passing too close to the gas-jet every time she went by, so that Clover’s attention had to dart after her.

Mama halted by the table where Aurora was doing her face. ‘Has he—made up to you already?’

She stared into Aurora’s face in the mirror, her own beside it. Clover saw how alike they were in certain ways, in expression rather than shape of face or colouring. Aurora had their father’s fairness. Then Mama was off again, moving, picking up Bella’s boots and brushing mud from their tips with a fold of her new dove-coloured walking skirt, so that Clover went to her and took them, and smoothed the skirt down. Mama flicked at it and turned away, jagged motions, saying, ‘Stop, Clover. Don’t fuss at me.’ She sat in the armchair.

‘No, he hasn’t,’ Aurora said.

‘Hasn’t what?’

‘Hasn’t done a thing. Hasn’t fondled me or made sheep’s eyes at me or anything. He probably felt a little awkward, being your old pal.’

Bella came bursting in from the hotel sketch. ‘Julius’s toupée came off, but the bald wig underneath came with it!’ she told Mama. ‘They’re fixing it on with spirit glue—What’s going on?’ She could see that Mama was not attending.

Clover took pity on her. ‘Mr. Mayhew spoke to Mama this afternoon, to see whether he might—he wants to—’

‘Oh!’ Aurora cried. ‘Out with it! He wants to marry me, that’s all.’

Bella stood still, staring.

Aurora stared back, as if reading Bella’s thoughts. ‘He likes my looks, I suppose.’

Mama shook her head, and was going to speak, but she looked suddenly up at the ceiling and then bolted out of the room. Clover looked after her.

‘I’d leave her, if I was you,’ Aurora said. ‘It’ll take her a day or two to talk herself round.’

Clover nodded.

‘Mayhew?’ Bella asked. ‘Will you be rich?’

Aurora laughed. ‘It’s not so strange. Look at Evelyn Nesbit. Sanford White was thirty years older than she. It happens all the time.’ She set her brushes at the edge of her towel perfectly even, and then, telling Clover and Bella to hurry, went out and up the stairs.

Maybe not the happiest analogy, Clover thought, seeing that Sanford White ended up murdered.

‘He asked permission before he even spoke to her!’ Bella said, hurrying into her white skirt for their number. ‘He is a strange customer.’

Clover shook her head and put a finger to her lips, in case anyone could hear.

Bella said quickly, ‘I mean, it was extremely polite of him.’ And then, more quietly, ‘He is the oldest person we know, now Gentry is gone. But I’d rather marry Gentry, wouldn’t you?’

Clover turned away from the dressing mirror. ‘Maybe it is like the Old Soldier in The Twelve Dancing Princesses—how at the beginning he is so decrepit and exhausted by the wars, but he is brave and resourceful and kind, and then he marries the oldest daughter.’

And Bella seemed happy enough with that explanation.


A Practical Provposal

Aurora was not surprised, of course, but did not know how to proceed. Especially since she was not sure how Mama felt about Mayhew, and the whole idea. A card came down at intermission to say that after the second show the Pierce-Arrow would be waiting for her, to take her out for a late supper.

Mayhew had caused a bower to be built in the ballroom at the Placer Hotel: white gauze cascading down from a ring in the ceiling to make a silken tent within the golden room. The white carpet laid as a path across the polished floor to the tent was lined with lilies, looking to Aurora’s eyes rather funerary, but unquestionably opulent. A roving violinist played Kreisler, never wandering too near. Waiters appeared, vanished; plates materialized upon the table and her glass was refilled—bubbles rose in straight, slow-moving, perfect lines from the stem to the lip.

Aurora thought about bread and milk for supper, about holes in shoes and kerosene cans around bed-legs.

‘You’ll have been told,’ he said, and she thought perhaps he blushed in the candlelight. ‘What I proposed to your—to Flora.’

She nodded, smiling at him; unable not to smile.

‘How would we deal together? Hey? Do you think?’

She set her glass down; it was again replenished. Mayhew’s flick dismissed the waiter. Was this the entire proposal? She’d imagined something more flowery.

‘You and the girls, and your mama, need protection. A weary business, booking and managing: I offer my poor efforts at your service. A practical arrangement.’

Aurora had already determined to accept him. He would not keep them on the bill otherwise; there was a vein, a lode, of untrustworthiness in him, and she did not think his support would outlast a refusal for long. She had that lode of selfishness herself and did not shy away from seeing it in him. This was their ticket. They’d seen over the past week what life in his train would be: good hotels, good service, no more worrying over pennies and pawnshops, no more hungry nights for Clover and Bella. Already Bella’s eyes were bright again; even Clover looked less tired after a few days with lots to eat.

Mayhew sat watching her, one leg crossed over the other in a lazy, confident attitude; but the look on his face was not lazy. Not confident either. It was very gratifying to be so admired. He leaned forward and reached for her hand across the table, and when he had captured it, sat staring at her smooth-skinned fingers where they wound in and out of his.

‘I’ll tell you true, you have enflamed me. My soul is not my own.’

He did not seem entirely comfortable uttering these high-flown statements, but there was no doubt that he was sincerely struck by her.

She rose from the table, and stretched her hands up to touch the white silk roof with her fingertips, letting her back arch. Her hair felt heavy on the back of her head. Clover had coiffed it in the Gibson manner, with an extra rat to give it superabundance; Mama had finished stitching her ivory satin bodice during the second show, sewing up the back seam right on her: décolletage more daring than she’d had before, and she was wearing the gold locket they’d reclaimed from pawn. The plum velvet cummerbund matched a tiny bunch of velvet pansies on the bodice, pinned so that their weight pulled the satin down a little, a sweet revealing swoop.

He was waiting for her to speak.

‘I think we will deal very well together, Fitz,’ she said. ‘I think we will be the best team in vaudeville!’

When he stood and took her in his arms to kiss her forehead, all that was appropriate with the waiters and violinist still present, she felt him, his—prodding between her legs, as if it knew its place. He did not grind at her, as Maurice Kavanagh had done, but pulled back a little, releasing her.

‘Don’t be afraid, I would not demand too much of you,’ he said.

She kissed him, then, leaning forward—his mouth much fresher and sweeter than she had expected. He was older than Kavanagh, even. (Older than Papa, in fact, but she shut that piece away from her thinking because it contained Papa and was not to be dwelt on.) She had the power, but he had the purse strings and the authority. She liked his clothes and his money, she told herself. And the fearfulness in his eyes at her gaze. She would have to take care of him, in certain ways, and that was appealing too. Jimmy the Bat was in Winnipeg with Mrs. Masefield, probably taking a bouquet of white roses to her boudoir, probably walking across the floor in his polished dance-mules, offering her his arm, his evening coat brushed and his white tie snugged tight. And Mrs. Masefield would be putting one of her alabaster arms around his neck anyway.

So what was she to do but take Mayhew?


A Sparkling Eye

Sybil claimed the credit for it, having introduced them, as she repeated to Mama eighteen times a day: ‘—and I said how it would be, at that instant!’ Julius bent from his remote height to wish Aurora the best, in ornate prose. East laughed; Verrall turned away abruptly before turning back to tell her with some ferocity that Mayhew was the luckiest man in the world.

The thing was done, more or less, though there were details to be decided.

‘Not sure we want a long engagement, but we don’t know each other too well just yet,’ Mayhew had said, and Aurora was grateful for it. ‘Don’t want to attend with wedding plans immediately …’

Did he mean contend? That was the biggest stumbling block for her, Mayhew’s occasional lapses in language. Sometimes she couldn’t even trace back what word he had meant to say. She could see that Clover despised him slightly for it. But it was an innocence in him, too. It made her feel like Papa in the schoolroom, waiting patiently as poor Oscar Meller’s meaning emerged through his broken English. As she had loved that patience in her father, she loved that Mayhew brought it out in her.

‘We’ll make a thing of it in the press,’ he’d said. ‘Use it as a draw—what are we, April now? Let’s say late May, to make you Mrs. Mayhew.’

Next night the dressing room was filled with flowers—twenty dozen white roses, Bella counted for her. At the end of the show there was a boy at the door with a box of chocolate bonbons and a bottle of champagne. But no Mayhew. From some unexpected delicacy he stayed out of Aurora’s way for several days, letting business take him down to Butte and Missoula on a quick tour of theatres there.

At first it was a relief, not to have to see him. But as more days went by it was odd, then irritating. She wanted to marry him, wanted to have him look after her, after them all. That was a slightly delicate matter: how responsible would he make himself for her sisters and Mama? There was a great deal that had not been said and she did not yet feel able to make him say it.

In his photograph, newly posted in the lobby—top hat and cane and white kid gloves—he was not unhandsome. She tried to see past the stiff rustiness of his hair, the wrinkles around his mouth, age everywhere. His air of fashion could only survive at a distance. Close up, nothing about him wakened her or made her warm, nothing caused the delicious snake to curl over in her belly. But she would go through with it, she told herself. She would get pleasure out of making him cry out, out of her own supremacy. And the whole idea of crossing into the real world of marital love was exciting to her.

One morning, walking alone down State Street looking in shop windows, Aurora heard her name called. Behind her ran Mercy of the Simple Soubrettes, from their first gig at the Empress: bright face and black-jet eyes. A wholly unexpected pleasure—off guard, Aurora reached out in happy welcome, and they embraced and laughed in the empty street. Mercy pulled her into a nearby café, and had them at a table with tea in front of them in a twinkling of her clever eye. The Soubrettes (now the Good-time Girls, not wanting to soil the name Simple Soubrettes) were booked for a two-week gig, to start next day—at the nearby Variety theatre.

The Variety was a burlesque house. Aurora had to school her face, not to let shocked pity show.

‘We only had the two weeks booked with Cleveland, and he let us go after that, the stinker! Then our Calgary jump fell through, and altogether we had a hole in the schedule—next Patty turned her ankle and we could not coach her to work round it, so we had to send her home to Spokane, which she does not like. And neither does my brother, of course. But it’s only for a little while, and there’s no denying that we get along faster without Patty. My brother says we’ll be on Pan-time soon with this new look, since we’ve given the act a greater wow.’ Mercy bent to drink her tea, but could not repress a doubtful shrug. ‘Hope he’s right! But tell me, what’s this gossip about Fitzjohn Mayhew being at the Parthenon. I was never so surprised!’

Aurora was surprised herself, to hear Mayhew’s name said with such relish. ‘Why, what do you know of him? He’s come from Ziegfeld’s company, to take the reins after Drawbank was pushed out.’

‘Fancy!’

Something hidden there. ‘You know him?’

‘Oh, no, not to say know. One hears things, that’s all.’

Aurora waited.

‘I used to know a girl who knew him, as you might say. He left Boston in a hurry. And he came back PDQ from San Francisco, too. Not that that means anything—I think it was around the time of the ’quake. I don’t know—’ Mercy pressed her lips together into a pink pucker. ‘Have you gotten yourself mixed up with him?’

Aurora puckered in turn, twisting the little sapphire ring that Mayhew had given her. ‘I suppose it is mixed up. I am to marry him in May,’ she said.

‘No!’ Mercy laughed, loud enough to make heads turn among the café patrons. ‘You are quick off the mark! You one-up my friend—he never thought of marrying her. I’ll bet your mama had a hand in deciding it! Hearty best wishes for a prosperous union, et cetera—send me a card for the wedding.’

She and Aurora regarded each other across the table. ‘Where are your sisters?’ Aurora asked.

‘Dozing! Where are yours? Nice to have a jaunt without them, ain’t it?’

Aurora nodded, but was surprised to find it so. She had not been conscious of feeling crowded.

There was a silence.

‘All prepared for it?’ Mercy asked.

‘What is a French job?’ Aurora asked, at nearly the same time.

Mercy did not laugh, but took up the salt shaker. ‘Good thing to have up your sleeve, they like it very much. Hold firm, but not too tight. I always think of a fry-pan handle, that’s about the right grip.’ After a quick look around, she bent over the table behind the menu and demonstrated the action. It was only as she proceeded that Aurora made sense of what she was doing.

‘Into your—mouth?’

‘It’s what they like,’ Mercy said.

‘Where did you learn it?’

‘Ship’s steward on our way over from Bristol, when I was twelve. Taught me all I know.’

Aurora had been half laughing, but she stopped then, truly shocked.

‘Don’t fret! It’s been a boon to me all this time,’ Mercy said. She set down the salt shaker and scrubbed at its head with her napkin. ‘It’s often good for a night off, when the other seems—well, a bit of a burden.’

‘Oh, good God!’ Aurora said.

‘Have you done It yet, with him?’

Aurora shook her head.

‘With anyone?’

‘Not—not fully.’

‘It hurts a bit, the first time. The thing is to be patient. And stay calm. It’s only natural, it’s what we’re built for. If you get lucky with the man, it can be a very good time.’

But that was not her consideration, anyhow, Aurora thought. She wanted to be expert, to bind him to her. The sentimental part of it was not necessary—Mercy was proof of that. And she did not wish to be a prude. ‘I will be brave,’ she said.

Mercy looked at her and grinned. ‘Ho, yes, you will be!’ she said. ‘Ain’t we all.’


My Man Famble

Back from Missoula, Mayhew began work on his melodrama. After running lines with Aurora in every spare moment, Clover sat in the empty house to watch the first rehearsal. Aurora was Miss Sylvia; East became the theatrical producer Fibster Malverley, ‘a handsome demon,’ and Verrall oiled on and off in the minor part of Malverley’s agent, Flink. Sybil was given a brief but poignant role as Miss Sylvia’s white-haired mother, who spent much of the play visible through a window, tied up and gagged.

MALVERLEY: Of course we can wait for your dear mother—what can have detained her?

(aside) Perhaps it was my man Famble and his blackjack!

(to Sylvia) We are honoured by your presence. Can I give you a glass of ratafia?

SYLVIA: I do not know what ratafia is, sir.

MALVERLEY: Oh, it is a mild soft drink. (aside) Along the lines of Madeira or Blue Ruin …

East enjoyed his villainy hugely, chewing with relish upon his moustache as he inveigled the innocent miss into a state of drunken compliance and made his hideous assault, against her maidenly protests.

MALVERLEY: It is entirely your own fault for enflaming me, Sylvia. My heart has been yours since first setting eyes on you. Let me call you—my Own.

SYLVIA: (blushing) Please, sir! Unhand me, I beg of you!

MALVERLEY: (aside) She maddens me! But her beaux yeux will not make me marry her …

Knowing the play as well as Aurora did by that time, Clover was leaning forward in her seat, mouthing the lines, when she felt a touch on her arm and Victor Saborsky sat down beside her.

He was back! She jumped and would have shrieked, but he caught her arms and stopped her mouth with a kiss. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, in a barely audible tone. ‘I am back—we are reunited—but first, what is this appalling tripe they are playing on the stage?’

Clover explained, filling him in on the plot so far, and settled into the crook of Victor’s arm to watch the rest, as if it were a private showing just for them. In the end it was revealed that clever Sylvia and her mother had planned the encounter themselves; Sylvia gave Malverley knock-out drops and robbed him of the papers which would have compromised her mother. Nonsense, yes, but Clover thought Aurora did a beautiful job of conveying the pure-minded maiden who was so put-upon by the Producer, willing to give up even her Virtue if that could save her Widowed Mother.

Going down to the dressing rooms to help Victor unpack, Clover murmured that she found it quite impenetrable that Mr. Mayhew would be interested in staging a melodrama that so closely resembled his own life—except he did not seem to have a Man Famble.

Victor suggested that perhaps Mayhew did not see the similarity. ‘We have not always nose-past acuity,’ he said, beginning a set of pull-ups on the dressing-room door.

She laughed, and he dropped down to the floor to kiss her. She blushed.

‘I love that you blush when I kiss you,’ he said. ‘But you have no need.’

‘I know! I do not know why I do it. Because I am so happy!’

‘Reason enough,’ he said, reaching to kiss her again.

But Aurora and East came running down the stairs, arguing about a bit of business with the ratafia glasses. Clover straightened her dress as Mayhew followed the others down.

‘We’ll put it on the bill at the beginning of May,’ he told Aurora. ‘Just time enough for a new gown for the beautiful Miss Sylvia.’

Aurora laughed and turned, arms in air, to show off the exquisite dress she wore: a float of embroidered lawn, pin-tucks and lace that Clover had helped her pick from the dressmaker’s shop. ‘Will this not do?’

‘No, no,’ Mayhew said, seriously. ‘Your opulence in dress is your stock-in-trade, my dear. Never underestimate the importance of being well turned-out. For a woman especially, variety in dress is a necessity. Order one in ivory peau de soie. When that’s done we’ll put the melodrama on the bill, and not before.’


Gumballs

The older brother of the Tusslers was called Walter Middleton. Bella knew the name of the younger brother now too, but she refused to use it, even in her mind. Every show, at the end of their turn, the younger Tussler was there in the wings staring at her, and she remembered again the slam of his fist, those ham-knuckle bones. When he was hit onstage, or fell down the trick-collapsible stairs, she felt hot pleasure. Even so, she would have left it alone, hating herself for the mousey way fear made her behave; but then he began to bother Xiang.

The Chinese girl was unknowable—they had no common language, and her father required her constant presence both offstage and on—but Bella loved her straight-across bangs and mincing, dress-hobbled step. Before Long Chak Sam’s act, Xiang carried a red lacquer tray of assorted magician’s props upstairs. She wore big-soled black slippers with a divider between the toes and cotton socks that split her toes to match, and they were not easy on stairs. Perhaps wearied of worrying Bella, the Tussler started lying in wait for Xiang during the intermission. He had prop-work to do himself, clearing up the clattered furniture their act left splintered about the stage, and would engineer it so that he finished just in time to arrive at the top of the stairs as Xiang began to climb from the bottom. He’d have something large and awkward in his hands, wooden slats or a drawer, and would slip, stumbling down as she was going up. It was loud and terrifying, but he was very practised at falling; his wood slats were aimed with skill into Xiang’s painstakingly arranged tray of props, scattering them. The first time Bella happened to see this, she was frightened enough to leap to help, although she usually avoided being within twenty feet of the Tussler. He scrambled up, pawing at Xiang’s dress, and made as if to do the same to Bella, except that Bella fled back into their dressing room. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Xiang fly to the top of the stairs as if by magic.

It happened again at the next show. And again, and again. Afraid to tell her sisters what had happened to her, Bella could not tell them what was happening to Xiang; but she could not leave it as it was. She woke one night from bad dreams and lay in the dark, cold even under Clover’s arm. He would have to be stopped.

She had no poison. Oil on the dressing-room stairs might kill him, but the Tussler was very good at falling. Oil on his collapsible stairs would kill only him, but the brothers checked their set-up before every show and would certainly notice oil-slick. For a moment she thought longingly of the bright spears of broken glass in the glass-crash box—but could not bear to imagine how it would cut her hand to use one to kill the Tussler.

Mattie could not help, he was just a boy. Verrall was so fearful of any trouble that he would only clasp his hands and beg her to take no notice. East was more of a firebrand but did not care for anybody but Verrall. No point in asking him. Maybe Aurora could get Mayhew to fire him? But she’d have to tell Aurora why, and no matter how she scolded herself she found she could not bear to speak of it, of the shame of being hit.

She needed Nando from the Knockabout Ninepins. She thought with pleasure of Nando dropping the gumballs that his wicked father danced and fell on later. Victor Saborsky had returned—maybe he could help somehow, he was good at elaborate machines. But she was shy of him, of his formal speaking and his intense, un-ironic energy. It was as if he could only speak to one woman in his life, and that was Clover. It was tiresome also because Clover was so mad in love with him that she was in a daze, a dazzle-ry, distracted and prone to fits of slight bad temper, unlike herself. And Bella could not bear her to know about this, anyway.

What would be the worst thing for the Tussler—humiliation during a show? To be injured, to lose confidence—to be afraid, to see how that felt. Except maybe that was why he liked to do it to her, because he already knew himself.


Les Trois

The theatre was warmer during the day, now that spring had come, and a good thing too, Bella thought: their costumes for the peasant number of Les Très Belles were cut scandalously low, and high. Mayhew came to watch the girls go through their paces. He wore the astrakhan-collared coat, though it was a little too warm outside, and in Bella’s eyes he looked the perfect impresario.

They’d started rehearsing by singing la-la-la because they did not know how to pronounce the French words properly, but Victor spoke French, and had coached them till they were at least comfortable, if not entirely accurate. In fun, Clover and Bella had begun larding ordinary conversation with eus and entrezs and carrying on as if they were actually French, which pleased Mayhew so much that he insisted they ought to keep it up always. ‘No need to inform the press of your nationality—ah, but I forgot! You are true Canadiennes—we merely stress the Frenchity of your native land.’

After listening, he reluctantly agreed that the uptempo Plaisir d’Amour did not work—they would try Mon Homme instead, Clover singing in French with Aurora and Bella in English after. It was Mistinguett’s cabaret song and possibly the only genuine thing in the act, and Bella liked the song very well. Sad or funny, she could work it either way, depending.

‘Two or three girls has he,

That he likes as well as me,

But I love him—I don’t know why I should,

He isn’t true, he beats me too …’

Mayhew also approved Sur le Pont d’Avignon and their bridge dance, which Mama had blocked out to echo the children’s game, London Bridge. ‘That’s the ticket,’ he said. ‘Familiar, yes—but Frenchified. No more of the Scottish numbers, that’s clouding the issue. You’ll have to stick to La Françoise.’ Naturally, they would do as they were told.

Did they have to obey him even more, Bella wondered, now that he was going to be Aurora’s husband? She had thought it might mean Aurora could jolly him out of things. Now they were working on the Lakmé and that meant she could sit out, a good thing since she’d been the one running through the bridge in the previous number, and was covered in a gleam of sweat. She retired behind the piano to watch, running a cloth over her face and neck and (screened by the piano’s bulk) down her chest. The wads of cotton pouffing up her bosom were soaked through, but she looked much older with them and would not even rehearse without. Cleaned up, she could listen to Aurora establishing her own authority over their act, little by little.

‘The key is too high for us,’ Aurora was saying. Mama protested, but Aurora nodded firmly to Caspar, who rustled his paper making a little note, and took it down a few notches to the key of G. ‘But we’ll only do the first third,’ she told him. It was Mayhew who objected this time, so that Aurora had to stop and smile and tell him that perhaps he was a little biased—and that maybe this week, for Clover’s sake, they could begin with a short section and expand as they went along. Bella saw her apologize with her eyes to Clover, who obliged by looking downcast and incompetent. She shuffled her sides and held one upside down, until Aurora walked in front of her again and whispered, ‘Enough, I think!’

The harmony was demanding, and the accompaniment did not match the melody—Aurora and Clover could not catch it till Caspar cleared his throat and sang each part separately for them, which Bella could only be grateful that Gentry Fox did not witness. As she sat waiting for Lakmé to be done, Bella wrote him a letter in her mind:

Dear Gentry Fox,

You were right, we are not singers. But we do what you told us to do and somehow people are fooled. We miss you very much, and thank you, and wish our sister was marrying you, if you were not quite so antique.

Your young friend,

ARABELLA AVERY


What Beauty Awaits

Clover and Victor leaned on the lip of the false front of the theatre. Spring snow fell delicate and whole-flaked around them but none of it stayed on the black tarred roof. It was late in the season for a cloudburst to slink down the mountain driftway from Canada, but the snow was pretty, not threatening. The moon shone through torn clouds, bright as afternoon.

Inside a corner of Victor’s greatcoat Clover was warm, and she loved heights. He had found her watching in the wings after his turn, and had spirited her away up the steel stairs beyond the catwalks, out onto the roof through the trap door which even Bella had not dared to open. He was an adventurer, an explorer. Music from the pictures clanged and banged, so far below that it was like faerie music.

‘This is a night for Galichen, my teacher,’ Victor said. ‘I will take you to see his tall thin house, his all-white garden in the moonlight, and he will see that you are a sliver of moon yourself.’

Clover looked down at the street below, the black footprints of the audience being erased by whiteness. ‘Well, I will have to get there on a moonbeam.’

‘My mother will love you,’ he said. She saw that he was quite serious. She did not speak, did not need to speak. After a pensive moment he added, ‘As long as Gali does …’ and she laughed, having heard about this master or monster of eccentricity who had ensnared Victor’s parents. He lifted her to sit on the parapet. ‘When you are old enough you, ma mie, will be the mother of my children.’

‘Will we have children?’

‘Before, I believed that it was irresponsible to usher infants into a world well-conditioned to cause them pain. But Galichen says: as pain is the human condition, love is its alleviation, and we must train. We endure the pain that visits us in order to be capable of enduring the flashes of sudden joy.’ I now want to have children, because I have met the mother of them. The ridge of his nose stood dark against the light spilling upwards from the lighted Parthenon sign. His skin was too thin, and showed if he was tired or overwrought.

‘You will be a good father.’

‘I will be. Our children will be good children, because they will have found their true parents. Little do you know, children!’ he shouted, his voice falling off the roof and down into the silent street where no one stood or walked any longer. ‘What beauty awaits you! This is your mother!’

Aurora would be waiting for her, she should go, she should go.

‘Do not talk about being married any more,’ Clover said, turning away from the roof’s edge. ‘It makes my chest hurt to think of it. I have to look after Mama.’


A Hundred Jawbreakers

In the second show it happened: the Tussler fell. Bella had stayed in the wings after their turn to watch how the Tusslers’ number went, to see if there was some weak spot she could use—she had been thinking again about gumballs. Nando had shown her how the hollow gumballs squashed when stepped on, so that his father could control exactly how his feet flew out from under him. But jawbreakers were not hollow, they were hard as iron and slippery as hell’s slope, and if she let loose a hundred jawbreakers under the Tussler’s feet he would go down, for sure.

Watching him in the act, though, she gave it up. He hardly set foot on the stage floor, but only ran up and down the twenty-foot set of stairs that was their central prop, carrying chairs and tables, hooking them out of the air as his brother tossed them. And now that she thought about it, a hundred jawbreakers would cost a dollar, and she had no money at all. Which was also infuriating, since she worked as hard as any of the others and never saw a red cent to call her own. She could feel her jaw tighten and the muscles under her eyebrows bunch up, but was making herself shrug and move away when the small thing happened. A small noise, a tink on the floor.

She turned—and saw a shape behind the scaffolding of the Tusslers’ staircase-flat. In the backstage darkness, the shape was half as high as the staircase, and moved like a tall, stiff man. A man nine feet tall. Impossible. It must be a trick of shadow and the footlights.

The staircase shook and rumbled again as the younger Tussler crashed up to the summit, to receive the emptied desk which his brother tossed. In a minute he would toss the desk back and the brother would work the mechanism that turned the staircase into a slide, and the Tussler would slide all the way down for their big finale. He got to the top, and reached out his arms to catch the desk, which was careening through the air towards him—and the stairs went flat.

The Tussler seemed to hang in the air, still reaching up for the desk, before his feet came out awkwardly and his body tried to twist into a hook to grab somewhere, and—all unready, off balance—he crashed backwards onto the flattened stairs and down down down the twenty feet.

After he landed, seconds later, the desk crashed languidly down on top of him. And after that, the top half of the stairs themselves folded over and came cracking and breaking down until they lay in a dreadful heap.

The orchestra was still thumping away; the audience went wild for what they took to be the biggest finish of all. Bella stared at the wreck on the floor, then turned to look through the backstage dusk for the tall man. Nobody to be seen.

Xiang stood at the stairwell beside her father, shorter than him by a foot, and slighter. Their identical eyes gazed past Bella to the rumpus onstage: the older Tussler calling for help as the main curtain rippled shut, stagehands running to lift the wreckage off the under-Tussler. Him at first frighteningly silent, then yelling blue murder with the pain of something—everything—broken.


The Same

Aurora ran up the stairs and out into the auditorium. She should have seen—She had seen, that hideous bruise! She had known perfectly well that Bella was in trouble that evening at the roadhouse, and that the trouble had not gone away. Aurora hated herself. Mercy from the Soubrettes, with no kind of education, looked after poor Patience far better than she had looked after Bella. And now, what, what had Bella done?

She sped up the aisle to the lobby, hardly able to see her way in the after-hours gloom. The theatre had been emptied, the stage cleared, the Tussler hauled away to the hospital—all cacophony had ceased while they were down in the dressing room dealing with poor Bella’s hysterics.

And it might have been worse—what if he had died from the fall?

The door to the upstairs offices was closed, but not locked. She ran up those stairs too, into Mayhew’s office. He was still sitting over ledgers laid out under a green-shaded lamp, but looked up at her step. She could not speak.

‘What is it?’ He came round the desk to catch her hands, which she had held out without knowing it. ‘Sit, sit—’ He looked around the barren office as if a chair for her would materialize. Then he took her to his desk chair, saying easily, ‘What a dingy place this is! Unfit for you.’ He sat down in the chair himself and pulled her to his knee.

Aurora sat off balance at first, resisting—then caving in. What luxury, to let someone else be in charge. She lay against Mayhew and closed her eyes.

‘Quietly, quietly. We’ll fix it. What is the bother, my dear girl?’

Tense again, she straightened, but did not climb down off his knee.

‘The Tussler—Verrall has just told me that he hit Bella, when we were in Butte—you did not see the bruise she got, the night we met.’

‘The night we met, all I thought of was you,’ Mayhew said.

Aurora shook her head. ‘No, no—that girl, lying in the snow. Because she was so badly hurt I did not let myself think more about Bella. But what if he had—’ Her brain was spinning. What if he had died tonight; what if he had killed Bella that night, or raped her? None of those could be spoken. ‘And ever since she has been plagued by him.’

‘So it’s a timely thing that he has gone.’

‘Bella has made herself ill, crying about it. Bella never cries.’ She could not tell him what she feared: that it was Bella who had pulled the pin from the hinge on the stairs and caused them to crash down. If she had done it, nothing to be gained by saying so.

‘Those two were unreliable, and their equipment ill-maintained,’ Mayhew said. ‘Walter’s been in here giving me a song-and-dance about how he can continue on his own, he’s got a single act, but I’ve told him it’s no go.’ In the circle of Mayhew’s arm Aurora let herself subside. ‘They’ll be gone, and unable to make any more trouble for us, either of them.’

And unable to make a living, Aurora thought. Two gangly boys, no older than herself, as precariously perched in vaudeville. Now off their perch, Arnold hurt and Walter with no partner. But it was their own responsibility to check and recheck their equipment, and she could believe they’d neglected it. Everybody was in the same boat as far as injury went—if you could not work, you would not earn.

And perhaps, perhaps, as Bella had sobbed out to them below-stairs, it had been the Tussler who had hurt the Irish girl; and then good riddance to bad rubbish. Bella would be safe now, this way.

‘All right,’ she said into Mayhew’s ear.

His arm gathered her in more strongly, almost rocking her. She turned her head until she could see up into his face, in the dim green dusk of the office. He was staring at her with a sad intensity.

‘It will be all right,’ she said to him.

After a minute he said, as if afraid to ask, ‘What will?’

‘Us,’ she said. She touched his cheek, his forehead. ‘Don’t be worried. We are the same kind of person,’ she said. He buried his head in her bosom, and she cupped her hand to hold him there.


Hurting Each Other

On Sunday, one of their dark-days, Clover persuaded Mama to invite Victor to tea at the Pioneer. Mayhew was there too, as he always was these days. The landlady, Mrs. Burday, offered the hotel’s fancy parlour for the formal visit. Looking round the hideously refined room, with its lace-edged mantel and skirts on every chair, Clover thought it a fine example of the false ease that money brings. Mayhew had increased their dot to $150 per week, and they were finally able to put something away—now that they had no need to, because Mayhew looked after everything.

But of course they must not relax too much. Out of Aurora’s hearing, Clover and Bella had decided they’d need a stake, in case Mayhew got tired of two sisters tagging along and decided to make Aurora into a single act. And they’d have to look after Mama as well. Bella wanted to work out a sketch bit with East and Verrall, but relying on those two made Clover no more confident. On a secret piece of paper she was figuring what they’d need to set off on their own: at least $200, she thought, to be comfortable for a month, and not very comfortable for another two or three. Even if they started with an engagement elsewhere.

She was too sick with apprehension to enjoy the tea. Mama turned prickly around Victor; and she thought Victor might find Mama’s pretenses abominable. He would see through everything and perhaps, perhaps—Clover shook her head. He would still love her.

But they were arguing already. Mama had started in the moment he arrived, telling Victor how much he must have loved, and would now sadly miss, the Tusslers, since they were so very much like his own act. Victor had bowed, rather than speak, keeping the unspoken pact not to let Mama in on the true tale of the Tussler and Bella.

‘And you must be looking forward to the Melodrama which Mr. Mayhew is proposing! So high-toned and instructive, just the thing to raise our vaudeville above the common run.’

Clover bit the inside of her cheek.

‘But I like the common run,’ Victor said. He pulled a red rubber ball out of his pocket.

‘You are a certified genius and must scorn us mere mortal dancers and singers! But there is good in every type of act,’ Mama said.

‘I could not agree more,’ Victor said, but his voice was flat.

‘We agree, really!’ Mama said, to jolly him. ‘You like the same lovely things we do.’

‘Sometimes I do. Sometimes we agree.’

‘We enjoy a good laugh—like the Tusslers.’

Victor was oddly serious in this little argument. ‘I laughed at them because I was afraid they were hurting each other.’

So Mama became serious as well—or rather, Clover saw, she began playing A Serious Artiste, nodding sagely, invisible spectacles settling upon her nose. ‘Oh yes, I quite agree, Art must educate! That’s what we both believe. It must be understood.’

Victor broke into a quick laugh. ‘How can we presume to understand the mystery of art? It does not ask us to understand it, only to be present.’

‘Well, I consider that Laughter, you know, makes the Message easier to hear!’

The pompous sentimentality of this was apparently too much for Bella. She jumped up from the settee with a small, impatient shriek. ‘There is no message, Mama! Especially not in the Très Belles Bull-Roarers! If the turn is good, it’s good, that’s all—it doesn’t need a moral, or to be interpreted.’

Mama continued her irritating nodding. ‘Oh, dearest child, that’s very true—they understand us, because we’re just ordinary folk, like them.’

‘We are nothing like them,’ Victor said. He lounged against the table, idly winding the red ball through his finger. ‘They are citizens, we are not.’

Like a spectator at tennis, Clover looked to see how Mama would return that serve—since to her citizen, like worthy, meant the despised Aunt Queen, she could not very well class herself as a citizen too. ‘Now, my dear, dear Victor,’ Mama said. ‘You will admit that here in polite vaudeville we are all one happy family, now that certain standards are adhered to from town to town. And that we all get along beautifully, like you and my sweet Clover.’

‘On the contrary, we quarrel often. The better to love.’

‘Well, all I say is, we can move in the first circles of Society; and we work very hard to do the best we can to make the words clear and to show the purity and beauty of our girls. Crystal clear!’

She was almost defiant, and Clover was relieved to see Victor give her a tender glance. ‘Not everything can be clear,’ he said, suddenly kind, speaking to Mama’s confusion. ‘Sometimes I have no idea why I do something! I do it to provoke, to stagger—not to clarify.’

Mayhew raised his head from his paper, reminded. ‘Speaking of stagger—I’ve invited the newspaper critics to lunch at the Placer next week, and I’ll need you girls on hand all togged out.’ He nodded to Aurora, where she sat studying her lines in the window seat. ‘Getting them well-buttered will help with publicizing your melodrama.’

Victor bowed in his direction. ‘Machiavelli in spats.’

Mama commended Mayhew on his initiative, but Clover could see she wasn’t giving up the argument with Victor, who seemed to make her as worried and confused as a small dog with a huge bone. Mama stretched out a hand to him, imploring him with great shadowy eyes to yield, to agree, to be at one with her in understanding. But Victor laughed and tossed the ball up into the air, where it became three balls, cascading down and flowing up again. Still, Mama reached out to him again. ‘The girls give people Hope, and that is so important, you know. To Entertain is a great calling, a great service. We send the audience home happy and strengthened, better able to bear their burdens.’

Victor laughed, whistled a twiddly bit of tune, and turned the red balls into a rose, which he handed her with an apologetic bow. ‘No. Not I, at least. I wish to send them home shocked, exhausted, discontented with their lives, and amazed.’

Amazed, yes, always, Clover thought. Even if you can amuse, amaze. Amazement is the best of all, in vaudeville.