The Little Shadows

6.

Headliners




MAY–JUNE, 1912

The Parthenon, Helena

The Starland, Calgary

The highest salary acts are usually placed last on the bill and are referred to as headliners or features.

FREDERICK LADELLE, HOW TO ENTER VAUDEVILLE





And then the axe fell. They were still eating breakfast the next morning in the Pioneer dining room when Mayhew appeared, wearing his motoring-coat. Aurora could see he was in a taking. His face was a thunderstorm—mouth in a tight line, dark air seeming to swirl around him. He took Aurora’s arm to pull her out on the porch with him, and—an afterthought—tweaked Flora’s shoulder too.

Bella stayed at the table with Clover, unable to eat. It was frightening to be in the presence of someone so very angry. Papa had rarely given way. From the porch they heard Mayhew’s raised voice, and after a bit, a slight shriek from Flora.

Then Aurora put her head in the dining-room door, and jerked her chin. The girls got up in haste, found her already racing up the stairs, and followed.

‘We’re to be packed in half an hour,’ she told them as they ran. ‘He’s taken all his papers, the accounts, everything, out of the theatre—some intolerable slight that Mrs. Ackerman has dealt him. Mama is finding out more, but they sent me to begin.’

A very dreadful development. Bella felt ready to screech with feverish excitement.

Clover kissed her cheek and whispered, ‘Don’t! It will be all right!’

They’d cleared out their dressing room, as always on a Saturday night, to let the porters clean thoroughly over the dark-days—so all their things were in the room. And they had laundered their smalls last night and hung them by the stove.

Flora came flying up the stairs—then down again to give Mrs. Burday the news that they would be leaving without notice—and came back in a taking of her own, because La Burday had insisted on being paid out for the week, though this was only Monday. Conscious of the clock, Aurora grabbed the grouch-bag from her and went, slick black shoes skating on the drugget, to settle up with Mrs. Burday; as she went she shouted for Clover and Bella to come sit on the lid of the trunk once they had added the gold silk comforter.

Clover let Bella go, and snatched the chance to run three doors down to Mrs. Denham’s boarding house, where others in the Parthenon company had rooms. East opened the door, his own case in hand, and Verrall behind him was clapping his bowler on his head—they were off that morning on a long jump to Portland for their next gig.

‘Victor?’ she asked, out of breath. Yes, he was in—his head appeared over the banister rail. She ran up two steps at a time. ‘Mayhew has told us we are to leave—Aurora says we’re going to Calgary, then Edmonton. He’s had a wire from Mrs. Ackerman that sent him into blind rage.’

Victor stared at her, still not properly awake. His fluffy hair stood up in a rooster’s comb.

‘We’re leaving!’ She stamped her foot. ‘I will never see you again!’ Then she burst into soft weeping and pulled her arm up over her eyes.

‘No, no, no,’ Victor said.

‘Yes, I am telling you!’ Her voice was muted by her sleeve.

‘No, I mean, no, you will not never see me again! We are conjoined! There is no other for us—and we are vaudeville people, used to separation. I am booked for San Francisco next week, but up the coast on Pan-time to Vancouver next month, and then in Edmonton myself. Come in, come in.’

Clover stood inside the door of his bedroom while Victor rummaged through his suitcase to find a booking sheet, then copied it out in his black European hand, 7s crossed with sharp lines, ds made with long rising tails. San Francisco, Eugene, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver—the cities formed under his pen, each with a theatre and a bracket of dates beside it, and then Edmonton, The Empire (June 25–July 11). She had never been to Edmonton. She had never been inside Victor’s bedroom before. His jacket, hanging limp on the cracked closet door, broke her heart. He was wearing a shirt with no collar, grey flannel trousers; his socks were clean as new snow. The room smelled of him, his arm smelled of him. She took the paper.

‘I will see you soon, then,’ she said. She nodded her head and pressed her hands to her cheeks. He put his arms around her again, and then she ran back, before Aurora might notice she was gone.

Within the allotted half-hour they were arrayed on the front porch. Mayhew’s long Pierce-Arrow touring car wheeled up. No train trip for them this time! Bella was thrilled to be travelling by car. Only Clover was unhappy, because she always felt sick in a car, and dreaded Mayhew’s fury. And because there was no happiness in the world. The paper on which Victor had written his dates crackled in her pocket.


The Open Road

‘It’s the lack of vision—that’s what frosts me,’ Mayhew said as they drove away, shouting to Aurora, in the seat of honour beside him. ‘I can handle any kind of slur, but what makes me impatient is abrogant stupidity.’

Did he mean arrant, or arrogant? Ignorant? Aurora closed her eyes and concentrated on the slight tremble of the wind whipping at her hat-feather, even tied under the motoring veil. Mama and Clover sat with Bella between them in the back. Aurora felt she must be grateful they’d not been left behind. Their trunks had been directed to the train station and would meet them in Calgary, which had meant a quick reassembling of overnight things in two hat boxes, now strapped up behind the boot of the Pierce-Arrow.

‘Wait!’ Aurora cried, her hand flashing to the dashboard as if to stop the car. ‘My gown! My new peau de soie, for the melodrama—please, Fitz, please, can we stop?’

The dressmaker lived behind her shop. Although fussed about the unturned hem, she was persuaded to give up the gown when Mayhew signed the bill to the theatre. As they pulled away, she ran after them down the street with a small package, shouting, ‘The sash!’ Bella leaned out the back and grabbed it.

They whirled past the theatre and the train station, and onto the main road rising north out of town, moving just faster than their dust. As the car swayed, the three in the back swayed together, nobody daring to say a word after that last interruption.

‘Mrs. Bloody Ackerman—bloody fool, never been the same since she took the reins, you can’t tell me he actually meant her to take over when he popped—It’s the lack of—’ The wind or the sound of the engine whipped away some of each sentence. Aurora sat looking straight ahead, sometimes nodding. Once she put her gloved hand on Mayhew’s knee, and he took one hand off the wheel and set it over hers.

He had talked himself into an expansive temper again by the time they stopped for the night in Shelby, at a plain-looking place that Mayhew had heard was the best hotel in town. Certainly the sheets were clean and there was a good fire in the parlour, where they sat after supper. Before long, Mayhew excused himself and went out ‘to see about the car.’ They did not see him again until morning, when he was waiting outside the hotel, in the Pierce-Arrow.

Rather than ask him to come in and pay for their room, Aurora paid. She could not help feeling the weight of the grouch-bag lessening. A momentary panic overtook her, to think that they had left the Parthenon. Mama came down the stairs with Bella, the strings of their hat boxes tangled, and Aurora did not wish her to see that she was paying their bill. But it was too late—Mama looked up and caught Aurora’s eyes, and they turned together away from the desk to look out the door at Mayhew.

‘What’s his is yours, soon,’ Mama said. ‘But what’s ours has to do for Clover and Bella too.’

‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ Aurora whispered, stooping to pick up a hat box.

Mayhew sprang out of the car as they went down the steps, to open the doors for them. ‘All aboard for the open road,’ he said, all geniality this morning. He had found a barber: his face was still bright pink from the hot towel and he smelled of bay rum and the spring wind. Aurora took some comfort from his sheer cleanliness, if not his godliness, and did not ask where he had spent the night.

A hundred miles from Shelby up to Lethbridge. In the late afternoon Aurora looked back at Mama, Bella and Clover, cramped in the rear seat—bedraggled and silent, their hair choked with dust, mouths parched—and knew herself to be in the same sad state. Only Mayhew remained spruce.

During the long drive Aurora had kept her face turned to the window, staring at the blank spring landscape, seeing only what she’d got herself into—and her sisters, and Mama. It was all down to Mrs. Ackerman, it seemed to her: if Gentry Fox had not been pushed out, they would have continued to learn from him until they were ready to make the leap to the big-time. Now Fitz was pushed out too, and they were left in mid-air, halfway between their old act and their new. And (but this was childish) she had been looking forward to the melodrama very much.


Firmament of Beauty

One night in Lethbridge, and they reached Calgary the next afternoon: a broad, wide-open place, with not a tree to be seen, nor a paved street, the riverbanks crowded with tumbledown shacks and garbage dumps. Indians were common in the streets, walking in parties of six or seven with their horses and women. It was a raw city, Clover thought, but had everything laid out as if it one day might be as civilized as Helena, and trolley cars already zipping along the thoroughfares.

She and Bella walked the straight streets while Mama and Aurora fought through sessions with the dressmaker. The Très Belles Aurores would be opening at the Starland in a week. The peasant blouses, casino skirts and Lakmé costumes were a rush job, and much was still to be discussed: ribbon, depth of flounce, and for the Lakmé costumes—perfect!—short hoops like lampshades, worn over tight pantaloons, enchantingly oriental.

Clover had heard talk of a wedding dress, as well, but Aurora had put a stop to that, insisting that she would wear the peau de soie from Helena: an ice-cream vision, needing only to be hemmed. The wedding was set for the Saturday before they opened, to garner the most press possible. Mayhew was busy sweet-talking editors from the eight newspapers; he had himself paged in hotels and restaurants, interrupting with messages of bogus urgency the lavish luncheons he gave. He’d installed the Très Belles Aurores in Mrs. Hillier’s, a small boarding hotel catering to respectable vaudeville, only six streets from the Starland.

The Starland itself was a plain box on 8th Avenue, not near as grand as many of the other theatres, one of a small string with theatres in Winnipeg, Brandon, Calgary and Lethbridge, and on the other side of the line, in St. Paul and Omaha. Although most were moving-picture houses, the Omaha theatre had been running vaude, and management had decided to try it in the Calgary branch. Mayhew arranged, in what seemed like a matter of hours, to helm the effort until the Muse should be ready to open in Edmonton. He seemed to have twenty irons neatly arranged at his fire, Clover thought. Twenty she knew of, probably another dozen he’d kept up his sleeve. He dashed in and out of the theatre, where rehearsals had begun; in the evenings, Mayhew squired the three girls to the other theatres in town to check the competition—never paying for a seat, so successfully had he established himself as an impresario to be given every entrée.

Mama begged off each time, saying that Mayhew’s escort was enough; she was working in secret, Clover knew, on an embroidered wedding veil for Aurora. Between the fire and two gas-lamps, she sat stitching late into the evening, a garden of white-on-white flowers growing under her silver needle. Clover had heard her murmuring a series of wishes, like spells, into the veil as she sewed: that Mayhew would treat Aurora well, that he would be kind to her sisters, that Aurora would be happy, or at least safe and well. Nothing more ambitious. She was careful not to prick her finger, saying blood on the veil would mean a wound or a broken marriage.

The girls wore their best lawn to the fashionable Bijou Theatre. They had carefully dressed their hair, but were overshadowed by the extravagance of dress and coiffure in the audience around them, let alone onstage. Made shy by the noise and crush and sheer number of people, Clover felt they were country mice as they settled into red velvet seats, lights dimming and the chatter finally lessening.

The opener was a comic, Joe Whitehead. His catch-phrase was ‘squeaky good!’ and he used it every other line; Clover whispered to Bella, ‘I miss East and Verrall, and Julius.’

What the Bijou Theatre bill did feature was beautiful girls. Even Aurora was not a candle to them; the Avery girls could barely register in the firmament of beauty there. The Eight Palace Girls, ravishing nymphs in complicated costumes, changed three times during their number—each time into rather less. Each of the eight was equally well shaped; all seemed good-natured. While music played they stood in graceful poses, altering slowly from stance to stance. Like matched ponies at a horse show, Clover thought, and just as tedious.

The Dahlia Sisters closed the first half: two very beautiful, modestly dressed girls who sang, and did not dance at all. They wore pretty gowns, but more, they seemed to glow with good nature and kindness, and Clover wanted to sit through their number again from the beginning.


December–May

Aurora asked Mayhew to take her backstage at intermission, if he was able. He laughed at the notion that anyone would try to keep him out, and they trooped down.

The Dahlia girls were even lovelier, close to. Aurora found she could not look them in the eyes for long, as if she were drinking in too much light. The fair-haired girl’s cheek was flushed with apricot; her eyes were grey or green or blue, pale brows giving an odd impression of vulnerability to her open regard. She seemed unknowable. The dark-haired girl’s sprinkling of tiny freckles could be counted, this close. Her eyes were bright and sad at the same time, perhaps some trick of birth, the lift in the upper lid coming at the exact point for tragedy. Her underlying sorrow gave a sombre quality to their songs.

Thoroughly humbled, Aurora saw that she and her sisters had been mistaken to think themselves anything out of the common run. And she had been lucky to hook Mayhew, it now seemed to her. He was dallying with the fair Dahlia Sister but he kept Aurora in the corner of his eye, and from time to time gave her a warm look.

The orchestra pit door opened, and through it came a creased squirrel-face that was pleasingly familiar: Mendel, the bandleader from the old Empress, with a bundle of music. Aurora remembered how he had tried to help them. It seemed like such a long time ago.

‘Miss—Aurora,’ he said, after the briefest of pauses. Then he added, ‘Looking like a dozen roses—I see vaudeville has been good to you!’

She smiled, too broadly, tickled that he could see the shine on her. ‘You gave us a good steer,’ she said, nodding quickly. ‘We worked with Gentry Fox down there, you know.’ She stopped herself before she said ‘for free.’ No one should know that.

‘I can see you’ve prospered—and your sisters, your mama, all well?’

‘Oh yes! And you are here at the Bijou?’

‘Yes, found I couldn’t stomach Cleveland any longer. There’s plenty of work at theatres in Calgary, and many old pals. Eleanor Masefield’s company is at the Orpheum now, with Jimmy Battle, you’d remember him. Coming along a treat as a hoofer and a juvenile tenor. He’ll branch out from the Masefield troupe one of these days.’

She nodded again. Cast a quick eye to where Mayhew was immersed with Cleveland.

‘Are they touring the same play?’

‘No, The Undertow now—December–May romance kind of thing, turned upside down, you know, because the man is the younger. A tragedy, I believe. He walks into the sea at the end, or maybe it’s the woman who does.’

‘Yes,’ Aurora said, as if she knew all about the play, and the relationship, and the general tendency of the world to pair people who were completely unsuited to each other in the name of various conveniences. She found herself about to weep.


A Cage-Bird

The next night the Belle Auroras attended the Orpheum, though Bella felt tired almost to frailty from rehearsals, and was glad when Clover suggested that they stay at home for a night. But Mayhew had arranged for a box, and would not hear of missing it.

The Orpheum’s melodrama was The Undertow. Bella, who seldom bothered with the printed word, was taken by surprise when the curtain rose on the drawing-room set of the play and Jimmy Battle was discovered sitting at a writing desk. She jumped, and clutched at Aurora’s arm excitedly—then, as quickly, let go and sat abruptly back.

‘What’s to do?’ Mayhew asked.

Eleanor Masefield was making her entrance just then, so Clover gestured towards her and said, ‘We shared a bill with Miss Masefield long ago.’ Which made Mayhew smile indulgently.

Bella did not dare turn her head to look at Aurora. Instead, she watched as Jimmy and Miss Masefield circled each other. It was a tedious, hackneyed play, only elevated by the tension that emanated from the thin young man and the wilder, darker woman, who did not look at all old until she chose to do so. Eleanor Masefield—Evaline Burton, in the play—confessed with fitting and beautiful shame that she had lost her heart to him, in a light, drawing-room comedy sort of way, until suddenly her deeper heart was revealed.

EVALINE: And so I—must ask you to leave, Jerry.

JERRY: But, Evaline! Miss Burton! I thought we were having such a ripping time.

EVALINE: Like seabirds, cavorting in the wind! But—

JERRY: But what?

EVALINE: Society—does not like—

JERRY: Is Society to dictate to our hearts?

EVALINE: You are in your first youth, Jerry. I am—in my second.

An uneasy laugh from the audience. Bella heard Clover whisper in Aurora’s ear, ‘Her third, more like.’

But Jimmy’s graceful kindness would not allow them to laugh at Mrs. Masefield. He knelt at her feet, the picture of rational adoration.

JERRY: Ten years means nothing to people in love!

‘Ten!’ Bella said. ‘Try thirty!’ Then she shot a scared glance at Mayhew.

Onstage, Jimmy the Bat knelt again at the actress’s feet and begged her not to consider the world’s judgement, ‘When Love is at stake!’ (‘Good title for a vampire play,’ thought Bella) but marry him instead.

The instant they became engaged, a gentleman entered: her lawyer, come about her father’s will. He shooed off Jimmy the Bat and wormed it out of Miss Masefield that she was planning to marry. They moved to the other end of the room to discuss the papers he had brought for her to sign, and Jimmy, who had been listening at the door, had a dramatic monologue where he spoke to her photograph:

JERRY: I cannot be the ruin of you. (ruefully) And I cannot live without money. I am no seabird, happy to wheel in the wind. I’m one who needs a gilded cage.

He stared out to the ocean, looking terribly romantic in his tennis flannels and faintly nautical blazer. A rotter, an adventurer, a cad. (‘I do like him,’ Bella whispered to Clover.) The lawyer came back to question the cad’s motives, while the woman watched in silence, posed in a frozen tableau, one arm along the mantelpiece, head bent but her glorious chest still heaving, diamond pendant flashing—usually during the lawyer’s speeches, Bella noticed—drawing focus.

Then Miss Masefield sent Jerry away and gave the lawyer what-for, magnificent in defence of her lover. But the lawyer had the parting shot, telling her that she would ruin the young man. ‘That is your real sin,’ he said, and Bella concurred.

Evaline bowed her head and called Jerry in, to renounce him by pretending to care for money.

JERRY: I see now that I was your plaything.

EVALINE: Yes. And the time has come to put away childish things. To put away the toys … He looks at her, in hurt rage, then whirls and leaves the room.

EVALINE: … And go to bed.

She walks out the French doors, towards the cliff.

There was, some seconds later, a muted splash. Bella had to stifle a giggle—after all, the audience could have had no doubt as to what Evaline was planning, with that tragedy-face she’d pulled as she went out. She was a seabird, after all.


Nobody’s Fault

Aurora knew they must go backstage. Mayhew’s consequence demanded it, and business contracted during the backstage crush was their whole purpose for being at the theatre. Clover and Bella walked one each side of Aurora, closing her off from Mayhew until he reached back to take her arm.

She went forward, eyes and mouth well controlled, prepared to see Jimmy Battle. He would not be prepared to see her—that worried her a little. But in the event it was all right. Mayhew knew Eleanor Masefield—Norie, he called her—and she flew to his side and took all his attention, giving no sign of recognizing Aurora.

Detached from Mayhew by Miss Masefield, Aurora watched Bella run ahead to where Jimmy was receiving a velvet box from one of Eleanor’s admirers. Bella waited till Jimmy turned, then kissed him and clapped her arms around him in childish pleasure, whispering something in his ear. Then Clover pulled Bella along and they melted away.

Aurora stood alone in a shadowy part of the hall, spectators and artistes milling around them, and Jimmy Battle came down the hall to find her. She was angry, without the least right to be. The privacy of the noisy crowd let her speak without restraint.

‘We did not fall in love,’ she said. ‘Back then.’

‘No.’ Jimmy’s chin, his cheeks, were thinner. ‘Did we not?’

‘You were under contract.’

‘Yes, I was. I am.’ He was angry himself. He must see that she was with Mayhew, now twenty feet away, deep in flirtatious conversation with Eleanor Masefield.

His anger melted her own. In an instant she was nothing but brokenhearted, that the infant thing between them must be squashed. She wanted to comfort him.

‘Sometimes these things just do not work out,’ she said. ‘It is nobody’s fault.’

He bit his lip, and fumbled with his cuff, his wrist. Then he handed her something, his fingers pressing it into her hand. She looked at the shape of them, strong and narrow, well groomed, nails trimmed very short. No hair on them, brown as if from sun.

‘Keep that for me.’

She met his anxious eyes, and managed a smile.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘We do what we must do. But keep that, anyway.’

She looked down at what he’d given her: a plain silver chain bracelet, not at all the sort of thing she would have thought he’d wear.

‘It was my mother’s. I’ll come and get it back from you one day.’

‘All right,’ she said.

The crowd was breaking, and Mayhew and Eleanor were louder.

So Aurora and Jimmy separated, each taking the arm of a patron, and laughed at what was said. Whatever it was.


On the Starland Bill

Flora was pleased to see that dodgers for the Starland Theatre already littered the streets, advertising the starting bill, headlined by The Très Belles Aurores de Nouvelle France. Mayhew sent a packet to Mrs. Hillier’s boarding house so the girls could see themselves written up:

… widely-known through Europe for their excellent singing and the very best in stage dancing in the flamboyant French style, the three very jolie Très Belles Aurores are making their first American tour.

The other artistes on this first bill were impressive, Flora had to credit Mayhew, and his write-ups hit the heights of hyperbole. Paul Conchas, The Military Hercules, for example: Mayhew had penned a startling tale to go with his title, about Conchas serving in the German army, his magnificent physique drawing the personal attention of the Kaiser. ‘When his term of service expired he came to America and since then has been a marvel and inspiration to thousands of young men.’

‘As long as he is not in the vein of the Tusslers,’ said Clover. ‘But listen: The Ioleen Sisters, twin Amazons from Australia with a double set of accomplishments, slack-wire walking and sharp-shooting. Why those two skills? For crossing a river as an alligator attacks?’

Flora frowned at her to stop, lest Mayhew take offence. Clover seemed so quiet, but she had a vein of humour that could deflate the fragile male.

Jolly Banjophiends were the dumb act opener (‘from the most raggy of the popular and up-to-date music to the highest classical selections’), and Alberick Heatherton, Romantic Violin (‘experience the passionate intensity of his selections’) was to play between the melodrama and themselves in the second half.

Turning the dodger over, Clover exclaimed to the others, ‘East & Verrall!’

Bella shrieked, and read it out: ‘The Sidewalk Conversationalists, vivacious vagabonds of the road, contracted to this engagement at considerable expense.’

Mayhew came tearing up the stairs to the hotel sitting room at that moment, vivid and energetic in a new plaid suit. Bella ran to thank him for booking East & Verrall.

‘Now I can still do the hotel number! And we were working on a golf sketch.’

‘Not golf, in this cowtown,’ Mayhew declared. ‘Nobody’d get the gag. I want to bring our own melodrama, The Casting Couch, along here, and the boys will save us rehearsing. But that East is a champion dickerer. I’ll be paying them twice over when the play goes up.’

Paying for things had been a repeated refrain in the last week, Flora thought with some dismay. Clover glanced at Aurora, and went back to the dodger.

Flora gathered her courage and said, ‘The pretty dresses for Lakmé are ready, dear Fitz, but the dressmaker won’t deliver them here without payment. Shall I …?’ She let the words die away, and sat rather tense while Mayhew stared out the window to 8th Street.

‘Hmm?’ he said, seeming to wake to her inquiry. ‘Dresses? Have her send them to the theatre, tell her to make up an invoice for the package. The fellow there will deal with it.’

Flora had been awake all night, obsessively counting over the dollars they had left, extremely reluctant to part with sixty to take possession of the new outfits. She ought to have been more prudent, she knew, scolding herself in the darkness, but what was to be done?

She watched as Aurora went to the window and touched Mayhew’s arm. ‘I believe we will need summer frocks as well, Fitz. We could make them ourselves, if Mama and I—’

He pulled out his money-roll, and peeled off several bills. ‘New dresses, new hats, new buckles to my lady’s shoes. Outfit yourselves with this, my dear. Next week we’ll be raking in receipts at the Starland hand over fist, and you’ll have to look the part.’ He closed her hand over the money. ‘Now let me listen to your rehearsals for a moment, and then I’m off to meet the Herald editor, at his club—club! In this pioneer place! Never mind, I’ll invite him to the wedding. Two more days!’ He sat on the window-ledge in the weak May sunshine, and waved a hand for them to begin.

The wedding was another worry, Flora thought, moving to the piano (a boarding-house nag, tinny but in tune) to play for the girls. Two days! Mayhew had booked the ballroom at the new Palliser Hotel, very imposing, and was issuing invitation cards to every pressman he encountered. The whole thing had the air of a stunt, but Flora could not remonstrate with him; she could not even mention it to Aurora, who had sequestered herself in silence. She sang at rehearsal, and shopped and stood for fittings; but she was … remote.

Nobody seemed at ease any more. Clover and Bella did not take to Mayhew’s company, as they had East and Verrall’s, say, or Julius Foster’s. That was unfair of them—Mayhew always had a joke for Bella and a greeting for Clover, no matter how busy and distracted he became, thought Flora, as her tinkling accompaniment flowed without ceasing, as the girls sang on. She had a constant feeling, lately, of holding her breath.


Milk, Honey, Cream

Mayhew sat on the window-ledge with the light behind him, intending to listen critically; but he became fascinated by the three mouths moving at the same time, the shape of their mouths so much the same although their faces differed. When all three sang together, it was richer, deeper—a surprise that three young sylphs like these could produce that tone. Gentry Fox, that training showed. Their bird-waists and the small cages of their ribs, and then the pleasure of pretty girls’ profiles: milk-pale skin on Clover, warm honey on Bella, full cream on Aurora.

Mayhew found himself pitifully aroused by her, and wished it were not so. He thought for a moment of the Irish girl they had found lying in the snow.

The complications of his business interests were extreme, but would be solvable without this baggage. The mirror over the piano showed him the backs of their heads, the coils and rolls they had pinned carefully into each others’ coiffure. They were darlings, and he was as happy as he’d ever been, in fact. And they would help with the Starland, no question.

Oughtn’t to have handed Aurora so much of the roll, though.

‘I’m off,’ he murmured, in the middle of verse two. He grabbed his hat and was out the door before the piano’s notes had ebbed away.


A Sudden Fall of Snow

On the night before the wedding it snowed. Silent, constant, nickel-sized snowflakes fell all night, in no wind, and in the morning when Clover awoke the light in the room was blue.

Mama gasped when Clover pulled open the curtain to show snow heaped halfway up the window. Snow covered the entire landscape like fondant on a wedding cake, smoothing definition of curbs and corners. The street was deserted, and snow was still falling, fifteen inches already on the ground—late May, and the worst blizzard of the year. A shell of ice waited on the water jug.

Clover’s first feeling was relief. We’ll never get there, she thought. Now they can’t be married. Bella had jumped out of the blankets and come to join Clover at the window. She said out loud: ‘Aurora! A blizzard has come—you’ll miss your wedding!’

But Mrs. Hillier knocked on their door soon afterwards with an offer from her son to take them to the Palliser in the draycart. His big horse Clem had famously got through to the train station in the worst storm of 1910, and Hillier was itching to match the feat today.

The girls and Mama spent the morning washing and putting up their hair; in the afternoon they dressed in their wedding clothes—and all the time the snow fell.

The draycart’s wheels shrieked and the snow squealed as they lurched along, but it was a pretty drive, through slow-falling flakes that dazzled in occasional spears of sun. Mama raised her white lawn parasol to shield Aurora’s veil. When the wedding party disembarked at the Grain Exchange building, where the justice of the peace had his office, it was to silence. No streetcars were running, no carriages or cars rolled through the streets.

The Grain Exchange lobby was icy cold—no furnaceman had come to make the furnaces up. They left their galoshes by the door and climbed the stone stairs to the third floor, and there was Mayhew waiting in the hall, as if nothing were amiss with the world.

Bella and Clover were ahead, climbing the stairs, but they parted and let Aurora go through, and Clover was touched to see how Mayhew’s face changed and steadied when he saw his bride.

The justice of the peace, a hardy man who laughed at the thought of a little snow keeping him from his work, dispensed the marriage proper within three minutes; it was little more than a quick ‘Any reason they cannot be joined?’ and a stamp, and signatures.

Mama shed a crystal tear, but at Clover’s nudge and Aurora’s impatient glance, she caught it in a lace hanky and put it tidily away. Then the party trooped down two flights of stairs (the elevator, like the furnace, being out of commission due to the storm), cut cater-corner across the deserted, snow-blown street and up more stairs into the Palliser lobby.

Nobody waited there but one greatcoated major domo, and one stick-thin bellhop in a hat too large for him. Mayhew gave a great snort, shook snow off his coat and divested himself, then assisted the women to take off their wraps. The bellhop disappeared behind a mountain of steaming wool.

‘Well! On to the feast,’ Mayhew exclaimed, as if expecting trumpets to strike up.

Silence prevailed. Clover stole a look at Aurora: her face seemed frozen. They walked across the marble hall and up the marble stairs. At the door of the Maple Leaf Room they were met by a fatly smiling waiter and not another single soul.

Inside, a dozen tables stood spread with white cloths, and a head table heavy with flowers. No guests were waiting here, either.

Space had been left clear on the glossy parquet floor for dancing; four members of the Starland orchestra sat at the ready. The bandleader, Tony Carrera, lifted his baton and applied himself, and a ragged-up rendition of Mendelssohn split the peaceful air.

‘Mrs. Smarty gave a party,’ Mama said. ‘No one came.’

‘Then her brother gave another, just the same,’ said Bella.

Clover could not help laughing, then Bella and Mama joined in.

Aurora twiddled her ridiculous parasol and took Mayhew’s arm where he stood, stiff as a poker, by the door. ‘You know, Fitz,’ she said, ‘I don’t think I was ever at a handsomer wedding feast. I’ll tell you what we’ll do, we’ll have a good time.’

They were accustomed to making light of disaster. As chief attendant, Clover had two funny stories to tell about Aurora’s childhood; Bella rose next, to compliment Mr. Mayhew on his accomplishments, not least of which was the winning of her dear sister’s hand. Then they all did their best to drink a jeroboam of champagne. At least the waiters had turned up, and presumably, somewhere in the bowels of the hotel, the cooks.

Intermittent waiters served them turtle soup and roast capon with hot-house peas, a fine spring menu. Plates were set on all twelve tables, and carried away again untouched. Bella whispered to Clover that she was tempted to run down and eat a pea from each plate—such a scandalous waste!

A great cake was wheeled in on a trolley. Mayhew and Aurora stepped down to have their picture taken cutting it—and then Mayhew saw that the photographer had failed to appear. He turned to the cake, picked up the top layer and dashed it down to the floor. Icing roses slumped into the pale floor, petals smudged.

‘Take the thrice-damned thing away!’ he shouted, and the two waiters did so, as fast as their canter-wheeled trolley could go. Mayhew ran a few steps after it as if he would kick it, beside himself with rage.

Aurora stood still, keeping her peau de soie skirt out of the crumple of cake and cream. Clover held Bella’s hand tightly under the high table’s cloth.

Mama stood up (very nobly, Clover thought) and proposed, in a bravely raised voice, a toast. ‘To Fitz and Aurora,’ she cried. ‘The best of good fellows, as I know you’ll all agree, and the loveliest of girls. And so say all of us! Join me in three rousing cheers for the happy couple!’

No doubt when Mama had planned that phrasing, she had expected a genial, well-fed crowd of pressmen to shout Hurrah along with her. Clover was too frightened to speak, and Bella had bent her head in ferocious concentration so as not to giggle with nerves; Aurora and Mayhew could not very well cheer for themselves, and the four bandsmen, addressing their dinners, had forgotten to pay attention. So it was only Mama’s single nervous Hurrah! that rang through the ballroom, at least as far as it could reach. She said again, Hurrah! and, not being able to stop, Hurrah! and then sat and drank down her champagne punch—and then, without noticing it, Clover’s.