The Little Shadows

Condemned

Mayhew did not come home that night. Aurora found him at the Muse, Friday morning, standing in the rubble of the house. His perfect boots dusty, a tear in one sleeve. The city building inspector (who’d had many a lunch on Mayhew during the building process) had placarded the bevelled-glass front doors of the Muse with BUILDING CONDEMNED cards. From the front, the theatre looked unharmed, as if it might all have been a bad dream. Rounding the building, though, the sad truth became evident. There was a plain of devastation, an expanse of jumbled white and grey, with here and there the red velvet of a seat jutting through, caked with plaster grime. They won’t come in their best clothes if they think their skirts will be dirtied, Aurora remembered Mayhew telling the cleaning women, the first week the Muse was open.

She had never known that so much wire went into a building. Dangling ends and spikes stuck out everywhere. One of the balcony’s grand pillars remained standing—sheared off in a long diagonal, the plaster-of-Paris foliage still curling rambunctiously. Like the broken pillar she had cut her finger on, when Mayhew hurled their wedding cake to the floor. Perhaps Sybil, with her forebodings, would have seen this coming, if she’d been invited to the wedding.

Aurora picked her way across the expanse of wreckage. All the way there on the streetcar, she had rehearsed what not to say to Mayhew. The rain had subsided to dribs and drabs, but her boots would be quite ruined by the combination of plaster dust and jagged wood and tar-muck.

‘It’s been a great gig,’ he said, when she’d come close enough to hear.

The quiet interested her. After all the noise last night it seemed peaceful, even calm this morning.

‘Edmonton, of all cursed places, to take me down.’

She looked at him. The astrakhan collar of his overcoat, slung over his arm, was as plush as ever.

‘It’s just the house, you see,’ he said, gesturing right and left to where the newer additions were still standing—the stage looking naked, open to the elements. ‘Penstenny will be able to rebuild, if he chooses. He can turn the front piece into a decent office block. He won’t be ruined.’

She nodded. Workmen were moving here and there, one pushing a wheelbarrow piled high with detritus.

‘Came at the right time,’ Mayhew said. ‘I couldn’t have made payroll tomorrow … Might have had to fire the place anyhow.’

He offered her an arm, and she took it. They progressed together through the broken bits of wood, back to the street.

The Pierce-Arrow was parked in front, his monogrammed suitcases already strapped on the rumble seat. She had not noticed anything missing from the apartment, but hadn’t looked inside his closet. He must have been ready to do a bolt for some time.

‘I’d take you with me,’ he ventured.

Weak autumn sun made an effort to turn the puddles gold; the boardwalk glistened grey and black. ‘That’s kind of you, but no—there’s Mama, and the girls.’

He nodded. He opened the car door, and hesitated with one foot on the running board.

‘I love you,’ he said.

Because that was so absurd a thing to say, and so stupid, her resolution from the streetcar ride gave out. ‘Did you hurt that girl, the Irish girl?’ she asked him quickly, wanting desperately to know.

Mayhew stared down at her, at the bright cloud of hair, the young rise of bodice and neck and cheek. At her face, so well known to him now, and her self—impervious to his love, not part of him, not his in any sense.

‘No!’ he said. ‘How could you ask me such a thing?’

‘I was not certain,’ she said.

‘Have I hurt you so badly?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Only a little. I don’t care.’

From an inner pocket he pulled out a roll of money, pressing it into her glove. ‘Won’t last you long, but don’t give the vultures any of it,’ he said as he got into the car. ‘Promise me.’

Aurora laughed, unable to resist his cock-eyed gall. The car door slammed, and off Mayhew went, white wheels skimming over the golden pools of rain.

There went her livelihood. What a fix to be in.

She felt ridiculously happy.