The Little Shadows

ACT THREE





8.

Butterfly Girls




OCTOBER 1914–JANUARY 1915

The David, Camrose

The Lyric, Swift Current

The Pantages, Winnipeg

Never carry more baggage than absolutely necessary. Excess baggage rates are exorbitant on the majority of railroads since the 2 cent a mile passenger rate has gone into effect.

FREDERICK LADELLE, HOW TO ENTER VAUDEVILLE





They counted their money.

The roll Mayhew had given Aurora held fives and tens, adding up to a hundred. A month’s rent on both Arlington apartments, with a little over for food. A month’s grace, then.

With a sad feeling of virtue, Clover opened her letter-box and brought out seventy-eight dollars she had been hoarding for some eventuality (not so well-formed an idea as running away to find Victor). Bella was handed fifty in notes by Verrall, which he said was only fair, for many times when they had not bothered to settle up her contracted dollar-per-show. $228: once that would have seemed like riches.

Flora had been diligent in banking half the Belle Auroras’ hundred a week (down again from the original $150 once Mayhew had settled them into the apartment and was paying for so much). Although they’d not worked every week, and had incurred large expenses for costumes and fallals—exorbitant, for the butterfly wings—she was confident, or at least hopeful, that there was more than a thousand in the bank.

When she went up to the teller the horrible truth came out.

Mayhew had set up their banking, as the man necessarily in charge, and his rubber Muse cheques had been assigned forward to empty all his accounts, including the one he’d set up for the Belle Auroras. The ledger showed, in fact, a deficit of eighteen dollars.

Flora came home in palpitations, the loss of the money far worse than the rather exciting loss of the Muse, and lay on the sofa in Aurora’s suite at the Arlington, weeping in great sodden gulps, railing against Mayhew in an incoherent spate which even Aurora could not stem. She let Mama run on as she struggled to close the lid of Mayhew’s rolltop desk over the nest of unpaid bills that feathered there.

Next morning, when Aurora was finally allowed to make her way up to the untouched office floor at the Muse, she found a matching bill-pillow squashed into his desk drawer there. She looked at the mass of papers for six thudding heartbeats; then gently shut the drawer and left, without another glance at the ruin of the Muse.

As she rode the streetcar home it began to snow. She put one grey-gloved hand out the window and caught a constellation of snowflakes. The river down below was slow-churning ice cream.

That afternoon Aurora spoke to the manager of the Arlington, to give notice. He explained, kindly, that Mayhew had signed a year’s unbreakable, iron-clad lease. Aurora then explained, equally kindly, that Mayhew had absconded, and that Mr. Crumley could sue her vanished husband for the rent if he pleased, but might wish to consult a lawyer before making ugly threats to an abandoned woman. Abandoned was right, the manager said, and battle would have been joined, except that Aurora laughed.

‘Dear Mr. Crumley,’ Aurora said, giving him a bewilderingly happy smile. ‘My abandoned sisters and I will stay on in the third-floor apartment till the end of November, but I’ll be out of the top-floor suite by Monday—and the rent’s been paid, so just think! You could have it twice over, if you move fast. Such a desirable residence will be snatched up, even if you were to raise the rent.’

Before he left he had agreed to take much of the furniture off her hands, to rent the place as a fully furnished gentleman’s apartment.

Any proper woman would be shattered to lose her work and her husband in one go, she thought, watching Crumley’s satisfied rump rumbling away down the hall. But as she shut the door she was still fizzing gently, like very cold champagne, with the consciousness of life starting up again.


Baggage

So they were off, although they did not yet know where. They had nice new trunks now, three of them—purchased by Mayhew, in a fit of prosperity, with his own monogrammed suitcases. Mama, when she emerged from her sobs, said the trunks should be sold ‘along with everything else!’ but Bella refused to part with hers, which was sapphire blue leather and very beautiful.

‘No,’ Aurora agreed. ‘We have the props to look like headliners, and we must keep as much of our outfit as may be managed.’

Clover gave an internal sigh of relief because she loved hers too: mole brown, but with a pleated orange silk lining that pierced her heart with its beauty every time she opened it. And Aurora’s was a sight to behold, a silver-grey upright-opening dresser trunk with mother-of-pearl knobbed drawers, too lovely to be dispensed with—unless she might dislike to have anything that reminded her of Mayhew; but Clover had not noticed that she was sensitive that way.

‘Well, keep them, then,’ Mama said. ‘But when we are begging in the streets for a crust of bread I hope someone comes along who wants a trunk!’ She sank her aching head back into one weak hand, and put the other out for Bella to refill her teacup.

Aurora’s trunk stood open in one corner of the kitchen, acting as her wardrobe. In a fluttering of satin and silks she turned out her closet upstairs; Clover and Bella took the excess clothing to be sold—a long, weary tramp to the rag merchants, who paid far less than the girls had hoped. Then to the dairy and the butcher, paying off accounts. Bella was shocked that they were even bothering to pay what she saw as Mayhew’s bills, but Clover held that after all they’d eaten the eggs and sausages, and could not cheat the tradesmen.

They brought home half a dozen brown eggs and a fresh loaf, and were eating a poached egg supper when the doorbell rasped, six twists, followed by a light-rapping knock. Julius and Sybil blew into the hall, stamping snowy boots, and followed Clover along to the kitchen, Sybil exclaiming and Julius declaiming. They had seen the ruin of the Muse.

‘A Cataclysm,’ Julius declared, raising his voice over Sybil’s excited continuous yip-yapping of: ‘Who’d have thought? Who could have imagined?’

Mama had stayed collapsed in the armchair they’d dragged into the kitchen for her. Julius pressed her hand, begging her not to rise. Bella brought two more chairs from the parlour, Clover set to making more toast, and they had a cozy party in the little kitchen.

‘We saw it in the paper!’ Sybil pulled out a cutting: ‘The dull refulgence of the chandeliers, now lying smashed and buried in the rubble of the auditorium … So of course we rushed round to see, and there it is, displastered all to pieces.’

‘Don’t, don’t read it,’ Mama begged. ‘I will have another spasm.’

‘I took the liberty of bringing liquid refreshment,’ Julius said, with ponderous courtesy. ‘A bottle of sherry, now, brings comfort to the widow and the orphan alike.’

He pulled three bottles from his coat and set them in the middle of the table with a flourish. People like to be helpful in affliction, Clover thought—our kind of people do. All week small packages and bottles had been brought to their door, from the Novelli Brothers, from Teddy—also thrown out of work by the demise of the Muse, with reason to hate anyone associated with Mayhew. Even from Mr. Penstenny, for whom she felt terribly sorry.

‘Not that you are a widow, precisely, dear Aurora,’ Sybil said, receiving a teacup with a bob of thanks to Bella. ‘Although I did hear—but no—oh! Toast! How kind you are, dear Clover.’

‘And a free hand with the butter, a rare thing in a woman,’ Julius said. He pulled a chair up to the little table and Bella made room for his plate by moving the cocoa jug.

‘So what are you going to do?’ Sybil asked.

The three girls looked at her in some dismay, and Mama burst again into damp sobs.

‘Well, I’m sorry to bring it up, I’m sure,’ Sybil said.

‘No, no,’ Aurora said. ‘It must be—we do have to—What was it you heard, Sybil?’

Sybil covered her mouth with her small fat paws.

Clover said, ‘We do not know just yet what we will do, dear Sybil. But what did you hear?’

‘Oh!’ Sybil’s wide mouth came down into a small pursing whistle. But she had the eyes of all and her histrionic heart could not resist. ‘It is only gossip, and I did not like to say, but I understand that he already has a wife, married some years ago, in San Francisco.’

Aurora could not have been exactly surprised, but Clover felt a hideous downward bend within her chest.

It was Julius who protested. ‘Syb!’ he shouted. ‘No! Too much. There is not a man alive who does not have a wife down in San Francisco. I do myself! To suggest bigamy as the reason that the rascal has decamped—merely frivolous! He’s a crook, that’s all.’

He poured himself a glass of whiskey and knocked half of it back.

‘Besides, he’d be a fool,’ he added. ‘Greatest beauty in vaudeville, why would he desert la belle Aurore for a previous marital error? Excess baggage, my dear, excess baggage.’


A Gig from a Pool Hall

As they sat in limbo, it snowed and snowed and snowed.

Used to this, the city dug in under a goose-feather blanket. Enough to drive you mad, Bella thought, when you had no work and had to stare at snow the live-long day. The furnace clanked through the building, loud as the elevator; pipes hissed and spat, and Bella discovered that if you whirled the radiator tap unwarily, a powerful stream of water hissed out and soaked your dress and burned your hand.

She was so glad they were leaving this stupid town. She had had no answer to her letters to Nando, so perhaps the Ninepins had not got to Seattle yet; or perhaps Joe had been thrown out of another gig. Nando ought to have written.

Glaring out the window, she decided that the real trouble was they did not yet know enough people in vaudeville. The only other person they knew was Jimmy the Bat, and he was in Winnipeg at the Pantages—the theatre where C.P. Walker, who had liked Aurora so well at Mayhew’s last dinner party, was the boss. Bella stared into the bald white field towards the ice-bound river, thinking about Jimmy’s face as he had stood talking to Aurora in the hall of the Calgary theatre. Then she put on her coat and boots.

Going down the stairs she met East and Verrall coming up, shaking snow from their bowler hats, dank hair sticking up in spikes where they had dashed the snow away.

‘You need better hats than that for this horrid winter,’ she said, laughing at them.

‘We need to be elsewhere!’ East shouted, and she hushed him, looking back to see if the apartment door would fly open and one of her sisters burst out to stop her going anywhere.

East and Verrall had leaped straight over to the Pantages, missing only one night’s work after the flood—they were employable anywhere. East could wangle a gig from a pool hall if need be. A funeral hall. She ought to have asked his advice earlier.

‘Come along,’ she said to East and Verrall. ‘I’m going to send a cable, and you’d like a walk.’

‘We just had a walk,’ East protested, but Verrall patted his (entirely flat) stomach and said he could use the exercise. They went back out into the snow-silenced street.


Dreadful Frozen City

Aurora had moved a cot down to the third floor and shoved Bella and Clover’s bed right against the wall to make room. She could not share the Murphy bed with Mama, who was spending longer and longer hours in bed, in a state of sherry-induced stupefaction. Better to be back in the room with her sisters. Everything was tranquil now. And something would come up. If she held to that, she could manage.

But her bone-china composure broke one night. She woke from her first fitful sleep and lay in the little bed, choked by her nightgown, remembering Mayhew’s hand moving down her side from shoulder to arm, slipping over her flank and down her legs, the bulk of him always behind her. The thousand countless humiliations of lying with him and never being loved, or known, only being of use to him, all mocked and redoubled now by the hopeless absurdity of missing him.

She broke into painful tears, seeing with eye-pricking clarity that Mayhew was gone for good, was a rascal. Worse: that she had dragged her sisters and Mama into the muck and was wholly responsible for them being stranded in this dreadful frozen city, probably forever, until they were obliged to find work as domestics.

When Clover, waking, slid into the cot and put her arms around her, she whispered all of that, unable to find the breath to speak out loud.

‘No, no,’ Clover said, pulling her fingers gently through Aurora’s hair to comfort her. ‘We are all much better off, even stuck here penniless, than we were in Montana. We ought not to be moving southwards, we need to go East, to where things really matter in vaude. To Chicago, and New York. Come, let me braid your hair for you, and you will sleep better.’

Aurora clasped her sister’s narrow body close, remembering her wedding night, and how Clover had come to braid her hair. She was the best and kindest of all of them.


Painted Wings

The Belle Auroras had been headliners only by Mayhew’s favour. To begin afresh, it was necessary to realize where they stood in the natural order of vaudeville. Not openers, they were too good for that. But they were a quiet act, a simple one, and it seemed to Aurora that simplicity was their strength: charming songs, charmingly sung, no tricksy gimmicks. Their dancing was good, but not of stellar quality; they were nothing at all out of the ordinary as far as looks went.

As they were debating how to begin again, a letter arrived from Gentry. When Aurora found the envelope in the mail slot she knew his thick-stroked writing. Even as she opened it, she felt a warm glow of returning life. He had learned of their predicament from Julius, and while regretting that he had no money to send them, he had taken the liberty of enclosing a new song he’d laid hands on—perhaps they could make something of it?

… Ray Hubbell, an associate of mine in olden days, sent it to me for comment—no harm testing it out before Hubbell finds a show to slide it into. Jack Golden stole the poignant story of an abandoned Japanese maiden direct from Puccini: perhaps its delicate fragrance might make up for the slight tinge of irony in its similarity to your own story.

And if I may take a further liberty, may I remind you, my dear Aurora, that you did very well with the song Danny Boy. Sometimes it is the song that makes the singer.

Yours aff’ly,

et cetera,

GENTRY FOX, ESQ. (RETIRED)

The song-sheet had been folded into eighths to cram into the envelope. While Aurora scanned the letter, Bella opened the sheet music, and laughed as she read the title: ‘Poor Butterfly!’

She flapped the music like wings, tap-tapping the sheets against the vilely expensive silk butterfly wings, which had been delivered days before and lay furled against the parlour wall, hooked on the ceiling moulding. Stiff painted silk stretched over bent balsa-wood frames. Mama and Clover exclaimed in pleasure: Mama for joy at not having wasted such a great deal of money, and Clover because the wings themselves were so fragile and lovely, and ought to be used.

‘Perhaps we could make of it something that would please,’ Aurora said.

It was the first good thing in what seemed like a long while.

They cleared the floor and began to work (missing the expanse of the Muse’s rehearsal hall), testing out ideas that Mama called to them. Sashays, grands battements, arabesques, cramped into the parlour-space: none of it made the scalp tingle or the breath catch, as the good idea will.

The painted design delighted them when the wings were open. But the Poor Butterfly tune did not work for dancing unless the tempo was jinked up, which bent the song out of true. After a while, Aurora stopped them. ‘If we had a good dance with the wings—maybe Spring Song?—I could do Butterfly afterwards, almost as a playlet. With Bella’s Bumble Bee, we could do a whole insect number. A kimono would be quick to run up in art silk, and I’m sure Clover could paint it to match the wings.’

Bella was discontent. ‘But why do I still have to be a bee?’

‘Because,’ Clover told her, ‘you get the biggest laughs and the biggest hand of all.’

Clover and Aurora bent and fluttered and bowed, and Bella sang the tweedly Spring Song for all she was worth, but the thing lacked zing. The afternoon darkened into evening, and they still had nothing usable.

‘Wear less,’ Mama said. ‘That’s the ticket.’ She snatched off their practice skirts and wrapped a tea towel round Clover’s middle, leaving most of her legs revealed.

‘Mama!’ Bella said, but she was laughing—Clover’s legs were spindly and insect-like, quite sweet. Aurora stood in her stockings, considering.

‘Longer stockings will be needed,’ Mama said. ‘But it is all God’s creation, no earthly reason not to display such limbs, in the service of transformative dance. You will need more accentuation at the eyes.’ Then, overcome, she went to lie down on Bella and Clover’s bed.

Thoughtfully, Aurora pulled Bella’s skirt up, up—till most of her darling legs stood revealed. ‘I think she’s right,’ she said. ‘And Bella’s right too. Bella should be the other butterfly, and I’ll turn up alone with the song, afterwards. Ditch the bee, for now. But let’s think of other music for the dance—On Wings of Song might be much better.’

Bella clapped her hands. ‘Oh yes! Perfect, it is about sisters!’

The other two stared at her.

‘Their lovely sister-flowers—the lotus flowers await thee, their lovely sister-flower!’

Finally Aurora’s scalp sparkled, and they were off.


American Dollars

Four days later a telegram came, addressed to Bella. Clover answered the bell and gave the boy a nickel, and stood looking at the yellow envelope, thinking it must be from Nando. And an envelope in the mail slot too: from Victor. ‘Bella!’ she called, going down the dusky hall to the parlour, where Bella was curled in the armchair, discontentedly reading a three-day-old newspaper holding nothing but war news.

Aurora and Mama were playing Up-the-River on the Murphy bed. Bella had to edge around it to get to the yellow envelope, but she made good time and flicked it from Clover’s grasp, opened and read it in the blink of an eye—and threw her arms into the air in joy. The Journal went flying, aflutter, pages like grouse lifting. ‘Reprieved!’ she cried. ‘Look, look!’

Clover took the telegram and read it out to the others:

‘WALKER SAYS SPOT PANTAGES WINNIPEG JAN 1 BELL AURORS OPENERS SORRY J BATTLE.’

Aurora, sank to the bed, saying, ‘Openers again. But thank God!’ She began mumbling numbers: rent for December, food, train fare to Winnipeg.

Bella read the telegram again to Mama, who began to praise Jimmy Battle as the best boy in vaudeville, how she had known he would never let them down, unlike some, and how you could tell who was solid sterling worth, and so on.

There was an extra sheet in the envelope, Clover saw as she picked it up. ‘He wired cash as well,’ she said. ‘Forty-seven dollars. Not a round number—perhaps it is all he has.’

But still not enough for train fare for the four of them. Mama and Bella debated hammer-and-tongs who should be left behind to find her own way to Winnipeg, on foot if necessary.

While they were quarrelling, Clover opened her letter from Victor, and three American twenty-dollar bills fell out.


The Casting Couch Redux

East and Verrall heard the news and proposed that instead of stewing in their own juices, the girls come along with them for two jumps on their way to Regina, at small-time houses in Camrose and Swift Current.

‘You’d waste the rent-paid place for the rest of November, yes, but you’d be earning all the way, and refining your new number at the same time,’ Verrall said persuasively.

‘And here’s the bonus,’ East said, holding her other arm. ‘We thought we ought—’

‘Well, we thight we might,’ Verrall said.

‘We think we ink, we thought, ought we not?’ East joggled her arm. ‘Agree! Agree!’

‘To what?’ Aurora begged.

Verrall swatted East to make him stop. ‘Stan Bailey at the David Theatre in Camrose wants a melodrama more than life itself, he’s been shopping everywhere: and we’ve got one in our pocket!’

‘The Casting Couch? But we are missing Miss Heatherton for the mother, and—’

‘Your sainted mama! She would be magnificent in the role! I itch to see it!’

Aurora pushed East away and turned to Verrall. ‘You want to re-stage it?’

‘Indeed, and we’d work on Stan to engage you for Les Très as well as the melodrama, so it might mean double pay—although at a sadly, even pitifully, low rate …’

East chimed back in, mournful: ‘Worst pay in the West. He’s legendary.’

In a flurry of telegrams, Stan Bailey refused to pay full shot but agreed to mount The Casting Couch at $120 for a two-week stint in Camrose, a town southeast of Edmonton—at least in the direction of Winnipeg. Aurora would have taken less to get them to Winnipeg on time and be able to repay Jimmy Battle’s money. And Verrall thought he could also get them onto the bill at the Lyric, in Swift Current (farther south into Saskatchewan, still towards Winnipeg), where he had pull with the management.

For three days the girls rehearsed the melodrama and worked on the butterfly numbers, in a much better frame of mind and heart. The night before they left, Aurora counted the kitty beside Mama, listing additions and subtractions from the sale of their effects and the cash they’d shelled out for the new number: the purchase of sides for On Wings of Song, kimono silk, and new photographs.

After two counts, the tally came to $169, not including Jimmy Battle’s $47, which Aurora had sewn into the bottom pocket of her grouch-bag, hoping not to have to spend it. Four train fares to Camrose cost $40.

One last brangle erupted when Aurora decided she should sell her fur wrap before they left, thinking to get a better price for it in Edmonton than she might in a smaller place. But Mama, recovered from her earlier vapours, put her Louis-heeled foot down. ‘You must not sell your furs. Nothing succeeds like good clothes, and a fur carries unmistakable glamour.’

‘None of you have furs,’ Aurora said.

‘You give us all cachet, by wearing yours. It’s a great mistake, economy at the expense of the illusion of success.’

A dis-illusion, Aurora thought, but she did not say so, and she kept her furs.


Malingerer

On the way to the station Flora asked if they might stop to visit Sybil, laid up in the Alberta Hotel with bronchitis, lest it turn to pneumonia, to which she was prone. Verrall had told them that the Orpheum was famous for cold: ‘An ungodly icy stand, where the audience knows to keep their overcoats on. Comes up through the boards as you stand onstage, shivering through your number—good for castanet acts.’

Sybil’s button eyes shone out of the sheet Julius had wrapped her in, a dwindled mummy within a sarcophagus of flannel. Flora bent to kiss her hot cheek and asked whether they should perhaps crack the window—was she not sweltering in all that cloth?

‘Oh no! I like to be toasty warm, you know,’ Sybil said, coughing wretchedly with the effort of being vivacious. ‘A sip—?’

Flora held the water glass to her lips. Sybil drank, then lay back against her cushions with a fine show of exhausted bravery. ‘So you’re off—and who knows when we shall meet once more?’

From the doorway, where his bulk would not impede the visit, Julius gave a grunting laugh. ‘In three or four weeks’ time, you malingerer! We are engaged to Regina next, then to Winnipeg ourselves. I doubt these maids of mirth will have had their photographs handed back by then.’

‘It’s a sad thing to be going down in the world,’ Flora said. ‘Camrose, of all unheard-of places—then the Lyric in Swift Current. A large house, we hear, but still small-time.’

‘But Winnipeg,’ Sybil whispered, after another coughing fit. ‘Big-time! Very big!’

After a period of consultation and debate over which boarding houses to favour along the road, and which to avoid at all costs due to poor food or a history of bugs, it was time to go to the station, a block away. The girls bent to kiss her goodbye.

Sybil’s eyes were feverish and fearful. She doled out dire warnings, one apiece. ‘Dear Aurora! Destined for great things, my dear,’ she said, with some of her usual fervour. ‘Make sure you’re eating enough for, you can’t be too—And Clover, oh, there’s a lover in your name, isn’t there? You’ve a loving heart, that’s why, but you think you’ll be taken care of, and you end up taking care. Like me and poor old Jay.’ She coughed, waited for breath, coughed. ‘Baby Bella, last never least, the very best of all! What a merry dance you lead them! Such a tussle getting to the top, be extra careful of Mr. Pericles Pentangles, Alexander I don’t think, unless Alexander was Lothario.’

Flora pushed Sybil’s feet over and sat on the bed. ‘Don’t be pronouncing, Syb, you give the girls fits with your feyness,’ she said.

‘Oh, Flora, what yoicks we had!’ Sybil wiped away a sudden tear. ‘It’s you I always talk to in my head. Jay wouldn’t listen anyway! Nobody knows you like I do, nor me like you. Pretty thing I was in the olden days—never a candle to you for brains, but did we have larks!’

‘You are smart as a whip and always was,’ Flora said. ‘It’s you got Julius to where he is and kept him up to the mark—you’d have had a starring career of your own if you so chose.’

‘Never!’ Sybil was smiling, though, to think of it. The two women held hands for a little, and then Sybil said briskly, as if she’d got her health back all of a sudden, ‘Where’s that Jay? Jay! Come, escort the ladies to the station, they’ll be missing their train. It’s always nicer to go about with a man, I find.’

She blew them kisses with her fat little hands, each finger covered with spiked and sparkly rings. Tears welling out of her staring eyes, unregarded.


Snow on the Line

The train had a great pointed plow in front, a gleaming axe for snow. It seemed to Clover, settling into her seat, that they were a winter family—everything, good and bad, happened to them in snow: Papa dying—before that, Harry dying. Aurora’s wedding, Bella’s tangle with the Tussler. But also their first gig, and Gentry.

Clover leaned on the window, not sleepy. Victor’s letter, sent with the money, had said that he would try to come to Edmonton: If a way can be devised I will devise it. But now—well, they would meet in Winnipeg, perhaps, where he had two gigs in February. Unless he went to England to enlist.

Their predicament had knocked the war out of her thinking, but not out of Victor’s. There was a car of soldiers on this train, heading to some camp, not yet overseas. In uniform, though, very boisterous with each other, some already sprawled snoring across the seats. How would Victor the Eccentric fare with men like that? He would win them over, but perhaps not straightaway. Strange never to have seen him in any other circumstances but backstage in vaude. Or the night in the woods, at the roadhouse.

Emptying her mind of worry, she looked out at the winter landscape. Snow and sky in places indistinguishable because they were almost of one colour: the sky white-ash and the snow blue-ash. Monochrome, except that the blue-grey of the trees held inside it a suspicion of orangey life, ash over embers. A long, curling ostrich-plume of smoke trailed behind the train.

Three crows hopped from a snow-furred telegraph wire, knocking the snow free from the line and leaving a blank space—she now saw many such breaks in the wire-snow, where birds had been and gone like notes in music sitting on the staff.

Snow had drifted onto the tracks. The sun shone in a long low line; they would miss band call if the train was held up for long. Ahead, a small army of men in dark clothing, all wearing dark caps, shovelled and gestured while the engine steamed and stamped. The thick glass of the window did not let her hear their shouts. Their clothes were dotted with snow; more snow fell as they worked.


King of Whiskeys

Bella thought Camrose was no kind of a town. A little spot on the blank earth, two streets, dirt blown bare of snow. Still, a certain lightness of heart came with being nomads again, rather than stuffy apartment-dwelling citizens. Apartments were for the audience.

The David Theatre, at the top of the main business street, had a new coat of paint: green, gold and white, garishly delineating medallions of pressed tin that covered walls and ceiling. As they waited for Mr. Bailey to appear, Aurora said it was refreshing to see a theatre with its roof on tight. In this wintry snap the David was as cold as Sybil’s Orpheum, but that would remedy itself when warm bodies filled it to bursting, as East had assured Bella they would. In a moment, a short, carrot-headed man came up the auditorium aisle, eyeing them.

‘The Belle Auroras,’ Mama said, in her old grand manner. ‘Here for The Casting Couch.’ She held her hand out, as if she expected him to kiss it; he stared at her blankly. Clover touched Mama’s elbow to restrain her, and Mama shook her off, with some irritation.

‘Hello, Mr. Bailey!’ Aurora gave him an ordinary smile, to make up for Mama’s condescension. ‘Very sorry we’ve missed band call—the train was held up by snow. We are here to join Mr. East and Mr. Verrall in the melodrama. I promise you, we are ready.’

Understanding seeped gradually into Mr. Bailey’s stolid face. ‘Ho!’ he said. ‘Down in the dressing room. Ladies stage left,’ he added, pointing stage right, revealing himself not to be a true man of vaudeville yet; Bella felt pleasantly superior.

They went through a door into the bare brick-walled backstage—no wonder it was cold—and down the side stairs, Bella in a clattering rush, taking the luxury of being loud, since no one was working above.

The dressing room was empty, cramped, and hot: a Quebec stove in one corner churning out heat. The comforting sameness of lights and tables and small rooms to make ready in. Mama pulled a chair nearer the stove, sank into it, and shut her eyes.

‘Oh my dears, I can’t seem to get warm, since seeing Sybil shivering,’ she said.

While Aurora unpacked their makeup boxes, Clover ran up again with the purse, to see if the boy had brought their basket-trunk yet. The other baggage had been sent straight to Mrs. Ardmore’s boarding house, where East and Verrall were also putting up.

Bella called through the wall, ‘East! Verrall! Are you there?’ and received a muted shout in reply; she bustled out to ask when the run-through of the melodrama would be held.

In the men’s room East was lounging on the dressing table, flat on his back, cutting his fingernails with a jackknife. He looked up. ‘You’re here, are you? Thought you’d mosey along?’

‘The train was held up, snow—’

‘Oh, there’s always some excuse from women,’ East said. Unfairly, of course, but Bella did not need Verrall to scold East for it. She laughed and demanded to know why they were not going to do the golf sketch at the David.

‘Nobody golfs,’ Verrall said. ‘They don’t speak the language.’

Groaning, East rolled over and sat up. ‘Wouldn’t get a single laugh. Out, wenchling! I disrobe. And take that to your mama.’ His hand whipped out to toss a white paper bag of opera fudge. East always had something sweet about him, it was one way he acquired his lady friends. He did not usually waste it on them, though.

‘Sybil’s made her sad, the candy might cheer her up,’ he said, and Bella understood: he was sacrificing his bait for the good of the melodrama. Fair enough.


Her Beaux Yeux

Aurora inspected the dressing table, wiping it down so she could lay out, and polished the mirror. Reaching the edge of it she found a picture drawn in pencil on the wall: King of Whiskeys. She laughed, for the first time in a long while. So Jimmy had played here too. He had been so kind, campaigning for them, sending the money. Did it mean he was no longer associated with Eleanor Masefield? She had no one to ask, and had not liked to put such a bald question in her letter of thanks. She opened her dressing-box and took out the silver bracelet he had given her long ago.

The cast had rehearsed in Edmonton, but when the audition began that evening with the audience in place (breathing, sighing, emanating their anxiety for the innocent Miss Sylvia), Aurora found it different. Perhaps it was the deep golden warmth of the lit stage in darkness, or the costume slowing her movement. She had not worn the peau de soie for rehearsals—its heavy, luxurious skirt, trailing after her as she moved, gave greater gravity to the scene. She was brought to sudden attention by East’s line, which she had heard a thousand times:

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

That hissing whisper seemed to ring in her ears, hanging in the empty atmosphere above the stage. If Sybil’s information about the San Francisco wife was true, then the line was true—Mayhew had not married her. The world ran still and cold. She turned, and the turning seemed to take an age.

SYLVIA: What’s that you say, Mr. Malverley?

The audience tensed and gasped at her hauteur—

MALVERLEY: (hastily) I say I long for your sake to marry you! To smooth life’s path, to heal the wounds that fate has dealt you, and your sainted mother.

SYLVIA: Sir! You deal with me, here, not my mother. Let us leave her out of our—negotiations. I believe I will have a glass of wine, if you will join me?

—and they were hers from that moment, as she worked to bring about Malverley’s ruin. As she sang the aria for him and drew him in, as she doctored his wine, as the plot worked its tortuous and silly way, she felt herself unfreezing and coming to a fine and useful heat. Use this, she thought, use this.


The Only Possible

Verrall watched the nonsensical Casting Couch from the wings, enthralled. Half believing it. Having drugged the wine, Aurora bent to frisk old East—who was as ticklish as the devil and always had to bite his cheek not to giggle as he was searched. Right then, in that ludicrous moment of melodrama, Verrall realized that he must love Aurora. The only woman, ever, the only possible. He saw it very clearly.

Sad, he told himself, drawing a slow breath. An odd stick of a thing like himself, and too old, besides; and then there was East. You couldn’t abandon a fellow.

But Aurora, the lovely girl. Everything about her fine and sweet; the vile stinking Mayhew ought to be bullwhipped or worse. Look at her, suffering there—ah, but she had the letter and was reading it, released from bondage, on fire with relief and joy. He found himself overcome, and had to turn aside to blow his nose, quietly but thoroughly, before gathering Flora up to chase her on for her big scene.


Close-Packed Teeth

At the end of the first week at Mrs. Ardmore’s, Bella and Clover joined the boarders for midday Sunday dinner in the dining hall. Two long tables filled the room, with not enough leeway between for either set of chairs to be comfortable; patrons on the inside were prisoners till the end of the meal. Twenty boarders at a sit, Mrs. Ardmore boasted. Many of the boarders had returned from church; they all seemed to have been awake for hours, working up an appetite; the noise was terrific as Clover and Bella sidled through to less-desirable inner chairs. East and Verrall were already ensconced, East in a prime window corner, Verrall wedged beside him.

Aurora had turned over in the bed that morning, not feeling well, and begged to be allowed to sleep, a very rare thing with her. Mama was still dressing. Bella and Clover had waited, tiptoeing around the darkened room, till Clover signed that they ought to go down ahead.

Now Bella almost wished they had not. A fat man covered in bristles speared his food with his fork, all anyhow, and sawed at it with his knife held awkwardly. Bella looked away. It was snobbish, wanting to eat like civilized people. Mama had been diligent in correcting them, quoting Aunt Queen. Table manners were a social delineator. The woman across the table was picking at something caught in her tooth, which she examined and then ate. Bella resolved never to do that again, although her close-packed teeth were prone to catching celery strings and meat. Clover’s little pearls were spaced apart so she never had any trouble; Aurora’s teeth were perfect. Oh, it was hard to be the homely; the youngest ought always to be the prettiest. Gawky and too buxom—and spots on her skin, now. Although her blue boots were very nice, she herself was hideous and she knew it, and so did the others, however they might try to puff her up.

Food was handed down the table: massive bowls of mashed potatoes, cabbage salad with cooked dressing, a crock of beans, a platter of bumpy sausages. Food piling into all those mouths. Clover, a surgeon with her knife and fork, reminded Bella of Papa. All around them men and women sat, chewing with their mouths open, knocking ladles onto the floor and putting them straight back into dishes; but Clover polished her teaspoon on her napkin and ate blancmange, calmly accepting everyone—not superior either, just being herself. Bella made a second resolution: to overlook the faults of others.

Mama came late enough to table that she could not forge a way to the seat Bella had saved. Instead she perched on the piano stool at the head of the table, under Mrs. Ardmore’s elbow, flinching every time the landlady’s wooden spoon banged.

A clanging came from the front doorbell. Mrs. Ardmore shouted to the back regions, ‘Bridie! Come answer the door! Bridie!’ until a small girl in a gunny-sack apron scuttled out from the kitchen, and opened the door wide, so that a whirl of cold air and snow blew in.

With it blew a man in a flowing dark greatcoat. He came to the archway and peered round the crowded room, searching for someone, it seemed. He undid his muffler and lifted his hat, revealing the fluffy coxcomb of hair, the thin tender cheek and interested eye of Victor Saborsky, the Eccentric.

Clover stood straight up, and cried out, ‘Here I am!’

Victor laughed, and somehow made a straight path through the tables to catch her hands and then her shoulders, to pull her to him. They embraced in the centre of all those people, right out in public. Bella was a bit shocked. When Clover woke to where they were, she stepped back, or would have if there’d been room.

Mama gave a startling shriek and leaped up herself, wild-eyed in horror, hands clapped to her cheeks. Clover clasped Victor’s hand, saying, ‘Oh, no, Mama—it is quite all right—We—’

‘No, no, oh no—just, I have broken a tooth,’ Mama said. She burst into small childish sobs, and Bella went squirming through the crowd to help her.

The assembled boarders exclaimed, one or two of the rougher boys laughed, and Mrs. Ardmore banged her spoon on the table for order, bellowing that dinner service was over. ‘Supper to be had at six sharp, for those who behave like civilized gentlemen!’

Victor, whose own teeth were awful, slipped out during the commotion and came back within ten minutes, having searched out and arranged for a dentist to see Mama right away.

‘So kind,’ Mama said earnestly to Clover. ‘I see, now, what you love in him.’ But she continued to mourn all afternoon. Even as the dentist (with the very latest in nitrous oxide equipment for pain-free dental excavation) prepared to pull what remained of her tooth, she wept all the harder, until the nitrous took her.

When she first caught sight of herself in the mirror afterwards, though, Mama’s eyes were quite, quite dry. ‘There goes the last of my beauty,’ she said.

Bella and Clover clasped her hands. ‘You are always beautiful,’ Bella told her. ‘The most beautiful.’

‘We will have a replacement tooth made very soon,’ Aurora promised, but Bella saw how carefully she folded the flap down on the grouch-bag, lighter by another five dollars.


A Quiet Walk

Victor had been set on their trail by Julius, whom he had found performing alone at the Orpheum. ‘I am afraid for Sybil,’ Victor told Clover, and the whole company, settled that evening in Mrs. Ardmore’s tiny parlour for a hand or two of cards—East and Verrall having shelled out extra for the privilege of lounging there with guests on Sunday afternoons. ‘Julius scolds her for a lay-about, but she is not shamming, and he knows it—high fever, eyes distressed. She pants.’

Mama turned aside, shuffling the old playing cards over and over.

‘She seemed in a terrible state when we visited her,’ Clover said. ‘Julius had her tight-wrapped in flannel, but the hotel room was not warm enough.’

‘No, but it will be the Orpheum’s chill that kills her, you mark,’ East predicted.

At Mama’s face, Bella begged him to stop—and Verrall suddenly shouted, ‘Don’t be a bloody dolt, East!’

Everyone was silent.

Verrall shrugged and sank back to the piano bench, blushing a faint rose. ‘Sybil is—we are all used to arctic air. Takes an iron constitution to tour, and she’s been touring twenty years.’

They left the subject, no one wishing to think further on Sybil’s illness, since they had no remedy and could not even take over a bottle of spirits to lift hers.

The wind had dropped, and it was not so cold. Slipping outdoors once Mama became engrossed in Racing Demon, Clover and Victor walked deserted streets under the full moon, by the light of which he regaled her with tales of Galichen the guru, whose philosophy ascribed eerie importance to the moon, and the follies of his own mother, now a full-fledged disciple. ‘Working her way up through the ranks of acolytes as fast as her slim purse will take her,’ Victor said, but with tolerance.

Clover kept step with Victor’s beautiful flowing gait, and they soon passed out of the town along the empty road, which had blown clear of snow and was sheltered by drifted banks.

‘I respect her fervour. Since my father died she has had no outlet for her energies; no way now to return to Paris, with the war.’

That word hung in the frozen air like the moon, Clover thought. Distant, constant, overlooking, undeniable. Victor did not pause at it, but continued his account of Galichen selling a carpet to the widow whose son he had cured, by hypnosis, of a terrible opium addiction. ‘He is one of the great storytellers. That is half—three-quarters of his mystery. He travelled the east as we vaudevillians tour, performing, gathering tales, working with yogis. He swears there is no truth to the rumour that he was once a secret agent of the Russian Tsar—and the Scales are definitely not secret semaphore code.’

‘The scales?’

He stopped in his tracks and laughed. ‘Wait, I will show you. Sometimes his followers are not allowed to speak, but must communicate only by physical movements he has taught them—his sense of humour is so strange that I do not know what this means. It might be nonsensical gyration—or a powerful gathering and expending of energy. The movements, which he calls directions of intent, are arranged in scales, sequences as permutable as the layouts of Tarot cards.’ He took off his overcoat, threw it to a bank of snow, and struck a twisted attitude, staring and reaching backwards with his arm across his face. ‘The numbers go up on a notice board in the garden hall of the London house: Eleven to three!’ he cried, and drew his right arm from behind him as if it wanted to go through his body, then slipping it round and out in front, stretching heavenward and to the right. ‘Three to one, one to eight!’ The arm described a wide circle over his head, flung down and back, then reached out yearningly to the middle left as if begging a coin from a passing king. She had seen him doing movements like these before, alone on the empty stage after the band call. ‘All the community comes pouring out into the garden in the yellow-green light of spring to convey unearthly concepts. Is he at an upstairs window, laughing at his foolish followers? But the movements feel wonderful. Eight to four, four to twelve, twelve to seven!’ he continued, reaching to different points, like da Vinci’s drawing in her father’s book, a trebled man inside a globe.

‘But is it a code?’ Clover demanded. ‘What are you saying now?’

‘I am attracted to you, as to a vast electromagnet!’ Victor answered as he swept through the compass. ‘You are the light and warmth upon which life depends, the glow of the ray of creation—in the magnetic economy of the universe nothing is lost, ten to six, and the energy that entwines us, six to eleven, having finished its work on this plane, will go to another—and eleven to three!’

The scale complete, Victor pulled her down onto the overcoat which he had flung on the bank, sinking them into the drift as into a feather bed.

He pointed up. ‘Man cannot tear free from the moon, Galichen says. All our movements and actions are controlled by her. If one kills a man, the moon does it. If one sacrifices himself for others, the moon does that also. All evil deeds, all crimes, all heroic exploits, all the actions of an ordinary life, are due to the influence of the moon on our minds and hearts.’

She stared at the monstrous moon and then at Victor’s face.

He caught her eyes and stopped playing the lunatic. ‘So says Galichen, and I love him for his madness, but it is not true. You are the moon for me, Clover.’

They turned together in the warmth of his coat, as if true magnets were pulling them—no need to be apart. No outdated falseness, no propriety could keep them from each other. No buttons, no belts, no cold, no hollow, wall-eyed moon could slow their snowy marriage.


A Pair of Scissors

Across the fields, upstairs in Mrs. Ardmore’s boarding house, Aurora lay in a trapezoid of moonlight, half awake. Mama and Bella had stayed to play cards with East and the others, but she had found herself unaccountably sleepy, and had slipped away. She ached underneath, as if from riding, and she did not know why. She held herself cupped in her hand, unable not to, needing comfort or company, somehow, in this new loneliness.

Clover was out walking with Victor, in the snow, but that was all right. Although Aurora could not imagine loving the Eccentric herself, he and Clover were as well matched as fireplace dogs, or the two halves of a pair of scissors. Neither useful without the other, it seemed, now that they had found each other.

No need to weep, Aurora told herself. But she had time before the others came up to bed, so she did.


A Drop Too Much

A few days later, with East and Verrall but without Victor, they disembarked at the train station in Swift Current. A hilly place, pretty in the noonday sun. Motes of snow fell through still air. Clover was relieved to be out of the train and felt somehow freed by the height of the cloud-straddled blue sky, clouds like cotton batten pulled thin.

The Lyric had a woman in charge. Calm, barrel-bodied, Lyddie ran the place with an iron thumb strong upon the neck of all; she had even rented out the basement of the theatre for the drilling and training of soldiers, so there was a martial stir about the place. Lyddie slapped East’s shoulder and gave Verrall an arm, and put them all straight to work. Her stagehands were well trained, and everybody involved in The Casting Couch relaxed, knowing it would go well that night.

It was a good house, too, the people of Swift Current being starved for entertainment with only two theatres open. At the end of the play, when the cast stood together to bow, the audience looked to Clover, peeking from the wings, like people who have been to an unexpected feast. Pleased and full, grateful to the cooks. That is what we are, she thought.

But Mrs. O’Hara’s boarding house, booked on Julius’s recommendation, was appalling.

The woman herself was fully drunk. They had been late arriving, it was true, past ten-thirty, and nobody would blame a poor woman for taking a drop in the evening, but Mrs. O’Hara opened the door in her nightgown, pulling a dirty plaid shawl around her, far gone in drink, reeking of sweat and homebrew. Her burnt-red hair was slipping down at the back and sides. She bunched it up and solemnly, stupidly, fixed a pin in it again. After thus repairing her hair, Mrs. O’Hara pulled herself up the stairs ahead of Mama by hauling on the handrail. She threw open the door of a double room with pride, wincing at the slam as the door met the wall behind.

Mama put out an arm to stop the girls, bidding them stay in the hall, and moved into the room, a squalid chamber with bare dirty windows and a sagging bed, ill-covered by a torn quilt. She pointed, and twitched one end of the covering, to reveal the bed-legs standing in rusted tin cans. She sniffed for kerosene.

‘empty, but you know what they are there for,’ Mama said quietly.

The landlady leaned against the wall, seemingly dizzy. Mama went to the head of the bed and turned back the bedclothes—and something, many things, moved on the unsheeted mattress. Nothing matches the scuttle of a bug, Clover thought. Prickles moved up and down her arms.

‘Bedding?’ Mama asked, speaking sharply, to wake the woman from her stupor.

‘I’ll get sh-sheets,’ the woman said. She coughed phlegm into a filthy hankie. ‘Water jug, my son’s supposed—but—he’s away—’

‘It’s a wonder to me that you have not been closed down,’ Mama said.

The woman laughed, ‘Nobody minds my housekeeping when they’ve et my cooking! I’m the best cook in the province of Saskatchewan, and damn anyone who doubts it.’

‘Enough!’ Mama said, with a chilling absence of emotion. ‘Never receive a guest when drunk again. You’ve lost the custom of many more than us by this disgraceful room—we represent the vast part of your clientele, and you’ll find vaudevillians stick together.’

Pushing the girls before her, Mama marched down the stairs and out.

‘My son has gone for a soldier,’ Mrs. O’Hara said from the top of the stairs. ‘And if I’ve took a drop too much that’s the cause of it.’

Clover looked back up the flight to where the woman lolled against the banister rail.

‘I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier!’ Mrs. O’Hara fumbled with her shawl, heavy with the drink, almost fell and then stood upright again. ‘I’ll fight anyone who says I did!’

They went down the front steps and out into the street, a small phalanx with no bed for the night.

‘You can’t have your deposit back,’ Mrs. O’Hara shouted after them.

Since they had paid none, they were not worried about that.


Above the Lyric

Arriving so late, they perplexed the prim hotel clerk at the Alexandra, a block from the Lyric, who was reluctant to admit he had a room available and made all kinds of difficulties. Aurora was reminded strongly of Verrall in the hotel sketch—then realized with a laugh (as East and Verrall sauntered in the door from the beer parlour) that of course the performance must be based on this very man.

East and Verrall gave them bona fides, and winked and worried the clerk into finding them a room with two beds—on the shady side, so the morning would not strike too harshly in their eyes, as Verrall put it, with a flowery bow that clearly impressed the clerk. When Aurora explained that they had come away from Mrs. O’Hara’s, East shouted, ‘No, not there! What were you thinking?’

The desk clerk, succumbing to East’s personality, or to Verrall’s kindness, swivelled the register around to Mama, took a pen out of a glass of buckshot, dipped it in the inkwell and handed it to her.

Verrall took Aurora aside for a conference: he and East were not staying in the hotel, but were putting up in the small apartments above the Lyric—‘Shall I ask Lyddie to fit you in there too?’ Aurora snatched at this intervention. The next day, after a quick tour of the suite Lyddie had to let—four small rooms opening off each other, an ingenious arrangement whereby one large skylight served to light all the rooms—Aurora closed with the offer.


The Love Magician

East & Verrall had a new bit, twenty minutes all on love. Bella was featured in the middle sketch, but their act opened with East alone onstage, as a Love Magician in a vast flashy turban. He called out to the audience for a volunteer, in a ludicrous accent intended to portray the mysterious Hindu: ‘I must have a man with the physique of Hercules, the courage of Napoleon—above all, with what we might delicately call It.’

At that, Verrall slid out of his seat and came down the aisle, slumped into a scrawny slope.

‘Sir, did you not hear the particular criteria?’ East demanded, turban bobbing. ‘I am looking for someone with It.’

‘Oh!’ said Verrall. ‘I thought you said If.’

Backstage, Bella laughed at that every time, a corner of curtain-leg over her mouth to muffle it.

East read Verrall’s mind, retrieving from concealment in the turban a miner’s reflector and a magnifying glass, and peering in Verrall’s ear. ‘Ahhh! Down here … down this very dark tunnel, I begin to see …’

‘What, what?’ Verrall asked, agog.

‘No. I was wrong. Nothing there at all.’ He tapped with a small hammer on Verrall’s head. The orchestra timpanist made a lovely knock on the wooden block.

East promised to conjure up a wife for Verrall, but all his magic failed, as lovely visions (Bella, popping up from behind a screen in a succession of hats) appeared, took one look at Verrall, and vanished again in small puffs of smoke (which East continually begged the stagehand to make very small, since smoke-powder was expensive).

Finally the magician tore off his turban and stomped on it. ‘By jinks, I’ll have to marry you myself!’

After a musical interlude they were back, in their usual bowlers, criss-crossing the stage with their loping lallygagging stride—Verrall saying sadly, ‘If it weren’t for pickpockets, I’d have no love life at all.’

East suggested that Verrall send for a mail-order bride.

‘I tried that once,’ Verrall confessed. ‘Put an ad in the classifieds: Wife Wanted. Next day I had a hundred replies! Each one said, You can have mine.’

Pa-dum-cha! from the timpanist.

‘I’m a married man myself,’ East said, passing again. ‘People ask the secret of our long marriage, and it is simply this: we take time to go to a restaurant every week. A little candlelight dinner, soft music, dancing … Mmm.’ He stared dreamily into the middle distance.

‘And does it work, Mr. East?’

‘Works like a charm. She goes Thursdays, I go Fridays.’

Another cymbal.

Bella turned up in the second half of their act, in a very short skirt (now that they were wearing the brief butterfly skirts, nothing seemed too short, even to Mama) with a very large bow tying up her ruffly hair. She and East became instant pals, and he recruited her as a possible mate for his pal Verrall.

‘Not for me,’ he promised her. ‘No no no no. I’ve got a wife, who is worth her weight in gold.’

He took out a photo to show Bella, who exclaimed, ‘Oh my, I didn’t think there was that much money in the world!’ He nodded, proudly, then did a lovely double-take. Some nights he made it a triple-take—Verrall kept challenging him to try a quadruple.

Bella changed clothes almost without ceasing, but she enjoyed that, with always the laughable risk of going on in the wrong costume. Lucky the wings came first, she thought, and Clover now helped her to lay out her quick changes, since the night she’d missed one change and had been scolded by East and docked fifty cents of her pay—still one silver dollar per performance. They ought to address that ridiculous deal, Aurora had said, but it was only through East and Verrall that they’d got this gig at all.


Pie

In the street in front of the Lyric that evening, as they set off to the late-opening café for supper after the second show, a small crowd had gathered. The usual bold young men wanting to speak to East, shy ones sending furtive glances to the girls. A woman detached herself from the group and rushed forward to Aurora, who felt Clover move closer to protect her.

It was Mrs. O’Hara, from the filthy boarding house.

‘Oh miss,’ she cried, drunk again, but not as far gone as before. ‘I wanted to tell you how good you was. I’m ashamed of how you saw me the other night and I—you made me cry so, that song.’

Verrall, leaving East to the young men, tried to motion Mrs. O’Hara away. He waved to the seven-foot-tall policeman strolling the sidewalk across the street.

‘No, Mr. Verrall, it’s all right,’ Aurora said.

‘My own boy, gone to the war already,’ Mrs. O’Hara said. ‘Not old enough to let him go. I live in fear, miss, and I can’t bear, but needs must, you know, needs must, needs must, and there was no work here for him to—’ She cracked into ugly weeping.

‘You must be proud of your son for serving his King and country,’ Aurora suggested. Clover took Mrs. O’Hara’s arm and gave her a hanky.

The tall policeman had arrived; he bent to listen.

‘He was a gentle boy,’ Mrs. O’Hara said. ‘He could not smack a fly, you know.’

Bella patted her other arm. ‘Well, but he is going to defend poor little Belgium,’ Aurora said.

‘I’ve seen the last of him, I tell myself. I know it to be true. He always liked my pie.’

‘Yes,’ said Aurora. ‘You told us you were a good cook, I remember.’

‘So I am,’ the woman said, and she turned away, hiccuping, and reeled up the street into the darkness, unquestioned by the giant policeman, who crossed the street again slowly on long stilt legs.

‘You belong in vaudeville, you know,’ East called after him.

They turned away to the lit windows of the Modern Restaurant.

All the rest of their time at the Lyric, a pie arrived for Aurora every afternoon.


Dummy

Their next stop, Regina, was a wasteland of snow. The day they arrived a blizzard came in behind them, and no sooner had they established themselves in Mrs. Mead’s, the boarding house where East and Verrall always stayed, than the world went white.

When the storm finally let up they rushed to band call through fresh-sugared streets, in air so still and cold their nostrils froze together. Wish as Flora might to run, her legs would not obey. Bella’s gloveless fingers were beet-red with cold when they arrived, and Flora took her hands between her own to warm them—only just stopping herself from thrusting Bella’s hands into her bodice, as she used to do when the girls were very small.

The Regina bill was sharps and flats, East had said. The Belle Auroras were preceded by a terrible act, Scintillating Songsters: two small bald men with wheedling smiles, a bull-shaped woman swaying between them, in rousing roundelays of slightly-off songs like Mrs. Binns’s Twins in English accents. After them, it was a haul to retrieve whatever audience was already there. Stragglers, coming in as the girls began, were easier to catch.

East and Verrall were headlining at the Regina Theatre, but did not put on airs about it. They always behaved the same, whatever their position. The bill was filled out by a semi-amateur blackface troupe, Hubert’s Loop-de-Loop. Eight slender young men, who ought to have had better things to do than sing college songs with shoe polish on their faces, Flora said, aside, to East.

‘Once conscription starts up,’ East said, ‘they’ll be gone. Make the most of ’em, ladies.’

The Butterfly number went over big, with those long fluttering wings, which Bella and Clover made fan and flicker in the footlights. In the cold backstage Flora confided to Aurora her worry that the costumes might edge over the line into tawdry: ‘And the more high-toned an act, the better the pay, it has to be faced.’ The butterfly idea was pure art—but seeing Clover’s goose-pimpled arms and bluish bare legs, Flora imagined light-floating skirts (and perhaps pale green leather slippers?) when they finally reached Winnipeg and had some money to work with. The loss of that money in Mayhew’s bank had bruised her deep in her soul, leaving a dank sense of foreboding, and along with everything else it made her feel very low.

Dread burst into flower one morning shortly before Christmas, as she sat in the audience waiting for the girls at band call. Hearing some noise, she looked back to the lobby doors and saw Julius Foster Konigsburg roiling down the aisle, carrying a huge valise. Alone.

She stood up and went to meet him, her hands outstretched.

‘Sybil?’ she asked, and he stared, trying to bring her face into focus. Her hand went nervously to her mouth, to hide the gap in her teeth.

‘Flora Dora,’ he said, after a moment. ‘Yes, indeed, the Dame aux Fleurs.’ He was not reeling drunk, but studiously, concentratedly so.

She took his hands, which were pawing at his pockets as if in search of a bottle, and he stilled, and stood there for a moment unspeaking.

‘You’ve guessed it,’ he said then.

‘Oh, my dear,’ she said.

‘Two weeks gone.’ He counted. ‘Yes. Hah. Seems longer.’

Flora guided him into the seats, out of the way as the company moved up and down the aisle.

‘Quite quick, at the end,’ he said. ‘She asked for you, if that’s a comfort. Don’t see why it would be.’ His hand trembled on the velvet armrest. She did not quite dare to touch him.

‘I put pennies on her eyes,’ he said. ‘One is required to do so. But they fell off, and her eyes flew open, and for a moment I persuaded myself—’

Kneeling, she took his hand and kissed it, but he snatched it away and flicked the air. ‘Frees me up,’ he said. ‘I’ll travel now.’

Flora looked at him, the bulk of him wedged into the velvet seat. He had not shaved, but his shirt was clean and buttoned, a string tie pulled tight at the neck.

East and Verrall, coming down the aisle, saw them and approached. Behind Julius, East gestured, questioning, and Flora nodded. ‘Come on, then, old chum,’ Verrall said. He took one arm and East took the other, and they helped Julius to rise.

‘Foster & Foster, ventriloquy,’ he told them, as if they were the management. ‘I’ve bought a dummy. I’ll do Syb’s lines for her.’

‘Come on, you bunk in with us,’ East said. ‘We’ll take you back and set you up. Don’t dawdle, now, we’re going to be late.’

Flora sat back down and laid her head along the red velvet, and cried like a little girl.


Gone for a Soldier

Soon after Julius arrived, as if he had brought trouble with him, something went wrong with the furnace at the boarding house. Mrs. Mead’s husband ran up and down stairs with buckets and wrenches; workmen trooped through the house, to no avail. Cold pervaded everything. Tea steamed in the cups, the air was so frigid.

Clover listened as Mama complained, heavy-eyed and listless, that she could not keep warm. In some form of mourning for Sybil’s death, she took to her bed and stayed there for days, missing several shows. Julius reported for duty but maintained a rigid state of semi-drunkenness; the others tried to pull him into conversation or a hand of cards, but he would not be drawn.

Clover was silent too. A couple of days earlier she had found a letter from Victor waiting at the Regina Theatre. His mother had booked him passage on a ship to England, sailing in April from New York.

She is weak from the after-effects of rheumatic fever, and begs to see me before she passes beyond—Galichen assures me in a postscript that she is not in peril of death, but reminds me that I had sought some way over, and here two birds can be dispatched one-stone-wise. I will write again before I go. V

Reading it, she’d felt her heart crack inside her chest. He would die in battle, she knew it. That was what happened to the ones you loved. She’d seen the last of him. Unhurriedly, she had folded the letter and put it in the pocket of her skirt.

That night was a rough one. The invisible manager, Mr. Cartwright, whom they had never yet met, had put up a new order, in which Julius took second spot and the Belle Auroras closed the first half. A good promotion, but in his present state Julius was a tough act to follow, no one knowing on what line, or if, he would end his act. Mama had remained in bed, which complicated Aurora’s quick change after Poor Butterfly. They felt themselves on suffrage still with Mr. Cartwright, and were anxious for everything to go well. So anxious, in fact, that Aurora was sick twice in the fire bucket while Bella danced the Bumble Bee.

Aurora went on for Poor Butterfly, saying that she would be all right now. But during the bridge of the song, drifting from one painted cherry tree to another, Clover could see her breathing very carefully again. And then the second verse, ‘The moments pass into hours, The hours pass into years, And as she smiles through her tears, She murmurs low …’ she bent to murmur low to a bough of the cherry tree, the painted whorls of its brown cloth bark, and spat daintily into the palm of her hand. Her face was flake-white under the black wig, Clover saw, as she came off and held out her arms for help with the kimono.

Bella was there to do Aurora’s costume change; Clover grabbed her violin and flitted behind the backdrop. She strolled out onto the stage as the lights came up again, and began the intro to Danny Boy. At the assigned phrase she turned to watch Aurora enter, for they liked to nod to each other as they began.

But Aurora did not come.

Clover played the intro again, then—helpless, not skilled enough to improvise—carried on through the song. The only other piece she knew by heart was The Minstrel Boy. She played that.

As her eyes adjusted to the brightness of the lights in front she could see Aurora in the wings being wretchedly sick, shoulders heaving in silence, Bella attending to her. Bella cast a frightened glance back at the stage, but she was half-in, half-out of her Love Magician costume, and could hardly run on in that state.

The song was finishing. Although a serviceable violinist for accompaniment, Clover was not a strong enough musician to hold the crowd for long—and this was their first chance at closing the first half.

Three more phrases, two more, the final long pull on the last chord of The Minstrel Boy …

Clover laid her violin carefully on the small flower table, and without too much thought, stepped forward into the light where Aurora ought to be.

‘The Minstrel Boy to the war has gone,’ she said, not singing but letting the words ring. ‘In the ranks of death ye’ll find him.’

The crowd stilled. Nothing like a bit of death to stop the chatter, she thought, but she did not slow. ‘His father’s sword he hath girded on, and his wild harp slung behind him.’

She paused, unwound her tartan scarf from her shoulder, and lifted it into a shawl round her head. ‘My son has gone for a soldier,’ she called out, in the words of Mrs. O’Hara, the boarding-house landlady at the Lyric. ‘If I’ve took a drop too much that’s the cause of it.’

Nobody moved or spoke. The men at the back stood quiet.

‘I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier!’

She fumbled with her shawl, she tottered with the drink, she stood upright again.

‘And I’ll fight anyone who says I did!’

Not much thinking was going on in Clover’s usually thought-crowded head. Faced with the imminent death of the empty stage, she had slipped a cog and gone into a different way of being—just doing, rather than thinking. Since there was no sign of Aurora entering, and the audience seemed to be listening, she kept on going, still without any planning.

In Mrs. O’Hara’s hunched posture she bustled back, turned around twice, as if going up stairs, and flung open an imaginary door. ‘My best room, saved for you,’ she boasted to an imaginary prospective boarder, one without as much gumption as Mama. ‘Oh yes! I’ve had the windows painted shut a-purpose—that way there’s no nasty draft. No, no need to shift the bedclothes, sir! Perfectly clean in there—well, now look at that—’ (Seeing the bugs scuttling everywhere she twitched her dress away, stomping on one, then pretended not to have stomped, then casually brushed off the boot behind her skirts.) ‘Don’t that beat the Dutch? Mr. Ainsley in here last seemed such a cleanly gentleman!’

She bent to sweep the bugs off the imaginary bed, and the imaginary potential boarder pointed to the cans. ‘Why are the bed-legs in tin cans, you say? Oh, well, you know, precautionary—no, no, there’s no kerosene in there, but should we ever need it, well, you know, it’s a particulous convenimence to have the cans already there!’

The audience laughed. Bella would have laughed with them, but that was her way. Clover paid not the least attention, but kept on convincing the boarder that hers was the best house in town. She gathered herself to assert the strictness of her propriety, reciting a cascade of rules: ‘No eating, no cooking, no murder done, no smoking, no smoking hams, no playing cards, no playing piano, no playing of the piano accordion,’ and ending with, ‘Lights out at 3 a.m. and everybody goes back to their own room! Iron-clad, no deviagation from that one.’

Again the audience laughed, a good big rollicking laugh. But it was no good, the prospective boarder was leaving. She ran ahead of him to block the stairs, promising hot water, lowering the rent, begging him to stay. And when he would not, she burst into floods of noisy alcoholic tears, explaining and exclaiming that her son was gone to serve his King and country.

‘I live in fear, sir, but needs must, you know, needs must, needs must, and there was no work here for him to—He always liked my pie …’

The boarder seemed to relent. She took his money and watched him go upstairs to the room, then turned away, dancing a rackety little jig as she counted the money, and tucked it away in her bosom.

Still for a moment, she put both hands flat on her chest, and shut her eyes. She spoke quietly, drawing them in to hear her secret thought: ‘My gentle boy. I’ve seen the last of him, I tell myself. I know it to be true.’

Then she straightened her back and regained her ferocious air. ‘Supper at six sharp for those who are civilized behaviers,’ she shouted up the stairs to her new boarder.

Clover turned back to the audience, glanced around at the upturned faces watching her, took off her shawl and curtsied, a dainty girl again. The bandleader was on the ball; he struck up a bright recruiting march, and off she went in the noise of their applause.

‘What on earth possessed you?’ Bella asked, interestedly, when they were alone in the dressing room, Aurora asleep on the little sofa with a cold cloth over her eyes.

‘I had to do something,’ Clover said. ‘Nobody came on.’

‘I’d have run screaming, myself.’

‘Oh, you would not! You’d have done a nice dance and given them a song that you made up.’

‘Well, you did more than that, you did a whole monologue! You should write that down.’

Clover wished Bella would stop talking. The whole idea was too new, or too—holy. ‘I’ve heard enough of Julius’s,’ she said, pulling her dress over her head.

‘Yes, but not done by a woman—that was the best part of all. Although I did like your jig. You have spidery legs, but you are a beautiful dancer.’