The Little Shadows

Yellow Custard

We are proper tour poeple now, one week in each. Verrll says we weill get sixtie 60 weeks of worrrk. And there are 11 theatrees in Caliofrnia alone. So no holiday for mine.

Remember the Tuslers? The older brother is back on the circit, he’s a gag weihgt-lifter now. Dosnt say what happened to the other one.

That was all Bella could stand to write about him. The smell of cold crumbling earth in the root cellar tumbled in her mind with the hotel sheets and the violet aftershave on Mr. Pantages, and her own shabbiness of spirit. The Irish girl’s face outside in the snow, her dress so badly torn. Her blood-smudged thighs. It must have been the Tussler who hurt her. Now he was hurt and gone from vaude or maybe dead, his brother never said. Or else it was this older brother who’d done it, and then the wrong one got hurt. But the younger had hurt her, had hurt Bella herself.

One night as she was racing down the iron stairs for her turn, the older brother grabbed her arm and planted a sucking kiss on her neck. Not even enough time to hit him—her intro was starting! She yanked away and he let her go, laughing to see her stumble down to stage level. At the curtain’s edge she found herself doubled over, arms around her stomach, which was on fire. She tried to think about Nando instead—but thinking of him made her so angry and miserable her stomach got worse. Biting her arm hard enough that the teeth-marks stayed for days, she went on.

Verrall placed himself between her and the tough any time he could manage. And of course East knew. Bella told them that she meant to put him out of business, and after Verrall had gently shrieked, East suggested pulling the old pie gag on him: ‘No physical damage, but it does a fellow’s reputation a world of hurt, and gives some satisfaction to the pie-dealer.’

Bella thought there was quite a list, actually, of people to whom she’d like to deal a pie. But the Tussler would do to begin with.

When East brought up the subject of free dates, the Tussler rose like a fish to the fly. ‘I know a beautiful gal,’ said East. ‘Buxom! Lives with her father, but he’s a trainman, works nights. Bring her a custard pie and she is yours for the night.’

The Tussler was more than willing, and next day a custard pie sat waiting on his dressing table. After the second show, East led him down dark alleys and round a few corners, circling to give the others time to get in place; slavering for the girl as he was, the Tussler did not notice. East carried the custard pie, just being naturally helpful.

He stopped at a side door and up they went into a stairwell lit by small gas lights—dim, rather than dark. East handed off the custard pie to Bella, who stood hiding in the shadows by the door.

East and the Tussler climbed the narrow stairs, and as they neared the top East called out, ‘Annie, Annie! We’ve brought pie!’

At that cue Verrall, waiting up above in a riotous grey beard, leaned over the banister and shouted in a heavy Ukrainian accent, ‘Zo! You would ruin my Anna? I kill you!’

At that, Bella hurled an old mason jar at the brick wall beside the Tussler. Exploding violently, it echoed in the dark stairwell like a shotgun blast. The Tussler skedaddled down the stairs three at a time. East and Verrall reached the bottom just in time to see Bella, lurking at the door, sploosh that custard pie into the Tussler’s terrified mug.

East had twigged the cops to the gag, and they were posted at the corner in time to see the Tussler streak through the streets shouting for help, face yellow with custard, two eye-holes dragged through the mess with his thumbs. They said it was as good as a show.

Bella was so grateful to East for helping her to snapdragon the Tussler that she kissed him. He tightened his arm around her waist and with the other hand offered her a small white sack of sherbet candy.

She was everybody’s baby—but not the Tussler’s.


Gilt Wings

The ten days of Victor’s leave stretched very long, chiefly because he could not sleep in the bed Clover had so carefully prepared. He lay down gratefully on the laundered sheets after tea, burying his nose in the down pillow, and was unconscious within seconds. But every noise of the baby woke him; every time Clover moved to her, he started upright. He took to walking the streets at night, sleeping in fits and starts during the day. He said he needed to get back into good condition and the walking would do him good. But he was white and silent in the mornings, never seeming fully asleep or awake. London was dark all day long, it seemed, the atmosphere plagued by fog, or rain too listless to fall. Air, water, darkness—no distinction.

Clover was dancing again at the Vaudeville, in a middling revue. If only Victor could have seen her monologue act! But there was one lovely number, a flitting fairy dance to Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen, and she had gilt wings.

On his third night home Victor saw the show and came to the dressing room in a seething rage, declaring it beneath her and demanding that she quit. She guided him down to the stage door laughing, thinking he was playing. Out into the alley—it was only there under the lit sign that she saw he was serious. She laughed again, for how absurd it was.

‘It’s not the Palace,’ she said, ‘but it puts coal in the fireplace!’

He fired up, blazingly angry. ‘What am I to do about the coal? Should I desert?’

Now Clover was angry too. ‘How can you ask that? I said nothing to deserve it.’ That sounded like the quarrels of her parents’ marriage. A black pall smothered her own spirits.

They walked home in silence. Clover took Harriet from Madame and left Victor to sit by the fire with her—the fire itself now in some unwanted way a reproach to both of them.

He did come to her in bed. He was always silent there, now; Clover did not feel able, either, to speak the soft besotted things they had once said.

Before returning to the Front, Victor was summoned to an audience with Galichen; he and Clover presented themselves as required, Harriet at their feet in a basket. Gali pronounced himself satisfied with Clover on eugenic grounds, congratulated Victor on his devotion to the cause of freedom, and reminded him to make certain to do his scales every day. He presented Victor with a handwritten chart of strengths and weaknesses, not unlike a school report card, and kissed him gravely on both cheeks, much moved.

Outside Gali’s door they caught each other’s eye and choked with laughter, but kept that silent too. And then Victor was gone.


Breakdown

In mid-June the congregation thronged to Mrs. Gower’s garden for the Strawberry Festival: melting ice cream and strawberries. Aurora was observing a truce with Mrs. Gower, who had spoken very kindly to her and to Mama at the end of the Deanery working-bee; and since Bella’s latest cheque had paid for a new moon-green silk dress which was at least the match of any other lady’s there, Aurora prepared herself to enjoy the fete. She looked around (she could not help it) for Lewis Ridgeway, but did not find him. Perhaps he had end-of-term school work to do, or—well, it did not matter.

Avery was cranky and suffering from a surfeit of ice cream. Mabel took him into her arms, needing something to occupy herself. They’d learned that morning that an Indian Head boy had been killed in action: Frank Richmond, a schoolfriend of Aleck Graham’s. Dr. Graham had brought the news to church with him. The doctor and Mabel were carefully not talking together, as if conversation could only tend in one direction, and that a useless one.

The night before, Mabel had shown Aurora part of a letter that a friend of Aleck’s, John Levitt (wounded in action and invalided home) had brought from the Front. She’d handed the page over without a word, and retired to her room once it was back in her hand.

… give me the rifle fire all day, every day instead of one of those hellish coal-boxes packed with nails, screws, anything sharp—no wonder to see men go plumb loony, nutty—

You read of such cases in the papers, how men suffer from breakdown.

Don’t think they are nervous or weak or anything like that. Pity them rather—for the whine and sizzle of the shell in the air, and the awful suspense of waiting for the explosion to come is what does the trick. Enough of this—

Enough, yes. The sun was pale for May.

Aurora stood on Mrs. Gower’s graceful veranda, listening to Mama’s slight, sweet voice singing to Avery as Mabel held him, ‘Whispering Hope, oh how welcome thy voice, making my heart in its sorrow rejoice …’

Hearing an odd groan or gasp, Aurora stepped in through the French doors to see Mrs. Gower standing in the middle of her wood-panelled hall. Dr. Graham and Lewis and the Dean had come in through the front door together, looking grave or unhappy depending on their natures, and the Dean held a telegram.

Mrs. Gower’s mouth opened very sadly, as if she were going to speak, but she did not. One foot pawed at the first of the grand stairs, could not lift to it. Lewis went to help her. She shied away from him too, now saying, ‘No, no,’ in almost her ordinary voice, and tripped, falling heavily onto the stair.

Dr. Graham knelt beside her. Seeing that she had the help she needed, Lewis led Aurora back through the drawing room, out onto the veranda again. ‘Her son has been killed in Belgium,’ he said. But she had already known that.

Mama’s voice had dwindled to a whisper. Behind Avery’s drowsing golden head, Mabel’s eyes were like caves. Aurora took her hand.


Moon Flit

Victor’s leave only worried Clover more. She did not see how he could carry on in that state of distress, in the dreadful conditions which were becoming known. And now so weak in body. He had not talked about the trenches in daylight, only in the half-dream state at four a.m. But she had seen his feet, and the hideous bruises coursing down his back and flanks. Greyer than before, Madame crept through the house and spent more time on scales and meditation at Galichen’s atelier, seeking comfort. Clover wrote lightly to her sisters. To Aurora:

Galichen requires his followers to be tested for purity, purpose and spiritual fitness before they reproduce, so we jumped the gun. But Harriet is such a darling, not even he could carp. While I work she stays with Madame or with Heather Jakes in the atelier kitchen. Work has dried up, and these are my last few weeks for now. I would like to go with that American singer, Elsie Janis, to the Front—but Harriet makes that impossible. I am not complaining. Victor did not want to talk about the war at all when he was home.

That was all Clover could say about that. After Victor’s visit she found it harder to write to him, mired as he was in unimaginable terrors. He had talked of shelling that turned pretty woods into blank prairies, land scarred worse than the mine pit at Butte; he had said (this in fits and starts, in the dark, and she was not sure he was awake) that one night they had camped in a bad smell, and only when a poor boy went off his head, hacking at the ground, did they realize that they were lying on a mud stew of shallow-buried bodies.

She did not want to hurt him more. At last she managed a few sentences that were neither frozen nor frivolous: the first time she’d ever thought twice before speaking or writing to him. When she had addressed her letters, she wrapped Harriet up and took her along to the postbox. The walk along wide pavements soothed her spirit a little, and Harriet’s slight weight gave her ballast. The moon flitted between clouds. She tried not to think what its light shone on, over in France.


Shadow Buff

At Katepwa that second August the mornings were fresh and the weather very fine and hot. Towards evening thunderstorms swelled down the valley like a tide. In late August, when idleness began to pall, Mabel organized a games evening for all their acquaintances to join in: the Dean with his daughter Nell, Miss Frye and her great friend Miss North who was visiting in the area, even Mrs. Gower, Dr. Graham and Lewis Ridgeway.

Aurora went to settle Mama and Avery for the night. The thundery air had made both of them fractious and demanding, and Avery insisted Aurora hold him for a little while before he climbed into bed with his grandmother. Mama was trying to convey something in a cautious whisper. All that came out, though, was a thread of song: ‘… sweetheart’s the man in the moon …’ At last she gave up the attempt and opened the coverlet, singing instead, ‘Come out tonight, come out tonight’ to Avery, who joined in her lento, lullaby version of Buffalo Gals. Aurora kissed them and dimmed the lamp.

Outside the door she stopped to listen to the two reedy voices in the room behind. She checked her reflection in the hall mirror: pale green dress, cloud of hair pinned up, her little necklace of brilliants. Fine.

She was not the Belle Auroras any more. A mother, a dutiful daughter, a matron in comfortable circumstances—thanks to Chum’s kindness and to Bella’s money, which kept coming and coming in slightly alarming amounts. Missing Bella very much, Aurora went down to the party.

Across the wide arch between dining room and parlour a white sheet hung. The piano stool sat lonely in the middle of the carpet, the furniture moved back. Well behind the stool, the strongest lamp in the house shone—its mica shade tilted to throw a bright beam.

Mabel explained to the little company, ‘This is Shadow Buff. Someone must be It, and sit on the stool, staring at the screen. Then everyone else will parade behind, between It and the lamplight, so their shadows fall upon the screen like moving pictures—then It must guess whose each shadow is. You may disguise yourselves by changing your gait, rumpling your hair, or—look! Adding one of these ridiculous noses.’ She and Aurora had cut and glued paper noses all the afternoon, laughing at each other’s new profiles.

The Dean was unexpectedly good at the game. He identified more than half the strange shadow-creatures, saying it was due to long observation of his parishioners’ idiosyncracies. Mrs. Gower, drawn in to take a turn, sat on the stool, calling out names almost at random. She had shrunk since her son’s death. The opulent clothes hung on her frame; deep new lines fell from mouth to jowl. After five or six of the company had passed behind her she rose from the stool and retired, saying, ‘Well, I am no use at this game, I’ll give over to all of you.’

Miss Frye bounced up to take her place, pulling off the paper beak with which she had successfully duped the Dean, but did not manage to identify anyone but Miss North (whose bulk was undisguisable) and Nell Barr-Smith, a girl she had taught for six years. ‘It would have been surprising if I’d missed you, Nell,’ she cried, very jocular. ‘Stand up straight next time and I won’t know you!’

The darkened room, the parade of shambling creatures, had become nightmarish to Aurora. The thunderstorm was building, that must be it.

Lewis Ridgeway stood next and took the stool, and the line of disguisers moved behind him. He took the game oddly seriously, asking one or other to pass by again, or turn around. ‘Dean, you are betrayed by the pitch of your head,’ Lewis said. ‘Mabel, no one could miss the kindness in your profile, nose or not. Dr. Graham—but what is the matter with your back, sir? Heal thyself!’

Dr. Graham straightened, indignant at being caught, for no one else had known him.

‘And this—’ Lewis paused.

Aurora walked slowly, putting a hitch in her gait, like Mama since her stroke—or perhaps like Aunt Elsie, with one lame booted foot. She waited for Lewis to name her, but he remained silent as she took the last few steps across the sheet.

At the edge her shadow paused and turned to hook-nosed profile with a giddy flourish. Lewis turned his head quickly to see who it was, to a roar of ‘Cheat! Cheat!’ from the crowd. Accepting disgrace, he yielded the chair and found a nose of his own.

The heat grew in advance of the storm. When the sheet was pulled down from the arch to reveal a late supper, iced lemonade was the first aim of the revellers.

No rain this evening. A storm would help, Aurora thought. She slipped out to the long porch and walked along into the shadows at the far end, wishing she could go down to the lake and bathe without worrying her aunt, who believed that anyone with a toe in the water would naturally be electrified during a storm. Bella would bathe with her, if she was here. Aurora longed for the company of her sisters, for the long-ago time when they’d slid into the water together as children at Christopher Lake. She and Clover had held Bella’s hands the first time, but after that she was a little fish.

Bella would not come to Qu’Appelle, not while she was earning big money; she had not even come to visit when she’d played Regina last spring, had not let Aurora know until afterwards. She must be in trouble, but did not say what the matter was; her letters were short and funny and told you nothing. Clover’s were just as opaque: she was caught up with Victor. A sudden wave of longing hit Aurora, to be loved like Victor loved Clover, simply for herself, not for beauty or skill.

A long rumble of thunder curled at the edge of the valley and receded. Uncle Chum had put the music on, Aunt Elsie was urging the others to dance. Aurora thought she’d rather stay outside than go in and dance with Lewis in that cramped space.

She heard the French door click and Lewis came out at the other end of the porch. He stood looking down to the lake, perhaps not wanting to dance with her, either.

He had not seen her yet. Aurora studied him in the light that spilled from the house. Arrogant, she told herself. Severe, over-fastidious—yet she also knew him to be perceptive and thoughtful. She must have sighed a little; a tilt of his head betrayed that Lewis had sensed her there.

Even then it took him some time to turn. Spontaneity was not his way.

‘That dress is the colour of a luna moth,’ he said.

‘I know. I looked them up in the library.’

‘I did not know it was you,’ he said. ‘Your shadow.’

Aurora smiled in the darkness.

‘A remarkable example of pathetic fallacy,’ he said, as the thunder rumbled out again. ‘Of all this crowd, I thought it would be you I’d know.’

‘I have a spell to cloud men’s minds,’ she said. One of Madame Tatiana’s mysterioso lines. Lewis laughed then, at her accent and the mysterious swoop her shadow made.

‘Walk down to the shore with me,’ he said. ‘If you are not afraid of the storm. I think it is some way off yet.’

They met at the steps and he took her hand to help her down. When she tried to retrieve it his grip tightened. They walked that way, hidden by darkness, to the edge of the lake and out onto the pebbly sand. East of the thunderclouds a horned moon had risen over the hills, ready to sit on like the green prop moon.

In the warm air Lewis brought her hand to his mouth and kissed her palm, and kissed it again. His mouth was cool and smooth as lake water. She felt the snaking curl in her belly and chest, radiating everywhere, the inner appetite wanting, wanting. But remembering the luna moth, which has no mouth and cannot eat, she took her hand away.

‘What is to be done?’ he asked her, as he had in the woods last winter.

‘It is impossible, I know,’ she said, answering all the considerations he had not said: her vanished husband, her child, Lewis’s position.

Water lapped at the sand.

After a moment, she said, ‘I don’t know what you want.’

Lewis walked a little away along the edge of the lake. ‘I know I am clumsy,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. Perhaps his fiancé had told him so. ‘No, it is just difficult.’

‘I want to be honourable,’ he said. ‘To honour what is between us.’

He was looking at her in the darkness, at her silk dress, her silk hair, her costume wings: not seeing her, herself. Naming shadows and fancy moths, this pampered life—it was all false, Aurora thought.

Also false: herself and Lewis.

‘I want to be honest,’ she said. ‘I don’t care much about honour.’

She took off her shoes and stockings, and walked into the water, certain he would not follow. He did not.


Imaginary Ladies

In Portland, East and Verrall stayed in Mrs. Kay’s boarding hotel as they always had, Julius in the next room. Bella was at the Nortonia Hotel, but the delightful tea garden with its Japanese lanterns was closed for the winter. Mr. Pantages had gone south to see a very pretty quick-change artiste whose final change was Godiva. It was more peaceful without his attentions, but her contract was up in January. She continued to headline every bill—and had her picture on the cover of a song-sheet for You’d Be Surprised!—but could not help feeling unsettled.

She felt a fretful, pestering hunger for company, a loneliness as grey as the November evening. Restless and not at all tired, instead of turning in to the Nortonia, she walked down towards Mrs. Kay’s hoping to catch East still at cards in the parlour; it was only just past midnight. She did love East, and he liked her too, however brisk he might be.

Everyone knew Verrall loved Aurora, but maybe East could like her best—he liked so many girls, why not her most of all? She was no longer a child, after all. Perhaps he would come back to the Nortonia with her, just this once.

A fast clip down cold, echoey pavement warmed her. Through hedge-grown back streets she arrived at Mrs. Kay’s from the side and could see, across the grass, the lighted square of East’s and Verrall’s window—not asleep, then.

No, there was East in his shirt-sleeves moving about. Verrall stood behind him, brushing a coat with careful strokes. It was like the picture screen. Bella stood watching.

Taking off his shirt, his chest vulnerable and thin in the lamplight, East laughed at something Verrall had said. Just quietly, a joke between the two of them. Verrall wore a grin of calm pleasure, having pleased his friend. He came to the window—he would see her watching.

No, he turned back, hand on the curtain, to say something, and East came forward and laid his hand on Verrall’s neck. An easy gesture. But it came to Bella, watching them, that East was Verrall’s, and Verrall East’s.

That it had always been so, whatever nonsense East might spout about imaginary ladies, whatever bonbons he might dole out.

Verrall pulled the curtain across.

Bella turned and made her way back through empty streets to the hotel.


Suffit

Victor had been wounded at the Somme. In November the official letter came, before any word from Victor. Both Clover and Madame stood for a long while in the gloomy front hall, trying to read the telegram. Three heads close together in the hall mirror when Clover raised her eyes. Madame’s dark little head—how fond she had become of it—and Harriet’s, remarkably similar.

‘Wait,’ Clover said, and stepped across to push the brass light switch. Before she could return to the paper, Madame had read it and fainted flat on the worn carpet.

Clover read it for herself and then sat down beside Madame, back against the wall and legs out in front of her, still holding Harriet. It was a relief, in a way, that it said wounded in action. That it had come, the thing she knew would be coming.

Harriet climbed off her lap and patted Madame’s face, saying, ‘Dama! Dama!’

In January 1917, Victor was sent to a London hospital, his leg badly infected. The pins the field surgeons had inserted to hold his leg together were causing a great deal of pain; the swelling was terrible to see, and the scar livid. Clover went to Wandsworth Hospital every day, a complicated trip involving two changes on the underground and several buses. Two hours, to be allowed ten minutes with Victor—‘until his condition improves to my liking,’ the ward sister said.

He was not always himself. He did not want to speak, but might return the pressure of her hand. Sometimes there would be a delay, and Clover counted the seconds until the faint squeeze came. The ward was full of men in worse case, very few in better. It was not a peaceful place, but they kept up the cheer—Victor’s next-cot neighbour (who’d lost one leg at the thigh and one at the knee, but was game as a pebble) told her they had ‘a few infectious spirits who rouse all the others: a very gay ward here, very gay.’ She was grateful to him for trying to rouse her own spirits.

Once they left Harriet with Heather Jakes, so Madame could come. But the visit led to three days’ hysterical weeping from Madame, and was clearly painful for Victor as well; they did not repeat the experiment.

Slowly, in snatches, he began to talk. One day as Clover bent over to kiss his marble face he said, ‘I can’t—’ She stayed bent over his bed, close enough to hear. ‘Tell them—you’ll have to telegraph them. I can’t go back.’

‘All right,’ she said. As if it ever could be all right again.

For days he kept his eyes shut. The nurse, and later the doctor, assured Clover that there was nothing wrong with his eyes. So she thought perhaps he did not want to see her. She visited anyway. Weeks progressed; his leg went from one infection to another as they pondered taking it off, alternately threatening or promising to do so.

At home, Madame was frantic. She often woke Clover, and Harriet, screaming in the night; she denied having nightmares but called them visions. She had been ‘vouchsafed to know the possibilities’ and Victor was not, not, to return to the Front when his leg had been patched together. Walking the floor with Harriet (who cried constantly these days, a colicky stomach or teething or the accumulating strain of everyone around her), Clover tried to reassure Madame—but the only reassurance she had in her quiver was Victor’s leg, which seemed so bad to her that he would never walk on it again.

‘Suffit!’ Madame shrieked, finally. ‘I will speak to Gali.’


After the Ball

Lewis often drove out with Dr. Graham, who found distraction in puzzling out new ways to tempt Mama into using her reluctant right side. Lewis always brought something for Mabel, a new book of poems or a bottle of Pelikan ink, hard to obtain these days, for her letters; cigars for Chum; something sweet for Aunt Elsie; a toy for Avery.

‘Christmas every day,’ Aurora said, watching him hand out presents.

She wanted Lewis to come, she found his visits energizing; she wished he would never come again. Each time he reawakened in her some vague dream of a peaceful life, an honourable husband. She had even mooned over Lewis’s nice brick house—and that made her truly angry with herself—when Uncle Chum pointed it out one day in town.

In January, Lewis came for dinner and found Dr. Graham already in the parlour. Mama had Avery on display there, entertaining Uncle Chum and the doctor with his precocious tricks; she had been demonstrating Avery’s command of the naval jig. Hands on hips, Avery followed Mama’s beat, surprisingly controlled for a child not yet two. Mama motioned Aurora to dance with him and they did an exhibition waltz: step-two-three, twirl together, twirl apart, around the room as Mama sang, ‘After the ball is over, after the break of dawn …’

Mabel looked in from the kitchen, hair curled into tendrils by the heat of the stove. Aurora left off dancing and went to help her, but Mabel saw Lewis there and shooed Aurora back to the parlour.

Newly returned from a Christmas trip to Winnipeg, Lewis had brought a stack of sheet music for Aurora. He handed the pile to her with some diffidence, saying he’d asked for the newest songs in the shop. She was delighted with the gift, and looked through the sheets at once.

The third sheet down was You’d Be Surprised!—the cover a ravishing photo of Bella in a pink-sashed dress, powdering her nose with an arch sideways glance to the reader.

‘It is Bella!’ Aurora cried. ‘My sister!’

Lewis came to look more closely. ‘She doesn’t resemble you,’ he said—as if disputing that they could be sisters.

Looking up quickly, Aurora saw that he was disturbed. ‘Does the photograph offend you?’ she asked. It was a very demure dress, compared to most.

‘It is vulgar, that’s all,’ he said. ‘They have tinted the photograph with too vivid a colour. Nothing like you.’

Aurora laughed. ‘No, no, that’s Bella! She was probably brighter in real life.’

Mama came to see, and took the sheet. She seemed to be about to speak, then lifted the paper to touch Bella’s photograph to her cheek. Aurora put her arm around Mama and kissed her soft hair. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘She will come to see us soon. I’ll write again.’ She turned to take Mama up to their room.

Lewis was watching her, unsmiling.

At the stairs, seeing that Mama had the banister railing, Aurora looked back, her voice pitched to him alone, not even angry.

‘You would not be judging my sister, would you?’

Mama had stopped on the stairs; she kept her face resolutely turned away, but Aurora thought she was listening.

‘My father the schoolmaster had some difficulty with my mother’s life in vaudeville,’ Aurora said to Lewis. ‘I wouldn’t stomach that for an instant, in anyone I respected or whose respect I valued.’

For some while after that, Lewis did not visit.


Like the Rose

As Bella headed north on the long leg into Canada, Pantages headed to Seattle, to take his wife across-country, scouting for theatres to swallow up. He gave Bella a diamond brooch and signed her six-month contract as a solo artiste, till July 1917: a thousand a week for two comic numbers and one straight.

So she was rich. Surprising how flat she felt.

Then East & Verrall—disturbed by recent talk of the United States entering the war after all—announced they were stepping into an Australian tour that Julius and Sybil had had booked years ahead, but of course could not fulfill. Verrall felt they should not leave Julius behind; but East was heart-hardened.

‘We’ve carried him more than a year, to what avail? He doesn’t want to buck up, he wants to lie down in the road and die. Time to wash our hands and let him—he’s on Pan-time all the way to Edmonton till his contract runs out in May. And don’t think, Bella my girl, we’re leaving you in charge of him, because that is not the case.’

Well, they were. Somebody would have to look out for him. Julius was eating again, pretending to be on the mend, but offstage he was still alarmingly disconnected. And he’d never taken to her. Nobody loved her, in fact, but that did not matter.

Nothing mattered. People kept company with other people just because the thought occurred to them, and only innocents or bumpkins followed the old society laws or worried, as Mama always had, about their virtue. Nobody cared, in the vaude world, if a person was pure. Perhaps it was different in the old days. But thinking about some things Mama had let slip, she did not think so. Drinking was nothing—she had a very hard head and could drink all evening and never feel it. Or if she felt it a bit, it did not matter. Only her stomach troubled her, and sometimes she had to lie in a warm bath for an hour before she could make herself dress for the theatre. She was no fatter, and she still had her monthlies, but everything hurt down there.

Anyway, off they went.

From the hotel in Butte, Bella wrote to Aurora and to Clover, whose shades she seemed to see on every street corner; she lay in bed till noon most days, staring at nothing. Julius gave her some reason to get up—he had to be hustled into dressing and got down for late breakfast or he would not eat, and if he missed another show from ‘illness’ she thought he might get canned. Without East and Verrall, he’d switched to an older number, the Sad Philosophizer. He ran with it for the rest of their tour, a lamentation on life and death that Bella could hardly bear to watch. The bit ended with a song, Life’s a Funny Proposition After All, which was enough to send you searching for the razor blades.

‘With all we’ve thought and all we’re taught,

All we seem to know

Is we’re born, and live a while, and then we die.’

Spare me, she thought, the first time she watched. Julius pulled out all the stops: adding blue shadows to his own sunken eyes and cheeks, accenting his well-worn lines with carmine into a ghastly tragedy mask. But he was painfully funny, as the hobo preparing for bed in a fleabag hotel. His disrobing for bed was the peeling of his defences, the revealing of his starveling soul: horribly sad, and horribly entertaining. The melody unwound on drums and a squeezebox, as played by the monkey in the park. Julius prepared to lay him down to sleep as if for the last time, making the bed tenderly, praying, finally setting a bud vase with a gorgeous full-blown rose on the upturned night-soil bucket. He pulled the sheet down gently, like a shroud, then heeled back, his shock making clear that the bed was alive with bugs. He brushed them one way and the other, counted, gave up counting, shook hands with a few of them and asked permission to join their party, and gingerly climbed in.

‘We’re born to die, but don’t know why, or what it’s all about,

Young for a day, then old and gray;

Like the rose that buds and blooms … and fades and falls away,

Life’s a very funny proposition, anyway.’

Last of all, he pulled a concealed string, and the petals fell from the rose. And then the lights went out.

Though Bella resisted, and hated him for it, the number caught her every time. Why do we die? Papa; Harry, who had faded from her memory until he was just a flash of blue jacket running up the road; Sybil. She hated death and knew her own would come too soon. So did everyone’s. It gave her a deep trembling in her legs, wanting to see Aurora and Clover, Mama and Avery—and Clover’s Harriet—but she must keep working, to keep them all afloat. Maybe next summer, maybe when her Pantages contract ended in June.

Loneliness swamped her, in the darkness of the wings, but there was no one to joke or give her a candy or have a good time with. She waited for Julius to come offstage, and she said left ’em gasping in the aisles with that one, you killed, you’re a marvel—all the things he needed to have said, that Sybil had once said for him. Then she walked him up the stairs to his dressing table, and ran down again in time for her own number. It was all a very funny proposition, after all.


Bright Dark Red

Julius died in Edmonton.

Bella had got used to money. For their two weeks in April she’d booked a suite at the MacDonald, the limestone chateau on the bluff above the river where the Galician immigrants had lived like bears in their caves (it was of them that Bella always thought when Clover mentioned Galichen). Very handy for the Pantages. The suite was huge. Bella and Julius rattled in it like two dry beans in a can; the bathroom was a palace of marble.

Julius was not bad to travel with, aside from the massively disgusting nose-blowing in the morning as he dislodged the night’s accumulated phlegm; he made far less mess than she did herself, and as long as he had his medicinal dose of gin (increased by half again, even while she’d been his minder) he kept himself in order well enough.

One night she stayed out for an after-theatre dinner at the Shasta Grill—trying to enjoy the old glamour—and walked home through streets she and Clover had so often walked in those old days, with a dog-leg to the Arlington to wave at their old windows.

When she let herself into the suite she stumbled over Julius’s body, slumped like a suit of old clothes across the parquet floor of the vestibule. He was snoring painfully and she could not wake him. She rang the front desk for help and two liveried boys came up and carried him to his bed; after they’d left she discovered that Julius had soiled himself. There being nobody else to clean him, she did it herself, rolling him back and forth to undress him and wash his backside. The bedding would never recover.

When it was done she stood staring at him, pinned in the bed by a clean sheet from her own bed. He had shrunk. His still-massive head and wild grizzled hair made his diminishment less noticeable when he was awake, but the rest of him was just a bundle of kindling now. His hands lay flaccid on the sheets, long bones in gloves of skin. Julius had never had the time of day for her, really. It ought to be Clover looking after him, he’d like that better. They were the ones who’d been such friends. It ought to be Sybil.

It ought to be Papa she was helping, or horrible old Joe Dent.

Julius only made it to the theatre next day after she’d sent down for another bottle of gin. He was unsteady on his pins and his number did not make much sense, but the audience took it as a drunk act, and he got by. He could not eat the supper she brought to his dressing room. After a look at his grey face she did not press him. But he would not go to hospital, nor allow her to send for a doctor.

He opened a fresh bottle and took a tumblerful as if it were ghastly medicine, and the shaking that ran through his body lessened. At the end of the second show she bundled him into a cab and took him back to the hotel, where she propped him up in bed with water to hand, and of course the gin. She raced back to the Pantages and made her nine o’clock call by a whisker. In the glory of taking the chilly Edmonton audience by storm she was able to forget his cadaverous eyes, not beseeching her to stay but only staring at her face as if it were the last thing he would see.

Which it was, because when she got home that evening she found him in the elegant bathroom, blind drunk, clinging to the tub with clawed hands. His eyes almost sewn shut, so deep was his refusal to open them. ‘Cannot, no,’ he whispered, when she begged him to look at her. His belly was distended and stiff, and he quaked from time to time—she ran to the house-phone and asked the desk to send for a doctor or a nurse, and ran back to hold him till help came.

But Julius opened his mouth like a fountain’s mouth, and like a fountain, a waterfall of blood poured out. The violent noise of the blood slamming into the bathtub made Bella dizzy. Towels—she reached for a towel and shoved it into Julius’s mouth, but more blood came out, first leaking and soaking and then in a shuddering stream, and the bathtub was filling with it, and another towel, and another. She could not stop it. The blood was a terrible bright dark red.

No, no—the necessity of it remaining inside his body made her eyes swim and blacken, until she took hold of herself. She tried to speak to Julius, saying nothing useful, but just, ‘No, no, don’t, I will hold you—’ To which he made no answer, nor did his eyes ever open.

The doctor took Julius out of her arms and laid him flat on the blood-swimming tiles, and a sigh came out of Julius’s mouth but the doctor said that was just air, that he had already been dead for some time. Because the body cannot live without the blood that fills its caverns and tributaries.

A nurse helped Bella up from the floor and washed her hands and face till water took all that blood away and they put her in a different room, and that was the last of Julius.


Cartwheel

Clover reread Aurora’s letters as she had once read Victor’s. (She read Bella’s, too, but they were so few she had to hoard them, like Madame with her last box of French nougat.) She knew the cast of people in Qu’Appelle and read between the lines when necessary; she was dismayed both by Lewis Ridgeway’s entire absence from the letter, and the news of Aleck Graham.

Dr. Graham has received a telegram reporting his son Aleck ‘wounded, no particulars.’ Dear Mabel spent a day in her room, and another day sitting in the darkened church; then she wrote to Aleck (the first of no doubt a thousand cheerful letters) and went back to her ordinary work.

The Dean has an illuminated War Roll in St Peter’s. All the boys gone from Qu’Appelle and Ft Qu’Appelle and Indian Head. Many of them already dead. This is the news: lists, telegrams, pride in one son’s sacrifice.

Pride holds them up after their sons are gone, Clover thought. So we agree not to take that away. But pride was not helping Madame these days. She crept back and forth to the atelier like a mouse, shrinking within her draperies. Only calm, briefly, when feeding Harriet or playing at puppets with her.

The hospital discharged Victor in April, saying they’d done everything they could; the army invalided him out. His leg was useless; his vision and lungs were compromised from the chlorine attack in 1915, the army doctor told her.

‘He can walk, in a dot-and-carry way—and will regain some strength for walking, but he’ll always need the crutch. He won’t be fit for any regular kind of life,’ he said.

The doctor’s moustache was cut straight across, perhaps with a special set of moustache scissors, Clover thought—so she did not have to think about Victor’s leg, the suppurating sores, the mass on one side, the swelling that came and went, the constant tearing pain. Or about the impossible cartwheel into the sky that he had performed the first night she saw him, at the Hippodrome in Montana.

She brought him home in a hackney. The atelier acolytes came to visit, while Madame made potage. Victor lay in his old room, moving from bed to couch in a kind of stasis, not speaking unless driven to it. He could not bear Harriet to chatter, as she did now from morning to night; he had a very uncertain temper for the tuck of his sheets and the noise of the ticking clock two floors below.

One afternoon, after an unusually bad day, Clover knelt and begged him to tell her what he was thinking about that plagued him so badly.

‘It is nothing to do with you,’ Victor said.

He swung off the couch, grabbing his crutch, and manoeuvred himself downstairs and out the door. It was the first time he’d spoken to her in a week. Through the window, Clover watched him walking down the road. Nothing to do with her. She had never been accused of selfishness before.

They blundered on into spring. The difficulties of managing Victor and Harriet while finding, keeping and doing work piled up in Clover’s mind in a great mountain range; she longed for the prairies. Victor tried to help—but would peel until the potato was all peeled away, or prune till the branches were all hacked off the bush. He could not look her, or anyone, in the eye. He did not speak easily, but sometimes she heard him telling stories to Harriet in her cot.

When Galichen returned in late April from one of his mysterious absences, he came to see Victor and carried him away, literally in his arms, to the atelier for two days. Clover went over to find him, the first evening, and Heather Jakes told her not to fuss. ‘He’s giving him the business,’ Heather said. ‘You’ll be glad of it, when he’s through.’ Next morning Clover looked out and saw Victor in the next-door garden among the white-robed acolytes, doing scales. Gali had given him a knee-cup, a carved peg with a cushioned knee he could strap on to relieve the pressure on his shinbones. He looked absurd, a pirate strayed into a Greek chorus, but he was moving through the sequences and his eyes were open.

Forty-eight hours of penetrating attention from Galichen was enough to turn an invalid around, or knock one through death’s door. Victor came back with his crutch, but not hobbling so badly, and Heather Jakes brought poultices for her to use, on Gali’s orders, which seemed at least as effective as the carbolic and boracic acid the hospital had advised.

Clover talked to Madame, to Heather Jakes; then went next door, heart in her hands, and talked to Gali himself. At the end of the week she wrote to Aurora:

Victor does not sleep. He lies beside me staring into the darkness. He falls into a drowse—then the jerking begins, twitching in his legs and arms, as if when he loses consciousness his body begins to fight again or fight it off, whatever it is. The things that I can’t know about.

Gali has arranged passage on a merchant ship to which he has some connection. They say shipping will be cut off in the next little while, and I don’t dare wait—for his sake and for Harriet’s, and even mine. Please ask Uncle Chum if we can stay there, till we get on our feet. Victor cannot work, but truly, I’ll be able to get bookings. My monologues have done well here, even in the wartime theatre. They will get better, too. It’s not like the violin.

Trusting to Aurora, Uncle Chum, Gali’s string-pulling and her own instinct, she kissed Madame goodbye, and they boarded the ship.