The Little Shadows

A Broken Spell

They were allowed to find a seat at intermission, if they were out of makeup and costume. Bella was poring over the melodrama script she’d found tucked into the old velvet armchair in the dressing room. She and Clover leafed through it—lines underlined, cryptic notations—before returning to the first page:

IN AN ARTIST’S STUDIO

Scene: An artist’s studio in Bohemia, in the heart of New York City. A model’s throne, Stage Left, heavy draperies behind a chaise longue. A great easel dominates the room, on which stands a full-length portrait of a beautiful raven-haired woman, carrying lilies. The woman of the portrait is caught, as the curtain rises, in the act of securing a diaphanous robe around her waist—had the curtain risen an instant before, her nakedness would have been exposed.

Nakedness! But they had to stop reading, as the lights were lowered and the music began for the Knockabout Ninepins. The Ninepins were just as startling as their audition had been, the fury of Mr. Dent if anything more ferocious than before. Nando, hair standing out like Struwwelpeter’s, was a shock-headed boy-broom whisking around the stage upside down. Mama gave a shriek, with the audience—impossible to believe that he was not being hurt in the act, but after yesterday’s run he’d had no bruises, no scrapes. Bella winced, as he whirled up into the air at the end of that long broom, to see his hands tightening in what looked like terror. But the crowd adored it. They had merely clapped before; now they stamped their feet, and when the beautiful Mrs. Dent rose up unhurt as well, there were cries of relieved admiration from the people sitting nearby.

Soon after the melodrama began, Nando came crashing into the seat beside Bella and filled her and Clover in on the plot: ‘She’s a wealthy society queen—that’s her portrait. He wants her to pose in the altogether, but she won’t do it. A good thing too, though she does keep her figure pretty well hitched in.’

Bella thought Miss Masefield very beautiful. Massive eyes under arching, piteous brows, masses of dark hair heaped behind her head like a Gibson girl. Nando told them she was on loan from the legitimate theatre—like Ethel Barrymore, only older, or Sarah Bernhardt, only younger and not so famous. Another actress deigning to come around the vaudeville circuit with a play. The surprise for Bella and Clover was that the man in the play was Jimmy Battle. They’d thought him a singer, or a dancer, but here was where he had been hiding! He was lovely, Bella thought: wavy dark hair, dark eyes, and a look of sophisticated and desperate loneliness.

The first part was waffle about her broken heart and the young artist’s empty bohemian life—his need for a woman who could teach him to love again, purely. He begged her to cast aside the shackles of society, and yield to him her soul. The words were racy, like those lyrics that Aurora’d sung yesterday, pretending to be chaste in order to be fast.

‘Hey, they cut the bit about him wanting to paint her in a state of nature!’ Nando whispered. ‘But they kept the sheer curtains on her. Need to for the plot, you’ll see.’ Bella clamped her hand on his arm to make him hush. The woman was moving about the room in her trailing draperies, dark and passionate, practically writhing in the throes of some terrible dilemma. Finally she subsided onto a low couch, close to Jimmy.

MRS. FARQUHAR: I must be true or I am nothing, can’t you understand?

Her great eyes stared up at his slim figure, his hand resting negligently on the pillar. Bella wondered if he really did love her; he looked so hurt that she wouldn’t be his own. He was a good dancer, and he liked Aurora, so maybe he didn’t care about Mrs. Farquhar.

MRS. FARQUHAR: I married him—that is sacred.

AUBREY: I understand. You do not love me enough to brave the world’s disdain.

MRS. FARQUHAR: It is not disdain I shrink from, but I would not have you smirched.

AUBREY: Oh, you—darling!

Jimmy raised Eleanor Masefield up, and then drew her near. ‘They’ve cut the kiss,’ Nando said in Bella’s ear. ‘Couldn’t get it across Cleveland. The old girl was in a snit about that, said it’s played the toniest gigs from Boston to Topeka.’ But they nearly kissed, nearly. Jimmy the Bat’s long nose touched the actress’s long nose, and brushed along it until—she turned suddenly away. Her noble profile, the studied grace of her movements, made Bella’s stomach swoop. Eleanor Masefield walked away from Jimmy, holding out a white arm behind her, begging him to stop. She crumpled to her knees, then knelt, back straight, a white flame in a lonely chapel. How does she make herself look so holy all at once, Bella wondered—while busy believing it with all her heart.

MRS. FARQUHAR: I have a sacred duty to my husband, for he was the father of my little son—my son, passed on to heaven at three years old. That hallowed memory keeps me locked in my golden cage.

She smiled, a soft, sad smile, and lifted a serenely grieving face heavenward.

At that Bella’s fascination ended with a cool click in her mind. No. That is not how Mama looks when she talks about Harry.

Bella pulled her arm out of Nando’s and decided not to watch any more. But then there was a tramping sound, and Aubrey and Mrs. Farquhar turned as one towards the door in dramatic attitudes of apprehension and alarm which, now the spell was broken, struck Bella as funny. It was her husband! They sprang apart. He picked up his palette and she clutched her negligee around her once more, and shrank back onto the platform as if to hide behind it—but the artist was a smarty, and moving her arms into place as if she were a statue, he picked up the sheer drapery and flung it over Mrs. Farquhar.

The veil was barely in place when the husband came in. He was in a storm, thundering round the studio, looking for his wife in the corners and behind the dressing screen. He stopped, transfixed, in front of her beautiful portrait. Then his eye caught the veiled form, and he went to tear the veiling off, but Aubrey stopped him.

AUBREY: A statue, in its early stages. The clay cannot be exposed to air.

Oh, what a piffle! Bella did not expect the husband to be fooled by that—but he let his hand drop, and went back to staring at the portrait.

MR. FARQUHAR: I raised her from obscurity, a poor girl, daughter of a country schoolmaster—she knew nothing of the ways of high society. I schooled her. Now she leads the social world. Or has, till now …

The draped figure moved, one arm yearning towards her husband.

AUBREY: And you seek to upbraid her for her sins?

MR. FARQUHAR: To beg her forgiveness, before—I have failed her. The truth is, I am a failure. Cracked up, business in ruins. I came to say—farewell.

AUBREY: You take the coward’s way out, sir?

MR. FARQUHAR: If it is cowardly to rid the world of one without worth, yes.

Bella was back in the story now with the stumpy businessman, whose round stomach and twiddly moustache might have made him ridiculous, except that he was so downtrodden by bad luck. He grovelled onto the model platform and collapsed at the feet of his wife’s statue.

MR. FARQUHAR: She will be better without me. Free to love, again!

He was still. Aubrey looked up at the statue and held out his hand, beckoning to his love with the imperiousness of youth. But lo! A rustle of silks, the veil cast aside, and the goddess knelt to the crumpled creature at her feet and touched his bald pate. The husband gasped; his head lifted. (Like one of Juddy’s dogs sniffing a bone, Bella thought.)

MRS. FARQUHAR: I love you better in your failure than ever in success. Come to me, my dear.

She cradled his head upon her bosom. Aubrey looked at the pair with a sardonic air. Swept a bow, picked up his hat, and left the two alone, in an artist’s studio.

Watching Jimmy Battle come back for a curtain call and smile off into the wings (which she’d bet a nickel was where Aurora stood) Bella had a revelation. It came clear to her, about performing: there was the imaginary version, the vision of how the thing was going to be—how they would dance, how the people would be transported on wings of song. But then there was what really happened—how she almost came in a beat too soon and that threw them all off, then Aurora forgetting the words—which was the truth of it.

But not the whole truth of it, because they would be good, someday they would be. And it seemed to her that the part of herself that would be good was the same part that tripped and fell, that came in too soon, that held the notes too long. As the part of Aurora that was best was the part that nearly killed her every time she did anything less than perfect—her privacy, her unwillingness to fail. And Clover? Clover was a puzzle. She thought nothing of herself, but that was so pure! That self-ignoring made Clover nothing but music when she sang, made her self disappear and the notes come forward. Maybe that was her goodness? And Mama was good at the vision of how things could be, at continuing on, no matter what.


Where We Want to Be

Tea was served onstage during the break between shows, a nice surprise; the girls had thought they’d have to tramp back to the hotel or go without. A cup of stewed black tea and a biscuit one step up from hardtack, but they were not asked to contribute a penny each as Clover had feared they might be. Jimmy was there, and Clover nudged Bella to give him back his script and beg pardon for stealing it. He laughed and said he did not need it any longer, only kept it as a talisman. ‘I figure I can’t be fired if I’ve got my script in hand!’

Mama did not like that, she thought talk of trouble courted trouble. She knocked quickly on a wooden tabletop. ‘Oh, it’s all right,’ he said, seeing her do it. ‘I’m in pretty good with the management, at least until the wind changes.’

‘You poor boy, all alone in the world, and in such a perilous business as this!’

Jimmy smiled at her lovingly. (Easy to see how well he went over with the older ladies, Clover thought.) ‘Well, it is lonesome sometimes, but as for hating the work and wanting to give it up, no! Not as long as you can get booked and get a good salary, for there is no work in the world as nice and easy as this business when things are coming right.’

‘That’s exactly what I say to my girls. How long have you been with Miss Masefield?’

‘Just this year. I was with Pantages for three years, and before that on the western tour with the Barnabas company in East Lynne—abridged version, twenty minutes, start to tagline. Headlining smaller theatres on the Sullivan–Considine circuit. Three days then to get from Helena to Spokane—that’s halved now, only two changes, and a sleeper on one of the legs. But’—he lowered his voice—‘I’d certainly rather play out east, wouldn’t you?’

‘Keith’s family vaudeville is where we want to be,’ Mama confided.

‘As if that isn’t where everybody wants to be!’ Bella said. She went to talk to Nando, who was standing by the tea cart eating biscuits as if that were his vaudeville act: How many will one mouth hold?

Then tea service was over, since Mrs. Cleveland was waiting to wash the floor again, her grey hair pinned clumsily back and her hands dark red with soap-rash. Clover could not help thinking that she might be better to hire a floor-washing woman, to keep her own position a little more dignified, but perhaps the saving in money was too tempting.


Imaginary Monster

In the half-hour before the second show Bella slipped down the tunnel to the lobby and took a look from the audience side, to remind herself of the people sitting close-packed and hot, still bundled up after travelling through the cold maybe for miles and miles, waiting for the only wonderful thing they might see all year. It was so touching that they came, and she found that looking at the people made the audience less of an imaginary monster. The safety curtain shone like the aurora borealis, its white metallic surface covered with fancy-lettered ads from all the local businesses, a thousand messages obscured by rippling lights from buttons and mirrors and glass in the theatre—where was that light coming from? Then she saw: a banjo’s silver plate, flashing as the musician strummed, made the footlights dance on the pressed-tin ceiling, light sparks reflecting everywhere. What a pretty halo everything had!

Bella was as happy as she could ever remember, watching all this.

Time to go on: she nipped back through the tunnel and up to the stage, and saw that from behind the curtain Mama was motioning her to hurry. Like walking to the theatre that morning, everything in the act went faster because they knew what was coming, and how things would go. They stood in the wings waiting for their cue, they sang, and before they knew where they were, they were done.


Dilly-Dally

Aurora did not forget the words to Dilly-Dally, though she could feel Bella and Clover alert beside her, ready to chime in with them if needed. She sang Last Rose even better than before, her throat funnelling the song upwards and hanging up there at flown … with Mendel following perfectly. The audience was livelier, or perhaps better fed. The applause at the end of their turn was gratifying; they heard two separate whistles. Even Clover was pink with pleasure as they came off, and Mama was clapping for them backstage. She shepherded them down the stairs to change out of their flowered shirtwaists. They’d been onstage for all of fourteen minutes, but it seemed an hour.

Aurora hung back—she had spotted Jimmy the Bat watching from the darkness beyond the second leg. She dodged in there, just for an instant, and he said, ‘There! Told you so, you are a professional now.’

Aurora laughed and went to leave, but Jimmy caught her wrist and pulled her in close, one arm about her waist as if they were about to dance, and then kissed her.

Exactly what she wanted: the silkiness of his lips surprising and familiar, and the smell that hung about his mouth, fresh, a bit of cinnamon.

Aurora looked up into his dark eyes, one glance. She knew him.

‘We would dance well,’ she said. He would rather dance than act with Eleanor Masefield, she thought. She would rather that too.

Off she went. As the Wonder Dogs rose onto the stage like the tide, she turned back for a moment and saw a flash stage left that emanated from Mrs. C.’s searchlight eyes. She hoped Mrs. Cleveland had not seen that kiss; she would be a devil for anything of the kind. Jimmy was fording through the dogs, away from Mrs. Cleveland, who stared after him with blank, tight eyes and a mean mouth.


Not Allowed a Bath

The hotel room was warm from the Quebec stove bravely hissing. Mama sat sewing lace saved from her wedding peignoir to the collars of their ivory shirtwaists, and recalling her own mother, who’d had some success in the legitimate theatre, long before the current refinement of vaudeville. As she sewed, Mama retold stories of the pleasurable touring of her childhood, before her disapproving father snatched her up and left her with Aunt Queen and Uncle Elmore, the Plymouth Brethren and the dentistry. As she talked, her mouth filled and emptied of the pins necessary to keep the lace perfectly straight on the collars.

Almost dreaming already, Clover closed her eyes and listened to the rambling reminiscence. It was sad, that Mama could never forget a kindness or a slight or snub. She was as angry now over Aunt Queen not allowing her to have a bath in Madison before the dance concert as she must have been at that very moment—‘Can you feature it!’ she asked, as if she had not asked them all to feature it a thousand times. Clover sighed out and breathed in, and never minded Mama.

They would get better. It had not been a good show, except for the very last song, and a dull feeling accompanied that realization. But they’d practise tomorrow morning, and Clover felt the satisfying stability of being in a good company. Lying on her side in the quieting night, she could hear East and Verrall arguing along the hall in the hotel.

‘… your boot?’ That was Verrall.

Then East said more loudly, ‘Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!’

More murmuring as Verrall shushed him, then a bump.

East said, ‘Does it hurt?’ and Verrall answered sadly, ‘He wants to know if it hurts.’

They tramped on down the hall.


White Feathers

Bella woke slowly in pale morning light. A noise outside gradually turned into sense—shovels catching from time to time as men cleared the boardwalk. It must be late; there was sunlight on Aurora’s hair, straying on the pillow beside her. A thousand colours, not just one gold: white and silver and caramel and pale, hardly ripe apricots, gleaming in the sun, the prettiest thing in the world. Her own hair was taffy-brown, dull and ugly.

Clover brought her porridge in the little flower-bottom bowl. ‘We let you sleep, but come, eat. We’ll have to climb through drifts today.’

When they left the hotel the sun was hung with sun-dogs, huge blinding brackets in the sky. The wind had died and glittering motes of snow stood suspended in air. Every branch, every twig of every tree and bush was furred and blurred with white feathers.

Too soon, almost, they were at the Empress. The same bustle and darkness, but Nando was not at the door to welcome them. They stood in the lobby to let their eyes adjust to the twilight, and saw a notice posted on the door, NEW ORDER, listing the order of acts for the day’s shows.

‘Now, look! Perhaps Cleveland has seen the light and placed you later in the bill!’ Mama said with satisfaction. She peered at the list but could not make it out in the dimness. ‘Clover?’

Obedient, Clover bent to the list, and found herself in a strange pause, not feeling as if she could breathe or had breathed for some time. Opener, in one: Maximilian the Bird Magician, she read. She ran her eye up and down the list, again, again. How could she say it out loud? Aurora and Bella leaned in to see.

They were not on the list.

Aurora felt it in her hands and feet, the coldness of the blood drained away. Bella in her stomach, a great swoop—it was her fault, it must be. Clover’s breath would not come. Mama jerked her head and blinked, to insist her vision re-form: but still they were not on the list.

The list swam away from them through the darkness as Mendel opened the door to the theatre, a metal weight ready in his hand to prop it open for air.

‘What does this mean?’ Mama asked him, without histrionics.

‘Sorry,’ Mendel said, not even pretending not to know. ‘Cleveland decided to make a change. You could find him in his office, but he’ll only tell you that.’

The four of them, young and old, looked at Mendel, at his wise pitying face.

‘I’m sorry. You’ve been cancelled.’

Aurora felt her hands as juggernauts, the weight of them threatening to sink her down through the floor. It was her, forgetting the lyrics—she had jinxed them at that very moment.

Bella cried, ‘It’s all my fault!’ and Clover said, ‘It’s me, not you. It should have been the Belle–Aurora duo.’

Mendel looked over his shoulder quickly, and said, ‘I understand it may have been the Mrs. who decided. Sometimes she does take a sudden whim.’

Mama somehow drew up her chin, her proud carriage returning. Small rapid tears were coursing down her cheeks, but there was no muffle in her voice. ‘Girls, it’s just the way it sometimes goes. We move on to the next gig, that’s all.’ She put an arm round Clover and one round Bella, leaving Aurora the dignity of the eldest.

‘If—’ Mendel hesitated, still holding the heavy weight. ‘If it’s not beneath you, I do have a pal in Calgary, in the burlesque house there. I could put in a word—’

‘Thank you, but no, not at all,’ Mama said.

‘No,’ Aurora agreed.

Schedules of trains, wagon rates, hotels, cartage fees, the fifty cents gone on supper last night riffled through Aurora’s head like a magician’s deck of cards. They’d be broke in a week. In this snow it was unlikely they could get to Qu’Appelle so soon.

Mendel came out into the lobby, shut the door, and put the weight down. ‘I don’t know how you’re fixed, maybe you’re fine—but look—it’s nowhere near the money you’d get in burlesque, but I know Johnny Drawbank is hiring down in Helena, on the Ackerman circuit through Montana. I don’t mind tipping him onto you, you’re nice gals, a nice enough act, no reason you couldn’t shine down there. No guarantee, but I’d say it’s a good chance.’

Mama looked at him without gratitude. ‘I did the Death Trail, twenty years ago. I have seen the elephant down there, Mr. Mendel.’

He almost laughed. ‘It’s not so bad these days. No more storefronts. Theatres, every one a plush-seat house. They’re building brick, sprouting up all over. Keith’s is looking to purchase in Great Falls, that’s how far it’s come. You’d be with the same artistes for a couple of months, they tour together through there. Down into Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas, but not rough like it used to be. Half-pay weeks, I know—but it’d be good training and a good start.’

The girls had heard Mama’s account of the Death Trail, its privations and indignities. Mama had turned her face into Clover’s shoulder, pretending to comfort her, to try to regain composure.

Watching the brown swirl of her mother’s hair, trained into a respectable chignon, Aurora weighed the likelihood of Qu’Appelle, how it would be there when none of them knew Uncle Chum (and when Mama felt true hatred for Papa’s family, possibly with some cause). As far as Aurora could see at this point, the only alternative was to return to Calgary and try to get taken on as domestic servants. That might easily be a fate worse than the Death Trail, and anyway it would take too long. They’d be starving at a soup kitchen before then.

Now Aurora touched Mendel on his sleeve, and smiled into his melted-chocolate eyes, because he was kind, and because it would help that he liked her.

She said, ‘Yes, please, yes. If you could give us a note for Mr. Drawbank, that might ease our way.’