The Little Shadows

The Grand Scale

So Gentry put them through a test. He spent an hour teaching them a plain scale without accompaniment, which he called The Grand, and for another hour made them sing it alone and together, over and over, till each note rang to the back of the hall and resounded in their inner ears. He ignored their music and their songs; he tapped them on the stomach where he wanted them to breathe, which each sister separately found objectionable and which they whispered about together while he struggled up the raked aisle on his half-sized legs to the very back of the auditorium.

‘Do not push,’ he said—and although he was almost out the lobby door, they heard him perfectly. ‘Give me the first line of Early One Morning.’

They had not sung that for him—how could he know they knew it? He knew Mama. She turned on the piano bench and gave them an F and they sang, ‘Early one morning, just as the sun was rising …’

‘Do not push,’ he said again, his voice tender and young, coming from that wizened wizard’s face. ‘Just sing to me.’

‘I heard a maid singing in the va-alley below,’ they sang. The notes streamed out of their open mouths and through the empty twilit air and slipped into his ear, and he nodded (even at that distance they could see his head bob on his squat body) and said, ‘Enough, for this morning. Your photos have arrived and look very pretty in the lobby, I am relieved to say; you may perform tonight, and this rehearsal will preclude the requirement of a band call. Take them away and sponge them, Flora, and after today’s pictographs they may close with that song—and Buffalo Gals, with a bit of dancing. Not After the Ball, I beg you.’

‘We’ve no sides for Early One Morning,’ Flora said, hesitating to mention it.

‘Caspar will manage—won’t you?’ At the bandleader’s nod, Gentry waved them all away. ‘Now sponge!’

Sponging they knew; Mama always made them do it when they were hoarse or had a cold in the throat: she poured boiling hot water into a bowl, let a sponge suck it all up, and (with a towel to protect her hand) squeezed it firmly out again. Then they sang scales in half-voice, breathing through the sponge for ten minutes, so the hot steam would act upon the bronchial tubes and the mucous membranes. The sponge had to be squeezed quite dry or it would make you choke. Having only one sponge, they took turns; while one was wheezing and singing, the others teased and distracted her until Mama made them stop. She would not let them go out into the cold air after the sponging, so they spent an endless hour lying flat on their backs on the bed going over the Early One Morning lyrics—until it was time to spring up and dress quickly (in their white wool challis, because the theatre was so cold that Gentry had forbidden them to wear the flowered waists) and trot cross-lots to the theatre.


Miss Belle-A-Clovers

No need to be on time for the opener since they were the closer, but they heard the tail end as they slid quietly in the stage door. Clover caught her breath, already winded from racing to the theatre, when she heard Julius Foster Konigsburg’s rolling voice.

She dodged up to the wings and, craning around the last curtain-leg, saw his massive silhouette against the footlights, one arm flung dramatically out as he intoned, ‘Do you love me so much you would die for me? Ahhh—but remember! Mine is an undying love.’

Clover hid her mouth in her sleeve, so as not to make noise. She loved that bit. Julius was well in flight and the audience was laughing—how glad Clover was that he and Sybil had landed here where they were! And now they were balanced again, since the Belle Auroras had been cancelled too. He would be able to like them again. She kept her sleeve wrapped around her neck, hugging herself to get warm in this cold coffin of a place.

‘The soubrette has a lantern jaw and so has to sing light music, tra-la-la-la,’ Julius sang, mangling a bit of operetta with the most ridiculous exaggerated face, chin dropping to his middle waistcoat button, eyes rolling back in his head. ‘She sings with impressive strength, strangling up to that last petrified high-C. Rising to the last screech of her upper register, her mouth looks like one long red Tunnel to Perdition.’

Couldn’t have said perdition at the Empress, Clover thought.

‘A flat flounder of a running mate with straggling pink moustachios accompanies this heavyweight Harpy in her flight …’

An in-drawn gasp beside her made Clover jump, and she saw that two people in costume had come to stand in the wings. They must be the next turn. One was a towering prow of a woman in a tight sateen gown, the other a fish-mouthed young man in ill-fitting tails, with a reddish moustache—the longest and limpest she had ever seen.

On the stage Julius continued: ‘Her fervour is enough to shake the rafters—the poor young limpet thanks his stars it’s not the ballet, so he doesn’t have to hoist his Inamorata to the heavens, which would mean serious damage to his Inner Works and probably a perpetual Truss.’

The woman gasped again and grabbed at the stage manager—who Clover now saw was Johnny Drawbank, dressed for the work in a grey collarless shirt and no hat.

‘Stop him!’ the woman demanded.

Drawbank goggled, and the tenor goggled too. They were twin frogs and Clover had to clap her arm over her mouth again. This must be how Bella feels all the time, she thought, this crazy laugh wanting to come out. On the stage Julius had worked himself up into a frenzy, shielding his eyes as from a burning glare: ‘But soft! What light is this from yonder balcony? It is a vast explosion—an explosion of song!’

‘Stop him,’ the woman hissed, and Clover saw the uniformed boy ready with the signboard:

AN EXCURSION OF SONG

SUNDERLAND & PETTIBONE

‘Please, Miss Sunderland—’ Johnny Drawbank began, but at her glare, his drooping eyes blinked and he bent to whisper through the speaking tube to the orchestra pit. ‘Change music! Change!’ and then as the piano cut in, covering Julius, Johnny murmured to the lights, ‘Follow down, and let him off, and …’

Clover watched Julius draw out the applause and bow and bow, acknowledging quite imaginary bravos and kissing his hand to the non-existent balcony. He raised himself to his great height and strode off into the wings, where the tenor and the woman waited.

‘I think that went rather well, would you not say so, dear Drawbank?’ he inquired pleasantly.

The boy had run on to change the placards and a sudden wave of laughter broke, as the audience read the new one. The opera dame empurpled, and seemed to double in size. Clover wondered if she would burst. ‘I will not go on. After such an insult? How dare you fit me into your paltry act,’ she demanded of Julius.

‘Happy accident, ma’am, I’m forced to say—you fitted hand-in-glove-like into a patter I had long been in habit of using. But I can see, looking at the dangling whiskers of your little friend here, how you might forgivably have wondered if I was referencing your Execution of Song—forgive me, Excrement of—but no. In-credible. No one who’d heard you sing, madam, could possibly believe that my poor comedy could in any way hope to approach its sheer horror—’

The soprano reached out one big paw and slapped Julius Foster Konigsburg’s face. The sound must certainly have carried into the audience, but the music started up, operatic, and the lights rose again. Miss Sunderland sailed onstage, her arms held out to receive the slavish clapping of Pettibone the tenor. Her long green sateen train swam behind her like the tail of a giant fish. A scattering of applause from the audience, and quite a lot of laughter.

‘My dear young miss—it is the middle Miss Belle-A-Clovers, is it not?’ said Julius, in great good humour. He took her hand to draw her arm through his, and walked her towards the dressing-room stairs. ‘Delighted to see you gracing this hectic Hebron of theatrical delights, however it comes about. My comrade-in-arms will be in alt, to find your Floral Mater restored to her.’

Clover matched her stride to his, not feeling the faintest desire to stay and hear An Excursion of Song.


A Really Well-trained Rat

They had a dressing room of their own. Or, if not quite all their own, they were only sharing it with one other number, the strawberry-haired woman from Swain’s Rats & Cats. The cats, and most fortunately the rats, were housed with her husband in another dressing room, and the woman assured Mama that never, not once, had a rat been known to escape.

‘These that we have in our act are not your run-of-the-mill rats,’ she explained kindly. Her name was Letty Swain. Her nose and teeth were pointed and her chin slightly lacking, which made it easy to remember which act she was. As she talked she burnished small leather harnesses with mink oil, one after another, laying each one neatly down and picking up the next with small leather fingers. ‘Ours are highly educated rats on whom no expense has been spared. The cats alone are worth in their tens of thousands, but the rats, well! There’s no placing a value on a really well-trained rat.’

Bella agreed, the skin shivering up and down her arms at the very thought of one rat, let alone a plurality of them, but promised herself she would watch their turn if she could creep away. Tiny swords lay waiting to be polished, and a pumpkin, which had been hollowed out and made into a pretty travelling coach, and she longed to see these things in action. Let alone the rats.

‘It’s the cats who are the trouble,’ Letty said. ‘Always sickening for something, and my Greymalkin has a tumultuous growth behind her ear needs draining from week to week, but they’re a lot less bother than a fistful of daughters would be, and if I feel like an evening out, all I’ve to do is fill the water bowls and lock the door behind me.’

(And hope that the cats don’t eat the rats, Bella supposed.)

‘Hubert can feed them, if I tell him every nig-nag detail, and he keeps the rats in order during the act, but it’s I who doctors them and sits up with them nights when they are ailing.’

The boy stuck his head in the door. In this on-the-cheap establishment it was Mattie, the uniformed placard boy, who did the calls, too. ‘On in ten,’ he told Letty.

‘Have you knocked on Room 3 yet?’

‘Course.’

‘Any answer?’

‘He banged on the table and cursed.’

Letty jumped up and grabbed the tiny harnesses. ‘Oh Lord, he’s late,’ she cried. ‘Hopeless, hopeless!’

She ran out, and Mattie laughed and followed to see the fun. Smothered shrieks wound back along the hall as she harried the poor man, never mind the rats and cats, into harness.


Interested Red Eyes

Impatient with the long wait, Aurora went up and stood in the wings to watch Maurice Kavanagh, Irish Elocutionist. She’d caught a glimpse of him earlier, striding into his dressing room, and wanted to see if he was as striking as his photographs.

Oh, he was. His voice was like port wine, she thought. Dressed in a dark velveteen jacket, a luxurious darkness, mauve velvet tie graceful at his throat; long hair flung wildly back over a broad, speaking brow. In the pool of light his feet were planted in a romantic stance, one leg thrust forward, as if the emotion of the moment had nigh unbalanced him. His arm rose as he declaimed:

‘The star of the unconquered will,

He rises in my breast,

Serene, and resolute, and still,

And calm, and self-possessed.’

Aurora found her hands clasped at her collar, and dropped them. The velvet curtain-leg was close by her; as Kavanagh turned onstage she slipped quickly behind it to hide. To be caught watching!

He took a drink from the glass on the table—a tinted glass, which most likely meant the liquid was not water—and set it down, his face downcast and hidden. He came to stillness, to a profound thoughtfulness that was shared by the audience, judging from the silence, then filled his vast barrel of a chest and cried, in a sharp shout of loathing, ‘Rats!’

Aurora’s skirts jumped into her hands, and she scanned the boards beneath her feet, frozen in terror—But he went on,

‘They fought the dogs and killed the cats,

And bit the babies in the cradles …’

She had to lean on the rope-bed, weak with relief. It was only Browning, in fifty different sharps and flats. Kavanagh did the wild beginning of Pied Piper in a galloping, ranting screech that made her laugh as the audience did, then broke off and moved into My Last Duchess, changing himself in an instant into the cold, ferocious grandee with his gift of a nine hundred years old name, hating his young wife:

‘… Just this

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,

Or there exceed the mark.’

And then he had her killed, as easy as that: ‘I gave commands, then all smiles stopped together.’ It was so cruel! As if Browning himself recited, Aurora thought.

Kavanagh moved stage left, cajoling the audience. ‘Longfellow speaks to the inmost heart of us, in accents gentle enough to praise the hidden flowers of womanhood …’

‘Standing, with reluctant feet,

Where the brook and river meet …’

It was such a man’s piece of poesy to leave her meek, bewildered and damp. But Kavanagh was beautiful to look at, and besides his skill, the strength of his build pleased her very much.

Into the wings came a rather portly man, panting, carrying two cages with difficulty because a third perched between them. A score of interested red eyes peered out between the bars. Aurora yelped and dodged around the curtain before she could help herself, her skirt’s tail whisking into view for an instant, and then out again. In the wings again she looked back and found Mr. Kavanagh staring offstage at her, an arrested look on his broad countenance.

She fled.


An Ocean of Joy

Mama and Sybil sat side by side in the dressing room, hemming the girls’ ivory wool skirts to a sprightly six inches off the floor, and having a very satisfactory sentimental reunion, as touching as their last only three days ago.

Clover found it strange to see Mama so at ease with another woman, telling stories and laughing. In Paddockwood Mama had not had any friends. When out in company, uneasy with farm people and anxious to raise Papa’s stature in the community, she had overplayed the gracious lady; at home, she was almost embarrassingly vulgar, an easy fountain of stories and songs, spending whole days in her wrapper. Clover watched her now with Sybil, giving back joke for joke, exchanging opinions about the success or failings of people they’d known, and thought that it was odd, how someone as inward and melancholy as Papa could have loved a person so transparently light. Light-hearted, light-minded. Or perhaps it was not odd at all.

She resolved not to think any more about Papa. She wetted the mascara brush and did her lashes again. She thought of them too often. After Papa the memory of Harry always came tagging along: sadder but cleaner, at least less complicated, the poor lamb. Clover was tired. We are far away, she thought, from what we’ve known. This small room, this momentary warmth and crowding, is what we have now instead of our old life. The table under her elbows was pitted and scarred, more than a school desk even, and the wooden plank walls between and above the mirrors were dotted with signatures and notes from artistes who had travelled through. She leaned on the heels of her hands and stared at Eulélé Josephine, 1911, the accents cut sharply into the wood, and tried not to think at all for a moment.

Sybil’s catalogue of vaudeville stitched gently on, her tinny voice sharp and helpful as any needle. ‘Julian Eltinge, he’s from out here, you know. Years ago, when things were wilder, he made his living as a lap-girl in a box-house out in Butte—a very respectable girl, I’m sure—they were short on females in the area, so they’d dress a boy or two,’ Sybil added quickly, with an eye towards the girls. ‘His father found out and beat the tar out of him, so he went east—the suavest thing in shoes, a lovely dancer. This was in Boston, after you’d left us, Flora. Before he struck it big as a female impersonator, he was with Cadet Theatricals, but then E.E. Rice saw him, and he was made. In ’03 he was already getting a thousand a week with Keith’s, so he told me, and much more now, I’m sure. We did the galop, a private party at the Lyceum there in Cincinnati—I’d show you but there’s not enough room to swing a cat, let alone a rat!’ Sybil took a turn around the ballroom in her chair, little feet peeping out from her pink petticoat and fluttery hands dancing in the air. She sang, ‘Waltz me around again, Willie, around, around, around—’ and ended in a skirt-gathering kick.

Clover could see what a hit she would have been as Miss Saucy Saunders, when broke and nothing for it but burlesque. ‘I feel like a ship on an ocean of joy …’

For herself, Clover thought she would rather do anything—go to Normal School to teach, be a telephone operator—than take that road, burlesque or box-house. They would just have to make some money. Mama was right. A thousand a week ought to do it.


A Dreadful Jig

The Old Soldiers sawed away at tunes left over from the Civil War. Several were blind or maimed, their faces old and blank. One fiddler sat playing with a bow strapped to his foot, having lost his arm. Another, blind, danced a dreadful jig as he played, thin legs darting lightly ahead and behind, and while he jigged he made his mouth into a grin that had no meaning. Bella said she could not bear to watch, and left Mattie to finish his apple alone; but it seemed to Clover, standing unnoticed in the wings, that the audience did not mind at all. They could not know how terrible it would be to have a skill, to lose it, then turn freak to get a portion of it back. Or was it still the same—did one still lose one’s misery in the music? Clover curtsied as the soldiers filed past when their turn was over, silent in the backstage gloom.

Cornelius the Bubble Juggler was nothing but that, a stooped man with an outsize bubble-pipe and a carefully guarded Proprietary Mixture for making bubbles, which he patted up into the air from a silk cushion like a large glove on his hand. It was tedious, and he insisted on counting each pat, starting over when the bubble burst, as it always did. His was the first act Clover had seen that left her feeling flat and critical, and she did not like the feeling. Especially when they had to go on themselves in so little time.

But the pictures came between Cornelius and their turn. Clover ran down to help Aurora cope with Bella. She was only thirteen, even though they had to say she was sixteen. She’d been the baby for a long time—until she was eight, when Harry had come along, Clover and Aurora had called her Baby.

In the dressing room Clover found Aurora panting and sighing, standing against the wall. Clover panted too, filling out her narrow chest gorgeously as if she were Miss Sunderland, whisking an imaginary green-satin train from side to side and trilling to make her sisters laugh. She finished Bella’s makeup and re-did her own frog-pond eyes, taking a pin to separate her own and Bella’s thick-blacked eyelashes.

The challis shirtwaists had been fresh-pressed with sizing, skirt hems ironed to a knife-edge; the dressing room smelled deliciously of laundry. Mama had rigged an improvised board from their placard, two coffee cans and a towel.

‘Ge-ge-ge-ge-geh,’ Aurora sang. ‘Ke-ke-ke-ke-keh.’

‘If you need an encore …’

But Clover said, ‘We won’t, Mama, we’re just the closer. They’ll be wanting to go home as much as we want to send them.’ Which was true, of course.

The boy knocked at the door, and they were up and out in a flurry of skirts and boots, a herd of young horses rising suddenly from a field.


The Life

Gentry was not backstage, but the girls knew he must be watching. Clover breathed in through the bottom of her boots, as Gentry had said to do, determined not to look so serious.

Mattie held his hand out for their placard. Oh, the placard! The ironing board!

Bella raced down on galumphing feet, grabbed it, nearly throwing the rats’ tack into a tangle, and jumped back upstairs three at a time, to the music already beginning over the end of the pictograph reel.

Mattie marched the card onstage and set it, and the music swelled, and they were up.

They ran prancing on to the music, holding hands. Into position. The lights were brighter in this theatre. Hot onstage—and they were ready, and the piano slid into the verse.

‘Early one morning, just as the sun was rising

I heard a maid singing in the valley below,

O, don’t deceive me, O, never leave me,

How could you use a poor maiden so?’

In the song’s story Clover was the low-voiced singer, and Aurora the maiden. Bella—another happier maiden, unable to contain her delight at being up on the boards again. She stood by Clover as Gentry had commanded; she did not swish her skirt or fidget.

They opened their mouths like caves and let the sound flow out, running smooth to the back of the house—Aurora opened up the top of her head and opened down the bottom of her jaw, the sweetest and most dreadfully deceived of girls, wandering there back of the castle all pregnant with her apron not fitting any more. Bella almost laughed as she thought about that humped-up apron. But they were using the more refined lyrics with only the garlands that you pressed on my brow … Even Mrs. Cleveland could not have objected to them.

There was a difference this evening, Aurora thought, a change clearer in the house than in themselves: the audience was relaxed, as if knowing the girls would sing well right from the start. Their act wasn’t just good in spots, it was good all through, and the back-and-forthness between them and the people was made of pleasure rather than kindness. If they kept working, they could be good like this all the time.

Then it was time for Buffalo Gals, where Bella could cut loose and kick up her heels, and the audience became more lively. One of her tapping heels encountered a smear of soap bubble left by the juggler, whisked out from under her, and nearly took her whooshing off the stage—but she recovered, with a windmill of arms that shook a huge laugh out of the audience, and the applause at the end was such a cascade of happiness that Bella laughed as she bowed. This was the life for her.


A Kick

‘Very—energetic,’ Gentry said, waiting in the wings when they came off. ‘My dear Bella, your poise and aplomb was never more evident than when you did not land in the front row after slipping. Head voice well released—it is a beginning. If you continue to give me that forward tone, I will let you do it in two, with the park backdrop, well behind the Bubbler’s soap scum.’

Aurora considered the honour. They had never yet been in two. Mama pressed Gentry’s hand and said, ‘It is like you to be careful of my girls, dear Gentry, thank you.’ And then it was all to do over again for the seven o’clock show—the waiting, the climbing up and down stairs, makeup removed and their faces cleaned, as Mama insisted, between shows.

The dressing room became a cozy snug, Sybil and Mama continuing their rambling catalogue of every gig and artiste they had played, or played with, or ever seen; Letty Swain showing Bella how the harnesses worked and roping her in to polishing brass; Clover and Aurora brushing each other’s hair a thousand counted strokes.

After the second show, in the welter of prop-setting for Julius, Gentry stopped Aurora backstage with one twisted, arthritic hand on her arm. ‘At the garlands verse, take a turn farther left to find the light. Your mama can find steps for that—allemande, pas de bourrée, not too lively. I’m pleased with you,’ he said. ‘Much as it pains me to say so.’

Aurora laughed, and caught the eye of the Elocutionist, passing behind Gentry just then, and no doubt hearing what Gentry had said. Kavanagh gave her a nod, a note of his eyes.

Gentry glanced over his shoulder to see who Aurora looked at. ‘But I’m putting you back in one,’ he told her, ignoring Kavanagh. ‘I’ll move the Soap Juggler back into two, so he won’t sully the apron-stage with his suds. Distance is required for that illusion; and I still can’t hear you dear girls when you are in two.’

Oh well, Aurora thought. A compliment, and then a kick to chase it. She gathered Clover and Bella, and they went down to wait the long stretch till the closer.


A Night Out

Maurice Kavanagh was served late supper at the Pioneer Restaurant, a favour granted by Mrs. Burday because she found him so romantical. When the girls and Mama trooped through the restaurant on their way to the back-hall stairs, he twisted in his seat, judging his timing to a pin, and called softly, ‘Miss! Miss!’

Aurora, trailing the others, turned and gave him a delicious smile, in honour of his brilliance and the mauveness of his soft-folding tie.

He reared his head back and eyed her with a look pleasantly askance, considering. ‘I’m a stranger here myself,’ he said.

‘Oh, so are we, Mr. Kavanagh.’

‘But so familiar with the layout of the place?’

‘We are lodging here, you see.’

‘I do see,’ he said, looking at her as a man might look at the menu at Delmonico’s, then shaking his head. ‘But I don’t see—what is to be done.’

‘What kind of a thing needs doing?’

‘Well, here am I, with an evening on my hands, and no guide to this Underworld.’

Aurora laughed. He was quite old, probably thirty. Long thick eyelids under very dark brows. He liked her extremely. Everybody did! She was beautiful, at least this one evening.

‘Will you?’

‘Will I?’

‘Be my Beatrice, lead me through at least the first circle of this Inferno of a town.’

She laughed again, but said, ‘How can I? I know it no more than you do.’

‘Accompany me and we will root out its terrors together. At least, eat supper with me,’ he said. ‘Mrs. Burday has promised a supportive meal, to restore the overextended nerves.’

In the stair-hall beyond, Mama paused by the newel post. Aurora could certainly use a good supper. If she should take the fancy of an artist as well-established as Kavanagh!—although it was not entirely clear whether he was on his way up or down. What harm could come from it when she was right here in the same building? She craned her neck back, holding the newel, and nodded to Aurora.

‘Well, if you have no other company,’ Aurora said.

She gave a hint of a bow and sat opposite him at the table, then reached her arms up and made a small show of taking off her hat. They had laid out too much on clothes when they were starting out, and after all, what was the point in a black velvet hat if you did not make use of it?

Mrs. Burday made no difficulty about bringing another plate. ‘There’s plenty, I’m sure. The potatoes is fresh fried up, the shin left over from suppertime. You’ll want a glass of milk,’ she told Aurora, making her very angry.

When supper had been disposed of, Mr. Kavanagh sat on, seeming in no hurry for his bed. It was after midnight, but he was into his stride, telling Aurora about his engagements in the legitimate theatre—his Alving in Ghosts, and how Belasco wanted him for Chicago, and (in a generous nod to her sex) discoursing on the art of elocution as it pertained to females. ‘The penetrative quality of every woman’s voice may be improved,’ he told her. ‘Elocution can hardly make women orators; it cannot confer intelligence or discrimination; but it can tune that disordered instrument, the body.’

Abruptly he stopped, pulling out his watch. He stood, and commanded, ‘Come!’

Aurora gathered her coat and mantle and stabbed her hat into place, trying not to disorder her hair too badly. ‘Where?’

‘Do you care? I asked for Beatrice, and the Underworld awaits!’

Virgil led the poet through the Underworld, not Beatrice, Aurora thought, but she did not complain. They went a long way over icy paths, down empty, snow-packed streets to wherever he was going. He did not talk much, trotting her along like a prize calf to market, but at last they came to a square, brick-built house on a corner of State Street, snow cleared from its edges and gaslight gleaming from the windows, music sending fronds of spring out into the winter darkness.

‘Just a private party,’ he said at the tall black door, as he knocked. ‘Jenny won’t mind that I’ve brought you.’ Bullying through the crush of backs and arms, Maurice introduced her to a high-cheeked woman who seemed the hostess. Older than Mama and taller, almost stern-looking, in an elegant ruby silk dress, with dark coils of hair piled on her head.

‘Make this little bird welcome, Jenny. She’s dancing up at the Parthenon, she and her sisters, new to the boards but she’ll learn.’

‘A dancer! You’re in good company here, my dear, we were all dancers once—but those days are past and it is much more respectable here than formerly.’

Aurora gave her a hand, not certain this was correct, and said, ‘Aurora Avery.’

The woman laughed, but not unkindly, and took her hand, then tweaked her elbow, fingering the billowing flannel sleeve.

‘You’re a pearl, all right.’ The ruby dress split as she swayed, revealing inner slashes of pale peach-fuzz velvet. ‘Now, Maurice, you find her a cup of the punch, and tell Ricardo to fetch you the usual; if you’d rather something stronger, my dear Miss Avery, say what you want, I’m sure he’s got every kind of liquor. We haven’t gone Temperance here, not yet!’

Aurora bobbed her head to thank her, and at Maurice’s pressure on her arm went into the shifting noisy crowd, musicians adding their own noise. Although Aurora kept drinking the punch (and found herself very thirsty) and nodding her head, she quite often had no idea what was being said to her. She felt very happy to be here, to be a woman in the world.

Maurice fell into animated argument with several different people who of course she did not know (though some of the orchestra members were familiar, moonlighting from the Parthenon); she was hard put to keep up with him as he moved from place to place. The room was smoky, hot after their cold walk to get here. Wherever here was. Suddenly weary, she thought of leaving, but found she could not reconstruct their route in her mind, and into the small hours, now, she would not be safe, wandering the streets to find the hotel.

She tried to be patient, but Maurice’s conversations were full of names and people she did not know, consisting of highly coloured stories that left out all details. ‘Jerry did, God-damned hound—nobody’s fault but his own, we told him that—never saw her again nor wanted to …’ in quick exchanges along the same lines with several different sets of men.

The women did not do much talking, but some were beautiful, and they wore dazzling dresses and jewellery. Aurora stood by a massive mahogany pocket door, tucked in, her punch-glass held carefully out of the way. It was delicate crystal with thistles etched upon it, and she feared to break it.


Almost Empty

Bella poured hot milk into the bread, feeling Clover’s careful eye upon her lest she scald herself or spill. Mama had taken off her boots and sunk upon the sofa, feeling every inch of her years, she said, so Bella had gone down to the kitchen to get the milk while Clover combed Mama’s hair out and rubbed her temples with a dab of perfume to help her aching head. The scent bottle was almost empty. Papa had given it to Mama for Christmas before … all the rest of it. Bella did not like the smell. She leaned over the bowls, warm sweet bread sending a curl of comfort to her nose. Aurora’s lustreware bowl sat clean and empty on the dresser, but she’d be having something lovely downstairs, and probably cake. She was taking a very long time over supper.

Mama waved away her bowl, saying, ‘You eat mine, Bella dear. You jump around so, you need the extra.’ Clover shook her head, though, so the two girls helped Mama to sit up and Bella pressed the bowl into her hand.

‘Look how nicely Bella has made it, Mama,’ Clover said. ‘All stirred smooth for you.’

So Mama opened her eyes and exclaimed over the perfection of the mixing and how her own mama had made it for her while touring long ago, and wasn’t it lucky that they were cozy in this nice hotel. But after a spoonful or two she leaned her head on the arm of the sofa and let damp trails of tears fall down her cheeks.

Bella put the bowls on the dresser and brought the gold silk coverlet; Clover took Mama’s stockings off and tucked her feet under the warm folds. The girls let her lie quiet while they undressed themselves in silence, and got into bed.

A lively evening is often followed by a sad ending, Bella thought, staring through the darkness at the paler rectangle of the window.


A Fool

‘Hot in here,’ Kavanagh said in Aurora’s ear. She turned quickly and he gave her a loving, slow-growing smile that took in all the details of her face and hair and hat. ‘Still got that hat on? Let’s take you up—we’ll find the cloakroom or something of the sort.’

The stairs were crowded too, and dark, though all the wood shone; dark doors lined the upper hall. In the first chamber, two people sat on the edge of an iron bed, the woman on the man’s lap with her legs quite bare. Aurora looked quickly away. Maurice backed her out and closed the door with exaggerated care, and swung his arm out dramatically to open the next door, like a genie conjuring up a robbers’ cave.

Nobody there—a small stuffy room with garments heaped up on the bed and couch; no lamp lit. He pushed the door farther open and manoeuvred her inside, not that she resisted.

Once inside the darkened room he cupped her chin and cheek in his hands in a well-practised fashion and tilted her head up. He missed her mouth when he bent to kiss her, smearing her eye, and then pretended to have been planning all along to plant kisses around her face, murmuring broken love-notes as he did so.

But her mind, which had been confused and unthinking, suddenly became a clean open space: He is a fool, she thought. Well, that was not a useful thing to be thinking. She returned his kiss, tipping her head so his mouth, smelling of rum and pastilles and tobacco, met hers. He seemed younger as she kissed him. She touched the cleft in his chin.

‘You’re a beauty,’ he said. He wrapped an arm around her waist, and the hand on the arm circled around her breast while the other fumbled with the hooks on her bodice, but he soon gave up and merely mashed her chest in his hand, the other hand brought into play as well, lurching her into the wall, first, then to the couch covered with dresses. The fabric beneath them shifted and slid—they were going to flump onto the floor, but Aurora hoisted him up as well as she could. She did not know whether to stop him or go on, and found that she did not even care which, but she was uncomfortable.

‘Beauty, beauty,’ he kept saying, and she thought that really, an Elocutionist ought to have more eloquence at his disposal. But he was very handsome, and she recalled the mastery with which his voice had teased the meaning from Browning and Longfellow.

A quick rap at the door, and Jenny came into the room, skirts swirling, bright velvet visible and invisible. She took in Aurora’s confusion and Maurice’s heavy-lidded glare at the interruption, and spoke only to Aurora, her tone pitched as if they were quite alone.

‘You shouldn’t be here. You go on home, now.’

Aurora stood. She pulled at her skirt and smoothed the waistband. She straightened her hat, turning her face away to give herself time for breath.

To Maurice, Jenny said, as if she knew him very well, ‘Out, you! Take this little girl safe home and then I might let you come back. You’re a twister.’

He laughed and overbalanced, crashing into the nightstand but not quite to the floor. Then was up again, still laughing. ‘You heard her, my dear, take me home safe, and then perhaps I will be let back into Paradise.’

Aurora looked at Jenny’s strong-boned face, at her clean skin and long eyes. Old enough to be her mother, but seeming young and full of energy, and she gave back look for look, so that without the least bit wanting to, Aurora decided she was right. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Thank you, ma’am, I had best be leaving.’ She took Maurice’s arm and steered him to the door, saying, ‘They will be looking for me at home, sir.’


The Playbill

Clover could not quite sleep: the Parthenon playbill ran through her head continually, so that at one moment she was haunted by fascinated fear lest Julius cause another scene or be injured by the vast Miss Sunderland; at another, in an almost-dream, the rats and cats were the ones who fought. Aurora had been too long with the Elocutionist, some page of the programme said. Another page, and there was Mama, left alone in the world. Clover could not turn the next page because there would be her father lying on the front walk with the dark stain seeping under him, so she riffled back through the pages to Julius, to Gentry calling out from the back of the theatre.

She struggled to wake. The room shaped itself around her: the leaning square of mirror tilted over the dresser, the coal-fire’s last ember in the stove, a small mountain of Mama on the sofa. Montana. From Paddockwood to Prince Albert, to Regina, to Calgary, to the Empress in Fort Macleod—now Helena. Clover pushed out of bed and stood. Her feet gripped the linoleum, one hand on the rough sheet still. No Aurora.

Across the room Mama lay uncovered, the coverlet fallen to the floor. Too slippery. Clover took the wool blanket off the bed, easing Bella’s fingers from its edge, and tucked that around Mama instead. She laid the coverlet gently over Bella and stood a moment longer, silent in the dark room, before she made herself climb back into bed.


In Drink

Aurora hurried along beside Maurice as he straggled through silent frozen streets, seeming to know the route more as a horse knows the stable than as a thinking man. She put her hand through his arm, as his hands were shoved into his topcoat pockets, and took the longest strides she could. She feared that if their pace slowed he would forget what he was doing. She had many times seen men in drink, and it did not seem to her that he was too far gone, compared to how Papa had been once or twice, let alone Mr. Dyment from the land office, but she thought he might walk ahead and forget she was with him. From time to time she spoke; he did not seem to hear.

At last she spied the Pioneer on its corner, a block ahead, and felt some relief. Just then Maurice dodged away from her into a dark entryway, the cobbled tunnel to a yard behind a store. She stopped and moved towards him, but he flung out a beautiful white hand.

‘Wait!’ he cried. ‘Nature must be answered!’ and then she saw his arm braced against the bricks and understood that he was relieving himself. Hot piss made a curl of steam in the air. She felt more tired than she had for a very long time. And they had a lesson with Gentry in the morning.

‘Sweetness? My beauty? Girl?’ Maurice’s voice came out of the passageway in a stage whisper, and she realized that he did not know her name.

‘I’m here,’ she said.

‘Come, come,’ he said.

No one in the street. The moon lay on snowy ruts and drifts impartially. She stepped into the shadow, keeping to the opposite wall from where he had been leaning. He opened his topcoat and folded her inside it, keeping her warm, and she found she was fond of him, of his looseness and greatness and strength, however fallen and come low. He kissed her again less clumsily, his mouth cooler after the long walk. With one hand he kirtled up her skirt and then, pinning the gathers between their two bodies, he nudged a knee at her legs to open them, and then his fingers touched her under there, opening her there, pushing through her legs to touch all through her, beneath her drawers along the silky tops of her legs above her stockings, and the feel of that hand on that skin was one of the things she was looking for, she thought, or perhaps she should push him away, she could not tell. After that first soft sweeping his fingers shoved into her too strongly, so he hurt her, and she did not know how to tell him she did not like it. His eyes were closed. Then he paused, pressed against her fiercely, paused again, and said in a reasonably sober voice, ‘Your mama will be waiting. We must go.’

Once he had stopped pushing against her she could be kind in her thoughts towards him, and she supposed that they would continue like this, only not outside in the cold but in some rose-petal-strewn hotel room in Chicago or New York, where it would somehow be easier, or once she could get it right, all right.

He stood waiting for her to shake her skirts down and did not look at her, nor speak, the rest of the block to the Pioneer. Mrs. Burday had left the side door unlatched for them and he pushed her up the stoop and swayed on the doorstep.

‘Lovely child,’ he said. ‘Lovely Silence.’ She looked at him, puzzling out his face to see what his expression was: nothing but a smile there, and a quirk of the eyebrows.

‘Wicked Jenny was right. But I’ll make her sorry for that!’ He shut the door and she could hear his feet clumsy on the steps, then making off down the street.

Upstairs, Mama woke from where she had been curled on the sofa, and asked in a clouded voice, ‘Aurora? Did you have a good supper? You were an age down there. I hope he entertained you kindly and was not … I meant to come down and—but I dropped off …’

‘Oh, it was fine, Mama. Mrs. Burday gave us shin of beef and fried potatoes, and when we’d eaten we went for a walk.’ Enough to make Mama sigh and sleep again.

Clover sat up and watched her as she took her clothes off in the moonlight. Being Clover she did not ask anything, but Aurora lay down beside her and was very grateful for her thin arm around her for comfort. After a while she whispered, as if answering, ‘I do not know. I think it was a bordello he took me to. The punch was delicious. The room is going round the bed, or the bed going round me, oh …’

She felt like a ship on an ocean of shame.

Before she slept she thought of Jimmy Battle, and felt the arch of bone inside her pelvis as she turned over in the bed to lie farther away from Clover. The spread of that bone, how her hips had opened and were waiting for women’s work. Not children, she did not mean that, but the pressure of a man, however that would be. She would not expect love, because that was a weakening thing, but passion would be useful in her art.


Innermost Heart

Drops of water raced down the dark window as Bella opened her eyes. She put out a finger to touch one drop, splitting it into two pearls that ran onward to the sill. It was not a thaw, but the hip-bath steaming in front of the stove. The sky was still dark, it must be early. They had let her sleep till last again. She stretched under the gold coverlet, taking up the whole bed luxuriously, and rolled her head to see who was in the bath: Clover, her thin back bent, each nub of bone raised like a long set of knuckles, running down her spine.

Bella watched Clover stand, hugging herself as the water drained off, steaming in the cold air, hip bones a-jut and every side rib visible. Mama put a sheet around her. Aurora poured another kettle of hot water into the hip-bath. Clover bumped up into bed and under the coverlet, and laid her cold feet against Bella’s legs so that Bella shrieked softly—and was shushed by Aurora, mindful as they always had to be of the sleepers in rooms beside theirs. The walls were thin as cardboard. Even with the steam and the stove it was too cold for Bella to be happy about taking off her nightgown, but it had to be done, so she stripped and stepped into the water. Once she had scrubbed herself she braced against the lip of the bath and Mama and Aurora poured water over her head, soaped her, and took the suds out in a towel. They rinsed her hair with bathwater and then twice with new water, with vinegar in it for shine, but that was very cold, and then she stood and they helped her out to stand shivering on the linoleum in front of the stove until, wrapped and warming like a loaf in a napkin, she could get back under the coverlet while Aurora and Clover laced their corsets. Aurora said, ‘Tighter, tighter,’ and Clover pulled. Aurora had a beautiful corset: cut-away hips and a short back, made of French coutil with écru lace trimming and pale blue ribbons. God only knew what it had cost, Mama said. It was from the Queen of the May costume.

She ought to have a corset too, but Bella was still treated like a baby; hers was only a band, even though she had a bust beginning, and perhaps with a little cotton stuffed inside a corset she would look more like the sixteen she was supposed to be. Aurora was as cold as winter, and Clover only loved Aurora. They did not care about her, no matter how much she tried to be good and no trouble to anyone and to dance as well as the others. She dug her head under the coverlet and went back into the darkness for a while, into the misery of nobody, nobody knowing her innermost heart or loving her at all.


Sentimental Bilge-Distiller

‘You have laced yourself too tight to breathe. You cannot sing if you cannot breathe.’

Gentry’s stick whisked at Aurora, flicking like a carriage whip on her stiffened midriff. ‘Take her to the dressing room and loosen her corset,’ he told Flora, not troubling to make it a request. His impatience was always on fire in the mornings. A bad time for classes. But they had the choice: learn, or go. He cast his pearls before them! What was it to him if they chose to lace themselves into asphyxia for a pair of booze-soaked Irish eyes?

Clover and Bella ran through the Grand Scale twenty times before Aurora came back and joined them in the line, cheeks hot and bodice loose. They continued together, but Gentry flung up his arms and left the stage, struggling down the portable stairs with his cane, each step a contortion and spasm of limbs and hips and angles.

At the scale’s downward arc, they fell silent. From the darkened auditorium they heard Gentry’s voice in a smooth, powerful undertone that grew louder without tightness or exertion, imitating and correcting the tones he criticized. ‘When you push, you create tension in the heart and in the brain—so the voice goes up in pitch and acquires a spindly, questioning, uncertain tone. If you try to make your voice big by pushing from the throat, you cut your voice in pieces, lose all the undertones and individuality. In the throat, you must feel no effort at all.’ Gentry paced up and down the aisles, ending by shouting ‘Throat!’ at them, with as far as they could detect no effort at all in his own.

Aurora felt dizzy and sick, and had to remember to blink her eyes; Clover beside her was straight as a pillar, no colour in her face. Bella seemed to be struggling not to laugh, but glancing at her quickly, Aurora sent a dagger look. At the smallest infraction Gentry might dismiss them, and she needed him to tell her everything, everything. She could feel her understanding stretching to take in what he said.

At Gentry’s command they sang Buffalo Gals again, and again, and again, a capella. At length he relented, came towards the stage, and softened his tone. ‘Of course extra force is required to fill the theatre. You must find the fire to fill this space, and learn to release it without constriction. You prepare, prepare, prepare, and then you let it go, give your work out freely in your singing, and your audience will receive it as freely. Generosity is the lesson I would teach you.’ He turned away, then back again. ‘And focus.’

His own focus was ferocious. Aurora nodded but did not dare speak.

‘Use it like the violin, your voice-box. Do not draw those strings tight so that they squawk and squeak—let them vibrate freely, with firm control, flowingly.’ Then Gentry slammed the end of his stick down on the stage, making the girls jump. He shouted, ‘Mr. Caspar? Are you there?’ and the mousey bandleader ran down to the pit. ‘Early One Morning,’ Gentry barked to him, and almost instantly the piano intro began.

Aurora stepped forward into her usual position and the girls began, following the song until Aurora took it alone: ‘O don’t deceive me, O never leave me,’ she sang, with the rise and plaintive fall of ‘How could you use a poor maiden so?’

‘Stop, stop!’ Gentry’s stick hit the stage again. ‘Why is this so hollow? Why so icy? Come! It is not enough to sing on key. You must give me something from your—’

He paused, seeming not to want to say heart, although he was pounding his chest. ‘From your own pain. Don’t you have some sorrowful love in your past? Has no one ever betrayed you?’

Aurora stood still.

Gentry came close to her. ‘If no one has, rest assured that someone will. Imagine it.’

She looked into his face, below her own. He seemed to be trying to convey something vital to him and so she put aside her resistance and her pride, and let out a breath.

‘Well, I am only young, still, sir,’ she said. She gave a great smile, suddenly, and said, ‘And still quite pretty.’

At that his ferocity broke, and he laughed and opened his arms wide, bowing to her. ‘You are a brave girl, and an honest one, you rascal,’ he said. ‘As you sing that song, think of the poor girl who has been done wrong, rather than of your own safe prettiness.’

He turned away, saying, ‘And give me a little of your father, and your young brother, in that dying fall.’

They none of them moved or spoke. But their silence felt charged, as if the sisters and their mother stood together against him.

Gentry paused. Then he turned back to Aurora, and bowed slightly, in what might have been some rare species of apology. ‘All right. We need more of you. I want you to do a new song tonight, so some hard work this morning.’

She kept her astonishment carefully to herself. Clover and Bella said nothing either, although she could feel them tremble on either side of her.

‘My Rosary?’ Mama suggested, hurriedly searching through her music case for those pieces for which she had sides. ‘We have a sweetly pretty arrangement for three voices, by Nevin himself.’

‘My Rosary!’ Gentry seethed to a dangerous boil all over again. ‘A bastard get of the popular song—unbearably pretentious, pandering to the crowd, with the finicking touch of “Art” which makes all things false and vulgar. A sentimental bilge-distiller.’

Mama shut her case with a ridiculous little bob of apology and the girls stood frozen, waiting for the end of Gentry’s rant.

‘So, a new song!’ Gentry said—suddenly, bewilderingly cheerful. ‘I Can’t Do the Sum from Babes in Toyland. Victor Herbert, who has never written an original strain and is a plagiarist from first to last, whose music is execrable—but not, per se, immoral.’

He banged his cane again and Mattie rolled a large blackboard onto the stage, deposited a chunk of chalk on its ledge, and handed the girls their music. The jaunty little tune started up. They allowed the music to move them out of their stillness, and they sang.

Oh! Oh! Oh!

Put down six and carry two, Gee, but this is hard to do,

You can think and think and think, till your brain goes numb—

I don’t care what Teacher says, I can’t do the sum!’

Gentry decreed that Bella take the first verse, as a little girl trying to solve arithmetic stumpers; she could wear baby-girl and a giant bow. A quick change after the song, therefore a couple of minutes for Clover and Aurora to fill with a dance number—Mama recalled the Musical Snuff-Box routine from the last school concert before Papa died. They could easily work around Bella’s absence.

Gradually, gradually, Aurora thought, their minutes were extending. From two songs to three, now a dance interlude. Unless Gentry turned it down for sentimental bilge.

He did not, again praising Mama’s attention to their steps and telling the girls they were luckier than they knew to have such a fine instructor. By noon he seemed tired, and they were happy to run out of the theatre and back to the Pioneer. Bella would need her baby-doll shirtwaist and perhaps the prop lollipop. ‘If we were paying for this,’ Mama told Aurora, hurrying them along the cleared walks, ‘we would not be able to. Whatever the cost to your self-pride.’

‘Yes, it is worth it. At least he is not too hard on the others.’

Clover took Aurora’s left hand as they ran, and Bella took the right.


A Living Hell

At the dressing mirror Aurora took great pains with her hair and eyes, and was made up before Julius finished his opening turn at the first show. She perched on the edge of the makeup table in a state of light carbonation, one eye on the hallway through the open door.

Sybil fretted, afraid that Julius had gone too far the day before in quarrelling with Miss Sunderland and might go farther today. Duetto Paradiso—a new placard had been made the day before, Miss Sunderland refusing to perform under the name Excursion of Song ever again—was warming up in half-voice across the hall. Sybil confided to Mama, in a stage whisper, that Julius had touched a drop at breakfast, and that Italians always set him off.

Neither singer was truly Italian, Aurora considered saying, but she left it.

‘Everybody knows it is necessary to get along with all the artistes in a company, and Jay has never done such a pointed thing before—why should he have taken against them so? Except that Miss Sunderland does a little resemble Jay’s mother, who was a terrible tyrant and made his early years a living hell,’ Sybil continued, in a running commentary that soon drove Aurora out into the hall.

She leaned against the doorjamb, staring at the piece of publicity letterhead Kavanagh had pinned to his dressing-room door: Maurice MacKenna Kavanagh, Elocutionist, in glossy black letters above his sketched profile. Remembering (with a delightful swoop of dizziness) his nose on her cheek, his black beard-shadow and the sharp cleft in his chin, she thought that the Belle Auroras needed some publicity letterhead of their own. Clover could draw their three profiles, that would be stylish. She wanted to see his face. His fingers had hurt her, but she had not said so; it was necessary to be brave. His glinting eyes were navy blue.

She could not linger in the doorway. He would think she was waiting for him when he came, as he must do very quickly, or be fined for missing his half-hour call. She started up the stairs on quick feet, planning to find a quiet corner where she could watch the show and not be seen at all.

But—her heart jumped—Kavanagh thundered through the backstage door above. He came pelting down the stairs towards her, his hair dull and tousled.

Aurora flattened against the railing, twinkling up at him (with just the right laughing touch of aren’t you late, rascal!) as he brushed past.

He glanced at her, then aside. She put out a hand to catch his sleeve, and he knocked it away roughly, saying, ‘Get the f*ck out of it. Leave me be!’

Her legs trembled so, she thought she might fall. He was in a hurry (she heard herself telling herself), late for his call. The railing felt very shaky.

Kavanagh slammed through the door of his dressing room and swore again.

There was no place to be in the theatre that was dark enough. After a minute Aurora walked up the halls past the dressing rooms (his door not quite closed, she could see him grinding greasepaint stick into the palm of his hand, dark head bent over the job) and, grasping at any door, went into the coal cellar—where she stood on the cleared space of floor waiting to catch her breath. She wanted more than anything to walk casually back and open his door to say something fine and witty, some little remark to let him see that she was perfectly unaffected; but she could not trust herself to get it right. It had been—displeasure. In his eyes, at seeing her.

Not displeasure, disgust.

She felt quite stupid, trying to think.

He had smelled strongly of liquor. And he had looked away, aggrieved that she would be in his way, demanding something of him. The coal dust left on the scraped floor would ruin her white skirt, she had to keep it heaped into her hands—as he had lifted her skirts, last night. A deep worm crawled and turned in her belly. But she would not be sick.

She gathered her skirts in one hand, opened the coal-cellar door with the other, and walked out, back straight and a dainty smile on her face. She went up to the wings to listen to his turn.

His elocution was as brilliant as before.