The Little Shadows

by Marina Endicott

  Copyright © 2011 Marina Endicott

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Endicott, Marina, 1958-

  The little shadows / Marina Endicott.

  eISBN: 978-0-385-66892-7

  I. Title.

  PS8559.N475L58 2011 C813′.6 C2011-902496-9

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Kelly Hill

  Cover art: Rosanne Olson | Riser | Getty Images

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For all my sisters

  What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night.

  It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.

  It is the little shadow which runs across the grass

  and loses itself in the sunset.

  CROWFOOT

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Overture Act One

  Act Two

  Intermission Act Three

  Act Four

  Finale

  Acknowledgements

  OVERTURE

  A summer evening. Moths dance in the lights outside the opera house.

  A girl in a white dress slides into a seat on the aisle beside her father. The hall is crowded, many standing at the back. Ladies exclaim over the playbill while men, heads bent together, talk about the war. An older, greying soldier sits with his kind-faced wife. Her big black boot tucks out of sight behind his leg.

  The curtain sways, curling along its bottom edge in a velvet wave, swept not by wind or the weight of the moon but by a company assembling backstage.

  In the enfolding darkness of the wings, Aurora reaches out her hand on one side to find Clover’s thin one; on the other Bella’s, small and strong. Their warm clasp stills her trembling.

  Silver-shelled footlights snap a scalloped arc of light onto the main curtain. Fresh red velvet: crimson lake, bright blood, the colour of love. Murmurs cease as the violins come creaking into tune, their mild excitable cacophony resolving into sense and meaning, into A, the one note they all seek. In the audience, silence falls. The cessation of visiting, the folding of programmes, the last adjustment to the seats.

  Tips of shoes show beneath the bobble-fringe—a quiet rumpus, that must be the girls.

  The bandmaster taps his stand.

  It is about to start.

  Breathe in—

  ACT ONE

  1.

  Doing It in One

  JANUARY 1912

  The Empress, Fort Macleod

  We usually select a ‘dumb act’ for the first act on the bill—makes a good impression and will not be spoiled by late arrivals. A song-and-dance turn, a sister act, or any other little act that does not depend upon its words being heard.

  WILL ROGERS

  ‘Keep moving,’ Mama told them. ‘You will only be cold if you are slow, and we must get on. He won’t wait.’

  So they went quickly over the half-frozen field, in gritty snow that crunched underfoot but stung on their cheeks, and rubbed like sand between their hats and collars. Three girls in a row behind one round-bundled woman, who bent to the wind and made good headway on short, flicking legs. Aurora slid between snowbursts, smooth-sailing as a swan over a white lake. Bella was the smallest, hurrying to warm her hand by tucking it into Mama’s pocket; Clover behind them, slowest and least desirous of their destination.

  Everything in the little town was whirling and bright, late-afternoon whiteness unusual here where it did not snow deeply, being too far west into desert. But they could see through the squall the brick building of the Empress Theatre, and the black frame around its door, and the white placard tacked up on the door:

  CLEVELAND’S STAR UNION VAUDEVILLE

  And now they could hear a plink-plink-plink timpani of notes with depth removed by distance, and a soaring, scooping voice doing arpeggios. Aurora felt her own voicebox contracting in time, one octave up, tenor to soprano, reaching and then cascading down.

  The door stuck—jammed—and their mama jerked her head so someone would help her pull. Bella did (no glove to soil, her right-hand one gone missing that morning and nothing for it but to keep her hand in her pocket, or in Mama’s) and then Clover too. They yanked off-time—then again, together, and the door burst open. They fell back, then moved forward into a blur of darkness and warmth, with somewhere in the distance red velvet and those arpeggios, very much louder now. Inside, a lobby gradually framed itself for their dazzled eyes, and a lighter square, two doors standing open into the theatre hall. An old scrubwoman, busy on the floor, grabbed her bucket away from their clumsy boots. Bella whispered an apology; after one glare the woman let her by and went back to her scrubbing.

  Now that they stood still, the lobby was cold too. A little warmth curled out of the open doors, so the girls pressed their mother forward again, stepping quietly this time, Aurora’s new boots almost skating over the glossy floorboards, to look through into the theatre.

  It looked much larger inside. The space opened up and out—high, high ceiling with a silver sheen even in this low light. The walls were pressed tin too, but painted flat gold, so that it took a moment to make sense of the play of light and dark on the ornate lozenge patterns. The chairs had been pushed to the sides for floor-sweeping, topped by a tumbled mass of velvet cushions.

  One skinny boy with a broom stood looking up at the stage: an eight-foot butte of bare boards, the frankly false proscenium decked out with advertisements in florid fancy scripts. Silver-shelled footlights dotted around the curve.

  Up on the stage people were shifting furniture, moving carpets and hauling ropes. A man in a bright yellow waistcoat shouted down to the boy to make speed, and he dodged to the right of the stage and up, broom flying ahead of him like the flag Excelsior.

  The scenery flats had been hiked high into the rafters and the curtains drawn as far open as they would go; the stage was bald. At the rim of the stage an elegant young man stood beside the piano, one arm laid along it while he sang. A small squirrelly fellow played for him, very flourishingly as to the notes but no folderol in his face.

  The smell was port wine and dirt, velvet, greasesticks. And ashes, a frightening smell in a theatre. It was cold in here too—everywhere seemed like it would be warm, and then was not. Not till nighttime. Then the heat of bodies would help, when this whole space would be filled with breathing, laughing, sighing people crammed in side-by-each, all waiting and waiting for some beauty, some moment of transport.

  Finished, the elegant gent bowed to the squirrel, received back his music, and took himself off smartly to the left, his top hat rolling down his arm and vanishing last. It was quieter in the hall then, so they could hear the slopping and brushing of the woman washing the lobby floor on her hands and knees behind them.

  ‘Well—off we go,’ Mama said. She made a complicate
d good-luck gesture, nipped at some fluff on Aurora’s sleeve and gripped Bella’s hand again, and they set off across the empty expanse of the hall. Their feet made no clatter at all on the shiny wooden floor, as Mama had taught them.

  A stout man in a black coat stood mending a chair close to the stage. Mama stopped before him. ‘The Three Graceful Avery Girls are here to audition,’ she said, very haughty.

  The man looked up at her, then at the girls. His black eyes shone in a long white tombstone face, and he looked them all over, staring the longest at Aurora, at the shine of her gold hair under the black hat, the huge velvet rose. Then he jerked his lipless mouth into a sideways, considering purse. ‘Be a while. Stove in the dressing room,’ he said. ‘Stan’ll fetch them when we’re ready.’

  Mama nodded and led the girls to the left side of the stage, where a hidden door now stood ajar into a bare brick passage open to the stage and the back workings. A little drift of snow lay in the bright patch of light along the back of the stage, where the flies above had been opened to the sky. Twenty feet along, stairs led up on the right, to the stage; down on the left, to the cellar under the stage. Aurora would not touch the makeshift splintery railing with her new mauve gloves, but the other girls held tight, stumbling down the steep steps after Mama.

  Someone shouted as they were descending—‘Maximilian! You’re up!’—and a skinny dark man rushed up the stairs, pushing past, each one at a time having to endure him, a smelly man carrying a birdcage and a box, and both those things banged into the girls but he murmured, Oh dear, oh so, so sorry, as he went, clearly in a panic, so they could not mind him.

  Except that Mama said, ‘Oh! Never cross on the stairs!’ and stared up after him, frightened. This was a day for good luck.

  On Our Uppers

  At the bottom of the stairs was a close dark space. Mama found the door and Aurora went first, into a warm room glowing with light from the oil-stove and a lamp or two, a cozy room with benches set in front of tables lining the walls, mirrors showing a crowd of people—but half those people were themselves again, redoubled in the glass. Still, the room was crammed, and very warm, with a strong smell of heating oil.

  ‘Flora!’ A little shriek, and then a pink hand clapped to a round pink mouth. A woman waved from one of the benches and leaned forward—so small was the room—to pat at Mama’s arm urgently.

  Mama peered through the glittering shadows, and then cried, in a whisper, ‘Sybil! Of all delightful things! Now this makes me much easier in my mind—and you as pretty as—’

  The woman got up (but was not much taller standing up) and hugged Mama. She was wearing bright-spangled pink artificial silk, very full in the skirt, which brushed too near the stove. Her eyes were shiny black sequins in a doll’s face. ‘You are a thousand years older now, Flora, and so am I. And who are these with you? Are they your daughters?’

  ‘Aurora’—pulling her forward—‘Sixteen! But we say eighteen, of course, and here is Amelia, not even a year younger, we call her Clover, her papa’s pet name for her—Girls, this is Sybil Sutley, you’ll remember me speaking of. Where are you, Bella? Arabella, she’s the baby, now—thirteen, but sixteen, wink-wink, for the Gerry Society.’ Mama patted them into order as she spoke, adjusting Aurora’s hat around her face and pulling at the velvet flower’s petals.

  ‘And this is what came of your schoolmaster?’

  ‘Yes, the very same, and very sad—’ Mama broke off. She gritted her teeth and turned her face to one side, the palm of her small hand over her eyes and nose. An ugly gesture. Aurora turned to help, but Clover put an arm around Mama’s waist as she continued, ‘And my little Harry as well. But there, not now.’ Then Mama was upright again, and Clover slid back into the shadow by the dressing-screen.

  Bella was edging away, too, Aurora saw. Bella hated to hear Mama say Harry’s name, or Papa’s; she slipped out to sit alone on the stairs in the dark. Her skirt would get dusty, but they could brush it down for her. Aurora stood by a dressing mirror and carefully removed her hat, pin by pin, not looking (although she could see him perfectly clearly in the mirror) at the young man in evening clothes who had been singing upstairs, now lounging on one end of the table to draw on the wall an exact replica of a bottle on the table: King of Whiskeys. Many people had signed and drawn on the wall, so it must be all right that he was defacing it, but a whiskey bottle was not polite.

  She stabbed each hatpin into a square of cloth that belonged in her velvet muff. Red scabs dotted her fingers, but she tried not to let herself pin them in the same holes each time, because that would smack of Mama, who had to count as she walked over the boardwalk back in Paddockwood—otherwise, what?—her long-dead mother’s back would break, the mirrors would crack, seven years’ bad luck would pour down on them. In sudden impatience, Aurora stripped off her mauve kid gloves. With her bare hand she swept dust from the dressing table before she set down her hat, then wiped off the dust on an inner fold of her black skirt. No towels set out, and they had forgot to borrow some from the boarding hotel.

  Her mother and Sybil Sutley sat close together, talking sotto voce, reliving Boston and Chicago and their wonderful engagements with Keith’s twenty years before (of which the girls knew every turn and every whistle stop), while the mad Maximilian pranced about the stage above their heads, sifting dust down on them all.

  At least this was a proper theatre, if shabby. Not like the hotel in Prince Albert where they’d had their first professional audition, last summer. The conceited young man lounging on a sofa while they sang and danced for him, making them spin over and over so their skirts flew outward and their petticoats rose, then sidling too close to the makeshift stage in the hotel banqueting room to see what they had on underneath. Mama had left the piano, shutting the lid with a bang, and marched them out of there double-quick. ‘Not for us,’ she’d said. ‘And besides, he has an unlucky face. I doubt if his touring company will come to pass.’

  He had passed Aurora on the street as she walked to teach piano to the Sadler girls, and asked her to come for a second audition, on her own, and it was enough to make you laugh that he thought he was fooling anybody. Pulling her into a shadowed space between buildings, saying the number of his hotel room. If he’d had any skill she’d have thought it over, at least; as it was she just despised him. But he had a nice little tongue for kissing and he made her laugh with his bold unpractised wickedness, much as he made her angry with his superior air. She sang under her breath, staring at herself in the dim-lit mirror, ‘He’s a devil, he’s a devil, He’s a devil in his own home town!’ The elegant singer hummed along as he drew, but Aurora did not glance at him. A burst of jinkety music above: the piano playing Streets of Cairo—maybe the magician had a snake.

  The pink-dressed Sybil woman leaned forward again to snatch at the knee of a dark old man, his massive head springing with wild gouts of grey hair, who sat hunched in a threadbare armchair shoved back into the alcove. Her hand like a bird’s beak, pecking: ‘And this is Julius Foster Konigsburg, my old man—we’ve been touring Europe, you know, after Australia, had a reversal there, but never mind that.’ Peck-peck again. ‘You remember me talking about Flora, Julius—we met in Boston on the continuous vaudeville—eleven o’clock in the morning till eleven at night and what a mercy those days are done.’

  The heavy man’s face was exaggeratedly made-up, lined with ochre and highlighted in strange patches; he must be a character actor in a melodrama or perhaps a single-man comic—but the pink lady was with him. Sybil’s makeup was soubrette. She was still talking, though he paid her not the slightest heed.

  ‘Touring with the Leddy Quartet, refined entertainment, Mr. and Mrs. Leddy and their son; Flora replaced their daughter when she ran off with a miner. Costumed mimicry—Flora, you was the best fancy dancer on any circuit from Ottawa to Corpus Christi. And you won a piano for dancing, in Minneapolis, just before you left us!’

  ‘I did, but it’s sold now, had to go. Left without a sou!’


  That was not true. Aurora hated her for saying it, when Papa had tried so hard about money. It was just that the teacherage was not theirs and naturally they’d had to leave when the new man came, after Papa died—and everything cost so much—but they could always go to Qu’Appelle and stay with Papa’s brother, only Mama would not. No reason they couldn’t earn their way, she had said, and better. But she should not talk about Papa like that.

  Aurora could feel her huge heart pounding, but half of her knew it was not for these small irritations, but for the terror of upstairs, and Mr. Cleveland, and getting the gig. And they wouldn’t be paid less than a hundred a week; Mama would have to hold the line.

  ‘Well, we’re on our uppers, but the girls are greatly talented and we’re going to make our way very-nicely-thank-you.’ Mama ruffled her skirts and gave Aurora a chin-up look. ‘You could be getting dressed, you girls: dodge behind the screen, nobody will mind.’

  Clover was in a dream, so Aurora slipped into the space behind the cloth screen first, took off her long black skirt and hung it over a chair, fluffing out her shirtwaist into the baby-doll dress and pinafore of their costume. The stove-oil smell made her feel both comforted, because it was like the teacherage, and sick.

  She mmmed and hummed and worked her mouth in their exercises. There was not more than twenty dollars left in Mama’s purse. One more night in the hotel here, then the fare back to Calgary. Or write to Uncle Chum in Qu’Appelle, begging for help.

  Aurora breathed slowly. She stopped listening to everything else and became still.

  Music of the Spheres

  Out on the stairs, cold and cramped, Bella sat thinking of the dark staircase the Twelve Dancing Princesses travelled down when they went out to dance all night, dancing the soles right off their shoes. Her own feet felt pinched, but only Aurora had new boots. It was fair—Aurora was the eldest, after all, and maybe tight boots would keep one’s feet from growing too gigantic.