Aurora did not speak, but nodded, seeing the justice of his criticism.
‘Lyrics are specific and rarely subtle, yet their extravagance encourages you to do extravagant things which are not untrue. You use inflections which if they had been calculated would seem false, but which if they spring from the stimulation of a song are quite true. Rhythms, lengths of words, playing with suspending, overriding rhythm while the sense goes on—those tricks keep a song driving through the verse without rushing.’
Gentry waved an arm to the wings and the black-toothed crashbox man wheeled out their old I Can’t Do the Sums blackboard, covered with new lyrics. Aurora braced herself as Gentry grabbed the chalk and began to mark the board, muttering to himself, ‘The pipes, the pipes, are ca-all-ling …’ He turned, whirling in an excess of driving energy, cracking chalk in dagger lines above the words. ‘Sense-stress and metre-stress go against each other; you can stretch or shorten words as you sing—syncopate them, or linger on a syllable, a phrase, to enliven meaning.’
White lines dashed on the board: Aurora thought of Papa, teaching them dactyl and spondee, feet and metre, flashing white text, with accents slashed in above. The stage blackboard merged with the blackboard in the schoolroom in Paddockwood—
And without any idea that she was about to do it, Aurora fainted.
Chicken Sandwiches
Bella and Clover crouched on the stage beside Aurora’s slumped body. ‘Well! Now what’s to do?’ asked Gentry, blankly. ‘Is it her corset again?’
‘She is hungry,’ Bella said, angry.
Aurora’s hand twitched under hers, and gripped to make her stop.
‘Did you not eat this morning?’ Gentry demanded. ‘You are always to eat before practice, I have said so.’
‘We had no money left,’ Clover said, speaking too gently for Bella’s liking. ‘But we will be paid tomorrow.’
Aurora sat up. ‘No, no, not—I was thinking of—I am very well, please.’
Gentry walked to where his snow-damped coat lay, and pulled out a paper bag.
‘Come, sit, you girls,’ he said. ‘I had forgotten the lunch.’
Four wrapped bundles in the bag. It made Bella’s mouth water just to see them. Chicken, on white rolls! ‘Thank you very much,’ she said, and bit ferociously down.
Clover stayed by Aurora’s side, so Gentry took the bag to them, where their skirts lay pooled on the boards, their thin torsos upright in their white shirtwaists.
‘Eat,’ he said. ‘Eat. You do not have very good voices, but you sing much better than you did.’
Even Bella could not be anything but grateful for this, especially as she ate.
‘You are not singers—’ he said, with what Bella knew he must think of as enveloping kindness in his tone. ‘But you are delightful performers. Worry less about the singing, now. Take care over your dancing steps, and enjoy yourselves, as the darlings you are—make some art, give the rubes some pleasure.’ He rubbed his hands over his face, and smearing up into his eyebrows and hair and on up to the heavens—a theatrical gesture, but not untrue.
‘Aurora, I have a gift for you. A new song—lyrics by a lawyer in England with song-writing aspirations. His sister-in-law showed me the song, and I have fitted it to the Londonderry Air. It will do well for you, here amongst the Irish miners.’
They read the words and Aurora nodded quickly, as if she already knew them.
‘It is possible,’ Gentry said, ‘that I have misdirected you against sentiment. Much as it fails to please my own tastes, there is no denying that for a large part of our audience a tug on the heartstrings is part of the pleasure of vaudeville, and who am I to disparage them? But when embracing sentiment, guard against the sentimental.’
They were certainly words to tug the heart.
And if you come, when all the flowers are dying
And I am dead, as dead I well may be
You’ll come and find the place where I am lying
And kneel and say an Ave there for me.
‘A lazy, fat-headed singer lards a song with emotion, signals what she is supposed to be feeling. The tremolo is a villain. In a song with great depth of feeling, when the voice is allowed to become romantic, you tell the audience that you feel, but you do not convince them of the reason for that feeling: they do not, therefore, believe you. Or a suffering quality appears which is tedious. Whatever you are feeling, work against it—that pull of contradiction entices the listener. When you find yourself about to weep in life, you try not to! So you must in song. Also, tears clog the voice.’
Bella disliked tears very much. She would rather scream than cry. She watched Gentry walk around the stage, unburdening himself of ideas and principles as if his life depended on it, on their understanding him. ‘It is the same as pushing. One pushes at the audience, blasts them with noise and energy, but when the listener feels these emotions being pushed at him he steps back, because exhibited reaction makes people recoil. In real life when someone is over-anxious to tell you something you are irritated and want to get away.’
And that was true, Bella thought.
‘In comedy as well,’ Gentry continued, ‘a song which is witty and extravagant is not made funny by telling the audience with a wink and a nudge and an eye-roll that it is funny. Humour comes from necessity, from the belief of the singers in what they are singing. If we tinge this with smug understanding of why it is funny, the gag does not work. You must come down to the simplicity and logic of those words—as in I Can’t Do the Sum, where the important thing is the attempt to solve those impossible puzzles.’
That was how it was when the song was working; Bella shivered because she could see that he was exactly right. When her bit in the hotel sketch worked best, it was because she was trying to help, not trying to be funny. You could see the force of it in Victor’s act, how his absurdly concentrated discipline drew people in with him. Aurora simply listened, chicken roll in hand—how could she forget to eat? Bella wondered.
The practice pianist arrived, a tidy, nun-like man who seemed out of place in Butte, and in the theatre. He opened the sides that Gentry had left on the piano and played it through for them, the mountainside tune going up and down. When he added embellishments the next time through, Gentry spoke quietly to him, and he returned to the plainest rendering possible, barely an accompaniment at all. Bella watched Clover finger the notes on an imaginary violin.
Aurora tried the words under her breath, as if to see how they would wind through the highlands. ‘And I shall hear, tho’ soft you tread above me, And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be … For you will kneel and tell me that you love me …’ and then down again into peaceful sleep.
Then she stood and went to the piano and sang it for Gentry, once through.
Bella was both sad and satisfied to see that he wept without shame.
And Say an Ave There for Me
Gentry stood in the open door of the Hippodrome—how had he embroiled himself in this, after all? A loving glance from Flora’s brown velvet eyes, long ago, perhaps that had been it. However extravagant in other ways, a manager could never afford affection.
Before driving back to the train station, Gentry visited the Hippodrome manager’s office and corrected the Drawbank–Parthenon company pay schedule to read, Belle Auroras, sister act: $100 per week.
ACT TWO
5.
A Change of Management
MARCH-MAY 1912
The Babcock, Billings
The People’s Hippodrome, Butte
The Parthenon, Helena
There is no keener psychologist than a vaudeville manager. Not only does he present the best of everything that can be shown upon a stage, but he so arranges the heterogeneous elements that they combine to form a unified whole.
BRETT PAGE, WRITING FOR VAUDEVILLE
When Aurora opened their pay envelope that Saturday night, she sent the placard boy straight to the telegraph office with a message to Mama in Helena: ONE HUNDRED PER STOP
GENTRY PRINCE STOP QUIT JOB STOP WILL SEND MONEY. In the ten-word reply, which Aurora had sensibly paid for, Mama answered: WILL QUIT TOMORROW STOP NEW WAISTS STOCKINGS BUTTE STOP THOUSAND PER NEXT.
New clothes would be tomorrow’s task. Tonight’s was supper. The girls had been managing on bread and milk both morning and evening, their only meal at noon (usually beans), to make their few dollars last till payday. Now they ordered a magnificent supper at the Palace Hotel, roast chicken and ice cream, such a blowout that Bella feared her skirt might not do up next day.
Mama felt she must stay out her notice at the Pioneer, and so missed their week in Billings. They played the Babcock, which had replaced the burned-down Opera House: it was plain brick, elevated only by columns with floral carving, and already dingy on the inside. But with their newfound wealth they stayed in a lovely hotel, and their superior room had two beds. At first they argued over whose turn it was for the single, but after one night each alone, Clover and Bella let Aurora have the narrower bed in lonely state, and slept tangled up together as usual.
The Babcock playbill remained the same, but for Victor, who had a month booked with Sullivan–Considine, and was travelling from Spokane down to San Francisco. He was replaced by Zeno the Human Calculator, a silent man sunk in apathy save when he stood onstage and dazzled the crowd by naming the day of the week in response to their shouts of birthdates from various years over the last century. It was a very dull show compared to Victor’s extravagant glory. Clover retired into herself again, but lived in expectation of the letters Victor had promised faithfully to send; he had left her with such reassurance of his affection that she was not troubled. It was the vaudeville life to be separated, and vaudeville people did not repine.
Bella lived in a state of dread because of the Tussler. The bruise on her cheek faded from purple, to brown, to yellow. Aurora and Clover quietly helped to conceal the damage. The Tussler grinned when he could catch Bella’s eye, happy to see her worried.
The reunion with Mama in Butte, the week after, coincided with their third real payday. At the dressing table Aurora opened their packet almost fearfully, imagining that Gentry had changed his mind without telling them, but there it was again, a short stack: ten blessed ten-dollar bills.
They were together again, and in the money.
Past Life
When the company returned to Helena in late March, the snow was gone, and so was Gentry Fox. On the train, Flora described her visit to his dingy rooms: ‘Only feature, a dreadful shame, to be cast on the charity of a relation—he has so much pride! And so much to be proud of, but all in the past now, poor man.’
Flora was keyed up almost to giddiness with the overwhelming relief of their raise in pay, which over the last month had made every difference to their lives. She had been able to purchase silk taffeta to make plaid sashes that swooped over their shoulders and down their white skirts, and had added a graceful swinging reel for the girls too, of which she knew Gentry would have approved. Danny Boy made her boo-hoo every time, tears seeping through her fingers, even if her girls only sighed at her.
The first rains of spring had muddied Helena’s streets and sent occasional sprinkles like sneezes chasing them from street to street as they hurried from the train station to the Parthenon on Sunday afternoon—they’d been told to attend at the theatre for a company meeting on first return. Flora had spent the whole train journey from Butte in gossiping conjecture with Sybil as to what the news might be. It was whispered that Drawbank was out of the picture too, along with Gentry.
At the theatre a Pierce-Arrow car gleamed under the portico, which sported a glittering new white-lettered PARTHENON sign. Inside, Flora felt a pleasant hum of change—apparent immediately in the immaculate polished brass and spotless lobby floor.
The girls stepped lightly down the incline of the aisle, as Flora strained her eyes here and there, gathering clues to the mystery of what might happen next. The company sat assembled in the first rows, murmuring as if repeating rhubarb, rhubarb to each other the way theatre crowds are told to do. A new Diamond Dye olio drop was down in two, with a view of mountain ranges; the stage looked freshly painted.
As Flora seated herself beside her girls, there was a disturbance behind them. The assembled heads turned. Julius frankly gawped, rotating his huge upper body and poking a vast finger at Sybil: ‘Mayhew!’ he hissed, far too loudly.
Mr. Fitzjohn Mayhew, that well-known impresario, fresh from the East, from haunts of Keith and Albee, made his way down the aisle with the backward-leaning gait the incline forced.
Flora exclaimed softly. She’d missed his visit to the roadhouse, of course, but had heard various versions of that evening from the girls and Sybil and Julius. This was lucky—Mayhew was known to her of old. He’d been a dashing fellow in the ’80s, although not at that time in a position of any importance, merely an assistant to Mr. Beckwith, the manager of the Rialto in Chicago. She and Sybil had been friendly with him again at Proctor’s Criterion in ’87. Flora felt a tickle of pleasure at the sight of his face: older, of course, and with that distinguished streak of grey now, but still handsome. He had liked her very well in the old days.
She gave him a sparkling smile of pleased recognition. Knowing him would help her daughters now—which just showed how foolish Arthur’s fears had been, that her past life might taint their prospects.
A Showman
Clover turned to see Mr. Mayhew, as Aurora had turned too, tilting her hat and chin carefully to the angle that made her neck’s ivory column very long. Clover set herself back slightly, to serve as a dark foil to her bright sister.
Mayhew was nicely turned out again today, Clover saw; nothing but the best in men’s suiting. As he ascended the moveable steps to the stage and turned to survey the company, she watched Aurora give him a welcoming, acknowledging, second-degree-of-warmth smile, which he returned with a nod, oddly shy for an instant. Aurora had made a good start with him at the roadhouse; maybe they were safe after all.
Regaining his showman’s poise, Mayhew stood cocksure on the forestage, chest proud and knees locked backwards in a kind of strut. His vicuña coat was magnificent. The company clustered in the front rows sat rapt, as if at a performance, Clover thought: a tableau vivante—assumption of the throne by the new king.
‘The Ackerman–Harris Company will not maintain a theatre that is not paying its way,’ Mayhew announced, a trumpet voluntary kind of opener. His hat this morning was a tan fedora, brand new or immaculately brushed. ‘Well, they can’t! I’ve been asked to sweep in, a new broom, and I can tell you now, I’ve done the job in spades. As of today, Mr. Drawbank’s services are surplus-to-requirement at this establishment.’
None of the assembled artistes had liked Drawbank, but there was general silence all the same. Houses had never been more than half full at the Parthenon—Clover had not understood till they went to Butte how sparse the audiences here in Helena had been—but things could not have been that bad?
Julius Foster Konigsburg stood and raised the question they all feared to ask: ‘And what, my dear Maestro, has become of Gentry Fox, our long-time comrade and the artistic vision behind this fanfaronade?’
‘Well, he’s gone too,’ Mayhew said. ‘But not with any stain on his noble escutcheon, as you might say, Mr. Foster.’
Julius shuddered visibly.
‘Recall that Mr. Fox was well along in years—in fact it was he who wrote to Mrs. Ackerman suggesting she have a second look at the books here—no tinge of criminal suspicion, but merely to ascertain whether full benefit of box office was being rendered.’
Satisfied, or at least muzzled, Julius settled himself again beside Sybil.
Mayhew gathered himself into a nobler pose and deepened his voice. ‘In fact, at this time I’d like to pay a tribute to our pal Mr. Gentry Fox, late of this theatre, who has gone to what we all know is bound to be a rewarding retirement off the boards, down Montreal way. A legend in modern vaudeville, who sounded the depths and the
rarefied air above the clouds of theatredom; the general of many battles, often in an army of one. As they say of the great ones, he cried for the griefs of others—for himself he chuckled. A great man of the theatre, and of the world!’
And that was all the fare-thee-well Gentry got: gone and only semi-besmirched. Clover felt a stab of pity, or perhaps anger.
Turning to practicalities, Mayhew expatiated on the seismic changes to come, growing particularly lively on the subject of the Press, and of Advertising, the Key to Success in Modern Polite Vaudeville. He dropped tantalizing hints about publicity stunts and gimmicks, and urged the company to greater efforts. ‘Don’t tell me that you killed at the Palace—do it here! I’ll tell you this for free: the audience is never wrong. If a performer fails to get across, it’s the material or the manner of presentation—don’t let me hear you blaming the rubes for not getting something. This is a discriminating audience here in Helena and in all our theatres, and we play to them and respect them.’
Which Gentry never had, Clover thought. He was a dreadful snob and elitist, but it was deeply kind of him to leave their pay increase on the books—for Mayhew to assume, it turned out. They had better be worthy of their hire.
Mayhew stepped down from rhetoric and into details: ‘First off, we’ll be papering the house for the next two weeks. No more playing to empty seats. We’ll take advantage of the community friendliness here, oil the water and find you some good audiences.’
New acts would be arriving to fill out the bill that Gentry had gradually reduced. Mayhew extolled their magnificence in such a naive, hucksterish way that after a little while Clover gave up listening. Maintaining an outward appearance of attention, she secretly pictured the back of Victor’s head, the tender hollow between two tendons at his neck.
The Little Shadows Page 19
