The Little Shadows

by Marina Endicott

  Her attention was called back when a large curtained easel rolled out, with red-tasseled drawings displayed on it, and—she gave a gasp of pleasure—a beautiful photo of Victor Saborsky. New playbills were distributed among the company as Mayhew sang the praises of Thierry & Thierrette (magic/terp team), The Royal Cingalese Dancers in picturesque national costumes, Victor Saborsky the Eccentric (guaranteed back by audience demand), and the rest of the company, including Julius (listed alone, and praised by Mayhew as Our Celebrated Protean Raconteur, which made Sybil mutter to Flora that she was ‘nobody’s excess baggage’), East & Verrall—and to Clover’s surprise, themselves in a new guise: ‘Les Très Belles Aurores, renowned Paris Casino favourites, a trio of charming prima donnas famous for their personal beauty and their delightful, angelic voices.’

  This was news. Her sisters had come to attention too. What did Mayhew intend? They’d done very well with sentimental ballads, wearing demure dresses and plaids. Casino girls would not wear tartans; they’d require more revealing garments—and what would they sing, Au Claire de La Lune?

  Onstage, Mayhew was winding up to a rousing finish.

  ‘We have to engage in a spirited campaign, boys, and dear ladies. From this day forward, the Parthenon Company is on the move!’

  There was a burst of applause from the performers, and the meeting was over. Clover was impressed, a little against her will, to see how Mayhew had shifted the mood from glum to anticipatory.

  A Dozen Dozen

  Aurora stood with Clover in the lobby waiting for Mama—and saw with some pleasure that they seemed to stand among a dozen dozen pairs of pretty girls, refracted in the repeating gilted mirrors.

  Emerging from the theatre, Mayhew found them there. ‘Today being dark—’ he began, putting his hand on Aurora’s elbow to speak more privately with her, as the rest of the company streamed out into the noontime sun.

  Dark is the wrong word for today, Aurora thought. Light flashed on the marble floor and the glass and rebounded along the mirrors, almost hurting the eyes.

  ‘I mean to say—no shows today, I hope I may treat you girls and your dear mother to lunch—talk about this French Casino angle. The name gave me the idea, you know. When I saw you sing, before.’

  In the bright lobby, Aurora let herself look into Mayhew’s eyes for the first time. Pale blue, with yellowing whites, a bit lost in his large face.

  At the roadhouse he had been smooth, even glossy. In this light she saw that Mayhew was not so dapper, but slightly frayed around the edges. His moustache raggedly trimmed; his nails, which bent over the tips of his fingers, yellow and not quite even. The skin sagged at his eyes and ears. Around the pointed beard, white stubble had formed on his jowls after his morning shave; she saw the cracked edge of a half-healed snick. His hair was like stiff straw. Seeing these things, oddly, made him more real to her.

  He looked searchingly at her own face, his eager heart on display, and she was sorry for him. She smiled, to see him liking her, and understanding leaped between them. So much that he stood taller and breathed in loudly. ‘Well!’ he said, patting his chest, maybe not even conscious of that. She could have laughed at what she did to him, but that would hurt his dignity.

  ‘Well!’ he repeated. ‘Mademoiselle Aurora.’

  Bella clattered into the lobby, Mama behind her. At the sight of Mayhew, Bella stopped short, making Mama stumble.

  Mayhew moved quickly, to help her regain her balance. Aurora liked that in him too, his awareness of other people. ‘Dear Flora,’ he said, clasping her hand and shaking it strongly. ‘Or rather, Mrs. Avery I must call you now! To make your acquaintance again! What joy.’

  ‘So pleasant to see—after too many years—and you not looking a moment older!’

  ‘Nor you, my dear,’ Mayhew said, as he could hardly help doing. ‘I have been arranging with your girls, to carry you all away to luncheon. We’re booked at the Placer, where I have my suite. It is the newest and the best: their atrium lobby is a thing to behold. Come now! The chariot awaits!’

  Hot-house

  Over lunch Mayhew outlined his vision for Les Très Belles: ditch the sentimental ballads, move along to a whole new act—‘the French thing,’ as Mendel had said long ago at the Empress. Starting with familiar folk-songs ‘in demure old-country garb,’ then, after a rural tour through Florian’s Song, a quick change for some Parisienne flounce-skirt dancing—nothing risqué, this was family vaudeville—a pert, uptempo rendition of Plaisir d’Amour; one last change, into spectacular (here Aurora caught the overtone of ‘seductive’) costume for (and this he was proud of) the Flower Duet from Lakmé.

  ‘French as you please,’ he said. ‘Saw it in Boston last fall, it brought down the house. Had to reprise twice! High reach, but voices just like yours,’ nodding to Aurora and Clover.

  Aurora glanced at Bella, who was apparently to be left out of that one, but Bella was finishing her oysters Rockefeller in a philosophical way.

  Mayhew ate in great bites between spates of talk; his lunch was over and done with before theirs, even though he talked the whole time.

  ‘Do you plan to return to New York, dear Fitz?’ Mama asked, no doubt trying to discern the future.

  ‘Vaudeville’s all sewn up out East,’ Mayhew said, shaking his head. ‘But here and in the North there’s opportunity, and I intend to seize it. I’ve got an option pending on a brand-new two-a-day house up in Edmonton. I call it The Muse. There’s a venture in Calgary I’m looking at—fill you in on that later. For now at the Parthenon, we’ll mount a melodrama. I wonder—’ He turned to Aurora and tapped her thoughtfully on the forearm. ‘I wonder if you’ve ever thought of acting? I saw a short play in Chicago as I went through—it strikes me that it might adapt well for you.’

  Aurora still found his partiality for her slightly shocking. But not unreasonable, she supposed; it was the response one worked for, after all. ‘I would love to act,’ she said, smiling for him. Her hand went to her wineglass. She loved champagne, loved being in vaudeville, loved being the object of Mayhew’s attentions. Mama and the girls were happy too, and the lunch was magnificent! Oysters and lamb chops, meringues with hot-house strawberries, every kind of careful service from three hovering waiters. She was so happy. Glorious golden-yellow roses massed in a bank on the table—in April!

  Mayhew touched her arm again, his fingers warm through the voile, then turned and made certain that Mama had had enough, offering to call up more meringue. She demurred, but Bella said she could manage another. Mayhew laughed and gestured to one of the waiters, who vanished and reappeared like an Arabian djinn, a new plate in hand piled high with meringue and fruit and cream.

  ‘These darling girls need fattening up!’ Mayhew said. ‘You’re going to need a new set of photos, new placards—we’ll get cracking on it all right away and aim to introduce the new act in a week or two.’

  The abacus in Aurora’s mind clicked: cloth, lace, new slippers and other necessities.

  ‘An increase in pay, of course,’ he told her solemnly, as if this was a sad consequence, and added to Flora, ‘And in view of the expense of these costumes I’m demanding, we’ll work out an advance, dear madam, that will amply cover your outlay.’ Inwardly, Aurora sighed with relief, and wondered exactly how great an increase. She decided that her role here was to be an innocent girl, and leave it all to Mama.

  And indeed, Mama was claiming Mayhew’s attention, in an effort to draw him out about himself, asking if he had created acts himself in Ziegfeld’s operation. He laughed. ‘Oh ho! You don’t create around Flo! He takes care of the direction—I mined the raw materials. I’ve always had an eye for remarkable talent. Well, didn’t I say, my dear Flora, that you had a gift for enchantment, in those old days at Proctor’s?’

  Her nostalgia appealed to, she gave a great heart-shaped smile, blushing a little in happy confusion. ‘You did, dear Fitz, and I’ve often remembered that over the years,’ she admitted. ‘But the girls don’t need to waltz dow
n memory lane with us!’

  ‘Beauty and grace,’ he said, almost turning serious. ‘That’s what the vaudeville stage can never have enough of. And with a voice and a face like your daughter’s, my dear—well, these girls are going to go far.’

  We Need the Eggs

  Bella thought about Mayhew as she sat on the hotel counter in the wings, waiting for East and Verrall’s sketch during their first show back in the saddle in Helena. She did not mind him, but he had no value for her or Clover except as Aurora’s appendages. And he thought her a child, which she was not.

  The stagehands rolled the counter on and she fluffed her skirt higher. The curtain parted and there she sat, knees jauntily revealed, and here was East, coming on to book a hotel room. Laughter rolled from the audience at the sight of her perched on the counter, and again at East’s admiring double-take. It was much better to be playing to full houses—Mayhew had got that right.

  ‘This is where my wife and I spent our wedding night!’ East told Bella, while they waited for Verrall to answer the ping of the desk bell. ‘Only this time I’ll stay in the bathroom and cry.’

  Her job here was to be dumb-Dora, and look fetching while the audience laughed.

  ‘It is a little difficult to travel these days,’ East said. ‘My wife thinks she’s a chicken.’

  ‘Goodness! You should take her to the hospital!’

  ‘Well, I would,’ East confessed. ‘But we need the eggs.’

  ‘I think it’s mean,’ Bella said, very shocked. ‘Your wife ought to be your soulmate!’

  ‘Well, she was my cell-mate—that’s where we first met, in pokey.’

  ‘How romantic,’ Verrall said, popping up from under the hotel desk as if he were climbing the stairs from the basement—he did that false climb so brilliantly that every time Bella had the urge to check behind her for the trap door.

  ‘You again!’ he said, when his head was high enough to see East. ‘No room till we see the colour of your money! ’

  East looked ashamed. Since he could not pay—and still owed Verrall for his honeymoon visit—East was shanghaied into a job as waiter in the hotel restaurant. The desk spun round and disgorged a café table complete with red-checked cloth, and Julius already seated at the table in a black wig, the only customer, with a full roster of complaints and problems, from the first fly in his soup to the last corn on his toe, set to be stomped on by East’s extra-long boot. More ridiculous nonsense, plates of soup and flying loaves of bread and egg-juggling (by everyone but Bella, who simply could not get the hang of it, try though she had). From time to time Julius’s patently false black toupée would be dislodged by East or Verrall—and set back in place, so delicately that Julius continued in blissful self-satisfaction whether it was backwards, forwards, or drenched in soup.

  She was Julius

  After the intermission, Clover joined Bella, Mama and Sybil at the back of the house to watch Long Chak Sam, a copy-cat Chinese magician Mayhew had booked in for the week before Thierry & Thierrette. Myriad three-named Chinese magicians worked the circuits—this one, at least, was truly Chinese. A silent, unsmiling man, he had a little daughter who spoke no English, but carried a document swearing she was sixteen. It was obvious to anyone with an eye that she was ten or twelve.

  The daughter’s name was Xiang, Bella whispered, and she had discovered the name’s meaning also: cloud. Her own name meaning beautiful, she said in Clover’s ear, under cover of the tinkling Eastern music, was nothing but a joke these days: there were horrible spots popping out on her face and the pudge around her middle had stayed even when there was not enough to eat. She hated herself, she said, but Clover squeezed her hand and told her to be patient, and she would be the most beautiful swan of all of them.

  Clover did not like the magician’s act, in which he swallowed a long length of thread followed by a bristling quiverful of sewing needles. She could feel the needles entering her own mouth and throat, and had to close her eyes. At his command, his daughter-assistant began drawing the long thread from his mouth, and there, suspended at regular intervals, were the needles, all threaded, on it. It made Clover shudder. She did like when he turned a child’s dollhouse on a lazy Susan to reveal a tiny Chinese doll standing in the inside rooms. He twirled the house again, and the doll inside had grown much larger, straining at the rooftop. At the next turn, the doll was Xiang, and she rose through the roof to jump into his arms.

  Julius Foster Konigsburg was up next, by himself, in full Protean mode with his Voices of Kipling medley. He began in a great mysterious cloak with If, using the cloak (wire rigging built into it) to mask his gyrations as he changed costume for each new poem. He ended in a torn and stained Indian army uniform, for Gunga Din; the cloak, dropped, formed a muddy battlefield.

  ‘Ah, this brings back memories,’ Sybil whispered, with a sentimental squeeze of Clover’s hand. ‘Julius used to do Gunga Din regular, you know, he was famous for Kipling.’ She gave a quick quiet laugh. ‘As they say, I don’t know, I’ve never Kippled!—but he only does it now out here in the sticks, because Clifton Crawford has been doing it in Boston and New York and Albee asked Julius to stop. Asked, don’t make me laugh! As if he’d have a choice, when Albee asked!’

  ‘But this isn’t even an Albee theatre!’

  ‘As you say! Except that now, whenever he does the bit, someone is sure to come up and accuse him of copying Crawford, and you know there’s nothing sooner puts poor Jay in a rage than being accused of any kind of stinginess of spirit like imitation.’

  ‘No wonder—it is entirely unfair!’

  Sybil squeezed her arm and cozied a little closer. ‘You’re a dear girl, Clover. We never had a daughter, but if we had had, I’d have liked her to be just like you.’

  Clover was abashed. She could not imagine being Sybil’s daughter.

  Julius had come to the end and shouted the last line, ‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!’—then ripped his uniform away and stood in Gunga Din’s filthy linen wrap and shawl, bandy legs brown and bruised—which worried Clover until she realized it was only his dreadful ochre makeup. Then there was a terrifying blast of artillery fire and a vile puff of smoke, which drifted off into silence to reveal the linen clout, empty on the floor.

  The audience applauded with moderate enthusiasm, but one lady in the front row, in a great black hat with red feathers and a veil, kept clapping wildly, and jumped up crying, ‘Do it again, Sonny, it’s great!’ Her escort tried to quiet her, and the people close by shhed, but she would not be silent. She announced in a forte voice, ‘I paid my money, and if I want to encore an act I’m going to do it.’

  By this time the audience had become interested. Mattie stepped out from behind the proscenium arch and asked the woman not to talk so loud, as she was stopping the show.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she shouted. ‘My money is as good as anyone else’s, and I mean to have that handsome quick-change man on again. He’s the best thing in the show!’

  ‘Behave yourself, madam,’ Mattie warned. ‘Or we will send for the police!’

  With a banshee shriek the woman brangled down into the orchestra pit and took three wild leaps—piano bench, keyboard with a reverberating dischord, piano lid—and then hopped up onto the stage, where she began to wrestle Mattie, bringing whoops and shouts for the manager from the audience.

  She got the poor boy into a headlock, but he wriggled around like a greased pig and managed to tear the hat and veil off the lady—

  And she was Julius.

  ‘If you can’t amuse ’em, amaze ’em,’ Sybil whispered to Clover. Under cover of the renewed applause they slipped out the back.

  Not Pity Alone

  Mayhew, standing to watch at the back of the house, followed the women down to the dressing rooms. He was thinking about girls and women, as he often had in a long life spent in theatres of one kind or another. Sybil, that old warhorse; Flora. Game old girls, a sad life behind each one. But pity was not everything, not anything
much at all. Not pity alone.

  He was not affected by Clover or Bella. It was all Aurora for him: the soft rounding of her chin, the eyes. And the mouth—at odd moments her mouth would look like she’d been hit, and must be shielded. It was the frailty that caught at him. How they were not quite professional, no matter how they twinkled and light-stepped. That was the charm of Les Très Belles Aurores—it would translate especially well if they were foreign waifs. He could make something of them …

  He knocked at the door of their dressing room.

  Aurora had taken down her mass of pale hair and was brushing it out, silk tatters, silk ribbons, dark yellow, paler yellow and gold, black brush sliding through the silk over and over. Smooth-spun floss, curving feathers at the ends. Black velvet ribbon down the back of her neck where the knobs of bone showed too clearly—and yet the softness of the line!

  At first she did not see him; then she did. She did not turn around, but remained at her table, brushing her hair, watching him in the mirror. A self-conscious ploy. Her idiotic youth tore him open. Anxious fingernails bitten to the quick, beneath the pretty net gloves. Her mouth’s betraying softness that no hard expression could control. Her eyelashes were black against the white lids, thickly mascara’d. Yet he had seen her without stage makeup and knew them to be genuinely dark, set delicate as mink paintbrushes in the porcelain eyelids.

  He had not thought like this for so long. He had not thought he ever would again.

  Contagious

  Flora and the girls were invited again, with East and Verrall, Julius and Sybil, to an early dinner on Sunday, a special feast prepared by the Placer chef. Mayhew held forth on the future of vaudeville as they waited for the first course to be served. ‘The Parthenon circuit is going to get a tremendous boom from this new stagehand expense deal in the big-time. Big-time acts will come to us where they can play in decent houses at smaller salaries, but with consecutive bookings and a family atmosphere behind the curtain as well as out front.’