‘The key is too high for us,’ Aurora was saying. Mama protested, but Aurora nodded firmly to Caspar, who rustled his paper making a little note, and took it down a few notches to the key of G. ‘But we’ll only do the first third,’ she told him. It was Mayhew who objected this time, so that Aurora had to stop and smile and tell him that perhaps he was a little biased—and that maybe this week, for Clover’s sake, they could begin with a short section and expand as they went along. Bella saw her apologize with her eyes to Clover, who obliged by looking downcast and incompetent. She shuffled her sides and held one upside down, until Aurora walked in front of her again and whispered, ‘Enough, I think!’
The harmony was demanding, and the accompaniment did not match the melody—Aurora and Clover could not catch it till Caspar cleared his throat and sang each part separately for them, which Bella could only be grateful that Gentry Fox did not witness. As she sat waiting for Lakmé to be done, Bella wrote him a letter in her mind:
Dear Gentry Fox,
You were right, we are not singers. But we do what you told us to do and somehow people are fooled. We miss you very much, and thank you, and wish our sister was marrying you, if you were not quite so antique.
Your young friend,
ARABELLA AVERY
What Beauty Awaits
Clover and Victor leaned on the lip of the false front of the theatre. Spring snow fell delicate and whole-flaked around them but none of it stayed on the black tarred roof. It was late in the season for a cloudburst to slink down the mountain driftway from Canada, but the snow was pretty, not threatening. The moon shone through torn clouds, bright as afternoon.
Inside a corner of Victor’s greatcoat Clover was warm, and she loved heights. He had found her watching in the wings after his turn, and had spirited her away up the steel stairs beyond the catwalks, out onto the roof through the trap door which even Bella had not dared to open. He was an adventurer, an explorer. Music from the pictures clanged and banged, so far below that it was like faerie music.
‘This is a night for Galichen, my teacher,’ Victor said. ‘I will take you to see his tall thin house, his all-white garden in the moonlight, and he will see that you are a sliver of moon yourself.’
Clover looked down at the street below, the black footprints of the audience being erased by whiteness. ‘Well, I will have to get there on a moonbeam.’
‘My mother will love you,’ he said. She saw that he was quite serious. She did not speak, did not need to speak. After a pensive moment he added, ‘As long as Gali does …’ and she laughed, having heard about this master or monster of eccentricity who had ensnared Victor’s parents. He lifted her to sit on the parapet. ‘When you are old enough you, ma mie, will be the mother of my children.’
‘Will we have children?’
‘Before, I believed that it was irresponsible to usher infants into a world well-conditioned to cause them pain. But Galichen says: as pain is the human condition, love is its alleviation, and we must train. We endure the pain that visits us in order to be capable of enduring the flashes of sudden joy.’ I now want to have children, because I have met the mother of them. The ridge of his nose stood dark against the light spilling upwards from the lighted Parthenon sign. His skin was too thin, and showed if he was tired or overwrought.
‘You will be a good father.’
‘I will be. Our children will be good children, because they will have found their true parents. Little do you know, children!’ he shouted, his voice falling off the roof and down into the silent street where no one stood or walked any longer. ‘What beauty awaits you! This is your mother!’
Aurora would be waiting for her, she should go, she should go.
‘Do not talk about being married any more,’ Clover said, turning away from the roof’s edge. ‘It makes my chest hurt to think of it. I have to look after Mama.’
A Hundred Jawbreakers
In the second show it happened: the Tussler fell. Bella had stayed in the wings after their turn to watch how the Tusslers’ number went, to see if there was some weak spot she could use—she had been thinking again about gumballs. Nando had shown her how the hollow gumballs squashed when stepped on, so that his father could control exactly how his feet flew out from under him. But jawbreakers were not hollow, they were hard as iron and slippery as hell’s slope, and if she let loose a hundred jawbreakers under the Tussler’s feet he would go down, for sure.
Watching him in the act, though, she gave it up. He hardly set foot on the stage floor, but only ran up and down the twenty-foot set of stairs that was their central prop, carrying chairs and tables, hooking them out of the air as his brother tossed them. And now that she thought about it, a hundred jawbreakers would cost a dollar, and she had no money at all. Which was also infuriating, since she worked as hard as any of the others and never saw a red cent to call her own. She could feel her jaw tighten and the muscles under her eyebrows bunch up, but was making herself shrug and move away when the small thing happened. A small noise, a tink on the floor.
She turned—and saw a shape behind the scaffolding of the Tusslers’ staircase-flat. In the backstage darkness, the shape was half as high as the staircase, and moved like a tall, stiff man. A man nine feet tall. Impossible. It must be a trick of shadow and the footlights.
The staircase shook and rumbled again as the younger Tussler crashed up to the summit, to receive the emptied desk which his brother tossed. In a minute he would toss the desk back and the brother would work the mechanism that turned the staircase into a slide, and the Tussler would slide all the way down for their big finale. He got to the top, and reached out his arms to catch the desk, which was careening through the air towards him—and the stairs went flat.
The Tussler seemed to hang in the air, still reaching up for the desk, before his feet came out awkwardly and his body tried to twist into a hook to grab somewhere, and—all unready, off balance—he crashed backwards onto the flattened stairs and down down down the twenty feet.
After he landed, seconds later, the desk crashed languidly down on top of him. And after that, the top half of the stairs themselves folded over and came cracking and breaking down until they lay in a dreadful heap.
The orchestra was still thumping away; the audience went wild for what they took to be the biggest finish of all. Bella stared at the wreck on the floor, then turned to look through the backstage dusk for the tall man. Nobody to be seen.
Xiang stood at the stairwell beside her father, shorter than him by a foot, and slighter. Their identical eyes gazed past Bella to the rumpus onstage: the older Tussler calling for help as the main curtain rippled shut, stagehands running to lift the wreckage off the under-Tussler. Him at first frighteningly silent, then yelling blue murder with the pain of something—everything—broken.
The Same
Aurora ran up the stairs and out into the auditorium. She should have seen—She had seen, that hideous bruise! She had known perfectly well that Bella was in trouble that evening at the roadhouse, and that the trouble had not gone away. Aurora hated herself. Mercy from the Soubrettes, with no kind of education, looked after poor Patience far better than she had looked after Bella. And now, what, what had Bella done?
She sped up the aisle to the lobby, hardly able to see her way in the after-hours gloom. The theatre had been emptied, the stage cleared, the Tussler hauled away to the hospital—all cacophony had ceased while they were down in the dressing room dealing with poor Bella’s hysterics.
And it might have been worse—what if he had died from the fall?
The door to the upstairs offices was closed, but not locked. She ran up those stairs too, into Mayhew’s office. He was still sitting over ledgers laid out under a green-shaded lamp, but looked up at her step. She could not speak.
‘What is it?’ He came round the desk to catch her hands, which she had held out without knowing it. ‘Sit, sit—’ He looked around the barren office as if a chair for her would materialize. Then he took her to
his desk chair, saying easily, ‘What a dingy place this is! Unfit for you.’ He sat down in the chair himself and pulled her to his knee.
Aurora sat off balance at first, resisting—then caving in. What luxury, to let someone else be in charge. She lay against Mayhew and closed her eyes.
‘Quietly, quietly. We’ll fix it. What is the bother, my dear girl?’
Tense again, she straightened, but did not climb down off his knee.
‘The Tussler—Verrall has just told me that he hit Bella, when we were in Butte—you did not see the bruise she got, the night we met.’
‘The night we met, all I thought of was you,’ Mayhew said.
Aurora shook her head. ‘No, no—that girl, lying in the snow. Because she was so badly hurt I did not let myself think more about Bella. But what if he had—’ Her brain was spinning. What if he had died tonight; what if he had killed Bella that night, or raped her? None of those could be spoken. ‘And ever since she has been plagued by him.’
‘So it’s a timely thing that he has gone.’
‘Bella has made herself ill, crying about it. Bella never cries.’ She could not tell him what she feared: that it was Bella who had pulled the pin from the hinge on the stairs and caused them to crash down. If she had done it, nothing to be gained by saying so.
‘Those two were unreliable, and their equipment ill-maintained,’ Mayhew said. ‘Walter’s been in here giving me a song-and-dance about how he can continue on his own, he’s got a single act, but I’ve told him it’s no go.’ In the circle of Mayhew’s arm Aurora let herself subside. ‘They’ll be gone, and unable to make any more trouble for us, either of them.’
And unable to make a living, Aurora thought. Two gangly boys, no older than herself, as precariously perched in vaudeville. Now off their perch, Arnold hurt and Walter with no partner. But it was their own responsibility to check and recheck their equipment, and she could believe they’d neglected it. Everybody was in the same boat as far as injury went—if you could not work, you would not earn.
And perhaps, perhaps, as Bella had sobbed out to them below-stairs, it had been the Tussler who had hurt the Irish girl; and then good riddance to bad rubbish. Bella would be safe now, this way.
‘All right,’ she said into Mayhew’s ear.
His arm gathered her in more strongly, almost rocking her. She turned her head until she could see up into his face, in the dim green dusk of the office. He was staring at her with a sad intensity.
‘It will be all right,’ she said to him.
After a minute he said, as if afraid to ask, ‘What will?’
‘Us,’ she said. She touched his cheek, his forehead. ‘Don’t be worried. We are the same kind of person,’ she said. He buried his head in her bosom, and she cupped her hand to hold him there.
Hurting Each Other
On Sunday, one of their dark-days, Clover persuaded Mama to invite Victor to tea at the Pioneer. Mayhew was there too, as he always was these days. The landlady, Mrs. Burday, offered the hotel’s fancy parlour for the formal visit. Looking round the hideously refined room, with its lace-edged mantel and skirts on every chair, Clover thought it a fine example of the false ease that money brings. Mayhew had increased their dot to $150 per week, and they were finally able to put something away—now that they had no need to, because Mayhew looked after everything.
But of course they must not relax too much. Out of Aurora’s hearing, Clover and Bella had decided they’d need a stake, in case Mayhew got tired of two sisters tagging along and decided to make Aurora into a single act. And they’d have to look after Mama as well. Bella wanted to work out a sketch bit with East and Verrall, but relying on those two made Clover no more confident. On a secret piece of paper she was figuring what they’d need to set off on their own: at least $200, she thought, to be comfortable for a month, and not very comfortable for another two or three. Even if they started with an engagement elsewhere.
She was too sick with apprehension to enjoy the tea. Mama turned prickly around Victor; and she thought Victor might find Mama’s pretenses abominable. He would see through everything and perhaps, perhaps—Clover shook her head. He would still love her.
But they were arguing already. Mama had started in the moment he arrived, telling Victor how much he must have loved, and would now sadly miss, the Tusslers, since they were so very much like his own act. Victor had bowed, rather than speak, keeping the unspoken pact not to let Mama in on the true tale of the Tussler and Bella.
‘And you must be looking forward to the Melodrama which Mr. Mayhew is proposing! So high-toned and instructive, just the thing to raise our vaudeville above the common run.’
Clover bit the inside of her cheek.
‘But I like the common run,’ Victor said. He pulled a red rubber ball out of his pocket.
‘You are a certified genius and must scorn us mere mortal dancers and singers! But there is good in every type of act,’ Mama said.
‘I could not agree more,’ Victor said, but his voice was flat.
‘We agree, really!’ Mama said, to jolly him. ‘You like the same lovely things we do.’
‘Sometimes I do. Sometimes we agree.’
‘We enjoy a good laugh—like the Tusslers.’
Victor was oddly serious in this little argument. ‘I laughed at them because I was afraid they were hurting each other.’
So Mama became serious as well—or rather, Clover saw, she began playing A Serious Artiste, nodding sagely, invisible spectacles settling upon her nose. ‘Oh yes, I quite agree, Art must educate! That’s what we both believe. It must be understood.’
Victor broke into a quick laugh. ‘How can we presume to understand the mystery of art? It does not ask us to understand it, only to be present.’
‘Well, I consider that Laughter, you know, makes the Message easier to hear!’
The pompous sentimentality of this was apparently too much for Bella. She jumped up from the settee with a small, impatient shriek. ‘There is no message, Mama! Especially not in the Très Belles Bull-Roarers! If the turn is good, it’s good, that’s all—it doesn’t need a moral, or to be interpreted.’
Mama continued her irritating nodding. ‘Oh, dearest child, that’s very true—they understand us, because we’re just ordinary folk, like them.’
‘We are nothing like them,’ Victor said. He lounged against the table, idly winding the red ball through his finger. ‘They are citizens, we are not.’
Like a spectator at tennis, Clover looked to see how Mama would return that serve—since to her citizen, like worthy, meant the despised Aunt Queen, she could not very well class herself as a citizen too. ‘Now, my dear, dear Victor,’ Mama said. ‘You will admit that here in polite vaudeville we are all one happy family, now that certain standards are adhered to from town to town. And that we all get along beautifully, like you and my sweet Clover.’
‘On the contrary, we quarrel often. The better to love.’
‘Well, all I say is, we can move in the first circles of Society; and we work very hard to do the best we can to make the words clear and to show the purity and beauty of our girls. Crystal clear!’
She was almost defiant, and Clover was relieved to see Victor give her a tender glance. ‘Not everything can be clear,’ he said, suddenly kind, speaking to Mama’s confusion. ‘Sometimes I have no idea why I do something! I do it to provoke, to stagger—not to clarify.’
Mayhew raised his head from his paper, reminded. ‘Speaking of stagger—I’ve invited the newspaper critics to lunch at the Placer next week, and I’ll need you girls on hand all togged out.’ He nodded to Aurora, where she sat studying her lines in the window seat. ‘Getting them well-buttered will help with publicizing your melodrama.’
Victor bowed in his direction. ‘Machiavelli in spats.’
Mama commended Mayhew on his initiative, but Clover could see she wasn’t giving up the argument with Victor, who seemed to make her as worried and confused as a small dog with a huge bone. Mama s
tretched out a hand to him, imploring him with great shadowy eyes to yield, to agree, to be at one with her in understanding. But Victor laughed and tossed the ball up into the air, where it became three balls, cascading down and flowing up again. Still, Mama reached out to him again. ‘The girls give people Hope, and that is so important, you know. To Entertain is a great calling, a great service. We send the audience home happy and strengthened, better able to bear their burdens.’
Victor laughed, whistled a twiddly bit of tune, and turned the red balls into a rose, which he handed her with an apologetic bow. ‘No. Not I, at least. I wish to send them home shocked, exhausted, discontented with their lives, and amazed.’
Amazed, yes, always, Clover thought. Even if you can amuse, amaze. Amazement is the best of all, in vaudeville.
6.
Headliners
MAY–JUNE, 1912
The Parthenon, Helena
The Starland, Calgary
The highest salary acts are usually placed last on the bill and are referred to as headliners or features.
FREDERICK LADELLE, HOW TO ENTER VAUDEVILLE
And then the axe fell. They were still eating breakfast the next morning in the Pioneer dining room when Mayhew appeared, wearing his motoring-coat. Aurora could see he was in a taking. His face was a thunderstorm—mouth in a tight line, dark air seeming to swirl around him. He took Aurora’s arm to pull her out on the porch with him, and—an afterthought—tweaked Flora’s shoulder too.
The Little Shadows Page 23
