Bella stayed at the table with Clover, unable to eat. It was frightening to be in the presence of someone so very angry. Papa had rarely given way. From the porch they heard Mayhew’s raised voice, and after a bit, a slight shriek from Flora.
Then Aurora put her head in the dining-room door, and jerked her chin. The girls got up in haste, found her already racing up the stairs, and followed.
‘We’re to be packed in half an hour,’ she told them as they ran. ‘He’s taken all his papers, the accounts, everything, out of the theatre—some intolerable slight that Mrs. Ackerman has dealt him. Mama is finding out more, but they sent me to begin.’
A very dreadful development. Bella felt ready to screech with feverish excitement.
Clover kissed her cheek and whispered, ‘Don’t! It will be all right!’
They’d cleared out their dressing room, as always on a Saturday night, to let the porters clean thoroughly over the dark-days—so all their things were in the room. And they had laundered their smalls last night and hung them by the stove.
Flora came flying up the stairs—then down again to give Mrs. Burday the news that they would be leaving without notice—and came back in a taking of her own, because La Burday had insisted on being paid out for the week, though this was only Monday. Conscious of the clock, Aurora grabbed the grouch-bag from her and went, slick black shoes skating on the drugget, to settle up with Mrs. Burday; as she went she shouted for Clover and Bella to come sit on the lid of the trunk once they had added the gold silk comforter.
Clover let Bella go, and snatched the chance to run three doors down to Mrs. Denham’s boarding house, where others in the Parthenon company had rooms. East opened the door, his own case in hand, and Verrall behind him was clapping his bowler on his head—they were off that morning on a long jump to Portland for their next gig.
‘Victor?’ she asked, out of breath. Yes, he was in—his head appeared over the banister rail. She ran up two steps at a time. ‘Mayhew has told us we are to leave—Aurora says we’re going to Calgary, then Edmonton. He’s had a wire from Mrs. Ackerman that sent him into blind rage.’
Victor stared at her, still not properly awake. His fluffy hair stood up in a rooster’s comb.
‘We’re leaving!’ She stamped her foot. ‘I will never see you again!’ Then she burst into soft weeping and pulled her arm up over her eyes.
‘No, no, no,’ Victor said.
‘Yes, I am telling you!’ Her voice was muted by her sleeve.
‘No, I mean, no, you will not never see me again! We are conjoined! There is no other for us—and we are vaudeville people, used to separation. I am booked for San Francisco next week, but up the coast on Pan-time to Vancouver next month, and then in Edmonton myself. Come in, come in.’
Clover stood inside the door of his bedroom while Victor rummaged through his suitcase to find a booking sheet, then copied it out in his black European hand, 7s crossed with sharp lines, ds made with long rising tails. San Francisco, Eugene, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver—the cities formed under his pen, each with a theatre and a bracket of dates beside it, and then Edmonton, The Empire (June 25–July 11). She had never been to Edmonton. She had never been inside Victor’s bedroom before. His jacket, hanging limp on the cracked closet door, broke her heart. He was wearing a shirt with no collar, grey flannel trousers; his socks were clean as new snow. The room smelled of him, his arm smelled of him. She took the paper.
‘I will see you soon, then,’ she said. She nodded her head and pressed her hands to her cheeks. He put his arms around her again, and then she ran back, before Aurora might notice she was gone.
Within the allotted half-hour they were arrayed on the front porch. Mayhew’s long Pierce-Arrow touring car wheeled up. No train trip for them this time! Bella was thrilled to be travelling by car. Only Clover was unhappy, because she always felt sick in a car, and dreaded Mayhew’s fury. And because there was no happiness in the world. The paper on which Victor had written his dates crackled in her pocket.
The Open Road
‘It’s the lack of vision—that’s what frosts me,’ Mayhew said as they drove away, shouting to Aurora, in the seat of honour beside him. ‘I can handle any kind of slur, but what makes me impatient is abrogant stupidity.’
Did he mean arrant, or arrogant? Ignorant? Aurora closed her eyes and concentrated on the slight tremble of the wind whipping at her hat-feather, even tied under the motoring veil. Mama and Clover sat with Bella between them in the back. Aurora felt she must be grateful they’d not been left behind. Their trunks had been directed to the train station and would meet them in Calgary, which had meant a quick reassembling of overnight things in two hat boxes, now strapped up behind the boot of the Pierce-Arrow.
‘Wait!’ Aurora cried, her hand flashing to the dashboard as if to stop the car. ‘My gown! My new peau de soie, for the melodrama—please, Fitz, please, can we stop?’
The dressmaker lived behind her shop. Although fussed about the unturned hem, she was persuaded to give up the gown when Mayhew signed the bill to the theatre. As they pulled away, she ran after them down the street with a small package, shouting, ‘The sash!’ Bella leaned out the back and grabbed it.
They whirled past the theatre and the train station, and onto the main road rising north out of town, moving just faster than their dust. As the car swayed, the three in the back swayed together, nobody daring to say a word after that last interruption.
‘Mrs. Bloody Ackerman—bloody fool, never been the same since she took the reins, you can’t tell me he actually meant her to take over when he popped—It’s the lack of—’ The wind or the sound of the engine whipped away some of each sentence. Aurora sat looking straight ahead, sometimes nodding. Once she put her gloved hand on Mayhew’s knee, and he took one hand off the wheel and set it over hers.
He had talked himself into an expansive temper again by the time they stopped for the night in Shelby, at a plain-looking place that Mayhew had heard was the best hotel in town. Certainly the sheets were clean and there was a good fire in the parlour, where they sat after supper. Before long, Mayhew excused himself and went out ‘to see about the car.’ They did not see him again until morning, when he was waiting outside the hotel, in the Pierce-Arrow.
Rather than ask him to come in and pay for their room, Aurora paid. She could not help feeling the weight of the grouch-bag lessening. A momentary panic overtook her, to think that they had left the Parthenon. Mama came down the stairs with Bella, the strings of their hat boxes tangled, and Aurora did not wish her to see that she was paying their bill. But it was too late—Mama looked up and caught Aurora’s eyes, and they turned together away from the desk to look out the door at Mayhew.
‘What’s his is yours, soon,’ Mama said. ‘But what’s ours has to do for Clover and Bella too.’
‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ Aurora whispered, stooping to pick up a hat box.
Mayhew sprang out of the car as they went down the steps, to open the doors for them. ‘All aboard for the open road,’ he said, all geniality this morning. He had found a barber: his face was still bright pink from the hot towel and he smelled of bay rum and the spring wind. Aurora took some comfort from his sheer cleanliness, if not his godliness, and did not ask where he had spent the night.
A hundred miles from Shelby up to Lethbridge. In the late afternoon Aurora looked back at Mama, Bella and Clover, cramped in the rear seat—bedraggled and silent, their hair choked with dust, mouths parched—and knew herself to be in the same sad state. Only Mayhew remained spruce.
During the long drive Aurora had kept her face turned to the window, staring at the blank spring landscape, seeing only what she’d got herself into—and her sisters, and Mama. It was all down to Mrs. Ackerman, it seemed to her: if Gentry Fox had not been pushed out, they would have continued to learn from him until they were ready to make the leap to the big-time. Now Fitz was pushed out too, and they were left in mid-air, halfway between their old act and their new.
And (but this was childish) she had been looking forward to the melodrama very much.
Firmament of Beauty
One night in Lethbridge, and they reached Calgary the next afternoon: a broad, wide-open place, with not a tree to be seen, nor a paved street, the riverbanks crowded with tumbledown shacks and garbage dumps. Indians were common in the streets, walking in parties of six or seven with their horses and women. It was a raw city, Clover thought, but had everything laid out as if it one day might be as civilized as Helena, and trolley cars already zipping along the thoroughfares.
She and Bella walked the straight streets while Mama and Aurora fought through sessions with the dressmaker. The Très Belles Aurores would be opening at the Starland in a week. The peasant blouses, casino skirts and Lakmé costumes were a rush job, and much was still to be discussed: ribbon, depth of flounce, and for the Lakmé costumes—perfect!—short hoops like lampshades, worn over tight pantaloons, enchantingly oriental.
Clover had heard talk of a wedding dress, as well, but Aurora had put a stop to that, insisting that she would wear the peau de soie from Helena: an ice-cream vision, needing only to be hemmed. The wedding was set for the Saturday before they opened, to garner the most press possible. Mayhew was busy sweet-talking editors from the eight newspapers; he had himself paged in hotels and restaurants, interrupting with messages of bogus urgency the lavish luncheons he gave. He’d installed the Très Belles Aurores in Mrs. Hillier’s, a small boarding hotel catering to respectable vaudeville, only six streets from the Starland.
The Starland itself was a plain box on 8th Avenue, not near as grand as many of the other theatres, one of a small string with theatres in Winnipeg, Brandon, Calgary and Lethbridge, and on the other side of the line, in St. Paul and Omaha. Although most were moving-picture houses, the Omaha theatre had been running vaude, and management had decided to try it in the Calgary branch. Mayhew arranged, in what seemed like a matter of hours, to helm the effort until the Muse should be ready to open in Edmonton. He seemed to have twenty irons neatly arranged at his fire, Clover thought. Twenty she knew of, probably another dozen he’d kept up his sleeve. He dashed in and out of the theatre, where rehearsals had begun; in the evenings, Mayhew squired the three girls to the other theatres in town to check the competition—never paying for a seat, so successfully had he established himself as an impresario to be given every entrée.
Mama begged off each time, saying that Mayhew’s escort was enough; she was working in secret, Clover knew, on an embroidered wedding veil for Aurora. Between the fire and two gas-lamps, she sat stitching late into the evening, a garden of white-on-white flowers growing under her silver needle. Clover had heard her murmuring a series of wishes, like spells, into the veil as she sewed: that Mayhew would treat Aurora well, that he would be kind to her sisters, that Aurora would be happy, or at least safe and well. Nothing more ambitious. She was careful not to prick her finger, saying blood on the veil would mean a wound or a broken marriage.
The girls wore their best lawn to the fashionable Bijou Theatre. They had carefully dressed their hair, but were overshadowed by the extravagance of dress and coiffure in the audience around them, let alone onstage. Made shy by the noise and crush and sheer number of people, Clover felt they were country mice as they settled into red velvet seats, lights dimming and the chatter finally lessening.
The opener was a comic, Joe Whitehead. His catch-phrase was ‘squeaky good!’ and he used it every other line; Clover whispered to Bella, ‘I miss East and Verrall, and Julius.’
What the Bijou Theatre bill did feature was beautiful girls. Even Aurora was not a candle to them; the Avery girls could barely register in the firmament of beauty there. The Eight Palace Girls, ravishing nymphs in complicated costumes, changed three times during their number—each time into rather less. Each of the eight was equally well shaped; all seemed good-natured. While music played they stood in graceful poses, altering slowly from stance to stance. Like matched ponies at a horse show, Clover thought, and just as tedious.
The Dahlia Sisters closed the first half: two very beautiful, modestly dressed girls who sang, and did not dance at all. They wore pretty gowns, but more, they seemed to glow with good nature and kindness, and Clover wanted to sit through their number again from the beginning.
December–May
Aurora asked Mayhew to take her backstage at intermission, if he was able. He laughed at the notion that anyone would try to keep him out, and they trooped down.
The Dahlia girls were even lovelier, close to. Aurora found she could not look them in the eyes for long, as if she were drinking in too much light. The fair-haired girl’s cheek was flushed with apricot; her eyes were grey or green or blue, pale brows giving an odd impression of vulnerability to her open regard. She seemed unknowable. The dark-haired girl’s sprinkling of tiny freckles could be counted, this close. Her eyes were bright and sad at the same time, perhaps some trick of birth, the lift in the upper lid coming at the exact point for tragedy. Her underlying sorrow gave a sombre quality to their songs.
Thoroughly humbled, Aurora saw that she and her sisters had been mistaken to think themselves anything out of the common run. And she had been lucky to hook Mayhew, it now seemed to her. He was dallying with the fair Dahlia Sister but he kept Aurora in the corner of his eye, and from time to time gave her a warm look.
The orchestra pit door opened, and through it came a creased squirrel-face that was pleasingly familiar: Mendel, the bandleader from the old Empress, with a bundle of music. Aurora remembered how he had tried to help them. It seemed like such a long time ago.
‘Miss—Aurora,’ he said, after the briefest of pauses. Then he added, ‘Looking like a dozen roses—I see vaudeville has been good to you!’
She smiled, too broadly, tickled that he could see the shine on her. ‘You gave us a good steer,’ she said, nodding quickly. ‘We worked with Gentry Fox down there, you know.’ She stopped herself before she said ‘for free.’ No one should know that.
‘I can see you’ve prospered—and your sisters, your mama, all well?’
‘Oh yes! And you are here at the Bijou?’
‘Yes, found I couldn’t stomach Cleveland any longer. There’s plenty of work at theatres in Calgary, and many old pals. Eleanor Masefield’s company is at the Orpheum now, with Jimmy Battle, you’d remember him. Coming along a treat as a hoofer and a juvenile tenor. He’ll branch out from the Masefield troupe one of these days.’
She nodded again. Cast a quick eye to where Mayhew was immersed with Cleveland.
‘Are they touring the same play?’
‘No, The Undertow now—December–May romance kind of thing, turned upside down, you know, because the man is the younger. A tragedy, I believe. He walks into the sea at the end, or maybe it’s the woman who does.’
‘Yes,’ Aurora said, as if she knew all about the play, and the relationship, and the general tendency of the world to pair people who were completely unsuited to each other in the name of various conveniences. She found herself about to weep.
A Cage-Bird
The next night the Belle Auroras attended the Orpheum, though Bella felt tired almost to frailty from rehearsals, and was glad when Clover suggested that they stay at home for a night. But Mayhew had arranged for a box, and would not hear of missing it.
The Orpheum’s melodrama was The Undertow. Bella, who seldom bothered with the printed word, was taken by surprise when the curtain rose on the drawing-room set of the play and Jimmy Battle was discovered sitting at a writing desk. She jumped, and clutched at Aurora’s arm excitedly—then, as quickly, let go and sat abruptly back.
‘What’s to do?’ Mayhew asked.
Eleanor Masefield was making her entrance just then, so Clover gestured towards her and said, ‘We shared a bill with Miss Masefield long ago.’ Which made Mayhew smile indulgently.
Bella did not dare turn her head to look at Aurora. Instead, she watched as Jimmy and Miss Masefield circled each other. It was a tediou
s, hackneyed play, only elevated by the tension that emanated from the thin young man and the wilder, darker woman, who did not look at all old until she chose to do so. Eleanor Masefield—Evaline Burton, in the play—confessed with fitting and beautiful shame that she had lost her heart to him, in a light, drawing-room comedy sort of way, until suddenly her deeper heart was revealed.
EVALINE: And so I—must ask you to leave, Jerry.
JERRY: But, Evaline! Miss Burton! I thought we were having such a ripping time.
EVALINE: Like seabirds, cavorting in the wind! But—
JERRY: But what?
EVALINE: Society—does not like—
JERRY: Is Society to dictate to our hearts?
EVALINE: You are in your first youth, Jerry. I am—in my second.
An uneasy laugh from the audience. Bella heard Clover whisper in Aurora’s ear, ‘Her third, more like.’
But Jimmy’s graceful kindness would not allow them to laugh at Mrs. Masefield. He knelt at her feet, the picture of rational adoration.
JERRY: Ten years means nothing to people in love!
‘Ten!’ Bella said. ‘Try thirty!’ Then she shot a scared glance at Mayhew.
Onstage, Jimmy the Bat knelt again at the actress’s feet and begged her not to consider the world’s judgement, ‘When Love is at stake!’ (‘Good title for a vampire play,’ thought Bella) but marry him instead.
The instant they became engaged, a gentleman entered: her lawyer, come about her father’s will. He shooed off Jimmy the Bat and wormed it out of Miss Masefield that she was planning to marry. They moved to the other end of the room to discuss the papers he had brought for her to sign, and Jimmy, who had been listening at the door, had a dramatic monologue where he spoke to her photograph:
The Little Shadows Page 24
