Bella came from the kitchen, where she had been bundling dirty dishes quietly into the oven. She had tied a bib apron over her nightgown, and her feet were crammed into Clover’s other shoes. ‘Julius!’ she cried, giving him a warm embrace; she turned to Sybil, but stopped in time.
‘We are here to see Flora, if you please,’ Sybil said, frost sharp in her voice and face.
The girls fell back and Clover showed their guests into the parlour. There they all stood awkwardly. The Murphy bed’s rise had left the room disordered. Clover flicked the carpet into place and adjusted the armchair and the small table by the window. She opened the drapes to let in pale autumn sun.
Nobody spoke; there was only the wheeze of Julius breathing.
Then Mama was at the door, her hair tidied, girdle snug and everything dainty about her, as if she’d never had a bad night in her life. ‘Dear Syb! And Julius,’ she cried, her hands outstretched as she came forward. ‘Here you are in cold old Edmonton, what a pleasure!’
Sybil tittered. ‘Yes, here we are, back again like a bad penny. Two bad pennies!’ Clover saw her eyes dart over Mama, taking in the new lace-point collar, the dove kid slippers peeping out under the silk morning-gown wrapper—noting, no doubt, the undeniable air of prosperity. ‘We thought you would find it a pleasure,’ Sybil said. The splotches of colour on her cheeks worried Clover.
Julius shambled to the single armchair and settled his bulk. One eyebrow waggled. Enjoying himself, Clover thought, the old scallywag. She sent Bella for more chairs.
‘Got your address from Teddy Vickers at the Muse. We ourselves are staying at Mrs. Springer’s, where the food is very decent—very. Performing later this week, Professor Konigsburg’s Ventri-lectricity—at the Princess, south of the river …’ He subsided, at a glance from Sybil.
‘They’ll know where the Princess is, Julius,’ she said, with the sweetest of trills. ‘Even though they theirselves are at the up-tone Muse, above our touch. Took us this long to get to Edmonton, to find a theatre that would book us here, but we made it.’
Bella came back, dressed, with two wooden chairs from the kitchen. She set them carefully for the ladies, but Sybil would not sit, so neither could Mama. Clover, queasy from the excess of ire in the room, saw that Sybil’s eyes showed white all round the pupils.
There was a silence.
‘When we left Helena so abruptly—’ Mama began, but Sybil would not let her finish.
‘Swanning it pretty well up here, are you? Cats that swallowed the cream?’
Mama turned her head in distaste.
‘Oh, is that too coarse for you? Too materialistic for your fine sensibility?’
‘You—I don’t know what you mean,’ Mama said. ‘I’m sorry if you—’
‘Hist!’ Sybil said sharply. ‘None of that! We need no apology from you!’
Julius turned from the window, pulling his chair beneath him without troubling to lift its feet. It set up a painful screech in the suddenly silent room. ‘Sybil, my dear,’ he said, mild as milk. ‘Can it be you harbour some rancour towards our dear Flora?’
Sybil pounced on that: ‘Oh, can it be? But how should I rancourize? You and I left high and dry without a gig and without a pay packet—Mayhew having come to Jay cap in hand that very afternoon, to ask for the loan of a hundred to tide him over to meet payroll! Fifty dollars he got off him! And if Jay had had more in pocket, we’d have been out all that as well, sure as shooting.’
Mama put out her hand towards Sybil, who leaped back as if the hand were a hot poker. ‘Oh no! Don’t you come the friendly with me now. Never a word we had from you, nor from Fitz Mayhew, not that I’d have expected it from him—and Jay ought to have known better—we’ve had enough words over that, thank you very much. But no word of warning that everything was done up! How much would that have cost you?’
Mama sat down quickly on the kitchen chair, as if her knees were not obeying her.
Bella had crept forward to Clover’s elbow and now tugged very slightly on her sleeve, making bulgy eyes to pull her out of this. Clover was grateful—she knew Bella herself could stand the music and if there was to be a fight would not want to miss the fireworks, but Clover was likely to faint if she was too close to the action.
‘I’d like to know how you could betray me so,’ Sybil continued as the girls edged away. ‘That had been your friend from olden days and forward, and would have gone to the ends of the earth for you—left with egg all over my face!’
The girls had reached the doorway; Clover halted there, feeling cowardly to leave Mama alone. But Mama was rising to the attack, cheeks flushed and eyes bright as if she’d been dancing.
‘I thought it was you who had your finger on all the pulses, always up to snuff, queen of the prying noses—knew anything there was to know, long before we knew it, Sybil Sly.’
Julius leaned back in his chair, applauding this rejoinder. ‘One to the solar plexus!’
Now Mama turned on Julius: ‘You introduced my daughters to Fitz Mayhew in the first place, as I recall it, you old Pander.’
Sybil milled back in. ‘So we did, as a favour, and look what good it’s done her! And you!’
‘If you call it good, for her to be tied to an old goat more than twice her age. Whom you now—when it suits your story—call unscrupulous.’
In the doorway Clover clung to Bella. Thank God, she thought, Mayhew is not here to add to this. Mama waved a hand at the girls, ordering them from the room. But Clover stayed rooted to the spot, as Sybil, towering to her full five feet, jabbed her jaw forward furiously. ‘I don’t say he’s unscrupulous—I say he’s a damned cheat, and I’ll be damned if we’ll ever work with him again!’
Julius hummed, his demon tickled by this excitement. ‘Well, now, my dear Syb, where would we be in vaudeville if we refused to work with cheats and whores!’
Mama turned on him in a fury. ‘And who are you calling a whore?’
There was a moment of silence in the room. But Julius never backed away from a fence. ‘I suppose, dear lady, that I was referring to your eldest daughter.’
Mama stared at him, her eyes dark caves, her mouth fallen off its usual line.
Sybil cracked a sudden laugh. ‘You’d rather he was talking of you?’
‘That’s enough!’ Mama dashed her hand across her eyes to clear them and advanced on Sybil, step by step. Her wrapper had come untied, Clover saw, and the slip underneath drooped, revealing her slackened chest. ‘After what you did to me! Such a good friend in those olden days—you made trouble between me and Arthur that nearly dished me, talking to Chum as if I was no better than a trollop.’
Sybil sobbed. ‘I never meant to,’ she said, ‘I never meant it.’
‘Well, you ought to have meant not to! You were jealous as a cat, and you are still, and you near as nothing ruined my life.’
Sybil gave a bleat of anguish and fell to her knees.
‘Do you know how hard that was to fight against?’ Mama demanded. ‘He never truly believed me again—his whole life—’ She looked at Clover and Bella, seeming to see them there for the first time. Her voice cracked and her fists flew through her hair, disarranging it.
‘Girls, out!’ She pointed to the apartment door. ‘Go to Aurora.’
They ran.
Outside in the stair-hall, Bella and Clover stood shivering, almost laughing, unable to climb the flights to Aurora and Mayhew’s suite. Bella rang the button, but the elevator banged and clanged down in the basement region.
‘Whore!’ Bella said, behind her hand, her eyes bright and scared.
Clover put her arm around Bella. ‘Oh, fish! Any girl in vaudeville might be called that. Even in the legitimate, to some people’s mind.’
‘I thought he liked us!’
‘Think of Mr. Tweedie in Paddockwood,’ Clover said. ‘Everybody had him over to supper and felt so sorry for him because he was a bachelor and a sidesman. But nobody talked to Lily Bain or even let her come to church.’
‘Well, but Lily Bain went with all the men.’
‘Why should that make a difference? All the men went with her!’
‘She looked like a scrag-end of mutton.’
‘And Mr. Tweedie an old goat, they were well-suited that way.’
Bella laughed. ‘All those scrawny goat-kid children!’
‘I don’t see why when a woman does that, she’s a whore. When a man does it, there’s no bad name to call him.’
The elevator came trundling up at last.
The apartment door behind them opened and Julius slid out, then shut the door again on a confused babble of women’s voices. ‘I’ve a mind to see Mayhew,’ he said, with a bob of his massy head. ‘And Miss Aurora—the virtue of whom has never been impugned, to my knowledge. Regrets! My devilish tongue cannot resist a quarrel.’
So Clover held the gate open, and let Julius ride up with them.
Charlatan
On the fifth floor Aurora was in perfect order, her rooms fresh as iced water after the overheated atmosphere downstairs. Bella and Clover vanished into the kitchenette, in fits of horrified laughter after attempting to convey the situation.
Aurora made a polite effort to entertain Julius—with whom she’d never had a cordial friendship, his heart having been given to Clover. She had noticed it often: people picked one or another sister to like, not understanding how closely they were twined. There was no point in his partisanship for Clover, because Clover herself was hopelessly partisan for Aurora and Bella, and they for her.
She sought for some subject that might interest him. ‘We had a delightful dinner with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle last summer, perhaps you have met him on your travels? I know he is fond of vaudeville.’
Julius gave a snort of mingled derision and amusement. ‘Phoo! A charlatan, I believe. Authors always are. But I confess, I enjoy the humbuggery of his stories. A fascinating instance of Art surpassing the frail human who creates it—who is the conduit for it, more like.’
Since that had been Aurora’s own estimate of Conan Doyle, she could not help laughing. ‘It was only a month before war was declared, yet all he could talk of was those uppity suffragettes and his moony wife. He is a champion storyteller, though.’
The girls came in with a tea tray, and Aurora sighed as she saw that Clover was thoughtfully carrying Fitz’s good whiskey by its neck.
Some time later, when Julius had succumbed to the whiskey and lay snoring in a corner of the upholstered sofa, Mama brought Sybil up to see Aurora’s flat and all her nice things. They had made up, by the mysterious alchemy of long knowledge of each other. Aurora marvelled at the cozy way the ladies walked arm-in-arm through the suite, conferring over the latest rising salaries in the big-time.
Sybil spoke with earnest emphasis: ‘Tanguay gets $3,500 a week. Miss Barrymore asks $3,000—but vaude is on the up. The trick,’ she said, flicking a jaundiced eye over the slumbering form on the sofa, ‘is making sure Julius doesn’t give up. Which he will do, he’s such a one for losing heart. Only sixty-three, but you’d never know it; he’s got a decade to go before he really can’t be hired, if I play his cards right and keep him off the roller skates.’
Papa would have been forty-five this year, Aurora calculated. Ten years younger than Fitz. Sybil bent over Julius, stroking his shoulder to waken him, and for a moment Aurora saw herself standing there. Blonde curls, black smudged around starting eyes, elderly husband.
Aurora promised herself that she would not let her eyes goggle like Sybil’s. But the husband was undeniable.
The door opened. As if conjured by her thoughts, Fitz Mayhew strode in with a bundle of shirts, spiced meat from the Hungarian butcher, and an armful of gold chrysanthemums. ‘Aurora! The car is waiting! You’ll miss your call!’ he shouted—then halted, seeing the array of women in front of him, and the bulk of Julius sleeping in the distance.
‘My dear, you ought to have warned me, and I’d have brought more whiskey,’ Mayhew said.
‘Yes, and you’ll need it,’ Sybil said darkly. She prodded Julius. ‘Jay! Jay! Here’s Fitzjohn back. Tell him what you want.’
‘I’ve no room at all on the bill,’ Mayhew said, but he had a laugh in his eyes. He was entirely on the ball, as always, and Aurora found herself enjoying the scene, which had taken her some time to piece together. She wondered how much Mayhew owed Julius.
Not Brought Up to It
Excusing themselves on the grounds of their early call, Mama took Clover and Bella down to dress for the theatre. ‘Can you feature it?’ Mama said, as the elevator clanked down grinding its chain. ‘What was Julius about to let her get into that state?’ She polished her wedding ring on a lifted bit of skirt. ‘He ought never to have lent Mayhew that money, but it’s hardly our funeral—she was unreasonable, distrait even, during our little tête-à-tête.’ (Clover could not help a gasp of laughter whenever Mama trotted out her French.) ‘And Julius—that word.’ She scrubbed at the ring, staring out into the bright brass cage that fell so slow. ‘Can you feature?’
Must be close to the truth, or she would not be so distrait herself, Clover thought. She must have come pretty near it in Paddockwood, towards the end. Where is the line between being a weak, sweet, affectionate widow when the grocer comes for his bill, and being Lily Bain? A heavy clunk, and the cage opened, and they were set free.
Sham Friends
After the show Mayhew hosted a late dinner at the Shasta Grill, near the Pantages. Aurora hated going there; it always made Mayhew ill-tempered to see the Pantages Theatre’s opulent appointments, compared to the little Muse.
As they drove through the rainy streets, Mayhew listed the evening’s guests for Aurora: he had invited several vaudeville managers, including C.P. Walker, a Winnipegger who had taken over W.B. Sherman’s enterprises in June (Sherman retreating to Calgary with his tail between his legs). Walker wanted to discuss continued rumours of Sullivan & Considine’s demise, which would hurt them all; Mayhew discounted S&C, but had other fish to fry. He’d invited Mr. Penstenny too, the Muse’s main investor. Mr. Penstenny’s real estate wangling (he’d made a sudden fortune by being third in line when the Hudson’s Bay Company sold off their lands) had financed the Muse. Penstenny was a stout ex-grocer with darting eyes and a pouted-out mouth, exuding stockyard breath. Aurora found him physically repellent, but always made an effort to hide that, out of courtesy as well as practicality. Penstenny now had a mortgage on his office block, and she did feel sorry for him.
The Pierce-Arrow whisked them along Jasper to the Shasta, where the party settled at a large table and began, as always, with champagne. Like that night at the roadhouse, Aurora thought, feeling unaccountably tired of popping corks.
Walker arrived with Charles Gill, manager of the Pantages. Both substantial men, but Walker the sharper-eyed of the two. Mayhew put Aurora between them, and she set about her work, to fascinate the new man, Walker, and jolly the dyspeptic Gill. Mayhew would manage Penstenny.
Aurora was surprised to find Sybil and Julius present. Mayhew must be feeling guilty, she supposed at first. But then she saw that he was using them as puppets, to talk to Walker and Gill. ‘This city is on the verge of greatness,’ Mayhew was telling Julius. ‘Real estate speculation men have surveyed and laid out lots for a city the size of New York!’
Julius said, remembering his lines, ‘Four and a half millions! That’s what those chisellers at the Hudson’s Bay netted when they sold their land.’
‘A good bargain, for that land,’ Mayhew said. ‘Money is tight with the unsettling prospect of war—but it will loosen later, whether or not the war continues.’ Under this, Aurora heard Sybil and Mama reciting a rude verse about the war, cackling at the end of the table.
Julius rode over them. ‘Your house, the Muse—magnificent—full to bursting tonight!’
‘Never better!’ Mayhew lied and smiled with equal breadth. He leaned across to Gill. ‘You may say the Pantages beats us, and for size you surely do, but not for high-class acts
! East & Verrall, as an example: top-draw, top-class, travel all over the continent.’
So—the theatre was successful, land values were secure, nobody need worry about their money. Not looking at Mayhew, Aurora wondered how far in debt he was, and to whom.
The courses kept coming. By 2 a.m. the wine and the warmth had sent Sybil off to sleep beside Julius. A long day for them, Aurora thought, considering they’d been rampaging at Mama’s door at ten that morning. Mama herself was having a grand blowout, and had found a kindred spirit in Mr. Walker of Winnipeg.
‘Sherman had Marie Lloyd here in January,’ she was saying. ‘Now, she needs no publicity stunts!’
‘A little of what you fancy,’ Walker said, agreeing. He winked at Aurora.
Mama flung an arm out in Marie’s dashing style—‘There he is, can’t you see, a-waving his handkerchee!’—and lashed a waiter who had just bent forward, Mayhew having directed him to fill her water glass. The waiter caught the pitcher, but Mama upset the glass as he poured, and icy water flooded the south end of the table. ‘Oopsy-daisy!’ she cried gaily, mopping with her napkin. ‘Fitz! Fitz! Didn’t Ziegfeld have them deliver four hundred bottles of milk for Anna Held? And when the pressmen didn’t get hold of it in time, he sued the dairyman, saying it was sour. Anything to get her in the headlines.’
Walker laughed. Mayhew was turning a cigar under his nose; he snipped it and looked up. ‘That’s the ticket, Aurora, my girl, we’ll have you bathe in milk.’
Aurora saw that Gill was a little scandalized that Mayhew would mention her naked body (or cause it to be imagined, at least) at the dinner table. Walker cast a speculative eye over her, which she caught, and returned with a minutely arched brow.
‘Onstage, Fitz?’ she asked, cool as milk herself.
She let her bare white arms float up in a flash of soap-sudsing, and the men shouted with laughter, that bursting basso shout that had flared up from her father’s card-games in childhood. She loved how it mixed with the smell of cigars and liquor, loved her skill in provoking their big-toned laugh. Walker leaned towards her, his interest caught by the glimpse of wit beneath her polished surface.
The Little Shadows Page 29
