The Little Shadows

by Marina Endicott

  ‘A Cataclysm,’ Julius declared, raising his voice over Sybil’s excited continuous yip-yapping of: ‘Who’d have thought? Who could have imagined?’

  Mama had stayed collapsed in the armchair they’d dragged into the kitchen for her. Julius pressed her hand, begging her not to rise. Bella brought two more chairs from the parlour, Clover set to making more toast, and they had a cozy party in the little kitchen.

  ‘We saw it in the paper!’ Sybil pulled out a cutting: ‘The dull refulgence of the chandeliers, now lying smashed and buried in the rubble of the auditorium … So of course we rushed round to see, and there it is, displastered all to pieces.’

  ‘Don’t, don’t read it,’ Mama begged. ‘I will have another spasm.’

  ‘I took the liberty of bringing liquid refreshment,’ Julius said, with ponderous courtesy. ‘A bottle of sherry, now, brings comfort to the widow and the orphan alike.’

  He pulled three bottles from his coat and set them in the middle of the table with a flourish. People like to be helpful in affliction, Clover thought—our kind of people do. All week small packages and bottles had been brought to their door, from the Novelli Brothers, from Teddy—also thrown out of work by the demise of the Muse, with reason to hate anyone associated with Mayhew. Even from Mr. Penstenny, for whom she felt terribly sorry.

  ‘Not that you are a widow, precisely, dear Aurora,’ Sybil said, receiving a teacup with a bob of thanks to Bella. ‘Although I did hear—but no—oh! Toast! How kind you are, dear Clover.’

  ‘And a free hand with the butter, a rare thing in a woman,’ Julius said. He pulled a chair up to the little table and Bella made room for his plate by moving the cocoa jug.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ Sybil asked.

  The three girls looked at her in some dismay, and Mama burst again into damp sobs.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry to bring it up, I’m sure,’ Sybil said.

  ‘No, no,’ Aurora said. ‘It must be—we do have to—What was it you heard, Sybil?’

  Sybil covered her mouth with her small fat paws.

  Clover said, ‘We do not know just yet what we will do, dear Sybil. But what did you hear?’

  ‘Oh!’ Sybil’s wide mouth came down into a small pursing whistle. But she had the eyes of all and her histrionic heart could not resist. ‘It is only gossip, and I did not like to say, but I understand that he already has a wife, married some years ago, in San Francisco.’

  Aurora could not have been exactly surprised, but Clover felt a hideous downward bend within her chest.

  It was Julius who protested. ‘Syb!’ he shouted. ‘No! Too much. There is not a man alive who does not have a wife down in San Francisco. I do myself! To suggest bigamy as the reason that the rascal has decamped—merely frivolous! He’s a crook, that’s all.’

  He poured himself a glass of whiskey and knocked half of it back.

  ‘Besides, he’d be a fool,’ he added. ‘Greatest beauty in vaudeville, why would he desert la belle Aurore for a previous marital error? Excess baggage, my dear, excess baggage.’

  A Gig from a Pool Hall

  As they sat in limbo, it snowed and snowed and snowed.

  Used to this, the city dug in under a goose-feather blanket. Enough to drive you mad, Bella thought, when you had no work and had to stare at snow the live-long day. The furnace clanked through the building, loud as the elevator; pipes hissed and spat, and Bella discovered that if you whirled the radiator tap unwarily, a powerful stream of water hissed out and soaked your dress and burned your hand.

  She was so glad they were leaving this stupid town. She had had no answer to her letters to Nando, so perhaps the Ninepins had not got to Seattle yet; or perhaps Joe had been thrown out of another gig. Nando ought to have written.

  Glaring out the window, she decided that the real trouble was they did not yet know enough people in vaudeville. The only other person they knew was Jimmy the Bat, and he was in Winnipeg at the Pantages—the theatre where C.P. Walker, who had liked Aurora so well at Mayhew’s last dinner party, was the boss. Bella stared into the bald white field towards the ice-bound river, thinking about Jimmy’s face as he had stood talking to Aurora in the hall of the Calgary theatre. Then she put on her coat and boots.

  Going down the stairs she met East and Verrall coming up, shaking snow from their bowler hats, dank hair sticking up in spikes where they had dashed the snow away.

  ‘You need better hats than that for this horrid winter,’ she said, laughing at them.

  ‘We need to be elsewhere!’ East shouted, and she hushed him, looking back to see if the apartment door would fly open and one of her sisters burst out to stop her going anywhere.

  East and Verrall had leaped straight over to the Pantages, missing only one night’s work after the flood—they were employable anywhere. East could wangle a gig from a pool hall if need be. A funeral hall. She ought to have asked his advice earlier.

  ‘Come along,’ she said to East and Verrall. ‘I’m going to send a cable, and you’d like a walk.’

  ‘We just had a walk,’ East protested, but Verrall patted his (entirely flat) stomach and said he could use the exercise. They went back out into the snow-silenced street.

  Dreadful Frozen City

  Aurora had moved a cot down to the third floor and shoved Bella and Clover’s bed right against the wall to make room. She could not share the Murphy bed with Mama, who was spending longer and longer hours in bed, in a state of sherry-induced stupefaction. Better to be back in the room with her sisters. Everything was tranquil now. And something would come up. If she held to that, she could manage.

  But her bone-china composure broke one night. She woke from her first fitful sleep and lay in the little bed, choked by her nightgown, remembering Mayhew’s hand moving down her side from shoulder to arm, slipping over her flank and down her legs, the bulk of him always behind her. The thousand countless humiliations of lying with him and never being loved, or known, only being of use to him, all mocked and redoubled now by the hopeless absurdity of missing him.

  She broke into painful tears, seeing with eye-pricking clarity that Mayhew was gone for good, was a rascal. Worse: that she had dragged her sisters and Mama into the muck and was wholly responsible for them being stranded in this dreadful frozen city, probably forever, until they were obliged to find work as domestics.

  When Clover, waking, slid into the cot and put her arms around her, she whispered all of that, unable to find the breath to speak out loud.

  ‘No, no,’ Clover said, pulling her fingers gently through Aurora’s hair to comfort her. ‘We are all much better off, even stuck here penniless, than we were in Montana. We ought not to be moving southwards, we need to go East, to where things really matter in vaude. To Chicago, and New York. Come, let me braid your hair for you, and you will sleep better.’

  Aurora clasped her sister’s narrow body close, remembering her wedding night, and how Clover had come to braid her hair. She was the best and kindest of all of them.

  Painted Wings

  The Belle Auroras had been headliners only by Mayhew’s favour. To begin afresh, it was necessary to realize where they stood in the natural order of vaudeville. Not openers, they were too good for that. But they were a quiet act, a simple one, and it seemed to Aurora that simplicity was their strength: charming songs, charmingly sung, no tricksy gimmicks. Their dancing was good, but not of stellar quality; they were nothing at all out of the ordinary as far as looks went.

  As they were debating how to begin again, a letter arrived from Gentry. When Aurora found the envelope in the mail slot she knew his thick-stroked writing. Even as she opened it, she felt a warm glow of returning life. He had learned of their predicament from Julius, and while regretting that he had no money to send them, he had taken the liberty of enclosing a new song he’d laid hands on—perhaps they could make something of it?

  … Ray Hubbell, an associate of mine in olden days, sent it to me for comment—no harm testing it out before Hubbe
ll finds a show to slide it into. Jack Golden stole the poignant story of an abandoned Japanese maiden direct from Puccini: perhaps its delicate fragrance might make up for the slight tinge of irony in its similarity to your own story.

  And if I may take a further liberty, may I remind you, my dear Aurora, that you did very well with the song Danny Boy. Sometimes it is the song that makes the singer.

  Yours aff’ly,

  et cetera,

  GENTRY FOX, ESQ. (RETIRED)

  The song-sheet had been folded into eighths to cram into the envelope. While Aurora scanned the letter, Bella opened the sheet music, and laughed as she read the title: ‘Poor Butterfly!’

  She flapped the music like wings, tap-tapping the sheets against the vilely expensive silk butterfly wings, which had been delivered days before and lay furled against the parlour wall, hooked on the ceiling moulding. Stiff painted silk stretched over bent balsa-wood frames. Mama and Clover exclaimed in pleasure: Mama for joy at not having wasted such a great deal of money, and Clover because the wings themselves were so fragile and lovely, and ought to be used.

  ‘Perhaps we could make of it something that would please,’ Aurora said.

  It was the first good thing in what seemed like a long while.

  They cleared the floor and began to work (missing the expanse of the Muse’s rehearsal hall), testing out ideas that Mama called to them. Sashays, grands battements, arabesques, cramped into the parlour-space: none of it made the scalp tingle or the breath catch, as the good idea will.

  The painted design delighted them when the wings were open. But the Poor Butterfly tune did not work for dancing unless the tempo was jinked up, which bent the song out of true. After a while, Aurora stopped them. ‘If we had a good dance with the wings—maybe Spring Song?—I could do Butterfly afterwards, almost as a playlet. With Bella’s Bumble Bee, we could do a whole insect number. A kimono would be quick to run up in art silk, and I’m sure Clover could paint it to match the wings.’

  Bella was discontent. ‘But why do I still have to be a bee?’

  ‘Because,’ Clover told her, ‘you get the biggest laughs and the biggest hand of all.’

  Clover and Aurora bent and fluttered and bowed, and Bella sang the tweedly Spring Song for all she was worth, but the thing lacked zing. The afternoon darkened into evening, and they still had nothing usable.

  ‘Wear less,’ Mama said. ‘That’s the ticket.’ She snatched off their practice skirts and wrapped a tea towel round Clover’s middle, leaving most of her legs revealed.

  ‘Mama!’ Bella said, but she was laughing—Clover’s legs were spindly and insect-like, quite sweet. Aurora stood in her stockings, considering.

  ‘Longer stockings will be needed,’ Mama said. ‘But it is all God’s creation, no earthly reason not to display such limbs, in the service of transformative dance. You will need more accentuation at the eyes.’ Then, overcome, she went to lie down on Bella and Clover’s bed.

  Thoughtfully, Aurora pulled Bella’s skirt up, up—till most of her darling legs stood revealed. ‘I think she’s right,’ she said. ‘And Bella’s right too. Bella should be the other butterfly, and I’ll turn up alone with the song, afterwards. Ditch the bee, for now. But let’s think of other music for the dance—On Wings of Song might be much better.’

  Bella clapped her hands. ‘Oh yes! Perfect, it is about sisters!’

  The other two stared at her.

  ‘Their lovely sister-flowers—the lotus flowers await thee, their lovely sister-flower!’

  Finally Aurora’s scalp sparkled, and they were off.

  American Dollars

  Four days later a telegram came, addressed to Bella. Clover answered the bell and gave the boy a nickel, and stood looking at the yellow envelope, thinking it must be from Nando. And an envelope in the mail slot too: from Victor. ‘Bella!’ she called, going down the dusky hall to the parlour, where Bella was curled in the armchair, discontentedly reading a three-day-old newspaper holding nothing but war news.

  Aurora and Mama were playing Up-the-River on the Murphy bed. Bella had to edge around it to get to the yellow envelope, but she made good time and flicked it from Clover’s grasp, opened and read it in the blink of an eye—and threw her arms into the air in joy. The Journal went flying, aflutter, pages like grouse lifting. ‘Reprieved!’ she cried. ‘Look, look!’

  Clover took the telegram and read it out to the others:

  ‘WALKER SAYS SPOT PANTAGES WINNIPEG JAN 1 BELL AURORS OPENERS SORRY J BATTLE.’

  Aurora, sank to the bed, saying, ‘Openers again. But thank God!’ She began mumbling numbers: rent for December, food, train fare to Winnipeg.

  Bella read the telegram again to Mama, who began to praise Jimmy Battle as the best boy in vaudeville, how she had known he would never let them down, unlike some, and how you could tell who was solid sterling worth, and so on.

  There was an extra sheet in the envelope, Clover saw as she picked it up. ‘He wired cash as well,’ she said. ‘Forty-seven dollars. Not a round number—perhaps it is all he has.’

  But still not enough for train fare for the four of them. Mama and Bella debated hammer-and-tongs who should be left behind to find her own way to Winnipeg, on foot if necessary.

  While they were quarrelling, Clover opened her letter from Victor, and three American twenty-dollar bills fell out.

  The Casting Couch Redux

  East and Verrall heard the news and proposed that instead of stewing in their own juices, the girls come along with them for two jumps on their way to Regina, at small-time houses in Camrose and Swift Current.

  ‘You’d waste the rent-paid place for the rest of November, yes, but you’d be earning all the way, and refining your new number at the same time,’ Verrall said persuasively.

  ‘And here’s the bonus,’ East said, holding her other arm. ‘We thought we ought—’

  ‘Well, we thight we might,’ Verrall said.

  ‘We think we ink, we thought, ought we not?’ East joggled her arm. ‘Agree! Agree!’

  ‘To what?’ Aurora begged.

  Verrall swatted East to make him stop. ‘Stan Bailey at the David Theatre in Camrose wants a melodrama more than life itself, he’s been shopping everywhere: and we’ve got one in our pocket!’

  ‘The Casting Couch? But we are missing Miss Heatherton for the mother, and—’

  ‘Your sainted mama! She would be magnificent in the role! I itch to see it!’

  Aurora pushed East away and turned to Verrall. ‘You want to re-stage it?’

  ‘Indeed, and we’d work on Stan to engage you for Les Très as well as the melodrama, so it might mean double pay—although at a sadly, even pitifully, low rate …’

  East chimed back in, mournful: ‘Worst pay in the West. He’s legendary.’

  In a flurry of telegrams, Stan Bailey refused to pay full shot but agreed to mount The Casting Couch at $120 for a two-week stint in Camrose, a town southeast of Edmonton—at least in the direction of Winnipeg. Aurora would have taken less to get them to Winnipeg on time and be able to repay Jimmy Battle’s money. And Verrall thought he could also get them onto the bill at the Lyric, in Swift Current (farther south into Saskatchewan, still towards Winnipeg), where he had pull with the management.

  For three days the girls rehearsed the melodrama and worked on the butterfly numbers, in a much better frame of mind and heart. The night before they left, Aurora counted the kitty beside Mama, listing additions and subtractions from the sale of their effects and the cash they’d shelled out for the new number: the purchase of sides for On Wings of Song, kimono silk, and new photographs.

  After two counts, the tally came to $169, not including Jimmy Battle’s $47, which Aurora had sewn into the bottom pocket of her grouch-bag, hoping not to have to spend it. Four train fares to Camrose cost $40.

  One last brangle erupted when Aurora decided she should sell her fur wrap before they left, thinking to get a better price for it in Edmonton than she might in a smaller place.
But Mama, recovered from her earlier vapours, put her Louis-heeled foot down. ‘You must not sell your furs. Nothing succeeds like good clothes, and a fur carries unmistakable glamour.’

  ‘None of you have furs,’ Aurora said.

  ‘You give us all cachet, by wearing yours. It’s a great mistake, economy at the expense of the illusion of success.’

  A dis-illusion, Aurora thought, but she did not say so, and she kept her furs.

  Malingerer

  On the way to the station Flora asked if they might stop to visit Sybil, laid up in the Alberta Hotel with bronchitis, lest it turn to pneumonia, to which she was prone. Verrall had told them that the Orpheum was famous for cold: ‘An ungodly icy stand, where the audience knows to keep their overcoats on. Comes up through the boards as you stand onstage, shivering through your number—good for castanet acts.’

  Sybil’s button eyes shone out of the sheet Julius had wrapped her in, a dwindled mummy within a sarcophagus of flannel. Flora bent to kiss her hot cheek and asked whether they should perhaps crack the window—was she not sweltering in all that cloth?

  ‘Oh no! I like to be toasty warm, you know,’ Sybil said, coughing wretchedly with the effort of being vivacious. ‘A sip—?’

  Flora held the water glass to her lips. Sybil drank, then lay back against her cushions with a fine show of exhausted bravery. ‘So you’re off—and who knows when we shall meet once more?’

  From the doorway, where his bulk would not impede the visit, Julius gave a grunting laugh. ‘In three or four weeks’ time, you malingerer! We are engaged to Regina next, then to Winnipeg ourselves. I doubt these maids of mirth will have had their photographs handed back by then.’