The Little Shadows

by Marina Endicott

  ‘It’s a sad thing to be going down in the world,’ Flora said. ‘Camrose, of all unheard-of places—then the Lyric in Swift Current. A large house, we hear, but still small-time.’

  ‘But Winnipeg,’ Sybil whispered, after another coughing fit. ‘Big-time! Very big!’

  After a period of consultation and debate over which boarding houses to favour along the road, and which to avoid at all costs due to poor food or a history of bugs, it was time to go to the station, a block away. The girls bent to kiss her goodbye.

  Sybil’s eyes were feverish and fearful. She doled out dire warnings, one apiece. ‘Dear Aurora! Destined for great things, my dear,’ she said, with some of her usual fervour. ‘Make sure you’re eating enough for, you can’t be too—And Clover, oh, there’s a lover in your name, isn’t there? You’ve a loving heart, that’s why, but you think you’ll be taken care of, and you end up taking care. Like me and poor old Jay.’ She coughed, waited for breath, coughed. ‘Baby Bella, last never least, the very best of all! What a merry dance you lead them! Such a tussle getting to the top, be extra careful of Mr. Pericles Pentangles, Alexander I don’t think, unless Alexander was Lothario.’

  Flora pushed Sybil’s feet over and sat on the bed. ‘Don’t be pronouncing, Syb, you give the girls fits with your feyness,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, Flora, what yoicks we had!’ Sybil wiped away a sudden tear. ‘It’s you I always talk to in my head. Jay wouldn’t listen anyway! Nobody knows you like I do, nor me like you. Pretty thing I was in the olden days—never a candle to you for brains, but did we have larks!’

  ‘You are smart as a whip and always was,’ Flora said. ‘It’s you got Julius to where he is and kept him up to the mark—you’d have had a starring career of your own if you so chose.’

  ‘Never!’ Sybil was smiling, though, to think of it. The two women held hands for a little, and then Sybil said briskly, as if she’d got her health back all of a sudden, ‘Where’s that Jay? Jay! Come, escort the ladies to the station, they’ll be missing their train. It’s always nicer to go about with a man, I find.’

  She blew them kisses with her fat little hands, each finger covered with spiked and sparkly rings. Tears welling out of her staring eyes, unregarded.

  Snow on the Line

  The train had a great pointed plow in front, a gleaming axe for snow. It seemed to Clover, settling into her seat, that they were a winter family—everything, good and bad, happened to them in snow: Papa dying—before that, Harry dying. Aurora’s wedding, Bella’s tangle with the Tussler. But also their first gig, and Gentry.

  Clover leaned on the window, not sleepy. Victor’s letter, sent with the money, had said that he would try to come to Edmonton: If a way can be devised I will devise it. But now—well, they would meet in Winnipeg, perhaps, where he had two gigs in February. Unless he went to England to enlist.

  Their predicament had knocked the war out of her thinking, but not out of Victor’s. There was a car of soldiers on this train, heading to some camp, not yet overseas. In uniform, though, very boisterous with each other, some already sprawled snoring across the seats. How would Victor the Eccentric fare with men like that? He would win them over, but perhaps not straightaway. Strange never to have seen him in any other circumstances but backstage in vaude. Or the night in the woods, at the roadhouse.

  Emptying her mind of worry, she looked out at the winter landscape. Snow and sky in places indistinguishable because they were almost of one colour: the sky white-ash and the snow blue-ash. Monochrome, except that the blue-grey of the trees held inside it a suspicion of orangey life, ash over embers. A long, curling ostrich-plume of smoke trailed behind the train.

  Three crows hopped from a snow-furred telegraph wire, knocking the snow free from the line and leaving a blank space—she now saw many such breaks in the wire-snow, where birds had been and gone like notes in music sitting on the staff.

  Snow had drifted onto the tracks. The sun shone in a long low line; they would miss band call if the train was held up for long. Ahead, a small army of men in dark clothing, all wearing dark caps, shovelled and gestured while the engine steamed and stamped. The thick glass of the window did not let her hear their shouts. Their clothes were dotted with snow; more snow fell as they worked.

  King of Whiskeys

  Bella thought Camrose was no kind of a town. A little spot on the blank earth, two streets, dirt blown bare of snow. Still, a certain lightness of heart came with being nomads again, rather than stuffy apartment-dwelling citizens. Apartments were for the audience.

  The David Theatre, at the top of the main business street, had a new coat of paint: green, gold and white, garishly delineating medallions of pressed tin that covered walls and ceiling. As they waited for Mr. Bailey to appear, Aurora said it was refreshing to see a theatre with its roof on tight. In this wintry snap the David was as cold as Sybil’s Orpheum, but that would remedy itself when warm bodies filled it to bursting, as East had assured Bella they would. In a moment, a short, carrot-headed man came up the auditorium aisle, eyeing them.

  ‘The Belle Auroras,’ Mama said, in her old grand manner. ‘Here for The Casting Couch.’ She held her hand out, as if she expected him to kiss it; he stared at her blankly. Clover touched Mama’s elbow to restrain her, and Mama shook her off, with some irritation.

  ‘Hello, Mr. Bailey!’ Aurora gave him an ordinary smile, to make up for Mama’s condescension. ‘Very sorry we’ve missed band call—the train was held up by snow. We are here to join Mr. East and Mr. Verrall in the melodrama. I promise you, we are ready.’

  Understanding seeped gradually into Mr. Bailey’s stolid face. ‘Ho!’ he said. ‘Down in the dressing room. Ladies stage left,’ he added, pointing stage right, revealing himself not to be a true man of vaudeville yet; Bella felt pleasantly superior.

  They went through a door into the bare brick-walled backstage—no wonder it was cold—and down the side stairs, Bella in a clattering rush, taking the luxury of being loud, since no one was working above.

  The dressing room was empty, cramped, and hot: a Quebec stove in one corner churning out heat. The comforting sameness of lights and tables and small rooms to make ready in. Mama pulled a chair nearer the stove, sank into it, and shut her eyes.

  ‘Oh my dears, I can’t seem to get warm, since seeing Sybil shivering,’ she said.

  While Aurora unpacked their makeup boxes, Clover ran up again with the purse, to see if the boy had brought their basket-trunk yet. The other baggage had been sent straight to Mrs. Ardmore’s boarding house, where East and Verrall were also putting up.

  Bella called through the wall, ‘East! Verrall! Are you there?’ and received a muted shout in reply; she bustled out to ask when the run-through of the melodrama would be held.

  In the men’s room East was lounging on the dressing table, flat on his back, cutting his fingernails with a jackknife. He looked up. ‘You’re here, are you? Thought you’d mosey along?’

  ‘The train was held up, snow—’

  ‘Oh, there’s always some excuse from women,’ East said. Unfairly, of course, but Bella did not need Verrall to scold East for it. She laughed and demanded to know why they were not going to do the golf sketch at the David.

  ‘Nobody golfs,’ Verrall said. ‘They don’t speak the language.’

  Groaning, East rolled over and sat up. ‘Wouldn’t get a single laugh. Out, wenchling! I disrobe. And take that to your mama.’ His hand whipped out to toss a white paper bag of opera fudge. East always had something sweet about him, it was one way he acquired his lady friends. He did not usually waste it on them, though.

  ‘Sybil’s made her sad, the candy might cheer her up,’ he said, and Bella understood: he was sacrificing his bait for the good of the melodrama. Fair enough.

  Her Beaux Yeux

  Aurora inspected the dressing table, wiping it down so she could lay out, and polished the mirror. Reaching the edge of it she found a picture drawn in pencil on the wall: King of Whiskeys. She laugh
ed, for the first time in a long while. So Jimmy had played here too. He had been so kind, campaigning for them, sending the money. Did it mean he was no longer associated with Eleanor Masefield? She had no one to ask, and had not liked to put such a bald question in her letter of thanks. She opened her dressing-box and took out the silver bracelet he had given her long ago.

  The cast had rehearsed in Edmonton, but when the audition began that evening with the audience in place (breathing, sighing, emanating their anxiety for the innocent Miss Sylvia), Aurora found it different. Perhaps it was the deep golden warmth of the lit stage in darkness, or the costume slowing her movement. She had not worn the peau de soie for rehearsals—its heavy, luxurious skirt, trailing after her as she moved, gave greater gravity to the scene. She was brought to sudden attention by East’s line, which she had heard a thousand times:

  MALVERLEY: (aside) She maddens me! But her beaux yeux will not make me marry her …

  That hissing whisper seemed to ring in her ears, hanging in the empty atmosphere above the stage. If Sybil’s information about the San Francisco wife was true, then the line was true—Mayhew had not married her. The world ran still and cold. She turned, and the turning seemed to take an age.

  SYLVIA: What’s that you say, Mr. Malverley?

  The audience tensed and gasped at her hauteur—

  MALVERLEY: (hastily) I say I long for your sake to marry you! To smooth life’s path, to heal the wounds that fate has dealt you, and your sainted mother.

  SYLVIA: Sir! You deal with me, here, not my mother. Let us leave her out of our—negotiations. I believe I will have a glass of wine, if you will join me?

  —and they were hers from that moment, as she worked to bring about Malverley’s ruin. As she sang the aria for him and drew him in, as she doctored his wine, as the plot worked its tortuous and silly way, she felt herself unfreezing and coming to a fine and useful heat. Use this, she thought, use this.

  The Only Possible

  Verrall watched the nonsensical Casting Couch from the wings, enthralled. Half believing it. Having drugged the wine, Aurora bent to frisk old East—who was as ticklish as the devil and always had to bite his cheek not to giggle as he was searched. Right then, in that ludicrous moment of melodrama, Verrall realized that he must love Aurora. The only woman, ever, the only possible. He saw it very clearly.

  Sad, he told himself, drawing a slow breath. An odd stick of a thing like himself, and too old, besides; and then there was East. You couldn’t abandon a fellow.

  But Aurora, the lovely girl. Everything about her fine and sweet; the vile stinking Mayhew ought to be bullwhipped or worse. Look at her, suffering there—ah, but she had the letter and was reading it, released from bondage, on fire with relief and joy. He found himself overcome, and had to turn aside to blow his nose, quietly but thoroughly, before gathering Flora up to chase her on for her big scene.

  Close-Packed Teeth

  At the end of the first week at Mrs. Ardmore’s, Bella and Clover joined the boarders for midday Sunday dinner in the dining hall. Two long tables filled the room, with not enough leeway between for either set of chairs to be comfortable; patrons on the inside were prisoners till the end of the meal. Twenty boarders at a sit, Mrs. Ardmore boasted. Many of the boarders had returned from church; they all seemed to have been awake for hours, working up an appetite; the noise was terrific as Clover and Bella sidled through to less-desirable inner chairs. East and Verrall were already ensconced, East in a prime window corner, Verrall wedged beside him.

  Aurora had turned over in the bed that morning, not feeling well, and begged to be allowed to sleep, a very rare thing with her. Mama was still dressing. Bella and Clover had waited, tiptoeing around the darkened room, till Clover signed that they ought to go down ahead.

  Now Bella almost wished they had not. A fat man covered in bristles speared his food with his fork, all anyhow, and sawed at it with his knife held awkwardly. Bella looked away. It was snobbish, wanting to eat like civilized people. Mama had been diligent in correcting them, quoting Aunt Queen. Table manners were a social delineator. The woman across the table was picking at something caught in her tooth, which she examined and then ate. Bella resolved never to do that again, although her close-packed teeth were prone to catching celery strings and meat. Clover’s little pearls were spaced apart so she never had any trouble; Aurora’s teeth were perfect. Oh, it was hard to be the homely; the youngest ought always to be the prettiest. Gawky and too buxom—and spots on her skin, now. Although her blue boots were very nice, she herself was hideous and she knew it, and so did the others, however they might try to puff her up.

  Food was handed down the table: massive bowls of mashed potatoes, cabbage salad with cooked dressing, a crock of beans, a platter of bumpy sausages. Food piling into all those mouths. Clover, a surgeon with her knife and fork, reminded Bella of Papa. All around them men and women sat, chewing with their mouths open, knocking ladles onto the floor and putting them straight back into dishes; but Clover polished her teaspoon on her napkin and ate blancmange, calmly accepting everyone—not superior either, just being herself. Bella made a second resolution: to overlook the faults of others.

  Mama came late enough to table that she could not forge a way to the seat Bella had saved. Instead she perched on the piano stool at the head of the table, under Mrs. Ardmore’s elbow, flinching every time the landlady’s wooden spoon banged.

  A clanging came from the front doorbell. Mrs. Ardmore shouted to the back regions, ‘Bridie! Come answer the door! Bridie!’ until a small girl in a gunny-sack apron scuttled out from the kitchen, and opened the door wide, so that a whirl of cold air and snow blew in.

  With it blew a man in a flowing dark greatcoat. He came to the archway and peered round the crowded room, searching for someone, it seemed. He undid his muffler and lifted his hat, revealing the fluffy coxcomb of hair, the thin tender cheek and interested eye of Victor Saborsky, the Eccentric.

  Clover stood straight up, and cried out, ‘Here I am!’

  Victor laughed, and somehow made a straight path through the tables to catch her hands and then her shoulders, to pull her to him. They embraced in the centre of all those people, right out in public. Bella was a bit shocked. When Clover woke to where they were, she stepped back, or would have if there’d been room.

  Mama gave a startling shriek and leaped up herself, wild-eyed in horror, hands clapped to her cheeks. Clover clasped Victor’s hand, saying, ‘Oh, no, Mama—it is quite all right—We—’

  ‘No, no, oh no—just, I have broken a tooth,’ Mama said. She burst into small childish sobs, and Bella went squirming through the crowd to help her.

  The assembled boarders exclaimed, one or two of the rougher boys laughed, and Mrs. Ardmore banged her spoon on the table for order, bellowing that dinner service was over. ‘Supper to be had at six sharp, for those who behave like civilized gentlemen!’

  Victor, whose own teeth were awful, slipped out during the commotion and came back within ten minutes, having searched out and arranged for a dentist to see Mama right away.

  ‘So kind,’ Mama said earnestly to Clover. ‘I see, now, what you love in him.’ But she continued to mourn all afternoon. Even as the dentist (with the very latest in nitrous oxide equipment for pain-free dental excavation) prepared to pull what remained of her tooth, she wept all the harder, until the nitrous took her.

  When she first caught sight of herself in the mirror afterwards, though, Mama’s eyes were quite, quite dry. ‘There goes the last of my beauty,’ she said.

  Bella and Clover clasped her hands. ‘You are always beautiful,’ Bella told her. ‘The most beautiful.’

  ‘We will have a replacement tooth made very soon,’ Aurora promised, but Bella saw how carefully she folded the flap down on the grouch-bag, lighter by another five dollars.

  A Quiet Walk

  Victor had been set on their trail by Julius, whom he had found performing alone at the Orpheum. ‘I am afraid for Sybil,’ Victor tol
d Clover, and the whole company, settled that evening in Mrs. Ardmore’s tiny parlour for a hand or two of cards—East and Verrall having shelled out extra for the privilege of lounging there with guests on Sunday afternoons. ‘Julius scolds her for a lay-about, but she is not shamming, and he knows it—high fever, eyes distressed. She pants.’

  Mama turned aside, shuffling the old playing cards over and over.

  ‘She seemed in a terrible state when we visited her,’ Clover said. ‘Julius had her tight-wrapped in flannel, but the hotel room was not warm enough.’

  ‘No, but it will be the Orpheum’s chill that kills her, you mark,’ East predicted.

  At Mama’s face, Bella begged him to stop—and Verrall suddenly shouted, ‘Don’t be a bloody dolt, East!’

  Everyone was silent.

  Verrall shrugged and sank back to the piano bench, blushing a faint rose. ‘Sybil is—we are all used to arctic air. Takes an iron constitution to tour, and she’s been touring twenty years.’

  They left the subject, no one wishing to think further on Sybil’s illness, since they had no remedy and could not even take over a bottle of spirits to lift hers.

  The wind had dropped, and it was not so cold. Slipping outdoors once Mama became engrossed in Racing Demon, Clover and Victor walked deserted streets under the full moon, by the light of which he regaled her with tales of Galichen the guru, whose philosophy ascribed eerie importance to the moon, and the follies of his own mother, now a full-fledged disciple. ‘Working her way up through the ranks of acolytes as fast as her slim purse will take her,’ Victor said, but with tolerance.

  Clover kept step with Victor’s beautiful flowing gait, and they soon passed out of the town along the empty road, which had blown clear of snow and was sheltered by drifted banks.