The Little Shadows

by Marina Endicott

  Aurora cracked a laugh and sat up. ‘Verrall, could you take me to the Orpheum this morning? I met Martin once, with Mayhew. At least I can sound him out. I might be able to put it to him—’

  ‘If you are looking for a gig,’ Verrall said, ‘I am your man. Martin asked about your bookings while you was gone to points south! If you care to come along that would be sound management, but we must make a mile because East is already shouting from the door.’

  Indeed they could all hear him, now that Mama had subsided into mere moaning.

  ‘I think you must sign up with our booking agent, Miss Aurora,’ Verrall said as they went down the stairs. ‘He does very well for us, and the portion that we pay him is repaid tenfold in extra dates.’

  He wished he could say what was in his heart: that the doltish Jimmy was a fair way to a drunkard anyway, and of unsavoury habits, and everybody knew it to be so. But the cad had sloped off and what need, now, to hurt her more?

  Earle Martin seemed to think he was stealing a march on Walker, snatching the Belle Auroras out from under his nose, and with a brand-new novelty dance as well. Their number would be filled out with a soldier song and (Aurora having a moment of inspiration) the sentimental favourite Songs My Mother Taught Me. Verrall remembered with approval that Martin had been very fond of his mother; he was damp in the eye by the time Aurora had run through it for him.

  ‘We’ll bill it as Belle Auroras: Sweetness in Song,’ Martin said, blowing his nose horribly on a dirty handkerchief. ‘In two.’

  The Orpheum was no kind of class, and the floors were grimy, but on the snowy sidewalk outside, Verrall was rewarded with Aurora’s quick, fervent hug, and a kiss on his hollow cheek.

  Bella’s New Car

  With the Ninepins also booked in at the Orpheum the chance was too good to miss: Nando had decided it was time to test out the exploding car sketch. With his mother’s doleful blessing (she took a few weeks off to lie weeping in bed, eating chocolates), he and Bella worked non-stop on effects and banter.

  Clover loved the new sketch. She watched it every show, seeing new bits of invention and precision each time. Bella had grown into her comic self so brilliantly. She and Nando were a perfect match, Clover thought; she also thought, with greater comfort, that it was they who would hit the big-time after all, now that Jimmy had decamped, and carry Aurora and Mama along with them.

  The Orpheum stage was massive, made for stunts, but even so, when the rippling curtains opened in three, the crowd gasped to see Nando and Bella driving their flivver on from the wings (pulled by stagehands with a hidden rope, while the glass-crash man made a tolerable engine racket on his machines). An automobile, onstage!

  Hinky-dinky cacophony music travelled along with them, a jaunty outing on a summer day, Bella enjoying the sun and the breeze. ‘Hold my head scarf for me, Tommy!’ she begged in pretty flirtation. She had just rearranged her tumbling curls when the car’s motor coughed and spat.

  They lurched forward again, then the car coughed again, and stopped.

  They sat, Nando staring blankly, until Bella said, ‘Do something! Talk to it!’

  Nando got out and lifted the hood, and disappeared into it, feet waggling. A moment later an ominous sputter like a fizzing ginger-beer bottle (exactly like, in fact, since inside the hood Nando had been shaking one like crazy) finished with a terrific explosion and a flash (as he lit the flashpan), and Nando (having hooked himself onto the flying-harness) was blown backwards away from the car, blackfaced and flailing, and fell clump onto the ground.

  Bella shrieked and hid her eyes.

  Nando wiped his face with his kerchief, then realized it was Bella’s pink scarf, now blackened. He made a great show of hiding the ruined scarf.

  Regaining some courage and human decency, Bella exclaimed and jumped out of the car and rushed to him, applying first aid in the form of blown kisses (no actual kisses being yet permitted onstage, even at the relaxed Orpheum).

  She sat him up, and he fell down.

  She stood him up. He fell forward, flat on his nose, except that she caught him in the nick of time, and they both fell sprawling in a very improper attitude (so that Clover caught her breath, hearing Sybil say, ‘Begs for a blue envelope!’)—and were up, next instant, Bella giving the cheekiest dimpling wave to the manager in the booth.

  Nando dusted himself off and thanked Bella, but no, thank you very much, she was just a woman and he could fix the ding-danged car himself. He rustled in the trunk for a tool box, pulled out a gigantic wrench, and made his way round to the front of the car, legs rubbery from the explosion. He made his legs such instruments of comedy: stiff and limp at once, unpredictably non–weight-bearing, expressive both of excruciating pain and irrepressible gaiety. Just watching him walk round to the front of the car Clover could see why Bella was so fond of him.

  The headlight fell off in his hand.

  Oh! It was hot! He hot-potatoed it, tossed it up in the air, bright and fragile and dangerous. Bella, leaning forward to give helpful unwanted advice, caught it—ouch! She juggled it delicately, carefully (Clover knew how hard she had worked at that juggling) and tossed it back to him; he whipped it back, like a badminton birdie. They volleyed it twice, and then, being burned again, Nando gave it an angry smack and it smashed into the stage. The sugar-glass took forever to make each morning, Mrs. Dent standing fretting over the stove.

  The front bumper fell off with a clang. Nando caught it up, handed it to Bella, and the back bumper fell slantwise with an ominous creak—he rushed to it and something exploded at the front, giving Bella instant blackface. She opened her bright eyes at the audience and leaned back over the car, in time for the radiator to spray out a jet of water and wash her face, till she jumped back, dripping.

  The two of them danced around the car reattaching the bumpers backwards, and the audience-side door fell off. The wheels went flat, each one hissing in turn, till the last wheel hopped right off its axle and went rolling all over the stage, almost out into the audience. Nando raced, tripping over his own feet, hopping the wheel back and forth, and caught it each night, just before it beaned someone.

  Then he was angry. He took Bella to task: ‘You could have killed someone!’ Finger wagging.

  She wagged right back at him since the whole thing was his fault, and—His fault! why, it was she who was distracting him with her endless chatter—Then Bella leaned over and kissed him (the kiss not visible, of course, just the back of her head and her arm round his neck), and demurely returned upright, with a secret smile.

  Nando’s face went still, enraptured. His fist relaxed and his arm dropped, as he entered a trance of beauty. After a moment, his hand crept over and clasped hers.

  Together they approached the car with dread. The horn toot-tooted: watch out!

  After a breath, the car exploded, collapsed into twenty-five pieces.

  A sway-backed horse wandered onstage, and they mounted and rode away.

  Show after show, Clover sat in the midst of the cheering audience and ached to think of leaving Bella.

  A Snow White Dove

  Earle Martin, the Orpheum manager, brought the war in by insisting the Belle Auroras add a soldier song to their medley. He summoned Aurora to push for the sentimental number Cradle Song, a soldier’s widow singing to her poor che-ild:

  Father lies upon the plain.

  He is sleeping too.

  Mother’s heart must bear the pain

  Heav’n hath sent her you.

  Over your bed a snow white dove

  That watches the long night through …

  The horror of crooning vile treacle to an imaginary fatherless babe, while conscious of the real fatherless babe within, made Aurora adamant against it. She argued that it was hardly an encouraging song, a poor fellow left dead on some Belgian field. ‘Soldiers brave must fight and fall for their native land,’ she pointed out to Mr. Martin. ‘I would think twice, myself, if that were the recruiting poster.’

  The or
chestra leader (a long-faced Dutchman called Vanderdonk, known as Donkey) agreed with Aurora and suggested instead a new song from Britain, There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding, on the grounds that it could be almost a cowboy song, as well as a girl longing for her soldier-lad. He shuffled through his sheets to find the music, muttering about another new song, Roses of Picardy.

  Aurora could sense Martin studying her—too closely—in the pause. She pulled herself up, and refused to smile at him. He was following, she knew, the little path down between her breasts, gleaming in the work-lights. She caught his eye and he looked upward to the fly gallery, checking the position of the second drop.

  In the end Martin let the Belle Auroras off with Long Trail, but with two stipulations: they must add a brief, brisk gallop through a rousing song being puffed off as the latest thing.

  We’re the Boys from Canada

  Glad to serve Britannia!

  Don’t you hear them? Well then, cheer them!

  Send a loyal, loud Hurrah!

  Not at all to Aurora’s taste, but better than the snow white dove. And his final demand: he wished them to use Flora, whom he had known in years past, as accompanist for the Long, Long Trail. An old mother, he insisted, would lend the song authenticity.

  Washed Up

  When Aurora relayed Martin’s request, Flora was taken aback, not having yet begun to consider herself an ‘old mother.’ But she was game for anything that kept her girls at the Orpheum. That evening when they’d gone onstage, she climbed the iron stairs to the dressing room and powdered her hair, to dim the brown and see how she looked. Very tired, very old, was the answer. She stared at herself in the mirror: washed up, finished. Her memory failing, her eyes impossible; there had never been time to get a false tooth, and the little gesture to hide the gap with her hand was second nature now—her hand had drifted up even as she thought.

  When the girls came up ten minutes later, they found her in a state of strangled weeping. Flora could see that they hated her grief. ‘It is nothing,’ she said, to forestall them. ‘A momentary spasm. I looked very ancient with white hair, that is all.’

  Then they went to work to fix it, her good girls: to brush the powder from her hair, to kiss her and tell her how pretty she was, to scold her for dimming her beauty with tears, to chatter about which gown she ought to wear, perhaps the Alice-blue linen that had been Aurora’s in Montana, a flattering yet maternal colour. Flora laughed and pushed them away and said she was all right, never mind it.

  But she felt the strain—the move from the Walker, the danger of cancellation—in her chest. She was aware of Aurora’s misery, and hated Jimmy and that Actress, whom she would not name even in her thoughts. He was a weak puppet, she a monster.

  And there was something still wrong, some other axe to fall that nobody was telling her. She could not discern whether it was Clover’s trouble or Aurora’s, or even Bella’s, because her girls did not confide in her any longer, because she was too old and they too strong and young, and the girls who had loved her best of anyone in the world, better than even Arthur had loved her, now found her foolish and had to manage her.

  Which could not be allowed, so she must take courage and stiffen her backbone and do this small performing, without any more silly vanity.

  Man in the Moon

  The Ninepins’ flying apparatus was being wasted, since only the one rig was needed for Bella’s New Car. But Nando could not stop his mind from thinking up new stunts, and he came to Aurora with an idea for a new number, a dreamy thing about the man in the moon that she loved the sound of; when he showed her the sketch, Bella pointing and explaining, Aurora had clapped her hands and laughed for the first time in ages.

  Donkey had sides for My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon, and he was happy to do the switch for the coming week. He would put it in three.

  Nando had drawn a crescent moon, with a seat and a harness and a couple of girls dancing around on the ground, vaguely worked in, because he was only interested in the flying. Aurora scotched that, though. No dancing in this one. She needed a sit-down number, for a rest from the exertions of Beautiful Doll. And once she’d read the lyrics, she wanted three moons. ‘One each, please,’ she said to the stage carpenters. ‘And each one different: silver and cream and faint, faint green—with a whiff of cheese.’

  She sang it straight down to the baby, who had begun to swim and cavort inside her, who loved underdone beef (she realized when she ate steak at Mariaggi’s one night, and received such a tremendous kick that she thought Mama must have noticed), and kept her awake at night with its constant exertions. During those wakeful hours she thought of how she would break this news to Mama, but always fell asleep before a sensible answer occurred.

  The number began with an empty, cloud-strewn stage, just Aurora strolling on, already singing and dreaming, a pirouette to match the simple, winding, dreamy tune.

  ‘Everybody has a sweetheart, underneath the rose.

  Everybody loves a body, so the old song goes …’

  She found her mark in the gauze-and-batten clouds, and turned to tell the audience,

  ‘I’ve a sweetheart—you all know him just as well as me.

  Every evening I can see him shortly after tea.’

  Behind her tiny stars sprinkled in the rigging, and the great creamy moon floated down from the night sky, a perfect crescent moon, closer and closer, until it was the right height for her to hop up into the seat nestled in its cupped point.

  ‘My sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon

  I’m going to marry him soon

  It would fill me with bliss, just to give him one kiss

  But I know that a dozen I never would miss …’

  And the moon climbed gradually with her into the night sky—but not very far, for she had no kind of a head for heights.

  ‘Then behind a dark cloud, where no one is allowed

  I’ll make love to the Man in the Moon …’

  Words just intoxicating enough to cause a slight, delighted gasp from the audience. Before they had time to settle in to another verse, another moon rose into view—this one cunningly contrived to sweep in from stage left, as if rising over an unseen horizon, Clover already in place in its silver curve. Dark hair gleaming, she sang the chorus, with Aurora singing wistful harmony.

  And at last Bella came chiming in, her green moon sinking gradually down from the heavens (six flights of iron stairs on tiptoe, to get into position on the catwalk).

  ‘Last night while the stars brightly shone,

  He told me through love’s telephone,

  That when we were wed, he’d go early to bed,

  And never stay out with the boys (so he said).’

  All three moon-girls became aware of each other, in the venerable musical tradition of suddenly seeing what’s been under one’s nose for some time, and continued together.

  ‘We’re going to marry next June,

  The wedding takes place on the moon.’

  And each of them reached behind the moon’s curve to produce a small bundle of joy.

  ‘A sweet little Venus,

  We’ll fondle between us,

  When I wed my old man in the moon.’

  If Mama doesn’t get this hint, Aurora told herself, settling into better comfort on her moon’s shelf, she can’t really blame me.

  True Moon

  The Man in the Moon was a colossal hit. For the next two weeks, the theatre sold out night after night. No slouch, Earle Martin quickly switched them to the headliner spot, raised their pay to six-fifty, and wanted them to sign a long-term contract. But the idea for the number had not been his and on the advice of Verrall’s booking agent (wired to in New York) they felt no qualm saying no.

  The act was good because it was true, Clover thought. All their loves were on the moon, in one way or another: Victor, that night in Camrose under the moon’s power. Anyone could see how much Bella loved Nando, the high-flyer, her hand in his, her face lifted to tell him something f
unny as they walked by moonlight ahead of the others, on the way home after the evening show. And Aurora was a moon herself, a small new moon burgeoning out of her. Then Clover shook her head to shake out fancy, and ran a little to catch Nando’s other arm and be warm and close in company, rather than alone and cold like the moon in the darkness.

  The second week with the new number, Martin upped the ticket price and still sold out. On Friday morning Alexander Pantages, of the Pantages chain, sent his Winnipeg manager Tom Brownlee round to Mrs. Jewett’s to enter into negotiations with the Belle Auroras for a move to Pantages following their stint at the Orpheum. They would begin in Chicago, with jumps to the end of July, including Boston and New York. Further continuance in the fall if suitable to both parties.

  He offered a thousand a week.

  When Brownlee had gone, the girls sat quite still in the back parlour. Mama’s eyes were shining, and the hand at her mouth trembled. She could not speak for happiness. ‘It’s Bella’s little telephone that took the trick,’ Aurora said, and Bella laughed. ‘No! It’s the three dollies that make it so good!’

  Clover looked at the calendar. May fourth. One more week.

  The Flower

  Before going to the theatre for band call on Saturday morning, the eighth of May, Aurora made Mama stop at a dental surgery to have an impression taken for a new tooth. It was time and more—they were settled and prospering and little things could be looked after, she told Mama, blowing aside all objections happily.

  But when they reached the theatre, Aurora decided to stay in the dressing room and let the others run through without her. She was not comfortable. Her back had ached all night and she wished she had stayed in bed. But you could not stop when the going was good.