No storms left in Mama now, so tiny in the bed. But she would improve, Aurora told herself. Avery reached for her, his face breaking open in a dripping smile when he caught her eye. She unpinned her bodice again, took him up, and began composing a letter to Clover as they rocked.
A No-Hoper
The Minneapolis bill was chock-a-block even in summer, from Chinese jugglers to a horse act, and the best magician Bella had ever seen, Harlan the Great. Harlan had adored Nando’s mother when Myra was a girl down in Florida; in his company she was less despondent, basking in nostalgic admiration. As a bonus, East and Verrall were at the Regent, the other Pantages theatre, with Julius. They were all staying at the same hotel, patronized by Pantages folk; it made for cozy visits. But it was hard for Bella to see Julius so thin, legs like two sticks covered with cloth, his chest fallen. He did not meet her eyes but talked in a rambling way about Clover.
Julius only made one show in three, Verrall told Bella in a quiet corner. ‘But he is right on the money when he manages to stay vertical.’
‘Making almost enough to keep himself in gin,’ East said, as he passed with a bottle. East had brought Bella a new song, Pretty Baby, which she and Nando were working up as a dolly comedy. Everybody loves a baby, that’s why I’m in love with you … I’d like to be your sister, brother, dad and mother too, Pretty Baby of mine!
At the end of their first week in Detroit, a telegram came to the dressing room Bella shared with Myra, addressed to N. Dent. Myra pretended to think that was an M, opened it, and went straight into hysterics. Bella knew better by then than to fool with her, but ran for Nando. He dropped his greasestick and stepped across the hall to dash a cup of water in his mother’s face, reducing her to fishlike gasps.
His face went tight when he read the telegram—he passed the yellow sheet to Bella:
PATIENT J DENT NO LONGER COMPLIANT. REMOVE
AT EARLIEST CONVENIENCE.
GEO STURGIS, DIRECTOR, CLIFTON SPRINGS
SANATORIUM, PHILADELPHIA, PA.
Myra sobbed helplessly (consoled by Harlan and other members of the company, who knew Joe’s reputation all too well) long into the night at their hotel. In the morning she was out on the street, hailing a cab, when Bella and Nando found her.
Nando grabbed her suitcase and pulled her back to the curb. ‘We’ve got to do three shows today, Ma, and talk to Burt. We’ll take the train to Philly Sunday morning.’
Myra made no answer, but dissolved into a further wash of tears.
Harlan the Great came down the steps, his own valise in hand, and took Myra’s case from Nando. ‘She’s coming with me,’ Harlan said. ‘Don’t make it hard on her, laddie.’
Bella, standing in the doorway, thought her stomach would come right out her mouth. She hated Harlan and Myra equally. No, she despised Myra more, seeing her swoon on the big magician’s arm. The quickness of his hand deceived the eye: he bundled her and the baggage into the cab and barred the door to Nando.
‘I’m taking her to Florida,’ Harlan announced. ‘Where she’ll be happy for a change. You’re a good lad, don’t waste your own life with that worthless drunk.’
Bella thought Nando might die right there on the pavement. She went down to stand beside him while the cab wheeled off, and pulled him gently out of the street.
‘Well, I’ve got to go get Dad, anyhow,’ he said.
‘Of course.’
He would not meet her eyes.
She squeezed his elbow, all she could get hold of. ‘He’ll be glad to see us! We can do A Good Night Out, you know—I could do it easy!’
‘Not you,’ he said. ‘Not without Ma, you can’t travel with us.’
She gave a shocked laugh. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Anyway, I don’t want you.’ He went up the steps, and would not say another word.
Best to let him alone till they went to the theatre, she thought, remembering Papa on his darker days.
Between the first and second shows, Nando had a word with George Burt, the Detroit manager, who looked fussed and said he’d deal with it after the second. As Bella was wiping the dust off her face and bosom from the New Car explosion-finale, Burt turned up, ushering in the big boss, Mr. Pantages. Burt went across to fetch Nando.
Bella shrieked and dodged behind her screen, and Pantages laughed. His heavy eyes creased, smooth as unbaked buns. ‘Nice little number,’ he said, peering over the screen. She turned her back but could not resist giving him just a very brief view of her pretty bodice. It could not hurt to keep the boss intrigued.
Nando came into the room and asked Pantages shortly what he could do for him.
‘It’s you wants to see me, boy,’ Pantages said, good-naturedly enough. His shining hair was parted in the middle over a very white scalp. ‘I hear you wants out your contract.’
‘Can’t help it, sir,’ Nando said, stiff as a plank. He gave Bella not one glance. ‘My old dad’s in trouble and there’s only me to help him.’
‘And me,’ Bella said behind the screen.
‘I’ve got to head for Philly in the morning,’ Nando said, doggedly ignoring her.
Pantages examined a hand full of rings. ‘And that leaves me where?’
‘I know it’s putting you out, but I got no choice,’ Nando said. ‘If it means I’m sunk in this business, I still got to go.’
‘Oh you’ll be sunk, if you cross me,’ Pantages promised, still genial, and glossy as shellac.
‘Well, I got an offer for the movies and I’ll take that. My dad and me together. It’s the coming thing, it’ll beat out vaudeville, you’ll see!’
Bella ducked her head below the screen to hide her shock—Nando had baldly refused to have anything to do with the pictures before this.
‘If that’s all right with you, boy,’ Pantages said. ‘And what about your missus here?’
‘She’s not my missus, she’s just a baby. She’s not in on this. She’s a good girl and a trouper—I know East & Verrall have been trying to get her for their new number over at the Regent, she’ll be all right with them. I’m sorry you’re out an act.’
He’s arranging my next jump as if I was props, Bella thought, but she kept silence. As long as he didn’t send her straight to Qu’Appelle to wither into dust.
Pantages stared at Nando for a beat, eyes like jet beads. ‘I know your dad, he’s a no-hoper.’
‘Not for me.’
‘Your funeral, boy,’ the boss said, and he went.
After a minute Nando said to the screen, ‘I’ll talk to East. You’ll be safe with them.’
There’s only so much you can do, Bella thought, to throw yourself at someone who doesn’t want you. She stayed behind the screen, pulling on her clothes, every piece of her body hurting like she’d been beaten up, and when she came out Nando had gone.
They did the third show. They yelled at each other as the car fell to pieces, and near the end of the number Bella hauled off and slugged him straight in the eye as hard as she could.
She sat back, aghast, looking at the eye already starting to swell. The audience broke into delighted hoots.
Nando pulled the string that set off the final explosion, and under it he said, quite quietly, ‘Guess that’s that, then. See you in the funny papers.’
‘I hate you so much,’ Bella said, and the car fell apart.
The Work
Left with Madame Saborsky now that Victor was at training camp, late night was Clover’s only solitude. Lamp oil was dear, so she wrote to Aurora by moonlight at the barred window in Victor’s third-floor sitting room, once a nursery. The bed was warm, piled with feather beds and comforters, the linens heavy and smooth. Madame Saborsky had fine taste in fabrics, and wore gorgeous embroidered velvet drapery on her person too. The plank floor was bare and the damp could not be beaten back by the stingy supply of coals for the tiny fireplace, but it was quiet. Down in the cellar Madame would be sorting her hoard of marmalade and tinned beef, her treasure-store against the starvation
she expected inevitably to follow war. Small stone crocks of goose-grease—which Madame used as face cream—lined up like soldiers.
It seemed disloyal to send her sisters a full portrait of Madame. Instead Clover wrote of Galichen. Even in vaude she had never met such a person.
A head bald as an egg, a pair of gimlet eyes—one hugely magnified by a thick monocle. He stares into one’s soul with that one moon eye. I creep about in terror, hiding in the skirts of Victor’s mother. Gali’s people put me to work washing stairs; but everyone about the place scrubs floors all the time. The one to pity is M. le Comte Filouski, who is detailed to Galichen’s own bathroom. I have never seen it, thank God, but the legends are horrific. ‘At times I have to use a ladder to clean the walls,’ he is supposed to have said. But I see how people are swept under Gali’s sway. He puts them through The Work in order to clean their spiritual houses, their soul’s rooms; and they say they are better for it.
Victor said I ought to call his mother Belle-Mère, but it sounds fake-French, like Les Très Belles: I call her Madame. She is unsteady in her spirits and keeps two or three of everything—the house is crammed with things she has collected. Her face puckers under a head of flat black hair, which she dyes herself with some walnut-juice concoction. I miss Mama. Is she writing on her slate yet? Please give her a tender kiss from me, and forward the enclosed note (which of course you may read!) to Bella.
To Bella, she wrote:
There is a variety theatre not far from here, the Gate. I watched the show with Victor before he left—it is vulgar but very funny. They don’t need any singers thank you very much no thank you, especially not ones with colonial accents, but I will keep trying to find some work. I hope your new car is exploding explosively and that you and Nando are headed straight for the Palace. A-oooga!
Love love
Your Clover
Black Thread
The strings on the back of Aurora’s neck tensed painfully when she sewed. But in this domestic life, she knew, it must be done. One summer evening, she went up to Mabel’s room to ask for black darning thread, and found Mabel sorting through a box of letters. On the uncluttered dressing table stood a photo of her Captain Graham, two ivory-backed brushes, and a limp dun hairnet: an inexpressibly sad collection. The young captain’s direct eyes stared from a wide, easy-natured face.
Mabel got up at once to find thread. Seeing Aurora’s eye on the photograph, she held out a page of the letter she had let fall on the bed. Aurora read:
… Tom is still in England, he was left in care of the horses, but—just on the q.t. between you and me May—he got ‘cold feet,’ savvy?
I am sorry I have not written you more. When we go into the firing line for eight days and get about three hours sleep out of every twenty-four, one gets dead all over nearly, and during all the hours whether asleep or awake, one has always to keep his eye skinted down his rifle barrel. It does get one’s nerves, some, but it’s all right—
‘This page is sad, the rest is more—well. I wish you knew him. You will someday.’ Mabel’s fingers refolded the flimsy page gently, her face lighted, shining.
Aurora experienced a dreadful pang of envy, seeing quiet Mabel transformed by love. She took up the spool of black thread to go. But Mabel, composed again, said, ‘Won’t you play for us instead? I can mend your things, if you will play. We get so little good music here, although the high school gives a charity concert from time to time.’
Happy to give over the needlework, Aurora fetched sheet music Bella had sent her, Paderewski’s Minuet and a book of Field and Chopin Nocturnes: suitable for drawing-room music, but a challenge to perfect. Mama sat by the piano, her head leaning on her left hand, the weak right arm abandoned in her lap, humming softly.
After that, Aurora played for them every evening once Avery was put in his cot. She played for him, too, as he lay sleeping right above the drawing room.
Words and Music
On his return to Qu’Appelle in late July, Dr. Graham came out to see Mama. He was a loose-jointed, surprisingly unkempt man with spiky hair that looked as if he’d just run his fingers through it; he had clever crow’s eyes and an air of tolerance.
After listening closely to what Aurora could tell him of Dr. King’s diagnosis, Dr. Graham spent most of the afternoon observing Mama, talking to her as if she would respond. He sat on her left side, chatting easily of Avery, who lay playing with a silver spoon from the old apostle set. When Dr. Graham moved to Mama’s right side she ignored him; but when Avery fussed and Aurora picked him up and sat close to Dr. Graham, Mama’s eyes followed the baby.
‘There, you see! The child will be a help,’ the doctor said. ‘You must use whatever interests her strongly to reawaken her desire to use this damaged side.’
Aurora told him she had been placing Avery in Mama’s right arm from time to time, to force her to hold tight; the doctor commended her and asked if she saw any improvement in Mama’s speech.
‘No, but—I don’t know if this matters—she can sing.’
‘I heard her humming to the babe, yes.’
‘But she sings in words.’
That did surprise him. Aurora sang, ‘O, don’t deceive me …’ and Mama, without seeming to think at all, joined in: ‘O, never leave me, How could you use a poor maiden so?’—the words quite clear.
Dr. Graham’s attention was truly caught, then. ‘Has she any other songs? Does she appear to know the meaning of the words?’
‘Sometimes,’ Aurora said. ‘The phrases she uses when she sings seem to fit what is happening. I have heard snatches of other songs, but this is the only one she sings all the way through.’
‘You must keep note! This may smooth the path of her recovery.’
Dr. Graham made other recommendations: to maintain natural speech with Mama, including her in their conversations as if she could answer, and not to expect too speedy a progress. ‘Try not to correct her, or grow impatient; the connection from brain to tongue has been broken and must be relearned. It may never be fully restored, I’m sorry to say,’ he told Aurora. ‘But we will expect the best. This singing business—I must write to King and some others …’ He looked again at Mama. ‘Have you tried her with drawing?’
‘She does not like to hold the slate,’ Aurora said. ‘But she can form letters still, very slowly. One or two words, no more.’
‘Yes, that is usual—well, we shall see! I will keep her under my eye,’ he said.
Mama looked away from him and plucked with her left hand at her skirt until Aurora sat beside her, taking the fretful hand.
Dr. Graham came back across the fields for dinner that evening, bringing the schoolmaster, Lewis Ridgeway, with him. ‘He’s all alone,’ the doctor murmured to Elsie. ‘I knew you would not mind.’
While the men were smoking in the garden after dinner, Elsie whispered to Aurora and Mama that Ridgeway had had a disappointment in love. ‘His fiancée left at Christmas—she has taken a school in Weyburn. And nobody knows, my dears, whether she will come back at all—no one is certain why she left. I have heard it said that she was made unhappy.’
Mr. Ridgeway must be to blame if his fiancée skittered off, it seemed. Aurora listened to Mama singing under her breath: ‘Thus sang the poor maiden, her sorrows bewailing …’
‘Lewis can be a little daunting,’ Mabel said quietly. ‘But he is a good friend.’
Out of sympathy with ladies who talked secrets, Aurora played piano behind the gathering—Dr. Graham monopolizing Uncle Chum, with an occasional aside to Mabel; Elsie and Mama drowsing in their chairs.
Mr. Ridgeway seemed to attend to Dr. Graham’s conversation, but when Mabel brought in the tea tray he came to the piano as Aurora played the final quiet chords of a Field nocturne. He leaned down to say, ‘I can’t recall when I’ve enjoyed an evening more, Mrs. Mayhew. I like to listen to you.’
She looked up, one arm stretched in the lamplight to close the book. ‘I wish you could have heard my mother, before—Sh
e plays far better than I do.’
‘My musical understanding cannot reach to anything better than your playing.’
Made self-conscious, Aurora straightened the edges of the music.
‘Perhaps next term I could persuade you to play for my students?’
‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘If you would like me to. But perhaps my mother’s health will improve under Dr. Graham’s care, and you may yet hear her play.’
He nodded, allowing this as a serious possibility, then said, ‘I’m sorry to have missed the little boy this evening. He is very bonny.’
She smiled up at Mr. Ridgeway. She liked him, she decided, for his kindness to Mabel and his half-concealed unhappiness.
The Candy Habit
‘Pantages has taken a fancy to her,’ East told Verrall as they ran up the iron flights of stairs to their dressing room, Bella following like a puppy on a leash. ‘And Julius—’
‘A good name, but some nights you can’t get him onstage,’ Verrall said.
‘If we’ve got her, we’re flexible,’ East said. ‘If he’s good, we do the old hotel routine. If not, we do the golf.’ East opened the door to their dressing room and bowed her in.
Julius was in the armchair, a glass in hand. He looked up. ‘Ahh, my boys. And.’ He stared at Bella. ‘Oh no, no. No, no … I’ve had one or two over the eight, my dear,’ he said. ‘Can’t fulfill my—can’t manage—take her away, boys, don’t tempt me.’
Verrall blushed brilliantly and begged Bella to take no notice, but she found it horrible that Julius mistook her for a floozy. He’d never mistake Clover or Aurora that way, she’d bet.
The Little Shadows Page 44
