East bustled about making cocoa while Verrall explained the deal.
‘Pantages is a famous highway robber. Thirty-two weeks is only to tempt us; you’ll see, the written contract will be for fourteen weeks. Six weeks to work our way out to the West Coast—then Pantages will hand us the choice of being cancelled and stranded, or taking a 25-percent cut in salary for the remaining eight weeks.’
‘But he can’t do that!’
‘He won’t do it to us,’ East boasted. ‘I’ll see to that! We’ll see our sixty weeks of work, because he likes us. And you, Pretty Baby—you’re the icing on the cake this year.’
Verrall said, ‘Pantages wants us—well, except Jay—to meet him for dinner after the show. He is generous, in his way, always ready with a bag of peanuts or—say, East, is that where you got the candy habit?’
‘Penuche?’ East asked, producing a crumpled bag.
Bella laughed and sang her chorus: ‘Oh I want a loving baby and it might as well be you, Pretty Baby of mine …’
Yawning
Uncle Chum and Aunt Elsie spent every August at their cottage at Katepwa, twenty-five miles up into the country on a long lake cut through prairie tableland. Aurora did not need more rest-cure, but thought the change might do Mama good. They drove out to the lake in Uncle Chum’s new toy, a shining bottle-green Ford motorcar. Aurora wondered again how well-off Chum was; so far she had not been able to engage him in serious discussion about paying for their board, and had abandoned the struggle.
Aunt Elsie sat with Mama, Avery between them, in the back seat; Aurora, the only one not afraid of the car, sat up front watching Uncle Chum slash the gear lever violently in all directions until something caught. She kept the laugh caught in her throat, feeling like Bella, and did not let it come streaming out.
Katepwa was a huddle of pleasant cottages set in stone-walled lots along the lakeshore. Mabel had gone up a few days before (when Dr. Graham was going to his own place) to air the cottage and lay in supplies. When the Ford pulled up, tea was waiting on the porch: a pretty table set with a white cloth, and Mabel smiling from the steps.
Mama gasped with pleasure, like her old self—Aurora felt a hard double-beat in her heart, frustrated longing to leave combined with certainty that she was doing the right thing. She wished her sisters could see Mama here. Another thing: whatever rift there had been between Mama and Uncle Chum, clearly he had no memory of it, and she was blessedly blank now too. Aurora found it a great relief that Mama had put down that heavy baggage of past grievance.
At Katepwa there was nothing to do but listen to Victrola records and play with Avery. The dollhouse kitchen was too small for more than Elsie and Mabel, and even those two spent as little time as possible on housewifely duty. The lake community visited all day, or canoed at a leisurely stroke up and down the lake. Mabel and Aurora strolled the lanes while Avery napped in the afternoon. Mabel got freckles on her nose and was distressed; Aurora told her they became her very well, and Mabel glowed, briefly.
After dinner the lake stilled, only the placid, plangent popping of fish breaking the surface. Chum did his fishing in the morning, but kept an ear open in the evening. On Saturday night, when a band came to play for the weekly dance, Chum grunted and paced down to the shore to watch the fish rise, as music slid over the water. Aurora and Mabel canoed out onto the lake, under the brightest full moon Aurora had ever seen. They talked about dropping in at the dance—and paddled home down the moonbeam instead.
It was all excruciatingly boring. But restful. Aurora felt her breathing deepen, the muscles around her ribs loosening after years of tautness—as if she were unlacing her corset, as Gentry had ordered her to do so long ago. She thought of sending him a postcard, but did not want to sadden him with news of Mama’s infirmity.
Dr. Graham came to the cottage one morning to work with Mama again. After spending an hour watching her play with Avery on the lawn, he said that he was well satisfied, though they might not see the tiny gradation of improvement. But once in a while, Aurora did catch Mama lifting the cream jug with the reluctant right hand; if frustrated enough she might scrawl a few words on her slate. Avery called forth greater effort; when Mama was frustrated or tired and weepy, plumping him onto her knee would stem her tears. She sang to him all day long, branching out from Early One Morning to snatches of Last Rose of Summer, and Aurora could hear the lyrics becoming clearer.
Mail and the papers followed them up to Katepwa, a day or two late. A letter from Clover on the peculiarities of Galichen’s atelier was a galvanizing jolt of pleasure in the soporific haze. Aurora read excerpts to Mabel and Elsie as they sat playing honeymoon whist on the porch one rainy afternoon. Mama dandled Avery on her lap—her reluctant right arm put to work around his waist, keeping him safe.
Gali issues dicta. Yawning is the latest: on Monday at the noon meal (we take it at the atelier every day; one piece of bread per person and a ladle of thin soup) he came out of his sanctum and spoke: we must yawn! Breath frees the soul and body to work more freely, yawning signals the moving of the mind to a new plane of discovery. So no one must be polite (always a cuss word around here) and repressed, but yawn mightily all day long.
By Thursday I guess he’d had enough of our tonsils: the dicta was on the noticeboard in the morning. Yawning would not be tolerated—a yawn is the sign of a disengaged mind, tending towards sleep, and we were all in need of waking up! If we find ourselves about to yawn we are to bend from the hips and breathe deeply six times.
A letter came from Bella, too, and required puzzling through as if it were the Rosetta stone:
Verrall has bouhgt a typerwriter, the better to seem proffesional!! I am traelling with him and eEast now because Nando has gone to work in the movies. Hiw father maeoe him. made him. Nando s mother went off with a magician she used to know. that broke his heart then he had to go get horrible Joe from the san so he went. Also some man in New Yrok wanted him to go int the movies but Nando does not want to but he could take his dad there too so he went. But do not worry about the $$$ becaues I will get a third of E&V take now they’ve come over to Pantages because Mr. Pantages likes me. He is faft. He wants me to do the bumbble bee but I do not have the wings. I might do Pretty Baby in Seattle. Every body loves a baby that’s why I’m in love with you, Pretty Baby. tell mama I miss her is she alll rihgt?
xxxxXXXXXXxxxxx for you and mama and the little dovey-boy
YOUR LOVING B.
i like Avery for his name thats good
Did that mean Pantages was fast, or fat? The typewriter was no better than Bella’s handwriting. Disturbing to hear that Nando’s mother had run off—and impossible to tell exactly what was going on with Nando, but perhaps it was for the best. Aurora had not been entirely easy about letting Bella travel with Nando when she was so enamoured of him, and still so young. It was a comfort that East and Verrall were with Pantages now and would look after Bella. How lucky that Pantages himself had taken a liking to her!
Aurora took the baby upstairs, and thought as he nursed of the lively lives her sisters were pursuing—and how this long hiatus was dulling her own mind, making her unfit for work. Avery’s hair was growing in, bright gold. His fingers worked on her breast, muddling her thoughts, and they fell asleep together, as they did most afternoons at Katepwa.
A King of Vaude
Bella lay watching, in an unlucky tilt of the dressing-table mirror, Mr. Pantages’s heels pushing backwards against the polished bed-foot, his bandy legs in boots. He hadn’t even taken off his boots. Black pants flurried around his ankles, caught his legs, tangled them, all lard fatness and the wool serge wrinkling. And in between his gasping—a sow searching out something rotten. She did not believe that Mayhew would have been so piggy, but comforted herself that Mayhew was only a faker, not a true King of Vaude.
Pantages went ahhh! in one high-pitched squeal and then he slacked, he slumped, he pushed again, groaning and kicking the bed, and then he huffed, like the train engine coming in
to Paddockwood and stopping—you know that lurch is coming, and it comes.
Although it hurt more than she had expected, she did not make any complaint. All that lather and steam out of him and not a note from her.
That was that, then. Bella closed her eyes.
In the morning, waking with the sun spiking through a tear in the blind, her first thought was that she’d lived through it. How perfect a coincidence it was, that the sun would rise in that exact trajectory to blind her. Her eyes were sore and sandy from the night before. His leg was heavy over hers: girly-soft white skin, massive in the thigh, dwindling to a hard skinny shin. She supposed that she must love him or something, to notice that. But no, she hated him in fact and never wished to see his pasty face again. And she would have to smile or get cancelled, and she had East and Verrall to think of.
This was a no-good comedown for her. She was not the Belle Auroras any more.
She slid out from under Pantages—no reaction, he seemed unconscious rather than asleep—and padded into the marble temple of the bathroom, turning the brass lock. Mirrors filled the wall about the bath. This place had tone. Her body looked the same. If she pulled in her belly she could look quite pretty, rounded at the hip and bust but with a little bird waist, almost like Aurora. Perhaps she was going to have a baby now too; it could happen so suddenly. She felt stupid and also uncomfortable and did not want to identify exactly why. You do what you have to do, Mama had said. But where Mama had been was a vacant space Bella could not bear to think about. She sat for a while on the tiles in the clean morning light. It would be nice to cry.
Pantages took her to luncheon; then he flicked her on the chin and left, heading for St. Louis and San Francisco. What was the point, Bella wondered, if he was just going to drop her? Maybe she was not very good at that sort of thing, or she was not pretty enough.
Well, cat piss to that. She gave herself a good scolding, and decided to ignore how pretty or not-pretty she was from now on. She was different from Aurora, she never would be beautiful that way, but she could fool people into wanting her. The trick was not to let them follow through.
She had to write to Aurora, but she used a postcard, to make it short.
We are staying put here in Chi for a while loonger becasue Mistrr Pantages says so.
LOVE YOUR BELLA
The Tiny Knot
Clover managed to get hired as a dancer in a revue at the Tivoli: the show was not merely shabby but off-colour, a tired old Saucy Soubrette kind of gig. But she made a friend of the sole remaining comic on the bill, a wizened fellow named Felix Quirk. Perhaps because he reminded her of Julius, she told Quirk that she wanted to try her hand as a monologuist, and he offered to call a few pals and get her an audition. He was a haggard but functioning drunk who had been rejected for service. The theatre, indeed the whole of England, was full of drunks, to Clover’s eyes. The streets as she walked home after the theatre were lousy with semi-conscious men, often in khakis, tottering from lamppost to lamppost, or being herded up drunk and disorderly by the police van. They were never troublesome to her, and the money was vital, because Victor’s pay was small and he could not send them much.
And because Clover found that she was going to have a baby—in January, as well as she could count.
The chorus girls were cheerful in the dressing room, toasted by the reeking gas fire where they dried their washed-out stockings. After the heat and the noise, the silent walk home through dripping streets was a pleasure, but Clover often found herself tired and lonely. She could not tell Victor her news in a letter, and would not tell Madame or Aurora until he knew. The tiny knot of the baby inside her clutched and stretched, and she sometimes sang to it as she walked along. The London streets were dark with the Zeppelin blackout, yet she felt perfectly safe. She watched for a vast, ghostly shape moving through the skies, but never saw one. Only the great searchlights quartering the sky, and craters the bombs had left.
The baby was so much in the forefront of her mind that she almost told the gnome-like Felix Quirk as they were strolling away from the theatre one evening. But just then, in the grip of some necessity, he dodged into a public house for a quick snifter of brandy, leaving her to make her way home alone.
No. Not alone, for the child went with her.
Hole in the Heart
Late in September, Lewis Ridgeway invited Aurora to give a piano concert to the senior high-school girls. Remembering how she had longed for lovely clothes at that age, she wore the blue grosgrain afternoon gown with a linen jabot, and her best shoes; the half-mile walk would not ruin them. Mr. Ridgeway had asked for a mixed repertoire; she would sandwich two nocturnes around MacDowell’s To A Wild Rose, which the girls could play themselves. The brass zip on her leather music case ran smooth and cool. She missed working.
As she left the house she passed Mama standing on the porch with a watering can for the stone jars of marigolds. ‘O, who would inhabit, This bleak world alone?’ Mama sang, eyes fastened on hers, desperate to convey a message.
Aurora pressed a kiss on her cheek, and told her Avery was in his cot with Mabel writing letters beside him. Her present strategy was to expect Mama to understand, to be perfectly capable, as if that might make her capable.
Mr. Ridgeway was waiting for her at the entrance to the brick high school. The school suited him—it was an oddly significant building for such a little town. Walking down the glossy-floored hall they passed several empty classrooms. She glanced into yet another large bare room, and he gave a sudden smile. ‘Yes, we have the facilities for a music room. Mrs. Gower has donated an instrument I think you’ll enjoy.’
He ushered her through the last double doors into a pleasant open hall with folding wooden chairs and, on a raised dais, a vast black concert grand.
Aurora went to examine the piano. The high-school girls trooped in, taking their seats with decorum, and Mr. Ridgeway introduced Aurora as a seasoned concert performer.
Feeling a ridiculous blush rise to her cheeks, she turned to the girls to say, ‘My sisters and I toured in vaudeville for several years …’ Then she fell silent, alone onstage, missing Clover and Bella—as if her arms were gone, whole portions of her body. What could these girls know about vaude, the real life and ordinary beauty of it?
Taking herself in hand, Aurora bowed and began. Halfway through the Field nocturne she wished she’d thought to turn the piano, so she could see the audience. The audience. Even a handful of schoolgirls was worth working for—it was not vanity or shallowness of mind, it was the desire to do one’s best by the music, and to—to elevate the listeners, or simply delight them.
She turned from the piano after Wild Rose, to find several of the girls in tears. ‘It’s exquisite!’ said a cherry-ribboned girl—Nell Barr-Smith, the Dean’s daughter. ‘But does it have words, could you sing it?’ And the others cried yes, yes, please.
Grateful and surprised, Aurora altered her plan and instead of the second Field piece gave them Last Rose of Summer, a capella. After singing it under-voice all these months to encourage Mama, it was a pleasure to let her full voice out—but a pity to do without Clover’s mourning violin.
She sang, enjoying the song’s frank sentiment and the long afternoon light streaming in the tall windows. At the end, smiling down at the flowery faces, she sank into a formal curtsy, one hand over her heart, to please them. The girls came in twos and threes to thank her and make shy compliments.
As the room emptied, Aurora was left alone on the dais, packing her music away.
Mr. Ridgeway regarded her from his position by the windows, twenty feet away. Happy to have been able to play for the girls, she began to thank him for inviting her, but he waved a hand. They stood silent for a moment.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said, his look too direct for light conversation.
‘About what?’
He turned his head away, then fixed his eyes on her again, across the room. ‘You must know already, your voice is—you are—beauti
ful.’
Aurora was not shocked, exactly, but entirely surprised. She stared back at him, not smiling, unsure herself what to say or do.
Hurrying footsteps sounded in the hall: two tall girls rushed in with a bucket of blackboard erasers. ‘All clean, sir,’ the taller girl said.
The spell was broken, and Aurora picked up her hat and music case.
‘Don’t go, Mrs. Mayhew,’ Mr. Ridgeway said, his voice very dry and scholarly. ‘Miss Frye will want to see you about the Christmas concert.’
The girls said goodbye to her again, and to Mr. Ridgeway; he made a show of ushering them out and then turned back to Aurora. ‘I should correct myself—’ He shook his head, raised his hands. ‘I cannot apologize. It was an observation of fact.’
She walked home deep in thought, conscious of a terrible appetite. Not for Lewis Ridgeway, who was so odd and angular—but for some flare of excitement. Maybe she was perfectly frozen, and never would love anyone. There were women like that, pathologically cold—one heard about them. She had not been cold with Jimmy, but was never his, not really. Not the way Clover was Victor’s, unquestioningly, her whole heart open to him. Or Mabel, with her Aleck. For a moment Aurora wished very badly to have that. Perhaps one could be wholehearted with Lewis Ridgeway. Except that she was still married to Mayhew, so there was no point in thinking of—And she did not want to think of it, any of it. Better to be alone.
Not alone; with Avery. She could be whole in heart there. A hole in the heart, perhaps that is what she had.
Better and Better
Do you remember that time when you were sick backstage—that must have been the baby coming!—and I did Mrs. O’Hara? Well, I have been earning a bit of money doing monologues like that for the Gate variety theatre near here. Most of their comics have gone to the Front and they are starved for artistes. Good to have a jingle of coins in my pocket although Gali is kind and so is Madame. (But I think she is a little mad.)
The Little Shadows Page 45
