The Little Shadows (13 page)

‘Stop
him,’ the woman hissed, and Clover saw the uniformed boy ready with the signboard:

AN EXCURSION OF SONG
SUNDERLAND & PETTIBONE

‘Please, Miss Sunderland—’ Johnny Drawbank began, but at her glare, his drooping eyes blinked and he bent to whisper through the speaking tube to the orchestra pit. ‘Change music! Change!’ and then as the piano cut in, covering Julius, Johnny murmured to the lights, ‘Follow down, and let him off, and …’

Clover watched Julius draw out the applause and bow and bow,
acknowledging quite imaginary
bravos
and kissing his hand to the non-existent balcony. He raised himself to his great height and strode off into the wings, where the tenor and the woman waited.

‘I think that went rather well, would you not say so, dear Drawbank?’ he inquired pleasantly.

The boy had run on to change the placards and a sudden wave of laughter broke, as the audience read the new one. The opera dame empurpled, and seemed to double in size. Clover wondered if she would burst. ‘I will not go on. After
such
an insult? How dare you fit
me
into your paltry act,’ she demanded of Julius.

‘Happy accident, ma’am, I’m forced to say—you fitted hand-in-glove-like into a patter I had long been in habit of using. But I can see, looking at the dangling whiskers of your little friend here, how you might forgivably have wondered if I was referencing your
Execution of Song
—forgive me,
Excrement of
—but no. In-credible. No one who’d heard you sing, madam, could possibly believe that my poor comedy could in any way hope to approach its sheer horror—’

The soprano reached out one big paw and slapped Julius Foster Konigsburg’s face. The sound must certainly have carried into the audience, but the music started up, operatic, and the lights rose again. Miss Sunderland sailed onstage, her arms held out to receive the slavish clapping of Pettibone the tenor. Her long green sateen train swam behind her like the tail of a giant fish. A scattering of applause from the audience, and quite a lot of laughter.

‘My dear young miss—it is the middle Miss Belle-A-Clovers, is it not?’ said Julius, in great good humour. He took her hand to draw her arm through his, and walked her towards the dressing-room stairs. ‘Delighted to see you gracing this hectic Hebron of theatrical delights, however it comes about. My comrade-in-arms will be in
alt
, to find your Floral Mater restored to her.’

Clover matched her stride to his, not feeling the faintest desire to stay and hear
An Excursion of Song
.

A Really Well-trained Rat

They had a dressing room of their own. Or, if not quite all their own, they were only sharing it with one other number, the strawberry-haired woman from Swain’s Rats & Cats. The cats, and most fortunately the rats, were housed with her husband in another dressing room, and the woman assured Mama that never, not once, had a rat been known to escape.

‘These that we have in our act are not your run-of-the-mill rats,’ she explained kindly. Her name was Letty Swain. Her nose and teeth were pointed and her chin slightly lacking, which made it easy to remember which act she was. As she talked she burnished small leather harnesses with mink oil, one after another, laying each one neatly down and picking up the next with small leather fingers. ‘Ours are highly educated rats on whom no expense has been spared. The cats alone are worth in their tens of thousands, but the rats, well! There’s no placing a value on a really well-trained rat.’

Bella agreed, the skin shivering up and down her arms at the very thought of one rat, let alone a plurality of them, but promised herself she would watch their turn if she could creep away. Tiny swords lay waiting to be polished, and a pumpkin, which had been hollowed out and made into a pretty travelling coach, and she longed to see these things in action. Let alone the rats.

‘It’s the cats who are the trouble,’ Letty said. ‘Always sickening for something, and my Greymalkin has a tumultuous growth behind her ear needs draining from week to week, but they’re a lot less bother than a fistful of daughters would be, and if I feel like an evening out, all I’ve to do is fill the water bowls and lock the door behind me.’

(And hope that the cats don’t eat the rats, Bella supposed.)

‘Hubert can feed them, if I tell him every nig-nag detail, and he keeps the rats in order during the act, but it’s I who doctors them and sits up with them nights when they are ailing.’

The boy stuck his head in the door. In this on-the-cheap establishment it was Mattie, the uniformed placard boy, who did the calls, too. ‘On in ten,’ he told Letty.

‘Have you knocked on Room 3 yet?’

‘Course.’

‘Any answer?’

‘He banged on the table and cursed.’

Letty jumped up and grabbed the tiny harnesses. ‘Oh Lord, he’s late,’ she cried. ‘Hopeless, hopeless!’

She ran out, and Mattie laughed and followed to see the fun. Smothered shrieks wound back along the hall as she harried the poor man, never mind the rats and cats, into harness.

Interested Red Eyes

Impatient with the long wait, Aurora went up and stood in the wings to watch Maurice Kavanagh, Irish Elocutionist. She’d caught a glimpse of him earlier, striding into his dressing room, and wanted to see if he was as striking as his photographs.

Oh, he was. His voice was like port wine, she thought. Dressed in a dark velveteen jacket, a luxurious darkness, mauve velvet tie graceful at his throat; long hair flung wildly back over a broad, speaking brow. In the pool of light his feet were planted in a romantic stance, one leg thrust forward, as if the emotion of the moment had nigh unbalanced him. His arm rose as he declaimed:

‘The star of the unconquered will
,
He rises in my breast
,
Serene, and resolute, and still
,
And calm, and self-possessed.’

Aurora found her hands clasped at her collar, and dropped them. The velvet curtain-leg was close by her; as Kavanagh turned onstage she slipped quickly behind it to hide. To be caught watching!

He took a drink from the glass on the table—a tinted glass, which most likely meant the liquid was not water—and set it down, his face downcast and hidden. He came to stillness, to a profound thoughtfulness
that was shared by the audience, judging from the silence, then filled his vast barrel of a chest and cried, in a sharp shout of loathing,
‘Rats!
’

Aurora’s skirts jumped into her hands, and she scanned the boards beneath her feet, frozen in terror—But he went on,

‘They fought the dogs and killed the cats
,
And bit the babies in the cradles …’

She had to lean on the rope-bed, weak with relief. It was only Browning,
in fifty different sharps and flats
. Kavanagh did the wild beginning of
Pied Piper
in a galloping, ranting screech that made her laugh as the audience did, then broke off and moved into
My Last Duchess
, changing himself in an instant into the cold, ferocious grandee with his
gift of a nine hundred years old name
, hating his young wife:

‘… Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss
,
Or there exceed the mark.’

And then he had her killed, as easy as that: ‘I
gave commands, then all smiles stopped together.’
It was so cruel! As if Browning himself recited, Aurora thought.

Kavanagh moved stage left, cajoling the audience. ‘Longfellow speaks to the inmost heart of us, in accents gentle enough to praise the hidden flowers of womanhood …’

‘Standing, with reluctant feet
,
Where the brook and river meet …’

It was such a man’s piece of poesy to leave her meek, bewildered and damp. But Kavanagh was beautiful to look at, and besides his skill, the strength of his build pleased her very much.

Into the wings came a rather portly man, panting, carrying two cages with difficulty because a third perched between them. A score
of interested red eyes peered out between the bars. Aurora yelped and dodged around the curtain before she could help herself, her skirt’s tail whisking into view for an instant, and then out again. In the wings again she looked back and found Mr. Kavanagh staring offstage at her, an arrested look on his broad countenance.

She fled.

An Ocean of Joy

Mama and Sybil sat side by side in the dressing room, hemming the girls’ ivory wool skirts to a sprightly six inches off the floor, and having a very satisfactory sentimental reunion, as touching as their last only three days ago.

Clover found it strange to see Mama so at ease with another woman, telling stories and laughing. In Paddockwood Mama had not had any friends. When out in company, uneasy with farm people and anxious to raise Papa’s stature in the community, she had overplayed the gracious lady; at home, she was almost embarrassingly vulgar, an easy fountain of stories and songs, spending whole days in her wrapper. Clover watched her now with Sybil, giving back joke for joke, exchanging opinions about the success or failings of people they’d known, and thought that it was odd, how someone as inward and melancholy as Papa could have loved a person so transparently light. Light-hearted, light-minded. Or perhaps it was not odd at all.

She resolved not to think any more about Papa. She wetted the mascara brush and did her lashes again. She thought of them too often. After Papa the memory of Harry always came tagging along: sadder but cleaner, at least less complicated, the poor lamb. Clover was tired. We are far away, she thought, from what we’ve known. This small room, this momentary warmth and crowding, is what we have now instead of our old life. The table under her elbows was pitted and scarred, more than a school desk even, and the wooden plank walls between and above the mirrors were dotted with signatures and notes from artistes who had travelled through. She leaned on the heels of her
hands and stared at
Eulélé Josephine, 1911
, the accents cut sharply into the wood, and tried not to think at all for a moment.

Sybil’s catalogue of vaudeville stitched gently on, her tinny voice sharp and helpful as any needle. ‘Julian Eltinge, he’s
from
out here, you know. Years ago, when things were wilder, he made his living as a lap-girl in a box-house out in Butte—a very
respectable
girl, I’m sure—they were short on females in the area, so they’d dress a boy or two,’ Sybil added quickly, with an eye towards the girls. ‘His father found out and beat the tar out of him, so he went east—the suavest thing in shoes, a lovely dancer. This was in Boston, after you’d left us, Flora. Before he struck it big as a female impersonator, he was with Cadet Theatricals, but then E.E. Rice saw him, and he was made. In ’03 he was already getting a thousand a week with Keith’s, so he told me, and much more now, I’m sure. We did the galop, a private party at the Lyceum there in Cincinnati—I’d show you but there’s not enough room to swing a cat, let alone a rat!’ Sybil took a turn around the ballroom in her chair, little feet peeping out from her pink petticoat and fluttery hands dancing in the air. She sang,
‘Waltz me around again, Willie, around, around, around
—’ and ended in a skirt-gathering kick.

Clover could see what a hit she would have been as Miss Saucy Saunders, when broke and nothing for it but burlesque. ‘I
feel like a ship on an ocean of joy …’

For herself, Clover thought she would rather do anything—go to Normal School to teach, be a telephone operator—than take that road, burlesque or box-house. They would just have to make some money. Mama was right. A thousand a week ought to do it.

A Dreadful Jig

The Old Soldiers sawed away at tunes left over from the Civil War. Several were blind or maimed, their faces old and blank. One fiddler sat playing with a bow strapped to his foot, having lost his arm. Another, blind, danced a dreadful jig as he played, thin legs darting lightly ahead and behind, and while he jigged he made his mouth into a grin that had no meaning. Bella said she could not bear to watch,
and left Mattie to finish his apple alone; but it seemed to Clover, standing unnoticed in the wings, that the audience did not mind at all. They could not know how terrible it would be to have a skill, to lose it, then turn freak to get a portion of it back. Or was it still the same—did one still lose one’s misery in the music? Clover curtsied as the soldiers filed past when their turn was over, silent in the backstage gloom.

Cornelius the Bubble Juggler was nothing but that, a stooped man with an outsize bubble-pipe and a carefully guarded Proprietary Mixture for making bubbles, which he patted up into the air from a silk cushion like a large glove on his hand. It was tedious, and he insisted on counting each pat, starting over when the bubble burst, as it always did. His was the first act Clover had seen that left her feeling flat and critical, and she did not like the feeling. Especially when they had to go on themselves in so little time.

But the pictures came between Cornelius and their turn. Clover ran down to help Aurora cope with Bella. She was only thirteen, even though they had to say she was sixteen. She’d been the baby for a long time—until she was eight, when Harry had come along, Clover and Aurora had called her Baby.

In the dressing room Clover found Aurora panting and sighing, standing against the wall. Clover panted too, filling out her narrow chest gorgeously as if she were Miss Sunderland, whisking an imaginary green-satin train from side to side and trilling to make her sisters laugh. She finished Bella’s makeup and re-did her own frog-pond eyes, taking a pin to separate her own and Bella’s thick-blacked eyelashes.