The Little Shadows (15 page)

The stairs were crowded too, and dark, though all the wood shone; dark doors lined the upper hall. In the first chamber, two people sat on the edge of an iron bed, the woman on the man’s lap with her legs quite bare. Aurora looked quickly away. Maurice backed
her out and closed the door with exaggerated care, and swung his arm out dramatically to open the next door, like a genie conjuring up a robbers’ cave.

Nobody there—a small stuffy room with garments heaped up on the bed and couch; no lamp lit. He pushed the door farther open and manoeuvred her inside, not that she resisted.

Once inside the darkened room he cupped her chin and cheek in his hands in a well-practised fashion and tilted her head up. He missed her mouth when he bent to kiss her, smearing her eye, and then pretended to have been planning all along to plant kisses around her face, murmuring broken love-notes as he did so.

But her mind, which had been confused and unthinking, suddenly became a clean open space:
He is a fool
, she thought. Well, that was not a useful thing to be thinking. She returned his kiss, tipping her head so his mouth, smelling of rum and pastilles and tobacco, met hers. He seemed younger as she kissed him. She touched the cleft in his chin.

‘You’re a beauty,’ he said. He wrapped an arm around her waist, and the hand on the arm circled around her breast while the other fumbled with the hooks on her bodice, but he soon gave up and merely mashed her chest in his hand, the other hand brought into play as well, lurching her into the wall, first, then to the couch covered with dresses. The fabric beneath them shifted and slid—they were going to flump onto the floor, but Aurora hoisted him up as well as she could. She did not know whether to stop him or go on, and found that she did not even care which, but she was uncomfortable.

‘Beauty, beauty,’ he kept saying, and she thought that really, an Elocutionist ought to have more eloquence at his disposal. But he was very handsome, and she recalled the mastery with which his voice had teased the meaning from Browning and Longfellow.

A quick rap at the door, and Jenny came into the room, skirts swirling, bright velvet visible and invisible. She took in Aurora’s confusion and Maurice’s heavy-lidded glare at the interruption, and spoke only to Aurora, her tone pitched as if they were quite alone.

‘You shouldn’t be here. You go on home, now.’

Aurora stood. She pulled at her skirt and smoothed the waistband. She straightened her hat, turning her face away to give herself time for breath.

To Maurice, Jenny said, as if she knew him very well, ‘Out, you! Take this little girl safe home and then I might let you come back. You’re a twister.’

He laughed and overbalanced, crashing into the nightstand but not quite to the floor. Then was up again, still laughing. ‘You heard her, my dear, take me home safe, and then perhaps I will be let back into Paradise.’

Aurora looked at Jenny’s strong-boned face, at her clean skin and long eyes. Old enough to be her mother, but seeming young and full of energy, and she gave back look for look, so that without the least bit wanting to, Aurora decided she was right. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Thank you, ma’am, I had best be leaving.’ She took Maurice’s arm and steered him to the door, saying, ‘They will be looking for me at home, sir.’

The Playbill

Clover could not quite sleep: the Parthenon playbill ran through her head continually, so that at one moment she was haunted by fascinated fear lest Julius cause another scene or be injured by the vast Miss Sunderland; at another, in an almost-dream, the rats and cats were the ones who fought. Aurora had been too long with the Elocutionist, some page of the programme said. Another page, and there was Mama, left alone in the world. Clover could not turn the next page because there would be her father lying on the front walk with the dark stain seeping under him, so she riffled back through the pages to Julius, to Gentry calling out from the back of the theatre.

She struggled to wake. The room shaped itself around her: the leaning square of mirror tilted over the dresser, the coal-fire’s last ember in the stove, a small mountain of Mama on the sofa. Montana. From Paddockwood to Prince Albert, to Regina, to Calgary, to the Empress in Fort Macleod—now Helena. Clover pushed out of bed and stood. Her feet gripped the linoleum, one hand on the rough sheet still. No Aurora.

Across the room Mama lay uncovered, the coverlet fallen to the floor. Too slippery. Clover took the wool blanket off the bed, easing Bella’s fingers from its edge, and tucked that around Mama instead. She laid the coverlet gently over Bella and stood a moment longer, silent in the dark room, before she made herself climb back into bed.

In Drink

Aurora hurried along beside Maurice as he straggled through silent frozen streets, seeming to know the route more as a horse knows the stable than as a thinking man. She put her hand through his arm, as his hands were shoved into his topcoat pockets, and took the longest strides she could. She feared that if their pace slowed he would forget what he was doing. She had many times seen men in drink, and it did not seem to her that he was too far gone, compared to how Papa had been once or twice, let alone Mr. Dyment from the land office, but she thought he might walk ahead and forget she was with him. From time to time she spoke; he did not seem to hear.

At last she spied the Pioneer on its corner, a block ahead, and felt some relief. Just then Maurice dodged away from her into a dark entryway, the cobbled tunnel to a yard behind a store. She stopped and moved towards him, but he flung out a beautiful white hand.

‘Wait!’ he cried. ‘Nature must be answered!’ and then she saw his arm braced against the bricks and understood that he was relieving himself. Hot piss made a curl of steam in the air. She felt more tired than she had for a very long time. And they had a lesson with Gentry in the morning.

‘Sweetness? My beauty? Girl?’ Maurice’s voice came out of the passageway in a stage whisper, and she realized that he did not know her name.

‘I’m here,’ she said.

‘Come, come,’ he said.

No one in the street. The moon lay on snowy ruts and drifts impartially. She stepped into the shadow, keeping to the opposite wall from
where he had been leaning. He opened his topcoat and folded her inside it, keeping her warm, and she found she was fond of him, of his looseness and greatness and strength, however fallen and come low. He kissed her again less clumsily, his mouth cooler after the long walk. With one hand he kirtled up her skirt and then, pinning the gathers between their two bodies, he nudged a knee at her legs to open them, and then his fingers touched her under there, opening her there, pushing through her legs to touch all through her, beneath her drawers along the silky tops of her legs above her stockings, and the feel of that hand on that skin was one of the things she was looking for, she thought, or perhaps she should push him away, she could not tell. After that first soft sweeping his fingers shoved into her too strongly, so he hurt her, and she did not know how to tell him she did not like it. His eyes were closed. Then he paused, pressed against her fiercely, paused again, and said in a reasonably sober voice, ‘Your mama will be waiting. We must go.’

Once he had stopped pushing against her she could be kind in her thoughts towards him, and she supposed that they would continue like this, only not outside in the cold but in some rose-petal-strewn hotel room in Chicago or New York, where it would somehow be easier, or once she could get it right, all right.

He stood waiting for her to shake her skirts down and did not look at her, nor speak, the rest of the block to the Pioneer. Mrs. Burday had left the side door unlatched for them and he pushed her up the stoop and swayed on the doorstep.

‘Lovely child,’ he said. ‘Lovely Silence.’ She looked at him, puzzling out his face to see what his expression was: nothing but a smile there, and a quirk of the eyebrows.

‘Wicked Jenny was right. But I’ll make her sorry for that!’ He shut the door and she could hear his feet clumsy on the steps, then making off down the street.

Upstairs, Mama woke from where she had been curled on the sofa, and asked in a clouded voice, ‘Aurora? Did you have a good supper? You were an age down there. I hope he entertained you kindly and was not … I meant to come down and—but I dropped off …’

‘Oh, it was fine, Mama. Mrs. Burday gave us shin of beef and fried potatoes, and when we’d eaten we went for a walk.’ Enough to make Mama sigh and sleep again.

Clover sat up and watched her as she took her clothes off in the moonlight. Being Clover she did not ask anything, but Aurora lay down beside her and was very grateful for her thin arm around her for comfort. After a while she whispered, as if answering, ‘I do not know. I think it was a bordello he took me to. The punch was delicious. The room is going round the bed, or the bed going round me, oh …’

She felt like a ship on an ocean of shame.

Before she slept she thought of Jimmy Battle, and felt the arch of bone inside her pelvis as she turned over in the bed to lie farther away from Clover. The spread of that bone, how her hips had opened and were waiting for women’s work. Not children, she did not mean that, but the pressure of a man, however that would be. She would not expect love, because that was a weakening thing, but passion would be useful in her art.

Innermost Heart

Drops of water raced down the dark window as Bella opened her eyes. She put out a finger to touch one drop, splitting it into two pearls that ran onward to the sill. It was not a thaw, but the hip-bath steaming in front of the stove. The sky was still dark, it must be early. They had let her sleep till last again. She stretched under the gold coverlet, taking up the whole bed luxuriously, and rolled her head to see who was in the bath: Clover, her thin back bent, each nub of bone raised like a long set of knuckles, running down her spine.

Bella watched Clover stand, hugging herself as the water drained off, steaming in the cold air, hip bones a-jut and every side rib visible. Mama put a sheet around her. Aurora poured another kettle of hot water into the hip-bath. Clover bumped up into bed and under the coverlet, and laid her cold feet against Bella’s legs so that Bella shrieked softly—and was shushed by Aurora, mindful as they always had to be
of the sleepers in rooms beside theirs. The walls were thin as cardboard. Even with the steam and the stove it was too cold for Bella to be happy about taking off her nightgown, but it had to be done, so she stripped and stepped into the water. Once she had scrubbed herself she braced against the lip of the bath and Mama and Aurora poured water over her head, soaped her, and took the suds out in a towel. They rinsed her hair with bathwater and then twice with new water, with vinegar in it for shine, but that was very cold, and then she stood and they helped her out to stand shivering on the linoleum in front of the stove until, wrapped and warming like a loaf in a napkin, she could get back under the coverlet while Aurora and Clover laced their corsets. Aurora said, ‘Tighter, tighter,’ and Clover pulled. Aurora had a beautiful corset: cut-away hips and a short back, made of French coutil with écru lace trimming and pale blue ribbons. God only knew what it had cost, Mama said. It was from the Queen of the May costume.

She
ought to have a corset too, but Bella was still treated like a baby; hers was only a band, even though she had a bust beginning, and perhaps with a little cotton stuffed inside a corset she would look more like the sixteen she was supposed to be. Aurora was as cold as winter, and Clover only loved Aurora. They did not care about her, no matter how much she tried to be good and no trouble to anyone and to dance as well as the others. She dug her head under the coverlet and went back into the darkness for a while, into the misery of nobody, nobody knowing her innermost heart or loving her at all.

Sentimental Bilge-Distiller

‘You have laced yourself too tight to breathe. You cannot
sing
if you cannot
breathe.’

Gentry’s stick whisked at Aurora, flicking like a carriage whip on her stiffened midriff. ‘Take her to the dressing room and loosen her corset,’ he told Flora, not troubling to make it a request. His impatience was always on fire in the mornings. A bad time for classes. But they had the choice: learn, or go. He cast his pearls before them! What was
it to him if they chose to lace themselves into asphyxia for a pair of booze-soaked Irish eyes?

Clover and Bella ran through the Grand Scale twenty times before Aurora came back and joined them in the line, cheeks hot and bodice loose. They continued together, but Gentry flung up his arms and left the stage, struggling down the portable stairs with his cane, each step a contortion and spasm of limbs and hips and angles.

At the scale’s downward arc, they fell silent. From the darkened auditorium they heard Gentry’s voice in a smooth, powerful undertone that grew louder without tightness or exertion, imitating and correcting the tones he criticized. ‘When you push, you create tension in the heart and in the brain—so the voice goes up in pitch and acquires a spindly, questioning, uncertain tone. If you try to make your voice big by pushing from the throat, you cut your voice in pieces, lose all the undertones and individuality. In the
throat
, you must feel no effort at all.’ Gentry paced up and down the aisles, ending by shouting ‘Throat!’ at them, with as far as they could detect no effort at all in his own.

Aurora felt dizzy and sick, and had to remember to blink her eyes; Clover beside her was straight as a pillar, no colour in her face. Bella seemed to be struggling not to laugh, but glancing at her quickly, Aurora sent a dagger look. At the smallest infraction Gentry might dismiss them, and she needed him to tell her everything, everything. She could feel her understanding stretching to take in what he said.

At Gentry’s command they sang
Buffalo Gals
again, and again, and again,
a capella
. At length he relented, came towards the stage, and softened his tone. ‘Of course extra force is required to fill the theatre. You must find the fire to fill this space, and learn to release it without constriction. You prepare, prepare, prepare, and then you let it go, give your work out freely in your singing, and your audience will receive it as freely. Generosity is the lesson I would teach you.’ He turned away, then back again. ‘And focus.’