The Little Shadows (19 page)

Stroking Bella’s hair, Clover was lonely. Bella’s childishness made her feel old and calm. Farther down the carriage Julius played pinochle with the leader of the Old Soldiers outfit, John Wendt Hayden. The son of a soldier, he had not seen action himself and bore no terrible wound; he had a lovely friendly voice. She could change seats and join them, but was disinclined to move. After the usual hubbub of the theatre it was nice to have quiet.

She could hear Julius holding forth to John Hayden: ‘I
did
attempt blackface for a year or so, travelling in the Antipodes. No more. The young comic Jolson goes corked for Sullivan–Considine—a mouth with a man attached. I saw him perform in San Francisco, unfazed in the aftermath of the earthquake; I won’t compete with him. I’d rather mock the German.’

Julius was easy to hear, but John had a low voice, so their conversation was an exchange of booms and murmurs, like Clover imagined the sound of the sea might be.

‘Yon Jolson transcends the genre because he is in some sense sending up his Hebraism, of which the audience is perfectly well aware. But
it’s a pesky makeup to do. I have disliked it ever since, in my youth, I was persuaded to use coal dust one evening. Took seven months to rid my skin of the blue tinge. I looked like a damned Taffy, fresh from the mine.’ Puffing on a cheroot, Julius expanded. ‘When you work in concert with someone like Bert Williams, the race ceases to be abstraction, and becomes a collection of human beings, as noble, nasty, sharp or foolish as our own. Oddly, this transmogrification does not seem to attain with the German, whom I am never loath to loathe, and ever find more loathly on closer acquaintance—for example a railway journey, during which your German will always be provided with a frumious wurst of blemished origin, and an unsharp pocket knife to saw it with.’

As Julius’s trumpeted over John’s voice, his blatant body trumpeted too, lounging legs laid out into the aisle. ‘In New York last year, Flo Ziegfeld signed Bert Williams to star in the Follies—blackface over his own black face—and when the cast (a collection of gabies) threatened to walk out rather than appear onstage with him, Ziegfeld’s response was simple: Go if you want! I can replace every one of you—
except
the man you want me to fire!’

Clover thought of blackface as a costume. It startled her to think of the person under the makeup.

Across the aisle, Aurora stared at her own reflection in the train window, the abbreviated slant of her un-made-up brows and the jut of her too-strong chin. She tried to pull it in, experimenting with the angle to find how to make their next photos more flattering, and let the words to
Last Rose
, which Gentry had put permanently into their turn, run through her head:
Thus kindly I’ll scatter thy leaves o’er the bed, Where thy mates of the garden lie scentless and dead
. A manual for deadheading in the garden; that practical coolness could be used in the song too. But when it came to
From love’s shining circle, the gems drop away
, you could let the throb in there, open the coolness to the dark heart that lay under everyone’s life. All the dead sisters and brothers, the lost fathers and children of everyone in the audience would come and sit beside them briefly, because she was singing. Perhaps Gentry meant that it was a better thing to do with grief than just being sad alone.

A Thin Man, Not Too Tall

The Hippodrome in Butte was a brand-new theatre, but only one of seventeen operating in the wealthy copper town. The Grand Opera on Myers Avenue was the largest; the Lyric Opera the most notorious (according to Sybil, the fancy name was a front for gambling and prostitution); and the Hippodrome the newest. The girls climbed dirty-snowed streets from the train station, following the straggling artistes, and were rewarded. Inside and out, it was a beauty. The opulent lobby was freshly painted, the smell of linseed oil still strong.

Inside the house, Clover stopped on her way down the aisle to turn around and around, staring up at the ceiling. A bright wreath of flowers painted around the ventilated dome in the centre of the roof held four figures (ribbon-sashes for
Music, Dancing, The Drama
, and
Tragedy
draped prudently over bare chests) and a fruit-basket-upset of musical instruments. Instead of advertisements, like in most theatres they had seen, the front-drop curtain featured a painted Greek scene: ruins on the shore of a lake and a dangerous mountain range behind.

Bella and Aurora went down to the dressing rooms, but Clover stayed to watch the flymen run through the ropes, testing the rigging. Myriad backdrops swept up and down, each with its own wing pieces: a fancy drawing room with folding doors, a poor kitchen, two different streets (one elegant, one shabby), a ship dock, dawn in a forest glade, a rocky pass fit for brigands, and many others. As she delightedly inspected the detail of a starving artist’s garret (two mice fighting over a bit of cheese, a baby’s fat little fist visible above the rim of a cracked cradle), a voice spoke behind her.

‘Looks comfortable enough, and cheap, shall we move in?’

She turned quickly and saw a thin man, not too tall, with fluffy brown hair and a sharply bent nose. The sweetest face she’d ever seen: mild, interested, open to excitement. She liked his face on sight, more than any man’s she could remember, except—perhaps it reminded her a bit of Papa’s, abstraction combined with a suddenly present attention. He was attending to her at this moment.

‘Victor Smith,’ he said, indicating himself.

‘Clover Avery,’ she returned automatically, thinking he must be manager here. He did not look like a manager, but neither did Gentry Fox, and this man had something of Gentry’s air of being not from the place he found himself in. She held out her hand and he laughed, and raised it almost to his lips—in a European way, but jokingly.

‘I think you must be one of
Les Très Belles Aurores
?’

‘Well, we’re just the Belle Auroras,’ Clover said. ‘My sisters are Bella and Aurora, you see.’

‘No Clover in that name—does that mean I can pluck you loose from them?’

‘I sing alto,’ she said, as if that explained the whole thing.

‘Then you must definitely come over to my act. I need some sweet meadow flower to pull the bees. I am Victor Saborsky, when I am on the boards.’

‘Oh! Our friend Sybil Sutley knows you, sir.’

‘So she does. She was a good friend to my mother.’

‘As she is to mine,’ Clover said.

‘Then we are cousins,’ Victor said. He bowed to her, but shyness descended on her under his continued regard, so she turned again to watch the drops being raised and lowered—they were now in a stone square lit by shafts of moonlight, some European capital waiting for a princess to trip lightly down the stairs, or a king to abdicate—and when she raised her eyes he was gone. Vanished without a sound. She found herself looking up, as if for a bird. Nothing.

One Silver Dollar

The dressing rooms were shining clean, bright with mirrors. At one side a darling stove puffed heat into the room. Bella held her boots out one at a time to admire their gleam in the rows of electric bulbs. The first time they’d had electric lights in a dressing room, too. This was the fanciest place. Aurora had checked the bill and there were no other females on it—only Sybil,
who had a dressing room of her own with Julius—so she let Bella pick the best spot and set out their things, with a place for Clover between them. Clover is the best friend of each of us, Bella thought, she is always between us. But she loved Aurora too. In some ways she and Aurora were the most alike: strong and bold. Clover was the sweetest of them, though.

A thousand thousand Bellas found the ranked mirrors entrancing. Their placement round the room showed her herself as a regiment of girls, all those shards, and ghosts dainty and slim, ready to dance. The Parthenon’s old mirrors had not been so flattering.

A tap on the door—and two heads poked around it, like another doubling mirror.

‘Mr. East and Mr. Verrall!’ Bella exclaimed, happy to see old friends. ‘Come in!’

‘Oh, we will not intrude,’ Verrall was saying, but East burst through his arm and into the room, to give each of the sisters a warm and slightly over-personal embrace.

Verrall flapped an envelope in his long fingers. Not entirely clean, Bella saw, after their railway journey, but her own hardly ever were either.

‘We were charged with, given, we—’

East snatched the letter from him. ‘Jimmy the Bat got us to bring this,’ he said, rolling his eyes at Verrall’s politesse. ‘Not knowing what hotel you would be putting up at—and do you know yourselves?’

‘I believe we are at Mrs. Seward’s,’ Aurora said. ‘It is only a boarding house.’

‘We will
call
it an hotel,’ Verrall declared. ‘We are there too.’

‘Mrs. Seward’s is the
only
place to stay in Butte,’ East announced, sunk in gloom.

‘Fine testimonial,’ Verrall said. ‘Not a paid endorsement.’

‘We are thinking about hotels, because our present routine, that we are breaking in on this western swing, is hotelly.’

‘It has a hotellishness about it,’ Verrall agreed.

‘A dark and hellish hotellishness.’

‘So, Miss Bella, we were wondering if you could be purr-suaded—’

‘We need, we have need, we are in need of, a good little girl …’

‘… to hotel for us tonight?’

No matter how they talked over each other you could always hear each one, Bella noticed. East was the funniest. Or maybe Verrall, with his sad eyes and bluish teeth.

‘We would add to your consequence the amount of
one silver dollar.’
Verrall flourished the coin as if it were a king’s ransom.

‘Per diem,’ East put in hastily. ‘Not per showem.’

‘To help you in your act?’ Bella was astonished.

‘That very thing. You would have one or two lines, just old hokum, but would carry the day, and could wear whatever pretty little frock you’ve been singing in, without a change to trouble you.’

Aurora said, before Bella could agree, ‘We’d have to see the lines. There cannot be any suggestive nonsense.’ That chafed, but Bella knew that Aurora felt herself to be Mama while they were here, and was determined to look after their reputation as delicate girls.

‘What,
none?’

‘No, no, East,’ Verrall said. ‘None of the kind, nothing, no. Only a sweet girl receptionist, a little stupid.’

‘A very stupid, but such a pretty little hen!’ said East, chucking Bella under the chin and almost kissing her, but managing to make Aurora smile about it.

Bella spun around till her skirt spread wide. ‘Oh yes, yes, yes, please!’ she cried.

Balance

While East and Verrall set about coaching Bella, Aurora read the letter they had brought her:

Dear Miss Aurora,

Miss Eleanor has decided to return East, which means I must go too for now. We’ve lost Mr. Hanrahan (who played her husband in the melodrama you might recall) and cannot do the show longer so she pulls it back to NY or Boston and we will do ‘The Slap’ again.

So it may be some time before I make it back Out West again and I am sorry for it. Keep up with your dancing and one of these turns it will be you and me.

Yours already, without any Right to style myself so,

JIMMY BATTLE

No, he did not have any right. It made her warm to think of it, but almost equally irritated. He was the puppy of that actress, even if he was working on a song-and-dance routine on the side. But it was comforting to think of him. She touched the signature,
Jimmy Battle
. Small writing, but not cramped. He would not ever shove her away and curse her. He was a good match for her; they were the same in many ways. But there ought to be some balance in things. Perhaps she too would find a patron for a while.

Glass Crash

The orchestra master knew his work and put the Belle Auroras through their cues like lightning, wasting no time at all on compliments but treating them like veterans, which was better. He nodded them off and turned to the more difficult cues for the Furniture Tusslers, a robust pair of young men with small eyes and ham-shaped arms who threw tables and chairs, and each other, across the stage at predetermined intervals, to the loud crashing of cymbals. The wood-crash operator was irritably busy stage right—when the girls crossed his line of vision he missed a cue. They fled.

Bella (who had looked back at the younger, quite-handsome Tussler) stomped on the foot of the waiting glass-crash man. He swore horribly, but gave her a black-toothed grin when she apologized. She loved his glittering basket of glass shards and the spare bottles he had lined up to break in it; but the wood-crash machine with its heavy handle frightened her. It sounded too much like a real man falling
down stairs, or landing in a woodpile, or breaking a spindly Sheraton desk, depending on the velocity at which the handle was turned.

East and Verrall were quarrelling on the stairs as the girls went down, as they seemed almost always to be doing, when not performing or testing out their routines on personable girls. Bella knew that Aurora felt herself to be above them, although she could not have said why; and Clover liked them well enough but was still shy of their patterschtick. Bella, however, was one of their company now, and they put out black-suited arms to stop her halfway down, and got her to run through her lines again at a whisper. ‘
Would you like to take a bath?
’ ‘
No thanks, I’ll leave it right where it is!
’ and all the rest of the old gags. The second time through, Bella’s tongue tripped up and she said, ‘
Would you like me to take a bath?
’ Quick as lightning East said, ‘
Whoo-hoo, absolutely
!’—eyes goggling happily out of his head, hands somehow conjuring a claw-footed tub.

She didn’t hesitate either, but asked, as if it were his luggage, ‘
Where would you like me to take it?
’ which made East laugh out loud instead of carrying on—and that was winning the trick, so she was proud of herself.