The Little Shadows (2 page)

Except that Mama said, ‘Oh!
Never
cross on the stairs!’ and stared up after him, frightened. This was a day for good luck.

On Our Uppers

At the bottom of the stairs was a close dark space. Mama found the door and Aurora went first, into a warm room glowing with light from the oil-stove and a lamp or two, a cozy room with benches set in front of tables lining the walls, mirrors showing a crowd of people—but half those people were themselves again, redoubled in the glass. Still, the room was crammed, and very warm, with a strong smell of heating oil.

‘Flora!’ A little shriek, and then a pink hand clapped to a round pink mouth. A woman waved from one of the benches and leaned forward—so small was the room—to pat at Mama’s arm urgently.

Mama peered through the glittering shadows, and then cried, in a whisper, ‘Sybil! Of all delightful things! Now this makes me much easier in my mind—and you as pretty as—’

The woman got up (but was not much taller standing up) and hugged Mama. She was wearing bright-spangled pink artificial silk, very full in the skirt, which brushed too near the stove. Her eyes were shiny black sequins in a doll’s face. ‘You are a thousand years older now, Flora, and so am I. And who are these with you? Are they your daughters?’

‘Aurora’—pulling her forward—‘Sixteen! But we say eighteen, of course, and here is Amelia, not even a year younger, we call her Clover, her papa’s pet name for her—Girls, this is Sybil Sutley, you’ll remember me speaking of. Where are you, Bella? Arabella, she’s the baby, now—thirteen, but sixteen, wink-wink, for the Gerry Society.’ Mama patted them into order as she spoke, adjusting Aurora’s hat around her face and pulling at the velvet flower’s petals.

‘And this is what came of your schoolmaster?’

‘Yes, the very same, and very sad—’ Mama broke off. She gritted
her teeth and turned her face to one side, the palm of her small hand over her eyes and nose. An ugly gesture. Aurora turned to help, but Clover put an arm around Mama’s waist as she continued, ‘And my little Harry as well. But there, not now.’ Then Mama was upright again, and Clover slid back into the shadow by the dressing-screen.

Bella was edging away, too, Aurora saw. Bella hated to hear Mama say Harry’s name, or Papa’s; she slipped out to sit alone on the stairs in the dark. Her skirt would get dusty, but they could brush it down for her. Aurora stood by a dressing mirror and carefully removed her hat, pin by pin, not looking (although she could see him perfectly clearly in the mirror) at the young man in evening clothes who had been singing upstairs, now lounging on one end of the table to draw on the wall an exact replica of a bottle on the table:
King of Whiskeys
. Many people had signed and drawn on the wall, so it must be all right that he was defacing it, but a whiskey bottle was not polite.

She stabbed each hatpin into a square of cloth that belonged in her velvet muff. Red scabs dotted her fingers, but she tried not to let herself pin them in the same holes each time, because that would smack of Mama, who had to count as she walked over the boardwalk back in Paddockwood—otherwise, what?—her long-dead mother’s back would break, the mirrors would crack, seven years’ bad luck would pour down on them. In sudden impatience, Aurora stripped off her mauve kid gloves. With her bare hand she swept dust from the dressing table before she set down her hat, then wiped off the dust on an inner fold of her black skirt. No towels set out, and they had forgot to borrow some from the boarding hotel.

Her mother and Sybil Sutley sat close together, talking
sotto voce
, reliving Boston and Chicago and their wonderful engagements with Keith’s twenty years before (of which the girls knew every turn and every whistle stop), while the mad Maximilian pranced about the stage above their heads, sifting dust down on them all.

At least this was a proper theatre, if shabby. Not like the hotel in Prince Albert where they’d had their first professional audition, last summer. The conceited young man lounging on a sofa while they
sang and danced for him, making them spin over and over so their skirts flew outward and their petticoats rose, then sidling too close to the makeshift stage in the hotel banqueting room to see what they had on underneath. Mama had left the piano, shutting the lid with a bang, and marched them out of there double-quick. ‘Not for us,’ she’d said. ‘And besides, he has an unlucky face. I doubt if his touring company will come to pass.’

He had passed Aurora on the street as she walked to teach piano to the Sadler girls, and asked her to come for a second audition, on her own, and it was enough to make you laugh that he thought he was fooling anybody. Pulling her into a shadowed space between buildings, saying the number of his hotel room. If he’d had any skill she’d have thought it over, at least; as it was she just despised him. But he had a nice little tongue for kissing and he made her laugh with his bold unpractised wickedness, much as he made her angry with his superior air. She sang under her breath, staring at herself in the dim-lit mirror,
‘He’s a devil, he’s a devil, He’s a devil in his own home town!’
The elegant singer hummed along as he drew, but Aurora did not glance at him. A burst of jinkety music above: the piano playing
Streets of Cairo
—maybe the magician had a snake.

The pink-dressed Sybil woman leaned forward again to snatch at the knee of a dark old man, his massive head springing with wild gouts of grey hair, who sat hunched in a threadbare armchair shoved back into the alcove. Her hand like a bird’s beak, pecking: ‘And this is Julius Foster Konigsburg, my old man—we’ve been touring Europe, you know, after Australia, had a reversal there, but never mind that.’ Peck-peck again. ‘You remember me talking about Flora, Julius—we met in Boston on the continuous vaudeville—eleven o’clock in the morning till eleven at night and what a mercy
those
days are done.’

The heavy man’s face was exaggeratedly made-up, lined with ochre and highlighted in strange patches; he must be a character actor in a melodrama or perhaps a single-man comic—but the pink lady was with him. Sybil’s makeup was soubrette. She was still talking, though he paid her not the slightest heed.

‘Touring with the Leddy Quartet, refined entertainment, Mr. and Mrs. Leddy and their son; Flora replaced their daughter when she ran off with a miner. Costumed mimicry—Flora, you was the best fancy dancer on any circuit from Ottawa to Corpus Christi.
And
you won a piano for dancing, in Minneapolis, just before you left us!’

‘I did, but it’s sold now, had to go. Left without a sou!’

That was not true. Aurora hated her for saying it, when Papa had tried so hard about money. It was just that the teacherage was not theirs and naturally they’d had to leave when the new man came, after Papa died—and everything cost so much—but they could always go to Qu’Appelle and stay with Papa’s brother, only Mama would not. No reason they couldn’t earn their way, she had said, and better. But she should not talk about Papa like that.

Aurora could feel her huge heart pounding, but half of her knew it was not for these small irritations, but for the terror of upstairs, and Mr. Cleveland, and getting the gig. And they wouldn’t be paid less than a hundred a week; Mama would have to hold the line.

‘Well, we’re on our uppers, but the girls are greatly talented and we’re going to make our way very-nicely-thank-you.’ Mama ruffled her skirts and gave Aurora a chin-up look. ‘You could be getting dressed, you girls: dodge behind the screen, nobody will mind.’

Clover was in a dream, so Aurora slipped into the space behind the cloth screen first, took off her long black skirt and hung it over a chair, fluffing out her shirtwaist into the baby-doll dress and pinafore of their costume. The stove-oil smell made her feel both comforted, because it was like the teacherage, and sick.

She
mmm
ed and hummed and worked her mouth in their exercises. There was not more than twenty dollars left in Mama’s purse. One more night in the hotel here, then the fare back to Calgary. Or write to Uncle Chum in Qu’Appelle, begging for help.

Aurora breathed slowly. She stopped listening to everything else and became still.

Music of the Spheres

Out on the stairs, cold and cramped, Bella sat thinking of the dark staircase the Twelve Dancing Princesses travelled down when they went out to dance all night, dancing the soles right off their shoes. Her own feet felt pinched, but only Aurora had new boots. It was fair—Aurora was the eldest, after all, and maybe tight boots would keep one’s feet from growing too gigantic.

‘Have a bit of chocolate,’ Sybil was saying to Mama in the dressing room, and the prospect almost made Bella go back in. But she would have to share, and she disliked that very much, and her mouth still remembered the hotel stew. She stayed on the step. The magician’s patter that pittered down the stairwell sounded stilted. She could go watch from the wings. The other door at the bottom of the stairs, though, would be the tunnel under the seats to the lobby, like the one in the Prince Albert theatre. That would be better; she could pretend to be audience. She opened the wooden-slat door. Inside was a dirt-packed tunnel, a mine shaft. It was dark.

She stepped in, meaning to leave the door open, but it had a spring attached, like a front-porch door. Nothing to brace it with, so she would have to feel her way along the dirt wall. She stood inside the closed door to test if she could bear the dark. No, she could not—she opened the door. But the thought came to her that if she was brave enough, they would get the gig. So then she had to.

This cold-earth smell is what it will be like inside my grave, she thought. What it is like in Papa’s grave, and Harry’s. She saw Harry’s small cold face, and how greatly still he had been. The floor was uneven, spills of dirt and pieces of lumber lying along it. Her fingers moved slowly over the dirt wall, scraping sometimes on a rock, jamming up against a beam every six feet or so. To calm herself she thought the hall was perhaps sixty feet long, so that would mean ten of those beams. Or maybe it was a hundred feet, and she could not imagine what the arithmetic for that would be. She stopped. Pretty soon she would be dead too, and packed in earth. There was no sound down here, none. Her own breathing, and a swimming sound. Papa had said it
was the Music of the Spheres: you could only hear it when you were quite alone, when all other noise was absent, when your mind was clear. She loved that sound.

If She’s Your Niece

A trill of music plinking—the magician upstairs, playing a ukulele, Clover thought. Quite good. She leaned against the wall, reading a posted sign with great concentration so no one would try to talk to her:

Don’t say ‘slob’ or ‘son-of-a-gun’ or ‘hully gee’ on Mr. Cleveland’s stage unless you want to be cancelled peremptorily. Lack of talent will be less open to censure than would be an insult to a patron.

If you are in doubt as to the character of your act, consult the manager, for if you are guilty of uttering anything sacrilegious or suggestive, you will be immediately closed and will never again be allowed in a theatre where Mr. Cleveland is in authority.

‘He stole that direct from Keith’s, of course,’ said a rich voice beside Clover. It belonged to the large man pushed deep into the armchair fitted into a hole in the wall; the bit of cloth draped around it was not enough to hide the dirt wall showing behind, hollowed out like a cave.

‘Has ideas above his station, Mr. Kennebec Cleveland does. Aping bloody Keith. Bloody one-horse, miles-from-nowhere …’

The man’s voice was swelling but the pink woman was suddenly across the room and up on his lap, her tiny paw stopping the large man’s mouth. She whispered, ‘No more of that, my dear, no more. Lucky to be here, and now my old pal Flora Dora, only Flora Avery she is now, and her baby-girl act—and no need for despair.’ She turned her face up at a new noise from the stage. ‘We’ll get a thousand a week
before we’re done, you see if we don’t!’ As if listening to a lullaby, the large man subsided, until a raucous flapping above made them all start. Clover could see, between lines of dust filtering down through the cracks in the stage boards, a white feather.

The crooning, screeling noise of the birds was painful. ‘And
there’s my flock
!’ shrieked Maximilian the Bird Magician. His big
finale
.

The door slammed open and Sybil jumped up, frightened. It was only a gawking boy to say, ‘Julius Foster Konigsburg, King of Protean Raconteurs?’

The large man swept an arm forward, acknowledging the title. ‘Yours to command, dear boy,’ he said, and Clover could not help but laugh. Julius Foster Konigsburg liked that. He waggled his hand again.

‘Mr. Cleveland says you have to wait a while. Knockabout Ninepins up next, and then he wants the Avery girls before you …’

Sybil told Mama, ‘He does it in one, so he’s much in demand, and of
course
would not be required to audition in the ordinary way. But Mr. Cleveland has asked to see his new material, thinking to put him number eight, next to closer on a nine-act bill—a headliner comedy smash for the big finish.’

‘Nine, in such a little one-horse burg! Really!’

‘I don’t think you’ll know anyone from the rest of the bill: a mind reader, but he’s a sleazy type, and his assistant is beginning to show, poor little thing. Cleveland will be dumping them, his wife is a terrible prude. And of course there are the Wonder Dogs—’ Sybil jerked a shoulder to the back wall, where a minor mutiny seemed to have broken out in the next room over. ‘Now
he’s
a character, quite a sweetheart but trouble with his temper, swears without meaning to. He keeps his cheeks stuffed with chaw and you can’t make out what he’s saying, so he gets by. I heard—but this is only gossip—that he cut off his own pecker in a rage one day. But the dogs are dear little things.’

Clover could not help wondering what that would look like, a stump like that. She tried not to think. She looked instead at a playbill pasted to the wall:
None are more Clever and Few Half so Good! Frederic LaDelle, the Man Who Mystifies! A very funny mystical effect that provokes
laughter and surprise from the most blasé!
She filled in the first
e
in Clever to make a circle, so it read
None are more Clover
.