The Little Shadows (41 page)

East professed to have seen it coming, of course. ‘Can’t blame Mayhew,’ he said. ‘Joe isn’t hardly fit for human consumption. He’s a brute and treats that boy like a rented mule, and the sooner they start losing bookings, the faster Nando’s going to jump ship.’

‘He cannot leave his mother,’ Flora said. ‘He is too loyal and good a boy for that.’

East glowered at her, and said pointedly, ‘She made her bed, and has lain on it these many years of her own choosing. What’s the boy to do, submit to endless beatings? Kill his old dad?’

Clover intervened before they could brangle, asking how the golf sketch had shaped up. East clapped his hands. ‘Capital, capital, we’re
ready to try it out tomorrow if you’re game, Belle of All the World? Verrall has your sides—where are they, Verrall? Don’t say you left them in the train or I will simply—’

But Verrall produced them, and they retreated to the Ninepins’ empty dressing room across the hall to run the sketch through pronto. Clover could hear them through the flimsy walls: Verrall attempting to teach East, who had no idea how to hold a club.

VERRALL:
No, no, now take the stick again in your hand and I’ll show you … you swing back like this—

EAST:
Like this?
(smashing sound as the club connects)
A pause
.

VERRALL:
(very controlled)
What are you going to do with that club now?

EAST:
Hit around corners?

VERRALL:
Stand over here—no, here, in front of me. I want to examine your form.

EAST:
Examine my form?

VERRALL:
Yes, now I’ll just stand behind you, and put my arms around yours like this, and my hands on your—

EAST:
Hey!
(smashing sound as the club connects)

VERRALL:
(yelping)
Hey! What did you do that for?

EAST:
You don’t know me well enough for that yet. I think you need someone more—female—to teach! Hey, miss! miss!

Bella was a young golf widow searching for her husband with a bent club of her own. She told East and Verrall the whole sad story:

BELLA:
My Archie played golf yesterday—he came home two hours late! He confessed the whole sordid tale: he said that a beautiful lady had jumped out of the bushes on the eleventh tee, dressed just as she came delivered from her Maker. She ravished him for hours, and he did not have the strength to refuse her, and he was very sorry.

EAST:
He made a clean breast of it, in fact.

BELLA:
He did
indeeeeed
.

VERRALL:
And did you forgive him?

BELLA:
Ha! I know him far too well for that—I hit him over the head with the rolling-pin. Lady, indeed! The wretch had played another nine holes!

Her mama had told her that she must take up golf herself, if she wanted to preserve her marriage, and she was there for a lesson. Verrall taught her about golf, and East taught her about love, ending in a completely ridiculous song, the lyrics of which descended to a thousand rapid repetitions of the word
love
.

Clover continued her work, putting Aurora’s hair up and tidying the dressing room, but it seemed to her that the song echoed and echoed in her own idiotic heart,
love love love love love
—and no one to answer it. No letter from Victor.

And now the rain had got into her eyes.

Lot’s Wife

At the eight-thirty show, the girls pranced on for
Spring Song
to the basso accompaniment of a colossal clap of thunder. At least, Bella thought it was thunder—

But as everyone in the house looked up, the middle rows of the audience were stung with a sliding shower of water. Then a shining sheet—then the roof parted, through the centre, and a waterfall fell through.

Aurora and Clover had raised their wreaths for Bella to duck through, and they all stopped still, stone statues of the Muses.

The audience began screaming, starting with the people directly under the waterspout. Luckily it was a paltry house again, and there was plenty of room to run up the aisles.

The bandleader in the pit turned when he saw the stricken look on the girls’ faces. He whipped his stick up in the air and shouted, ‘Out, boys!’ and the orchestra grabbed their instruments and hightailed it, the sudden ceasing of the music lost in the stampeding noise of the water still pouring down, and the ominous and quite dreadful shrieking of the ceiling.

The sidelights in the house went out, but the stage lights, wired separately in a new-built section, stayed on, so they could see it happen: the roof caving in. First the pressed-tin panels sagged, and a few drooped to the seats; then the great metal span bent down and down, and then it snapped, with another hideous wrenching noise, and more of the ceiling came down, in a terrific rush of smoking dust and water. The older girls huddled over Bella, but it did not occur to them to run. Teddy and his hands had come out to see the devastation. The stage was filling with silent gawping faces, turned audience themselves. The balcony emptied fast, but people were still streaming up the side aisles, some looking back like Lot’s wife, then yanked along by their friends.

‘Playing to the haircuts,’ Aurora said, and the other two could not help but laugh. That’s what was said when your act was so bad people left in the middle.

The fire curtain never did come down, as it was supposed to in any catastrophe.

Another span bent, another section of roof collapsed. And another. At the centre lobby doors, a brave or reckless group of men from the audience stood watching. Those onstage stared back, across the awful chasm that had been the Muse’s seats. Just before they finally ran for it, Bella watched in fascination as Mayhew appeared in the window of the booth, shouting something nobody could hear.

Condemned

Mayhew did not come home that night. Aurora found him at the Muse, Friday morning, standing in the rubble of the house. His perfect boots dusty, a tear in one sleeve. The city building inspector (who’d had many a lunch on Mayhew during the building
process) had placarded the bevelled-glass front doors of the Muse with
BUILDING CONDEMNED
cards. From the front, the theatre looked unharmed, as if it might all have been a bad dream. Rounding the building, though, the sad truth became evident. There was a plain of devastation, an expanse of jumbled white and grey, with here and there the red velvet of a seat jutting through, caked with plaster grime.
They won’t come in their best clothes if they think their skirts will be dirtied
, Aurora remembered Mayhew telling the cleaning women, the first week the Muse was open.

She had never known that so much wire went into a building. Dangling ends and spikes stuck out everywhere. One of the balcony’s grand pillars remained standing—sheared off in a long diagonal, the plaster-of-Paris foliage still curling rambunctiously. Like the broken pillar she had cut her finger on, when Mayhew hurled their wedding cake to the floor. Perhaps Sybil, with her forebodings, would have seen this coming, if she’d been invited to the wedding.

Aurora picked her way across the expanse of wreckage. All the way there on the streetcar, she had rehearsed what not to say to Mayhew. The rain had subsided to dribs and drabs, but her boots would be quite ruined by the combination of plaster dust and jagged wood and tar-muck.

‘It’s been a great gig,’ he said, when she’d come close enough to hear.

The quiet interested her. After all the noise last night it seemed peaceful, even calm this morning.

‘Edmonton, of all cursed places, to take me down.’

She looked at him. The astrakhan collar of his overcoat, slung over his arm, was as plush as ever.

‘It’s just the house, you see,’ he said, gesturing right and left to where the newer additions were still standing—the stage looking naked, open to the elements. ‘Penstenny will be able to rebuild, if he chooses. He can turn the front piece into a decent office block. He won’t be ruined.’

She nodded. Workmen were moving here and there, one pushing a wheelbarrow piled high with detritus.

‘Came at the right time,’ Mayhew said. ‘I couldn’t have made payroll tomorrow … Might have had to fire the place anyhow.’

He offered her an arm, and she took it. They progressed together through the broken bits of wood, back to the street.

The Pierce-Arrow was parked in front, his monogrammed suitcases already strapped on the rumble seat. She had not noticed anything missing from the apartment, but hadn’t looked inside his closet. He must have been ready to do a bolt for some time.

‘I’d take you with me,’ he ventured.

Weak autumn sun made an effort to turn the puddles gold; the boardwalk glistened grey and black. ‘That’s kind of you, but no—there’s Mama, and the girls.’

He nodded. He opened the car door, and hesitated with one foot on the running board.

‘I love you,’ he said.

Because that was so absurd a thing to say, and so stupid, her resolution from the streetcar ride gave out. ‘Did you hurt that girl, the Irish girl?’ she asked him quickly, wanting desperately to know.

Mayhew stared down at her, at the bright cloud of hair, the young rise of bodice and neck and cheek. At her face, so well known to him now, and her self—impervious to his love, not part of him, not his in any sense.

‘No!’ he said. ‘How could you ask me such a thing?’

‘I was not certain,’ she said.

‘Have I hurt you so badly?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Only a little. I don’t care.’

From an inner pocket he pulled out a roll of money, pressing it into her glove. ‘Won’t last you long, but don’t give the vultures any of it,’ he said as he got into the car. ‘Promise me.’

Aurora laughed, unable to resist his cock-eyed gall. The car door slammed, and off Mayhew went, white wheels skimming over the golden pools of rain.

There went her livelihood. What a fix to be in.

She felt ridiculously happy.

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8.
Butterfly Girls

OCTOBER
1914–
JANUARY
1915

The David, Camrose
The Lyric, Swift Current
The Pantages, Winnipeg

Never carry more baggage than absolutely necessary. Excess baggage rates are exorbitant on the majority of railroads since the 2 cent a mile passenger rate has gone into effect.

FREDERICK LADELLE,
HOW TO ENTER VAUDEVILLE

T
hey counted their money.

The roll Mayhew had given Aurora held fives and tens, adding up to a hundred. A month’s rent on both Arlington apartments, with a little over for food. A month’s grace, then.

With a sad feeling of virtue, Clover opened her letter-box and brought out seventy-eight dollars she had been hoarding for some eventuality (not so well-formed an idea as running away to find Victor). Bella was handed fifty in notes by Verrall, which he said was only fair, for many times when they had not bothered to settle up her contracted dollar-per-show. $228: once that would have seemed like riches.

Flora had been diligent in banking half the Belle Auroras’ hundred a week (down again from the original $150 once Mayhew had settled them into the apartment and was paying for so much). Although they’d not worked every week, and had incurred large expenses for costumes and fallals—
exorbitant
, for the butterfly wings—she was confident, or at least hopeful, that there was more than a thousand in the bank.