The Little Shadows (42 page)

When she went up to the teller the horrible truth came out.

Mayhew had set up their banking, as the man necessarily in charge, and his rubber Muse cheques had been assigned forward to empty all his accounts, including the one he’d set up for the Belle Auroras. The ledger showed, in fact, a deficit of eighteen dollars.

Flora came home in palpitations, the loss of the money far worse than the rather exciting loss of the Muse, and lay on the sofa in Aurora’s suite at the Arlington, weeping in great sodden gulps, railing against Mayhew in an incoherent spate which even Aurora could not stem. She let Mama run on as she struggled to close the lid of Mayhew’s rolltop desk over the nest of unpaid bills that feathered there.

Next morning, when Aurora was finally allowed to make her way up to the untouched office floor at the Muse, she found a matching bill-pillow squashed into his desk drawer there. She looked at the mass of papers for six thudding heartbeats; then gently shut the drawer and left, without another glance at the ruin of the Muse.

As she rode the streetcar home it began to snow. She put one grey-gloved hand out the window and caught a constellation of snowflakes. The river down below was slow-churning ice cream.

That afternoon Aurora spoke to the manager of the Arlington, to give notice. He explained, kindly, that Mayhew had signed a year’s unbreakable, iron-clad lease. Aurora then explained, equally kindly, that Mayhew had absconded, and that Mr. Crumley could sue her vanished husband for the rent if he pleased, but might wish to consult a lawyer before making ugly threats to an abandoned woman.
Abandoned
was right, the manager said, and battle would have been joined, except that Aurora laughed.

‘Dear Mr. Crumley,’ Aurora said, giving him a bewilderingly happy smile. ‘My abandoned sisters and I will stay on in the third-floor apartment till the end of November, but I’ll be out of the top-floor suite by Monday—and the rent’s been paid, so just think! You could have it twice over, if you move fast. Such a desirable residence will be snatched up, even if you were to
raise
the rent.’

Before he left he had agreed to take much of the furniture off her hands, to rent the place as a fully furnished gentleman’s apartment.

Any proper woman would be shattered to lose her work and her husband in one go, she thought, watching Crumley’s satisfied rump rumbling away down the hall. But as she shut the door she was still fizzing gently, like very cold champagne, with the consciousness of life starting up again.

Baggage

So they were off, although they did not yet know where. They had nice new trunks now, three of them—purchased
by Mayhew, in a fit of prosperity, with his own monogrammed suitcases. Mama, when she emerged from her sobs, said the trunks should be sold ‘along with everything else!’ but Bella refused to part with hers, which was sapphire blue leather and very beautiful.

‘No,’ Aurora agreed. ‘We have the props to look like headliners, and we must keep as much of our outfit as may be managed.’

Clover gave an internal sigh of relief because she loved hers too: mole brown, but with a pleated orange silk lining that pierced her heart with its beauty every time she opened it. And Aurora’s was a sight to behold, a silver-grey upright-opening dresser trunk with mother-of-pearl knobbed drawers, too lovely to be dispensed with—unless she might dislike to have anything that reminded her of Mayhew; but Clover had not noticed that she was sensitive that way.

‘Well, keep them, then,’ Mama said. ‘But when we are begging in the streets for a crust of bread I hope someone comes along who wants a trunk!’ She sank her aching head back into one weak hand, and put the other out for Bella to refill her teacup.

Aurora’s trunk stood open in one corner of the kitchen, acting as her wardrobe. In a fluttering of satin and silks she turned out her closet upstairs; Clover and Bella took the excess clothing to be sold—a long, weary tramp to the rag merchants, who paid far less than the girls had hoped. Then to the dairy and the butcher, paying off accounts. Bella was shocked that they were even bothering to pay what she saw as Mayhew’s bills, but Clover held that after all they’d eaten the eggs and sausages, and could not cheat the tradesmen.

They brought home half a dozen brown eggs and a fresh loaf, and were eating a poached egg supper when the doorbell rasped, six twists, followed by a light-rapping knock. Julius and Sybil blew into the hall, stamping snowy boots, and followed Clover along to the kitchen, Sybil exclaiming and Julius declaiming. They had seen the ruin of the Muse.

‘A Cataclysm,’ Julius declared, raising his voice over Sybil’s excited continuous yip-yapping of: ‘Who’d have thought? Who could have imagined?’

Mama had stayed collapsed in the armchair they’d dragged into the kitchen for her. Julius pressed her hand, begging her not to rise. Bella brought two more chairs from the parlour, Clover set to making more toast, and they had a cozy party in the little kitchen.

‘We saw it in the paper!’ Sybil pulled out a cutting: ‘The
dull refulgence of the chandeliers, now lying smashed and buried in the rubble of the auditorium …
So of course we rushed round to see, and there it is, displastered all to pieces.’

‘Don’t, don’t read it,’ Mama begged. ‘I will have another spasm.’

‘I took the liberty of bringing liquid refreshment,’ Julius said, with ponderous courtesy. ‘A bottle of sherry, now, brings comfort to the widow and the orphan alike.’

He pulled three bottles from his coat and set them in the middle of the table with a flourish. People like to be helpful in affliction, Clover thought—our kind of people do. All week small packages and bottles had been brought to their door, from the Novelli Brothers, from Teddy—also thrown out of work by the demise of the Muse, with reason to hate anyone associated with Mayhew. Even from Mr. Penstenny, for whom she felt terribly sorry.

‘Not that you are a widow, precisely, dear Aurora,’ Sybil said, receiving a teacup with a bob of thanks to Bella. ‘Although I did
hear
—but no—oh! Toast! How kind you are, dear Clover.’

‘And a free hand with the butter, a rare thing in a woman,’ Julius said. He pulled a chair up to the little table and Bella made room for his plate by moving the cocoa jug.

‘So what are you going to do?’ Sybil asked.

The three girls looked at her in some dismay, and Mama burst again into damp sobs.

‘Well, I’m sorry to bring it up, I’m sure,’ Sybil said.

‘No, no,’ Aurora said. ‘It must be—we do have to—What was it you heard, Sybil?’

Sybil covered her mouth with her small fat paws.

Clover said, ‘We do not know just yet what we will do, dear Sybil. But what did you hear?’

‘Oh!’ Sybil’s wide mouth came down into a small pursing whistle. But she had the eyes of all and her histrionic heart could not resist. ‘It is
only
gossip, and I did not like to say, but I understand that he already
has
a wife, married some years ago, in San Francisco.’

Aurora could not have been exactly surprised, but Clover felt a hideous downward bend within her chest.

It was Julius who protested. ‘Syb!’ he shouted. ‘No! Too much. There is not a man alive who does
not
have a wife down in San Francisco. I do myself! To suggest bigamy as the reason that the rascal has decamped—merely frivolous! He’s a crook, that’s all.’

He poured himself a glass of whiskey and knocked half of it back.

‘Besides, he’d be a fool,’ he added. ‘Greatest beauty in vaudeville, why would he desert
la belle Aurore
for a previous marital error? Excess baggage, my dear, excess baggage.’

A Gig from a Pool Hall

As they sat in limbo, it snowed and snowed and snowed.

Used to this, the city dug in under a goose-feather blanket. Enough to drive you mad, Bella thought, when you had no work and had to stare at snow the live-long day. The furnace clanked through the building, loud as the elevator; pipes hissed and spat, and Bella discovered that if you whirled the radiator tap unwarily, a powerful stream of water hissed out and soaked your dress and burned your hand.

She was
so glad
they were leaving this stupid town. She had had no answer to her letters to Nando, so perhaps the Ninepins had not got to Seattle yet; or perhaps Joe had been thrown out of another gig. Nando ought to have written.

Glaring out the window, she decided that the real trouble was they did not yet know enough people in vaudeville. The only other person they knew was Jimmy the Bat, and he was in Winnipeg at the Pantages—the theatre where C.P. Walker, who had liked Aurora so well at Mayhew’s last dinner party, was the boss. Bella stared into the
bald white field towards the ice-bound river, thinking about Jimmy’s face as he had stood talking to Aurora in the hall of the Calgary theatre. Then she put on her coat and boots.

Going down the stairs she met East and Verrall coming up, shaking snow from their bowler hats, dank hair sticking up in spikes where they had dashed the snow away.

‘You need better hats than that for this horrid winter,’ she said, laughing at them.

‘We need to be elsewhere!’ East shouted, and she hushed him, looking back to see if the apartment door would fly open and one of her sisters burst out to stop her going anywhere.

East and Verrall had leaped straight over to the Pantages, missing only one night’s work after the flood—they were employable anywhere. East could wangle a gig from a pool hall if need be. A funeral hall. She ought to have asked his advice earlier.

‘Come along,’ she said to East and Verrall. ‘I’m going to send a cable, and you’d like a walk.’

‘We just had a walk,’ East protested, but Verrall patted his (entirely flat) stomach and said he could use the exercise. They went back out into the snow-silenced street.

Dreadful Frozen City

Aurora had moved a cot down to the third floor and shoved Bella and Clover’s bed right against the wall to make room. She could not share the Murphy bed with Mama, who was spending longer and longer hours in bed, in a state of sherry-induced stupefaction. Better to be back in the room with her sisters. Everything was tranquil now. And something would come up. If she held to that, she could manage.

But her bone-china composure broke one night. She woke from her first fitful sleep and lay in the little bed, choked by her nightgown, remembering Mayhew’s hand moving down her side from shoulder to arm, slipping over her flank and down her legs, the bulk of him always
behind her. The thousand countless humiliations of lying with him and never being loved, or known, only being of use to him, all mocked and redoubled now by the hopeless absurdity of missing him.

She broke into painful tears, seeing with eye-pricking clarity that Mayhew was gone for good, was a rascal. Worse: that she had dragged her sisters and Mama into the muck and was wholly responsible for them being stranded in this dreadful frozen city, probably forever, until they were obliged to find work as domestics.

When Clover, waking, slid into the cot and put her arms around her, she whispered all of that, unable to find the breath to speak out loud.

‘No, no,’ Clover said, pulling her fingers gently through Aurora’s hair to comfort her. ‘We are all much better off, even stuck here penniless, than we were in Montana. We ought not to be moving southwards, we need to go East, to where things really matter in vaude. To Chicago, and New York. Come, let me braid your hair for you, and you will sleep better.’

Aurora clasped her sister’s narrow body close, remembering her wedding night, and how Clover had come to braid her hair. She was the best and kindest of all of them.

Painted Wings

The Belle Auroras had been headliners only by Mayhew’s favour. To begin afresh, it was necessary to realize where they stood in the natural order of vaudeville. Not openers, they were too good for that. But they were a quiet act, a simple one, and it seemed to Aurora that simplicity was their strength: charming songs, charmingly sung, no tricksy gimmicks. Their dancing was good, but not of stellar quality; they were nothing at all out of the ordinary as far as looks went.

As they were debating how to begin again, a letter arrived from Gentry. When Aurora found the envelope in the mail slot she knew his thick-stroked writing. Even as she opened it, she felt a warm glow of returning life. He had learned of their predicament from Julius, and while regretting that he had no money to send them, he had taken the
liberty of enclosing a new song he’d laid hands on—perhaps they could make something of it?

 … Ray Hubbell, an associate of mine in olden days, sent it to me for comment—no harm testing it out before Hubbell finds a show to slide it into. Jack Golden stole the poignant story of an abandoned Japanese maiden direct from Puccini: perhaps its delicate fragrance might make up for the slight tinge of irony in its similarity to your own story.

And if I may take a further liberty, may I remind you, my dear Aurora, that you did very well with the song
Danny Boy
. Sometimes it is the song that makes the singer.

Yours aff’ly,

   et cetera,

GENTRY FOX, ESQ. (RETIRED)

The song-sheet had been folded into eighths to cram into the envelope. While Aurora scanned the letter, Bella opened the sheet music, and laughed as she read the title:
‘Poor Butterfly
!’

She flapped the music like wings, tap-tapping the sheets against the vilely expensive silk butterfly wings, which had been delivered days before and lay furled against the parlour wall, hooked on the ceiling moulding. Stiff painted silk stretched over bent balsa-wood frames. Mama and Clover exclaimed in pleasure: Mama for joy at not having wasted such a great deal of money, and Clover because the wings themselves were so fragile and lovely, and ought to be used.

‘Perhaps we could make of it something that would please,’ Aurora said.