The Little Shadows (43 page)

It was the first good thing in what seemed like a long while.

They cleared the floor and began to work (missing the expanse of the Muse’s rehearsal hall), testing out ideas that Mama called to them. Sashays, grands battements, arabesques, cramped into the parlour-space: none of it made the scalp tingle or the breath catch, as the good idea will.

The painted design delighted them when the wings were open. But the
Poor Butterfly
tune did not work for dancing unless the tempo was jinked up, which bent the song out of true. After a while, Aurora stopped them. ‘If we had a good dance with the wings—maybe
Spring Song?
—I could do
Butterfly
afterwards, almost as a playlet. With Bella’s
Bumble Bee
, we could do a whole insect number. A kimono would be quick to run up in art silk, and I’m sure Clover could paint it to match the wings.’

Bella was discontent. ‘But why do I still have to be a bee?’

‘Because,’ Clover told her, ‘you get the biggest laughs and the biggest hand of all.’

Clover and Aurora bent and fluttered and bowed, and Bella sang the tweedly
Spring Song
for all she was worth, but the thing lacked zing. The afternoon darkened into evening, and they still had nothing usable.

‘Wear less,’ Mama said. ‘That’s the ticket.’ She snatched off their practice skirts and wrapped a tea towel round Clover’s middle, leaving most of her legs revealed.

‘Mama!’ Bella said, but she was laughing—Clover’s legs were spindly and insect-like, quite sweet. Aurora stood in her stockings, considering.

‘Longer stockings will be needed,’ Mama said. ‘But it is all God’s creation, no earthly reason not to display such limbs, in the service of transformative dance. You will need more accentuation at the eyes.’ Then, overcome, she went to lie down on Bella and Clover’s bed.

Thoughtfully, Aurora pulled Bella’s skirt up, up—till most of her darling legs stood revealed. ‘I think she’s right,’ she said. ‘And Bella’s right too. Bella should be the other butterfly, and I’ll turn up alone with the song, afterwards. Ditch the bee, for now. But let’s think of other music for the dance—
On Wings of Song
might be much better.’

Bella clapped her hands. ‘Oh yes! Perfect, it is about sisters!’

The other two stared at her.

‘Their lovely sister-flowers—
the lotus flowers await thee, their lovely sister-flower!’

Finally Aurora’s scalp sparkled, and they were off.

American Dollars

Four days later a telegram came, addressed to Bella. Clover answered the bell and gave the boy a nickel, and stood looking at the yellow envelope, thinking it must be from Nando. And an envelope in the mail slot too: from Victor. ‘Bella!’ she called, going down the dusky hall to the parlour, where Bella was curled in the armchair, discontentedly reading a three-day-old newspaper holding nothing but war news.

Aurora and Mama were playing Up-the-River on the Murphy bed. Bella had to edge around it to get to the yellow envelope, but she made good time and flicked it from Clover’s grasp, opened and read it in the blink of an eye—and threw her arms into the air in joy.
The Journal
went flying, aflutter, pages like grouse lifting. ‘Reprieved!’ she cried. ‘Look, look!’

Clover took the telegram and read it out to the others:

‘WALKER SAYS SPOT PANTAGES WINNIPEG JAN 1 BELL AURORS OPENERS SORRY J BATTLE.’

Aurora, sank to the bed, saying, ‘Openers again. But thank God!’ She began mumbling numbers: rent for December, food, train fare to Winnipeg.

Bella read the telegram again to Mama, who began to praise Jimmy Battle as the best boy in vaudeville, how she had known he would never let them down, unlike some, and how you could tell who was solid sterling worth, and so on.

There was an extra sheet in the envelope, Clover saw as she picked it up. ‘He wired cash as well,’ she said. ‘Forty-seven dollars. Not a round number—perhaps it is all he has.’

But still not enough for train fare for the four of them. Mama and Bella debated hammer-and-tongs who should be left behind to find her own way to Winnipeg, on foot if necessary.

While they were quarrelling, Clover opened her letter from Victor, and three American twenty-dollar bills fell out.

The Casting Couch Redux

East and Verrall heard the news and proposed that instead of stewing in their own juices, the girls come along with them for two jumps on their way to Regina, at small-time houses in Camrose and Swift Current.

‘You’d waste the rent-paid place for the rest of November, yes, but you’d be earning all the way, and refining your new number at the same time,’ Verrall said persuasively.

‘And here’s the bonus,’ East said, holding her other arm. ‘We thought we ought—’

‘Well, we thight we might,’ Verrall said.

‘We think we ink, we thought, ought we not?’ East joggled her arm. ‘Agree! Agree!’

‘To what?’ Aurora begged.

Verrall swatted East to make him stop. ‘Stan Bailey at the David Theatre in Camrose wants a melodrama more than life itself, he’s been shopping everywhere: and we’ve got one in our pocket!’

‘The Casting Couch
? But we are missing Miss Heatherton for the mother, and—’

‘Your sainted mama! She would be magnificent in the role! I itch to see it!’

Aurora pushed East away and turned to Verrall. ‘You want to re-stage it?’

‘Indeed, and we’d work on Stan to engage you for
Les Très
as well as the melodrama, so it might mean double pay—although at a sadly, even pitifully, low rate …’

East chimed back in, mournful: ‘Worst pay in the West. He’s legendary.’

In a flurry of telegrams, Stan Bailey refused to pay full shot but agreed to mount
The Casting Couch
at $120 for a two-week stint in Camrose, a town southeast of Edmonton—at least in the direction of Winnipeg. Aurora would have taken less to get them to Winnipeg on time and be able to repay Jimmy Battle’s money. And Verrall thought he could also get them onto the bill at the Lyric, in Swift Current
(farther south into Saskatchewan, still towards Winnipeg), where he had pull with the management.

For three days the girls rehearsed the melodrama and worked on the butterfly numbers, in a much better frame of mind and heart. The night before they left, Aurora counted the kitty beside Mama, listing additions and subtractions from the sale of their effects and the cash they’d shelled out for the new number: the purchase of sides for
On Wings of Song
, kimono silk, and new photographs.

After two counts, the tally came to $169, not including Jimmy Battle’s $47, which Aurora had sewn into the bottom pocket of her grouch-bag, hoping not to have to spend it. Four train fares to Camrose cost $40.

One last brangle erupted when Aurora decided she should sell her fur wrap before they left, thinking to get a better price for it in Edmonton than she might in a smaller place. But Mama, recovered from her earlier vapours, put her Louis-heeled foot down. ‘You must not sell your furs. Nothing succeeds like good clothes, and a fur carries unmistakable glamour.’

‘None of
you
have furs,’ Aurora said.

‘You give us all cachet, by wearing yours. It’s a great mistake, economy at the expense of the illusion of success.’

A dis-illusion, Aurora thought, but she did not say so, and she kept her furs.

Malingerer

On the way to the station Flora asked if they might stop to visit Sybil, laid up in the Alberta Hotel with bronchitis, lest it turn to pneumonia, to which she was prone. Verrall had told them that the Orpheum was famous for cold: ‘An ungodly icy stand, where the audience knows to keep their overcoats on. Comes up through the boards as you stand onstage, shivering through your number—good for castanet acts.’

Sybil’s button eyes shone out of the sheet Julius had wrapped her in, a dwindled mummy within a sarcophagus of flannel. Flora bent to
kiss her hot cheek and asked whether they should perhaps crack the window—was she not sweltering in all that cloth?

‘Oh no! I like to be toasty warm, you know,’ Sybil said, coughing wretchedly with the effort of being vivacious. ‘A sip—?’

Flora held the water glass to her lips. Sybil drank, then lay back against her cushions with a fine show of exhausted bravery. ‘So you’re off—and who knows when we shall meet once more?’

From the doorway, where his bulk would not impede the visit, Julius gave a grunting laugh. ‘In three or four weeks’ time, you malingerer! We are engaged to Regina next, then to Winnipeg ourselves. I doubt these maids of mirth will have had their photographs handed back by then.’

‘It’s a sad thing to be going down in the world,’ Flora said. ‘Camrose, of all unheard-of places—then the Lyric in Swift Current. A large house, we hear, but still small-time.’

‘But
Winnipeg,’
Sybil whispered, after another coughing fit. ‘Big-time! Very big!’

After a period of consultation and debate over which boarding houses to favour along the road, and which to avoid at all costs due to poor food or a history of bugs, it was time to go to the station, a block away. The girls bent to kiss her goodbye.

Sybil’s eyes were feverish and fearful. She doled out dire warnings, one apiece. ‘Dear Aurora! Destined for great things, my dear,’ she said, with some of her usual fervour. ‘Make sure you’re eating enough for, you can’t be too—And Clover, oh, there’s a lover in your name, isn’t there? You’ve a loving heart, that’s why, but you think you’ll be taken care of, and you end up taking care. Like me and poor old Jay.’ She coughed, waited for breath, coughed. ‘Baby Bella, last never least, the very best of all! What a merry dance you lead them! Such a tussle getting to the top, be extra careful of Mr. Pericles Pentangles, Alexander I
don’t
think, unless Alexander was Lothario.’

Flora pushed Sybil’s feet over and sat on the bed. ‘Don’t be pronouncing, Syb, you give the girls fits with your feyness,’ she said.

‘Oh, Flora, what yoicks we had!’ Sybil wiped away a sudden tear. ‘It’s you I always talk to in my head. Jay wouldn’t listen anyway! Nobody
knows you like I do, nor me like you. Pretty thing I was in the olden days—never a candle to you for brains, but did we have larks!’

‘You are smart as a whip and always was,’ Flora said. ‘It’s you got Julius to where he is and kept him up to the mark—you’d have had a starring career of your own if you so chose.’

‘Never!’ Sybil was smiling, though, to think of it. The two women held hands for a little, and then Sybil said briskly, as if she’d got her health back all of a sudden, ‘Where’s that Jay? Jay! Come, escort the ladies to the station, they’ll be missing their train. It’s always nicer to go about with a man, I find.’

She blew them kisses with her fat little hands, each finger covered with spiked and sparkly rings. Tears welling out of her staring eyes, unregarded.

Snow on the Line

The train had a great pointed plow in front, a gleaming axe for snow. It seemed to Clover, settling into her seat, that they were a winter family—everything, good and bad, happened to them in snow: Papa dying—before that, Harry dying. Aurora’s wedding, Bella’s tangle with the Tussler. But also their first gig, and Gentry.

Clover leaned on the window, not sleepy. Victor’s letter, sent with the money, had said that he would try to come to Edmonton:
If a way can be devised I will devise it
. But now—well, they would meet in Winnipeg, perhaps, where he had two gigs in February. Unless he went to England to enlist.

Their predicament had knocked the war out of her thinking, but not out of Victor’s. There was a car of soldiers on this train, heading to some camp, not yet overseas. In uniform, though, very boisterous with each other, some already sprawled snoring across the seats. How would Victor the Eccentric fare with men like that? He would win them over, but perhaps not straightaway. Strange never to have seen him in any other circumstances but backstage in vaude. Or the night in the woods, at the roadhouse.

Emptying her mind of worry, she looked out at the winter landscape. Snow and sky in places indistinguishable because they were almost of one colour: the sky white-ash and the snow blue-ash. Monochrome, except that the blue-grey of the trees held inside it a suspicion of orangey life, ash over embers. A long, curling ostrich-plume of smoke trailed behind the train.

Three crows hopped from a snow-furred telegraph wire, knocking the snow free from the line and leaving a blank space—she now saw many such breaks in the wire-snow, where birds had been and gone like notes in music sitting on the staff.

Snow had drifted onto the tracks. The sun shone in a long low line; they would miss band call if the train was held up for long. Ahead, a small army of men in dark clothing, all wearing dark caps, shovelled and gestured while the engine steamed and stamped. The thick glass of the window did not let her hear their shouts. Their clothes were dotted with snow; more snow fell as they worked.

King of Whiskeys

Bella thought Camrose was no kind of a town. A little spot on the blank earth, two streets, dirt blown bare of snow. Still, a certain lightness of heart came with being nomads again, rather than stuffy apartment-dwelling citizens. Apartments were for the audience.

The David Theatre, at the top of the main business street, had a new coat of paint: green, gold and white, garishly delineating medallions of pressed tin that covered walls and ceiling. As they waited for Mr. Bailey to appear, Aurora said it was refreshing to see a theatre with its roof on tight. In this wintry snap the David was as cold as Sybil’s Orpheum, but that would remedy itself when warm bodies filled it to bursting, as East had assured Bella they would. In a moment, a short, carrot-headed man came up the auditorium aisle, eyeing them.

‘The Belle Auroras,’ Mama said, in her old grand manner. ‘Here for
The Casting Couch.’
She held her hand out, as if she expected him to
kiss it; he stared at her blankly. Clover touched Mama’s elbow to restrain her, and Mama shook her off, with some irritation.