The Little Shadows (5 page)

Mama pinched Aurora fiercely, for something to hold onto. ‘Aurora, Amelia, Arabella, my three lovely girls. The Adora Belles.’

‘There’s a set of them already at a box-house in Montana—you don’t want a mix-up with them, skirtless hussies,’ Mrs. Cleveland said. ‘Aurora Dawn, how about?’ Asking her husband, rather than Mama.

Mendel swung round on the piano bench and said, ‘The Belle Auroras. Got the French tone and the dawn thing, got a ring.’

Mr. Cleveland shut his eyes and seemed to think. Then he nodded his stiff head once and made to turn away, but Mama had not finished.

‘And we would not be prepared to commit for less than $200 a week.’

He turned back, eyes darting into sharp focus.

‘$150. Offer is final.’

‘Well.’

Mrs. Cleveland piped up. ‘And we play a split week, so half of that, Cleveland.’

He looked irritated, but nodded his head at Mama. Stuck in a cleft stick with that wife, Aurora thought.

‘Done, then,’ Mama said. ‘$75 for
this
week. ’And out went her hand to shake on it. ‘I’—she bowed—‘come gratis, as their accompanist.’

She was good with exit lines and stepped smartly, spinning the girls before her, up the aisle and out.

‘First show 2 p.m., band call at noon, keep strict to time,’ Mendel called after them.

Gold Silk

Clover tucked one mouse-coloured glove into the other, a bit sad that she was left out of their new name. But as she was feeling sorry for herself she spied Julius Foster Konigsburg limping down the street in front of them, heading for the hotel—and then where?

Back in their crowded room at the hotel, bread and milk for supper, they were subdued. Julius K. and Sybil’s room was close down the hall. There could be no congratulating themselves when all this had only come about by the miserable loss of the work for Julius. Mama pulled out the sealer jar of brown sugar and sprinkled a dusting on each bowl. ‘We won’t despair, my chicks, they’ll get back on their feet,’ she said. Clover watched the silver apostle spoon clink in the glass jar, flutter in the air above the bowls.

But although truly distressed for her old friend, Mama could not be sad for long. ‘And of all the lucky breaks, when you think of it! We’re on our way!
A hundred and fifty!’

‘Seventy-five,’ Aurora said softly.

‘You’ll get a thousand a week, a thousand a week yet. Oh, I can see your names in lights, pricked out in silver on the bill of the Pantages, or Keith’s—true talent will rise to the top, you’ll see. If only we had a bit of cream this would be so nice.’

Each with her own bowl. When they were travelling, Clover would sometimes think of their supper bowls during the day, the little dishes nestled safely in Mama’s humpbacked trunk. Bella’s was pearly-white with a clump of bright flowers in the bottom, revealed
as she ate her porridge or bread and milk. Clover had the Irish bowl with clovers on it, thin and delicate, Papa’s mother’s bowl—she’d been called Clover too, when she was a girl. Aurora’s was lustreware, golden as her hair. The shine had tarnished on one side and Aurora always ate with the shine out, the tarnish turned towards her so no one would see, even though it was only them in the room. And Mama ate from the pot, crying again, as she often cried over her supper since Papa and Harry died.

They sat in a row to put their hair up in rags: Mama doing Aurora; Aurora doing Clover; Clover, Bella. Then the girls climbed into the big bed under the gold silk coverlet, last remnant of home, and Mama blew out the lamp. She lay along the end of the bed warming their feet and talking for a while, as she had always done, telling them stories of her life on the circuit and her miserable childhood in Madison, Wisconsin with Aunt Queen, who would hardly ever let her have a bath. Tonight she made plans for costumes and new songs and ways to keep the audience tacked to the edge of their seats, though the girls were only openers, until she had talked out her excitement and could rest. She ended: ‘One week with the Star Union, a good start with a good company—we’re on our way. Go to sleep, my clever girls, your dear papa is looking down from heaven on his daughters, with our little Harry in his arms, warm and peaceful and so happy to be together.’

She lay at their feet, murmuring of Harry’s blond silk curls, how his darling sweetness bound them together—and how she should have ate better while expecting, or not run the last bit uphill with the water pail that one day when she cramped up, or what other thing she had done to leave him so weak that the pneumonia could take hold and carry him off.

She let herself sigh and cry then, and they all lay still in the cooling room, frost creeping over the window like a blind.

But Clover could not sleep. It was funny how that stage name left her out. Belle–Aurora with a blank space in the middle, because she was the blank among them, really. Clover turned again in the bed, making the others turn, and put her arm over Bella this time, who slid
backwards into Clover’s knees and thighs more tightly, warm under the gold silk. Mama had been right to bring the coverlet, though it had to be tied so tight to pack into the trunk every morning. They were getting faster at packing. Rags out of their hair, stays tied, stockings on, petticoats, skirts and waists, boots rubbed and retied—there was a complicated sequence to dressing, and the peacefulness of thinking about it let Clover drift away.

Moth-Girls

Later, when Mama tiptoed out to knock on Sybil’s door, Aurora woke. She lay curled beside her sisters, thinking of what they would do tomorrow, how it would go. Down the hall she could hear the women comparing money outside Sybil’s door before going down to the hotel bar by the back stairs, to get blissfully drunk on two of the last twenty dollars. The Italian Boys came down the hall and joined them as they went, so it sounded like to be a cheerful evening all around.

Wakened by the noise, Bella begged for a fairy story, as she used to when she was small.

‘You are on the boards now, too old for fairy tales,’ Aurora said. But she looked around the darkness for something to tell. Nothing, nothing—‘Well, there, under the windowsill, in the shadows, is a clutch of moth fairies’ eggs. They will hatch out soon into a little troop of moth-girls in feathery dresses, dancing in and out of the candlelight and trying not to get singed …’ Aurora felt Bella’s knees cosy closer into Clover’s, feet tucked under her bony heels; she spoke softer as Bella’s breath slowed, sinking to sleep again, thinking of moth-girls, or maybe that boy—Nando?—who flew round the room on a flagpole broom.

Aurora slid her arm from where it had gone numb under Clover’s neck and hugged her more tightly round her narrow waist.

They would do it in one and charm the house. They could do that, easy.

2.
First Night

JANUARY
1912

The Empress, Fort Macleod

 … and there we were, not on the list.

FRED ASTAIRE

S
nowlit wind, brilliant with ice-chips, swirled them along paths shovelled like tunnels through the drifts. Without the bunched baby-doll petticoats, the cold cut sharper. Aurora could feel it chafing to bright red the bare skin above her stocking tops. She breathed through her muff to keep her voice from freezing.

Clover held fingers over her eyes, leaving only a narrow slit to see through, as her father had said the Esquimaux did in the farthest North. A shorter journey to the theatre today because they knew the way—Clover had noticed that before. Or because she was dreading this a little, the band call and how that would be.

Bella walked through the snow thinking of Gerda’s trail to the Snow Queen. Except Bella and her sisters were glad to be trapped in this palace. They would sing and dance for their supper because they were the luckiest, and too bad for poor Mr. Konigsburg. Her boots said
Konigsburg-Konigsburg
crunching over the snow. She wondered what Julius and Sybil were doing, where they had gone.

Mama’s tight, black-gloved hand was on the handle, but the door flew open of its own accord, and there was the Ninepins’ broom-boy, Nando Dent.

‘Mendel sent me to look out for you,’ he said, flat-planed face cracking into a creased grin. ‘Welcome, ladies!’

‘We are not behind time?’ Mama asked, anxious.

‘No, no, he wants to give you an extra bit, that’s all.’ Nando hurried them, still snow-dazzled, through the lobby, encouraging and clucking as if he were shooing chickens. He swung the inner door open, and the girls stopped in a clump—the velvet darkness again assailing them with its complicated smell and music. A little band assembled at the
left in front of the stage was twiddling away: fiddle, clarinet, piano, one uncertain double bass. Another player, stretching his slide trombone to oil the long brass bones of it, inserted himself behind an array of odd percussion. Would they be heard over all that? Clover caught her cheek in her teeth and then let go. They were on their way. Her chest felt tight, and she could see the pulse jumping in Aurora’s tender neck. Bella did not seem at all affected.

‘It will be all right,’ Mama said, softer-toned. ‘You are very good girls and good performers, there is nothing to fret about.’

Her black hands pushed them in.

Bella skipped round the others and went first, Nando Dent bounding to run beside her down the slightly sloping floor to the small clear space in front of the stage. Half the chairs had been set up; part of the noise was the rest of them being crashed into place by a couple of skinny hands. Up on the stage Mr. Cleveland stood barking some order up into the fly gallery, then calling for
‘Silence!
’

Which fell without delay, musicians and chair-movers milling around the house all stilled and expectant. Cleveland came forward to the lip of the stage and peered down, looking for Mendel. ‘When you are ready, Mr. Mendel, we may begin?’

‘Uno momento,’
Mendel called up from the piano.

Aurora watched Cleveland make his way down the moveable stairs and midway up the house to his station at a two-legged table propped on seat-backs, strewn with papers and props; a squat, ugly man sat scribbling there already and looked up to murmur something.

The musicians huddled around Mendel once more. Nando danced back and pulled at Mama’s sleeve. ‘Your sides? The band arrangements?’

‘Oh, mercy! I forgot. Here!’ Mama held out the worn piano music, and then (with a grimace, for she knew it betrayed their lack of experience) brand-new sides, on very crisp paper, for violin, woodwind and double bass. ‘But stay—is there a programme?’

He pulled one out of his pants pocket and bestowed it like a rose on the beloved, and Flora laughed and smacked at him affectionately,
as if he were one of Arthur’s big-boy students. A nice boy, with easy manners and some thought for the feelings of others.

They took their seats in the front row, crowded with other artistes waiting their turn. Aurora, in the middle, held the programme so they could all see. A long slim booklet of flimsy pinkish paper, with
Cleveland’s Empress Theatre
on the front. She flipped over the pages, sifting through the rich black, decoratively lettered words, and finally—there—on the first page, all alone in a sea of advertisements, their new name:

THE BELLE AURORAS, ART SONGS OLD & NEW

So it must be real, Aurora thought.

‘Openers, yes, but we’ll work our way up from that, you’ll see!’ Mama whispered.

Pretty Little Gal

Aurora sat beside Clover and breathed through a light commotion in her stomach. This was only the band call—nothing, nothing to worry about.

Mendel’s hand rose and the musicians dodged back to their stands, and they broke into a roistering little march, a lovely encouraging
come-in-and-enjoy-this
piece. Too soon for Aurora, Mendel’s hand rose again and the band straggled to a stop, the violinist a bit behind the others, having had his eyes closed. The musicians were dressed in tight old suits, the patina of long use on knees and sleeves. One, the trombone player, had a slight dusting of flour all down his right side, which he brushed at whenever he was not playing. Perhaps he was a baker the rest of the time.

‘Cut to … eight bars from the end,’ Mendel said. ‘Belle Auroras?’

‘Present!’ said Aurora, then blushed.
Present
, as if they were girls at school.

They ran up the backstage stairs and found another stagehand waiting there, who cried out to Mendel, ‘In place!’ The band struck up the cantering march and rode it to a happy crash of cymbals—a brief
pause—then the opening bars of the
Whispering Hope
intro began. The stagehand motioned them to
go, go!
—and on they went. The stage was dusty and dirty, but Aurora could see the marks painted to show where to stand to do it in one. They arranged themselves sufficiently ahead of the marks to let the curtains swing closed behind them, and (brushing down their skirts into pretty order) stood still, breathed in all at the same moment, and sang—

Mendel’s hand shot up on their third note, and the band stopped. Only Bella kept on singing, her wobbling voice echoing through the hall on
An-gel …
But she stopped when Clover’s hand pinched her waist, and clamped her mouth shut with one hand, and the little audience of performers laughed, kindly enough.

Mendel consulted his sides: ‘And then
Bow-Wow
—I thought we cut the
Bow-Wow
?’

Mama hastened onstage, explaining, ‘Well, my dear sir, Mr. Cleveland required a twenty-minute length, and
without
that number we come in just a trifle under eighteen.’

‘Better short than long,’ Mr. Cleveland intoned from the worktable, waxy face gleaming in the lamplight as he leaned forward. ‘Anyhow,
Bow-Wow
is Simple Soubrettes material. Clear the stage except performers.’