The Little Shadows (65 page)

Julius was not bad to travel with, aside from the massively disgusting nose-blowing in the morning as he dislodged the night’s accumulated phlegm; he made far less mess than she did herself, and as long as he had his medicinal dose of gin (increased by half again, even while she’d been his minder) he kept himself in order well enough.

One night she stayed out for an after-theatre dinner at the Shasta Grill—trying to enjoy the old glamour—and walked home through streets she and Clover had so often walked in those old days, with a dog-leg to the Arlington to wave at their old windows.

When she let herself into the suite she stumbled over Julius’s body, slumped like a suit of old clothes across the parquet floor of the vestibule. He was snoring painfully and she could not wake him. She rang the front desk for help and two liveried boys came up and carried him to his bed; after they’d left she discovered that Julius had soiled himself. There being nobody else to clean him, she did it herself, rolling him back and forth to undress him and wash his backside. The bedding would never recover.

When it was done she stood staring at him, pinned in the bed by a clean sheet from her own bed. He had shrunk. His still-massive head and wild grizzled hair made his diminishment less noticeable when he was awake, but the rest of him was just a bundle of kindling now. His hands lay flaccid on the sheets, long bones in gloves of skin. Julius had never had the time of day for her, really. It ought to be Clover looking after him, he’d like that better. They were the ones who’d been such friends. It ought to be Sybil.

It ought to be Papa she was helping, or horrible old Joe Dent.

Julius only made it to the theatre next day after she’d sent down for another bottle of gin. He was unsteady on his pins and his number
did not make much sense, but the audience took it as a drunk act, and he got by. He could not eat the supper she brought to his dressing room. After a look at his grey face she did not press him. But he would not go to hospital, nor allow her to send for a doctor.

He opened a fresh bottle and took a tumblerful as if it were ghastly medicine, and the shaking that ran through his body lessened. At the end of the second show she bundled him into a cab and took him back to the hotel, where she propped him up in bed with water to hand, and of course the gin. She raced back to the Pantages and made her nine o’clock call by a whisker. In the glory of taking the chilly Edmonton audience by storm she was able to forget his cadaverous eyes, not beseeching her to stay but only staring at her face as if it were the last thing he would see.

Which it was, because when she got home that evening she found him in the elegant bathroom, blind drunk, clinging to the tub with clawed hands. His eyes almost sewn shut, so deep was his refusal to open them. ‘Cannot, no,’ he whispered, when she begged him to look at her. His belly was distended and stiff, and he quaked from time to time—she ran to the house-phone and asked the desk to send for a doctor or a nurse, and ran back to hold him till help came.

But Julius opened his mouth like a fountain’s mouth, and like a fountain, a waterfall of blood poured out. The violent noise of the blood slamming into the bathtub made Bella dizzy. Towels—she reached for a towel and shoved it into Julius’s mouth, but more blood came out, first leaking and soaking and then in a shuddering stream, and the bathtub was filling with it, and another towel, and another. She could not stop it. The blood was a terrible bright dark red.

No, no—the necessity of it remaining inside his body made her eyes swim and blacken, until she took hold of herself. She tried to speak to Julius, saying nothing useful, but just, ‘No, no, don’t, I will hold you—’ To which he made no answer, nor did his eyes ever open.

The doctor took Julius out of her arms and laid him flat on the blood-swimming tiles, and a sigh came out of Julius’s mouth but the doctor said that was just air, that he had already been dead for some
time. Because the body cannot live without the blood that fills its caverns and tributaries.

A nurse helped Bella up from the floor and washed her hands and face till water took all that blood away and they put her in a different room, and that was the last of Julius.

Cartwheel

Clover reread Aurora’s letters as she had once read Victor’s. (She read Bella’s, too, but they were so few she had to hoard them, like Madame with her last box of French nougat.) She knew the cast of people in Qu’Appelle and read between the lines when necessary; she was dismayed both by Lewis Ridgeway’s entire absence from the letter, and the news of Aleck Graham.

Dr. Graham has received a telegram reporting his son Aleck ‘wounded, no particulars.’ Dear Mabel spent a day in her room, and another day sitting in the darkened church; then she wrote to Aleck (the first of no doubt a thousand cheerful letters) and went back to her ordinary work.

The Dean has an illuminated War Roll in St Peter’s. All the boys gone from Qu’Appelle and Ft Qu’Appelle and Indian Head. Many of them already dead. This is the news: lists, telegrams, pride in one son’s sacrifice.

Pride holds them up after their sons are gone, Clover thought. So we agree not to take that away. But pride was not helping Madame these days. She crept back and forth to the atelier like a mouse, shrinking within her draperies. Only calm, briefly, when feeding Harriet or playing at puppets with her.

The hospital discharged Victor in April, saying they’d done everything they could; the army invalided him out. His leg was useless; his
vision and lungs were compromised from the chlorine attack in 1915, the army doctor told her.

‘He can walk, in a dot-and-carry way—and will regain some strength for walking, but he’ll always need the crutch. He won’t be fit for any regular kind of life,’ he said.

The doctor’s moustache was cut straight across, perhaps with a special set of moustache scissors, Clover thought—so she did not have to think about Victor’s leg, the suppurating sores, the mass on one side, the swelling that came and went, the constant tearing pain. Or about the impossible cartwheel into the sky that he had performed the first night she saw him, at the Hippodrome in Montana.

She brought him home in a hackney. The atelier acolytes came to visit, while Madame made potage. Victor lay in his old room, moving from bed to couch in a kind of stasis, not speaking unless driven to it. He could not bear Harriet to chatter, as she did now from morning to night; he had a very uncertain temper for the tuck of his sheets and the noise of the ticking clock two floors below.

One afternoon, after an unusually bad day, Clover knelt and begged him to tell her what he was thinking about that plagued him so badly.

‘It is nothing to do with you,’ Victor said.

He swung off the couch, grabbing his crutch, and manoeuvred himself downstairs and out the door. It was the first time he’d spoken to her in a week. Through the window, Clover watched him walking down the road.
Nothing to do with her
. She had never been accused of selfishness before.

They blundered on into spring. The difficulties of managing Victor and Harriet while finding, keeping and doing work piled up in Clover’s mind in a great mountain range; she longed for the prairies. Victor tried to help—but would peel until the potato was all peeled away, or prune till the branches were all hacked off the bush. He could not look her, or anyone, in the eye. He did not speak easily, but sometimes she heard him telling stories to Harriet in her cot.

When Galichen returned in late April from one of his mysterious absences, he came to see Victor and carried him away, literally in his
arms, to the atelier for two days. Clover went over to find him, the first evening, and Heather Jakes told her not to fuss. ‘He’s giving him the business,’ Heather said. ‘You’ll be glad of it, when he’s through.’ Next morning Clover looked out and saw Victor in the next-door garden among the white-robed acolytes, doing scales. Gali had given him a knee-cup, a carved peg with a cushioned knee he could strap on to relieve the pressure on his shinbones. He looked absurd, a pirate strayed into a Greek chorus, but he was moving through the sequences and his eyes were open.

Forty-eight hours of penetrating attention from Galichen was enough to turn an invalid around, or knock one through death’s door. Victor came back with his crutch, but not hobbling so badly, and Heather Jakes brought poultices for her to use, on Gali’s orders, which seemed at least as effective as the carbolic and boracic acid the hospital had advised.

Clover talked to Madame, to Heather Jakes; then went next door, heart in her hands, and talked to Gali himself. At the end of the week she wrote to Aurora:

Victor does not sleep. He lies beside me staring into the darkness. He falls into a drowse—then the jerking begins, twitching in his legs and arms, as if when he loses consciousness his body begins to fight again or fight it off, whatever it is. The things that I can’t know about.

Gali has arranged passage on a merchant ship to which he has some connection. They say shipping will be cut off in the next little while, and I don’t dare wait—for his sake and for Harriet’s, and even mine. Please ask Uncle Chum if we can stay there, till we get on our feet. Victor cannot work, but truly, I’ll be able to get bookings. My monologues have done well here, even in the wartime theatre. They will get better, too. It’s not like the violin.

Trusting to Aurora, Uncle Chum, Gali’s string-pulling and her own instinct, she kissed Madame goodbye, and they boarded the ship.

Very Fond of That

Bella worked her way down the Pantages circuit as the spring wore on, to Los Angeles, where she would have a month playing the top four of the city’s eight Pan-time theatres. As a single headlining act, she did an expanded version of the
Bumble Bee
song (with very beautiful new wings and clod-hoppy black boots) and had introduced a send-up of
Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life
from Victor Herbert’s operetta where she played both lovers; she switched her straight song night to night, as fancy took her, between
Danny Boy
and a new song,
I’m Always Chasing Rainbows
, a glum little number about bad luck. She thought she might make a hit of
Life’s a Very Funny Proposition After All
, taking it sad and poignant. If she could bear to do it—although hardly being able to stand performing something seemed to be part of the art of it.

Touring alone these last weeks, she’d worked out a plan for doing
Bella’s New Car
alone—an elegant lady motorist driving herself in hat and veil, kind of a Gibson girl dame, until the disasters began and she could strip off one piece of veiling at a time, almost a burlesque number except of course that she would still be demurely covered until the contraption blew up and a pull-away frock left her in tattered underclothes.

She was enjoying herself, except when she was not. She had stopped drinking anything more than an occasional polite sherry (Julius’s ulcerative stomach and hideous death being the best of dissuasion), and was sleeping better, except for the nightmares.

Coming backstage her third night at the Arcade on Broadway, she found a note pinned to her dressing-room door. She opened it without much thought, expecting something from the orchestra leader—and saw his name first of all, his initial.

There were no other
Ns
for her.

Found you. I hear you’re staying at the Alexandria, good hotel. I know you might not want to see me, but I’ll be in the mezzanine at eleven tomorrow morning, in case you do.

See you there, I hope,

N. (NANDO DENT)

He stood against the railing, hat in his hand. Nice grey suit, but it looked like it might be his only one. She had changed her dress eight times.

The mezzanine lobby was empty, the lunch rush not yet begun.

She had thought about what to say, but it flew out of her head. ‘Why didn’t you come up and see me after the show?’

‘Not sure you would talk to me,’ he said. ‘Now you are headlining.’

That was not worthy of comment.

‘Besides,’ he said, turning his hat round and round in his hands, as if it were a stage prop. ‘I tried to make you mad when I left.’

‘That worked.’ She put her hand on a pillar, casual, but needing a bit of support.

Nando looked up, his careful eyes checking her face, and he turned her to a nearby plush-covered bench. They sat, and she waited.

‘You didn’t know my dad, not really. Not when he was so far gone in drinking, nobody knew about that. I couldn’t let you come along and see that. Look what he did to my mam. She wasn’t bad really—she’d had the biscuit. I still can’t blame her.’

‘Do you ever see her?’

‘Haven’t heard a word from her all this time. We know she’s alive, because Harlan the Great sends out Christmas cards to the industry and she’s in them. Looks pretty. Happier.’

‘It was a mean thing to leave you,’ Bella said.

He moved on the bench, got up and walked to the railing. ‘It was a mean thing to leave
you,’
he said.

Bella’s eyes suffered an unaccustomed rush of water. Not for herself, but because he did not know what she had been doing. Maybe he thought they could still be partners, or something.

Nando looked at her. She looked over the rail to the staircase instead.

‘I know you was with Pantages,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘Some people told me, and I saw your photo with him once or twice. You still with him?’

‘No.’

‘He leave you in the lurch too?’

She looked at him again.

‘I figure that’s what
I
did, is why I’m asking. East and Verrall weren’t fit to look after a girl, and Julius was a sad old drunk. But I couldn’t see anything but Dad then. Without my mam around I’ve got to know him a bit better. He’s still an ugly customer but he’s mellowed a fraction. Got Christian Science now and swears he’s off the bottle.’