The Little Shadows (7 page)

Mama had made them do an Italian run of their songs at the hotel, speaking very quickly, to make sure that everyone remembered the lyrics.
Nothing
more inexcusable than forgetting lyrics, she said; some acts might be able to make them up, but the audience would know their old favourites, and any false word would jar. Clover was cold with dread that she might forget.

The Wonder Dogs man sat in the middle of the table, a row of dogs behind, led by a cock-eared black terrier. He whistled and they settled, with that same tight attention and excitement that Clover felt herself when standing ready to perform.

As the curtain opened, Juddy rang a brass bell for service and a maid-dog entered, prancing on hind legs, dressed in a darling little white cap and apron. As she set a plate in front of Juddy, a tiny poodle, nosed by the black terrier, jumped from the row of boxes behind and stood
quivering upon the table. The maid-dog chased him off—but the same rascally black terrier nudged another onto the table, and another, until the maid found a whisk broom under the table and whisked the little dogs off, chasing them right offstage.

Juddy rang the bell again. No answer but a blat from the trombone, so he flung his dinner napkin down and went haring off after the maid-dog.

As soon as he’d gone, up jumped that rascally terrier—the instigator, Clover thought—and began to wolf down the abandoned dinner. Some commotion occurred offstage and the dog looked up, one ear cocked. He jumped down, grabbed a new dog, a hairy Pekinese-looking thing, by the scruff of her neck and plumped her down beside the plate.

Then the black dog nipped back to his box and sat, angelic—just in time, for his master came storming back in. When he saw the Pekinese at the half-eaten plate, Juddy lost his temper, scolding it in a torrent of hideous triple-speed curses, stamping his feet in a rage, then drawing a pistol and training it on the poor pup.

Clover was frightened. She thought Juddy truly was mad, and was going to kill his own dog like that, shoot him right there on the stage, for having ruined his number. The gun was very black and real. The substitute thief shrank, cowering, a masterpiece of abject apology, as Juddy cocked the pistol and prepared to execute the poor little creature.

But the black dog leaped up from his box and jumped onto the table between the gun and the Peke, begging piteously for his master to spare its life. Juddy dragged him off the table onto the floor, and instead—oh no! He shot the black dog!

The dog rocked back on his hind legs as if he were a man, and staggered about the stage, one paw over the wound, the other across his eyes. His whimpering was loud above the suddenly hushed music, and then—he died.

Appalled by what he had done, Juddy fell to his knees weeping. A huge dog—the biggest dog Clover had ever seen, in a police jacket and helmet—came in and grabbed Juddy from behind, nipping him on the
seat of the pants, and dragged him offstage, straight to pokey where he belonged for killing his clever little dog. From the wings Clover could see how Juddy looked like he was being dragged when he was actually pushing himself along; he was very convincing even so. She was so sorry for the dead black dog—until, after a long funereal trombone blast, he jumped up onto the table and coolly finished his dinner.

‘Right!’ called Mendel. ‘Out of time for you, Juddy—we’ll wing it with part two.’ He turned back to his band. ‘Minou’s up next, vamp sixty-four bars while they strike the dogs.’

The curtains swirled shut, and the stage was a welter of hands shifting stools and plinths in the blue working lamp, silent under a winding French café tune from the band.

Out of the darkness close beside Clover, a man said softly, ‘Fresh blood?’

She jumped, then stood very still.

‘New to this the-ayter, I mean to say? Humbug?’ He proffered a paper bag to entice her. He had reddish hair and bright eyes that looked blue in the bluish light.

Another man emerged from the velvet curtain’s shadow. ‘Now, East, don’t tease the lady.’

‘This is no lady, she’s a
soubrette,’
said East. They stood very near.

‘Oh, I think not, I think she is not—I’d lay you odds she’s as prim as you please.’

‘Verrall, you back away slow and you won’t get hurt. I’ve got dibs on this young miss.’ East ran his arm behind Clover and pulled her quite close, but not close enough to be serious. There was a joke in everything he said, you could not be cross with him—besides, Clover was never subjected to this kind of attention, standing beside Aurora as she always did, and she found it interesting.

Verrall extended one long thin finger at East and twitched it side to side like Papa’s metronome. ‘Mrs. C. is watching. You’ll find yourself in hot water with the management, my dear old East,’ he said.

‘D’you think? When he needs us ever so desperately?’ East squeezed Clover’s waist, measuringly, and then used both his hands to set her a
little apart, like a doll he was putting back in the toy box. ‘But perhaps he don’t need
you
so desperately, my tidy tenderfoot, and it would never do to get you canned.’

Still Clover had not spoken a word. She could not say anything at all witty, so she tore herself away from watching Madame Minou’s Statuary and trotted down the stairs to the dressing room as if she were quite confident and pert. Only her legs, trembling slightly, showed the lie.

The Doorstep

Aurora watched the Soubrettes running out as Clover ran in, and shortly back again, their call brief because they’d been with Cleveland’s so long.

The Italian Boys had the last band call, coming next-to-close, before the pictures. Here at the Empress those were little more than a magic lantern show to harry the audience out of their seats, Cleveland saying that if the Keith–Albee circuit didn’t bother with them he didn’t see why he should pay through the nose for bad celluloid. The current picture was
A Natural History Study Showing Fifteen Phases of Bee Culture
; not even Bella wanted to see it. The girls were free to stay by the stove and keep warm for the hour before the first show.

But Aurora could not sit. Wrapping her shawl around herself she went up the stairs and outside as if to the privy, then turned round the side of the theatre and kept walking as far as she could in the cold. She took quick strides on the packed-snow path and watched her new boots peeping in and out beneath her swaying skirt, and thought of a blank blue sky over their old home in Paddockwood, of lying on the stone fence by the schoolhouse after all the others had gone in to supper; her father’s shuttered face, bent over papers at his desk on the dais, when she went to call him in long after supper was cold.

‘What a voice you’ve got,’ he’d said one evening, after the Victoria Day concert. ‘Wherever it came from.’ Mama had never had much voice. Everybody said so, it was not disloyal. Aurora had more talent, and
more beauty, but Mama had fiery energy and gumption, and those things counted high. Talent was only a tenth of it.

Aurora’s feet were ice-lumps, so she turned and strode back. It was exciting, she told herself. It was—the doorstep of their professional lives. She took one last breath of cold air, feeling the well-known shock as the cold’s bite reached down her chest.

The heat of the theatre warmed her skin on her way in. She passed grey-banged, whey-faced Mrs. Cleveland, but shy of being thought to have been at the outhouse, Aurora went on without speaking, aware of those flat eyes swinging to watch. She walked, in consequence, very straight and smooth.

Openers

At ten to two the lobby doors opened and the house came in. The audience made a breathing noise, a subtle tidal movement beneath the excited chatter and the noise of Mendel’s band playing warm-up music.

Openers, the girls stood dressed and ready in the wings: Aurora with her eyes closed, Clover looking a bit pinched but calm enough. Bella leaned up against the proscenium facade, peeping through an unstitched line in the velvet curtains to see what waited out there for them. People of every kind, wide and middling and narrow, anxious-looking or happy, in groups or by twos or alone, moving down the aisles to find a good spot, shuffling through the crowd to get to an empty seat in the middle.

All those velvet seats filling, all the feet trampling, all there to hear them—Bella was lifted up, buoyant deep in her belly with the pleasure of what was to come. Here we go, she thought, and it seemed like her whole life had been waiting for this particular minute. She turned to see how her sisters were—Aurora had not yet thrown up but Mama had brought up a slop pail and set it behind the second leg. Poor stuff! Bella was glad not to have a queasy stomach. Had she smudged her lip on the curtain?

They could hear Mendel winding his little orchestra down, and then there was a pause, and then it would be them. Aurora turned blindly in the dark. Clover pushed the slop pail to her, Aurora threw up quickly, and Mama wiped her mouth.

And then the stagehand was holding back a fold of curtain and the music rose, and it was time to go on. Clover went first, Bella second, and then Aurora, out into the liquid brilliance of the footlights, drinking it like wine or how they imagined champagne must be. Bits of people’s heads and eyes and teeth showed in the darkness, that same breathing noise continuing, the swell and ebb of the audience’s desire to be pleased.

Third bar of the intro, fourth bar of the intro. Now the climbing notes that made a ladder into the song:

‘Soft as the voice of an angel
,
breathing a welcome unheard
,
Hope with her gentle persuasion
whispers a comforting word …’

Were they loud enough? There was still some talk and some movement, but that was all right, that was to be expected, since they were the openers. Mama had coached them to carry on good-naturedly even if it seemed that no one was listening at all. ‘We won’t be in this spot for long, dear chickens,’ she’d said. ‘But make the best of it while visiting.’

Clover’s dark, steady voice split for the chorus, her gentle low notes letting Aurora reach upward and keeping Bella grounded—‘Why
should the heart sink away?
’ Aurora was so gratefully fond of Clover that she could not help smiling at her, and then she could feel, almost like the press of a hand, the returned pleasure of the audience in their singing, and in their liking for one another.

‘Making my heart, making my heart
In its sorrow rejoice …’

They did not make too much of a meal out of the ending, but allowed the audience to remember being sad and then feeling a bit better. No going up on that last note, as some singers did; Mama felt anything show-offy ruined the song’s genuine sentiment.

After that, how enjoyable to feel the tempo change to
Buffalo Gals
, and slip behind Bella while she glided forward, close to the glowing footlights that cast such a rosy shine onto their faces, Bella’s now mischievous, happy to be in the blushing light, the limelight. She knew she was a very good gal, clowning: she found the crowd happy as she was herself, on her gangly feet.

‘Her feet took up the whole sidewalk
,
And left no room for me
.
Oh-oh-oh! Buffalo Gals, won’t you come out tonight …’

Aurora and Clover danced shuffling swoops behind her, almost mocking her—but that was just what the song had in mind, for someone to poke a bit of cheerful fun at themselves. She was the gal with the hole in her stocking whose heel kept a-knocking, and weren’t they all lucky to be having such a good time?
But wait
, Bella seemed to say, when she waved a flip goodbye at the end,
because here’s the real treat!
The band swept into
Don’t Dilly-Dally
. Many people in the audience perked up and started to hum along. ‘Not too much of that,’ Mama had warned. ‘Cleveland won’t like it if you turn his vaudeville into a common music hall, but you don’t have to squelch them either.’

Aurora grabbed the birdcage from behind the downstage leg and went into the spotlight all forlorn, a lost girl in the city.
‘My old man said, “Follow the van, And don’t dilly-dally on the way …’ ”
Nice as it was to be centre stage, taking sympathy from the sea of faces down below, Aurora disliked this song. She wended through long verses about chamber pots (which they’d ditch tomorrow if Mrs. Cleveland happened to carp), into the chorus again. But by then the crowd was turning its attention to the programme, wondering what came next. She could see them
shift in their seats, and only managed to keep panic from entering her voice by pushing it louder, which did not work.

Chorus again, this one the last:
‘My old man said, Follow the van, don’t dilly-dally on the way!
’—and then, a terrible blank.

The music went on alone. She had forgotten the lyrics.

She looked over at Mendel in a panic and saw his head swivel quickly to look at her, and then an eyebrow lifted—he reached the end of the bar and swung his hand around in a circle to the band as if he’d meant to do that all along. A cheerful broad-faced lady in the audience took that as encouragement and sang along gaily,
‘My old man,’
and when they got to the second line it came back into Aurora’s head and she sang on, ‘
Off went the cart with our home packed in it, I walked behind with my old cock linnet,’
while cold horror ran through her: she had forgotten the words. The stupidest of sins.

Bella nudged Clover to join in, and they sang along with the lady in the front row, rising up into a loud triumph on
‘Can’t find my way home!’
Aurora bobbed a curtsy to thank her for the lines, and knocked her head to show that it was empty.

Then the audience was all clapping, as much for their own woman as for the girls.