The Little Shadows (21 page)

Receiving no answer but the hoot of a lonely owl, he brought out a silk kerchief and philosophically polished up that pallid face. ‘Until we meet again,’ he told the moon, with a lover’s caressing promise. Then he turned away from the moon and leaped—so far forward that Clover was in terror—and landed again on the forestage, precisely in one, and stood triumphant.

The people went wild and Saborsky bowed a gigantic bow, wheeling his arms in a wild sunburst-rolling jump and bowing again, shouting
‘Encore!
’ for himself. He took fourteen bows, tossing and picking up (with enormously vulnerable gratitude and some elastic-string mechanism) the same two bouquets of red silk roses over and over, terribly reminiscent of Sunderland and Pettibone applauding each other, and almost the funniest bit of all.

Clover’s whole heart and self was won.

Standing at the back of the hall beside Sybil, who had made them come up for a rare treat, her sisters watched too, and each in her own way saw how Saborsky’s true skill outshone every little thing they might do themselves.

A Chance Not to Be Missed

Mrs. Seward’s boarding hotel was a large, noisy place full of vaudeville people visiting with acquaintances from other theatres in town; a general movement through the house seemed to go on almost all night.

At 3 a.m. Mrs. Seward emerged in awful dudgeon and rang a little bell, and everyone went back to their own rooms, as East and Verrall had promised Aurora would happen. Finally something close to silence fell over the house and the girls could sleep, though Aurora was kept awake a little longer with the sick knowledge that they’d have to be up in four hours to make the band call for the next day’s performances.

The next night, Friday night, a proposal floated through the dressing rooms, to go after the show to hear members of the Hippodrome orchestra moonlighting at a roadhouse in the nearby countryside. Most of the company were going. An important visiting impresario was to put in an appearance.

‘A chance not to be missed,’ Julius confided, leaning in to their dressing room. His eyes popped at Aurora earnestly: a surprising pale green, like peeled grapes floating in custard. ‘We work, we strive, art is all—but at a certain juncture, management is a necessity. Mr. Fitzjohn Mayhew is a rising man and was last winter at the Follies. I think it worth the excursion.’

Aurora considered the proposal as she creamed off her makeup, listening to Sybil’s rippling account of how such a party would be perfectly permissible and even educational. The hotel would be in a din till three again, anyway. She and Clover had been to country dances at home in Paddockwood, some quite rambunctious, and could certainly take care of themselves; besides, they’d be with all their friends from the Parthenon company. She did briefly wonder whether she ought to leave Bella behind at Mrs. Seward’s, but Bella heard her saying as much to Clover and scotched that plan.

‘Cat piss! I am just as fit as you to go out in the country without Mama,’ Bella cried. ‘You can’t leave me here while you two go gallivanting!’

‘I’m thinking of your good,’ Aurora told her sharply. ‘You’re still a child.’

‘Ha, no, I’m not any more, and
you know it!
Don’t you treat me like a baby.’

‘Only our own dear Baby,’ Clover said, using Bella’s old pet-name. ‘We must look out for you.’

‘If I’m old enough to be in the show, I’m old enough to go out with you.’

Aurora would have fought her down, but the boarding hotel with its wandering artistes was no safer a place for a girl alone. Instead she did a quick job on Bella’s eyes, then Clover’s and her own, as if looking older would better fortify them to cope with any questionable doings they might encounter. In any case, they had done nothing but work and strive for many months—it was delightful to think of a trip to the woods.

After the last show the whole party together rode the streetcar till the track ended, at a blank crossroads. After a chilly wait, a long cutter came jingling out of the darkness. A man with surprisingly few teeth jumped down to help them up into the hay that filled the wagon-bed, and then to plump carriage robes around them, paying some special attention to the girls’ knees and feet until Julius growled at him; then they slid slowly off into the night woods.

The full moon had risen long before and rode above them, a silver orange dangling just out of reach. Clover was squashed in beside Mr. Verrall, but if she craned her neck slightly her cheek grazed the coat of Victor Saborsky, sitting on the wagon’s sidebar. At one corner the wagon lurched and Victor put out a hand to save her from being tossed out. It was too dark to see his eyes but his hand felt warm right through her melton coat-sleeve.

The silence of the forest was broken by a chuffing, a huffing. The cutter drew to one side of the narrow track; the clattering sewing-machine sound rose, and a touring car burst out of the shadows behind them. It squeezed past, honking, headlamps flaring in the darkness, and off around a bend, the commotion gradually fading.

‘Fitzjohn Mayhew,’ Julius pronounced. ‘His imprimatur.’

It was peaceful once the automobile had gone. The cutter slid on, runners scraping over gravel—winter was drying out to spring. Before long music twined out of the woods, and around another dark, piney dogleg they found a warm-lit huddle under the trees, a low log-built house with small windows under its eaves, each one a prick of light; buggies and wagons ranged alongside. Aurora took Bella’s arm on one side and Clover caught her other hand, and they followed Sybil and Julius, and went before East & Verrall, Victor Saborsky, the Tussler boys and the musicians, crowding up into the ante-porch and through a cracked, moss-packed door into a cacophony of noise and smoke.

Aurora tried to make out the room through the haze. A low dive, she thought, and the smell was fierce, but there was music playing over the racket of talk, and none of the men seemed instantly violent. Miners, she thought, and officials at the mines. Girls moved through the crowd, a sprinkling among the men: well-dressed working women, a few drunken drabs. Wan, skinny chits who looked like God’s last leftovers carried tin jugs of beer and unlabelled bottles. Although it irked her, Aurora saw she had made a mistake in coming. It was not a box-house—the kind of place she’d heard Sybil tell of, where girls went straight down from the stage to dally with the patrons in small enclosed boxes, for a little extra income—but it was not at all a respectable place. She kept a good grip on Bella’s hand.

Across one end of the long room a slightly raised platform held the musicians. Silver plates on an accordion flashed in the lamplight as the musicians squashed together to make a larger empty space on the platform. Blurry forms of dancers waited to begin.

East took Clover’s elbow to steer the girls to a half-empty table, then vanished with Verrall, reappearing with small stools to crowd in tight about the table. Aurora did a quick check of the room. No sign of the promised impresario. There was no one who could possibly have come in that touring car. There must be other rooms—or perhaps a different class of entertainment, in the outbuildings crouched around the wagon yard. She settled herself to watch, but kept one eye on the room.

A Little Less Sad

This was a wild place, Bella thought. Just what her mood required! The thin girls serving and the thin men drinking interested her equally. The trampled floor was dark dirt; the long, low-ceilinged room felt dank with a distillery brew of yeasty sweat, but the woodsmoke and deer-hide smell reminded her of country dances in Paddockwood, and the theatre people seemed like old friends too: East and Verrall, of course, but Saborsky and the Tusslers too. The older Tussler gave her a wink and she gave him a twinkling one back, so he elbowed his brother and guffawed, winking again and again. Bella decided he was not entirely right in his head.

Fitful light fell from oil lamps set on tables and hung from beams, not bright enough to make it truly cheerful, but she felt like she knew the ropes here. In a back L of the room—closer to the still-room, she guessed, since the jugs of beer came from that end—men and a few women were playing cards.

The dancers came on: a man and woman, both wearing tattered street clothes and caps. The music changed to a
danse Apache
rag, and the man grabbed the woman’s arm. He pulled her to him and slapped her, hard! But she didn’t seem to mind. Still holding her arm, the man and his partner did a cocky strut till he grabbed her into a bear-hug and a rough little quickstep. They clung together, then the man threw the woman to the floor and yanked her back up to dance a squatting parody of a waltz. It was tight and harsh and none of it pretty; exciting to witness, like a fight on the street.

Next up was a singer, an older woman with a rasping voice and low-slung breasts that threatened to burst out of her stained satin dress. She did music-hall stuff at a rattling pace, with no stinting of lewd gestures and eye-rollings. Ugly, but with enough assurance to put her songs across, and the music was lively.

At first it had been lovely to sit in the warmth, cozied up between Clover and Aurora, but now Bella was hot and the place seemed only ordinary after all. She got up and wound round tables to the back of the long room as if she might be looking for a way out to the privy, but
she had no need, only restlessness. Aurora had let her wear her dainty-flowered shirtwaist. She must look as old as her sisters, with her eyes darkened so.

There was a stronger odour back here, a hay smell or a burning-barrel. She supposed it was some unusual cure of tobacco. East had followed her and caught her sniffing at the air. He said, ‘That’s loco weed, that’s all, hashish cigarillos.’ Verrall came up beside him, and added, ‘Makes these folk feel a little less sad, for a while.’

‘But
you
wouldn’t want that, no, no,’ East said, steering her slightly wide of that table. ‘Although
we
are as sad as can be. We need it to be comic in our Art.’

‘No sadness for you,’ Verrall agreed. ‘Cards, though—we could all use some of the innocent joy that gambling brings to the hectic personality.’

At home in Paddockwood Bella had frequently played with the men. Her papa had taught her how to play poker, how to make it look like she couldn’t play very well. Though that joke worked only once, she did enjoy trotting it out. East tucked her into the crowd watching a small table where a heavy-set woman was dealing and talking, talking and dealing. Bella could see that she was good.

The younger of the Tusslers was playing at the table, but he dashed his hand down in disgust as East and Bella joined the group, and the older brother replaced him. The younger stood beside them to watch a hand or two, commenting scornfully on the play under his breath to East, who stayed silent and watched; admiring his detached alertness, Bella copied him, a trill of pleasure running under her skin to be out in this wild place, at night. She was not the baby sister here. She was herself.

A Very Fine Suit

Near the end of a song from an angry woman with lank blonde hair, there was a commotion at the door and a large man came in, a bevy of theatre people around him chattering and showing off, oblivious to the performance going on. From his white silk scarf and pointed beard, from the cut of the astrakhan-collared
overcoat, and from the very fine suit revealed as he doffed his coat (which was whisked to safety by one of his entourage), Aurora knew this must be Mr. Fitzjohn Mayhew.

The singer onstage knew it too—she snapped urgent fingers at the bandleader and the music changed to a hotter song, syncopated and loud, and she shouted a welcome over the heads of the crowd: ‘Fitz! About time you came back to the sticks!’ Mayhew raised his cane and saluted her, everything fine about him, even his manners. He waved to encourage the music, and the singer went on with a bawdy piece about her loving cup and the man to fill it up. Sybil, sitting alert in the shadow of Julius’s bulk, pressed an importunate hand on Aurora’s arm. ‘You must sing next,’ she hissed.

‘Oh, no,’ Aurora said, surprised. ‘They’ve got plenty here to entertain.’

‘Julius will work it. It’s your best chance for Fitz Mayhew. He’s got an eye for a pretty girl. You go ahead. You can’t say no!’

Aurora could not, of course. Julius had already lumbered up and was talking to the band captain, gesturing back at the table.

But what to sing? Not their Parthenon act; Mayhew might have caught the show. Something different for this crowd. They’ve been riotous, she thought, violent and loud, so we’ll be simple and sad.
After the Ball?
But it was long and didn’t make sense without all the verses, and she wasn’t sure she and Clover could get through to the last without losing the crowd. And the band didn’t know them, and they had no sides. Julius came back and escorted Clover up to the stage. Bella was nowhere to be seen, but Aurora dared not hesitate or they would lose this chance. She needed something to catch the heart, to catch the attention of this Mayhew. Aurora leaned across to the fiddler and asked him, with her most engaging smile and a small, apologetic, enlisting shrug—
what is to be done?
—if they could borrow the loan of his violin for just one song. He blushed and handed it over.

‘Songs My Mother,’
she whispered to Clover, who gave her a strange eye back but dutifully tuned the fiddle,
plick-plick-plick
, swung it under her chin, and with her thin hip, edged behind Aurora into better position for her bow arm to begin the intro. Obedient to the music, the
crowd quietened to listen. Aurora sang alone, not too high but rising into alt at the end of each line.

‘Songs my mother taught me
,
In the days long vanished;
Seldom from her eyelids
Were the teardrops banished …’

There was nothing to that song: just a little door opened to the mother that you missed so dreadfully, who had loved you as nobody else ever could; and now that she was dead, who would pray for you? As the verse ended Clover went soaring on the fiddle, a yellowy amateurish-looking thing that wept convincingly. Aurora sent the song streaming straight from her sadness, confusion stripped away and only one-bladed pain remaining.
Missing you, missing you
, the violin sang. Missing Papa’s violin too, which had been sold in the first batch of selling, because they could hope to get another someday. The piano had not gone for another six months. Clover’s bow pulled strongly down and rose sweetly up. Then Aurora, with the verses again, no embellishment: