The Little Shadows

by Marina Endicott

  Pincushion

  Flora scuttled along the cleared path through the snow. Her left boot had a thin place and the cold seemed to come up in a fiery line straight through to her hip. ‘Pincushion, pincushion,’ she sang to herself beneath her breath—not wanting to find herself in the hotel room, unable to recall why she had come. Her head ached, and after the theatre’s darkness the morning sun was dazzling, sun-dog prisms glittering too bright to be borne. She put her gloved hand up to shade her eyes. One eye was not behaving properly; she ought not to have spent so long out with Sybil and Julius last night, and then she had been plagued with dreams.

  What joy to see her girls onstage. Cleveland was one to watch out for, though; and he had eyed Aurora too openly, which would earn them all Mrs. C.’s dislike. Flora had seen enough of that. Aurora was too unseasoned to realize how careful she must be, but—

  A patch of black ice nearly sent Flora tumbling—phew! A broken leg at this juncture would be disastrous!

  More slowly, she stepped along the snowy edge of the path. Life on the stage was like a pincushion, she thought. Sharp points all around: useful, but you needed a silver thimble to manage. She must keep her thimble over her girls. The thought of Cleveland forcing himself on Aurora made her face break into a fearful heat, even in this prickling cold. Behind her black glove she could see it happening, an upsetting vision of Cleveland tugging at Aurora’s hand, pressing it to his trousers—oh! Flora shook her head to clear it and redoubled her speed.

  It was an advantage that she knew the way of the vaudeville world very well, its blessings as well as its dangers. She must simply be determined, and not let weakness or tiredness, or useless visions, distract her from keeping all her girls safe and sound.

  An Instant Liking

  ‘How’d you get the gig?’ Mercy asked Aurora. Clover was there too, but Mercy did not bother with her, seeing at once who was in charge of the Belle Auroras, and speaking to her equivalent number.

  ‘Auditioned yesterday,’ Aurora said, as brief as possible.

  Silence. Tongue out in concentration, Temperance drew on a crescent of eyebrow.

  No reason not to be honest, Aurora judged. ‘We didn’t get it, but Cleveland was angry with Julius Foster Konigsburg, so then he had no opener and called us back.’

  Mercy was kind, though. ‘Oh, he could have used Maximilian the Bird Magician, if he’d been desperate. Maxie can do it in one if he’s got to—less comfy for the birds, is all.’

  Aurora gave way to an instant liking for Mercy. Her soldierly air, her lean arms, her eyes which were both sharp and melting. Her lips, too: full, but cut cleanly around the arching edge. Little chin. What was their life like, with no mother or manager to be seen?

  ‘How did you get the gig?’

  ‘Gave him a French job under the lighting table.’

  Aurora looked blank.

  ‘Where he sits with Lights. Sent Lights off to check for a burnt bulb.’ Mercy laughed at the look on Aurora’s face, at Clover staring too. ‘It’s not so bad—quick work, and no danger, you know. I’d far rather that than the other.’

  Aurora did not want Mercy to see that she did not know what a French job might be. Whatever it was, how had it come about? How had Mr. Cleveland introduced the subject—or had Mercy? Would she herself be expected to do whatever it was? But she had Mama. She would have to watch out for Bella and Clover. She looked up and caught Clover’s eye, and saw that she too was speculating as to what exactly it might be.

  Clover rose and slid out of the room, the knuckles of her hand grazing the back of Aurora’s neck gently on her way by.

  Mercy said, drawing her own brows, ‘Well, see you keep the gig now you’ve got it! Mrs. C. will ding you with her carving knife if she catches you at hanky-panky. She sent poor Melvin packing this morning, and his Tina, only because she was getting big in front.’

  ‘Is that Neville Melvin Reads Your Subconscious Mind?’ Aurora turned pages in the programme to find him, there, fourth on the bill.

  ‘Yes. East & Verrall are coming. Cleveland got them on their way down to the Death Trail.’

  ‘I love East,’ Temperance said. The only thing she’d said so far. Her eyes were thick-rimmed with black, and she was painting a line of palest blue along the soft pink inner edge of her eyelid. She was spectacularly pretty, if you liked an armful. ‘He gives you fudge.’

  Mercy nodded. ‘No girl with them. We wouldn’t want to follow a girl.’

  ‘Comics?’

  ‘Double act, three hundred dates a year, but they run down to the Montana circuit to make that many. But what do they do with the money? They never seem to have any.’

  Aurora watched Mercy paint her eyes. It was peaceful in that warm dark rabbit-hole of a room, while the work went on above them. In a droning, listless voice, Patience sang, ‘What’s my name? Poon’tain. Ask me again, I’ll tell you the same.’

  Living Snake

  Dogs were surging up the stairs stage left as Clover went to look for Bella. A moving river of white and black fur flowed onstage behind the curtain. Bella was there, watching the fray. Mama had returned, and she did not like dogs. Holding the pincushion out like a bone to tempt them, she backed away. One little dog, a ball of white fluff, snapped up at her with pointed white teeth.

  ‘Oh, help! Save us!’ Mama cried, and the Wonder Dogs man ran up behind the dogs and called them to order with a quiet whistle.

  He avoided Mama’s eyes, but grunted, ‘Thorry,’ and dealt with the dog by a short punch on the nose, his expressionless face rough but soft, like bread-dough torn into halves. Was he mad, a little? He must be, to have cut that living snake away. Clover shuddered. She was glad Bella had not heard what he’d done to himself, the poor man.

  Mama gathered Bella’s hand, clutched tight, and pulled her back down to the dressing room. Clover stopped to adjust her stocking (Mama’s—too big, it sagged gradually down, however tight she tied her garter) and stayed to watch the dogs: twelve of them lined up on a row of stools behind a long table. Mendel pulled the curtain aside and said in a careful voice, as if talking to someone slow or deaf, ‘Take that new opener all the way through, Juddy, Lights hasn’t seen it yet … Make it an Italian if that suits the dogs, but go through the whole dinner party—after that we’ll skip from cue to cue.’

  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 s
pot 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.’