The Little Shadows

by Marina Endicott

  ‘My dear young miss—it is the middle Miss Belle-A-Clovers, is it not?’ said Julius, in great good humour. He took her hand to draw her arm through his, and walked her towards the dressing-room stairs. ‘Delighted to see you gracing this hectic Hebron of theatrical delights, however it comes about. My comrade-in-arms will be in alt, to find your Floral Mater restored to her.’

  Clover matched her stride to his, not feeling the faintest desire to stay and hear An Excursion of Song.

  A Really Well-trained Rat

  They had a dressing room of their own. Or, if not quite all their own, they were only sharing it with one other number, the strawberry-haired woman from Swain’s Rats & Cats. The cats, and most fortunately the rats, were housed with her husband in another dressing room, and the woman assured Mama that never, not once, had a rat been known to escape.

  ‘These that we have in our act are not your run-of-the-mill rats,’ she explained kindly. Her name was Letty Swain. Her nose and teeth were pointed and her chin slightly lacking, which made it easy to remember which act she was. As she talked she burnished small leather harnesses with mink oil, one after another, laying each one neatly down and picking up the next with small leather fingers. ‘Ours are highly educated rats on whom no expense has been spared. The cats alone are worth in their tens of thousands, but the rats, well! There’s no placing a value on a really well-trained rat.’

  Bella agreed, the skin shivering up and down her arms at the very thought of one rat, let alone a plurality of them, but promised herself she would watch their turn if she could creep away. Tiny swords lay waiting to be polished, and a pumpkin, which had been hollowed out and made into a pretty travelling coach, and she longed to see these things in action. Let alone the rats.

  ‘It’s the cats who are the trouble,’ Letty said. ‘Always sickening for something, and my Greymalkin has a tumultuous growth behind her ear needs draining from week to week, but they’re a lot less bother than a fistful of daughters would be, and if I feel like an evening out, all I’ve to do is fill the water bowls and lock the door behind me.’

  (And hope that the cats don’t eat the rats, Bella supposed.)

  ‘Hubert can feed them, if I tell him every nig-nag detail, and he keeps the rats in order during the act, but it’s I who doctors them and sits up with them nights when they are ailing.’

  The boy stuck his head in the door. In this on-the-cheap establishment it was Mattie, the uniformed placard boy, who did the calls, too. ‘On in ten,’ he told Letty.

  ‘Have you knocked on Room 3 yet?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘Any answer?’

  ‘He banged on the table and cursed.’

  Letty jumped up and grabbed the tiny harnesses. ‘Oh Lord, he’s late,’ she cried. ‘Hopeless, hopeless!’

  She ran out, and Mattie laughed and followed to see the fun. Smothered shrieks wound back along the hall as she harried the poor man, never mind the rats and cats, into harness.

  Interested Red Eyes

  Impatient with the long wait, Aurora went up and stood in the wings to watch Maurice Kavanagh, Irish Elocutionist. She’d caught a glimpse of him earlier, striding into his dressing room, and wanted to see if he was as striking as his photographs.

  Oh, he was. His voice was like port wine, she thought. Dressed in a dark velveteen jacket, a luxurious darkness, mauve velvet tie graceful at his throat; long hair flung wildly back over a broad, speaking brow. In the pool of light his feet were planted in a romantic stance, one leg thrust forward, as if the emotion of the moment had nigh unbalanced him. His arm rose as he declaimed:

  ‘The star of the unconquered will,

  He rises in my breast,

  Serene, and resolute, and still,

  And calm, and self-possessed.’

  Aurora found her hands clasped at her collar, and dropped them. The velvet curtain-leg was close by her; as Kavanagh turned onstage she slipped quickly behind it to hide. To be caught watching!

  He took a drink from the glass on the table—a tinted glass, which most likely meant the liquid was not water—and set it down, his face downcast and hidden. He came to stillness, to a profound thoughtfulness that was shared by the audience, judging from the silence, then filled his vast barrel of a chest and cried, in a sharp shout of loathing, ‘Rats!’

  Aurora’s skirts jumped into her hands, and she scanned the boards beneath her feet, frozen in terror—But he went on,

  ‘They fought the dogs and killed the cats,

  And bit the babies in the cradles …’

  She had to lean on the rope-bed, weak with relief. It was only Browning, in fifty different sharps and flats. Kavanagh did the wild beginning of Pied Piper in a galloping, ranting screech that made her laugh as the audience did, then broke off and moved into My Last Duchess, changing himself in an instant into the cold, ferocious grandee with his gift of a nine hundred years old name, hating his young wife:

  ‘… Just this

  Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,

  Or there exceed the mark.’

  And then he had her killed, as easy as that: ‘I gave commands, then all smiles stopped together.’ It was so cruel! As if Browning himself recited, Aurora thought.

  Kavanagh moved stage left, cajoling the audience. ‘Longfellow speaks to the inmost heart of us, in accents gentle enough to praise the hidden flowers of womanhood …’

  ‘Standing, with reluctant feet,

  Where the brook and river meet …’

  It was such a man’s piece of poesy to leave her meek, bewildered and damp. But Kavanagh was beautiful to look at, and besides his skill, the strength of his build pleased her very much.

  Into the wings came a rather portly man, panting, carrying two cages with difficulty because a third perched between them. A score of interested red eyes peered out between the bars. Aurora yelped and dodged around the curtain before she could help herself, her skirt’s tail whisking into view for an instant, and then out again. In the wings again she looked back and found Mr. Kavanagh staring offstage at her, an arrested look on his broad countenance.

  She fled.

  An Ocean of Joy

  Mama and Sybil sat side by side in the dressing room, hemming the girls’ ivory wool skirts to a sprightly six inches off the floor, and having a very satisfactory sentimental reunion, as touching as their last only three days ago.

  Clover found it strange to see Mama so at ease with another woman, telling stories and laughing. In Paddockwood Mama had not had any friends. When out in company, uneasy with farm people and anxious to raise Papa’s stature in the community, she had overplayed the gracious lady; at home, she was almost embarrassingly vulgar, an easy fountain of stories and songs, spending whole days in her wrapper. Clover watched her now with Sybil, giving back joke for joke, exchanging opinions about the success or failings of people they’d known, and thought that it was odd, how someone as inward and melancholy as Papa could have loved a person so transparently light. Light-hearted, light-minded. Or perhaps it was not odd at all.

  She resolved not to think any more about Papa. She wetted the mascara brush and did her lashes again. She thought of them too often. After Papa the memory of Harry always came tagging along: sadder but cleaner, at least less complicated, the poor lamb. Clover was tired. We are far away, she thought, from what we’ve known. This small room, this momentary warmth and crowding, is what we have now instead of our old life. The table under her elbows was pitted and scarred, more than a school desk even, and the wooden plank walls between and above the mirrors were dotted with signatures and notes from artistes who had travelled through. She leaned on the heels of her hands and stared at Eulélé Josephine, 1911, the accents cut sharply into the wood, and tried not to think at all for a moment.

  Sybil’s catalogue of vaudeville stitched gently on, her tinny voice sharp and helpful as any needle. ‘Julian Eltinge, he’s from out here, you know. Years ago, when things were wilder, he made his living as a lap-girl in a box-hou
se out in Butte—a very respectable girl, I’m sure—they were short on females in the area, so they’d dress a boy or two,’ Sybil added quickly, with an eye towards the girls. ‘His father found out and beat the tar out of him, so he went east—the suavest thing in shoes, a lovely dancer. This was in Boston, after you’d left us, Flora. Before he struck it big as a female impersonator, he was with Cadet Theatricals, but then E.E. Rice saw him, and he was made. In ’03 he was already getting a thousand a week with Keith’s, so he told me, and much more now, I’m sure. We did the galop, a private party at the Lyceum there in Cincinnati—I’d show you but there’s not enough room to swing a cat, let alone a rat!’ Sybil took a turn around the ballroom in her chair, little feet peeping out from her pink petticoat and fluttery hands dancing in the air. She sang, ‘Waltz me around again, Willie, around, around, around—’ and ended in a skirt-gathering kick.

  Clover could see what a hit she would have been as Miss Saucy Saunders, when broke and nothing for it but burlesque. ‘I feel like a ship on an ocean of joy …’

  For herself, Clover thought she would rather do anything—go to Normal School to teach, be a telephone operator—than take that road, burlesque or box-house. They would just have to make some money. Mama was right. A thousand a week ought to do it.

  A Dreadful Jig

  The Old Soldiers sawed away at tunes left over from the Civil War. Several were blind or maimed, their faces old and blank. One fiddler sat playing with a bow strapped to his foot, having lost his arm. Another, blind, danced a dreadful jig as he played, thin legs darting lightly ahead and behind, and while he jigged he made his mouth into a grin that had no meaning. Bella said she could not bear to watch, and left Mattie to finish his apple alone; but it seemed to Clover, standing unnoticed in the wings, that the audience did not mind at all. They could not know how terrible it would be to have a skill, to lose it, then turn freak to get a portion of it back. Or was it still the same—did one still lose one’s misery in the music? Clover curtsied as the soldiers filed past when their turn was over, silent in the backstage gloom.

  Cornelius the Bubble Juggler was nothing but that, a stooped man with an outsize bubble-pipe and a carefully guarded Proprietary Mixture for making bubbles, which he patted up into the air from a silk cushion like a large glove on his hand. It was tedious, and he insisted on counting each pat, starting over when the bubble burst, as it always did. His was the first act Clover had seen that left her feeling flat and critical, and she did not like the feeling. Especially when they had to go on themselves in so little time.

  But the pictures came between Cornelius and their turn. Clover ran down to help Aurora cope with Bella. She was only thirteen, even though they had to say she was sixteen. She’d been the baby for a long time—until she was eight, when Harry had come along, Clover and Aurora had called her Baby.

  In the dressing room Clover found Aurora panting and sighing, standing against the wall. Clover panted too, filling out her narrow chest gorgeously as if she were Miss Sunderland, whisking an imaginary green-satin train from side to side and trilling to make her sisters laugh. She finished Bella’s makeup and re-did her own frog-pond eyes, taking a pin to separate her own and Bella’s thick-blacked eyelashes.

  The challis shirtwaists had been fresh-pressed with sizing, skirt hems ironed to a knife-edge; the dressing room smelled deliciously of laundry. Mama had rigged an improvised board from their placard, two coffee cans and a towel.

  ‘Ge-ge-ge-ge-geh,’ Aurora sang. ‘Ke-ke-ke-ke-keh.’

  ‘If you need an encore …’

  But Clover said, ‘We won’t, Mama, we’re just the closer. They’ll be wanting to go home as much as we want to send them.’ Which was true, of course.

  The boy knocked at the door, and they were up and out in a flurry of skirts and boots, a herd of young horses rising suddenly from a field.

  The Life

  Gentry was not backstage, but the girls knew he must be watching. Clover breathed in through the bottom of her boots, as Gentry had said to do, determined not to look so serious.

  Mattie held his hand out for their placard. Oh, the placard! The ironing board!

  Bella raced down on galumphing feet, grabbed it, nearly throwing the rats’ tack into a tangle, and jumped back upstairs three at a time, to the music already beginning over the end of the pictograph reel.

  Mattie marched the card onstage and set it, and the music swelled, and they were up.

  They ran prancing on to the music, holding hands. Into position. The lights were brighter in this theatre. Hot onstage—and they were ready, and the piano slid into the verse.

  ‘Early one morning, just as the sun was rising

  I heard a maid singing in the valley below,

  O, don’t deceive me, O, never leave me,

  How could you use a poor maiden so?’

  In the song’s story Clover was the low-voiced singer, and Aurora the maiden. Bella—another happier maiden, unable to contain her delight at being up on the boards again. She stood by Clover as Gentry had commanded; she did not swish her skirt or fidget.

  They opened their mouths like caves and let the sound flow out, running smooth to the back of the house—Aurora opened up the top of her head and opened down the bottom of her jaw, the sweetest and most dreadfully deceived of girls, wandering there back of the castle all pregnant with her apron not fitting any more. Bella almost laughed as she thought about that humped-up apron. But they were using the more refined lyrics with only the garlands that you pressed on my brow … Even Mrs. Cleveland could not have objected to them.

  There was a difference this evening, Aurora thought, a change clearer in the house than in themselves: the audience was relaxed, as if knowing the girls would sing well right from the start. Their act wasn’t just good in spots, it was good all through, and the back-and-forthness between them and the people was made of pleasure rather than kindness. If they kept working, they could be good like this all the time.

  Then it was time for Buffalo Gals, where Bella could cut loose and kick up her heels, and the audience became more lively. One of her tapping heels encountered a smear of soap bubble left by the juggler, whisked out from under her, and nearly took her whooshing off the stage—but she recovered, with a windmill of arms that shook a huge laugh out of the audience, and the applause at the end was such a cascade of happiness that Bella laughed as she bowed. This was the life for her.

  A Kick

  ‘Very—energetic,’ Gentry said, waiting in the wings when they came off. ‘My dear Bella, your poise and aplomb was never more evident than when you did not land in the front row after slipping. Head voice well released—it is a beginning. If you continue to give me that forward tone, I will let you do it in two, with the park backdrop, well behind the Bubbler’s soap scum.’

  Aurora considered the honour. They had never yet been in two. Mama pressed Gentry’s hand and said, ‘It is like you to be careful of my girls, dear Gentry, thank you.’ And then it was all to do over again for the seven o’clock show—the waiting, the climbing up and down stairs, makeup removed and their faces cleaned, as Mama insisted, between shows.

  The dressing room became a cozy snug, Sybil and Mama continuing their rambling catalogue of every gig and artiste they had played, or played with, or ever seen; Letty Swain showing Bella how the harnesses worked and roping her in to polishing brass; Clover and Aurora brushing each other’s hair a thousand counted strokes.

  After the second show, in the welter of prop-setting for Julius, Gentry stopped Aurora backstage with one twisted, arthritic hand on her arm. ‘At the garlands verse, take a turn farther left to find the light. Your mama can find steps for that—allemande, pas de bourrée, not too lively. I’m pleased with you,’ he said. ‘Much as it pains me to say so.’

  Aurora laughed, and caught the eye of the Elocutionist, passing behind Gentry just then, and no doubt hearing what Gentry had said. Kavanagh gave her a nod, a note of his eyes.

  Gentry glanced over hi
s shoulder to see who Aurora looked at. ‘But I’m putting you back in one,’ he told her, ignoring Kavanagh. ‘I’ll move the Soap Juggler back into two, so he won’t sully the apron-stage with his suds. Distance is required for that illusion; and I still can’t hear you dear girls when you are in two.’

  Oh well, Aurora thought. A compliment, and then a kick to chase it. She gathered Clover and Bella, and they went down to wait the long stretch till the closer.

  A Night Out

  Maurice Kavanagh was served late supper at the Pioneer Restaurant, a favour granted by Mrs. Burday because she found him so romantical. When the girls and Mama trooped through the restaurant on their way to the back-hall stairs, he twisted in his seat, judging his timing to a pin, and called softly, ‘Miss! Miss!’

  Aurora, trailing the others, turned and gave him a delicious smile, in honour of his brilliance and the mauveness of his soft-folding tie.

  He reared his head back and eyed her with a look pleasantly askance, considering. ‘I’m a stranger here myself,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, so are we, Mr. Kavanagh.’

  ‘But so familiar with the layout of the place?’

  ‘We are lodging here, you see.’

  ‘I do see,’ he said, looking at her as a man might look at the menu at Delmonico’s, then shaking his head. ‘But I don’t see—what is to be done.’

  ‘What kind of a thing needs doing?’

  ‘Well, here am I, with an evening on my hands, and no guide to this Underworld.’