FREDERICK LADELLE, HOW TO ENTER VAUDEVILLE
At the end of February an announcement was posted at the theatre: the Fox–Drawbank Parthenon company would spend four weeks touring the circuit. Gentry assumed Flora would accompany the girls, but she laughed and said she’d have a holiday; Aurora was perfectly capable, and they would have Sybil and Julius to rely on in need.
In truth, she’d been totting up what they would spend in costs—every bit of their new-won pay—and had nervously determined that she must retain her waitress job. Even as she talked airily to Gentry, she was figuring in her head. Numb to worry for some time after Arthur’s death, she now felt it descend heavily on her; it seemed there were cartwheel grooves that her tired mind slid into over and over: hotel bills, supper, thread, shoes … She refused to allow the faintest tinge of fright to appear on her face, knowing nothing was more fatal to success than the appearance of failure.
The one thing that gave her pause was Bella—almost fourteen, and still not yet begun her womanly cycles, but ten to one she would do so any day, far from her mama’s guidance.
Aurora, hearing this fear, told her not to be silly; she and Clover could do all that was necessary, and Bella already knew all about it anyway, having watched her sisters washing out their monthly rags these last four years.
But as if to iron their path, that last worry vanished the day before the cavalcade was to set off: between the five and seven-thirty shows Bella came bursting into the dressing room with her face glowing, back from the privy, and announced, ‘It’s come! I’ve got it!’—so tickled to have achieved womanhood that nobody could be in doubt as to what she referred.
Her sisters clucked over her and rigged a temporary pinning, and warned her about the pain that might attend her, but Bella laughed and pooh-poohed them. Kitted up with the unfamiliar wad between her legs, she danced around the room to test it out, pleased as Punch. She did not even protest when Mama could not refrain from telling, yet one more time, the well-known tale of Aunt Queen in Madison, when Mama had rushed in from playing one day, ‘with no more idea than a bird of what had happened—I thought I’d cut myself! And she said, Well! Now you can have a baby. I asked, How on earth? And here’s what she said, the only knowledge she gave me: The man will stick his thing in you, and you’ll have a baby—can you feature it?’
All Mama’s stories ended that way, Clover thought: in disbelief at the lack of understanding in this cold old world. Except those ending ‘… then Arthur and I had our lovely children and all was worth the struggle.’ But she had made certain that her girls knew how babies came to be, even if her description of the mechanics was flowery and sun-dappled, and slightly vague as to biology.
Louis Heels
After an anxious morning of packing and repacking, Flora went with her girls to the station to participate in the general jollity of the company’s departure. She stood beside Gentry Fox to wave them off, the girls swathed in their warmest wraps. If only they’d had furs, which make leave-taking so festive! They had tried on their new dancing slippers the night before—white kid, Louis heels, tied with satin ribbons criss-crossing up the ankle—and their delight had been enough to stave off any slight regret Flora might have had about her locket. Arthur could not know, and what use had she for sentiment if the girls were ill-shod? She’d bought Bella proper boots at the New York Store too, and had even got the apostle spoons back from Hiram in the deal. She beamed wholeheartedly at the girls as they left, her mind at ease for once. They had good shoes and were guaranteed on the bill of the Ackerman–Harris travelling company for a solid month—programme sheets printed, and nobody the wiser about the cut-rate pay they’d be getting, which was still much better than nothing! She knew they would do well.
Gentry gave her a cup of tea in the station waiting room after the train departed, and she headed back to the Pioneer (allowing Gentry to assume that she was off to enjoy her leisure) more happily than her daughters might have expected.
The Jump
They would play the People’s Hippodrome in Butte the first week, meeting up there with several new acts. Swain’s Rats & Cats were off to Chicago, with a cheery wave of too many tails. Instead they would share the bill with the Furniture Tusslers and Victor Saborsky, Eccentric, whom Sybil and Julius knew well.
‘Oh yes, from a babe,’ Sybil told Bella and Clover, sitting across from them on the first leg of their trip. ‘His ma was an English variety dancer—well, she was Polish in fact, but married English, and him some kind of fiddler. Fabians, you know, very free, and then they took up with some heathen madman or other as well, odd as anything. Over they came, three or four years, with the little tyke in tow. This was after your ma had left us. He did his schooling in the dressing room, but his father was determined he get an education, very, so they upped back to England for a time, for him to attend a high-toned establishment, because the father, you know, was Someone in his own right before taking up with the Polish dancer. She was sweetly pretty, but a bit black in her moods from time to time; she struggled with her temper. Well, you’ll notice his nose, that was her doing. Not that she was alone in that—look for example, if you need one, at those poor Ninepins, Missus and the boy, and how they must creep around that Joe Dent, who has a kind heart I’m sure but is a demon when in drink, and you can’t tell me that boy is not being brutalized no matter how they blandish the authorities. And now he’s a certified Eccentric, working without a net—I mean Victor Saborsky, not Nando. Odd to see a little boy all grown up now, makes you feel a bit old. His face so thin and sad, he looks as old as us, however sweet his expression may be—but his turn is spectacular, ever an honour to be on the bill with him. Always excepting of course my dear Jay, Victor’s my favourite act on the circuits, this or any other year.’
From Butte, they would head east to Billings for a week; retrace their steps for a second week in Butte; and then shuffle west to Missoula for another week’s engagement before making their way back to Helena—which now seemed like home.
The green leather seats felt sticky under Bella’s tucked-up shins. In the warm train she had pushed her black stockings down from their elastic and rolled them tight-tight-tight around the tops of her new boots. Butte boot. Bella stared out the window at the hills rising oddly out of flat plains, the bones of the earth showing through, no decorations at all beyond a scrub of trees; here and there a blackened patch from fire.
Butte was always on fire in Mama’s tales of the old Death Trail—one of her best stories was the fire in the butcher shop in Butte where her company was playing on her very first tour, how the pigs in the back squealed through the crackle of the flames, and the smell of roast pork beginning—extremely gruesome. Bella could not get it out of her mind; it ran horrified prickles up and down her scalp. Mama had been in no danger, she had said so over and over, but Bella could not help imagining that her feet were burning, Mama’s feet, on the boards rigged over the butcher’s counter for a stage—little feet in embroidered satin slippers. The horse-drawn fire wagon had scrambled up to the front door of the butcher shop as all the audience was streaming out. Mayhem! But it was better to think of that little fire than the big fire in Butte, the explosion in 1895, before Mama left vaudeville and married Papa and had Aurora and left this life. That explosion was far from the theatre, but onstage they’d heard the roar of it, and when they stopped the play and went out into the street there was a boy’s body, blown several blocks by the blast—the whole thing like a scene from the war, dead bodies everywhere and blood seeping into the dirt of the road, and brains spattered here and there, parts of human beings. Bella had read the clipping in Mama’s scrapbook: ‘the cries and groans of the injured and dying and some of the bodies still quivering, remnants of human beings, legs and arms torn off … shapeless trunks quivered and died in the arms of the living.’
She shook her hands out quickly and lay down, her head on Clover’s lap. A boy like Mattie, perhaps, or—not Nando! After a moment she whispered, ‘In But
te there was a boy lying dead outside the theatre, and when they walked to see the explosion they passed parts of people quivering on the ground.’
Clover smoothed her hair. ‘That was years ago—we will not be exploded this time, I promise.’
‘I love you, Clover,’ Bella said, digging her cheek into Clover’s knee as if they were about to be separated by some great cataclysm. ‘I love you.’
Clover’s hand passed gently and constantly over her hair and her ears and presently she stopped thinking, and the swaying of the train over the tracks lulled her to sleep.
Stroking Bella’s hair, Clover was lonely. Bella’s childishness made her feel old and calm. Farther down the carriage Julius played pinochle with the leader of the Old Soldiers outfit, John Wendt Hayden. The son of a soldier, he had not seen action himself and bore no terrible wound; he had a lovely friendly voice. She could change seats and join them, but was disinclined to move. After the usual hubbub of the theatre it was nice to have quiet.
She could hear Julius holding forth to John Hayden: ‘I did attempt blackface for a year or so, travelling in the Antipodes. No more. The young comic Jolson goes corked for Sullivan–Considine—a mouth with a man attached. I saw him perform in San Francisco, unfazed in the aftermath of the earthquake; I won’t compete with him. I’d rather mock the German.’
Julius was easy to hear, but John had a low voice, so their conversation was an exchange of booms and murmurs, like Clover imagined the sound of the sea might be.
‘Yon Jolson transcends the genre because he is in some sense sending up his Hebraism, of which the audience is perfectly well aware. But it’s a pesky makeup to do. I have disliked it ever since, in my youth, I was persuaded to use coal dust one evening. Took seven months to rid my skin of the blue tinge. I looked like a damned Taffy, fresh from the mine.’ Puffing on a cheroot, Julius expanded. ‘When you work in concert with someone like Bert Williams, the race ceases to be abstraction, and becomes a collection of human beings, as noble, nasty, sharp or foolish as our own. Oddly, this transmogrification does not seem to attain with the German, whom I am never loath to loathe, and ever find more loathly on closer acquaintance—for example a railway journey, during which your German will always be provided with a frumious wurst of blemished origin, and an unsharp pocket knife to saw it with.’
As Julius’s trumpeted over John’s voice, his blatant body trumpeted too, lounging legs laid out into the aisle. ‘In New York last year, Flo Ziegfeld signed Bert Williams to star in the Follies—blackface over his own black face—and when the cast (a collection of gabies) threatened to walk out rather than appear onstage with him, Ziegfeld’s response was simple: Go if you want! I can replace every one of you—except the man you want me to fire!’
Clover thought of blackface as a costume. It startled her to think of the person under the makeup.
Across the aisle, Aurora stared at her own reflection in the train window, the abbreviated slant of her un-made-up brows and the jut of her too-strong chin. She tried to pull it in, experimenting with the angle to find how to make their next photos more flattering, and let the words to Last Rose, which Gentry had put permanently into their turn, run through her head: Thus kindly I’ll scatter thy leaves o’er the bed, Where thy mates of the garden lie scentless and dead. A manual for deadheading in the garden; that practical coolness could be used in the song too. But when it came to From love’s shining circle, the gems drop away, you could let the throb in there, open the coolness to the dark heart that lay under everyone’s life. All the dead sisters and brothers, the lost fathers and children of everyone in the audience would come and sit beside them briefly, because she was singing. Perhaps Gentry meant that it was a better thing to do with grief than just being sad alone.
A Thin Man, Not Too Tall
The Hippodrome in Butte was a brand-new theatre, but only one of seventeen operating in the wealthy copper town. The Grand Opera on Myers Avenue was the largest; the Lyric Opera the most notorious (according to Sybil, the fancy name was a front for gambling and prostitution); and the Hippodrome the newest. The girls climbed dirty-snowed streets from the train station, following the straggling artistes, and were rewarded. Inside and out, it was a beauty. The opulent lobby was freshly painted, the smell of linseed oil still strong.
Inside the house, Clover stopped on her way down the aisle to turn around and around, staring up at the ceiling. A bright wreath of flowers painted around the ventilated dome in the centre of the roof held four figures (ribbon-sashes for Music, Dancing, The Drama, and Tragedy draped prudently over bare chests) and a fruit-basket-upset of musical instruments. Instead of advertisements, like in most theatres they had seen, the front-drop curtain featured a painted Greek scene: ruins on the shore of a lake and a dangerous mountain range behind.
Bella and Aurora went down to the dressing rooms, but Clover stayed to watch the flymen run through the ropes, testing the rigging. Myriad backdrops swept up and down, each with its own wing pieces: a fancy drawing room with folding doors, a poor kitchen, two different streets (one elegant, one shabby), a ship dock, dawn in a forest glade, a rocky pass fit for brigands, and many others. As she delightedly inspected the detail of a starving artist’s garret (two mice fighting over a bit of cheese, a baby’s fat little fist visible above the rim of a cracked cradle), a voice spoke behind her.
‘Looks comfortable enough, and cheap, shall we move in?’
She turned quickly and saw a thin man, not too tall, with fluffy brown hair and a sharply bent nose. The sweetest face she’d ever seen: mild, interested, open to excitement. She liked his face on sight, more than any man’s she could remember, except—perhaps it reminded her a bit of Papa’s, abstraction combined with a suddenly present attention. He was attending to her at this moment.
‘Victor Smith,’ he said, indicating himself.
‘Clover Avery,’ she returned automatically, thinking he must be manager here. He did not look like a manager, but neither did Gentry Fox, and this man had something of Gentry’s air of being not from the place he found himself in. She held out her hand and he laughed, and raised it almost to his lips—in a European way, but jokingly.
‘I think you must be one of Les Très Belles Aurores?’
‘Well, we’re just the Belle Auroras,’ Clover said. ‘My sisters are Bella and Aurora, you see.’
‘No Clover in that name—does that mean I can pluck you loose from them?’
‘I sing alto,’ she said, as if that explained the whole thing.
‘Then you must definitely come over to my act. I need some sweet meadow flower to pull the bees. I am Victor Saborsky, when I am on the boards.’
‘Oh! Our friend Sybil Sutley knows you, sir.’
‘So she does. She was a good friend to my mother.’
‘As she is to mine,’ Clover said.
‘Then we are cousins,’ Victor said. He bowed to her, but shyness descended on her under his continued regard, so she turned again to watch the drops being raised and lowered—they were now in a stone square lit by shafts of moonlight, some European capital waiting for a princess to trip lightly down the stairs, or a king to abdicate—and when she raised her eyes he was gone. Vanished without a sound. She found herself looking up, as if for a bird. Nothing.
One Silver Dollar
The dressing rooms were shining clean, bright with mirrors. At one side a darling stove puffed heat into the room. Bella held her boots out one at a time to admire their gleam in the rows of electric bulbs. The first time they’d had electric lights in a dressing room, too. This was the fanciest place. Aurora had checked the bill and there were no other females on it—only Sybil, who had a dressing room of her own with Julius—so she let Bella pick the best spot and set out their things, with a place for Clover between them. Clover is the best friend of each of us, Bella thought, she is always between us. But she loved Aurora too. In some ways she and Aurora were the most alike: strong and bold. Clover was the sweetest of them, though.
A th
ousand thousand Bellas found the ranked mirrors entrancing. Their placement round the room showed her herself as a regiment of girls, all those shards, and ghosts dainty and slim, ready to dance. The Parthenon’s old mirrors had not been so flattering.
A tap on the door—and two heads poked around it, like another doubling mirror.
‘Mr. East and Mr. Verrall!’ Bella exclaimed, happy to see old friends. ‘Come in!’
‘Oh, we will not intrude,’ Verrall was saying, but East burst through his arm and into the room, to give each of the sisters a warm and slightly over-personal embrace.
Verrall flapped an envelope in his long fingers. Not entirely clean, Bella saw, after their railway journey, but her own hardly ever were either.
‘We were charged with, given, we—’
East snatched the letter from him. ‘Jimmy the Bat got us to bring this,’ he said, rolling his eyes at Verrall’s politesse. ‘Not knowing what hotel you would be putting up at—and do you know yourselves?’
‘I believe we are at Mrs. Seward’s,’ Aurora said. ‘It is only a boarding house.’
‘We will call it an hotel,’ Verrall declared. ‘We are there too.’
‘Mrs. Seward’s is the only place to stay in Butte,’ East announced, sunk in gloom.
‘Fine testimonial,’ Verrall said. ‘Not a paid endorsement.’
‘We are thinking about hotels, because our present routine, that we are breaking in on this western swing, is hotelly.’
‘It has a hotellishness about it,’ Verrall agreed.
‘A dark and hellish hotellishness.’
‘So, Miss Bella, we were wondering if you could be purr-suaded—’
‘We need, we have need, we are in need of, a good little girl …’
‘… to hotel for us tonight?’
No matter how they talked over each other you could always hear each one, Bella noticed. East was the funniest. Or maybe Verrall, with his sad eyes and bluish teeth.
The Little Shadows Page 14