The Little Shadows

by Marina Endicott

  ‘How did you find out she was dead?’ East asked, after a little silence. Verrall groaned and turned away into the darkness, to be loudly sick.

  Bella knelt by Aurora and lifted the girl’s bloody head to her lap. She still had a clump of snow in her hand, and with that she touched the broken cheek and eyelids. Aurora found the girl’s hands and chafed them.

  The girl shifted, not moaning but making a small cat sound. She opened her eyes and stared at them, then looked away and tried to cover her skinny legs.

  ‘Mr. East?’ Aurora said into the darkness, where East had gone to help Verrall.

  ‘In a minute,’ he said. ‘Finish off, for the lord’s sake, Verrall! How much do you have in there?’

  Then Mayhew came, full of authority. He bent and lifted the girl by the shoulders to help her sit up, and Bella and Aurora gave him room; he felt her head with practised fingers, then said, ‘Upsy-daisy,’ and lifted her right up to her feet.

  She stood there swaying. Bella found the ripped end of the girl’s skirt and tucked it up so the girl was covered. Aurora pressed the girl’s limp hand. ‘Can you see?’ she asked. ‘Can you speak to me?’

  The girl licked her broken lip. A purple mark showed faintly on her neck in the dim light. ‘My shawl …’ she said.

  Bella searched for it and found it caught on a splinter of the fence-rail.

  Aurora asked her, ‘Who hurt you?’

  ‘I—he—I—’ The girl touched her neck, and felt along her chest. ‘He took my—’

  Mayhew still had hold of her back. ‘Best not to pry into it,’ he told the others, quietly. ‘It’s her livelihood, after all. You’d only get her sacked.’

  Aurora felt so sorry for her. No bigger than Bella, and not much older, from her voice. Her matted red braid had come down. It lay like a rope around her neck. Her poor lip.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ the girl finally said. She shook her head, slowly, experimentally. ‘I’m lucky, this time.’ She had a strong accent—Irish, perhaps, mangled through her swollen mouth. She put up one hand and tucked a strand of hair back into order. ‘Let me go.’

  Aurora fell back. There was nothing to be done.

  ‘You sang so nice,’ the girl said to her. She almost smiled, then put a hand to her mouth. She took her shawl from Bella and walked off, feet very careful, into the dark recess behind the roadhouse where the privy was.

  Lamentations

  Flora woke in the clutch of a sudden vision: fetching carrots from the Pioneer’s cellar, brushing the preserving sand off a bunch of dull orange fingers, feeling the cold depth of the sand with her own raw fingers. In the dream she knelt back on splintery planks over the packed-earth cellar floor and looked from the carrots upwards, to see Bella in trouble, pansy eyes shocked, necklace gone. Bella’s face, head shaking, no, no, no, don’t, don’t.

  She woke sweating and afraid, but all was still and safe in her room. A cock must have crowed in the darkness, to wake her. She should not have sent the girls off alone.

  Indian pudding and Boston brown bread, ladles of soup into bowls for the hungry boys—Flora got through lunch service and put in her hour helping to wash up. Then she folded her apron, put on her threadbare ulster, and walked to Gentry’s lodgings. She hesitated to intrude on his private life, but the dream of Bella’s eyes would not stop plaguing her.

  Gentry Fox, Impresario, read the card in the brass slot of the building directory. He lived on the top floor in the flatiron-shaped Hannasyde building: monumental red stone, a good address. But as Flora climbed from floor to floor she saw how the grand staircases narrowed and the carpets grew less plush, down to bare drugget.

  When he opened the door to her, Gentry grimaced, but waved her in.

  His room was high-ceilinged for an attic, but narrow, cut from a larger chamber, and she was absurdly shocked to see how poor and cluttered and unclean it was. She somehow had not realized that he was straitened himself. Of course, of course he would have paid the girls properly, if he could have done so.

  It was, then, impossible to make any demand of him. He had been her good friend here, to bring the girls onto the bill when he was in this case. Advancing a few feet into the room, she took hold of a chair-back to give herself some balance.

  ‘Gentry, I’m afraid I find you in a pickle, and I did not mean to inconvenience you.’

  He waved his hands, taking in the whole sorry mess. ‘Not like old times, is it—best of everything, the finest suite at every hotel. Wouldn’t have demeaned myself in those days with a mere sixth-floor room.’

  She did not know what to say to that.

  ‘What is the trouble, dear girl?’

  ‘Oh! You must not call me girl! I am—’

  ‘Forty-three.’

  ‘Well!’ She laughed. ‘Forty-nine, if we’re honest. I scrubbed a few years off the slate in the old days.’

  ‘They seem to fly, do they not? In the rough-and-tumble.’

  His words made her gasp and remember her dream. ‘Oh, Gentry, I came because I need to follow after the girls. I ought not to have let them go alone, you were right. Aurora is wise—but the others are very young still. I’ve got to follow after, but I have no money. I came to ask you for a—for an advance, and I am very sorry to do it. Ten dollars would do me.’

  He pulled out his wallet at once, and extracted two five-dollar bills. ‘Flora, be easy. I’m certain you are wallowing in anti-nostalgic visions of the various hells in which you found yourself in your own youth, but consider: you had no mama to shepherd you in the wilderness. You were alone—and pretending to be older, rather than younger, in those days. How old were you, when you struck out on your own?’

  ‘Fourteen, when I left my aunt’s house.’

  ‘But these girls of yours are well-protected at the theatre, I promise you; those old days are done, when any ruffian could accost a girl backstage—and there are three of them! What harm could come to one with the other two hawklike in her defence?’

  Impossible to tell him of the dream—the pain, and Bella’s eyes.

  He waited, and then went on, ‘They are good girls, keen to get on, and—wait, I received the manager’s report from Butte yesterday: here, let me find it—’ He scrabbled in his papers and found a yellow telegraph form and read, scanning down the sheet, ‘Foster, Ventriloquist: Comedy rather talky and long drawn-out but holds the audience, secured a number of laughs; East & Verrall: Not a bad act though decidedly overpaid; Tusslers: All the bad features of the act were eliminated when the chandelier … Ah! Belle Auroras: Dancing is good and seems to please. All their numbers were applauded. They hold their own here. So! You see they are very well.’

  She shook her head. ‘There’s something wrong, that’s all. I had a dream.’

  ‘Don’t tell me!’

  ‘I dreamt that—’

  ‘Don’t tell me.’

  ‘Who am I to tell my nightmares to, Gentry?’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve been lonely, but you must have been enjoying your unaccustomed leisure while the girls are away,’ he said, to divert her.

  She laughed, and then, remembering that he did not know of her waitress work, said, ‘Oh yes, twiddling my thumbs!’

  Gentry stood by the door, but had not opened it.

  ‘To tell you the truth, Flora, I did wish to speak to you; to warn you of a—development. I am not in the very best of health. My medical man informs me that I ought to get my affairs in order.’

  ‘Gentry.’ She heard her own voice, low and tired.

  ‘He exaggerates, you know how those fellows are, but I’m going to ground.’

  She could not bear how old he looked, how broken-down.

  ‘You’re a dear girl, Flora, and these daughters of yours will go far.’ He shrugged into his velvet evening jacket, one sleeve, then the other more slowly. ‘I can’t do anything for you now, and it pains me to say so.’

  ‘No, Gentry, don’t.’

  ‘I’ve spent everything I ever made. Or lost it other way
s.’ He passed both hands over his large, mobile face. ‘We’ve staved off ruin, so far, but I think Drawbank will be out within the month, and I’m away before that happens.’

  Flora felt hopelessness steal over her again and pushed it away. ‘I wish I had some money,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I wish it too, fervently, but you couldn’t help me even if you did.’

  ‘At least I could help you to get home.’

  ‘Home! I won’t be going home, any more than you ever could. Madison has nothing for you. A few street names you’d know. A church, a school—you’d walk around the town and wear out your fragile memory in a day.’

  She laughed, because it was true. She could not even conjure up a church. Perhaps Uncle Elmore’s dentistry office would still be there; Uncle Elmore himself, of course, was long dead.

  ‘And no more for me. London, a poem—’ He broke off.

  ‘It’s a long way to go.’

  ‘Without the means for travel, yes.’ He nodded, master of himself again. ‘No, no, I am for Montreal, where an elderly relative, washed up on that shore, will permit me to share his flat. We have our own Gerry Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Elders.’

  ‘Do you know him well?’

  ‘Oh yes, well enough to hate him; he is my brother.’

  ‘I did not know you had a brother! You will be glad to be with him.’

  ‘You don’t know my brother. He is observant; he will force me to synagogue, and will call me by my real name, or rather, refuse to call me by my real name, which has been Gentry Fox these forty years. He will serve me lamentations on my long life wasted, and I can tell you that I am not at all happy about this. But if I stay here I will die in a rented room, swollen and purple, and they will take me out feet-first to the paupers’ field and bury me unmarked, and somehow that does not seem comfortable.’

  Flora would have liked to touch him, to put her arm around his shoulders, but he had never been one for physical contact, even in the old days when she was pretty.

  ‘Gentry, I cannot—what you have done with the girls—there’s no payment we can make.’

  ‘Our ledger is balanced: I gave them a first season, they gave me a last season. You will not mention any shadow of illness to them, if you please. I’d as soon they thought of me as hale.’

  He was moving through the room now, putting objects in piles as if his packing had begun, his limp very marked. Flora felt her own legs twist and swell, every joint racked to match his. He was very old.

  This is what comes to us, she thought—lonely exile, a time with those who don’t know us, death. She could feel her heart beating; she could see, in a drift of snow, Arthur lying still.

  ‘My husband killed himself,’ she said.

  Gentry came to her side, and took her hands.

  ‘Our life could not sustain him. Our girls. After Harry died, he was not himself any longer, and then he—’

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said.

  ‘For him? Or me?’ She shook her head. No reason to have told poor Gentry this. Except to say that we all live in pain. ‘I’m sorry, Gentry. I only meant to say, everything is so sad.’

  He held her hands, and there was some shred of comfort in that. He had known her when she was a girl.

  But her errand was wasted. Gentry had no money to spare; she’d have to wait till her wages were paid, and the apostle spoons would have to go up the spout again. Fiddle, she thought. Arthur is dead after all and will not know. She set Gentry’s five-dollar bills on the table behind her and gathered herself to go, her natural buoyancy helping her to look cheerful despite consuming worry. She touched the back of his greyish hand, and then went out into bright sunshine, to do her duty at the Pioneer.

  Bruise

  The bruise on Bella’s face could be masked with an extra application of 5 and 9. Clover’s spidery fingers were gentler than Aurora’s on the swelling. Bella stared at herself as Clover dabbed: the puffing-out gave her the appearance of mumps on one side. Her cheek still hurt every time she opened her mouth to sing or chew.

  She had managed to avoid the Tussler by remaining with her sisters in their dressing rooms; he and his brother did not board with Mrs. Seward, so she was not worried in the night, walking the halls to the bathroom. He hated her now, and in the theatre she could not entirely escape his baleful eye. At the end of their turn the Tusslers were always waiting in the wings to go on. Bella had twisted her steps in I Can’t Do the Sum in order never to look stage right; she was first off, now, and usually the first heading down the stairs. Aurora and Clover had not complained. They were being kind.

  Bella could not stop thinking about the poor beaten girl, left in the snow in the darkness. But what could they do anyway? They could not bring her to live with them at Mrs. Seward’s. Bella indulged for a while in a continuing story where she rode a grey horse to the woods and found the red-haired girl, and brought her up behind the saddle and galloped off to a peaceful farm somewhere; but that was stupid and she did not even tell Clover, who had not seen the girl, because she’d been off in the darkness with Victor.

  In the second show, Bella stayed for a moment offstage to watch the Tussler fall down the set of collapsing stairs (feeling almost avenged as he conked his head on the bottom). She did not think there had been time for the Tussler to do—whatever had been done to the poor girl. But someone had done it, and even if she was a dance-hall girl, nobody ought to do things like that.

  The wealthy Mr. Mayhew, too: he’d been Johnny-on-the-spot. Perhaps it was he who’d done it. He’d been masterful that evening, liking his own authority and liking to throw money about, as if it was still a thrill for him to take charge of helpless females and solve everything. Under his silvering beard, Mayhew seemed young in an odd way. Not confident interiorly, as Gentry was, or Victor; only polished on the exterior with his fine clothes and motorcar. He had talked importantly about ‘the wrong kind of scandal’ and had impressed the need for discretion on East and Verrall (poor Verrall still very green from being so sick), and then, reassuming his silk hat and astrakhan-collared coat, had bundled them all into his car, a Pierce-Arrow saloon car more magnificent than anything Bella had ever seen, let alone been for a ride in. Every piece of it shone in the moonlight. The seats were like leather clouds, but she wished she could have stood on the running board instead, to feel the speed as they rushed through the night back to the city and pulled up in front of Mrs. Seward’s—as if Cinderella and her Beautiful Sisters had all come home together in the coach.

  Then Mr. Mayhew had melted away, as perhaps impresarios always must, and they had not seen him again.

  Adjustments

  Arriving at the Butte train station late in the evening, Gentry found a porter and gave him a well-shined ten-cent piece to convey his one bag to Butte’s best hotel. No economy would save him now, might as well shoot the moon. He had stopped at the Pioneer to leave a note for Flora before leaving, explaining that he would make sure the girls were safe; through the French glass doors from the lobby he had been very much shocked to see her decked out in a full-length apron in the lunchroom, serving beans by the ladle to a rowdy table of bachelors who seemed only too familiar with her.

  He’d taken care that Flora not catch sight of him, and had made his way to the train on slow pins, making some adjustments to his thinking.

  I Cast My Pearls

  A note from Gentry arrived in the Hippodrome dressing room in the middle of the nine o’clock show, where the girls sat mending their stockings and keeping warm as the stove died, before joining the rest of the company to make their way through the windy streets to Mrs. Seward’s.

  ‘A lesson!’ Aurora was surprised. ‘First thing in the morning.’

  Clover paled. ‘Do you think he has had a bad report of us?’

  It seemed unlikely—Robson, the Hippodrome’s manager, had made a point of congratulating the girls on their performance at the early show. But Aurora passed a restless night, and sat by the window watching the milk w
agon clopping up and down the street, impatient for the time to pass till they could go to the theatre.

  Although they arrived early, there he was: short as life, impatiently awaiting them on the stage. One sleepy stagehand stayed close by to do his bidding; the rest of the theatre sat empty and lonely, as always in the pale mornings.

  Gentry paced back and forth on the stage in front of the Belle Auroras, occupying one as they stood in two. He seemed possessed of an urgent demon, or Legion—ideas and advice teeming from his mind and heart. They had missed him.

  First, a lecture on The Voice, which he delivered at a high declarative volume, glaring into each sister’s eye in turn: ‘The voice must be flexible, to reflect what you think and feel. Able to surprise, to make the audience remark what you make remarkable. Life in the voice springs from emotion—you must keep that emotion fresh, so that each time you sing the song is new. Technique supports you, but the work is never dulled, never the same.’

  Earnest and intent that they should hold to these tenets he was giving them, he seemed terribly old and vulnerable.

  ‘Lehmann used to tell us, I cast my pearls, I cast my pearls before you—are you swine, or humans who can benefit from this teaching?’

  Then Gentry abandoned philosophy and turned to technique, directing a series of exercises on the breath, breathing into the back ribs, opening out. He made them lie in a row at the edge of the stage.

  They breathed obediently for an hour before he would let them up, never coming close to falling asleep because he continued to pace above them, snapping formidable fingers when they sagged in concentration. Then he put them through their repertoire, shouting or nodding his head as they pleased or displeased him. He was not unkind, even when correcting (mostly herself, and Aurora recognized that as an honour).

  ‘You must trust me when I tell you that the voice you hear inside that lovely head is not the one we hear outside it. Brilliance and carrying power you have, but without the true warm chest notes your soprano will always be light, disembodied, metallic—a little contrived. Your natural honesty demands better. You must reach down into yourself for that true voice, the one that is rooted at the core of your being.’