The Little Shadows

by Marina Endicott

  Mama always told her dreams in the morning now, as she searched for warnings. Clover put the kettle on again and brought a warm towel and Mama’s wrapper, wondering if she ought to tell Aurora how unsteady Mama was these days. Her rough, misshapen feet peeped out of the bedclothes; Clover slipped carpet-shoes on them, and together they made their way down the hall to the bathroom.

  ‘You ought not to spend so much time with Victor, dear Clover. It is not suitable,’ Mama said, as Clover closed the bathroom door on her.

  ‘I am nearly eighteen, Mama. I have not seen Victor for two months, I don’t know why you’re saying this.’

  ‘Mooning over him. Just that one must be so careful—think of Julius, the other day, and how the least suspicion can destroy—You do not know how harsh the world can be.’

  Clover thought that, actually, she did. Through the bathroom door, Mama had gone back to dream-recounting. ‘One stone leaning, another crashed down … Moss grown into the letters, a missive gone astray.’

  Papa’s gravestone, she must be thinking of, or Harry’s. Clover ran her hands over her face. The rain had got into her head.

  Flood

  It rained and rained and rained. A percussion pattered under all the numbers in the matinee. Water dripped from weak places in the roof, and steamed up from the pitifully sparse audience, who sat drying in the communal warmth. The wet-dog smell was terrific.

  Between shows Teddy the stage manager took a couple of hands up onto the roof to sweep the water from the worst places that had pooled and begun to leak; wherever they pushed the water over, the white stone front of the theatre stained grey. Clover watched Mayhew stalk the aisles, directing one or other of the cleaning women to towel up wet patches or blot a seat down. Morose, distracted, he failed to respond at all to Mama’s damp curtsy and trill of greeting, after she’d ventured out for buns from the Whyte Avenue tea room. Mama scuttled back up to the dressing room, Clover following; Mama found her needle again by jamming it into her thumb, but did not curse. The room was silent in the humming hive of the Muse, each sister locked in her own thoughts and Mama too anxious to sing.

  But East and Verrall brightened the day when they knocked on the door, fresh in on the northbound Flyer from Montana. They’d come in early to replace the Ninepins, to start that night, although Friday was the usual bill-change day. Bella shrieked and jumped up to tell them the true story of the sacking of Joe and the others, which shocked Verrall.

  East professed to have seen it coming, of course. ‘Can’t blame Mayhew,’ he said. ‘Joe isn’t hardly fit for human consumption. He’s a brute and treats that boy like a rented mule, and the sooner they start losing bookings, the faster Nando’s going to jump ship.’

  ‘He cannot leave his mother,’ Flora said. ‘He is too loyal and good a boy for that.’

  East glowered at her, and said pointedly, ‘She made her bed, and has lain on it these many years of her own choosing. What’s the boy to do, submit to endless beatings? Kill his old dad?’

  Clover intervened before they could brangle, asking how the golf sketch had shaped up. East clapped his hands. ‘Capital, capital, we’re ready to try it out tomorrow if you’re game, Belle of All the World? Verrall has your sides—where are they, Verrall? Don’t say you left them in the train or I will simply—’

  But Verrall produced them, and they retreated to the Ninepins’ empty dressing room across the hall to run the sketch through pronto. Clover could hear them through the flimsy walls: Verrall attempting to teach East, who had no idea how to hold a club.

  VERRALL: No, no, now take the stick again in your hand and I’ll show you … you swing back like this—

  EAST: Like this? (smashing sound as the club connects) A pause.

  VERRALL: (very controlled) What are you going to do with that club now?

  EAST: Hit around corners?

  VERRALL: Stand over here—no, here, in front of me. I want to examine your form.

  EAST: Examine my form?

  VERRALL: Yes, now I’ll just stand behind you, and put my arms around yours like this, and my hands on your—

  EAST: Hey! (smashing sound as the club connects)

  VERRALL: (yelping) Hey! What did you do that for?

  EAST: You don’t know me well enough for that yet. I think you need someone more—female—to teach! Hey, miss! miss!

  Bella was a young golf widow searching for her husband with a bent club of her own. She told East and Verrall the whole sad story:

  BELLA: My Archie played golf yesterday—he came home two hours late! He confessed the whole sordid tale: he said that a beautiful lady had jumped out of the bushes on the eleventh tee, dressed just as she came delivered from her Maker. She ravished him for hours, and he did not have the strength to refuse her, and he was very sorry.

  EAST: He made a clean breast of it, in fact.

  BELLA: He did indeeeeed.

  VERRALL: And did you forgive him?

  BELLA: Ha! I know him far too well for that—I hit him over the head with the rolling-pin. Lady, indeed! The wretch had played another nine holes!

  Her mama had told her that she must take up golf herself, if she wanted to preserve her marriage, and she was there for a lesson. Verrall taught her about golf, and East taught her about love, ending in a completely ridiculous song, the lyrics of which descended to a thousand rapid repetitions of the word love.

  Clover continued her work, putting Aurora’s hair up and tidying the dressing room, but it seemed to her that the song echoed and echoed in her own idiotic heart, love love love love love—and no one to answer it. No letter from Victor.

  And now the rain had got into her eyes.

  Lot’s Wife

  At the eight-thirty show, the girls pranced on for Spring Song to the basso accompaniment of a colossal clap of thunder. At least, Bella thought it was thunder—

  But as everyone in the house looked up, the middle rows of the audience were stung with a sliding shower of water. Then a shining sheet—then the roof parted, through the centre, and a waterfall fell through.

  Aurora and Clover had raised their wreaths for Bella to duck through, and they all stopped still, stone statues of the Muses.

  The audience began screaming, starting with the people directly under the waterspout. Luckily it was a paltry house again, and there was plenty of room to run up the aisles.

  The bandleader in the pit turned when he saw the stricken look on the girls’ faces. He whipped his stick up in the air and shouted, ‘Out, boys!’ and the orchestra grabbed their instruments and hightailed it, the sudden ceasing of the music lost in the stampeding noise of the water still pouring down, and the ominous and quite dreadful shrieking of the ceiling.

  The sidelights in the house went out, but the stage lights, wired separately in a new-built section, stayed on, so they could see it happen: the roof caving in. First the pressed-tin panels sagged, and a few drooped to the seats; then the great metal span bent down and down, and then it snapped, with another hideous wrenching noise, and more of the ceiling came down, in a terrific rush of smoking dust and water. The older girls huddled over Bella, but it did not occur to them to run. Teddy and his hands had come out to see the devastation. The stage was filling with silent gawping faces, turned audience themselves. The balcony emptied fast, but people were still streaming up the side aisles, some looking back like Lot’s wife, then yanked along by their friends.

  ‘Playing to the haircuts,’ Aurora said, and the other two could not help but laugh. That’s what was said when your act was so bad people left in the middle.

  The fire curtain never did come down, as it was supposed to in any catastrophe.

  Another span bent, another section of roof collapsed. And another. At the centre lobby doors, a brave or reckless group of men from the audience stood watching. Those onstage stared back, across the awful chasm that had been the Muse’s seats. Just before they finally ran for it, Bella watched in fascination as Mayhew appeared in the window of the booth, shouting
something nobody could hear.

  Condemned

  Mayhew did not come home that night. Aurora found him at the Muse, Friday morning, standing in the rubble of the house. His perfect boots dusty, a tear in one sleeve. The city building inspector (who’d had many a lunch on Mayhew during the building process) had placarded the bevelled-glass front doors of the Muse with BUILDING CONDEMNED cards. From the front, the theatre looked unharmed, as if it might all have been a bad dream. Rounding the building, though, the sad truth became evident. There was a plain of devastation, an expanse of jumbled white and grey, with here and there the red velvet of a seat jutting through, caked with plaster grime. They won’t come in their best clothes if they think their skirts will be dirtied, Aurora remembered Mayhew telling the cleaning women, the first week the Muse was open.

  She had never known that so much wire went into a building. Dangling ends and spikes stuck out everywhere. One of the balcony’s grand pillars remained standing—sheared off in a long diagonal, the plaster-of-Paris foliage still curling rambunctiously. Like the broken pillar she had cut her finger on, when Mayhew hurled their wedding cake to the floor. Perhaps Sybil, with her forebodings, would have seen this coming, if she’d been invited to the wedding.

  Aurora picked her way across the expanse of wreckage. All the way there on the streetcar, she had rehearsed what not to say to Mayhew. The rain had subsided to dribs and drabs, but her boots would be quite ruined by the combination of plaster dust and jagged wood and tar-muck.

  ‘It’s been a great gig,’ he said, when she’d come close enough to hear.

  The quiet interested her. After all the noise last night it seemed peaceful, even calm this morning.

  ‘Edmonton, of all cursed places, to take me down.’

  She looked at him. The astrakhan collar of his overcoat, slung over his arm, was as plush as ever.

  ‘It’s just the house, you see,’ he said, gesturing right and left to where the newer additions were still standing—the stage looking naked, open to the elements. ‘Penstenny will be able to rebuild, if he chooses. He can turn the front piece into a decent office block. He won’t be ruined.’

  She nodded. Workmen were moving here and there, one pushing a wheelbarrow piled high with detritus.

  ‘Came at the right time,’ Mayhew said. ‘I couldn’t have made payroll tomorrow … Might have had to fire the place anyhow.’

  He offered her an arm, and she took it. They progressed together through the broken bits of wood, back to the street.

  The Pierce-Arrow was parked in front, his monogrammed suitcases already strapped on the rumble seat. She had not noticed anything missing from the apartment, but hadn’t looked inside his closet. He must have been ready to do a bolt for some time.

  ‘I’d take you with me,’ he ventured.

  Weak autumn sun made an effort to turn the puddles gold; the boardwalk glistened grey and black. ‘That’s kind of you, but no—there’s Mama, and the girls.’

  He nodded. He opened the car door, and hesitated with one foot on the running board.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  Because that was so absurd a thing to say, and so stupid, her resolution from the streetcar ride gave out. ‘Did you hurt that girl, the Irish girl?’ she asked him quickly, wanting desperately to know.

  Mayhew stared down at her, at the bright cloud of hair, the young rise of bodice and neck and cheek. At her face, so well known to him now, and her self—impervious to his love, not part of him, not his in any sense.

  ‘No!’ he said. ‘How could you ask me such a thing?’

  ‘I was not certain,’ she said.

  ‘Have I hurt you so badly?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Only a little. I don’t care.’

  From an inner pocket he pulled out a roll of money, pressing it into her glove. ‘Won’t last you long, but don’t give the vultures any of it,’ he said as he got into the car. ‘Promise me.’

  Aurora laughed, unable to resist his cock-eyed gall. The car door slammed, and off Mayhew went, white wheels skimming over the golden pools of rain.

  There went her livelihood. What a fix to be in.

  She felt ridiculously happy.

  ACT THREE

  8.

  Butterfly Girls

  OCTOBER 1914–JANUARY 1915

  The David, Camrose

  The Lyric, Swift Current

  The Pantages, Winnipeg

  Never carry more baggage than absolutely necessary. Excess baggage rates are exorbitant on the majority of railroads since the 2 cent a mile passenger rate has gone into effect.

  FREDERICK LADELLE, HOW TO ENTER VAUDEVILLE

  They counted their money.

  The roll Mayhew had given Aurora held fives and tens, adding up to a hundred. A month’s rent on both Arlington apartments, with a little over for food. A month’s grace, then.

  With a sad feeling of virtue, Clover opened her letter-box and brought out seventy-eight dollars she had been hoarding for some eventuality (not so well-formed an idea as running away to find Victor). Bella was handed fifty in notes by Verrall, which he said was only fair, for many times when they had not bothered to settle up her contracted dollar-per-show. $228: once that would have seemed like riches.

  Flora had been diligent in banking half the Belle Auroras’ hundred a week (down again from the original $150 once Mayhew had settled them into the apartment and was paying for so much). Although they’d not worked every week, and had incurred large expenses for costumes and fallals—exorbitant, for the butterfly wings—she was confident, or at least hopeful, that there was more than a thousand in the bank.

  When she went up to the teller the horrible truth came out.

  Mayhew had set up their banking, as the man necessarily in charge, and his rubber Muse cheques had been assigned forward to empty all his accounts, including the one he’d set up for the Belle Auroras. The ledger showed, in fact, a deficit of eighteen dollars.

  Flora came home in palpitations, the loss of the money far worse than the rather exciting loss of the Muse, and lay on the sofa in Aurora’s suite at the Arlington, weeping in great sodden gulps, railing against Mayhew in an incoherent spate which even Aurora could not stem. She let Mama run on as she struggled to close the lid of Mayhew’s rolltop desk over the nest of unpaid bills that feathered there.

  Next morning, when Aurora was finally allowed to make her way up to the untouched office floor at the Muse, she found a matching bill-pillow squashed into his desk drawer there. She looked at the mass of papers for six thudding heartbeats; then gently shut the drawer and left, without another glance at the ruin of the Muse.

  As she rode the streetcar home it began to snow. She put one grey-gloved hand out the window and caught a constellation of snowflakes. The river down below was slow-churning ice cream.

  That afternoon Aurora spoke to the manager of the Arlington, to give notice. He explained, kindly, that Mayhew had signed a year’s unbreakable, iron-clad lease. Aurora then explained, equally kindly, that Mayhew had absconded, and that Mr. Crumley could sue her vanished husband for the rent if he pleased, but might wish to consult a lawyer before making ugly threats to an abandoned woman. Abandoned was right, the manager said, and battle would have been joined, except that Aurora laughed.

  ‘Dear Mr. Crumley,’ Aurora said, giving him a bewilderingly happy smile. ‘My abandoned sisters and I will stay on in the third-floor apartment till the end of November, but I’ll be out of the top-floor suite by Monday—and the rent’s been paid, so just think! You could have it twice over, if you move fast. Such a desirable residence will be snatched up, even if you were to raise the rent.’

  Before he left he had agreed to take much of the furniture off her hands, to rent the place as a fully furnished gentleman’s apartment.

  Any proper woman would be shattered to lose her work and her husband in one go, she thought, watching Crumley’s satisfied rump rumbling away down the hall. But as she shut the door she was still fizzing gently,
like very cold champagne, with the consciousness of life starting up again.

  Baggage

  So they were off, although they did not yet know where. They had nice new trunks now, three of them—purchased by Mayhew, in a fit of prosperity, with his own monogrammed suitcases. Mama, when she emerged from her sobs, said the trunks should be sold ‘along with everything else!’ but Bella refused to part with hers, which was sapphire blue leather and very beautiful.

  ‘No,’ Aurora agreed. ‘We have the props to look like headliners, and we must keep as much of our outfit as may be managed.’

  Clover gave an internal sigh of relief because she loved hers too: mole brown, but with a pleated orange silk lining that pierced her heart with its beauty every time she opened it. And Aurora’s was a sight to behold, a silver-grey upright-opening dresser trunk with mother-of-pearl knobbed drawers, too lovely to be dispensed with—unless she might dislike to have anything that reminded her of Mayhew; but Clover had not noticed that she was sensitive that way.

  ‘Well, keep them, then,’ Mama said. ‘But when we are begging in the streets for a crust of bread I hope someone comes along who wants a trunk!’ She sank her aching head back into one weak hand, and put the other out for Bella to refill her teacup.

  Aurora’s trunk stood open in one corner of the kitchen, acting as her wardrobe. In a fluttering of satin and silks she turned out her closet upstairs; Clover and Bella took the excess clothing to be sold—a long, weary tramp to the rag merchants, who paid far less than the girls had hoped. Then to the dairy and the butcher, paying off accounts. Bella was shocked that they were even bothering to pay what she saw as Mayhew’s bills, but Clover held that after all they’d eaten the eggs and sausages, and could not cheat the tradesmen.

  They brought home half a dozen brown eggs and a fresh loaf, and were eating a poached egg supper when the doorbell rasped, six twists, followed by a light-rapping knock. Julius and Sybil blew into the hall, stamping snowy boots, and followed Clover along to the kitchen, Sybil exclaiming and Julius declaiming. They had seen the ruin of the Muse.