The Little Shadows

by Marina Endicott

  In the last weeks she had been very careful not to stand in profile when Mama was watching; but Mama, tired and seeming queasy herself, had hardly been watching. She was making new skirts for the moon number, their old skirts now soiled beyond what was nice, and always had one with her to stitch the endless gored seams. She would have stayed in the dressing room for the band call, save that Aurora snapped at her to go.

  A wave of cramping hit Aurora and she had to sit down, but that was not comfortable either, she had to squat, and then lie down, and no position made her better until it lifted in a moment and she could breathe again. She could not bear the couch; she spread a spare velvet curtain-leg, all there was, on the floor and tried to be calm, knowing she must have done something wrong—she had been tight all morning, and low in spirits, and had not wanted to eat her breakfast. She feared for the baby, suddenly. Another wave coming, another mountain of—oh heavens, Aurora thought, or did not think.

  A Russian psychic, Madame Tatiana, had the next dressing room. It was she, hearing Aurora’s stifled cries, who came in time to assist with the baby’s birth. Aurora had hardly spoken to her before, but took her offered hands without the least restraint and obeyed every command she was given, and bit hard on a fold of velvet rather than shriek when her entire body was riven and split up the middle and her back exploded and cracked right open, and then with a surprising and quite different ease a tiny squaller slid out of her onto sheets of Clover’s newspaper, which Tatiana had quickly spread.

  ‘Oh, you are a rare one for speed,’ Tatiana said, crowing with surprise. ‘We will have to get you training all the women!’

  Aurora could not believe it was done with. She wanted the baby, she wanted to stop it crying. With shaking fingers she pulled at the buttons on her bodice, and then the laces on her corset cover, and let all fall open, leaning up—all the time keeping her unfocused, focusing eyes on the round dark head and tiny red face of her baby, whose arms and legs were waving like water-fronds in this unexpected element of air. A firm hand pushed her back down, and laid the baby warm and damp on her chest, and a voice said, ‘You wait, wait.’ Her belly being swept with strong hands, and then there was another awful wave of clenching and turbulence and another push of something rushing out and such a deal of blood and mess, it would have been humiliating except that Tatiana was taking care of it and it did not matter. The baby’s mouth was seeking on her chest, complaining and writhing with its arms, and she sat up a little to guide it to her breast and then it was all right: its mouth sucking for a moment, its fingers relaxing from fists to open and spread on her chest, red on white.

  She closed her eyes, and let the flower feed.

  ‘A lovely boy—maybe early, but in good heart. Did you not know this dear one was coming?’ Tatiana asked, in a soft crooning quite unlike her mysterioso stage tone.

  ‘I knew, I knew,’ Aurora said. The baby, now that it had found its place, let go with his mouth and looked around the room with great attention, his black glossy eyes, like chips of shining coal, roving here and there.

  Something warm was wrapped around her, and the baby wrapped too, in a spare petticoat.

  ‘You are not much torn, there, lucky girl. I need some string—you stay till I come back, and we let nobody bother you.’

  ‘The matinee,’ Aurora said.

  Tatiana laughed. ‘You are true vaudeville, my dear.’

  Bella was the first to see, running up after the rehearsal. She gasped in mingled horror, for the bloody cloths still heaped against the wall, and adoration, for the tiny squeeze-faced lump that Aurora held so lightly. ‘It is real! It has come, then!’

  Aurora laughed, a whisper of a laugh, at least. ‘Real, oh yes—look at his hand.’

  Bella leaned close to study the furled fist and the furled eyelashes, the perfection of the blistered lip. ‘What kind is it?’ she asked.

  ‘It is a boy, it is my boy.’ Tears welled out of Aurora’s eyes and Bella seemed more shocked at that than at the blood.

  Then Clover was at the door, with Mama. Who took in the scene and looked around for help, or air, and crumpled without sound into an untidy faint.

  New

  Everybody in the company came round to see the baby, the news having zipped through the backstage like a quick fuse. Madame Tatiana and Clover had tidied the room remarkably well, Aurora found when she looked up from staring at the darling creature. She had not expected to like it so much—it was new, to see the thing that had been growing for so long inside her, but not frightening, because he was so instantly a person. He was not a stranger, but she did not know his name yet, and when East prodded her for one she only laughed and shrugged.

  ‘Not George East, at any rate,’ Verrall told him severely.

  Julius bent to peer at the red thing and announced a solid likeness to Fitzjohn Mayhew, which was undeniable, but no one else was rude enough to bring it up again.

  Clover and Bella did the matinee without her, but Aurora insisted on doing the moon number in the evening show. ‘All I have to do is sit,’ she said. ‘I am not wounded, only a little shocked.’

  Turned inside out was more like it, but able to sing. Eager to sing.

  Mama had recovered from her faint and turned to frenzied cleaning, the one anchor she could hold to. She saw a likeness to Harry (so frequently that Aurora found herself superstitiously unable to use Harry even as the boy’s second name), and drove herself into a frenzy watching over the baby—all with an eldritch air of stability, entirely invented.

  The worst of it was that Mama had conceived a ferocious jealousy of Madame Tatiana and seemed to feel that Aurora had preferred to have another woman help her with the birth. Aurora felt guilty enough already for not having told her of the secret, but on the other hand, here was an excellent illustration of why she had chosen to keep silent.

  For two days she watched as Mama cleaned, murmured to herself of lists and tasks, and smiled perpetually—showing off her new tooth, though she said she found its unaccustomed presence odd in her mouth. The only respite was when she held the still-unnamed baby. Then she fell quiet, seeming to be in a relapse of mourning Harry. She suffered frequent palpitations, needing to sit, just for a moment, begging their understanding. Aurora was no longer merely impatient with her: it was difficult to manage the baby with Mama bleating and getting in the way. She suffered bouts of unstoppable hiccups—her embarrassment heaping more fire on Aurora’s head.

  Nobody slept much, with the new one in the bed between Aurora and Clover (a less thrashy sleeper than Bella), and the necessity for keeping him quiet to placate Mrs. Jewett, who although reminded vehemently by Mama of Aurora’s married state, had not bargained for an infant and said as much, twice.

  Pole-axed

  A week later, worn out from long days and nights of fretting, Flora sank for a moment onto the dressing-room couch before the evening show, wishing she could wake the baby to have an excuse to lie and hold him. But then Madame Tatiana came snooping about, and how could she lie down when that woman was there, thinking her neglectful no doubt for not realizing that her own daughter, her own—

  The anxiousness became so extreme that Flora had to rise, and bustle to the drying rack to fluff out the girls’—what?—sleeves. The other fly-bite was that she had been forgetting words, quite simple words like sleeves. She smoothed her blue linen, and pinned up her hair in the mirror. Mouth sagging, no prettiness left in her. She could kill Hattie Walker for remembering her, and even yet dismissing her girls.

  With a dreadful glut of hate in her heart, Flora went down with the girls, leaving Madame Tatiana (too tenderly thanked by Aurora, who was after all paying the woman) to rock the baby during their turn.

  A person gets themselves into a state, she thought, as she made her way to the piano in the dark behind the curtain, and the body well nigh goes berserk. She felt she could not contain any more worry, nor endure it. She would have to leave the stage and lie down. There was no pain, only the weight of dread,
something terrible to happen to the baby, or to the girls, and all of it her fault, and if she had been a better mother to begin with, Harry would not have died, and then nor would Arthur, because she could have jollied him along a while—

  The girls were in place. Flora opened the piano, ready for A Long, Long Trail A-Winding.

  As the curtain lifted and the glittering fragments of the house appeared, she lifted her hands to the keyboard to play the introduction.

  The left hand line went as usual, but she found that she could not make her right hand play. She turned to look at Clover, sent a beseeching, apologetic look to Aurora, and then fell forward onto the keys in a jarring chord. She tried to muffle it with the soft pedal, but her foot would not catch, would not obey. Not fainting, not, but. Words suspended, she slumped from the bench to the boards.

  Nice Little Number

  Mama was brought round, one eye opening and closing, but she could not stand or respond sensibly to questions; she was in vague distress, but unable to speak or even to weep. Bella watched in shock as Clover, who had run almost in time to catch Mama before the fall, held her while Aurora spoke urgently to East, who stepped in front of the curtain to request any doctor present to visit the rear of the stage.

  A burly, bullish man presented himself, and after examining Mama’s inert form pronounced her to have suffered a paralytic stroke. ‘Have her conveyed to the General,’ he said, giving Verrall his card. ‘I will attend on her.’ He stood, and brushed stage grit from his knees. ‘Nice little number you girls do,’ Bella heard him say to Aurora—as if they cared for his review just then! ‘My wife has seen it twice already, she won’t mind leaving early.’

  East took the card from Verrall’s limp hand, bustled a stagehand into bringing round the theatre’s wagon, and organized the transfer to the hospital; Clover went with her in the wagon while Bella and Aurora went back upstairs to dress and take the baby from Madame Tatiana—who must be onstage soon. Indeed, after a slightly extended intermission, the show continued, Martin never being one to hand out refunds if any alternative existed.

  Bella’s hands trembled as she buttoned up her coat and boots; then she took the baby, who mewled and cast his little head from side to side, alarmed by the upset. Aurora dressed in a trice and gathered Clover’s hat and coat, and they followed Mama.

  Dr. King was before them, already standing by the bed where Mama lay, suddenly minute, beneath a hard white sheet. Knife-starched nurses clip-clopped out as the girls came in; it seemed to Bella that the oldest of them cast a sharp eye at the baby bundled in Aurora’s arms, but the nurse said nothing.

  Clover stood, like a line of shadow in her straight grey dress, by the long window at the end of the room, a small ward with six white iron beds. Each bed had a white curtain pulled to the wall at a mathematical angle, and the antiseptic bite in the air was ferocious. It was the cleanest, most military place Bella had ever seen; nothing in that comforted her. She rushed forward and knelt beside the bed, her face on a level with the flat, deserted thing lying there. ‘Mama, Mama,’ she whispered, until Clover put a hand on her shoulder. Then she clamped her mouth shut and said no more, but stayed, stroking her mother’s hand.

  Possibly, Possibly

  ‘It is an ischemic stroke, what you would know as apoplexy, not the worst of possibilities,’ Dr. King said, taking Aurora’s arm to lead her out into the hall. The Matron, at her station near the door, offered to hold the baby while they talked. Aurora gave him into her arms and beckoned to Clover.

  ‘She has lost the use of the left side, and is presently incapable of speech, but that may alter. It is very likely that she will regain some function, possibly more than with the usual run of patients. She is relatively young, and looks to have been in general health before this—was she under a great deal of strain?’

  Aurora did not feel that the doctor needed a full account of their recent years.

  ‘She had returned to the stage,’ was all she said.

  ‘Possibly, possibly. There is often some instigating incident. But the underlying condition of worry contributes.’ He was a chubby man, with a habit of leaning his weight over his heels, so that he seemed about to fall backwards. ‘We will bully her out of bed tomorrow, and sit her upright as much as possible—difficult to say for a day or two what degree of impairment we may expect. Then there is the question of long-term care. Of course you lead a transitory life, but perhaps there is family? I do not recommend a sanatorium, or anything of that kind. With the best will in the world, the institutional tendency is for a patient to be left to rest, and that will not do for your mother. She must be cared for, but more importantly she must move and walk, the more the better. A sanatorium is a death-sentence. She must use those faculties which are impaired—you must demand that she speak, for instance.’

  Aurora was grateful to have Clover standing beside her, hearing all this too. She would remember what must be done.

  Then the Matron came out into the hall carrying the baby, newly washed and wrapped tight. The doctor went to consult at another bed, leaving Aurora with her little family.

  Not the Belle Auroras

  Time passed strangely in the hospital ward, compressed but empty. The afternoon shaded down—they would have to go back to the theatre for their call at 8 p.m. When the nurses came to change the sheets under Mama, Clover and Bella moved to the last bed by the window, where Aurora had retired behind the white curtain to nurse her child.

  Bella sat on the end of the bed, and Clover stayed by the window, looking out.

  ‘We do not need Mama for the act,’ Aurora said. The baby had lapsed into sleep at her breast, petal mouth fallen open. ‘But she cannot be moved about from hotel to hotel.’

  Bella said, ‘She would want to come—’ And then, feeling that made Mama sound dead, said, ‘She wants to come! A thousand a week!’

  Clover looked back to the suddenly slight figure in the bed, hardly making a hump in the white sheet. Stricken, that is why they call it a stroke, she thought.

  ‘Or—a sanatorium! Joe Dent is at one in Philadelphia—I will ask Nando—’

  ‘Not a sanatorium,’ Clover said. She had an obstructive lump in her chest and was finding breathing difficult, let alone speaking.

  Aurora traced the round line of her baby’s cheek with a delicate finger. Under downcast lids, her eyes flicked this way and that, considering. A decision had to be made, she must find the best solution—oh, but she was hardly used to the child yet and still fuzzy-headed. She looked up at her sisters. ‘It is the tenth today, we are due in Chicago on the eighteenth—there is nothing for it,’ she said. ‘We will have to send her to Uncle Chum in Qu’Appelle.’

  Bella exclaimed, ‘No! She would hate that!’

  The nurse at the far end of the ward straightened from a patient and gave an admonitory shhh!

  ‘The doctor does not think she is going to be fully aware for some time yet.’ Aurora put it as careful as she could, not wanting to give Bella all his bad news. ‘We can work it this last week at the Orpheum: two moons will be enough. Not as funny, but we can let the situation become known, and I do not think the audience will complain. We will ask to delay our opening in Chicago by a week, and if we cannot, then we’ll start there, with two moons, until Clover gets back.’

  ‘Back from where?’ Clover asked, her voice more quiet than usual.

  Aurora looked up, impatient. ‘From Qu’Appelle, of course. You will have to accompany Mama there, see that she is safe, and then hurry back to us.’

  ‘I cannot go,’ Clover said. Behind her the window shone, and the dark blue, clouded sky outside. Bella stared at her, wondering why she looked stone-stiff, desperate. Clover never refused Aurora. Bella found herself holding her breath.

  ‘I cannot take her,’ Clover said. ‘I am going to England tomorrow.’

  Then Aurora stared too. Her grip must have changed, for the baby startled awake and began to wail, and the ward sister came hurrying down the polished black floo
r, shoes squeaking on the linoleum.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to leave!’ An officious whisperer. ‘My patients really must be kept perfectly quiet!’

  Aurora stood, furious, her bodice open and a damp-shining nipple eluding the baby’s grasping mouth. As she guided him back, she said to the nurse, ‘Have the goodness to leave us in peace. Most of your ward is catatonic, and if my mother wakes, so much the better for her to hear her grandson close by!’

  ‘Well, really!’ said the nurse.

  ‘Oh, do go away!’ said Bella, pounding her fists together in a passion.

  Clover took Bella round the waist, pushing her to the window enclosure; to the nurse in a soothing tone she said, ‘The baby is brand new, you know, and still learning how. Look, he is content now, and so tender, is he not?’

  Which made the nurse leave off her huffing. After casting a softened eye over the now-suckling infant, she turned and went back to her work.

  They sat in silence, then, the only noise the baby’s gulping and grizzling.

  ‘Victor has sent me a steamship ticket, to sail from Montreal on the fifteenth,’ Clover said at last.

  Bella felt so lonely then, so painfully lonely, that her icy fright dissolved and she felt tears come to her eyes. She said nothing, but let them well over and fall, trying to be interested in the cool trails they left down her cheek, and wondering which would fall first to her chest.

  After several moments Aurora asked, ‘Were you never going to tell us? What about the Pantages contract?’

  ‘I was too cowardly,’ Clover said. She twined her fingers together in a nervous knot. ‘And I did not know yet whether I would go.’

  That was a lie, Aurora thought; you’d go anywhere he asked. She looked down at the round head at her breast, and for the sake of the milk she tried not to let herself be angry.