The Little Shadows

by Marina Endicott

  ‘Suffit!’ Madame shrieked, finally. ‘I will speak to Gali.’

  After the Ball

  Lewis often drove out with Dr. Graham, who found distraction in puzzling out new ways to tempt Mama into using her reluctant right side. Lewis always brought something for Mabel, a new book of poems or a bottle of Pelikan ink, hard to obtain these days, for her letters; cigars for Chum; something sweet for Aunt Elsie; a toy for Avery.

  ‘Christmas every day,’ Aurora said, watching him hand out presents.

  She wanted Lewis to come, she found his visits energizing; she wished he would never come again. Each time he reawakened in her some vague dream of a peaceful life, an honourable husband. She had even mooned over Lewis’s nice brick house—and that made her truly angry with herself—when Uncle Chum pointed it out one day in town.

  In January, Lewis came for dinner and found Dr. Graham already in the parlour. Mama had Avery on display there, entertaining Uncle Chum and the doctor with his precocious tricks; she had been demonstrating Avery’s command of the naval jig. Hands on hips, Avery followed Mama’s beat, surprisingly controlled for a child not yet two. Mama motioned Aurora to dance with him and they did an exhibition waltz: step-two-three, twirl together, twirl apart, around the room as Mama sang, ‘After the ball is over, after the break of dawn …’

  Mabel looked in from the kitchen, hair curled into tendrils by the heat of the stove. Aurora left off dancing and went to help her, but Mabel saw Lewis there and shooed Aurora back to the parlour.

  Newly returned from a Christmas trip to Winnipeg, Lewis had brought a stack of sheet music for Aurora. He handed the pile to her with some diffidence, saying he’d asked for the newest songs in the shop. She was delighted with the gift, and looked through the sheets at once.

  The third sheet down was You’d Be Surprised!—the cover a ravishing photo of Bella in a pink-sashed dress, powdering her nose with an arch sideways glance to the reader.

  ‘It is Bella!’ Aurora cried. ‘My sister!’

  Lewis came to look more closely. ‘She doesn’t resemble you,’ he said—as if disputing that they could be sisters.

  Looking up quickly, Aurora saw that he was disturbed. ‘Does the photograph offend you?’ she asked. It was a very demure dress, compared to most.

  ‘It is vulgar, that’s all,’ he said. ‘They have tinted the photograph with too vivid a colour. Nothing like you.’

  Aurora laughed. ‘No, no, that’s Bella! She was probably brighter in real life.’

  Mama came to see, and took the sheet. She seemed to be about to speak, then lifted the paper to touch Bella’s photograph to her cheek. Aurora put her arm around Mama and kissed her soft hair. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘She will come to see us soon. I’ll write again.’ She turned to take Mama up to their room.

  Lewis was watching her, unsmiling.

  At the stairs, seeing that Mama had the banister railing, Aurora looked back, her voice pitched to him alone, not even angry.

  ‘You would not be judging my sister, would you?’

  Mama had stopped on the stairs; she kept her face resolutely turned away, but Aurora thought she was listening.

  ‘My father the schoolmaster had some difficulty with my mother’s life in vaudeville,’ Aurora said to Lewis. ‘I wouldn’t stomach that for an instant, in anyone I respected or whose respect I valued.’

  For some while after that, Lewis did not visit.

  Like the Rose

  As Bella headed north on the long leg into Canada, Pantages headed to Seattle, to take his wife across-country, scouting for theatres to swallow up. He gave Bella a diamond brooch and signed her six-month contract as a solo artiste, till July 1917: a thousand a week for two comic numbers and one straight.

  So she was rich. Surprising how flat she felt.

  Then East & Verrall—disturbed by recent talk of the United States entering the war after all—announced they were stepping into an Australian tour that Julius and Sybil had had booked years ahead, but of course could not fulfill. Verrall felt they should not leave Julius behind; but East was heart-hardened.

  ‘We’ve carried him more than a year, to what avail? He doesn’t want to buck up, he wants to lie down in the road and die. Time to wash our hands and let him—he’s on Pan-time all the way to Edmonton till his contract runs out in May. And don’t think, Bella my girl, we’re leaving you in charge of him, because that is not the case.’

  Well, they were. Somebody would have to look out for him. Julius was eating again, pretending to be on the mend, but offstage he was still alarmingly disconnected. And he’d never taken to her. Nobody loved her, in fact, but that did not matter.

  Nothing mattered. People kept company with other people just because the thought occurred to them, and only innocents or bumpkins followed the old society laws or worried, as Mama always had, about their virtue. Nobody cared, in the vaude world, if a person was pure. Perhaps it was different in the old days. But thinking about some things Mama had let slip, she did not think so. Drinking was nothing—she had a very hard head and could drink all evening and never feel it. Or if she felt it a bit, it did not matter. Only her stomach troubled her, and sometimes she had to lie in a warm bath for an hour before she could make herself dress for the theatre. She was no fatter, and she still had her monthlies, but everything hurt down there.

  Anyway, off they went.

  From the hotel in Butte, Bella wrote to Aurora and to Clover, whose shades she seemed to see on every street corner; she lay in bed till noon most days, staring at nothing. Julius gave her some reason to get up—he had to be hustled into dressing and got down for late breakfast or he would not eat, and if he missed another show from ‘illness’ she thought he might get canned. Without East and Verrall, he’d switched to an older number, the Sad Philosophizer. He ran with it for the rest of their tour, a lamentation on life and death that Bella could hardly bear to watch. The bit ended with a song, Life’s a Funny Proposition After All, which was enough to send you searching for the razor blades.

  ‘With all we’ve thought and all we’re taught,

  All we seem to know

  Is we’re born, and live a while, and then we die.’

  Spare me, she thought, the first time she watched. Julius pulled out all the stops: adding blue shadows to his own sunken eyes and cheeks, accenting his well-worn lines with carmine into a ghastly tragedy mask. But he was painfully funny, as the hobo preparing for bed in a fleabag hotel. His disrobing for bed was the peeling of his defences, the revealing of his starveling soul: horribly sad, and horribly entertaining. The melody unwound on drums and a squeezebox, as played by the monkey in the park. Julius prepared to lay him down to sleep as if for the last time, making the bed tenderly, praying, finally setting a bud vase with a gorgeous full-blown rose on the upturned night-soil bucket. He pulled the sheet down gently, like a shroud, then heeled back, his shock making clear that the bed was alive with bugs. He brushed them one way and the other, counted, gave up counting, shook hands with a few of them and asked permission to join their party, and gingerly climbed in.

  ‘We’re born to die, but don’t know why, or what it’s all about,

  Young for a day, then old and gray;

  Like the rose that buds and blooms … and fades and falls away,

  Life’s a very funny proposition, anyway.’

  Last of all, he pulled a concealed string, and the petals fell from the rose. And then the lights went out.

  Though Bella resisted, and hated him for it, the number caught her every time. Why do we die? Papa; Harry, who had faded from her memory until he was just a flash of blue jacket running up the road; Sybil. She hated death and knew her own would come too soon. So did everyone’s. It gave her a deep trembling in her legs, wanting to see Aurora and Clover, Mama and Avery—and Clover’s Harriet—but she must keep working, to keep them all afloat. Maybe next summer, maybe when her Pantages contract ended in June.

  Loneliness swamped her, in the darkness of the wings, but
there was no one to joke or give her a candy or have a good time with. She waited for Julius to come offstage, and she said left ’em gasping in the aisles with that one, you killed, you’re a marvel—all the things he needed to have said, that Sybil had once said for him. Then she walked him up the stairs to his dressing table, and ran down again in time for her own number. It was all a very funny proposition, after all.

  Bright Dark Red

  Julius died in Edmonton.

  Bella had got used to money. For their two weeks in April she’d booked a suite at the MacDonald, the limestone chateau on the bluff above the river where the Galician immigrants had lived like bears in their caves (it was of them that Bella always thought when Clover mentioned Galichen). Very handy for the Pantages. The suite was huge. Bella and Julius rattled in it like two dry beans in a can; the bathroom was a palace of marble.

  Julius was not bad to travel with, aside from the massively disgusting nose-blowing in the morning as he dislodged the night’s accumulated phlegm; he made far less mess than she did herself, and as long as he had his medicinal dose of gin (increased by half again, even while she’d been his minder) he kept himself in order well enough.

  One night she stayed out for an after-theatre dinner at the Shasta Grill—trying to enjoy the old glamour—and walked home through streets she and Clover had so often walked in those old days, with a dog-leg to the Arlington to wave at their old windows.

  When she let herself into the suite she stumbled over Julius’s body, slumped like a suit of old clothes across the parquet floor of the vestibule. He was snoring painfully and she could not wake him. She rang the front desk for help and two liveried boys came up and carried him to his bed; after they’d left she discovered that Julius had soiled himself. There being nobody else to clean him, she did it herself, rolling him back and forth to undress him and wash his backside. The bedding would never recover.

  When it was done she stood staring at him, pinned in the bed by a clean sheet from her own bed. He had shrunk. His still-massive head and wild grizzled hair made his diminishment less noticeable when he was awake, but the rest of him was just a bundle of kindling now. His hands lay flaccid on the sheets, long bones in gloves of skin. Julius had never had the time of day for her, really. It ought to be Clover looking after him, he’d like that better. They were the ones who’d been such friends. It ought to be Sybil.

  It ought to be Papa she was helping, or horrible old Joe Dent.

  Julius only made it to the theatre next day after she’d sent down for another bottle of gin. He was unsteady on his pins and his number did not make much sense, but the audience took it as a drunk act, and he got by. He could not eat the supper she brought to his dressing room. After a look at his grey face she did not press him. But he would not go to hospital, nor allow her to send for a doctor.

  He opened a fresh bottle and took a tumblerful as if it were ghastly medicine, and the shaking that ran through his body lessened. At the end of the second show she bundled him into a cab and took him back to the hotel, where she propped him up in bed with water to hand, and of course the gin. She raced back to the Pantages and made her nine o’clock call by a whisker. In the glory of taking the chilly Edmonton audience by storm she was able to forget his cadaverous eyes, not beseeching her to stay but only staring at her face as if it were the last thing he would see.

  Which it was, because when she got home that evening she found him in the elegant bathroom, blind drunk, clinging to the tub with clawed hands. His eyes almost sewn shut, so deep was his refusal to open them. ‘Cannot, no,’ he whispered, when she begged him to look at her. His belly was distended and stiff, and he quaked from time to time—she ran to the house-phone and asked the desk to send for a doctor or a nurse, and ran back to hold him till help came.

  But Julius opened his mouth like a fountain’s mouth, and like a fountain, a waterfall of blood poured out. The violent noise of the blood slamming into the bathtub made Bella dizzy. Towels—she reached for a towel and shoved it into Julius’s mouth, but more blood came out, first leaking and soaking and then in a shuddering stream, and the bathtub was filling with it, and another towel, and another. She could not stop it. The blood was a terrible bright dark red.

  No, no—the necessity of it remaining inside his body made her eyes swim and blacken, until she took hold of herself. She tried to speak to Julius, saying nothing useful, but just, ‘No, no, don’t, I will hold you—’ To which he made no answer, nor did his eyes ever open.

  The doctor took Julius out of her arms and laid him flat on the blood-swimming tiles, and a sigh came out of Julius’s mouth but the doctor said that was just air, that he had already been dead for some time. Because the body cannot live without the blood that fills its caverns and tributaries.

  A nurse helped Bella up from the floor and washed her hands and face till water took all that blood away and they put her in a different room, and that was the last of Julius.

  Cartwheel

  Clover reread Aurora’s letters as she had once read Victor’s. (She read Bella’s, too, but they were so few she had to hoard them, like Madame with her last box of French nougat.) She knew the cast of people in Qu’Appelle and read between the lines when necessary; she was dismayed both by Lewis Ridgeway’s entire absence from the letter, and the news of Aleck Graham.

  Dr. Graham has received a telegram reporting his son Aleck ‘wounded, no particulars.’ Dear Mabel spent a day in her room, and another day sitting in the darkened church; then she wrote to Aleck (the first of no doubt a thousand cheerful letters) and went back to her ordinary work.

  The Dean has an illuminated War Roll in St Peter’s. All the boys gone from Qu’Appelle and Ft Qu’Appelle and Indian Head. Many of them already dead. This is the news: lists, telegrams, pride in one son’s sacrifice.

  Pride holds them up after their sons are gone, Clover thought. So we agree not to take that away. But pride was not helping Madame these days. She crept back and forth to the atelier like a mouse, shrinking within her draperies. Only calm, briefly, when feeding Harriet or playing at puppets with her.

  The hospital discharged Victor in April, saying they’d done everything they could; the army invalided him out. His leg was useless; his vision and lungs were compromised from the chlorine attack in 1915, the army doctor told her.

  ‘He can walk, in a dot-and-carry way—and will regain some strength for walking, but he’ll always need the crutch. He won’t be fit for any regular kind of life,’ he said.

  The doctor’s moustache was cut straight across, perhaps with a special set of moustache scissors, Clover thought—so she did not have to think about Victor’s leg, the suppurating sores, the mass on one side, the swelling that came and went, the constant tearing pain. Or about the impossible cartwheel into the sky that he had performed the first night she saw him, at the Hippodrome in Montana.

  She brought him home in a hackney. The atelier acolytes came to visit, while Madame made potage. Victor lay in his old room, moving from bed to couch in a kind of stasis, not speaking unless driven to it. He could not bear Harriet to chatter, as she did now from morning to night; he had a very uncertain temper for the tuck of his sheets and the noise of the ticking clock two floors below.

  One afternoon, after an unusually bad day, Clover knelt and begged him to tell her what he was thinking about that plagued him so badly.

  ‘It is nothing to do with you,’ Victor said.

  He swung off the couch, grabbing his crutch, and manoeuvred himself downstairs and out the door. It was the first time he’d spoken to her in a week. Through the window, Clover watched him walking down the road. Nothing to do with her. She had never been accused of selfishness before.

  They blundered on into spring. The difficulties of managing Victor and Harriet while finding, keeping and doing work piled up in Clover’s mind in a great mountain range; she longed for the prairies. Victor tried to help—but would peel until the potato was all peeled away, or prune till the branches were all
hacked off the bush. He could not look her, or anyone, in the eye. He did not speak easily, but sometimes she heard him telling stories to Harriet in her cot.

  When Galichen returned in late April from one of his mysterious absences, he came to see Victor and carried him away, literally in his arms, to the atelier for two days. Clover went over to find him, the first evening, and Heather Jakes told her not to fuss. ‘He’s giving him the business,’ Heather said. ‘You’ll be glad of it, when he’s through.’ Next morning Clover looked out and saw Victor in the next-door garden among the white-robed acolytes, doing scales. Gali had given him a knee-cup, a carved peg with a cushioned knee he could strap on to relieve the pressure on his shinbones. He looked absurd, a pirate strayed into a Greek chorus, but he was moving through the sequences and his eyes were open.

  Forty-eight hours of penetrating attention from Galichen was enough to turn an invalid around, or knock one through death’s door. Victor came back with his crutch, but not hobbling so badly, and Heather Jakes brought poultices for her to use, on Gali’s orders, which seemed at least as effective as the carbolic and boracic acid the hospital had advised.

  Clover talked to Madame, to Heather Jakes; then went next door, heart in her hands, and talked to Gali himself. At the end of the week she wrote to Aurora:

  Victor does not sleep. He lies beside me staring into the darkness. He falls into a drowse—then the jerking begins, twitching in his legs and arms, as if when he loses consciousness his body begins to fight again or fight it off, whatever it is. The things that I can’t know about.

  Gali has arranged passage on a merchant ship to which he has some connection. They say shipping will be cut off in the next little while, and I don’t dare wait—for his sake and for Harriet’s, and even mine. Please ask Uncle Chum if we can stay there, till we get on our feet. Victor cannot work, but truly, I’ll be able to get bookings. My monologues have done well here, even in the wartime theatre. They will get better, too. It’s not like the violin.