The Little Shadows

by Marina Endicott

  ‘Somebody must go,’ the old woman said. ‘But oh, my boy.’

  Mabel stood against the proscenium arch, just touching it. Clover had spoken to her beforehand, had asked her please not to listen, but she could not bear to miss it. In the audience, a woman began to sob. Mabel hoped it was not Mrs. Gower.

  Ferocious again, the old Irishwoman straightened and stepped up one stair, shouting, ‘Supper six sharp, for them as can mind their manners!’

  On second thought, Mrs. Gower can stand it, Mabel told herself. She has good company here.

  Miss Peavey and Miss Frye were sitting directly behind Victor Saborsky, having changed seats during the fruit-basket-upset of the intermission. Miss Peavey leaned over to congratulate Mr. Saborsky on his wife’s mastery of the monologue form, which made him duck his head; Miss Frye then leaned forward to confide. ‘What I want to know,’ she whispered, ‘is about your experience of the hospitals—Miss Peavey is our district nurse, and she will certainly be enthralled.’

  Victor could not answer. He shook his head stiffly. The air seemed to be full of eyes. He got up and limped along the row, and went backstage instead, where he belonged, to find his wife.

  Miss Frye was not much taken aback by Mr. Saborsky’s behaviour; everyone knew him to be suffering from shell shock. But Miss Peavey whispered that they ought not to have presumed to speak to him about his war experiences. Chastened, Miss Frye sat back to watch as the curtains unfurled—and there was lovely Mrs. Mayhew and such a very handsome gent with shiny shoes. The music for the Castle Walk number was enchanting.

  Lewis Ridgeway sat beside Dr. Graham, watching Aurora dance with that negligible jackanapes. She had thrown off her disguise tonight, and he saw her more clearly now, in company with her sisters. Not in any sense the wife of a superintendent of schools. All evening he had hovered on the verge of saying to himself irrevocable words. He had been puzzling over what an honourable person ought to do, but there was only one answer. The men he most admired, Chum and Dean Barr-Smith, had seen active service. Victor Saborsky was entirely admirable too—even the comical Mr. Verrall was going to sign up. It seemed they had all beaten him to the punch. Miss Frye would make an adequate principal while he was away. He could discover for himself what Aleck Graham knew, and all those other men. If he came back, perhaps things would look different all around.

  The frail, exquisite grace of the dancing made ripples of breath go through the audience over and over. Bella whispered to Nando that Jimmy was better than he’d ever been before.

  ‘But a bit of a flatfish, don’t you think?’ Nando said. He was happy now that the tilting of the wings had gone without a hitch, and his head was mostly full of ways to make the plane do more, when he had the chance of a really big theatre, like the Palace or Ziegfeld’s or—or when he would be able to fly a real plane. His head went into cloud.

  Bella ran down to change into her white dress for They Didn’t Believe Me, leaving Nando to his dreaming. She had stripped to her corselette when the door handle turned. Hearing Jimmy’s voice she ducked down behind the screen, onto the little cushioned stool for putting shoes on.

  ‘Just a little—a very little something,’ Jimmy was saying.

  Aurora thanked him, paper tore, and she said, ‘Oh, Jimmy, what a kind memento.’

  Not the thing a lady says when she’s over the moon, Bella thought. Through the hinge-crack in the screen, she saw Jimmy lean forward and kiss Aurora’s cheek, and his arms go round her, but Aurora was out of that very quick. You could take lessons from her, Bella thought.

  ‘I made the wrong choice,’ Jimmy said, in a heartfelt, legitimate-theatre voice—the younger lover in that seabird melodrama! Bella almost laughed. ‘I know that now,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, you did,’ Aurora said, and she was laughing. ‘But it was very nice to dance with you again.’

  She’s over it, Bella thought. That’s for certain.

  ‘Actually, I’m going up to Keith’s in the fall, you know, in a play with Ethel Barrymore. But I’m thinking about the pictures, I’ve had a couple of offers.’

  Bella found it hard to listen to his blather—East and Verrall were on, she wanted to see them.

  ‘Anyhow, that bracelet’s more worth keeping than the old one, and it comes straight from me to you with no hard feelings,’ Jimmy said. ‘Say a fond adieu to Bella for me … It’s been a great gig.’

  He took himself off as cleanly and neatly as he’d done everything else. It seemed he had erased himself, had become nothing but a handsome escort.

  ‘Makes you a bit sad,’ Aurora said through the screen to Bella. ‘When you think how lovely he was when we first met him.’

  ‘Let’s go up and watch old East and Verrall,’ Bella said, jumping up to pull on her frock. ‘They only get better, you know.’

  They crowded in backstage with all the others who wanted to see the number.

  East had failed at his golf lessons many times, and Verrall, finally losing his temper completely, had whacked him over the head with a club that rebounded and hit his own head, bringing up a lump the size of a golf ball under his hat. In fact it was a golf ball. Verrall pocketed it thoughtfully.

  East, glaring at him, said, ‘There are times when I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for us to part.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Verrall. ‘I’ve got my temper back now. Let’s turn to the book I brought for you, in my desperation: Launcelot Cressy Servos’s Practical Instruction in Golf.’ Here, Verrall evinced a Moment of Discovery. ‘Oh dear, I seem to have brought the wrong manual.’

  ‘What have you brought?’

  ‘The Art of Flirtation. How to make a lady fall in love with you, for ten cents,’ Verrall said.

  East hooted. ‘A lady fell in love with me once and it cost me five-hundred dollars.’

  ‘That’s because you didn’t have this book.’

  Always in favour of saving money, East decided he did need flirtation lessons after all, and they settled down to work.

  Mrs. Gower was laughing so hard already that Miss Peavey expressed a fear, to her other-side neighbour Miss North, that she might take an apoplexy.

  But Verrall was giving a hands-on demonstration. ‘Just to teach you how to flirt, I am going to take a walk through the park. I am a beautiful woman,’ he said in a fluting voice.

  East, puzzled, said, ‘I thought you were a gentleman.’

  Verrall was patient. ‘No, no, just for an example, I am a lady. I will walk past in a reckless way, and make eyes at you.’

  East would have none of that. ‘If you do, I will smash up your face!’

  ‘No, no, it’s pretend. When I make eyes at you, you say something. What do you say?’

  ‘Ten cents?’

  Verrall moaned, but persevered: ‘Now I’m the lady, I am coming. Get ready.’ He did a glorious walk around the park, worthy of the sultriest of box-hall girls, melted along in front of East, dropped his handkerchief and swanned away.

  East shouted after him, ‘Hey! You dropped something.’

  ‘I know, I know!’ Verrall hissed back. ‘I’m flirting! Pick up my handkerchief!’

  But East was proud. ‘I don’t need any. I got one of my own.’

  Mrs. Gower’s mirth passed from merry to alarming at that point, and Dr. Graham leaned over to lay a cautious hand on her pulse.

  In three, the little golden moon was being set up for Bella and Nando to sing in front of. ‘I’m not a singer like that fellow’s a dancer,’ Nando said. ‘It’s not too late to bow out—you could do my verses.’ Bella thumped his arm. Then, remembering the time she’d punched his eye, asked how long it had stayed black.

  ‘Never went black at all,’ he said stoutly. ‘Or not for more than a month.’

  ‘I hope it was embarrassing when you went to the sanatorium to get your dad, looking like another candidate.’

  ‘Very funny,’ he said, and the music was beginning, and they were on.

  Now this was the sort of thing that she loved, t
hought Elsie, sitting comfortably in Chum’s lee. ‘How wonderful you are …’ That’s the way she could imagine Chum talking to her, if they’d met when they were young. Not that it mattered, they didn’t have to say things to know them. ‘They’ll never believe me, that from this great big world you’ve chosen me …’ It would make Chum laugh if she told him that, but the reason these nice songs worked was that they told the truth, a certain kind of truth. ‘All I know is I said yes, hesitating more or less …’ But she had not needed to hesitate for an instant of course. Except for their dear baby’s death, she was the happiest of women. And lucky, too, not to have had to worry about Chum while he was still in active service. Clover’s face broke her heart, too often. This little Bella now, she was in the best of spirits. But she too looked as if she had been through the wars, overlaid now with the air of having been struck lucky that Elsie expected her own face showed. Faces gave out so much.

  Chum’s elbow squeezed her arm, and she gave a little pressure back.

  At the last verse Nando Dent stood forward, and Bella turned her face away, suddenly grief-stricken. Was it acting? Elsie had heard that he was going to enlist.

  ‘Now this is the verse they’ve been singing, over in France,’ he said, and stood to a casual attention. ‘A bit of a joke, of course, to keep the spirits up:

  ‘And when they ask us, How dangerous it was,

  Oh! We’ll never tell them—no, we’ll never tell them,

  We spent our pay in some café,

  And fought wild women night and day,

  It was the cushiest job we ever had …’

  Chum bent his head down to hear his wife’s whisper, as the curtains floated inward. ‘Aurora tells me Clover’s worried about poor Victor—she wants to leave tomorrow—and Aurora is going with her, to help with any—well, to see that they are all right.’

  ‘She told me too,’ Chum said. ‘I said we’d be happy to keep Flora, if that’s to your mind?’

  ‘Well, of course,’ Elsie said, a little doubt in her voice. The music was growing. ‘Will she want to stay, though?’ she said, close to his ear, but he was a little deaf.

  The music blaring up had caught him—very martial, you could see the arousal in the faces around. His own heart strained upward to meet it. An American song, Clover had said. Be a useful recruitment tool. ‘Tell your dad to be glad that he had such a lad …’

  That fellow East was good at his job, sawing along up there, with all Canadian girlhood getting in his way.

  So were his nieces, good at their jobs. Watching this, knowing that they’d pulled it together from scratch, he saw they’d have to go. That Bella was a minx, sorry not to know her better. If he and Elsie kept Flora, the girls would have some reason to come back.

  It would leave Mabel lonesome. Not everything could be fixed.

  The audience was up and clapping, and the company assembled on the stage, a hullabaloo all round. It would be good to get home after all this. He reached for his hat but Elsie stopped him—oh, an encore. He sat back down, obedient to her hand.

  He’d done very well for himself there. He’d advised Arthur not to marry, he recalled. If anyone had advised me like that, I’d have punched his lights out, Chum thought now. Advised him most strenuously not to marry Flora, of all people, no better than she should be, and very unlikely to be faithful to him. Temperamental to the point of throwing doubt upon her sanity. Had he said that to Arthur? He did remember offering him a thousand pounds in English money not to do it.

  But she had raised these girls, and without much help from Arthur by the sounds of it. He’d be glad to give Flora a home. Elsie liked her very well, and Mabel did too.

  Her pretty girls, singing together up there—some fluffery, but it had got to Elsie. Tears in her eyes. He was the luckiest man in the world: conscious that he was saying the same thing every moderately happy husband had said in the history of human interaction. Content to do so. The rose that I keep in my heart …

  The crowd was applauding again, up on its feet in its animal way. Through the open windows of the hall some cool air blew.

  Encore

  JULY 2, 1917

  Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan

  All acts should have an encore arranged that can be done in one, and acts that work in one are always in demand by managers.

  FREDERICK LADELLE, HOW TO ENTER VAUDEVILLE

  The trunks went ahead to the station in the cart, Aurora’s grey trunk among them. The girls petted and kissed Mama, still drowsing in bed after her exertions at the concert; they bid a fond goodbye to Chum and to Aunt Elsie, and gave Mabel all Bella’s tour dates—which they were going to fill, now that Nando would be leaving, as some permutation of the Belle Auroras. It was a difficult parting for Aurora, but Avery was happy to travel on a train with his odd little cousin.

  Chum piled them all into the Ford and blew a double honk to say goodbye to Elsie, as he always did.

  In the bedroom upstairs, Flora sat up, a flood of understanding in her brain like a slung pail of water. Going, all going—all going.

  Not without! Not without!

  She threw nightgown, brush and her best dress into the carpet-bag Aurora had left unneeded by the bed. Into shoes. Her hands shook but she gripped the leather handles hard and the weight of it steadied her. Down the (forcing her dragging right foot to do its work on the staircase), quiet mouse, cross hall—miss creaking board. The big door swung, she was out and down those steps, the car only just pulling out to the drive.

  She ran, hobbling and wobbling, and she sang out as she ran, more to herself than to get their attention, ‘Hope with a gentle persuasion, whispers her comforting word …’

  As the green car slowed to turn out onto the main road, she gathered her skirts together and pelted after them, and a shout gathered in her throat and leaped out.

  ‘Wait!’ she cried. ‘Wait for me!’

  Acknowledgements

  This is a book of vaudeville. Everything in it is stolen, juggled, stitched together backwards and upside down, shined up and sent back out to see how it will play. I have been faithful to the vaudeville circuits in Alberta, Montana and Saskatchewan, although I invented an extra one, the Parthenon. In the shallows of the medium-time, very few big historical sharks swim into the Belle Auroras’ ken; I regret any calumny done to Alexander Pantages’ ghost, but he was, after all, convicted in 1929 of the rape of a 17-year-old vaudeville dancer. (His conviction was overturned when a second trial allowed the dancer to be portrayed as a woman of low morals.) The roof of a vaudeville theatre in Edmonton did cave in, as told in the wonderful book Fallen Empires, by Jon Orrell. Victor’s elastic bouquet and sunburst bow is borrowed from Tomás Kubínek; the remarkable beauty of Kubínek’s act was a prime instigator of this book. If you ever have a chance, see him! The Melodramas are All My Own Work. East & Verrall use period vaude routines, from Brett Page’s Writing for Vaudeville (Mr. Page acknowledges their venerable age himself) and other classic comics; every joke is a genuine antique. The more absurd facts of Nando’s life with the Knockabouts are true of Buster Keaton’s life with his parents and their family act; as Avery is, Buster was born backstage. Gentry’s scolding the girls on pushing is borrowed from Cicely Berry. His other voice lessons are amalgams of advice from Berry, Lili Lehmann and Peter Brook. When Mama and Victor disagree over art, their argument owes its vigour to Howard Barker; East & Verrall doff their hats to Beckett.

  I thank the Canada Council for funding during the writing of this book, and the Augustana Faculty at the University of Alberta for research funds; thanks also to my research assistants, Sarah Haywood and Jordhana Rempel. Impossible to have written the book without Robert Earley’s tour of the Bailey Theatre in Camrose (first known as the David), before their restoration project got underway; thanks also to Hugh Henry at the Swift Current Museum for his guided tour of the Lyric Theatre in Swift Current.

  I’m indebted to my darling mother, Julianne Endicott, for an account of her experience of stroke a
nd her memories of Qu’Appelle; and to my constant readers: Barbara Barnes, Thyra Endicott, Jeanne Harvie, Glenda MacFarlane, and Sara O’Leary. For the beautiful design of this book, a round of applause to Kelly Hill. For their skill, perspicacity and general loveliness, I thank Tracy Bohan, Kristin Cochrane, and my dear editor, Lynn Henry. Love as always to Rachel, Will and Peter Ormshaw for the continuous vaudeville of the everyday.

  These girls and other artistes, these theatres and managers, are amalgams of hundreds of vaudeville performers known and forgotten. If you want to read more about vaudeville, and I certainly recommend it, start with Trav S.D.’s No Applause, Just Throw Money; if you’re hooked, find Frank Cullen’s massive encyclopedia, Vaudeville Old & New. For a full bibliography and list of sources and music, please visit www.marinaendicott.com