The Little Shadows
Copyright © 2011 Marina Endicott
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Endicott, Marina, 1958-
The little shadows / Marina Endicott.
eISBN: 978-0-385-66892-7
I. Title.
PS
8559.
N
475
L
58 2011
C
813′.6
C
2011-902496-9
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design: Kelly Hill
Cover art: Rosanne Olson | Riser | Getty Images
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,
a division of Random House of Canada Limited
Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website:
www.randomhouse.ca
v3.1
For all my sisters
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night.
It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.
It is the little shadow which runs across the grass
and loses itself in the sunset.
CROWFOOT
Contents
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Act Four
O
V
E
R
T
U
R
E
A
summer evening. Moths dance in the lights outside the opera house.
A girl in a white dress slides into a seat on the aisle beside her father. The hall is crowded, many standing at the back. Ladies exclaim over the playbill while men, heads bent together, talk about the war. An older, greying soldier sits with his kind-faced wife. Her big black boot tucks out of sight behind his leg.
The curtain sways, curling along its bottom edge in a velvet wave, swept not by wind or the weight of the moon but by a company assembling backstage.
In the enfolding darkness of the wings, Aurora reaches out her hand on one side to find Clover’s thin one; on the other Bella’s, small and strong. Their warm clasp stills her trembling.
Silver-shelled footlights snap a scalloped arc of light onto the main curtain. Fresh red velvet: crimson lake, bright blood, the colour of love. Murmurs cease as the violins come creaking into tune, their mild excitable cacophony resolving into sense and meaning, into A, the one note they all seek. In the audience, silence falls. The cessation of visiting, the folding of programmes, the last adjustment to the seats.
Tips of shoes show beneath the bobble-fringe—a quiet rumpus, that must be the girls.
The bandmaster taps his stand.
It is about to start.
Breathe in—
A
C
T
O
N
E
1.
Doing It in One
JANUARY 1912
The Empress, Fort Macleod
We usually select a ‘dumb act’ for the first act on the bill—makes a good impression and will not be spoiled by late arrivals. A song-and-dance turn, a sister act, or any other little act that does not depend upon its words being heard.
WILL ROGERS
‘K
eep moving,’ Mama told them. ‘You will only be cold if you are slow, and we must get on. He won’t wait.’
So they went quickly over the half-frozen field, in gritty snow that crunched underfoot but stung on their cheeks, and rubbed like sand between their hats and collars. Three girls in a row behind one round-bundled woman, who bent to the wind and made good headway on short, flicking legs. Aurora slid between snowbursts, smooth-sailing as a swan over a white lake. Bella was the smallest, hurrying to warm her hand by tucking it into Mama’s pocket; Clover behind them, slowest and least desirous of their destination.
Everything in the little town was whirling and bright, late-afternoon whiteness unusual here where it did not snow deeply, being too far west into desert. But they could see through the squall the brick building of the Empress Theatre, and the black frame around its door, and the white placard tacked up on the door:
CLEVELAND’S STAR UNION VAUDEVILLE
And now they could hear a
plink-plink-plink
timpani of notes with depth removed by distance, and a soaring, scooping voice doing arpeggios. Aurora felt her own voicebox contracting in time, one octave up, tenor to soprano, reaching and then cascading down.
The door stuck—jammed—and their mama jerked her head so someone would help her pull. Bella did (no glove to soil, her right-hand one gone missing that morning and nothing for it but to keep her hand in her pocket, or in Mama’s) and then Clover too. They yanked off-time—then again, together, and the door burst open. They fell back,
then moved forward into a blur of darkness and warmth, with somewhere in the distance red velvet and those arpeggios, very much louder now. Inside, a lobby gradually framed itself for their dazzled eyes, and a lighter square, two doors standing open into the theatre hall. An old scrubwoman, busy on the floor, grabbed her bucket away from their clumsy boots. Bella whispered an apology; after one glare the woman let her by and went back to her scrubbing.
Now that they stood still, the lobby was cold too. A little warmth curled out of the open doors, so the girls pressed their mother forward again, stepping quietly this time, Aurora’s new boots almost skating over the glossy floorboards, to look through into the theatre.
It looked much larger inside. The space opened up and out—high, high ceiling with a silver sheen even in this low light. The walls were pressed tin too, but painted flat gold, so that it took a moment to make sense of the play of light and dark on the ornate lozenge patterns. The chairs had been pushed to the sides for floor-sweeping, topped by a tumbled mass of velvet cushions.
One skinny boy with a broom stood looking up at the stage: an eight-foot butte of bare boards, the frankly false proscenium decked out with advertisements in florid fancy scripts. Silver-shelled footlights dotted around the curve.
Up on the stage people were shifting furniture, moving carpets and hauling ropes. A man in a bright yellow waistcoat shouted down to the boy to make speed, and he dodged to the right of the stage and up, broom flying ahead of him like the flag
Excelsior
.
The scenery flats had been hiked high into the rafters and the curtains drawn as far open as they would go; the stage was bald. At the rim of the stage an elegant young man stood beside the piano, one arm laid along it while he sang. A small squirrelly fellow played for him, very flourishingly as to the notes but no folderol in his face.
The smell was port wine and dirt, velvet, greasesticks. And ashes, a frightening smell in a theatre. It was cold in here too—everywhere seemed like it would be warm, and then was not. Not till nighttime. Then the heat of bodies would help, when this whole space would be
filled with breathing, laughing, sighing people crammed in side-by-each, all waiting and waiting for some beauty, some moment of transport.
Finished, the elegant gent bowed to the squirrel, received back his music, and took himself off smartly to the left, his top hat rolling down his arm and vanishing last. It was quieter in the hall then, so they could hear the slopping and brushing of the woman washing the lobby floor on her hands and knees behind them.
‘Well—off we go,’ Mama said. She made a complicated good-luck gesture, nipped at some fluff on Aurora’s sleeve and gripped Bella’s hand again, and they set off across the empty expanse of the hall. Their feet made no clatter at all on the shiny wooden floor, as Mama had taught them.
A stout man in a black coat stood mending a chair close to the stage. Mama stopped before him. ‘The Three Graceful Avery Girls are here to audition,’ she said, very haughty.
The man looked up at her, then at the girls. His black eyes shone in a long white tombstone face, and he looked them all over, staring the longest at Aurora, at the shine of her gold hair under the black hat, the huge velvet rose. Then he jerked his lipless mouth into a sideways, considering purse. ‘Be a while. Stove in the dressing room,’ he said. ‘Stan’ll fetch them when we’re ready.’
Mama nodded and led the girls to the left side of the stage, where a hidden door now stood ajar into a bare brick passage open to the stage and the back workings. A little drift of snow lay in the bright patch of light along the back of the stage, where the flies above had been opened to the sky. Twenty feet along, stairs led up on the right, to the stage; down on the left, to the cellar under the stage. Aurora would not touch the makeshift splintery railing with her new mauve gloves, but the other girls held tight, stumbling down the steep steps after Mama.
Someone shouted as they were descending—‘Maximilian! You’re up!’—and a skinny dark man rushed up the stairs, pushing past, each one at a time having to endure him, a smelly man carrying a birdcage and a box, and both those things banged into the girls but he
murmured,
Oh dear, oh so, so sorry
, as he went, clearly in a panic, so they could not mind him.