He sighed and began the long climb down the stairs on swollen and aching legs.
Julius struggled to his feet but fell again, again and again, wheels rolling out from under him no matter how he placed them.
Clover, watching all this in the wings, believed he’d have to stop, but then would come another attempt, another roll. Mattie was laughing so hard he could barely stand up, this being the first time he’d done the turn, his hilarity pitched the higher since he could not know how badly Drawbank was going to take all this.
‘In what way is this to blackmail me?’ Gentry asked Julius interestedly, as he came offstage.
‘My voice shall not ring out in this Ephesus, this Delphi of the mind,’ whispered Julius into Gentry’s ear, crepe beard tickling considerably, ‘until the Bella–Clovers are compensated commensurate with their endeavours! I say this to your ear alone,’ he added prudently, gesturing with one fan-shaped hand to make Clover recede behind a curtain-leg.
‘Well, Julius,’ Gentry confided, ‘the awkward thing is,
you
are compensated commensurate with your windage, due to your unexpected arrival like an orphan on my doorstep, and Syb’s skilful playing on my heartstrings …’
‘You! You have no heart to string,’ Julius pronounced.
‘… and therefore the exchequer is entirely empty, my dear old boy—and since the busting of Sunderland and the Irishman I am merely going into a fraction less debt, daily. There is no more compensation to be had, unless you would like me to direct Johnny Drawbank to divvy up your allotment and hand a portion over to the delightful girls. No? Ah, I thought not. Good day to you then.’
Not cowed, but pensive, Julius did his German professor at the nine o’clock show.
A Tenderfoot Act
After watching Julius cavort in their cause, Aurora gathered her courage and went to Gentry herself that evening. Her mother had not come to bed till after midnight the night before, and her hands were red and split in the morning. Aurora calculated the odds of Gentry firing them on the spot, and concluded that on balance, he
would want to keep them. But it was clear that the theatre had no money to spare, and possible that Drawbank was pressing Gentry to reduce the numbers on the bill. The matter needed delicate handling.
She found him putting on his topcoat in his cubbyhole office.
‘I believe my mother is shy to speak to you, sir,’ she said, trying not to halt in her delivery. ‘But I know there was a plan to revisit our arrangement, and I hope we have been—’ She couldn’t say
giving satisfaction
as if they were parlourmaids. ‘I think we have been pleasing the crowds.’
Gentry looked hunted.
‘Here’s my proposal,’ Aurora said. ‘Your lessons are worth a great deal to us, at least half of what we might expect to get, I think $60 or $70 a week for a tenderfoot act. If you’ll keep teaching us, we’ll work for you for $30 a week, and keep that arrangement to ourselves—but you’d have to let us have the Act 1 closer spot, and more time for dancing.’
‘That’s the second-best spot.’
Did he think she didn’t know that? She waited, trying not to reveal anything. Like a game of beggar-your-neighbour with Papa and Mr. Dyment.
His discomfort seemed to express itself in a stiff neck. He rolled his grizzled head wildly, staring up at her. Then he sidled crab-wise a step or two to his door, and closed it. ‘$20 a week is the outside I can stretch to,’ he said. ‘But you’ve worked hard, you are good girls. As a consideration for your efforts, I will give you the opener.’
‘But—Julius—’
‘No, no, no need to fret about Julius. I’m moving him and Syb to open the second act, with their ventriloquy number. She pinned me down for that one months ago.’
Aurora had not realized they had a double act. She had not paid the least attention to Sybil, but now remembered that she’d been wearing a pink tulle costume when they first met her, at Cleveland’s—all that time ago, it now seemed.
‘Done,’ she said, and gave Gentry her hand.
‘And the ghost will walk on Saturday, as usual,’ he said, only faintly sighing.
After she’d gone, Gentry pulled out his watch, a beautiful gold turnip from his father on the occasion of his twenty-first birthday, lost now in the mists of time, and polished it once more on his sleeve. Only 9:18. Time, still, to knock on Hiram’s door. He picked up his watch and the old French ebony carriage clock from the tiny mantel, then looked into his bowler hat, its rich silk lining agleam in the lamplight. He set it on his head and, pleased with the conceit, went round to the pawnshop to see what could be got for the time he had left.
4.
A Change of Scene
FEBRUARY-MARCH
1912
The Parthenon, Helena
The People’s Hippodrome, Butte
The Digby Parthenon, Missoula
If you open the show, you have a considerable advantage in not having the stronger acts appear before you, so that the audience might compare them and applaud accordingly. Whatever place you are assigned by the management, take it uncomplainingly.
FREDERICK LADELLE,
HOW TO ENTER VAUDEVILLE
A
t the end of February an announcement was posted at the theatre: the Fox–Drawbank Parthenon company would spend four weeks touring the circuit. Gentry assumed Flora would accompany the girls, but she laughed and said she’d have a holiday; Aurora was perfectly capable, and they would have Sybil and Julius to rely on in need.
In truth, she’d been totting up what they would spend in costs—every bit of their new-won pay—and had nervously determined that she must retain her waitress job. Even as she talked airily to Gentry, she was figuring in her head. Numb to worry for some time after Arthur’s death, she now felt it descend heavily on her; it seemed there were cartwheel grooves that her tired mind slid into over and over: hotel bills, supper, thread, shoes … She refused to allow the faintest tinge of fright to appear on her face, knowing nothing was more fatal to success than the appearance of failure.
The one thing that gave her pause was Bella—almost fourteen, and still not yet begun her womanly cycles, but ten to one she would do so any day, far from her mama’s guidance.
Aurora, hearing this fear, told her not to be silly; she and Clover could do all that was necessary, and Bella already knew all about it anyway, having watched her sisters washing out their monthly rags these last four years.
But as if to iron their path, that last worry vanished the day before the cavalcade was to set off: between the five and seven-thirty shows Bella came bursting into the dressing room with her face glowing, back from the privy, and announced, ‘It’s come! I’ve
got
it!’—so tickled to have achieved womanhood that nobody could be in doubt as to what she referred.
Her sisters clucked over her and rigged a temporary pinning, and warned her about the pain that might attend her, but Bella laughed and pooh-poohed them. Kitted up with the unfamiliar wad between her legs, she danced around the room to test it out, pleased as Punch. She did not even protest when Mama could not refrain from telling, yet one more time, the well-known tale of Aunt Queen in Madison, when Mama had rushed in from playing one day, ‘with no more idea than a bird of what had happened—I thought I’d cut myself! And she said, Well! Now you can have a baby. I asked, How on earth? And here’s what she said, the only knowledge she gave me:
The man will stick his thing in you, and you’ll have a baby
—can you feature it?’
All Mama’s stories ended that way, Clover thought: in disbelief at the lack of understanding in this cold old world. Except those ending ‘… then Arthur and I had our lovely children and all was worth the struggle.’ But she had made certain that her girls knew how babies came to be, even if her description of the mechanics was flowery and sun-dappled, and slightly vague as to biology.
Louis Heels
After an anxious morning of packing and repacking, Flora went with her girls to the station to participate in the general jollity of the company’s departure. She stood beside Gentry Fox to wave them off, the girls swathed in their warmest wraps. If only they’d had furs, which make leave-taking so festive! They had tried on their new dancing slippers the night before—white kid, Louis heels, tied with satin ribbons criss-crossing up the ankle—and their delight had been enough to stave off any slight regret Flora might have had about her locket. Arthur could not know, and what use had she for sentiment if the girls were ill-shod? She’d bought Bella proper boots at the New York Store too, and had even got the apostle spoons back from Hiram in the deal. She beamed wholeheartedly at the girls as they left, her mind at ease for once. They had good shoes and were guaranteed on the bill of the Ackerman–Harris travelling company for a solid
month—programme sheets printed, and nobody the wiser about the cut-rate pay they’d be getting, which was still much better than nothing! She knew they would do well.
Gentry gave her a cup of tea in the station waiting room after the train departed, and she headed back to the Pioneer (allowing Gentry to assume that she was off to enjoy her leisure) more happily than her daughters might have expected.
The Jump
They would play the People’s Hippodrome in Butte the first week, meeting up there with several new acts. Swain’s Rats & Cats were off to Chicago, with a cheery wave of too many tails. Instead they would share the bill with the Furniture Tusslers and Victor Saborsky, Eccentric, whom Sybil and Julius knew well.
‘Oh yes, from a babe,’ Sybil told Bella and Clover, sitting across from them on the first leg of their trip. ‘His ma was an English variety dancer—well, she was Polish in fact, but married English, and him some kind of fiddler. Fabians, you know,
very
free, and then they took up with some heathen madman or other as well, odd as anything. Over they came, three or four years, with the little tyke in tow. This was after your ma had left us. He did his schooling in the dressing room, but his father was determined he get an education, very, so they upped back to England for a time, for him to attend a high-toned establishment, because the father, you know, was Someone in his own right before taking up with the Polish dancer. She was sweetly pretty, but a bit black in her moods from time to time; she struggled with her temper. Well, you’ll notice his nose, that was her doing. Not that she was alone in that—look for example, if you need one, at those poor Ninepins, Missus and the boy, and how they must creep around that Joe Dent, who has a kind heart I’m sure but is a demon when in drink, and you can’t tell me that boy is not being brutalized no matter how they blandish the authorities. And now he’s a certified
Eccentric
, working without a net—I mean Victor Saborsky, not Nando. Odd to see a
little boy all grown up now, makes you feel a bit old. His face so thin and sad, he looks as old as us, however sweet his expression may be—but his turn is spectacular, ever an honour to be on the bill with him. Always excepting of course my dear Jay, Victor’s my favourite act on the circuits, this or any other year.’
From Butte, they would head east to Billings for a week; retrace their steps for a second week in Butte; and then shuffle west to Missoula for another week’s engagement before making their way back to Helena—which now seemed like home.
The green leather seats felt sticky under Bella’s tucked-up shins. In the warm train she had pushed her black stockings down from their elastic and rolled them tight-tight-tight around the tops of her new boots.
Butte boot
. Bella stared out the window at the hills rising oddly out of flat plains, the bones of the earth showing through, no decorations at all beyond a scrub of trees; here and there a blackened patch from fire.
Butte was always on fire in Mama’s tales of the old Death Trail—one of her best stories was the fire in the butcher shop in Butte where her company was playing on her very first tour, how the pigs in the back squealed through the crackle of the flames, and the smell of roast pork beginning—extremely gruesome. Bella could not get it out of her mind; it ran horrified prickles up and down her scalp. Mama had been in no danger, she had said so over and over, but Bella could not help imagining that her feet were burning, Mama’s feet, on the boards rigged over the butcher’s counter for a stage—little feet in embroidered satin slippers. The horse-drawn fire wagon had scrambled up to the front door of the butcher shop as all the audience was streaming out. Mayhem! But it was better to think of that little fire than the big fire in Butte, the explosion in 1895, before Mama left vaudeville and married Papa and had Aurora and left this life. That explosion was far from the theatre, but onstage they’d heard the roar of it, and when they stopped the play and went out into the street there was a boy’s body, blown several blocks by the blast—the whole thing like a scene from the war, dead bodies everywhere and blood seeping into the dirt of the road, and brains spattered here and there, parts of human beings. Bella had read
the clipping in Mama’s scrapbook: ‘the cries and groans of the injured and dying and some of the bodies still quivering, remnants of human beings, legs and arms torn off …
shapeless trunks quivered and died in the arms of the living.’
She shook her hands out quickly and lay down, her head on Clover’s lap. A boy like Mattie, perhaps, or—not Nando! After a moment she whispered, ‘In Butte there was a boy lying dead outside the theatre, and when they walked to see the explosion they passed parts of people quivering on the ground.’
Clover smoothed her hair. ‘That was years ago—we will not be exploded this time, I promise.’
‘I love you, Clover,’ Bella said, digging her cheek into Clover’s knee as if they were about to be separated by some great cataclysm. ‘I love you.’
Clover’s hand passed gently and constantly over her hair and her ears and presently she stopped thinking, and the swaying of the train over the tracks lulled her to sleep.