She laughed, and then, remembering that he did not know of her waitress work, said, ‘Oh yes, twiddling my thumbs!’
Gentry stood by the door, but had not opened it.
‘To tell you the truth, Flora, I did wish to speak to you; to warn you of a—development. I am not in the very best of health. My medical man informs me that I ought to get my affairs in order.’
‘Gentry.’ She heard her own voice, low and tired.
‘He exaggerates, you know how those fellows are, but I’m going to ground.’
She could not bear how old he looked, how broken-down.
‘You’re a dear girl, Flora, and these daughters of yours will go far.’ He shrugged into his velvet evening jacket, one sleeve, then the other more slowly. ‘I can’t do anything for you now, and it pains me to say so.’
‘No, Gentry, don’t.’
‘I’ve spent everything I ever made. Or lost it other ways.’ He passed both hands over his large, mobile face. ‘We’ve staved off ruin, so far, but I think Drawbank will be out within the month, and I’m away before that happens.’
Flora felt hopelessness steal over her again and pushed it away. ‘I wish I had some money,’ she said.
‘Oh, I wish it too, fervently, but you couldn’t help me even if you did.’
‘At least I could help you to get home.’
‘Home! I won’t be going home, any more than you ever could. Madison has nothing for you. A few street names you’d know. A church, a school—you’d walk around the town and wear out your fragile memory in a day.’
She laughed, because it was true. She could not even conjure up a church. Perhaps Uncle Elmore’s dentistry office would still be there; Uncle Elmore himself, of course, was long dead.
‘And no more for me.
London, a poem
—’ He broke off.
‘It’s a long way to go.’
‘Without the means for travel, yes.’ He nodded, master of himself again. ‘No, no, I am for Montreal, where an elderly relative, washed up on that shore, will permit me to share his flat. We have our own Gerry Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Elders.’
‘Do you know him well?’
‘Oh yes, well enough to hate him; he is my brother.’
‘I did not know you had a brother! You will be glad to be with him.’
‘You don’t know my brother. He is observant; he will force me to synagogue, and will call me by my real name, or rather, refuse to call me by my real name, which has been Gentry Fox these forty years. He will serve me lamentations on my long life wasted, and I can tell you that I am not at all happy about this. But if I stay here I will die in a rented room, swollen and purple, and they will take me out feet-first to the paupers’ field and bury me unmarked, and somehow that does not seem comfortable.’
Flora would have liked to touch him, to put her arm around his shoulders, but he had never been one for physical contact, even in the old days when she was pretty.
‘Gentry, I cannot—what you have done with the girls—there’s no payment we can make.’
‘Our ledger is balanced: I gave them a first season, they gave me a last season. You will not mention any shadow of illness to them, if you please. I’d as soon they thought of me as hale.’
He was moving through the room now, putting objects in piles as if his packing had begun, his limp very marked. Flora felt her own legs twist and swell, every joint racked to match his. He was very old.
This is what comes to us, she thought—lonely exile, a time with those who don’t know us, death. She could feel her heart beating; she could see, in a drift of snow, Arthur lying still.
‘My husband killed himself,’ she said.
Gentry came to her side, and took her hands.
‘Our life could not sustain him. Our girls. After Harry died, he was not himself any longer, and then he—’
‘I am sorry,’ he said.
‘For him? Or me?’ She shook her head. No reason to have told poor Gentry this. Except to say that we all live in pain. ‘I’m sorry, Gentry. I only meant to say, everything is so sad.’
He held her hands, and there was some shred of comfort in that. He had known her when she was a girl.
But her errand was wasted. Gentry had no money to spare; she’d have to wait till her wages were paid, and the apostle spoons would have to go up the spout again. Fiddle, she thought. Arthur is dead after all and will not know. She set Gentry’s five-dollar bills on the table behind her and gathered herself to go, her natural buoyancy helping her to look cheerful despite consuming worry. She touched the back of his greyish hand, and then went out into bright sunshine, to do her duty at the Pioneer.
Bruise
The bruise on Bella’s face could be masked with an extra application of 5 and 9. Clover’s spidery fingers were gentler than Aurora’s on the swelling. Bella stared at herself as Clover dabbed: the puffing-out gave her the appearance of mumps on one side. Her cheek still hurt every time she opened her mouth to sing or chew.
She had managed to avoid the Tussler by remaining with her sisters in their dressing rooms; he and his brother did not board with Mrs. Seward, so she was not worried in the night, walking the halls to the bathroom. He hated her now, and in the theatre she could not entirely escape his baleful eye. At the end of their turn the Tusslers were always waiting in the wings to go on. Bella had twisted her steps in
I Can’t Do the Sum
in order never to look stage right; she was first off, now, and usually the first heading down the stairs. Aurora and Clover had not complained. They were being kind.
Bella could not stop thinking about the poor beaten girl, left in the snow in the darkness. But what could they do anyway? They could not bring her to live with them at Mrs. Seward’s. Bella indulged for a while in a continuing story where she rode a grey horse to the woods and found the red-haired girl, and brought her up behind the saddle and galloped
off to a peaceful farm somewhere; but that was stupid and she did not even tell Clover, who had not seen the girl, because she’d been off in the darkness with Victor.
In the second show, Bella stayed for a moment offstage to watch the Tussler fall down the set of collapsing stairs (feeling almost avenged as he conked his head on the bottom). She did not think there had been time for the Tussler to do—whatever had been done to the poor girl. But
someone
had done it, and even if she was a dance-hall girl, nobody ought to do things like that.
The wealthy Mr. Mayhew, too: he’d been Johnny-on-the-spot. Perhaps it was he who’d done it. He’d been masterful that evening, liking his own authority and liking to throw money about, as if it was still a thrill for him to take charge of helpless females and solve everything. Under his silvering beard, Mayhew seemed young in an odd way. Not confident interiorly, as Gentry was, or Victor; only polished on the exterior with his fine clothes and motorcar. He had talked importantly about ‘the wrong kind of scandal’ and had impressed the need for discretion on East and Verrall (poor Verrall still very green from being so sick), and then, reassuming his silk hat and astrakhan-collared coat, had bundled them all into his car, a Pierce-Arrow saloon car more magnificent than anything Bella had ever seen, let alone been for a ride in. Every piece of it shone in the moonlight. The seats were like leather clouds, but she wished she could have stood on the running board instead, to feel the speed as they rushed through the night back to the city and pulled up in front of Mrs. Seward’s—as if Cinderella and her Beautiful Sisters had all come home together in the coach.
Then Mr. Mayhew had melted away, as perhaps impresarios always must, and they had not seen him again.
Adjustments
Arriving at the Butte train station late in the evening, Gentry found a porter and gave him a well-shined ten-cent piece to convey his one bag to Butte’s best hotel. No economy would save
him now, might as well shoot the moon. He had stopped at the Pioneer to leave a note for Flora before leaving, explaining that he would make sure the girls were safe; through the French glass doors from the lobby he had been very much shocked to see her decked out in a full-length apron in the lunchroom, serving beans by the ladle to a rowdy table of bachelors who seemed only too familiar with her.
He’d taken care that Flora not catch sight of him, and had made his way to the train on slow pins, making some adjustments to his thinking.
I Cast My Pearls
A note from Gentry arrived in the Hippodrome dressing room in the middle of the nine o’clock show, where the girls sat mending their stockings and keeping warm as the stove died, before joining the rest of the company to make their way through the windy streets to Mrs. Seward’s.
‘A lesson!’ Aurora was surprised. ‘First thing in the morning.’
Clover paled. ‘Do you think he has had a bad report of us?’
It seemed unlikely—Robson, the Hippodrome’s manager, had made a point of congratulating the girls on their performance at the early show. But Aurora passed a restless night, and sat by the window watching the milk wagon clopping up and down the street, impatient for the time to pass till they could go to the theatre.
Although they arrived early, there he was: short as life, impatiently awaiting them on the stage. One sleepy stagehand stayed close by to do his bidding; the rest of the theatre sat empty and lonely, as always in the pale mornings.
Gentry paced back and forth on the stage in front of the Belle Auroras, occupying one as they stood in two. He seemed possessed of an urgent demon, or Legion—ideas and advice teeming from his mind and heart. They had missed him.
First, a lecture on The Voice, which he delivered at a high declarative volume, glaring into each sister’s eye in turn: ‘The voice must be flexible, to reflect what you think and feel. Able to surprise, to make the
audience remark what you make remarkable. Life in the voice springs from emotion—you must keep that emotion fresh, so that each time you sing the song is new. Technique supports you, but the work is never dulled, never the same.’
Earnest and intent that they should hold to these tenets he was giving them, he seemed terribly old and vulnerable.
‘Lehmann used to tell us,
I cast my pearls, I cast my pearls before you—are you swine, or humans who can benefit from this teaching?
’
Then Gentry abandoned philosophy and turned to technique, directing a series of exercises on the breath, breathing into the back ribs, opening out. He made them lie in a row at the edge of the stage.
They breathed obediently for an hour before he would let them up, never coming close to falling asleep because he continued to pace above them, snapping formidable fingers when they sagged in concentration. Then he put them through their repertoire, shouting or nodding his head as they pleased or displeased him. He was not unkind, even when correcting (mostly herself, and Aurora recognized that as an honour).
‘You must trust me when I tell you that the voice you hear inside that lovely head is not the one we hear outside it. Brilliance and carrying power you have, but without the true warm chest notes your soprano will always be light, disembodied, metallic—a little contrived. Your natural honesty demands better. You must reach down into yourself for that true voice, the one that is rooted at the core of your being.’
Aurora did not speak, but nodded, seeing the justice of his criticism.
‘Lyrics are specific and rarely subtle, yet their extravagance encourages you to do extravagant things which are
not untrue
. You use inflections which if they had been calculated would seem false, but which if they spring from the stimulation of a song are quite true. Rhythms, lengths of words, playing with suspending, overriding rhythm while the sense goes on—those tricks keep a song driving through the verse without rushing.’
Gentry waved an arm to the wings and the black-toothed crashbox man wheeled out their old
I Can’t Do the Sums
blackboard, covered
with new lyrics. Aurora braced herself as Gentry grabbed the chalk and began to mark the board, muttering to himself, ‘The
pipes, the pipes, are ca-all-ling …’
He turned, whirling in an excess of driving energy, cracking chalk in dagger lines above the words. ‘Sense-stress and metre-stress go against each other; you can stretch or shorten words as you sing—syncopate them, or linger on a syllable, a phrase, to enliven meaning.’
White lines dashed on the board: Aurora thought of Papa, teaching them dactyl and spondee, feet and metre, flashing white text, with accents slashed in above. The stage blackboard merged with the blackboard in the schoolroom in Paddockwood—
And without any idea that she was about to do it, Aurora fainted.
Chicken Sandwiches
Bella and Clover crouched on the stage beside Aurora’s slumped body. ‘Well! Now what’s to do?’ asked Gentry, blankly. ‘Is it her corset again?’
‘She is hungry,’ Bella said, angry.
Aurora’s hand twitched under hers, and gripped to make her stop.
‘Did you not eat this morning?’ Gentry demanded. ‘You are always to eat before practice, I have said so.’
‘We had no money left,’ Clover said, speaking too gently for Bella’s liking. ‘But we will be paid tomorrow.’
Aurora sat up. ‘No, no, not—I was thinking of—I am very well, please.’
Gentry walked to where his snow-damped coat lay, and pulled out a paper bag.
‘Come, sit, you girls,’ he said. ‘I had forgotten the lunch.’
Four wrapped bundles in the bag. It made Bella’s mouth water just to see them. Chicken, on white rolls! ‘Thank you
very
much,’ she said, and bit ferociously down.
Clover stayed by Aurora’s side, so Gentry took the bag to them, where their skirts lay pooled on the boards, their thin torsos upright in their white shirtwaists.
‘Eat,’ he said. ‘Eat. You do not have very good voices, but you sing much better than you did.’
Even Bella could not be anything but grateful for this, especially as she ate.
‘You are not singers—’ he said, with what Bella knew he must think of as enveloping kindness in his tone. ‘But you are delightful performers. Worry less about the singing, now. Take care over your dancing steps, and enjoy yourselves, as the darlings you are—make some art, give the rubes some pleasure.’ He rubbed his hands over his face, and smearing up into his eyebrows and hair and on up to the heavens—a theatrical gesture, but not untrue.