The daughter’s name was Xiang, Bella whispered, and she had discovered the name’s meaning also:
cloud
. Her own name meaning
beautiful
, she said in Clover’s ear, under cover of the tinkling Eastern music, was nothing but a joke these days: there were horrible spots popping out on her face and the pudge around her middle had stayed even when there was not enough to eat. She hated herself, she said, but Clover squeezed her hand and told her to be patient, and she would be the most beautiful swan of all of them.
Clover did not like the magician’s act, in which he swallowed a long length of thread followed by a bristling quiverful of sewing needles. She could feel the needles entering her own mouth and throat, and had to close her eyes. At his command, his daughter-assistant began drawing the long thread from his mouth, and there, suspended at regular intervals, were the needles,
all threaded
, on it. It made Clover shudder. She did like when he turned a child’s dollhouse on a lazy Susan to reveal a tiny Chinese doll standing in the inside rooms. He twirled the house again, and the doll inside had grown much larger, straining at the rooftop. At the next turn, the doll was Xiang, and she rose through the roof to jump into his arms.
Julius Foster Konigsburg was up next, by himself, in full Protean mode with his Voices of Kipling medley. He began in a great mysterious cloak with
If
, using the cloak (wire rigging built into it) to mask his gyrations as he changed costume for each new poem. He ended in a torn and stained Indian army uniform, for
Gunga Din
; the cloak, dropped, formed a muddy battlefield.
‘Ah, this brings back memories,’ Sybil whispered, with a sentimental squeeze of Clover’s hand. ‘Julius used to do
Gunga Din
regular, you know, he was famous for Kipling.’ She gave a quick quiet laugh. ‘As they say,
I don’t know, I’ve never Kippled!
—but he only does it now out here in the sticks, because Clifton Crawford has been doing it in Boston and New York and Albee asked Julius to stop.
Asked
, don’t make me laugh! As if he’d have a choice, when Albee
asked!’
‘But this isn’t even an Albee theatre!’
‘As you say! Except that now, whenever he does the bit, someone
is sure to come up and accuse him of copying Crawford, and you know there’s nothing sooner puts poor Jay in a rage than being accused of any kind of stinginess of spirit like imitation.’
‘No wonder—it is entirely unfair!’
Sybil squeezed her arm and cozied a little closer. ‘You’re a dear girl, Clover. We never had a daughter, but if we
had
had, I’d have liked her to be just like you.’
Clover was abashed. She could not imagine being Sybil’s daughter.
Julius had come to the end and shouted the last line,
‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!
’—then ripped his uniform away and stood in Gunga Din’s filthy linen wrap and shawl, bandy legs brown and bruised—which worried Clover until she realized it was only his dreadful ochre makeup. Then there was a terrifying blast of artillery fire and a vile puff of smoke, which drifted off into silence to reveal the linen clout, empty on the floor.
The audience applauded with moderate enthusiasm, but one lady in the front row, in a great black hat with red feathers and a veil, kept clapping wildly, and jumped up crying, ‘Do it again, Sonny, it’s great!’ Her escort tried to quiet her, and the people close by
shh
ed, but she would not be silent. She announced in a
forte
voice, ‘I paid my money, and if I want to encore an act I’m going to do it.’
By this time the audience had become interested. Mattie stepped out from behind the proscenium arch and asked the woman not to talk so loud, as she was stopping the show.
‘I don’t care,’ she shouted. ‘My money is as good as anyone else’s, and I mean to have that handsome quick-change man on again. He’s the best thing in the show!’
‘Behave yourself, madam,’ Mattie warned. ‘Or we will send for the police!’
With a banshee shriek the woman brangled down into the orchestra pit and took three wild leaps—piano bench, keyboard with a reverberating dischord, piano lid—and then hopped up onto the stage, where she began to wrestle Mattie, bringing whoops and shouts for the manager from the audience.
She got the poor boy into a headlock, but he wriggled around like a greased pig and managed to tear the hat and veil off the lady—
And
she
was Julius.
‘If you can’t amuse ’em, amaze ’em,’ Sybil whispered to Clover. Under cover of the renewed applause they slipped out the back.
Not Pity Alone
Mayhew, standing to watch at the back of the house, followed the women down to the dressing rooms. He was thinking about girls and women, as he often had in a long life spent in theatres of one kind or another. Sybil, that old warhorse; Flora. Game old girls, a sad life behind each one. But pity was not everything, not anything much at all. Not pity alone.
He was not affected by Clover or Bella. It was all Aurora for him: the soft rounding of her chin, the eyes. And the mouth—at odd moments her mouth would look like she’d been hit, and must be shielded. It was the frailty that caught at him. How they were not quite professional, no matter how they twinkled and light-stepped. That was the charm of
Les Très Belles Aurores
—it would translate especially well if they were foreign waifs. He could make something of them …
He knocked at the door of their dressing room.
Aurora had taken down her mass of pale hair and was brushing it out, silk tatters, silk ribbons, dark yellow, paler yellow and gold, black brush sliding through the silk over and over. Smooth-spun floss, curving feathers at the ends. Black velvet ribbon down the back of her neck where the knobs of bone showed too clearly—and yet the softness of the line!
At first she did not see him; then she did. She did not turn around, but remained at her table, brushing her hair, watching him in the mirror. A self-conscious ploy. Her idiotic youth tore him open. Anxious fingernails bitten to the quick, beneath the pretty net gloves. Her mouth’s betraying softness that no hard expression could control. Her eyelashes were black against the white lids, thickly mascara’d. Yet he
had seen her without stage makeup and knew them to be genuinely dark, set delicate as mink paintbrushes in the porcelain eyelids.
He had not thought like this for so long. He had not thought he ever would again.
Contagious
Flora and the girls were invited again, with East and Verrall, Julius and Sybil, to an early dinner on Sunday, a special feast prepared by the Placer chef. Mayhew held forth on the future of vaudeville as they waited for the first course to be served. ‘The Parthenon circuit is going to get a tremendous boom from this new stagehand expense deal in the big-time. Big-time acts will come to us where they can play in decent houses at smaller salaries, but with consecutive bookings and a family atmosphere behind the curtain as well as out front.’
One arm draped along Mayhew’s chair-back, the other occupied in draining a large brandy and soda, Julius had merely to raise an eyebrow to encourage the flow.
‘But that does not mean,’ Mayhew said, ‘any diminument in our loyalty to the faithful medium-time acts which have stood by the company in times past.’
Verrall choked, then quickly asked whether there might be holes in the big-time, at this rate. Mayhew thought there might be, for a suitcase outfit that could travel without sets or stagehands. ‘It will be contagious on you to take every advantage of the situation,’ he said.
Flora did not mind the occasional miswording; she basked in Mayhew’s golden spotlight. He’d been a jumped-up boy in the old days and was much the same now, with a patina of prosperity overlaying his familiar charm.
At the end of the evening, while the party was fetching wraps from the cloakroom, Mayhew managed to lead Flora apart from the others into the lee of the shining oak staircase.
‘Thought you’d like to see this,’ Mayhew said, showing Flora a yellow telegraph form he’d pulled out of his inner pocket. The manager’s report from their last week in Billings:
BELLE A’S
:
AS SQUARE AND HIGH-TONED A LITTLE TEAM AS EVER CAME ROUND THE CIRCUIT. IT’LL BE A PLEASURE TO READ THEIR NAMES ON THE BOOKING LIST AGAIN
.
ON THE JOB TO THE MINUTE, STRAIGHT HOME AFTER THEIR ACT, EACH ONE A LADY AND NOT ONE A QUEEN
.
‘You can be proud of those girls, Flora,’ he said.
Flora did not speak, but nodded.
Each one a lady
. That was what mattered, that’s what she’d been able to give them. She and Arthur between them, give him his due.
Mayhew looked at her earnestly. ‘What a job you’ve done! No time just now, but—’
She looked up, dashing wetness from below her eye.
‘Could you grant me a few moments alone, my dear Flora? Perhaps tomorrow, right after the first show goes up? I’ll take you to tea,’ he said. ‘It’s a delicate matter.’ He seemed to hover between smiling and embarrassment.
Flora stared at him for a moment. Then he reached out and squeezed her hand, and she saw that his eyes were—
beseeching
was the word that sprang to her mind. She returned his smile, and the pressure of his hand. ‘I’d be very happy to have tea,’ she said, gently taking over. ‘I’ll be in the lobby as soon as the overture begins.’
She would wear her new dove-coloured walking suit. And the pheasant-wing hat, and her locket, which she’d been able to redeem. It was time to re-enter the world, her period of mourning done.
But that night Flora woke in a panic from a dream: kneading bread in the summer kitchen at Paddockwood, watching Arthur walk over the field from the schoolhouse—her hair unpinned, arms floured to the elbows, the apron loose around her middle, which was big with Harry. Arthur walked in, lifting her easily up onto the dry-sink edge to kiss her without ceasing, bundled belly and flour and all. He did not speak, did not need to, only enveloped her, loving her for her true self, as she did him. The girls were singing in the parlour and
she was beloved and the bread would rise and Harry would be born—
Not Harry. She struggled awake and put that aside. Travelled backwards in the dream and found Arthur again walking across the field and the shape he made against the pale sky and the full-carved shape of his mouth after love, and how she had loved him.
Mayhew was nothing to her. A dynamo of a manager, pleasant company.
But she ought to accept his proposal, whatever it might be, for the sake of the girls. She ran her hands down the bodice of her nightgown to her child-bagged belly. How could she bear to? When she was so old. But people did. You often heard of late marriages. Or late arrangements of convenience.
Flora pushed the covers aside and fit her feet into her house-shoes. She let herself out, leaving the door on the latch, and made her way to the privy through the darkness of the yard.
Wafting Like a Ghost
When Clover heard Mama come inside again, she pushed past the panel of the hall curtain and went towards her.
‘Oh, Clover!’ Mama whispered. ‘You took ten years off me, wafting like a ghost!’
‘I heard you get up,’ Clover said. ‘I heard you weeping.’
‘No, no, no need. I just had a dream.’
Clover was shivering. Mama wrapped her arms around her and the shawl about them both. ‘I’m to have tea with Mr. Mayhew tomorrow, during the first show, and I will try to let him down as easy as I can. Your father’s memory is sacred to me.’
Clover looked down at the floor, at the parting line between the drugget carpet runner and the whitewashed floorboards. Snow on the front yard. Her father sprawled, snow on his black back and legs, red underneath him. Only a body, though, nothing left of himself. She trembled a little and her mother tightened the arm around her.
‘I am sorry,’ Mama said. ‘Never mind it. Forget what I said. He loved us so.’
Clover wished she could erase the parts of her memory that did not tally with Mama’s sweet remembrance. ‘I thought it was Aurora that Mr. Mayhew wanted,’ she said, pretending to be puzzled—the only way she could think to save her mother from humiliation.
‘Aurora!
She is thirty years younger than he!’
Clover went down the hall, feeling indeed like a ghost, one who could not make people listen.
Permission
Flora stayed in the dressing room after the girls had gone up, giving her skin a lustrous glow with just a very little ivory 5. The least suspicion of mascara under the shading black velvet brim. She looked very well, she thought. A dash of powder. There. He understands this world, that is the great thing, she thought. She would not have to justify the frippery nature of theatre, or patiently soothe fears of licentiousness, as she’d had to do even after fourteen years with Arthur. Outrageous, since he had been so wild himself: but it was no wonder, once Chum had put the bee into his bonnet … Fitz understood you had to set preference aside from time to time, to secure a place. It was a business.
She pinched her cheeks but did not add rouge. Arthur had not liked too high a colour.
The car was waiting, but Mayhew said, ‘Will you walk? It’s a lovely evening.’
The five o’clock sun was still striking the bright windows of the city. He took her arm as they walked up the length of State Street to the Grandon, which surprised Flora a little, knowing that the Placer was his favourite. The route took them past Gentry’s building and she could not help a pang—how pleasant it would have been to form a partnership with him, odd as he was. She’d always had a soft place for Gentry.
At the Grandon, Mayhew settled her into an easy chair in the tea-lounge. A small bustle of waiters, then a lovely pot of tea steaming, and a tray of nice things to eat. It would be like this, to be married to Mayhew. All the superficial things would be delightful.