She excused herself, and went to the ladies’ powder room, where she carefully washed off the 5 and dabbed her face back into plainness. Because Arthur—
All the superficial things—but beneath that, the immovable rock of memory. The silence in the night when Arthur was outside and she’d known he was out there and unable to bear his life. He’d been infinitely more to her than any other could be, and it was her fault that he died. It was her fault that Harry died.
She leaned on the marble counter, then pushed herself away and stood straight. In the mirror she saw a very tired older woman, with a stricken face and a long past behind her. A bundle of lies she’d told her beloved husband and a package of make-believe she’d sold her daughters, and with all that, she could not bring herself to take on Fitz Mayhew.
‘I’m sorry, your tea must be growing cold,’ she said, gliding back to the table.
‘Neither the tea nor my heart!’ His humour a little ponderous as always.
‘Oh!’ Then she was at a loss. She poured a cup of tea.
‘I don’t know how to begin,’ he confessed, looking up with a frank expression of hopeless vulnerability. ‘It’s caught me late. I’m not used to this!’
She truly did feel sorry for him.
‘You’ve probably seen how it is for me,’ he said. ‘I’m head over ears, but I wasn’t sure how you—’
She began to stop him, but he broke in.
‘Oh, Flora, just tell me, can I have your dear girl? I would keep her very well.’
She looked up then, suddenly, into his eyes. Pale blue and staring, straw-coloured lashes standing stiff out from them, faint blueness under the skin around the eyes. So old! For a brief instant she stared. Then she lowered her eyelids, and then her face, and bit the inside of her cheek till it bled.
He leaned forward. ‘I see you are not prepared for this.’
She shook her head, rapid, almost furtive. Eyes still downcast to her hands, twined in her lap.
‘Maybe you don’t like to think of your daughter—’
Up came her eyes again, and he stopped.
They sat without speaking for a moment.
‘Flora, I think you have got the wrong end of the stick.’ He shifted a little in his cretonne chair, yanked it slightly off its line, put his stiff hands on the armrests. ‘I’m not—I’m not suggesting anything you wouldn’t like, you know. I want to marry the girl.’
She was unable to make herself speak.
Fitz leaned back again and gave a gusty sigh. A waiter zoomed to his side. ‘A whiskey,’ Fitz ordered. ‘And the bottle.’
The locket around Flora’s throat was choking her but she did not think she could make her fingers undo the catch. Such deep shame had bloomed in her belly and groin that she was afraid she might hemorrhage. A wave of heat poured upward from there, up her chest and throat. She must be a hideous colour but could not for the life of her manage to breathe, to get rid of the shame of it, of thinking it was she—
Fitz poured himself a whiskey and she reached for the bottle and poured a slug into her tea. He laughed. He knocked back his, and she took a good sip of hers.
‘You’ve surprised me,’ she said. ‘You are right. I—a mother …’—try again!—‘She was my little girl, you know, for a very long time.’ Clover! Clover had known, last night. She took another drink of tea, wishing she’d poured a more generous dot from the bottle.
‘Oh, Flora, I know.’ She knew he was going to say it, and then he did. ‘But you will not be losing your daughter,’ he said. Some lightning must have alerted him in her eyes.
‘Or
gaining a son! Hardly that! We are contemporaries and must always be!’ His arm flew out and the waiter was there in a trice, and back again in another with a second glass.
Mayhew poured a couple of fingers and handed the glass to her. ‘You can’t drink that in tea.’
Then she could laugh and drink her shot. They laughed together and he poured another for each of them, and the worst of the shame receded, heat borne backwards on that wave of reliable warmth. There was some consolation in being pole-axed by someone who could afford a very good whiskey.
The Old Soldier
Mama had been drinking. She flitted around the dressing room, hanging clothes and tidying, an agitated moth brushing against things, her cloud of soft brown hair passing too close to the gas-jet every time she went by, so that Clover’s attention had to dart after her.
Mama halted by the table where Aurora was doing her face. ‘Has he—made up to you already?’
She stared into Aurora’s face in the mirror, her own beside it. Clover saw how alike they were in certain ways, in expression rather than shape of face or colouring. Aurora had their father’s fairness. Then Mama was off again, moving, picking up Bella’s boots and brushing mud from their tips with a fold of her new dove-coloured walking skirt, so that Clover went to her and took them, and smoothed the skirt down. Mama flicked at it and turned away, jagged motions, saying,
‘Stop
, Clover. Don’t fuss at me.’ She sat in the armchair.
‘No, he hasn’t,’ Aurora said.
‘Hasn’t what?’
‘Hasn’t done a thing. Hasn’t fondled me or made sheep’s eyes at me or anything. He probably felt a little awkward, being your old pal.’
Bella came bursting in from the hotel sketch. ‘Julius’s toupée came off, but the bald wig underneath came with it!’ she told Mama. ‘They’re fixing it on with spirit glue—What’s going on?’ She could see that Mama was not attending.
Clover took pity on her. ‘Mr. Mayhew spoke to Mama this afternoon, to see whether he might—he wants to—’
‘Oh!’ Aurora cried. ‘Out with it! He wants to marry me, that’s all.’
Bella stood still, staring.
Aurora stared back, as if reading Bella’s thoughts. ‘He likes my looks, I suppose.’
Mama shook her head, and was going to speak, but she looked suddenly up at the ceiling and then bolted out of the room. Clover looked after her.
‘I’d leave her, if I was you,’ Aurora said. ‘It’ll take her a day or two to talk herself round.’
Clover nodded.
‘Mayhew?’ Bella asked. ‘Will you be rich?’
Aurora laughed. ‘It’s not so strange. Look at Evelyn Nesbit. Sanford White was thirty years older than she. It happens all the time.’ She set her brushes at the edge of her towel perfectly even, and then, telling Clover and Bella to hurry, went out and up the stairs.
Maybe not the happiest analogy, Clover thought, seeing that Sanford White ended up murdered.
‘He asked permission before he even spoke to her!’ Bella said, hurrying into her white skirt for their number. ‘He is a strange customer.’
Clover shook her head and put a finger to her lips, in case anyone could hear.
Bella said quickly, ‘I mean, it was extremely polite of him.’ And then, more quietly, ‘He is the oldest person we know, now Gentry is gone. But I’d rather marry Gentry, wouldn’t you?’
Clover turned away from the dressing mirror. ‘Maybe it is like the Old Soldier in
The Twelve Dancing Princesses
—how at the beginning he is so decrepit and exhausted by the wars, but he is brave and resourceful and kind, and then he marries the oldest daughter.’
And Bella seemed happy enough with that explanation.
A Practical Provposal
Aurora was not surprised, of course, but did not know how to proceed. Especially since she was not sure how Mama felt about Mayhew, and the whole idea. A card came down at
intermission to say that after the second show the Pierce-Arrow would be waiting for her, to take her out for a late supper.
Mayhew had caused a bower to be built in the ballroom at the Placer Hotel: white gauze cascading down from a ring in the ceiling to make a silken tent within the golden room. The white carpet laid as a path across the polished floor to the tent was lined with lilies, looking to Aurora’s eyes rather funerary, but unquestionably opulent. A roving violinist played Kreisler, never wandering too near. Waiters appeared, vanished; plates materialized upon the table and her glass was refilled—bubbles rose in straight, slow-moving, perfect lines from the stem to the lip.
Aurora thought about bread and milk for supper, about holes in shoes and kerosene cans around bed-legs.
‘You’ll have been told,’ he said, and she thought perhaps he blushed in the candlelight. ‘What I proposed to your—to Flora.’
She nodded, smiling at him; unable not to smile.
‘How would we deal together? Hey? Do you think?’
She set her glass down; it was again replenished. Mayhew’s flick dismissed the waiter. Was this the entire proposal? She’d imagined something more flowery.
‘You and the girls, and your mama, need protection. A weary business, booking and managing: I offer my poor efforts at your service. A practical arrangement.’
Aurora had already determined to accept him. He would not keep them on the bill otherwise; there was a vein, a lode, of untrustworthiness in him, and she did not think his support would outlast a refusal for long. She had that lode of selfishness herself and did not shy away from seeing it in him. This was their ticket. They’d seen over the past week what life in his train would be: good hotels, good service, no more worrying over pennies and pawnshops, no more hungry nights for Clover and Bella. Already Bella’s eyes were bright again; even Clover looked less tired after a few days with lots to eat.
Mayhew sat watching her, one leg crossed over the other in a lazy, confident attitude; but the look on his face was not lazy. Not confident either. It was very gratifying to be so admired. He leaned forward and
reached for her hand across the table, and when he had captured it, sat staring at her smooth-skinned fingers where they wound in and out of his.
‘I’ll tell you true, you have enflamed me. My soul is not my own.’
He did not seem entirely comfortable uttering these high-flown statements, but there was no doubt that he was sincerely struck by her.
She rose from the table, and stretched her hands up to touch the white silk roof with her fingertips, letting her back arch. Her hair felt heavy on the back of her head. Clover had coiffed it in the Gibson manner, with an extra rat to give it superabundance; Mama had finished stitching her ivory satin bodice during the second show, sewing up the back seam right on her: décolletage more daring than she’d had before, and she was wearing the gold locket they’d reclaimed from pawn. The plum velvet cummerbund matched a tiny bunch of velvet pansies on the bodice, pinned so that their weight pulled the satin down a little, a sweet revealing swoop.
He was waiting for her to speak.
‘I think we will deal very well together, Fitz,’ she said. ‘I think we will be the best team in vaudeville!’
When he stood and took her in his arms to kiss her forehead, all that was appropriate with the waiters and violinist still present, she felt him, his—prodding between her legs, as if it knew its place. He did not grind at her, as Maurice Kavanagh had done, but pulled back a little, releasing her.
‘Don’t be afraid, I would not demand too much of you,’ he said.
She kissed him, then, leaning forward—his mouth much fresher and sweeter than she had expected. He was older than Kavanagh, even. (Older than Papa, in fact, but she shut that piece away from her thinking because it contained Papa and was not to be dwelt on.) She had the power, but he had the purse strings and the authority. She liked his clothes and his money, she told herself. And the fearfulness in his eyes at her gaze. She would have to take care of him, in certain ways, and that was appealing too. Jimmy the Bat was in Winnipeg with Mrs. Masefield, probably taking a bouquet of white roses to her
boudoir, probably walking across the floor in his polished dance-mules, offering her his arm, his evening coat brushed and his white tie snugged tight. And Mrs. Masefield would be putting one of her alabaster arms around his neck
anyway
.
So what was she to do but take Mayhew?
A Sparkling Eye
Sybil claimed the credit for it, having introduced them, as she repeated to Mama eighteen times a day: ‘—and I said how it would be, at that instant!’ Julius bent from his remote height to wish Aurora the best, in ornate prose. East laughed; Verrall turned away abruptly before turning back to tell her with some ferocity that Mayhew was the luckiest man in the world.
The thing was done, more or less, though there were details to be decided.
‘Not sure we want a long engagement, but we don’t know each other too well just yet,’ Mayhew had said, and Aurora was grateful for it. ‘Don’t want to attend with wedding plans immediately …’
Did he mean
contend?
That was the biggest stumbling block for her, Mayhew’s occasional lapses in language. Sometimes she couldn’t even trace back what word he had meant to say. She could see that Clover despised him slightly for it. But it was an innocence in him, too. It made her feel like Papa in the schoolroom, waiting patiently as poor Oscar Meller’s meaning emerged through his broken English. As she had loved that patience in her father, she loved that Mayhew brought it out in her.
‘We’ll make a thing of it in the press,’ he’d said. ‘Use it as a draw—what are we, April now? Let’s say late May, to make you Mrs. Mayhew.’
Next night the dressing room was filled with flowers—twenty dozen white roses, Bella counted for her. At the end of the show there was a boy at the door with a box of chocolate bonbons and a bottle of champagne. But no Mayhew. From some unexpected delicacy he stayed out of Aurora’s way for several days, letting business take him down to Butte and Missoula on a quick tour of theatres there.
At first it was a relief, not to have to see him. But as more days went by it was odd, then irritating. She
wanted
to marry him, wanted to have him look after her, after them all. That was a slightly delicate matter: how responsible would he make himself for her sisters and Mama? There was a great deal that had not been said and she did not yet feel able to make him say it.
In his photograph, newly posted in the lobby—top hat and cane and white kid gloves—he was not unhandsome. She tried to see past the stiff rustiness of his hair, the wrinkles around his mouth, age everywhere. His air of fashion could only survive at a distance. Close up, nothing about him wakened her or made her warm, nothing caused the delicious snake to curl over in her belly. But she would go through with it, she told herself. She would get pleasure out of making him cry out, out of her own supremacy. And the whole idea of crossing into the real world of marital love was exciting to her.