She was too sick with apprehension to enjoy the tea. Mama turned prickly around Victor; and she thought Victor might find Mama’s pretenses abominable. He would see through everything and perhaps, perhaps—Clover shook her head. He would still love her.
But they were arguing already. Mama had started in the moment he arrived, telling Victor how much he must have loved, and would now sadly miss, the Tusslers, since they were so very much like his own act. Victor had bowed, rather than speak, keeping the unspoken pact not to let Mama in on the true tale of the Tussler and Bella.
‘And you must be looking forward to the Melodrama which Mr. Mayhew is proposing! So high-toned and instructive, just the thing to raise our vaudeville above the common run.’
Clover bit the inside of her cheek.
‘But I like the common run,’ Victor said. He pulled a red rubber ball out of his pocket.
‘You are a certified genius and must scorn us mere mortal dancers and singers! But there is good in every type of act,’ Mama said.
‘I could not agree more,’ Victor said, but his voice was flat.
‘We agree, really!’ Mama said, to jolly him. ‘You like the same lovely things we do.’
‘Sometimes I do. Sometimes we agree.’
‘We enjoy a good laugh—like the Tusslers.’
Victor was oddly serious in this little argument. ‘I laughed at them because I was afraid they were hurting each other.’
So Mama became serious as well—or rather, Clover saw, she began playing A Serious Artiste, nodding sagely, invisible spectacles settling
upon her nose. ‘Oh yes, I quite agree, Art must educate! That’s what we both believe. It must be
understood.’
Victor broke into a quick laugh. ‘How can we presume to understand the mystery of art? It does not ask us to understand it, only to be present.’
‘Well, I consider that Laughter, you know, makes the Message easier to hear!’
The pompous sentimentality of this was apparently too much for Bella. She jumped up from the settee with a small, impatient shriek. ‘There is no message, Mama! Especially not in the
Très Belles
Bull-Roarers! If the turn is good, it’s good, that’s all—it doesn’t need a moral, or to be interpreted.’
Mama continued her irritating nodding. ‘Oh, dearest child, that’s very true—they understand us, because we’re just ordinary folk, like them.’
‘We are nothing like them,’ Victor said. He lounged against the table, idly winding the red ball through his finger. ‘They are citizens, we are not.’
Like a spectator at tennis, Clover looked to see how Mama would return that serve—since to her
citizen
, like
worthy
, meant the despised Aunt Queen, she could not very well class herself as a citizen too. ‘Now, my dear, dear Victor,’ Mama said. ‘You will admit that here in polite vaudeville we are all one happy family, now that certain standards are adhered to from town to town. And that we all get along beautifully, like you and my sweet Clover.’
‘On the contrary, we quarrel often. The better to love.’
‘Well, all I say is, we can move in the first circles of Society; and we work very hard to do the best we can to make the words clear and to show the purity and beauty of our girls. Crystal clear!’
She was almost defiant, and Clover was relieved to see Victor give her a tender glance. ‘Not everything can be clear,’ he said, suddenly kind, speaking to Mama’s confusion. ‘Sometimes I have no idea why I do something! I do it to provoke, to stagger—not to clarify.’
Mayhew raised his head from his paper, reminded. ‘Speaking of stagger—I’ve invited the newspaper critics to lunch at the Placer next week, and I’ll need you girls on hand all togged out.’ He nodded to
Aurora, where she sat studying her lines in the window seat. ‘Getting them well-buttered will help with publicizing your melodrama.’
Victor bowed in his direction. ‘Machiavelli in spats.’
Mama commended Mayhew on his initiative, but Clover could see she wasn’t giving up the argument with Victor, who seemed to make her as worried and confused as a small dog with a huge bone. Mama stretched out a hand to him, imploring him with great shadowy eyes to yield, to agree, to be at one with her in understanding. But Victor laughed and tossed the ball up into the air, where it became three balls, cascading down and flowing up again. Still, Mama reached out to him again. ‘The girls give people Hope, and that is so important, you know. To Entertain is a great calling, a great service. We send the audience home happy and strengthened, better able to bear their burdens.’
Victor laughed, whistled a twiddly bit of tune, and turned the red balls into a rose, which he handed her with an apologetic bow. ‘No. Not I, at least. I wish to send them home shocked, exhausted, discontented with their lives, and amazed.’
Amazed, yes, always, Clover thought. Even if you
can
amuse, amaze. Amazement is the best of all, in vaudeville.
6.
Headliners
MAY–JUNE
, 1912
The Parthenon, Helena
The Starland, Calgary
The highest salary acts are usually placed last on the bill and are referred to as headliners or features.
FREDERICK LADELLE,
HOW TO ENTER VAUDEVILLE
A
nd then the axe fell. They were still eating breakfast the next morning in the Pioneer dining room when Mayhew appeared, wearing his motoring-coat. Aurora could see he was in a taking. His face was a thunderstorm—mouth in a tight line, dark air seeming to swirl around him. He took Aurora’s arm to pull her out on the porch with him, and—an afterthought—tweaked Flora’s shoulder too.
Bella stayed at the table with Clover, unable to eat. It was frightening to be in the presence of someone so very angry. Papa had rarely given way. From the porch they heard Mayhew’s raised voice, and after a bit, a slight shriek from Flora.
Then Aurora put her head in the dining-room door, and jerked her chin. The girls got up in haste, found her already racing up the stairs, and followed.
‘We’re to be packed in half an hour,’ she told them as they ran. ‘He’s taken all his papers, the accounts, everything, out of the theatre—some intolerable slight that Mrs. Ackerman has dealt him. Mama is finding out more, but they sent me to begin.’
A very dreadful development. Bella felt ready to screech with feverish excitement.
Clover kissed her cheek and whispered, ‘Don’t! It will be all right!’
They’d cleared out their dressing room, as always on a Saturday night, to let the porters clean thoroughly over the dark-days—so all their things were in the room. And they had laundered their smalls last night and hung them by the stove.
Flora came flying up the stairs—then down again to give Mrs. Burday the news that they would be leaving without notice—and came back in a taking of her own, because
La Burday
had insisted on being
paid out for the week, though this was only Monday. Conscious of the clock, Aurora grabbed the grouch-bag from her and went, slick black shoes skating on the drugget, to settle up with Mrs. Burday; as she went she shouted for Clover and Bella to come sit on the lid of the trunk once they had added the gold silk comforter.
Clover let Bella go, and snatched the chance to run three doors down to Mrs. Denham’s boarding house, where others in the Parthenon company had rooms. East opened the door, his own case in hand, and Verrall behind him was clapping his bowler on his head—they were off that morning on a long jump to Portland for their next gig.
‘Victor?’ she asked, out of breath. Yes, he was in—his head appeared over the banister rail. She ran up two steps at a time. ‘Mayhew has told us we are to leave—Aurora says we’re going to Calgary, then Edmonton. He’s had a wire from Mrs. Ackerman that sent him into blind rage.’
Victor stared at her, still not properly awake. His fluffy hair stood up in a rooster’s comb.
‘We’re leaving!’ She stamped her foot. ‘I will never see you again!’ Then she burst into soft weeping and pulled her arm up over her eyes.
‘No, no, no,’ Victor said.
‘Yes, I am telling you!’ Her voice was muted by her sleeve.
‘No, I mean, no, you will
not
never see me again! We are conjoined! There is no other for us—and we are vaudeville people, used to separation. I am booked for San Francisco next week, but up the coast on Pan-time to Vancouver next month, and then in Edmonton myself. Come in, come in.’
Clover stood inside the door of his bedroom while Victor rummaged through his suitcase to find a booking sheet, then copied it out in his black European hand, 7s crossed with sharp lines, ds made with long rising tails.
San Francisco, Eugene, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver
—the cities formed under his pen, each with a theatre and a bracket of dates beside it, and then
Edmonton, The Empire (June 25–July 11)
. She had never been to Edmonton. She had never been inside Victor’s bedroom before. His jacket, hanging limp on the cracked closet door, broke her heart. He was wearing a shirt with no collar, grey flannel trousers; his
socks were clean as new snow. The room smelled of him, his arm smelled of him. She took the paper.
‘I will see you soon, then,’ she said. She nodded her head and pressed her hands to her cheeks. He put his arms around her again, and then she ran back, before Aurora might notice she was gone.
Within the allotted half-hour they were arrayed on the front porch. Mayhew’s long Pierce-Arrow touring car wheeled up. No train trip for them this time! Bella was thrilled to be travelling by car. Only Clover was unhappy, because she always felt sick in a car, and dreaded Mayhew’s fury. And because there was no happiness in the world. The paper on which Victor had written his dates crackled in her pocket.
The Open Road
‘It’s the lack of vision—that’s what frosts me,’ Mayhew said as they drove away, shouting to Aurora, in the seat of honour beside him. ‘I can handle any kind of slur, but what makes me impatient is abrogant stupidity.’
Did he mean arrant, or arrogant? Ignorant? Aurora closed her eyes and concentrated on the slight tremble of the wind whipping at her hat-feather, even tied under the motoring veil. Mama and Clover sat with Bella between them in the back. Aurora felt she must be grateful they’d not been left behind. Their trunks had been directed to the train station and would meet them in Calgary, which had meant a quick reassembling of overnight things in two hat boxes, now strapped up behind the boot of the Pierce-Arrow.
‘Wait!’ Aurora cried, her hand flashing to the dashboard as if to stop the car. ‘My gown! My new peau de soie, for the melodrama—please, Fitz,
please
, can we stop?’
The dressmaker lived behind her shop. Although fussed about the unturned hem, she was persuaded to give up the gown when Mayhew signed the bill to the theatre. As they pulled away, she ran after them down the street with a small package, shouting, ‘The sash!’ Bella leaned out the back and grabbed it.
They whirled past the theatre and the train station, and onto the main road rising north out of town, moving just faster than their dust. As the car swayed, the three in the back swayed together, nobody daring to say a word after that last interruption.
‘Mrs. Bloody Ackerman—bloody fool, never been the same since she took the reins, you can’t tell me he actually meant
her
to take over when he popped—It’s the lack of—’ The wind or the sound of the engine whipped away some of each sentence. Aurora sat looking straight ahead, sometimes nodding. Once she put her gloved hand on Mayhew’s knee, and he took one hand off the wheel and set it over hers.
He had talked himself into an expansive temper again by the time they stopped for the night in Shelby, at a plain-looking place that Mayhew had heard was the best hotel in town. Certainly the sheets were clean and there was a good fire in the parlour, where they sat after supper. Before long, Mayhew excused himself and went out ‘to see about the car.’ They did not see him again until morning, when he was waiting outside the hotel, in the Pierce-Arrow.
Rather than ask him to come in and pay for their room, Aurora paid. She could not help feeling the weight of the grouch-bag lessening. A momentary panic overtook her, to think that they had left the Parthenon. Mama came down the stairs with Bella, the strings of their hat boxes tangled, and Aurora did not wish her to see that she was paying their bill. But it was too late—Mama looked up and caught Aurora’s eyes, and they turned together away from the desk to look out the door at Mayhew.
‘What’s his is yours, soon,’ Mama said. ‘But what’s ours has to do for Clover and Bella too.’
‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ Aurora whispered, stooping to pick up a hat box.
Mayhew sprang out of the car as they went down the steps, to open the doors for them. ‘All aboard for the open road,’ he said, all geniality this morning. He had found a barber: his face was still bright pink from the hot towel and he smelled of bay rum and the spring wind. Aurora took some comfort from his sheer cleanliness, if not his godliness, and did not ask where he had spent the night.
A hundred miles from Shelby up to Lethbridge. In the late afternoon Aurora looked back at Mama, Bella and Clover, cramped in the rear seat—bedraggled and silent, their hair choked with dust, mouths parched—and knew herself to be in the same sad state. Only Mayhew remained spruce.
During the long drive Aurora had kept her face turned to the window, staring at the blank spring landscape, seeing only what she’d got herself into—and her sisters, and Mama. It was all down to Mrs. Ackerman, it seemed to her: if Gentry Fox had not been pushed out, they would have continued to learn from him until they were ready to make the leap to the big-time. Now Fitz was pushed out too, and they were left in mid-air, halfway between their old act and their new. And (but this was childish) she had been looking forward to the melodrama very much.