The Melee
The Muse’s current bill, a short one, opened with the Novelli Brothers, tumbling twin violinists who were the antithesis of the Tusslers. Fey little men, they rolled and caracoled like two bits of chestnut-fluff on a zephyr. As the Novellis came running offstage, Clover would duck behind the curtain-leg to evade the delicate sweat that sprayed off their foreheads, arms and heaving chests. She had never seen men so watery before. They played their violins with precise joy even while tumbling. When the first twin had heard her playing Victor’s violin as he climbed the stairs past the girls’ dressing room, he’d offered to play with her from time to time. ‘To make a practice go more pleasing,’ he said—by which Clover knew that she was not playing well enough. She was willing to be schooled. Novelli the Elder showed her
how to allow her fingers fall over the neck to let strings sing more silkily, to make the notes fly crisp from one perch to another, no flailing in between. He was involved only in music and never offered the least effrontery; nor did Novelli the Younger. She’d have thought them nancy-boys, if she had not had East’s word on it that they spent all their money at a fleabag whorehouse farther south into the boondocks.
Professor OK Griffith, Hypnotist, came next. Clover thought him the strangest man! A round, buglike body supported on slender legs; delicate feet, the toes of his shoes curling upward. Offstage, the Professor sported a blue swallowtail coat, a vest of white duck stretched across his wide body, and trousers of fawn-coloured plush—like a riverboat gamester from the late century. For the stage, he donned a scholar’s gown of glistening silk, opening over a striped vest. His round black eyes popped more than was strictly usual, but the expression on the Professor’s face was never unpleasant.
Suggestion was OK’s first great trick. He suggested to the audience that only the highly intelligent were susceptible to hypnotism, which made them all wish to be susceptible. Reading people well was his second: he could spot lonely women and gullible men a mile away, and the ones looking for any excuse to cluck like a chicken.
Mayhew said the act stank of snake-oil, and was not intending to bring him back to the Muse. Besides, he had lost a painful amount of money to OK, playing poker one evening. Not a smart move on OK Griffith’s part, Clover thought. But perhaps he had read Mayhew, found him unsuggestible, and already knew he would not be booked again at the Muse.
Bella came to coax Clover out of the wings before the end of OK, to watch the Ninepins from the projection booth, which Clover knew was her secret hideaway—the booth was empty till late in the second half, when the projectionist would come with his oil can and prayer-book. The projection machinery was ticklish.
Nando always blew a lavish kiss up to Bella, which the girls in the balcony believed was coming to them. Twenty little arms would shoot up into the air, but Bella turned her face to the light and caught it smack upon her cheek. Clover would have worried about her except that Nando was
tremendously well behaved, and under his father’s bloodshot eye near every minute of the day. Mrs. Dent was so sweet and weak, she could have used a girl about. If Bella had been eighteen, Clover thought, she’d have been off with the Knockabout Ninepins in a flash, taking her knocks as a fourth member of their troupe. Joe Dent would not take her until then.
But Joe might not last that long. Tonight he was struggling through their act. The Ninepins were working these days with a breakaway wall, spring-hinged windows and doors, and a couple of hidden springboards, all of which seemed to be nipping at Joe’s heels. Nando said you had to be wide awake, or the scenery would spank some sense into you. When they were first setting up, he sat beside them and described everything: ‘And that rotating thing there is the paraturn, of course …’
Clover bit. ‘What’s a paraturn?’
‘About two bits an hour, if he’s got good references.’
He made her laugh even more than East and Verrall.
In their
A Good Night Out
number, Nando and his father were two burglars in dark suits and half-masks, wild fake hair escaping from dark cloth caps. Each scaled the wall for separate nefarious purposes, scrambling over the bricks as if it were horizontal instead of vertical. Nando tumbled out through an upper window, Joe through a bottom—they collided—and the chase was on. Just as the schtick was getting a little familiar, Mrs. Dent appeared from a hidden alcove with a board, whacked Nando, and vanished again. Next time Joe went by, her arm snaked out and whacked
him
one. Clover always loved that, when Mrs. Dent got one in on Joe. Nando and Joe, each thinking the other had hit him, went for each other and fought in and out the windows. The business was repeated with a bucket of water—but just as Joe kicked Nando out the bottom window, both of them sopping wet, they spotted Mrs. Dent at the top with the bucket and realized she had done it.
Then the music picked up wildly and all three of them were in and out the doors and windows like mice or snakes. In the melee, Joe caught Mrs. Dent a good clip on the side of her head with his lump-filled burglar sack
(clang!
from the cymbals) that whooshed her in through the bottom window in a heap, and gave a terrible clout to Nando
(clang!)
that sent
him flying ten feet straight up into the upper window. For an instant Joe stood victorious on the stage. Then Nando and Mrs. Dent flew back to the attack, and the fight was on again, in and out and up and down. Clover got dizzy watching—like a shell game, she had no idea who was where.
The music blared, and all three of them emerged from the same upper window, stuck fast, stuck—till their pounding caused the whole wall to collapse in a cloud of white chalk dust. The cloud hung for a minute, then the three of them emerged for a bow, in whiteface rather than blackface, coughing and wheezing. Even back in the booth, where they could not possibly hear her, Clover clapped like mad.
Down to Twelve
Bella slipped out of the booth and dashed back round the theatre in the cool night air, to help Nando towel off the white dust from his act. She didn’t like that dust; it made Nando cough. Behind the curtain stagehands were busy with wet mops while the audience exploded into noise and swelled out into the lobby and the street for a breath of air. Bella examined Nando for bruises and cuts, as she always did, and he laughed and showed his unmarked face, saying, ‘You should see the other fella.’
Joe was mopping himself down in a fairly good humour. It wasn’t till after the show and back at the hotel that he became difficult. His excessive energy could be useful: the first place the Ninepins had stayed in south Edmonton had burned down—Joe had got them all out, and went back to get other tenants out too. When he came out of his berserker mood later, on the smoking grass, they saw the one treasure he’d managed to save from their luggage: a bar of soap. It was their third boarding-house fire, Nando said, and each time his father had saved a bar of soap. He was good in an emergency but a terrible fellow for ordinary life.
At the dressing table, Myra Dent pulled a washcloth over her face and stared blankly into the mirror. Myra still had a girlish figure, high breasts and slim waist, but her face was cut so deep in sad lines that it seemed she could not smile. Nando was not much of a smiler either. Only
Joe: big teeth grinning in his round face, little eyes stalking round the room for something to get mad at.
A knock on the door, and there was Fitz Mayhew, just the ticket.
‘What were you doing a-standing there offstage like that?’ Joe shouted, going from his self-satisfied hum to rage in a winking. ‘Puts me off! It’s dangerous!’
‘Timing you,’ Mayhew said. ‘Seventeen minutes, Joe.’
‘We’ve never gone over fifteen in our lives!’
Bella and Nando and Mrs. Dent all seeped back into the walls, white into whitewash, as Joe swelled and darkened with rage.
‘Well, you’re going down to twelve, tomorrow. Figure what to cut, and I’ll see you at the band call at eleven.’
‘You can’t cut us! Who do you think you fecking are?’
‘I’m the bloody boss around here, that’s who. Cut to twelve, or you’re cut for good.’
You had to hand it to Mayhew for laying down the law, Bella thought. He stayed steady even while Joe came at him, though Joe outweighed him by fifty pounds and was known as a scrapper. Mayhew’s cigar came pointing out, that’s all: ‘Don’t press me, Joe. I won’t take guff from a drunk. You’ll end up in the tank tonight if I have to call for help.’
‘I’m not drunk!’
‘If you were, you’d be fired.’
For a moment it seemed that Joe would jump Mayhew, and Bella felt Nando tense beside her. But he subsided, slumping his shoulders back down, turning his head from side to side. ‘After a show, medicinal purposes only,’ Joe said. ‘Have one with me then, Fitzie.’
Mayhew smiled then, never one to say no to a shot himself. He took the glass from Joe and knocked it back. ‘You watch it,’ he said, still smiling. ‘You’ve got a reputation for precision. Don’t want to sully that.’
There was something about Mayhew that Bella found unsettling, lately. He was reckless in some ways, and acted unpredictably. Perhaps Aurora could predict him. Bella shivered and gave Nando a smearing kiss before she dashed off to her own dressing room, one flight down.
Far, Far Away
To revamp their number, and against their protests, Mayhew had insisted that they do
The Rosary
, which he called French on grounds of its sheer Catholicism. They obeyed, but with shame. Gentry had been entirely right to disdain it. ‘Oh,
how I hate this tawdry song,’
Aurora sang softly, as the intro ran on, turning her cheek into the light and making her throat into a silver funnel for false and holy prettiness. Clover hid a laugh. Mayhew would not let them sing it at anything approaching a bearable tempo, so they were forced to moo slightly.
‘The hours I spent with Thee, Dear Heart!
Are as a string of pearls to me
,
I count them over, every one apart
,
My rosary, my rosary!’
‘My Gent-a-ry, My Gent-a-ry!
’ Bella sang for Clover’s ears only. ‘
O King of excellent taste, we loved you so.’
Funny that Bella would remember Gentry with such fondness; she was always asking for news of him, from any artistes who’d been out east. Not that they ever heard much; he had disappeared into retirement like a bear into a cave—but, Clover thought (stepping sedately through ‘to
still a heart in absence wrung …’
), they would have heard if he had died.
At last,
My Rosary
over, they processed mournfully offstage to a tiresome sprinkle of applause from the saps who actually liked the song.
The girls crowded back into the wings stage right to peel off their vestal-white gowns and scamper into their second costumes, low-cut waltz-length gowns with flower wreaths round the neck for the sappy
L’Air Printemps
. Mama adjusted the wreaths and they flew out, one-two-three: fifteen seconds in all.
They pas-de-trois’d Muse-like round and round, again feeling the energy leaking out of the act. The city was tired of them, and no wonder, after sixteen months. Clover and Aurora moved through a tricky series of arabesques while Bella danced off to get into her
bumble-bee wings; they wafted into the ether of spring, the music metamorphosed, and Bella came clumping on in her bee costume: a comedy no matter how you tweaked the wings.
‘Be my little baby bumble bee
(Buzz around, buzz around, keep a-buzzin’ ‘round) …’
Nothing fazes Bella, Clover thought, watching from the darkness. Bella’s plump bosom filled up the stripey dress so nicely. Clover’s own chest was two separate little teacups, but Bella had turned out almost upholstered, her rounded robin’s front very appealing.
‘Let me spend the happy hours
Roving with you ’mongst the flow’rs
And when we get where no one else can see
(Cuddle up, cuddle up, cuddle up) …’
There she went, flirting with the men in the first row of the balcony. Every few steps she’d hop-sidle, in sweet imitation of a bee landing on a flower clump. Mama had tried to infuse this dance with a bit more grace but had thrown up her hands in the end and told Bella to dance it her own way.
‘I’ve got a dozen cousin bees
But I want you, to be my baby bumble bee!’
The stage manager, Teddy, grinned as he watched Bella, showing tiny upper teeth in a very even row, so that they looked as if they might have been filed off. He was decent and kind, as they had come to know, but Clover could never feel entirely easy with him. She waited till he’d turned his back before slipping her
Spring
dress off, and the
Per Valli
costume on, over her head.
Per Valli
was her favourite song in the world, Clover had decided. It was Italian, not French, but Mayhew hadn’t seemed to notice.
Perfect to sing with Aurora, whose lovely high register had got better and better while working with Gentry, and ever since, continued to put his lessons to use. Clover dashed across the dark stage behind the second drop, and slowed her breathing in time to enter as Bella bumbled off, taking advantage of the wave of applause the audience always gave her bee-costume and general odour of honey-sweetness.
The audience settled in the dark, seeing Aurora and Clover reappear.
Another damn song
, you could almost hear them thinking. But they would like this.
‘Per valli,’
Aurora called.
‘Per boschi,’
Clover answered, and they were off.
The song went over valleys and forests, searching for the beloved, Clover singing the darker second line and searching in her heart for where Victor might be, going through his calendar in her mind’s eye. September 30, Cincinnati to St. Louis.