Sybil spoke with earnest emphasis: ‘Tanguay gets $3,500 a week. Miss Barrymore asks $3,000—but vaude is on the up. The trick,’ she said, flicking a jaundiced eye over the slumbering form on the sofa, ‘is making sure Julius doesn’t give up. Which he will do, he’s such a one for losing heart. Only sixty-three, but you’d never know it; he’s got a decade to go before he really
can’t
be hired, if I play his cards right and keep him off the roller skates.’
Papa would have been forty-five this year, Aurora calculated. Ten years younger than Fitz. Sybil bent over Julius, stroking his shoulder to waken him, and for a moment Aurora saw herself standing there. Blonde curls, black smudged around starting eyes, elderly husband.
Aurora promised herself that she would not let her eyes goggle like Sybil’s. But the husband was undeniable.
The door opened. As if conjured by her thoughts, Fitz Mayhew strode in with a bundle of shirts, spiced meat from the Hungarian butcher, and an armful of gold chrysanthemums. ‘Aurora! The car is waiting! You’ll miss your call!’ he shouted—then halted, seeing the array of women in front of him, and the bulk of Julius sleeping in the distance.
‘My dear, you ought to have warned me, and I’d have brought more whiskey,’ Mayhew said.
‘Yes, and you’ll need it,’ Sybil said darkly. She prodded Julius. ‘Jay! Jay! Here’s Fitzjohn back. Tell him what you want.’
‘I’ve no room at all on the bill,’ Mayhew said, but he had a laugh in his eyes. He was entirely on the ball, as always, and Aurora found herself enjoying the scene, which had taken her some time to piece together. She wondered how much Mayhew owed Julius.
Not Brought Up to It
Excusing themselves on the grounds of their early call, Mama took Clover and Bella down to dress for the theatre. ‘Can you feature it?’ Mama said, as the elevator clanked down grinding its chain. ‘What was Julius about to let her get into that state?’ She polished her wedding ring on a lifted bit of skirt. ‘He ought never to have lent Mayhew that money, but it’s hardly our funeral—she was unreasonable,
distrait
even, during our little
tête-à-tête.’
(Clover could not help a gasp of laughter whenever Mama trotted out her French.) ‘And Julius
—that word.’
She scrubbed at the ring, staring out into the bright brass cage that fell so slow. ‘Can you
feature?’
Must be close to the truth, or she would not be so distrait herself, Clover thought. She must have come pretty near it in Paddockwood, towards the end. Where is the line between being a weak, sweet, affectionate widow when the grocer comes for his bill, and being Lily Bain? A heavy
clunk
, and the cage opened, and they were set free.
Sham Friends
After the show Mayhew hosted a late dinner at the Shasta Grill, near the Pantages. Aurora hated going there; it always made Mayhew ill-tempered to see the Pantages Theatre’s opulent appointments, compared to the little Muse.
As they drove through the rainy streets, Mayhew listed the evening’s guests for Aurora: he had invited several vaudeville managers, including C.P. Walker, a Winnipegger who had taken over W.B. Sherman’s enterprises in June (Sherman retreating to Calgary with his tail between his legs). Walker wanted to discuss continued rumours of Sullivan & Considine’s demise, which would hurt them all; Mayhew discounted S&C, but had other fish to fry. He’d invited Mr. Penstenny too, the Muse’s main investor. Mr. Penstenny’s real estate wangling (he’d made a sudden fortune by being third in line when the Hudson’s Bay Company sold off their lands) had financed the Muse. Penstenny was a stout ex-grocer with darting eyes and a pouted-out mouth, exuding stockyard breath. Aurora found him physically repellent, but always made an effort to hide that, out of courtesy as well as practicality. Penstenny now had a mortgage on his office block, and she did feel sorry for him.
The Pierce-Arrow whisked them along Jasper to the Shasta, where the party settled at a large table and began, as always, with champagne. Like that night at the roadhouse, Aurora thought, feeling unaccountably tired of popping corks.
Walker arrived with Charles Gill, manager of the Pantages. Both substantial men, but Walker the sharper-eyed of the two. Mayhew put Aurora between them, and she set about her work, to fascinate the new man, Walker, and jolly the dyspeptic Gill. Mayhew would manage Penstenny.
Aurora was surprised to find Sybil and Julius present. Mayhew must be feeling guilty, she supposed at first. But then she saw that he was using them as puppets, to talk to Walker and Gill. ‘This city is on the verge of greatness,’ Mayhew was telling Julius. ‘Real estate speculation men have surveyed and laid out lots for a city the size of New York!’
Julius said, remembering his lines, ‘Four and a half millions! That’s what those chisellers at the Hudson’s Bay netted when they sold their land.’
‘A good bargain, for that land,’ Mayhew said. ‘Money is tight with the unsettling prospect of war—but it will loosen later, whether or not the war continues.’ Under this, Aurora heard Sybil and Mama reciting a rude verse about the war, cackling at the end of the table.
Julius rode over them. ‘Your house, the Muse—magnificent—full to bursting tonight!’
‘Never better!’ Mayhew lied and smiled with equal breadth. He leaned across to Gill. ‘You may say the Pantages beats us, and for size you surely do, but not for high-class acts! East & Verrall, as an example: top-draw, top-class, travel all over the continent.’
So—the theatre was successful, land values were secure, nobody need worry about their money. Not looking at Mayhew, Aurora wondered how far in debt he was, and to whom.
The courses kept coming. By 2 a.m. the wine and the warmth had sent Sybil off to sleep beside Julius. A long day for them, Aurora thought, considering they’d been rampaging at Mama’s door at ten that morning. Mama herself was having a grand blowout, and had found a kindred spirit in Mr. Walker of Winnipeg.
‘Sherman had Marie Lloyd here in January,’ she was saying. ‘Now, she needs no publicity stunts!’
‘A little of what you fancy,’ Walker said, agreeing. He winked at Aurora.
Mama flung an arm out in Marie’s dashing style—‘
There he is, can’t you see, a-waving his handkerchee!
’—and lashed a waiter who had just bent forward, Mayhew having directed him to fill her water glass. The waiter caught the pitcher, but Mama upset the glass as he poured, and icy water flooded the south end of the table. ‘Oopsy-daisy!’ she cried gaily, mopping with her napkin. ‘Fitz! Fitz! Didn’t Ziegfeld have them deliver four hundred bottles of milk for Anna Held? And when the pressmen didn’t get hold of it in time, he sued the dairyman, saying it was sour. Anything to get her in the headlines.’
Walker laughed. Mayhew was turning a cigar under his nose; he snipped it and looked up. ‘That’s the ticket, Aurora, my girl, we’ll have you bathe in milk.’
Aurora saw that Gill was a little scandalized that Mayhew would mention her naked body (or cause it to be imagined, at least) at the dinner table. Walker cast a speculative eye over her, which she caught, and returned with a minutely arched brow.
‘Onstage, Fitz?’ she asked, cool as milk herself.
She let her bare white arms float up in a flash of soap-sudsing, and the men shouted with laughter, that bursting basso shout that had flared up from her father’s card-games in childhood. She loved how it mixed with the smell of cigars and liquor, loved her skill in provoking their big-toned laugh. Walker leaned towards her, his interest caught by the glimpse of wit beneath her polished surface.
But Mayhew raised an imaginary hat to her, not smiling, and she looked away, putting a hand across the table to ask Mama if she would like a soda water.
The night wore on, and the talk turned to the war, and to despairing, at least from Gill. Not Walker, who seemed a sensible man: ‘Oh, war will be bad for vaudeville, take it from me—but we’ll do better in polite vaudeville than the burlesque houses will, when their audiences disappear. My wife reminds me that when the men go off to war we’ll still have the women and children, anxious to forget their troubles.’
Already, Aurora considered, they were seeing this very thing at the Muse.
‘Unpleasant bully-ragging in Europe,’ Julius pronounced, peering from his fug. ‘Weeping sore, can be lanced. Strike hard and sharp.’
How Julius loves to look wise, Aurora thought. But she had begun to despise everyone. A darkness had slid over the world.
True Pain
The party broke up around four without anything secured, as far as Aurora could see. They were the last to leave
the dimming Shasta. Mayhew’s flourishing signature on the bill, and a fat tip in bills pressed into the maître d’s hand, seemed to console the staff.
The elevator struggled up, first to Mama’s floor to let her totter out, then to theirs, doors clanging as they shut and opened, even though Mayhew put out a gloved hand to damper the noise.
‘You seemed to get along very well with Walker,’ he said, throwing his gloves on the table in the hall. ‘He’s hired Julius. Did he boast? Given him dates in Winnipeg as well, the remainder of the year. Shows his lack of discrimination, I suppose.’
Mayhew was jealous; Aurora had had to turn down her lamps at dinner. Irrational, since he’d been using her to sweeten the table; and now it likely meant a sleepless night while he railed at her misbehaviour and then took her with some force. Sometimes that was good, the race of it making her blood thump, but tonight she was unaccountably tired and only wanted sleep.
He came to take her cloak and held her, his fingers pressing underneath her arm so as to leave no bruise visible onstage. He was never entirely blind to practicality.
‘You’re hurting me,’ she said, gently pulling away. You had to be careful not to escalate things, with Mayhew.
‘Oh, it’s a world of hurt,’ he threw at her, and crashed the cloak onto the table as he stalked into the parlour, ignoring the lateness of the hour and the sleeping tenants below them.
Turn it aside to something else. She went to the piano, and lifted the keyboard lid as if she would play to soothe him.
‘How much did you give Julius?’ she said lightly.
‘I paid him back. He’d lent me a century—told his wife it was only fifty.’ The electric candles at the fireplace went on. Mayhew pushed with his boot at the half-burned log in the grate, and bent to light it again.
Aurora’s index finger touched a note, a note, a note. Very softly. ‘With sixteen months’ interest?’
Mayhew cracked a laugh. ‘No! Only Julius’s self-interest. The hope I’ll hire him again someday.’
She sat on the piano bench, where he could not comfortably follow
her. Every inch of her body was weary and sore, and she had a strange taste in her mouth.
Mayhew turned from the fire. ‘I’m taking
Les Très Belles
off the bill,’ he said abruptly, with no softening introduction. ‘You’ll be the better for a transformation of some kind. Get involved in another vaude house, perhaps—you can work with Walker, or Gill.’
‘Why?’ She bit her lip. She knew why, all the reasons.
‘Give the Muse’s audience a goddamned rest, for one thing,’ he said.
Aurora turned her head to see his face in the firelight.
He stayed by the mantel, staring back at her. ‘You can take a break for four months. I’m working on the Spokane deal. We’ll see how that pans out. In the meantime, you’ll have to economize,’ he said, closing the subject. He poured another whiskey and headed for the bathroom.
Four months—stuck in the apartment with nothing to do, and with less money! The collapse must be closer than she’d suspected. And she did not see how the Spokane deal could possibly come together.
Her trailing skirt caught on a carpet tack as she went to the bedroom—and when she pulled, it ripped. Another thing to fix. Mama would do it. The dressing table was tidy, Annie and Berthe had been in that afternoon. They would not be able to afford to have the maids every other day. Once a week, perhaps, at first, and then once every two, and then there would be a stiff little meeting where she handed them an envelope with a generous present for their service and a ‘thank you very much, no thank you,’ as Sybil would say.
Pulling out the velvet stool, she sat, bone-tired, took her hair down and ran the brush through it. It would be pleasant to braid one’s hair for bed again, but Mayhew liked it loose. She took off her necklace. They were not diamonds, only brilliants. The glass laid over the fine wood of the dressing-table surface bothered her, she wanted to touch the wood. She ran a finger along the bevelled edge, careful not to cut herself.
Mayhew came from the bathroom with a damp face, scrubbing it with a towel. He shaved before bed, a custom he’d acquired from some fancy-woman so as not to scratch her delicate skin. Aurora was grateful enough, although she had not liked to hear him tell the story.
He often talked of former lovers. She had none, of course. But she’d known better than to mention Maurice Kavanagh or any of the boys from the old days. No reason on earth to mention Jimmy Battle. Mayhew’s dignity was fragile.
She switched off the dressing-table lamp. Mayhew lay on the bed in his shirt-sleeves, waiting for her. He liked her to be naked in the bed and she had become accustomed, so that it was no longer anything odd, to let her peignoir drop away.
The moon fell in the river windows. Sounds floating up from the street below. Pieces of him were worth loving: his acumen, his energy, his definite, positive stance. But he was not honest, and never aimed for anything but the progress of Mayhew.
His hands moved over her like brick hods, one hand bigger than her breast pulling it, sliding downward, smearing the shape. She was cold, and wanted the comforter, but he lay sprawled across it, surveying her body in bands of moonlight that fell over the white bed. She arched her back when his hand moved lower. All she had to do was magnify the small responses that her body made. But she was tired, deep inside, of all this work: trying to please him by day and by night.