‘Your mama had better watch the drink,’ he said, as if he had only just now thought of it. ‘I won’t put up with that, I’ve told you so.’
Aurora lay still, not answering, Mama being a subject that could go either way.
His hand pulled heavier down her, moving into the cleft of her legs, pulling and pinching there the way he liked to do, feeling or fondling. He believed she would like it; maybe some woman in the past had told him so. She did not like anything, any of it. The spell that could come over her and make it all right was not working this night; her mind was too full of thinking.
She supposed they had been cancelled again, in fact. Taken off the list.
That thought made a vast lump in her chest, too hard, so she pushed it away. After a moment’s stroking and pulling he unbuckled his cummerbund, awkwardly, then sat up to the edge of the bed to pull it away and unbutton his trousers.
‘I won’t take her to Spokane if she’s in that state again,’ he said, casually, in the brief pause between one trouser-leg and the other. Speaking as if she wouldn’t care at all what was done to Mama. He flung the cummerbund into the corner, where his evening shirt lay crumpled. ‘She’s an embarrassment, in public.’
Aurora turned in the bed and found her peignoir with one hand; stood and pulled it on in one motion, not able to talk without at least that shield.
‘What do you mean?’
‘What I said!’ He laughed at her ferocity. ‘I’m not taking her. And the way things look, we’ll be off sooner than later. The girls can come, but you’ll have to ditch Flora.’
And for how long could the girls come? She must pull her wits together.
‘If we’re to shake this boondocks dust off our feet we can’t be travelling with an old harpy—I’ll tell you what, she and that Sybil hag get along so well, give her to Julius, he can have a
hareem.’
Aurora’s arm jerked as if she might hit him, but Mayhew was fast. He grabbed her hand as it came up, and he laughed. ‘I won’t put up with a drunk! Making a fool of herself, and of me.’
‘Don’t say that! You don’t mind the drink in Julius, or your pals—or yourself.’
‘I’m not supporting them to the tune of a hundred a week.’
Little enough, for headliners, she wished to say, but she could not fight with him. It was not safe to do so. She could not cajole him when he was close to anger. And he had drunk a great deal himself.
She let the lace peignoir drift apart, and put a hand on his arm. ‘I’ll speak to her, Fitz. She’d had a terrible fight with Sybil, and she’s not feeling up to snuff these days, that’s all.’
‘Send her to grass, with that uncle of yours in Saskatchewan.’
‘I can’t do that, she wouldn’t go. She needs us to look after her, you know that. She couldn’t do without Clover and Bella—’
‘Send them too!’
But he did not mean that. He saw her realize it, and he flung his trousers at the chair behind him, angry again, silver from his pockets spinning along the floor.
‘Time for her to pack it in, the old cow!’
She shoved at his bare chest, at the grey wool and sunken paunch revealed in the cold moon—her temper suddenly lost, she felt a fierce need to make him lose his, and to hell with everything.
‘She’s no older than you! Time for
you
to pack it in? If you can’t manage—’
He pushed her back into the bedclothes then with all his power, slamming her head down, hands on her neck and crushing her into the sheets, and she remembered that she had no strength at all, compared to him; there was nothing she could do. She did not panic, but waited, effort drained from her muscles. Thinking done with, pride useless. But she’d said what she thought, there was some virtue in that.
He stopped, and released her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I do not mean to hurt you.’
She lay still, pushed down into a nest of linens. Her eyes were slow to open.
‘Poor darling girl, poor girl,’ he said, as soft as the wind outside. ‘Forgive me. Poor dear sweet girl, I love you so, and I torment you. You are a precious girl, my dearest one, don’t fear me.’
Finally then she put her hand on his arm, and raised her head so her neck was open to him, submitting. Tears ran out her eyes and down the side of her face, but she did not cry out loud.
Later, she heard him speaking. She was almost asleep, not certain whether he spoke to her or thought her dreaming.
‘I love beauty,’ he said. ‘I wanted to do beautiful things.’
Bella’s bee wings had never got mended—I will do them tomorrow, she thought.
Legerdemain
Nobody at the Muse knew what caused Mayhew’s patience to snap, but it was done. Bella stared at the new order-list that had been pasted on the lobby doors in the morning: the Knockabout Ninepins were moved to opener. A grievous insult for an act with the Ninepins’ years of experience in the big-time. Not to be borne.
Everyone was scared and silent in the dressing rooms, wondering what Joe Dent was likely to do.
What he did was simple enough: he took an alarm-clock onstage with him, set for twelve minutes, and when it rang, he stopped the act without finishing the routine. Mrs. Dent and Nando stopped too, frozen in their window frames. Then they all walked offstage. The audience tried to clap, unsure what was going on; they had been only half attending, as usual with the opener, and the brief patter petered out.
There was a long blank silence, on an empty, lit stage, before the boy rushed out with OK Griffith’s placard and his music started up.
That was the end of the Knockabout Ninepins at the Muse.
Up in the booth, Bella was beside herself with rage, so angry and frightened that for the first time in recorded history she was unable to speak. By the time she got back to the dressing rooms, Joe had the whole family packed up and out the back door, a feat of legerdemain that would have taken masterly planning—so he must have known they’d be done.
Late that night, Nando sent a note to the Arlington to tell Bella what was happening.
Found a booking, so it’s the Flyer south for us. We’re off to the small-time in Spokane, a place Dad knows well. Ma not so pleased to leave the Muse and she remembers the last place we was at in Spokane, where we had to put the bedstead legs in cans of kerosene to stop the bugs invading nightly.
No hard feelings, tell Mayhew. He’s a hard man, but Dad’s head is harder than anything.
Spokane is just till November, then we’re booked straight to Christmas, so don’t be blue. Up to Winnipeg in January, two weeks at the Pantages, fine old Pan-time.
See you in the funny papers, and don’t forget that you are my, and I
your sweetheart,
N. DENT
Bella declared secret war on Mayhew from that moment.
And he was making Aurora miserable too. In the morning, as soon as Bella was sure Mayhew would have left for the Muse, she went up to the top floor to get her bee wings, leaving Clover to wake and dress Mama. She found Aurora still in the bedroom, her head down on the burl maple dressing table. Still in her nightgown, cloudy hair in a bad tangle.
Bella picked up the comb and began to work through it. Having to be gentle made her calmer, and she told Aurora about Nando’s letter, including the bit about Nando having no hard feelings. ‘But
I
do!’
‘Fitz is in trouble, Bell, it’s not—it’s not his real nature, to ditch them that way.’
‘What trouble?’ She pulled the comb through another long unknotted section.
‘Oh, too many things to say.’
Aurora bent her head to let Bella reach the last of the tangles, and to rest her forehead again on the cool glass protecting the wood. She spoke from within the dark shade her arm and head made. ‘He left a hotel bill as long as your arm in Helena, for which both the Placer and the Ackermans are chasing him, and another in Calgary only half paid. All those dinners.’
Bella whistled. She let the ends of Aurora’s hair curl around the comb, satin once again, and patted her neck.
‘You comb so well, with your light hands,’ Aurora said, turning her head to kiss Bella’s wrist. ‘He says it is perfectly justified, that everything was for the betterment of the theatres, even the wedding. All press is good press—you know what he says.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Yes.’
In the grey morning, rain drenching the windows, the bedroom was ugly, untidy. Tangled sheets on the floor. Bella began to set things in order again, ready for the maids to clean. She watched her sister lift her head and stare into the mirror, blank eyes making a cold assessment of her face; at least it was not the dumbstruck tragedy mask she’d been wearing when Bella came in.
Aurora opened a little pot and added a tinge of purplish ochre to one eyelid. ‘The thing is, he is not a scrupulous person.’
‘I know.’
‘I think he will make us all do a bunk in the night. Don’t tell Clover, it would make her unhappy.’
Bella nodded, coming to have her own eyes done. She spat into the little pot and stirred, then held out the mascara stick and leaned forward so Aurora could do her lashes.
‘Hold still,’ Aurora warned. She took the pin to separate the clotted lashes. ‘He is not precisely bad,’ she said, in a light, objective tone as she pricked and dabbed. ‘He just does not operate under the same code—he was trained by Ziegfeld, and he goes on the way they do there. For these Ackerman circuit types to be slandering him is pretty rich.’
‘They can’t slang anyone more than they’ve been slanged themselves,’ Bella agreed. She kept her head as still as marble.
Rain
Rain made the rooms at the Arlington cold, so that early October felt like November. Clover lit the gas fire and made tea before waking Mama. At first waking, as usual, Mama came back from the distance of her dreams, eyes moving frantically under tight-closed papery lids. ‘Mama,’ Clover said gently. ‘Mama, here is your tea.’
She watched as Mama’s eyes opened, rolled, trying for focus. She reached for a sip of tea and then pushed the cup away and turned back (bedsprings squeaking like a thousand baby mice) to catch at her dream, murmuring in a slurred, furred voice, ‘One more minute …’
Fire within, rain without, suited Clover’s mood. She sat at the window, rereading a letter from Victor about Galichen, the guru Victor’s parents had espoused. How he demanded unthinking obedience from his followers, and often gave them ridiculous or conflicting orders ‘to
set their orderly brains at odds, so they might wake from what he calls their sleep.’
Once, Gali had made Victor’s parents the floor-washers at his tall, thin house in Ladbroke Grove, a part of London. The stairs
there were steep, five pairs of rackety narrow flights, ten landings to the attics—where they found Galichen waiting with freshly muddied boots, in which he stomped and slid downstairs so that they had all to do again. There was some lesson in there, but Clover decided she was too asleep, or too sensible, to see it.
There had been no news since the enlisting letter.
Mama stirred again in the bed and propped herself up on one pointed white elbow, smoothing a hand across her chest. She stared at the rain-smeared window, her hair crazy with curl-papers from the night before, half of them come undone.
‘I’ve irritated poor Fitz,’ she confided, picking at her lip with one unsteady hand. ‘I must go in today and see if I can mend our fences … Bees in the caragana, and a stone leaning sideways in the churchyard. Collapsed because of the rain, it had flooded out the grave, you know. That would mean a change of scene.’
Mama always told her dreams in the morning now, as she searched for warnings. Clover put the kettle on again and brought a warm towel and Mama’s wrapper, wondering if she ought to tell Aurora how unsteady Mama was these days. Her rough, misshapen feet peeped out of the bedclothes; Clover slipped carpet-shoes on them, and together they made their way down the hall to the bathroom.
‘You ought not to spend so much time with Victor, dear Clover. It is not suitable,’ Mama said, as Clover closed the bathroom door on her.
‘I am nearly eighteen, Mama. I have not seen Victor for two months, I don’t know why you’re saying this.’
‘Mooning over him. Just that one must be so careful—think of Julius, the other day, and how the least suspicion can destroy—You do not know how harsh the world can be.’
Clover thought that, actually, she did. Through the bathroom door, Mama had gone back to dream-recounting. ‘One stone leaning, another crashed down … Moss grown into the letters, a missive gone astray.’
Papa’s gravestone, she must be thinking of, or Harry’s. Clover ran her hands over her face. The rain had got into her head.
Flood
It rained and rained and rained. A percussion pattered under all the numbers in the matinee. Water dripped from weak places in the roof, and steamed up from the pitifully sparse audience, who sat drying in the communal warmth. The wet-dog smell was terrific.
Between shows Teddy the stage manager took a couple of hands up onto the roof to sweep the water from the worst places that had pooled and begun to leak; wherever they pushed the water over, the white stone front of the theatre stained grey. Clover watched Mayhew stalk the aisles, directing one or other of the cleaning women to towel up wet patches or blot a seat down. Morose, distracted, he failed to respond at all to Mama’s damp curtsy and trill of greeting, after she’d ventured out for buns from the Whyte Avenue tea room. Mama scuttled back up to the dressing room, Clover following; Mama found her needle again by jamming it into her thumb, but did not curse. The room was silent in the humming hive of the Muse, each sister locked in her own thoughts and Mama too anxious to sing.
But East and Verrall brightened the day when they knocked on the door, fresh in on the northbound Flyer from Montana. They’d come in early to replace the Ninepins, to start that night, although Friday was the usual bill-change day. Bella shrieked and jumped up to tell them the true story of the sacking of Joe and the others, which shocked Verrall.