The Regina bill was sharps and flats, East had said. The Belle Auroras were preceded by a terrible act, Scintillating Songsters: two small bald men with wheedling smiles, a bull-shaped woman swaying between them, in rousing roundelays of slightly-off songs like
Mrs. Binns’s Twins
in English accents. After them, it was a haul to retrieve whatever audience was already there. Stragglers, coming in as the girls began, were easier to catch.
East and Verrall were headlining at the Regina Theatre, but did not put on airs about it. They always behaved the same, whatever their position. The bill was filled out by a semi-amateur blackface troupe, Hubert’s Loop-de-Loop. Eight slender young men, who ought to have had better things to do than sing college songs with shoe polish on their faces, Flora said, aside, to East.
‘Once conscription starts up,’ East said, ‘they’ll be gone. Make the most of ’em, ladies.’
The
Butterfly
number went over big, with those long fluttering wings, which Bella and Clover made fan and flicker in the footlights. In the cold backstage Flora confided to Aurora her worry that the costumes might edge over the line into tawdry: ‘And the more high-toned an act, the better the pay, it has to be faced.’ The butterfly idea was pure art—but seeing Clover’s goose-pimpled arms and bluish bare legs, Flora imagined light-floating skirts (and perhaps pale green leather slippers?) when they finally reached Winnipeg and had some money to work with. The loss of that money in Mayhew’s bank had bruised her deep in her soul, leaving a dank sense of foreboding, and along with everything else it made her feel very low.
Dread burst into flower one morning shortly before Christmas, as she sat in the audience waiting for the girls at band call. Hearing some noise, she looked back to the lobby doors and saw Julius Foster Konigsburg roiling down the aisle, carrying a huge valise. Alone.
She stood up and went to meet him, her hands outstretched.
‘Sybil?’ she asked, and he stared, trying to bring her face into focus. Her hand went nervously to her mouth, to hide the gap in her teeth.
‘Flora Dora,’ he said, after a moment. ‘Yes, indeed, the
Dame aux Fleurs.’
He was not reeling drunk, but studiously, concentratedly so.
She took his hands, which were pawing at his pockets as if in search of a bottle, and he stilled, and stood there for a moment unspeaking.
‘You’ve guessed it,’ he said then.
‘Oh, my dear,’ she said.
‘Two weeks gone.’ He counted. ‘Yes. Hah. Seems longer.’
Flora guided him into the seats, out of the way as the company moved up and down the aisle.
‘Quite quick, at the end,’ he said. ‘She asked for you, if that’s a comfort. Don’t see why it would be.’ His hand trembled on the velvet armrest. She did not quite dare to touch him.
‘I put pennies on her eyes,’ he said. ‘One is required to do so. But they fell off, and her eyes flew open, and for a moment I persuaded myself—’
Kneeling, she took his hand and kissed it, but he snatched it away and flicked the air. ‘Frees me up,’ he said. ‘I’ll travel now.’
Flora looked at him, the bulk of him wedged into the velvet seat. He had not shaved, but his shirt was clean and buttoned, a string tie pulled tight at the neck.
East and Verrall, coming down the aisle, saw them and approached. Behind Julius, East gestured, questioning, and Flora nodded. ‘Come on, then, old chum,’ Verrall said. He took one arm and East took the other, and they helped Julius to rise.
‘Foster & Foster, ventriloquy,’ he told them, as if they were the management. ‘I’ve bought a dummy. I’ll do Syb’s lines for her.’
‘Come on, you bunk in with us,’ East said. ‘We’ll take you back and set you up. Don’t dawdle, now, we’re going to be late.’
Flora sat back down and laid her head along the red velvet, and cried like a little girl.
Gone for a Soldier
Soon after Julius arrived, as if he had brought trouble with him, something went wrong with the furnace at the boarding house. Mrs. Mead’s husband ran up and down stairs with buckets and wrenches; workmen trooped through the house, to no avail. Cold pervaded everything. Tea steamed in the cups, the air was so frigid.
Clover listened as Mama complained, heavy-eyed and listless, that she could not keep warm. In some form of mourning for Sybil’s death, she took to her bed and stayed there for days, missing several shows. Julius reported for duty but maintained a rigid state of semi-drunkenness; the others tried to pull him into conversation or a hand of cards, but he would not be drawn.
Clover was silent too. A couple of days earlier she had found a letter from Victor waiting at the Regina Theatre. His mother had booked him passage on a ship to England, sailing in April from New York.
She is weak from the after-effects of rheumatic fever, and begs to see me before she passes beyond—Galichen assures me in a postscript that she is not in peril of death, but reminds me that I had sought some way over, and here two birds can be dispatched one-stone-wise. I will write again before I go. V
Reading it, she’d felt her heart crack inside her chest. He would die in battle, she knew it. That was what happened to the ones you loved. She’d seen the last of him. Unhurriedly, she had folded the letter and put it in the pocket of her skirt.
That night was a rough one. The invisible manager, Mr. Cartwright, whom they had never yet met, had put up a new order, in which Julius took second spot and the Belle Auroras closed the first half. A good promotion, but in his present state Julius was a tough act to follow, no one knowing on what line, or if, he would end his act. Mama had remained in bed, which complicated Aurora’s quick change after
Poor Butterfly
. They felt themselves on suffrage still with Mr. Cartwright, and
were anxious for everything to go well. So anxious, in fact, that Aurora was sick twice in the fire bucket while Bella danced the
Bumble Bee
.
Aurora went on for
Poor Butterfly
, saying that she would be all right now. But during the bridge of the song, drifting from one painted cherry tree to another, Clover could see her breathing very carefully again. And then the second verse, ‘The
moments pass into hours, The hours pass into years, And as she smiles through her tears, She murmurs low …’
she bent to murmur low to a bough of the cherry tree, the painted whorls of its brown cloth bark, and spat daintily into the palm of her hand. Her face was flake-white under the black wig, Clover saw, as she came off and held out her arms for help with the kimono.
Bella was there to do Aurora’s costume change; Clover grabbed her violin and flitted behind the backdrop. She strolled out onto the stage as the lights came up again, and began the intro to
Danny Boy
. At the assigned phrase she turned to watch Aurora enter, for they liked to nod to each other as they began.
But Aurora did not come.
Clover played the intro again, then—helpless, not skilled enough to improvise—carried on through the song. The only other piece she knew by heart was
The Minstrel Boy
. She played that.
As her eyes adjusted to the brightness of the lights in front she could see Aurora in the wings being wretchedly sick, shoulders heaving in silence, Bella attending to her. Bella cast a frightened glance back at the stage, but she was half-in, half-out of her Love Magician costume, and could hardly run on in that state.
The song was finishing. Although a serviceable violinist for accompaniment, Clover was not a strong enough musician to hold the crowd for long—and this was their first chance at closing the first half.
Three more phrases, two more, the final long pull on the last chord of
The Minstrel Boy
…
Clover laid her violin carefully on the small flower table, and without too much thought, stepped forward into the light where Aurora ought to be.
‘The Minstrel Boy to the war has gone,’
she said, not singing but letting the words ring. ‘
In the ranks of death ye’ll find him.’
The crowd stilled. Nothing like a bit of death to stop the chatter, she thought, but she did not slow.
‘His father’s sword he hath girded on, and his wild harp slung behind him.’
She paused, unwound her tartan scarf from her shoulder, and lifted it into a shawl round her head. ‘My son has gone for a soldier,’ she called out, in the words of Mrs. O’Hara, the boarding-house landlady at the Lyric. ‘If I’ve took a drop too much that’s the cause of it.’
Nobody moved or spoke. The men at the back stood quiet.
‘I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier!’
She fumbled with her shawl, she tottered with the drink, she stood upright again.
‘And I’ll fight anyone who says I did!’
Not much thinking was going on in Clover’s usually thought-crowded head. Faced with the imminent death of the empty stage, she had slipped a cog and gone into a different way of being—just doing, rather than thinking. Since there was no sign of Aurora entering, and the audience seemed to be listening, she kept on going, still without any planning.
In Mrs. O’Hara’s hunched posture she bustled back, turned around twice, as if going up stairs, and flung open an imaginary door. ‘My best room, saved for you,’ she boasted to an imaginary prospective boarder, one without as much gumption as Mama. ‘Oh yes! I’ve had the windows painted shut a
-purpose
—that way there’s no nasty draft. No, no need to shift the bedclothes, sir! Perfectly clean in there—well, now look at that—’ (Seeing the bugs scuttling everywhere she twitched her dress away, stomping on one, then pretended not to have stomped, then casually brushed off the boot behind her skirts.) ‘Don’t that beat the Dutch? Mr. Ainsley in here last seemed such a cleanly gentleman!’
She bent to sweep the bugs off the imaginary bed, and the imaginary potential boarder pointed to the cans. ‘Why are the bed-legs in tin cans, you say? Oh, well, you know, precautionary—no, no, there’s
no kerosene in there, but should we ever need it, well, you know, it’s a particulous convenimence to have the cans already there!’
The audience laughed. Bella would have laughed with them, but that was her way. Clover paid not the least attention, but kept on convincing the boarder that hers was the best house in town. She gathered herself to assert the strictness of her propriety, reciting a cascade of rules: ‘No eating, no cooking, no murder done, no smoking, no smoking
hams
, no playing cards, no playing piano, no playing of the piano
accordion,’
and ending with, ‘Lights out at 3 a.m. and everybody goes back to their own room! Iron-clad, no deviagation from that one.’
Again the audience laughed, a good big rollicking laugh. But it was no good, the prospective boarder was leaving. She ran ahead of him to block the stairs, promising hot water, lowering the rent, begging him to stay. And when he would not, she burst into floods of noisy alcoholic tears, explaining and exclaiming that her son was gone to serve his King and country.
‘I live in fear, sir, but needs must, you know, needs must, needs must, and there was no work here for him to—He always liked my pie …’
The boarder seemed to relent. She took his money and watched him go upstairs to the room, then turned away, dancing a rackety little jig as she counted the money, and tucked it away in her bosom.
Still for a moment, she put both hands flat on her chest, and shut her eyes. She spoke quietly, drawing them in to hear her secret thought: ‘My gentle boy. I’ve seen the last of him, I tell myself. I know it to be true.’
Then she straightened her back and regained her ferocious air. ‘Supper at six sharp for those who are civilized behaviers,’ she shouted up the stairs to her new boarder.
Clover turned back to the audience, glanced around at the upturned faces watching her, took off her shawl and curtsied, a dainty girl again. The bandleader was on the ball; he struck up a bright recruiting march, and off she went in the noise of their applause.
‘What on earth possessed you?’ Bella asked, interestedly, when they were alone in the dressing room, Aurora asleep on the little sofa with a cold cloth over her eyes.
‘I had to do something,’ Clover said. ‘Nobody came on.’
‘I’d have run screaming, myself.’
‘Oh, you would not! You’d have done a nice dance and given them a song that you made up.’
‘Well, you did more than that, you did a whole monologue! You should write that down.’
Clover wished Bella would stop talking. The whole idea was too new, or too—holy. ‘I’ve heard enough of Julius’s,’ she said, pulling her dress over her head.
‘Yes, but not done by a woman—that was the best part of all. Although I did like your jig. You have spidery legs, but you are a beautiful dancer.’
The Wings
On the off-days in late December the girls had Christmas party engagements. They wore their tartan scarves and sang sentimental songs to please the crowds. Every ten dollars helped get them to Winnipeg; and it was instructive to see the telephone operator girls at their Christmas tea: pinched faces, higgledy-piggledy teeth, twisted stockings and thick eyebrows. Aurora thought how easily she herself might have been one of them, watching the performers with longing.
They’d worked out a dance number for a small area, pretty and flashy, and Mama (who always accompanied them to private parties, clad in forbidding black with an air of terrifying respectability) gave them notes afterwards: ‘Sloppy on the pirouettes, Bella,
snap
round. And make sure there’s something going on with your eyes, all of you. Dead-face, or thinking about your supper?’
Their last night at the Regina Theatre was December twenty-seventh, the evening before they were to leave for Winnipeg at last. Christmas revelries were over, and another blinding snowstorm made it a small house, half the seats empty. But it was payday, and on receipt of their buff envelopes, the artistes were cheerful. Verrall and East ran through jokes as they dressed, Verrall dabbing on the white makeup that let him appear more of a blister than he was.