Very quietly, and very quickly.
She held him closer, closer, and then rolled him sideways and sprang up and dashed to the piano, playing the chorus through in a fine gallop, and then said loudly, ‘All right, one more time
—I never envied the rich millionaires, I never wanted to have what was theirs, I never bother about their affairs
—’ but when he reached for her she felt a warm liquidity run down the inside of her thigh, and she shuddered and laughed and shook her head, and step-stepped around the room (still in her shoes, they had not got so far as taking off her stockings), dancing as loud-clacking as might be while she grabbed one garment at a time and shrugged into it or under it, and he lay back on the cushions, laughing without the faintest sound.
‘Perhaps we need a gramophone,’ he said, when she was tight and tidy once more.
Four Months, Maybe Five
On Mondays, when the rest of the town was open for business, the vaudeville people took each other out for supper to Mariaggi’s or visited burlesque theatres, or danced at one of the big hotels. Jimmy and Aurora went dancing the Monday night before their premier at the Walker as the Double-Glide Duo. Aurora took Clover along for propriety; Bella had begged to come too, but Aurora had been hard as coal and would not let her. Mama told Bella she needed her to help with the finishing on the white dress, and that was the final word. Bella had thrashed off to the bedroom in a serious huff.
The Palm Lounge at the Fort Garry Hotel had a lovely little band, but it was not mere pleasure for Jimmy and Aurora to dance there: they were advertisements for themselves. Walker had taken a party there and all evening he directed their attention to Aurora and Jimmy.
Aurora was purely happy, spinning through the crystalled air, amid palm fronds and wineglasses and waiters and the polished parquet floor. The dance floor was sprung, with a horsehair cushion beneath it, so you could dance all night and never be tired. At the end of every dance, a scattering of applause broke out.
She was not tired these days, but full of vigour, with a little wellspring of pleasure—all the day brightened by the chance to dance with Jimmy. The sinews in his arm, masked by black broadcloth; everything about him so clean and fresh, the size of him just right and the steps that they knew well enough to ignore, to dream through the dances; even more, the perfect understanding that existed between them, and their alikeness.
It was too bad that Bella was angry, she would have to fix that. It was irritating; nothing was fun if Bella and Clover were unhappy. Mama’s grief, on the other hand, compounded of sadness and illness, she could not fix. Around, around, around—counting without knowing that she was counting, her body knowing that they were nearing the end, the end, whirling twice more, once more, and then the sweet little dual kicks and the bow. There. The song was
Helen Gone
, a racy ragtime
two-step, much more fun than the Irving Berlin they’d got to use for Mr. Walker.
Helen gone, she could dance all night until the dawn …
They had supper after dancing, and as they ate Jimmy made every effort to draw Clover out. Kind, but mistaken, Aurora thought: Clover was not shy, only leaden. It was a niggling burden to see her so miserable over that odd fish Victor, who would probably sail through the war untouched, playing his strange tricks on the Hun. Catching herself thinking so uncharitably, Aurora stopped, and asked, ‘Have you had a letter from Victor?’
Clover blushed, her delicate skin pinking from the cheeks outward till even her ears were rosy.
Jimmy said, with a comic leer, ‘Someone has a beau?’
But that was too much. Clover, choking, stood up and left the table.
Aurora dashed down her napkin and went after her, but it was no good. Clover locked herself in a marble cubicle, only replying, ‘It is nothing …’ no matter how Aurora begged her to say what the trouble might be. Under the eye of the powder room attendant she could not bully Clover into telling. She went back out.
Jimmy was waiting in the hall. ‘Walker paid our tab—decent of him,’ he said. ‘So we’ve got some coin left, and the night’s a pup. Did you know that Mercy’s Soubrettes are here, playing the little Lyric down by Annabella Street? We could catch their last turn.’ Burlesque worked Mondays (though even those houses stayed dark on Sundays, lest the town make an example of them and shut them down permanently).
Emerging, Clover quietly agreed to go, and they set off.
Although delighted at the prospect of seeing friends again after many months, Aurora hesitated at the down-at-heels lobby of the theatre and the rowdy patrons. Jimmy grinned and elbowed them through to a box, where they sat in relative peace and watched the last of the show: a bad comic whose gimmick was that he hit himself with a rubber chicken; then a very doleful, illogical comedy-melodrama; and finally, Mercy and the Soubrettes. Billed as the Saucy Soubrettes now, instead of Simple.
Mercy wore a skimpy gypsy dress (but no more scandalous than the butterfly costumes had been, Aurora reflected); little Joyful danced
behind her in a revolving series of hootchie-kootchie wiggles. Joyful, skinny as ever, stayed fully draped in a Nautch girl curtain; Mercy’s seven veils, none very opaque, came off in due rotation. At the seventh, Aurora turned her head away, but found Clover staring in such surprise that she had to look back: Mercy naked, save for a peach-coloured full-body stocking.
Jimmy laughed at their shock, and after the show ground to a halt he took them round to the tiny dressing room where a dozen girls, the Soubrettes and others from earlier acts, were wiping themselves down in various stages of undress. With the tripling mirrors and the closeness and the lateness of the hour, it seemed to be a roomful of trembling rumps and breasts.
After the first exclamations, a bottle of plum brandy came out of hiding and they all sat down for a general reunion and exchange of news. The Soubrette sisters had split: Temp and simple Patience had been ill, and were in Spokane being bullied by the brother; Mercy and Joy would work the circuit till May, then go back and summer there too, so Patience could be happy. As Mercy and Joy were, to hear that the Belle Auroras were together, doing finely at the Walker, whatever vicissitudes might have come before. The room gradually filled with comics and trick jugglers who seemed to know Jimmy. Jimmy had pulled a new bottle from somewhere, and was filling glasses for the bandmen, some of whom were smoking reefer, which Aurora did not like the smell of. East arrived, without Verrall but with two hoydenish half-naked girls and a couple of pale boys; many toasts were drunk, and Clover settled in to a comfortable game of cards with Joyful, always the sweetest of the girls.
Rising from the drunken rabble to change into street clothes, Mercy pulled Aurora gently behind the screen, setting an arm round her shoulders and one warm hand on her belly.
‘When is the baby coming?’ she whispered, her eyes bright.
The floor seemed to buckle slightly. Aurora put her own hand over Mercy’s, and then, moving Mercy’s aside, over her midsection—feeling it gathered there beneath her hand, taut and firm. Oh, heavens.
‘Did you not know?’
Aurora glanced above the screen to where Jimmy rocked back on his heels, laughing at some joke—then shook her head.
Mercy had seen the glance. ‘Oh, you must be further along than that, to be showing. I’d say four months, maybe five.’
She skinned off her stocking-suit, whipped the legs straight, and rolled them efficiently to keep the wrinkles out; she slung her gypsy bandeau over the screen and wiped the makeup off her chest with a rough towel. In the shadows behind the screen, Mercy’s naked midriff was as flat and smooth as a dish of cream—but so was her own, Aurora had thought.
‘Have you not felt the baby moving? Though you’re the type as won’t show much, ever—I’d be over to the yard if it was me, which it won’t be. I know how to stop all that.’
Moving? Aurora felt the blood humming in her ears, in her veins. ‘What does it feel like?’
‘Like a fish, like a secret. Like you et something that’s alive.’
Then Aurora thought she might be sick again—but was too busy thinking, as a succession of images flashed through her mind: how long it had been since her last blood, Mayhew’s face above her, Jimmy’s. ‘I have always had an uneasy stomach,’ she said quietly.
Mercy laughed. ‘Well, it will be uneasy now!’ She put her arms round Aurora and kissed her. ‘It will be all right, don’t look so! The human race keeps on and on, and all of
us
were born.’
Come Up Trumps
At home, Aurora found Mama alone, nodding over her thimble, and stroked her cheek to waken her. ‘Come, Mama,’ she whispered, not to disturb her dream. ‘We must put you to bed.’
The bedroom was still pristine—and Bella was nowhere to be seen. Just as she was about to panic, Aurora heard boots climbing the stairs, and Clover and Bella arguing, their voices boarding-house low. Mama sank onto the bed and put her feet up under the covers, turning her
back so Aurora could loosen her corset, saying irritably, ‘No, no, don’t, just untie me, I’ll sleep in my wrapper. I’m cold.’
Bella flung the door open, but caught it back before it could slam on the wall. ‘You have no right to scold me!’ she whispered, in a fury. ‘Or to tell me what I cannot do. I’m almost sixteen—I can look after myself!’
‘Not if you are so dead to propriety as to be out in the streets alone at this hour!’
‘Propriety
—’ Bella fairly spat.
Clover’s face was tight and cold. ‘You might have run into terrible trouble, and none of us to know what had become of you.’
‘I would not, so there! I was with Nando, and he would protect me, but there was no need, for we were not up to tricks but only gone for a drive for an hour to see the moon, that was all.’
Aurora tucked the gold coverlet around Mama’s neck and kissed her cheek, murmuring that she and Clover would see to Bella; she drew her sisters through into the other room. ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘Mrs. Jewett will throw us out on our ears, and if you went for an hour how does it come about that it is almost four in the morning?’
Bella gave a jumbled explanation about the state of the Portage road and the darkness and Nando being a very good driver really, except the automobile had given up the ghost five miles out of town: ‘And a very good thing that I dressed warmly, because you know it is an open car, I freeze in it, so we could walk back without harm, and since there was no traffic it was a very good thing,
another
good thing, that there was a moon to light us, the lantern having broken when the car blew up.’
She got the desired effect from that, and laughed. ‘Well, smoke came out of it and something melted, and Nando says it is not going to go again. But we have thought of the best thing: we’re going to have it carted back to the city and turn it into a vaudeville act! Nando says he’s going to call it “Bella’s First Car,” a very nice honour, I think.’
Aurora sat on the daybed and tried to unclench her stomach. ‘Bella—you cannot run around with Nando in the middle of the night! You know
what people will think of you. Perhaps Mrs. Jewett will already be composing her speech to turf us out. How could you be so naughty?’
‘Naughty? I am
sixteen!
I cannot abide that superior coolness you pretend—you have a dreadful temper, if anyone crosses you!’ Bella said, fierce as a fire. ‘When you were sixteen you had all the money already and were looking after all of us. I don’t even get to keep my own pay!’
‘That’s so, and it isn’t right,’ Clover said. She put her arm around Bella, who stayed stiff, but did not shout or pull away. ‘We’ve been relying on you for too long to look after everything for us. We ought to divvy up the pay packet, and each put back into the kitty for lodging and food.’
Aurora could not sort her thoughts to argue against this: it was absurd, of course, and would lead to arguments and trouble, but she could not—She only wanted to be alone to think, and when was she ever, ever, alone? Through the door to the bedroom she could see Mama’s mouth fallen open, head back in the doped sleep of exhaustion. Her finished white dress, hanging like a lily in the firelight.
And inside her, as she sat still and quiet, she felt a leaf tremble, a tendril grow, a finger drawn across her cheek. She said, ‘Ohh. The baby moved …’
Her sisters dropped beside her.
‘Do not tell Mama,’ she said.
Beautiful Doll
The Belle Auroras’ original week at the Walker was extended ‘by popular demand’ and after two weeks with the
If I Had You
number, another big hit, they went on the road, down through the Walker chain into Minneapolis and points west. The houses there were not on the scale of the Winnipeg theatre, but were well run and well appointed. Bee Ho Gray travelled too, and Rouclere, so they had familiar company, as well as a few new faces to meet. They were in the money, and Flora was happy not to count the change obsessively at every tea shop. Out of town, the Walker people stayed in hotels, and that was very comfortable too, she and Clover taking one room, Bella and Aurora another.
Jimmy suggested he and Aurora work up a second song-and-dance number, another arrow for their quiver. Challenged, Flora studied sheets and chose
Oh, You Beautiful Doll
—a song that had never had much made of it. It made her think of Sybil, jaunty and nonsensical. Aurora would look very nice got up as an Eaton Beauty Doll. And she thought to herself, secretly, that the dance would work just as well if Bella were a little girl being given the doll—she worked the steps with that in mind. Jimmy was a dear boy, attentive, an elegant, expert dancer; but there was something not quite right about him. He had lost his clear look, from when they’d first met him back at the Empress. Little pouches under his eyes, a hesitancy, shame of some sort. He was—smirched, she thought.
In any case, not being a widow, Aurora could not marry anyone. When Flora thought about Mayhew her scalp tightened as if her head were swelling. She had learned not to think about him. She bent her mind to creating a lovely, adaptable set of steps, so Bella could do the trick if need be.