The Little Shadows (55 page)

Bella exclaimed,
‘No!
She would
hate
that!’

The nurse at the far end of the ward straightened from a patient and gave an admonitory
shhh!

‘The doctor does not think she is going to be fully aware for some time yet.’ Aurora put it as careful as she could, not wanting to give Bella all his bad news. ‘We can work it this last week at the Orpheum: two moons will be enough. Not as funny, but we can let the situation become known, and I do not think the audience will complain. We will ask to delay our opening in Chicago by a week, and if we cannot, then we’ll start there, with two moons, until Clover gets back.’

‘Back from where?’ Clover asked, her voice more quiet than usual.

Aurora looked up, impatient. ‘From Qu’Appelle, of course. You will have to accompany Mama there, see that she is safe, and then hurry back to us.’

‘I cannot go,’ Clover said. Behind her the window shone, and the dark blue, clouded sky outside. Bella stared at her, wondering why she looked stone-stiff, desperate. Clover never refused Aurora. Bella found herself holding her breath.

‘I cannot take her,’ Clover said. ‘I am going to England tomorrow.’

Then Aurora stared too. Her grip must have changed, for the baby startled awake and began to wail, and the ward sister came hurrying down the polished black floor, shoes squeaking on the linoleum.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to leave!’ An officious whisperer. ‘My patients really must be kept perfectly quiet!’

Aurora stood, furious, her bodice open and a damp-shining nipple eluding the baby’s grasping mouth. As she guided him back, she said to the nurse, ‘Have the goodness to leave us in peace. Most of your ward is catatonic, and if my mother wakes, so much the better for her to hear her grandson close by!’

‘Well, really!’ said the nurse.

‘Oh, do go away!’ said Bella, pounding her fists together in a passion.

Clover took Bella round the waist, pushing her to the window enclosure; to the nurse in a soothing tone she said, ‘The baby is brand new, you know, and still learning how. Look, he is content now, and so tender, is he not?’

Which made the nurse leave off her huffing. After casting a softened eye over the now-suckling infant, she turned and went back to her work.

They sat in silence, then, the only noise the baby’s gulping and grizzling.

‘Victor has sent me a steamship ticket, to sail from Montreal on the fifteenth,’ Clover said at last.

Bella felt so lonely then, so painfully lonely, that her icy fright dissolved and she felt tears come to her eyes. She said nothing, but let them well over and fall, trying to be interested in the cool trails they left down her cheek, and wondering which would fall first to her chest.

After several moments Aurora asked, ‘Were you never going to tell us? What about the Pantages contract?’

‘I was too cowardly,’ Clover said. She twined her fingers together in a nervous knot. ‘And I did not know yet whether I would go.’

That was a lie, Aurora thought; you’d go anywhere he asked. She looked down at the round head at her breast, and for the sake of the milk she tried not to let herself be angry.

‘Well. We will have to refuse the contract,’ she said, at last. ‘We could do without you for a week, but not for longer. We are not the Belle Auroras if there are only two of us left.’

Clover looked at her sister, her cool grace not lessened by the recent birth, or by Mama’s collapse, or by anything. Then you shouldn’t have left me out of the name, she thought. But it was a childish thought,
unworthy. Childish, not to have told them. ‘I could not disappoint you both—I could not bring myself—A thousand a week! But I must go.’

Impossible to explain how she could abandon them, after all they had done to get to this place. And Mama in the bed like a dead bird on the road, flattened and helpless. To abandon her too was a dreadful thing. But if she stayed now, if she was dutiful, she would be the one to take Mama to Qu’Appelle, and nurse her there, and never leave that place—so they would be disbanded anyhow. And she would never see Victor again, because he would be killed in the war.

She turned from them and walked away down the long black road of the ward, straight and modest in her grey dress, carrying nothing.

Bella was crying openly now, leaning against the white iron rail. ‘I’m going to die too,’ she said in a clogged whisper. ‘Like Mama.’

The baby unlatched, his arm flying open in ecstatic relaxation, with a popping noise and a vast, surprising sigh that made Bella laugh, she could not help it.

‘She is not dying,’ Aurora said, smiling down at the baby. An inexplicable calm possessed her—she supposed it was his doing. His little body, still curled like a fiddle-head, occupied her in some way that did not allow, at present, for worry or ambition. After adoring him for a moment she returned to the business of soothing Bella. ‘The doctor does not believe so—but her recovery may be long. What will we do, Bella? We are in the soup now. We must both go with Mama, I suppose. I do not know how we will manage, without money to—well, never mind it,’ she said quickly.

Bella straightened like a puppet yanked into life. ‘I
?
I am not going to that rinky-dink place, I promise you! Besides, we cannot both stop working. I have
Bella’s New Car
—Nando and I will book more dates for it. Or I can work with East and Verrall—in their new number somehow.’

She was intent, her face bright in the evening sun streaming through the window, and Aurora saw her all at once as a person, not the baby sister. That was as it should be: there was someone younger in the room now. ‘I wish you could take our Pantages dates,’ Aurora said, thinking. ‘It is all Nando’s flying equipment anyway …’

‘He could be the man in the moon!’

Yes, that might do very well, the second verse, and perhaps the telephone could stretch between them—or a tin-can phone. ‘We would have to talk to Mr. Brownlee. You must be ready by the eighteenth, or he’d have no incentive to book you.’

‘We can! Easy!’

‘Nando—can he even sing?’

‘No, but he don’t need to,’ Bella said, her eyes in happy circumflex as she thought of how it might go. ‘He can have one moon, and I’ll take another, and I’ll do most of the singing. He plays the ukulele, we might let him strum.’

‘You could put his mama on the third moon?’

Bella looked doubtful. ‘She is not much for performing now, the life has been squashed out of her. But she is very pretty.’

It would mean income. Bella was sixteen—older than she had been herself when they set out from Paddockwood—and established. She would be safe travelling with Nando and his mother; East and Verrall would look out for her too. And Bella could send money to Qu’Appelle for their keep, so they would not be entirely beholden to Uncle Chum.

‘One good thing,’ Bella said, staring down the ward to Mama’s bed with some of her buoyancy restored. ‘That you insisted on her new tooth. She could not bear to go to Uncle Chum without it.’

But Aurora’s eye had caught the big clock at the end of the ward, and she jumped up. ‘We must dash back—we’ll be late for the call.’

‘Do you think Clover will even come?’ Swept into sadness again, Bella kissed the uncomplaining baby’s downy scalp.

Aurora fastened her bodice and settled the baby in an already-practised arm. She stooped to place a cool hand on Mama’s cheek, and they went away down the echoing polished halls.

A
C
T
F
O
U
R
     

10.
Per Valli, Per Boschi

JUNE
1915–
AUGUST
1917

Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan
London, England
The Pantages Circuit, United States

Practice alone before a mirror, then before one or two of your friends, and ask them to tell you of any faults they see in your work. The vim and enthusiasm you put into your act is often contagious, and many a mediocre stunt will bring applause if presented in a buoyant manner.

FREDERICK LADELLE,
HOW TO ENTER VAUDEVILLE

A
n Indian man crouched by the side of the road, smoking a long white pipe. His coat was a white blanket, roughly cut and sewn, edged with ragged fringe. He wore a bandana at his neck and a big silver ring on one long finger. His face was the leather of shoes, brown and hard, seams cut from nose to mouth and around his eyes, which sparked in swollen pockets. Hunkered on his heels in long grass, he looked up at Aurora. Earrings glinted under his fall of grey matted hair.

The sight of him pulled Aurora back to the old days, before their vaudeville life. Her father had bought his liquor from an old Cree woman who ran a still in the woods near the school in Paddockwood. Her sons had come to the teacherage with deliveries or to ask for payment. They made jokes. Sometimes the girls came, bright eyes and soft cheeks, big with babies, one on a hip and one in the belly. Now Aurora had her own baby, halfway between belly and hip, too small to balance there yet.

Dust kicked up by the horses had been sifting gently over them since they’d left the train station, sanding the blanket Aurora had set over the baby, sleeping in his basket. The wagon moved slowly, every wheel-turn rolling them closer to Uncle Chum.

Qu’Appelle was as far away as Paddockwood from flying rigs and marble foyers. Pretty in the afternoon stillness: brilliant green leaves frilled under mauve cones of lilac, and yellow-flowering caragana hedges bordering streets of oiled dust over hard-packed dirt. A girl walked along the ditch, white stockings tanned with dirt, dust-coloured ringlets and a fine white dress blowing vaguely about her.

It was hot. Grasshoppers creaked their gates.

Aurora clenched her knees together to stop from jumping out of the wagon and running back to the station. It would jounce the baby, and Mama could not be abandoned.

Mama sat in a daze, dully conscious but not talking. She’d been given a slate at the hospital; she had not used it yet, but Aurora was to remind and require her to write. Aurora found herself looking everywhere but at Mama’s face, still dragged down on the right side, fallen from sense, from gravity.

Looking down instead, Aurora checked the baby in his basket at her feet and gazed at his sleeping face, beautifully abandoned, mouth slightly open, petal lip blistered from nursing. A delicious quiver filled her chest.

Half a mile past the edge of town, a big house rose behind a bank of caraganas. It was square-built stone, an imposing place with eight-foot windows and a white-roofed portico. Far grander than Aurora had expected. She was not sure whether that was good or bad. Uncle Chum had retired from the North West Mounted Police as an inspector, but he might still have family money, after all these years. Papa’s remittance had been cut off when Aurora was ten—what a wailing in the house there’d been at that letter! Mama could not tell her now, if she knew, whether it had been punishment for some action of Papa’s or a failure in England. Aurora put her warm hand on Mama’s cold one.

Not a word between the brothers even then; they’d had no contact at all since Papa had married Mama. But when Aurora had written to inform her uncle of Papa’s death, a kind letter had arrived by return, offering them help or a home—only Mama had been very angry, and had refused even to answer. In her right senses, Aurora knew, she would never have agreed to come here.

The wagon trundled inexorably down the long drive, and at length pulled up.

Aurora stepped out onto the gravel and grass of the drive, a little blinded by the sun. People stood on the porch, and one of them moved forward: a man in a dark suit coat, upright in his bearing. A pleasant shape of a man. His face, as well as she could see, was calm, with mild, well-intentioned eyes—not the martial personage she had expected from Mama’s stories.
Familiar around the eyes, the nose, but not much like Papa, she thought. His thick hair was iron grey, for one thing. Her father’s had been fair.

Her uncle came down the steps and reached to help her down, saying, ‘Well now, you are no little girl, but all grown up!’ He put an arm around Aurora’s shoulders, to her surprise. ‘With a great look of your father about you—that pleases me.’

‘How do you do, sir?’ Aurora set the baby’s basket at her feet, and turned to help Mama down.

‘And there’s little Flora,’ Chum said. He set Aurora aside and lifted Mama down from the wagon’s step. ‘I hear you’ve been through the mill, my poor dear. Come inside, let’s have a proper talk.’

Mama was docile enough, but did not lift her face to look at Chum. She looked round at the garden as if dazzled.

‘Sad to see her so burnt to the socket.’ Chum spoke to Aurora, but kept Mama’s arm tucked through his own as they went up the walk. ‘And what’s in the basket you carry so carefully?’