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