“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.
An Appetite
Aurora liked the new number very well. She had not told Jimmy about the baby; had not spoken of it again to her sisters, nor they to her. But it was never entirely out of her mind. When she crossed the street she was careful of trams and horses; when she was hungry she ate; when she was tired, she curled up on coats on the dressing-room floor and slept. It seemed that she had to, now that she knew. But the knowledge did not stop her wanting Jimmy—she had such an appetite for him, for the energetic exchange of their lovemaking, that it shocked her. She expected a kind of holiness to descend, instead of greater greed for their snatched opportunities. In the St. Paul Walker Theatre, a closet full of velvet drapes made a dark red bower; in Bismarck, a loose button on a dark, unused dressing-room’s horsehair divan scraped the skin on her back till she bled.