he should pay through the nose for bad celluloid. The current picture was A Natural History Study Showing Fifteen Phases of Bee Culture; not even Bella wanted to see it. The girls were free to stay by the stove and keep warm for the hour before the first show.
But Aurora could not sit. Wrapping her shawl around herself she went up the stairs and outside as if to the privy, then turned round the side of the theatre and kept walking as far as she could in the cold. She took quick strides on the packed-snow path and watched her new boots peeping in and out beneath her swaying skirt, and thought of a blank blue sky over their old home in Paddockwood, of lying on the stone fence by the schoolhouse after all the others had gone in to supper; her father’s shuttered face, bent over papers at his desk on the dais, when she went to call him in long after supper was cold.
‘What a voice you’ve got,’ he’d said one evening, after the Victoria Day concert. ‘Wherever it came from.’ Mama had never had much voice. Everybody said so, it was not disloyal. Aurora had more talent, and more beauty, but Mama had fiery energy and gumption, and those things counted high. Talent was only a tenth of it.
Aurora’s feet were ice-lumps, so she turned and strode back. It was exciting, she told herself. It was—the doorstep of their professional lives. She took one last breath of cold air, feeling the well-known shock as the cold’s bite reached down her chest.
The heat of the theatre warmed her skin on her way in. She passed grey-banged, whey-faced Mrs. Cleveland, but shy of being thought to have been at the outhouse, Aurora went on without speaking, aware of those flat eyes swinging to watch. She walked, in consequence, very straight and smooth.
Openers
At ten to two the lobby doors opened and the house came in. The audience made a breathing noise, a subtle tidal movement beneath the excited chatter and the noise of Mendel’s band playing warm-up music.
Openers, the girls stood dressed and ready in the wings: Aurora with her eyes closed, Clover looking a bit pinched but calm enough. Bella leaned up against the proscenium facade, peeping through an unstitched line in the velvet curtains to see what waited out there for them. People of every kind, wide and middling and narrow, anxious-looking or happy, in groups or by twos or alone, moving down the aisles to find a good spot, shuffling through the crowd to get to an empty seat in the middle.
All those velvet seats filling, all the feet trampling, all there to hear them—Bella was lifted up, buoyant deep in her belly with the pleasure of what was to come. Here we go, she thought, and it seemed like her whole life had been waiting for this particular minute. She turned to see how her sisters were—Aurora had not yet thrown up but Mama had brought up a slop pail and set it behind the second leg. Poor stuff! Bella was glad not to have a queasy stomach. Had she smudged her lip on the curtain?
They could hear Mendel winding his little orchestra down, and then there was a pause, and then it would be them. Aurora turned blindly in the dark. Clover pushed the slop pail to her, Aurora threw up quickly, and Mama wiped her mouth.
And then the stagehand was holding back a fold of curtain and the music rose, and it was time to go on. Clover went first, Bella second, and then Aurora, out into the liquid brilliance of the footlights, drinking it like wine or how they imagined champagne must be. Bits of people’s heads and eyes and teeth showed in the darkness, that same breathing noise continuing, the swell and ebb of the audience’s desire to be pleased.
Third bar of the intro, fourth bar of the intro. Now the climbing notes that made a ladder into the song:
‘Soft as the voice of an angel,
breathing a welcome unheard,
Hope with her gentle persuasion
whispers a comforting word …’
Were they loud enough? There was still some talk and some movement, but that was all right, that was to be expected, since they were the openers. Mama had coached them to carry on good-naturedly even if it seemed that no one was listening at all. ‘We won’t be in this spot for long, dear chickens,’ she’d said. ‘But make the best of it while visiting.’