Harry’s name, or Papa’s; she slipped out to sit alone on the stairs in the dark. Her skirt would get dusty, but they could brush it down for her. Aurora stood by a dressing mirror and carefully removed her hat, pin by pin, not looking (although she could see him perfectly clearly in the mirror) at the young man in evening clothes who had been singing upstairs, now lounging on one end of the table to draw on the wall an exact replica of a bottle on the table: King of Whiskeys. Many people had signed and drawn on the wall, so it must be all right that he was defacing it, but a whiskey bottle was not polite.
She stabbed each hatpin into a square of cloth that belonged in her velvet muff. Red scabs dotted her fingers, but she tried not to let herself pin them in the same holes each time, because that would smack of Mama, who had to count as she walked over the boardwalk back in Paddockwood—otherwise, what?—her long-dead mother’s back would break, the mirrors would crack, seven years’ bad luck would pour down on them. In sudden impatience, Aurora stripped off her mauve kid gloves. With her bare hand she swept dust from the dressing table before she set down her hat, then wiped off the dust on an inner fold of her black skirt. No towels set out, and they had forgot to borrow some from the boarding hotel.
Her mother and Sybil Sutley sat close together, talking sotto voce, reliving Boston and Chicago and their wonderful engagements with Keith’s twenty years before (of which the girls knew every turn and every whistle stop), while the mad Maximilian pranced about the stage above their heads, sifting dust down on them all.
At least this was a proper theatre, if shabby. Not like the hotel in Prince Albert where they’d had their first professional audition, last summer. The conceited young man lounging on a sofa while they sang and danced for him, making them spin over and over so their skirts flew outward and their petticoats rose, then sidling too close to the makeshift stage in the hotel banqueting room to see what they had on underneath. Mama had left the piano, shutting the lid with a bang, and marched them out of there double-quick. ‘Not for us,’ she’d said. ‘And besides, he has an unlucky face. I doubt if his touring company will come to pass.’
He had passed Aurora on the street as she walked to teach piano to the Sadler girls, and asked her to come for a second audition, on her own, and it was enough to make you laugh that he thought he was fooling anybody. Pulling her into a shadowed space between buildings, saying the number of his hotel room. If he’d had any skill she’d have thought it over, at least; as it was she just despised him. But he had a nice little tongue for kissing and he made her laugh with his bold unpractised wickedness, much as he made her angry with his superior air. She sang under her breath, staring at herself in the dim-lit mirror, ‘He’s a devil, he’s a devil, He’s a devil in his own home town!’ The elegant singer hummed along as he drew, but Aurora did not glance at him. A burst of jinkety music above: the piano playing Streets of Cairo—maybe the magician had a snake.
The pink-dressed Sybil woman leaned forward again to snatch at the knee of a dark old man, his massive head springing with wild gouts of grey hair, who sat hunched in a threadbare armchair shoved back into the alcove. Her hand like a bird’s beak, pecking: ‘And this is Julius Foster Konigsburg, my old man—we’ve been touring Europe, you know, after Australia, had a reversal there, but never mind that.’ Peck-peck again. ‘You remember me talking about Flora, Julius—we met in Boston on the continuous vaudeville—eleven o’clock in the morning till eleven at night and what a mercy those days are done.’
The heavy man’s face was exaggeratedly made-up, lined with ochre and highlighted in strange patches; he must be a character actor in a melodrama or perhaps a single-man comic—but the pink lady was with him. Sybil’s makeup was soubrette. She was still talking, though he paid her not the slightest heed.
‘Touring with the Leddy Quartet, refined entertainment, Mr. and Mrs. Leddy and their son; Flora replaced their daughter when she ran off with a miner.