more about Papa. She wetted the mascara brush and did her lashes again. She thought of them too often. After Papa the memory of Harry always came tagging along: sadder but cleaner, at least less complicated, the poor lamb. Clover was tired. We are far away, she thought, from what we’ve known. This small room, this momentary warmth and crowding, is what we have now instead of our old life. The table under her elbows was pitted and scarred, more than a school desk even, and the wooden plank walls between and above the mirrors were dotted with signatures and notes from artistes who had travelled through. She leaned on the heels of her hands and stared at Eulélé Josephine, 1911, the accents cut sharply into the wood, and tried not to think at all for a moment.
Sybil’s catalogue of vaudeville stitched gently on, her tinny voice sharp and helpful as any needle. ‘Julian Eltinge, he’s from out here, you know. Years ago, when things were wilder, he made his living as a lap-girl in a box-house out in Butte—a very respectable girl, I’m sure—they were short on females in the area, so they’d dress a boy or two,’ Sybil added quickly, with an eye towards the girls. ‘His father found out and beat the tar out of him, so he went east—the suavest thing in shoes, a lovely dancer. This was in Boston, after you’d left us, Flora. Before he struck it big as a female impersonator, he was with Cadet Theatricals, but then E.E. Rice saw him, and he was made. In ’03 he was already getting a thousand a week with Keith’s, so he told me, and much more now, I’m sure. We did the galop, a private party at the Lyceum there in Cincinnati—I’d show you but there’s not enough room to swing a cat, let alone a rat!’ Sybil took a turn around the ballroom in her chair, little feet peeping out from her pink petticoat and fluttery hands dancing in the air. She sang, ‘Waltz me around again, Willie, around, around, around—’ and ended in a skirt-gathering kick.
Clover could see what a hit she would have been as Miss Saucy Saunders, when broke and nothing for it but burlesque. ‘I feel like a ship on an ocean of joy …’
For herself, Clover thought she would rather do anything—go to Normal School to teach, be a telephone operator—than take that road, burlesque or box-house. They would just have to make some money. Mama was right. A thousand a week ought to do it.
A Dreadful Jig
The Old Soldiers sawed away at tunes left over from the Civil War. Several were blind or maimed, their faces old and blank. One fiddler sat playing with a bow strapped to his foot, having lost his arm. Another, blind, danced a dreadful jig as he played, thin legs darting lightly ahead and behind, and while he jigged he made his mouth into a grin that had no meaning. Bella said she could not bear to watch, and left Mattie to finish his apple alone; but it seemed to Clover, standing unnoticed in the wings, that the audience did not mind at all. They could not know how terrible it would be to have a skill, to lose it, then turn freak to get a portion of it back. Or was it still the same—did one still lose one’s misery in the music? Clover curtsied as the soldiers filed past when their turn was over, silent in the backstage gloom.
Cornelius the Bubble Juggler was nothing but that, a stooped man with an outsize bubble-pipe and a carefully guarded Proprietary Mixture for making bubbles, which he patted up into the air from a silk cushion like a large glove on his hand. It was tedious, and he insisted on counting each pat, starting over when the bubble burst, as it always did. His was the first act Clover had seen that left her feeling flat and critical, and she did not like the feeling. Especially when they had to go on themselves in so little time.
But the pictures came between Cornelius and their turn. Clover ran down to help Aurora cope with Bella. She was only thirteen, even though they had to say she was sixteen. She’d been the baby for a long time—until she was eight, when Harry had come along, Clover and Aurora had called her Baby.
In the dressing room Clover found Aurora panting and sighing, standing against the wall.