was absent, when your mind was clear. She loved that sound.
If She’s Your Niece
A trill of music plinking—the magician upstairs, playing a ukulele, Clover thought. Quite good. She leaned against the wall, reading a posted sign with great concentration so no one would try to talk to her:
Don’t say ‘slob’ or ‘son-of-a-gun’ or ‘hully gee’ on Mr. Cleveland’s stage unless you want to be cancelled peremptorily. Lack of talent will be less open to censure than would be an insult to a patron.
If you are in doubt as to the character of your act, consult the manager, for if you are guilty of uttering anything sacrilegious or suggestive, you will be immediately closed and will never again be allowed in a theatre where Mr. Cleveland is in authority.
‘He stole that direct from Keith’s, of course,’ said a rich voice beside Clover. It belonged to the large man pushed deep into the armchair fitted into a hole in the wall; the bit of cloth draped around it was not enough to hide the dirt wall showing behind, hollowed out like a cave.
‘Has ideas above his station, Mr. Kennebec Cleveland does. Aping bloody Keith. Bloody one-horse, miles-from-nowhere …’
The man’s voice was swelling but the pink woman was suddenly across the room and up on his lap, her tiny paw stopping the large man’s mouth. She whispered, ‘No more of that, my dear, no more. Lucky to be here, and now my old pal Flora Dora, only Flora Avery she is now, and her baby-girl act—and no need for despair.’ She turned her face up at a new noise from the stage. ‘We’ll get a thousand a week before we’re done, you see if we don’t!’ As if listening to a lullaby, the large man subsided, until a raucous flapping above made them all start. Clover could see, between lines of dust filtering down through the cracks in the stage boards, a white feather.
The crooning, screeling noise of the birds was painful. ‘And there’s my flock!’ shrieked Maximilian the Bird Magician. His big finale.
The door slammed open and Sybil jumped up, frightened. It was only a gawking boy to say, ‘Julius Foster Konigsburg, King of Protean Raconteurs?’
The large man swept an arm forward, acknowledging the title. ‘Yours to command, dear boy,’ he said, and Clover could not help but laugh. Julius Foster Konigsburg liked that. He waggled his hand again.
‘Mr. Cleveland says you have to wait a while. Knockabout Ninepins up next, and then he wants the Avery girls before you …’
Sybil told Mama, ‘He does it in one, so he’s much in demand, and of course would not be required to audition in the ordinary way. But Mr. Cleveland has asked to see his new material, thinking to put him number eight, next to closer on a nine-act bill—a headliner comedy smash for the big finish.’
‘Nine, in such a little one-horse burg! Really!’
‘I don’t think you’ll know anyone from the rest of the bill: a mind reader, but he’s a sleazy type, and his assistant is beginning to show, poor little thing. Cleveland will be dumping them, his wife is a terrible prude. And of course there are the Wonder Dogs—’ Sybil jerked a shoulder to the back wall, where a minor mutiny seemed to have broken out in the next room over. ‘Now he’s a character, quite a sweetheart but trouble with his temper, swears without meaning to. He keeps his cheeks stuffed with chaw and you can’t make out what he’s saying, so he gets by. I heard—but this is only gossip—that he cut off his own pecker in a rage one day. But the dogs are dear little things.’
Clover could not help wondering what that would look like, a stump like that. She tried not to think. She looked instead at a playbill pasted to the wall: None are more Clever and Few Half so Good! Frederic LaDelle, the Man Who Mystifies! A very funny mystical effect that provokes laughter and surprise from the most blasé! She filled in the first e in Clever to make a circle, so it read None are more Clover.
‘Then there’s the Sidewalk Conversationalists, East & Verrall, you might remember—I can’t go on! I’ll go on!—and Madame Minou and Her Living Statuary, never been top-of-the-bill and they’ve seen better days. He’s lost the Hi-Jinx Jacksons, they got taken on by Keith’s and are shuffling off to Buffalo! Good luck to them—that’s why he’s got the Knockabout Ninepins coming on—and for now The Italian Boys