Clover panted too, filling out her narrow chest gorgeously as if she were Miss Sunderland, whisking an imaginary green-satin train from side to side and trilling to make her sisters laugh. She finished Bella’s makeup and re-did her own frog-pond eyes, taking a pin to separate her own and Bella’s thick-blacked eyelashes.
The challis shirtwaists had been fresh-pressed with sizing, skirt hems ironed to a knife-edge; the dressing room smelled deliciously of laundry. Mama had rigged an improvised board from their placard, two coffee cans and a towel.
But Clover said, ‘We won’t, Mama, we’re just the closer. They’ll be wanting to go home as much as we want to send them.’ Which was true, of course.
The boy knocked at the door, and they were up and out in a flurry of skirts and boots, a herd of young horses rising suddenly from a field.
The Life
Gentry was not backstage, but the girls knew he must be watching. Clover breathed in through the bottom of her boots, as Gentry had said to do, determined not to look so serious.
Mattie held his hand out for their placard. Oh, the placard! The ironing board!
Bella raced down on galumphing feet, grabbed it, nearly throwing the rats’ tack into a tangle, and jumped back upstairs three at a time, to the music already beginning over the end of the pictograph reel.
Mattie marched the card onstage and set it, and the music swelled, and they were up.
They ran prancing on to the music, holding hands. Into position. The lights were brighter in this theatre. Hot onstage—and they were ready, and the piano slid into the verse.
‘Early one morning, just as the sun was rising
I heard a maid singing in the valley below,
O, don’t deceive me, O, never leave me,
How could you use a poor maiden so?’
In the song’s story Clover was the low-voiced singer, and Aurora the maiden. Bella—another happier maiden, unable to contain her delight at being up on the boards again. She stood by Clover as Gentry had commanded; she did not swish her skirt or fidget.
They opened their mouths like caves and let the sound flow out, running smooth to the back of the house—Aurora opened up the top of her head and opened down the bottom of her jaw, the sweetest and most dreadfully deceived of girls, wandering there back of the castle all pregnant with her apron not fitting any more. Bella almost laughed as she thought about that humped-up apron. But they were using the more refined lyrics with only the garlands that you pressed on my brow … Even Mrs. Cleveland could not have objected to them.
There was a difference this evening, Aurora thought, a change clearer in the house than in themselves: the audience was relaxed, as if knowing the girls would sing well right from the start. Their act wasn’t just good in spots, it was good all through, and the back-and-forthness between them and the people was made of pleasure rather than kindness. If they kept working, they could be good like this all the time.
Then it was time for Buffalo Gals, where Bella could cut loose and kick up her heels, and the audience became more lively. One of her tapping heels encountered a smear of soap bubble left by the juggler, whisked out from under her, and nearly took her whooshing off the stage—but she recovered, with a windmill of arms that shook a huge laugh out of the audience, and the applause at the end was such a cascade of happiness that Bella laughed as she bowed. This was the life for her.
A Kick
‘Very—energetic,’ Gentry said, waiting in the wings when they came off. ‘My dear Bella, your poise and aplomb was never more evident than when you did not land in the front row after slipping. Head voice well released—it is a beginning. If you continue to give me that forward tone, I will let you do it in two, with the park backdrop, well behind the Bubbler’s soap scum.’
Aurora considered the honour. They had never yet been in two. Mama pressed Gentry’s hand and said, ‘It is like you to be careful of my girls, dear Gentry, thank you.’ And then it was all to do over again for the seven o’clock show—the waiting, the climbing up and down stairs, makeup removed and their faces cleaned, as Mama insisted, between shows.
The dressing room became a cozy snug, Sybil and Mama continuing their rambling catalogue of