they helped her out to stand shivering on the linoleum in front of the stove until, wrapped and warming like a loaf in a napkin, she could get back under the coverlet while Aurora and Clover laced their corsets. Aurora said, ‘Tighter, tighter,’ and Clover pulled. Aurora had a beautiful corset: cut-away hips and a short back, made of French coutil with écru lace trimming and pale blue ribbons. God only knew what it had cost, Mama said. It was from the Queen of the May costume.
She ought to have a corset too, but Bella was still treated like a baby; hers was only a band, even though she had a bust beginning, and perhaps with a little cotton stuffed inside a corset she would look more like the sixteen she was supposed to be. Aurora was as cold as winter, and Clover only loved Aurora. They did not care about her, no matter how much she tried to be good and no trouble to anyone and to dance as well as the others. She dug her head under the coverlet and went back into the darkness for a while, into the misery of nobody, nobody knowing her innermost heart or loving her at all.
Sentimental Bilge-Distiller
‘You have laced yourself too tight to breathe. You cannot sing if you cannot breathe.’
Gentry’s stick whisked at Aurora, flicking like a carriage whip on her stiffened midriff. ‘Take her to the dressing room and loosen her corset,’ he told Flora, not troubling to make it a request. His impatience was always on fire in the mornings. A bad time for classes. But they had the choice: learn, or go. He cast his pearls before them! What was it to him if they chose to lace themselves into asphyxia for a pair of booze-soaked Irish eyes?
Clover and Bella ran through the Grand Scale twenty times before Aurora came back and joined them in the line, cheeks hot and bodice loose. They continued together, but Gentry flung up his arms and left the stage, struggling down the portable stairs with his cane, each step a contortion and spasm of limbs and hips and angles.
At the scale’s downward arc, they fell silent. From the darkened auditorium they heard Gentry’s voice in a smooth, powerful undertone that grew louder without tightness or exertion, imitating and correcting the tones he criticized. ‘When you push, you create tension in the heart and in the brain—so the voice goes up in pitch and acquires a spindly, questioning, uncertain tone. If you try to make your voice big by pushing from the throat, you cut your voice in pieces, lose all the undertones and individuality. In the throat, you must feel no effort at all.’ Gentry paced up and down the aisles, ending by shouting ‘Throat!’ at them, with as far as they could detect no effort at all in his own.
Aurora felt dizzy and sick, and had to remember to blink her eyes; Clover beside her was straight as a pillar, no colour in her face. Bella seemed to be struggling not to laugh, but glancing at her quickly, Aurora sent a dagger look. At the smallest infraction Gentry might dismiss them, and she needed him to tell her everything, everything. She could feel her understanding stretching to take in what he said.
At Gentry’s command they sang Buffalo Gals again, and again, and again, a capella. At length he relented, came towards the stage, and softened his tone. ‘Of course extra force is required to fill the theatre. You must find the fire to fill this space, and learn to release it without constriction. You prepare, prepare, prepare, and then you let it go, give your work out freely in your singing, and your audience will receive it as freely. Generosity is the lesson I would teach you.’ He turned away, then back again. ‘And focus.’
His own focus was ferocious. Aurora nodded but did not dare speak.
‘Use it like the violin, your voice-box. Do not draw those strings tight so that they squawk and squeak—let them vibrate freely, with firm control, flowingly.’ Then Gentry slammed the end of his stick down on the stage, making the girls jump. He shouted, ‘Mr. Caspar? Are you there?’ and the mousey bandleader ran down to the pit. ‘Early One Morning,’ Gentry barked to him, and almost instantly the piano intro began.
Aurora stepped forward into her usual position and the girls began, following the song until Aurora took it alone: ‘O don’t deceive me, O