‘Our life could not sustain him. Our girls. After Harry died, he was not himself any longer, and then he—’
‘I am sorry,’ he said.
‘For him? Or me?’ She shook her head. No reason to have told poor Gentry this. Except to say that we all live in pain. ‘I’m sorry, Gentry. I only meant to say, everything is so sad.’
He held her hands, and there was some shred of comfort in that. He had known her when she was a girl.
But her errand was wasted. Gentry had no money to spare; she’d have to wait till her wages were paid, and the apostle spoons would have to go up the spout again. Fiddle, she thought. Arthur is dead after all and will not know. She set Gentry’s five-dollar bills on the table behind her and gathered herself to go, her natural buoyancy helping her to look cheerful despite consuming worry. She touched the back of his greyish hand, and then went out into bright sunshine, to do her duty at the Pioneer.
Bruise
The bruise on Bella’s face could be masked with an extra application of 5 and 9. Clover’s spidery fingers were gentler than Aurora’s on the swelling. Bella stared at herself as Clover dabbed: the puffing-out gave her the appearance of mumps on one side. Her cheek still hurt every time she opened her mouth to sing or chew.
She had managed to avoid the Tussler by remaining with her sisters in their dressing rooms; he and his brother did not board with Mrs. Seward, so she was not worried in the night, walking the halls to the bathroom. He hated her now, and in the theatre she could not entirely escape his baleful eye. At the end of their turn the Tusslers were always waiting in the wings to go on. Bella had twisted her steps in I Can’t Do the Sum in order never to look stage right; she was first off, now, and usually the first heading down the stairs. Aurora and Clover had not complained. They were being kind.
Bella could not stop thinking about the poor beaten girl, left in the snow in the darkness. But what could they do anyway? They could not bring her to live with them at Mrs. Seward’s. Bella indulged for a while in a continuing story where she rode a grey horse to the woods and found the red-haired girl, and brought her up behind the saddle and galloped off to a peaceful farm somewhere; but that was stupid and she did not even tell Clover, who had not seen the girl, because she’d been off in the darkness with Victor.
In the second show, Bella stayed for a moment offstage to watch the Tussler fall down the set of collapsing stairs (feeling almost avenged as he conked his head on the bottom). She did not think there had been time for the Tussler to do—whatever had been done to the poor girl. But someone had done it, and even if she was a dance-hall girl, nobody ought to do things like that.
The wealthy Mr. Mayhew, too: he’d been Johnny-on-the-spot. Perhaps it was he who’d done it. He’d been masterful that evening, liking his own authority and liking to throw money about, as if it was still a thrill for him to take charge of helpless females and solve everything. Under his silvering beard, Mayhew seemed young in an odd way. Not confident interiorly, as Gentry was, or Victor; only polished on the exterior with his fine clothes and motorcar. He had talked importantly about ‘the wrong kind of scandal’ and had impressed the need for discretion on East and Verrall (poor Verrall still very green from being so sick), and then, reassuming his silk hat and astrakhan-collared coat, had bundled them all into his car, a Pierce-Arrow saloon car more magnificent than anything Bella had ever seen, let alone been for a ride in. Every piece of it shone in the moonlight. The seats were like leather clouds, but she wished she could have stood on the running board instead, to feel the speed as they rushed through the night back to the city and pulled up in front of Mrs. Seward’s—as if Cinderella and her Beautiful Sisters had all come home together in the coach.
Then Mr. Mayhew had melted away, as perhaps impresarios always must, and they had not seen him again.
Adjustments
Arriving at the Butte train station late in the evening, Gentry found a porter