and a nudge and an eye-roll that it is funny. Humour comes from necessity, from the belief of the singers in what they are singing. If we tinge this with smug understanding of why it is funny, the gag does not work. You must come down to the simplicity and logic of those words—as in I Can’t Do the Sum, where the important thing is the attempt to solve those impossible puzzles.’
That was how it was when the song was working; Bella shivered because she could see that he was exactly right. When her bit in the hotel sketch worked best, it was because she was trying to help, not trying to be funny. You could see the force of it in Victor’s act, how his absurdly concentrated discipline drew people in with him. Aurora simply listened, chicken roll in hand—how could she forget to eat? Bella wondered.
The practice pianist arrived, a tidy, nun-like man who seemed out of place in Butte, and in the theatre. He opened the sides that Gentry had left on the piano and played it through for them, the mountainside tune going up and down. When he added embellishments the next time through, Gentry spoke quietly to him, and he returned to the plainest rendering possible, barely an accompaniment at all. Bella watched Clover finger the notes on an imaginary violin.
Aurora tried the words under her breath, as if to see how they would wind through the highlands. ‘And I shall hear, tho’ soft you tread above me, And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be … For you will kneel and tell me that you love me …’ and then down again into peaceful sleep.
Then she stood and went to the piano and sang it for Gentry, once through.
Bella was both sad and satisfied to see that he wept without shame.
And Say an Ave There for Me
Gentry stood in the open door of the Hippodrome—how had he embroiled himself in this, after all? A loving glance from Flora’s brown velvet eyes, long ago, perhaps that had been it. However extravagant in other ways, a manager could never afford affection.
Before driving back to the train station, Gentry visited the Hippodrome manager’s office and corrected the Drawbank–Parthenon company pay schedule to read, Belle Auroras, sister act: $100 per week.
ACT TWO
5.
A Change of Management
MARCH-MAY 1912
The Babcock, Billings
The People’s Hippodrome, Butte
The Parthenon, Helena
There is no keener psychologist than a vaudeville manager. Not only does he present the best of everything that can be shown upon a stage, but he so arranges the heterogeneous elements that they combine to form a unified whole.
BRETT PAGE, WRITING FOR VAUDEVILLE
When Aurora opened their pay envelope that Saturday night, she sent the placard boy straight to the telegraph office with a message to Mama in Helena: ONE HUNDRED PER STOP GENTRY PRINCE STOP QUIT JOB STOP WILL SEND MONEY. In the ten-word reply, which Aurora had sensibly paid for, Mama answered: WILL QUIT TOMORROW STOP NEW WAISTS STOCKINGS BUTTE STOP THOUSAND PER NEXT.
New clothes would be tomorrow’s task. Tonight’s was supper. The girls had been managing on bread and milk both morning and evening, their only meal at noon (usually beans), to make their few dollars last till payday. Now they ordered a magnificent supper at the Palace Hotel, roast chicken and ice cream, such a blowout that Bella feared her skirt might not do up next day.
Mama felt she must stay out her notice at the Pioneer, and so missed their week in Billings. They played the Babcock, which had replaced the burned-down Opera House: it was plain brick, elevated only by columns with floral carving, and already dingy on the inside. But with their newfound wealth they stayed in a lovely hotel, and their superior room had two beds. At first they argued over whose turn it was for the single, but after one night each alone, Clover and Bella let Aurora have the narrower bed in lonely state, and slept tangled up together as usual.
The Babcock playbill remained the same, but for Victor, who had a month booked with Sullivan–Considine, and was travelling from Spokane down to San Francisco. He was replaced by Zeno the Human Calculator, a silent man sunk in apathy save when he stood onstage and dazzled the crowd by naming the day of the week in response to their shouts of birthdates from various years over the last century. It was a very dull show compared to Victor’s extravagant glory. Clover retired into herself again, but