for Bella. She jumped up from the settee with a small, impatient shriek. ‘There is no message, Mama! Especially not in the Très Belles Bull-Roarers! If the turn is good, it’s good, that’s all—it doesn’t need a moral, or to be interpreted.’
Mama continued her irritating nodding. ‘Oh, dearest child, that’s very true—they understand us, because we’re just ordinary folk, like them.’
‘We are nothing like them,’ Victor said. He lounged against the table, idly winding the red ball through his finger. ‘They are citizens, we are not.’
Like a spectator at tennis, Clover looked to see how Mama would return that serve—since to her citizen, like worthy, meant the despised Aunt Queen, she could not very well class herself as a citizen too. ‘Now, my dear, dear Victor,’ Mama said. ‘You will admit that here in polite vaudeville we are all one happy family, now that certain standards are adhered to from town to town. And that we all get along beautifully, like you and my sweet Clover.’
‘On the contrary, we quarrel often. The better to love.’
‘Well, all I say is, we can move in the first circles of Society; and we work very hard to do the best we can to make the words clear and to show the purity and beauty of our girls. Crystal clear!’
She was almost defiant, and Clover was relieved to see Victor give her a tender glance. ‘Not everything can be clear,’ he said, suddenly kind, speaking to Mama’s confusion. ‘Sometimes I have no idea why I do something! I do it to provoke, to stagger—not to clarify.’
Mayhew raised his head from his paper, reminded. ‘Speaking of stagger—I’ve invited the newspaper critics to lunch at the Placer next week, and I’ll need you girls on hand all togged out.’ He nodded to Aurora, where she sat studying her lines in the window seat. ‘Getting them well-buttered will help with publicizing your melodrama.’
Victor bowed in his direction. ‘Machiavelli in spats.’
Mama commended Mayhew on his initiative, but Clover could see she wasn’t giving up the argument with Victor, who seemed to make her as worried and confused as a small dog with a huge bone. Mama stretched out a hand to him, imploring him with great shadowy eyes to yield, to agree, to be at one with her in understanding. But Victor laughed and tossed the ball up into the air, where it became three balls, cascading down and flowing up again. Still, Mama reached out to him again. ‘The girls give people Hope, and that is so important, you know. To Entertain is a great calling, a great service. We send the audience home happy and strengthened, better able to bear their burdens.’
Victor laughed, whistled a twiddly bit of tune, and turned the red balls into a rose, which he handed her with an apologetic bow. ‘No. Not I, at least. I wish to send them home shocked, exhausted, discontented with their lives, and amazed.’
Amazed, yes, always, Clover thought. Even if you can amuse, amaze. Amazement is the best of all, in vaudeville.
6.
Headliners
MAY–JUNE, 1912
The Parthenon, Helena
The Starland, Calgary
The highest salary acts are usually placed last on the bill and are referred to as headliners or features.
FREDERICK LADELLE, HOW TO ENTER VAUDEVILLE
And then the axe fell. They were still eating breakfast the next morning in the Pioneer dining room when Mayhew appeared, wearing his motoring-coat. Aurora could see he was in a taking. His face was a thunderstorm—mouth in a tight line, dark air seeming to swirl around him. He took Aurora’s arm to pull her out on the porch with him, and—an afterthought—tweaked Flora’s shoulder too.
Bella stayed at the table with Clover, unable to eat. It was frightening to be in the presence of someone so very angry. Papa had rarely given way. From the porch they heard Mayhew’s raised voice, and after a bit, a slight shriek from Flora.
Then Aurora put her head in the dining-room door, and jerked her chin. The girls got up in haste, found her already racing up the stairs, and followed.
‘We’re to be packed in half an hour,’ she told them as they ran. ‘He’s taken all his papers, the accounts, everything, out of the theatre—some intolerable slight that Mrs. Ackerman has dealt him. Mama is finding out more, but they sent me to begin.’
A very dreadful development. Bella felt ready to screech with feverish excitement.
Clover kissed her cheek and whispered, ‘Don’t! It will be all right!’
They’d cleared out their dressing room, as always on a Saturday night, to let the