Serafim and Claire (13 page)

Ville de Québec, le 8 octobre 1926

Ma douce, ma sœur,

Thank you for being so patient with me on the phone. I've been thinking about your question and why it infuriates me so. I think the reason lies in how utterly powerless I am to criticize Maman, to step in on Grand-maman's behalf. My hands have never felt so tied, Claire.

Everything she is doing ostensibly for Grand-maman is exactly as Dr. Bertrand had suggested. After her stroke last month, he insisted she have plenty of fresh air, and that she have as much human interaction and stimulus as possible. So, then, how could I have the audacity to disapprove of her wheeling Grand-maman to church? Oh, Claire, but you should see the way she sits there, parked at the front of the congregation, slumped to the side and gripping the wood and wicker of her mobile chair. If she could speak, I am convinced she would curse us all to hell and back. Instead, she can only quiver and grimace in the clothes and hats Maman has dressed her in. There are tears smearing her cheeks at times, and I am weak with the thought that they might be of the truest kind, that they have nothing at all to do with the dryness in the air.

Maman, who still will not speak of you, seems determined to have the last word on how our inimitable Grand-maman will be seen and spoken of in this world. Between you and me, I wonder if she would not find death at her own hand more dignified.

Tu me manques, Claire,

Cécile

The autumn that
Claire's parents effectively disowned her was a rainy one. Red, wet leaves tongued the windows, rusted foliage slicked the cobblestones, and the gutters overflowed. While Claire's normally animated nature felt just as dampened as the weather, her shoulders hung as if with the weight of a woollen, drizzle-drenched sweater.

By the winter, she was returning to her normal self. She rang in the new year of 1926 by raising a volley of champagne glasses, and stepping through the snow in high heels to climb the steps of another club for more after-hours dancing.

She continued her work in burlesque and was given more freedom and say at Midway. She felt increasingly appreciated there, though at the same time understood that she was in no position to make demands, that she could be both instantly and easily replaced. At any given moment there was an elaborate queue of potential dancers, each of them as young, attractive, and talented as the next, biding their impatient time just behind her.

Dance had certainly come into its own in the city. In terms of artistic merit and importance, it had become such a high priority that the government had adopted an immigration law that gave dancers the same title, status, and priority as specialized workers. Lithe and limber Europeans now punctuated the competitive mix, and stood out with their distinctive dress and styles.

Throughout the year, and for the first time in her life, Claire prided herself on staying one step ahead of fashion. As it became more in vogue for women to smoke with cigarette holders, she took to smoking hers like a casual man; when hemlines rose above the mid-calf, Claire's encroached upon her knees; as hairstyles shortened in length, she had her own cropped into a bob so high she could barely use the new “bobby pins” designed just for that coif; while the highly desired boyish figure had her, unlike many women, actually binding her breasts tight to her ribs.

It was also the year that her grandmother had a stroke, and Claire struggled with wanting to go and see her and needing to acknowledge her parents in order to do so. She was made doubly indignant by the fact that they hadn't even bothered to let her know it had happened. In fact, if it weren't for Cécile's correspondence, she would have been left entirely in the dark as to her immediate (and extended) family's existence. Claire felt that her father, in some nameless and obscure way, was betraying her, betraying a kind of unspoken trust and alliance they'd once shared. The shiniest of steel attachments appeared to have corroded overnight.

The trend of trying to hold her chin up high above the gloom of bad news continued the following winter when, before the confetti of the new year's festivities had even settled, the city was struck by a horrifying disaster. Claire was out shopping the Sunday it happened, January 9, when she heard the first sirens and commotion on St. Catherine Street. She followed a team of horses that had careened past in a thunder of hooves, firemen at the reins on their way to a blaze, hauling a massive steam pump. A coal truck to fuel it was in pursuit right behind, carving through the streetscape of stilled trams and vehicles, dumbstruck drivers huddled on the snowy curbs. Claire followed the smoke and panic, both towering in the distance.

She eventually approached the Laurier Palace Theatre, where grey-brown fumes rippled and ballooned from the upper windows. Ladders were clumsily being assembled to reach them. Most of the sounds, however, were coming from below, where it soon became apparent there were children trapped inside, blocked at a door that should have opened out onto the street but had been hinged backwards so that the harder they pushed, the harder the door sealed itself. The door bulged with the crushing weight but would not give way. Frantically men tried to break it down and pry it open. Others fumbled to get water to spout from limp hoses. Nothing seemed to be working as it should. The pounding of little fists grew fainter as time went on. The muffled moans, screams, wails, and coughing grew quiet. Horses stood staring forward, adjusting their ears, shifting anxiously.

Finally, the door was broken in, but in lieu of a scurrying confusion of children's legs escaping, only smoke and silence poured out. A man finally leapt into the fumes, only to re-emerge dragging a small body that he would momentarily learn was his son. Other tiny bodies were tugged onto the sidewalk, flaccid and quickly piling up. Claire watched, removing her cloche hat and holding it against her mouth, her knees threatening to give way. In her other hand she held the strings of a paper bag, a new pair of shoes (with button-fastening Mary Jane ankle straps that she'd bought for a steal) inside. A large sign on the adjoining building continued to boldly advertise Rex Cigarettes.

Clambering over the hoses, blackened snow, and splintered window frames on the ground, Claire saw two photographers, one taking pictures of the bodies as they mounted — there would be seventy-eight in all — another taking shots of the crowd as they watched it all unfold, quickly winding and adjusting a tiny camera in front of his chest before each new exposure. Claire felt a wave of disdain for such photographers, people who, in place of helping, seemed bent on archiving their own vile curiosity instead. When the photographer taking pictures of the onlookers caught sight of Claire, he slowly lowered his camera from his eye and looked at her, singling her out with even greater focus. Disgusted, Claire turned and hurried away from the chaotic scene, from the hysterical fathers and mothers screaming and moaning in grief, leaving it all behind.

A few months later, Claire had a conversation that would shake her, and eventually jar her into action. She'd been sitting beside the radio, that vital organ at the centre of every dwelling's life, where people gathered, sat, and stared into the middle distance while listening to their daily broadcasts. The radio where Claire lived was always tuned to CKAC, which catered more to a French-Canadian audience and, like every station in Montreal, was hosted by agile bilingual broadcasters, such as J. Arthur Dupont and Phil Lalonde, who could suavely switch between French and English at every introduction, advertisement, and commentary. Claire was listening to an interview with a famous Canadian actress who was touring Montreal at the time before returning to Hollywood. The host's voice was soft, his questions flattering and flirtatious.

A new roommate — a young girl who was already showbiz hardened and smart-alecky — came into the room and flopped herself down on the coffee-stained sofa across from Claire. She listened for a few seconds. “Bea Lillie? Pfff. I could act her off the stage.” She waved a contemptuous hand at the speaker. “Really, I could.”

“Then I would get to it if I were you,” said Claire. “Can't make it any bigger. Surely beats a two-minute vaudeville routine in some mislaid theatre.”

Snubbed and spiteful, the girl didn't hesitate to respond in kind. “You know, you'd be surprised the things I learn there. Why, just the other day this woman enlightened me with a hard-and-fast rule that I didn't know about: if a girl waiting around to make it big hasn't done so by twenty-five, she never, ever, will. So I got to thinking about exceptions to that rule, looking for them in my head and in the papers, on the radio, and I just couldn't find a single one.” She stood up. “Such a shame,” she said, leaving the room, not waiting for Claire to answer the question that she left trailing behind her. “Say, how old are you again?”

Claire was twenty-four; in just over half a year she would be twenty-five. While it was something she hadn't thought about for quite some time, she knew, had always known, that the girl was right. In fact, now that she mentioned it — Claire's eyes darting around the room — at twenty-four she was the oldest woman in the house, as she had been in the last three apartments. And she was without a doubt the oldest dancer at Midway. Claire sank deeper into her chair. Come to think of it, she was the oldest dancer she knew of, anywhere. How had she let this happen, so quietly, so invisibly? While being convinced that she was always progressing, on to bigger, more prestigious venues, she'd actually, slowly, settled herself into a complacent niche, becoming gradually indolent. If this tried-and-true rule held water (and everyone knew it did), there were really only six months remaining for her to rise to the kind of starlit fame she'd always imagined herself basking in for the rest of her days.

That afternoon, she started getting ready for her evening performance at Midway hours before she needed to, adding the final details to her makeup — generous dabs of ivory face powder, eyes lined and the points of her brows extended with kohl, tiny pucker of lipstick in oxblood red — long before she had to leave the house. She stood around the apartment for a few minutes, turning in front of her mirror. Then she left, taking a tram along St. Catherine Street and getting off at St. Urbain, just in front of the Gayety Theatre.

Of the three or four burlesque venues in the city, the Gayety was undoubtedly the most prestigious. Most of its shows came direct from New York, and it was an integral part of the Columbia Amusement circuit, with open ties to Broadway, even Hollywood. It was seen by Montreal dancers as more or less off limits, as its performers were of the touring variety, always imported from afar and passing through without even so much as a perfunctory wink at the local talent. Claire had never heard of anyone breaking through its elitist barriers. But on this particular September day, with only eight months left before she turned twenty-five, and having long ago exhausted every other prospect she could think of to access industry bigwigs, Claire calculated that she had little to lose in giving it a shot. She crossed the street, paused at the threshold, and stepped through the hallowed door.

It was a Friday, four o'clock, and the night's preparations were just getting under way. Claire stood on her toes to ask a man behind the bar, who was on his knees and stocking the liquor onto shelves, if she could speak to the manager. He reluctantly got to his feet and returned with a short man walking briskly behind him. Everything the short man did appeared agitated, quick, and jittery. He hiked up his pants, looked at the empty door behind her, then at the stage, back at Claire, then hopped on his toes and started towards her. “What are you, doll, late or early? Sorry, got no time to punch the bag right now. Did we talk on the phone?” He stopped in front of her, shot a glance to his right, offered her a cigarette, lit it, then steadied the match to the tip of his own. “I call you?”

Claire smiled. “I am” — she drew in a long breath of smoke — “a great dancer,” she said, blowing a stream of grey over his head.

“Fine, fine. Called a few of ya. So the act's a lead-in to our Harlem dancers. World-class, they are — and how! So it's gotta be hot, 'kay? Let's get Stanley play ya a ditty and see whatcha got.” He turned and gave a whistle and holler to beckon Stanley as if he were a German shepherd, and the piano player emerged from a backroom and waited for his orders. The manager motioned for him to play something and turned back to Claire. “Was a car wreck busted her leg. Is who I need a stand-in for, you see. Up there on the stage, and make your way towards me with the goods.”

In truth, Claire missed most of what he was saying, but she managed to catch the general drift that she'd stumbled into the right place at the right time, and that she now needed to impress him. And she did. When she was finished, both he and the pianist wiped their brows and shook their heads. The manager whisked her into a dressing room and explained that she would be hired for the night, and that he would see how things went from there. In the dressing room, she was introduced to the other dancer she would be performing with. It was explained that she would be one of two dancers flanking a well-known feature performer at centre stage, all three of them moving to hot jazz over a ten-minute routine. The act would come after a ventriloquist, and would nicely set the tone for the famed Harlem dancers to follow, with their patchwork of bright tassels and sequins barely covering their caramel skin, swinging legs and arms with a rhythm and skill that was legendary.

Claire had to steady herself with all the excitement she felt. It wasn't only the performers and musicians she rehearsed with that were more professional, more elevated than she was used to, but the theatre itself. It was lavishly decorated, with designer lights, crisp linen, and exclusive wooden trim. During the first act, when Claire peeked at the audience through a slat in the plush curtains, she realized that these were likely the very people who lived at the foot of Mount Royal, in the Golden Square Mile. They were some of the wealthiest people in the nation, upper-class anglophones out for an evening of leisure after having supped at the nearby Hôtel d'Italie, or the chic and exclusive La Corona, or some other luxurious and pricey restaurant in the city. Any one of them might be her ticket to the big time, providing the finger flick that would finally get the ball of her career unstoppably rolling.

Onstage, Claire stood out like never before, to the point of upstaging the feature performer whom she was supposed to be supporting. She felt her limbs moving like supple willow branches, wafts of music shuddering through her frame. When their act came to an end, she saw several elegant and jewel-bedecked wives elbowing their husbands for clapping too raucously. In the powder room afterwards, the feature dancer wouldn't speak to her. Claire wasn't particularly bothered by this because after the show, and in lieu of that feature dancer, it was Claire who was called over to the manager's table for a drink.

Standing tall and commanding in front of the table, dwarfing the stunted manager, she was introduced to a semicircle of powerful men — theatre executives, producers, agents, directors — and was heartily congratulated on her performance, the rims of champagne flutes clinking at the centre of the table like transparent oohs of adoration, foaming at the mouth. Not knowing what else to do, Claire simply giggled through all the English slang she didn't understand, words such as
milquetoast
,
flivver
,
rubes
, and
hooey
. By the end of the evening she'd managed to win them over enough to be invited out, and continued dancing well into the night.