“I have gone once or twice,” Mrs. Howard was saying, “but it’s mainly a man’s affair.” She was talking about the theaters in Cincinnati. “I have neighbors who boast they have never once seen a play in all of their lives! Well, this is hardly surprising in a city where billiards and cards are forbidden by law. Do you know that to sell a pack of cards you might incur a fine of fifty dollars?”
She paused to take a sip of water. The meal was almost over. Soon it would be time for me to leave, and I needed to get this business over with before then. My regret—one of my regrets—was that if I followed Thaddeus’s plan, I couldn’t tell them that I had found myself a job, and I wanted to tell them that.
Instead I said, “I’ve decided to take you up on your offer, Mrs. Howard.”
Mrs. Howard put down her glass. I’ll say this for her, she never pretends not to understand anything that she understands perfectly well.
“I’m glad,” she said. “I’m so glad. And when do you plan to go home?”
Alpha. Beta. Gamma. Delta, I recited to myself slowly, looking at the red wallpaper. “Think of it as a script,” Thaddeus had told me. “Memorize your lines, and then recite the Greek letters in your head before you can say anything else. That’s the way to lie.”
“As soon as I can buy my ticket,” I said instead of what I really wanted to say: I won’t be going home. I need the money to repair a boat so the owner will hire me to do what his sister used to do because she died on the Moselle, unlike Comfort and me, who survived but lost the little we still had . . . I swallowed. “Tomorrow, if I’m able.”
“That’s just grand. And how much is the ticket?”
Alpha, beta, gamma . . . “Twenty dollars,” I told her.
I waited for her to say that that was absurd—a single coach ticket could not possibly cost so much, and what was I really planning to do with the money?—but when the silence continued I looked up to see that Mrs. Howard was smiling broadly at Comfort. Comfort was looking at me.
“Are you certain you want to?” Comfort asked. Her ingénue voice was gone.
“What else would I do?”
“She’s right, she’s right, my dear,” Mrs. Howard said quickly. “This is by far the best plan.”
“But surely you needn’t go right away.” Comfort looked at Mrs. Howard. “She can wait a few days, Flora, maybe cut out a dress or two? Do some alterations for you? To give May a bit of pocket money for traveling.”
“Oh, I’m prepared to give her something extra—say, another five or six dollars. Let’s call it twenty-five dollars. She’s your cousin! I would not hire her, my dear, that’s absurd.” The irony that she was hiring Comfort to go on a lecture circuit did not seem to occur to her.
Comfort slid her chair back and came over to my place to put her arms around me. “May, May,” she said, leaning over me. For some reason this made me cross.
“Well, it’s too late for that,” I said.
“I know. I’m sorry.” She drew back and looked at my face, and I found myself staring at the cleft in her chin. It was small and perfect, like a tiny almond, and because of a trick of the candlelight it seemed raised rather than receding, an almond I could pluck and take with me. “Do you hate me?” she asked.
I thought about this. “No,” I told her.
“Girls,” Mrs. Howard said, rising from the table. “No sentiment, please. Donaldson!” He came in before she even finished saying his name, as if he had been standing all this while with his white glove on the doorknob, waiting to be called. Mrs. Howard told him we would take our dessert in the parlor, and although I am not given to fancies, when his eyes slid over mine I had the strongest sensation that from the other side of the door he had heard my lie and understood it as such. My stomach felt both tight and queasy, and in the parlor I did not look twice at the dessert he brought in on a shiny silver platter, a white cake with two thick layers of cream frosting.
Later, with a fold of Mrs. Howard’s bills in my pocket, I said good-bye to Comfort. The bills were so crisp I wondered if one of the maids had ironed them along with the linen, and I felt them crunch when Comfort hugged me. Even with the money I did not feel victorious, however. Instead, strangely, I felt even lower than I had when I’d arrived. Perhaps part of me thought that even at this late hour Comfort might change her mind and fight for me. But as we stood at the door waiting for the horses, she said nothing except that I must write her with news. When I looked back at her standing in the foyer, I had to admit that she went very well with the pretty house and the pretty furniture, and Mrs. Howard must have thought so, too, because her eyes kept straying to her even as she said good-bye to me.
The night air had a slight chill to it, and after Donaldson helped me into the carriage he arranged a wool blanket over my knees. Then, to my surprise, he cleared his throat. I had a moment’s feeling that he was about to say something to me, either a reprimand for my lie or perhaps something sympathetic. But he only shut the door, checked the latch, and then put his hand up to signal to the driver that I was ready to go.
I did not look out to see if Comfort was watching me leave from the window. I did not think that she was.
6
The morning that the Floating Theatre was fully repaired and ready to depart Cincinnati, I was up and dressed a few hours before sunrise. Since it was too early even for her cow to arrive at the back door, Mrs. Nedel gave me a knuckle of ham and a piece of pound cake wrapped in a clean sheet of paper in lieu of breakfast. The night before she’d taken down from the attic a cracked leather carryall with rope straps, into which I packed my clothes and a half dozen handkerchiefs that Elizabeth gave me, her initials loosely stitched in the corner; I thought I could easily pull those out. Elizabeth also found an empty cigar box I could use for my new sewing supplies, which I’d purchased using a dollar of the “extra money” that Mrs. Howard had given me: needles and thread, nested embroidery hoops, two sizes of scissors, a thimble, a piece of chalk for marking up, and pins. I’d earned a dollar and a quarter from Mrs. Nedel plus another one of her discarded dresses for doing some alterations, although I used fifty cents of it to have my father’s watch repaired.
Four dollars and seventy-five cents, three dresses, and my sewing supplies. That was everything I had.
Outside, it was still more night than day. The sky rippled out above me in yards of gray linen, and small points of stars shone out where the clouds had thinned. However, the street already had a fair amount of traffic: milk carts, bread trucks, and a few tradesmen walking briskly along the sidewalk, their shoes already coated with Cincinnati’s pervasive white dust. As I waited on a corner for some carts to pass, I read a broadside nailed to a tree trunk. Looking back, the notice had the feel almost of an omen, although I didn’t take it as such at the time:
RANAWAY from the subscriber on the night of 22nd March, a handsome negro boy named Philip, assisted by a tall white man with a scar down the right side of his face. The WHITE THIEF is thought to live in Cincinnati; he is a LAW BREAKER and will decoy more slaves away if not stopped. If the organized courts are not up to the task, then Old Judge Lynch will soon sit upon the bench.
“Well, now,” said a man in a gray felt cap who had stopped at the corner, too. “That oughta frighten a soul. Judge Lynch, that’s who takes them down, no one but.”
“Is he a judge in Cincinnati?” I asked.
“Haw haw haw,” the man laughed.
A space between carts opened up, and I crossed the street thinking no more about it. I could now make out the wharf in the distance, and the Ohio River, vast and heavy, the largest tributary of the Mississippi—in fact, when the two rivers met, I was later told, the Ohio was the greater body of water—looked like a dark shadow beside it.
You might think that after living through the destruction of one boat I would not want to embark on another, but I am not sensitive in that way. Besides, there were obvious differences: One, the Floating Theatre was a flatbed, not a steamship, so it had no boilers t
o overstoke. It was poled downstream with the current, and at the end of the run it would be pushed back up the river by a hired steamer. Two, Hugo Cushing was not interested in breaking any kind of record traveling from one town to the next, or in outracing another boat, or in any other way putting his life (and ours) in danger. He was a man, I would soon learn, for whom theater was everything. All he wanted to do was to get to the next town so he could put on his show. His company consisted of five actors and three actresses. In addition to acting himself, Hugo was the director, manager, accountant, and owner, and he also held captain’s papers good from the head of the Allegheny to the lower Mississippi. Most of the company called him Captain, or Captain Cushing, but in my mind I always thought of him as Hugo, perhaps because of the green flag waving on the jack staff, “Hugo and Helena’s Floating Theatre,” which was the first thing I’d noticed.
I hadn’t seen Hugo since I’d given him the loan of twenty dollars three days before, but as I came up the gangplank I spotted him at the end of the boat winding a line around an oversized spool, getting the boat ready to embark. Thaddeus and two other men were on deck helping, all with their backs to me. Although the wind had not yet risen, the boat leaned slightly like a tree against a steady gust. I put my carryall down next to the ticket office window and hugged my shawl more tightly around me.
Small steamboats were already chugging past us, coughing up smoke. In comparison, the Floating Theatre seemed more like a barge: a box with another box nailed on top of it. Still, its fresh paint and green trim made it stand out from the other barges lining the pier, which were rusty and workmanlike, with dark barrels full of cargo roped onto their decks. Hugo’s boat was something in between commerce and pleasure. It was painted white like a two-tiered frosted cake, and like a cake some places needed more frosting than others to cover the dents. It had two decks with narrow walkways around them called guards, and evenly spaced square windows, and a striped green-and-white awning over the upper porch at the stern. The theater and the small ticket office took up the lower deck, whereas the upper deck was divided into living quarters: the galley, the dining room, and the staterooms—which were our bedrooms—all of which I would find as compact as the inside of a toolbox, useful without being pretty.
I stood on the lower deck uncertainly, not wanting to interrupt the men’s work but looking for the chance to say, Here I am; where should I go? Usually Comfort was the one who said this whenever we arrived somewhere new, smiling and using a great many more words. I recrossed my shawl and waited for an opening. No one noticed me. Meanwhile, Hugo was speaking loudly to the men while he pulled up the lines.
“Now, Leo, remember to keep her to the middle of the river; the water will begin to rise as we leave the city. But listen here, half a mile out there’s a sandbar, so keep closer to the right there. Now take care to knot that line up tight. You have it? Good man. Hold up! Bells starting!”
Today was the one-week anniversary of the sinking of the Moselle, and, according to the newspapers, at sunrise the bells of St. George would ring out twelve times to honor the one hundred and eighty dead. The man Hugo called Leo wrapped his arm around a long pole that he’d stuck down into the muddy bottom of the river, anchoring us, and then he took off his hat. Although the rest of us turned to the east when the bells started, Hugo turned to the west. I wondered about that. I watched his face soften as he looked out over the water.
The sound of the last bell was still echoing when he turned and noticed me. His face returned to a stern expression. “You’re here, then, are you? All right, well off the deck now. We have work to do.”
“Where should I go?” I asked.
The slightest pause. Then gruffly: “To Helena’s stateroom, I suppose.”
“Where is that?”
But he had already turned around, and if he said something more I didn’t catch his words. Leo left his long pole and walked over to a little bell strung up near the boat’s stern, ringing it to signal our departure. Although Hugo was a tall man, Leo was taller by nearly a head, and his copper skin—he was part Seminole Indian, I learned later, and part Negro—was already shiny with sweat. He went back to the pole, which the boat had drifted slightly away from, pulled it out, and began poling us expertly into the middle of the river.
Thaddeus came up to me with a can of lamp oil hooked over his forefinger. “I’ll show you where to go. Just let me take this to the theater first.” He’d been living on the boat for less than a week but carried the air of an old-timer.
“Don’t track mud onto my stage,” Hugo called after us. “And don’t fiddle with anything!”
We entered at the back of the auditorium, which was narrow but long. Two rows of benches had been nailed to the ground in front of a small stage, which was divided from the audience by a painted proscenium. The stage floor and walls were white—Hugo repainted the stage floor himself once a month—and five or six of the smallest kerosene lamps I’d ever seen were lined up on the floor at the proscenium line.
“Seats almost a hundred,” Thaddeus told me as we walked up the aisle between the two rows of benches. “Risers in the back for free blacks. Back behind the stage is the green room.”
We went up the three or four steps on the side of the stage and then around to the small room at the back of it, which had more furniture and crates crammed into it than seemed possible. At one end there was a couch and two straight-backed chairs all rather tightly pushed together, and at the other end was a makeshift kitchen: a squat portable stove sitting in a box of sand, a shelf of cups and saucers above it, and a kettle on the floor. Someone had hung up an unframed picture of the English actress Mrs. Siddons, but other than that the walls were peeling planks of bare wood. One small window looked out onto a slice of river without giving much of a view, and wooden crates of various sizes had been stacked on either side of it.
Two women were sitting on the couch: a young, pale, pretty woman and an older woman with a thick mantle of white hair piled on top of her head. They stopped running lines to look at us when we walked in, and I saw that the woman with the white hair was younger than the color of her hair implied, maybe only forty. Mrs. Niffen was her name.
“Pleased, I’m sure,” she said when Thaddeus introduced me, “although I must say that I certainly could have done Miss Helena’s job as well as my own. I told Captain Cushing that. I told him how I helped her all last year doing everything—the tickets, the props—and I’m quite a fine seamstress.”
“Mrs. Niffen is principally an actress,” Thaddeus said to me with a smile that seemed to convey something other than pleasure. “And Mr. Niffen plays all the mayors and shopkeepers.”
“Doubles on the fiddle,” Mrs. Niffen told me. She had a sharp nose and small eyes and her face made me think of an illustration I’d once seen in a storybook of a very clever rat. Her skin was softly pink and nearly unwrinkled, a curious complement to her white hair.
“I’m Lydia Fiske,” the younger woman said. “Please call me Liddy.” She had a full, round face with pretty downturned eyes that seemed sad, and a pleasant upturned mouth that seemed happy. The contrast was fetching. Here was a younger Comfort: pretty, used to playing the lead roles, and charming—she smiled at me as though she had already decided she liked me, in marked contrast to Mrs. Niffen, whose frown seemed to deepen whenever she looked at me. I stepped forward to take Liddy’s outstretched hand and tripped on a box.
“Careful,” Liddy said. “I don’t know why we keep these crates. There’s something moldering somewhere in one of them but we can’t discover what.”
Mrs. Niffen assured us all that she knew what was moldering and she was dealing with it in a timely way, and also that there was always something moldering on theater boats and one could never be sure entirely what it was; she seemed to be arguing both points at once. While she was speaking, the floorboards shifted beneath my feet and I felt my body dip and move as the boat pitched forward. A strong odor of mud blew in from the partially open window.
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“Whew! That’s a smell for you,” Thaddeus said, and all at once my stomach seemed to tighten and take notice. All this while the water had been pushing up at the boat from below, trying to move it, and yet I had been standing as though the ground were as stable as plowed earth. But it was not stable, I realized now, not at all. As we lurched again into the current I put my hand on the wall. I swallowed and then swallowed again. Liddy looked out the window.
“A little rough today,” she said.
• • •
Mrs. Niffen decided that she should be the one to show me Helena’s room, for reasons I could not follow. As the boat rocked over the choppy water my attention became riveted on my stomach, which seemed to be rising inside my chest. While we were climbing the outside stairs, the boat pitched forward and my stomach fell with a funny twist. The top deck consisted of a line of narrow rooms ending with the dining room and kitchen galley, each room accessible only from the outdoor guard, although the galley also had an interior door to the dining room.
Helena’s room was on the other end at the stern of the boat, just above the ticket office. Captain Cushing’s room, Mrs. Niffen told me as she opened the door, was the next one over. All the staterooms were small, less than ten feet across; but, being on the end, Helena’s room was a little bit longer than most. Inside, there was a narrow cot with two trunks at its foot forming a long T, along with the usual chipped washstand, chipped basin, and short oak cabinet. I was used to boardinghouse furniture, but here everything was about three or four inches smaller in width. On the far end was a door leading to a small outdoor porch overlooking the river, and near the solitary window stood a drop bucket attached to a rope so that I could pull up my own water, Mrs. Niffen explained.
The Underground River Page 7