Show Boat

by Edna Ferber

  It was easy enough for Kim to believe in those fairy tales that had to do with kindly sprites who worked miracles overnight. A whole staff of such good creatures seemed pretty regularly occupied with the Ravenal affairs.

  Once a month there came a letter from Mrs. Hawks. No more and no less. That indomitable woman was making a great success of her business. Her letters bristled with complaint, but between the lines Magnolia could read satisfaction and even a certain grim happiness. She was boss of her world, such as it was. Her word was final. The modern business woman had not yet begun her almost universal battle against the male in his own field. She was considered unique. Tales of her prowess became river lore. Parthy Ann Hawks, owner and manager of the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre, strong, erect, massive, her eyebrows black above her keen cold eyes, her abundant hair scarcely touched with gray, was now a well-known and important figure on the rivers. She ran her boat like a pirate captain. He who displeased her walked the plank. It was said that the more religious rivermen who hailed from the Louisiana parishes always crossed themselves fearfully at her approach and considered a meeting with the Cotton Blossom a bad omen. The towering black-garbed form standing like a ship’s figurehead, grim and portentous, as the boat swept downstream, had been known to give a really devout Catholic captain a severe and instantaneous case of chills and fever. Her letters to Magnolia were characteristic:

  Well, Maggie, I hope you and the child are in good health. Often and often I think land knows what kind of a bringing up she is getting with the life you are leading. I can imagine. Well, you made your own bed and now you can lie in it. I have no doubt that he has run through every penny of your money that your poor father worked so hard to get as I predicted he would. I suppose you heard all about French’s New Sensation. French has the worst luck it does seem. She sank six weeks ago at Medley’s just above New Madrid. The fault of the pilot it was. Carelessness if ever I heard it. He got caught in the down draft of a gravel bar and snagged her they say. I think of your poor pa and how he met his end. It took two weeks to raise her though she was only in six feet of water. On top of that his other boat the Golden Rod you remember went down about four weeks ago in the Illinois near Hardin. A total loss. Did you ever hear of such luck. Business is pretty good. I can’t complain. But I have to be right on hand every minute or they would steal me blind and that’s the truth. I have got a new heavy. No great shakes as an actor but handy enough and a pretty good black face in the concert and they seem to like him. We had a pretty rough audience all through the coal country but whenever it looked like a fight starting I’d come out in front and stand there a minute and say if anybody started anything I would have the boat run out into the middle of the river and sink her. That I’d never had a fight on my boat and wasn’t going to begin any such low life shenanigans now.

  (Magnolia got a swift mental picture of this menacing, black-garbed figure standing before the gay crude curtain, the footlights throwing grim shadows on her stern face. That implacable woman was capable of cowering even a tough coal-belt audience bent on a fight.)

  Crops are pretty good so business is according. I put up grape jell last week. A terrible job but I can’t abide this store stuff made of gelatine or something and no real grapes in it. Well I suppose you are too stylish for the Cotton Blossom by now and Kim never hears of it. I got the picture you sent. I think she looks kind of peaked. Up all hours of the night I suppose and no proper food. What kind of an education is she getting? You wrote about how you were going to send her to a convent school. I never heard of such a thing. Well I will close as goodness knows I have enough to do besides writing letters where they are probably not wanted. Still I like to know how you and the child are doing and all.

  Your mother,

  PARTHENIA ANN HAWKS.

  These epistles always filled Magnolia with an emotion that was a poisonous mixture of rage and tenderness and nostalgia. She knew that her mother, in her harsh way, loved her, loved her grandchild, often longed to see both of them. Parthy’s perverse and inhibited nature would not permit her to confess this. She would help them with money, Magnolia knew, if they needed help. But first she must know the grisly satisfaction of having them say so. This Magnolia would not do, though there were many times when her need was great. There was Kim, no longer a baby. This feverish and irregular life could not go on for her. Magnolia’s letters to her mother, especially in lean times, were triumphs of lying pride. Sentimental Tommy’s mother, writing boastfully home about her black silks and her gold chain, was never more stiff-necked than she.

  Gay is more than good to me.… I have only to wish for a thing … Everyone says Kim is unusually tall and bright for her age.… He speaks of a trip to Europe next year … new fur coat … never an unkind word … very happy …

  Still, if Magnolia was clever at reading between the lines of her mother’s bald letters, so, too, was Parthenia at hers. In fact, Parthy took many a random shot that struck home, as when once she wrote, tartly, “Fur coat one day and none the next I’ll be bound.”

  XV

  THE problem of Kim’s education, of Kim’s future, was more and more insistently borne in upon her. She wanted money—money of her own with which to provide security for the child. Ravenal’s improvident method was that of Paddy and the leaky roof. When luck was high and he was showering her and Kim with luxuries, he would say, “But, good God, haven’t you got everything you want? There’s no satisfying you any more, Nola.”

  When he had nothing he would throw out his hands, palms upward, in a gesture of despair. “I haven’t got it, I tell you. I give you everything I can think of when I am flush. And now, when I’m broke, you nag me.”

  “But, Gay, that’s just it. Everything one day and nothing the next. Couldn’t we live like other people, in between? Enough, and none of this horrible worrying about to-morrow. I can’t bear it.”

  “You should have married a plumber.”

  She found herself casting about in her mind for ways in which she could earn money of her own. She took stock of her talents: a slim array. There was her experience on the show-boat stage. She could play the piano a little. She could strum the banjo (relic of Jo’s and Queenie’s days in the old Cotton Blossom low-raftered kitchen). She had an untrained, true, and rather moving voice of mediocre quality.

  Timidly, with a little nervous spot of red showing in either cheek, she broached this to Ravenal one fine afternoon when they were driving out to the Sunnyside Hotel for dinner. Gaylord had had a run of luck the week before. Two sleek handsome chestnuts seemed barely to flick the road with their hoofs as they flew along. The smart high cart glittered with yellow varnish. None of your cheap livery rigs for Ravenal. Magnolia was exhilarated, happy. Above all else she loved to drive into the country or the suburbs behind a swift pair of horses. Ravenal was charming; pleased with himself; with his handsome, well-dressed young wife; with the cart, the horses, the weather, the prospect of one of Old Man Dowling’s excellent dinners. They sped through Lincoln Park. Their destination was a two-hours’ drive north, outside the city limits: a favourite rendezvous for Chicago’s sporting world. At Dowling’s one had supper at a dollar a head—and such a supper! The beefsteak could be cut with a fork. Old Man Dowling bred his own fine fat cattle. Old Lady Dowling raised the plump broilers that followed the beefsteak. There was green corn grown in the Dowling garden; fresh-plucked tomatoes, young onions. There was homemade ice cream. There was a huge chocolate cake, each slice a gigantic edifice alternating layers of black and white.

  “Can’t I drive a while, Gay dear?”

  “They’re pretty frisky. You’d better wait till we get out a ways, where there aren’t so many rigs.” The fine cool late summer day had brought out all manner of vehicles. “By that time the nags’ll have some of the skittishness worked out of them, too.”

  “But I like to have them when they’re skittish. Papa always used to let me take them.”

  “Yes—well, these aren’t canal-boa
t mules, you know. Why can’t you be content just to sit back and enjoy the drive? You’re getting to be like one of those bloomer girls they joke about. You’ll be wanting to wear the family pants next.”

  “I am enjoying it, only——”

  “Only don’t be like your mother, Nola.” She lapsed into silence. During one of their many sojourns at the Ontario Street hotel she had struck up a passing acquaintance with a large, over-friendly blonde actress with green-gold hair and the tightest of black bodices stretched over an imposing shelf of bosom. This one had surveyed the Ravenal ménage with a shrewd and kindly though slightly bleary eye, and had given Magnolia some sound advice.

  “Why’n’t you go out more, dearie?” she had asked one evening when she herself was arrayed for festivity in such a bewilderment of flounces, bugles, jets, plumes, bracelets, and chains as to give the effect of a lighted Christmas tree in the narrow dim hallway. She had encountered Magnolia in the corridor and Nola had returned the woman’s gusty greeting with a shy and faintly wistful smile. “Out more, evenin’s. Young thing like you. I notice you’re home with the little girl most the time. I guess you think that run, run is about all I do.”

  Magnolia resented this somewhat. But she reflected instantly this was a friendly and well-meaning creature. She reminded her faintly of Elly, somehow; Elly as she might be now, perhaps; blowsy, over-blown, middle-aged. “Oh, I go out a great deal,” she said, politely.

  “Husband home?” demanded the woman, bluntly. She was engaged in the apparently hopeless task of pulling a black kid glove over her massive arm.

  Magnolia’s fine eyebrows came up in a look of hauteur that she unconsciously had borrowed from Ravenal. “Mr. Ravenal is out.” And started on toward her room.

  The woman caught her hand. “Now don’t get huffy, dear. I’m a older woman than you and I’ve seen a good deal. You stay home with the kid and your husband goes out, and will he like you any better for it? Nit! Now leave me tell you when he asks you to go out somewheres with him you go, want to or not, because if you don’t there’s those that will, and pretty soon he’ll quit asking you.”

  She had waddled stiffly down the hallway then, in her absurdly high-heeled slippers, leaving a miasma of perfume in the passage. Magnolia had been furious, then amused, then thoughtful, then grateful. In the last few years she had met or seen the wives of professional gamblers. It was strange: they were all quiet, rather sad-faced women, home-loving and usually accompanied by a well-dressed and serious child. Much like herself and Kim, she thought. Sometimes she met them on Ohio Street. She thought she could recognize the wife of a gambler by the look in her face.

  Frequently she saw them coming hurriedly out of one of the many pawnshops on North Clark, near the river. The windows of these shops fascinated her. They held, often, such intimate, revealing, and mutely appealing things—a doll, a wedding ring, a cornet, a meerschaum pipe, a Masonic emblem, a Bible, a piece of lace, a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles.

  She thought of these things now as she sat so straight and smartly dressed beside Ravenal in the high yellow cart. She stole a glance at him. The colour was high in his cheeks. His box-cut covert coat with the big pearl buttons was a dashingly becoming garment. In the buttonhole bloomed a great pompon of a chrysanthemum. He looked very handsome. Magnolia’s head came up spiritedly.

  “I don’t want to wear the pants. But I would like to have some say-so about things. There’s Kim. She isn’t getting the right kind of schooling. Half the time she goes to private schools and half the time to public and half the time to no school at all—oh, well, I know there aren’t three halves, but anyway … and it isn’t fair. It’s because half the time we’ve got money and half the time we haven’t any.”

  “Oh, God, here we are, driving out for pleasure——”

  “But, Gay dear, you’ve got to think of those things. And so I thought—I wondered—Gay, I’d like to earn some money of my own.”

  Ravenal cut the chestnuts sharply with his whip.

  “Pooh!” thought Magnolia. “He can’t scare me that way. How like a man—to take it out on the horses just because he’s angry.” She slipped her hand through his arm.

  “Don’t! Don’t jerk my arm like that. You’ll have them running away in a minute.”

  “I should think they would, after the way you slashed them. Sometimes I think you don’t care about horses—as horses—any more than you do about——”

  She stopped, aghast. She had almost said, “than you do about me as a wife.” A long breath. Then, “Gay darling, I’d like to go back on the stage. I’d like to act again. Here, I mean. In Chicago.”

  She was braced for a storm and could have weathered it. But his shouts of laughter startled and bewildered her and the sensitive chestnuts as well. At this final affront they bolted, and for the next fifteen minutes Magnolia clutched the little iron rod at the end of the seat with one hand and clung to her hat with the other as the outraged horses stretched their length down the rutty country road, eyes flaming, nostrils distended, hoofs clattering, the light high cart rocking and leaping behind them. Ravenal’s slender weight was braced against the footboard. The veins in his wrists shone blue against dead white. With a tearing sound his right sleeve ripped from his coat. Little beads of moisture stood out about his mouth and chin. Magnolia, white-lipped, tense, and terribly frightened, magnificently uttered no sound. If she had been one of your screamers there probably would have been a sad end. Slowly, gradually, the chestnuts slowed a trifle, slackened, resumed a normal pace, stood panting as Ravenal drew up at the side of the road. They actually essayed to nibble innocently at some sprigs of grass growing by the roadside while Ravenal wiped his face and neck and hands, slowly, with his fine perfumed linen handkerchief. He took off his black derby hat and mopped his forehead and the headband of his hat’s splendid white satin lining. He fell to swearing, softly, this being the form in which the male, relieved after fright, tries to deny that he has been frightened.

  He turned to look at her, his eyes narrow. She turned to look at him, her great eyes wide. She leaned toward him a little, her hand over her heart. And then, suddenly, they both began to laugh, so that the chestnuts pricked up their ears again and Ravenal grabbed the reins. They laughed because they were young, and had been terribly frightened, and were now a little hysterical following the strain. And because they loved each other, so that their fear of injury and possible death had been for each a double horror.

  “That’s what happens when you talk about going on the stage,” said Ravenal. “Even the horses run at the thought. I hope this will be a lesson to you.” He gathered up the reins.

  “A person would think I’d never been an actress and knew nothing of the stage.”

  “You don’t think that catch-as-catch-can performance was acting, do you? Or that hole in the wall a stage! Or that old tub a theatre! Or those plays—— Good God! Do you remember … ‘Sue, if he loves yuh, go with him. Ef he ain’t good to yuh——’ ”

  “But I do!” cried Magnolia. “I do think so. I loved it. Everybody in the company was acting because they liked it. They’d rather do it than anything in the world. Maybe we weren’t very good but the audiences thought we were; and they cried in the places where they were supposed to cry, and laughed when they should have laughed, and believed it all, and were happy, and if that isn’t the theatre then what is?”

  “Chicago isn’t a river dump; and Chicago audiences aren’t rubes. You’ve seen Modjeska and Mansfield and Bernhardt and Jefferson and Ada Rehan since then. Surely you know the difference.”

  “That’s the funny part of it. I don’t, much. Oh, I don’t mean they haven’t got genius. And they’ve been beautifully directed. And the scenery and costumes and all. But—I don’t know—they do exactly the same things—do them better, but the same things that Schultzy told us to do—and the audiences laugh at the same things and cry at the same things—and they go trouping around the country, on land instead of water, but trouping just the
same. They play heroes and heroines in plays all about love and adventure; and the audiences go out blinking with the same kind of look on their faces that the river-town audiences used to have, as though somebody had just waked them up.”

  “Don’t be silly, darling.… Ah, here we are!” And here they were. They had arrived in ample time, so that Magnolia chatted shyly and Ravenal chatted charmingly with Pa and Ma Dowling; and Magnolia was reminded of Thebes as she examined the shells and paper roses and china figurines in the parlour. The dinner was excellent, abundant, appetizing. Scarcely were they seated at the long table near the window when there was heard a great fanfare and hullabaloo outside. Up the winding driveway swept a tallyho, and out of it spilled a party of Chicago bloods in fawn covert coats and derby hats and ascot ties and shiny pointed shoes; and they gallantly assisted the very fashionable ladies who descended the perilous steps with much shrill squealing and shrieking and maidenly clutching at skirts, which clutchings failed satisfactorily of their purpose. Some of the young men carried banjos and mandolins. The four horses jangled their metal-trimmed harness and curveted magnificently. Up the steps swarmed the gay young men and the shrill young women. On closer sight Magnolia noticed that some of these were not, after all, so young.

  They entered the big dining room on a wave of sound and colour. They swarmed the table. They snatched up bits of bread and pickles and celery, and munched them before they were seated. They caught sight of Ravenal.

  “Gay! Well, I’m damned! Gay, you old Foxey Quiller, so that’s why you wouldn’t come out! Heh, Blanche, look! Here’s Gay, the bad boy. Look who’s here!”

  “I thought you were going out to Cramp’s place,” Gay said, sullenly, in a low voice, to one of the men.

  He chose the wrong confidant, the gentleman being neither reticent nor ebriate. He raised his voice to a shout. “That’s a good ’un! Listen! Foxey Gay thought we were going out to Cramp’s place, so what does he do? He brings his lady here. Heh, Blanche, d’you hear that? Now you know why he couldn’t come.” He bent upon Magnolia a look of melting admiration. “And can you blame him? All together! NO!”