Show Boat

by Edna Ferber

  Descending the great broad flight of outside steps Magnolia said, like a child, “From now until Monday we’ll do things, shall we? Fun. What would you like to do?”

  “Oh, a matinée on Saturday——” began Kim eagerly. Magnolia was enormously relieved. She had been afraid that this brief glimpse into the more spiritual life might already have had a chastening effect upon the cosmopolitan Kim.

  Thus the child was removed from the pernicious atmosphere of the Chicago Levee just when the Levee itself began to feel the chastening hand of reform. Suddenly, overnight, Chicago went civic. For a quarter of a century she had been a strident, ample-bosomed, loud-mouthed Rabelaisian giantess in red satin and diamonds, who kept open house day and night and welcomed all comers. There were food and drink and cheer. Her great muscular arms embraced ranchers from Montana and farmers from Indiana and bankers from New York. At Bath House John’s Working-men’s Exchange you got a tub of beer for a nickel; the stubble-faced bums lined the curb outside his ceaselessly swinging door on Clark Street. The visiting ranchers and farmers and bankers were told to go over to the Palmer House and see the real silver dollars sunk in the tiled floor of that hostelry’s barroom. The garrulous Coughlin, known as The Bath, and the silent little Hinky Dink Mike Kenna were Chicago’s First Ward aldermen and her favourite naughty sons. The faro wheels in Gamblers’ Alley spun merrily by day and by night. The Mayor of the city called a genial, “Hope you’re all winning, boys!” as he dropped in for a sociable drink and a look at the play; or even to take a hand. “What’ll you have?” was Chicago’s greeting, and “Don’t care if I do,” her catch phrase. Hetty Chilson was the recognized leader of her sinister world, and that this world happened to be prefaced by the qualifying word, “under” made little difference in Chicago’s eyes. Pawnshops, saloons, dives, and gambling houses lined Clark Street from Twelfth to the river, and dotted the near-by streets for blocks around. The wind-burned ranchmen in bearskin coats and sombreros at Polk and Clark were as common a sight as the suave white-fingered gentry in Prince Alberts and diamonds at Clark and Madison. It was all one to Chicago. “Game upstairs, gentlemen! Game upstairs!”

  New York, eyeing her Western cousin through disapproving lorgnettes, said, “What a crude and vulgar person!”

  “Me!” blustered Chicago, dabbing futilely at the food and wine spots on her broad satin bosom. “Me! I’ll learn you I’m a lady.”

  The names of University of Chicago professors (Economics Department) began to appear on the lists of aldermanic candidates. Earnest young men and women with notebooks and fountain pens knocked at barred doors, stated that they were occupied in compiling a Survey, and asked intimate questions. Down came whole blocks of rats’ nests on Clark and Dearborn, with the rats scuttling frantically to cover. Up went office buildings that actually sneered down upon the Masonic Temple’s boasted height. Brisk gentlemen in eyeglasses and sack suits whisked in and out of these chaste edifices. The clicking sound to be heard on Clark Street was no longer that of the faro wheel but of the stock market ticker and the Western Union transmitter.

  It was rumoured that they were going to close Jeff Hankins’. They were going to close Mike McDonald’s. They were going to banish the Washington Park race track.

  “They can’t do it,” declared Gaylord Ravenal.

  “Oh, can’t we!” sneered the reformers. Snick-snack, went the bars on Hankins’ doors and on Mike McDonald’s. It actually began to be difficult to find an open game. It began to be well-nigh impossible. It came to such a pass that you had to know the signal knock. You had to submit to a silent scrutiny from unseen eyes peering through a slit somewhere behind a bland closed door. The Prince Alberts grew shiny. The fine linen showed frayed edges. The diamonds reposed unredeemed for longer and longer periods at Lipman’s or Goldsmith’s. The Ravenal ring and the succession of sealskin sacques seemed permanently to have passed out of the Ravenal possession. The malacca stick, on the other hand, was now a fixture. It had lost its magic. It was no longer a symbol of security. The day was past when its appearance at Lipman’s or Goldsmith’s meant an I O U for whatever sum Gay Ravenal’s messenger might demand. There actually were mornings when even the Cockeyed Bakery represented luxury. As for breakfast at Billy Boyle’s! An event.

  The Ravenals’ past experience in Chicago seemed, in comparison with their present precarious position, a secure and even humdrum existence. Ohio and Ontario streets knew them for longer and longer periods. Now when Magnolia looked into the motley assemblage of objects in the more obscure pawnshop windows, she was likely to avert her eyes quickly at recognition of some object not only intimate but familiar. Magnolia thought of Kim, safe, secure, comfortable, in the convent on Wabash Avenue.

  “I must have felt this thing coming,” she said to Ravenal. “Felt it in my bones. She’s out of all this. It makes me happy just to think of it; to think of her there.”

  “How’re you going to keep her there?” demanded Ravenal, gloomily. “I’m strapped. You might as well know it, if you don’t already. I’ve had the damnedest run of luck.”

  Magnolia’s eyes grew wide with horror. “Keep her there! Gay! We’ve got to. I wouldn’t have her knocking around here with us. Gay, can’t you do something? Something real, I mean. Some kind of work like other—I mean, you’re so wonderful. Aren’t there things—positions—you know—with banks or—uh—those offices where they buy stocks and sell them and make money in wheat and—wheat and things?” Lamely.

  Ravenal kissed her. “What a darling you are, Nola. A darling simpleton.”

  It was a curious and rather terrible thing, this love bond between them. All that Parthy had grimly predicted had come to pass. Magnolia knew him for what he was. Often she hated him. Often he hated her. Often he hated her because she shamed him with her gaiety, her loyalty, her courage, her tenderness. He was not true to her. She knew this now. He knew she knew this. She was a one-man woman. Frequently they quarrelled hideously. Tied to you.… Tied! God knows I’d be happier without you. You’ve never brought me anything but misery.… Always finding fault.… Put on those fine lady airs with me. What’d I take you out of!… An honest living, anyway. Look people in the face. Accusations. Bitterness. Longing. Passion. The long periods of living in sordid surroundings made impossible most of the finer reticences. Garments washed out in the basin. Food cooked over the gas jet. One room. One bed. Badly balanced meals. Reproaches. Tears. Sneers. Laughter. Understanding. Reconciliation.

  They loved each other. Over and above and through and beneath it all, thick and thin, warp and woof, they loved each other.

  It was when their fortunes were at lowest ebb; when the convent tuition had now been two terms unpaid; when the rent on the Ontario Street lodgings was overdue; when even Ravenal, handsome and morose, was forced to content himself with the coffee and rolls of the bedroom breakfast; when a stroll up Clark Street meant meeting a dozen McLean suits as shabby as his own—it was at this unpropitious time that Parthenia Ann Hawks was seized with the idea of visiting her daughter, her son-in-law, and her grandchild in Chicago. Her letters always came to the Sherman House—had been called for there through these years though the fluctuations of fortune had carried the Ravenals away from the hotel and back again with a tide-like regularity. Twice Magnolia had taken Kim to see her grim grandmamma at Thebes when the Cotton Blossom was in for repairs during the winter season. These visits had always been timed when the Ravenal tide was high. Magnolia and Kim had come back to Thebes on the crest of a wave foaming with silks and laces and plumes and furs. The visits could not, however, be said to have been a success. Magnolia always came prepared to be the fond and dutiful daughter. Invariably she left seething between humorous rage and angry laughter.

  “It wasn’t anything she actually did,” she would explain afterward, ruefully, to Ravenal. “It’s just that she treats me with such disrespect.” She pondered this a moment. “I honestly think Mama’s the vainest woman I have ever met.”

  Strangely enou
gh, Kim and her grandmother did not get on very satisfactorily, either. It dawned on Magnolia that the two were much alike. Their methods were different, but the result was the same. Each was possessed of an iron determination; boundless vitality; enormous resistance; canny foresight; definite ambition. Parthy was the blustering sort; Kim the quietly stubborn. When the two met in opposition they stood braced, horn to horn, like bulls.

  On both occasions these visits had terminated abruptly in less than a week. The bare, wind-swept little town, winter-locked, had seemed unspeakably dreary to Magnolia. In the chill parlour of the cottage there was a wooden portrait of her father done in crayon. It was an enlargement which Parthy had had done from a small photograph of Andy in his blue coat and visored cap and baggy wrinkled pants. An atrocious thing, but the artist, clumsy though he was, had somehow happened to catch the alert and fun-loving brightness of the keen brown eyes. The mutton-chop whiskers looked like tufts of dirty cotton; the cheeks were pink as a chorus girl’s. But the eyes were Andy’s. Magnolia wandered into the parlour to stand before this picture, looking up at it with a smile. She wandered, too, down to the river to gaze at the sluggish yellow flood thick now with ice, but as enthralling as ever to her. She stood on the river bank in her rich furs, a lonely, wind-swept figure, gazing down the river, down the river, and her eyes that had grown so weary with looking always at great gray buildings and grim gray streets and swarming gray crowds now lost their look of strain, of unrepose, as they beheld in the far still distance the lazy Southern wharves, the sleepy Southern bayous—Cairo, Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, New Orleans—Queenie, Jo, Elly, Schultzy, Andy, Julie, Steve.

  She took Kim eagerly to the water’s edge—gave her the river with a sweep of her arm. Kim did not like it.

  “Is that the river?” she asked.

  “Why, yes, darling. Don’t you remember! The river!”

  “The river you told me about?”

  “Of course!”

  “It’s all dirty and ugly. You said it was beautiful.”

  “Oh, Kim, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  She showed her the picture of Captain Andy.

  “Grampa?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cap’n?”

  “Yes, dear. He used to laugh so when you called him that when you were a little baby. Look at his eyes, Kim. Aren’t they nice? He’s laughing.”

  “He’s funny-looking,” said Kim.

  Parthy asked blunt questions. “Sherman House? What do you go living in a hotel for all these years, with the way they charge for food and all! You and that husband of yours must have money to throw away. Why don’t you live in a house, with your own things, like civilized people?”

  “Gay likes hotels.”

  “Shiftless way to live. It must cost a mint of money.”

  “It does,” agreed Magnolia, amiably.

  “Like to know where you get it, that’s what.”

  “Gay is very successful.”

  A snort as maddening as it was expressive from Parthy. The widow Hawks did not hesitate to catechize the child in the temporary absence of her mother. From these sessions Parthy must have gained some knowledge of the Ohio and Ontario street interludes, for she emerged from them with a look of grim satisfaction.

  And now Parthenia Ann Hawks was coming to Chicago. She had never seen it. The letter announced her arrival as two weeks distant. The show-boat season was at an end. She would stay at the Sherman House where they were, if it wasn’t too expensive. They were not to pay. She wouldn’t be beholden to any one. She might stay a week, she might stay two weeks or longer, if she liked it. She wanted to see the Stockyards, the Grand Opera House, the Masonic Temple, Marshall Field’s, Lincoln Park, and the Chicago River.

  “My God!” said Gaylord Ravenal, almost piously. “My GOD!”

  Stricken, they looked at each other. Stared. It was a thing beyond laughter. Every inch of space about them spelled failure. Just such failure as had been predicted for them by the woman who was now coming, and whose coming would prove to her the triumph of that prediction. They were living in a huddle of discomfort on Ontario Street. Magnolia, on her visits to Kim at the convent, was hard put to it to manage the little surprise gift planned to bring to the girl’s face the flashing look of gay expectancy. A Henrici cake elaborately iced, to share with her intimates; a book; a pair of matinée tickets as a special treat; flowers for the Mother Superior; chocolates. Now the Christmas holidays were approaching. Kim would expect to spend them with her parents. But where? They would not bring her to this sordid lodging. And somehow, before the new term began, the unpaid tuition fee must be got together. Still, the Ravenals had faced such problems as these before now. They could have met them, they assured each other, as they always had. Luck always turned when things looked blackest. Life did that to tease you. But this was different. Gaylord Ravenal’s world was crumbling. And Parthy! Parthy! Here was a situation fraught with what of horror! Here was humiliation. Here was acknowledged defeat.

  “Borrow,” suggested Magnolia.

  “On what security?”

  “I don’t mean that kind of—I don’t mean businesslike borrowing. I mean borrowing from friends. Friends. All these men——”

  “Men! What men?” “The men at the—at the places.” She had always pretended that she did not actually know he came by his livelihood as he did. She never said, “Gamblers’ Alley.” She refused to admit that daily he had disappeared within the narrow slit of lane that was really a Clark Street alley; that he had spent the hours there watching bits of pasteboard for a living. “The men you have known so many years.”

  Grimly: “They’ve all been trying to borrow of me.”

  “But Mike McDonald. Hankins. Varnell.” She cast pretense aside now. “Thousands. They’ve had thousands of dollars. All the money we brought with us to Chicago. Won’t they give some of it back?”

  This he found engaging rather than irritating, as well he might have. He shouted with laughter as he always did at a fresh proof of her almost incredible naïveté. At times such as these he invariably would be impelled to caress her much as one laughs at a child and then fondles it delightedly after it has surprised one with an unexpected and charming trick. He would kiss the back of her neck and then her wide, flexible mouth, and she would push him away, bewildered and annoyed that this should be his reaction to what she had meant so seriously.

  “Nola, you’re priceless! You’re a darling. There’s no one like you.” He went off again into a shout of laughter. “Give it back! McDonald, h’m? There’s an idea for you.”

  “How can you act like that when you know how serious it is!”

  “Serious! Why, damn it, it’s desperate. I tell you I’ll never have her come here and see us living like this. We’ll get out, first.… Say, Nola, what’s to prevent us getting out, anyway? Chicago’s no good any more. Why not get out of this! I’m sick of this town.”

  “We haven’t any money to get out with, for one reason. And Kim’s at school and she’s going to stay there. She’s going to stay there if I have to——”

  “Have to what?”

  “Ask Mama for the money.” She said this mischievously, troubled though she was. Out he flew into a rage.

  “I’ll see her in—— I’ve been in deeper holes than this and managed to crawl out.” He sat a moment in silence, staring with unseeing eyes at the shabby sticks of furniture that emphasized the room’s dreariness. Magnolia, seated as quietly opposite him, sewing on a petticoat for Kim, suddenly let her hands sink in her lap. She realized, with a sort of fright, that he was as completely outside the room as though his body had been wafted magically through the window. And for him she, too, had vanished. He was deep in thought. The mask was off. She sat looking at him. She saw, clearly, the man her mother had so bitterly fought her marrying. The face of this man now in his late thirties was singularly unlined. Perhaps that was what you missed in it. The skin and hair and eyes, the set of the shoulders, the lead of th
e hand from the wrist, bespoke a virile man. But vigour—vigorous—no, he was not that. This was a fencer, not a fighter. But he had fought for her, years ago. The shambling preacher in the little river town whose name she had forgotten. That simple ignorant soul who preached hell fire and thought that play actors were damned. He had not expected to be knocked down in his own musty little shop. Not much of a victory, that. Gay had opposed that iron woman, her mother. But the soft life since then. Red plush, rich food, Clark Street. Weak. What was it? No lines about the mouth. Why was it weak? Why was it weak now if it had not been twelve years ago? A handsome man. Hard. But you couldn’t be hard and weak at the same time, could you? What was he thinking of so intently? His face was so exposed, so defenceless, as sometimes when she awoke in the early morning and looked at him, asleep. Almost ashamed to look at his face, so naked was it of the customary daytime covering.

  Now resolve suddenly tightened it. He stood up. He adjusted the smart and shabby hat at an angle that defied its shabbiness. He reached for the malacca stick. It was nine o’clock in the evening. They had had a frugal and unappetizing meal at a little near-by lunch room. Ravenal had eaten nothing. He had, for the most part, stared at the dishes with a detached and slightly amused air as though they had been served him by mistake and soon would be apologetically reclaimed by the slovenly waitress who had placed them before him.

  She had never been one to say, “Where are you going?” Yet now her face was so moving in its appeal that he answered its unspoken question.

  “Cheer up, old girl! I know somebody.”

  “Who? Who, Gay?”

  “Somebody I’ve done favours for. She owes me a good turn.” He was thinking aloud.

  “She?”

  “Never mind.”

  “She, Gay?”

  “Did I say—now never mind, Nola. I’ll do the worrying.”

  He was off.

  She had become accustomed, through these years, to taking money without question when there was money; to doing without, uncomplainingly, when there was none. They had had to scheme before now, and scurry this way and that, seeking a way out of a tight corner. They had had to borrow as they had often lent. It had all been part of the Clark Street life—the gay, wasteful, lax, improvident sporting life of a crude new Mid-west city. But that life was vanishing now. That city was vanishing with it. In its place a newer, harder, more sophisticated metropolis was rearing its ambitious head.