Show Boat

by Edna Ferber

  “There, there!” cooed Elly Chipley, pleased that her recital had at last moved this handsome silent woman to proper tears. “There, there!” She patted her hand. “Look, Nollie dear. There’s the boat. Seems funny not to see her lighted up for the show this time of night.”

  Magnolia peered through the dusk, a kind of dread in her heart. Would this, too, be changed beyond recognition? A great white long craft docked at the water’s edge. Larger, yes. But much the same. In the gloom she could just make out the enormous letters painted in black against the white upper deck.

  COTTON BLOSSOM FLOATING PALACE THEATRE

  Parthenia Ann Hawks, Prop.

  And there was the River. It was high with the April rains and the snows that nourished it from all the hundreds of miles of its vast domain—the Mississippi Basin.

  Vaguely she heard Barnato—“Just started out and promised to be the biggest paying season we had for years. Yessir! Crops what they were last fall, and the country so prosperous.… Course, we don’t aim to bother you with such details now.… Troupe wondering—ain’t no more’n natural—what’s to become of ’em now.… Finest show boat on the rivers.… Our own electric power plant.… Ice machine.… Seats fifteen hundred, easy.…”

  And there was the River. Broad, yellow, turbulent. Magnolia was trembling. Down the embankment, across the gangplank, to the lower forward deck that was like a comfortable front porch. The bright semicircle of the little ticket window. A little group of Negro loungers and dock-hands making way respectfully, gently for the white folks. The sound of a banjo tinkling somewhere ashore, or perhaps on an old side-wheeler docked a short distance downstream. A playbill in the lobby. She stared at it. Tempest and Sunshine. The letters began to go oddly askew. A voice, far away—“Look out! She’s going to faint!”

  A tremendous effort. “No, I’m not. I’m—all right. I don’t think I’ve eaten anything since early morning.”

  She was up in the bedroom. Dimity curtains at the windows, fresh and crisp. Clean. Shining. Orderly. Quiet. “Now you just get into bed. A hot-water bag. We’ll fix you a tray and a good cup of tea. To-morrow morning you’ll be feeling fine again. We got to get an early start.”

  She ate, gratefully. Anything I can do for you now, Nollie? No, nothing, thanks. Well, I’m kind of beat, myself. It’s been a day, I can tell you. Good-night. Good-night. Now I’ll leave my door open, so’s if you call me——

  Nine o’clock. Ten. The hoarse hoot of a boat whistle. The clank of anchor chains. Swish. Swash. Fainter. Cluck-suck against the hull. Quieter. More quiet. Quiet. Black velvet. The River. Home.

  XIX

  KIM RAVENAL’S tenth letter to her mother was the decisive one. It arrived late in May, when the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre was playing Lulu, Mississippi. From where the show boat lay just below the landing there was little enough to indicate that a town was situated near by. Lulu, Mississippi, in May, was humid and drowsy and dusty and fly-ridden. The Negroes lolled in the shade of their cabins and loafed at the water’s edge. Thick-petalled white flowers amidst glossy dark green foliage filled the air with a drugging sweetness, and scarlet-petalled flowers stuck their wicked yellow tongues out at the passer-by.

  Magnolia, on the Cotton Blossom upper deck that was like a cosy veranda, sat half in the shade and half in the sun and let the moist heat envelop her. The little nervous lines that New York had etched about her eyes and mouth seemed to vanish magically under the languorous touch of the saturant Southern air. She was again like the lovely creamy blossom for which she had been named; a little drooping, perhaps; a little faded; but Magnolia.

  Elly Chipley, setting to rights her privileged bedroom on the boat’s port side, came to the screen door in cotton morning frock and boudoir cap. The frock was a gay gingham of girlish cut, its colour a delicate pink. The cap was a trifle of lace and ribbon. From this frame her withered life-scarred old mask looked out, almost fascinating in its grotesquerie.

  “Beats me how you can sit out there in the heat like a lizard or a cat or something and not get a stroke. Will, too, one these fine days.”

  Magnolia, glancing up from the perusal of her letter, stretched her arms above her head luxuriously. “I love it.”

  Elly Chipley’s sharp old eyes snapped at the typewritten sheets of the letter in Magnolia’s hand. “Heard from your daughter again, did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I never seen anybody such a hand at writing letters. You got one about every stand since you started with the boat, seems. I was saying to Clyde only yesterday, I says, what’s she find to write about!”

  This, Magnolia knew, was not a mere figure of speech. In some mysterious way the knowledge had seeped through the Cotton Blossom company that in these frequent letters between mother and daughter a battle was being waged. They sensed, too, that in the outcome of this battle lay their own future.

  The erstwhile ingénue now assumed an elaborate carelessness of manner which, to the doubting onlooker, would forever have decided the question of her dramatic ability. “What’s she got to say, h’m? What——” here she giggled in shrill falsetto appreciation of her own wit—“what news on the Rialto?”

  Magnolia glanced down again at the letter. “I think Kim may come down for a few days to visit us, in June. With her husband.”

  The ribbons of Elly’s cap trembled. The little withered well-kept hand in which she still took such pride went to her lips that were working nervously. “You don’t say! Well, that’ll be nice.” After which triumph of simulated casualness you heard her incautious steps clattering down the stairs and up the aisle to the lesser dressing rooms and bedrooms at the rear of the stage.

  Magnolia picked up the letter again. Kim hated to write letters. The number that she had written her mother in the past month testified her perturbation.

  Nola darling, you’ve just gone gaga, that’s all. What do you mean by staying down there in that wretched malarial heat! Now listen to me. We close June first. They plan to open in Boston in September, then Philadelphia, Chicago. My contract, of course, doesn’t call for the road. Cruger offered me an increase and a house percentage if I’d go when the road season opens, but you know how I hate touring. You’re the trouper of this family. Besides, I wouldn’t leave Andy. He misses you as much as Ken and I do. If he could talk, he would demand his grandmother’s immediate presence. If you aren’t in New York by June third I shall come and get you. I mean this. Ken and I sail on the Olympic June tenth. There’s a play in London that Cruger wants me to see for next season. You know. Casualty. We’ll go to Paris, Vienna, Budapest, and back August first. Come along or stay in the country with Andy. Nate Fried says he’ll settle up your business affairs if that’s what’s bothering you. What is there to do except sell the old tub or give it away or something, and take the next train for New York? Your bookings say Lazare, Mississippi, June fourth, fifth and sixth. Nate looked it up and reports it’s twenty miles from a railroad. Now, Nola, that’s just too mad. Come on home.

  KIM.

  The hand that held the letter dropped to her lap again. Magnolia lay relaxed in the low deck chair and surveyed through half-closed lids the turgid, swift-flowing stream that led on to Louisiana and the sea. Above the clay banks that rose from the river lay the scrubby little settlement shimmering in the noonday heat. A mule team toiled along the river road drawing a decrepit cart on whose sagging seat a Negro sat slumped, the rope lines slack in his listless hands, his body swaying with the motion of the vehicle. From the cook’s galley, aft, came the yee-yah-yah-yah of Negro laughter. Then a sudden crash of piano, drum, horn, and cymbals. The band was rehearsing. The porcine squeal and bleat and grunt of the saxophone. Mississippi Blues they were playing. Ort Hanley, of the Character Team, sang it in the concert after the show. I got the blues. I said the blues. I got the M-i-s-, I said the s-i-s, I said the s-i-pp-i, Mississippi, I got them Miss-is-sippi blu-hoo-hoos.

  The heat and the music and the laughter and the squeak of the mule car
t up the road blended and made a colourful background against which the woman in the chair viewed the procession of the last twenty-five years.

  It had turned out well enough. She had gone on, blindly, and it had turned out well enough. Kim. Kim was different. Nothing blind about Kim. She had emerged from the cloistral calm of the Chicago convent with her competent mind quite made up. I am going to be an actress. Oh, no, Kim! Not you! But Kim had gone about it as she went about everything. Clearheaded. Thoughtful. Deliberate. But actresses were not made in this way, Magnolia argued. Oh, yes, they were. Five years in stock on Chicago’s North Side. A tiny part in musical comedy. Kim decided that she knew nothing. She would go to the National Theatre School of Acting in New York and start all over again. Magnolia’s vaudeville days were drawing to an end. A middle-aged woman, still able to hold her audience, still possessing a haunting kind of melancholy beauty. But more than this was needed to hold one’s head above the roaring tide of ragtime jazz-time youngsters surging now toward the footlights. She had known what it was to be a headliner, but she had never commanded the fantastic figures of the more spectacular acts. She had been thrifty, though, and canny. She easily saw Kim through the National Theatre School. The idea of Kim in a school of acting struck her as being absurd, though Kim gravely explained to her its uses. Finally she took a tiny apartment in New York so that she and Kim might have a home together. Kim worked slavishly, ferociously. The idea of the school did not amuse Magnolia as much as it had at first.

  Fencing lessons. Gymnastic dancing. Interpretive dancing. Singing lessons. Voice placing. French lessons.

  “Are you studying to be an acrobat or a singer or a dancer? I can’t make it out.”

  “Now, Nola, don’t be an old-fashioned frumpy darling. Spend a day at the school and you’ll know what I’m getting at.”

  The dancing class. A big bright bare room. A phonograph. Ten girls bare-legged, bare-footed, dressed in wisps. A sturdy, bare-legged woman teacher in a hard-worked green chiffon wisp. They stood in a circle, perhaps five feet apart, and jumped on one foot and swung the other leg behind them, and kept this up, alternating right leg and left, for ten minutes. It looked ridiculously simple. Magnolia tried it when she get home and found she couldn’t do it at all. Bar work. Make a straight line of that leg. Back! Back! Stretch! Stretch! Stretch! Some of it was too precious. The girls in line formation and the green chiffon person facing them, saying, idiotically, and suiting actions to words:

  “Reach down into the valley! Gather handfuls of mist. Up, up, facing the sun! Oh, how lovely!”

  The Voice class. The Instructor, wearing a hat with an imposing façade and clanking with plaques of arts-and-crafts jewellery, resembled, as she sat at her table fronting the seated semi-circle of young men and women, the chairman of a woman’s club during the business session of a committee meeting.

  Her voice was “placed.” Magnolia, listening and beholding, would not have been surprised to see her remove her voice, an entity, from her throat and hold it up for inspection. It was a thing so artificial, so studied, so manufactured. She articulated carefully and with great elegance.

  “I don’t need to go into the wide-open throat to-day. We will start with the jaw exercises. Down! To the side! Side! Rotate!”

  With immense gravity and earnestness twelve young men and women took hold of their respective jaws and pulled these down; from side to side; around. They showed no embarrassment.

  “Now then! The sound of b. Bub-ub-ub-ub. They bribed Bob with a bib. Sound of t. It isn’t a bit hot. Sound of d. Dad did the deed. Sound of n. None of the nine nuns came at noon”

  Singly and en masse they disposed of Bob and Dad and the nine nuns. Pharynx resonance. Say, “Clear and free, Miss Ravenal.” Miss Ravenal said clear-and-free, distinctly. No, no, no! Not clear-and-free, but clear—and free. Do you see what I mean? Good. Now take it again. Miss Ravenal took it again. Clear—and free. That’s better.

  Now then. Words that differ in the wh sound. Mr. Karel, let us hear your list. Mr. Karel obliges. Whether-weather, when-wen, whinny-winnow, whither-wither; why do you spell it with a y?

  Miss Rogers, l sounds. Miss Rogers, enormously solemn (fated for Lady Macbeth at the lightest)—level, loyal, lull, lily, lentil, love, lust, liberty, boil, coral——

  Now then! The nerve vitalizing breath! We’ll all stand. Hold the breath. Stretch out arms. Arms in—and IN—AND IN—out—in—head up—mouth open——

  Shades of Modjeska, Duse, Rachel, Mrs. Siddons, Bernhardt! Was this the way an actress was made!

  “You wait and see,” said Kim, grimly. Dancing, singing, fencing, voice, French. One year. Two. Three. Magnolia had waited, and she had seen.

  Kim had had none of those preliminary hardships and terrors and temptations, then, that are supposed to beset the path of the attractive young woman who would travel the road to theatrical achievement. Her success actually had been instantaneous and sustained. She had been given the part of the daughter of a worldly mother in a new piece by Ford Salter and had taken the play away from the star who did the mother. Her performance had been clear-cut, modern, deft, convincing. She was fresh, but finished.

  She was intelligent, successful, workmanlike, intuitive, vigorous, adaptable. She was almost the first of this new crop of intelligent, successful, deft, workmanlike, intuitive, vigorous, adaptable young women of the theatre. There was about her—or them—nothing of genius, of greatness, of the divine fire. But the dramatic critics of the younger school who were too late to have seen past genius in its heyday and for whom the theatrical genius of their day was yet to come, viewed her performance and waxed hysterical, mistaking talent and intelligence and hard work and ambition for something more rare. It became the thing to proclaim each smart young woman the Duse of her day if she had a decent feeling for stage tempo, could sustain a character throughout three acts, speak the English language intelligibly, cross a stage or sit in a chair naturally. By the time Kim had been five years out of the National Theatre School there were Duses by the dozen, and a Broadway Bernhardt was born at least once a season.

  These gave, invariably, what is known as a fine performance. As you stood in the lobby between the acts, smoking your cigarette, you said, “She’s giving a fine performance.”

  “A fine performance!” Magnolia echoed one evening, rather irritably, after she and Kim had returned from the opening of a play in which one of Kim’s friends was featured. “But she doesn’t act. Everything she did and everything she said was right. And I was as carried out of myself as though I were listening to a clock strike. When I go to the theatre I want to care. In the old days maybe they didn’t know so much about tempo and rhythm, but in the audience strong men wept and women fainted——”

  “Now listen, Nola darling. One of your old-day gals would last about four seconds on Broadway. I’ve heard about Clara Morris and Mrs. Siddons, and Modjeska, and Bernhardt all my life. If the sentimental old dears were to come back in an all-star revival to-day the intelligent modern theatre-going audience would walk out on them.”

  The new-school actresses went in for the smarter teas, eschewed cocktails, visited the art exhibits, had their portraits painted in the new manner, never were seen at night clubs, were glimpsed coming out of Scribner’s with a thick volume of modern biography, used practically no make-up when in mufti, kept their names out of the New York telephone directory, wore flat-heeled shoes and woollen stockings while walking briskly in Central Park, went to Symphony Concerts; were, in short, figures as glamorous and romantic as a pint of milk. Everything they did on the stage was right. Intelligent, well thought out, and right. Watching them, you knew it was right—tempo, tone, mood, character. Right. As right as an engineering blueprint. Your pulses, as you sat in the theatre, were normal.

  Usually, their third season, you saw them unwisely lunching too often at the Algonquin Round Table and wise-cracking with the critics there. The fourth they took a bit in that new English comedy just until O’Neill should
have finished the play he was doing for them. The fifth they married that little Whatshisname. The sixth they said, mysteriously, that they were Writing.

  Kim kept away from the Algonquin, did not attend first nights with Woollcott or Broun, had a full-page Steichen picture in Vanity Fair, and married Kenneth Cameron. She went out rarely. Sunday night dinners, sometimes; or she had people in (ham à la Queenie part of the cold buffet). Her list of Sunday night guests or engagements read like a roster of the New York Telephone Company’s Exchanges. Stuyvesant, Beekman, Bleeker, Murray, Rhinelander, Vanderbilt, Jerome, Wadsworth, Tremont. She learned to say, “It’s just one of those things——” She finished an unfinished sentence with, “I mean——!” and a throwing up of the open palms.

  Kenneth Cameron. Her marriage with Kenneth Cameron was successful and happy and very nice. Separate bedrooms and those lovely negligées—velvet with Venetian sleeves and square neck-line. Excellent friends. Nothing sordid. Personal liberty and privacy of thought and action—those were the things that made for happiness in marriage. Magnolia wondered, sometimes, but certainly it was not for her to venture opinion. Her own marriage had been no such glittering example of perfection. Yet she wondered, seeing this well-ordered and respectful union, if Kim was not, after all, missing something. Wasn’t marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded? Wasn’t it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt? She was wrong, of course. Ken’s manner toward Kim was polite, tender, thoughtful. Kim’s manner toward Ken was polite, tender, thoughtful. Are you free next Thursday, dear? The Paynes are having those Russians. It might be rather interesting.… Sorry. Ken’s voice. Soft, light. It was the—well, Magnolia never acknowledged this, even to herself, but it was what she called the male interior decorator’s voice. You heard it a good deal at teas, and at the Algonquin, and in the lobby between the acts on first nights and in those fascinating shops on Madison Avenue where furniture and old glass and brasses and pictures were shown you by slim young men with delicate hands. I mean——! It’s just one of those things.…