Show Boat (24 page)

E
VEN after she had seen the Atlantic in a January hurricane, Kim Ravenal always insisted that the one body of water capable of striking terror to her was the Mississippi River. Surely she should have known. She had literally been born on that turbid torrent. All through her childhood her mother, Magnolia Ravenal, had told her tales of its vagaries, its cruelties, its moods; of the towns along its banks; of the people in those towns; of the boats that moved upon it and the fantastic figures that went up and down in those boats. Her grandfather, Captain Andy Hawks, had lost his life in the treacherous swift current of its channel; her grandmother, Parthenia Ann Hawks was, at eighty, a living legend of the Mississippi; the Flying Dutchman of the rivers, except that the boat touched many ports. One heard strange tales about Hawks’ widow. She had gone on with the business after his tragic death. She was the richest show-boat owner on the rivers. She ran the boat like a female seminary. If an actor uttered so much as a damn, he was instantly dismissed from the troupe. Couples in the company had to show a marriage certificate. Every bill—even such innocuous old-timers as East Lynne and The Gambler’s Daughter and Tempest and Sunshine—were subject to a purifying process before the stern-visaged female
owner of the new
Cotton Blossom
would sanction their performance on her show boat.

Kim herself remembered many things about the Mississippi, though after her very early childhood she did not see it for many years; and her mother rarely spoke of it. She even shook her head when Kim would ask her for the hundredth time to tell her the story of how she escaped being named Mississippi.

“Tell about the time the river got so high, and all kinds of things floated on it—animals and furniture and houses, even—and you were so scared, and I was born, and you wanted to call me Mississippi, but you were too sleepy or something to say it. And the place was near Kentucky and Illinois and Missouri, all at once, so they made up a name from the letters K and I and M, just till you could think of a real name. And you never did. And it stayed Kim.… People laugh when I tell them my name’s Kim. Other girls are named Ellen and Mary and Elizabeth.… Tell me about that time on the Mississippi. And the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre.”

“But you know all about it. You’ve just told me.”

“I like to hear you tell it.”

“Your father doesn’t like to have me talk so much about the rivers and the show boat.”

“Why not?”

“He wasn’t very happy on them. I wasn’t, either, after Grandpa Hawks——”

Kim knew that, too. She had heard her father say, “God’s sake, Nola, don’t fill the kid’s head full of that stuff about the rivers and the show boat. The way
you tell it, it sounds romantic and idle and picturesque.”

“Well, wasn’t——?”

“No. It was rotten and sordid and dull. Flies on the food and filthy water to drink and yokels to play to. And that old harridan——”

“Gay!”

He would come over to her, kiss her tenderly, contritely. “Sorry, darling.”

Kim knew that her mother had a strange deep feeling about the rivers. The ugly wide muddy ruthless rushing rivers of the Middle West.

Kim Ravenal’s earliest river memories were bizarre and startling flashes. One of these was of her mother seated in a straight-backed chair on the upper deck of the
Cotton Blossom
, sewing spangles all over a high-busted corset. It was a white webbed corset with a pinched-in waist and high full bosom and flaring hips. This humdrum garment Magnolia Ravenal was covering with shining silver spangles, one overlapping the other so that the whole made a glittering basque. She took quick sure stitches that jerked the fantastic garment in her lap, and when she did this the sun caught the brilliant heap aslant and turned it into a blaze of gold and orange and ice-blue and silver.

Kim was enchanted. Her mother was a fairy princess. It was nothing to her that the spangle-covered basque, modestly eked out with tulle and worn with astonishingly long skirts for a bareback rider, was to serve as Magnolia’s costume in The Circus Clown’s Daughter.

Kim’s grandmother had scolded a good deal about
that costume. But then, she had scolded a good deal about everything. It was years before Kim realized that all grandmothers were not like that. At three she thought that scolding and grandmothers went together, like sulphur and molasses. The same was true of fun and grandfathers, only they went together like ice cream and cake. You called your grandmother grandma. You called your grandfather Andy, or, if you felt very roguish, Cap’n. When you called him that, he cackled and squealed, which was his way of laughing, and he clawed his delightful whiskers this side and that. Kim would laugh then, too, and look at him knowingly from under her long lashes. She had large eyes, deep-set like her mother’s and her mother’s wide mobile mouth. For the rest, she was much like her father—a Ravenal, he said. His fastidious ways (highfalutin, her grandmother called them); his slim hands and feet; his somewhat drawling speech, indirect though strangely melting glance, calculatedly impulsive and winning manner.

Another childhood memory was that of a confused and terrible morning. Asleep in her small bed in the room with her father and mother, she had been wakened by a bump, followed by a lurch, a scream, shouts, bells, clamour. Wrapped in her comforter, hastily snatched up from her bed by her mother, she was carried to the deck in her mother’s arms. Gray dawn. A misty morning with fog hanging an impenetrable curtain over the river, the shore. The child was sleepy, bewildered. It was all one to her—the confusion, the shouting, the fog, the bells. Close in her mother’s arms, she did not in the least understand what had happened when the
confusion became pandemonium; the shouts rose to screams. Her grandfather’s high squeaky voice that had been heard above the din—“La’berd lead there! Sta’berd lead! Snatch her!
SNATCH HER!
” was heard no more. Something more had happened. Someone was in the water, hidden by the fog, whirled in the swift treacherous current. Kim was thrown on her bed like a bundle of rags, all rolled in her blanket. She was left there, alone. She had cried a little, from fright and bewilderment, but had soon fallen asleep again. When she woke up her mother was bending over her, so wild-eyed, so frightening with her black hair streaming about her face and her face swollen and mottled with weeping, that Kim began to cry again in sheer terror. Her mother had snatched her to her. Curiously enough the words Magnolia Ravenal now whispered in a ghastly kind of agony were the very words she had whispered after the agony of Kim’s birth—though the child could not know that.

“The river!” Magnolia said, over and over. Gaylord Ravenal came to her, flung an arm about her shoulder, but she shook him off wildly. “The river! The river!”

Kim never saw her grandfather again. Because of the look it brought to her mother’s face, she soon learned not to say, “Where’s Andy?” or—the roguish question that had always made him appear, squealing with delight: “Where’s Cap’n?”

Baby though she was, the years—three or four—just preceding her grandfather’s tragic death were indelibly stamped on the infant’s mind. He had adored her;
made much of her. Andy, dead, was actually a more vital figure than many another alive.

It had been a startling but nevertheless actual fact that Parthenia Ann Hawks had not wanted her daughter Magnolia to have a child. Parthy’s strange psychology had entered into this, of course—a pathological twist. Of this she was quite unaware.

“How’re you going to play ingénue lead, I’d like to know, if you—when you—while you——” She simply could not utter the word “pregnant” or say, “while you are carrying your child,” or even the simpering evasion of her type and class—“in the family way.”

Magnolia laughed a little at that. “I’ll play as long as I can. Toward the end I’ll play ruffly parts. Then some night, probably between the second and third acts—though they may have to hold the curtain for five minutes or so—I’ll excuse myself——”

Mrs. Hawks declared that she had never heard anything so indelicate in her life. “Besides, a show boat’s no place to bring up a child.”

“You brought me up on one.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Hawks, grimly. Her tone added, “And now look at you!”

Even before Kim’s birth the antagonism between Parthy and her son-in-law deepened to actual hatred. She treated him like a criminal; regarded Magnolia’s quite normal condition as a reproach to him.

“Look here, Magnolia, I can’t stand this, you know. I’m so sick of this old mud-scow and everything that goes with it.”

“Gay! Everything!”

“You know what I mean. Let’s get out of it. I’m no actor. I don’t belong here. If I hadn’t happened to see you when you stepped out on deck that day at New Orleans——”

“Are you sorry?”

“Darling! It’s the only luck I’ve ever had that lasted.”

She looked thoughtfully down at the clear colourful brilliance of the diamond on her third finger. Always too large for her, it now hung so loosely on her thin hand that she had been obliged to wind it with a great pad of thread to keep it from dropping off, though hers were the large-knuckled fingers of the generous and resourceful nature. It was to see much of life, that ring.

She longed to say to him, “Where do you belong, Gay? Who are you? Don’t tell me you’re a Ravenal. That isn’t a profession, is it? You can’t live on that.”

But she knew it was useless. There was a strange deep streak of the secretive in him; baffling, mystifying. Questioned, he would say nothing. It was not a moody silence, or a resentful one. He simply would not speak. She had learned not to ask.

“We can’t go away now, Gay dear. I can’t go. You don’t want to go without me, do you? You wouldn’t leave me! Maybe next winter, after the boat’s put up, we can go to St. Louis, or even New Orleans—that would be nice, wouldn’t it? The winter in New Orleans.”

One of his silences.

He never had any money—that is, he never had it for long. It vanished. He would have one hundred
dollars. He would go ashore at some sizable town and return with five hundred—a thousand. “Got into a little game with some of the boys,” he would explain, cheerfully. And give her three hundred of it, four hundred, five. “Buy yourself a dress, Nola. Something rich, with a hat to match. You’re too pretty to wear those home-made things you’re always messing with.”

Some woman wisdom in her told her to put by a portion of these sums. She got into the habit of tucking away ten dollars, twenty, fifty. At times she reproached herself for this; called it disloyal, sneaking, underhand. When she heard him say, as he frequently did, “I’m strapped. If I had fifty dollars I could turn a trick that would make five hundred out of it. You haven’t got fifty, have you, Nola? No, of course not.”

She wanted then to give him every cent of her tiny hoard. It was the tenuous strain of her mother in her, doubtless—the pale thread of the Parthy in her makeup—that caused her to listen to an inner voice. “Don’t do it,” whispered the voice, nudging her, “keep it. You’ll need it badly by and by.”

It did not take many months for her to discover that her husband was a gambler by profession—one of those smooth and plausible gentry with whom years of river life had made her familiar. It was, after all, not so much a discovery as a forced admission. She knew, but refused to admit that she knew. Certainly no one could have been long in ignorance with Mrs. Hawks in possession of the facts.

Ten days after Magnolia’s marriage to Ravenal (and what a ten days those had been! Parthy alone crowded
into them a lifetime of reproach), Mrs. Hawks came to her husband, triumph in her mien, portent in her voice:

“Well, Hawks, I hope you’re satisfied now.” This was another of Parthy’s favourite locutions. The implication was that the unfortunate whom she addressed had howled heaven-high his demands for hideous misfortune and would not be content until horror had piled upon horror. “I hope you’re satisfied now, Hawks. Your son-in-law is a gambler, and no more. A common barroom gambler, without a cent to his trousers longer’n it takes to transfer his money from his pocket to the table. That’s what your only daughter has married. Understand, I’m not saying he gambles, and that’s all. I say he’s a gambler by calling. That’s the way he made his living before he came aboard this boat. I wish he had died before he ever set foot on the
Cotton Blossom
gangplank, and so I tell you, Hawks. A smooth-tongued, oily, good-for-nothing; no better than the scum Elly ran off with.”

“Now, Parthy, what’s done’s done. Why’n’t you try to make the best of things once in a while, instead of the worst? Magnolia’s happy with him.”

“She ain’t lived her life out with him yet. Mark my words. He’s got a roving eye for a petticoat.”

“Funny thing, Parthy. Your father was a man, and so’s your husband, and your son-in-law’s another. Yet seems you never did get the hang of a man’s ways.”

Andy liked Ravenal. There was about the fellow a grace, an ease, a certain elegance that appealed to the aesthetic in the little Gallic captain. When the two men talked together sometimes. after dinner, it was amiably,
in low tones, with an air of leisure and relaxation. Two gentlemen enjoying each other’s company. There existed between the two a sound respect and liking.

Certainly Ravenal’s vogue on the rivers was tremendous. Andy paid him as juvenile lead a salary that was unheard of in show-boat records. But he accounted him worth it. Shortly after Kim’s birth, Andy spoke of giving Ravenal a share in the
Cotton Blossom
. But this Mrs. Hawks fought with such actual ferocity that Andy temporarily at least relinquished the idea.

Magnolia had learned to dread the idle winter months. During this annual period of the
Cotton Blossom’s
hibernation the Hawks family had, before Magnolia’s marriage, gone back to the house near the river at Thebes. Sometimes Andy had urged Parthy to spend these winter months in the South, evading the harsh Illinois climate for a part of the time at least in New Orleans, or one of the towns of southern Mississippi where one might have roses instead of holly for Christmas. He sometimes envied black Jo and Queenie their period of absence from the boat. In spite of the disreputable state in which they annually returned to the
Cotton Blossom
in the early spring, they always looked as if they had spent the intervening months seated in the dappled shade, under a vine, with the drone of insects in the air, and the heavy scent of white-petalled blossoms; eating fruit that dripped juice between their fingers; sleeping, slack-jawed and heavily content, through the heat of the Southern mid-afternoon; supping greasily and plentifully on fried catfish and corn bread; watching the moon
come up to the accompaniment of Jo’s coaxing banjo.