Show Boat (27 page)

Magnolia took the plunge. “We’re not—I’m not—Gay’s not happy any more on the rivers.”

“You’ll be a sight unhappier on land before you’re through, make no mistake about that, young lady. Where’ll you go? Chicago, h’m? What’ll you do there? Starve, and worse. I know. Many’s the time you’ll wish yourself back here.”

Magnolia, nervous, apprehensive, torn, now burst into sudden rebellion against the iron hand that had gripped her all these years.

“How do you know? How can you be so sure? And even if you are right, what of it? You’re always trying to keep people from doing the things they want to do. You’re always wanting people to live cautiously. You fought to keep Papa from buying the
Cotton Blossom
in the first place, and made his life a hell. And now you won’t leave it. You didn’t want me to act. You didn’t want me to marry Gay. You didn’t want me to have Kim. Maybe you were right. Maybe I shouldn’t
have done any of those things. But how do you know? You can’t twist people’s lives around like that, even if you twist them right. Because how do you know that even when you’re right you mayn’t be wrong? If Papa had listened to you, we’d be living in Thebes. He’d be alive, probably. I’d be married to the butcher, maybe. You can’t do it. Even God lets people have their own way, though they have to fall down and break their necks to find out they were wrong.… You can’t do it … and you’re glad when it turns out badly …”

She was growing incoherent.

Back of Parthy’s opposition to their going was a deep relief of which even she was unaware, and whose existence she would have denied had she been informed of it. Her business talent, so long dormant, was leaping into life. Her energy was cataclysmic. One would almost have said she was happy. She discharged actors, crew; engaged actors, crew. Ordered supplies. Spoke of shifting to an entirely new territory the following year—perhaps to the rivers of North Carolina and Maryland. She actually did this, though not until much later. Magnolia, years afterward reading her mother’s terse and maddening letters, would be seized with a nostalgia not for the writer but for the lovely-sounding places of which she wrote—though they probably were as barren and unpicturesque as the river towns of the Mississippi and Ohio and Big Sandy and Kanawha. “We’re playing the town of Bath, on the Pamlico River,” Parthy’s letter would say. Or, “We had a good week at Queenstown, on the Sassafras.”

Magnolia, looking out into the gray Chicago streets, slippery with black ice, thick with the Lake Michigan fog, would repeat the names over to herself. Bath on the Pamlico. Queenstown on the Sassafras.

Mrs. Hawks, at parting, was all for Magnolia’s retaining her financial share in the
Cotton Blossom
, the money accruing therefrom to be paid at regular intervals. In this she was right. She knew Ravenal. In her hard and managing way she loved her daughter; wished to insure her best interests. But Magnolia and Ravenal preferred to sell their share outright if she would buy. Ravenal would probably invest it in some business, Magnolia said.

“Yes—monkey business,” retorted Mrs. Hawks. Then added, earnestly, “Now mind, don’t you come snivelling to me when it’s gone and you and your child haven’t a penny to bless yourselves with. For that’s what it’ll come to in the end. Mark my words. I don’t say I wouldn’t be happy to see you and Kim back. But not him. When he’s run through every penny of your money, he needn’t look to me for more. You can come back to the boat; you and Kim. I’ll look for you. But him! Never!”

The two women faced each other, and they were no longer mother and daughter but two forces opposing each other with all the strength that lay in the deep and powerful nature of both.

Magnolia made one of those fine speeches. “I wouldn’t come to you for help—not if I were starving to death, and Kim too.”

“Oh, there’s worse things than starving to death.”

“I wouldn’t come to you no matter what.”

“You will, just the same. I’d take my oath on that.”

“I never will.”

Secretly she was filled with terror at leaving the rivers; for the rivers, and the little inaccessible river towns, and the indolent and naïve people of those towns whose very presence in them confessed them failures, had with the years taken on in Magnolia’s eyes the friendly aspect of the accustomed. Here was comfort assured; here were friends; here the ease that goes with familiarity. Even her mother’s bristling generalship had in it a protective quality. The very show boat was a second mother, shielding her from the problems and cares that beset the land-dweller. The
Cotton Blossom
had been a little world in itself on which life was a thing detached, dream-like, narcotic.

As Magnolia Ravenal, with her husband and her child, turned from this existence of ease to the outside world of which she already had had one bitter taste, she was beset by hordes of fears and doubts. Yet opposing these, and all but vanquishing them, was the strong love of adventure—the eager curiosity about the unknown—which had always characterized her and her dead father, the little captain, and caused them both to triumph, thus far, over the clutching cautious admonitions of Parthenia Ann Hawks.

Fright and anticipation; nostalgia and curiosity; a soaring sense of freedom at leaving her mother’s too-protective wing; a pang of compunction that she should feel this unfilial surge of relief.

They were going. You saw the three of them
scrambling up the steep river bank to the levee (perhaps for the last time, Magnolia thought with a great pang. And within herself a voice cried no! no!) Ravenal slim, cool, contained; Magnolia whiter than usual, and frankly tearful; the child Kim waving an insouciant farewell with both small fists. They carried no bundles, no parcels, no valises. Ravenal disdained to carry parcels; he did not permit those of his party to carry them. Two Negroes in tattered and faded blue overalls made much of the luggage, stowing it inefficiently under the seats and over the floor of the livery rig which had been hired to take the three to the nearest railway station, a good twelve miles distant.

The
Cotton Blossom
troupe was grouped on the forward deck to see them off. The
Cotton Blossom
lay, smug, safe, plump, at the water’s edge. A passing side-wheeler, flopping ponderously downstream, sent little flirty waves across the calm waters to her, and set her to palpitating coyly. Good-bye! Good-bye! Write, now. Mis’ Means’ face distorted in a ridiculous pucker of woe. Ravenal in the front seat with the driver. Magnolia and Kim in the back seat with the luggage protruding at uncomfortable angles all about them. Parthenia Ann Hawks, the better to see them, had stationed herself on the little protruding upper deck, forward—the deck that resembled a balcony much like that on the old
Cotton Blossom
. The livery nags started with a lurch up the dusty village street. They clattered across the bridge toward the upper road. Magnolia turned for a last glimpse through her tears. There stood Parthenia Ann Hawks, silhouetted against
sky and water, a massive and almost menacing figure in her robes of black—tall, erect, indomitable. Her face was set. The keen eyes gazed, unblinking, across the sunlit waters. One arm was raised in a gesture of farewell. Ruthless, unconquerable, headstrong, untamed, terrible.

“She’s like the River,” Magnolia thought, through her grief, in a sudden flash of vision. “She’s the one, after all, who’s like the Mississippi.”

A bend in the upper road. A clump of sycamores. The river, the show boat, the silent black-robed figure were lost to view.

T
HE most casual onlooker could gauge the fluctuations of the Ravenal fortunes by any one of three signs. There was Magnolia Ravenal’s sealskin sacque; there was Magnolia Ravenal’s diamond ring; there was Gaylord Ravenal’s malacca cane. Any or all of these had a way of vanishing and reappearing in a manner that would have been baffling to one not an habitué of South Clark Street, Chicago. Of the three, the malacca stick, though of almost no tangible value, disappeared first and oftenest, for it came to be recognized as an IOU by every reputable Clark Street pawnbroker. Deep in a losing game of faro at Jeff Hankins or Mike McDonald’s, Ravenal would summon a Negro boy to him. He would hand him the little ivory-topped cane. “Here—take this down to Abe Lipman’s, corner Clark and Monroe. Tell him I want two hundred dollars. Hurry.” Or: “Run over to Goldsmith’s with this. Tell him a hundred.”

The black boy would understand. In ten minutes he would return minus the stick and bearing a wilted sheaf of ten-dollar bills. If Ravenal’s luck turned, the cane was redeemed. If it still stayed stubborn, the diamond ring must go; that failing, then the sealskin sacque. Ravenal, contrary to the custom of his confrères, wore no jewellery; possessed none. There were
certain sinister aspects of these outward signs, as when, for example, the reigning sealskin sacque was known to skip an entire winter.

Perhaps none of these three symbols was as significant a betrayal of the Ravenal finances as was Gay Ravenal’s choice of a breakfasting place. He almost never breakfasted at home. This was a reversion to one of the habits of his bachelor days; was, doubtless, a tardy rebellion, too, against the years spent under Mrs. Hawks’ harsh régime. He always had hated those
Cotton Blossom
nine o’clock family breakfasts ominously presided over by Parthy in cap and curl papers.

Since their coming to Chicago Gay liked to breakfast between eleven and twelve, and certainly never rose before ten. If the Ravenal luck was high, the meal was eaten in leisurely luxury at Billy Boyle’s Chop House between Clark and Dearborn streets. This was most agreeable, for at Billy Boyle’s, during the noon hour, you encountered Chicago’s sporting blood—political overlords, gamblers, jockeys, actors, reporters—these last mere nobodies—lean and somewhat morose young fellows vaguely known as George Ade, Brand Whitlock, John McCutcheon, Pete Dunne. Here the news and gossip of the day went round. Here you saw the Prince Albert coat, the silk hat, the rattling cuffs, the glittering collar, the diamond stud of the professional gamester. Old Carter Harrison, Mayor of Chicago, would drop in daily, a good twenty-five-cent cigar waggling between his lips as he greeted this friend and that. In came the brokers from the Board of Trade across the way.
Smoke-blue air. The rich heavy smell of thick steaks cut from prime Western beef. Massive glasses of beer through which shone the pale amber of light brew, or the seal-brown of dark. The scent of strong black coffee. Rye bread pungent with caraway. Little crisp round breakfast rolls sprinkled with poppy-seed.

Calories, high blood pressure, vegetable luncheons, golf, were words not yet included in the American everyday vocabulary. Fried potatoes were still considered a breakfast dish, and a meatless meal was a snack.

Here it was, then, that Gay Ravenal, slim, pale, quiet, elegant, liked best to begin his day; listening charmingly and attentively to the talk that swirled about him—talk of yesterday’s lucky winners in Gamblers’ Alley, at Prince Varnell’s place, or Jeff Hankins’ or Mike McDonald’s; of the Washington Park racetrack entries; of the new blonde girl at Hetty Chilson’s, of politics in their simplest terms. Occasionally he took part in this talk, but like most professional gamblers, his was not the conversational gift. He was given credit for the astuteness he did not possess merely on the strength of his cool evasive glance, his habit of listening and saying little, and his bland poker face.

“Ravenal doesn’t say much but there’s damned little he misses. Watch him an hour straight and you can’t make out from his face whether he’s cleaning up a thousand or losing his shirt.” An enviable Clark Street reputation.

Still, this availed him nothing when funds were low. At such times he eschewed Billy Boyle’s and break-fasted
meagrely instead at the Cockeyed Bakery just east of Clark. That famous refuge for the temporarily insolvent was so named because of the optical peculiarity of the lady who owned it and who dispensed its coffee and sinkers. This refreshment cost ten cents. The coffee was hot, strong, revivifying; the sinkers crisp and fresh. Every Clark Street gambler was, at one time or another, through the vagaries of Lady Luck, to be found moodily munching the plain fare that made up the limited menu to be had at the Cockeyed Bakery. For that matter lacking even the modest sum required for this sustenance, he knew that there he would be allowed to “throw up a tab” until luck should turn.

Many a morning Gaylord Ravenal, dapper, nonchalant, sartorially exquisite, fared forth at eleven with but fifty cents in the pocket of his excellently tailored pants. Usually, on these occasions, the malacca stick was significantly absent. Of the fifty cents, ten went for the glassy shoeshine; twenty-five for a boutonnière; ten for coffee and sinkers at the Cockeyed Bakery. The remaining five cents stayed in his pocket as a sop to the superstition that no coin breeds no more coins. Stopping first to look in a moment at Weeping Willy Mangler’s, or at Reilly’s pool room for a glance at the racing chart, or to hear a bit of the talk missed through his enforced absence from Boyle’s, he would end at Hankins’ or McDonald’s, there to woo fortune with nothing at all to offer as oblation. But affairs did not reach this pass until after the first year.

It was incredible that Magnolia Ravenal could so
soon have adapted herself to the life in which she now moved. Yet it was explicable, perhaps, when one took into consideration her inclusive nature. She was interested, alert, eager—and still in love with Gaylord Ravenal. Her life on the rivers had accustomed her to all that was bizarre in humanity. Queenie and Jo had been as much a part of her existence as Elly and Schultzy. The housewives in the little towns, the Negroes lounging on the wharves, the gamblers in the river-front saloons, the miners of the coal belt, the Northern fruit-pickers, the boatmen, the Southern poor whites, the Louisiana aristocracy, all had passed in fantastic parade before her ambient eyes. And she, too, had marched in a parade, a figure as gorgeous, as colourful as the rest.

Now, in this new life, she accepted everything, enjoyed everything with a naiveté that was, perhaps, her greatest charm. It was, doubtless, the thing that held the roving Ravenal to her. Nothing shocked her; this was her singularly pure and open mind. She brought to this new life an interest and a curiosity as fresh as that which had characterized the little girl who had so eagerly and companionably sat with Mr. Pepper, the pilot, in the bright cosy glass-enclosed pilot house atop the old
Creole Belle
on that first enchanting trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans.