Show Boat (34 page)

“I do,” repeated Kim, patiently, as one speaks to an irritating child.

Magnolia was conscious of a sinking sense of disappointment. She had hoped, perversely enough, that Kim would stamp her feet, throw herself screaming on the floor, and demand to be carried out of the bare clean orderly place back to the delightful welter of Clark Street. She could not overcome the feeling that in thus bestowing upon Kim a ladylike education and background she was depriving her of something rich and precious and colourful. She thought of her own childhood. She shut her eyes so as to see more clearly the pictures passing in her mind. Deep rivers. Wide rivers. Willows by the water’s edge trailing gray-green. Dogwood in fairy bloom. Darkies on the landing. Plinketty-plunk-plunk-plunk, plinketty-plunk-plunk-plunk. Cotton bales. Sweating black bodies. Sue, ef he loves yuh, go with him. To-morrow night, ladies and gentlemen, that magnificent comedy-drama, Honest Hearts and Willing Hands. The band, red-coated, its brass screaming defiance at the noonday sun.

The steely blue eyes in the pink face surrounded by the white wimple and the black coif seemed to be boring into her own eyes. “If you yourself would rather not have her here with us we would prefer not to take her.”

“Oh, but I would! I do!” Magnolia cried hastily.

So it was arranged. Next week. Monday. Half a dozen woollen this. Half a dozen cotton that.

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 enough, 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.