Show Boat (36 page)

The door was opened by a Negro in a clean starched white house coat. Magnolia did not know why the sight of this rather sad-eyed looking black man should have reassured her; but it did. She knew exactly what she wanted to say.

“My name is Mrs. Ravenal. I want to speak to Hetty Chilson.”

“Mis’ Chilson is busy, ma’am,” he said, as though repeating a lesson. Still, something about the pale, well-dressed, earnest woman evidently impressed him. Of late, when he opened the door there had been frequent surprises for him in the shape of similar earnest and well-dressed young women who, when you refused them admittance, flashed an official-looking badge, whipped out notebook and pencil and insisted pleasantly but firmly that he make quite sure Miss Chilson was not in. “You-all one them Suhveys?”

Uncomprehending, she shook her head. He made as though to shut the door, gently. Magnolia had not spent years in the South for nothing. “Don’t you shut that door on me! I want to see Hetty Chilson.”

The man recognized the tone of white authority. “Wha’ you want?”

Magnolia recovered herself. After all, this was not the front door of a home, but of a House. “Tell her Mrs. Gaylord Ravenal wants to speak to her. Tell her that I have one thousand dollars that belongs to her, and I want to give it to her.” Foolishly she opened her bag and he saw the neat sheaf of bills. His eyes popped a little.

“Yes’m. Ah tell huh. Step in, ma’am.”

Magnolia entered Hetty Chilson’s house. She was frightened. The trembling had taken hold of her knees again. But she clutched the handbag and looked about her, frankly curious. A dim hallway, richly carpeted, its walls covered with a red satin brocade. There were deep soft cushioned chairs, and others of carved wood, high-backed. A lighted lamp on the stairway newel post cast a rosy glow over the whole. Huge Sèvres vases stood in the stained-glass window niches. It was an entrance hall such as might have been seen in the Prairie Avenue or Michigan Avenue house of a new rich Chicago packer. The place was quiet. Now and then you heard a door shut. There was the scent of coffee in the air. No footfall on the soft carpet, even though the tread were heavy. Hetty Chilson descended the stairs, a massive, imposing figure in a black-and-white patterned foulard dress. She gave the effect of activity hampered by some physical impediment. Her descent was one of impatient deliberateness. One hand clung to the railing. She appeared a stout, middle-aged, well-to-do householder summoned from some domestic task abovestairs. She had aged much in the last ten years. Magnolia, startled, realized that the distortion of her stout figure was due to a tumour.

“How do you do?” said Hetty Chilson. Her keen eyes searched her visitor’s face. The Negro hovered near by in the dim hallway. “Are you Mrs. Ravenal?”

“Yes.”

“What is it, please?”

Magnolia felt like a schoolgirl interrogated by a stern
but well-intentioned preceptress. Her cheeks were burning as she opened her handbag, took out the sheaf of hundred-dollar bills, tendered them to this woman. “The money,” she stammered, “the money you gave my—you gave my husband. Here it is.”

Hetty Chilson looked at the bills. “I didn’t give it to him. I loaned it to him. He said he’d pay it back and I believe he will. Ravenal’s got the name for being square.”

Magnolia touched Hetty Chilson’s hand with the folded bills; pressed them on her so that the hand opened automatically to take them. “We don’t want it.”

“Don’t want it! Well, what’d he come asking me for it for, then? I’m no bank that you can take money out and put money in.”

“I’m sorry. He didn’t know. I can’t—we don’t—I can’t take it.”

Hetty Chilson looked down at the bills. Her eyeglasses hung on the bodice of her dress, near the right shoulder, attached to a patent gold chain. This she pulled out now with a businesslike gesture and adjusted the eyeglasses to her nose. “Oh, you’re that kind, huh?” She counted the bills once and then again; folded them. “Does your husband know about this?” Magnolia did not answer. She looked dignified and felt foolish. The very matter-of-factness of this world-hardened woman made this thing Magnolia had done seem overdramatic and silly. Hetty Chilson glanced over her shoulder to where the white-coated Negro stood. “Mose, tell Jule I want her. Tell her to bring her receipt book and a pen.” Mose ran up the
soft-carpeted stairs. You heard a deferential rap at an upper door; voices. Hetty turned again to Magnolia. “You’ll want a receipt for this. Anyway, you’ll have that to show him when he kicks up a fuss.” She moved ponderously to the foot of the stairway; waited a moment there, looking up. Magnolia’s eyes followed her gaze. Mose had vanished, evidently, down some rear passage and stairway, for he again appeared mysteriously at the back of the lower hall though he had not descended the stairway up which he had gone a moment before. Down this stair came a straight slim gray-haired figure. Genteel, was the word that popped into Magnolia’s mind. A genteel figure in decent black silk, plain and good. It rustled discreetly. A white fine turnover collar finished it at the throat. Narrow cuffs at the wrist. It was difficult to see her face in the dim light. She paused a moment in the glow of the hall lamp as Hetty Chilson instructed her. A white face—no, not white—ivory. Like something dead. White hair still faintly streaked with black. In this clearer light the woman seemed almost gaunt. The eyes were incredibly black in that ivory face; like dull coals, Magnolia thought, staring at her, fascinated. Something in her memory stirred at sight of this woman in the garb of a companion-secretary and with a face like burned-out ashes. Perhaps she had seen her with Hetty Chilson at the theatre or the races. She could not remember.

“Make out a receipt for one thousand dollars received from Mrs. Gaylord Ravenal. R-a-v-e-n-a-l. Yes, that’s right. Here; I’ll sign it.” Hetty Chilson
penned her name swiftly as the woman held the book for her. She turned to Magnolia. “Excuse me,” she said. “I have to be at the bank at two. Jule, give this receipt to Mrs. Ravenal. Come up as soon as you’re through.”

With a kind of ponderous dignity this strange and terrible woman ascended her infamous stairway. Magnolia stood, watching her. Her plump, well-shaped hand clung to the railing. An old woman, her sins heavy upon her. She had somehow made Magnolia feel a fool.

The companion tore the slip of paper from the booklet, advanced to Magnolia and held it out to her. “One thousand dollars,” she said. Her voice was deep and rich and strange. “Mrs. Gaylord Ravenal. Correct?” Magnolia put out her hand, blindly. Unaccountably she was trembling again. The slip of paper dropped from her hand. The woman uttered a little exclamation of apology. They both stooped to pick it up as the paper fluttered to the floor. They bumped awkwardly, actually laughed a little, ruefully, and straightening, looked at each other, smiling. And as Magnolia smiled, shyly, she saw the smile on the face of the woman freeze into a terrible contortion of horror. Horror stamped itself on her every feature. Her eyes were wild and enormous with it; her mouth gaped with it. So the two stood staring at each other for one hideous moment. Then the woman turned, blindly, and vanished up the stairs like a black ghost. Magnolia stood staring after her. Then, with a little cry, she made as though to follow her up the stairway. Strangely she cried, “Julie! Julie, wait for me!” Mose, the
Negro, came swiftly forward. “This way out, miss,” he said, deferentially. He held the street door open. Magnolia passed through it, down the steps of the brick house with the lions couchant, into the midday brightness of Clark Street. Suddenly she was crying, who so rarely wept. South Clark Street paid little attention to her, inured as it was to queer sights. And if a passer-by had stopped and said, “What is it? Can I help you?” she would have been at a loss to reply. Certainly she could not have said, “I think I have just seen the ghost of a woman I knew when I was a little girl—a woman I first saw when I was swinging on the gate of our house at Thebes, and she went by in a long-tailed flounced black dress and a lace veil tied around her hat. And I last saw her—oh, I can’t be sure. I can’t be sure. It might not——”

Clark Street, even if it had understood (which is impossible), would not have been interested. And presently, as she walked along, she composed herself. She dabbed at her face with her handkerchief and pulled down her neat veil. She had still another task to perform. But the day seemed already so old. She was not sleepy, but her mind felt thick and slow. The events of the past night and of the morning did not stand out clearly. It was as if they had happened long ago. Perhaps she should eat something. She had had only that cup of coffee; had eaten almost nothing the night before.

She had a little silver in her purse. She counted it as it lay next to the carefully folded thousand-dollar receipt signed in Hetty Chilson’s firm businesslike
hand. Twenty-five—thirty-five—forty—fifty—seventy-three cents. Ample. She stopped at a lunch room on Harrison, near Wabash; ate a sandwich and drank two cups of coffee. She felt much better. On leaving she caught a glimpse of herself in a wall mirror—a haggard woman with a skin blotched from tears, and a shiny nose and with little untidy wisps of hair showing beneath her hat. Her shoes—she remembered having heard or read somewhere that neat shoes were the first requisite for an applicant seeking work. Furtively and childishly she rubbed the toe of either shoe on the back of each stocking. She decided to go to one of the department-store rest rooms for women and there repair her toilette. Field’s was the nicest; the Boston store the nearest. She went up State Street to Field’s. The white marble mirrored room was full of women. It was warm and bright and smelled pleasantly of powder and soap and perfume. Magnolia took off her hat, bathed her face, tidied her hair, powdered. Now she felt less alien to these others about her—these comfortable chattering shopping women; wives of husbands who worked in offices, who worked in shops, who worked in factories. She wondered about them. She was standing before a mirror adjusting her veil, and a woman was standing beside her, peering into the same glass, each seemingly oblivious of the other. “I wonder,” Magnolia thought, fancifully, “what she would say if I were to turn to her and tell her that I used to be a showboat actress, and that my father was drowned in the Mississippi, and my mother, at sixty, runs a show boat all alone, and that my husband is a gambler and we have
no money, and that I have just come from the most notorious brothel in Chicago, where I returned a thousand dollars my husband had got there, and that I’m on my way to try to get work in a variety theatre.” She was smiling a little at this absurd thought. The other woman saw the smile, met it with a frozen stare of utter respectability, and walked away.

There were few theatrical booking offices in Chicago and these were of doubtful reputation. Magnolia knew nothing of their location, though she thought, vaguely, that they probably would be somewhere in the vicinity of Clark, Madison, Randolph. She was wise enough in the ways of the theatre to realize that these shoddy agencies could do little for her. She had heard Ravenal speak of the variety houses and museums on State Street and Clark and Madison. The word “vaudeville” was just coming into use. In company with her husband she had even visited Kohl & Middleton’s Museum—that smoke-filled comfortable shabby variety house on Clark, where the admission was ten cents. It had been during that first Chicago trip, before Kim’s birth. Women seldom were seen in the audience, but Ravenal, for some reason, had wanted her to get a glimpse of this form of theatrical entertainment. Here Weber and Fields had played for fifteen dollars a week. Here you saw the funny Irishman, Eddie Foy; and May Howard had sung and danced.

“They’ll probably build big expensive theatres some day for variety shows,” Ravenal had predicted.

The performance was, Magnolia thought, much like that given as the concert after the evening’s bill on the
Cotton Blossom
. “A whole evening of that?” she said. Years later the Masonic Temple Roof was opened for vaudeville.

“There!” Ravenal had triumphantly exclaimed. “What did I tell you! Some of those people get three and four hundred a week, and even more.” Here the juggling Agoust family threw plates and lighted lamps and tables and chairs and ended by keeping aloft a whole dinner service and parlour suite, with lamps, soup tureens, and plush chairs passing each other affably in midair without mishap. Jessie Bartlett Davis sang, sentimentally, Tuh-rue LOVE, That’s The Simple Charm That Opens Every Woman’s Heart.

At the other end of the scale were the all-night restaurants with a stage at the rear where the waiters did an occasional song and dance, or where some amateur tried to prove his talent. Between these were two or three variety shows of decent enough reputation though frequented by the sporting world of Chicago. Chief of these was Jopper’s Varieties, a basement theatre on Wabash supposed to be copied after the Criterion in London. There was a restaurant on the ground floor. A flight of marble steps led down to the underground auditorium. Here new acts were sometimes tried out. Lillian Russell, it was said, had got her first hearing at Jopper’s. For some reason, Magnolia had her mind fixed on this place. She made straight for it, probably as unbusinesslike a performer as ever presented herself for a hearing. It was now well on toward mid-afternoon. Already the early December dusk was gathering, aided by the Chicago smoke and the lake fog.
Her fright at Hetty Chilson’s door was as nothing compared to the sickening fear that filled her now. She was physically and nervously exhausted. The false energy of the morning had vanished. She tried to goad herself into fresh courage by thoughts of Kim at the convent; of Parthy’s impending visitation. As she approached the place on Wabash she resolved not to pass it, weakly. If she passed it but once she never would have the bravery to turn and go in. She and Ravenal had driven by many times on their way to the South Side races. It was in this block. It was four doors away. It was here. She wheeled stiffly, like a soldier, and went in. The restaurant was dark and deserted. One dim light showed at the far end. The tablecloths were white patches in the grayness. But a yellow path of light flowed up the stairway that led to the basement, and she heard the sound of a piano. She descended the swimming marble steps, aware of the most alarming sensation in her legs—rather, of no sensation in them. It was as though no solid structure of bone and flesh and muscle lay in the region between her faltering feet and her pounding heart.