Show Boat (39 page)

“Your ma was quite a famous person in these parts, Mrs. Ravenal. Up and down the rivers and around she was quite a character. I’ve saved the pieces for you in the paper.”

“You don’t mean these people—all these people have come here to see——”

“Yes, ma’am. In state. I hope you don’t object, ma’am. I wouldn’t want to feel I’d done something you wouldn’t like.”

She felt a little faint. “I’d like them to go away now.”

Parthenia Ann Hawks in her best black silk. Her strong black eyebrows punctuated the implacable old face with a kind of surprised resentment. She had not succumbed to the Conqueror without a battle. Magnolia, gazing down upon the stern waxen features, the competent hands crossed in unwilling submission upon her breast, could read the message of revolt that was stamped, even in death, upon that strong and terrible brow. Here! I’m mistress of this craft. You can’t do this to me! I’m Parthenia Ann Hawks! Death? Fiddlesticks and nonsense! For others, perhaps. But not for me.

Presently they were driving swiftly out along the smooth asphalt road toward Cold Spring. Elly Chipley was telling her tale with relish, palpably for the hundredth time.

“…  seven o’clock in the evening or maybe a few minutes past and her standing in front of the
looking-glass in her room doing her hair. Clyde and me, we had the room next to hers, for’ard, the last few years, on account I used to do for her, little ways. Not that she was feeble or like that. But she needed somebody younger to do for her, now and then”—with the bridling self-consciousness of a girlish seventy, as compared to Parthy’s eighty and over. “Well, I was in the next room, and just thinking I’d better be making up for the evening show when I hear a funny sound, and then a voice I didn’t hardly recognize sort of squeaks, ‘Elly! A stroke!’ And then a crash.”

Magnolia was surprised to find herself weeping: not for grief; in almost unwilling admiration of this powerful mind and will that had recognized the Enemy even as he stole up on her and struck the blow from behind.

“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.

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.

K
IM 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.

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 cart 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.