Show Boat (8 page)

“But I thought it would be all light and glittery and like a fairy tale,” she protested.

“At night,” Andy assured her. He had her warm wriggling little fingers in his. “At night. That’s when it’s like a fairy tale. When the lamps are lighted; and all the people; and the band playing.”

“Where’s the kitchen?” demanded Mrs. Hawks.

Andy leaped nimbly down into the orchestra pit, stooped, opened a little door under the stage, and beckoned. Ponderously Parthy followed. Magnolia scampered after. Dining room and cook’s galley were under the stage. Great cross-beams hung so low that even Andy was forced to stoop a little to avoid battering
his head against them. Magnolia could touch them quite easily with her finger-tips. In time it came to seem quite natural to see the company and crew of the
Cotton Blossom
entering the dining room at meal time humbly bent as though in a preliminary attitude of grace before meat.

There were two long tables, each accommodating perhaps ten; and at the head of the room a smaller table for six.

“This is our table,” Andy announced, boldly, as he indicated the third. Parthy snorted; but it seemed to the sensitive Andy that in this snort there was just a shade less resentment than there might have been. Between dining room and kitchen an opening, the size of a window frame, had been cut in the wall, and the base of this was a broad shelf for convenience in conveying hot dishes from stove to table. As the three passed from dining room to kitchen, Andy tossed over his shoulder further information for the possible approval of the bristling Parthy. “Jo and Queenie—she cooks and he waits and washes up and one thing another—they promised to be back April first, sure. Been with the
Cotton Blossom
, those two have, ten years and more. Painters been cluttering up here, and what not. And will you look at the way the kitchen looks, spite of ’em. Slick’s a whistle. Look at that stove!” Crafty Andy.

Parthenia Ann Hawks looked at the stove. And what a stove it was! Broad-bosomed, ample, vast, like a huge fertile black mammal whose breast would suckle numberless eager sprawling bubbling pots and pans. It shone richly. Gazing upon this generous expanse
you felt that from its source could emerge nothing that was not savoury, nourishing, satisfying. Above it, and around the walls, on hooks, hung rows of pans and kettles of every size and shape, all neatly suspended by their pigtails. Here was the wherewithal for boundless cooking. You pictured whole hams, sizzling; fowls neatly trussed in rows; platoons of brown loaves; hampers of green vegetables; vast plateaus of pies. Crockery, thick, white, coarse, was piled, plate on plate, platter on platter, behind the neat doors of the pantry. A supplementary and redundant kerosene stove stood obligingly in the corner.

“Little hot snack at night, after the show,” Andy explained. “Coffee or an egg, maybe, and no lighting the big wood burner.”

There crept slowly, slowly over Parthy’s face a look of speculation, and this in turn was replaced by an expression that was, paradoxically, at once eager and dreamy. As though aware of this she tried with words to belie her look. “All this cooking for a crowd. Take a mint of money, that’s what it will.”

“Make a mint,” Andy retorted, blithely. A black cat, sleek, lithe, at ease, paced slowly across the floor, stood a moment surveying the two with wary yellow eyes, then sidled toward Parthy and rubbed his arched back against her skirts. “Mouser,” said Andy.

“Scat!” cried Parthy; but her tone was half-hearted, and she did not move away. In her eyes gleamed the unholy light of the housewife who beholds for the first time the domain of her dreams. Jo and Queenie to boss. Wholesale marketing. Do this. Do that.
Perhaps Andy, in his zeal, had even overdone the thing a little. Suddenly, “Where’s that child! Where’s——Oh, my goodness, Hawks!” Visions of Magnolia having fallen into the river. She was, later, always to have visions of Magnolia having fallen into rivers so that Magnolia sometimes fell into them out of sheer perversity as other children, cautioned to remain in the yard, wilfully run away from home.

Andy darted out of the kitchen, through the little rabbit-hutch door. Mrs. Hawks gathered up her voluminous skirts and flew after; scrambled across the orchestra pit, turned at the sound of a voice, Magnolia’s and yet not Magnolia’s, coming from that portion of the stage exposed below the half-raised curtain. In tones at once throaty, mincing, and falsely elegant—that arrogant voice which is childhood’s unconscious imitation of pretence in its elders—Magnolia was reciting nothing in particular, and bringing great gusto to the rendition. The words were palpably made up as she went along—“Oh, do you rully think so!… My little girl is very naughty … we are rich, oh dear me yes, ice cream every day for breakfast, dinner, and supper.…” She wore her mother’s dolman which that lady had unclasped and left hanging over one of the brass railings of a box. From somewhere she had rummaged a bonnet whose jet aigrette quivered with the earnestness of its wearer’s artistic effort. The dolman trailed in the dust of the floor. Magnolia’s right hand was held in a graceful position, the little finger elegantly crooked.

“Maggie Hawks, will you come down out of there this
instant!” Parthy whirled on Andy. “There! That’s what it comes to, minute she sets foot on this sink of iniquity. Play acting!”

Andy clawed his whiskers, chuckling. He stepped to the proscenium and held out his arms for the child and she stood looking down at him, flushed, smiling, radiant. “You’re about as good as your pa was, Nola. And that’s no compliment.” He swung her to the floor, a whirl of dolman, short starched skirt and bonnet askew. Then, as Parthy snatched the dolman from her and glared at the bonnet, he saw that he must create again a favourable impression—contrive a new diversion—or his recent gain was lost. A born showman, Andy.

“Where’d you get that bonnet, Magnolia?”

“In there.” She pointed to one of a row of doors facing them at the rear of the stage. “In one of those little bedrooms—cabins—what are they, Papa?”

“Dressing rooms, Nola, and bedrooms, too. Want to see them, Parthy?” He opened a little door leading from the right-hand box to the stage, crossed the stage followed by the reluctant Parthenia, threw open one of the doors at the back. There was revealed a tiny cabin holding a single bed, a diminutive dresser, and wash-stand. Handy rows of shelves were fastened to the wall above the bed. Dimity curtains hung at the window. The window itself framed a view of river and shore. A crudely coloured calendar hung on the wall, and some photographs and newspaper clippings, time-yellowed. There was about the little chamber a cosiness, a snugness, and, paradoxically enough, a sense of space. That was the open window, doubtless, with its
vista of water and sky giving the effect of freedom.

“Dressing rooms during the performance,” Andy explained, “and bedrooms the rest of the time. That’s the way we work it.”

Mrs. Hawks, with a single glance, encompassed the tiny room and rejected it. “Expect me to live in a cubby-hole like that!” It was, unconsciously, her first admission.

Magnolia, behind her mother’s skirts, was peering, wide-eyed, into the room. “Why, I
love
it! Why, I’d love to live in it. Why, look, there’s a little bed, and a dresser, and a——”

Andy interrupted hastily. “Course I don’t expect you to live in a cubby-hole, Parthy. No, nor the child, neither. Just you step along with me. Now don’t say anything; and stop your grumbling till you see. Put that bonnet back, Nola, where you got it. That’s wardrobe. Which room ’d you get it out of?”

Across the stage, then, up the aisle to the stairway that led to the balcony, Andy leading, Mrs. Hawks following funereally, Magnolia playing a zigzag game between the rows of seats yet managing mysteriously to arrive at the foot of the stairs just as they did. The balcony reached, Magnolia had to be rescued from the death that in Mrs. Hawks’ opinion inevitably would result from her leaning over the railing to gaze enthralled on the auditorium and stage below. “Hawks, will you look at that child! I declare, if I ever get her off this boat alive I’ll never set foot on it again.”

But her tone somehow lacked conviction. And when she beheld those two upper bedrooms forward, leading
off the balcony—those two square roomy bedrooms, as large, actually, as her bedroom in the cottage, she was lost. The kitchen had scored. But the bedrooms won. They were connected by a little washroom. Each had two windows. Each held bed, dresser, rocker, stove. Bedraggled dimity curtains hung at the windows. Matting covered the floors. Parthy did an astonishing —though characteristic—thing. She walked to the dresser, passed a practised forefinger over its surface, examined the finger critically, and uttered that universal tongue-and-tooth sound indicating disapproval. “An inch thick,” she then said. “A sight of cleaning this boat will take, I can tell you. Not a curtain in the place but’ll have to come down and washed and starched and ironed.”

Instinct or a superhuman wisdom cautioned Andy to say nothing. From the next room came a shout of joy. “Is this my room? It’s got a chair that rocks and a stove with a res’vore and I can see my whole self in the looking glass, it’s so big. Is this my room? Is it? Mama!”

Parthy passed into the next room. “We’ll see. We’ll see. We’ll see.” Andy followed after, almost a-tiptoe; afraid to break the spell with a sudden sound.

“But is it? I want to know. Papa, make her tell me. Look! The window here is a little door. It’s a door and I can go right out on the upstairs porch. And there’s the whole river.”

“I should say as much, and a fine way to fall and drown without anybody being the wiser.”

But the child was beside herself with excitement and
suspense. She could endure it no longer; flew to her stern parent and actually shook that adamantine figure in its dolman and bonnet. “Is it? Is it? Is it?”

“We’ll see.” A look, then, of almost comic despair flashed between father and child—a curiously adult look for one of Magnolia’s years. It said: “What a woman this is! Can we stand it? I can only if you can.”

Andy tried suggestion. “Could paint this furniture any colour Nola says——”

“Blue,” put in Magnolia, promptly.

“—and new curtains, maybe, with ribbons to match——” He had, among other unexpected traits, a keen eye for colour and line; a love for fabrics.

Parthy said nothing. Her lips were compressed. The look that passed between Andy and Magnolia now was pure despair, with no humour to relieve it. So they went disconsolately out of the door; crossed the balcony, clumped down the stairs, like mutes at a funeral. At the foot of the stairs they heard voices from without—women’s voices, high and clear—and laughter. The sounds came from the little porch-like deck forward. Parthy swooped through the door; had scarcely time to gaze upon two sprightly females in gay plumage before both fell upon her lawful husband Captain Andy Hawks and embraced him. And the young pretty one kissed him on his left-hand mutton-chop whisker. And the older plain one kissed him on the right-hand mutton-chop whisker. And, “Oh, dear Captain Hawks!” they cried. “Aren’t you surprised to see us! And happy! Do say you’re happy. We drove over from Cairo
specially to see you and the
Cotton Blossom
. Doc’s with us.”

Andy flung an obliging arm about the waist of each and gave each armful a little squeeze. “Happy ain’t the word.” And indeed it scarcely seemed to cover the situation; for there stood Parthy viewing the three entwined, and as she stood she seemed to grow visibly taller, broader, more ominous, like a menacing cloud. Andy’s expression was a protean thing in which bravado and apprehension battled.

Magnolia had recognized them at once as the pretty young woman in the rose-trimmed hat and the dark woman who had told her not to smile too often that day when, in company with the sloppy young man, they had passed the Hawks house, laughing and chatting and spitting cherry stones idly and comfortably into the dust of the village street. So she now took a step forward from behind her mother’s voluminous skirts and made a little tentative gesture with one hand toward the older woman. And that lively female at once said, “Why, bless me! Look, Elly! It’s the little girl!”

Elly looked. “What little girl?”

“The little girl with the smile.” And at that, quite without premeditation, and to her own surprise, Magnolia ran to her and put her hand in hers and looked up into her strange ravaged face and smiled. “There!” exclaimed the woman, exactly as she had done that first time.

“Maggie Hawks!” came the voice.

And, “Oh, my God!” exclaimed the one called Elly,
“it’s the——” sensed something dangerous in the air, laughed, and stopped short.

Andy extricated himself from his physical entanglements and attempted to do likewise with the social snarl that now held them all.

“Meet my wife Mrs. Hawks. Parthy, this is Julie Dozier, female half of our general business team and one of the finest actresses on the river besides being as nice a little lady as you’d meet in a month of Sundays.… This here little beauty is Elly Chipley—Lenore La Verne on the bills. Our ingénue lead and a favourite from Duluth to New Orleans.… Where’s Doc?”

At which, with true dramatic instinct, Doc appeared scrambling down the cinder path toward the boat; leaped across the gangplank, poised on one toe, spread his arms and carolled, “Tra-da!” A hard-visaged man of about fifty-five, yet with kindness, too, written there; the deep-furrowed, sad-eyed ageless face of the circus shillaber and showman.

“Girls say you drove over. Must be flush with your spondulicks, Doc.… Parthy, meet Doc. He’s got another name, I guess, but nobody’s ever used it. Doc’s enough for anybody on the river. Doc goes ahead of the show and bills us and does the dirty work, don’t you, Doc?”

“That’s about the size of it,” agreed Doc, and sped sadly and accurately a comet of brown juice from his lips over the boat’s side into the river. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Andy indicated Magnolia. “Here’s my girl Magnolia you’ve heard me talk about.”

“Well, well! Lookit them eyes! They oughtn’t to go bad in the show business, little later.” A sound from Parthy who until now had stood a graven image, a portent. Doc turned to her, soft-spoken, courteous. “Fixin’ to take a little ride with us for good luck I hope, ma’am, our first trip out with Cap here?”