The Underground River

by Martha Conway

  “I can be useful in other ways, too. The ballet girls often need help with their shoes, and in between acts, when the ladies need changing, I can help them as well. Also I play the piano. I can sight-read and transpose.”

  “What would I pay you?”

  I had thought about this. “Two dollars a week,” I said. Comfort often got as much as five.

  But he just laughed, which made him sneeze again. “I haven’t got two dollars to spare,” he said. “Nor even a nickel. They say they’re closing me down this week.” His creditors, I supposed.

  “They always say that.” I handed him my clean handkerchief, and his expression softened as he took it, thanking me. I was encouraged. “I noticed some lobelia growing in the park there on the corner. It’s very good for hay fever. You should try it.”

  “That so?”

  “You just grind up the root and put it in tea. But it’s a considerable diuretic, so I would be careful about the amount.”

  Now he looked at me strangely. I thought he didn’t understand.

  “Too much can strongly affect the bowels,” I explained.

  His face turned beet red and he folded up my handkerchief quickly.

  I said, “But it has no power of curing syphilis; that’s a mistaken idea.” I thought I should tell him everything I knew about the flower, in case something proved useful to him.

  “Syphilis! Now, listen here, I haven’t got that!”

  “Well,” I said, surprised at his vehemence, “some men do.”

  His face turned an even deeper shade and he held out my handkerchief. “I haven’t got work for a seamstress and I’m in the middle of rehearsal. Be off with you now. Go to the saloon if you want drama.”

  • • •

  I had no more success with the next two theater managers, although I tried to impress the last one with my knowledge of theater life: Never put a hat on a bed or shoes on a makeup table; no peacock feathers; and no yellow costumes.

  “Actors believe all sorts of nonsense,” I said. “I’ve learned that it is no use treating them like people guided by logic.”

  “Is that so? Well, I’m an actor myself,” he told me, waving me out. “And at the moment my logic tells me that I don’t need a seamstress.”

  Back on the sidewalk with the pigs.

  By this time the bells were chiming two o’clock, and I was hungry. I decided to walk down to the river, where pushcart vendors were selling food to the merchants and boatmen along the pier. It was very noisy there, with all the men calling out prices and haggling with each other or shouting directions to the Negro rousters loading or unloading cargo. I spotted a man smoking a pipe with a stem as long as his forearm who was selling rye rolls from a basket. As I leaned against an upright barrel eating my roll, I watched the wind ripple the river water into waves no bigger than mice. An old-fashioned keelboat rang its bell for departure, and when it pulled back I noticed a small, two-story flatbed boat tied up to the dock behind it. It was painted white with green trim and had a green flag on its staff with the words “Floating Theatre” in fancy script.

  A theater boat? Curious, I swallowed the last of my roll and walked along the raised pier to get a closer look. I could smell salt in the air, but the Ohio River is not a salt river; the smell was coming from a popcorn vendor in front of a stationary pushcart. He was young and darkly handsome, wearing a uniform that looked like striped red pajamas.

  “Popcorn! Fresh popcorn here!” he called out in a thick Irish accent.

  A group of maids with wicker baby carriages stood around his cart eating popcorn from red-and-white-striped paper bags while sneaking looks at him. Once I got around the crowd I could see the Floating Theatre more clearly: a narrow white barge, maybe a hundred feet long, with a kind of house built upon it, like a box on a box. The green flag unfolded itself in the wind:

  “Hugo and Helena’s Floating Theatre.”

  Two figures were standing on the lower deck at the stern of the boat. One of them might have been Hugo, but as I got closer I saw that the other one was certainly not Helena: it was Thaddeus Mason, eating popcorn from a red-and-white-striped bag.

  “What ho, May!” Thaddeus called out when he saw me, as if he were practicing for a nautical part. I noticed he no longer wore his arm in a sling. The other man turned as I came up the gangplank; like Thaddeus, he wore his hair long, but his coloring was darker and he was half a head taller. There was a band of black crepe around his straw hat, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up past his elbows. Thaddeus introduced me.

  “Captain Hugo Cushing,” the man said in a British accent, touching his hat.

  “May and I were on the Moselle together,” Thaddeus told him; was that to be his introduction for me from now on? But he went on to say that Hugo’s sister Helena had been on the Moselle, too. “Do you remember the singer at dinner? Helena Cushing, of Hugo and Helena’s Floating Theatre?” Thaddeus took off his hat. “Sadly, she was not as fortunate as we were.”

  I looked at Hugo and tried to think of something kind to say. I remembered the singer in her pink dress with the light shining behind her.

  “The captain let her on to perform,” Hugo said. “We often made a few extra dollars this way. She was going to get off at the stop after Fulton. I was just pushing off to meet up with her there when the sky broke up with the explosion.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That is—that’s very bad . . .” I trailed off awkwardly, but Thaddeus came in with a string of platitudes, which he spoke with great conviction and aplomb—“a terrible disaster,” “an immense misfortune,” the captain was a “dastardly fellow.”

  “Where do you go?” I asked Hugo when Thaddeus finished. “Or do you stay here?”

  He looked at me blankly.

  “On this boat. Your theatre. Where do you perform?”

  “Oh, well, then, down along the Ohio, of course. We dock at a different town every day, put on a show, and then the next morning pull up and head for the next town. We go all the way to the Mississippi, playing towns until the weather turns. Then we get pushed back up the river; I hire a steamer.” I could see that his boat, a flatboat, had no steam power of its own. “Fourth year at it,” he told me. “My sister and I put it all together. But now . . .” He made a gesture that I took to mean that, for him, like me, his old partnership was over.

  “And if that weren’t enough, his boat was damaged by the explosion,” Thaddeus added. “The captain was just telling me. Part of the Moselle’s paddle box shot in like a cannonball.”

  “Even worse, my leather boat pump got punctured,” Hugo said. “Don’t know how I’m going to fix it, and a new one costs twenty dollars more than I have.”

  “How much does a new one cost?” I asked.

  He looked at me as if I were a fool. “Twenty dollars.”

  “Where is your company?” Thaddeus asked him. “Maybe you could take up a collection.”

  “They skittered off into town. Probably drinking their way into even more uselessness. Damn actors. Excuse me,” he said, but I wasn’t sure he meant the apology for me, since he was looking out at the river. I wasn’t offended in any case. I had seen actors humiliate themselves in a variety of ways over the years.

  “I can help you with that hole if you like,” Thaddeus told him, taking off his coat. “My father was a boatbuilder.”

  I had heard Thaddeus say, in the course of the two months that I knew him, that his father was an actor, a playwright, a wheelwright, and a steam engine designer, but I’d never heard boatbuilder before. Hugo Cushing glanced at me again with a stern expression, perhaps expecting me to leave so they could get on to their work, but I recrossed my shawl and made it my turn to look out onto the river. A passing steamer pushed heavy clouds of black smoke into the air, and after a moment I felt Hugo’s small boat catch its wake.

  Here was a theater, I was thinking. Here was the possibility of employment.

  But I was a terrible advocate for my own cause; this morning had shown me that clearl
y. Thaddeus, on the other hand, like Comfort, was at his most eloquent when arguing for his personal gain. I waited while Hugo and Thaddeus conferred with each other on how best to mend the hole, and when Hugo went off to get more oak nails, I turned to Thaddeus and told him as quickly as I could about Comfort’s new employment and how I was out looking for work.

  “Little Comfort off to give stump speeches?” he asked. “Well! Good for her! Wouldn’t I like to be on the payroll of some wealthy benefactress.”

  I didn’t want to discuss it with him; I only wanted to lay out the facts. “Listen, would you help me ask for a job? I don’t know what Mr. Cushing’s sister did, but I could probably do it—all except sing. Wardrobe, props, playing the piano, keeping the books—I could do all of that.”

  “I was looking for a job with him myself but I’m not sure that he’s hiring. Plus there’s the matter of the boat pump. Anyway, why stick around here? Or don’t you have the money to hightail it back home?”

  “It’s not that. Florid told me she would pay for my ticket. Flora, I mean. Mrs. Howard.”

  “ ‘Florid’?” Thaddeus laughed. “I like that. ‘Florid Horrid.’ But why not take her up on her offer? It’s always easier finding work among people who know you.”

  Florid Horrid. Yes, that was what she was. And although I was used to Comfort telling me what to do, I did not want Mrs. Howard to feel that she had the same right. But to Thaddeus I just said that there was no employment for me back home, which also was true.

  “How much for the coach ticket?” he asked after a moment.

  “If I had to guess, I’d say near ten dollars. But I told you, I don’t want to go back.”

  “I was thinking of the boat pump,” he said.

  Before I could ask what he meant, Hugo Cushing came back with oak nails and a canvas folding chair for me, as if by now he guessed I had nowhere else to go. While they worked, Thaddeus told Hugo about his last run in Pittsburgh, taking particular care to describe the three costumes I’d made for Comfort, one for each act. But it wasn’t until a few of the boat’s actors came up the gangplank that Thaddeus broached the matter of employment. The actors were carrying one of their company, a drunk heavyset man who had tripped over a sugar barrel in town, badly twisting his ankle. But they needn’t have bothered carrying him back: as soon as Hugo saw the condition of his foot, he gave the actor the sack. How could he have a performer who couldn’t walk across the stage? he asked angrily. This left an opening for Thaddeus. And once his place was secured, Thaddeus began arguing for mine.

  “Don’t need a seamstress,” Hugo, who was picking up his hammer again, told him.

  “She’s more than just a seamstress—she’s a costume designer,” Thaddeus said. “I wish you could see how beautiful her work is, but, sadly, it’s all being eaten now by the fish.”

  “My people see to their own costumes.”

  I pinched the inside of my wrist nervously. I could hear Hugo’s actors—whom Hugo had ordered up to the galley to get themselves strong cups of coffee—laughing and banging pots.

  “I understand,” Thaddeus said. “But if you don’t mind me asking, what did your sister do”—he took a moment to remove his hat in respect—“besides sing?”

  Hugo looked down at the plank he was nailing. He had taken off his straw hat and his dark hair fell over his forehead.

  “Played the piano,” he said, striking the nail. “All the cue music and mood music and the actors’ specialties; also the community sing at the end. She painted scenery. Repaired props and wardrobe. Made up the show bills and the tickets. Handled sales.” With every task he named, his hammer seemed to get louder. “Advertised the show, talked it up at every landing, found out who she should give free tickets to and gave them free tickets.”

  “You can do all that, can’t you, May?”

  “I can play the piano, but—”

  “May is a wonderful seller!” Thaddeus talked over me. “She’ll get you more tickets bought than ever before. And her musicality is just what it should be. She’s played piano for shows in New York and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, but I’ve never—”

  “And she can transpose just about anything! I know because I’ve had her do that for me, and it takes her no time. Sight-reading is no problem, either. And she can play by ear if need be.”

  Hugo gave a few last taps to the nail, looked at his thumb, and then looked over at me with a frown that I was already getting used to. “Can she, now,” he said. “Well, our Mrs. Niffen can play the piano. She’s one of the company. But she can’t sight-read and she can’t transpose.”

  Here I felt more comfortable. “I can do both,” I told him.

  “There’s still the matter of the pump,” Hugo said, rubbing his hand down his pant leg. “Can’t leave the dock without it.” He looked around for another nail.

  “You’re in luck there, too,” Thaddeus told him, handing him one. “If you hire her, May can help with that as well. Just a loan, of course.”

  Hugo turned to me.

  “You have twenty dollars to loan?”

  “May can bring it to you tomorrow,” Thaddeus told him. “The whole twenty dollars. You’ll have your boat pump and be off before the week is out.”

  “Well . . .” Hugo hesitated. He looked at me in a thoughtful manner.

  “Right, then,” Thaddeus said. “Now I’ll just go fetch my things. You never know: that chap’s ankle might suddenly improve once his head clears up.” He put on his hat and picked up his coat from the railing.

  “Mistimed his entrances anyway,” Hugo said. “Not even an actor; he was a scene shifter when I met him.”

  The waves lapped lightly against the boat with the sound of a kitten at its milk bowl as I followed Thaddeus down the gangplank. I wasn’t sure I was hired, but Thaddeus seemed to think that I was. I could tell he was very pleased with himself by the way he swung his jacket over his shoulder, and he made long strides up the sand, leaving me to struggle behind him. It was getting late, and the Irish popcorn vendor, the maids, and the babies in their carriages all were gone. Up on the sidewalk Thaddeus turned and waited for me, his curly hair blowing back in the wind.

  “Now for that money,” he said.

  5

  Comfort exclaimed over Mrs. Howard’s china, which was white with swirls of blue floral sprays and red cranberries along the rim. In the tradition of allowing me into one room per day, this evening Donaldson led me straight to the dining room, where Mrs. Howard and Comfort were already waiting. Tonight he was wearing another stiff dark suit and starched white gloves, and he served and cleared and took instructions all without moving a muscle in his face. When his eyes met mine, I felt I was back at school and awaiting directions, but of course none were forthcoming.

  “So lovely!” Comfort said, looking at her plate. “Is the pattern from England? It must be English.” I noticed she was using her ingénue’s voice.

  “I bought the set just after Mr. Howard’s last illness. I needed something pretty to cheer me up. We all need that, don’t we?”

  Mrs. Howard looked at Comfort in the same manner as she looked at her food. She was a very hearty eater and made no apologies for it, and she urged us to eat heartily, too. Donaldson served a light-colored fish boiled in a light-colored sauce, followed by venison in peach syrup. After that, he came around with dishes of custard, cucumbers, string beans, and baked beans, and then he set a platter of warm rolls in the center of the table.

  Although eating took some attention—Mrs. Howard’s dinner knives, though graceful and perfectly shined, were more decorative than effective when cutting the hard squares of meat—I found myself looking up whenever Mrs. Howard turned to address Comfort. Tonight Comfort was wearing a simple mouse-colored dress with high sleeves and a low neckline. I wondered if Mrs. Howard had hired a seamstress for her: the dress was simple enough to have been stitched up in a day. To my surprise I felt some jealousy, although why should I care who
made Comfort’s dresses? I was just used to doing it myself. The candelabra cast shadows on Mrs. Howard’s pretty wallpapered walls—in this room, red scenes of birds feathering their nests—as I struggled with the blunt point of Mrs. Howard’s pretty knife. In spite of the fire in the fireplace, I was cold, and I wished I had another shawl to put over my lap.

  Lying is easy, Thaddeus had told me on the wharf. All you have to do is create the space for it. I didn’t see why I should lie to Mrs. Howard to get money for the boat pump, and I told him so. “If she’s willing to give me money for my ticket home, I said, surely she’ll give the same to help me secure employment here.” But Thaddeus disagreed.

  “She wants you out of the way. She wants Comfort all to herself. These abolitionist ladies, they like other women, don’t you know. All abolitionists are like that. Teetotalers, too.”

  I had never heard such nonsense.

  “Listen, May. Look at it this way. If Florid says no, then that’s our chance gone. Better just to say that you’ve decided to take her up on her offer. It would only be a little lie. It would in no way blemish your natural honesty.”

  “It’s not that. I just can’t do it. It’s not in me.”

  “Sure it is! Lying is part of the human condition. It’s what separates us from the beasts in the wild. Listen, May. We need that money. You want a job, don’t you? I’ll teach you how to do it; you can use an old acting trick. Do you know the Greek alphabet?”

  I did not.

  “Good,” he told me. “Because it’s hard to remember.”

  Unlike Thaddeus, I did not think being an abolitionist meant that you liked other ladies, but, watching Mrs. Howard at the head of the table at supper, I noticed her flushed cheeks and how often she patted Comfort’s hand. Comfort sat on her right and I sat on her left, and the polished mahogany table between us grew darker as the candles burned down. I was never good at guessing someone’s thoughts by looking at their faces, even Comfort’s, but tonight, chatting about the china and the food, she seemed happy. I thought of two women who had lived in the boardinghouse where Comfort and I passed our first winter in New York: Miss Linsome and Miss Bates. “Sapphos,” Comfort told me. When I didn’t understand, she said, “They love each other, like a married couple.” While Donaldson cleared our plates I tried to remember what I thought about Miss Linsome and Miss Bates. I remember noticing Miss Linsome’s hat, which was made of black sealskin—unusual, for a woman’s hat—and it struck me as quite stylish.