The Underground River

by Martha Conway

  For a moment he seemed broken, although he stood as upright as before. Then, as if a string had been pulled, Hugo lifted himself up out of the role and turned to face the company.

  “Well?”

  A long moment. Then, alone, Mrs. Niffen began to nod. “Yes, yes, quite right,” she said. “I saw it very well. Breathing from the back. Nicely done.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Hugo said. “I’m glad you could see it. And now, Mrs. Niffen, please explain to the others why you breathe from the back?”

  “Because . . .” Mrs. Niffen looked around at the other players for help, but they looked back at her blankly. “Because. . .” She frowned and looked out past him. “Why, who is that? Is that Miss May up there? I didn’t know you were sitting there. Did you know she was sitting there, Captain? Isn’t this a closed rehearsal?”

  Hugo turned. I said quickly, “I had a question about the tickets,” and in a moment he was striding down the aisle between the benches with the manner of a man who might take a fancy to knock one of them over as he passed, though they were nailed down. At every second I was expecting him to raise his voice against me, and I turned my head so that only my bad ear would catch it; but when he got to the risers, he merely took the inky sheet of paper from my hands and held it up to the light.

  “Good God, is this what you’ve been doing? How much paper have you wasted? This is terrible! Utter rubbish! Where’s the date? Doesn’t matter if everyone knows the showboat’s in town today so the show will be tonight—they want to see the date. And what’s this? ‘Come to see some river entertainment’?” This he read in a character voice, scoffing. “What kind of send-up is that? Where’s the spark? Where’s the spur to the imagination? You need something to drive folks here, you understand?”

  “I could make up the tickets, Captain; it would take me no time at all,” Mrs. Niffen called from the stage. “I know how to draw in a crowd. No one is better than me at drawing in a crowd.”

  Hugo ignored her. “Try this: ‘Riverboat theatre at its finest.’ Or: ‘The entertainment of the year.’ Or even: ‘The finest show on the Ohio.’ ”

  “Is that true?” I asked.

  “Is what true?”

  “Is it the finest show on the Ohio?”

  “You don’t think I’m capable of producing the finest show on the Ohio River?” he shouted at me.

  The boat rocked sharply for a moment as if lung power alone could unmoor it. Hugo reminded me, and then he turned to remind everyone, that he had been trained in London, he had acted in Oxford, he had directed comedies in the very town where Shakespeare was born. He had been on the stage with the best, and so on and so forth. I found myself staring at the knot of his tie; I was surprised that, given all his vocal assertions of the last hour, it still showed no signs of loosening. The material would probably do well as a sash if a military figure was needed. After a while Hugo finished spooling off his accomplishments and looked at me expectantly.

  I said, “The boat’s name, the Floating Theatre—that should be written on the ticket.”

  “Oh, really? The name of the boat but not the date?”

  “Next to the date, perhaps.”

  “And why is that?” He was testing me as he had tested Mrs. Niffen about the breathing. I knew what I meant, but I wasn’t sure how to explain it. Earlier, while I was listening to him give Hotspur’s dying speech, a slight upheaval in the river made the riser seat shift beneath me, and a picture came into my mind: a flat stage surrounded by lit candles floating downstream. Hugo was standing, giving his speech within the frame of candles, and an audience floated alongside on another barge to watch. In my mind the sound of Hugo’s voice carried out over the water toward the riverbanks, the flatlands of the north on one side and the sloped hills of the south on the other. A floating theater. Of course, this wasn’t an accurate representation of what the audience would see once they paid for their tickets. I knew that, of course.

  “It . . . well . . . it brings up a picture,” I told him.

  A short silence. Hugo narrowed his eyes, looking at me.

  Then: “I agree with May,” Liddy said from the stage. “I always liked that name. It sounds like a fairy tale. If you’re talking about drawing in an audience.” From that moment on, I considered Liddy my friend.

  Now Hugo turned to look at her instead of me. She blushed and took a deep, dramatic breath and reached back to feel, with her fingers, the end of her spine, trying, I suppose, to breathe from her back—a ridiculous notion if ever I heard one.

  7

  Two by two, like the animals on Noah’s boat, I met the actors and actresses on board. Mrs. Niffen and Liddy, of course, were the first, and after rehearsal Liddy came to me with a young girl in tow, the one with the brown braid I’d seen on the stage.

  “This is Celia Oxberry,” Liddy said, stepping into the office, where I was busy rewriting the tickets after Hugo sent me away. “Mrs. Niffen’s niece. We share a room. Rehearsal’s over and we’ve come to take you up to the dining room. Cook usually has tea.”

  Celia was a thin, pale girl who seemed to sink under the weight of her thin cotton dress. She was fourteen years old, she told me, and was here because her mother had gotten remarried last year and was now expecting another child and the pregnancy was a difficult one and so her new father’s mother was attending her only there were but two bedrooms in their house although it was a new house right inside town—her words came out in a rush while she looked steadily at the corner of the ceiling. After a while Liddy said kindly, “Enough now, Cee, we’ve come to take Miss May and see that she eats something,” at which point I said, “Please call me May,” and Celia looked at my face for a quick moment before resting her eyes on my shoulder.

  Jemmy Grieve and Sam Trotter were next. We found them in the dining room eating sandwiches they’d slapped together themselves with cold meat and Cook’s fresh bread. Jemmy (James on the playbill) played mostly villains—bankers and governors, he told me. He sported a long moustache and was about my age. Sam Trotter was younger and partial to light comedy, he said, but he could also play villains, as he did once with a pasted-on moustache made from mule hair when Jemmy fell ill last season. All of the company except Celia and Thaddeus had been on the boat last year, and many had been on the year before that as well.

  “A good job,” Jemmy told me. “No coaches to catch while we struggle with our costumes and such, going from town to town with our acts. Guaranteed a full season, no traveling or living expenses—why, last year I came away with near two hundred dollars!”

  Celia had started to put together a sandwich like the men until she saw that Liddy had buttered her bread and was cutting up her meat neatly in pieces, so she took her sandwich apart and tried to butter the bread, now greasy with meat juice. Considering my stomach, I thought it wise to stick to salt crackers.

  The next two actors walked in carrying a line of fish between them; as if in a play, one was tall and one was short. I recognized the short one as the one Hugo had called Pinky, who’d worn a boy’s cap at rehearsal.

  “Francis Winter,” he said, introducing himself. He held up the little finger to his left hand, which was only a stub. “Everyone calls me Pinky.”

  “Did you have an accident?” I asked, about the missing finger.

  “Sure did,” he said. “I was born.”

  The tall actor was Mrs. Niffen’s husband; I was told later that he was very charming when he talked but that this was not often. He did not say anything now but only made a slight bow to me and then got right down to his food. Everyone called him Mr. Niffen with some formality, even Mrs. Niffen, although they’d been married for twenty years. Mr. Niffen spoke to his wife as rarely as he did anyone else—not that it mattered, since Mrs. Niffen had voice enough for both of them.

  “Captain’s saving up to buy himself a steamboat,” Pinky told me. “Small ones getting cheaper all the time. If it works out, next year we might forget the Mississippi and steam up some of these side riv
ers and back down again, like the Monongahela and the Green.”

  “And the Kentucky River,” Jemmy added. “Good fishing there. The Mississippi, in my opinion, has got itself too crowded.”

  “What about you, May?” Liddy asked me. “Do you act?”

  “Act on the stage? Never.” I must have said this with some vehemence, because everyone looked up from their plates. Here is where, if I were with Comfort, she would say something like “Don’t mind May, she just says what she thinks,” or “May isn’t interested in plays, she’s only interested in sewing.” I’d gotten used to her explaining me to new people, but now I would have to do it myself.

  “I sew. I play the piano . . .” They waited for more, looking at my face. Mr. Niffen, sitting at the next table, didn’t join the conversation but ate steadily while reading the side of a newspaper. For a moment I wished I were at his table, where I wouldn’t have to speak.

  “I was hired to do what the captain’s sister used to do,” I said. “Before she was blown up on the Moselle.”

  Liddy cast me a surprised look, and I saw that everyone else wore near the same expression. “Apt to be literal” was another way Comfort described me.

  “Yes, we know,” Liddy said gently after a moment. “She was our friend.”

  They were all looking at me, not unkindly, but waiting for something. An explanation?

  “I have . . . I can be very literal,” I told them, “when I talk. That’s what my cousin used to say. I say what I think.”

  Another short silence. Then Pinky said, “I guess I can tell you’re not an actor, then, ha-ha!”

  Sam and Liddy laughed, too.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, we theater people aren’t exactly known for saying what we think,” Liddy told me.

  “Rather we say whatever we would like to be true,” Pinky said. They all laughed again.

  “Or what we believe is true, which is never the same as what we think is true,” Jemmy put in. More laughter.

  After this bump in the conversation, everyone except Celia—who never spoke much—resumed telling stories. Liddy kept a small cloth purse on her lap, even while she ate, and her face colored attractively when she laughed. Celia’s eyes kept straying to her. So did Pinky’s.

  “I found him on the guard with a fish on his line,” Pinky said to me, but he was looking at Liddy, “and I said, Where’s your wig? They’ve just said your cue.”

  Jemmy laughed. “I knew you were having me on.”

  “Got your hair on double quick, though, didn’t you?” Pinky countered.

  They could laugh at each other, and they didn’t take what I had said very much to heart. That was good. Liddy asked where I was from and seemed genuinely interested in our dairy farm. “I’m also from Ohio, but closer to Akron,” she told me. She asked me if I liked to swim, and when I said yes, she invited me go to the river with her in the afternoons. “I’m teaching Celia how to dive,” she said. “I could teach you, too.”

  Later, walking back to my stateroom, I decided I liked this new crop of actors. They were cheerful enough and didn’t seem to be overly shocked by what my mother called my straightforward nature. Maybe I didn’t need Comfort to explain me to them. That thought, or my lunch of salt crackers, made me feel much better until I opened the door to find Mrs. Niffen kneeling on the floor of my room, going through Helena’s large gray trunk.

  “Just doing an inventory,” she said, taking her time standing up.

  There was a keyhole in my door but no key to fit into it. I had to do something about that.

  • • •

  We were tied up near the little town of North Bend, Ohio, not at the town’s proper landing but at a smaller bend farther downstream, where it was cheaper to dock. The plan was to stay here for three days rehearsing the show with Thaddeus before putting it on for the people of North Bend. That meant I had three days to get the costumes in order.

  I wasn’t sure it could be done, given what I’d found in Helena’s trunk. I was also supposed to put up posters and advertise the show in town, but I kept circling back to the problem of the costumes: I needed to shorten Jemmy’s knee breeches and make a vest for Thaddeus and fix Mrs. Niffen’s red wig, which was matted at the nape. For that, I usually use cooking oil, and afterwards I rub a little perfume into the wig to diffuse the smell.

  The boat itself took some getting used to also, and I don’t mean my initial seasickness, which was no longer a problem now that we were docked. The smell of my stateroom, like wood soaked in fish oil, and the way the morning light came across my bed, starting from the left instead of the right as it had in my last room, and the texture of the light, which bounced off the river water, giving it a silvery quality, not to mention the rough walls, which were not wallpapered or painted, even badly, as they would have been in a boardinghouse—all this pulled at my attention in a vague but unsettling way. And that was only my own room. Every time I took a step out, I was barraged with new details—the slant of the guard, the white paint that pimpled along the upper deck’s port side—and when I went down to the lower deck, I took care to accommodate for the uneven spacing of the stairs. If I could have, I would have just stayed in my room and sewed.

  But the light left my room after mid-morning, and so I sewed down in the auditorium, which got the most sun if the heavy curtains were tied back. Fortunately by this time Hugo had eased his rule about closed rehearsals.

  “But don’t say a word, and for God’s sake don’t clap. Chances are you’ll clap when they’ve done something wrong, and then I’ll have a deuce of a time getting them to change it.”

  I didn’t want to clap; I only wanted to sew. When I sewed, I forgot the unfamiliar and the strange; my world narrowed to the ends of my fingers, which was a sight I was used to and liked. It reminded me that I was still the same person. And it made up for the empty space I felt beside me, which was Comfort. Of all the strange things I needed to get used to, her absence was the strangest.

  Every time I thought to myself, In an hour I will walk into town and paste up some show posters, I found that, before that hour had passed, something new had sprung up that needed my attention: a button off a cape, or a loose hem, or Pinky telling me that it was very important that he have a red necktie and what could we use for that? And so the three days became two days, and the two days became one, and still I hadn’t set foot in town. The thought that my job in town was to talk to more people I didn’t know, complete strangers, did not help matters.

  On the morning of the show I woke early and put the show posters into Helena’s satchel along with a stack of complimentary tickets I was to give away. Then I ate breakfast. Then I sewed a button on Pinky’s breeches, and Liddy asked me to look at her bonnet, and Sam or Jemmy wanted something, too. When at last I walked down the gangplank—here called a stage plank, something else that was new—it was almost noon. And I’d only finally gotten myself off the boat because Hugo had said, “Come along, now, May, let’s do one last round in town.” I didn’t tell him that this last round was also my first.

  We walked up the path Leo had cut through the willow trees, Hugo wearing his captain’s hat and me with my satchel of homemade posters and tickets. Leo couldn’t read or write but he could draw, and on each handbill he had sketched a woman in a long, flowing dress with her mouth open in a circle as if singing. Underneath the drawings I had printed:

  The Floating Theatre.

  Sunset, May the Fifth, 1/2 mile upstream from town landing.

  Best Show on the Ohio River.

  “Right, very nice,” Hugo said when I showed him. “And it is indeed the best show,” he added proudly. I was determined that the costumes would be the best costumes, too, and I worried about the work I still had to do: I needed to sew a gathering stitch on the bottom of Jemmy’s shirtsleeves to make channels for the ribbons, and I wanted to add more lace to Liddy’s bonnet.

  “Some of these towns,” Hugo was telling me, “have a feed store as well as
a grocer’s. In that case you’ll want to put up a handbill there, too.” He had tied a bit of blue silk around his walking stick, and it waved back and forth with each step. His voice carried over the wide road, and his English accent, though not refined, combined a clipped sense of business with pleasure.

  “Here there’s just the one store, Brown’s. You’ve gone there already, I expect. Now, make sure you go up to that bluff there . . .” He waved his hand toward a purplish rise in the north that looked more like a cloud than a piece of land. “Paste some bills on the higher trees so the farmers notice. They’ll see something’s up and go have a look. Have you met the justice of the peace? In these little towns, that’s what goes for a mayor.”

  I was wondering how I was going to disguise the fact that I hadn’t gone to town earlier, had given away no tickets, and had put up no posters, but Leo saved me from that. We heard a shout and turned to see him running up the road.

  “Broadhorn snapped, Captain,” he said when he got to us.

  “What? What was it doing in the water?”

  “It’s fixable, but I thought you’d want to come see it.”

  Hugo pulled at his collar with two fingers and looked at me with a frowning expression, as though I had snapped the broadhorn myself. “Take Miss May into town, would you, Leo? See that the rest of those show posters get up.”

  I watched him turn back, pulling his walking stick under his arm like a riding crop. He wasn’t running but was so energetic, he seemed to draw movement from the very air around him.

  “How’re you liking the boat, Miss May?” Leo asked me as we walked. We passed the town pier with several barges tied up to it and bales of cotton piled neatly on the dock like a row of corks. I told him that at the moment the boat felt more like a boardinghouse.