Show Boat

by Edna Ferber

  Julie lingered. Steve crossed the gangplank, turned, beckoned with his head. Julie lingered. An unspoken question in her eyes.

  Andy flushed and scratched the mutton-chop whiskers this side and that. “Well, you know how she is, Julie. She don’t mean no harm. But she didn’t let on to Magnolia just what time you were going. Told her to-morrow, likely. Women folks are funny, that way. She don’t mean no harm.”

  “That’s all right,” said Julie; picked up the valises, was at Steve’s side. Together the two toiled painfully up the steep river bank, Steve turning to aid her as best he could. They reached the top of the levee. They stood a moment, breathless; then turned and trudged down the dusty Southern country road, the setting sun in their faces. Julie’s slight figure was bent under the weight of the burden she carried. You saw Steve’s fine blond head turned toward her, tender, concerned, encouraging.

  Suddenly from the upper deck that fronted Magnolia’s room and Parthy’s came the sound of screams, a scuffle, a smart slap, feet clattering pell-mell down the narrow wooden balcony stairs. A wild little figure in a torn white frock, its face scratched and tear-stained, its great eyes ablaze in the white face, flew past Andy, across the gangplank, up the levee, down the road. Behind her, belated and panting, came Parthy. Her hand on her heart, her bosom heaving, she leaned against the inadequate support offered by Andy’s right arm, threatening momentarily to topple him, by her own dead weight, into the river.

  “To think that I should live to see the day when—my own child—she slapped me—her mother! I saw them out of the window, so I told her to straighten her bureau drawers—a sight! All of a sudden she heard that woman’s voice, low as it was, and she to the window. When she saw her going she makes for the door. I caught her on the steps, but she was like a wildcat, and raised her hand against me—her own mother—and tore away, with me holding this in my hand.” She held out a fragment of torn white stuff. “Raised her hand against her own——”

  Andy grinned. “Good for her.”

  “What say, Andy Hawks!”

  But Andy refused to answer. His gaze followed the flying little figure silhouetted against the evening sky at the top of the high river bank. The slim sagging figure of the woman and the broad-shouldered figure of the man trudged down the road ahead. The child’s voice could be heard high and clear, with a note of hysteria in it. “Julie! Julie! Wait for me! I want to say goodbye! Julie!”

  The slender woman in the black dress turned and made as though to start back and then, with a kind of crazy fear in her pace, began to run away from the pursuing little figure—away from something that she had not the courage to face. And when she saw this Magnolia ran on yet a little while, faltering, and then she stopped and buried her head in her hands and sobbed. The woman glanced over her shoulder, fearfully. And at what she saw she dropped her bags and bundles in the road and started back toward her, running fleetly in spite of her long ruffled awkward skirts; and she held out her arms long before they were able to reach her. And when finally they came together, the woman dropped on her knees in the dust of the road and gathered the weeping child to her and held her close, so that as you saw them sharply outlined against the sunset the black of the woman’s dress and the white of the child’s frock were as one.

  VIII

  MAGNOLIA, at fifteen, was a gangling gawky child whose eyes were too big for her face and whose legs were too long for her skirts. She looked, in fact, all legs, eyes, and elbows. It was a constant race between her knees and her skirt hems. Parthy was for ever lengthening frocks. Frequently Magnolia, looking down at herself, was surprised, like Alice in Wonderland after she had eaten the magic currant cake, to discover how far away from her head her feet were. Being possessed of a natural creamy pallor which her mother mistook for lack of red corpuscles, she was dosed into chronic biliousness on cod liver oil, cream, eggs, land butter, all of which she loathed. Then suddenly, at sixteen, legs, elbows, and eyes assumed their natural proportions. Overnight, seemingly, she emerged from adolescence a rather amazing looking young creature with a high broad forehead, a wide mobile mouth, great dark liquid eyes, and a most lovely speaking voice which nobody noticed. Her dress was transformed, with Cinderella-like celerity, from the pinafore to the bustle variety. She was not a beauty. She was, in fact, considered rather plain by the unnoticing. Being hipless and almost boyishly flat of bust in a day when the female form was a thing not only of curves but of loops, she was driven by her mother into wearing all sorts of pads and ruffled corset covers and contrivances which somehow failed to conceal the slimness of the frame beneath. She was, even at sixteen, what might be termed distinguished-looking. Merely by standing tall, pale, dark-haired, next to Elly, that plump and pretty ingénue was transformed into a dumpy and rather dough-faced blonde in whose countenance selfishness and dissatisfaction were beginning to etch telltale lines.

  She had been now almost seven years on the show boat. These seven years had spread a tapestry of life and colour before her eyes. Broad rivers flowing to the sea. Little towns perched high on the river banks or cowering flat and fearful, at the mercy of the waters that often crept like hungry and devouring monsters, stealthily over the levee and into the valley below. Singing Negroes. Fighting whites. Spawning Negroes. A life fantastic, bizarre, peaceful, rowdy, prim, eventful, calm. On the rivers anything might happen and everything did. She saw convict chain gangs working on the roads. Grisly nightmarish figures of striped horror, manacled leg to leg. At night you heard them singing plantation songs in the fitful glare of their camp fires in the woods; simple songs full of hope. Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel? they sang. Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Comin’ for to Carry Me Home. In the Louisiana bayou country she saw the Negroes perform that weird religious rite known as a ring shout, semi-savage, hysterical, mesmerizing.

  Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri small-town housewives came to be Magnolia’s friends, and even Parthy’s. The coming of the show boat was the one flash of blazing colour in the drab routine of their existence. To them Schultzy was the John Drew of the rivers, Elly the Lillian Russell. You saw them scudding down the placid tree-shaded streets in their morning ginghams and calicoes, their bits of silver clasped in their work-seamed hands, or knotted into the corner of a handkerchief. Fifty cents for two seats at to-night’s show.

  “How are you, Mis’ Hawks?… And the little girl?… My! Look at the way she’s shot up in a year’s time! Well, you can’t call her little girl any more.… I brought you a glass of my homemade damson preserve. I take cup of sugar to cup of juice. Real rich, but it is good if I do say so.… I told Will I was coming to the show every night you were here, and he could like it or lump it. I been saving out of the housekeeping money.”

  They brought vast chocolate cakes; batches of cookies; jugs of home-brewed grape wine; loaves of fresh bread; jars of strained honey; stiff tight bunches of garden flowers. Offerings on the shrine of Art.

  Periodically Parthy threatened to give up this roving life and take Magnolia with her. She held this as a weapon over Andy’s head when he crossed her will, or displeased her. Immediately boarding schools, convents, and seminaries yawned for Magnolia.

  Perhaps Parthy was right. “What kind of a life is this for a child!” she demanded. And later, “A fine kind of a way for a young lady to be living—slopping up and down these rivers, seeing nothing but loafers and gamblers and niggers and worse. What about her Future?” Future, as she pronounced it, was spelled with a capital F and was a thin disguise for the word husband.

  “Future’ll take care of itself,” Andy assured her, blithely.

  “If that isn’t just like a man!”

  It was inevitable that Magnolia should, sooner or later, find herself through force of circumstance treading the boards as an actress in the Cotton Blossom Floating Theatre company. Not only that, she found herself playing ingénue leads. She had been thrown in as a stop-gap following Elly’s defection, and had become quite without previous planning, a permanent member of the troupe
. Strangely enough, she developed an enormous following, though she lacked that saccharine quality which river towns had come to expect in their show-boat ingénues. True, her long legs were a little lanky beneath the short skirts of the woodman’s pure daughter, but what she lacked in one extremity she made up in another. They got full measure when they looked at her eyes, and her voice made the small-town housewives weep. Yet when their husbands nudged them, saying, “What you sniffling about?” they could only reply, “I don’t know.” And no more did they.

  Elly was twenty-eight when she deserted Schultzy for a gambler from Mobile. For three years she had been restless, fault-finding, dissatisfied. Each autumn she would announce to Captain Andy her intention to forsake the rivers and bestow her talents ashore. During the winter she would try to get an engagement through the Chicago booking offices contrary to the custom of show-boat actors whose habit it was to hibernate in the winter on the savings of a long and economical summer. But the Chicago field was sparse and uncertain. She never had the courage or the imagination to go as far as New York. April would find her back on the Cotton Blossom. Between her and Schultzy the bickerings and the quarrels became more and more frequent. She openly defied Schultzy as he directed rehearsals. She refused to follow his suggestions though he had a real sense of direction. Everything she knew he had taught her. She invariably misread a line and had to be coached in it, word by word; inflection; business; everything.

  Yet now, when Schultzy said, “No! Listen. You been kidnapped and smuggled on board this rich fella’s yacht, see. And he thinks he’s got you in his power. He goes to grab you. You’re here, see. Then you point toward the door back of him, see, like you saw something there scared the life out of you. He turns around and you grab the gun off the table, see, and cover him, and there’s your big speech. So and so and so and so and so and so and so and so——” the ad lib. directions that have held since the day of Shakespeare.

  Elly would deliberately defy him. Others in the company—new members—began to take their cue from her.

  She complained about her wardrobe; refused to interest herself in it, though she had been an indefatigable needlewoman. Now, instead of sewing, you saw her looking moodily out across the river, her hands idle, her brows black. An unintelligent and unresourceful woman turned moody and thoughtful must come to mischief, for within herself she finds no solace.

  At Mobile, then, she was gone. It was, they all knew, the black-moustached gambler who had been following the show boat down the river since they played Paducah, Kentucky. Elly had had dozens of admirers in her show-boat career; had received much attention from Southern gallants, gamblers, loafers, adventurers—all the romantic beaux of the river towns of the ’80s. Her attitude toward them had been puritanical to the point of sniffiness, though she had enjoyed their homage and always displayed any amorous missives or gifts that came her way.

  True to the melodramatic tradition of her environment, she left a note for Schultzy, written in a flourishing Spencerian hand that made up, in part, for the spelling. She was gone. He need not try to follow her or find her or bring her back. She was going to star at the head of her own company and play Camille and even Juliet. He had promised her. She was good and sick and tired of this everlasting flopping up and down the rivers. She wouldn’t go back to it, no matter what. Her successor could have her wardrobe. They had bookings through Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas. She might even get to New York. (Incredibly enough, she did actually play Juliet through the Mid-west, to audiences of the bewildered yokelry.) She was sorry to leave Cap in the lurch like this. And she would close, and begged to remain his loving Wife (this inked out but still decipherable)—begged to remain, his truly, Elly Chipley. Just below this signature the added one of Lenore La Verne, done in tremendous sable down-strokes and shaded curlecues, especially about the L’s.

  It was a crushing blow for Schultzy, who loved her. Stricken, he thought only of her happiness. “She can’t get along without me,” he groaned. Then, in a stunned way, “Juliet!” There was nothing of bitterness or rancour in his tone; only a dumb despairing wonder. “Juliet! And she couldn’t play Little Eva without making her out a slut.” He pondered this a moment. “She’s got it into her head she’s Bernhardt, or something.… Well, she’ll come back.”

  “Do you mean to say you’d take her back!” Parthy demanded.

  “Why, sure,” Schultzy replied, simply. “She never packed a trunk in her life, or anything. I done all those things for her. Some ways she’s a child. I guess that’s how she kept me so tight. She needed me all the time.… Well, she’ll come back.”

  Captain Andy sent to Chicago for an ingénue lead. It was then, pending her arrival, that Magnolia stepped into the breach—the step being made, incidentally, over what was practically Parthy’s dead body. For at Magnolia’s calm announcement that she knew every line of the part and all the business, her mother stormed, had hysterics, and finally took to her bed (until nearly time for the rise of the curtain). The bill that night was The Parson’s Bride. Show-boat companies to this day still tell the story of what happened during that performance on the Cotton Blossom.

  They had two rehearsals, one in the morning, another that lasted throughout the afternoon. Of the company, Magnolia was the calmest. Captain Andy seemed to swing, by invisible pulleys, from the orchestra pit below to Parthy’s chamber above. One moment he would be sprawled in the kerosene footlights, his eyes deep in wrinkles of delight, his little brown paws scratching the mutton-chop whiskers in a frenzy of excitement.

  “That’s right. That’s the stuff! Elly never give it half the——’Scuse me, Schultzy—I didn’t go for to hurt your feelings, but by golly, Nollie! I wouldn’t of believed you had it in you, not if your own mother told——” Then, self-reminded, he would cast a fearful glance over his shoulder, that shoulder would droop, he would extricate himself from the welter of footlights and music racks and prompt books in which he squatted, and scamper up the aisle. The dim outline of a female head in curl papers certainly could not have been seen peering over the top of the balcony rail as he fancied, for when he had clattered up the balcony stairs and had gently turned the knob of the bedroom door, there lay the curl-papered head on the pillow of the big bed, and from it issued hollow groans, and plastered over one cheek of it was a large moist white cloth soaked in some pungent and nostril-pricking stuff. The eyes were closed. The whole figure was shaken by shivers. Mortal agony, you would have said (had you not known Parthy), had this stricken and monumental creature in its horrid clutches.

  In a whisper—“Parthy!”

  A groan, hollow, heartrending, mortuary.

  He entered, shut the door softly, tiptoed over to the bed, laid a comforting brown paw on the shivering shoulder. The shoulder became convulsive, the shivers swelled to heaves. “Now, now, Parthy! What you taking on so for? God A’mighty, person’d think she’d done something to shame you instead of make you mighty proud. If you’d see her! Why, say, she’s a born actress.”

  The groans now became a wail. The eyes unclosed. The figure raised itself to a sitting posture. The sopping rag rolled limply off. Parthy rocked herself to and fro. “My own daughter! An actress! That I should have lived to see this day!… Rather have … in her grave … why I ever allowed her to set foot on this filthy scow …”

  “Now, Parthy, you’re just working yourself up. Matter of fact, that time Mis’ Means turned her ankle and we thought she couldn’t step on it, you was all for going on in her part, and I bet if Sophy Means hadn’t tied up her foot and gone on like a soldier she is, we’d of had you acting that night. You was rarin’ to. I watched you.”

  “Me! Acting on the stage! Not that I couldn’t play better than any Sophy Means, and that’s no compliment. A poor stick if I couldn’t.” But her defence lacked conviction. Andy had surprised a secret ambition in this iron-armoured bosom.

  “Now, come on! Cheer up! Ought to be proud your own daughter stepping in and saving us money like this. We�
�d of closed. Had to. God knows when that new baggage’ll get here, if she gets here at all. What do you think of that Chipley! Way I’ve treated that girl, if she’d been my own daughter—well!… How’d you like a nice little sip of whisky, Parthy? Then you come on down give Nollie a hand with her costumes. Chipley’s stuff comes up on her like ballet skirts.—Now, now, now! I didn’t say she—— Oh, my God!”

  Parthy had gone off again into hysterics. “My own daughter! My little girl!”

  The time for severe measures had come. Andy had not dealt with actresses for years without learning something of the weapons with which to fight hysteria.

  “All right. I’ll give you something to screech for. The boys paraded this noon with a banner six feet long and red letters a foot high announcing the Appearance Extraordinaire of Magnolia the Mysterious Comedy Tragedienne in The Parson’s Bride. I made a special spiel on the corner. We got the biggest advance sale we had this season. Yessir! Doc’s downstairs raking it in with both hands and you had the least bit of gumption in you, instead of laying here whining and carrying on, you’d——”

  “What’s the advance?” spake up Parthy, the box-office expert.

  “Three hundred; and not anywheres near four o’clock.”

  With one movement Parthy had flung aside the bedclothes and stepped out of bed revealing, rather inexplicably, a complete lower costume including shoes.

  Andy was off, down the stairs, up the aisle, into the orchestra pit just in time to hear Magnolia say, “Schultzy, please! Don’t throw me the line like that, I know it. I didn’t stop because I was stuck.”