Show Boat

by Edna Ferber

  Never had the Cotton Blossom troupe so revelled in home-baked cakes, pies, cookies; home-brewed wine; fruits of tree and vine. The female population of the river towns from the Great Lakes to the Gulf beheld in him the lover of their secret dreams and laid at his feet burnt offerings and shewbread. Ravenal, it was said by the Cotton Blossom troupe, could charm the gold out of their teeth.

  Perhaps, with the passing of the years, he might have grown quite content with this life. Sometimes the little captain, when the two men were conversing quietly apart, dropped a word about the future.

  “When I’m gone—you and Magnolia—the boat’ll be yours, of course.”

  Ravenal would laugh. Little Captain Andy looked so very much alive, his bright brown eyes glancing here and there, missing nothing on land or shore, his brown paw scratching the whiskers that showed so little of gray, his nimble legs scampering from texas to gangplank, never still for more than a minute.

  “No need to worry about that for another fifty years,” Ravenal assured him.

  The end had in it, perhaps, a touch of the ludicrous, as had almost everything the little capering captain did. The Cotton Blossom, headed upstream on the Mississippi, bound for St. Louis, had struck a snag in Cakohia Bend, three miles from the city. It was barely dawn, and a dense fog swathed the river. The old Cotton Blossom probably would have sunk midstream. The new boat stood the shock bravely. In the midst of the pandemonium that followed the high shrill falsetto of the little captain’s voice could be heard giving commands which he, most of all, knew he had no right to give. The pilot only was to be obeyed under such conditions. The crew understood this, as did the pilot. It was, in fact, a legend that more than once in a crisis Captain Andy on the upper deck had screamed his orders in a kind of dramatic frenzy of satisfaction, interspersing these with picturesque and vivid oaths during which he had capered and bounced his way right off the deck and into the river, from which damp station he had continued to screech his orders and profanities in cheerful unconcern until fished aboard again. Exactly this happened. High above the clamour rose the voice of Andy. His little figure whirled like that of a dervish. Up, down, fore, aft—suddenly he was overboard unseen in the dimness, in the fog, in the savage swift current of the Mississippi, wrapped in the coils of the old yellow serpent, tighter, tighter, deeper, deeper, until his struggles ceased. She had him at last.

  “The river,” Magnolia had said, over and over. “The river. The river.”

  XII

  THEBES?” echoed Parthenia Ann Hawks, widow. The stiff crêpe of her weeds seemed to bristle. “I’ll do nothing of the kind, miss! If you and that fine husband of yours think to rid yourself of me that way——”

  “But, Mama, we’re not trying to rid ourselves of you. How can you think of such things! You’ve always said you hated the boat. Always. And now that Papa—now that you needn’t stay with the show any longer, I thought you’d want to go back to Thebes to live.”

  “Indeed! And what’s to become of the Cotton Blossom, tell me that, Maggie Hawks!”

  “I don’t know,” confessed Magnolia, miserably. “I don’t—know. That’s what I think we ought to talk about.” The Cotton Blossom, after her tragic encounter with the hidden snag in the Mississippi, was in for repairs. The damage to the show boat had been greater than they had thought. The snag had, after all, inflicted a jagged wound. So, too, had it torn and wounded something deep and hidden in Magnolia’s soul. Suddenly she had a horror of the great river whose treacherous secret fangs had struck so poisonously. The sight of the yellow turbid flood sickened her; yet held her hypnotized. Now she thought that she must run from it, with her husband and her child, to safety. Now she knew that she never could be content away from it. She wanted to flee. She longed to stay. This, if ever, was her chance. But the river had Captain Andy. Somewhere in its secret coils he lay. She could not leave him. On the rivers the three great mysteries—Love and Birth and Death—had been revealed to her. All that she had known of happiness and tragedy and tranquillity and adventure and romance and fulfilment was bound up in the rivers. Their willow-fringed banks framed her world. The motley figures that went up and down upon them or that dwelt on their shores were her people. She knew them; was of them. The Mississippi had her as surely as it had little Andy Hawks.

  “Well, we’re talking about it, ain’t we?” Mrs. Hawks now demanded.

  “I mean—the repairs are going to be quite expensive. She’ll be laid up for a month or more, right in the season. Now’s the time to decide whether we’re going to try to run her ourselves just as if Papa were still——”

  “I can see you’ve been talking things over pretty hard and fast with Ravenal. Well, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, miss. We’re going to run her ourselves—leastways, I am.”

  “But, Mama!”

  “Your pa left no will. Hawks all over. I’ve as must say-so as you have. More. I’m his widow. You won’t see me willing to throw away the good-will of a business that it’s taken years to build up. The boat’s insurance’ll take care of the repairs. Your pa’s life insurance is paid up, and quite a decent sum—for him. I saw to that. You’ll get your share, I’ll get mine. The boat goes on like it always has. No Thebes for me. You’ll go on playing ingénue leads; Ravenal juvenile. Kim——”

  “No!” cried Magnolia much as Parthy had, years before. “Not Kim.”

  “Why not?”

  There was about the Widow Hawks a terrifying and invincible energy. Her black habiliments of woe billowed about her like the sable wings of a destroying angel. With Captain Andy gone, she would appoint herself commander of the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre. Magnolia knew that. Who, knowing Parthy, could imagine it otherwise? She would appoint herself commander of their lives. Magnolia was no weakling. She was a woman of mettle. But no mettle could withstand the sledge-hammer blows of Parthy Ann Hawks’ iron.

  It was impossible that such an arrangement could hold. From the first Ravenal rejected it. But Magnolia’s pleadings for at least a trial won him over, but grudgingly.

  “It won’t work, Nola, I tell you. We’ll be at each other’s throats. She’s got all kinds of plans. I can see them whirling around in her eye.”

  “But you will try to be patient, won’t you, Gay? For my sake and Kim’s?”

  But they had not been out a week before mutiny struck the Cotton Blossom. The first to go was Windy. Once his great feet were set toward the gangplank there was no stopping him. He was over seventy now, but he looked not an hour older than when he had come aboard the Cotton Blossom almost fifteen years before. To the irate widow he spoke briefly but with finality.

  “You’re Hawks’ widow. That’s why I said I’d take her same’s if Andy was alive. I thought Nollie’s husband would boss this boat, but seems you’re running it. Well, ma’am, I ain’t no petticoat-pilot. I’m off the end of this trip down. Young Tanner’ll come aboard there and pilot you.”

  “Tanner! Who’s he? How d’you know I want him? I’m running this boat.”

  “You better take him, Mrs. Hawks, ma’am. He’s young, and not set in his ways, and likely won’t mind your nagging. I’m too old. Lost my taste for the rivers, anyway, since Cap went. Lost my nerve, too, seems like.… Well, ma’am, I’m going.”

  And he went.

  Changes came then, tripping on each other’s heels. Mis’ Means stayed, and little weak-chested Mr. Means. Frank had gone after Magnolia’s marriage. Ralph left.

  Parthy met these difficulties and defeats with magnificent generalship. She seemed actually to thrive on them. Do this. Do that. Ravenal’s right eyebrow was cocked in a perpetual circumflex of disdain. One could feel the impact of opposition whenever the two came together. Every fibre of Ravenal’s silent secretive nature was taut in rejection of this managerial mother-in-law. Every nerve and muscle of that energetic female’s frame tingled with enmity toward this suave soft-spoken contemptuous husband of her daughter.

  Finally, “Choose,” said Gaylord Ravena
l, “between your mother and me.”

  Magnolia chose. Her decision met with such terrific opposition from Parthy as would have shaken any woman less determined and less in love.

  “Where you going with that fine husband of yours? Tell me that!”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll warrant you don’t. No more does he. Why’re you going? You’ve got a good home on the boat.”

  “Kim … school …”

  “Fiddlesticks!”

  Magnolia took the plunge. “We’re not—I’m not—Gay’s not happy any more on the rivers.”

  “You’ll be a sight unhappier on land before you’re through, make no mistake about that, young lady. Where’ll you go? Chicago, h’m? What’ll you do there? Starve, and worse. I know. Many’s the time you’ll wish yourself back here.”

  Magnolia, nervous, apprehensive, torn, now burst into sudden rebellion against the iron hand that had gripped her all these years.

  “How do you know? How can you be so sure? And even if you are right, what of it? You’re always trying to keep people from doing the things they want to do. You’re always wanting people to live cautiously. You fought to keep Papa from buying the Cotton Blossom in the first place, and made his life a hell. And now you won’t leave it. You didn’t want me to act. You didn’t want me to marry Gay. You didn’t want me to have Kim. Maybe you were right. Maybe I shouldn’t have done any of those things. But how do you know? You can’t twist people’s lives around like that, even if you twist them right. Because how do you know that even when you’re right you mayn’t be wrong? If Papa had listened to you, we’d be living in Thebes. He’d be alive, probably. I’d be married to the butcher, maybe. You can’t do it. Even God lets people have their own way, though they have to fall down and break their necks to find out they were wrong.… You can’t do it … and you’re glad when it turns out badly …”

  She was growing incoherent.

  Back of Parthy’s opposition to their going was a deep relief of which even she was unaware, and whose existence she would have denied had she been informed of it. Her business talent, so long dormant, was leaping into life. Her energy was cataclysmic. One would almost have said she was happy. She discharged actors, crew; engaged actors, crew. Ordered supplies. Spoke of shifting to an entirely new territory the following year—perhaps to the rivers of North Carolina and Maryland. She actually did this, though not until much later. Magnolia, years afterward reading her mother’s terse and maddening letters, would be seized with a nostalgia not for the writer but for the lovely-sounding places of which she wrote—though they probably were as barren and unpicturesque as the river towns of the Mississippi and Ohio and Big Sandy and Kanawha. “We’re playing the town of Bath, on the Pamlico River,” Parthy’s letter would say. Or, “We had a good week at Queenstown, on the Sassafras.”

  Magnolia, looking out into the gray Chicago streets, slippery with black ice, thick with the Lake Michigan fog, would repeat the names over to herself. Bath on the Pamlico. Queenstown on the Sassafras.

  Mrs. Hawks, at parting, was all for Magnolia’s retaining her financial share in the Cotton Blossom, the money accruing therefrom to be paid at regular intervals. In this she was right. She knew Ravenal. In her hard and managing way she loved her daughter; wished to insure her best interests. But Magnolia and Ravenal preferred to sell their share outright if she would buy. Ravenal would probably invest it in some business, Magnolia said.

  “Yes—monkey business,” retorted Mrs. Hawks. Then added, earnestly, “Now mind, don’t you come snivelling to me when it’s gone and you and your child haven’t a penny to bless yourselves with. For that’s what it’ll come to in the end. Mark my words. I don’t say I wouldn’t be happy to see you and Kim back. But not him. When he’s run through every penny of your money, he needn’t look to me for more. You can come back to the boat; you and Kim. I’ll look for you. But him! Never!”

  The two women faced each other, and they were no longer mother and daughter but two forces opposing each other with all the strength that lay in the deep and powerful nature of both.

  Magnolia made one of those fine speeches. “I wouldn’t come to you for help—not if I were starving to death, and Kim too.”

  “Oh, there’s worse things than starving to death.”

  “I wouldn’t come to you no matter what.”

  “You will, just the same. I’d take my oath on that.”

  “I never will.”

  Secretly she was filled with terror at leaving the rivers; for the rivers, and the little inaccessible river towns, and the indolent and naïve people of those towns whose very presence in them confessed them failures, had with the years taken on in Magnolia’s eyes the friendly aspect of the accustomed. Here was comfort assured; here were friends; here the ease that goes with familiarity. Even her mother’s bristling generalship had in it a protective quality. The very show boat was a second mother, shielding her from the problems and cares that beset the land-dweller. The Cotton Blossom had been a little world in itself on which life was a thing detached, dream-like, narcotic.

  As Magnolia Ravenal, with her husband and her child, turned from this existence of ease to the outside world of which she already had had one bitter taste, she was beset by hordes of fears and doubts. Yet opposing these, and all but vanquishing them, was the strong love of adventure—the eager curiosity about the unknown—which had always characterized her and her dead father, the little captain, and caused them both to triumph, thus far, over the clutching cautious admonitions of Parthenia Ann Hawks.

  Fright and anticipation; nostalgia and curiosity; a soaring sense of freedom at leaving her mother’s too-protective wing; a pang of compunction that she should feel this unfilial surge of relief.

  They were going. You saw the three of them scrambling up the steep river bank to the levee (perhaps for the last time, Magnolia thought with a great pang. And within herself a voice cried no! no!) Ravenal slim, cool, contained; Magnolia whiter than usual, and frankly tearful; the child Kim waving an insouciant farewell with both small fists. They carried no bundles, no parcels, no valises. Ravenal disdained to carry parcels; he did not permit those of his party to carry them. Two Negroes in tattered and faded blue overalls made much of the luggage, stowing it inefficiently under the seats and over the floor of the livery rig which had been hired to take the three to the nearest railway station, a good twelve miles distant.

  The Cotton Blossom troupe was grouped on the forward deck to see them off. The Cotton Blossom lay, smug, safe, plump, at the water’s edge. A passing side-wheeler, flopping ponderously downstream, sent little flirty waves across the calm waters to her, and set her to palpitating coyly. Good-bye! Good-bye! Write, now. Mis’ Means’ face distorted in a ridiculous pucker of woe. Ravenal in the front seat with the driver. Magnolia and Kim in the back seat with the luggage protruding at uncomfortable angles all about them. Parthenia Ann Hawks, the better to see them, had stationed herself on the little protruding upper deck, forward—the deck that resembled a balcony much like that on the old Cotton Blossom. The livery nags started with a lurch up the dusty village street. They clattered across the bridge toward the upper road. Magnolia turned for a last glimpse through her tears. There stood Parthenia Ann Hawks, silhouetted against sky and water, a massive and almost menacing figure in her robes of black—tall, erect, indomitable. Her face was set. The keen eyes gazed, unblinking, across the sunlit waters. One arm was raised in a gesture of farewell. Ruthless, unconquerable, headstrong, untamed, terrible.

  “She’s like the River,” Magnolia thought, through her grief, in a sudden flash of vision. “She’s the one, after all, who’s like the Mississippi.”

  A bend in the upper road. A clump of sycamores. The river, the show boat, the silent black-robed figure were lost to view.

  XIII

  THE most casual onlooker could gauge the fluctuations of the Ravenal fortunes by any one of three signs. There was Magnolia Ravenal’s sealskin sacque; there was Magnoli
a Ravenal’s diamond ring; there was Gaylord Ravenal’s malacca cane. Any or all of these had a way of vanishing and reappearing in a manner that would have been baffling to one not an habitué of South Clark Street, Chicago. Of the three, the malacca stick, though of almost no tangible value, disappeared first and oftenest, for it came to be recognized as an IOU by every reputable Clark Street pawnbroker. Deep in a losing game of faro at Jeff Hankins or Mike McDonald’s, Ravenal would summon a Negro boy to him. He would hand him the little ivory-topped cane. “Here—take this down to Abe Lipman’s, corner Clark and Monroe. Tell him I want two hundred dollars. Hurry.” Or: “Run over to Goldsmith’s with this. Tell him a hundred.”

  The black boy would understand. In ten minutes he would return minus the stick and bearing a wilted sheaf of ten-dollar bills. If Ravenal’s luck turned, the cane was redeemed. If it still stayed stubborn, the diamond ring must go; that failing, then the sealskin sacque. Ravenal, contrary to the custom of his confrères, wore no jewellery; possessed none. There were certain sinister aspects of these outward signs, as when, for example, the reigning sealskin sacque was known to skip an entire winter.

  Perhaps none of these three symbols was as significant a betrayal of the Ravenal finances as was Gay Ravenal’s choice of a breakfasting place. He almost never breakfasted at home. This was a reversion to one of the habits of his bachelor days; was, doubtless, a tardy rebellion, too, against the years spent under Mrs. Hawks’ harsh régime. He always had hated those Cotton Blossom nine o’clock family breakfasts ominously presided over by Parthy in cap and curl papers.

  Since their coming to Chicago Gay liked to breakfast between eleven and twelve, and certainly never rose before ten. If the Ravenal luck was high, the meal was eaten in leisurely luxury at Billy Boyle’s Chop House between Clark and Dearborn streets. This was most agreeable, for at Billy Boyle’s, during the noon hour, you encountered Chicago’s sporting blood—political overlords, gamblers, jockeys, actors, reporters—these last mere nobodies—lean and somewhat morose young fellows vaguely known as George Ade, Brand Whitlock, John McCutcheon, Pete Dunne. Here the news and gossip of the day went round. Here you saw the Prince Albert coat, the silk hat, the rattling cuffs, the glittering collar, the diamond stud of the professional gamester. Old Carter Harrison, Mayor of Chicago, would drop in daily, a good twenty-five-cent cigar waggling between his lips as he greeted this friend and that. In came the brokers from the Board of Trade across the way. Smoke-blue air. The rich heavy smell of thick steaks cut from prime Western beef. Massive glasses of beer through which shone the pale amber of light brew, or the seal-brown of dark. The scent of strong black coffee. Rye bread pungent with caraway. Little crisp round breakfast rolls sprinkled with poppy-seed.