Show Boat (30 page)

Magnolia, too, boiled coffee and eggs over the gas jet in these lean times. Gravely she counted out the two nickels that would bring her and Kim home from Lincoln Park on the street car. Lincoln Park was an oasis—a life-giving breathing spot to the mother and child. They sallied forth in the afternoon; left the gas jet, the three-dollar room, the musty halls, the stout females behind them. There was the zoo; there was the lake; there was the grass. If the lake was their choice it led inevitably to tales of the rivers. It was in this
way that the background of her mother’s life was first etched upon Kim’s mind. The sight of the water always filled Magnolia with a nostalgia so acute as to amount to an actual physical pain.

The childish treble would repeat the words as the two sat on a park bench facing the great blue sea that was Lake Michigan.

“You remember the boat, don’t you, Kim?”

“Do I?” Kim’s diction was curiously adult, due, doubtless, to the fact that she had known almost no children.

“Of course you do, darling. Don’t you remember the river, and Grandma and Grandpa——”

“Cap’n!”

“Yes! I knew you remembered. And all the little darkies on the landing. And the band. And the steam organ. You used to put your hands over your ears and run and hide, because it frightened you. And Jo and Queenie.”

“Tell me about it.”

And Magnolia would assuage her own longing by telling and retelling the things she liked to remember. The stories, with the years, became a saga. Figures appeared, vanished, reappeared. The rivers wound through the whole. Elly, Schultzy, Julie, Steve; the man in the box with the gun; the old
Creole Belle
and Magnolia’s first trip on the Mississippi; Mr. Pepper and the pilot house; all these became familiar and yet legendary figures and incidents to the child. They were her Three Bears, her Bo-peep, her Red Riding Hood, her Cinderella. Magnolia must have painted
these stories with the colour of life itself, for the child never wearied of them.

“Tell me the one about the time you were a little girl and Gra’ma locked you in the bedroom because she didn’t want you to see the show and you climbed out of the window in your nightie …”

Kim Ravenal was probably the only white child north of the Mason and Dixon line who was sung to sleep to the tune of those plaintive, wistful Negro plantation songs which later were to come into such vogue as spirituals. They were the songs that Magnolia had learned from black Jo and from Queenie, the erstwhile rulers of the
Cotton Blossom
galley. Swing Low Sweet Chariot, she sang. O, Wasn’t Dat a Wide River! And, of course, All God’s Chillun Got Wings. Kim loved them. When she happened to be ill with some childhood ailment, they soothed her. Magnolia sang these songs, always, as she had learned to sing them in unconscious imitation of the soft husky Negro voice of her teacher. Through the years of Kim’s early childhood, Magnolia’s voice might have been heard thus wherever the shifting Ravenal fortunes had tossed the three, whether the red-plush luxury of the Sherman House, the respectable dulness of the family hotel, or the sordid fustiness of the cheap rooming house. Once, when they were living at the Sherman, Magnolia, seated in a rocking chair with Kim in her arms, had stopped suddenly in her song at a curious sound in the corridor. She had gone swiftly to the door, had opened it, and had been unable to stifle a little shriek of surprise and terror mingled. There stood a knot of black faces, teeth
gleaming, eyes rolling. Attracted by the songs so rarely heard in the North, the Sherman House bell boys and waiters had eagerly gathered outside the closed door in what was, perhaps, as flattering and sincere a compliment as ever a singer received.

Never did child know such ups and downs as did this daughter of the Chicago gambler and the showboat actress. She came to take quite for granted sudden and complete changes that would have disorganized any one more conventionally bred. One week she would find herself living in grubby quarters where the clammy fetid ghost of cabbage lurked always in the halls; the next would be a gay panorama of whisking waiters, new lace petticoats, drives along the lake front, ice cream for dessert, front seats at the matinée. The theatre bulked large in the life of the Ravenals. Magnolia loved it without being possessed of much discrimination with regard to it. Farce, comedy, melodrama—the whole gamut as outlined by Polonius—all held her interested, enthralled. Ravenal was much more critical than she. You saw him smoking in the lobby, bored, dégagé. It might be the opening of the rebuilt Lincoln Theatre on Clark near Division, with Gustave Frohman’s company playing The Charity Ball.

“Oh, Gay, isn’t it exciting!”

“I don’t think much of it. Cheap-looking theatre, too, isn’t it? They might better have left it alone after it burned down.”

Kim’s introduction to the metropolitan theatre was when she was taken, a mere baby, to see the spectacle America at the Auditorium. Before she was ten
she had seen everyone from Julia Marlowe to Anna Held; from Bernhardt to Lillian Russell. Gravely she beheld the antics of the Rogers Brothers. As gravely saw Klaw and Erlanger’s company in Foxey Quiller.

“It isn’t that she doesn’t see the joke,” Magnolia confided to Ravenal, almost worriedly. “She actually doesn’t seem to approve. Of course, I suppose I ought to be glad that she prefers the more serious things, but I wish she wouldn’t seem quite so grown-up at ten. By the time she’s twenty she’ll probably be spanking me and putting me to bed.”

Certainly Magnolia was young enough for two. She was the sort of theatre-goer who clutches the hand of her neighbour when stirred. When Ravenal was absent Kim learned to sustain her mother at such emotional moments. They two frequently attended the theatre together. Their precarious mode of living cut them off from sustained human friendships. But the theatre was always there to stimulate them, to amuse them, to make them forget or remember. There were long afternoons to be filled, and many evenings as Ravenal became more and more deeply involved in the intricacies of Chicago’s night world.

There was, curiously enough, a pendulum-like regularity about his irregular life. His comings and goings could be depended on almost as though he were a clerk or a humdrum bookkeeper. Though his fortunes changed with bewildering rapidity, his habits remained the same. Indeed, he felt these changes much less than did Magnolia and Kim. No matter what their habitation—cheap rooming house or expensive hotel—he left
at about the same hour each morning, took the same leisurely course toward town, returned richer or poorer—but unruffled—well after midnight. On his off nights he and Magnolia went to the theatre. Curiously, they seemed always to have enough money for that.

Usually they dwelt somewhere north, just the other side of the Chicago River, at that time a foul-smelling and viscid stream, with no drainage canal to deodorize it. Ravenal, in lean times, emerging from his dingy hotel or rooming house on Ontario or Ohio, was as dapper, as suave, as elegant as that younger Ravenal had been who, leaning against the packing case on the wharf at New Orleans, had managed to triumph over the handicap of a cracked boot. He would stand a moment, much as he had stood that southern spring morning, coolly surveying the world about him. That his viewpoint was the dingy front stoop of a run-down Chicago rooming house and his view the sordid street that held it, apparently disturbed his equanimity not at all. On rising he had observed exactly the same niceties that would have been his had he enjoyed the services of a hotel valet. He bathed, shaved, dressed meticulously. Magnolia had early learned that the slatternly morning habits which she had taken for granted in the
Cotton Blossom
wives—Julie, Mis’ Means, Mrs. Soaper, even the rather fastidious Elly—would be found inexcusable in the wife of Ravenal. The sternly utilitarian undergarments of Parthy’s choosing had soon enough been done away with, to be replaced with a froth of lace and tucks and embroidery
and batiste. The laundering of these was a pretty problem when faro’s frown decreed Ohio Street.

Ravenal was spared these worrisome details. Once out of the dingy boarding house, he could take his day in his two hands and turn it over, like a bright, fresh-minted coin. Each day was a new start. How could you know that you would not break the bank! It had been done on a dollar.

Down the street Ravenal would stroll past the ship chandlers’ and commission houses south of Ontario, to the swinging bridge that spanned the slimy river. There he would slacken his already leisurely pace, or even pause a moment, perhaps, to glance at the steamers tied up at the docks. There was an occasional sailboat. A three-masted schooner,
The Finney
, a grain boat, was in from up North. Over to Clark and Lake. You could sniff in the air the pleasant scent of coffee. That was Reid & Murdock’s big warehouse a little to the east. He sometimes went a block out of his way just to sniff this delicious odour. A glittering shoeshine at the Sherman House or the Tremont.

“Good-morning, George.”

“Mawnin’ Mist’ Ravenal! Mawnin’! Papah, suh?”

“Ah—n-n-no. No. H’m!” His fifty cents, budgeted, did not include the dispensing of those extra pennies for the
Times-Herald
, the
Inter-Ocean
, or the
Tribune
. They could be seen at McDonald’s for nothing. A fine Chicago morning. The lake mist had lifted. That was one of the advantages of never rising early. Into the Cockeyed Bakery for breakfast.
Tomorrow it would be Boyle’s. Surely his bad luck would break to-day. He felt it. Had felt it the moment he opened his eyes.

“Terrapin and champagne to-morrow, Nola. Feel it in my bones. I woke up with my palm itching, and passed a hunchback at Clark and Randolph last night.”

“Why don’t you let me give you your coffee and toast here this morning, Gay dear? It’ll only take a minute. And it’s so much better than the coffee you get at the—uh—downtown.”

Ravenal, after surveying his necktie critically in the mirror of the crazy little bureau, would shrug himself into his well-made coat. “You know I never eat in a room in which I have slept.”

Past the Court House; corner of Washington reached. Cut flowers in the glass case outside the basement florist’s. A tapping on the glass with a coin, or a rapping on the pavement with his stick—if the malacca stick was in evidence. “Heh, Joe!”

Joe clattering up the wooden steps.

“Here you are, sir. All ready for you. Just came in fresh.” A white carnation. Ravenal would sniff the spicy bloom, snap the brittle stem, thrust it through the buttonhole of his lapel.

A fine figure of a man from his boots to his hat. Young, handsome, well-dressed, leisurely. Joe, the Greek florist, pocketing his quarter, would reflect gloomily on luck—his own and that of others.

Ravenal might drop in a moment at Weeping Willy Mangler’s, thence to Reilly’s pool room near Madison, for a look at the racing odds. But no matter how low
his finances, he scorned the cheaper gambling rooms that catered to the clerks and the working men. There was a great difference between Jeff Hankins’ place and that of his brother, George. At George’s place, and others of that class, barkers stood outside. “Game upstairs, gentlemen! Game upstairs! Come in and try your luck! Ten cents can make you a millionaire.”

At George Hankins’ the faro checks actually were ten cents. You saw there labouring men with their tin dinner pails, their boots lime-spattered, their garments reeking of cheap pipe tobacco. There, too, you found stud poker, roulette, hazard—percentage games. None of these for Ravenal. He played a gentleman’s game, broke or flush.

This game he found at Mike McDonald’s “The Store.” Here he was at home. Here were excitement, luxury, companionship. Here he was Gaylord Ravenal. Fortune lurked just around the corner. At McDonald’s his credit always was good for enough to start the play. On the first floor was the saloon, with its rich walnut panelling, its great mirrors, its tables of teakwood and ivory inlay, its paintings of lolling ladies. Chicago’s saloons and gambling resorts vied with each other in rich and massive decoration. None of your soap-scrawled mirrors and fancy bottle structures for these. “Prince” Varnell’s place had, for years, been famous for its magnificent built-in mantel of Mexican onyx, its great marble statue of the death of Cleopatra, its enormous Sevres vases.

The second floor was Ravenal’s goal. He did not even glance at the whirling of the elaborately inlaid rou
lette wheels. He nodded to the dealers and his greeting was deferentially returned. It was said that most of these men had come of fine old Southern families. They dressed the part. But McDonald himself looked like a farmer. His black clothes, though well made, never seemed to fit him. His black string tie never varied. Thin, short, gray-haired, Mike McDonald the Boss of the gamblers would have passed anywhere for a kindly rustic.

“Playing to-day, Mr. Ravenal?”

“Why, yes. Yes, I thought I’d play a while.”

“Anything we can do to make you comfortable?”

“Well—uh—yes——”

McDonald would raise a benevolent though authoritative hand. His finger would summon a menial. “Dave, take care of Mr. Ravenal.”

Ravenal joined the others then, a gentleman gambler among gentleman gamblers. A group smartly dressed like himself, well groomed, quiet, almost elegant. Most of them wore jewellery—a diamond scarf pin, a diamond ring, sometimes even a diamond stud, though this was frowned on by players of Ravenal’s class. A dead cigar in the mouth of each. Little fine lines etched about their eyes. They addressed each other as “sir.” Thank you, sir.… Yours I believe, sir.… They were quiet, quiet. Yet there was an electric vibration in the air above and about the faro table. Only the dealer seemed remote, detached, unmoved. An hour passed; two, three, four, five. The Negro waiters in very white starched aprons moved deferentially from group to group. One would have said that no
favouritism was being shown, but they knew the piker from the plunger. Soft-voiced, coaxing: “Something to drink, suh? A little whisky, suh? Cigar? Might be you’d relish a little chicken white meat and a bottle of wine?”

Ravenal would glance up abstractedly. “Time is it?”