“He wasn’t very happy on them. I wasn’t, either, after Grandpa Hawks——”
Kim knew that, too. She had heard her father say, “God’s sake, Nola, don’t fill the kid’s head full of that stuff about the rivers and the show boat. The way you tell it, it sounds romantic and idle and picturesque.”
“Well, wasn’t——?”
“No. It was rotten and sordid and dull. Flies on the food and filthy water to drink and yokels to play to. And that old harridan——”
“Gay!”
He would come over to her, kiss her tenderly, contritely. “Sorry, darling.”
Kim knew that her mother had a strange deep feeling about the rivers. The ugly wide muddy ruthless rushing rivers of the Middle West.
Kim Ravenal’s earliest river memories were bizarre and startling flashes. One of these was of her mother seated in a straight-backed chair on the upper deck of the Cotton Blossom, sewing spangles all over a high-busted corset. It was a white webbed corset with a pinched-in waist and high full bosom and flaring hips. This humdrum garment Magnolia Ravenal was covering with shining silver spangles, one overlapping the other so that the whole made a glittering basque. She took quick sure stitches that jerked the fantastic garment in her lap, and when she did this the sun caught the brilliant heap aslant and turned it into a blaze of gold and orange and ice-blue and silver.
Kim was enchanted. Her mother was a fairy princess. It was nothing to her that the spangle-covered basque, modestly eked out with tulle and worn with astonishingly long skirts for a bareback rider, was to serve as Magnolia’s costume in The Circus Clown’s Daughter.
Kim’s grandmother had scolded a good deal about that costume. But then, she had scolded a good deal about everything. It was years before Kim realized that all grandmothers were not like that. At three she thought that scolding and grandmothers went together, like sulphur and molasses. The same was true of fun and grandfathers, only they went together like ice cream and cake. You called your grandmother grandma. You called your grandfather Andy, or, if you felt very roguish, Cap’n. When you called him that, he cackled and squealed, which was his way of laughing, and he clawed his delightful whiskers this side and that. Kim would laugh then, too, and look at him knowingly from under her long lashes. She had large eyes, deep-set like her mother’s and her mother’s wide mobile mouth. For the rest, she was much like her father—a Ravenal, he said. His fastidious ways (highfalutin, her grandmother called them); his slim hands and feet; his somewhat drawling speech, indirect though strangely melting glance, calculatedly impulsive and winning manner.