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.