Still, if Magnolia was clever at reading between the lines of her mother’s bald letters, so, too, was Parthenia at hers. In fact, Parthy took many a random shot that struck home, as when once she wrote, tartly, “Fur coat one day and none the next I’ll be bound.”
XV
The problem of Kim’s education, of Kim’s future, was more and more insistently borne in upon her. She wanted money—money of her own with which to provide security for the child. Ravenal’s improvident method was that of Paddy and the leaky roof. When luck was high and he was showering her and Kim with luxuries, he would say, “But, good God, haven’t you got everything you want? There’s no satisfying you any more, Nola.”
When he had nothing he would throw out his hands, palms upward, in a gesture of despair. “I haven’t got it, I tell you. I give you everything I can think of when I am flush. And now, when I’m broke, you nag me.”
“But, Gay, that’s just it. Everything one day and nothing the next. Couldn’t we live like other people, in between? Enough, and none of this horrible worrying about to-morrow. I can’t bear it.”
“You should have married a plumber.”
She found herself casting about in her mind for ways in which she could earn money of her own. She took stock of her talents: a slim array. There was her experience on the show-boat stage. She could play the piano a little. She could strum the banjo (relic of Jo’s and Queenie’s days in the old Cotton Blossom low-raftered kitchen). She had an untrained, true, and rather moving voice of mediocre quality.
Timidly, with a little nervous spot of red showing in either cheek, she broached this to Ravenal one fine afternoon when they were driving out to the Sunnyside Hotel for dinner. Gaylord had had a run of luck the week before. Two sleek handsome chestnuts seemed barely to flick the road with their hoofs as they flew along. The smart high cart glittered with yellow varnish. None of your cheap livery rigs for Ravenal. Magnolia was exhilarated, happy. Above all else she loved to drive into the country or the suburbs behind a swift pair of horses. Ravenal was charming; pleased with himself; with his handsome, well-dressed young wife; with the cart, the horses, the weather, the prospect of one of Old Man Dowling’s excellent dinners. They sped through Lincoln Park. Their destination was a two-hours’ drive north, outside the city limits: a favourite rendezvous for Chicago’s sporting world. At Dowling’s one had supper at a dollar a head—and such a supper! The beefsteak could be cut with a fork. Old Man Dowling bred his own fine fat cattle. Old Lady Dowling raised the plump broilers that followed the beefsteak. There was green corn grown in the Dowling garden; fresh-plucked tomatoes, young onions. There was homemade ice cream. There was a huge chocolate cake, each slice a gigantic edifice alternating layers of black and white.
“Can’t I drive a while, Gay dear?”
“They’re pretty frisky. You’d better wait till we get out a ways, where there aren’t so many rigs.” The fine cool late summer day had brought out all manner of vehicles. “By that time the nags’ll have some of the skittishness worked out of them, too.”