“I never seen anybody such a hand at writing letters. You got one about every stand since you started with the boat, seems. I was saying to Clyde only yesterday, I says, what’s she find to write about!”
This, Magnolia knew, was not a mere figure of speech. In some mysterious way the knowledge had seeped through the Cotton Blossom company that in these frequent letters between mother and daughter a battle was being waged. They sensed, too, that in the outcome of this battle lay their own future.
The erstwhile ingénue now assumed an elaborate carelessness of manner which, to the doubting onlooker, would forever have decided the question of her dramatic ability. “What’s she got to say, h’m? What——” here she giggled in shrill falsetto appreciation of her own wit—“what news on the Rialto?”
Magnolia glanced down again at the letter. “I think Kim may come down for a few days to visit us, in June. With her husband.”
The ribbons of Elly’s cap trembled. The little withered well-kept hand in which she still took such pride went to her lips that were working nervously. “You don’t say! Well, that’ll be nice.” After which triumph of simulated casualness you heard her incautious steps clattering down the stairs and up the aisle to the lesser dressing rooms and bedrooms at the rear of the stage.
Magnolia picked up the letter again. Kim hated to write letters. The number that she had written her mother in the past month testified her perturbation.
Nola darling, you’ve just gone gaga, that’s all. What do you mean by staying down there in that wretched malarial heat! Now listen to me. We close June first. They plan to open in Boston in September, then Philadelphia, Chicago. My contract, of course, doesn’t call for the road. Cruger offered me an increase and a house percentage if I’d go when the road season opens, but you know how I hate touring. You’re the trouper of this family. Besides, I wouldn’t leave Andy. He misses you as much as Ken and I do. If he could talk, he would demand his grandmother’s immediate presence. If you aren’t in New York by June third I shall come and get you. I mean this. Ken and I sail on the Olympic June tenth. There’s a play in London that Cruger wants me to see for next season. You know. Casualty. We’ll go to Paris, Vienna, Budapest, and back August first. Come along or stay in the country with Andy. Nate Fried says he’ll settle up your business affairs if that’s what’s bothering you. What is there to do except sell the old tub or give it away or something, and take the next train for New York? Your bookings say Lazare, Mississippi, June fourth, fifth and sixth. Nate looked it up and reports it’s twenty miles from a railroad. Now, Nola, that’s just too mad. Come on home.
Kim.
The hand that held the letter dropped to her lap again. Magnolia lay relaxed in the low deck chair and surveyed through half-closed lids the turgid, swift-flowing stream that led on to Louisiana and the sea. Above the clay banks that rose from the river lay the scrubby little settlement shimmering in the noonday heat. A mule team toiled along the river road drawing a decrepit cart on whose sagging seat a Negro sat slumped, the rope lines slack in his listless hands, his body swaying with the motion of the vehicle. From the cook’s galley, aft, came the yee-yah-yah-yah of Negro laughter. Then a sudden crash of piano, drum, horn, and cymbals. The band was rehearsing. The porcine squeal and bleat and grunt of the saxophone. Mississippi Blues they were playing. Ort Hanley, of the Character Team, sang it in the concert after the show. I got the blues. I said the blues. I got the M-i-s-, I said the s-i-s, I said the s-i-pp-i, Mississippi, I got them Miss-is-sippi blu-hoo-hoos.
The heat and the music and the laughter and the squeak of the mule cart up the road blended and made a colourful background against which the woman in the chair viewed the procession of the last twenty-five years.