“I did so. Jo, didn’t you hear me practising?”
“Ah suah did, Miss Magnolia.”
“You march right out of here, young lady, and practise another half hour. Do you think your father’s made of money, that I can throw fifty-cent pieces away on George for nothing? Now you do your exercises fifteen minutes and the Maiden’s Prayer fifteen. . . . Idea!”
Magnolia marched. Out of earshot Parthy expressed her opinion of nigger songs. “I declare I don’t know where you get your low ways from! White people aren’t good enough for you, I suppose, that you’ve got to run with blacks in the kitchen. Now you sit yourself down on that stool.”
Magnolia was actually having music lessons. George, the Whistler and piano player, was her teacher, receiving fifty cents an hour for weekly instruction. Driven by her stern parent, she practised an hour daily on the tinny old piano in the orchestra pit, a rebellious, skinny, pathetic little figure strumming painstakingly away in the great emptiness of the show-boat auditorium. She must needs choose her time for practice when a rehearsal of the night’s play was not in progress on the stage or when the band was not struggling with the music of a new song and dance number. Incredibly enough, she actually learned something of the mechanics of music, if not of its technique. She had an excellent rhythm sense, and this was aided by none other than Jo, whose feeling for time and beat and measure and pitch was flawless. Queenie lumped his song gift in with his general shiftlessness. Born fifty years later he might have known brief fame in some midnight revue or Club Alabam’ on Broadway. Certainly Magnolia unwittingly learned more of real music from black Jo and many another Negro wharf minstrel than she did from hours of the heavy-handed and unlyrical George.
That Mrs. Hawks could introduce into the indolent tenor of show-boat life anything so methodical and humdrum as five-finger exercises done an hour daily was triumphant proof of her indomitable driving force. Life had miscast her in the rôle of wife and mother. She was born to be a Madam Chairman. Committees, Votes, Movements, Drives, Platforms, Gavels, Reports all showed in her stars. Cheated of these, she had to be content with such outlet of her enormous energies as the Cotton Blossom afforded. Parthy had never heard the word Feminist, and wouldn’t have recognized it if she had. One spoke at that time not of Women’s Rights but of Women’s Wrongs. On these Parthenia often waxed tartly eloquent. Her housekeeping fervour was the natural result of her lack of a more impersonal safety valve. The Cotton Blossom shone like a Methodist Sunday household. Only Julie and Windy, the Mollie Able pilot, defied her. She actually indulged in those most domestic of rites, canning and preserving, on board the boat. Donning an all-enveloping gingham apron, she would set frenziedly to work on two bushels of peaches or seckel pears; baskets of tomatoes; pecks of apples. Pickled pears, peach marmalade, grape jell in jars and pots and glasses filled shelves and cupboards. Queenie found a great deal of satisfaction in the fact that occasionally, owing to some culinary accident or to the unusual motion of the flat-bottomed Cotton Blossom in the rough waters of an open bay, one of these jars was found smashed on the floor, its rich purple or amber contents mingling with splinters of glass. No one—not even Parthy—ever dared connect Queenie with these quite explicable mishaps.
Parthy was an expert needlewoman. She often assisted Julie or Elly or Mis’ Means with their costumes. To see her stern implacable face bent over a heap of frivolous stuffs while her industrious fingers swiftly sent the needle flashing through unvarying seams was to receive the shock that comes of beholding the incongruous. The enormity of it penetrated even her blunt sensibilities.
“If anybody’d ever told me that I’d live to see the day when I’d be sewing on costumes for show folks!”
“Run along, Parthy. You like it,” Andy would say.
But she never would admit that. “Like it or lump it, what can I do! Married you for better or worse, didn’t I!” Her tone leaving no doubt as to the path down which that act had led her. Actually she was having a rich, care-free, and varied life such as she had never dreamed of and of which she secretly was enamoured.