Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri small-town housewives came to be Magnolia’s friends, and even Parthy’s. The coming of the show boat was the one flash of blazing colour in the drab routine of their existence. To them Schultzy was the John Drew of the rivers, Elly the Lillian Russell. You saw them scudding down the placid tree-shaded streets in their morning ginghams and calicoes, their bits of silver clasped in their work-seamed hands, or knotted into the corner of a handkerchief. Fifty cents for two seats at to-night’s show.
“How are you, Mis’ Hawks? . . . And the little girl? . . . My! Look at the way she’s shot up in a year’s time! Well, you can’t call her little girl any more. . . . I brought you a glass of my homemade damson preserve. I take cup of sugar to cup of juice. Real rich, but it is good if I do say so. . . . I told Will I was coming to the show every night you were here, and he could like it or lump it. I been saving out of the housekeeping money.”
They brought vast chocolate cakes; batches of cookies; jugs of home-brewed grape wine; loaves of fresh bread; jars of strained honey; stiff tight bunches of garden flowers. Offerings on the shrine of Art.
Periodically Parthy threatened to give up this roving life and take Magnolia with her. She held this as a weapon over Andy’s head when he crossed her will, or displeased her. Immediately boarding schools, convents, and seminaries yawned for Magnolia.
Perhaps Parthy was right. “What kind of a life is this for a child!” she demanded. And later, “A fine kind of a way for a young lady to be living—slopping up and down these rivers, seeing nothing but loafers and gamblers and niggers and worse. What about her Future?” Future, as she pronounced it, was spelled with a capital F and was a thin disguise for the word husband.
“Future’ll take care of itself,” Andy assured her, blithely.
“If that isn’t just like a man!”
It was inevitable that Magnolia should, sooner or later, find herself through force of circumstance treading the boards as an actress in the Cotton Blossom Floating Theatre company. Not only that, she found herself playing ingénue leads. She had been thrown in as a stop-gap following Elly’s defection, and had become, quite without previous planning, a permanent member of the troupe. Strangely enough, she developed an enormous following, though she lacked that saccharine quality which river towns had come to expect in their show-boat ingénues. True, her long legs were a little lanky beneath the short skirts of the woodman’s pure daughter, but what she lacked in one extremity she made up in another. They got full measure when they looked at her eyes, and her voice made the small-town housewives weep. Yet when their husbands nudged them, saying, “What you sniffling about?” they could only reply, “I don’t know.” And no more did they.
Elly was twenty-eight when she deserted Schultzy for a gambler from Mobile. For three years she had been restless, fault-finding, dissatisfied. Each autumn she would announce to Captain Andy her intention to forsake the rivers and bestow her talents ashore. During the winter she would try to get an engagement through the Chicago booking offices contrary to the custom of show-boat actors whose habit it was to hibernate in the winter on the savings of a long and economical summer. But the Chicago field was sparse and uncertain. She never had the courage or the imagination to go as far as New York. April would find her back on the Cotton Blossom. Between her and Schultzy the bickerings and the quarrels became more and more frequent. She openly defied Schultzy as he directed rehearsals. She refused to follow his suggestions though he had a real sense of direction. Everything she knew he had taught her. She invariably misread a line and had to be coached in it, word by word; inflection; business; everything.
Yet now, when Schultzy said, “No! Listen. You been kidnapped and smuggled on board this rich fella’s yacht, see. And he thinks he’s got you in his power. He goes to grab you. You’re here, see. Then you point toward the door back of him, see, like you saw something there scared the life out of you. He turns around and you grab the gun off the table, see, and cover him, and there’s your big speech. So and so and so and so and so and so and so and so——” the ad lib. directions that have held since the day of Shakespeare.