The Underground River

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  For my father, Richard Conway, who toured the Ohio River with me.

  1

  April 25, 1838, Cincinnati, Ohio

  When the steamboat Moselle blew apart just off its Cincinnati landing, I was sitting below deck in the ladies’ cabin, sewing tea leaves into little muslin bags and plotting revenge on my cousin Comfort for laughing at me during dinner.

  I had many ways of getting back at her. Sometimes I put a few darts in her cuffs so that when her wrists swelled, which they always did when she was performing, she would have to cut the cloth later to get her arms out. Or I snipped her lace ties just a little, which kept her from pulling her corset as tightly as she liked; or I sewed a small pigeon feather into the back of one of her costumes so that when she walked across the stage the shaft scratched at her skin.

  I was Comfort’s seamstress, dresser, and trunk packer. And a hundred other things as well. She was the Famous Comfort Vertue. That was her stage name.

  But she was not famous, and she was not related to Lord and Lady Vertue of Suffolk, England, as she claimed at dinner. Comfort was nearly thirty but gave her age as my own, twenty-two. In the last six months, offers for ingénue roles had begun to dry up, but she was not yet willing to move on to stately matriarchs or widows, since those parts received second or third billing at best. Instead she booked us both tickets to St. Louis on the steamboat Moselle in search, as she put it, of new opportunities.

  We had quarreled about it in Pittsburgh. I wanted to take an overland coach to New York, where there were more opportunities. But Comfort had had enough of New York.

  “We haven’t enough money for that, Frog. Anyway, I’ve got an offer from the New Theatre in St. Louis. The director is putting together a company.”

  She smiled at me. She was a very beautiful woman, my cousin, with bright, reddish-gold hair that I curled in rags for her every night, and clear blue eyes, and good teeth. Although her nose was ever so slightly crooked, it called attention to the cleft on her chin.

  “A firm offer?” I asked.

  She liked to say that she rescued me after my mother died, but that was not true. She recognized an opportunity is all. Like the opportunity she now saw in St. Louis. No one knew us there. She could be twenty-two and just starting out, instead of almost thirty and stumbling along. I would be who I always was: her dark-haired cousin who sewed for her and stayed well off the stage. I could be twenty-two also. Which I was.

  • • •

  On the afternoon the Moselle went down, we’d already been on board for six days and expected to be on it for six more. At dinner, Comfort and I sat at a large table near the center of the dining room with seven or eight other guests, all of us pulled up close to the white cloth with its small dots of gravy stains spattered over it, while men in white jackets brought out platters from the kitchen: broiled and fried chicken, breaded cod, cold ham, hot bread, pickled peaches, preserved cucumbers, and big ironstone bowls of steaming vegetables. The dining room smelled of roasted meat and turpentine, and there was a low but constant roar from the boilers, which we had to speak over. This was no problem for Comfort, a trained actress. One of the ladies at our table, Mrs. Flora Howard, a red-faced abolitionist—I called her Florid Howard to myself—was someone we’d begun to eat all our meals with. She was telling us a funny story about a mule, and I suppose I must have been smiling, because another one of our party, Mr. Thaddeus Mason, an actor like Comfort, suddenly said, “Why, May! What a beautiful smile!”

  I immediately felt self-conscious and pulled my lips together.

  “Now see what you’ve done,” Mrs. Howard said. “I do believe I’ve never seen May’s teeth before.”

  “The smile that is all the more entrancing because it’s so rare,” Thaddeus said in his poetry-reciting voice. Thaddeus was a shade shorter than average and wore his curly blond hair rather long, like a younger man. We knew him from the Third Street Theatre, where Comfort played opposite him for a month. Mrs. Flora Howard had been visiting her brother in Shippingport and now was going to visit another brother in Vevay. She was a heavyset woman who wore long ropes of pearls and silver chains every day over the drapery of her silk dresses. A great many yards of fabric went into each dress she wore, and I wondered if the cost alone wouldn’t induce her to slim down a bit; but Comfort told me that Mrs. Howard was a wealthy widow with a large, beautifully furnished house in Cincinnati—Comfort always seems to find out about such things—so perhaps she felt she could afford her weight.

  Comfort tilted her head at Mrs. Howard and smiled her dimpled, childlike smile; she was used to being the one who received the attention and she didn’t like sharing it with me. Nor did I like taking any share, for that matter.

  “You have a great deal of talent,” she said to Mrs. Howard, “if you can make my cousin smile. And if you can make her laugh, why, I’ll give you a dollar. I believe I’ve heard May laugh only twice in all of my life.”

  An exaggeration. I dislike exaggerations.

  “I laugh sometimes,” I said.

  “I’m sure you have a beautiful laugh,” Thaddeus put in. “Like your smile.”

  Comfort frowned. Attention, to her, was what sewing a perfectly straight hemline was to me, and we were both willing to work hard to get what we wanted.

  “Why, look at that: Is that girl going to sing for us?” she asked loudly, changing the subject. “I do believe I’m right! I do believe that girl is actually going to sing for her supper!”

  I turned. A tall woman wearing a rose-colored dress was standing on a small dais, preparing to perform. Next to her a man with a violin under his chin played a few tuning notes to get our attention, and when the room quieted he pointed to her with his violin bow and said: “Ladies and gentlemen! Miss Helena Cushing, from Hugo and Helena’s Floating Theatre.”

  The closed glass doors of the dining room cast a diffused afternoon light onto her pink dress and her lovely soft face. Above us, the chandeliers swung as the boat made a slight course adjustment, and then Miss Cushing spread her arms and began to sing:

  “Drink to me only with thine eyes, and I will pledge with mine

  Or leave a kiss within the cup and I’ll not ask for wine . . .”

  She sang in a composed and relaxed manner, not at all as if she was standing in front of a hundred strangers with napkins tucked into their collars and their forks halfway to their mouths, but rather like someone alone in a room, letting her tea grow cold while she followed her own thoughts to their rightful end. When she finished, there was some polite applause, and then people began ringing their bells for more bread.

  Miss Cushing turned to the violinist and began speaking to him energetically. All in a moment her lovely stillness was gone.

  “Well, that’s just terrible,” Mrs. Howard announced.

  I followed her gaze to a nearby table, where an elderly woman in a dark green dress was being waited on by a young Negro boy.

  “She’s brought her slave boy with her,” Mrs. Howard said.

  The boy was standing behind his mistress’s chair, wearing white gloves buttoned tightly at the wrist and a little brown necktie over a freshly ironed white shirt. I’d grown up in the North and had only seen slaves a few times before. Although his shirt had clea
rly been made over for him—the line of the shoulders was not quite right—he or someone else took great care to keep it clean.

  One of our dinner table companions, a man with mutton-chop whiskers and a ring with an emerald stone on his smallest finger, leaned forward.

  “In St. Louis I hear the slaves all speak French,” he said.

  “He’s like a piece of luggage to her,” Mrs. Howard went on in a loud, indignant voice. “She just picks him up and carries him with her wherever she goes. Someone should snatch him away right now and take him to Canada.”

  The man with the pinkie ring scowled. “That’s theft; they could hang you for that. Take that man Lovejoy: all he did was run a few antislavery articles in his paper and they burned down the press and him in it. Or shot him—I can’t remember which.”

  But this just made Mrs. Howard more adamant. “Slavery must be eradicated, not tomorrow but today. I’m sure everyone at this table agrees.”

  For some reason her eyes rested on me. Getting no reaction—I was not sure what she wanted—her gaze traveled to Comfort. “What do you think, my dear?” she asked.

  But Comfort was still looking at the singer. “Oh, she has a pleasant enough voice to be sure,” she said. “But nowadays you need to know a bit of everything. A pleasant voice is not enough. Why, I was at a theater in Boston where they wanted me to dance a jig. A jig! And they all want someone singing ‘Jump Jim Crow.’ I could kill Tom Rice for writing that down. I know him, of course. We performed together in Tarrytown. He heard the song from a stable hand in back of the theater. I was on the stage at the time.”

  Not true. More than an exaggeration—a lie. I wiped my hands on a dark brown napkin that seemed already greasy.

  “May was there, too,” Comfort went on, giving me a sly look, and I saw that she was not done teasing me. “She heard the stable boy singing it herself. If she had been quicker, she might have written down the song first and made us our fortune.”

  “Is that so?” Thaddeus asked, helping himself to another piece of cod. The food on the boat came with the price of the ticket.

  “No,” I said. “It is not. Tom Rice heard the song in Baltimore, not Tarrytown. And I was nowhere near.”

  Comfort burst out laughing. “There—did I not tell you, Mrs. Howard? May cannot tell a lie! She simply cannot do it!”

  I looked at her sharply. Had she been talking about me before I sat down? But Mrs. Howard was still staring daggers at the woman with the slave boy.

  “She never in her life has been able to tell a lie,” Comfort said, this time addressing everyone at the table. “Not even to say she likes your hat when she does not. Once I heard her tell a bride on the morning of her wedding that the weather would certainly not get any better that day. And it was raining only very slightly at the time.”

  The man with the emerald pinkie ring looked me over while still chewing his food, as though I were a curiosity. A dark anger rose in me.

  “And then of course May was right: a storm hit while they were in the church,” Comfort went on gaily, “and they missed their wedding breakfast, afraid to leave for the lightning. We ate it ourselves. Isn’t that right, May?”

  I felt my face flush hotter and crossed my fork and knife carefully over my plate. I did not want to speak—I do not like speaking in groups—but I had to say, “No. We did not.”

  Comfort laughed again. She had everyone’s attention now. “See! She can’t tell a lie, not even to let me save face, and I believe she is most fond of me in all of the world.”

  Mrs. Howard, Thaddeus, and the man with the emerald pinkie ring all turned to look at me. I pinched my wrist, willing the conversation to be over. I did not like speaking in a group, I did not like being teased, and I did not, above all, like everyone watching me. This was my punishment for smiling.

  “You are fond of me, Frog, aren’t you?” Comfort teased in her flirtatious voice.

  I looked away. I am fond of my cousin, it’s true, but at that moment I hated her.

  • • •

  After dinner Comfort and Mrs. Howard went for a walk around the deck, and Thaddeus Mason accompanied the man with the emerald pinkie ring to smoke cigars. I went by myself to the ladies’ cabin to sew and plot revenge on my cousin.

  The ladies’ cabin was a large square room, fitted up rather shabbily compared to the men’s, which Comfort and I had peeked into when we first came on board. Ours had a couple of thin rugs on the floor and only two framed pictures, but at least there were no spittoons. Fifteen or twenty women were already in the room when I entered, sitting in upholstered straight-backed chairs in little groups of three or four, all of them reading or talking or sewing.

  I found an empty chair near a window where I could look out on our westward progress. Since the Ohio flows downstream from Pittsburgh to where it meets the Mississippi River in Cairo, Illinois—passing four more states in between—we were going fairly fast with the current, and, sitting down, I could hear the rhythmic thrashing of the paddlewheels as they churned up the water.

  I arranged my light shawl over my knees, which get cold, and proceeded to take out a needle and thread and a squat jar of tea. I was sewing little tea sachets that I sold for extra money, an invention I thought of myself: shredded tea leaves, measured out for one cup, folded inside a square of absorbent muslin and then sewn closed. I used to take around a box of them during intermission at whatever theater Comfort was performing, explaining to the theatergoers how they could dip the sachets in a cup of boiling water for a convenient single serving of tea. I always gave the theater managers ten percent of my profit, and I was careful to calculate their amount to the penny, although I could have easily cheated them, they paid so little attention to what I did. But I would never cheat them, because cheating is the same thing as lying.

  Comfort was right when she said I could not lie. It’s not on principle. For reasons I can’t explain, I feel a great need to give a pointedly accurate account of the facts. And since I don’t always understand what people mean outside of their words, I might be more honest than is necessary or even desired. My mother used to blame this on the loss of hearing in my left ear. I could not hear the undertones, she explained, and that was why I didn’t pick up what other people might from a conversation. For instance, if a woman said to me, to use Comfort’s example, I am not sure about this new hat I bought, I probably would not guess that she wanted me to tell her I liked it. Instead I would try to list what I saw as the hat’s good points and bad in order to help her reach a conclusion. I don’t know why Comfort laughs at me when I do this. It’s just who I am, and she knows this. Why should someone lie about a hat?

  However, pushing a needle in and out of a small space always soothes me, and as the boat veered to stop at one of Cincinnati’s outlying landings, rocking gently forward and back over the thrum of its boilers, I began to forget my irritation with Comfort. I’d been on steamboats before and didn’t mind the smell of wet wood, cigar smoke, and roasted meat from meals long past that pervaded every cabin and deck, and I enjoyed the sight of the Ohio River with its long line of willows bending to bathe their leaves in the water. The river was the natural division between the North and the South, with Ohio on one side and Kentucky on the other. Along the shore I could see crooked shacks where the woodcutters lived, and a little boy with a bluish-white complexion waded along in the mud leading a half-starved cow. He looked up as the Moselle steamed past as if it alone were his instrument of redemption and here we were, passing him by. I snipped off the end of thread with my scissors: another tea sachet finished.

  “After Chautauqua I may take the water cure at Malvern,” one of the ladies opposite me said in a dry, feathery voice. It was the elderly lady from dinner who had brought her slave boy with her, although the boy was not with her now. She sat with her old, gnarled hands folded on the dark green silk of her dress, and a couple of shiny gray ringlets hung from beneath her matching green cap. As I cut more muslin into squares I could hear the steam o
n the boat rise to an unusual pitch while we waited for the newcomers to board. Later I heard that the captain of the Moselle was overly proud of his vessel, which had recently set a record for the quickest journey from Pittsburgh, and that on this particular day he wanted to beat the steamboat Tribune to the next landing. The new passengers pushed their way onto our crowded vessel, the captain raised his arm, and we were off, hoping to make up the time. But the wheel of the Moselle did not even make one full rotation when all four boilers burst at the same time with a sound like a full stockade of gunpowder all exploding at once.

  It was a noise I felt like a hit. For a moment it seemed as though the air itself had cracked open and the boat lurched sharply, causing all of us to fall from our chairs. The unlit oil lamps crashed to the floor, and above us the chandeliers swung crazily as everyone in the room tumbled toward the bulkhead. My face swept over someone’s gown and I was momentarily pinned by the elderly woman who wanted to go to Malvern.

  “What’s happened?” she asked in her old, feathery voice.

  “She’s blown!” someone cried.

  The boat lurched and stopped. For the first few minutes all any of us could do was try to stand up and help others get up, too. Everyone was saying the same thing: “Are you hurt?” “No, are you?” The old woman who wanted to go to Malvern was hugging her elbow. “Are we sinking?” she asked me. Without waiting for an answer, she said, “We must get to the deck before we go under.”

  Her cap had been partially knocked back and I saw that her shiny gray ringlets were fake, sewn onto the inside of the cap, and that her real hair was wispy and scarce. Although there were easily fifteen of us in the room, after the explosion my world shrank to the two or three people around me. Somehow the Malvern lady and I and another woman with her child made it our business to help each other. The air in the room was dangerously smoky and my ears hurt from the sound of the blast, but the walls, I noticed, were still level.