Mary Shura: Gabrielle

GABRIELLE had been dreaming. The sharp rap of her father’s knuckles on the door of her narrow cabin tumbled her back into reality with a painful start. With her eyes still tightly closed, she listened to the gentle slapping of the Mississippi River against the sides of the showboat and groaned. It couldn’t be three in the morning yet; it absolutely couldn’t. Yet above the rhythm of the current she heard morning sounds, muffled voices calling outside, and feet scraping along the decks of the Levee Princess . Within minutes she was supposed to be dressed and down in the galley to help Flossie McGregor fix coffee and breakfast for the other crew members before they untied the boat and started her on downstream.

Since her dream was fading too fast as it was, Gabrielle didn’t even light the lamp.

Instead, she opened her window in the dark and let down her bucket on a rope. The bucket hit the river and filled swiftly, tightening the rope in her hands.

She pulled the bucket up and hesitated only a moment before pouring some of the water into her wash basin. If any silly little minnow had swum into her wash bucket, that was its hard luck, not hers. She washed her face and hands, and, after dumping the soapy water back into the river, she tugged on her pantaloons. Like all the cabins on her father’s showboat, the room was narrow with only her bed, a shelf for her books, a washstand with pitcher and basin, and a row of shelves on the wall for her clothes. She had to twist carefully in the narrow space to reach the buttons down the back of her dress.

The memory of the dream was still more real than the darkness of her cabin. Her dress in the dream hadn’t been ordinary blue gingham, but rose-colored taffeta, a deep, warm rose that flattered the vivid coloring she had inherited from her dead French mother: pale skin, hair as black as the wing of a crow, and brilliant blue eyes. The skirt of that dream dress had stood out like the flaring petals of a magnolia blossom as she bowed to a roar of applause filling the auditorium of her father’s showboat.

And Stephen DuBois had been the first to rise to his feet, clapping. Stephen, who made a point of always having a job to do somewhere else on the boat when she came on stage to do her part in the show, would leap to his feet to start a standing ovation, a thundering ovation as she bent to the floor in one deep, graceful bow after another.

She stood motionless, thinking. If she could only talk her father into letting her try an act like that, her wonderful dream might really come true.

The rap came again at the door. "Coming, Father," she called. She lit the lamp a brief moment to brush her hair back and tie it with a ribbon. Then, before blowing the lamp out, she looked again at the poster someone had handed her at a landing near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She had studied the poster so much that by now the paper was ragged around the edge. The rude handbill, just like the ones the Levee Princess distributed along the river, showed a girl walking a tightrope above the heads of the staring audience.

COUNTESS ESMERELDA, it read, PERFORMING HER DEATH-DEFYING WALK BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES. She folded it into her pocket with an excited intake of breath. Her father had to at least let her try!

Out on deck, her breath formed a cloud of mist in the cold predawn air. There would be more warm days as they wended downriver between Illinois and Missouri, but this morning felt more like October than early September. Although birds were twittering in the willow trees along the bank where they were moored, it was as black as midnight . out there. Aside from the glow of the lamp from the galley, the only lights anywhere were stars.

Gabrielle stamped a little on the stairway down to the galley. All right, she thought. So she was feeling sorry for herself, but she had a perfect right to. Nobody even knew what made that silly cook Jake Harwell mad enough to go packing off the boat at Hannibal, Missouri, without so much as a "fare thee well." One day he was whistling in the galley, and the next he was marching down the gangplank with his suitcase, leaving the galley full of dirty dishes for Flossie and her to clean up.

But showboat cooks were famous for being temperamental. Jake himself was the third cook her father had hired on since they started the trip in Cincinnati in April. If Jake had been there, she could have slept a few minutes more and brought the dream to its triumphant end.

But, then, that wasn’t the only if . If she had been born to land people and lived in a regular house instead of on this boat, she could have slept for hours more. No other sixteen-year-old along the Mississippi River had to be up at three in the morning the way she did, especially after working a three-hour show that ended at ten o’clock. Even the round-eyed farm girls who came with their families and boyfriends to exclaim at the evening performances could lie in their beds until the sun was up!

Some day, she promised herself, some day I am going to sleep in, too, and in a proper bed on land, not in a narrow cot fitted against the wall of a showboat cabin.

The galley air was fragrant with the rich scent of coffee boiling in the big blue-flecked enamel pot. "There you are," Flossie called over her shoulder. "The oven’s heated up; you can get warm in here."

Gabrielle grabbed Flossie around the waist in a quick hug before getting down the coffee mugs. Flossie was not only wonderful, she was the closest thing Gabrielle could remember to a mother. She was also Gabrielle’s only real friend.

Soon there would be biscuits to make, and bacon and eggs and potatoes to cook for the crew of nine who ate their regular breakfast later. Gabrielle couldn’t wait that long. She split a leftover biscuit, buttered it, and stuck it into the oven to warm.

Flossie’s husband Lance played leading man in all the showboat productions, and probably was handsome to people who could stand him. Gabrielle couldn’t. She considered Lance a conceited dandy not worth the salt on his breakfast eggs. While Lance pranced around talking about acting and the theater as if he were Shakespeare himself, Flossie was the world’s best sport. Even though she wasn’t a day older than Lance, she was perfectly willing to play any role they needed, even if it meant powdering her beautiful red hair and making her voice creak like that of an old woman. Flossie had a wonderful singing voice, but never complained at only getting to sing the old people’s favorites, like "The Blue Alsatian Mountains" or Stephen Foster’s "Old Folks . at Home."

Gabrielle had been mad enough to spit when the cook had left. Flossie had only shrugged and said, "Gabrielle and I can manage until the captain can find us another." To see Flossie like this, with a gauze cap half covering her flaming red hair and her slim body hidden under a giant apron, no one would guess what a beautiful, talented woman she was. Now she hummed at her work, the snappiest sort of tune, as if to keep time with her hands.

Naturally Stephen DuBois had to come into the galley just as Flossie spoke. He poured himself a mug of coffee and blew away the steam, his dark, insolent eyes on Gabrielle. He turned to Flossie with a pained face. "I hope she isn’t planning to make the breakfast biscuits. My stomach is still churning from the ones she made yesterday."

Gabrielle flushed and set two more mugs down hard on the table. You’d think an eighteen-year-old newcomer to the boat would have better sense than to pick on the captain’s daughter. But Stephen seemed to know that Captain Prentice, appearing in the doorway, was too genial to take offense at anything that could be treated as a joke. He laughed at Stephen and patted his daughter on the shoulder in passing.