The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [167]
Miss Eckhart might also go abruptly to her little built-on kitchen—she and her mother had no Negro and didn't use Miss Snowdie's; she did not say "Excuse me," or explain what was on the stove. And there were times, perhaps on rainy days, when she walked around and around the studio, and you felt her pause behind you. Just as you thought she had forgotten you, she would lean over your head, you were under her bosom like a traveler under a cliff, her penciled finger would go to your music, and above the bar you were playing she would slowly write "Slow." Or sometimes, precipitant above you, she would make a curly circle with a long tail, as if she might draw a cat, but it would be her "P" and the word would turn into "Practice!!"
When you could once play a piece, she paid scant attention, and made no remark; her manners were all very unfamiliar. It was only time for a new piece. Whenever she opened the cabinet, the smell of new sheet music came out swift as an imprisoned spirit, something almost palpable, like a pet coon; Miss Eckhart kept the music locked up and the key down her dress, inside the collar. She would seat herself and with a dipped pen add "$.25" to the bill on the spot. Cassie could see the bills clearly, in elaborate handwriting, the "z" in Mozart with an equals-sign through it and all the "y's" so heavily tailed they went through the paper. It took a whole lesson for those tails to dry.
What was it she did when you played without a mistake? Oh, she went over and told the canary something, tapping the bars of his cage with her finger. "Just listen," she told him. "Enough from you for today," she would call to you over her shoulder.
Virgie Rainey would come through the beads carrying a magnolia bloom which she had stolen.
She would ride over on a boy's bicycle (her brother Victor's) from the Raineys' with sheets of advanced music rolled naked (girls usually had portfolios) and strapped to the boy's bar which she straddled, the magnolia broken out of the Carmichaels' tree and laid bruising in the wire basket on the handlebars. Or sometimes Virgie would come an hour late, if she had to deliver the milk first, and sometimes she came by the back door and walked in peeling a ripe fig with her teeth; and sometimes she missed her lesson altogether. But whenever she came on the bicycle she would ride it up into the yard and run the front wheel bang into the lattice, while Cassie was playing the "Scarf Dance." (In those days, the house looked nice, with latticework and plants hiding the foundation, and a three-legged fern stand at the turn in the porch to discourage skaters and defeat little boys.) Miss Eckhart would put her hand to her breast, as though she felt the careless wheel shake the very foundation of the studio.
Virgie carried in the magnolia bloom like a hot tureen, and offered it to Miss Eckhart, neither of them knowing any better: magnolias smelled too sweet and heavy for right after breakfast. And Virgie handled everything with her finger stuck out; she was conceited over a musician's cyst that appeared on her fourth finger.
Miss Eckhart took the flower but Virgie might be kept waiting while Cassie recited on her catechism page. Sometimes Miss Eckhart checked the questions missed, sometimes the questions answered; but every question she did check got a heavy "V" that crossed the small page like the tail of a comet. She would draw her black brows together to see Cassie forgetting,