The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [168]
Virgie would drift over to the piano, spread out her music, and make sure she was sitting just the way she wanted to be upon the stool. She flung her skirt behind her, with a double swimming motion. Then without a word from Miss Eckhart she would start to play. She played firmly, smoothly, her face at rest, the musician's cyst, of which she was in idleness so proud, perched like a ladybug, riding the song. She went now gently, now forcibly, never loudly.
And when she was finished, Miss Eckhart would say, "Virgie Rainey, danke schoen."
Cassie, so still her chest cramped, not daring to walk on the creaky floor down the hall, would wait till the end to run out of the house and home. She would whisper while she ran, with the sound of an engine, "Danke schoen, danke schoen, danke schoen." It wasn't the meaning that propelled her; she didn't know then what it meant.
But then nobody knew for years (until the World War) what Miss Eckhart meant by "Danke schoen" and "Mem lieber Kind" and the rest, and who would dare ask? It was like belling the cat. Only Virgie had the nerve, only she could have found out for the others. Virgie said she did not know and did not care. So they just added that onto Virgie's name in the school yard. She was Virgie Rainey Danke schoen when she jumped hot pepper or fought the boys, when she had to sit down the very first one in the spelling match for saying "E-a-r, ear, r-a-k-e, rake, ear-ache." She was named for good. Sometimes even in the Bijou somebody cat-called that to her as she came in her high heels down the steep slant of the board aisle to switch on the light and open the piano. When she was grown she would tilt up her chin. Calm as a marble head, defamed with a spit-curl, Virgie's head would be proudly carried past the banner on the wall, past every word of "It's Cool at the Bijou, Enjoy Typhoons of Alaskan Breezes," which was tacked up under the fan. Rats ran under her feet, most likely, too; the Bijou was once Spights' Livery Stable.
"Virgie brings me good luck!" Miss Eckhart used to say, with a round smile on her face. Luck that might not be good was something else that was a new thought to them all.
Virgie Rainey, when she was ten or twelve, had naturally curly hair, silky and dark, and a great deal of it—uncombed. She was not sent to the barber shop often enough to suit the mothers of other children, who said it was probably dirty hair too—what could the children see of the back of her neck, poor Katie Rainey being so rushed for time? Her middy blouse was trimmed in a becoming red, her anchor was always loose, and her red silk lacers were actually ladies' shoestrings dipped in pokeberry juice. She was full of the airs of wildness, she swayed and gave way to joys and tempers, her own and other people's with equal freedom—except never Miss Eckhart's, of course.
School did not lessen Virgie's vitality; once on a rainy day when recess was held in the basement, she said she was going to butt her brains out against the wall, and the teacher, old Mrs. McGillicuddy, had said, "Beat them out, then," and she had really tried. The rest of the fourth grade stood around expectant and admiring, the smell of open thermos bottles sweetly heavy in the close air. Virgie came with strange kinds of sandwiches—everybody wanted to swap her—stewed peach, or perhaps banana. In the other children's eyes she was as exciting as a gypsy would be.
Virgie's air of abandon that was so strangely endearing made even the Sunday School class think of her in terms of the future—she would go somewhere, somewhere away off, they said then, talking with their chins sunk in their hands—she'd be a missionary. (Parnell Moody