The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [180]
"Like a military operation."
Cassie's father always said the recital was planned that way, in all its tactics and dress. The preparations went on for many hot, secret weeks—all of May. "You're not to tell anyone what the program is to be," Miss Eckhart warned at every lesson and rehearsal, as if there were other music teachers, other classes, rivaling, and as if every year the program didn't begin with "The Stubborn Rocking Horse" by the one boy and end with "Marche Militaire" for eight hands. What Virgie played in the recital one year, Cassie (gradually improving) would come to the next, and Missie Spights had it one more step in the future.
Miss Eckhart decided early in the spring what color each child should wear, with what color sash and hair ribbon, and sent written word to the mother. She explained to the children that it was important which color followed which. "Think of God's rainbow and its order," and she would shake her pencil in abrupt little beats in an arch overhead; but they had to think of Spights' store. The quartet, with four dresses in view at one time and in close conjunction, pushing one another, made Miss Eckhart especially apprehensive.
Account was kept in a composition book of each child's assigned color; Miss Eckhart made a little "v" beside the name in token of the mother's agreement and regarded it as a promise. When the dress was reported finished, starched, and ironed, a line was drawn through that name.
In general, mothers were scared of Miss Eckhart then. Miss Lizzie Stark laughed about it, but she was as scared as anybody else. Miss Eckhart assumed that there would be a new dress for every pupil for the recital night, that Miss Perdita Mayo would make it, or if not Miss Perdita, who even with her sister could not make them all, then the pupil's own mother. The dress must be made with the fingers and the edges of bertha and flounce picoted, the sash as well; and—whatever happened—the costume must be saved for recital night. And this was the kind of thing that both Miss Perdita and most mothers understood immediately.
And it could seldom be worn again; certainly not to another recital—by then an "old" dress. A recital dress was fuller and had more trimming than a Sunday dress. It was like a flower girl's dress in a wedding; once little Nina Carmichael's was a flower girl's dress, after Etta's wedding, but this was special dispensation. The dress should be organdie, with ruffles on skirt, bertha, and sleeves; it called for a satin or taffeta sash tied in a back bow with long tails, pointed like the tails of arrows, to hang over the stool and, if it could be afforded, to reach the floor.
All through May, Miss Eckhart would ask how far along the dresses had come. Cassie was uneasy, for her mother's way was to speak too late for Miss Perdita's list and plan to run the dress up herself at the last minute; but Cassie had to encourage Miss Eckhart. "She's just evening my hem,' she would report, when the material would still be lying folded up with the newspaper-pattern borrowed from Miss Jefferson Moody, in the armoire.
As for the program, that was no problem; it existed readymade without discussion. Far back in the winter, Virgie Rainey would have been allotted a piece that was the most difficult Miss Eckhart could find in the music cabinet. Sometimes it was not as showy a thing as Teensie Loomis always had to have (before she got old and stopped taking), but always it was the hardest piece of all. It would be the test of what Virgie could do, to learn it; an ordeal was set for her each year and each year it was accomplished, with no yielding sign from Virgie that she had struggled. The rest of the program would lead up to this, and did not matter enough to be altered seriously from one year to the next. Just so everybody had a piece to play, and a new dress finished in time, and kept the secrets, there was nothing to do but endure May.
A week ahead of the night, the gold chairs were set in a solid row across the room, to look as if all were gold, and the extra chairs would appear one