The Four-Story Mistake by Elizabeth Enright

Author:Elizabeth Enright
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250102843
Publisher: Square Fish

Randy painted little pictures of Glamorosa on the covers of the programs and stitched the pages together with gold thread. They looked very pretty and professional.

There was some debate as to how much admission price they should charge. Mona thought it ought to be a dollar. “For our country, and all,” she said.

“A dollar!” cried Randy, scandalized. “Nobody would be able to come!”

“A dollar for grownups and fifty cents for children, I mean.”

But even that seemed far too high. In the end they decided to charge fifty cents for grownups and twenty-five for children.

“And we can get somebody from school, Pearl Cotton or someone, to take charge of the ticket selling,” said Mona.

The great day approached. The sliding doors between the dining and living rooms had been opened wide, and the stage set constructed in the dining room. The Melendys had to eat the last few meals before the play in the kitchen. Standing up, too, or perched on tables, because all the chairs in the house were now arranged in rows in the living room. Would there be enough of them? That was the question. The armchairs were grouped together at the back like a family of bears. The dining-room chairs stood in a righteous and unyielding row in the middle, and beside them the three Melendy rockers tipped jovially at different angles, like rowdy people laughing, splitting their sides, at some secret joke. In front of these there was a strange assortment: kitchen chairs and odd upstairs ones, and the big couch and the little yellow brocade love seat; old and young, spare and fat, in a sort of Memorial Day parade. At the very front were Oliver’s two small chairs, all the footstools in the house, and some packing boxes somberly draped in steamer rugs. These were for the littlest children in the audience.

Side by side waited the chairs, transfixed, struck dumb before the beauty of the stage set confronting them. Rush and Willy had built the backdrop out of beaverboard, and Randy had painted it. A lonely forest scene: dozens of pale-blue tree trunks and showers of blue leaves. At the right an opening among them disclosed the misty pinnacles of a castle. On the floor the old green rug from Father’s study was arranged in mossy folds; and soft blue cheesecloth curtains hung at either side of the wide door. The girls had dyed the cheesecloth themselves, and their blue hands had horrified people for days afterward.

Randy kept wandering into the living room; sinking first into one chair and then into another, regarding with awe the beauty of her handiwork. And this was only the first set, too. Think of that. Behind the forest scene there was the interior of the palace, with a tapestry painted on its wall and a window containing a piece of cloud and a sun with as many petals as a daisy. A throne went with that one, made out of Father’s old Morris chair and a bedspread. And then there was the night scene! It was the best of all.

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