On the Blue Comet Read online

  I sighed. “It’s better than nothing, Claire,” I said. “But back in Cairo I’ll still be a kindergartener. And then in five years’ time, Dad’ll lose his job again. We’ll have to sell our trains all over again. And Mr. Applegate will be shot dead again.”

  “No, he won’t!” said Claire. “I’ll think of something!” She frowned. A hundred ideas were scampering around in Claire’s brain. I could almost see them like eggs scrambling in a frying pan.

  “First things first, Oscar,” she said. “If you go back home to Cairo with some money in a bank account, your dad will never have to sell your house. You’ll never move in with your aunt Carmen, and Mr. Applegate won’t ever get shot.”

  “But how are you going to do that, Claire? It’d take a small fortune to buy back our house.”

  She thumped a code on the far wall of her room. Thumpety-thump-thump . . . thump, thump.

  There was a return thump. “Good!” said Claire. “He’s home.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s my brother,” said Claire. “Poor Max. He’s in the boys’ choir. He had to spend the whole day down in Saint Thomas’s Church on Fifth Avenue scrubbing the statuary with a toothbrush and Bon Ami.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Last Sunday he was caught spitting in the choir stall at evensong. He and the other boys have spitting contests. The choirmaster’s very strict. The boys hate scrubbing the saints’ feet, but they keep spitting anyway. Max has a singing voice like an angel. He gets solos. Otherwise they wouldn’t let him back in the choir again and again.”

  At the door stood a grumpy-looking fifth-grade boy in one of those sailor blouses that all the country club boys in River Heights wore when they got dressed up. His hands were an irritated nasty color, blotchy pink all the way up to the wrists.

  He asked, “Who’s this midget? He’s wearing my clothes too! Stop looking at my hands, midget!”

  “This is my brother, Maxwell, Oscar,” said Claire. “Max, meet Oscar.”

  “Who the heck is this little squirt?” asked Max.

  “Your twin?” I asked Claire.

  “Yup,” said Claire, looking him up and down. “Not identical in any way!”

  Max wiped his nose on the sleeve of his shirt and stared at me with contempt. “Why are you here? You look like something the cat dragged in,” he said.

  “My name is Oscar Ogilvie. I am eleven years old and I come from Cairo, Illinois,” I answered him.

  “Yer six. Not a day older,” said Maxwell. “Yer a twerp! Those clothes don’t even fit.” He sniffed at me. “Look at yer front teeth, for the love of God!”

  My hand flew to cover my mouth. My two front teeth were missing, leaving a wide gap.

  “Max,” said Claire, “Oscar comes from the year 1931, where he will be eleven. He’s six outside, but he’s eleven inside.”

  “Prove it,” said Maxwell, pouting.

  “Show the dime to him, Oscar,” said Claire.

  With great reluctance, I handed my dime to Maxwell, keeping hold of the end of the string.

  “Look at the date, fathead,” said Claire.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” said Maxwell. “Howdja get that, twerp?”

  “Shut up, Max,” said Claire. “I want you to do me a favor.”

  “Depends what it is, and it’ll cost you,” said Max.

  “You can have the dime for one hour, Max. Give it to your friend Henry. Ask him to show it to his father.”

  “Who’s Henry?” I asked.

  “His best friend,” said Claire. “Then bring it right back to Oscar, Max. If you lose it, I’ll kill you. Okay? Swear to God and hope to die with a poison stake in your heart if you don’t bring that dime right back. And don’t tell anyone Oscar’s here.”

  “Supposing I don’t want to,” said Max.

  “If you don’t do it, Max, I’ll tell Mummy and Daddy that you and Henry went up to the penthouse and lit a fire and roasted marshmallows on the roof.”

  “You wouldn’t tell!” said Max heatedly.

  “I would too.”

  Max considered this. “I told you it’ll cost you,” said Max, staring at the dime, which was now in the palm of his hand.

  “What’ll it cost me?” asked Claire.

  Max looked up, calculating. “I have three book reports due next month. No less than ten pages each,” he said. “Last of the Mohicans, Ivanhoe, Red Badge of Courage.”

  “Deal,” said Claire.

  “Plus your Christmas chocolate Santa,” Max added.

  “Deal!” said Claire. “Now move your tootsies. No telling anybody. Swear to God and hope to die.”

  “Swear to God,” said Max. Max left the room with my dime in his back pocket and no more to say.

  “Do you trust him?” I asked Claire.

  “Of course not!” said Claire. “But he’ll show that dime to Henry, all right, and Henry’ll show it to his old man. Henry’s dad is a coin collector. Henry Mellon Senior’ll put the dime under a big magnifier, and he’ll be on the phone to Daddy in three minutes’ time. It’s just what I want!”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Oscar,” said Claire. “Think hard. Remember all that stuff you told me on the train about the crash?”

  “The crash? The Wall Street crash in 1929?”

  “Oscar, please, please try to remember everything you ever knew or heard about that crash and about why the millionaires jumped out their windows and why the banks closed and all that.”

  “Oh, Claire,” I moaned, “I don’t know anything.”

  “You know enough,” said Claire. “You lived through it!”

  We sent the Twentieth Century around dozens more loops until we heard a squeak on a stair floorboard. A heavy foot approached us, heavier certainly than Max’s.

  There was a knock on the door. A firm, no-nonsense knock that meant only a few seconds would pass before the handle turned and whoever it was would come in, anyway.

  “Who is this, Claire?” asked Robert W. Bister. Her father was a splendid, in-the-pink kind of man with center-parted hair and a tweed suit that no one in Cairo could buy, even in the Cairo department store. He squatted in a friendly way on the carpet in front of me and bounced a bit on his tweed-covered haunches and his gleaming leather cordovans.

  “This is Oscar, Dad,” said Claire. “Oscar Ogilvie Junior of Cairo, Illinois.”

  Mr. Bister shook my little hand solemnly and with respect. “Is this yours, Oscar?” asked Claire’s father. He held out my dime.

  “Yes, sir,” I answered, plucking the coin with caution from his outstretched hand.

  “Claire, darling,” said her father, his eyes still on me, as if I might somehow escape, “I am afraid we cannot harbor missing children in our home. It is against the law, and your mother and I could be arrested.”

  “I’m not a missing child, sir,” I said.

  “You’ve got to be missing from somewhere,” her father said reasonably. “You’re five years old, and somebody must own you!” He smiled at his little joke.

  “I’m eleven years old, sir,” I said. “I live at number three, Lucifer Street, Cairo, Illinois. I am in Mrs. Olderby’s fifth grade at Cairo Central School. Normally I am four feet five inches tall, and I am here of my own accord.”

  “How did you get here, Oscar?” he asked in a very friendly tone.

  “You’ll never believe him, Dad,” snapped Claire. “It would be a waste of breath for Oscar to go through the whole story.”

  Her father changed tack. He tossed the empty Lionel boxes onto the floor from the easy chair where Claire had put them and took a seat. “That coin,” he said, pointing to it. “Max showed it to Henry. Henry thought the dime was a fake and showed it to his father. Henry’s father happens to be an ace amateur numismatist. That means he’s a coin collector. He examined this Liberty dime under a special magnifier. It’s absolutely genuine. Sterling silver. Nobody forges trick coins with real silver. It even has a mint mark in the corner. Unf
akeable. I want to know how you got here, Oscar Ogilvie, and how you came by that dime.”

  “You promise not to interrupt and make fun, Dad?” prodded Claire.

  “Scout’s honor, my dear,” said her father, and he crossed his tweed-swathed legs and beady-eyed me over his folded fingers.

  I began with the trains in our basement on Lucifer Street. From there I went to news of the crash in our morning paper, and the rich men jumping out of windows and selling apples in the street. Then to my dad losing his job, Mr. Pettishanks’s bank taking our house, Mr. Applegate’s visits, and Aunt Carmen. I told him about Stackpole and McGee, about my first jumping onto the train, and about Dutch meeting me on the Rock Island Line. All the while Mr. Bister absorbed it like blotting paper. He nodded his head frequently.

  I described the Crawford layout. And then it happened.

  I forgot Miss Chow’s name. It mattered frighteningly to me. It meant the forgetting was beginning. It meant that in this little boy’s body, five years in the past, I was already forgetting the future. I had to leave 1926 and get back to my own time and my own eleven-year-old body or even Mr. H. and Dutch would all go up in smoke. Then I would be none the wiser for all I had gone through.

  “Miss Chow,” interjected Claire. “You said her name was Miss Chow.”

  “Of course,” I stammered, and went on smoothly, describing Mr. H. and his bassett-hound face, “Hizzy” Hissbaum, and Lieutenant Cyril Pettishanks sending me to fight the Krauts with the Russkies. Mr. Bister stopped me there.

  “War?” he asked. “What war? When?”

  “I don’t know, exactly,” I answered. “I came in December 1941. Japan had just attacked America in a place called Pearl something. The whole world was in the army.”

  Claire stopped me with a gentle finger on the top of my hand. “Daddy,” she said, “as you can see, Oscar has to get home. He has to get back to his real life.”

  “Oscar, I’ll make a bargain with you,” said Claire’s father.

  “Dad, you’re such a lawyer!” said Claire.

  “And you, my dear?” he asked with a gleeful smile. “Did you not only this afternoon strike up a very good bargain with your mother and me? And, may I add, in perfectly square legal terms!”

  Claire had to admit that was true.

  Pride swam in her father’s voice. “I am indeed a famous lawyer, dear girl. But then we are a lawyer’s family. You make deals, Max makes deals, and I make deals. Deals make the world go round. I, personally, would sign a contract with Mussolini himself to find out what is going to happen to all our family investments in the year 1929. I don’t want to be jumping out of any high windows. It would upset your mother to no end if I did!” He laughed at his own joke.

  Mr. Bister’s eyes didn’t miss a trick. “I saw a flicker of recognition at the word Mussolini,” he said to me.

  Mussolini . . . Who was Mussolini? I pricked my brain from all sides. “He was the leader of the Italians, in the war,” I said.

  “Oscar,” said Mr. Bister seriously, “you spill everything you remember about what happens in 1929 to my friends and colleagues, and I will send you home with a first-class ticket on any train you like. A real, live train this time, Oscar. There’s one that leaves in a few hours. Deal?”

  I looked at Claire. She was shaking her head ever so slightly at me and studying her father. Jumbled possibilities raced through my mind. If I went home on a real train, I’d be doomed to repeat everything I’d lived through and I’d be doomed to repeat everything I’d done. But if I said no, how would I ever get home? My heart turned over inside me at the bleak choice.

  “Hold on a second, Daddy,” said Claire.

  “What could be better than that, dear girl?” inter­rupted her dad. He kept me in the corner of his sight.

  Claire went on: “It’s fine to send Oscar back on the train, Daddy. But we’ll have to give him some money, too. That way he and his father will be able to keep their house when the crash comes and his dad won’t ever have to leave Oscar for Cal­i­fornia.”

  “How much was your house worth, son?” Mr. Bister asked. “How about five thousand? Will that do it? A money order for five thousand in your pocket?”

  My jaw dropped open.

  “Make it ten, Daddy,” said Claire.

  “Seventy-five hundred,” said her father. “But, Claire . . .”

  “But what?” asked Claire.

  “This lad’s information better be good,” added Mr. Bister. “He’d better pass the test and give us the inside dope or the deal’s off.”

  I shuddered at the idea of passing a test. What would it be? Claire saw me go a little pale.

  “No deal, Daddy,” she said, crossing her arms on her chest and walking away to the other side of the room.

  I began to panic. This was my only chance. Was Claire going to blow it?

  “What do you mean, my lovely?” asked her father.

  “Oscar isn’t passing any tests. Pay up square for whatever Oscar can remember and tells you he remembers. He’ll do his best. If you don’t agree, Oscar never heard of the word crash.”

  Mr. Bister twiddled both sets of fingers inside his jacket pockets. “And if your young friend is a fake?” he asked. “If he lies or humiliates me in front of my business colleagues?”

  Claire narrowed her eyes. “Oscar doesn’t lie, Daddy,” she said. “And he’s no phoney!”

  “If he isn’t the real McCoy, my darling,” said her father, “if he makes me look like a fool, the deal’s off. I won’t pay good money for wooden nickels.”

  Claire held out her hand to her father. “Deal,” she said. “But remember, Daddy, Oscar’s only eleven and he hasn’t read the Wall Street Journal every day of his life, like you.”

  “Deal,” said her father. “You’re a toughie, Claire. You’ll be the first girl to sit on the Supreme Court someday. Don’t tell your mother I said so or she’ll have a heart attack.”

  It was my impression from the smile he tried to hide that Mr. Bister had, himself, tutored Claire in bargaining skills. I also would lay bets that Maxwell had none of these talents. An hour later firm hands guided me to the doorway. “Now, Oscar, will you kindly come down into the living room? On very short notice I have decided to assemble a circle of my closest friends.”

  I followed him down the stairs, Claire close at hand behind me. She pulled me back toward her on the landing and whispered to me, “Be good, Oscar. Be really good and try to tell these men what they want to know.”

  “What will they want to know?” I asked.

  “They are very wealthy men,” said Claire, “and they will want you to tell them how they can stay rich and maybe even get a little richer.”

  “But what do I know?” I asked.

  “Oscar, you know 1931. You know 1941, too. Daddy’s friends want to figure out how to avoid that crash. They’ll want to know ahead of time what that war is about so they can take their money out of German and Japanese investments.”

  “But I don’t know anything about investments!” I whispered. “I don’t even understand why your mother’d have a heart attack if you got to be the first lady on the Supreme Court.”

  “Because no man would marry me, silly!” said Claire. She poked me between the shoulder blades. “Be good, Oscar!” she said, and goosed me downstairs into the Bisters’ parlor.

  Spread out around a cheery fire were five very important-looking men. No Cairo Shoe Emporium brogans on their feet. Their gleaming wingtips had the slim leather soles of men who walked on marble floors. No broken fingernails or calluses on their hands. Their fingers were soft to the touch, nails pink and polished, as only comes when you don’t use your hands for work. Each smiling mouth contained dazzling teeth. No dentures there. They were tycoons, every one, and they were beautiful to behold. There was no other word for it. Power oozed into the air around them.

  “This is Henry’s father, Henry Mellon Senior,” said Mr. Bister. “He’s the coin collector. You may have heard of his fa
mily.”

  I had not heard of it. But Henry Mellon was dressed so finely, his shave and haircut so barber-perfect, that I guessed he might not even put on his own socks in the morning but had someone to do it for him.

  I was introduced to Mr. John P. Morgan and a Mr. Biddle. Next was a young man in a tennis sweater with wavy hair named Nelson Rockefeller. Then came a Joe Kennedy, who was accompanied by his son, who couldn’t have been more than ten. There were more freckles on young Kennedy than on a patch of gravel and he had the thickest thatch of hair I’d ever seen. The boy took no notice of me. His eyes flicked on me a second and he yawned. Last were a Mr. Merrill and Mr. Lynch, who sat together on a love seat. They all gave off a smell of butter and bay rum.

  I guessed they mostly were bankers and such because they had that Pettishanks smell and they sat in the Pettishanks positions with their legs crossed, just so.

  “Hi, Oscar!” Mr. Biddle greeted me heartily and each of the men shook my little six-year-old hand. It was Mr. Mellon who cleared his throat and began to speak. “This Liberty dime of yours, Oscar . . .” He smiled encouragingly at me. “I have an amateur darkroom. I’ve run off a photographic enlargement of the coin.” Mr. Mellon handed me a black and white picture of my dime enlarged twentyfold. “See that mark near the rim?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s a mint mark. Only the federal mint has the capacity to create a mint mark. The ridges around the rim of the coin are unmistakable. Forgers can never get the ridges evenly. It isn’t worth a forger’s time to forge a dime, anyway. So, what we have here is a sterling silver United States mint coin of a series not yet in circulation, from a year that has not yet happened. Where did you get it?”

  “From the night watchman at the First National Bank in Cairo, Illinois, sir. We used to run the Christmas train display with it,” I answered. “It’s glued to a string so we could yank it out of the coin slot and reuse it.”

  “And that was when, Oscar?”

  “About mid-December 1931.”

  “And you are a boy from that time. Is that correct, Oscar?”

  “Yes, sir. I was born in 1920, and I am eleven years old.”