On the Blue Comet Read online

  I shook my head no and nodded my head yes both at the same time. I could not control turning as red as a beetroot.

  “Oscar,” said Aunt Carmen, shutting the cover of the book, “did you leave this house without permission and go across town to the library today?”

  “No, ma’am,” I mumbled.

  “In that case, explain this soaking wet book, checked out of the library today, please, Oscar!” she said, looking up at me with her true blue eyes.

  For all it mattered to Aunt Carmen, I could have appendicitis and a broken leg, but she would never leave me home alone again. She did not trust me not to let riffraff into the house, endangering myself, her bisque figurine collection, and everything else she owned in the world. “Steal, steal, steal! Is what those tramps do,” she told me during my dressing-down. “And you let him in, Oscar! A common scallywag as if he were a man of the cloth!”

  There was no telling Aunt Carmen that Mr. Applegate was anything but a common scallywag.

  As a punishment for letting a stranger into the house, I had to write Rudyard Kipling’s “If” ten times in my notebook every night until Christmas. I was not alone. In the world of declamation, Rudyard Kipling’s “If” was a hot number. It was Aunt Carmen’s clients’ hands-down first choice. Everyone wanted their son to recite it. Nearly all her unlucky students had to memorize all thirty-two lines of it, standing straight as ramrods while they spoke.

  From that day forward, I had to come along to the piano and declamation lessons and do my homework in whatever house we happened to find ourselves spending the afternoon.

  The bus took us to the wealthier parts of Cairo. The lessons brought us into the homes of families who could afford to have Aunt Carmen teach their little girls to play the “Moonlight Sonata” and their sons to give George Washington’s Farewell. These were the children of our patricians, the Cairo Country Club families, every last one of them. They had cooks, gardeners, and driveways with cars in them. They possessed telephones without party lines and the telephones had whole rooms of their own. Their houses were furnished with glowing cherrywood antique cupboards and tables smelling of lemon-oil furniture polish. Their parlors contained thick oriental carpets and deeply upholstered easy chairs. The rich buttery smells from their kitchens were not the same as those that wafted out of Aunt Carmen’s parsimonious oven.

  Aunt Carmen kept one suspicious eye on me as I did my homework at strange dining tables and in unfamiliar inglenooks. If I tried to sink into one of the deep-as-your-elbow upholstered sofas, I was told to sit in a hard wooden chair instead.

  Willa Sue brought her dolls to these lessons. She dressed and undressed them and took them for walks. She played endless games with the dolls. It embarrassed me to even be in the same room with her. Mothers and cooks thought Willa Sue had cherub lips just like Shirley Temple and found her charming. They gave Willa Sue choice slices of pie and cake. They looked at me and my arithmetic book as if I were a stray cat. Sometimes they’d give me a piece of gum, which Aunt Carmen made me spit out the moment they were not looking.

  I endured. The only house I could not bear was the Pettishankses’. Betsy Pettishanks was a terrible little pianist. She burst into tears when Aunt Carmen made her start from the beginning every time she messed up on the second bar of the “Moonlight Sonata.” Betsy was meant to be in a first-grade recital, and her mother wanted her to get the prize. Mrs. Petti­shanks, in her fashionable dress with silk-covered buttons and linen collar, would drift into the living room just when Betsy was playing. She pretended to arrange and then rearrange vases of flowers or bowls of fruit. Encouragingly Mrs. Petti­shanks hummed the “Moonlight Sonata” as if it might help Betsy through the trouble spots. Every time Betsy missed that second bar, Mrs. Petti­shanks would startle a little as if a tooth hurt her. Aunt Carmen said privately that Betsy needed to be switched back to “Yankee Doodle” before advancing to the “Moonlight Sonata.” Privately Aunt Carmen did not think Betsy had a snowball’s chance on a griddle of getting a prize, but she said nothing about any of that to Mrs. Pettishanks.

  On seeing me for the first time, Mrs. Pettishanks, wife of the train thief, had donated a pile of her son Cyril’s cast-off clothing to Aunt Carmen for me to wear. “So much more personal than giving them to the church bazaar!” is what Mrs. Pettishanks had said to Aunt Carmen.

  I was a shrimp. The push weight on the doctor’s scale barely held at fifty pounds when I stood on it. Aunt Carmen took in Cyril’s waistbands and turned up his sleeves and pant legs. I would grow into them one day. “In the meantime we don’t have to take you down to Sears Roebuck for new clothes, and that’s a plus for the household budget, young man.” It was the greatest shame of my days to have to appear in front of Cyril Pettishanks dressed in his own hand-me-down clothes.

  Cyril Pettishanks was in the fifth grade just like me, but I had never laid eyes on him before because he went to River Heights Academy instead of the public school. Cyril’s father wanted Cyril to be on the debating team at Harvard one day. In order to prepare for this, Cyril had to memorize the great speeches of great men. According to Willa Sue, Mr. Pettishanks required a huge dose of Kipling, which, he said, “cleared the mind and soul.”

  Cyril was a handsome boy, if always a little damp. He had thick black eyelashes and a ruddy face. He was as bumptious as a Labrador retriever. Cyril wore a blue-and-red-striped tie because that was the River Heights Academy uniform, but the tie was knotted wildly and his shirt slewed out of his gray short pants.

  In order to recite the Kipling, Cyril leaned forward against the back of a wing chair and rocked it. He took a deep breath, whipped a forelock of wavy black hair out of his face, and appeared to take the poem straight off the ceiling. “‘If you can keep your head up when all around you / Are losing their heads and blaming it on you —’”

  “‘Keep your head,’ not ‘keep your head up,’” corrected Aunt Carmen. “And, Cyril, it’s ‘losing theirs,’ not ‘losing their heads.’”

  “‘If you can trust yourself when, when . . .’” he faltered.

  “The words are not written on the ceiling, Cyril,” said Aunt Carmen. “Look at your listeners. Gesture with one expressive hand as Kipling himself might have done. Picture Kipling in his pith helmet in the middle of the Indian jungle talking to the Punjabi natives! And Cyril, don’t slouch. You wouldn’t catch Mr. Rudyard Kipling slouching. Begin again, please.”

  I half listened to Cyril struggle with the words as I struggled with math. Dust motes spun in the afternoon light. Somewhere in this house were my trains. I wanted to see them. Where would they be? Probably in Cyril’s room, wherever that was. I wanted to see my trains so badly that it hurt, so I muttered “Excuse me,” and left my homework on the dining-room table. I ambled down the hall as if to go to the bathroom. The lavatory was tucked away in a little nook underneath the stairs. I opened the door and closed it firmly so that Aunt Carmen could hear it. I figured it would take Cyril a full twenty minutes to get through the first verse of “If.”

  Like a cat, I flew up the stairs and chanced a quick peek in each bedroom. Cyril’s room turned out to be the last in the upstairs hallway. I opened the ten-foot-high mahogany door carefully, minimizing the squeak. A crimson Harvard banner graced the wall over the bed. On the bed were piled footballs, baseballs, phonograph records, and a football helmet with an H on the side. He had tossed swords, a catcher’s mitt, and a bow and arrows in a pile on the floor. A catcher’s mask, chest protector, and shin guards took up the chair. Two tennis racquets lay on the radiator under a cowboy hat. Cyril owned an embossed chrome six-gun set. The holsters hung on the bedpost with their fake ammunition belt, red jewels sparkling on the gunstocks. Dirty socks lay everywhere, but there were no trains. Not a sign of trains or layouts anywhere.

  I turned to race downstairs again when I noticed one of Cyril’s school notebooks on the bed. It was open to what seemed to be a book report. What I saw registered shock that dried my mouth. Cyril Petti­shanks, born for H
arvard, the First National Bank, and beyond, had flunked his fifth-grade book report. His handwriting was no better than a first-grader’s.

  Apply yourself, boy! the teacher had written over the failing grade. It gave me the spiny all-overs.

  The next Monday it was only a matter of time before Cyril was waist deep in the quagmire of the poem. He had particular trouble with

  If you can dream — and not make dreams your master;

  If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim,

  If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

  And treat those two impostors just the same . . .

  Which he got sort of sideways with “if you can be the master of your dreams” and “greet those two impostors.”

  “It’s ‘meet with,’ not ‘meet up with,’ Cyril,” corrected Aunt Carmen. “And it’s treat, not greet!” Cyril rocked the wing chair so hard it fell over sideways.

  More patient than his sister, Betsy, Cyril reversed and started over and over and over again without complaint. He stood on one foot and then the other. He put his hands in his pockets, which made Aunt Carmen tell him to get his hands out of his pockets because Rudyard Kipling was an English gentleman in the jungle and English gentlemen never put their hands in their pockets when they were in the jungle. “Project your voice. Don’t mumble, Cyril,” she prompted. “Start at ‘If you can make one heap of all your winnings.’”

  I would have felt sorry for Cyril if it hadn’t been that he owned my trains out of no fault of mine or virtue of his. Once again I went to the bathroom. I opened the door and closed it firmly as Cyril stumbled, saying, “If you can heap up all your winnings.”

  This time I flew through the kitchen and found the door to the basement. I flicked on the overhead light and dashed downstairs. Three entire suits of armor stood under the stairs; piles of furniture and numerous tarnished silver tea sets crammed the corners, but no trains. Along the wall, hundreds of old National Geographics had been stowed in sloppy stacks. There was a dressmaker’s dummy tangled in the antlers of an enormous moose, but no sign of my trains, or even the boxes that might have contained them.

  It was two weeks before Christmas that I had a chance to try the Pettishankses’ attic. I waited for Cyril to bungle “If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, / Or walk with kings — nor lose the common touch,” which he changed to “If you can talk to crowds and keep on talking.”

  “‘Keep your virtue’! Cyril, not ‘keep on talking.’ Begin again, please,” said Aunt Carmen.

  I crept upstairs to the attic. Nothing in the attic but summer clothing in mothballed bags hanging everywhere. No trains. Where were they?

  Downstairs, Cyril was having a particularly sticky time. I crept back into my homework position at the dining table. Today he only had gotten as far as “If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew,” which he kept fouling up as “heart and soul and sinew.”

  “‘Heart and nerve and sinew,’ Cyril. Nerve, not soul. Start again with the beginning of that verse,” said Aunt Carmen.

  Cyril did it again. Again he said “heart and soul.”

  Mr. Pettishanks, Macanudo in hand, suddenly strolled into the room. He clipped off the tip of the cigar with a silver instrument from his pocket, lit it, and blew a long tail of azure smoke into the room.

  “How are you doing, son?” he asked. “Have you got the Kipling poem by heart? Shouldn’t take long! When I was your age, I used to memorize thirty lines of Shakespeare a night!”

  I stopped in the middle of my history homework. Even Willa Sue went quiet and put her dolls down.

  “Let’s hear it, son,” ordered Cyril’s father. “And tuck in that shirt!”

  Cyril began to sweat in great flowing beads. His ruddy face retreated to the color of unbaked bread. He inhaled as if for a high dive and sputtered, “‘If you can keep your head on when all around you are losing their heads and blaming . . .’” Cyril lurched through as far as “mastering your dreams and thoughts.” Then he braked on “meet up with Triumph and Disaster.”

  A curtain of silence descended on the room. I had actually been rooting for Cyril as he stumbled through the words. I couldn’t help it. He was so afraid of his father, I thought he’d piss his pants. Without realizing it, I mouthed the words along with him, trying to get him to feel a rhyming code: master-disaster, fools and tools. I did not notice that Mr. Pettishanks’s eyes were on me.

  “What are you doing, boy?” he asked me, blowing a few rings of smoke my way.

  “I’m . . . sir, I was just . . . reciting along with Cyril. I didn’t mean any harm.”

  Aunt Carmen’s eyes bored holes in me.

  “Cyril, finish the poem!” ordered his father.

  About you, doubt you; waiting and hating! My lips prepared to form each syllable for Cyril to follow half a beat later. But Cyril crumbled in a panic attack. I could almost hear his heart pound across the room. He turned and sprinted to the bathroom, where we all heard him sick-up loud and clear.

  No one moved. Mr. Pettishanks tapped the ash of his cigar into a green marble ashtray with two bronze Irish setters on it. “Can you finish that poem, boy?” he asked me.

  Could I finish Kipling’s “If”? I carried the master copy in the pocket of my coat, encoded for memory. If you can . . . walk with kings intruded on my dreams. If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken came unwanted into the bathtub with me. At lunchtime, all two hundred and eighty-eight words of it were embedded in the very beans of my baked-bean sandwiches. Not only did I have to write the entire thing ten times a night; I had to listen to four other poor fools like Cyril battle through it five afternoons a week.

  I stood up — in respect for either Mr. Pettishanks or Kipling, I did not know which.

  “May I start at the beginning, sir?” I asked.

  “Go ahead, boy!” answered Mr. Pettishanks. He propped a wing-tipped foot up on the seat of a dining chair and watched me like a buzzard. His eyes strayed to Aunt Carmen. Aunt Carmen sat motionless. I suddenly knew that she was, at that moment, a woman expecting execution. Her eyes sought only mine. In her face was equal measure of hope and fear, all bottled up in her wintery blue eyes.

  In that instant I understood everything perfectly. Mr. Pettishanks wanted to know if his son’s failure was Cyril’s fault or Aunt Carmen’s fault. If Mr. Pettishanks decided it was Aunt Carmen’s fault that his son had flubbed the poem, she would be fired. If Aunt Carmen were fired by the Pettishankses, word would soon spread around the bridge tables in the River Heights Country Club that Aunt Carmen was a second-rate tutor, and she would lose all her River Heights clients. Mr. Pettishankses was not testing me. He was testing Aunt Carmen.

  I did not read from the ceiling. I did not say “meet up with.” I stood straight as a poker and looked Mr. Pettishanks in the eye. I did not stumble over heap of all your winnings. I gestured with my right hand as Kipling might have done, smack in the middle of the Indian jungle. The words flew from my mouth as perfect as a song. I sailed on through all the way to

  If you can fill the unforgiving minute

  With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

  Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it,

  And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!

  without a single hesitation.

  “Good,” said Mr. Pettishanks, drawing deeply on his cigar. “You’re a smart boy. I like smart boys. Here’s bus fare and a dime for your trouble. Go down to my bank and give the night watchman this package. Tell’m to put it in the head teller’s drawer.”

  He turned to go. Cyril had crept into the room, wiping his mouth on his shirt cuff, his attention on his father as a mouse might eye an owl.

  “Learn it, son,” Mr. Pettishanks ordered, his words boring holes into Cyril, “or you’ll find yourself at military prep school for next term. You can bet your bottom dollar they’ll drill some discipline into you starting at five o’clock in the morning!”

  “Please, Father, n
o!” whimpered Cyril.

  Mr. Pettishanks grabbed his son by the front of his sweaty shirt. He undid and retied Cyril’s necktie and drew the knot up tight to Cyril’s neck. In a spitting whisper that everyone in the room could hear, he said, “I was cum laude at Harvard. Your grandfather the same, and his father before him. My son is not going to be the first failure in this family. Do you hear me, Cyril?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Cyril, his eyes flicking on me.

  “It’s two weeks before Christmas. You get it by the first week of the new year, or you’ll find yourself in a cadet’s uniform, drilling on the parade ground at the military prep. Think about it, son. Ice-water showers morning and night. The parade ground has flint chips on the track. They call it The Grinder. They make you do push-ups on it.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Cyril. His eyes were dull.

  His father released Cyril’s shirt and gave his tie a small yank. “We can’t have the public-school boys creeping up on ya and grabbing your slot at Harvard.” Mr. Pettishanks eyed me and smiled without humor at his own joke.

  Cyril tried his best to laugh. But when his father turned again to go, he snarled at me out of the side of his mouth, “You’re a little worm, Ogilvie. I’ll get you!”

  “Do as Mr. Pettishanks asks, Oscar,” said Aunt Carmen as if nothing had happened. “Do not linger. Take the number seventeen bus home when your errand is complete.”

  Out the front door I went, almost skipping with my sudden freedom. Free. Free as a sparrow in the sky for at least an hour. Unwatched and unremarked upon, I climbed aboard the streetcar and dropped my nickel fare into the slot just like all the free grown-up people. I might as well have joined life in Brazil. I turned my face upward to wherever God might be hiding. A tiny prayer of thanks blossomed in my heart, and I sent it skyward. Somehow I had pulled the lucky lever and got my dad instead of Mr. Petti­shanks. Cyril would never learn that poem. With all his money and privilege, he was going to wind up in Missouri Military Prep, just over the river from Cairo. Everybody knew what went on there. Sometimes we could see them drill and hear them shouting on the wind. My dad said, “The Prep is supposed to be a school for troublesome boys, but it’s really a school for the boys of troublesome dads. The Prep spits those boys out four years later as nasty little cadets.”