On the Blue Comet (22 page)

I found myself on the bedroom level. Oil paintings in heavy gilt frames lined the walls. One of those oriental runners caressed my feet, its red and blue silk patterns comforting to my little boy’s toes. To my right was the Bisters’ master bedroom. Next to their four-poster lay a polar bear rug with the bear’s head, teeth bared, still intact. I shuddered, picturing the poor bear, its life ended cruelly — not to mention having its beautiful thick pelt walked on by Mrs. Bister’s dainty feet morning and night. I looked on the bedside table. No telephone in sight. Where would these people have their telephone? Probably just like the Pettishankses, and other rich River Heights families, the Bisters had a telephone room.

Where would the Bisters’ telephone room be? On the ground floor, of course. Even more dangerous. I inched down the next set of stairs.

The parlor, if that’s what the Bisters called it, was as big as the entire floor of our house on Lucifer Street. It looked out over a snow-covered park two blocks away. Bulky wing chairs, embroidered with silk dragonflies, guarded either side of the marble fireplace. The hearth was immaculate and laid with small logs, stacked with military precision. I was tempted to jump on a creamy velvet sofa, but kept walking. No telephone here. I reckoned the sofa alone could fit five people. Count in the beefy leather easy chairs, and the room could hold two dozen comfortably, without bringing in wooden folding chairs from the garage, like my dad always did when Thanksgiving was at our house.

They don’t
have
wooden folding chairs
.
They don’t have a garage!
I reminded myself. One of the Bisters’ overstuffed ottomans could no doubt pay for all our Sears Roebuck furniture back in Cairo.

Go back, Oscar!
the inner voice urged me.
Just one minute to hear Dad say hello
.
That’s all I want,
I bargained with that unreasonable other Oscar.

A pair of French doors at the end of the parlor opened into the dining room. A dozen ladder-back chairs with gold inlay at the joints were precisely spaced around a mahogany table, its surface polished like a mirror. Overhead hung a chandelier with a hundred glass dangles on it.

Thankfully, the room to the side of this one was indeed the Bisters’ telephone room. It was decorated in the Spanish style. Heavy wine-colored draperies hung over the windows. Gold-thread dragonflies were embroidered into the velvet. I turned the lamp on. The light blazed through spangled colored panes, each no bigger than my thumbnail. Another dragonfly design — the Bisters must have liked dragonflies. Overlooking the telephone itself was an ivory statuette of a Greek god holding a snake-entwined staff. He had silver wings coming out of his heels.

“Mercury, Oscar!”
I could almost hear Mrs. Olderby’s voice reminding me. When Mrs. Olderby taught us ancient history, she made sure we memorized the names and characteristics of every god in Greek, Roman, and Egyptian heaven.

Glued in a tiny window on the front of the phone was the Bisters’ number, BUtterfield 8-7053. I picked up the receiver.

“Number, please?” said the operator. Immediately I was cheered by her voice, and my fears subsided. She was every bit as nice-sounding as the operators in Cairo, and she was going to put me through to my dad.

“Cairo, Illinois, please, ma’am. Cairo-six, oh-eight-four-five,” I repeated. My heart quickened inside me.
Just hello — that’s all I want to hear!
I told myself.
Then I’ll hang up and run back to the room and no one will see me and I’ll be safe
.
I promise!

“Illinois?” asked the operator. “Did you say Illinois, honey?”

“Yes,” I answered, trying to lower my six-year-old voice. There was that name
honey
again.

“Sweetie-pie,” piped the operator primly. “Bell Telephone operators are not allowed to accept long-distance calls placed by children.”

“I’m eleven,” I pleaded.

“Is there some grown-up at home who can make this call for you?” asked the operator.

“No!” I said.

“That’s what I thought,” said the operator. “Children like to play jokes over the telephone, so the company won’t take kiddy calls long distance. Now go and find your mommy or poppy, and then you can ask them to call long distance. Okay? Happy New Year!”

All this for nothing!
my inner voice croaked.
Scram, Oscar, while the scramming is good!
Held-back tears of disappointment throbbed in my jaw muscles. I hung up the receiver and wiped the prints off the telephone with the tail of one of the drapes. Back through the dining room I went, this time at a trot, which is all my burning ribs would allow, back through the parlor with its mighty chairs and lacquered tables, and upward I padded on the first stairway to the bedroom level.

As my foot reached the top step, a key turned in the front-door latch and the bolt clicked back. I scampered upward, heart hammering as the room below me filled with happy voices. My adventure with the phone had made me a nervous wreck. On Lisl’s dresser was a bottle of Nervosa. The label claimed to clear the bloodstream of clot-forming anxieties. I swallowed a big gulp and waited for it to take effect. After a time Claire reappeared. She beckoned to me from the doorway. “C’mon, Oscar!” she said.

“Where to?” I asked.

“My room! Mummy and Daddy have guests for tea downstairs,” said Claire. “They won’t come up again. Wait’ll you see the train, Oscar! I got the biggest, best layout I could find!”

“It’s the Twentieth Century, Claire!” I nearly shouted when I got to Claire’s room and saw the engine. The Twentieth Century Express ran regular service from New York to Chicago. Claire’s layout came with two terminals, New York’s Grand Central and Chicago’s Union Station.

We ran the train back and forth, blew the whistle, and put smoke into its stack. “Are you happy, Claire?” I asked, glancing at her eyes. Her dreamy eyes did not look happy. “What’s the matter?” I asked, crouching in front of her in the middle of the oval of newly laid railroad tracks. “You have to be thrilled about this train! It’s what you wanted, Claire! If you asked ’em, they’d probably buy you three more!”

Claire looked down at the train. “I don’t want you to leave and go home, Oscar,” Claire said. “But I won’t be happy until you’re happy and that means when you get safely home. You see, you’re the first person in the whole wide world I’ve ever really truly cared about, Oscar.”

“Me?”

“Yes, Oscar. You.”

I felt myself blush as red as a Lionel signal flare. “You love your mother and dad, too!” I said. “Not to mention your brother, wherever he is.”

“I love them, of course, Oscar. But no one’s ever listened to me like you and taken me seriously before you. Now you have to go home, and I don’t want you to go.”

“But how?” I asked. “I can’t jump onto your train, Claire. There’s nothing to scare me back onto it. Nothing can make me jump onto this layout and take me back to 1931 where I belong.”

“I’ll get Daddy to pay for a real ticket on a real train,” said Claire.

“Your dad won’t be happy to find a strange little boy in his apartment. The wrong kind of boy, too!” I added.

Claire took a deep breath. “If we play our cards right, Oscar, we can get you home tonight.”

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.