On the Blue Comet (5 page)

“Let me see your last test paper from Mrs. Olderby,” he said. “Let’s go over those answers.”

We worked from three-thirty to five o’clock each day as the days grew short and cold. Aunt Carmen never questioned the missing pieces of bread. She never discovered about Dad’s carton of Ham Stix behind the water tank.

Aunt Carmen did not exactly smile, nor did she offer any praise, but, lips pursed, she did say, “Oscar, your grades in arithmetic are more respectable than they were.”

I beamed, but then Aunt Carmen soured it by tacking on, “It seems as if you have a better sense of numbers than your father. Your father is terrible with numbers and money. That’s why he invested in those foolish trains and put himself in the poorhouse.”

“I hope to get a B soon, ma’am,” I allowed casually.

“Hard work will achieve it, Oscar,” she said. “I hope your father is able to find some hard work for himself.”

There had been nine postcards from my dad. Each one featured a picture of a new city in a new state. He had gone from Topeka to Little Rock, and from there to New Mexico, Arizona, then Fresno, California. There were no jobs, and I guessed his cash was beginning to run out. I had no address to write him at. I felt frozen in my half of our correspondence because I could not answer his cards.

My eyes prickled and nearly burst into embarrassing tears when I thought of him at dinner or in school. So instead I tried to imagine Los Angeles, City of Angels. In my mind’s eye it was a city of temples and oranges, grander than any of the seven wonders of the ancient world. In the middle was the train station. In its fabulous halls my dad ran down a gold speckled marble platform to meet my train and melt the ice that cramped my heart.

On November 18, it sleeted all afternoon. I was afraid Mr. Applegate would not come in the bad weather, but he showed up all the same. It was too cold to sit outside on the glider. Nervously I looked at the clock. Still two hours before Aunt Carmen and Willa Sue would trundle up the street from the number 17 bus that pulled in at 5:51.

“We can sit inside for a while,” I said. “I don’t reckon they’ll ever be the wiser.”

I made Mr. Applegate a cup of cocoa to go with his Ham Stix sandwich. He was grateful. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Oscar,” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “The food gives me strength. I’ve got a job tonight. Pays a dollar an hour. Shoveling slush and ice at some rich fellow’s party up in River Heights. His driveway’ll be full of fancy cars, and those folks don’t like to slip and slide. One of the gardeners said the boss might even have a regular indoor job for me downtown. We’ll see.”

“What kind of job?” I asked.

But Mr. Applegate didn’t know. His nose was running, and he blew it stuffily into his handkerchief. “My shoes have holes,” he explained nasally. “I caught a chill.”

I wished I had even a dry pair of socks for Mr. Applegate. I had nothing to give him. Aunt Carmen had darned my socks five times, heel and toe, but they were too small for a grown man.

“I don’t understand,” I told him. “One day everything in the world was fine. Dad and I had lamb chops and ice cream. The farmers farmed and bought tractors and the teachers like you had jobs teaching, then suddenly,
bingo
! It was over. My dad is gone, and now we’re lucky to have cold turnips for supper. How could it happen?”

“Greed,” said Mr. Applegate. “Greedy Wall Street profiteers pushing their luck like high rollers betting right over the top. They stacked the stock market like a house of playing cards. They bet way over their heads, couldn’t back up their spending, and it all came tumbling down.”

I knew well enough from Our Lady of Sorrows Sunday School about greed. I wasn’t sure if the money changers greased people’s palms in the Temple, or the Tower of Babel, but it didn’t matter. Sure as shooting, there were greaseballs and gamblers in the Bible, and their descendants had clearly been at work on Wall Street in October 1929.

Mr. Applegate and I solved the day’s arithmetic problems, going through the hoops of show-your-work on each one. “You’re not dreamin’ about your train set, now, Oscar,” Mr. Applegate prodded me gently whenever my eyes glazed over.

I looked up at the kitchen clock for a moment. It was exactly 4:15. I glanced out the window. “Holy mackerel!” I said. “There they are! Getting off the bus. They’re early! You’ll have to go out the back door!”

Mr. Applegate grabbed his tattered overcoat and vanished out of our kitchen like a rabbit in the night.

They noticed nothing amiss. Luckily the pot and cocoa cup were clean; the Wonder bread was tucked neatly in its wrapper in the bread box. The frying pan was hanging from its hook, brightly polished, all traces of Ham Stix gone, and the empty Ham Stix tin lay sunken beneath Aunt Carmen’s coffee grounds in the very bottom of the trash barrel. The kitchen smelled of my lima bean casserole.

I looked up from my arithmetic. “You’re early!” I said as calmly as I possibly could.

Aunt Carmen removed her hat. “The Merriweathers have chicken pox,” she announced as if chicken pox were a personal shortcoming. “They had a big yellow quarantine sign up, right next to the front door. Not a living soul is allowed in or out on account of the chicken pox. So that took care of Mary-Louise’s ‘Yankee Doodle’ practice and the Patrick Henry speech that her brother was rehearsing. We went all the way out to East Cairo for nothing, and of course, I can’t bill them for today.”

“And no key lime pie, either,” grumped Willa Sue. “I was all looking forward, and then here come the dumb yellow quarantine signs and no pie!”

There had been many a time that my dad had encouraged Aunt Carmen to get a telephone. “I’ll call you up, Carmen, and pass the time of day with you!” Dad always said. “Then you can talk to me and not have to put up with the cigars!”

Aunt Carmen always pointed out that telephones, like electric trains, were expensive gadgets. They were a luxury for those who could afford them, not ordinary folks like us.

This did not stop me from saying to Aunt Carmen, “If we had a telephone in the house, Mrs. Merriweather could have called —”

“What’s this?” interrupted Willa Sue. She hefted
The Fireside Book of Poetry
over the table to Aunt Carmen. “This book’s soaking wet!” Her voice began the singsong teasing of the playground.
“Oscar’s left the ho-use! Oscar’s been to the library in the ra-in and ruined the bo-ok, and he’s in big tro-uble!”

Aunt Carmen opened the clammy covers of
The Fireside Book of Poetry
. The book fell open where it had been bookmarked to Kipling’s “If.”

“Whose book might this be, Oscar?” asked Aunt Carmen.

“I don’t know!” came tumbling out of my mouth. Willa Sue snorted from across the room.

Aunt Carmen flipped to the inside back cover, where the library glued its card envelope and stamped the return dates for each book as it was checked out. She tapped the column of stamped dates with her fingernail.

“Let’s see,” she said. “It seems this book was checked out today, November eighteenth, Oscar!”

My mind was flying in circles of explanations, but none were needed.

Aunt Carmen squinted again at the stack of date stamps. “Interesting!” she said. “This book,
The Fireside Book of Poetry,
has been checked out of the Cairo Public Library every week since early fall this year. Hmm! Not one checkout before that for ten years. Early fall is when I began leaving you alone in this house. This must be your favorite book, Oscar. ‘If’ must be your favorite poem!”

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.