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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