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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