The Moffat Museum (13 page)

"I keep thinking it's Neufchâtel like the cheese," said Mrs. Price.

"I'll tell Sylvie that when I get there," said Jane, laughing. "But in this rehearsal, and way before the cheese station, well, me and Joey haven't even gotten to the Cranbury Station yet. When we do, the eight-fifteen will come along and, being a local, it will stop! A gush of steam will rush up from underneath. That always scares me, and that is one reason we're having this rehearsal right now, to practice not being scared."

"Want me to make a sound like a gush of steam coming up from under a train?" asked Mrs. Price.

"No, thank you," said Jane. "I'm practicing not being scared. I know what the steam sounds like, thank you all the same. Oh, you should have reminded me ... the ticket? Do I have a ticket? No. Joey and me will buy the ticket while we wait for the eight-fifteen, round-trip ticket, going to Neufchâtel and coming home."

"New Rochelle!" said Mrs. Price. "I'll have to give you an A minus if you don't get it straight in this geography lesson."

"Well, while the steam is gushing forth, with my ticket in my hand, I must get up those high steps. They must make the steps of trains for six-feet-high people like Judge Bell and Sam Doody, not little boys and girls. But Joey will give me a boost, a shove, and he will push my satchel in after me ... my nightgown and things, my pink dress. The train stops for only about a minute. I have a new nightgown."

Mrs. Price nodded. "That's nice," she said. "A nightgown!"

"You didn't think I was coming back the same day, did you? Well, I'm not. 1 am staying one solid week!"

Mrs. Price nodded. "A long stay. I'll miss you."

What a listener!
marveled Jane. But who wouldn't listen to such a story, a story that hadn't even happened yet! "Well, so now I am on the train and I stay on the train until I get to..."

"New Rochelle!" interrupted Mrs. Price, who was proud of her fine memory.

"Yes!" said Jane triumphantly. "But there, there will be many trolleys at the station to choose from, and I must find the one that says 'South Third Street.' Mama says it will be going north, but it will be marked 'South.' Coming home, back to the station, the sign makes more sense because we
will
be coming south."

"Lazy," observed Mrs. Price. "Can't even change the south to north."

"Perhaps the trolley people in New Rochelle are not as smart as the trolley people in Cranbury, where they change Savin Rock to Lighthouse Point or vice versa. Mrs. Price, have you ever heard of South Third Street in New Rochelle?" Jane had to speak a little louder now because Mrs. Price and her basket of wet clothes were moving farther and farther down the clothesline.

Mrs. Price heard, though. She shook her head ruefully. "And I'm supposed to be the teacher ... the geography teacher..."

"Don't mind," Jane pleaded. "Probably nobody else I know ever heard of it, either. And maybe the people in New Rochelle never heard of Ashbellows Place in Cranbury. 'Vice versa,' as Rufus would say. Has that struck you?"

"Well, the way you put it, it struck me now," said Mrs. Price.

"Well, me neither, until Sylvie moved there. Then, coming home, one week from tomorrow, I do the whole thing backward."

"Just like that trolley car that goes south or goes north," said Mrs. Price.

"Well ... sorta," said Jane.

"I think you're smart. If I am your pretend teacher, I give you an A. Forget the minuses. Any little girl that can go to a foreign town and take a trolley marked south when it means north deserves an A plus. Have a nice time! Maybe you will send me a postcard?"

"O-o-o-h my, yes!" said Jane. "Maybe I'll send you two." She thought a moment. "I'll send postcards to everybody on Ashbellows Place besides my brothers and Mama."

"A week of writing postcards, sounds like," said Mrs. Price.

"I write fast," said Jane.

"You'll see wonders," said Mrs. Price. She had finished hanging up her clothes now. She picked up the empty wicker basket. She was going to go indoors.

Jane, who had slid along the fence, even picking her way through the rosebushes carefully so she would not get scratched, didn't want to lose Mrs. Price, have her go in. She slid her way rapidly back to the end near Mrs. Price's back door. Mrs. Price already had one foot up on the bottom step and was now reaching for the handle of the screen door.

"Wait! Please wait, Mrs. Price. There is one thing that bothers me..."

"Worse them the gush of steam?" asked Mrs. Price.

"Well, different," said Jane. "I don't know what to do about packing, when to do it. What would you do? This has nothing to do with geography anymore. It's just an ordinary question. If ... if you were me, what would you do? Would you pack tonight and then go to bed, and everything, your satchel and your pocketbook, would be ready when you got up? Or would you go to bed early, get a good night's sleep, get up early when you hear a rooster crow, cock-a-doodle-do, and then pack?"

Mrs. Price put her wicker basket down on the top step.
So she can think better,
Jane imagined.

Mrs. Price then said, "Well, I've thought it over, Jane. What I think the wise thing to do, if it were me, not you, traipsin' all down the track, is to get all my packing done tonight and not listen for the rooster. Not taking a big trunk anyway, are you? Like I have in my attic?"

"No," said Jane. "It's a little straw satchel."

"No matter what. Trunk ... little straw satchel ... paper bag, I know if it were me, I would pack tonight. Then, in the morning, nothing to it but eat your breakfast, tie your satchel on the back of Joey's bike, put yourself on the crossbar, sideways ... tuck in your skirt so it don't get caught in the spokes ... and you and Joe go, just plain go, to the Cranbury depot. Step one in the geography lesson. How's that?"

"Yes," said Jane. "I think you are right. That's what I tended to think would be right, too. Well, two heads are better than one, right, Mrs. Price?"

"Depends on the heads," declared Mrs. Price. "And don't worry about your museum. I'll keep an eye on it if the boys aren't around. I might, just for fun, get into the sleigh before Mr. Price gets home. Then he'll say, 'Aggie! What the dickens!' seeing me over there in the sleigh. You can be sure, Jane, nobody is going to come in and steal some artifact—my old easel or anything—while you are away!"

"Good!" said Jane. "But, remember, it is free..."

"Right," said Mrs. Price. "But," she added ruefully, "I thought it would have been nice to sit up there with a little tin cup ... not charge to go into the museum, but just collect a penny or two for the starving people of Armenia, or anywhere..."

"Well, maybe you should do that down at the Green, not in our museum sleigh. More people down there. Anyway, Joey or Rufus will be around most of the time. So, so long, Mrs. Price. I may not see you again before I go."

Mrs. Price picked up her basket and waved to Jane as though Jane were already on her train pulling out of the depot.

Jane went indoors, too. For a while she stood in her room, and she didn't know quite what to do between now and evening ... packing time. Why wait for evening? Why not now? She had never packed a satchel with enough clothes to last one whole week, just a small amount of things for a day at the beach or up on Peter's Rock.

So she spread out on her bed everything she was going to take. She laid them beside the satchel. Then she put on a chair the clothes she was going to wear. She whitened her canvas slippers, including the narrow strap across the instep. And she washed and dried her comb. Now all was ready for filling the satchel.

She went back outdoors. She tidied up the museum. She jumped rope, played hopscotch, went to the corner to watch the trolley cars and raced one to the library at the next corner and won. What next?

Would the day ever come to an end? Finally it did. Dinner was over. Mama lit the little gas jet on the wall so Jane could see what she was doing. Mama said she would put it out when Jane had finished.

So now to pack! Jane packed her satchel and unpacked it and packed it again. Sometimes she put her pink dress on top, sometimes her nightgown. She finally left it with her nightgown on top. She fastened the two clasps. They didn't seem very strong. She got a cord from the kitchen and tied it around the satchel, so neither her nightgown nor her pink dress would go flying out the train window.

She put her little red patent leather pocketbook on the chair beside the blue dress she would wear. It had some nickels, some dimes, and a one-dollar bill in it, also a little envelope that had the exact amount of money to buy her ticket to and from the town of New Rochelle. She had a handkerchief in her pocketbook with her name embroidered in the corner, a birthday present from her aunt Tonty. If she saw a sad sight, or a funny one, both of which could make her tears flow, she could wipe her eyes.

Then she went to bed. Mama came up, turned off the gaslight, and put the littlest oil lamp on a bureau in the hall, where it always stayed on during the night in case anyone was afraid of the dark. Jane used to be, but not anymore.

She thought about the day. She thought about her conversation over the back fence with Mrs. Price ... the rehearsal for the big day tomorrow, as they had gone over it. Finally she went to sleep while still rehearsing and going over in her mind the stops on the train between Cranbury and Neufchâtel ... no ... New Rochelle....

Would the real trip tomorrow be as had been rehearsed?

In the beginning, Jane's trip on the eight-fifteen went exactly as she and Mrs. Price had practiced it yesterday in their conversation over the back fence. She woke up when the sun rose and the rooster crowed.

There was bound to be a surprise or two, especially for someone like Jane who had never before gone on a train all by herself. She felt excited and happy. No wonder people liked to travel, going somewhere, anywhere, to a near or faraway place. She dressed quickly, put on her blue dotted-Swiss dress, her shoes, and her socks, and sat down on the front porch. She had her satchel beside her. On top of it, she put her little red patent-leather pocketbook and her white piqué hat, with its make-believe red cherries around it.

She seemed to be the only person up anywhere. Dew sparkled on the grass. The trees and bushes looked brighter and fresher than usual. How sweet was the smell of honeysuckle on the fences, how pungent the smell of the hop vines growing by the porch! She rocked back and forth, back and forth, in the green wicker rocker, waiting for the sound of someone indoors waking up.

At last, there were sounds of stirring and the smell of Mama's coffee brewing on the stove! Then time spun as rapidly as the needle of a compass if you turned it this way and that. She went in, had some Post Toasties, and now the trip was about to commence!

Joey tied her satchel to the back carrier behind the seat of his bike; Jane kissed Mama good-bye, got on the crossbar, and with a wave to the whole of Ashbellows Place, she and Joey were off. She was on her way to the Cranbury depot, the first leg of the journey, to get herself on the eight-fifteen.

Joey was riding lickety-split because he wanted to be under the bridge when the Bankers' Express roared by above it. Jane didn't like noise and, thank goodness, the express streaked by just before Joey reached the bridge. So now Jane and Joey rode under the quiet bridge and up the pebbly slope to the depot.

The depot was a small brown clapboard building. Jane thought it looked like a cute little house to live in. That's what the pigeons thought, too. There was a cupola on top, and now the pigeons settled themselves on it, recovering from the unsettling occurrence of having the Bankers' Express go whizzing by. Beady-eyed, they surveyed the tracks for a crumb or two.

Jane hopped off the bike. Joey unstrapped her satchel, and they went in to buy her ticket. The station had a musty smell of stale tobacco and other stale smells from years long gone by.

A man in a shiny dark blue coat was standing behind the window. "Ticket? Where to?"

Breathlessly Jane said, "I'd like a round-trip ticket to New Rochelle. Have you heard of it?"