Keep Smiling Through (4 page)

I took my tea, toast, and jam and sat under the dining-room table. The lace cloth came halfway down, and I felt in a world of my own. The boys had grabbed their tea and toast and were glued to the radio.

Hop Harrigan was fighting madmen again. The world was full of madmen. They frothed at the mouth, they laughed like hyenas, and they plotted to take over the planet.

After Hop Harrigan came
Captain Midnight,
then
The Lone Ranger,
then
Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy.
There were plenty of madmen for all of them to handle.

That afternoon, however, my mind wasn't on Hop's problems but on my own. And by the time Glenn Riggs, the announcer, was reminding us at the end of the program to save and turn in waste fats and bring paper, tin, and rubber to the salvage depots, and how badly the Red Cross needed blood, I'd made up my mind.

I wouldn't tell anyone how Mrs. Leudloff
had given me candy. What I'd had that afternoon was an adventure.

Everybody was having adventures these days, from Captain Midnight to The Shadow. And one thing I'd noticed about them all: They had secrets. Things they didn't tell anybody.

Captain Midnight's job in the war was so important that not even his superiors knew his identity. The Shadow had a hypnotic power to cloud men's minds. He'd learned it in the Orient.

I have a right to an adventure
, I told myself.
And a secret.
Being a Catholic, I had to tell everything to the priest once a month, in confession. Secrets were forbidden to me.

But I hadn't stolen the candy, so I didn't do anything wrong. I had a real secret. For the first time in my life.

And Mrs. Leudloff had given it to me. The feeling was delicious. Almost as good as the candy.

Tony and Marie came to our back door that night just as Henry Aldrich's mother, on the radio, was calling him to come home. My sisters were listening in the dining room as they set their hair at the table.

One of Amazing Grace's rules was that none of us were allowed to stay in our bedrooms for anything but dressing and sleeping. "Anything else you can do right down here," she'd told Elizabeth and Mary. "I'm not going to have any girlish daydreaming in my house. It only leads to trouble."

We were allowed no privacy to think or read alone, any of us. Reading was a waste of time, Amazing Grace said. Idle hands were the devil's workshop.

So there were my sisters, with towels around their shoulders, setting their hair at the dining-room table, when Tony and Marie came into the kitchen to speak to my father.

Tom and Martin and I were on the stairs in the center hall, half listening to Henry Aldrich and half listening to the conversation in the kitchen.

"No drinking, Tony," I heard my father say. "I won't have drinking if you come work for me."

"I don't drink no more, mister," Tony said.

I could see him standing there with his hat in his hand, just like he'd done last Christmas Eve when he'd come to my father
and said, "Mister, I need to borrow some money. I have to buy my kids some presents."

"If you'd stop drinking..." my father had told him that day. Then he'd given Tony a lecture about drinking. I remember thinking that if Tony was my father I wouldn't want any presents if he had to listen to a lecture to get money to buy them.

"He needs money," Martin whispered to me. "I heard he was fired at the diner."

Tony washed dishes at the diner up on Route 6. He was very ragged. His eyes were red, and he wasn't shaved.

"Gosh all hemlock," I said.

"Will you stop talking like Betty on
Jack Armstrong?
" Tom complained.

Betty was the only girl in the cast of the show. I liked her because, like me, she was always waiting in agony for some important outcome.

"I'm afraid of Tony," I whispered to Tom. "He looks like an enemy of the free world. Are they going to live here?"

"Nah," Martin said. "They only live across the highway. They'll come every day."

Marie wore high-laced boots and layers of clothing. She didn't look as if she could tap dance.

"Kay, go get your teddy bear," Martin said.

"Not now, Martin."

"Go get him. I need a smoke."

Ope, my teddy bear, had a mouth that opened. Martin borrowed cigarettes from Amazing Grace and told her he put them in Ope's mouth to pretend the bear was smoking. Amazing Grace was awful stupid sometimes. She believed him.

Though Martin was only fourteen, he'd been smoking for two years already. He said that everybody who was grown up and important smoked. On
Your Hit Parade
, they told us how many cartons of cigarettes were sent to wounded soldiers in hospitals overseas. And how the new lucky Strike package would only be red and white now, because the green from the package had gone to war.

"Some night you're going to burn the house down," I told Martin. But I started upstairs to get Ope.

Later that night I lay in bed in my little room, staring at the ceiling and listening to the grown-up talk from below. Soon the conversation died down and I heard my father banking the fire in the kitchen stove and locking the doors.

"Go to sleep, girls," my father told my
sisters as he and Amazing Grace were coming up the stairs.

"After
Inner Sanctum
," Mary said.

And then I heard the squeaking door of
Inner Sanctum
and the announcer inviting my sisters through the squeaking door. Then he said something about werewolves and laughed crazily.

I wasn't afraid of werewolves, even though it was dark in my room. How could I be afraid of something they made up for radio programs when the world was full of madmen killing people? But I missed Ope, who was with Martin now. I missed Queenie, and I felt sad. The world was a sad place.

If it wasn't, I would have been allowed to take those mittens from Mrs. Leudloff so my hands wouldn't freeze. I would
have
new mittens, even though I'd lost my others.

I" hugged Mary Frances, my rubber baby doll. Mary had told me that my mother had held me only once before she'd died. "She had a long name picked out for you," Mary said. "But she said you were so little, she had to name you Kay."

Kay, not even Katherine. And Kay, not even with an E on the end.

"What was the name she had picked out?" I asked Mary.

But she said she didn't know. So it could be anything. It could be Victoria. Or Eugenia. Or Constance. Lovely names. I
would make a wonderful Constance,
I thought.

When I was seven I decided the name would have been Mary Frances. Two names, both strong and true. The girls in the Golden Band would respect me if my name were Mary Frances, I was sure of it. That was Francie's real name in
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
wasn't it?

So that was the name I'd given to my rubber baby doll. I fell asleep holding her tight.

I didn't have to peel potatoes when I got home from school anymore, now that Marie was in the kitchen. For the next few days I was freed from that task. In our house, for a short time, there was order, with Marie in the kitchen and Tony in the yard.

But only for a very short time.

On Saturday, Mary took me into town for shoes. All the way in on the number 4 bus, Mary read. She was always reading, though Amazing Grace didn't like it.

"What are you reading?" I asked. I don't like sitting on the bus with somebody and
having that somebody not talk to me. I do that all week with the public-high-school girls.

"
Great Expectations,
" she said. "It's by Charles Dickens."

"What's it about?"

"A little boy who gets treated very mean by an old lady."

"Why do you have to read that? We know all about being treated mean in our house."

Mary made her lips tight. "Don't talk bad about our family," she said.

"Well, there isn't anything good to say, is there?"

"Then don't say anything at all."

I kept quiet all the rest of the bus ride into town. Sometimes I just don't understand Mary. Amazing Grace is almost as bad to her as she is to the rest of us. But Mary won't complain. She won't talk against Amazing Grace, either. She pretends we're a happy family. Because that's the way she wants us to be. Pretending doesn't make it so. And I wonder if Mary knows that.

She fawns over Amazing Grace, too. Not that it gets her much more than the rest of us get. Mary isn't allowed to have bacon or
chocolate syrup, either. But Amazing Grace is a little nicer to her than she is to the rest of us.

Well, I don't care. I'm like Elizabeth. I won't fawn over anybody to get treated a little nicer. I'd rather be treated mean and say what I feel.

I got my Mary Janes that Saturday in town. Mary took me right into Carver's Department Store, where they have sparkling things behind glass counters. And salesladies in fluffy blouses. We walked through to the shoe department and right there, where I knew that Cathy Doyle and Amy Crynan got their Mary Janes, I got mine.

For once I didn't get Buster Brown oxfords. I couldn't believe it! The Mary Janes were so shiny, I could see my face in them. And when I walked across the carpet so the salesman could see how they fit, I felt as if I could tap-dance right there. I was so happy, I felt tears in my eyes. And I forgave Mary for fawning over Amazing Grace. Because if anybody could convince Amazing Grace that I should have these shoes, it was Mary. Nobody else.

Afterward, clutching the shoe box close, I
followed Mary while we shopped. We had some things to get for Amazing Grace. Then Mary took me to Hooper's Drugstore for an ice cream soda.

The sun shone warm that late March afternoon. The world seemed a bright bubble as I sat in a leather booth, looking out the clear glass window of Hooper's, and sipped my soda.

People were shopping for Easter, which was two weeks away. I would have Mary Janes for Easter!
Oh, Queenie,
I thought,
you were wrong! I
can
have Mary Janes! And I
will
be a tap dancer!

I didn't even mind that Mary didn't talk to me much but kept right on reading Charles Dickens while she sipped her coffee across the table from me. I was as close to being happy as I ever remember being in my life.

It didn't last.

I should have known it wouldn't last. The sky clouded over on the walk home from the bus stop. And when we got into the house, Amazing Grace and my father were just returning home from the market with the week's groceries.

Nothing put them both in a bad mood
more than shopping for groceries. Gloom descended over everything.

"Such money spent!" Amazing Grace was complaining. "And you children don't appreciate the fact that your father buys all this food for you. Did Elizabeth clean out the refrigerator?"

But Elizabeth was not to be found.

"Everything is so expensive! And we can't even get decent vegetables! I'm exhausted! Where's Marie?"

"She has the afternoon off," Martin said.

"Already?" Amazing Grace glared at me. "That lazy thing, taking a day off already. Nobody wants to work anymore."

I felt guilty. Surely, somehow it was all my fault—the high prices, the lack of vegetables, the unclean refrigerator, and the fact that nobody wanted to work anymore.

"Help your mother," my father scolded. Then he left the room, went across the hall into his library, and closed the door.

We all jumped into action. Martin ran for the rest of the grocery bags. Mary put on the kettle for tea. I started to put some boxes of dry food away, and Tom took the milk pail and went out to milk the cow.

"What's in the package?" Amazing Grace said, eyeing my shoe box on the chair.

"Kay's new shoes," Mary said.

"Well, I hope they fit right. They have to last. Let me see them."

From the stove, Mary half turned to look at me. "Open the box," she said. But her voice was dead when she said it, and my heart sank.

I'd thought Mary would make everything all right with the shoes. She could always get around Amazing Grace. Why was her voice so dead? She wouldn't let me down, would she? Not Mary! She could always work some kind of magic with our stepmother.

Amazing Grace untied the string and took off the lid. Then she gasped. "Mary Janes! Why Mary Janes?"

Mary was getting the tea out of the pantry. "Easter is coming. She's a little girl."

Amazing Grace scowled. Her mouth dropped at the corners. Her eyes went narrow. "You begged Mary for these, didn't you?" she said to me.

I didn't answer.

She grabbed me by the arms then and shook me. "I'll give you Mary Janes," she said angrily. "Your father works so hard. I
give up so much. And you think you're going to wear Mary Janes?"

But I couldn't answer, she was shaking me so hard.

"Who do you think you
are
that you should wear Mary Janes?" She growled it at me. Like Rex the dog.

"Mother, don't!" Mary cried. "It was my fault, not hers."

"Go clean out the refrigerator!" she ordered.

Mary did so.

"Who?" Amazing Grace screamed it.

"Nobody." I got the word out finally. "I'm nobody."

Satisfied, she released me and slammed the cover down on the box. "Mary, you're to take these shoes back. Next Saturday. And get brown oxfords. Do you hear?"

"Yes, Mother," Mary said meekly.

"Go set the table for supper!" Amazing Grace shoved me.

I went, sobbing. How could the beautiful bubble that had been my afternoon have broken so? Worse yet, how could I have been deceived by it, and think it wouldn't?

Things started to go real wrong from that Saturday on. And I guess Queenie was right. I never should have gotten those Mary Janes. Bad things would happen if I did.

First, Tony turned up missing. There was no real connection between him and my shoes, but the way I was thinking, I figured there must be.

It happened Monday after school. Amazing Grace was napping; Marie was in the kitchen preparing supper. I went into the dining room to join my brothers at the radio.

"Where's Martin?" I asked Tom.