Keep Smiling Through (8 page)

The house was very quiet. Mary and Elizabeth had gone off to work. Nana and Amazing Grace were still sleeping.

Grandpa was up, and I made his breakfast. First he had his orange, then one egg, some toast, and black coffee.

I sat waiting to put the egg in the boiling water. It must be boiled no longer than three
minutes. He is very exact about everything. Mary Frances sat on a chair next to me in her new dress.

I watched him eat his orange. First he peels it, then takes it apart carefully and eats one piece at a time. But that isn't the interesting part.

The interesting part is the way he mumbles to himself while he eats it. He carries on a whole conversation with himself. Never mind that I am right there in the room.

He seems to be arguing with somebody over something. And it is the same argument every morning. Finally now, however, he finished, and looked at me and smiled.

"Is it time to put the eggs in the water?" I asked. I was going to have an egg, too.

"Ya, put them in."

I did so. Then I put the toast in the toaster and sat back down. He timed the eggs in his head. He knew when the three minutes were up.

"That's a nice dolly you've got there," he said while we were waiting.

Mary Frances was considerably more than a dolly, but I said thank you just the same.

"What's her name?"

"Mary Frances."

"That's a long name."

"It was supposed to be mine," I said.

He scowled.

So I told him then how my mother had a long name picked out for me. And I didn't know what it was. But I decided it should have been Mary Frances.

"That name doesn't suit you," he said.

"But I'd be a better person with such a name."

"What's wrong with how you are now?"

I shrugged. Everything was wrong with me. Couldn't he see that? "I'd like to be like Betty Fairfield on the
Jack Armstrong
program. She's always having adventures. And her father takes her everywhere with her brother, Billy, and her cousin Jack. I always have to stay home."

He listened with great interest. "I thought you wanted to be a tap dancer. Like Shirley Temple."

I blushed. Mary must have told him this. I'd confided it to her the day she'd bought me the Mary Janes. But since all the trouble with the Mary Janes, all the bad feeling, and since we'd had to return them, I was turned against tap dancing.

I decided I'd much rather be Betty Fairfield,
who wore a luminous bracelet and went around the world on jaunts with her father, who never scolded and only spoke up when important decisions had to be made.

"This afternoon I'll take you for ice cream," Grandpa said. "Don't you want ice cream?"

"Yes," I said politely. But how could I tell him that Betty went in the
Silver Albatross,
her kindly father's hydroplane, to places like Africa or the Andes?

I couldn't even go with my brothers to see the Brooklyn Dodgers play.

It was a warm April. By afternoon the sun was actually hot. I felt its warmth on my back as I followed Grandpa on the path through the fields in back of our house. It was a long walk, but I didn't mind. I felt like Betty Fairfield, hacking through the jungles of the Philippines.

Nana had been napping when we left. She and Grandpa had argued once again about his taking me to Ernie's.

"Don't go, Grandpa, please," she'd begged. There was fear in her voice. "Bad things will happen."

"Bah," he told her. "Be quiet. You're getting old, woman."

So Nana got quiet and went to her room to nap.

Amazing Grace was sewing my feed-bag dress on her Singer.

Why didn't Nana want him to go? What bad thing could happen on a sun-filled day in the country? Maybe Nana was listening to too many radio programs, I thought. She liked her radio, too.

Her favorite was
The Adventures of the Thin Man.
Nick and Nora Charles were the happiest, merriest married couple in radio. Nick was a private eye who was always coming upon dead bodies.

Did Nana think we'd come upon dead bodies in the fields behind our house? All we came upon were chirping birds, droning bees, and a sun that seemed to have stopped in its tracks as we walked along the path that mid-April afternoon.

Well, if we came on a dead body, I'd know what to do, all right. I'd act just like Betty and track down the criminals before they got away. No, I didn't have a luminous bracelet, but Martin had given me his magic pedometer again that morning. I guess he felt sorry for me because I couldn't go to Brooklyn.

I got my ice cream. Strawberry. Two scoops.

Ernie's is a pretty place. It's a roadside stand where you can get good sandwiches, root beer, the real kind of beer for grown-ups, and ice cream. It has a small lake out back where there are picnic tables.

Grandpa set my ice cream down on a picnic table and told me he was going to talk to his friend. "Will you be all right?"

How could I not be all right? It was a sunny day, I had just been bought ice cream, and there were ducks on the lake, and a couple of picnicking families at other tables.

Better yet, Amazing Grace was nowhere in sight to tell me I wasn't holding my spoon right or I was eating too fast. I was in heaven. "Yes," I said.

He went off to see his friend, and I ate my ice cream. I took my time finishing it, walked down to the lake, watched the ducks for a while, and walked back to my table again.

Grandpa had been gone an awful long time. I decided to go and see if he was okay.

I came around to the side of Ernie's just in time to hear Grandpa talking through the little window where you give your order.

"So how is he doing, then?" he was asking. "Is he making a new Germany?"

I couldn't see Ernie's face on the other
side of the window, but I could hear his voice.

"He is trying, but it isn't easy, with the war. My friend Hauptmann writes that our people back there are suffering. Not enough to eat. They work long, hard hours, and the Americans are bombing the factories."

"Hauptmann?" Grandpa asked.

"Ya," the voice from behind the window said. "He used to be a professor at Rutgers. He is now back in the Fatherland, in charge of cultural interests for the Third Reich."

Grandpa said something then, but I did not hear it. All I heard was a buzzing in my ears and the pounding of my own heart.

They are talking about Hitler. And Germany,
I thought.

They are talking about how the German people are suffering! And a man named Hauptmann, who does something for the Third Reich!

Grandpa cares about these people? He asked how Hitler was doing with his new Germany! How can he care?

The sun felt so hot on my head! My palms were sweating. My knees were weak.

How can they be talking about such things, right here at Ernie's where strawberry ice cream
is served to people and there are ducks swimming in the lake?

"Hauptmann has sent me pamphlets," the voice behind the window went on. "They tell of the wonders of the new Germany. He wants me to distribute them. Will you take some back to Brooklyn?"

"Let me see one," Grandpa said.

A paper was shoved through the window. Grandpa took it and looked at it briefly.

All I could think of for one terrible moment was,
I'm behind enemy lines. I must do something.

But what?

I tried to speak. I wanted to scream out, "No, don't take it," like Mary did when Uncle Hermie offered the coupons to my father. But just as I was about to do so, there came a squeal of brakes as a car pulled up in front and raised dust on the gravel.

At the same time, Grandpa folded the paper, then turned, saw me standing there, and scowled. "What are you doing here? Didn't I tell you to stay at the table?"

"Yes."

"Then what are you doing here? Can't you obey?"

He was angry. But before his anger could
grow, some tough-looking men in city suits and ties and fedora hats came up behind him. "Out of the way, old man. We want to talk with Ernie here."

Grandpa stood aside.

They went up to the window. "So, this is the Nazi hideaway in New Jersey, is it?" they taunted. "Are you Ernie?"

The voice from behind the window said yes. "But I'm no Nazi."

"That's not what we hear," one of the three men said. They looked like G-men from
Gang Busters,
which comes on Friday nights, sponsored by Sloan's Liniment. Their tires had screeched just like on the show. But they had no machine guns.

"We hear you have Bund rallies here," one of the men said.

"No Bund rallies," came the voice from behind the window.

"No? We hear you kicked a man out of here last week because he was wearing the uniform of a United States soldier."

"He was drunk," the voice behind the window said. "This is a family place."

"Family place, is it? I'll just bet," said another of the three men. "Picnicking, beer drinking, marching. A German boot camp,
is what we hear. Do you have uniformed camp police and kids like Hitler's youth in brown shirts?"

At that moment Grandpa turned to me. "Kay, go back to the picnic table."

But I just stood there frozen. You didn't run when you were behind enemy lines or fighting evil. Did Jack Armstrong and Betty run when they were trapped in the Cave of the Mummies?

"Kay! Go. Now! What's the matter with you?"

When Grandpa was upset or angry, his German accent became stronger. So he didn't say "What's the matter with you?" He said, "Vat's the matter mit you?"

Mistake.

The three men turned to look at him. "You a Hitler lover too, mister?"

Grandpa stood his ground. He didn't back off. "No, no," he said, only it came out, "
Nein, nein.
"

If that wasn't enough, the paper in Grandpa's hand was. "What's this?" one of the men grabbed it, read it quickly. "Look at this, boys," he said to his companions. "Nazi propaganda."

One of them grabbed Grandpa roughly by
the sleeve. "What do you two have going here?" they demanded. "A Hitler rally? Don't you know New Jersey passed an anti-Nazi law nine years ago?"

Grandpa's face got red. He tried to pull away. "Leave me be," he said. He started to struggle.

Fear gripped me. It overcame me like nothing I had ever known before.

The man who was holding Grandpa shook him roughly.

"No!" I screamed.

Before I could do anything else, they pushed him to the ground. He went down, hard. I heard the smack of his head as it hit the ground. Heard him say "Oof" as the breath went out of him.

"Grandpa!" I ran to him.

Some women from the picnic tables out back came to see what was going on, saw him go down, and screamed. "Who are you people?" one woman asked the three men. "How dare you come here and rough up the patrons! Elsie, call the police!"

"We're leaving, lady," one of the men said.

The woman named Elsie was at the outside phone already. Ernie was shutting his little window. The three men started to
leave. Before they did one of them picked up a stone and threw it at the window.

Glass shattered. Two other women screamed. Some men came running from the picnic tables. A child with one of the women started to cry.

I'd heard glass shatter on
Gang Busters.
The program starts with a window breaking, a police siren, a burglar alarm going off, and then machine guns firing and tires screeching.

But the sound of this broken glass, together with that child crying and the women screaming, was like nothing I had ever heard before in my life.

I knelt beside Grandpa. The side of his head was bleeding. I didn't know what to do. "Grandpa," I cried. "Grandpa."

"The police are coming," the woman by the phone said.

The three men had stood as if frozen, too, by the whole crazy scene. At the word "police" they ran to their car with the New York plates. So I knew they weren't G-men.

They got into the car, fast. I got up and ran over to the front of the building. Just before they pulled away I saw the license plate.

735-RU-6.

I sealed the number in my head, the way Betty Fairfield would do. Then I went back to Grandpa as the car careened away, raising dust on the gravel.

By now Grandpa was sitting up. Ernie was standing over him. One of the women had a towel and ice. Two men customers helped him to his feet and another brought over a chair. They sat him down.

"Let me do it," I said to Ernie as he was about to put the ice, wrapped in a towel, on Grandpa's head. I was shaking.

"Hold the ice on his head, there's a good girl," a woman said to me. I did so. I just sat there holding that ice up to his head while he kept saying he was fine and the other customers stood around talking about hoodlums and hecklers and how they didn't know what the world was coming to.

I was still sitting there holding the ice on his head when the police arrived.

"Go home, Kay," Grandpa said.

"I want to stay with you."

I stayed while the police questioned Ernie. They knew him. "The same crowd as last time?" one officer asked Ernie.

He said yes. "I'm getting sick and tired of
it. A man can't make a decent living anymore without being accused of being a Nazi."

It was then that I saw the pamphlet on the ground behind Grandpa's chair. I got up while everyone was watching the police, and I picked the pamphlet up and put it in my dress pocket.

The police came over to Grandpa. They asked him his name and what had started the trouble. They asked if he could identify any of the men or the car.

"I have the license-plate number," I told them.

They smiled down at me. "Smart little girl," one said. "What is it?"

I gave it to them.

Grandpa just sat there, dazed. He didn't say anything, except that he didn't want any trouble. No, he didn't want to press charges. He just wanted to go home.

"I'm afraid we can't let you do that, mister," one of the officers said. "That head doesn't look so good. I'm afraid we're going to have to take you to the hospital for a look-see.

The way they said "look-see" was real nice. Like Uncle Jim would say it on
Jack Armstrong.