by Ann Rinaldi
As for my egg buying, I was used to Mrs. Schoenfeld, short and dumpy. Her house was cavernous and messy and dark. She was Jewish. She sang opera while she boxed the eggs for me. Everybody in operas either dies in the end or gets stabbed. My sister Mary says Mrs. Schoenfeld knows about sorrow, being Jewish. And that she has culture.
"One dozen?" Mrs. Leudloff asked.
"Yes, please."
She began to fill an egg carton. "How are your parents?"
"Fine, thank you."
"And school? Do you study hard?"
"Yes."
"Good. The new baby comes soon?"
"In late spring, I think." Oh, I knew Mary warned me not to tell her anything that goes on in our house. But what could I do? This lady was so cheerful.
"You want a brother or a sister?"
What I wanted had nothing to do with anything. I wanted bacon for breakfast, chocolate syrup in my milk, Mary Janes. I wanted Queenie back and Jennifer for a friend again. I would get none of these things, so what was the sense in wanting?
Besides, at home we never spoke of the baby, except for how we must take care of Amazing Grace. Its coming was a private matter. But Mrs. Leudloff was waiting for my answer.
"I'd like a little sister," I said.
She smiled. "Of course you would. I hear Queenie left."
"You know Queenie?"
"She came here for eggs once or twice. We became friends. I didn't think she'd stay at your house very long."
"My father is going to get someone else."
Her light blue eyes looked into mine. "Not Tony and Marie."
"Why?"
"They worked here once. I had to let them go. Now all I have is Mr. Jesco. But he's a good worker." She shook her head. "I don't usually say things against people. We must all learn to be kind to each other these days. Just tell your father, if he hires them, not to leave his children unsupervised."
I took the eggs and handed her the money.
"My, look at those chapped hands. Where are your mittens?"
"I lost them."
"Wait. I have an old pair around."
"No, ma'am, I couldn't."
"You wait!" She said it sternly.
I stood there in the cold yard. Rex was sitting in his fenced-in place, growling at me. I wanted to go. It was cold. I had another mile to walk yet. And I wanted to get home to listen to our radio programs. But Mrs. Leudloff had said to wait, and I was taught to obey.
The back door slammed again, and she came bouncing, out. "Here." She thrust a pair of blue mittens at me.
I looked at them in the same way I'd looked at the bacon at breakfast. "I couldn't take them," I said.
"Why? Nobody's using them."
I was confused. Why is she being so nice? I wondered. She isn't supposed to be nice. She's German, isn't she? I shook my head. "They wouldn't like it at home."
"So? Do you have to tell them?"
Not tell them? It was unthinkable. I didn't even know how to consider such a thing. "Thank you just the same," I said.
She put the mittens in her coat pocket. "Then have some candy." From her other pocket she took some wrapped taffy and hard candy. "Go ahead. All my customers get candy."
I accepted some, thanked her, and crept past Rex, who once again started to lunge at the white picket-fence enclosure.
"Don't be afraid, he wouldn't hurt you," she said.
I was not afraid. I was terrified. Somehow I got out the front gate and onto the road. She waved. I started to walk down the hill.
The candy was delicious. I felt so guilty eating it. I seldom got candy. But this I could keep from them at home. Because it would be gone before I got there. And I deserved something for putting up with Rex, didn't I?
I turned once, to look up at the house. I'd forgotten to listen for the shortwave radio!
"Maybe you'll take the mittens next time," she called out.
There would be no next time, candy or no candy, I told myself. Mrs. Schoenfeld couldn't stay away from the egg farm more than one day, even if her husband had hurt his eye. Only Mrs. Leudloff didn't know that.
CHAPTER 5
Hop Harrigan was just asking, on the radio, for clearance to land, when I came in the door.
His voice was calling the central tower on his plane's radio. The Ace of the Airwaves was starting another adventure. He and his pal, Tank Tinker, were always on dangerous missions behind enemy lines.
It's my job to make tea for Grace, my brothers, and myself when I get home from school. I hurried to the kitchen.
That's one good thing about Amazing Grace; she loves her afternoon tea. It's because she's English. At least that's what she tells us. Since her father is German and her mother Austrian, I don't know how she got to be English. But with the war, you never know.
People change with the war. Look at Kato, Britt Reid's houseboy on The Green Hornet. He was Japanese before the war. Now he's Filipino.
Amazing Grace was sitting in the dining room at her Singer sewing machine, putting the finishing touches on the jumper she was making for me. Martin and Tom were on the floor in front of the radio.
Amazing Grace had the water boiling and the toast in the toaster. I got out the butter and jam, put it all on a tray, managed to pour the water in the pot without burning my hands, and carried the tray to the dining-room table.
Amazing Grace watched as I set the tray down. She'd be on me in a minute if I spilled anything, slapping with her sharp hand. I was used to it. She was a stepmother, and stepmothers did that sort of thing. I was luckier than Snow White, after all. Her stepmother had ordered the huntsman to cut out her heart.
"Did you get the eggs?"
"Yes. I put them in the ice box."
"Well, Mr. Schoenfeld came home from the hospital this afternoon. He may be blind in one eye."
I didn't know what to say to that. She acted as if it was my fault. So I said nothing.
"So your father will want you to buy eggs from him. He'll need our business. Now have your tea, then go and change. I want you to peel potatoes for supper. I can't do everything around here, and your sisters don't get home until late."
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 hai
r 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.