Keep Smiling Through

by Ann Rinaldi

  And she looked at Nana and the boys, who were standing in the kitchen doorway, gaping.

  "Get the strap behind the kitchen door," she told them.

  She kept one of my father's old belts there. And used it on us when she got very angry.

  Nobody moved but me.

  "No," I said. And I began to run. But she grabbed me by my braids and dragged me through the hall.

  "I said get the strap!" she yelled.

  "Grace, don't excite yourself," Nana said.

  "Don't excite myself? I'm already excited. Thanks to this little demon." And she dragged me by my braids through the kitchen to the back door.

  "No!" Martin ran to her. "Don't hit her. She did what was right."

  She hit Martin in the face. Then she grabbed the strap and started hitting me with it with one hand while she held me by my braids with the other.

  "There, and there, and there," she said, swinging the strap. "Now we'll see how brave and smart you are."

  "No, no!" Martin was yelling. And he tried to grab the strap from her. A few times he got hit for his trouble.

  Tom was crying, "Stop it, stop it!" She'd hit him enough times with the strap for him to know how it felt.

  It felt bad. It felt like someone was burning me with hot irons, on my back and shoulders and legs. I screamed. I thrashed. "No, no, stop!" I cried.

  But she didn't stop.

  It was Nana who finally stopped her. "Grace. Stop it! Now!"

  Nana stepped into the fray. She even got caught once with the strap herself. "Grace, stop it. This is not how I raised you. What's the matter with you? Grace, you'll hurt yourself. You'll hurt the baby."

  That stopped her. She let me go." And I ran. I ran out the back door, across the driveway and lawns, through the fields, and down to the brook. I ran, crying and hurting and sore.

  I ran, and I was not brave.

  I'd known she would be mad. And I'd promised myself to be brave. Like Hop Harrigan is behind enemy lines. Like Betty Fairfield when she went with Jack Armstrong and her father, chopping their way through the Philippine jungles. Like Superman, standing up for truth, justice, and the American way, and like Britt Reid, who fights all people who try to destroy America.

  But when my time came to be brave, I was just a screaming little girl, begging Amazing Grace to stop, and running scared through the fields.

  She'd ruined it all, all the good I tried to do to keep America safe. The good feeling I'd had about doing right was gone. She'd killed it. The reporter had been wrong. I wasn't smart and brave. I was dirty and hurting and ashamed.

  And worst of all, the magic pedometer hadn't saved me.

  CHAPTER 17

  I stayed down by the brook all afternoon. I took off my blouse and washed myself by dipping it into the clear water. My legs and shoulders and back hurt so. The whole world hurt.

  It was full of treachery, evil, and betrayal. I'd tried to do right and fight for truth and justice, and it didn't work.

  On all our radio programs, doing what's right works for the heroes and heroines. They always win their battles against evil.

  I'd lost. It was probably my fault somehow, I was sure of it. I'd done something wrong. I'd missed some clue that I probably would go on missing forever. I was useless.

  I hung my blouse on a tree limb to dry. Then, because it hadn't been any good to me anyway, I took off the magic pedometer and set it down on a rock, and sat down to think.

  I would never go back to the house. I decided that while I was still crying. I would live down here by the brook. I'd get Martin and Tom to bring me sandwiches and water and a blanket. If I went back, Amazing Grace would make life more miserable for me than it already was.

  By the time I stopped crying, I decided that wasn't a good plan. It was a better idea to run away.

  Amazing Grace had run away once. She'd had a fight with my father, and I'd stood in her bedroom watching her put on her Coty powder and her Tangee lipstick, and patting her hair and looking at herself in the large oval mirror of her dressing table.

  "I'm running away," she'd said.

  "Can I go with you?"

  She said yes and so we walked all the way up our road, the River Road, to Route 6. Then we started walking north. I was very excited about the idea of running away. I didn't worry about where we would live or how. It was the idea of running away that was the important thing.

  More important, Amazing Grace had taken me with her!

  But then, before we'd walked too far, my father came by in the car and asked her to come home. Amazing Grace got into the car and made me get in, too.

  I was so disappointed in her. She hadn't really wanted to run away. All she wanted was for my father to come after her. But then something else disappointed me more. "I don't mind that you ran away," my father said to her, "but did you have to take Kay?"

  "Yes," she answered. "To make you worry more."

  It was then that I realized that Amazing Grace hadn't taken me with her because she wanted me. But because she wanted to hurt my father.

  I was thinking I'd do the same thing, just walk up River Road and head north on Route 6, when I saw Martin walking through the fields toward me. I got up and put on my blouse. Because Sister Brigitta said a girl should always be modest.

  "Nana said you should come home," Martin said. He'd brought water and bread with peanut butter on it.

  "I'm not ever coming home again. I'm going to run away."

  "Where?"

  "I don't know. It doesn't matter. I'm sure nobody would care or come after me."

  "Me and Tom would care. You can't do that."

  "Why?"

  He thought for a moment. "Because you wouldn't be able to listen to Hop Harrigan again. He and Tank Tinker are still in that Japanese prison camp. And the Nazis are going to try to kill Superman with kryptonite tonight."

  "I don't care about all that anymore," I told him.

  His eyes went wide. "You don't care about our radio programs?"

  "No. They're all phony."

  Martin was unbelieving. "How can you say that?"

  "I can. All those people like Superman and Hop Harrigan and Jack Armstrong are only stories. They tell us to be brave and tell the truth and fight evil and keep on punching. Well, it didn't work this afternoon for me. I tried to do the right thing and look what happened."

  Martin did the only thing he knew how to do when things got too much for him. He took out a cigarette, lighted it, and began to smoke. I ate my peanut-butter bread and drank my water.

  "Nana says you did the right thing," he said finally.

  My ears perked up. "Nana? I thought she'd be mad at me."

  "No. She says she told Grandpa to stay away from that place. And to stop talking about the old Germany. She says there is no more Germany and, la, Grandpa is a fool sometimes. And maybe now he'll learn his lesson."

  Tears came to my eyes. Nana. She'd stand by me. I had a brief feeling of hope. Nana was a good person to have around. Like Tonto on The Lone Ranger.

  No, I must stop thinking about my radio programs. All they'd done was get me into trouble.

  "What's my pedometer doing on that rock?" Martin asked.

  I picked it up and handed it to him. "You can have it back. It doesn't work. If it did, it would have protected me from Amazing Grace. I don't believe in it anymore. Take it."

  Martin regarded it solemnly. "You have to believe in it for it to work," he said.

  "Well, I don't anymore, so take it." Then I had another thought. "Daddy will kill me when he comes home. I upset Amazing Grace," I said.

  "No, he doesn't want trouble. You know how he hates trouble. And Nana says she'll talk to him."

  "But he lets Amazing Grace get away with everything. Why does he do that?"

  "He has to," Martin said.

  "Why?"

  "He has to keep peace."

  "Well, I'm still not coming home. Daddy won't care. The only one he cares about is Amazing Grace."

  Mart
in looked at me with his brown, steady gaze. "I'm going to tell you something now, to prove you're wrong," he said. "If you believe me, you must promise to come home. But even if you don't believe me, you have to promise never to let anybody know I told you. Okay?"

  I promised.

  "You know how he takes us to Coney Island whenever we go to Nana's on a Saturday? And how you always cry because he won't take you?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, we don't go to Coney Island."

  I felt something coming. Something big and powerful, like a locomotive, rushing right at me. "Where do you go?"

  "On a secret mission," Martin said.

  I believed him. He wasn't lying. The look on his face told me he wasn't. He was about to tell me something that would explain everything and make things all right again. "What kind of secret mission?"

  "We go and visit Mother's grave."

  The world got softer all of a sudden. The hard edges softened, the sense of evil lifted, and I felt hope instead of betrayal.

  "You go to Mother's grave?" I whispered.

  "Yes. She's buried in Brooklyn. Daddy puts flowers on it. He gives us each one and we put them on it, too."

  I was silent for a long time. So was Martin. He finished his cigarette and threw it into the brook. "So now will you come home?"

  I said yes. And I went home, walking back across the fields to that house where Amazing Grace held sway over us all, like some kind of evil goddess.

  Or thought she did. But now I knew she didn't. Because she didn't have all of my father's loyalty. I knew that now.

  In a corner of his heart, he still loved my mother. As long as I knew that, I could go on.

  At the end of the field, Martin turned to me and held out the pedometer. "You keep it," he said, "it's yours."

  I knew how much it meant to him. "No, I don't want it. I told you, it's no good to me."

  "The magic isn't in the pedometer," he said. "All it does is bring out the good things in the person who wears it."

  "Like what?"

  "Courage and good luck and faith."

  "I don't have any of those things."

  "Yes, you do," he said. "Just keep it. Some people don't know they have these things. After a while, when you know, you can give it back to me."

  I hesitated.

  "Maybe it's worked for you already," he said, "and you just don't know it."

  I thought of Rex that morning. And how he could have killed me and didn't. Had it worked for me already?

  I grinned. "All right," I said. And I took it.

  When my father got home that night, Amazing Grace had taken to her bed. He came down from their room, grim faced.

  "The child wasn't to blame," Nana told him in the kitchen.

  He looked at me. Then he looked at Martin and Tom. "Just be very quiet, all of you, the next few days. Kay, you'd better stay out of her way."

  "I'll keep Kay busy," Nana said.

  He was happy with that. We had supper and he said no more about it.

  CHAPTER 18

  Sunday came, the last day of our Easter vacation, the day the story about me was to be in the newspaper.

  Early in the morning I heard a noise.

  Amazing Grace was yelling.

  "John, oh, John," she was saying, "do something!"

  Their voices came from downstairs.

  I sat up in bed. Had I been dreaming? I looked across the room. Elizabeth's and Mary's beds were empty. I heard men's voices downstairs. I got up, put on my robe, and crept out into the hallway.

  Strange men were in the house. They were carrying Amazing Grace through the hall on a stretcher.

  "John!" she was wailing.

  Mary, Elizabeth, Martin, and Tom were downstairs. Mary was crying. Elizabeth stood next to her. They were both in robes and slippers.

  "It will be all right, children," Nana was saying. "Come into the kitchen."

  They followed her into the kitchen. "It's too early," Mary was saying. "It's too early."

  They took Amazing Grace away in the ambulance. I thought Mary was saying it was too early in the morning. I didn't understand until that night what she was really talking about.

  The story about me was in the Sunday Waterville Times, but nobody even bothered to read it. I sneaked a look at it when everyone else was busy.

  The reporter wrote that I was "a sad-looking little girl who looked like Margaret O'Brien and had the courage to come out and speak about what she thought was wrong, even though it involved a member of her family."

  Courage! He said I had courage! Was it like Martin said, then? That sometimes you didn't know you had it?

  I read further. The reporter had written that I spoke up about the pamphlet for my friend's brother, who'd gone down when his ship was torpedoed. I'd forgotten that I'd told him that.

  The rest of it was about German Americans in this country, how they are persecuted and how Ernie's place would probably lose its liquor license. And Ernie had been taken in for questioning for giving out the pamphlets.

  It said the hecklers had been arrested. But that Grandpa was innocent of all wrongdoing. He was only an old man concerned about his old country, it said. Not a Nazi sympathizer. Nazi sympathizers had been convicted before in our state, and the New Jersey Supreme Court had overturned their conviction because it violated the New Jersey Constitution.

  I didn't understand it all. But I breathed a sigh of relief that Grandpa wouldn't be arrested. And my picture was there, too. There I was, in my dungarees, blouse, and braids.

  Margaret O'Brien? Yes, I supposed so. That's who I was like. Not Shirley Temple in her fluffy dresses, singing and tap-dancing her way through life.

  Margaret O'Brien has tragedy in all her movies. Look at the way she buried all her dolls in Meet Me in St. Louis.

  How about that, I told myself. Wait until the kids in school see this. How about that.

  The Shadow was going against a demented hypnotist who wanted to take over the army when my father came home from the hospital that night.

  John Barclay, the announcer, was telling us how the weed of crime bears bitter fruit. My father came into the dining room, where we were all huddled around the old Philco radio.

  "And so, John," Nana said, "tell us, what's happened?"

  "Your daughter's had a baby girl," he told her.

  Mary jumped up and down. "A baby sister. We've got a baby sister," she said.

  Martin and Tom tried to look happy. So did Elizabeth. I said nothing. I won't be the baby in the family anymore, I thought. Maybe now I can be a big sister. Maybe now somebody will look up to me.

  "I've kept your dinner, John," Nana said.

  He went into the kitchen with her.

  "And how is Grace?" I heard Nana asking.

  "Weak, but resting. It was hard on her, Nana."

  "It's always hard on women."

  "The baby had to be put in an incubator," he told her. "It's only four pounds. We don't know if it's going to make it."

  In the dining room my brothers and sisters and I looked at each other. "What's an incubator?" I asked.

  "It's something they put a premature baby in to keep it alive," Elizabeth said.

  "What's premature?" I asked again.

  Nobody spoke for a moment. Then Elizabeth spoke again. "It's when a baby comes before its time. And is too small."

  The Baby Snooks Show was coming on next, sponsored by Post cereal. Her daddy and mommy are always fighting about something. And her daddy is very burdened by her mommy. Like mine. Baby Snooks is always getting him into trouble.

  "Whyyy, Daddy?" she keeps asking to drive him crazy. It's a comedy.

  "This baby came six weeks early," Mary was saying.

  Whyyy, Mary? I wanted to ask. Whyyy? But I didn't. Because I knew.

  The others knew, too.

  It was on account of me. Because I'd gotten Amazing Grace upset. Because I'd told the reporters the truth about her father.

  We sat listening to Baby Snooks. N
obody talked any more about our baby.

  CHAPTER 19

  Every summer the girls of the Golden Band have their pictures in the social section of the newspaper. The photographer shoots them posed on the beach, on vacation. Together, always together.

  Now I had my picture in the newspaper, with a story. What would they have to say about it? Would they see I wasn't so unworthy, after all?

  But on Monday morning in school, all I got was mean remarks about being Margaret O'Brien.

  "A kid actress!" Cathy Doyle said.

  "You could have at least rolled up your dungarees," Amy Crynan scolded.

  They have a song they sing:

  "We are St. Bridget's girls,

  we wear our hair in curls,

  we wear our dungarees

  rolled up right to our knees."

  My dungarees hadn't been rolled up properly.

  "God, I'd die if they put in the paper that I went for ice cream with my grandfather," Rosemary Winter mumbled.

  It is not the thing to do, to be seen socializing with your grandfather. If you go for ice cream with anybody, it should be a friend your own age.

  "You did it for Jen's brother?" Eileen Keifer asked. "Don't you think she feels bad enough? We're trying to help her forget!"

  Jen didn't look at me.

  I'd done everything wrong. I couldn't do anything right in the eyes of the Golden Band. I was glad I hadn't been trying.

  But I couldn't forget about Jen. It was like someone was kicking me in the stomach every time I saw her disappear around a corner with the girls of the Golden Band, all of them joking and singing, giggling and carrying on. Jen never joked or giggled or carried on like that. What were they doing to her?

  ***

  Our house was very quiet. All that could be heard was the grandfather clock ticking in the hall and Mary's sobbing. The radio was off, even though it was Sunday night, when all the best programs are on.

  But even though it was off, I could hear its sounds. I could hear the announcer of Lights Out telling us it was the witching hour, when dogs howl and evil is let loose on the world.