Keep Smiling Through (12 page)

"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.

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.
Nobody talked any more about our baby.

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.

I could hear the lonely police siren from
Gang Busters,
wailing in the night.

I could hear The Shadow's cackling laugh.

I sat on the stairs and put my hands over my ears. Still, I could hear Walter Winchell opening his news show, tapping his telegraph keys and telling Mr. and Mrs. North and South America, all ships at sea, and the
whole world,
that as he went to press he'd gotten news that Mr. and Mrs. John Hennings's baby girl had died last night in Waterville's hospital.

I could hear Baby Snooks's sad and whiny voice, saying, "
Whyyy,
Daddy,
whyyy?
"

My father was in their bedroom with Amazing Grace, who was very quiet. I don't know where my brothers were. Outside, I suppose. It was better outside. Elizabeth was
doing the supper dishes. The radio sounds kept going round and round in my head as I sat there. And through it all, I could hear Mary in her room, sobbing.

Then, all of a sudden, something almost magical happened. Somebody downstairs, maybe Elizabeth, had the radio on, real low. And there was Vera Lynn, singing her song about how we should keep smiling through.

I couldn't believe it! It was just what Queenie told me to do when things get bad. I listened, tears coming to my eyes, as Vera Lynn's husky voice sang about how we would all meet again and until then we had to keep smiling through.

And for a minute I felt Queenie there beside me.

"Oh, Queenie," I whispered, "how I miss you! But it's just like you're right here when she sings that song. I'll try, Queenie, I'll try!"

The song even drowned out the sound of Mary's sobbing.

We went on. We went to school every day. Mary and Elizabeth and my father went to work. Nana cooked and kept order.

Nobody said anything to me. Nobody blamed me. But I blamed myself. A hundred times in the next week I wished I hadn't told
the truth to that reporter and gotten Amazing Grace so upset that she'd had her baby too early.

As for the newspaper story about me, nobody in my house even mentioned it. Only Mrs. Leudloff smiled and patted me on the head and told me how proud she was of me, when I went for eggs.

And when I'd told her, on my last visit, that the baby was sickly, she said, "I lost my only child. What God decides will be, will be."

I couldn't tell her that I, not God, was to blame. She'd just smile and pat me on the head and say,
Have another caramel, you're far too serious for a little girl.
I didn't want her to know I'd caused the baby's death. She believed in me.

Amazing Grace sat in the rocker in the dining room in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows. It was Sunday.

She was just sitting and brooding. She'd been sitting there like that for a week, since the baby died. She hardly ate when Nana brought her food to her. She didn't speak to us. And she didn't cry at all.

Everyone was worried about her.

"If she doesn't snap out of it soon," Mary had said this morning, "she may go into depression."

"She isn't even mean anymore," Tom said.

My brothers and I were sitting out in the barn on stacks of hay, talking about it.

"What's depression?" I asked Martin.

"It means when you can't stop being sad."

Oh. It sounded like just the opposite of smiling through. But then, Amazing Grace had never been the kind to smile too much in the first place. We all knew that.

"If she gets any more depressed, we're all in for it," Martin said. "Daddy's very worried. He says we all have to be nice to her."

"Maybe I can do something nice," I said.

"The nicest thing you could do is leave her alone," Martin told me.

Tom agreed. "What could
you
do?" he hooted. "She doesn't like you, Kay. It's Mary she likes. She hates you almost as much as she hates Elizabeth."

But I had an idea. I knew, too, that if Amazing Grace got any more crazy than she already was, we'd all be in trouble. But I had another reason for wanting to try with her.

I felt sorry for her. I didn't think anything could make her sit there in that chair like
that, folded up like a dying flower.
It must be terrible, losing a baby,
I thought.

Why, I would feel terrible losing Mary Frances.

I said nothing to my brothers. They wouldn't understand.

Later on, after Sunday dinner, when my father was napping, my brothers were at the brook playing, Mary and Elizabeth were at the movies, and Nana was sewing, I went to the room I shared with my sisters and opened the closet.

There, where my few clothes hung, I took the feed-bag dress off its hanger.

Amazing Grace had finished it right before she had the baby. I hadn't worn it yet. I'd said I didn't want to. Then everything happened so fast, with the baby coming, that nobody cared.

I took off my dungarees and blouse and slipped the feed-bag dress over my head. Then I went to look in the mirror. It was full length. I looked at myself in the dress.