Keep Smiling Through Read online

  "You can," I heard Elizabeth whisper as she went back into the kitchen. "Mary and I turn in our whole paychecks every week."

  If he heard her, my father ignored her. He turned to me instead. "If you can't ask for the mittens on the bus, you can go to school with chapped hands. It's March. Winter's almost over." And with that, he went out the door.

  "What's all the noise? Can't a person sleep around here?" Amazing Grace came into the kitchen in her chenille bathrobe.

  "Queenie's gone," Mary told her. "She ran off. Daddy's upset. But no reason for you to be upset, Mother. Here, sit down, we've got your breakfast all ready."

  Amazing Grace took her place at the head of the table. Mary served her breakfast. Elizabeth stayed in the kitchen. She spoke to Amazing Grace even less than she spoke to my father.

  "She never was any good," Amazing Grace said of Queenie. "It's best she's gone. She was sly and lazy. All coloreds are."

  My face burned in shame. Not for what my stepmother said about Queenie, but because I didn't have the courage to defend her. Instead, I bent my head over my Wheatena, making myself invisible, as I always tried to do when Amazing Grace appeared.

  I wanted to be like The Shadow on the radio. The Shadow could make himself invisible. "What evil lurks in the hearts of men?" the announcer always asked. "Only The Shadow knows."

  Is it possible The Shadow is wrong? I asked myself. I know that evil lurks in the hearts of women as well as men. Amazing Grace has evil in her heart. But The Shadow is one of my radio heroes. How can he be wrong?

  I brushed the thought aside. But I didn't defend Queenie. I just ate my cereal as quietly as I could. Because making myself invisible was becoming my best talent. All I had to do was sit very still and quiet and before I knew it, grown-ups forgot I even existed.

  I watched Amazing Grace eat her eggs and bacon. The bacon smelled like all the things in the world I couldn't have. We weren't allowed bacon. Or chocolate Bosco to flavor our milk. Amazing Grace needed these things to make her strong for the baby. Even though she was plump and round already.

  I was so skinny I could see my ribs through my skin, but nobody cared. Nazis were killing people in Europe. Why would anybody care about a little girl in New Jersey whose ribs showed and who had chapped hands?

  My brothers came back downstairs, dressed for school, and took their places at the table.

  "Martin, you're to go to the butcher shop after school," Amazing Grace said. "Kay, you're to go for eggs. To Mrs. Leudloff."

  I stopped being invisible then and looked up. Mrs. Leudloff? We all stared at Amazing Grace. Even Elizabeth came in from the kitchen, though she didn't say anything.

  "What's the matter?" Amazing Grace asked.

  For once it wasn't Mary who spoke up. It was Martin. "Mrs. Leudloff is a German spy. She keeps a shortwave radio in her house."

  Amazing Grace scowled. "Do you think that just because she's German, she's a spy?"

  It was a trap. Amazing Grace often set traps for us. Her father was German, which made her half-German. Her mother was Austrian. Martin said Hitler was Austrian, too.

  But Martin didn't flinch. "Everybody knows she has a shortwave radio. People have heard it."

  "Who?" Amazing Grace demanded.

  Martin played with his spoon in his cereal. "Mr. Schoenfeld, where we're supposed to go for eggs," he said.

  "Mr. Schoenfeld is Jewish," Amazing Grace said. "So he hates all Germans. Mr. Schoenfeld is stupid. The reason Kay can't go there for eggs is because he got lime in his eye and is in the hospital. So today Kay goes to Mrs. Leudloff."

  She had spoken. The matter was finished.

  CHAPTER 3

  Before they left the house, my sisters gave me advice about Mrs. Leudloff.

  "Be polite," Mary said. "And don't tell her anything that goes on in this house. Don't dare mention that your sisters work in the arsenal!"

  I promised I wouldn't. Mary had told me, on more than one occasion, that loose lips sink ships, that Nazis burn people in ovens, and that I am lucky to be a little girl living in America, rather than a little girl starving in Europe.

  "Don't linger," was all Elizabeth said. Then she put her arm around me. And her arm around me was better than anything she could tell me.

  On the long walk to get the school bus, Martin had his own advice. "Going for eggs is better than going to the butcher shop. Sometimes I have to wait an hour in line. And all day, in school, I worry that I'll lose the coupons for meat. And sometimes I have to lug along that ball of fat to turn in. I hate it."

  Turning in a ball of fat was part of the war effort. I don't know what they did with the fat. None of us did. We figured it was a military secret.

  "Be careful of Rex, her Nazi dog," Tom said. "He'd just as soon bite your leg off as look at you. And listen for her shortwave radio. The FBI will want to know if you hear it."

  I jingled the egg money that was wrapped in a handkerchief in my pocket. Usually I was nervous enough, carrying egg money around with me all day. Amazing Grace would kill me if I lost it. Now I had to worry about old German spy Mrs. Leudloff all day, too.

  By the time I got on the bus my hands were freezing. But chapped hands could be hidden in my pockets, once I set my books and lunch box down. There was nowhere I could hide from the cold looks of the public-high-school girls.

  I scrunched down into my seat. I knew I looked a sight in my blue serge uniform, my navy blue pea jacket, my cotton stockings held up with garters, and my clumsy brown laced-up oxford shoes.

  The public-high-school girls wore neat pleated skirts, saddle shoes, and the whitest bobby socks. The white on their saddle shoes was buffed to a shine. The socks were rolled over twice. Under their coats they wore soft cashmere sweaters. Did one of them have my mittens? Why would they want them? They wore fashionable woolen or leather gloves.

  I stared out the window. I hated traveling five miles on this bus every day to school. But my little country school had been closed down the Monday after the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, a little over two years ago now. If I had no other reason to hate the Japs, that was enough.

  I'd gone to school on Monday morning, the eighth of December, to find the doors locked. I'd stood crying in the schoolyard.

  How could they close our school?

  We had walked there every day, Martin, Tom, and I, past brooks and fields. It was not far from home.

  I remember running around the schoolyard that day looking for Martin. Mary and Elizabeth, of course, had been in high school. But Martin would know what was going on.

  He did. "They're taking us away."

  "Away? Where?" I asked. I knew a war had started. I knew the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor the day before. I didn't even know where Pearl Harbor was. At first I thought it was on the river on the way to Waterville.

  Is this what happens when a war starts? Immediately, they take the little kids away?

  They loaded us onto yellow buses that day and took us on a two-mile ride to a strange school. Later on I found out they closed our school because it was across the street from the arsenal.

  When we got to the new school, I knew there was a war on, all right. The kids there were lined up, waiting for us, in their schoolyard.

  They all looked as mean as weasels. And they acted worse. They pushed, pinched, and shoved us, and said such terrible things that I began to wonder if the war hadn't really started a few miles away on the river.

  Martin and Tom told my father, of course. And within weeks he took us out of that new school and put us in St. Bridget's.

  I never did find out why those kids were so mean. I have discovered, since, that some people don't need a reason to be mean. That in itself is very scary.

  "You'll have to wear a uniform now, Kay," my brothers told me when I started St. Bridget's.

  I was glad for that. I pictured the uniform as being smart and sassy. I'd wear trousers with a stripe down the side. And a hat with a brim, like kids do in military school.

  But m
y uniform is not smart and sassy. All it ended up being was dull and drab. A navy blue serge jumper and a white blouse. I hate it.

  The kids in St. Bridget's are better, all except for the girls in the Golden Band. Whereas the kids in the last school were weasels, the girls in the Golden Band are only prigs.

  I got through two years. I'm in fifth grade now. And Sister Brigitta runs the fifth grade like Hitler runs Germany.

  ***

  In school Jennifer Bellows is my best friend.

  At home there are no girls in the neighborhood to play with. I play with my brothers. I'm a fair hand at Cowboys and Indians. I can shoot marbles. I know to bump a player off the track and win an extra shot, and how to guard my puries in a marble game. And I'm right there helping Martin and Tom dam up the brook in summer.

  At home I'd give my pea shooter for a girl best friend. So Jennifer is important to me.

  We both have dark hair in a school that seems to be full of blond, blue-eyed girls who wear Mary Jane shoes and have lisps.

  Jennifer is kind of a tomboy, too. We both wear brown oxfords, have older brothers, and bring lunch from home. All the other girls buy their lunches in the cafeteria, heaping plates of mashed potatoes with puddles of brown gravy, roast beef, and peas for ten cents a day. Chocolate milk is three cents.

  My lunch is a peanut-butter sandwich in winter and tomatoes on soggy bread in spring and fall. To save money, the sandwich is wrapped in paper from Wonder bread.

  I don't care that the other girls buy chocolate milk. Or that afterward they have money left to buy a Dixie cup. And they sit in front of me and lick ice cream off the photo of Judy Garland or Deanna Durbin inside the lid. But I'd give anything to have my sandwiches wrapped in real wax paper. Everybody stares at my Wonder-bread wrapping. And I feel poor.

  Jennifer has sandwiches, too. Cream cheese. I think we became friends because neither of us is worthy enough to belong to the Golden Band.

  They're the townie girls. They walk to school on tree-shaded streets. They live in identical two-story houses with wide porches. They listen to the same music, go to the same movies, and all wear their hair the same way: short and curled, with a little wave on top. They go to the same parties on weekends and wear Mary Janes.

  My house is bigger than any of theirs, if you want to talk about houses. But that isn't the point. My house is five miles away, out in the country.

  I don't belong. Neither does Jennifer, who also takes a bus to school, but from another direction.

  To not-belong is bad. We're smart enough to know that.

  But we're smarter not to try.

  Jennifer's mother works as a nurse on the new-baby floor in the hospital. That's another fault. Nobody's mother works. Oh, I know lots of women work in war plants. Mary told me. But none of these girls' mothers work. So Jennifer has to peel potatoes and get the supper started when she goes home. My stepmother doesn't work, but I know about peeling potatoes. I guess Jennifer and I just found each other and clung to each other to stay alive.

  As I stepped from the bus, I saw, right away, that there was a commotion in the schoolyard. Jennifer was surrounded by the Golden Band, and she was crying. I ran to her.

  The Golden Band consisted of six girls: Cathy Doyle, Amy Crynan, Betsy Palmer, Eileen Keifer, Rosemary Winter, and Mary Ellen Bradley.

  "What's wrong?" I asked.

  "You mean you don't know, Kay?" Amy Crynan said it with contempt. As if I should know. They did. But everybody in the Golden Band always knew things I didn't know. Which was why I always felt so stupid around them.

  Well, I was used to it. "No," I said.

  "Her brother's ship was torpedoed by the Germans. He was lost at sea," Mary Ellen Bradley said.

  Jennifer stood there and wailed louder and louder. Tears were streaming down her face. Deep sobs came up from her chest.

  "Jen," I said. I tried to push my way through to her.

  Her brother, Arthur, gone! I could not believe it.

  "His ship was torpedoed by Hitler's Wolf Pack," Amy Crynan told everyone.

  Here was something I knew. I knew about the Wolf Pack. They were Hitler's submarines. They called them U-boats. I'd seen them in movie newsreels that showed dead bodies floating in the ocean after one of our ships was torpedoed by them. Then, at the beach last summer, we'd seen tar and oil slicks on the sand from all the sunken ships.

  "Jen!" I touched her.

  But she didn't hear me. She was someplace else, in some terrible place where she was feeling a lot of pain. I could tell from the sound of her crying. It frightened me.

  And then the Golden Band pushed me aside. They led Jennifer away. They walked with her into the school. Sister Mary Louise was ringing the cowbell that meant classes were starting.

  They would announce over the loudspeaker that Jennifer Bellows's brother had been lost in the war. And we'd pray for him.

  I stood alone in the cold schoolyard, wondering whose loose lips had sunk the ship Jennifer's brother had been on. And how I was going to survive in school without Jennifer for a friend.

  Because I knew she was gone from me. Before this day the girls in the Golden Band would never have bothered with her. She wasn't a townie. She ate cream-cheese sandwiches, she wore brown oxfords, her mother worked.

  But today she had something nobody else had. A brother killed in the war.

  The nuns would coddle and pet her. She'd be the center of attention in school. She was important now. And worthy, finally, of the Golden Band.

  She was as gone from me as Queenie was. I'd lost another friend.

  Who will I have now? I asked myself. Lucy Spinella? She's Spanish and dark-skinned and poor. She stays to herself. The girls laugh at her. Once one of them touched her kerchief by mistake and ran, screaming, to wash her hands.

  Paula Karchup? She's even worse off. She doesn't even have lunch. She sits at the far end of the cafeteria with her hands folded in front of her, saying, "I'm not hungry." Every day she says that. Nobody bothers to ask why she doesn't have lunch or why she isn't hungry.

  I have nobody now, I thought. I'll walk alone, like it says in that song my sister Mary sings. Or like Bulldog Drummond, the detective who comes on the radio Tuesday evenings, I'll make lonely footsteps in the night, coming out of the fog. Then what will I do?

  I don't know, I decided. I'm not allowed to stay up to hear the whole show. So I don't know what happens to Bulldog Drummond when he walks alone in the fog. I'll just have to make up the rest as I go along.

  Oh, Queenie, how will I keep smiling through?

  CHAPTER 4

  I couldn't get Jennifer out of my mind all day.

  Sister Brigitta smacked me on the hand with the ruler four times because I couldn't remember how much nine times three was. She stood over me with that ruler while I recited the times tables. I was so scared that my mind went blank after nine times two. Then I started to cry, and she hit my hands and made me sit in the corner with a dunce cap on.

  Jennifer wasn't in class. Where was she? She finally arrived in time for the afternoon classes. Cathy Doyle whispered that she'd been in the nurse's office.

  Before we started, Sister Brigitta asked Jennifer who she wanted to go to the office with her, to lead the prayer for her brother over the loudspeaker.

  I was back in my seat by then. It was such an honor to go to the office and lead the prayers! I'd never been picked. I never thought I could do it if Sister sent me. But I'd do it for Jennifer. But Jennifer looked right past me.

  "Amy Crynan," Jennifer said.

  My heart sank.

  Amy was the leader of the Golden Band. Her hair was blond and she was perfect in every way. I always felt like an insect next to Amy.

  I wanted to die. It hurt worse than Sister Brigitta's ruler as I watched Jennifer and Amy walk out of the class, hand in hand.

  "Boys and girls." Sister Mary Louise's voice was soft and serious over the loudspeaker. "Amy Crynan will now lead the grammar school in prayer for Arthur Bellows,
whose ship was torpedoed by the Germans and whose soul is now with God. As you know, his sister, Jennifer, is in Sister Brigitta's fifth grade."

  His soul with God. It gave me the shivers. But it must be true. And Arthur Bellows must have some influence with God, too, I decided. Because Amy never got to say those prayers.

  Just then we heard the sirens for an air-raid drill. For the whole school, not just the grammar. St. Bridget's Junior High and High School were scattered through our building and the building next door.

  Immediately we dived under the desks, while the sirens kept on and on. We had to cross our legs and put our hands together over our heads and keep very quiet and still.

  The sirens made a lonely, frightening sound. I looked across the aisle at Jennifer's empty desk. Your brother is punishing you, Jen, I thought, because you didn't pick me to lead the prayers. And he's with God. So you better watch out.

  The minute I opened the gate at Mrs. Leudloff's house her German shepherd went crazy. He snarled and barked and his fangs dripped, just like some creature on the scariest radio program we listened to, Inner Sanctum Mysteries.

  Mrs. Leudloff kept him in a fenced-in place in the middle of the yard. Which meant I had to get by him in order to get to another gate, where I would have to ring a small bell to tell her I wanted eggs.

  I'd seen Nazi dogs in newsreels at the movies. And Rex acted as fierce as any of them. I kept as far from him as I could as I raced to the second gate. Then I rang the bell.

  The back door of the neat white clapboard house opened and Mrs. Leudloff came out. She had light brown, fluffy, short hair and a belted jacket, and she wore gray slacks. There was a bounce in her step and she was very slim and cheerful.

  "Yes?" she asked.

  "I need some eggs, Mrs. Leudloff."

  "Come, come. Glad to see you."

  She couldn't fool me with that nice smile. Or pull the wool over my eyes with her stylish hair or slim waist. I don't trust happy and cheerful anyway, I thought. Life is serious and hard. In school, when the nuns want to be nice, they read to us about the Christians who got eaten by the lions in Rome.