by Ann Rinaldi
I wanted to die. I felt myself blushing. I wished the ground would open up and swallow me. But then I remembered that sometimes spies fool people by being open and honest.
"No, ma'am," I said.
"Do I look like a spy?"
"No. You look like Greta Garbo."
"Good. We can't have any of that nonsense between us. We're friends, aren't we?"
"Yes."
"Now, what kind of candy do you prefer? Caramels or gumdrops?"
"Caramels."
She reached into her slacks pocket and pulled out a handful of caramels and dropped them into my hand.
I thanked her, still embarrassed.
She was smiling down at me. "I like listening to Mrs. Roosevelt on the radio best. And I listen to Lights Out. Do you?"
"Oh, yes!"
"They're going to do a rebroadcast of 'Chicken Heart.' Did you ever listen to that one?"
"Yes. The heart grows and grows and thumps and thumps, until it consumes the whole world."
We laughed together. "But it scares me," I confided.
She patted my shoulder. "You shouldn't be scared. It's just a story. Don't be scared of stories. Or rumors. We worry about all the wrong things in life. And what really can harm us we never worry about. Do you know why?"
"Why?"
"Because we aren't smart enough to worry about what will really harm us. If we were, we'd be fortune-tellers and make lots of money. Go now, and don't worry. You're too serious for such a little girl."
I went, eating my caramels. I felt twice as guilty this visit. Not only had I accepted her candy again, but I liked her. She was a nice lady. She knew how to talk to me.
I could never tell anyone at home that. They'd think I was crazy.
But worse, by being friends with her, I'd relaxed my efforts to help speed victory. "You must never relax, but keep on punching," Glenn Riggs the announcer told us on the radio.
I'd let him down. I'd let my brothers down. I'd let Jen down. And her brother, who'd been torpedoed. Jen must have known I was a weak-kneed, loose-lipped fool. No wonder she didn't want any more to do with me.
CHAPTER 11
"Kay," Nana said to me, "come thread this needle. My eyes are old."
She was sitting in an Adirondack chair out on the lawn on Easter Saturday. She and Grandpa had met my father in New York on Friday night and come home with him on the train.
How could anybody's eyes be so old they couldn't thread a needle? I put Mary Frances down and threaded it for Nana.
She was making Mary Frances a new dress for Easter. Nobody had ever thought to make Mary Frances a dress. I was delighted, of course. What with the war and everything, Mary Frances's wardrobe had been neglected worse than mine. And the dress wasn't of feed-bag material, either. It was from some scraps of blue dimity.
"After this I will make something for the new baby," Nana said.
"What?"
"A little dress."
"What if it's a boy? They don't wear dresses."
"They do when they are babies. You must be a help to your mother now, you know, with this baby coming."
I said yes, I would be.
"It will be nice, having a baby in the family. You'll enjoy that," she said.
I hadn't thought much about the baby as a real person. So far it was only an excuse for Amazing Grace to get everybody to wait on her hand and foot.
A baby in the house? That would be exciting. I must get used to the idea. "Where will they put it?" I asked.
"In your mama's room in the beginning."
"Then in mine," I said dismally. "I'll have to give up my room and stay with my sisters."
"Do you mind being with them now?" She put down her needle and looked at me over her glasses.
"No," I said. Their room is very large, with three windows. My bed had been put in one corner. And I liked it because when they weren't around, I could snoop in their things. Mary had a large chimney closet next to her bed that I could crawl into. It was full of magazines about Shirley Temple. Elizabeth had magazines on Loretta Young.
"But the baby should be a boy," I told Nana. "Boys have it better in the world."
"Now, that's not true, Kay."
"Yes, it is. Look at Tom and Martin. This week Daddy's taking them to New York with him so Uncle Hermie can take them to see the Brooklyn Dodgers play. And they're staying with Uncle Hermie overnight, too."
She shrugged. "Who wants to see the Brooklyn Dodgers play?"
"I do. I want to see Pee Wee Reese and Pete Reiser."
"Well, maybe Grandpa can take you somewhere when they go. Grandpa?" she called to him.
"Ya, Mama, what is it?"
He was repainting the top half of my father's car lights with black paint. All car lights have to be blacked out on top. So we can't be seen by submarines lurking offshore. Or by any German or Jap planes not spotted by our air-raid wardens.
The paint on our car lights was two years old and peeling.
"Grandpa, maybe this week when the boys go to the ball game, you could take Kay somewhere? You could drive John to the station in the morning and keep the car and take her to town."
"I'll take her somewhere, sure," he said. "But I don't need the car."
"Then where would you take her?" Nana was sewing, then she dropped her needle in her lap. "No, Grandpa, you will not go to Ernie's!"
"Mama, if I want to go to Ernie's, I'll go," he said.
"No, Grandpa. Do not go. There is trouble."
"What trouble, Mama?" he asked. "You see trouble behind every bush. Ernie is my friend. If I want to go see him, I'll go. I'll get Kay some ice cream. What's the harm in getting a little girl some ice cream?"
On Easter Monday, Tom and Martin got all their chores done so they could go to New York the next day.
One of Martin's chores is collecting the tin cans and newspapers for the scrap drive. I usually help him with the tin cans.
First we peel the paper off the cans. Then I stand at one end of the kitchen and Martin stands at the other. We make a game of it.
He rolls the can to me. And just as it gets to my feet, I jump and stamp on it to flatten it.
We rolled and flattened several cans, and Martin was putting them in a box when he looked at me.
"I'm taking them to the salvage bin in the wagon this afternoon," he said. "I've always had the biggest haul of scrap. But do you know what they need most?"
"No," I said.
"Rubber. They need lots of rubber to fight the war. Do you want to give us your rubber baby doll?"
I stared down at him hard. "Are you crazy? Give Mary Frances? I can't do that."
"Why?"
"Why?" For a minute I couldn't think why. Then I did. "Because they'd tear her apart and kill her. She can't die."
"Why?"
Why? Didn't boys understand anything? They all wanted to be Superman and bend steel with their bare hands and change the course of mighty rivers. But they didn't understand why a girl couldn't give her one and only baby doll to the scrap drive.
Because Mary Frances is more than a baby doll, that's why. She's my friend. I hug her at night, when I'm afraid. Or when I've been hit by Amazing Grace or yelled at by my father.
"Because Nana just made her a new dress," I said. "And you can't die when you've just been given a new dress."
To give Martin credit, he didn't argue. "Okay," he said. I thought that was very decent of him.
On Easter Tuesday morning Tom and Martin got up extra early and dressed in their good spring knickers, polished shoes, high socks, dress shirts, ties, jackets, and peaked caps, and with their overnight bags, went with my father to get the train for New York.
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 t
hree 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.
CHAPTER 12
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.
