Keep Smiling Through by Ann Rinaldi Read Free Book Online Page B

Amazing Grace visits with her mother. I cry because I want to go to Coney Island, too. But my father says I'm too little.
    These times, Nana takes me on her lap and tells me a story of her life in Austria when she was a young girl. It seems all she did was eat custard pudding and dance waltzes.
    "I danced so, when I was first in love," she'd say.
    Somehow I sense she didn't do those
waltzes with Grandpa but. with someone else, a man she left there. Grandpa can't dance. And she gets misty eyed when she talks about it.
    Nana's bedroom is blue and white. She's a regal lady with white hair who wears blue dresses and speaks with an Austrian accent. Grandpa speaks with a German accent and works as a cook in one of New York's fancy restaurants.
    Sometimes he mumbles to himself in German.
    Nana treats us special. She's the only grandmother I have. And the only thing I can't figure out is how she can be so nice and have such a miserable daughter.

CHAPTER 9
    Before Nana and Grandpa arrived, however, Uncle Hermie came to visit us.
    He's my father's older brother and the black sheep of the family. He isn't married, and he lives with a woman in an apartment in New York. This is not spoken of in polite company except in whispers, the way grown-ups speak when they think children's ears can't pick up the sound.
    "He's a man-about-town, like Lamont Cranston," Martin explained to me and Tom. Lamont Cranston is The Shadow.
    "But he's also a man of mystery," Martin added, "like Captain Midnight. Because the United States government doesn't know his identity."
    "Why?" I asked.
    "Because he wasn't born here, but in Italy. He has no papers, nothing's in his name, and he doesn't pay taxes."
    "Why?" I asked again.
    Martin shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe his job for the war effort is just too important."
    The best part about Uncle Hermie is that he always smells of olives. This is because he manages a New York deli to cover up what he really does as a man of mystery. He drives a big black Buick, he always smiles, and he thinks my father is crazy for living in the country.
    "What do you do here, watch the grass grow?" he always asks.
    We children love him. He picks us up, cracks jokes, and gives us candies from the pockets of his pinstriped suits. And he has a secret password.
    It's
Chicago.
Whenever we go out with him into a store or a restaurant, or if he's looking at something to buy and he doesn't like the looks of things, he says, "Chicago."
    That means, "Let's get out of here." And everybody with him moves to leave.
    You can't tell us children anything bad about Uncle Hermie. We won't believe it. My father always speaks of how, after their
father died, Uncle Hermie quit school. Only, instead of going to work to help their mother support the younger ones, he hung around in pool halls.
    We don't care about that. To us, he's wonderful because he has a password. There's a kind of magic and excitement about him when he pulls into our drive with his shiny black car and gets out in his pinstriped suit, wide tie, and fedora hat.
    He's the only man-about-town that we know.
    He brings the city with him. And we're fascinated with anything to do with the city. My father says there's evil in the city. People do terrible things there, and he moved us to the country so we could grow up clean.
    On Palm Sunday, Uncle Hermie came to visit with his girlfriend Fanny. She's blond and looks like Marlene Dietrich in the movies.
    My father loves all his brothers and sisters. But they don't come much. Amazing Grace doesn't like them. The reason for this is because they all remember my mother. There's a lot of tension when they come because we all know things could blow up any minute.
    This Palm Sunday Uncle Hermie had candy for us. Because of the sugar shortage, we never get candy.
    Except when I go to Mrs. Leudloff's. She'd given me candy again on my last visit. And again, I hadn't told anybody.
    Fanny went into the kitchen to try to help Amazing Grace. I was getting a