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ten, was the ringmaster, while the five-year-old Grace did a tightrope act dressed in a little ballet costume. The children sold tickets to all their rich Henry Avenue neighbors.
    “Everything was for Women’s Medical in our life,” remembered Peggy. “We stole flowers. I would tell my little sister to go up and steal all the flowers from next door. . . . I would send her up there, and she would pick those violets and then sell them back to the lovely ladies.”
    Ma Kelly had the same striving tunnel vision as her husband. A Kelly cause was a good cause, and normal rules could be waived in the achieving of it. Grace’s focus never strayed far from her charismatic father, but her mother influenced her in ways that were equally profound. There were the physical attributes—the Teutonic blondness and features that contributed so much to Grace’s astonishing adult beauty, as well as the oversized and sometimes ungainly Majer hands. More important was the willpower and the sense of purpose, the sheer busyness with which Ma Kelly tattooed her girls’ spirits.
    “We were never allowed to sit with our hands empty,” Peggy told the author Gwen Robyns, many years later. “We just knew we were expected to knit. We had to knit and to crochet from the time we were three or four years old. We had to because we were German girls. . . . Honey, we just had to. It was expected of us, and we just did it.”
    Peggy herself felt that she had managed to avoid most of the maternal Germanness. A fay and carefree spirit, the firstborn Kelly child saw herself as incorrigibly Irish. “I’m my father’s daughter,” she used to say with pride. It was middle sister Grace who turned out to be the German daughter, in Peggy’s opinion. Grace was the good girl who knew what was expected of her and just did it.
    Grace’s mother needed all her backbone to manage the task of being married to the dashing and romantic Jack Kelly. Ma Kelly ran the household and handled so much of the discipline at Henry Avenue because her husband was away from home so often—and the usual, painful reason for his absence was that he was off romancing other women.
    Handsome Jack took full advantage of his reputation as America’s most perfectly formed male. There was the telephone girl at the office, and a secretary. On many an afternoon his car was to be seen outside the home of Ellen Frazer, a divorcee who lived in Chestnut Hill and who was his escort to baseball games. February was Jack Kelly’s month for a jaunt to Florida without his wife and family—and one December the Elizabeth Arden store in downtown Philadelphia got a glimpse of how very extensive his social range might be. Jack Kelly placed an order for twenty-seven identical makeup cases, each to be gift-wrapped and sent to a different lady.
    This was the other side of Jack Kelly the hero. Fame went to his head. He cultivated his image as the showcase father of a showcase family, but his philandering suggested that the show might be more for his benefit than for theirs. There is a sense in which the 110 percent sportsman denies adult life, retreating into a world in which play is a value beyond any other, and when it came to women, Jack Kelly’s values were those of a playful child, tied up in himself and totally oblivious to those he might hurt. He would have left his wife and family for Mrs. Frazer, Germantown gossip asserted, if the lady had not been too canny, realizing how a woman had to maintain her independence from a man like Jack in order to avoid total subjugation to his will.
    “I don’t think there was one good marriage in the entire Kelly family,” commented Charles Kelly, a nephew of Jack’s. “The Kellys had a tendency to take over.”
    Jack Kelly could annihilate you in a sculling race, and he could annihilate you in real life, exhibiting an unblushing indifference to the feelings of other people. When in later years his son Kell became a father himself and confessed his