Of Time and Memory

by Don J. Snyder

  Chapter Two

  A week passes, maybe two. I have brought the wedding photograph into a sunstruck kitchen to draw my family to it; I want to show Jack how much chrome was on the old cars, and Cara how there is a little bit of her face in my father’s. I want to show Erin how Peggy styled her hair. But weekends are busy times in a family of six and my intentions are lost to the normal transactions of a happy Saturday morning. Jack, age nine, sails a paper airplane across the room; it hits me on the bridge of my nose with a surprising pain as I am crossing the floor and makes me spill a cup of coffee down my leg. I am just about to shout at him, but when I pick up the airplane I notice he has written across one wing, “I love you, Daddy. Can we play football today. Check yes or no.”

  Erin, our twelve-year-old, is on the telephone trying to make plans for an outing with her friend from sixth grade; she is talking with her friend and negotiating with me for some money for lunch at the same time I am cleaning up the spilled coffee. Why seven dollars for lunch? I ask. I’ve eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch every day for thirty years, why can’t I make you one?

  Meanwhile Nell, age ten, charges through the room chased by Cara, who is pulling her stuffed animals behind her on a makeshift sled that tips over the dog’s water bowl. If this were one of those old movies starring Fred MacMurray, the washing machine would suddenly overflow.

  I slip the photograph into my shirt pocket and surrender to it all, leaning back against the kitchen counter while the voices wash over me. I see all the commotion around me, but the picture of my mother and father is drawing me away from all of this. I have fallen onto a peculiar ground of stillness, like the stillness just before a snowstorm.

  Colleen appears next, her cheeks rosy from sleep. I am watching her from far away as she calmly gathers up dirty laundry, softly interrogating each of her children to find out if they’ve seen her sunglasses. When she passes by me her hair is red in the slanting light. In the next moment I watch her kneel down to tie the laces on Cara’s shoe. “I don’t like my face anymore,” Cara announces.

  “It’s a beautiful, beautiful face,” Colleen assures her.

  The room grows quiet. The other children have turned to watch their mother.

  You know this feeling we get when our life is suddenly orbiting us like a rich dream, this desire to freeze everything just as it is—to rescue one perfect moment from the rushing blur of time. It’s a feeling that comes from a sudden recognition of our privilege. How lucky, how fortunate I am, and please let it slow down, let this privilege last!

  The urgency behind this feeling comes today from the photograph; there was another woman so young and beautiful, and a man who loved her, never thinking that she would die.

  In the stillness, I am vowing to myself to begin living more thoughtfully. I will try harder to remember when I first saw the red in Colleen’s hair. I will picture her as she first appeared to me when I fell in love with her. I will remember which of our babies was born with their eyes opened wide. And which daughter named our dog. And which summer we taught our son to swim. I will slow my life down so that I can remember these things. And though we cannot begin to account for the way so much time has passed, or to say precisely how we have become the family we are, I will pull everyone closer to me and hold them there long enough to guard our closeness against the magnificent, hectic future ahead when the velocity of our lives will carry us off in different directions, each of us flying away at top speed, barely glancing back, scarcely remembering.

  Here we are, so many of us, standing in our middle age at the end of a century, trying our best to give our children a love story to follow. Our love story, more urgent than our daily battle for time and money.

  I am watching Colleen and thinking that I will never leave her side again, that I will spend every hour of every day beside her so that I will have this in case she ever gets sick and dies. I remember how frightened I was with each new baby, scared that something would go wrong in the hospital and I would lose her. These are strange thoughts for such a beautiful Saturday morning. I smile at my wife when she comes across the room toward me. She takes the photograph from my hands and holds it in front of her. “What do you remember?” she asks me.

  For days I’ve been thinking about this, trying to remember everything. Every Christmas my father would take us to Hatfield, to visit Grandmom and Granddad Schwartz. They were just kind old people to me. We’d sit in their tiny living room and open our presents, and I was never really sure who they were. Somehow I thought that my father was my older brother and that these old people were his parents. Their daughter, Audrey, lived in the house and there were pictures of her everywhere. But on the top shelf beside the fireplace there were photographs of two girls in silver frames. I remember this distinctly. The silver frames stood beside a white porcelain horse with a gold chain for its bridle.

  “You remember that?” Colleen asked.

  “Photographs,” I told her. “As a kid I always paid a lot of attention to pictures because I was always trying to find the face of the lady who visited me in my room at night.”

  Soon after we met I had told Colleen about the time my father drove my brother and me to Atlantic City for a day on the beach. I was small, maybe five years old. There was a strong undertow, I remember. We drank orange soda in thick glass bottles. It was the first time in my life I got water up my nose and in my ears. My father showed me how to tilt my head and jump up and down on one leg. When it was time to leave, we walked along the boardwalk and stopped at the outdoor shower, which was a garden hose hanging from a nail inside a wooden stall. It cost a nickel to wash off the sand. After I was finished, as my father took off his shirt to step under the hose, his wallet fell from his pocket and a photograph dropped to the ground. It was a black-and-white picture of the lady who visited me. There she was, sitting at the open window of a big black car with wide, sweeping fenders and hubcaps that were bright disks of light.

  I looked into my father’s eyes and asked him who she was. I think that even as I was asking him this, I was disappointed in myself for divulging my secret and fearful that now that it was out in the open she wouldn’t come to see me again. But it was the exact face that glided in through the window on top of the column of white light. I told my father that I had seen the lady before. He looked down at me with a puzzled expression but didn’t say anything else. He just washed the sand off my feet with the hose. He waited a few more years until I was eight or nine, and then he told me that she had been my mother.

  “I’ve been thinking about something,” I said to Colleen. “What if I went to Pennsylvania and tried to find out everything I could about Peggy. I mean if I could tell my father his own love story now that he can’t remember it. It could be a gift I give to him, while there’s still time. I think I owe him that.”

  Colleen gave me back the photograph. “You owe it to yourself, too,” she said.

  I didn’t see it like that. Not then anyway.

  Chapter Three

  That winter I was on the road, traveling a hundred miles from home each week to teach at a small college. I would leave the house early Monday morning, spend two nights in a motel, then drive home Wednesday night. A true roadside motel, one where you can sit outside the door to your room in a little plastic chair, put your feet up on the bumper of your car, and watch the traffic pass. In such a place your life can feel temporary and no more complicated than the three or four things you line up on the glass shelf above the bathroom sink. Or what you put on the bedside table.

  I always placed the photograph there, standing it up against the ceramic lamp. It had become something more real in my life than what was bringing me to the motel each week. When I was home one weekend Cara put it beside her on her bedside table. I had already left on Monday morning and was in town putting gas into the car when I remembered and drove all the way back home and took it from Cara’s table.

  I felt self-conscious about it and glad that I had managed to retriev
e the photograph and leave the house again without being seen. And that night in the motel I was thinking how I would explain this to anyone, what logic or reason I could have summoned to make it seem like it wasn’t the beginning of an obsession. I was lying on the bed watching fat snowflakes land on the roof of my car, when the telephone rang on the bedside table. It was Jack calling to tell me that he had scored a goal in his hockey game that evening. I made him describe the play in slow motion so I could see him in my mind breaking in from the blue line with the puck on his stick, driving hard to his right, white shavings of ice spraying from his blades, then wheeling across the face of the goal, holding the puck out toward the goalie, tantalizing him with it until, at the precise second when the goalie drops down to reach for it, he snaps his stick and sails the puck into the upper right corner of the net.

  “I wish you’d been here,” he told me.

  “I won’t miss any more games,” I said. It was what I needed to say for my own sake more than his. I’m a busy man with four children whose lives I need to be a part of. I don’t need to be searching the past, I need to be living right now in the present tense where my children live so that they don’t have to go searching their past someday to find out who the hell I was.

  I could balance the scales this way until I glanced at the photograph again, or until I shut off the light and tried to fall asleep with my brother’s warning banging inside my head.

  Even then, it isn’t easy to acknowledge certain things. We tell ourselves what is obviously true—that we don’t have forever—but until we feel this in some deep part of ourselves, we go on with our busy lives, leaving the truth behind while we worry about the balance in our checking account.

  I felt it the next night when I was driving home on a back road in the northern part of Maine. I felt a longing to decide something and to set it down in front of Colleen, to put words to the feeling in order to make it real before it could vanish again. I was dreaming myself home, already by her side, when I saw bright lights way out ahead, off in the distance, like a halo washed across the dark sky. I was feeling the loneliness of the road and this cheered me, the thought that the lights might be the town where I had attended college. I drove faster, eager to come upon that friendly town again. But soon the lights up ahead became too bright to be that small town and my spirits began to sink. And then I came upon it—a Wal-Mart standing high up on a hill, surrounded by the blinding arc lights that one associates with prisons. I pulled off to the side of the road and stared at the cinder-block monstrosity and I could not account for why it made me feel so empty. It was crazy, I know, but I started to wonder if all of us have been diminished in some vital way by the age in which we are living, an age when Wal-Marts are summoning us from hillsides across the republic. Did our mothers and fathers hold something fine between them that has been lost to us? Those young people in the old black-and-white photographs, were they trying to warn us of something? Were they trying to tell us that if we weren’t careful we might reach a point where much of the fabric of what had always been perceived to be good in America we’d left behind somewhere, left it behind thoughtlessly, without making a choice, and we had become a people cast out, or lured out of our own lives into this new landscape where the only thing familiar to us is the artless chain of roadside stores, motels, and restaurants.

  I thought again of Colleen at home and about the landscape of our life. Could I possibly lose her? Was there a time coming when I might lose her and never find her again in the dark countryside, the way my father had lost my mother? There they were in their wedding-car photograph, so fit and fine and so blind to the end that was rushing to meet them.

  Those moments on the side of the road before the blazing Wal-Mart made me feel like taking hold of something meaningful.

  I began to drive hard through the black night, all the elaborate purposes of my life, all the false starts and wrong turns distilled to the one simple act of reaching home. I kept pressing down hard on the accelerator but for some reason I was unable to close the distance; the miles seemed to be dividing and multiplying while I was frozen in place on a road that kept moving out ahead of me, pouring out of itself and spreading farther and farther into the distance.

  In the long succession of dark, empty miles I began to feel my father’s loss. The loss of hope and love and youth and promise. The loss of immunity. Coming upon my driveway, I pulled the car to a stop and hurried up the porch stairs.

  Home.

  The dog greets me at the door and leads me through the dark rooms to the kitchen where Colleen has left the stove light on and a plate of food in the refrigerator. I eat standing at the sink, already losing some of the resolve I had felt on the dark highway. This is where we are. Isn’t it enough just to be here and to feel the privilege of our life? Who, throughout history, could have had it any better than we do now? How sweet this life of ours, busy and fast and, yes, there is plenty for us to worry about, and we may curse the shallowness of this age and the Wal-Marts riding like cruise ships along the horizon, but hell, it is all so fine, isn’t it? I feel myself standing shoulder-to-shoulder with every other husband and wife who are opening their eyes to the end of a century and gazing across their best intentions and their most exquisite failures to the silent borders of time. All we need is to love each other in the best way. To see our children joyful in our closeness. Surely nothing matters more to us than this.

  Then I walk out into the living room and pause at the bottom of the stairs. When the house is this quiet I can hear my children breathing in their sleep. How fit and essential is this sound that seems to carry the rhythm of a slow and meaningful journey, a rhythm that sets the house trembling to its cadence.

  The dog and I go reverently from bed to bed, kissing a blessing to each sleeping child until, at last, I am standing in the presence of my wife’s plain beauty, her face on the pillow, the magazine she was reading on the floor, a night-light left on. The dog finds her place beneath my desk. I take off my shirt and drape it over a chair. There is moonlight on the floor and when I step through it I am suddenly surrounded again by that startling stillness. It seems as if every object in the room has just settled behind a gust of wind that has cleared away everything between me and an understanding of what I must do next in this world: the beautiful woman on the drive-in movie screen far away across the valley and up the hillside, the woman whose voice I tried to hear forty years ago, I have followed to this woman who is humming dreamily to herself as I lean against her. I can hear my wife hold her breath when I lay my palms against her soft skin. For a long time neither of us moves. I feel we are caught then in both the slow shadow of history and the sudden turn of fate.

  Chapter Four

  After that night I gave myself over to it.

  For years I had kept journals for each of my children, which began with a description of their birth and continued on until they were six or seven, when all the pages were filled. Only Cara’s had blank pages left, and on the first of these pages I wrote that I was going to go searching for her grandmother. I taped the wedding-car photograph on the same page. I stood up to put the journal on her shelf and when I glanced down again at the photograph it was like I was seeing it for the first time. It is a square, four-inch-by-four-inch picture dominated by the two-inch-by-two-inch car in the center foreground. The car is parked along the right side of the street, facing away from the viewer, a front and rear tire up against the curb. To the left, across the narrow street, stand two large wood-frame houses with porches and overhanging porch roofs in front and wide wooden front steps that descend to the sidewalk.

  In the background of the photograph, toward the end of the sidewalk that leads away from the viewer, perhaps fifty feet of actual distance ahead of the wedding car, there is a boy. I had not seen him before because he is wearing a dark double-breasted coat that is rendered shapeless against the dark background of the picture. The collar is turned up and conceals all but his chin. He has his hands in his coat pockets. The c
uffs of his trousers fall over his shoes. His light-colored hair is pushed to the right across his forehead. A man, perhaps his father, is walking just ahead of him, but the boy has stopped and completely turned around and is looking back at the wedding car. There is just enough light on the boy’s face to make out his features. He looks to be eight or nine years old and bears an unmistakable resemblance to me at that age. In all the photographs of myself that I have ever seen I look just like him. I closed my eyes and then opened them. Then again. Each time the boy seemed to be re-entering the photograph, just having stepped into the picture from the blackness behind him.

  The next night I went to each of my children in their beds, knelt down with the photograph, and asked them who the boy was. They all said it was me, and only Erin, my oldest child, questioned the mathematics.

  “You weren’t born before the wedding,” she said. “I don’t get it.”

  “You’re right, it couldn’t be me,” I told her.

  “But it is,” she said.

  “I know.”

  I called my father that same night. We talked for a while about the college football teams that had been chosen for bowl games. He was a Penn State partisan and he told me that he wasn’t going to miss the game on New Year’s Day.

  “Maybe I’ll watch it with you,” I told him.

  This didn’t register with him. Instead he told me he had been going to a lot of funerals lately for all his old buddies from his 1944 high school football team. “Just last week I bumped into Ozzie Newcomb at Ed Slater’s funeral. I don’t know how much longer Ozzie will live. I don’t know how all these big strong boys from the football team can die this way.”

  He said he still wished that he had been big enough to play football as a boy. Instead he was the team waterboy.

  I asked him if it would be all right if I came to see him. “We can watch the Penn State game together,” I said again.