Of Time and Memory

by Don J. Snyder

  “It’s a long trip for you.”

  “Not that long. Eight or nine hours.”

  “Longer than that, I think.”

  “It’s okay, Dad. I was hoping we could talk a little about Peggy. I thought we might just talk for a little while about her.”

  “Your mother was working at the telephone company when I met her. She was an operator.”

  A telephone operator?

  My mind went blank for a moment; my father was still talking at the other end but I had drifted far away. When I came back to his voice, it was with the realization that I was forty-seven years old and this was the first concrete detail about her that my father had ever passed on to me. I had never been to her grave, I had no idea how many days she lived after I was born, how old she was when she died, or what had been the cause of her death. Growing up with my father, I had always known in some part of my comprehension that talking about my dead mother was too painful for him. Because she had died when their love was new and they were still in the heat of their passion for each other, her death had cut an opening in him so that he was never the same and he could never speak about her. It is true that we all have a beginning, a middle, and an end to our lives, but they don’t always come in that order; even as a young boy I had known through intuition that by the time I knew my father he had already been through the beginning and the end of his life, and he was just living out the long middle part trying not to remember what had already happened to him.

  But now he had told me that she worked as a telephone operator. I could picture the girl in the wedding photograph going to work every day, probably sitting in a room full of young women wearing headsets. This simple detail from my father, and the vivid picture it inspired of her alive in a life that preceded me, rather than dead at a point in time after I was born, made all the difference.

  On New Year’s Day I threw a few things into the car and began the drive to Collegeville, Pennsylvania, where my father and stepmother lived. They had moved there after he retired from the ministry nine years earlier but I had never been to see them there and I had to call my brother for directions.

  I drove with the photograph on the seat beside me. Since discovering the boy in the picture, I kept expecting to find something new each time I looked at it. The car is polished to a high shine, a reflection of the church steeple is blown across its wide roof. Crepe paper streamers run from the front bumper and over the roof to the fender, which is a gash of bright silver that has caught the flash of the camera. Below the oval rear window that holds their faces is taped a square piece of construction paper with the word JUST at the top and the word MARRIED below. The words are printed by hand, neatly but with no artistic flare. Above the chrome trunk handle is the license plate: 5AJ87. And in smaller letters above the number, 1949 PENNA. A plaque of some sort with the logo of Lehigh University is attached by two screws to the top of the license plate. I wondered whose car this was, who had gone to Lehigh and who was driving the wedding couple.

  There is a puddle of water along the sidewalk and some litter in the gutter. On a telephone pole beyond the car the numbers 8 over 30 are stenciled with white paint. The bare branches of a tree are reflected in the polished chrome bumper, as well as a one-story house. It is a gangster car, a big tub of a car with swollen, sweeping fenders and dashes of chrome around all the windows. You cannot imagine going fast in this car, but you can imagine being safe in it.

  My father’s face reflects this; he looks so sure of himself, so secure in the confidence that nothing bad could ever happen to them. His wide smile of even white teeth, his eyes dancing in light behind the glass of his round wire-rimmed spectacles. All in all he shows the exuberance of a twenty-three-year-old man who has survived the nightmare of a long war and has returned home unharmed to claim the prettiest girl in town for his bride.

  Peggy is a different story. She is not looking at the camera as he is. Her eyes have strayed to the left a little. Her mouth is cut off by the lower frame of the rear window, but if she is smiling, there is no trace of it in her eyes, which show a puzzled look, as if she has seen something troublesome. It is an expression that doesn’t match the garland of bright flowers in her hair.

  I want to know what she sees on that November morning. She has just been married, and she will dance the night away and there is nothing not to smile about unless she sees something beyond this moment in time and is looking ahead rather than behind as is her new husband, to another war that will begin before ten months have passed and will take so many boys away again. Maybe even her new husband.

  Could she be thinking about the future, about the crazy times just ahead when the newspapers will be filled with stories about communist infiltrators, and a young husband and wife will be arrested in New York City as spies and taken from their two small children to be executed in the electric chair?

  Or maybe she has lost a friend in the last war and is thinking of this friend as the shutter of the camera falls, wishing he could be here to see her in her wedding car.

  Something has distracted her.

  I want to see some eagerness in her eyes, an eagerness to finish up with these wedding photographs so that she can be alone with my father. Eager to touch him and for him to touch her.

  It is the far-off look in her eyes that makes me wish I could do something to help her.

  I drove all the way to Pennsylvania that New Year’s Day, wishing I could do something for the people in the photograph beside me. The two of them, already fugitives from a fate that was bearing down on them as this photograph was being taken. A fate that would kill her and rip the trajectory out of his youth so that his life became tied to only one question—How will I ever go on living?

  There they were at the very beginning of their love story, yet already hurrying toward its end, and I could do nothing for them. I could not prevent them from taking another step closer to their end.

  Chapter Five

  Our fathers, who art in old age, how we shall come upon them, in pale blue flannel pajama bottoms pulled up too high, far above their waists, the way our own children hiked them up when they were first learning to dress themselves.

  “Oh, it’s been a sad game,” he says to me.

  “There was a lot of traffic on the New Jersey turnpike, but I had it on the radio. I’m sorry they lost.”

  “You must be hungry?”

  “No, no, I’m fine, Dad.”

  “I’ll make some coffee.”

  When he stands up I put my arms around him and he says to the emptiness in this room, “Donnie’s here. My boy is here.”

  “I’m here.”

  “I’m glad you’re here.”

  A house-worth of furniture lines the walls of these four tiny nailed-together rooms. An avocado-green couch I remember. An embroidered chair I’ve never seen. The old dining-room table I’d forgotten. “I need to get Ma some new chairs,” he tells me. “These are falling apart.”

  Grateful for something to do, I am soon down on my knees checking the joints of the chairs. “A little glue, but these are great, Dad. You couldn’t buy any as nice as these today.”

  He wanders out of the kitchen. I watch him disappear around the corner saying, “Christmas cookies, Christmas cookies.”

  Beneath the table I am his little boy again, setting up my Union and Confederate soldiers, moving cannons into place, tying horses to the oak legs. For my fort, a blanket draped across the table, hanging down over the sides. I would wait there for him to come home from the night shift. The best part was remaining perfectly still and silent, watching his shoes cross the floor, coming toward me, then turning away. He would pretend he didn’t see me there, making me wait. Then, as if it was the most sensible thing in the world as well as the thing he wanted most to do, he would crawl in beside me with his cup of coffee, the scent of tobacco and Old Spice aftershave filling the fort. “Am I your buddy today?” I would ask him.

  Now I hear him banging something in the next room. In the light, w
hen I come upon him, I can see how the tumor has begun to drag down the right side of his face. One eye is nearly closed.

  “What’s the trouble here, Dad?”

  Again he is my own little boy, Jack, at home, trying to stuff his clothes into a bureau drawer that is already full. He tells me that the whole football team is dying—here, this shirt, these sweaters belonged to a halfback and to the tall Polish boy who kicked extra points. “Their wives keep blessing me with their clothes,” he tells me. “Look at these beautiful clothes they’ve blessed me with.”

  I see a different bureau before me. The one in the basement where he kept his things from the army when I was his little boy. The collapsible wood-handled spade for digging a foxhole. The long green coat so heavy I cannot drag it away, the canvas poncho, the canteen, and the leatherbound Bible every GI was issued. You could fit the Bible in the pocket over your heart, and my father knew stories of these Bibles deflecting bullets. For five or six years I played war with his things until they were lost all over the neighborhood.

  We put everything on the bed and fold it carefully. “You need someone who will bless you with a bigger bureau,” I tell him.

  Like a teenager he sleeps late in the morning. I’ve been drinking coffee for hours when at last I hear him say, “It’s our big day, Donnie.”

  “Yes, our big day, Dad. Are you sure?”

  “Sure?”

  “It could be a long day.”

  “Oh, I’m ready,” he says. “This is our day.”

  After nearly fifty years he is going to take me to the old places. We made a list last night before we went to bed. The dance hall where he and Peggy went on dates, the church where they were married, the apartment where they lived after the honeymoon, the print shop where he worked, the parking lot where her uncle taught her to drive, the telephone company where she worked, the hospital where I was born, the cemetery. These points of their compass are all within an eight-mile radius.

  Two miles out on the main road his head is bowed and his eyes are closed. It’s the Dilantin he is taking to prevent seizures; it puts him to sleep at the drop of a hat. Oranges, I’ve been told, will help keep him awake. I follow the signs to Hatfield, peeling an orange in my lap.

  The road winds through farmland, past old barns and walls made of stone. I round a corner and suddenly the sky ahead is a riot of color. Two rainbows, perfect spectrums, are rising from the horizon in front of us and sweeping high across the sky. There is no rain or sun, just a pale gray sky, yet the rainbows are brilliant. When I call to my father and wake him to look, his eyes open wide as if he has awakened in heaven.

  We pull off the road into a gas station where the mechanics have come out from the garage bays and are looking up into the sky while they wipe grease from their hands.

  “I don’t see rain anywhere,” one of them says.

  Everyone is trying to figure out what has happened in the sky above our heads when my father says to me, “I don’t remember where I was when I first saw Peggy.”

  It was my last question to him the night before. He remembers seeing a picture of her at Lauchman’s print shop. Her father, who ran a Linotype press beside his, took the picture from his wallet and showed it to him during a morning coffee break.

  “You don’t have to remember right now,” I tell him.

  He’s angry with himself. “I want to remember,” he says. “I want to tell you everything.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh yes. Turn left right here.”

  Twenty minutes later we are lost, heading in the wrong direction. The rainbows are off to our left now, melting into the pale winter sky.

  My father bows his head and mutters, “Dumb. Dumb.”

  I feel sorry for him and try to cheer him up. “Do you remember the things you used to say to me when I was a little boy? Has your get-up-and-go got-up-and-went?”

  He smiles to himself. “Remember this one? ‘If you don’t behave yourself I’m going to send you to the Colorado School of Mines.’ ”

  He laughs at this. I am driving along and peeling another orange for him and thinking, I’m spending precious time with my father … I made him laugh.

  Coming into Hatfield now, he sits up straight and looks around thoughtfully, as if someone has called his name suddenly.

  He points out where the train station used to stand. And the lumber and coal yard where he and Peggy’s father got the materials to build his house on School Street. The old Army-Navy recruiting station used to be there on the corner. And the Hatfield Consolidated School where Peggy went through all twelve grades.

  “When did she graduate?” I ask.

  He does the mathematics in his head. “She worked for the telephone company in 1949. We were married that year. So, she must have graduated in 1948. Yes, 1948.”

  Just a few blocks from the school we pass a church, then turn left onto Market Street. “There,” he says. I stop in front of a duplex house, pale pink. There are five electric meters screwed to the side of the house by the entrance. Apartments.

  “It was a house when your mother and I lived there.”

  “When?”

  “Before you were born. It was your grandparents’ house; when Peggy got too sick to take care of herself, we left our own apartment in Lansdale and moved in here with Peggy’s mother and father. Her grandfather and grandmother lived in one half of the house, along with an aunt. We lived in the other half with her mother and father. And of course your uncle Jack, he was a little boy then, and his sister Audrey who was born just a few months before you boys.”

  I am watching him closely to see if this is too difficult.

  He tells me that Peggy got very heavy and was filling up with fluids. When you touched her, it was like she was filled with wet sand, your finger left an impression.

  “The hospital where she died, and the cemetery where she’s buried, are they near here?”

  Maybe he hasn’t heard me. “I’ll show you the church,” he says.

  Hatfield is a town whose streets you could memorize the first time through. A few shops downtown. The old granite bank building at the traffic light. Tiny houses with little front and back yards line all the streets, brick row houses built quickly to accommodate the troops coming back from the war. A huge new generation of babies conceived in their little rooms.

  “There must have been pregnant women everywhere you went,” I say to myself.

  “Your grandmother just had Audrey before we moved in,” he tells me.

  I guess I already knew this, but now with the picture of the tiny house in mind, it strikes me how impossible it must have been—my father and his pregnant sick wife, her father and mother and their newborn daughter and their little boy. The grandparents and an old aunt. All packed into the place on Market Street in the summer of 1950. And after August 11, add me and my twin brother to the population.

  “The noise level alone must have been something,” I say.

  “Your mother had terrible headaches. I used to put wet washcloths across her forehead, I remember.”

  We pull up against the curb in front of the brick church while he is telling me how Peggy would sit up in bed with her hands clamped over her ears.

  It’s the telephone pole up ahead of where we’ve parked that makes me take out the wedding-car photograph. The pole marked by the same numbers 8 over 30 stenciled in white. By chance we have parked in exactly the same spot where their wedding car was parked for the photograph. I am about to tell this to my father when he says, “This is where the hearse was parked. I remember.”

  It sweeps over him then, the great faraway look of weariness which my boyhood memorized.

  I am trying to banish his memory of the hearse. “Here,” I keep insisting, holding the wedding-car photograph in front of him. “The picture you sent me, Dad. Look. See the two houses across the street? There? And the telephone pole? It’s exactly the same. Nothing has changed. Look, count the front steps coming down from the porches. See?”


  Suddenly he tilts his head back. Light from the sky fills the lenses of his glasses so I can no longer see his eyes. He asks me what time it is. “We don’t want to be late for dinner,” he says.

  I tell him we have plenty of time. But I can see we aren’t going to make it to the hospital where Peggy died, or to the cemetery. I see that the past is not about time at all really. The past is a place. Right here where the hearse was parked. Here is the past.

  “Maybe we should head back,” I say.

  When I start up the car he places his hand on my right arm and thanks me. “I can’t remember where we used to go on dates. You asked me last night, and I can’t remember. I can’t remember where I first met your mother either. I used to know the answers to all those questions, but now I can’t remember.”

  “It’s okay,” I tell him.

  “But I do remember that your mother and I weren’t together the last night of her life. She wanted to sleep in her mother’s bed. She had your granddad carry her to her mother’s bed, I remember. And at the funeral, riding to the cemetery, I kept thinking about that.”

  I see the tears standing in his eyes. I get the car moving and peel another orange for him, and all I want to do is tell him something that will make his tears go away. I want to tell him that everything is going to be okay, that even with the pain and the awful memories, we’ll be all right.

  We talk about football that night. It’s as close as we can get to anything real. He dreamed of playing football from the time he was five years old. High school and then college football. But he was too skinny. When the Depression came along his family was forced to move, but it was a fortuitous move for him because he ended up in a duplex right next door to Jack Graham, captain of the Lansdale High School football team. Jack took the skinny kid under his wing, introduced him to all the important kids, the pretty girls, the football coach who gave him the job as waterboy. Just to be down on the field during the games was a thrill. Just to be that close to it.

  In the morning he makes me breakfast before I leave. Someone from church has sent him grapefruit and oranges from Florida and he insists on cutting up some for me. A bowl of fruit. I’m watching him trying to figure it all out, the right bowl, the knife, a dish towel to wipe the counter. Starting over, beginning with the orange this time. Where to put the seeds. It takes almost an hour.