I was talking to a dear friend about this a few days later. Duty, that was the right word, he agreed. “I’d say it’s your solemn duty.”
Chapter Eight
It was cold and there was a hard wind blowing. The people out walking along Main Street in Hatfield had their heads bowed low beneath the winter sky. I was standing at a pay phone, watching everyone who passed me, trying to figure out if they were old enough to have been alive when my mother walked these same streets. As I watched them, I had this mounting desire to whisper my mother’s name to each of them as they passed, and then to wait to see who would stop and turn around.
From the pay phone I called the number in the directory for Muriel Schwartz. She was Peggy’s aunt who, with her husband, Howard, had lived only a few blocks from the little duplex that Peggy’s parents rented on Market Street in Hatfield. I’d been told that she and Peggy spent a lot of time together.
On the telephone she said, “In the days after you were born I came by each morning to give you and your brother your baths.”
I asked her if I could come see her.
She lived alone in a modern complex of small apartments. She was shivering when I went inside. The winter weather bothered her and she told me that she seldom went outside. There was a photograph of Howard in a frame by the window and when I saw it, I told her how I had always liked him. Those times I was taken to my grandparents’ house on School Street around Christmas, Howard and Muriel were usually there. Howard had seen combat in the war. He was the kind of tough guy who naturally appeals to little boys because he told stories about soldiers, he had big muscles and tattoos on his arms and he would pass my brother and me bottles of Coca-Cola like a conspirator, saying with a sly grin, “Don’t tell anyone where this came from, boys.” He had died more than ten years ago.
“Are you okay, living here by yourself?” I asked Muriel.
“Oh, I’m fine,” she said brightly. “Lonely, I guess. No one prepares you for how lonely life becomes when you get old. But let’s talk about Peggy. Do you know your mother at all, Donald?”
“No,” I said.
She smiled at me. “Well, it’s time that you know her. I’m going to tell you who she was.”
I spent a wonderful morning there in her living room. Muriel spoke in soft, measured sentences about my mother’s childhood and her high school years when she was becoming a young woman. During those years Muriel had raised three small boys and Peggy was the primary baby-sitter. She helped Muriel care for these boys, and during the war when Howard was gone for three years, Peggy kept Muriel company.
“I considered your mother a close friend,” she told me.
The whole time I listened to Muriel, a picture of my mother began to form in my mind. The first clear picture I’d ever had. I felt so close to her that when it was time for me to leave, and Muriel spoke about the last hours of Peggy’s life, I felt the loss of my mother for the first time.
It was a Sunday morning and Muriel had come by as she always did to give Dave and me our baths. It was August 27, sixteen days after we were born, Peggy’s seventh day home from the hospital.
“The house was empty,” Muriel recalled. “It was a Sunday and everyone had gone to church. Your mother had been getting weaker and weaker since she came home after your birth. I never saw her hold you boys, not once. She just didn’t have the strength. That morning I had this really spooky feeling when I opened the front door. I can’t describe it. It was eerie and I can still remember it. There wasn’t a sound in the house. The bed in the sitting room where your mother and father slept was empty. I looked at it and it was the first time I didn’t see Peggy there. And I knew that wherever she was, she would have been carried from that bed, she was too weak to walk on her own.
“I found her upstairs in her mother’s bedroom. She was curled up on one corner of the bed. Her skin was gray, I will never forget that. Awful … She was coughing very faintly. I went over to her and said, ‘Oh, Peggy, you’re so sick, aren’t you?’ She looked into my eyes with such … I don’t know, just like she was crying out to me to please help her.
“I called Dr. Paul Moyer, the family doctor, not the doctor she’d had with you boys. Dr. Moyer arrived shortly, took one look at Peggy and exclaimed, ‘This is not the girl I know.’ He called for an ambulance while I stayed with Peggy. Her face … She looked like the photographs that we had all been seeing in the news of the people in the Nazi concentration camps.
“I went along to the hospital. Your father’s good friend, Bill someone … I can’t remember his last name. He drove me to the hospital.
“They took her upstairs. I was in the waiting room. Your father and grandparents arrived very soon after this. Granddad went upstairs with your father to be with Peggy. She died very shortly after this. No more than an hour after we were together at the hospital.
“Your father came to the waiting room to tell us. It was the oddest thing. He had this terrible look in his eyes, and a faint smile, like he was trying to be brave … He was holding Peggy’s watch above his head in his right hand. He was walking stiffly across the floor, taking tiny steps. ‘At least I have her watch,’ he said. ‘They let me keep her watch.’
“I knew then,” Muriel told me, “that your father might never be the same again.”
Chapter Nine
There were days after this when I had to keep a notebook with me everywhere I went. Driving the car, eating a meal with Colleen and the kids, even standing in front of a classroom teaching college students. Peggy’s story was such a presence in my mind and my heart that it poured out of me. I began waking at four in the morning to the sound of her voice, and the sentences that I wrote down weren’t coming from inside me, but from somewhere far away. The sentences fell onto each page effortlessly. And whenever I felt Peggy’s voice growing faint I telephoned one of her friends from high school whose names my grandfather had given me.
I was exhilarated by each new page. And then I was certain that I should throw the pages away so they would never see the light of day.
Because of my father. Because of the sadness at the center of Peggy’s story. For the same reason my father had never spoken to me and my brother about her, I was now convinced that I should let her voice remain silent, locked beyond the heavy door of sorrow that my father and my grandparents and everyone else had closed when Peggy died.
. . .
My mother’s brother, Jack, came to see me in Maine not long after this. I hadn’t seen him in fifteen years. He was sixty years old now and to our astonishment we looked so much alike, we could have been brothers. We walked the beach in Scarborough that day. The waves, when they rose up into the light just before they broke, were a lovely enamel green. I told Jack that I had spoken with his father and with Muriel and that I had begun writing pages but wasn’t sure I should take it any further.
“Why not?” he said.
I gave him what was becoming my stock reply, that if I kept going, I was bound to bring back all the sadness again. The sadness that my grandfather and my father had spent their lifetimes trying to outrun.
“Have you asked your dad how he feels about it?”
“Not directly,” I said. “I just don’t want to bring him any sadness now, at this time in his life.” I was staring out to sea as I said this to Jack. It was that time of late afternoon when there is a moment of stillness along the shore, just before the last slanting light disappears beyond the high dunes. In that moment I realized something, but I couldn’t say anything because Jack was suddenly telling me about the day Peggy died.
“I was riding my bike across the street at Snyder’s coal and lumber yard. One of the neighbors came across the street and said, ‘Your sister was taken to the hospital this morning.’ I said, ‘I know that.’ You know the way a twelve-year-old kid doesn’t want to let on that he doesn’t know everything there is to know about everything. Then she said, ‘She’s not coming home, she’s dead.’
“Just like that. ‘She’s not
coming home, she’s dead.’ And that’s how I learned that Peggy had died. And now I’m sixty years old and I still have no idea how my sister died. No one ever told me. So when Dad told me that you’ve been going to Pennsylvania to talk with people about Peggy, I thought, I’m going to tell Don to go to the Grandview Hospital and ask for Peggy’s records there. And her death certificate. I already called the hospital and they won’t release the records to me. But you can get them.”
Over the next two weeks I told Colleen many times about what I had realized on the beach that day with Jack: From the beginning I thought that I was setting out to discover who my mother was in this world. But now I knew that I was also going to discover my father. Muriel was right; from the moment my father lost Peggy, he was cast into some new person, never again to be the person he was during the ten months he spent with my mother. I wanted to know my father as my mother had known him when she fell in love with him, she the prettiest girl anyone in Hatfield could remember, and he a skinny, poor kid who grew up with no plumbing and already had false teeth by the time he met her in 1948. I wanted to know what she had loved about him and seen in him, and it seemed entirely possible to me that it was something he had never again possessed after her death. Something she had taken with her.
Our lives proceed in one direction for so long and then we take a half turn in another direction and the whole purpose of our lives is suddenly out there in front of us. I believe this now. I believe we are even given glimpses of our destiny. And on the cold winter afternoon when I sat with Muriel, Peggy’s aunt, I felt for the first time in my life that my destiny was to know my mother. The events of Peggy’s life were easy to trace, in part because hers was such a short life and it was lived at a time when things were less complicated than they are today, or if not less complicated, then at least less hurried. For example, a girl who worked with Peggy at the telephone company had no difficulty remembering how Peggy described her first date because a first date in 1948 was just a restaurant meal with a young man. A few hours of conversation and then a memory of that evening which contained no secrets.
I laid down the events of my mother’s life along a time line. But the events of our lives do not necessarily convey who we are in this world, and in order for me to connect these events so that they revealed the motives that had inspired them, I had to know the emotions beneath them. I am talking about the only way on earth that anyone ever comes to truly know us. By knowing our fears and our desires, the things that are deep and individual in each of us and the things we try hardest to conceal.
Peggy was an intensely private person who took great measures to conceal these things from the people closest to her. And if she had not opened herself to Muriel, I would only have been able to skate across the surface of her days on this earth. I will always remember and be thankful for Muriel’s words to me that winter afternoon: “Let me tell you who your mother was in this world.” Not only what she did, but how she felt about herself and the life that encircled her.
Muriel’s gift to me was inestimable. Without it I would have been left to imagine Peggy’s feelings. And I might have been wrong as often as I was right. This would not have been good enough. I wanted to know my mother. I wanted to know what she was afraid of and what she desired. I wanted to know the precise measurements of her love for my father so that I could give him back his love story in its true shape and texture.
We are living at a time now when we want to know what is true. In the stories that we read, we want to know what actually happened and what was invented. I don’t know why exactly. But in this story of mine, invention was not good enough for me. I had no wish to invent my mother, but to reinstate her.
Chapter Ten
Maybe our adult lives begin when we have that first sense that others are oblivious to our dreams and our desires. Peggy was seventeen when this happened. Later she suspected that it had happened much sooner for her girlfriends; she believed she was late with everything. The season helped—spring itself was a feast to her senses, and that spring of 1948 she could feel the texture of spring for the first time. The way the light struck the cold marble front of the Hatfield Building and Loan on Broad Street. The green grass at the Montgomery County fairgrounds. She was the kind of young girl who walked her own road alone, and she would have felt as if she was taking in the world around her that spring while everyone else was just moving past it, oblivious to the color and the light as well as to how these things registered inside her. I know that she was confused and unsure how this made her feel; on the one hand it gave her an intense and pleasant feeling of freedom and privacy. And on the other hand it made her feel lonely. Even isolated.
That spring of 1948, Peggy awakens early every morning. Long before the first light of dawn she opens her eyes and listens for the sounds of the world which in those days were the whistle of the Philadelphia train running east toward the city and the newspaper delivery truck pulling to the curb in front of I. C. Detweiler’s General Store. She plays a game with herself: if she awakens before anyone else, then she can lay claim to the world beyond the walls and roof of this house which contain her. Her father’s house. The train whistle starts her heart. The delivery truck fills her lungs with air.
Every few nights she will rearrange the furniture in her room—the twin bed, the bureau, the bedside table, the stuffed chair. She will move these things at night when the room is dark. Then when she opens her eyes in the morning, she will be somewhere else. Someone else.
Out of necessity she has been waking up earlier and earlier in order to beat her grandfather who has recently moved in with her to convalesce from a fall he took off a carpenter’s scaffold.
In her room she dresses in darkness. Her flannel nightgown she folds in tissue paper and slips into her drawer, a small act to purify the day. And before she leaves the room she kneels down on the floor of her closet to make sure that none of her shoes is out of place. She places her hand on the back of each shoe and pushes so all the toes are lined up against the baseboard. This small gesture folds into the smooth contours of an ordered life and holds together the symmetry of the world. She can sense this and it calms her. At this hour of the morning, the world, to her, is still a fine painting that she will only make a mess of, marching back and forth across it with paint on the soles of her shoes as the day goes on. That is how she thinks of herself in those days. Ungainly and unsure of herself. Not smart enough. Not pretty enough.
In the hallway she stops at the doorway of her brother’s room. Jack is ten years old. She has bought him a cowboy’s six-shooter and holster for his birthday and it hangs off the bedpost. She listens to him breathing. Sometime in the last year while she was growing into her beauty, the sharp angles of her body giving way to roundness, she had begun seeing her brother as more than a pest who plagued her, hiding her lipstick in the mailbox on the front porch, her underwear in the glove compartment of her father’s Ford. She had begun to see him as a person who would go on and take his place in the world, and this as much as any other change seemed to indicate that she had finally left behind her girlhood, ducking below the last breaking waves of adolescence, then emerging as a young woman while the turmoil and confusion washed away beneath her feet.
In a bed across from her brother, Aunt Sue is snoring faintly. She works as a nurse in Philadelphia and visits frequently. Her sister, Lilly, lives three doors away and lately has been giving Peggy a course in advanced sewing. Tonight, in front of both these aunts, Peggy will take her place at the Singer machine with the black wrought-iron legs and the little white light glowing beneath its tin shade.
A few steps away she pauses at the door of her mother and father’s bedroom. She can smell the printer’s ink on the clothes that her father has left on a chair. Tan khakis, top and bottom. A black leather belt. A white T-shirt. In another hour her mother will awaken to go to work in the cafeteria of the Consolidated School. She will put on her white uniform and the hair net that always makes Peggy feel sorry for her bec
ause with the hair net on, her mother doesn’t look like herself but like a kitchen worker complying with someone’s rules. The hair net, something so light that it is almost weightless in her hand, steals her mother from her and Peggy will turn away whenever her mother puts it on in her presence.
In the kitchen on these early mornings, Peggy’s grandfather is already sitting at the oak table, his head in his hands. Something is knocked down inside her when she sees that he has beaten her to the day.
She waits for him to finish his silent morning prayers, then touches his shoulder. Here is a man who dropped thirty feet from a carpenter’s scaffolding and landed on his back, the scaffold planks and all his tools crashing down on top of him. When the doctor examined him in the emergency room at Grandview Hospital in Sellersville he exclaimed, “You’re in so many pieces, Howard, that I don’t know where to start.” He’s an early riser out of habit, a carpenter who always prided himself on being the first one at George Snyder’s lumberyard each day to pick up his stock. He is an old man with a head of white waves, but his body is as hard as wood. “You have to be strong in this life, Peggy,” he has always told her. It is his battle cry and whenever he says it, it makes Peggy wonder just how strong she is, and will have to be.
He wants to show her what he has made with his big square hands. He is very pleased with himself when he takes it from the vise that he has screwed to the kitchen table so the glue would dry overnight. It’s a kind of wedge that he has carved out of wood and attached to the sole of his right shoe to compensate for the leg that has withered since his accident. The doctor had wanted to amputate the leg, but he healed it on his own, though it has shrunk three inches now. “How do you like it, what do you think?” he asks Peggy.
He wants to try it on and give it a test right now. She watches him walk to the sink and back, clomping like a horse. It is Peggy’s idea to put it to the real test. A few dance steps—not a slow dance, but the jitterbug.
Of Time and Memory Page 5