There were many letters; new ones arrived every morning in the day’s mail:
I remember as if it was just the other day, I was standing on my front porch with my best girlfriend when the funeral procession went past. It came to me at once that this must be the funeral of the dear young mother of the twin boys … For all these years I have wondered what ever became of these boys. Saturday when I picked up the newspaper, I finally knew.
I’ll never forget the utterly devastated, traumatized, grieving broken man who visited me to tell me his young wife had died, leaving newborn baby boys. It is hard enough to write about it even now, let alone talk about it through the years. I think it was a traumatic experience for everyone in the town of Hatfield. He kept repeating, “I didn’t know … No one told me.” Now at this time I don’t know whether he meant that no one told him just how ill she was … My heart ached for him and I wanted to say I would be glad to care for the babies (even with no previous experience).
For the fifty-seven years that I lived in Hatfield (on Cherry Street) I never remember anything so sad as the death of Peggy Schwartz. Many people like myself found it hard to pick our heads up and go on after that. But of course you must go on.
I have read that you are writing the story of your mother, Peggy Schwartz Snyder. I want you to know that I, too, was pregnant with twins in the same year as Peggy. We had the same doctor. Dr. Wright. He was an exceptional doctor, a tall, handsome man with bright eyes. Very intelligent and thorough. I had such extreme toxemia starting in the third month of my pregnancy that the doctor told me if things continued this toxemia would become preeclampsia and he would have to take my babies early, probably in the sixth month at the latest. I got worse and worse and in my twenty-sixth week, my babies were taken. They were twin boys like you and your brother. They only lived one day … In those days babies taken or born early before their lungs were developed could not live. Your mother must have been very brave to carry you and your brother through her full term.
Jack Schwartz, my uncle, had no idea about these letters or what people were writing me about my mother’s death. These words “eclampsia,” “toxemia,” strange words to me then, words I had never heard before in any of Colleen’s pregnancies, were adding up to something that I failed to recognize even when Jack called from his home in Vermont to tell me about an article he had just run across in a magazine. “I think I finally know what killed Peggy,” he said on the telephone.
In the January 1998 issue of Worth magazine there was a story under the title “The Best Medicine … The AMA doesn’t think ordinary Americans can handle the truth about their doctors. Tell that to what’s left of the Grossman family.”
The story was about a young pregnant woman who died of eclampsia in 1986. Eclampsia, described as extreme toxemia, killed the woman despite attentive care by her physician, and the additional scrutiny of her own father who was also a physician. The diagnosis, so simple to confirm by taking a patient’s blood pressure, is also equally simple to miss. In this story the woman’s normal baseline blood pressure was particularly low, and so her blood pressure during pregnancy, which did not appear dangerously high to her physician, was.
“I read the article and the whole time I was reading it, something said to me, this is what killed Peggy. I’m probably wrong. But I’m sending you the article anyway,” Jack said.
One of the most helpful letters I received was from an eighty-seven-year-old woman in a nursing home who told me about Anna Hartman, who was the labor and delivery nurse at the Elm Terrace Hospital for thirty-two years. She sent me a newspaper article that had appeared when Mrs. Hartman retired; it contained a thorough description of the Elm Terrace Hospital at the time my mother was a maternity patient there. I wrote her a letter thanking her, and she replied immediately that someone she knew had recently told her that Anna Hartman was still alive. She was going to try to contact her, and she asked me to call her after a few days if I wanted to speak with Anna Hartman about my mother.
That night I dreamed that I was standing in front of the Elm Terrace Hospital. It was summer and the tall shade trees on the lawn were blowing in a warm wind. On the porch, pregnant girls were sitting in white wicker rocking chairs. I could see inside the front door, a tall heavy door like the door of a church, and beyond into the foyer with the dark scrolled banister and the oak staircase where two men were carrying a woman on a stretcher up to the delivery room on the second floor. She was crying out for someone to help her and I was calling to the pregnant girls in their white wicker chairs on the porch, asking who was on the stretcher, but they couldn’t hear me. I ran down Broad Street to the corner of Fourth to Dr. Wright’s office in the big Victorian house with white crown molding and gables covered in vines. All the lights were off. But there was a man sitting on the front steps. He was holding something in his hand, gesturing for me to take it. In the light of a streetlamp I could see that he had handed me the medical records from the Grandview Hospital where Peggy died. I read the lines again “… 4:45 p.m. pt. complaining of ‘queer feeling in head’ ‘feels hot all over’—blood stopped. Dr. Peters called—respiration becoming extremely labored. 4:48 Caff.Sod.Benz. GR 7½ IV. given by Dr. Peters. 4:50 Patient not responsive—R.H.S. pronounced dead by Dr. Peters.” I ran back down the street to the Elm Terrace Hospital and began telling the pregnant girls that there had been some mistake, that Peggy Snyder couldn’t be dead because she was on the stretcher, being carried up the stairs to have her babies. The pregnant girls had their heads bowed. The wicker rocking chairs were still, and the pregnant girls were asleep. I stepped closer to the porch and saw that one of the sleeping girls was Erin, my twelve-year-old daughter, grown up. Her eyes were closed but there were tears running down her cheeks.
I awoke from this dream and went straight to Erin’s room. Her white down comforter had fallen from her bed. When I covered her I thought about how I used to lift her from her crib in the middle of the night to carry her back into my bed so Colleen could feed her. I would wrap her tightly in a small blanket, her arms against her sides inside the blanket. Colleen would turn onto one side, unbutton her nightgown, and place her nipple to Erin’s lips. Those days of my daughter’s infancy were the unhurried days of my own love story with Colleen, when the three of us would lie in bed all afternoon, enclosed within a tenderness for one another that the world could not diminish.
I looked down at Erin, her long legs beneath the blanket, so improbably long to me. She was coming into her own now, taking voice lessons, auditioning for parts in a children’s theater. She would march into the living room on a Sunday afternoon where her brother and I were camped out on the couch watching one football game turn into another and she’d let us have it: “I can’t believe you’re going to just lie there watching dumb football games all day!”
I have also seen this daughter with a far-off look in her eyes, and I’ve wondered if she inherited from my mother the same deep, perplexing loneliness that has always been the strongest emotion in me, stronger than love, anger, or ambition, a feeling so persistent that it could convince you in a moment it was a loneliness you had earned and would carry with you because you were worthy of nothing else.
My mother had created me and then re-created herself in my daughter. Tonight, looking down at her in her bed, I wondered how much of my mother she carried inside her. How much of who she was becoming had been shaped by a person she would never know. I went downstairs and took Erin’s baby journal off the bookshelf next to the fireplace. I began reading the pages, searching for the places where I had written to her about Peggy. I read about her first Christmas, her first day of school, the day she learned to ride a bicycle, the afternoon I buried her dog. But there was nothing about Peggy and now there was no room left to write anything.
Chapter Thirteen
My mother’s closest friends from high school have met me at the Heritage Hotel outside Collegeville to tell me about her. Adelle, who played field hockey with Peggy for two years in high
school and walked home with her every night from practice. Adelle graduated first in the class, went on to Ursinus College, and learned to fly an airplane. Peg, who was a nursing student at Grandview. She was on duty on the third floor of the hospital on Sunday afternoon, August 27, 1950, but did not find out until the next day that my mother, her dearest friend, had died in semiprivate room 9, one floor below her. Julia, who had met my father before she became friends with Peggy because she was a close friend of my father’s cousin Frances, who was paralyzed from polio. And Ginny, who threw an engagement party for Peggy in her basement and for years after her death went to visit my grandmother and grandfather every Sunday afternoon. “First,” she said, “because I needed to, and then after a while because it had become a habit.”
Adelle remembered coming home from college for Christmas and going to see Peggy in the apartment on North Broad Street in Lansdale. It was only a month after Peggy and my father were married, and Adelle asked her what her husband was going to get her for Christmas. “I’m giving Dick big hints,” Peggy told her. “I pretend to be talking in my sleep, saying, ‘Pearls, pearls, pearls.’ ”
I listened to these ladies as they laughed about their high school senior trip to Washington, D.C., and my mother’s brief romance with a man who placed bets over the telephone when she was working at the telephone company.
Peg stayed for a while after the other ladies had said goodbye. She spoke at length about my mother and then, with tears in her eyes, she handed me an envelope. “I want you to have this,” she said.
It was a pale green envelope addressed:
Miss Peggy Kirsch
Nurses Home
Grand View Hospital
Sellersville, Penna
The postmark was January 11, 1950, 9:30 a.m.
There was a three-cent stamp in the upper right-hand corner. The Ps in Peggy and Penna were fat and rounded, as if they had been written by a small child still thrilled by her newly acquired ability to write in cursive.
Printed on the back of the envelope:
Mrs Richard Snyder
623 North Broad Street
Lansdale, Pa.
My mother’s personal stationery. Her new married name was also printed at the top of the enclosed five-by-eight-inch sheet of paper.
In the only letter I would ever have of my mother’s she wrote with the same cursive flourishes:
Dear Peggy,
If this letter is a wee bit sloppy please excuse it, because I’m writing in bed.
Please forgive us for not coming over last week but I was sick every night but one and that night we got company. I thought I had a cold in my stomach, because I was sick in my stomach every day for more than a week, so last Wed. night I went to the Dr. and I told him how I felt and he asked me some questions and guess what he said—he said I was pregnant, isn’t that wonderful. I’m going to Scared (not spelled right) Heart in Norristown next September.
Are you surprised? So was I.
Did you have a nice vacation? I hope so.
I don’t know what to tell you. I guess I didn’t say much, I just wanted you to know I was thinking about you.
Please write to me.
Love,
Peggy.
My eyes filled with tears before I finished.
“I think I was her first friend she told,” Peg said. “It’s been so long ago and there’s so much that I’ve forgotten, but when I read the letter I wondered why Peggy says she’s going to have her baby in Norristown. She’d already made up her mind in the first month of her pregnancy. Everyone had their babies at Elm Terrace or at Grandview in those days.”
I knew what it meant because of the woman who had written to me after the Reporter article appeared, the woman who was so sick in her pregnancy that her doctor, Dr. Wright, sent her to Norristown where her life had been saved.
I told Peg about this and I asked her if my mother had ever said anything to her about being sick when she was pregnant.
“Nothing, but that’s something else I wanted to tell you. I never saw Peggy once she became pregnant. Neither did any of her other close friends. We never saw her once during the time she was carrying you twins. And I’ve brought you something else that’s a mystery to me.”
Another envelope addressed in my mother’s handwriting with the distinctive fat, round P:
Miss Peg Kirsch
Grand View Hospital
Sellersville, Pa.
It was a tiny envelope two-and-a-half-inches-by-three-inches. Inside was a small card with a child’s painting of a baby holding a pink umbrella with a blue ribbon tied to its hooked handle.
You’re invited to a
BABY SHOWER
DATE: MAY 22
TIME: 8:00
FOR: PEG SNYDER
PLACE: JENNY EBERHARDT
“Do you remember how my mother seemed at the shower?” I asked Peg.
“I’m sure I never went. And here, look at the date of the postmark.”
The envelope was postmarked June 8.
The shower was to take place May 22.
“No one went to her shower because she mailed the invitations two weeks late,” Peg said. “She didn’t want anyone to see her, I’m sure of it. This was in what would have been the last three months of her pregnancy.”
Peg let me keep the invitation and the letter. When we said goodbye we held each other outside the restaurant, in the rain.
“There’s a lot that no one knows about your mother,” she said to me. “Peggy was very, very private; if she was sick she never would have told anyone, not even your father. Particularly not your father. But you have to find out exactly what was going on. Don’t stop until you know all that there is to know.”
I used a pay phone at the restaurant to call the woman in the nursing home who was going to set up a meeting for me with the Anna Hartman who had been my mother’s nurse at the Elm Terrace Hospital during her delivery. My idea was to drive straight from the restaurant to see Anna. She would remember, I was sure, the young mother who died after giving birth to twins. And I hoped she might also be able to tell me what had happened to Peggy, what had caused her to become so sick.
“This is Don Snyder, Peggy Snyder’s son,” I said when she answered the telephone.
“Oh my,” she said. “I called your house in Maine this morning and your wife told me you were here. I’m sorry. Anna Hartman died yesterday.”
. . .
I drove fast through the rain to Lansdale with my mother’s letter to Peg on the seat beside me. It was raining too hard to read the numbers on the apartments on North Broad Street so I rolled the window down and leaned across the seat. When I thought I had found the right place I pulled the car to a stop on the side of the street and ran out into the pouring rain. I could feel the blood pounding in my head. I was asking myself, “What are you doing?” And it was number 632, not 623. Running back down to the sidewalk, I reached inside the car window I had left open and grabbed the letter. The ink on the envelope had begun to bleed from the rain.
I ran down the street and then across, through the traffic, to number 623. It was a brick walk-up, adjoined on both sides by identical apartments. I knocked hard on the front door and peered through the glass in the door to a dark corridor with a doorway on the right. No one answered and I went to the windows lining the front porch, knocking on each of them, knowing that it was no use because there wasn’t anyone home, but knocking anyway. I could see a couch through the windows and two chairs. I could picture Peggy walking through these rooms with my father. Some part of me believed that if I stayed there long enough someone would open the door for me and let me walk through the rooms and I would find something that had belonged to my mother, some small thing that would explain why she was planning even in the first month of her pregnancy to have her baby in Norristown instead of the Elm Terrace Hospital which had stood across the street where there was now an apartment building. Even as I was driving away and holding the letter over the car’s hea
ter to dry it before my mother’s handwriting disappeared, I was thinking that someday I would know why she had not mailed the invitations to her baby shower until two weeks after it was supposed to take place.
I drove to the North Penn Hospital next, the hospital that replaced Elm Terrace. A woman in the office where they keep medical records told me that all records from the old Elm Terrace Hospital had been destroyed. “We have nothing here,” she said. “The records are gone.”
I was standing at her desk soaking wet from the rain, asking her about something that had happened almost fifty years ago, long before she was born. I realized that I was leaning over her desk, too close to her, and dripping water on her papers. I had this feeling that she thought I was a lunatic who had wandered inside from the storm. I gave her my mother’s letter to read. When she was finished I told her that it was the only thing I had that my mother had ever written and that I had to find out what had happened to her. “She was only nineteen years old?” she said after I had told her my story.
“What about her doctor’s records?” I asked. “Dr. Wright. Dr. Edward Wright, whose office was on Broad and Third streets?”
“They would have been disposed of by his family when he died,” she said. “We wouldn’t have anything.”
I asked her if she would take my name and telephone number just in case. As she was writing them down she said, “I’m really sorry, sir, but I don’t think there’s anything I can do to help you.”
I found my father sitting at the dining-room table with the telephone and sheets of notebook paper. I stood inside the door and before I had even taken off my boots I was hitting him with questions. “The word ‘eclampsia,’ Dad—did you ever hear the doctor use that word? How did she die then, Dad? How come no one ever found out how she died! And do you remember the baby shower that she never went to? Here—have you ever seen one of these invitations? And why was she going to have her baby in Norristown? She must have talked with you about this? None of her girlfriends ever saw her when she was pregnant. None of them. What was she hiding from? And your apartment on Broad Street was right across the street from the Elm Terrace Hospital; weren’t you there every damned day asking Dr. Wright why she wasn’t getting better?”
Of Time and Memory Page 7