He looked at me with a puzzled expression. “We weren’t living in the apartment on Broad Street, we moved to Grandmother Schwartz’s house in Hatfield.”
“I know you did. Why?”
“So Grandmother could help out.”
“Help out with what, Dad? You were living there with Peggy and her mother and father and brother and her grandparents, and God knows, maybe two aunts—all of you crammed into that tiny half of a house, and no one could see that Peggy was dying? No one could pick up the damned telephone and call the doctor? I don’t get it … I don’t understand how she could get worse every day from the day we were born—”
“On August eleventh,” he said helplessly.
“Right, August eleventh. And they send her home from the hospital on the twentieth and she can’t walk on her own—that’s what Peg Kirsch told me she had been told. And she’d stopped eating completely. And it goes on for seven more days and no one calls Dr. Wright and tells him to do something? You’re going to have to help me figure this out, Dad, because I’m sorry, but I just don’t get it.”
I put my boots back on and went outside and smoked a cigarette. When I came back, my father was still at the table. He picked up a piece of paper and said, “I wrote down the names of all Peggy’s bridesmaids at the wedding.”
I took a deep breath.
“I called one of the girls and told her that you were writing Peggy’s memoirs. She wants to talk to you.”
I took the piece of paper.
“I just wanted to help you, Donnie,” he said to me. “I wish I could remember all these things.”
It was all out of me. I told him I was sorry.
Chapter Fourteen
Of all things, Peggy’s first real fling is with a bookie from Camden, New Jersey. It begins in the heat of July, in the summer of 1948. Actually he sends her a dozen peach-colored roses in May and a wide-brimmed straw hat in June with the same peach-color ribbon around the brim, both of these offerings because he found her voice so pleasant when she helped him take his bets through the switchboard of the telephone company in Lansdale. Some of the girls at work have teased her about this secret admirer, making him out to be a rogue like Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind. He bets on everything, it seems: professional baseball games in both the big leagues and the minor leagues; the women’s field hockey world championships which interested Peggy a great deal; the Wednesday-night fights which she found herself listening to on the radio lately, much to the puzzlement of her father who always sat in the stuffed chair listening by himself.
In July the summer Olympic games begin at Wembley Park in England after a lapse of twelve years, and the bookie has drawn her into the excitement surrounding the performance of a Dutch housewife named Fanny Blankers. The thirty-year-old mother of two from Amsterdam has won three gold medals in the hurdles and sprints and the bookie claims to have made a thousand dollars by betting on her.
He makes Peggy a simple proposition: if Fanny captures a fourth gold medal, then she must meet him in Souderton for dinner.
There is something about his voice that makes this offer attractive. Something wise and worldly. There is also the satisfaction of knowing how out of sorts her father would be to know that she had accepted a blind date from a bookie! Lately she has been searching for ways to threaten the principles he is so determined to stand upon. Her sweaters are too tight. She is spending too much time alone in her room. She disappears just when everyone else in the house is sitting down to meals. The dance moves that she rehearses upstairs rattle the pictures on the walls downstairs. And she refuses to date anyone, preferring instead to go out in large packs of girls and boys and then answering his queries about what she’d been doing and where she’d gone with the same vague answer each time he waits up for her: We were messing around, that’s all.
Messing around?
Messing around, that’s all.
So the Dutch housewife wins her fourth gold medal and Peggy takes the commuter train to Souderton on a Saturday night. She angers her father by wearing jeans rolled up to her knees and a cotton shirt with the tails hanging out, partly to provoke him and partly as a precaution because she has told the bookie that she will be wearing a green sundress; this way she can stand him up at the last minute if he shows up the way one of the girls at work predicted he would, sporting a thin moustache and wearing a zoot suit.
Actually he is dressed rather like a Fuller Brush salesman. A stiff blue suit with a white carnation in his lapel. He has jet black hair ironed straight back from his forehead above his pale gray eyes. He is carrying a newspaper rolled up like a telescope, which he is tapping against his thigh as he looks around the restaurant. As the diners turn to regard him he gives them each a pleasant half smile and a nod.
Friendly enough, Peggy guesses. So she raises her hand. He walks toward her with quick precise steps, which could be what remains of a march from his war days or which might indicate his eagerness.
They shake hands. His name is Robert Marsh. He calls her Miss Schwartz and tells her to call him Robert.
So, Mr. Marsh, she says. How much money have you made on your bets today?
He unfolds the newspaper and shows her the box scores of last night’s ball games. Two dollars here. Three-fifty here.
Do you ever lose, Mr. Marsh?
I could lose tonight, he tells her with a shy expression, placing his elbows on the Formica table, making a little pedestal of his hands and resting his chin on his knuckles.
What is it you’re betting on tonight? she asks, though she is aware that she’s walking straight into his trap.
I’m betting you’ll let me kiss you when I take you home.
The room seems to fall to silence around her.
She leans back in her chair, crossing her arms in front of her.
How much have you wagered, Mr. Marsh?
A great deal. My life’s savings.
Maybe I’ll let you win if you agree to split the jackpot with me.
He puts out his hand for her to shake. Deal, he says.
On the finger where a wedding ring would be, he is wearing a gold ring with the University of Virginia embossed on its face.
She shakes his hand.
What is interesting about him is that all through dinner he only asks her about herself and her life. She has scarcely been in the presence of a boy before who didn’t go on and on about himself.
But this is hardly a boy. Late twenties, nearly thirty years old, she guesses.
And the war? she says finally. Where did you spend the war?
Italy. In a tank division. Chasing around Mussolini. It was boring most of the time, and terrifying the rest. But I did manage to get to Venice. I went to the grave of John Keats and found that visitors had left notes on his headstone. They had written of their own difficulties in life as though they expected that there would be a response. As if seeking the counsel of God himself. I found it very strange. And touching. Do you know the poetry of John Keats, Miss Schwartz?
The poetry of John Keats. He might just as well have asked her to describe a street in Paris. Any question that exposed the vastness of what she didn’t know was a small terror that caused Peggy to withdraw into herself, back to the secret place where she drew comfort from lining up the shoes in her closet and wrapping her clothing neatly in tissue paper, and locking the front door of the house then making herself walk back downstairs to check and see if she locked it. Those crazy acts to purify the day, if performed diligently, can keep the world from ever finding out that she is not worthy of taking up space and air.
But sometimes they are not enough. There is so much in the world that she doesn’t know and will never know, and she might hide behind her beauty and her thoughts, concealing from some people her ignorance and her unworthiness, but not from everyone. Not from the people who get too close to her.
Even if the bookie smiles a little half smile meant to reassure this pretty girl, is it enough to keep her from drifting away from this t
able and this restaurant and his presence? He isn’t the first person to try to win her back from herself, to try to call to her before she disappears in a place she would never describe to anyone, a place that might have felt to her like the smooth walls of a vault rising up around her, imprisoning her in a blackness that she cannot climb out of. Like the walls of a bomb shelter, so smooth and so high that they keep her from ever imagining herself as competent as the Dutch housewife winning Olympic medals or as intelligent as this man who understands the poetry of the world. Walls and a cement lid threaded like a bolt that screws down above her.
Chapter Fifteen
And so, through the long summer she is always returning from that dark vault which contains her and surrounds her with the terrifying knowledge of her own unworthiness.
You’d better change your attitude, her father tells her.
Where are you, Peggy? her mother asks again and again.
How could she answer her mother’s question? Would the question only add to her darkness? Would the distance separating her from these people she loved push her so far into darkness that she tried desperately to force her mind to concentrate upon what she knew to be true and familiar, like the little town of Hatfield? A picture in her mind that might release her from the terrible darkness? A picture of the Town Center where she lives in the real world. The loading platform behind the lumberyard and the holding pens for sheep and cattle. The train station with its overhanging roof. A few freight cars on side rails, waiting or forgotten. Anders Market with its wood-planked floor, a great circle of yellow cheese on a stool inside the front door, the tall shelves lined with clean white stiff paper. The coffee grinder and scales. The Hatfield National Bank with its seven barred windows. In Geo. S. Snyder Estate, in the hardware section, the lightbulbs that the salesclerk tested for you before you paid for them. And out on the sidewalk people watching Hatfield’s first television set in the tall front window. The great pretzels in Zepp’s Bakery and the chest of ice-cold soda in Nick Gerhart’s Mobil station. At Pete Wyer’s barbershop, men filed in the front door as if to have their hair cut, then out the back door to the taproom of the Knipe Hotel. At I. C. Detweiler’s General Store, racks of Clark’s thread in all colors. The huge water tower on steel legs at the north end of town. Maybe this portrait inside her head is enough to make the darkness tolerable. This small town which was once freshly painted, everything restored and newly provisioned for the returning soldiers, will be there for her as well when she returns.
Did anyone warn her that one day when she returns from this blackness which people have begun to call her moodiness, and she walks down Market Street to the corner where she can see the school and the church and the train station, suddenly none of it will feel real, none of it will be hers? And she will be left waiting for her own life to begin and suspecting that she does not possess something essential that is required of everyone to live in this place. She will wonder if the normal life will ask a price of her which she cannot meet. The price paid by a neighborhood girl. Maybe the great illusion of life is that we are moving ahead, when, actually, we are always returning, stepping off the train, back again. Or perhaps it is only her; she is the only one who moves against life’s momentum.
She draws some consolation from the possibility that these thoughts she has, these dark thoughts, mean nothing at all, nothing profound. They are just the restless thoughts of a teenaged girl with hormones racing through her veins.
But this is a cold consolation and it vanishes completely when she overhears her uncle talking about her father’s dark moods. At Lauchman’s print shop, where he runs a Linotype press in a room with a dozen other men, her father sometimes goes for a week at a time speaking with none of them. On the hot summer days when they eat their lunches out on the loading dock, he will eat with his back turned to his confederates. Oh, there are other times when he is the life of the party and the center of attention, but he can change his mood without provocation.
She is too much like you, and you’re too much like her, she hears her mother telling her father one morning. She is waiting for him to give her a ride to work. It is raining hard, a morning thunderstorm with great sheets of blown rain. She runs through the rain and takes a place in the back seat of her father’s car. She will spite him by making him drive her like a chauffeur.
They ride along without speaking a word to one another. The rain is hitting the roof of the car with the sound of buttons poured from a jar. She looks at the back of his head where the hair has begun to turn gray. He has the same naturally wavy hair that she has. They are both the same height now. She is staring at his hand on the steering wheel when suddenly through the rain-streaked passenger window on her right she sees something straight out of a nightmare, an enormous shape rising out of the storm like a great passenger ship and coming right at them. She screams hard and this is enough to rouse her father. He stomps on the brakes, rising up in the seat as he drives the pedal to the floor.
After the train has passed, he drives ahead a little ways then pulls over to the side of the road. His head is bowed and he is breathing hard. You saved our lives, he says to her through his tears. Though she might have wanted to say something to him, or to reach out and touch his shoulder, she keeps her distance and her silence.
Chapter Sixteen
In Grace Lutheran Church the minister, Reverend Fluck, is talking again about the communists who are going to try to take over America. There was something in the news just the other week. A man named Walter P. Reuther, president of CIO United Auto Workers, was shot through the kitchen window of his home in Detroit and everyone knows that communists shot him. Before too much longer they are going to assassinate every public official who refuses to go along with their plans to dismantle everything this great nation holds most dear. Especially the right to worship God and Jesus Christ, the son of God.
Lifting her eyes, Peggy can see the heads nodding in agreement with the minister. Not just the old white heads and bald heads in the congregation, but many heads that are not much older than hers. Her father’s head is nodding but her mother is staring out the windows of the church. Jack is leaning against her, placated by a pack of Life Savers, as she gazes serenely out the windows at an empty blue sky. She looks like she is at peace with the world, unthreatened by the communists, or anyone else. The minister’s warnings are falling on deaf ears; communists, war, the Russians digging entrenchments in Korea, the man on Cow Path Road digging a bomb shelter in his backyard. All of this is beyond her immediate concern; she is a mother with children to take care of. And once you are a mother in this world, it is something that can never be taken from you. No one can take this from you, and it can surround you and separate you from the rest of the world, enclosing you within an order and a shape so completely defined by its necessity that the great troubles of the world will not matter anymore.
After church she asks her mother what she was thinking about. The farm, she tells Peggy. The farm in Souderton where she grew up.
They have driven by only a few times since the family lost it during the Depression, but her mother has spoken of it often.
An hour later Peggy has made up her mind and arranged everything. She makes a picnic lunch, asks her uncle Howard to drive them there, and then walks her brother, Jack, across town, to leave him with the mother of one of his friends. It is another sunny day, the summer has been a succession of bright days. There is a gentle breeze.
Peggy sits in the back seat with the picnic basket so her mother can ride in front with Howard. He is wearing one of those ditchdigger T-shirts, white with straps over his shoulders. He is tanned and strong, her father’s brother, but different from him in small important ways. Howard is carefree, always down on the floor roughhousing with his three little boys. Always putting his arms around his wife, Muriel. She is just a few years ahead of Peggy, still a girl herself, and a source of information about the important things in life that must be explained by someone. What is it like to be in love with a
boy? Muriel had responded frankly: When he’s away, when he’s not in bed with you, you ache for him, I mean you feel this physical pain right through your bones.
Howard drives with the window down, one arm hanging out, his hand cupping his cigarette against the rushing wind. The hard muscles in his tanned shoulders rippled.
At the farm Howard pulls to the side of the road and stops.
What are you stopping for? Peggy’s mother asks.
Howard replies with a big grin. I was in the service long enough to learn to do what I’m told to do.
Peggy tells him, Go on up the driveway.
Yes, sir, Howard says, saluting her.
Oh, we mustn’t do that, Peg. Her mother worries.
It takes a while for Peggy to coax her mother out of the car.
This is the bank’s property, Peg.
Big deal, Mom. Who cares about some stupid bank! The bank didn’t live in these rooms—you did.
Peggy is walking ahead when they cross the wide front lawn. The wind is to their backs. When Peggy looks back at Howard he has taken off his T-shirt, lit a cigarette, and is lying across the hood of the car like he owns the place. Peggy laughs and tells her mother to look at him. A smile comes to her mother’s face and it is so full of surprise that for a brief moment Peggy glimpses her mother as a younger woman, a girl really. It is such a pleasure to see, such a rare and precious thing. This woman, her mother, if only Peggy could have known her when she was a girl. How unfair that she couldn’t have been a friend to her in her youth.
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