Peggy stops her to ask her please not to say that she is like her father who has never outgrown his own restlessness.
Her mother says that she is sorry, then goes on to ask her where she goes when she disappears. When you won’t speak to anyone for days at a time, where are you, Peggy? All I want, all a mother ever wants, is for her children to be happy. But where do you go, Peggy? Can you tell me where you go when you get in one of your moods?
Where does my father go? Peggy asks her.
I wish I knew.
Did you ever ask him?
Not in so many words. But I’ve always been here for him when he returns. I’ve always been standing here, waiting for both of you.
Peggy nods her head. The night has closed in on her.
Children, her mother tells her, little children are the best thing in life. I can’t tell you how I missed dressing you. Some days I would sit in a chair with a picture of you as a toddler and I would pray for the chance to get you back, to have you come right out of that picture for just a little while. I wasn’t going to keep you for long, I just wanted to hold you for a little while.
Why are you telling me this, Mom?
Her mother takes Peggy in her arms. Babies are the truly best thing in life, she whispers. I’m going to have a baby, Peg.
That night she held her mother at arm’s length, her eyes opened wide with the surprise of this. True? she asked.
Yes. True.
When?
October. Next fall. First the baby, and then we’ll build the house the following summer. So will you put off Paris or New York City or wherever it is you might go until after I get used to babies again? I’m going to need your help.
Chapter Twenty
He tells her that he has heard that she can sing.
Who told you that?
Your father. He told everyone at work that you have the best voice in the church choir.
He pulls his car into a parking space on Broad Street just around the corner from the Strand Theater in Lansdale.
I’ll throw the anchor out, she says to tease him.
I’m going to ask you to sing something sometime, he says. I’m just warning you.
What about you, do you sing?
Me? Oh, no. I dance but I don’t sing.
He walks with such a purposeful stride. She is trying to keep up with him and, at the same time, not step on any of the cracks in the pavement. Not stepping on the cracks is the only way that she can keep herself from disappearing with the picture in her mind of her father advertising her to everyone in the print shop. The thought of this is maddening! But she doesn’t want to disappear tonight. Not tonight.
The window of the theater is lit like a makeup mirror, bright bulbs around the border. In the center on a stool is a single red rose in a vase, and above the rose the playbill picturing the movie stars. Greer Garson is a stunning beauty. Hey, she looks like you, Dick calls to Peggy. He is already at the door, holding it open for her, telling her that it feels cold enough to finally snow. As she steps past him through the door, his hand brushes her back then rests against her waist. This might be nothing more than his good manners. It might not mean anything.
The news comes first. THE MARCH OF TIME … Churchill has given a speech in Boston. He says that communists would have overrun Western Europe and attacked Britain within the past three years had they not been afraid of the U.S. atomic bomb.
This dark news. Such a contrast to what she wants to feel. Why must all the joyous moments in her life be set alongside talk of war. Will they ever stop talking of war?
This boy beside her who touched her back just a few minutes before is lost in the gloomy news. The black-and-white images from the screen are reflected in miniature on the lenses of his rimless glasses. This first date will be a bittersweet memory.
There is an orchestra in the theater playing an old song from the war, a song she knows the lyrics to, and she begins saying them to herself below her breath to try to block out the news.
For all we know, we may never meet again.
Before you go, make this moment sweet again.
We won’t say goodnight, until the last minute,
I’ll hold out my hand and my heart will be in it.
For all we know, this may only be a dream.
Tomorrow may never come for all we know. So love
me tonight, tomorrow is made for some, tomorrow
may never come for all we know.
She has known the words to this song for a long time, but before tonight they did not mean what they mean now; with Dick beside her the words tell the sadness of two lovers parting. Love made the war more hateful, more unbearable.
He tells her something he will always remember; he was on a ship heading for the invasion of Japan. A million or more GIs were expected to die in this invasion. Then the bomb was dropped. When he arrived in Japan, everywhere he went the Japanese fell to their knees and begged him not to kill them.
It made me feel guilty, he tells her. And it made me see that life isn’t fair, just as people say it isn’t. It isn’t fair, people say. Well, we’re lucky that it isn’t. Because if it was fair, then we would have to share the grief of those people. The world’s grief would be shared equally.
He has such big ideas. The way his mind works reminds her of her friend Adelle, off at Ursinus College.
You ought to go to college, she tells him.
Oh yes, he says. I’m thinking about it. I’ve already written to the University of Pittsburgh; they have a mechanical engineering degree. I could go on the GI Bill. I may apply. But first I’m going to learn how to build a house.
Oh?
Your father is going to teach me. I’m going to come over after work once spring is here and the days are longer.
Not this spring, she tells him. Next year he’s going to build the house.
Right, next year. Will you still be around then?
Me?
Yes, you.
She smiles when she says this: Oh, you never know, I may be living in Paris by then.
He takes her seriously and asks what she plans on doing there.
Singing, she replies. I’m going to sing in the little cafés, the sidewalk cafés.
That’s an excellent plan. I can see you doing that.
You can?
Absolutely. You’d sell a lot of coffee.
Well, it’s not really a plan. It’s more like a dream.
Dreams are good, he tells her. I think dreams are the most important thing a person can have.
When the movie begins, it looks like a dream itself. The men are handsome and they always know just what to say. The women are beautiful. Even in the morning the wives are dressed like Cinderella. And they live in magnificent white houses that are separated from the sidewalk by picket fences. The people who live in these houses have time to dress for dinner. The houses are all spacious and the little children say the most clever things.
And then the atmosphere of the story changes dramatically. This little town is an English village, and soon Hitler’s planes are dropping bombs on the dream. The pretty young bride, played by Teresa Wright, is eighteen years old, Peggy’s age exactly. She has just married the young British RAF pilot. There is a scene of them returning by train from their honeymoon, ready to begin their splendid, charmed life together. And then, five minutes later, the bride is dead, shot full of holes by a strafing Nazi airplane.
Who in the world except her aunt Muriel will understand how she feels when her heart sinks into sadness? It’s only a movie, she tells herself, it’s just a silly movie. It isn’t real. Isn’t real. But it’s as real as anything else and she can feel herself beginning to fall away. This isn’t supposed to happen on her first real date with him and she tries to concentrate on something other than the sadness of the story. She tries to think of work tomorrow to distract her. The girls at work will want to know all about her date. Well, it was very nice. The Strand was showing that old war movie, Mrs. Miniver, and it
was … no, it was strange and I cracked up. No. No. Sledding! Yes, sledding. Think about that beautiful picture he painted of how he used to go sledding down the hill in Skippack when he was a boy and if he could turn at the right moment, he could make it onto the frozen creek and glide forever.
She closes her eyes and pictures him as a boy flying on his wooden sled, the speed making wind and the wind making his eyes water. The metal runners catching the hard ice and sending him off down the creek. Her eyes are closed and she is trying hard to stay on the wooden sled with him and to feel the joy of this ride. But the ice is cracking all around her, pulling free from the banks of the creek, opening up great holes in front of her. And somehow she falls off the sled, into one of the holes. Before she goes down below the ice she can see him sailing away from her. He will glide along forever, oblivious to the cold, black water and the raging currents beneath the ice that have caught her.
What breaks this spell is the sound of his voice asking her if she is all right. Are you all right, Peggy?
Before she turns to reassure him that she is fine, she discovers that she has been gripping both arms of the red plush chair. She looks down at her hands. She can’t look at him now or he will know.
On the way out of the theater she stops in the rest room and leans over the sink, splashing cold water on her face. When she raises her head she can’t look at her face in the bright mirror.
Outside he is talking a mile a minute about how fantastic the show was and how they must be the only two people on earth who didn’t see that movie when it came out in 1942. Well, you were probably too young, he is saying. And I—
She doesn’t hear the rest because his voice is drowned out by an airplane groaning in the dark sky overhead.
She is aware that she is hiding some part of herself from him, even now. Maybe she doesn’t want to diminish the light of the world that he believes in. That would be unforgivable, wouldn’t it? To take this boy with all his joy and optimism and pass on her darkness to him. He believes in his future, he believes that all the bad things are behind him now, finally behind him, the death of two brothers, the war, all of this is behind him and he can hear the music in everything now, he is connected to the goodness of life. The fact that he has survived is reason enough for him to believe in his future.
But the airplane overhead is flying low in the sky and she is lost in the groaning engine and in the memory of her father looking up into the night sky during the war. She can still picture him tipping his head back and looking straight up into the sky. The tiny red and green blinking lights passing across the stars.
Suddenly she asks him if he would have to go if there were another war.
Sure, he says. He’s still on active reserve status in the army. He would be the first to go. He wants to tell her a funny story though; his uncle Linford, his father’s brother, was excused from the war because he was a conscientious objector. He was an insurance salesman and he called Dick right after Pearl Harbor and asked him to come talk to him. So he went to see him in his office and his uncle told him that he should think about applying for conscientious objector status himself because if ever there was anybody who wasn’t suited to kill another person it was Dick Snyder. But Dick told him that he planned to go in as soon as he finished school. He thanked his uncle for the advice but he had made up his mind to go do his best.
Well then, his uncle said to him, if you’re determined to go, I can sell you a fine life insurance policy.
Peggy can hear Dick’s laughter. And she is trying to follow the sound of it back to where she is standing by his side. She is looking into his eyes when he tells her that this is why he survived, this is the reason, to be here with her. She can tell that he is never going to judge her harshly. He will never try to make her become something that she doesn’t want to be. And when he takes her hand she is aware of her body moving, not spinning or dizzy with anticipation, just moving calmly and thoughtfully. It is a strange, inexplicable feeling that she is returning from a hard and tiresome journey. He is going to help her complete her return. And maybe love is nothing more complicated than turning to look at him and finding that he is already looking at her. He is there waiting for her to return. And then, as easily as if she had looked up into the sky and found the night stars there, his hands are on her shoulders, the tip of his nose brushes across her lips, and then her mouth is beneath his; cool and comforting, as if he is bestowing a prayer upon her, he kisses her. She can hear a sigh escape his lips. How his touch transports her. It carries her away from her father’s house, her lined-up shoes in the closet, her clothes folded neatly in tissue paper. This is what she has been searching for her whole life, to be touched like this. It stills some turmoil, just as she has seen the young mothers still their babies’ cries. His touch is like a blessing. And to be worthy of it, to earn his touch, she must conceal the darkness inside her, she must never allow her darkness to contaminate the marvelous fine light surrounding him. Though the light does not belong to her, it spills into her path, the path that the two of them are already following, and if she does anything to dull this light or to extinguish it, they will both be lost in the darkness.
And then he thanks her for the kiss.
Write me a letter tomorrow and tell me about it, she says to him.
He will. He says, I think I’ll write it and bring it by myself.
She will wait for him to come up the cement path from the sidewalk to her door. She already knows that she doesn’t want anyone else to have him. Before she knows what love is, she knows this.
The next time she is alone with her aunt she will tell her about this date. She will try to explain how he was so eager to touch her that she could feel him even before he placed his hand on her. And it was because of this that she fell in love with him, not thinking about marriage and children or any of that—but because of this marvelous thing, the way he touched her before he set his hand on her, this made her decide simply that no other girl should have him. That he should be hers.
BOOK THREE
Chapter Twenty-one
I didn’t see it then, but now I see clearly that when we pledge our passions to life we are brought within reach of the mysteries that surround us all, and which circle above time and reason and explain the fierce longings of our souls. I see now that my search for Peggy was the spiritual journey I had begun as a child when the face of my mother was revealed to me on the column of white light that glided across my bedroom. I am not a religious man and never have felt anything more than restlessness in the presence of my father’s religion. But that winter I built a small shrine to him and Peggy on the table beside my bed where I placed three photographs of them and the small blue rattle someone had given them when I was born. I included the invitation to the baby shower that Peggy purposely mailed too late for any of her friends to attend, and the only letter I would ever have that she had written to her best friend telling her that she had just learned she was pregnant.
I began waking at four o’clock in the morning to sit before the bedside table as if it were an altar. I would make the sign of the cross on my forehead and then close my eyes and wait for the first sentence of their love story to reach me through the layers of darkness that were the sad reflections of my boyhood. I suppose that I was worshipping my mother for the first time—or worshipping the memories I never had of her—in the still emptiness of these early morning hours, a holy emptiness that was gradually filled by her voice. And her voice, after such a long silence, was more welcome to me than the air I was breathing. The nearest I can come to describing how those early hours felt when I awakened and turned my eyes to the photographs is that I felt like I was falling in love. Each new morning I fell in love again.
One day before dawn I was told that I would find the end of my mother’s story in a cold place, far away from where her story was leading me now.
And on another morning, in the predawn darkness it came to me that I should watch the movie Mrs. Miniver.
I w
atched it at night when Colleen and the children were asleep, and when it turned out to be the story of a girl my mother’s age who dies suddenly, leaving her grief-stricken husband behind, it sent chills across my skin. When I stood up, I couldn’t feel my feet beneath me. I felt like I had been transported back across time and was sitting in the dark theater in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, watching with my father and Peggy as they saw but could not see the story of their own lives unfold on the movie screen in front of them. It seemed to me that Fate had arranged the events of their life so that on their first real date they ended up sitting in a movie theater watching an invented story that would soon become the story of their hearts’ passage.
I sat staring at the empty television screen long after the movie had ended. I went upstairs from room to room hoping that Colleen or one of my children was awake so I could tell them what I had just seen. But everyone was sleeping contentedly.
I felt very warm, and then very hot, and I went to the front door and opened it and stood in the cold winter air. It was snowing so hard that I couldn’t see across the street. I put on my coat and boots and walked down to the beach where a low wind off the ocean was driving the snow. With my head bowed I marched along on sand beneath my feet that was frozen hard like concrete. I knew then that in the mysteries I could not explain, I would find the truth of Peggy’s love story. And very soon then the mysteries began to reveal themselves to me.
I am back in the nursing home, visiting my grandfather again. He gives me a handwritten letter that he has found for me. At the top of the letter is the date, August 13, 1977, and then these words written to my grandmother:
Peggy’s death was caused by pregnancy toxemia, cerebral hemorrhage and anemia. The toxemia would be kidney failure, this is why she had so much fluid retention. The cerebral hemorrhage would be like a stroke, either a clot or bleeding in the brain area. The anemia would be not enough red blood cells. I remember that Peggy’s hemoglobin was only 47% when she was discharged from the hospital. I would think the main cause of her death was the toxemia, and of course that was greatly due to improper care on her doctor’s part.
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