Of Time and Memory

by Don J. Snyder

  I am told that Dick had the most wonderful, lit-up smile. A quick smile that gave off light. I never saw it myself. I remember him as a man with his head down. When he lost her, he lost his smile forever.

  She was hard on him. Her stubbornness is legendary among the people who remember her. They call it that for lack of a better word. Stubbornness. Shall I call it by some other name? Some name that will excuse her? Shall I say that she was prepossessed? Determined? Driven? Do I owe it to her to find the right word that will let her off the hook? Perhaps. But she held this boy’s heart in her palm, and she could hurt him deeply.

  Peggy climbed over the front seat of the car that day after the photograph and refused to ride next to him the rest of the way home. She lowered her head and wouldn’t look up to meet his eyes in the rearview mirror. She knew that she had hurt him again but she could not find her way to apologize.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Audrey is born in early October and Peggy begins getting up even earlier every morning to be awake before the baby. Sewing late into the night, waking early; her days are flying by now. Her time left in this little cramped house on Market Street is drawing to an end. Forty days left. Forty days, after eighteen years beneath her father’s roof.

  On her way downstairs she stops at her mother’s open door and watches her sleeping with the new baby. She stands in the doorway, trying to catch the sound of her breathing. There is the sweet scent of baby powder in the air. The maple-slatted crib is empty. Her mother brought the baby into bed for her middle-of-the-night feeding and she is still asleep between her mother and her father. When the baby is sleeping so peacefully, Peggy cannot pass her without feeling the restless urge to pick her up and press her against her skin. Anyone who ever breathed in the smell of a baby could have invented religion. Once when she was holding her in the first week of her life on this planet her eyes moved in the direction of her mother’s voice across the room. So small and new but already aware of the importance of recognizing who is on your side in this world.

  This baby is a sister who will always be separated from Peggy by eighteen years. How many times she had asked her mother for a baby sister when she was a little girl herself, all those years when she and a new sister might have become close friends. Her mother’s hair was turning gray by the time she finally got pregnant again. In church the pious ladies drew their heads together and whispered when her mother passed them with her swollen belly out in front of her like someone pushing a wheelbarrow. All of that has only drawn Peggy closer to her mother. The church ladies were concentrating on the next life while her mother was living out the mysteries of this one. Peggy took pride in it, the warm knowledge that some passion had survived in her mother, a passion that connected her to one of life’s deep desires.

  On one of those autumn days Peggy and her father put up a longer clothesline, one that reaches from the back door of the house to a corner of the little garage in the alley. Since the baby arrived he has been talking about building the house earlier; his original plan was to start the next spring, but now he is thinking about starting right away. With the new baby and grandmother and grandfather living in the tiny house, there is barely room for him to move. No place for him to be alone in his own house. He has begun spending more time in the garage with his tools, which he keeps in perfect order. He is a man with three children now. Someone has told him that once there are three, once the mother and father are outnumbered, everything changes, the operation of the family becomes a full-time job.

  Peggy understands his feelings of claustrophobia and she feels bad to be contributing to the clutter in his house. Last night she finished another bridesmaid’s dress; she and her mother worked on it together in the kitchen. Peggy stayed up long after her mother went off to bed because she wanted to finish cleaning up so that when her father got up in the morning he would be able to have his breakfast in a tidy kitchen.

  This morning after he has finished with the clothesline he tells her to come to the garage, he has something for her. He is walking ahead of her with his head down. He looks so sad and small to her, getting smaller it seems. There is no way for her to reach him. She will never know who he really is, only the superficial things that he cares about. A clean house, a waxed car, his tools in their proper place on his workbench, the flaps on his shirt pockets ironed so they don’t stick out. Maybe at the end of a life these are the things we remember best about a person. These little things contribute to an ordered world. And she shared with him the deep desire to impose some order upon the world. In this way she is her father’s child and always will be. She could never be less like him, more carefree, one of those people who drop their clothes on the floor and leave them there. Like Dick. This is something else she admires about him; the material world is of no consequence to him. Except for his precious car, you could strip him of his possessions and it would take him a few months to figure out that he was missing anything. She will be picking up after him all her life, she knows this, though she doesn’t know why it is she cares. These little habits of hers, lining her shoes neatly in her closet, folding her clothes at the end of the day, maybe these are the things someone will remember about her someday. More than her ideas or her passions. Because she keeps those ideas and passions and fears carefully concealed behind an ordered world.

  Her father has a pair of chopsticks for her. He has taken a pair of drumsticks that he had in the garage, planed them down and sanded them. She had mentioned the other night that she wanted to try Chinese food for the first time on her honeymoon in New York City and that she wanted to learn how to use chopsticks before the wedding. So, here you go, Peggy, a set of your own chopsticks. Her father doesn’t know the proper way to hold them, she’ll have to ask her uncle Howard about that, it is a skill he picked up during the war.

  She thanks her father. He bows his head again. She should take two steps across the space dividing them and kiss him. Maybe put her arms around him. But she doesn’t. Instead she takes the chopsticks up to her room where she wraps them in a blue-and-white-checked dish towel and places them in her hope chest for the life that will begin before too long.

  There was always laundry to hang out that fall, and as the days turned toward winter, the cotton diapers turned stiff as they dried. Peggy sets them over the heating grate in the kitchen to thaw. Her baby sister’s clothing is no bigger than doll’s clothes. The impossibly small T-shirts and socks, proof of the long life we have on this earth. People are forever saying that life is short, but hanging out the baby’s laundry confirms something that Peggy may have already suspected is true, that we travel a long way in our life.

  Hanging out the laundry is reassuring. It is an elemental and sensible act that places her in the company of every other person on the earth who is caring for a baby. And everyone who has ever cared for a baby. It is not hard to picture her grandmother Swan hanging her mother’s baby clothes in the wind that blew across the cornfields on the farm that is now gone. And her mother hanging out hers. It is an act that allows Peggy to see the deep patterns in life and for this reason she does it slowly, never hurrying to finish. And neatly too. She is a person who hangs all the diapers side by side, then the T-shirts, then the socks. A neatly hung load of laundry is satisfying to her. It’s silly, she knows this, but she can’t deny that it brings her pleasure. In the backyards up and down Market Street, people seem to be in a silent competition to keep the neatest life. You can see it in the way they care for their lawns as well. It seems that ever since the men came home from the war, order has taken a central place in people’s lives. Order to counteract the terrible disorder, the unspeakable disorder of the war.

  An ordered life. Could she sense that all this order is merely an illusion that we hold on to so we don’t have to face the fact that we are barely clinging to this planet? Had she already learned that life can be thrown into disorder almost at any moment? Is this why she tried to make everything so neat in her little world?

  It was a way of
managing her fear.

  She was afraid of the airplanes that crossed the skies while she hung out the laundry for her mother. So many more planes in the skies this late autumn of 1949. They were from the airfield at Willowgrove where fighter pilots were being trained for the next war, which is never far from her mind now. No matter how many times Dick tries to convince her that there won’t be a war in Korea, she is unconvinced.

  One Saturday morning when she was supposed to be waiting for him to pick her up to go shopping she went to the library instead, and left word with her mother to tell him to meet her there.

  When he came through the library door he was smiling and wearing his new tennis sweater, the one she would always say she loved to see him in—off-white, with a red and a blue stripe along the V neck and around each cuff. She will show him on the atlas where this country is. Korea. So small, it disappears beneath her thumb. But on the other side of the world.

  He is dumbfounded.

  How can you keep thinking about these things, Peggy?

  What things?

  All the things that make people sad.

  There’s no answer to this, and so she doesn’t even try to explain. She is supposed to go look at the house on Broad Street in Lansdale this morning, but somehow she has forgotten this. How could she forget this? How could she forget that the way to overcome her terrible fears is to give herself up to the momentum of a normal life. To let herself be carried along by the currents of a real life.

  It’s a fine little house, a row house along a wide street with overhanging elm trees. There are stairs up from the sidewalk to a front porch. Each house has its own porch, sectioned off from the houses on both sides by a scrolled handrail. At the top of the stairs in the house next door, and in the one next to that, is a baby gate. There is a lot of life in these little houses, and she can hear it faintly if she listens. She will never be alone here. If she cares to, she can invite the young mothers over for coffee. She can set the table with the cups and saucers she has chosen for her wedding gifts. Desert Rose pattern.

  It is exactly like the row house Dick lives in with his parents just a few blocks from here. Looking through the front windows into the living room she shows him where she wants to put the Christmas tree. He counts the rooms for her, and tells her there’s an extra room.

  And there, he says, turning to face the street. There’s the hospital right there. The Elm Terrace Hospital is just across the street. It’s where his sister, Jean, had her baby boy last week.

  In the backyard, a long rectangle leading to a tiny garage, a clothesline was already hung. It was raining that morning or she might have seen the wives who would become her neighbors hanging out their laundry up and down the street. A room for a baby. A backyard with a clothesline. If she brings a baby into this world, she brings with it the routines and duties that can fill her life and distract her from her distant worries. Her life will be reordered around the necessity that only a baby can provide. She will be far too busy to worry about the airplanes in the sky above her.

  Dick has something to show her this morning. A small card that he has printed at Lauchman’s.

  Dick and Peggy Snyder

  will be receiving guests

  after December fourth at

  623 North Broad Street

  Lansdale, Pennsylvania.

  He has already paid the first month’s rent. In four weeks they will be living here together. The wedding already behind them. Christmas lights on the tree. And maybe a strand of lights across the railing of the front porch.

  Holding the card in her hand, she begins to feel it is all becoming real to her.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  She looks up just as she is leaving the church. There is her father with a box of rice raised above his head. And then the rice showers over her. She is wearing a white cloth coat over her wedding dress, holding up the long train with her left hand. Her right hand is on Dick’s arm. It is a cold gray day. A shadowless day. Her mother looks very old, and there is a troubled expression on Peggy’s face. No one can remember ever seeing a prettier bride. Maybe she is overwhelmed by everything, maybe this explains the faraway look in her eyes. She is there, but not really there, in the photograph. Her mind is on something else.

  It is dark by the time they make their getaway from the reception. She and Dick dance a slow dance to “Peg o’ My Heart,” the only couple on the dance floor, then they are off to New York City. One of their friends gives her a small package wrapped in gold-foil paper on her way out to the honeymoon car. In the excitement of the day, with everything she and Dick have to talk about during the four-hour drive to New York City, they forget all about the present until the night is over and Dick is asleep beside her for the first time and she cannot seem to close her eyes. She would always remember the happy faces, and often recall them; more than anything else, she wanted people to have fun at her wedding, and it seems they all did. They were all smiling when she turned with Dick to walk down the aisle as man and wife. And now, on her wedding night, with her husband asleep next to her, the memory of this day is enough to reassure her of the promise of her life. All the people at the church had been drawn into the orbit of their fine new life. You could see it on their smiling faces.

  She turns on the bedside light and opens the gift wrapped in gold-foil paper. A best-seller, Cheaper by the Dozen. The true story of a family with twelve red-haired children.

  Life is a pair of glasses folded on the table by the bed, the morning’s first light glancing off their gold rims. Life is someone’s clothing draped over the arm of a chair with her own. The boy she loves lying beside her is the confirmation of life’s order and holiness. A thin gold band on his finger that matches her own. His face on the pillow. We see who a person is in the world if we watch him waking. Those first seconds as they are returning from sleep, before they remember where they are in the universe. This is a boy who asks for nothing for himself except that she never leave him. A pledge she cannot imagine breaking. There are his polished black shoes on the floor by the door. Sometime in the night an ache she carried inside her since he first touched her, a longing that she learned to accommodate, finally disappeared, replaced by a marvelous lightness. Across the room a shelf slides out of the wall to make a desk. On a piece of stationery marked “Taft Hotel,” she writes him a note and places it next to his face on the pillow. Are you as happy as I am?

  Here she is on the eleventh floor of a hotel in the world’s largest city. It seems strange. And yet, because she is still young enough to look behind her and see clearly the path that led her here, life feels like it is in her control.

  She has brought far too many clothes. Four suitcases full. And a hatbox. She packed like a movie star. One suitcase for each day. Like an actress who must change for every scene.

  Maybe she would prefer if I didn’t write about this, about how she cared about her beauty. Her nails and lipstick. Her complexion. She attended to her beauty. With dresses, she was partial to a bow or sash at the waist or collar, something extra to make the costume complete, so she could hide behind it. But here in New York City she is free to show her face, to stare at everyone who passes. It is the first time in her life that she is standing in a place where no one knows her and there is no one she has ever disappointed! She can be anyone here. It is enough to make her go skipping down the sidewalks.

  For five days Dick can barely keep up with her. The deal is if he can catch her, she will kiss him before she runs off again. Kiss him at the Statue of Liberty, on top of the Empire State Building, in front of the department stores on Fifth Avenue, their great sidewalk windows decorated for Christmas. Opening her eyes while he is kissing her, and there she is reflected in the glass. Who is she? A girl with a pair of chopsticks in her purse. A girl who once dreamed of living in this city. A girl in the arms of a boy who loves her depthlessly. She can feel his love for her, a trembling that rises off his skin. The only thing she has to do in the world now is lean toward him, return his to
uch.

  In the hotel lobby, a woman named Miss Allen sits at a desk and answers tourists’ questions about New York City. She is famous, she tells them; there is no question she cannot answer. She wears her gray hair pulled back in a bun. The first time Peggy walked through the lobby Miss Allen stopped her and said, Honeymoon, right? I can tell. Each time she sees Peggy, she smiles knowingly at her. A woman’s secret perhaps? Memories of her own honeymoon. It makes Peggy wonder how she looks to her. It makes her feel sorry for her and for everyone on earth who is no longer young and in love.

  There is a drugstore in the hotel. Two dining rooms, two nightclubs, and a florist where Dick buys her a bouquet of roses. He is holding them behind his back when he steps off the elevator right into her arms. She pushes him back inside and when the doors close he leans her against the wood-paneled elevator wall. It is the first elevator she has ever been on. She kisses him all the way down. When the doors begin to open, she can feel him pulling away. But she isn’t going to let him go. For some reason she wants everyone to see her in his arms.

  I saw him just last week. Peggy’s young man, my old father. I watched him sleeping in a chair, his soft white hair pushed to one side. His hands folded in his lap. We were talking about their honeymoon. He was telling me that they both chose the Taft Hotel because there had been a weekly radio broadcast from its rooftop dance club, big-band music which the two of them listened to every Saturday from the time they first met. The Vincent Lopez band. I was listening to my father and watching his expression; I could see something in his eyes, some spark of recognition. But then he bowed his head and fell asleep. My little boy, Jack, came up to me and whispered in my ear, Does Granddad fall asleep all the time because of that thing in his head?