I wasn’t really listening to Jack. I was watching Peggy’s husband in his sleep and remembering that he always slept with a tormented expression on his face that is so unlike the look he showed to the world when he was awake. He never appears to be resting in his sleep. As a small boy I used to stand beside him as he slept in his gold-colored chair in the living room where he always fell asleep reading the newspaper after he came home from work. I watched him carefully as a child. For the longest time before he remarried, I thought he was my brother. I remember when he went out at night with his friends, I’d be at the front door crying for him to stay home and he would promise to bring something back for me. And no matter how late it was when he returned, I would be awake, waiting for him to keep his promise. He never let me down when I was a child. He always made me feel like I was special to him. He always took my part. He was always for his boys. I would like to tell Peggy this.
But when he was sleeping his face frightened me; he always looked like he was pulling against a powerful force. When I saw him the other day I realized that in the last forty-seven years, Peggy’s death always inhabited his sleep. I don’t think he survived her death. The boy who jitterbugged on the rooftop of the Taft Hotel vanished when she died.
Chapter Thirty
On Peggy’s first shift back at the telephone company, the other girls want to know all about her time in New York City. They gather around her at the end of the day while she tells them about the big fantastic world beyond the small boroughs of Pennsylvania. Even as she is answering their questions, she is aware of the unlikelihood that she, a small-town girl whose life up until now had been lived within two square miles, would ever be speaking of her travels to distant places. Looking into their faces, listening to the excitement in their voices, brings her a sudden contentment because her life seems finally to have found its proper course. For so long now she never felt a part of the world that everyone else occupied, and now at last she occupies a different world.
The girls have heard that she’ll be working only half-day shifts now, and they want to know if this is true.
Yes, it’s true.
Oh dear, bread and beer, if I was married, I wouldn’t be here, one of them sings with a great, jealous sigh.
Peggy’s life has opened to her. Of course the world is full of married ladies, some of them even newly married like her. But all of them put together couldn’t convince her that her life with Dick wasn’t going to be extraordinary in some way. She can feel this deep in her bones.
She is going to work the noon-to-five shift from now on, so she invites them to come see her apartment at 623 North Broad Street on Saturday morning.
Six twenty-three Broad Street? One girl teases her about this. Peg, that’s just across the street from the Elm Terrace maternity unit!
Married lady. Up early, standing at the gas stove burning bacon. Dick comes bounding into the kitchen; he thought the place was on fire.
No, it’s just the bacon. It’s the stove’s fault. I’m used to an electric stove, but this damned stove with its gas flame keeps burning the frying pan.
Dick tries everything to make her laugh. He reminds her that it isn’t even five o’clock in the morning, it’ll be hours before any of the girls show up. He wants her to come back to bed with him.
She can’t, not now. Not until she has figured out this ridiculous stove.
When the girls arrive, there are four pans soaking in water in the sink and all the windows are opened to clear the air. They tease her, and she smiles for them, pretends to laugh it off. But that night she is still angry about it and when Dick tries to console her, she won’t speak to him about it. It is very late when she sits down at her sewing machine to try and calm herself. A new dress she’s been working on is folded on the chair next to the machine. When she picks it up it smells like bacon grease. She buries her face in it; it’s enough to make her want to weep. She will have to go through her life smelling like a short-order cook. Before she throws the dress away, she makes herself take out every stitch with a pair of scissors. One stitch at a time. It takes most of the night.
She was too young to understand why she was so hard on herself. She was only eighteen years old, and it was 1950, a time when most people didn’t speak of anything that wasn’t simple and pleasant. But she was tortured by her unworthiness, which was proven to her over and over again in each failure and every time she disappointed someone. Her inadequacies were so disgusting that the world deserved the chance to be rid of her. Her friends deserved the same.
And what about Dick, whose love for her was so blinding that he couldn’t see her failings? His love for her was the deepest thing in his comprehension. He loved her with the unconditional love of a child.
And she knew this. On the good days when she could see past her own terrors, she knew this.
Count the good days she had in her little apartment on Broad Street, the days before the unraveling began. What about Christmas, her first and last Christmas? She sewed two stockings out of corduroy material and embroidered their names with white thread. She sent letters to her friends, inviting them over for the holidays. She imagined how she would dust and vacuum and scrub the place so that it looked just right, just the way she wanted everything to look when her friends came over. When she couldn’t sleep, and when her eyes were too tired to sew, she just walked from room to room, rejoicing in all of the promise of her life.
BOOK FOUR
Chapter Thirty-one
It is just after midnight and my son, Jack, is on the floor beside my bed, inside his sleeping bag. When he was three and four years old he slept in our bedroom every night, and now that he is nine and we are in a larger house, he has his own room for the first time and I can’t remember the last time he slept beside me like this. The reason he is here is that tonight was hockey night for me, and I took him along to the rink because he wanted to watch me play.
I’m a goalie, or I once was something of one, but with a crushed disk in my back, it’s been five years since I played in a real game. Tonight was my first time on the ice in a long while, and the truth is, I needed Jack with me to help me get into my goalie equipment because I can’t bend over and reach the lower buckles on my leg pads.
On the drive into Portland I was thinking about how my father used to go to all my football and baseball games when I was in high school and how I used to love to hit home runs and score touchdowns for him. When colleges began writing to me offering me scholarships, I remember feeling like I was coming into my own as a man at last, and that one of the things I was going to do all my life was take care of my father. This was before a neurosurgeon in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, told him he had a brain tumor and told me in the hospital corridor outside my father’s room that the tumor was the size of a lime and needed to be removed.
I argued with my father a long time when he decided that he was going to surrender his illness to God and to the healing power of his faith rather than have surgery. This had made me angry at first until I woke up to the fact that it was his life.
His faith has held him up for a long time now. He has done well, though his faculties have been gradually diminished. He had been a marvelous driver, I always felt safe in the car when he was behind the wheel, but now it has been years since he drove.
I’ve been thinking about this all day today and it is the reason I said yes when the call came from the men’s ice hockey league asking me if I could play in the goal tonight.
I was nervous driving in. The last time I had played in a real game I wasn’t concentrating the way you have to with a puck sailing at you. I let one get past my glove and when it struck me on my Adam’s apple, it cut off my oxygen and I passed out.
I wasn’t afraid of getting hit tonight, though. I was afraid of letting Jack down.
I won the game with Jack standing just behind me, behind the glass, watching every save. I don’t think I ever played better. I took off my helmet and watched my son out of the corner of my eye when e
veryone on the team skated to the net to shake my hand after it was over.
In the locker room someone passed around cans of beer. I’d stripped off half of my equipment when a guy on skates appeared in the doorway. The next game was about to start and they were short a goaltender.
I had to get my son home to bed, it was a school night. I gave that excuse. But Jack said it was fine, he wasn’t tired and he always got too much sleep at night anyway. He had already begun to take my pads out of my duffel bag. The guys in the room were watching us, smiling. One of them threw me another beer. Jack put his arm around my shoulder and said, “My dad will play.”
As soon as I got on the ice I could see that these guys weren’t “B” level players. In the warmups the pucks were flying past me, there was nothing I could do to stop them.
But Jack was there watching and I won because he was standing behind me and because I had a couple of strong defense men skating in front of me. I made the big saves when I had to.
Now he is asleep on the floor beside me and I feel privileged that he wanted to stay near me tonight instead of sleeping in his own room. And there is something else; I played the second game of hockey tonight for another reason. It wasn’t that I didn’t want my son to think I was getting old; he knew I was getting old before I even put my skates on. I just wanted him to see that I was still strong so that he wouldn’t be afraid to push me when he thought I needed to be pushed, to yell at me and to stand up for himself when I was being unfair. He knew I was getting old but I didn’t want him to have to worry about me.
I have brought my family with me to Pennsylvania. We are in a room at the Holiday Inn in Kulpsville just off the turnpike. Everyone was exhausted from the trip and fell asleep right after dinner. It is seven o’clock, not even dark, and I am looking around this crowded room at my family sleeping so peacefully. How long ago was it that my children learned to fall asleep so easily? There were years when getting the children to sleep was the biggest challenge of my life. Those years are gone. It hits me now how fast those years disappeared. I wonder how Peggy would have coped with me and my brother when we were small on the nights when we couldn’t fall asleep. The nights when she was so exhausted that she would have gladly traded away four or five years of her life just to finally reach the point when we could put ourselves to sleep.
It’s a hot night like the Pennsylvania nights I remember from my boyhood, the time of year when the wool baseball uniform I wore in Little League would stick to my neck and shoulders.
I am sitting in bed, thinking how, in a few days, my brother will arrive and he and I will go to knock on Dr. Wright’s door. Then, for the first time since Peggy’s death in 1950, the five men in my nightmare will be assembled. Dr. Wright, my grandfather, my father, my brother, and I. I will have my answer. I will know if we conspired to steal my mother’s life from her.
After a while I get up to take a walk. The six of us are packed into this room and I have to move my oldest daughter, Erin, who is sleeping on the floor, in order to open the door. The rest of the children have scattered their clothes around the room, but Erin’s things are set neatly on a chair next to mine. Everything is carefully folded, and beneath the chair her tennis sneakers and her shoes are lined up beside my own, the toes all the same distance from the inside legs of the chair.
Erin is twelve years old now and, like me, she will stop to straighten a painting on a wall or to wipe the kitchen counter on her way out the door. She likes things neat. She won’t say much to anyone about her feelings; she has gone to see the movie Titanic three times with her friends this winter but she has not spoken to her mother or me about what keeps drawing her back to that tragedy. She carries everything deep inside her. I have a picture of my mother at this age standing in the church choir; her face so closely resembles Erin’s that you have to look again to be sure. And like Peggy, this daughter can sing like an angel. Amy Oliver, who worked at the telephone company with Peggy when they were both seventeen years old, has told me that men fell in love with my mother because of her voice. This is why the bookie fell in love with her.
I lift my daughter from the floor to lay her in bed next to Colleen. When I carry her, her arms go straight out at her sides, as if she is flying through the night. I want to enter her sleep. I want to know why she takes the time to put her clothes away at the end of each day. I want to know why this matters to her.
A few miles from here Peggy’s aunt Anna lives on Columbia Street just three blocks from the house on Market Street where she was born and married. She remembered going to visit Peggy in her Broad Street apartment soon after she and Dick returned from their honeymoon. Peggy had just finished taking a bath, and before she would speak with Anna she had to clean the tub. Anna waited in the living room a long time and then went down the hall and found Peggy finishing and then starting in again to scrub the same place in the tub that she had already cleaned.
I don’t know what this means but it is on my mind as I walk outside and cross the hotel parking lot. I am thinking of Peggy who is buried just a few miles from here. I am sorry that it took me this long to acknowledge her and to bring my family to stand at her grave.
Not far from where I’m standing there is a dogwood tree in full blossom. I walk toward it with the thought that I will break off four small branches, one for each of my children to lay at Peggy’s grave tomorrow. When I am standing below the branches a strong gust of wind comes out of nowhere. I can hear it charging across the parking lot so low to the ground that I can only feel it on my ankles as it picks up bits of paper and gravel. Then suddenly the wind races up through the branches above my head and a storm of white petals from the dogwood tree showers over me, filling the air, and covering me like snow.
It is the shock of it that leaves me shivering and I know that I must talk to my father. There is something I must say to him. Tonight, before the morning comes.
It takes thirty minutes to drive there and all the way over I am thinking that the wind in the branches of the dogwood tree, like the double rainbows in the sky on my first trip to find my mother, belong to a spirit that marks her presence in the world.
And this is why I am yelling at my father. This is why I am telling him that he should have taken me to her grave years ago. He is standing in the kitchen in his pajamas and it comes into my head that my daughter Nell asked me recently about my mother’s wedding album. She wanted to see their wedding album and I had no way of knowing what had become of it, or if there had even been a wedding album.
My father has a soup spoon in his hand because he wants to make me something to eat.
“I’m not hungry, I already told you, I’m not hungry.”
“That’s okay then.”
“It’s not okay, Dad. Nothing is okay! Don’t you see that? Can’t you see anything? All my life I’ve been tiptoeing around you because I was afraid to make you upset. Why didn’t you ever take me to see where she was buried? Before … before you got the stupid tumor in your head. Because now I can’t even yell at you about it, I can’t swear at you or tell you that you let her down, because you might fall over right in front of me, and then what the hell will I do?”
He didn’t say a word. He just sort of drifted down the hallway toward his bed while I was yelling at him that it was all on his shoulders because he had sent me the photograph of him and my mother in the wedding car.
“My obligation is to her!” I yelled at him. “I don’t owe you anything. I don’t owe you silence! And what happened to the rest of the pictures of my mother, what about her wedding album? You must have had a damned wedding album.”
When I finally stopped he was standing inside his bedroom doorway, looking out at me. “Do you still hear Peggy’s voice when you write in the mornings?” he asked me softly.
“What?”
“You told me that you can hear Peggy’s voice in the morning,” he said again.
I think of it as the worst night of my life. I’m sitting outside on the front stoop of th
e apartment house. I can’t go back inside and I can’t go back to the room at the Holiday Inn where my daughter has lined up her shoes.
On the ground in front of me there are three white petals from the dogwood tree that must have fallen off me on my way up the steps.
I can’t go back inside because I’m afraid my father will fall into one of his seizures, and I’ll be to blame for it. I remember then how the doctor who first diagnosed his brain tumor asked me if I recalled my father ever telling me that he’d been struck in the head when he was growing up. Some trauma from early in his life.
“Nothing I know of,” I had said to the doctor, though I was thinking, He took a hard blow to his heart.
“I believe God will heal me,” my father had told the doctor.
Now I am trying to imagine him assigning my mother’s illness during her pregnancy to the same God, the same power of faith.
This faith of his, where had it come from? How had he kept believing in God’s generosity after losing his twin brother, and then another brother and then his wife?
His brother’s coffin lay in the living room of the rented house in Skippack for two days before the burial. For weeks after his death my father rose from his bed at night when he heard his mother crying in her grief. He stood outside the door to her bedroom, sometimes for hours, until she had stopped crying and he was sure that she was sleeping.
Of Time and Memory Page 16