Of Time and Memory

by Don J. Snyder

  I am thinking about the time I took him swimming in the ocean off Martha’s Vineyard in big waves that were running ashore on a riptide after a storm. This was before the tumor, the last time I ever saw him healthy and fit. We were riding the waves onto the beach at dusk. You had to catch them just right, laying your body out flat just behind the curl as the wave was breaking, or the tremendous force would crush you headfirst against the rocks and sand.

  I saw him lining up the wrong way in front of a wave that was cresting high above his head. I yelled to him just as he went under. I saw him swallowed by the wave, just the white bottoms of his feet sticking up out of the boiling surf. I began swimming toward him and yelling for him but the riptide was dragging him away from me. When I finally reached him, he was on the bottom and didn’t have the strength left to lift his head out of the water.

  Now I wonder if he was already returning to my mother when I caught hold of his arm and pulled him out of the sea. He had finished his job by then; my brother and I turned twenty years old that summer.

  And was he trying again to return to my mother when he wouldn’t allow the neurosurgeon to operate? Was he waiting for God to sweep him away to wherever his two brothers and Peggy had gone before him?

  I was still on the porch of the apartment house when the paperboy arrived. I could see that he was afraid to get too close.

  “I’ll take it,” I said. I put the newspaper under my arm and watched him turn away. He was walking across the grass when I called to him. The words came out before I knew that I was saying anything. “Do you know the man who lives here?” I said, pointing to the set of windows on the ground floor.

  I was pleased when he stopped and turned to look back at me. “Not really,” he said.

  “I’m visiting my father here. He was a paperboy when he was about your age.”

  He didn’t seem to know what to say to this so I waved once and he hiked his bag of papers up higher on his shoulder before he went on walking. I looked at the apartment house. All the windows were the same, and the doors were the same, and I suppose all the people living there were the same to the boy who delivered their newspapers, and I guess I wanted to give him some small reason to care about my father.

  It was Sunday morning. When my father appeared at the door he was already dressed for church in a white shirt and a tie.

  As soon as I saw him smile at me I knew that he was going to ask me to go to church with him. And though I could have talked my way out of it, I told him I would.

  The church was maybe ten miles away. We were driving through the rain on a narrow country road and when we rounded one corner there was a car overturned in the ditch just ahead of us. A woman was standing in the road, holding her face in her hands. I pulled off the road and got out and ran up to her. She was shaking and when I asked her if she was hurt she said that she wasn’t but that there was someone still inside the wrecked car.

  I crawled down into the ditch. It was very quiet and I was aware of birds singing in the trees above my head. I tried to see inside the car but the glass on the windows was shattered. The doors were jammed shut by the collapsed roof. I pushed my knee against one window and when it fell into pieces, I smelled gasoline and I saw a young girl hanging upside down. I was amazed when she turned her head and looked at me calmly. She told me that she was unhurt but she couldn’t get the seatbelt unhooked. Then she began crying faintly.

  I crawled in through the window and cradled her head in my arms while I tried to get the seatbelt to release. I tried everything and then told her that I was going to have to leave her to go find a knife or a pair of scissors to cut the belt. She began to cry louder, and I can’t explain this, but suddenly when I looked at her face it was Peggy’s, the same face that I had seen as a young boy. I was holding my mother’s head against my chest. She was helpless and scared.

  Someone slid down into the ditch beside us. I called out that I needed a knife. I kept holding the girl in my arms and thinking how helpless my mother must have felt when she learned in January 1950 that she was pregnant. What must have come upon her was the realization that being pregnant is a public matter. Her anonymity was gone. There was no place she could hide from the world. People were watching her, asking her how she felt. Waiting for her and wishing her well. Expecting her to smile and be happy.

  “It’s as sharp as a razor,” a man said when he handed me the knife.

  The seatbelt was so tight against her stomach that I couldn’t slide the blade of the knife beneath it. “Take a deep breath,” I said, “and don’t let it out until I’ve cut you free.”

  I stared into her eyes and I knew in that moment that my father was not to blame for Peggy’s death. Neither was my grandfather or her doctor. I was responsible. And I was the one who had never asked my father to tell me about her.

  Even after I cut the seatbelt and pulled the girl from the car and carried her up the embankment to the road, I was still thinking that it was Peggy in my arms. I didn’t want to let go of her when the ambulance arrived.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  No company came to visit Peggy and Dick that Christmas. Just before the holidays she became sick. A stomach flu, a cold in her stomach is what she thinks is wrong. It is worse each time she tries to eat something.

  The nausea is bad enough to wake her from her night sleep. She stands alone in the kitchen, vomiting into the sink while moonlight falls on her toes. It is January of 1950, the start of a new decade. Ten years ago she was nine years old, a girl playing jump rope. The silly song she sang while jumping is still in her head:

  Fudge, fudge, call the judge,

  Peggy’s having a bay-bee!

  Wrap it up in toilet paper

  send it down the elevator,

  Boy!

  Girl!

  Twins!

  Triplets!

  By the end of the next ten years she will be turning thirty. Some nights she sits in a chair, listening to the radio. The news is terrible. The United States government and a committee of scientists are studying the feasibility of building a hydrogen bomb one thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima uranium bomb. Forty-two women die in a fire on the psychiatric ward of the Catholic Mercy Hospital in Davenport, Iowa. Barred windows hampered rescue. Doors locked from the outside prevented escape … Alger Hiss (there is that name again) is convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.

  Her breasts are sore. The soft circles around her nipples are turning the color of chocolate.

  The day before her doctor’s appointment, Peg Kirsch is supposed to stop by, to see the apartment. At the last minute Peggy asks her to meet her in town instead because she hasn’t felt well enough to vacuum. Dirty dishes in the sink, an unmade bed; as she glances around the rooms they don’t seem to belong to her. She never imagined herself in rooms where things were not put neatly away.

  It takes an effort to dress and Peg wouldn’t mind if she didn’t bother to brush her hair, but this will be Peg’s first glimpse of her since the wedding and she wants her to see that she is happy, that she has made the right choice, that her life is fine.

  They buy candy bars at the Nut Shop and then walk to Memorial Park to watch the deer. Across the way children are feeding them through the fence. How wonderful to have deer in the center of town. They imagine these children dreaming of the deer tonight.

  Peg will remember this day because of the dark circles around her friend’s eyes and because she looks so thin. Peggy makes a joke of this, telling her that it is difficult for two people to survive on whatever is not burned to death when she cooks. She asks Peg if she is still homesick at nursing school. Yes. Her father keeps telling her to just come home, but her mother is still adamant.

  Peggy tells her that she is envious of her relationship with her father.

  She asks Peggy about Dick, and Peggy replies that he is sweet to her, so patient and understanding.

  Her friend will remember this almost fifty years later; she will recall how happy Peggy s
eemed as she described Dick.

  They say goodbye at the trolley. They set a date for the next Friday night for Peg to come over for dinner, and on her way back to the nursing school at Grandview Hospital, the thought comes into her mind that Peggy might be feeling sick because she is pregnant.

  When Friday comes, Peggy is still throwing up almost everything she eats and so she calls her friend and cancels dinner.

  A cold in her stomach is what she has been thinking is wrong with her. But when her family doctor, Paul Moyer, suggests that she may be pregnant, it is as if she has just walked around a corner straight into a door. She is angry at herself. Until now she didn’t know that it is possible to feel both blessed and stupid in the same breath. How could she not know?

  She declines Dr. Moyer’s offer to fit her in on Friday for an examination and tests to confirm his suspicion. It only takes a small lie on her part to turn him away, and so she tells him that she’ll return to do the tests next week after her stomach feels better.

  Then she goes home alone and waits for Dick. There is time for her to think through the implications of this. She will never be alone again once she has a baby. She saw her mother surrender her life to a new baby. This will be her now. She might be summoned at any moment. She will not be able to hide from the world any longer. The cry of an infant will call her out into the open.

  She never returns to Dr. Moyer’s office. Instead she sees a physician on the other side of town. His office and examining rooms are on the first floor of a large house. His name is Dr. Edward Wright, a distinguished physician, precise in his manner, highly regarded in the small medical community as brilliant, a little distant, perhaps even slightly arrogant. But exceedingly gifted at his work.

  His nurse wants to know why Peggy has decided not to stay with Dr. Moyer. Peggy says the easiest thing to tell her, that she is living just across town from here and for the sake of convenience she decided to come to Dr. Wright. The truth is more complicated and none of her business anyway. The truth is that Dr. Paul Moyer has known her since she was a girl, he has taken care of everyone in her family and was her mother’s doctor just a few months before when her sister, Audrey, was born. She wants her own doctor, someone who will see her as a grown woman.

  The exam itself is an invasion that she has been dreading since the first time Aunt Muriel told her what was involved in having a baby. It makes Peggy feel like her life has suddenly fallen from her hands.

  It’s good news, the doctor tells her. Congratulations, you’re going to have a baby.

  She is off the ground for a few moments, thinking of all the people she must write and tell. In the next room the nurse is checking her urine for protein.

  When Peggy is dressed, Dr. Wright tells her about a book that she should read: Answers to Your Questions About Pregnancy and Childbirth. He writes the title down on the back of one of his cards. Read it, he says. And pay attention to the sections which explain a condition called toxemia. He doesn’t want her to worry, but there are traces of protein in her urine, and her blood pressure is high for a nineteen-year-old girl. These two things are the reason he tells her that she might want to plan on having her baby at the Sacred Heart Hospital in Norristown. Ordinarily he would expect to deliver her baby at Elm Terrace, which is right across the street from where she lives, but if the toxemia does present itself, it could result in complications, and Sacred Heart is a far better equipped hospital.

  Not to worry, he says at last. He is just being careful. Now go celebrate with your husband, he’s going to be a father. And read the book.

  She is staring at his hands when he gets up from behind his desk to show her to the door.

  A wife is supposed to surprise her husband; at least this is what she has seen in the movies, so she buys the book in town before she returns home. Where will she leave it for him to find? On the bedside table? In the empty bedroom that will be the baby’s room? Next to the sewing machine?

  She decides on the kitchen table where they eat their meals. The tin table painted with white enamel paint. Next to a tall blue candle in a crystal vase that was once her aunt Lilly’s. Then she sets about cooking Dick’s favorite meal. Brook trout which are not easy to find in January. Her mother knows the proprietor of a market in Telford.

  So, then, trout, mashed potatoes with lumps that she can’t ever seem to get out, and carrots. She makes him take a shower first. When he steps out of the bathroom she is dressed—high heels and a pale blue cotton dress with a dark blue bow; the four thin strands of pearls that he gave her for Christmas. He takes her in his arms.

  She lays her head on his shoulder.

  So, this is who I am, she is thinking. I am a man’s wife. A child’s mother. That is how I will find my way through this life.

  She is hungry by dinnertime. Has she ever been this hungry before? She eats everything on her plate and then runs to the bathroom and throws it all back up. Oh Peggy, she can hear Dick calling from the kitchen.

  Standing at the stove she fills her plate a second time. When she sits down at the table, he asks her what he can do to help. I’m going to make myself eat all this food, she tells him.

  A second time she throws it all back up in the toilet.

  So she gives up.

  When she tells him, he is overjoyed with the news. So soon? So soon? Could she be wrong? He reaches across the table and takes her hands. The bones of her wrists are so thin and frail that he says he is worried she might not be strong enough to have a baby. Don’t be silly, she tells him. You never saw me play field hockey.

  In the morning she will go shopping for more material. All the married-lady dresses that she sewed must now be put away to make room for the maternity clothes she will make. And then the baby clothes. Aunt Lilly will tell her to make neutral things, clothing that either a girl or a boy can wear. But Peggy won’t hear of this, and she buys the patterns for little boys’ trousers. Proper trousers, she calls them. Her mother and her aunt laugh at this. For almost a year all the baby will need is pajamas, they tell her. But this is her baby and she will dress him properly. Him. Even in this first month she is sure her baby is a boy. Even in this first month the baby is real to her. Only to her.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  On a sunstruck morning my brother meets me at the Holiday Inn in Kulpsville. I have a map and I’ve marked the road where Dr. Wright lives. He doesn’t know that we are coming. In my shirt pocket I have the index card from the Elm Terrace Hospital with his name and signature below Peggy’s name and the word preeclampsia.

  My brother is driving slowly down Main Street, pointing out where the hobby shop used to be, recalling how when we turned ten we were finally allowed to walk there by ourselves from our house just three-quarters of a mile away. I can show him things he has never known before: Peggy and Dick’s brick walk-up apartment on North Broad. Lauchman’s print shop where Dick went to work every day. The telephone company where Peggy worked. The train station where the trolley from Hatfield came in. “Why didn’t we ever know these things before?” he is saying. “I’ve learned more about our mother in the past few months than in the rest of my life.”

  On Clearspring Road we stop in front of the small stucco house with green trim. One pane of glass is missing from the garage windows. The willow tree reaches high above the roof now. Our bedroom window facing north is where I always imagined Peggy came in on the nights she visited me. “You never heard her voice?” I ask my brother.

  “No.”

  Why had she spoken only to me? Because I was the weaker of her two sons. I was the one who would hide from the world as she had, and in life’s deep loneliness there would be, at least, her voice to accompany me.

  This is the house we moved into a few days after Dick remarried. Another wedding. A new bride. Of course my mother would have been curious to see.

  At the end of the street, the silver water tower we walked past on the way to school and back each day. Its high chain-link fence with barbed wire around the top.
We threw stones at the tower, and by the time we were in the third grade we could reach it and it would whistle back a kind of shriek when the stone hit.

  The elementary school which was brand-new in 1956 is now showing signs of age. Streaks of rust along the window trim. Cracks in the concrete foundation. We drew pictures at our desks when the first astronaut rode into outer space. The teacher collected them and put them in a metal box that was buried beneath the building’s cornerstone for the demolition crew to discover in the distant future when, we believed, people would be living on the moon.

  In the basement below the cafeteria with its wood-and-gray-steel chairs is the fallout shelter where we practiced our escape from a Russian bomb. I think of it now and am reminded of the bomb shelter that Peggy saw being constructed. Rows and rows of Campbell’s soup cans.

  She missed the crazy years, and the bad years. She was dead before the exquisite order and hope of these neighborhoods died away completely.

  We count the numbers on Leslie Road. Then pull off to the side.

  There is a front porch on the house, a swing hanging from the rafters. The grounds are manicured, the grass is freshly cut. We ring the bell and stand in silence. Dave is looking up at the blue sky. “Beautiful day,” he says. He is facing this calmly and I am glad to have him with me.

  Not a sound from inside the house. Through a window, I see the rooms are without light. It seems that we have come on a day when he is gone.

  But then the door swings open. I can see the wariness in his eyes. So I smile and say we are Peggy Snyder’s twin sons. “We’ve gotten old. I’m sorry.”

  When I put out my hand he shakes it vigorously and tells us to come in.

  He walks ahead of us into the living room. My brother and I sit together on one couch, then stand when his wife appears. She is wearing a starched white blouse and a long wool skirt. He is dressed in a coat and tie as if he is expecting to see patients.