“We’re just trying to get to know who our mother was,” I tell him.
“I never knew her,” he says. “I delivered over a thousand babies and I never lost a mother.”
“Yes,” I say, “you told me.”
“I’ve gone over and over my records and I never had a patient by that name. The only thing I can figure is that I must have been called in to deliver you, that’s all. I must have been on call, covering for your mother’s doctor.”
I ask him where he referred his difficult cases in the early 1950s, women facing difficult pregnancies.
“Sacred Heart in Norristown,” he says. Then he apologizes again for not remembering anything. “I checked my records and your mother wasn’t my patient.”
I feel my heart beating faster against the index card from my mother’s hospital bed in my shirt pocket. Then I ask him if he has children.
“I have a daughter,” he says.
We listen to him and his wife as they speak of this fine daughter. The doctor remembers her IQ and I am watching his hands, thinking how they reached inside Peggy. His face is severe, such a stern look. She would have found no refuge looking up into his face. He is a man who would have sized her up as not terribly bright, from an uneducated family. Someone headed for the dull gray working-class life. Nothing as exceptional as the life of his daughter.
My brother is asking again if he will get in touch with us should he remember anything. I just want to get out of the house.
“Where was your office?” Dave asks.
“Derstein Street.”
My father is waiting at the motel. I put my arm around him and ask him one last question. “Where did you take Peggy for her regular visits to the doctor when she was pregnant? Can you remember where the doctor’s office was?”
“Yes. Derstein Street,” he says.
He is certain of this. And in the days that follow I grow more sure that Dr. Wright has lied to me. He is a man who remembers his daughter’s IQ but not the first set of twins he delivered, not the only mother who ever died in his care?
Everyone in the medical community at the time of Peggy’s death still remembers, except Dr. Wright. And he never asked my brother or me a single question about her. This is what makes me so certain he is lying. Not to ask one question. Where did your mother die? Who raised you boys? Is your father still alive? Nothing.
I wish I could have made him remember my mother. I wish I could have told him what it was like for her in the end. How she felt herself slipping away into madness, trying to recall the words to that record by Don Cornell, anything from a better time, something to pull herself back to this world. Her horrible headaches, her skull pounding to the noise from the racetrack in Hatfield on those hot August nights when sleep wouldn’t come. The engines of the race cars ripping and screaming through her consciousness. And all her worst fears exploding in her mind on June 25, when the war her husband promised her would never come, began. Three days later the army of North Korea had taken Seoul and over the radio came word that World War II veterans on active reserve status would be called to fight. That day W. Stuart Symington, chairman of the National Security Resources Board, told the American Red Cross that a foreign power had the capacity to attack all of the United States for the first time in history. “We have no adequate defense against such an attack,” he warned.
Chapter Thirty-four
The pregnancy book Peggy is reading in February to prepare herself for having a baby suggests daily exercise. It claims that the pain and discomfort of labor will be reduced by being in good physical condition. She decides to start taking regular walks around the block. She takes them in the evening just before going to bed, with the hope that she will be tired enough to fall asleep without a long struggle.
On one of those February nights, as she is passing the Elm Terrace Hospital, two young men come dashing down the sidewalk like burglars being chased. One of them is trying to button his long overcoat as he is running. It brushes her legs when he passes and she turns to see where they are going.
They run right up the front steps of the hospital and throw open the big door. Light from inside spills out across the porch. And brings with it the most ungodly scream that she has ever heard. Even when the door closes the sound is barely diminished. It is inside her. It draws her to the porch and up the first step. The woman screaming on the other side of the door will one day be her in her labor. She knows this. And the two boys who were summoned here tonight by a telephone call, boys who belong to the volunteer corps, will carry the mother in a stretcher up the stairs to the delivery room where a doctor, maybe her doctor, is washing his hands in the enamel sink.
It is enough to stop her heart if she lets it. The fear of this night becoming her night is something she cannot ignore. She can either sink beneath it, surrendering the last of her strength to its force, or face it head-on with the defiance of a young, beautiful girl whose body is strong and growing stronger. This defiance is a kind of faith, isn’t it? The faith to say I know how terrible the storm may become, but I have the strength to ride through it. God will help me ride it through with the strong heart that he has given me.
Dick is bringing home boxes from the print shop. Boxes that she lines with tissue paper. She is packing away the married-lady dresses. Three to a box. She is down on her knees wearing a slim blue skirt, a pale blue silk blouse. She is folding the dresses carefully. Her husband is watching from across the room. Smoking a cigarette. Trying to smile. Halloween, he says at once. By Halloween you’ll be unpacking your wonderful dresses.
She is on her knees, making an elaborate ceremony of this. What makes her husband’s smile disappear? Can he feel the time draining from this moment? What makes him walk across the room and kneel down next to her and take her in his arms as if she were going away on a long journey that might take the rest of her life?
Peggy is sitting at her glass-topped vanity combing her hair when Eileen Crockett calls on the telephone to ask if she can come over. Her husband, Bill, is at work with Dick at the print shop and she has just gotten off work at the hospital. I’m not dressed yet for the day, Peggy tells her. Give me an hour, Eileen.
When she arrives Peggy is still in her nightgown, still brushing her hair at the glass-topped vanity in her bedroom. The sound of her knocking at the door brings Peggy out of what feels like a trance. This is the second or third time she has had this happen in the past few weeks and it’s embarrassing to her. This morning Eileen is solicitous, apologizing for disturbing her. She is a tall, dark, and beautiful girl, a nurse like so many of Peggy’s other acquaintances, and when she first sees her standing at the back door off the kitchen, her impulse is to tell her what has just happened, how she was so lost in a daydream which she can no longer recall that an hour and a half somehow slipped away without her moving even a finger. Like she was hypnotized.
Eileen has a present for her wrapped in silver-foil paper with a thin red ribbon. Open it, she says.
It is another book about pregnancy, this one by a Dr. Benjamin Spock. Eileen is in a rush to tell her what a marvelous new book it is, she’s been urging every pregnant girl she knows to read it because it makes such good simple sense of the whole business of having babies and caring for them. All the expectant mothers who are patients of the doctor she works with are reading it. Anyway, she says to her, Happy Birthday, Peg.
Birthday? How could she have forgotten that today was her nineteenth birthday?
Eileen will remember this: how Peggy tried to conceal the fact that she had forgotten, but it was clear to Eileen that she had. And it will worry her. She will speak with her husband about this, and he will tell Dick. And when Dick asks Peggy about it, she will tell him it was nothing, nothing at all. It will start a small argument between them, and she will lose her patience and walk out of the room, leaving him standing there with his hands open at his sides, trying to reason with her.
Her nineteenth birthday. The news is not good. Albert Einstein is on the radi
o news, warning the country about the H-bomb. If man succeeds in making the hydrogen bomb, radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and hence annihilation of any life on earth has been brought within the range of technical possibility. And in a six-hour speech, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the Republican senator from Wisconsin, has renewed charges that fifty-seven communists have been employed in the State Department.
What kind of a world is she bringing a child into? This is on her mind on her birthday. The fear that she might not be able to protect this child in America’s future.
She is alone in the bedroom again, sitting again at the vanity. Sometimes when she loses her patience with Dick, she can find her way back to her affection for him by recalling their wedding day. The white lace covering the backs of her hands. When she looks down at her hands today, the flesh around her gold wedding band is swollen. Staring at her hand makes her heart race with worry; her long and elegant fingers which always pleased her and which inspired her across the last few years to diet continually, have disappeared. Their elegance is gone. The thin elegance she always thought she was hiding behind like a cat hiding behind a blade of grass. Now her hand looks like a starfish. The fingers are fat and misshapen. It is a hand she has never seen before. And she stares at it with contempt because … she cannot say exactly why. Maybe it is just that these pudgy fingers are not who she is. She is so delicate and pale that a friend of Frances (remember Frances over on Cherry Street, in her metal braces, paralyzed from polio?) has described her as a “Dresden doll.”
I keep telling her that she has to eat for two now, Dick says as he turns to glance at her in the back seat of the Chevy. He and Bill Crockett are in front. Peggy and Eileen are in back. They are heading to Atlantic City for the day because this is how Peggy wanted to celebrate her nineteenth birthday. It’s a cold winter day, much too cold to be at the shore, and they have all teased her about wanting to make this trip. But once Peg makes up her mind to do something … she heard Dick say on the telephone when he told the Crocketts of her plans.
Once she makes up her mind to do something, no one can dissuade her.
Eileen, the nurse, tells her that the old notion of eating for two isn’t quite true. You should just eat good nutritional meals, regular portions. And you should expect to gain maybe thirty-five pounds. With your delicate frame, perhaps even as little as twenty-five.
Eileen is sweet, but this is the part of being pregnant that Peggy cannot stand. The public nature of it. There she is in her condition. And everyone believes they are qualified to comment about her condition.
Why are my fingers swollen when I’m not eating anything at all? She doesn’t ask this question, but it runs through her mind as she stares down at her hand.
Maybe you’re eating for three! Dick says. She can see a smile light up his face. I was a twin. There are two sets of twins on my side of the family, and one of Peg’s aunts had three sets of twins herself.
Well, I hope they like crackers, she says. She has a box of Saltines on her lap and she is eating them one after another, slowly, chewing each one fifty times before she swallows, the way Aunt Anna told her to. She has heard that morning sickness can be cured by always keeping something in your stomach. The crackers do seem to be helping today.
The world sails by outside the car window. Long, even fields and then rolling farmland giving way to scrub pines and the salt scent of the sea. Dick and Bill are talking about the communists in Korea, discussing the chances for war there. We are going to have to take the commies on somewhere, Bill says. It might as well be Korea. Better than here, at home.
The giant billboard on the right-hand side of the road, a puppy pulling down a little child’s bathing suit in an advertisement for Coppertone sunbathing oil.
There are so many Chinese communists, they say we’d run out of bullets to gun them all down. We wouldn’t be able to make new bullets fast enough to kill the yellow hordes.
Peggy asks them to please stop. Eileen is looking through the pregnancy book which she has brought along to show her. Listen to this, everyone, she announces. She reads the part about the first cells dividing. The cells in salt water. You are carrying an ocean in your belly.
And listen to this, boys. How does the ideal husband behave during his wife’s pregnancy? First, last, and always he remembers he has a bigger share of the responsibility than the mere launching of the performance at one end or the paying for it at the other. He should be cheerful and patient—
That’s me! Dick sings out.
—relieve his wife of worries, avoid quarrels—
We never quarrel, do we, sweetheart?
—cater to her desires (up to the point where she is merely trying to be mollycoddled), overlook her appearance—
You look beautiful to me!
—and take an interest in their impending acquisition. Any expectant father who accomplishes all this deserves a Congressional Medal.
Pin it on right here, will you, Peg?
From behind she puts her arms around him and lays her head on his shoulder. She kisses his cheek and whispers, Pearls, pearls.
As far as maternity clothing is concerned, Eileen reads on, your clothing should be comfortable, but also attractive to your husband!
More laughter. The sound of it is reassuring. The pale sky is flying past Peggy’s window. She can feel herself smile. When are we going to get there, Daddy?
The laughter rises, such a sweet, sweet sound. And she rolls down her window to let the salt air fill the car. A smell as sweet as the sound of laughter.
But there is her hand again, her pudgy fingers; isn’t this the lousy way it always is with her and the world, always the collision of her desire to be at peace with the world, to laugh and smile and to embrace the miracles in her midst, her beautiful friends here with her, and her devoted young husband, and her baby growing inside her. But always, just as she is reaching to embrace all of this, there is something more to be afraid of, and to run from.
She doesn’t want Dick to turn and see, so she puts her hands beneath her thighs and sits on them the rest of the way.
. . .
On the shore they are teasing her—Whose kooky idea was it to come to the beach, anyway? They have to shout to be heard above the wind which is driving in, straight off the sea. It is the kind of weather that makes Peggy feel like she could be swept off the face of the earth in an instant without anyone even realizing that she is gone.
But it feels so good to be near the sea. This is the place where she fell in love with Dick. He and Bill are walking ahead. They still look like boys, not yet men, though they have been to war. Boys really. Slugging each other playfully. Peggy gathers a handful of small stones and surprises Dick by running up behind him and pouring them into his pocket. I don’t want you to blow away! I’m weighing you down so you won’t blow away!
There is the Steel Pier up ahead where the horse and rider dive from the top of a seventy-foot platform into a pool of water. In New York City on her honeymoon Peggy met a woman who had seen this on her honeymoon and she told Peggy never to go see it because it was terrifying for the horse. Peggy has never been able to forget this, the horrible image of a horse falling headfirst.
She takes Eileen’s arm and leans close to speak into her ear. The sight of Dick and Bill ahead of her has made her feel certain one more time that this baby is going to be a boy. I want six boys, she tells Eileen, but if I can’t get that many, I want at least two to take the places of the brothers Dick lost when he was a boy.
This is the only person she will ever tell.
On the ride home in the back seat Eileen answers some of her medical questions. Your doctor has said no salt because of your high blood pressure which can aggravate the toxemia. Toxemia can be dangerous. In extreme cases it is called preeclampsia, and can be fatal. Trust your doctor and do whatever he tells you, Eileen says.
That night after Dick had fallen to sleep, Peggy put her long winter coat on over her nightgown and walked out onto the f
ront porch to see if she could hear any sounds coming from the labor room of Elm Terrace. The second floor was dark but she stayed outside and watched for a long time, waiting for a light to go on in the delivery room and for the boys from the volunteer service corps to come dashing down Broad Street, waiting for a baby to be born on her birthday.
But nothing broke the darkness of the night.
Chapter Thirty-five
I should conceal this truth. I should turn my back to some of the things that my mother did so this will be a more uplifting story. A story that people can nod their heads to. I should say that Peggy went blithely along, believing in God and fearing nothing. It would be a story about faith that people read again and again when they are blue and when they catch an unexpected glimpse of the truth about their own lives—that they, like Peggy, are only barely hanging on to this life, that a single telephone call can throw our careful lives into unspeakable disorder. I should not say that sorrow awaits us all.
I can just say that Dick went off to work each morning whistling, which is the truth—the neighbors remember this. A skinny young man in khaki pants walking down the cement pathway to his green Chevrolet, whistling. Happy because he had such a beautiful girl for his wife, a girl he never dreamed might be interested in him, a kid who still had pimples on his face and who had false teeth issued to him by the United States Army on his fifth day in boot camp.
I should hide the fact that in April, at the beginning of Peggy’s fifth month, there was already enough concern on her doctor’s part that he advised against the trip to Washington, D.C., that she and Dick were planning to take with Roy and Naomi Meyers. The afternoon of her office visit, Dr. Wright’s nurse called Dick at Lauchman’s print shop. You’re not letting your wife eat salt, are you?
My father remembers the doctor forbidding Peggy to eat salt. This is one of the few things he can recall through his amnesia.
Of Time and Memory Page 18