And I can write this now because it is also true: This is the only thing he ever knew, the only thing he was ever told about her sickness. Peggy hid it all from him.
Aunt Anna smiled wisely at me when I laid out my theory for her as we sat in her living room on Columbia Street where she spends her days caring for her husband. I told her that I had this nightmare about the five men conspiring, on religious grounds, to force my mother to keep her baby.
“If you had ever known your mother you would understand that no one ever could have done that to her. Peggy made up her own mind to keep you boys. You were real to her. Remember that. To everyone else you were not yet real. And she never told your father about any of it. She made her choice and kept it all to herself.”
My father went off to work whistling each morning because no one ever told him how sick Peggy was. She never told him that during her exam the day before the trip to Washington, the doctor explained that by the end of this month if her condition continued to deteriorate she was going to have to give up her baby because the baby was poisoning her. He believed in taking every precaution. He was a skilled physician and he had never lost a mother.
There is a doctor in Lansdale who was in high school with my mother, one class ahead. He called me in April to say he needed to speak with me. He told me that he might have been in love with Peggy from a distance, though she never knew he existed. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen and when he was away at medical school and learned that she had died, he told himself that one day he was going to find out exactly what had happened.
Five years after her death he returned to Lansdale to begin his medical practice. On a rainy afternoon he looked up her medical records at Grandview Hospital. He began asking questions discreetly and he found that it was common knowledge among the physicians on the hospital staff that Peggy Snyder had died needlessly. Her doctor, Edward Wright, had done everything within his power to persuade her to give up her baby. But her mind was set, she refused to listen to him.
The doctor invited me to his house for breakfast. He stood at the stove cooking omelettes and telling me everything he remembered. She was young, she had that going for her, and Dr. Wright might have held out a slim hope. But in the early morning hours of August 11, when he delivered Peggy’s baby only to discover that there was a second baby inside her, he knew that it was hopeless.
He said that a man like Dr. Wright would have washed his hands of my mother after she refused to follow his warning. And now when Dr. Wright says that he never had my mother for a patient, he believes he is telling the truth. Peggy pushed him out of her life just when she needed him most. He was her last chance to survive.
“When I say she died needlessly,” he told me, “I mean she could have lived if she had been willing to lose you and your brother.”
. . .
She kept it all to herself. She made up her mind because to her alone we were already real.
But she was angry too. Her swollen hands made her angry. And her swollen feet and her face which was gradually becoming unrecognizable to her.
She was angry at the headaches that woke her from her sleep, and she was angry at her husband who said the same thing over and over when he laid cold washcloths on her forehead to try to numb the pain. You’ll be all right, Peggy, just don’t put salt on your celery.
It was the only thing he knew to say to her.
She wanted to see the cherry blossoms in Washington. She had gone to the city two years earlier for her senior class trip in high school and she wanted to return just to see if it was as beautiful a city as she remembered it. Were the monuments as white under their night lights as she remembered them? So white they appear covered in snow.
They were beautiful and she was happy and would never forget standing in moonlight before the Lincoln Memorial. And Arlington Cemetery with its rows of white crosses for as far you can see. Identical white crosses that look like sugar cubes on the distant hillsides. Standing there with Dick, she finally knew what the war on the radio had cost.
But she was angry and distracted the whole trip because the doctor had also told her that in another month, six weeks at the most, if she was still determined to keep the baby until its full term, she was going to have to be cared for for the remainder of her pregnancy. She was going to have to move back into her father’s house on Market Street and spend the next three months in bed. Back in her father’s house where the progression will fall from her life, the marvelous progression of the past twelve months when she went from being a single girl to an engaged girl to a married woman to a pregnant wife. She can’t imagine what she will do each day in her father’s house. Or how she will find any room there to be alone.
After her return from this trip to Washington she locks herself in her room all day for two days while she takes out all the seams of her maternity clothes because they have become too tight. She has a small scalpel as sharp as a razor, with a tortoiseshell handle and a slightly hooked blade. She cuts the seams one stitch at a time, the anger making her hand into a fist around the scalpel. She won’t speak to Dick for these two days because now the marvelous progression which took her from being a high school girl to a pregnant wife feels to her like it has stolen something from her. She didn’t even have time to learn what it meant to be a wife and now she is going to have to learn what it means to be a mother. And a fat lady too. A fat lady in her father’s tiny half house on Market Street.
But in Washington she recalls her high school trip here. How she could have been kissed by Lawrence Jackman standing in the shadow of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving where they had watched money being made. And in Arlington Cemetery she ends up lying in the grass in her husband’s arms. Surrounded by so many dead men. Dead husbands and fathers from the war. All of this was happening while she was learning how to walk in high heels and wear her hair like Ginger Rogers. And it makes her feel stupid now. So stupid. How could she have ever believed that the war was heroic rescues and parades and illicit love affairs. The war wasn’t at all what it had sounded like on the radio. The war was death. Countless graves. With her husband’s arms around her, one pale cheek pressed against his shirt collar, she sees the white crosses at ground level spilled across the green fields, each one commemorating a fiancée, wife, and mother whose world has stopped.
Dick tells her that he, too, has the right to be buried here because he is a veteran. This she does not want to hear. So she kisses his lips to make him stop talking. And he leans harder against her, and she tells herself that this is something she will never again take for granted. This chance to be touched and to touch someone she loves before the time comes for that person to be swept away and hidden forever beneath the grass.
It is raining hard all the way home. Dick is driving; thin curls of smoke from his cigarette rise above his head and explode silently against the roof. Roy talks about a story he has read in Reader’s Digest: in Great Britain, the government has commissioned the nation’s most talented artists and sculptors to work with veterans whose faces were disfigured in the war. A castle somewhere in England has been requisitioned by the government. This is where the artists and the soldiers live. Many of the soldiers have hideous wounds. Their noses have been shot off, their eyelids are gone. Each soldier arrives with a photograph of how he looked before the war, then the artists work on making him an identical mask that will conceal his wounds.
Dick is asking how the masks stay on, how they are attached. Peggy leans her cheek against the cool glass window and looks down at her puffy hands. Something like despair rises through her body. Oh God, how will she ever pass through another hour of her life without thinking of those boys with their noses shot off? How will she ever escape the image of these boys? It is an unspeakable horror and she is certain that it will happen again, there will be another war.
Why must she be married to a man who can’t see this? How can he keep smiling, and why is it that nothing can extinguish his optimism?
When R
oy is finished explaining that the masks are held on by glasses, Dick begins to extol the virtues of the United States government which has made so many opportunities available to its veterans of war. College tuition, which he is going to take advantage of one day. And the loans to buy a house. He makes it all sound so wonderful and each time his voice rises with enthusiasm, it makes Peggy want to scream. Why can’t he see that everything is going to come crashing down? Why can’t he be with her in her despair?
She knows the answer to this because she has invented it herself: if he were standing beside her in her despair, she would take him down with her and he would not be waiting with his smile to light the way back for her to return. Yes, this is why she must thank God for his cheerfulness and his faith. She must be grateful and she must never do anything intentionally to deprive him of his pleasure in life, or his hope. She must never tell him anything that might extinguish his light, the light that leads her back to his love for her. If there is another war she must fall into his embrace like one of those wives in the photographs in Life magazine. And then bravely surrender him to the ship or the train that will carry him away. Let him keep smiling through her misery and fear. He’s a boy in love with life. And the worst thing that she could ever do is give him a reason to doubt life’s goodness. She must keep her fears hidden. Hide them deeper and deeper inside her until she can feel the physical weight of her sorrow, and loneliness is in everything she knows.
Those two nights in April she has all her maternity clothes from her closet piled on the tin table in the kitchen. Dick is sleeping while she sits through the night tearing out the seams. She is trying to slow her mind so she can think clearly, but everything is crowding behind her temples, each thought catching on something inside her head and playing itself over and over. GENERAL ELECTRIC. The words on the refrigerator. She keeps seeing these words even after she has turned back to the dress in her hands. She is tearing the dress apart but her mind is speaking these maddening words! GENERAL ELECTRIC. GENERAL ELECTRIC. As if there is some deep meaning to these words, as if these words hold the truth about the rich and varied love that she and her husband have shared in their brief time together. She can’t turn away from the words and they won’t let go. She is memorizing the curling letters in those words outlined on the refrigerator door while the blood is thickening behind her eyes and the headache begins again with a cold spark at the back of her neck. Maybe she shouldn’t have gotten married so soon. Her mouth feels dry and scratchy. And there is some sound behind the door in the kitchen that leads to the basement. A scratching sound like the sound of a small animal trying to gnaw its way through the door. The sound is growing louder and the hole is closing above her head again, the concrete lid to the bomb shelter is being screwed down tightly on top of her.
Chapter Thirty-six
One night in Maine I could hear my mother’s voice so clearly that I wrote this long letter to her.
I can see you on one of those warm May days, taking out the storm windows in the brick apartment and washing them before you put in the screens. Washing each window with hot water and soap. Scalding water that turns your hands red, your hands which were once so delicate, the nails strong and ridged with perfect white half-moons. By now your fingers look like sausages. Dick keeps telling you how his sister, Jean, gained weight with her first baby, and you listen to him and you try to believe that he is right, that there is nothing to worry about. And you hate yourself for making a big deal of your swollen hands because in the scheme of things, with people starving in the world and with families still mourning the loss of loved ones in the war, your troubles are small and inconsequential. But still you can’t look at your hands without thinking that you are becoming disfigured and you need a way to hide from the world like the British soldiers who will hide behind masks for the remainder of their lives. You are scrubbing the windows until your hands are raw, the skin on your fingers cracked just short of bleeding; it is a kind of punishment, and you can hear your mother whispering to your husband, “She’ll get through it, she’s my daughter, I know how strong she is.”
Your mother has been calling you every morning, offering to come by and help you pack up your things so you and Dick can move into their house on Market Street where she can wait on you hand and foot like your doctor has advised. But how can you go back to your father’s house? The little half house which is already so crowded with your baby sister and your brother.
Maybe if you keep busy you can dissuade them from this plan. Maybe if you can show them that you are able to clean the windows yourself and put in all the screens, then they will give up the idea that you must move back home and be cared for like an invalid.
Maybe you can persuade them to leave you alone.
How? By smiling?
Yes, by becoming the perfect picture of a housewife. Dressed with your makeup on and your husband’s breakfast on the table before he awakens each morning. And standing at the door to greet him at the end of the day, dressed in a different outfit, smiling. Hello sweetheart, I made meatloaf for dinner.
And macaroni and cheese. You spend two days teaching yourself how to make macaroni and cheese. And at night after supper when you sit out on the back porch with Dick, you keep smiling even when the sky is filled with bombers from the Air Force base at Willowgrove and the radio is talking more and more of the troubles in Korea.
Keep smiling. And what about a double date this Friday night with Tom Pugles, Dick’s buddy, and Shirley Graham, the girl Tom’s dating now. Cinderella is opening at the Strand and you’re going to catch the early show and then have dinner together.
But when the night comes you make Dick call Tom and change it to the late movie and no dinner. And you insist on meeting them at the theater. Inside the theater. In the dark because that afternoon you looked through the Landsdale High School yearbook and saw how pretty and how thin Shirley is. Just the sight of your hand next to her smiling face on the page is enough to make your throat go dry.
But you keep trying. Joking with Tom that as soon as you have delivered this baby you’re going to hit him up for a ride in his state trooper cruiser. You want him to promise that he’ll flash the blue lights and drive as fast as it will go!
The macaroni and cheese in the glass casserole pan is for Dick’s sister, Jean, and her husband, Page, who you invited to dinner the next night. You are trying again to show your husband that you can manage. You have worked all day to get it right, washing every bowl and pan that you dirty as you go along so that there is nothing in the sink or on the counter that will be evidence of your struggle. When you bend over to pick a wood-handled spoon up off the floor you are a little short of breath. It’s nothing really, it’s only the strangeness of the feeling that draws your attention from the world of preparing meals and entertaining guests, back to the world of yourself. Inside yourself. You can feel the darkness cover you as you lean against the counter, the strip of metal trim around the wood counter pressing against your belly. If you lean harder, it disappears in the soft folds of skin that were never there before. Close your eyes and stop this before it claims you. Concentrate on something else. Concentrate on the picture of the sweet nurse who you have met, the woman who will help deliver your baby. Anna Hartman. Remember how she smiled at you when you were introduced to her the other day? Her strong handshake and her fine bright eyes? Can’t you see her handing you your baby—Here’s your son, Peggy. Congratulations. And the first thing you’ll do is count all the fingers and toes like every mother does. And take a good, long look at his face to make sure you’ll never forget it.
No one remembers today what it was that happened, Peggy. Jean and Page arrived just a little before Dick had returned home from work. They brought their new baby, a son named Douglas, nine months old now, just learning how to laugh at the world. They sat him on the burgundy-colored couch between them. He was dressed in short pants and a white T-shirt like the ones your father wore to the print shop. Ditchdigger T-shirts you called them. Everythi
ng was fine until he began crying hard about something. You watched Jean hold him up in the air and talk baby talk to him until he calmed down. And then you excused yourself and went into the bedroom. You closed the door behind you and sat down on the floor and leaned against the door.
This is where you stayed for the rest of the night. When Dick called to you and pleaded with you to open the door, you leaned your weight harder against it and told him that you felt too sick to come out. You wouldn’t let him in.
Even while it’s happening you know exactly how terrible this evening will be in everyone’s memory of it. But you cannot stop what is happening. Twice during dinner, Dick, like a child, comes hopefully to the door and knocks gently. I just can’t, you say to him. You can hear the plates and silverware. Before Jean and Page arrived you had set the tin table with your fancy wedding dishes. The beautiful hand-painted Desert Rose plates. The matching cups and saucers. They aren’t speaking a word over dinner. It is so terribly silent that you can hear them chewing. You can smell the smoke from their after-dinner cigarettes.
Finally when their baby begins to fuss, they say goodnight. The screen door closes behind them with a slow sigh. And then it begins again. Your husband’s hopeful tapping on the bedroom door. You’ll feel better in the morning, Peg. He says this all the time to you now, and you are trying to remember when he first began to say it.
Somehow you fall asleep leaning against the bedroom door. When you wake, it is the middle of the night. Broad Street is deserted. No cars go by. You wake suddenly, startled by the silence around you. There is a narrow band of light on the floor beside you coming from the light on the stove that Dick has left on for you.
You find him sleeping on the couch, his feet hanging over the end, and when you kneel down beside him and lay your head on his chest, he shudders and whispers to you that he doesn’t ever want to stop trying to make you happy but he is scared now. He’s scared that he may give up on you. He’s scared that he may lose his faith in you.
Of Time and Memory Page 19