He begins to cry. This is the first time you have made your husband cry. (This you will now have to carry with you.) The sound of him struggling to speak through his tears is enough to take your breath away. He is trying to tell you that he is scared and you are trying to stay where you are with your face pressed against him while the top of your head is burning and you begin to drift away. And the last thing you want to do is leave him behind. All you want is to stay where you are, right next to his sorrow, and so, to keep yourself from flying off, you try again to picture the center of your childhood town. To walk the streets in your memory, going calmly from store to store in Hatfield. Hirzel Drug Store with the glass vials in the window, and Anders Market. Beans Grocery and the old Knipe Hotel.
On Mother’s Day I took my family to your grave for the first time, Peggy. I stood beside Colleen, watching our children. Erin pulled the weeds that had grown up around the marble stone. Cara asked me if I was going to be buried here when I died. Nell did a cartwheel in the grass, pretending this was not a sad place. Jack buried a quarter and said, “Someday I’m going to come back and see if it’s still here.”
I wondered what would be left of you. A mat of hair, your shoes. Pages from the Bible your mother buried with you.
I tried to remember the times in my life when I felt close to you. The time I was caught in a gale in a small sailboat, two miles from the harbor. I was alone, down on my knees bailing the boat and trying to hold it on course. I had my St. Christopher’s medal between my teeth and I was talking to you as I am now.
And in 1987, when Colleen and I had gone to spend the winter in Ireland. Nell and Erin were babies and I had gone ahead to find a place. In the subway in London a fire broke out at the King’s Cross station. People were running over one another to find a way out. I ran to the tracks and pushed my way inside the last car of the last train out just as the doors were closing. As the train was pulling away there were people running beside it, screaming to be let on. And when I saw the great black wall of smoke behind us, I began to speak to you.
And the flight home from Los Angeles in 1982 when the plane fell suddenly and everyone’s dinner flew up to the ceiling. People were screaming but I was speaking to you as I am now.
Your bones are in the ground, seven or eight miles from where I was born, half a mile from where you last heard us cry. How far I’ve wandered from where you lie.
Chapter Thirty-seven
When the doctor opened Nancy Nau’s belly to deliver her babies by cesarean, a hot stream of fluids shot to the ceiling like a fountain. She told me how the nurses said they’d never seen anything like that before. She began to cry when she told me that her twin girls lived only a few hours. This was in the seventh month of her preeclampsia. She said, “If your mother hadn’t carried you to full term, and if I hadn’t had my babies taken early, you and I wouldn’t be here. Your Peggy and my twin girls died for us.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m sure your mother was beautiful and sweet and loved you and your brother so very much. Believe this, please, from someone who had the same condition as your mother. And if you want me to, I can tell you everything that your mother was going through, month by month, up to the end of her life.”
“Yes,” I said again.
One door opens and then another closes. I found Dr. Wright’s former office nurse living now in California. When my brother and I had met him, his wife just mentioned casually that the nurse was still alive and that she called them every month or so to see how they were.
It came down to this, me walking around for five days with her name and telephone number on a scrap of paper in my pocket, too afraid to call her. Why? Because what would I do if she told me that Peggy’s death was unnecessary? What if she told me that everyone who loved my mother failed her in the end; Peggy was dying in their midst and they failed to rescue her.
I had my brother call her first. She was annoyed and barely spoke to him. When I called she told me on the telephone that she had been expecting my call. “We never had a patient by your mother’s name,” she said.
“Maybe by her maiden name,” I said.
“No one named Peggy Snyder and no one named Peggy Schwartz.”
“Schwartz?” I said. “How do you know her maiden name?”
“I have to go,” she said. “I’m an old woman now, and I have to go.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
I know that on Mother’s Day in 1950 Peggy didn’t go to church because she was upset with the way her face had begun to swell. A pie face, she called it. The face of a circus freak. How could anyone expect her to believe that this was a normal part of being pregnant. Her cousin Jean was one month ahead of her in her pregnancy and she looked lovely. Her face was radiant—she had never looked prettier.
In the afternoon on Mother’s Day, Peggy allowed her mother to persuade her to take a walk. Peggy wanted to carry Audrey, and she was big enough now to sort of set Audrey’s bottom on her pregnant belly. They walked three blocks to East School Street where her father and Dick were working on the new house. It was a hot day and her mother brought along some lemonade in two old pickle jars with waxed paper screwed into the lids so they wouldn’t leak.
Her mother was pleased to show her that the dining room was already framed. All she wanted was a dining room because there wasn’t one in the half house on Market Street. Her father and Dick were so delighted to see Peggy there that they nailed together a few boards for a bench and put it in the shade of a willow tree so she and her mother and her baby sister could sit and watch them swing their hammers.
Here, on this makeshift bench, with Audrey sitting on the ground pulling up handfuls of grass, her mother told her that she had bought a daybed for the living room. She is going to put it against the far wall, and it will be a davenport during the day and at night her bed. It won’t be in the way. It won’t be any trouble. She must do what the doctor has told her to do.
She takes one of Peggy’s hands in hers and tells her, I don’t want to argue with you or upset you, but I’m your mother and someday you’ll understand the deep, instinctive desire to take care of the children God has given us.
Maybe it’s not what she says that persuades Peggy. Maybe it is the sight of her father and her husband happily building the house; it makes her believe that all of them living together in the half house will work out okay. They’ll be coming here straight from work each afternoon and working until it’s too dark to see, and she can sit and watch them. She can watch her mother’s house going up.
When Dick stops to drink his lemonade and smoke a cigarette, Peggy sits beside him in the grass. The sweat has left trails through the dirt on his cheeks. She pushes his hair back and presses the cool jar of lemonade against his forehead. The fine hair on his arms has begun to turn blond from the sun. She runs her fingers along the back of his hand and he tells her that someday he’s going to build her a house, that her father is teaching him everything he’ll need to know. And the land across the street is for sale. He has spoken with Mr. Lauchman; he’s willing to arrange a loan to buy the land. Would you like this? Would this make you happy?
I’m happy right now, she says to him.
He goes on to tell her that if they move back home with her folks now like the doctor has told her to do, they can start saving money to buy things for the house he’s going to build.
. . .
They are coming at her from every side. Respecting how stubborn she is and how her mind is impossible to change once she has made a decision. They are trying to appease her into agreeing to move back home.
Of all things, she tells Dick to write her a letter.
A letter?
Yes. Like the ones you used to write me after each date. Write me a letter, Dick. Tell me all about this house that you are going to build for me.
Chapter Thirty-nine
No one can tell me what became of her things that she had left in the apartment in Lansdale, expecting to return after she d
elivered her baby. Peggy was full of anger over losing her own place in the world, the five little rooms where she and Dick had set up housekeeping just six months earlier. The plywood cupboard below the kitchen sink where the pots and pans were kept, each of them new just half a year ago, now burned black on the bottom from when she tried to learn to cook. The hallway closet where she kept her extra shoes and the lovely married-lady dresses that she had made and then put away when she began wearing maternity clothes. Each of them on its own wood hanger covered with stiff white paper that she got from the dry cleaners.
What became of these possessions? She left behind everything that meant something to her and I will never be able to find what became of these things. I am to blame for this because for nearly thirty years of my grown-up life I never thought about her. How can I explain this? These were years when I could have found her grave on my own. Long ago I could have searched for the people who remembered her. There was nothing standing in my way. I simply forgot about her the way we do in this life. I turned and went on living.
Go and live, she might have said to me once when I was a boy. Go and live. But don’t forget me.
There is Dick at the door to the apartment after Peggy walks out. He is calling to her but she just keeps marching toward the car. He is calling to her that they will be back here soon, right after the baby is born, and in the meantime he will bring anything she wants to have with her. Anything.
Just tell me what you want to take with us, Peggy.
She won’t look back. She is sitting in the car with her head bowed when he carries her sewing machine down the front steps and lays it on its side in the trunk of the car.
It won’t be long and we’ll be back, he says as they drive away.
In her father’s house they put the sewing machine in front of a window in the living room as if it is a houseplant that needs the sunlight to survive. Late at night when everyone else is sleeping Peggy stays up sewing baby clothes and Mrs. Bower takes note of this. To this neighbor there still is a logical progression in Peggy’s life. She had taken note of her sewing her bridesmaids’ dresses, then her honeymoon wardrobe, then the married-lady dresses, and now she has returned with her pregnant belly to sew her baby’s clothes.
For the first time in her life Peggy sleeps late in the mornings. At first it takes an act of will to sleep until her husband and father have left for work. Her face and hands are most swollen in the morning and she has felt something in the way they look at her. Their fear, perhaps?
What is it that people see when they look at her? Maybe they can tell that something isn’t right with her pregnancy, and she can sense this so she hides herself away.
She hides herself away so well that all these years later I have only a mystery left in front of me, and small pieces of her secret.
But it makes sense to me. By June the shape of her face had changed dramatically, flattened without depth, and wide. So she mailed the invitations to her baby shower a week late so that no one would come. So no one would see her with her circus face.
By mid-June the severity of her illness hits her when she can no longer fit her feet into even her slippers. The toxemia that she read about in the pregnancy book has now become preeclampsia, the condition that Dr. Wright had warned her of.
Now she hides from everyone. Dick and her father work on the house until dark each day and by the time they come home she is in bed for the night. When they are asleep she goes for drives with the windows down to cool off her skin. I know that once she drove back to North Broad Street in Lansdale and parked in front of the maternity house of Elm Terrace Hospital to listen for the sound of a mother in labor. She told her cousin about this; she was right there, just across the street from her apartment, but she kept her head turned so she wouldn’t have to see it.
She is becoming nocturnal by the end of June and these are strange nights. Not only are the night skies groaning with the sounds of Air Force jets from the base in Willowgrove, as many planes flying test runs now as during the war, but in Hatfield the midget race cars are speeding around the dirt track until midnight with a high-pitched grinding noise that torments her soul and vibrates her mother’s china teacups. In order to drown out the maddening noise she leans her head close to the sewing machine motor as she works.
It got very bad in July. On some days she was too weak to dress. Her husband, hopeful, always hopeful, tried again and again to convince her that if she would only eat something she would start to feel better. Her empty chair at the table has come to symbolize her mother’s mounting fears. She knew that something terrible was happening to her daughter. But whenever she asked Peggy if it would be all right for her to have Dr. Moyer, her childhood doctor, come by, she refused. She buried her face in her pillow and told her mother that she would be all right if only everyone would just stop talking about how terrible she looked.
She had become hideous to look at; this was the source of her greatest despair. The physical beauty that she had always placed between herself and the world had been erased, leaving her vulnerable. So vulnerable that the baby rolling inside her stomach was not a comfort or a source of amazement to her. It only made her feel like she had no place to hide.
At dusk on the days when it was quiet enough she lay on the daybed with her head on the windowsill and she could hear the sound of hammers and saws from five blocks away where Dick and her father were working on the new house. This was a comfort to her. She listened for a pattern in the sounds and pictured them working side by side. She could close her eyes and see them in their khaki pants and white T-shirts. Her mother took them their dinner wrapped in tin foil. On hot nights, a bottle of beer each. She pushed Audrey in her stroller, the tray with their picnic supper on the little metal rack below the seat. One night she was caught in a thunderstorm, great gashes of lightning in the darkening sky. When she returned she sat on the daybed and told Peggy how the lightning had struck the roof of the house, setting off sparks of electricity as it raced across the roof, skipping along the nail heads.
When Peggy spoke at all it was always about the war in Korea. That war, so far away, seemed more real to her than the possibility that soon her baby would be born and she would be delivered.
Then one night Dick awoke her with a smile on his face. He placed his hand on her stomach and told her that he’d heard from one of the fellows at work that of all the veterans on active reserve, those with children would have their names put at the bottom of the list, they would be the last soldiers called to Korea.
This was the greatest news! She propped herself up on her elbows and let him kiss her. Finally the great burden of her pregnancy made sense in a way she never could have expected.
It gave her a burst of energy. When her cousin Jean came home from the hospital with her new baby on July 23, Peggy walked up the street to see her. Jean remembers this: Her mother at the window watching Peggy walk up the sidewalk. She is moving so slowly and with such effort it is as if she is climbing a steep ladder. Jean’s mother told her daughter to come to the window to watch. She told her that for a week now she hadn’t seen a light at the window; Peggy had stopped sewing baby clothes and this must mean that her time was near.
She walked up the sidewalk barefoot because by now she could not fit her swollen feet in even her father’s slippers.
“When I saw Peggy that day,” her cousin said to me, “I almost dropped my baby.”
She remembers Peggy struggling to smile. The vacant look in her eyes. Her cousin handed the baby to Peggy and thought, My God, why isn’t her doctor helping her! Why isn’t someone helping her!
Her lovely hair, which she was always so proud of, was lank, and matted against her forehead, like she’d been lost in the woods, wandering for days. Like she’d barely survived some terrible disaster. It was a hot day. Her blouse was wet with sweat.
“What can I do to help you, Peggy?” Jean asked her.
“I’m going to be all right, Jean,” she replied.
Jean did
n’t believe this. And her unasked question—Why isn’t someone helping her?—was left to me to answer. Swollen and misshapen, Peggy was barely able to walk; how could my father and her mother not see how terribly sick she was? How could they not see that they were losing her?
In Peggy’s brief time on this earth she had hidden behind her beauty. But her beauty had betrayed her now, just when she needed it most, and she was left to try and hide her secret behind the nightmare that had replaced this beauty.
Her secret was that she knew she was dying. She had the memory of Dr. Wright’s warning at the start of her pregnancy. His words had been only dull abstractions then, but now, in the heat of summer, she knew that her decision to take this pregnancy to the end was going to kill her.
Her beauty had betrayed her, exposing her to the questions and the fears of those people closest to her. They did see, of course. My father, her father, and her mother saw. I know that her mother, my grandmother, tried on several occasions to persuade her to let Dr. Moyer, their family doctor, examine her or at least come to the house on Market Street to see her. To see what? That some divine and grotesque trick had been played on her? He was summoned once by my father, and Peggy refused to let him into the room.
Should I blame my father for not breaking down the door?
For a week in the fall of 1998 I turned over my days and nights to this question—Why didn’t my father do something to help her? When there was no answer, a strange anger came up in me, an anger so profound that there were times when, standing in line at the grocery store, or watching the kids play soccer, the sounds of the world fell away into silence and I was left there, talking to myself.
Finally, I drove back to Pennsylvania with this anger, pressing hard on the gas pedal all the way down from Maine as I kept imagining my father standing at my mother’s grave in the weeks and months after her death. Going there by himself to speak the same question into the empty air, Why didn’t I do something to help you, Peggy?
Of Time and Memory Page 20