My mother put the lie to the wise nurse’s words; everything was never all right again. At 5:30 the next morning they called my father to tell him that he had twin boys and to ask him to find someone with A-positive blood as quickly as he could. Blood types had been stamped on all GIs’ dog tags, so men were familiar with theirs and my father’s buddy from the print shop, Bill Crockett, was a match.
Peggy took a quart of his blood as he lay next to her on a cot. A thin tube connected her body to his. He tried to make her laugh. Her raspy laugh was one of the things Bill liked about Peggy.
No one would ever hear her laugh again. The last thing Sally did before she went off duty was call the Lansdale Reporter to tell them that twins had been born.
Dr. Wright only charged my father for one of the babies. Twenty-five dollars. “You’re going to need to save all the money you can,” he told my father. “Twins are expensive.”
My father stood smiling in the doorway. It must have brought some pleasure to my mother that she had finally given him something, something no one could ever take from him. She might have pictured the three of us as friends. He would still only be in his thirties when these two boys became young men. One of us to stand on either side of him.
When he sat close to her on her bed, she said to him, “I’ve finally given you something, Dick.”
Tears were coming down her cheeks when she told him that these two boys were for him to make up for the two brothers he had lost in his childhood. It was a miracle, really.
Last night was hard, Dick, but I still want six boys.
He remembers my mother saying this. It was proof to him that she was going to get better. And he carried it with him through the days ahead when she wouldn’t eat and she grew weaker and weaker.
She was released from the hospital nine days later when the nurses could not get her to eat. She had given up by then because all along when she had been so sick during her pregnancy, my father kept telling her that all the bad stuff would go away just as soon as the baby was born, just as soon as she finally delivered the baby, and she had clung to this in order to live through those days. And then after the babies were born and she still kept feeling worse and worse, when she couldn’t even begin to imagine running on her legs as she had once run on cool autumn afternoons with her field hockey team in school, before taking a job and before falling in love, before setting up her own apartment and becoming a mother, she stopped eating. She stopped trying to get better.
I keep seeing the labor and delivery nurse, Anna Hartman, standing on the porch of the hospital that morning, watching the young mother get into her husband’s green Chevrolet to drive home with their newborn babies. I missed meeting Anna by two days—she died before I could talk with her. But she has been described to me as a loving, compassionate woman, someone who might have tried, for her own sake, to turn away and go back inside, but who would have lingered there on the porch to watch this ritual one more time. Wasn’t this the reason that she had chosen to be a labor and delivery nurse? So she could be up close to the miracle? This ritual of a new family beginning their journey home together for the first time is always reassuring to Anna and she loves to watch, in fact she feels she must watch, must bear witness to this part of the miracle. And she always wants to say the same thing to the father and mother, to tell them that in the full cast of a life with its wide arc of possibilities, small moments like this one are often lost, and they must tell themselves never to forget how blessed they were in their youth to bring home a healthy baby. They must never forget just how insistent the promise of happiness was as they made their first trip home together.
But what kind of miracle is this, this morning when the hot sky is white with light. Anna reaches out her hand to steady herself. There are things to do inside, other mothers to attend to. She must make herself stay on the porch, she has to force herself to watch.
Anna Hartman was a wise woman and in the time she had spent with Peggy she would have ascertained that this was a rather plain girl, not a girl who would set the world on fire. She would live just an average life, sewing her boys’ clothes until they wouldn’t wear homemade clothing anymore, feeling the small sadness of life when these little boys who called her Mommy would one day holler behind them, “See you later, Mom,” on their way out.
Always when Anna watched the new families leaving for home together, something inside her wanted to stop them and remind them to pay attention to these days. Days when they adored one another, days more precious than the treasures we dream of having in this world.
But what kind of miracle was this? This morning the promise of life seemed more tentative to Anna than ever before. She was the last person who could have stopped the young husband to tell him that his wife would not live more than a few days longer and that he should memorize her hand in his so he would never forget.
Each family driving away with a new baby is a love story. But Anna Hartman knew that my father’s love story was ending. She tried not to let it touch her too deeply, but it was no use. As closely as we can feel another person’s fear, she felt the fear of this young mother. The terrible fear that men never really feel the way a woman does when she asks in her sorrow, Who will care for my children when I’m no longer here?
Chapter Forty-one
The plan was for Peggy and Dick to take her parents’ room on the second floor, but she was never strong enough to make it up the stairs, and so she resumed her place on the daybed in the dining room where, for the first two days, she wouldn’t let my father out of her sight. She made him stay next to her. She was trying all over again to believe what he had told her about how everything would get back to normal now and how, before too much longer, she would move back to their brick apartment where she would be forever delivered from her dark fears and back into his hands. Delivered back into his grateful touch.
But even his presence next to her didn’t end the loneliness. The loneliness inside her was now part of everything she could comprehend.
What made the days back in her father’s house so difficult, what made it such a strange time, a dense and weightless, swirling time like a fever dream, was that everyone was forced to believe things that they could not imagine. Her mother, what was she to believe each of those mornings when she came downstairs from her bedroom and found the sheets on the daybed soaked in blood. How could she wash the blood off her daughter’s thighs each morning without thinking about that time they went to the farm together and her daughter was enchanted by the idea of pickling and jarring so many beets that her hands would be stained red? Her mother, my grandmother, was never the same after she lost Peggy. She raised Peggy’s brother and sister, then surrendered to her broken heart, spending her days feeding the cardinals that flew into her yard on School Street. She fed them through the long winters of her life, imagining at times that a certain cardinal who came back each year on Christmas morning was her daughter’s soul returning to keep her company.
On those late August days she began to believe the unimaginable, that she would outlive her daughter.
And Peggy’s husband, who tried to play records for her, setting up the record player in the dining room, hoping against hope that she would regain enough strength to dance one dance with him, a slow dance to the slow beating of their hearts. A rag doll in his arms. He didn’t care about the dance, it was just the chance to hold her again, that’s all he really wanted. What could he know for certain except the feeling deep inside that something was being taken from him now and he could not stop it from happening?
His grandmother was in the house every day to help out. She had delivered hundreds of babies and she was driving Peggy crazy, telling Peggy the same thing over and over—If you’d hold your babies, you’d start feeling better.
Peggy could hear her whispering this to everyone—If she starts holding her babies, she’ll start feeling better.
Now Peggy thanked God for the midget race cars that screamed their maddening sound through town each nigh
t because they drowned out the sound of everyone whispering about her, and because if she laid her head on the windowsill, the noise from the racetrack was enough to cover the sound of her babies crying.
. . .
It came down to one last night.
It was well after midnight and on the couch across the room, my father was tossing and turning in his exhausted sleep, his feet hanging over the edge. All those times during the months when he was courting her, he would drop her off at the front door to this house and then while he was driving home, she would lie in bed wishing in the worst way that she could sleep next to him. Since she had fallen in love with him and been certain that he was the one she was waiting for, it had seemed like such a sad waste of time to her not to sleep with him. Each night was a night they would never get back. Now she wanted all of those nights back.
Tonight, outside the front window of the living room, the branches of a young birch tree waved in the warm August wind. Since coming here from the hospital, she had been aware of the smallness of her parents’ house. Like the others on the block, it was divided into many rooms in an effort to give the illusion of space and privacy, but you could stand in the center of any room and stretch out your arms and nearly touch all four walls. Tonight the house seemed too small to contain her and her husband and the two babies. The house didn’t seem to hold enough oxygen for everyone.
The problem with being back here under her parents’ roof was that the progression in her life—the marvelous progression from being a single teenaged girl and then an engaged teenaged girl and then a married teenaged girl and then a mother—was suddenly interrupted. Here she was back home, sleeping alone again as if nothing had happened.
She gazed across the room at her husband and wished with everything in her comprehension that she felt strong enough to get up from the daybed and walk the five steps it would take to reach him. She wished she felt strong enough to get up and make him his lunch, the sandwiches that he would take to work at the print shop in the morning.
She thought how her love for him seemed to have begun in Atlantic City where he had driven her that Saturday during her seventh month of pregnancy. She stood looking at the ocean that day, wondering if the blue-green waves would be able to hold up even her great weight. Just beyond the boardwalk, on the way back to the parking lot, there was an outdoor shower, nothing more than a green garden hose hanging on a rusty nail inside a wooden stall, where he stopped to wash the sand off her feet so she wouldn’t track it into the Chevrolet. On the way home he pulled onto the side of the road to take pictures of her and this car. It was a 1948 Chevy with grand, sweeping fenders and hubcaps that were bright disks of light. He had wanted her to stand alongside the car, a profile so he could capture her enormous belly. But she wouldn’t. “A car parked next to a tank,” she said. She fell asleep before they reached home, waking once and for a few seconds forgetting it wasn’t a date she was on, forgetting she was married.
How this young man changed her. Something about his love for her, his way of accepting her despite her dark moods and her stubbornness, set her free to dream and to change. No one had ever heard her say that she wanted to get married young and have a family; she was headed out of town, off to a bigger, grander life. And then she met Dick, and suddenly she was a married lady who wanted to have six sons. Boys; she loved their inexhaustible energy. The way their imaginations were just beginning to take hold—explorers, sliding their canoes into the clear, cold water. They were always moving; even when they walked they were doing a kind of dance. She liked boys emphatically, felt she understood them. They drove their cars very fast, as if they were fleeing something. They pressed girls, like their cars, to go faster, farther. She admired the way they disdained convention, defied time, challenged even the force of gravity. Boys, not girls, because a daughter might inherit all her fears, be too much like her.
She saw the fright in children’s eyes—“I didn’t ask to be put here!” Like her, they were not completely of this world. She suspected that little children knew the mysteries of the universe, saw the truth in things; they cried when loved ones left the room as if they thought they might never return, because sometimes in life that was what happened.
Her mother had warned her about the sadness of raising children; when they are small and eager to draw close to you, they are too young to understand you. Then when they are finally old enough to understand you, they draw away. You never really understand each other, her mother had said. Your seasons never match.
In the hospital, between her terrifying contractions, one of the nurses had said, “Boys are easier, they’re not as smart and will do pretty much whatever you tell them to do.” That was probably Sally, trying to get her to laugh, trying to distract her. But there was something on the nurse’s face, some concern in her eyes.
When it was over, it was this nurse who held the babies up for Peggy to see, their anatomy so shockingly different from her own. Their beauty was stunning and she raised her hands at the moment she first saw my brother and me, reached for us to take us from the nurse. That was the moment the pain in her head returned, and now it was much worse than it had ever been. It felt like her skull was cracking.
. . .
The pain had frightened her because in the misery of those last weeks of pregnancy she had allowed herself to believe my father each time he told her that once she had delivered her baby, she would begin to feel better. She would begin to reclaim herself the way the other mothers in the hospital had. Tonight as my father lay sleeping across the room, she tried to count how many days she had been at home, how many days had passed since the pain grew worse. And this frightened her, because she realized that she had been sleeping away entire days at home. She had not awakened when my father got up for work in the morning, or when he came home in the late afternoon, or when he made his bed again on the couch, or when all of them sat down in the next room for dinner and breakfast and another dinner. She had slept through her babies’ crying. This thought tonight paralyzed her with fear, the same fear she had felt in April, up late in the kitchen, tearing the seams out of her maternity dresses with the feeling that an animal living secretly in the basement had found its way up the stairs and was gnawing through the door into the kitchen.
The only food that she could tolerate in her last days was the ice that my father fed her from the blue glass bowl, the blue of a mailbox. Little chips of ice that he fed her from a spoon. When she looked into his eyes as he raised the cold spoon to her lips, she could feel the world was falling away beneath her feet.
At last she called out to him that night, called his name softly and tried to move toward him. It was another hot and humid night and he slept with his shirt off, his wire-rimmed glasses folded on the mantel. Her legs were as heavy as iron to move, swollen twice their size as if they’d been blown up with a tire pump. And there he was, so thin, growing thinner every day now, seeming to get thinner right before her eyes whenever she answered the question that he kept asking her—Are you still bleeding, Peggy?
It was his fear that seemed to diminish his size.
The same fear was in her mother’s eyes when she changed the sheets. The look in her eyes that cried out—For God’s sake, Peggy, how can you have any blood left!
She wanted to wake her husband now, to bring him into the daybed, to tell him her terrible, terrible thoughts. But she was distracted then by a noise in the kitchen, the rattling of glass bottles in the pot of boiling water on the stove. She wondered angrily how she had slept through this sound! Then the sound of her mother’s slippers on the linoleum floor. She wished that her father had gotten up for this feeding. There was something she wanted to talk with him about. Ever since her pregnancy had begun to show, he seemed to be backing away from her, keeping his distance. She thought back to the nights when she had stood outside with him as he watched the skies. The war was on, and he was always watching for enemy planes overhead. He stood in the grass, his suspenders buckling a little each time he
tipped his shoulders back to look up at the sky.
But then, with her pregnancy, he began backing away. Maybe he was just stepping aside because he knew that she would be too busy to have much time for him anymore. She would leave him.
Tonight she felt guilty for taking over her father’s tiny house this way. The cot in the living room, things for the babies piled on every chair. Even the familiar scent of his aftershave lotion and her mother’s baking had given way to tonics, powders, disinfectants, and diapers. She was taking over his tidy house, making a mess of it.
His radio was pushed into a corner behind a chair. She remembered the day her father brought the big radio home, setting it carefully in the living room as if he were putting a monument in place. Its resonance in this house, its lighted blue dial, its doors like the doors of the Lutheran church in town. And when he fixed up the basement and brought home their first washing machine. Once she had roller-skated off the landing and fallen down the stairs to the basement floor, landing on her wheels and rolling along as if nothing had happened. Until now she had always felt safe in her father’s house.
More than anything else, she wanted to feel safe again. She wanted to get up and hold these people she loved, and make the most of this time they had together because she knew that no matter how hard these days were, these were the days they would all look back on, wanting to have them back again.
Soon her mother was standing at her side, apologizing. But Peggy began yelling at her. They’re my babies, I want to feed them. They’re not yours, they’re mine!
Her mother’s hands were open at her sides, pleading with her. You need to rest, you need to save your strength.
And then it returned—the pain like a cold spark exploding in the back of her head. Her voice woke my father. On the clock it was 1:30.
When the babies began crying to be fed, the milk ran from her nipples.
My father had brought the record player from the apartment because Peggy told him that as soon as she got out of the hospital she was going to start dancing herself back into shape. She was determined to regain her figure, and to remain a girl, always a girl. She would still go barefoot, babies or no babies, and she would keep her hair long, the curls hanging in her face. She would resist growing up for as long as possible, and then yield an inch at a time.
Of Time and Memory Page 22