Of Time and Memory (12 page)

She tells Peggy that she simply must come up some weekend and visit her there. The college is only thirteen miles from Hatfield, but it might as well be a million.

You'd absolutely love it there, Peg.

I would? Why?

Oh, you're so pretty, you'd be the center of attention. You're much prettier than the homecoming queen.

Adelle has to explain to her what a homecoming queen is, and the whole time Adelle is telling her, she isn't really listening. She has begun to drift away again on her thoughts. Why
hadn't somebody
told her
about college? Whose idea was it that she should spend most of her time in high school taking home economics courses? Learning to sew and cook. What is
home economics
anyway when you compare it to these things Adelle is telling her about?

Take mathematics, for example, Adelle is saying. My professor is an absolute genius. He's teaching us about whole-number theory, Peg. It's brilliant stuff, I'll show it to you sometime.

What is whole-number theory, anyway? Peg asks her.

You remember, we had it in eleventh grade.

Not me. I wasn't in your math class. I took business math. Balancing a checkbook, keeping a monthly budget.

Well, anyway.

Any idiot can balance a checkbook.

I wouldn't say that exactly.

Why not? It's true. I want you to teach me about whole numbers.

They're not really that important.

Yes they are. I want you to teach me about them.

You do?

Yes, right now. Show me right now, Adelle.

On a paper napkin she puts down these numbers: 6, 28, 496, 8,128. These are the perfect numbers, Peg. Each one of them is the sum of a series of consecutive counting numbers. Take 6 for example. 6 equals 1 plus 2 plus 3. And 28 equals 1 plus 2 plus 3 plus 4 plus 5 plus 6 plus 7.

Peg wants to know what the next perfect number is after 8,128?

Yes, tell me.

33,550,336!

Did your professor figure that out?

Oh no, Peg. Everybody's known that for centuries.

Not me. I didn't know it until you just told me.

Adelle goes on explaining how Pythagoras used to play around with the idea of perfect numbers. And Saint Augustine in
The City of God
argues that God took six days to create the world in order to show the world's perfect order. God could have done it in four days or in ten, but he chose six. You see, Peg, mathematics is the language of nature.

What her friend knows is staggering to Peggy. It's enough to take her breath away. Hey, she says to Adelle. Do you want me to tell you how long you bake chicken in an oven set at 325 degrees?

This is part of what troubles Peggy, this feeling of not being smart enough for the world, and once the feeling takes hold of her she begins to hate herself and to slide down the smooth cold wall of the vault again. It is Saturday morning; there is all that time to fill before Monday when she returns to work. Weekends are awful, the way they drag on.

And it gets worse when she is riding in the back of her father's car later in the day. She is looking at her mother in the front seat and her father behind the steering wheel. When they pass the Atlantic station Walter Snyder is out in front in his pale blue coveralls, wiping grease off his hands with a white handkerchief. Walter is Frances Snyder's father. Frances was Peggy's classmate at school until she contracted polio. She was away in Philadelphia for months, lying in an iron-lung machine. Now she is home, living with her father and mother.

Peggy has heard people say that Frances will have to live her whole life with her father and mother.

As they drive along she catches herself tapping the floor of the car each time they pass another telephone pole. She is
doing this loud enough for her father to look back at her in the rearview mirror. She can feel the heat rising up her arms, her pulse quickening.

She skips dinner and walks down Main Street to Lincoln Avenue. Leaves are rattling in the cold breeze. Cold? Yes, the first real touch of autumn in the air tonight. Somehow she has failed to notice up until now that the seasons are changing. Too self-absorbed. Too aloof, as they are always telling her.

There is something else she didn't notice; one of her friends has asked her why she stopped singing. She always used to sing when she walked along, but not anymore. Her friend remembers distinctly the time she and Peggy walked up and down Main Street singing that lovely war song—
I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places
 … Singing to herself at first and then gradually daring herself to sing a little louder, and then louder still until she wasn't just singing to herself anymore. People were turning on the sidewalk to watch her. It was like she was a character in a musical, the whole town nothing more than a stage set that would be knocked down and carted off at the end of the show.

I'll be seeing you in every lovely summer's day …

Those lovely sad lyrics. It is her one true talent, that she can memorize the lyrics to songs on the first time through. Her friends Peg Kirsch and Julia Liedy used to be astonished by this. But it came easily to her. The words entered her.
Used
to enter her.

She is half a block away from where Frances lives on Cherry Street when she sees the green Chevrolet convertible parked at the curb in front of her house. The car owned by
the skinny boy who she danced one dance with at Sunnybrook last spring.

She stops on the sidewalk. On the porch of Frances's house she can see this boy leaning against the scrolled railing, smoking and looking out into the street. Like a boy coming to pick Frances up for a date. Frances with her sparkling eyes who will spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. Frances who will never dance again at Sunnybrook. Frances whose life she will leave behind. For Peggy it is another one of those pictures that will stay in her soul.

A moment later, Frances's father, Walter, wheels his daughter out the front door. The boy turns to greet her. Then he and Walter lift her from the chair. They stand Frances up on her braces. A broken doll in the pale gray light of dusk. From where Peggy stands she can hear the sound of the metal braces clinking. And the steel hinges.

Peggy has come here before when she was feeling sorry for herself, just to remind herself how lucky she is, how purely fortunate she is. Sometimes this works, sometimes the thought of Frances in her iron braces for the rest of her life is enough to shake Peggy from her dark thoughts about herself. Tonight it makes her hope that she will make a better woman than she has made a girl. She hasn't taken orders very well. She has always been in too much of a hurry. And she has never felt connected to this world. Always strangely drifting above it. Not a part of life the way these three people on the porch of the little white house are.

Frances will never walk again. This is what Julia has told her. She will never dance or run to catch the train or make love or have a baby. All of that has been taken from her by polio. The skinny boy and her father are lifting her and moving her forward an inch or two at a time. The sight
of them is enough to make a teenaged girl like Peggy wonder if we have life all wrong. The way we are expected to live life. We pop out of somebody's belly and then people start telling us how to live. But what if the people who tell us are wrong and have always been wrong. All the rules and everything that is expected of us—what if it was all just dreamed up out of fear? School. Church. Jobs. Marriage. A little house along a row of houses. All of this was designed to make us forget that we're all just hanging on to this life by a thread. All of us like Frances, vulnerable to a sudden turn in the wind.

When the porch light goes on they are bathed in a light so bright and clear that Peggy can recognize the boy as the same skinny boy who danced one dance with her and showed her his new green convertible the spring before. The boy who told her about going up and down every street of his hometown after he returned from the army in order to see how he had changed. That night he was just another soldier back from the war and eager to grab a dance with any pretty girl who said yes. There was something he wanted from her and so her first impression of him was not to be relied upon. But tonight is different. Tonight she is seeing him as he really is as he walks the broken girl across her front porch.

A strange feeling comes over Peggy. She will tell only her closest friend how, as she stood down the street watching him lift Frances from one step to the next and listening to the metal leg braces scrape along the porch, she could feel her hand in his.

At home her father is standing at the kitchen counter polishing his work shoes. For some reason she tells him, I was out walking and I saw Frances on her porch with her father and a young man who was helping walk her.

He tells her that Stan Musial is going to be named Most Valuable Player in the National League for the second straight year.

Men always have their sports to talk about.

He seems to be about my age, she goes on. But I don't remember him from high school.

Her father is spit-shining the black toes of his shoes but he replies that the boy is probably Frances's cousin. I work with her cousin at the shop, he tells her.

What's his name?

Dick Snyder.

It's a name she has heard before, on that night during the war when she and Peggy Kirsch slept outside and rode on the back of Mr. Pugles's vegetable truck with Lorraine who told them about Dick Snyder and his wonderful letters to her after each date.

The same boy Peggy danced one dance with. She has these small pieces of him. He doesn't know that she is alive but she has gathered these pieces of him.

She thanks her father.

What did I do?

For the first time in a long time, she kisses him on his cheek then dances out of the room as he calls to her:
Hey, Peg, what did I do to deserve that?

A
Saturday morning in December of 1948. Peggy is babysitting her ten-year-old brother, Jack, and Muriel's boys. She is walking them down Main Street to watch men climbing ladders and hanging Christmas lights across the town center. She has been sewing navy blue cloth coats for the boys for Christmas and as they run out ahead of her, it is easy to picture them dressed for church in the coats and matching kneesocks.

Little Donnie is four years old. She has to watch him like a hawk. She turns her head for one second and he pulls free of her hand and disappears down the alley behind the barber. When she finds him he has claimed a huge cardboard box as large as a refrigerator that was flattened and left for trash pickup.

She carries the box home and turns it into an airplane for them. With a piece of coal she draws on windows and the machine guns that Jack insists on.

For hours they are in and out of the box, flying missions over Germany while she watches from a porch chair that she has pulled into the sun. Sun finally, after so much rain. So far this winter all the snowstorms have turned to rain. Pennsylvania has had the worst flooding in over a dozen years. The gloom of the weather has settled over everything.
Each morning when she awakens to rain, she has to fight the desire to pull the covers over her head, call in sick at work.

It is part of a darkness that seems to be gathering at the far edge of her consciousness. Even today in the sunlight, with the boys' happy voices rising into a blue sky, the darkness is drawing on her. Maybe it is the conversation that she overheard last night. She was at the sewing machine in the kitchen and she could hear her father and Howard talking. Her father had read some crazy spy story in the newspaper. Top secret documents from the State, War, and Navy departments were found on strips of microfilm in a hollow pumpkin on a Maryland farm, and in Washington, D.C., the House Un-American Activities Committee claimed this was definite proof of one of the most extensive espionage rings in the history of America.

The boys want wings for their airplane. They are not satisfied until she has punched holes in two sides of the box and stuck brooms through the holes by their handles.

She sits down again and closes her eyes. Maybe it is all the talk of communists. In Berlin communists have divided the city. American airmen are flying mercy missions across the skies above the city, dropping food and coal for the citizens, to help them survive the winter.

Even on this bright, sunny day with the children's laughter surrounding her, she can feel the darkness running toward her. And a little later when she hears Jack yelling that he is a paratrooper, the cold, smooth walls of the vault close in on her with the vision of the paratroopers caught in trees and on church steeples in the coastal villages of France during the invasion four years ago. She remembers hearing stories on the radio about the German soldiers carefully and slowly taking
aim at the paratroopers' heads and shooting them dead where they hung.

The darkness gathering in her soul is matched by some larger darkness in the wider world, and the distance separating the two is shrinking. All the joy of Christmas right after the war is already too distant to recall clearly. Or maybe it is only her? Maybe she is imagining this? Watching the boys lost in their make-believe world fills her with longing for her own childhood.

To try and shake herself out of this mood she joins the boys. She tells her brother, Jack, and his little cousins about the American pilot that the newspapers have called the Candy Bomber. He is flying over Berlin dropping sweets for the children.

Let's pretend we're dropping candy! Peggy exclaims.

But this idea doesn't amuse Jack. He wants to drop bombs.

Bombs
AWAY
, Peggy!
BOMBS AWAY
!

One long war over, and another about to begin. Maybe this is the meaning of the cold walls that enclose her.

Finally she leaves them and walks off. For a moment she stands on the cement walkway with her back turned to the boys. She shouldn't leave the boys alone in the yard but a heaviness fills her arms and legs and seizes her with an overpowering need to lie down.