Of Time and Memory (14 page)

Peggy helps her mother map out the size of the rooms, one step for each foot.

And a fireplace over here, Peggy. I've always wanted a fireplace in the living room. And bookshelves on both sides, and a big bay window.

She tells Peggy that this will be their dream house. That they will live here the rest of their lives.

Oh, you never know, Peggy says to her. You might end up in Paris, France.

You
might, but not me. I'm happy right where I am.

For a moment Peggy watches her mother walking along the borders of this dream house. When Peggy looks up into the sky, there are great mountains of clouds sailing across the face of the moon, clouds that carry her mother's voice away. There are lonely moments between a mother and daughter, moments like this when a daughter can almost picture herself becoming her mother. Despite how different she was determined to make her own life, there is a small house and a plain street waiting for her as well. A moment like this is enough to make a daughter feel the cold, damp earth beneath her feet and a piece of herself drifting toward the heaviness at the center of her body. But what is youth if not a promise? The promise of a letter in Peggy's pocket. She can trace her fingers along the envelope's torn edge and recall the feeling of him standing beside her. It comes on her unexpectedly, the thrill of this; he is standing close enough for her to feel his breath on her cheek, the passing of the words he speaks to her, each word brushing her face. This steadies her, calls her back to her mother in the moonlight, walking the straight lines of her imaginary house.

The sight of her is enough to make a young girl wonder for the first time what a woman's life is in this world. A window where she washes dishes? A place she occupies so often that the world will always see her there even after she has gone? A man can hang his coat up at the end of the day and fall asleep in a chair. He can live his life wherever his shoes are in the morning, without ever revealing himself to
anyone, but a woman must open herself to the world in order to be fulfilled. She must find her way past the slamming doors, the rising voices, the walkings out. She must break the silence.

For the last two years Peggy has minded the passing of her mother's youth. Her graying hair. The wrinkles set around her eyes. The little pocket of flesh appearing beneath her chin. A line across your forehead for each child, her mother has said to Peggy. The worrying. The vulnerability. But tonight, lost in the vision of her new house, passing through the moonlight, she looks beautiful and strong, her shoulders outlined against the blue-black sky. She is giving her daughter a glimpse of how strong a woman must be in this life. How strong to open herself again and again to life's possibilities so that one day she can proclaim to the world, I was a person on this earth who took care of children and a man; I put seeds out in the winter for the cardinals; I made a pirate hat out of aluminum foil for my little boy; I wore a hair net to work in a cafeteria to help buy a piece of land where we could build a house; I always broke the silence and filled it with a new chance.

Tonight it is there in front of Peggy, the fullness of her mother's life.

They are standing in the grass, where the porch will be, when her mother tells her what she has never told her before. She knows the restlessness inside her. She had hoped that the dark moods which came over her would have disappeared by now. I guess I've tried to believe all along that you would grow out of it, Peggy. But—

Peggy stops her to ask her please not to say that she is like her father who has never outgrown his own restlessness.

Her mother says that she is sorry, then goes on to ask her
where she goes when she disappears. When you won't speak to anyone for days at a time, where are you, Peggy? All I want, all a mother ever wants, is for her children to be happy. But where do you go, Peggy? Can you tell me where you go when you get in one of your moods?

Where does my father go? Peggy asks her.

I wish I knew.

Did you ever ask him?

Not in so many words. But I've always been here for him when he returns. I've always been standing here, waiting for both of you.

Peggy nods her head. The night has closed in on her.

Children, her mother tells her, little children are the best thing in life. I can't tell you how I missed dressing you. Some days I would sit in a chair with a picture of you as a toddler and I would pray for the chance to get you back, to have you come right out of that picture for just a little while. I wasn't going to keep you for long, I just wanted to hold you for a little while.

Why are you telling me this, Mom?

Her mother takes Peggy in her arms. Babies are the truly best thing in life, she whispers. I'm going to have a baby, Peg.

That night she held her mother at arm's length, her eyes opened wide with the surprise of this. True? she asked.

Yes. True.

When?

October. Next fall. First the baby, and then we'll build the house the following summer. So will you put off Paris or New York City or wherever it is you might go until after I get used to babies again? I'm going to need your help.

H
e tells her that he has heard that she can sing.

Who told you that?

Your father. He told everyone at work that you have the best voice in the church choir.

He pulls his car into a parking space on Broad Street just around the corner from the Strand Theater in Lansdale.

I'll throw the anchor out, she says to tease him.

I'm going to ask you to sing something sometime, he says. I'm just warning you.

What about you, do you sing?

Me? Oh, no. I dance but I don't sing.

He walks with such a purposeful stride. She is trying to keep up with him and, at the same time, not step on any of the cracks in the pavement. Not stepping on the cracks is the only way that she can keep herself from disappearing with the picture in her mind of her father advertising her to everyone in the print shop. The thought of this is maddening! But she doesn't want to disappear tonight. Not tonight.

The window of the theater is lit like a makeup mirror, bright bulbs around the border. In the center on a stool is a single red rose in a vase, and above the rose the playbill picturing the movie stars. Greer Garson is a stunning beauty.
Hey, she looks like you, Dick calls to Peggy. He is already at the door, holding it open for her, telling her that it feels cold enough to finally snow. As she steps past him through the door, his hand brushes her back then rests against her waist. This might be nothing more than his good manners. It might not mean anything.

The news comes first.
THE MARCH OF TIME
 … Churchill has given a speech in Boston. He says that communists would have overrun Western Europe and attacked Britain within the past three years had they not been afraid of the U.S. atomic bomb.

This dark news. Such a contrast to what she wants to feel. Why must all the joyous moments in her life be set alongside talk of war. Will they ever stop talking of war?

This boy beside her who touched her back just a few minutes before is lost in the gloomy news. The black-and-white images from the screen are reflected in miniature on the lenses of his rimless glasses. This first date will be a bittersweet memory.

There is an orchestra in the theater playing an old song from the war, a song she knows the lyrics to, and she begins saying them to herself below her breath to try to block out the news.

She has known the words to this song for a long time, but before tonight they did not mean what they mean now; with Dick beside her the words tell the sadness of two lovers parting. Love made the war more hateful, more unbearable.

He tells her something he will always remember; he was on a ship heading for the invasion of Japan. A million or more GIs were expected to die in this invasion. Then the bomb was dropped. When he arrived in Japan, everywhere he went the Japanese fell to their knees and begged him not to kill them.

It made me feel guilty, he tells her. And it made me see that life isn't fair, just as people say it isn't. It isn't fair, people say. Well, we're lucky that it isn't. Because if it was fair, then we would have to share the grief of those people. The world's grief would be shared equally.

He has such big ideas. The way his mind works reminds her of her friend Adelle, off at Ursinus College.

You ought to go to college, she tells him.

Oh yes, he says. I'm thinking about it. I've already written to the University of Pittsburgh; they have a mechanical engineering degree. I could go on the GI Bill. I may apply. But first I'm going to learn how to build a house.

Oh?

Your father is going to teach me. I'm going to come over after work once spring is here and the days are longer.

Not this spring, she tells him. Next year he's going to build the house.

Right, next year. Will you still be around then?

Me?

Yes, you.

She smiles when she says this: Oh, you never know, I may be living in Paris by then.

He takes her seriously and asks what she plans on doing there.

Singing, she replies. I'm going to sing in the little cafés, the sidewalk cafés.

That's an excellent plan. I can see you doing that.

You can?

Absolutely. You'd sell a lot of coffee.

Well, it's not really a plan. It's more like a dream.

Dreams are good, he tells her. I think dreams are the most important thing a person can have.

When the movie begins, it looks like a dream itself. The men are handsome and they always know just what to say. The women are beautiful. Even in the morning the wives are dressed like Cinderella. And they live in magnificent white houses that are separated from the sidewalk by picket fences. The people who live in these houses have time to dress for dinner. The houses are all spacious and the little children say the most clever things.

And then the atmosphere of the story changes dramatically. This little town is an English village, and soon Hitler's planes are dropping bombs on the dream. The pretty young bride, played by Teresa Wright, is eighteen years old, Peggy's age exactly. She has just married the young British RAF pilot. There is a scene of them returning by train from their honeymoon, ready to begin their splendid, charmed life together. And then, five minutes later, the bride is dead, shot full of holes by a strafing Nazi airplane.

Who in the world except her aunt Muriel will understand how she feels when her heart sinks into sadness? It's only a movie, she tells herself, it's just a silly movie. It isn't real. Isn't
real. But it's as real as anything else and she can feel herself beginning to fall away. This isn't supposed to happen on her first real date with him and she tries to concentrate on something other than the sadness of the story. She tries to think of work tomorrow to distract her. The girls at work will want to know all about her date. Well, it was very nice. The Strand was showing that old war movie,
Mrs. Miniver
, and it was … no, it was strange and I cracked up. No. No. Sledding! Yes, sledding. Think about that beautiful picture he painted of how he used to go sledding down the hill in Skippack when he was a boy and if he could turn at the right moment, he could make it onto the frozen creek and glide forever.

She closes her eyes and pictures him as a boy flying on his wooden sled, the speed making wind and the wind making his eyes water. The metal runners catching the hard ice and sending him off down the creek. Her eyes are closed and she is trying hard to stay on the wooden sled with him and to feel the joy of this ride. But the ice is cracking all around her, pulling free from the banks of the creek, opening up great holes in front of her. And somehow she falls off the sled, into one of the holes. Before she goes down below the ice she can see him sailing away from her. He will glide along forever, oblivious to the cold, black water and the raging currents beneath the ice that have caught her.

What breaks this spell is the sound of his voice asking her if she is all right. Are you all right, Peggy?

Before she turns to reassure him that she is fine, she discovers that she has been gripping both arms of the red plush chair. She looks down at her hands. She can't look at him now or he will know.

On the way out of the theater she stops in the rest room
and leans over the sink, splashing cold water on her face. When she raises her head she can't look at her face in the bright mirror.

Outside he is talking a mile a minute about how fantastic the show was and how they must be the only two people on earth who didn't see that movie when it came out in 1942. Well, you were probably too young, he is saying. And I—

She doesn't hear the rest because his voice is drowned out by an airplane groaning in the dark sky overhead.

She is aware that she is hiding some part of herself from him, even now. Maybe she doesn't want to diminish the light of the world that he believes in. That would be unforgivable, wouldn't it? To take this boy with all his joy and optimism and pass on her darkness to him. He believes in his future, he believes that all the bad things are behind him now, finally behind him, the death of two brothers, the war, all of this is behind him and he can hear the music in everything now, he is connected to the goodness of life. The fact that he has survived is reason enough for him to believe in his future.

But the airplane overhead is flying low in the sky and she is lost in the groaning engine and in the memory of her father looking up into the night sky during the war. She can still picture him tipping his head back and looking straight up into the sky. The tiny red and green blinking lights passing across the stars.