Of Time and Memory (15 page)

Suddenly she asks him if he would have to go if there were another war.

Sure, he says. He's still on active reserve status in the army. He would be the first to go. He wants to tell her a funny story though; his uncle Linford, his father's brother, was excused from the war because he was a conscientious objector. He was an insurance salesman and he called Dick right after Pearl
Harbor and asked him to come talk to him. So he went to see him in his office and his uncle told him that he should think about applying for conscientious objector status himself because if ever there was anybody who wasn't suited to kill another person it was Dick Snyder. But Dick told him that he planned to go in as soon as he finished school. He thanked his uncle for the advice but he had made up his mind to go do his best.

Well then, his uncle said to him, if you're determined to go, I can sell you a fine life insurance policy.

Peggy can hear Dick's laughter. And she is trying to follow the sound of it back to where she is standing by his side. She is looking into his eyes when he tells her that this is why he survived, this is the reason, to be here with her. She can tell that he is never going to judge her harshly. He will never try to make her become something that she doesn't want to be. And when he takes her hand she is aware of her body moving, not spinning or dizzy with anticipation, just moving calmly and thoughtfully. It is a strange, inexplicable feeling that she is returning from a hard and tiresome journey. He is going to help her complete her return. And maybe love is nothing more complicated than turning to look at him and finding that he is already looking at her. He is there waiting for her to return. And then, as easily as if she had looked up into the sky and found the night stars there, his hands are on her shoulders, the tip of his nose brushes across her lips, and then her mouth is beneath his; cool and comforting, as if he is bestowing a prayer upon her, he kisses her. She can hear a sigh escape his lips. How his touch transports her. It carries her away from her father's house, her lined-up shoes in the closet, her clothes folded neatly in tissue paper. This is what she has been searching for her whole life, to be touched like this. It stills
some turmoil, just as she has seen the young mothers still their babies' cries. His touch is like a blessing. And to be worthy of it, to earn his touch, she must conceal the darkness inside her, she must never allow her darkness to contaminate the marvelous fine light surrounding him. Though the light does not belong to her, it spills into her path, the path that the two of them are already following, and if she does anything to dull this light or to extinguish it, they will both be lost in the darkness.

And then he thanks her for the kiss.

Write me a letter tomorrow and tell me about it, she says to him.

He will. He says, I think I'll write it and bring it by myself.

She will wait for him to come up the cement path from the sidewalk to her door. She already knows that she doesn't want anyone else to have him. Before she knows what love is, she knows this.

The next time she is alone with her aunt she will tell her about this date. She will try to explain how he was so eager to touch her that she could feel him even before he placed his hand on her. And it was because of this that she fell in love with him, not thinking about marriage and children or any of that—but because of this marvelous thing, the way he touched her before he set his hand on her, this made her decide simply that no other girl should have him. That he should be hers.

I
didn't see it then, but now I see clearly that when we pledge our passions to life we are brought within reach of the mysteries that surround us all, and which circle above time and reason and explain the fierce longings of our souls. I see now that my search for Peggy was the spiritual journey I had begun as a child when the face of my mother was revealed to me on the column of white light that glided across my bedroom. I am not a religious man and never have felt anything more than restlessness in the presence of my father's religion. But that winter I built a small shrine to him and Peggy on the table beside my bed where I placed three photographs of them and the small blue rattle someone had given them when I was born. I included the invitation to the baby shower that Peggy purposely mailed too late for any of her friends to attend, and the only letter I would ever have that she had written to her best friend telling her that she had just learned she was pregnant.

I began waking at four o'clock in the morning to sit before the bedside table as if it were an altar. I would make the sign of the cross on my forehead and then close my eyes and wait for the first sentence of their love story to reach me through the layers of darkness that were the sad reflections of my boyhood. I suppose that I was worshipping my mother for the
first time—or worshipping the memories I never had of her—in the still emptiness of these early morning hours, a holy emptiness that was gradually filled by her voice. And her voice, after such a long silence, was more welcome to me than the air I was breathing. The nearest I can come to describing how those early hours felt when I awakened and turned my eyes to the photographs is that I felt like I was falling in love. Each new morning I fell in love again.

One day before dawn I was told that I would find the end of my mother's story in a cold place, far away from where her story was leading me now.

And on another morning, in the predawn darkness it came to me that I should watch the movie
Mrs. Miniver
.

I watched it at night when Colleen and the children were asleep, and when it turned out to be the story of a girl my mother's age who dies suddenly, leaving her grief-stricken husband behind, it sent chills across my skin. When I stood up, I couldn't feel my feet beneath me. I felt like I had been transported back across time and was sitting in the dark theater in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, watching with my father and Peggy as they saw
but could not see
the story of their own lives unfold on the movie screen in front of them. It seemed to me that Fate had arranged the events of their life so that on their first real date they ended up sitting in a movie theater watching an invented story that would soon become the story of their hearts' passage.

I sat staring at the empty television screen long after the movie had ended. I went upstairs from room to room hoping that Colleen or one of my children was awake so I could tell them what I had just seen. But everyone was sleeping contentedly.

I felt very warm, and then very hot, and I went to the front
door and opened it and stood in the cold winter air. It was snowing so hard that I couldn't see across the street. I put on my coat and boots and walked down to the beach where a low wind off the ocean was driving the snow. With my head bowed I marched along on sand beneath my feet that was frozen hard like concrete. I knew then that in the mysteries I could not explain, I would find the truth of Peggy's love story. And very soon then the mysteries began to reveal themselves to me.

I am back in the nursing home, visiting my grandfather again. He gives me a handwritten letter that he has found for me. At the top of the letter is the date, August 13, 1977, and then these words written to my grandmother:

The letter is signed. And to the right of the signature are the letters
R.N
.

“A nurse,” I say to my grandfather.

The room he has transformed into a gallery of his
daughter's photographs is cast into deep silence. He looks at me and nods his head slowly.

Nineteen seventy-seven. Twenty-seven years after Peggy's death, a nurse writes a letter to her mother, my grandmother, whom I only knew as a blue-eyed, beautiful woman who scattered seeds across the snow for the cardinals who flew into her yard in the winter.

My grandfather tells me that I can keep the letter as I am reading the last line again … “I would think the main cause of her death was the toxemia, and of course that was greatly due to improper care on her doctor's part.”

“Why wait all those years to write this letter?” I ask him.

He tells me that my grandmother's heart was failing her in 1977; there was the possibility that she might not live much longer and she was desperate to find a nurse who could tell her if Dr. Wright had been responsible for Peggy's death. He remembers this: “When your mother came home from the hospital with you boys, she got weaker and weaker. Your grandmother called Dr. Wright every day, but he told her there was nothing more he could do for her.”

On the way back home from Pennsylvania the next day, I stop in New York City to see the Taft Hotel where Peggy and my father went on their honeymoon. Of course the hotel was knocked down years ago. In the Public Library I read old newspaper accounts of the hotel. By the time Peggy and my father stayed at the Taft, it was already famous in New York as the place where young women went to jump to their death from the rooftop dance club. A month after my mother and father checked out of the hotel at the end of their honeymoon to begin their married life together, a nineteen-year-old
girl jumped into a crowd of five thousand spectators who had gathered below on Seventh Avenue.

I read this in the New York Public Library, then drive back to Maine, thinking how close the angel of death was to my mother even then, on her honeymoon.

O
f all the strange and unlikely possibilities, Dr. Wright is still alive. My daughter Erin looks up at me from the chair where she is reading when I cry out in my astonishment.

“He's still alive!”

A retired nurse has seen him in Lansdale, in a supermarket. She found his telephone number and address, then called my uncle Jack.

I go upstairs to my bedroom and turn on the night-light that illuminates the altar on the table beside my bed. My hands are shaking as I pick up the telephone.

He is eighty-eight years old, he tells me.

“You've lived a long life, doctor,” I tell him.

He replies, “I can assure you that on most days I don't consider it a privilege to have lived so long.”

I tell him who I am.

“Yes,” he says. “I saw the article in the newspaper.”

I tell him that I'd like to come see him to talk with him about my mother who was his patient.

He says at once that he doesn't remember a patient by that name and that none of his mothers ever died.

“I delivered over a thousand babies and I never lost a mother,” he says.

I remind him that Peggy was only nineteen years old when she died.

“Yes,” he says calmly. “I read that in the newspaper.”

“We were your first twins,” I tell him. “My father remembers you telling him that we were your first twins. You told him you were going to mark the occasion by charging him for only one baby.”

“No,” he says, “I don't remember any of that. I'm sorry.”

He is polite, soft-spoken, sure of himself, so sure of himself that he is completely unsurprised, as if he had been waiting for me to reach him. I am left feeling that he is withholding something from me.

This is the beginning of something I cannot stop even if I wished to. This is where the iron wheel is set rolling on a track that will lead me to the purpose for my life. I am sure of it, and two days later when I am a hundred miles from home, teaching a short story by John Cheever to a class of college freshmen, someone knocks on the classroom door and tells me there is an urgent telephone call from home.

Down the glassy corridor to the telephone, the sunlight reflecting off the snow casts a band of gold ahead of me. I feel weightless, a rush of cold air swirling in my lungs.

It is Colleen. “Something came for you in the mail this morning from the North Penn Hospital.”

I remember the woman who sat at her desk in the office of medical records. All the records from the Elm Terrace Hospital had been destroyed, she told me.

She has sent an index card that was taped to the rail of my mother's bed. “Read it to me,” I tell my Colleen.

Peggy L. Snyder. Delivery at full term. Diagnosis: preeclampsia.
Dr. Edward Wright. The doctor's name was typed just below his signature.

What this means is, forty-seven years after my mother died, I know what killed her. And I know that no matter what he has told me, Dr. Edward Wright was my mother's doctor.

The next week a woman named Joannie Murray called me to say that her cousin sent her the newspaper story about my mother. She told me that in 1954 she almost died of extreme toxemia during a pregnancy. A condition called preeclampsia. In 1954 she was twenty-five years old and had a two-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter. It was summer and she was in the fifth month of her pregnancy when she began to feel as if she was losing her mind. Her face had swollen to nearly twice its normal size. She was suffering excruciating headaches and for hours each day her vision was so blurred that she couldn't see across the room. One day in the middle of making lunch for her children she dropped a can of tomato soup onto the kitchen floor and this angered her so terribly that she began to hit the wall with her hand. She was watching herself hitting the wall and telling herself to stop, but she couldn't. Soon both children were screaming with fear. She hit the wall even harder, trying to drown out their screams. She didn't stop until she had punched a hole in the plaster.