Of Time and Memory (16 page)

A woman living in the upstairs apartment came to see what the noise was all about, and then called Joannie's physician.

She was hospitalized, first for three days during which time the preeclampsia was diagnosed, and then after another month at home, for six weeks. It was a Catholic hospital.
Joannie was Catholic and so were her husband and her doctor. During her second hospitalization she began to suspect that she wasn't being told everything by the medical staff. She had made friends by then with a red-haired nurse, an Irish girl who eventually confided in her that she was in grave danger. The only cure for preeclampsia was delivery of the baby. If she carried the baby to full term she would most likely die. In fact, she was in great danger if she didn't have the baby delivered prematurely before the seventh month.

Because preeclampsia is a condition where the fetus is poisoning the mother, the only cure is to take the baby. But the Irish nurse told her that the Catholic Church held a clear and unwavering moral position in such cases: the mother was always to be sacrificed in order to allow the baby the greatest possible chance to survive.

In Joannie's case, her husband and physician had agreed to keep from her the full account of her condition. The doctor instructed the nurses on the floor not to tell her that her life was threatened by the baby. They were to keep her as calm and as comfortable as possible.

After the Irish nurse broke the silence, Joannie had her mother arrange for her to be transferred to another hospital where, before she told her husband that she was going to give up the baby, she found a sympathetic doctor who did an emergency cesarean. Her four-months-premature baby boy did not live, but Joannie survived. “I had two children at home who I had to live for,” she told me. “At least this is what I have made myself believe all these years.”

That night I sat in the kitchen with the index card that had once been taped to the rail of my mother's bed. I wanted to believe that she had touched this card, had brushed her fingers across it.

I brought the card up to my bedroom and placed it on the altar with the photographs and the baby rattle and as I stared at the words—Peggy L. Snyder. Delivery at full term. Diagnosis: preeclampsia. Dr. Edward Wright, and the doctor's signature just above his typed name—I began to wonder if it was possible that my mother had carried my brother and me to full term without the knowledge of what this would do to her. If she had died in the name of some religious code. My grandfather had been a fervent churchman, he had practically started the Lutheran church in Hatfield. Was it possible that Dr. Wright had explained the preeclampsia to him and he had spoken with his minister and they had made a decision without consulting my mother? This might explain my grandfather's tears whenever he spoke about Peggy, and the gallery of photographs he lived with in the nursing home.

I already know that this sort of thing could have happened. After my mother died I went to live with my father's mother—a woman I called Nana, who became the center of my world. She died when I was fourteen of a horrible stomach cancer which filled the little house where she lived on Towamencin Avenue with a smell so rancid that it clawed at my eyeballs. The doctor and my father's father had made the decision that it was better for her if she wasn't told what was wrong with her. They told her she just had the stomach flu. She had to know that people with the flu don't smell the way she smelled. But no one ever told her the truth.

Not even my father, her only son. He must have believed it would be better for her. He must have kept his silence out of love for her.

My father. My mother's husband, a man who believed that God had chosen him for a special purpose. A man who saw the goodness in all things and whose faith in the divine order
of things was childlike and unyielding. He believed that Peggy was a gift from God. Could he also have believed then that her life was in God's hands?

What if my father knew? My father who, in his grief over losing Peggy, declared himself to blame for her death. My father who, ten years after her death, decided to go to the seminary to become a minister and devote himself to God. Could this have been an act of penance?

Was it possible that my grandfather and my father had placed my mother in God's hands, telling themselves that because they were doing the right thing by the Church, God would protect her from harm, and them from losing her?

That night I lay in bed listening to the branches of a tree rattle against the window. After a while it began to sound like someone was trying to get in from outside. It went on for hours and then I went out into the backyard and snapped the branch off with both hands. I threw the pieces as far as I could into the dark night.

On the altar was the index card that had changed everything. It was in writing: my mother didn't die because Dr. Wright had failed to make the proper diagnosis of her condition. He had known of her condition from the first time she visited him in January of 1950. He had done the urine test then and found the presence of protein. He had noted her high blood pressure and with these two things in mind he had told her that she would have to have her baby in the Sacred Heart Hospital in Norristown. She then told her husband and her mother and father. They all went to talk with the pastor of the Grace Lutheran Church. The law was laid down, and my mother was sentenced to death.

.  .  .

This is a new reason not to sleep at night. I sit in bed staring at Colleen asleep beside me. Should I tell her how little I thought of my dead mother across the years of my life? In 1985 when we were living in Iowa City expecting our first child I thought of Peggy because I thought that I might lose Colleen like my father had lost her. Then another five years passed before I thought of her again. Maybe it had been ten years since I had last thought of her.

Finally I get out of bed and call my brother who is a Lutheran minister. I ask him to find out for me what the Lutheran Church's position would have been in 1950.

“I already know,” he says. “I've been thinking the same thing, so I checked. The Lutheran Church held the same position as the Catholic Church.”

I feel a slow burning anger rise inside me. I imagine my mother growing sicker and sicker and no one telling her why.

In my nightmare, the same five men are standing at Peggy's grave. The moon is bright and a narrow band of light sweeps over their heads. These are the five men who have outlived her. The doctor who delivered her babies. Her father. Her husband. Her twin sons. They are all standing on the earth in her absence. All of them are gray-haired men now. Compared to her astonishing beauty, what a sorry sight they are there at her grave.

No wonder no one ever took me to this grave or told me anything about my mother's life. No wonder I never asked; a part of me must always have known that I was to blame.

I am thinking this in my half sleep as I watch the five men standing at my mother's grave. None of them boys, none of them young anymore. All of them have outlived her. Her
father at ninety. Her doctor at eighty-eight. Her husband at seventy-one. Her twin sons at forty-seven. We have all outlived her. Conspirators in her death, the death that claimed her at age nineteen. How can we justify our living? How can we ever sleep through the night knowing that we lived on for so long after her life was finished?

I feel blood on my hands. My part in her destruction.

I place another telephone call to Dr. Wright. “Are you sure you can't remember her, sir?”

This time he tells me that he has checked his records and he never had a patient by her name.

I
n the predawn light of those February mornings I felt like I was trying to pick a thread up off the dark floor. I was close to something, I knew that, but it would never stay between my fingertips long enough for me to hold it to the light. At times it felt like it was something I had once possessed, maybe some knowledge that I had always carried with me.

A neighbor of Peggy's who lived three doors down Market Street in 1950 told me that though my mother was living there in her parents' house, she never saw her after April and she didn't think Peggy went outside at all the whole summer until the morning of August 9 when she saw her hobbling barefoot down the cement walkway in the backyard. She was barefoot, her feet were swollen like blocks of wood and her face was twice its normal size. The neighbor watched Peggy slide into the front seat of her father's car and drive away. That was the day she went into Elm Terrace Hospital to be delivered.

I planned another trip to Pennsylvania at the end of the winter. My brother was going to meet me there and we were going to go see Dr. Wright. It was my idea not to tell him that we were coming; I was afraid he would find a reason not to be there. And I wrote him a long letter which I hoped would make it easier for him to open his door when we stood there knocking:

I couldn't be sure of any of this, but I sent the letter anyway and for a little while I pretended to know all the answers and to finally hold the reasons in my hands.

I soon had three wedding photographs to place on the altar beside my bed. Each of them showed Peggy in her wedding dress, and whenever I looked at them they set my heart racing. It had been more than forty years since she visited me in my room, but I remembered that this was the dress that she was wearing when she glided toward me on a column of light, calling me by my first and middle names. White satin. Delicate embroidery across the low neckline. The dress spilling like a pool of milk around her feet.

In the photographs she is holding white satin ribbons at her waist. A flowered headband in her hair holds the white-laced veil.

She only visited me for a brief time in my life. It was 1955. My father had just remarried and the four of us had moved into the little house on Clearspring Road in Lansdale. My brother, Dave, and I shared one of the two bedrooms on the first floor and this is where Peggy visited me. I don't know why Dave never woke up to see her. I would awaken with the knowledge that she was there, waiting for me to open my eyes. It is the way I've often awakened in the night, knowing that it has begun to snow.