Of Time and Memory (17 page)

I suppose it makes sense that she would have visited when she did; she would have wanted to see what our life was like now that she had been replaced. I imagine she stood over Dick as he slept beside his new wife. She would have seen the lines in his face, how he had aged in the five years since she left him. She would have noticed that he never smiled the way he used to. He never danced like he danced with her.

Long after her last visit to my bedroom, I tried to will her back. One Christmas I asked for an alarm clock. I remember everyone thought this was very strange of me. It was a wind-up clock with a black face and white hands and numerals. I
used to set it for two or three o'clock in the morning, and then once it woke me I would make myself stay awake, waiting for her. I didn't even know who she was. It was four years later before my father told us about her. I didn't know who she was but I was waiting for her to take me with her. This I remember distinctly. Wanting to go with her wherever she went when she left me in my room.

Staring at her wedding pictures, I know that there are things about her I will never know. I know that she took more than her share of secrets with her. But I could almost hear her now, I could almost hear her voice telling me not to stop searching for her until I knew fully who she had been in this world when she was here among the people who have all grown so unspeakably old in her long absence.

P
eggy's mother cooks pot roast every Sunday. Pot roast with potatoes and carrots in the same pan. She has the oven set to cook dinner while they are all in church. Soon Dick is with them every Sunday. In church he sits next to Peggy's mother and father, never taking his eyes off her in the choir. Whenever she glances at him, he is smiling up at her with a richly contented expression. The look of someone who has found what he was searching for.

After the service they all walk back to the house for dinner. He sits at one end of the table, Peggy sits to his right next to her mother. Sometimes her grandfather and grandmother, her aunt Sue, her aunt Anna, and her aunt Lilly join them. It reminds Dick of the Depression years when his mother's and father's brothers and sisters shared a rented house with his family. He recalls them as good years. Hard, but good, because everyone was so close. He remembers his mother trying to make a dinner out of only a half-dozen potatoes. His father coming home at the end of the day with a few nickels, his hands and face dark blue from the cold. But there were those marvelous evenings spent in the crowded living room, singing and listening to the radio. Everyone so close. Everyone in the same boat.

He talks and talks, having second helpings, then thirds.
Where does he
put
all that food! So skinny, so much like a little boy. The story of his life unfolds. When he was in ninth grade his father came home one day with a typewriter. He set it on the kitchen table and said there would never be enough money for college so Dick should learn to type. Here is your future, his father said to him. It will take you to a better life than the one I've had. The typing might have saved his life; in the army he was assigned as a clerk-typist rather than shipped to the Battle of the Bulge. His whole life has been like this, one small miracle after another. In 1941 when shortages of gasoline forced his family to move from Skippack into Lansdale so his father could ride the train to work in Philadelphia rather than use the family car, Dick lived right next door to Jack Graham who would be his friend for life. Jack was the big, affable captain of the Lansdale High School football team. He knew that Dick was far too slight to play football, but he encouraged him to become the team's waterboy and manager and this placed him in the circle of the best group of friends a kid could ever want. There was Jack, Lentz Tiffany and Roy Meyers, Tom Pugles and Bill Crockett.

One Sunday Dick talks about how he was the chaplain's assistant in the army when he was stationed in the Philippines. He enjoyed the work very much and feels that someday he may go on to seminary and become a parish minister. Or perhaps he'll become an engineer or an accountant. Whatever it is, it's only a matter of picking. All the doors are open to him now. America has come into her destiny, everything is under a bright coat of paint, a good life is available to anyone who is willing to work hard. No dream is beyond reach. He believes this. Deeply believes this because his whole life has been a miracle.

Here is a young man for whom everything seems possible. When he is in the house, Peggy is so relieved to be able to just sit here and not have to make conversation. For the first time in her life, she is out of the spotlight of center stage, standing in the wings and watching. He talks and talks, filling her house with such optimism and music that the moment he says goodbye, oxygen begins to drain from the rooms and Peggy follows him out onto the porch, wishing, as he drives away, that she could go along with him. Sometimes she will put on her coat and sit on the top step of the porch to wait for him to return.

And sometimes she will push him away. Why, she doesn't really know. It just comes over her, she wants to incorporate herself in him and run away from him at the same time. Maybe because she doesn't feel that she deserves his goodness. Maybe because she wants to see just how strong his affection for her is. She will push him away to show him how unworthy she is of his love and to see how much he loves her. Pushing him away accomplishes both.

It confuses her. The worst of it happens one night at Sunnybrook when she and Dick are there with all his wonderful friends. Tom Pugles, so handsome that when he goes to the Nurses' Home at Grandview Hospital in Sellersville to pick up his dates, all the student nurses run to the front windows just to get a look at him. And Bill Crockett, who works at Lauchman's print shop with Dick and who calls Peggy “Doll.” And Jack Graham, the big football player with his sleepy smile, as friendly as a big teddy bear. And Lentz Tiffany, with baby blue eyes, who can clear off the dance floor with his jitterbug moves. Peggy is watching them,
watching Dick surrounded by such marvelous friends. There is something about the way he carries himself in their presence; he doesn't compete with them, he observes them, as if he were the one in the group whose responsibility it is to remember these fine times that they are sharing. He is grateful for each of them. He seems so thankful that they have chosen him to be in their company. This is Dick Snyder and she is thankful for him. But still she excuses herself from the table and walks away. She finds a place where she can sit and watch them without them seeing her. She sees Dick get up from the table to go looking for her. Twice he leaves and then returns, shaking his head. She stays away so long that she is too embarrassed to return. Past the point of no return.

Then that lovely war song begins to play.

It is the last dance of the evening and though Peggy wants to be in his arms, wants this more than her next breath, she finds herself sneaking out of the room. Staying in the un-lighted places, walking with her head down so no one will try to stop her. Outside in the parking lot she stays as far away from his car as she can. What does she think she is doing? She can't walk all the way home from here.

She hears the violins and the slow, mournful drumbeat. It doesn't make any sense to her but she keeps walking. This is the pattern of her sadness; all her life it has been like this. Some darkness comes over her and then she ruins everyone else's good time and then she is too embarrassed to face anyone so she vanishes.

The road is dark and she is scared. This is what her father was warning her about all those times since she was a girl
when he told her that she had to change her attitude. Warning her that her moodiness would bring her trouble.

It has brought her onto a dark road on a winter night.

Of course he came after her. He pulled the car to the side of the road. She felt the heat of the car's headlights on her legs just as he began calling sweetly to her.

If you want to walk then I'll drive alongside you.

This is who he is: someone who will not try to change her or force her to do anything. A boy who accepts her as she is.

When she finally looks up, he is smiling at her. His breath is smoky in the cold night air. He tells her that he was going to ask the band to play “Peg o' My Heart” for the last number. He has already told her that he believes God has brought the two of them together for some purpose. Now he assures her that she can vanish whenever she needs to be alone, whenever the world becomes too sad for her. And he will always be here when she returns. Waiting here for her to look up.
This
, to him, is the meaning of love. And this is easy, waiting for her is easy. After surviving the loss of two brothers, after the long war, the rest of life is a picnic. A cinch.

It was his faith that broke her resistance. He had his optimism and his essential goodness to offer her.

And what did she have to offer him? Her beauty?

Yes, that was it. A young man with a boyish belief in the happiness of life can be persuaded by beauty alone.

In March they were engaged to be married. By then he had convinced her that he was right all along, God intended them to meet. This boy who walked with such purpose and who
stood with his shoulders pinned back as if he were still in the army standing at attention and who carried such a fine light in his eyes was a blessing. More than anything else, it was his words that she fell in love with. The way his words always conveyed hope. He seemed incapable of ever saying a bad thing about anyone. One night, kissing her goodbye after a date, he tells her that he has been put on this earth to make her believe in her own future.

Maybe love is a voice. A reassuring voice that becomes familiar and that she cannot imagine never hearing again.

A
few days before her eighteenth birthday she asked her mother if she could walk her to work at the school cafeteria. She took the same route that she had taken to school every morning, but those mornings now seemed as if they belonged to another lifetime. In those school days she often felt like she was living out ahead of her life a little ways, and she was always waiting for the events of her life to catch up. That morning, though, she could feel her life picking up speed. She told her mother that she and Dick were going to be married. Her mother tried to act surprised but she had already heard the news from Peggy's father; it seems that the word was already out at Lauchman's print shop where he and Dick worked together.

It was going to be a November wedding, the second weekend in November so Peggy could have everyone at her place for Thanksgiving dinner. She had made up her mind that she was going to cook the dinner herself.

After she told her mother this, the two of them burst into laughter. Peggy didn't know the first thing about cooking and her reputation in the kitchen did not promise much of a feast on Thanksgiving. She told her mother that she was going to have to begin giving her cooking lessons.

To Peggy it was already real. The Christmas holidays in her
own place. A tree that she and Dick would decorate together. A quiet Christmas Eve, just the two of them, Bing Crosby and Perry Como singing carols on the radio.

Her mother was happy for her. She already felt like Dick was part of the family. She admired his honesty and believed that he was a young man who would be content with the simple pleasures of life. Like a nice pot roast dinner on Sundays. The first thing that she was going to teach Peggy was how to cook pot roast.

He will make a good husband, her mother said.

The word
husband
hung in the blue stillness of the morning light. A new word for him. A word that now drew Peggy closer to her mother. She was catching up with her and it wasn't difficult for Peggy to imagine the long conversations the two of them would have about cooking and housekeeping and married life. It would be thrilling for Peggy to have her mother as less a mother, more a friend and confidante.

When the school bell rang, the children flew from the playground to the front doors where they tried to stand in long lines. So much energy. Maybe Peggy saw herself walking her children to school when they were small. Or standing at the corner, watching them on the playground with the other kids.

They were shrieking happily as they went inside.

Peggy's mother was worried that she might not have the energy to keep up with the new baby. She had just begun to show and had brought her old maternity clothes down from the attic. Each thing she wore now took her back in time, eleven years in the past, when she was carrying Peggy's brother, Jack. An old part of her life was being returned to her.

Peggy promised to help with the new baby. But her mother
reminded her that she would be gone. You'll have your own place, your own life.

Peggy told her not to worry; she wouldn't live far away, she would see her every day. And the following summer, when her father and Dick began building the house on School Street, the two of them and the new baby would have lots of time together. You can teach me all about babies, Peggy told her mother.

The waiting had begun for both of them. Maybe Peggy could see this. The waiting that would not last long before everything was scattered to the wind.

A goodbye kiss on her mother's cheek. She told Peggy that she hoped she wouldn't have a baby right away. She hoped that she and Dick would have time together first to get to know one another. You'll have plenty of time to have your babies, she said.

Before her mother went inside to work she reminded her that she had packed her lunch; it was in the refrigerator next to her father's. She wanted Peggy to start eating better. All she could really remember seeing her eat in the last two years was her carrot and celery sticks.

Whenever she packed Peggy's lunch like this for her, Peggy dropped it in the wastebasket at the trolley station. Her friend Peg Kirsch caught her doing this. Maybe you should be eating more, she said to her. Peg looked across the table at her in Liedy's one Saturday afternoon when she showed her her engagement ring and she thought how terribly pretty she was. Thin, yes. But not too thin. Her long elegant neck, her high sculpted cheekbones, her dark eyebrows slightly arching. Peg had expected her to go far away from Hatfield. Maybe to become an actress or a model. But Dick was such a sweet boy and she told her that they made a perfect couple.