Of Time and Memory (2 page)

My brother is not given to exaggeration and so I took what he said to heart. I'd hung up the telephone, when I caught myself turning over the photograph to my father's written words on the back:

November 1949, Peggy and me.

I felt the vulnerability we feel when our parents fall to deathly illness, taking our immunity from harm along with them. I sat at the table a long time. When my son, Jack, came
into the room I drew him into my arms and waited for the feeling to pass.

That was a year ago, before I knew anything about my mother, Peggy Lorraine Schwartz. Before I knew that she spent the war years learning to drive a car and walk a straight line in high heels. She wore her hair like Ginger Rogers and spent whole weekends with her Sunday school class sewing bandages for the Red Cross. She rode the Liberty Bell trolley to Lansdale to stand outside the recruitment center with her girlfriends and wish good luck to all the boys before they went inside. Sometimes the boys would take off their hats, lean down, and innocently kiss the girls on their foreheads. She went to Saturday-night dances to raise money for Civil Defense. A dime a dance. She was the prettiest girl in town and never sat out a single number. Men twirled her across the floor and she became aware of her beauty for the first time. One hot summer night in 1944, she went with her friends to sleep out in the country in the backyard of a girl named Lorraine Pugles. They laid their sleeping bags under the stars. At four in the morning Lorraine's father woke them up to ride with him to pick up fruit and vegetables, which he sold at a stand in Souderton. The girls all sat in the back of his truck, their bare legs hanging out, their feet on the bumper. Mr. Pugles beeped the horn each time before he came to a bump in the road. They were singing that silly song about the bugle boy in company B. Laughing. Laughing so hard. Peggy with her deep, rolling laugh that the rest of them still remember about her. They told me that Peggy was a quiet girl, always drifting off on her own, lost within her thoughts, but she could laugh when she felt like it. It was a big, strong, unladylike laugh and they remembered her laughing that night in the back of Mr. Pugles's truck as she stood up and danced the
jitterbug with an imaginary soldier. She danced right over the bumps in the road, until they were all rolling on the floor of the truck, laughing along with her. That night of the sleepover, before they took the ride, when the night was still around them, Lorraine told Peggy about a boy who had gone off to war. He was the only boy she ever went out with who wrote her letters the day after each date, thanking her and telling her how special everything was to him. Lorraine spoke his name, Dick Snyder. Peggy was fourteen years old that summer. Until that night she would remember the war years as a song, as people gathered around radios, and women wearing pants to work. And her father in the backyard searching the night sky for enemy planes. Now she added to these memories the name of a soldier who wrote letters to his girl after each date.

This is the boy she would one day decide that no one else should have but her. The boy she would marry and then leave behind. He would never really know who she was or how she loved him. Until I found her for him. Peggy Lorraine, the girl he missed so desperately after she died. He spent the days after her funeral lying in bed, trying to make a bargain with God. Thinking of the countless people who had come near her in the nineteen years of her life. People he would never know. Someone who spoke four words to her in the line at the grocery store. And someone who stood on the corner next to her waiting for the light to change. All of these people, strangers to him—he wanted the time they had spent with her. He wanted to gather all of these people together and have for himself the sum of all their moments in her presence. If he added up all these moments they might amount to an afternoon that he could have to share with her. To hold her close. He promised God that if He granted him this little
bit of time with her, he would never ask for anything else again.

There is another photograph. A picture my grandfather took of my father in front of the Christmas tree in December 1950, four months after Peggy's death. Someone has just told him to smile. Smile, Dick, we have to try to be happy for the babies. Smile. That would have been my grandmother, my Nana, telling him to smile. I am guessing at this part. But Pop Pop would have been holding the camera, concentrating too hard on holding it still and centering the picture in the viewfinder to say anything to my father. My twin brother and I are in my father's arms. He has a stunned look on his face, as if he has just been hit by something from behind. Or felt a trapdoor snap open beneath his feet. I am on his right knee. Dave, on his left. We are by now four months old, just old enough to sit up. We are the babies Peggy Lorraine gave him in the tenth month of their marriage and then left him to care for on his own.

I was seven or eight years old when I began to sense some connection between my father and the woman who visited my bedroom at night on the column of white light. We had gone on a family vacation to Cooperstown, New York, that summer to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame. We stayed in a little roadside place called the Wagon Wheel Motel. The first night we were there, my brother and I were enchanted to discover that from the front porch we could see the screen of a drive-in miles away across a valley and up a broad hillside.

It wasn't the first night, maybe the second or third, when I was watching with my father as a luscious black-haired woman in the movie stepped into the tender embrace of a
man, then wrapped her slender arms around him in an act of such physical hunger that my father rushed me off the porch. (The actress might have been Natalie Wood.) I can still feel his hand on the back of my head, gently steering me inside the room and into bed. I lay there a long time pretending to be asleep but watching to see if he went back outside. My stepmother was making us a bedtime snack, I remember. My father was walking back and forth, passing the foot of my bed. When at last he announced that he was going outside to smoke, I felt my heart begin to race. After he had passed through the open doorway and I could see his back was to the room, I sat up in bed and watched. For what, I didn't know. There was his slender, hipless outline, his shadow from the porch light falling behind him across the carpeted floor. Out across the grass and the tiny swimming pool and the cracked cement shuffleboard lanes, across the highway, beyond a stand of trees, and the wide sea of the hillside, the woman on the drive-in screen, a giant looming over my skinny father, was saying something to the actor in her arms while my father and I secretly tried to read her lips. I sensed at that moment that we were in this together. The woman on the drive-in screen was the one we both longed for, the one without whose touch our own worthiness would forever be in doubt. In that moment I felt supremely satisfied in some depthless part of me. I felt close to my father in the way I would only feel as a boy whenever he stood off from the rest of us, dreaming—as I imagined he was—about my mother, who was lost to him; dreaming—as I imagined he always did—of some ransom he could pay to God so he could have his pretty bride back. In those days we were conspirators. He dreamed of her, and I waited in my sleep for her to return and call to me by my first and middle names.

A
week passes, maybe two. I have brought the wedding photograph into a sunstruck kitchen to draw my family to it; I want to show Jack how much chrome was on the old cars, and Cara how there is a little bit of her face in my father's. I want to show Erin how Peggy styled her hair. But weekends are busy times in a family of six and my intentions are lost to the normal transactions of a happy Saturday morning. Jack, age nine, sails a paper airplane across the room; it hits me on the bridge of my nose with a surprising pain as I am crossing the floor and makes me spill a cup of coffee down my leg. I am just about to shout at him, but when I pick up the airplane I notice he has written across one wing, “I love you, Daddy. Can we play football today. Check yes or no.”

Erin, our twelve-year-old, is on the telephone trying to make plans for an outing with her friend from sixth grade; she is talking with her friend and negotiating with me for some money for lunch at the same time I am cleaning up the spilled coffee. Why seven dollars for lunch? I ask. I've eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch every day for thirty years, why can't I make you one?

Meanwhile Nell, age ten, charges through the room chased by Cara, who is pulling her stuffed animals behind her on a makeshift sled that tips over the dog's water bowl. If this were
one of those old movies starring Fred MacMurray, the washing machine would suddenly overflow.

I slip the photograph into my shirt pocket and surrender to it all, leaning back against the kitchen counter while the voices wash over me. I see all the commotion around me, but the picture of my mother and father is drawing me away from all of this. I have fallen onto a peculiar ground of stillness, like the stillness just before a snowstorm.

Colleen appears next, her cheeks rosy from sleep. I am watching her from far away as she calmly gathers up dirty laundry, softly interrogating each of her children to find out if they've seen her sunglasses. When she passes by me her hair is red in the slanting light. In the next moment I watch her kneel down to tie the laces on Cara's shoe. “I don't like my face anymore,” Cara announces.

“It's a beautiful, beautiful face,” Colleen assures her.

The room grows quiet. The other children have turned to watch their mother.

You know this feeling we get when our life is suddenly orbiting us like a rich dream, this desire to freeze everything just as it is—to rescue one perfect moment from the rushing blur of time. It's a feeling that comes from a sudden recognition of our privilege. How lucky, how fortunate I am, and please let it slow down, let this privilege last!

The urgency behind this feeling comes today from the photograph; there was another woman so young and beautiful, and a man who loved her, never thinking that she would die.

In the stillness, I am vowing to myself to begin living more thoughtfully. I will try harder to remember when I first saw the red in Colleen's hair. I will picture her as she first appeared to me when I fell in love with her. I will remember which
of our babies was born with their eyes opened wide. And which daughter named our dog. And which summer we taught our son to swim. I will slow my life down so that I can remember these things. And though we cannot begin to account for the way so much time has passed, or to say precisely how we have become the family we are, I will pull everyone closer to me and hold them there long enough to guard our closeness against the magnificent, hectic future ahead when the velocity of our lives will carry us off in different directions, each of us flying away at top speed, barely glancing back, scarcely remembering.

Here we are, so many of us, standing in our middle age at the end of a century, trying our best to give our children a love story to follow.
Our
love story, more urgent than our daily battle for time and money.

I am watching Colleen and thinking that I will never leave her side again, that I will spend every hour of every day beside her so that I will have this in case she ever gets sick and dies. I remember how frightened I was with each new baby, scared that something would go wrong in the hospital and I would lose her. These are strange thoughts for such a beautiful Saturday morning. I smile at my wife when she comes across the room toward me. She takes the photograph from my hands and holds it in front of her. “What do you remember?” she asks me.

For days I've been thinking about this, trying to remember everything. Every Christmas my father would take us to Hatfield, to visit Grandmom and Granddad Schwartz. They were just kind old people to me. We'd sit in their tiny living room and open our presents, and I was never really sure who they were. Somehow I thought that my father was my older brother and that these old people were his parents. Their
daughter, Audrey, lived in the house and there were pictures of her everywhere. But on the top shelf beside the fireplace there were photographs of two girls in silver frames. I remember this distinctly. The silver frames stood beside a white porcelain horse with a gold chain for its bridle.

“You remember that?” Colleen asked.

“Photographs,” I told her. “As a kid I always paid a lot of attention to pictures because I was always trying to find the face of the lady who visited me in my room at night.”

Soon after we met I had told Colleen about the time my father drove my brother and me to Atlantic City for a day on the beach. I was small, maybe five years old. There was a strong undertow, I remember. We drank orange soda in thick glass bottles. It was the first time in my life I got water up my nose and in my ears. My father showed me how to tilt my head and jump up and down on one leg. When it was time to leave, we walked along the boardwalk and stopped at the outdoor shower, which was a garden hose hanging from a nail inside a wooden stall. It cost a nickel to wash off the sand. After I was finished, as my father took off his shirt to step under the hose, his wallet fell from his pocket and a photograph dropped to the ground. It was a black-and-white picture of the lady who visited me. There she was, sitting at the open window of a big black car with wide, sweeping fenders and hubcaps that were bright disks of light.

I looked into my father's eyes and asked him who she was. I think that even as I was asking him this, I was disappointed in myself for divulging my secret and fearful that now that it was out in the open she wouldn't come to see me again. But it was the exact face that glided in through the window on top of the column of white light. I told my father that I had seen the lady before. He looked down at me with a puzzled
expression but didn't say anything else. He just washed the sand off my feet with the hose. He waited a few more years until I was eight or nine, and then he told me that she had been my mother.