Of Time and Memory (23 page)

O
n a sunstruck morning my brother meets me at the Holiday Inn in Kulpsville. I have a map and I've marked the road where Dr. Wright lives. He doesn't know that we are coming. In my shirt pocket I have the index card from the Elm Terrace Hospital with his name and signature below Peggy's name and the word
preeclampsia
.

My brother is driving slowly down Main Street, pointing out where the hobby shop used to be, recalling how when we turned ten we were finally allowed to walk there by ourselves from our house just three-quarters of a mile away. I can show him things he has never known before: Peggy and Dick's brick walk-up apartment on North Broad. Lauchman's print shop where Dick went to work every day. The telephone company where Peggy worked. The train station where the trolley from Hatfield came in. “Why didn't we ever know these things before?” he is saying. “I've learned more about our mother in the past few months than in the rest of my life.”

On Clearspring Road we stop in front of the small stucco house with green trim. One pane of glass is missing from the garage windows. The willow tree reaches high above the roof
now. Our bedroom window facing north is where I always imagined Peggy came in on the nights she visited me. “You never heard her voice?” I ask my brother.

“No.”

Why had she spoken only to me? Because I was the weaker of her two sons. I was the one who would hide from the world as she had, and in life's deep loneliness there would be, at least, her voice to accompany me.

This is the house we moved into a few days after Dick remarried. Another wedding. A new bride. Of course my mother would have been curious to see.

At the end of the street, the silver water tower we walked past on the way to school and back each day. Its high chain-link fence with barbed wire around the top. We threw stones at the tower, and by the time we were in the third grade we could reach it and it would whistle back a kind of shriek when the stone hit.

The elementary school which was brand-new in 1956 is now showing signs of age. Streaks of rust along the window trim. Cracks in the concrete foundation. We drew pictures at our desks when the first astronaut rode into outer space. The teacher collected them and put them in a metal box that was buried beneath the building's cornerstone for the demolition crew to discover in the distant future when, we believed, people would be living on the moon.

In the basement below the cafeteria with its wood-and-gray-steel chairs is the fallout shelter where we practiced our escape from a Russian bomb. I think of it now and am reminded of the bomb shelter that Peggy saw being constructed. Rows and rows of Campbell's soup cans.

She missed the crazy years, and the bad years. She was dead
before the exquisite order and hope of these neighborhoods died away completely.

We count the numbers on Leslie Road. Then pull off to the side.

There is a front porch on the house, a swing hanging from the rafters. The grounds are manicured, the grass is freshly cut. We ring the bell and stand in silence. Dave is looking up at the blue sky. “Beautiful day,” he says. He is facing this calmly and I am glad to have him with me.

Not a sound from inside the house. Through a window, I see the rooms are without light. It seems that we have come on a day when he is gone.

But then the door swings open. I can see the wariness in his eyes. So I smile and say we are Peggy Snyder's twin sons. “We've gotten old. I'm sorry.”

When I put out my hand he shakes it vigorously and tells us to come in.

He walks ahead of us into the living room. My brother and I sit together on one couch, then stand when his wife appears. She is wearing a starched white blouse and a long wool skirt. He is dressed in a coat and tie as if he is expecting to see patients.

“We're just trying to get to know who our mother was,” I tell him.

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

“Yes,” I say, “you told me.”

“I've gone over and over my records and I never had a patient by that name. The only thing I can figure is that I must have been called in to deliver you, that's all. I must have been on call, covering for your mother's doctor.”

I ask him where he referred his difficult cases in the early 1950s, women facing difficult pregnancies.

“Sacred Heart in Norristown,” he says. Then he apologizes again for not remembering anything. “I checked my records and your mother wasn't my patient.”

I feel my heart beating faster against the index card from my mother's hospital bed in my shirt pocket. Then I ask him if he has children.

“I have a daughter,” he says.

We listen to him and his wife as they speak of this fine daughter. The doctor remembers her IQ and I am watching his hands, thinking how they reached inside Peggy. His face is severe, such a stern look. She would have found no refuge looking up into his face. He is a man who would have sized her up as not terribly bright, from an uneducated family. Someone headed for the dull gray working-class life. Nothing as exceptional as the life of his daughter.

My brother is asking again if he will get in touch with us should he remember anything. I just want to get out of the house.

“Where was your office?” Dave asks.

“Derstein Street.”

My father is waiting at the motel. I put my arm around him and ask him one last question. “Where did you take Peggy for her regular visits to the doctor when she was pregnant? Can you remember where the doctor's office was?”

“Yes. Derstein Street,” he says.

He is certain of this. And in the days that follow I grow more sure that Dr. Wright has lied to me. He is a man who remembers his daughter's IQ but not the first set of twins he delivered, not the only mother who ever died in his care?

Everyone in the medical community at the time of Peggy's death still remembers, except Dr. Wright. And he never asked my brother or me a single question about her. This is what makes me so certain he is lying. Not to ask one question. Where did your mother die? Who raised you boys? Is your father still alive? Nothing.

I wish I could have made him remember my mother. I wish I could have told him what it was like for her in the end. How she felt herself slipping away into madness, trying to recall the words to that record by Don Cornell, anything from a better time, something to pull herself back to this world. Her horrible headaches, her skull pounding to the noise from the racetrack in Hatfield on those hot August nights when sleep wouldn't come. The engines of the race cars ripping and screaming through her consciousness. And all her worst fears exploding in her mind on June 25, when the war her husband promised her would never come, began. Three days later the army of North Korea had taken Seoul and over the radio came word that World War II veterans on active reserve status would be called to fight. That day W. Stuart Symington, chairman of the National Security Resources Board, told the American Red Cross that a foreign power had the capacity to attack all of the United States for the first time in history. “We have no adequate defense against such an attack,” he warned.

T
he pregnancy book Peggy is reading in February to prepare herself for having a baby suggests daily exercise. It claims that the pain and discomfort of labor will be reduced by being in good physical condition. She decides to start taking regular walks around the block. She takes them in the evening just before going to bed, with the hope that she will be tired enough to fall asleep without a long struggle.

On one of those February nights, as she is passing the Elm Terrace Hospital, two young men come dashing down the sidewalk like burglars being chased. One of them is trying to button his long overcoat as he is running. It brushes her legs when he passes and she turns to see where they are going.

They run right up the front steps of the hospital and throw open the big door. Light from inside spills out across the porch. And brings with it the most ungodly scream that she has ever heard. Even when the door closes the sound is barely diminished. It is inside her. It draws her to the porch and up the first step. The woman screaming on the other side of the door will one day be
her
in her labor. She knows this. And the two boys who were summoned here tonight by a telephone call, boys who belong to the volunteer corps, will carry the mother in a stretcher up the stairs to the delivery room where
a doctor, maybe
her
doctor, is washing his hands in the enamel sink.

It is enough to stop her heart if she lets it. The fear of this night becoming
her
night is something she cannot ignore. She can either sink beneath it, surrendering the last of her strength to its force, or face it head-on with the defiance of a young, beautiful girl whose body is strong and growing stronger. This defiance is a kind of faith, isn't it? The faith to say I know how terrible the storm may become, but I have the strength to ride through it. God will help me ride it through with the strong heart that he has given me.

Dick is bringing home boxes from the print shop. Boxes that she lines with tissue paper. She is packing away the married-lady dresses. Three to a box. She is down on her knees wearing a slim blue skirt, a pale blue silk blouse. She is folding the dresses carefully. Her husband is watching from across the room. Smoking a cigarette. Trying to smile. Halloween, he says at once. By Halloween you'll be unpacking your wonderful dresses.

She is on her knees, making an elaborate ceremony of this. What makes her husband's smile disappear? Can he feel the time draining from this moment? What makes him walk across the room and kneel down next to her and take her in his arms as if she were going away on a long journey that might take the rest of her life?

Peggy is sitting at her glass-topped vanity combing her hair when Eileen Crockett calls on the telephone to ask if she can come over. Her husband, Bill, is at work with Dick at the print shop and she has just gotten off work at the
hospital. I'm not dressed yet for the day, Peggy tells her. Give me an hour, Eileen.

When she arrives Peggy is still in her nightgown, still brushing her hair at the glass-topped vanity in her bedroom. The sound of her knocking at the door brings Peggy out of what feels like a trance. This is the second or third time she has had this happen in the past few weeks and it's embarrassing to her. This morning Eileen is solicitous, apologizing for disturbing her. She is a tall, dark, and beautiful girl, a nurse like so many of Peggy's other acquaintances, and when she first sees her standing at the back door off the kitchen, her impulse is to tell her what has just happened, how she was so lost in a daydream which she can no longer recall that an hour and a half somehow slipped away without her moving even a finger. Like she was hypnotized.

Eileen has a present for her wrapped in silver-foil paper with a thin red ribbon. Open it, she says.

It is another book about pregnancy, this one by a Dr. Benjamin Spock. Eileen is in a rush to tell her what a marvelous new book it is, she's been urging every pregnant girl she knows to read it because it makes such good simple sense of the whole business of having babies and caring for them. All the expectant mothers who are patients of the doctor she works with are reading it. Anyway, she says to her, Happy Birthday, Peg.

Birthday? How could she have forgotten that today was her nineteenth birthday?

Eileen will remember this: how Peggy tried to conceal the fact that she had forgotten, but it was clear to Eileen that she had. And it will worry her. She will speak with her husband about this, and he will tell Dick. And when Dick asks Peggy about it, she will tell him it was nothing, nothing at all. It
will start a small argument between them, and she will lose her patience and walk out of the room, leaving him standing there with his hands open at his sides, trying to reason with her.

Her nineteenth birthday. The news is not good. Albert Einstein is on the radio news, warning the country about the H-bomb. If man succeeds in making the hydrogen bomb, radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and hence annihilation of any life on earth has been brought within the range of technical possibility. And in a six-hour speech, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the Republican senator from Wisconsin, has renewed charges that fifty-seven communists have been employed in the State Department.

What kind of a world is she bringing a child into? This is on her mind on her birthday. The fear that she might not be able to protect this child in America's future.

She is alone in the bedroom again, sitting again at the vanity. Sometimes when she loses her patience with Dick, she can find her way back to her affection for him by recalling their wedding day. The white lace covering the backs of her hands. When she looks down at her hands today, the flesh around her gold wedding band is swollen. Staring at her hand makes her heart race with worry; her long and elegant fingers which always pleased her and which inspired her across the last few years to diet continually, have disappeared. Their elegance is gone. The thin elegance she always thought she was hiding behind like a cat hiding behind a blade of grass. Now her hand looks like a starfish. The fingers are fat and misshapen. It is a hand she has never seen before. And she stares at it with contempt because … she cannot say exactly why. Maybe it is just that these pudgy fingers are not who she is. She is so delicate and pale that a friend of
Frances (remember Frances over on Cherry Street, in her metal braces, paralyzed from polio?) has described her as a “Dresden doll.”

I keep telling her that she has to eat for two now, Dick says as he turns to glance at her in the back seat of the Chevy. He and Bill Crockett are in front. Peggy and Eileen are in back. They are heading to Atlantic City for the day because this is how Peggy wanted to celebrate her nineteenth birthday. It's a cold winter day, much too cold to be at the shore, and they have all teased her about wanting to make this trip. But once Peg makes up her mind to do something … she heard Dick say on the telephone when he told the Crocketts of her plans.