Of Time and Memory (27 page)

In Peggy's brief time on this earth she had hidden behind her beauty. But her beauty had betrayed her now, just when she needed it most, and she was left to try and hide her secret behind the nightmare that had replaced this beauty.

Her secret was that she knew she was dying. She had the memory of Dr. Wright's warning at the start of her pregnancy. His words had been only dull abstractions then, but now, in the heat of summer, she knew that her decision to take this pregnancy to the end was going to kill her.

Her beauty had betrayed her, exposing her to the questions and the fears of those people closest to her. They
did see
, of course. My father, her father, and her mother saw. I know that
her mother, my grandmother, tried on several occasions to persuade her to let Dr. Moyer, their family doctor, examine her or at least come to the house on Market Street to see her.
To see what?
That some divine and grotesque trick had been played on her? He was summoned once by my father, and Peggy refused to let him into the room.

Should I blame my father for not breaking down the door?

For a week in the fall of 1998 I turned over my days and nights to this question—
Why didn't my father do something to help her?
When there was no answer, a strange anger came up in me, an anger so profound that there were times when, standing in line at the grocery store, or watching the kids play soccer, the sounds of the world fell away into silence and I was left there, talking to myself.

Finally, I drove back to Pennsylvania with this anger, pressing hard on the gas pedal all the way down from Maine as I kept imagining my father standing at my mother's grave in the weeks and months after her death. Going there by himself to speak the same question into the empty air,
Why didn't I do something to help you, Peggy?

It was his question then, and mine when I stood at Peggy's grave the last time. Dusk had fallen and I was alone there. Leaves blew across the ground. On the wind there was a curl of dark smoke from the meatpacking plant. I bowed my head and asked for an answer. At first just with silence, and then speaking out loud, I told my mother that I would not leave until I knew why no one had come to her rescue. Cars were driving by. I was sure that I could hear them slowing down as they saw me. I tried to think back over everything that I finally knew about my mother. I was standing there a long time. Reading her name engraved in the granite marker, and then my father's, I pictured him pleading with her, and her
defying him, defying everyone. I thought of her defiance, and then of her faith. And then it came to me that they were the same thing in Peggy. For what is faith but the defiance to say,
I still believe
. Despite the evidence, despite the proof, despite what everyone is telling me,
I still believe
. Despite the fear I see in my husband's eyes, and in my mother's glance, despite their warnings, I will believe that I am going to get through this. Even if it isn't true, I won't let anyone take this belief from me.

And who would dare take this from her, knowing that it was the last thing she had to hold on to, knowing, as they must have known, that it was too late for anything but a blind faith in God's love.

That is the point, really: once Peggy decided at the beginning of the summer not to end her pregnancy, there was nothing anyone could do for her but allow her the dignity of her doomed faith.

She kept it until the last day of her life when she was too weak to object and Dr. Moyer was finally summoned. As he walked into the bedroom he looked at her and the color left his face. “This is not the girl I know,” he said gravely. Then he called for the ambulance.

Standing at my mother's grave that last time, I thought of my children growing up and wanting to know why the people who loved Peggy best had allowed her to die in their presence. I decided I would tell them that maybe we can't know the answer to this question until it is our turn to lose someone we love, and then we might learn that love in the end requires us to let go, to stand aside so that this person can prepare herself to fall back into the arms of the angels.

.  .  .

One day in July Aunt Lilly comes by to see her. She has a dress for Peggy that she has been working on all summer, made from a pattern that Peggy had chosen. Peggy didn't have the energy to make it herself so Lilly took over. It is a handsome gray tailored dress, and Peggy tries to thank her properly but when she holds the dress up she realizes that whoever she was before this began, she will never be that same person again. The person who might have worn this dress was lost.

Here is her aunt Lilly who had helped her sew her bridesmaids' dresses. They had spent long hours together before Peggy's wedding, and now as she stands in front of her, Peggy is trying desperately to recall what they had talked about all those nights when they were up late together sewing. If she could only remember one small thing from that lost time, just one thing, then maybe she could begin to get herself back.

Not long after Lilly's visit, Peggy decided she could no longer sleep in the living room because she was spending so much time in bed, and there was no privacy for her downstairs. And the noise that her baby sister makes is too much for her to bear when her head is aching. The bathroom is upstairs and sometimes when even the sound of people speaking below her is too much, she opens the faucet in the tub and lets the sound of running water drown out the rest of the world.

To Dick she still looked beautiful. He remembers that every day of her life she was beautiful. Up in her mother's bed he sat with her, putting cold washcloths on her head.

He tried to cheer her up. Telling her that it wouldn't be long before she and he and the baby could move back home. You're almost there, Peggy. Don't you see, you're almost there. You've been so brave through all of this. Soon now, things will return to normal. And who'll be here when you return, Peggy? Who'll be standing here waiting for you?

You will.

That's right.

Say it to me, please, Dick.

I'll be here when you return.

You will be here?

Yes, I will. Of course I will.

This was the last month she would ever see the end of. But in the final days of July she and Dick were so close that he stopped wishing away the time of her pregnancy. Instead he tried to think of each hour as a gift from God that he would appreciate fully so that he would remember. Because of her faith, his faith had never been stronger, and he was certain that God would take care of this girl he loved.

Innocent. He was innocent. She never told him anything. By the end of the month, when she got up to pee, nothing came out. She went six days without peeing a drop. All her organs were beginning to drown in the toxic fluids that ran through her. Dick granted her wish just a few days before she went into the hospital and took her back to Lansdale to see the apartment on North Broad Street. She told him how she was going to dream, through the pain of labor, of sitting on the loveseat in the front window with him and their baby between them. Sunlight falling on her baby. And playing records. She would dream that they were playing all her favorite records.

So Dick drove her back. From the street the apartment
seems already to have forgotten them, forgotten the way they had filled its rooms with love.

She begins to cry. Don't you want to go in, Peg? Dick asks her. Let me take you inside.

But she won't let him. She just keeps crying and this is the hardest thing for him to figure out; she has her faith and yet at times it seems like she has given up on everything. He will tell her once again that if she'd only start eating, she would begin to feel better. But she can tell by the flatness in his voice that he no longer believes this. He is just talking to her to try to reclaim her from the currents that are carrying her away. Does he know in some part of himself that he will never return here with her? Is he asking himself what he has done to this lovely, sad girl? What has he
not
done that he might have done to prevent this night from happening?

She didn't tell him. She didn't tell him that she was going to wander a million miles from here on another part of her journey. That she would never live here again. Never open the front door again. Never hang laundry out on the line in the backyard.

M
y father has told me that Peggy's faith in God was strong and that she was not afraid. He holds to this belief. Even now after I have told him the truth he never knew, he reassures me that she was not afraid.

I will believe this then, for my father's sake, and for my own. I will believe that when the first contraction came she took her deep breaths, breathing evenly and slowly, as she swung her legs out of bed. It was August 9, a Wednesday. Just before noon on a cloudless day so hot that the sidewalks burned the soles of her bare feet, she climbed behind the wheel of her father's Ford and drove herself to Elm Terrace Hospital. Even with the seat back as far as it could go, the steering wheel pressed into her stomach. Dick and her father were at work at the print shop. Her mother had gone grocery shopping, pushing Audrey along in her stroller with the fringed cloth hood blocking the sun.

Peggy had called the hospital, half an hour earlier, after a contraction took her breath away. Anna Hartman, the labor and delivery nurse, told her to come on in. There was a full moon and all but two of the beds were taken. The authority and competence in her voice was reassuring. She was calling Dr. Wright's office while Peggy was getting dressed. The only thing that fit her now was a flower-printed shift that hung off her shoulders.

Dick had packed the brown suitcase a week before. It stood next to the hot-water boiler in the kitchen and contained a comb, a brush (the matching mirror she would not let him pack), toothpaste and toothbrush, talcum powder, the pale yellow quilted gown that Lilly had sewn for her, three envelopes and sheets of paper, the pocket-sized Bible that Dick had carried with him during the war, a box of tissues, a wind-up clock, and a fountain pen and small glass bottle of ink.

The pen and ink were important because she was going to write my father letters. And he was going to write back to her, letters like the ones he wrote her after each date when they were starting out. She looked forward to this. She must have thought that as soon as her baby was delivered, she would regain her strength. No more headaches. No more blurred vision. She would be able to pee again, and she would get stronger each day in the hospital. She would finally be able to concentrate again, and to hold a thought in her mind about something other than the way her body felt.

She parked along the curb. Took her suitcase from the front seat. Who would have seen her hesitating on the sidewalk, like some weary traveler? A solitary figure with a suitcase. The same pose she had imagined her husband striking three years before, on a sidewalk in Seattle as he waited for the train that brought him home from the war, healthy and alive, so that his life could coincide with hers. Did she think of him just five blocks away now, standing at his Linotype press, the heat of the print shop gathering in his throat, causing sweat on his cheeks. He would be eating his lunch soon on the wood-planked loading dock in the alley, lighting a cigarette after he'd finished, taking a deep breath and blowing smoke into
the sky. When had she stopped packing his lunch? How many weeks had passed since she last had the strength to make his lunch?

Is this the way a life runs out? Small important and unimportant things falling out of the orbit of your life because you are spinning too slowly.

This is how Mrs. Bower remembers it: Her light is on late as she works at the sewing machine. First she was making her wedding dresses, then her married-lady dresses, then maternity clothes, then her baby clothes. And then the light went out.

The light went out.

Elm Terrace Hospital's maternity wing is just a lovely old Victorian house like one of the guest houses at the Jersey shore. Canvas awnings at the front windows. Trimmed hedges. Tall elm trees. The front porch five steps up from the sidewalk.

Did she pause to glance back across the street at her brick walk-up apartment? Could she picture herself back there on that porch, or joining the parade of young mothers pushing baby carriages up North Broad Street into the future of America?

The future. Did her faith in God allow her to believe that she would claim her place among those stroller mothers taking possession of the future?

The double oak doors with their fine oval glass panels open to a foyer of dark-paneled walls and wide stairs that climb to a landing where white lace curtains are flying like sails on the summer breeze. From where she stands the stairs look so steep, just looking at them is enough to make her wonder what happened to the little girl she once was who went flying up and down the stairs at school.

A nurse called Scottie shows her to her bed. One of five in a room with brightly flowered wallpaper and white crown molding along the ceiling. More white lace curtains blowing high. Her roommates smile and say hello. None of them looks the way she looks. None has a face as badly swollen as hers.

It is her face that persuades Scottie to admit her though her contractions that morning were only false labor. Scottie writes the word
preeclampsia
above Dr. Edward Wright's name on the index card and attaches it to the rail of her bed.

Across the hallway is the nursery with fifteen cribs lined up against the walls. Beside it another room for mothers, this one with six beds. Would she remember the mothers in these other beds? The one who told her that when the moon is full, every bed is always taken and the boys from the volunteer ambulance corps who carry the mothers up to the delivery room and then back down sleep in cots on the third floor, taking catnaps between deliveries. The night nurse, Sarah Cobley, who told her to call her Sally? How she rubbed Peggy's back until she fell asleep? The coffee urn that was used to heat water in the delivery room. The kitchen stove where the glass bottles were heated.