Of Time and Memory (28 page)

For two days she waited for the contractions to become steady and she wouldn't eat anything. Scottie and Anna were keeping a close watch on her, aware that she might go into convulsions, knowing that in such circumstances they could lose mother and baby. Each morning when Anna arrived she checked with Sally—Has she eaten anything?

Peggy can't sleep, either. The Crying House, she calls this place. Babies always crying in the nursery, and women crying through their labor upstairs. The sound of all this crying is
worse than the delirious race cars tearing around the track in Hatfield. And it's hot, it is so hot, heat from everyone's big body pushing slowly through the rooms of the Crying House. She is trapped beneath the heat and the noise and the two women in her room who call themselves veterans; they've delivered their new babies and because they have toddlers at home, they're determined to treat their ten-day recovery as a kind of vacation. Playing cards and asking for second helpings of mashed potatoes. Eating ice cream like it is going out of style, the wrapped square slices of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry like little flags. The same ice cream Peggy's church serves at its dinners.

Anna Hartman sits on the foot of her bed and talks with her about breast-feeding and circumcision should her baby be a boy. She uses one sheet of the paper she brought along to make Peggy a fan and as she is watching the nurse fold the paper Peggy recalls the fans that she made in grade school out of construction paper in art class along with Ginny and Adelle and Peg Kirsch. And the amazing thing is that she can see the schoolroom so clearly, the wood-and-gray-steel chairs, the water fountain in the right-hand corner across from the teacher's desk. It is all much too clearly focused to be a memory; it is part of the landscape she is passing now.

Her husband has left a letter for her, Sally reports the next morning. He stopped by on his way to work and when he found her sleeping, he left this letter with Sally.

It is just a short note telling her that he went to the apartment yesterday and it's very clean, just as they left it, and he didn't see any sign of the ants that she was worried about. The place is all ready for the two of them to move back home with
the new baby. He doesn't want her to worry about anything because he knows that all of this was meant to be, the way they met and knew at once that they wanted to spend their lives together. And now this baby, a gift from God.

I hope she believed him. I hope she didn't lie awake in her bed, listening to the crying mothers and babies, and feeling like God had forsaken her, or was punishing her for some terrible sin. She hadn't lived long enough to pile up enough sins to justify the awful way she felt. Her mind swarming with dark thoughts, and her head aching so that it took an act of will to keep from screaming.

On the night of August 10, just before nine o'clock, Dick kissed her and told her that he would be back in the morning. She was getting very close to her time. Scottie told him that the baby would come before morning. A part of Peggy wanted him to leave so she could stop trying to conceal her pain, and another part of her wanted desperately for him to stay. If she'd had the energy, she would have begged him not to go. How wonderful it would be if someone could carry her across the street to her apartment and the doctor could deliver the baby there, in her bed, with her husband beside her.

The last thing he told her before he left was that he was going to stay up late writing her another letter, and in the morning he would bring it by for her.

She closed her eyes when he turned to leave. Scottie rubbed her back and told her that everything was going to be okay. She told her what she had told all the other mothers: “God made women to have children and you will make it through all right.”

She had those words to carry her through the long night, and she had my father's promise that he would stay up late writing her a letter.

The promise was still on his lips when he left the hospital, stepping outside into the night. On the sidewalk he stood between the empty rooms of the brick apartment where he had made love to her and the lighted rooms of the hospital where this love had taken her. Love as logical as geometry.

He turned back to face the hospital which looked even more like a tourist house in moonlight, a seaside tourist house that covered the danger of what it really was. The tourists were crying in the night. Why? Because the lives they left behind when they arrived and signed in would not be the same anymore?

He couldn't drive away with her cries joining the others that night. He unlocked the apartment door. He listened to a Phillies game on the radio. He tried to fall asleep and not to fall asleep in the morris chair by the window. He kept turning down the sound on the radio, hoping that the shrieks of terror had stopped.
What have I done to her?
he thought.

Sometime in the night he did fall into his sleep as she was being carried upstairs to the delivery room by boys from the volunteer corps. Less than an hour after Dick left her with his promise to write her a letter that night, the boys from the volunteer corps who were napping on the third floor were awakened by Sally. They were as careful with Peggy as they could possibly be but still when they rounded the landing they tilted the gurney and she felt the blood rush into her head. She could hear them shuffling their feet on the wood stairs and groaning against her weight and she apologized.

Anna was plugging in the coffee urn when she was carried into the delivery room. It was just after ten o'clock. The white lace curtains hung straight down at the windows, trapped in the awful heat and humidity. “It's all right,” Scottie whispered in her ear, “God made women to have babies. Everything is
going to be all right now.” Would Peggy try to remember this to countervail the awful smell of the black rubber mask and the nitrous oxide administered by Anna Hartman when my brother's head began to distend the muscles of her pelvis?

My mother put the lie to the wise nurse's words; everything was never all right again. At 5:30 the next morning they called my father to tell him that he had twin boys and to ask him to find someone with A-positive blood as quickly as he could. Blood types had been stamped on all GIs' dog tags, so men were familiar with theirs and my father's buddy from the print shop, Bill Crockett, was a match.

Peggy took a quart of his blood as he lay next to her on a cot. A thin tube connected her body to his. He tried to make her laugh. Her raspy laugh was one of the things Bill liked about Peggy.

No one would ever hear her laugh again. The last thing Sally did before she went off duty was call the
Lansdale Reporter
to tell them that twins had been born.

Dr. Wright only charged my father for one of the babies. Twenty-five dollars. “You're going to need to save all the money you can,” he told my father. “Twins are expensive.”

My father stood smiling in the doorway. It must have brought some pleasure to my mother that she had finally given him something, something no one could ever take from him. She might have pictured the three of us as friends. He would still only be in his thirties when these two boys became young men. One of us to stand on either side of him.

When he sat close to her on her bed, she said to him, “I've finally given you something, Dick.”

Tears were coming down her cheeks when she told him that these two boys were for him to make up for the two brothers he had lost in his childhood. It was a miracle, really.

Last night was hard, Dick, but I still want six boys.

He remembers my mother saying this. It was proof to him that she was going to get better. And he carried it with him through the days ahead when she wouldn't eat and she grew weaker and weaker.

She was released from the hospital nine days later when the nurses could not get her to eat. She had given up by then because all along when she had been so sick during her pregnancy, my father kept telling her that all the bad stuff would go away just as soon as the baby was born, just as soon as she finally delivered the baby, and she had clung to this in order to live through those days. And then after the babies were born and she still kept feeling worse and worse, when she couldn't even begin to imagine running on her legs as she had once run on cool autumn afternoons with her field hockey team in school, before taking a job and before falling in love, before setting up her own apartment and becoming a mother, she stopped eating. She stopped trying to get better.

I keep seeing the labor and delivery nurse, Anna Hartman, standing on the porch of the hospital that morning, watching the young mother get into her husband's green Chevrolet to drive home with their newborn babies. I missed meeting Anna by two days—she died before I could talk with her. But she has been described to me as a loving, compassionate woman, someone who might have tried, for her own sake, to turn away and go back inside, but who would have lingered there on the porch to watch this ritual one more time. Wasn't this the reason that she had chosen to be a labor and delivery nurse? So she could be up close to the miracle? This ritual of
a new family beginning their journey home together for the first time is always reassuring to Anna and she loves to watch, in fact she feels she must watch, must bear witness to this part of the miracle. And she always wants to say the same thing to the father and mother, to tell them that in the full cast of a life with its wide arc of possibilities, small moments like this one are often lost, and they must tell themselves never to forget how blessed they were in their youth to bring home a healthy baby. They must never forget just how insistent the promise of happiness was as they made their first trip home together.

But what kind of miracle is this, this morning when the hot sky is white with light. Anna reaches out her hand to steady herself. There are things to do inside, other mothers to attend to. She must make herself stay on the porch, she has to force herself to watch.

Anna Hartman was a wise woman and in the time she had spent with Peggy she would have ascertained that this was a rather plain girl, not a girl who would set the world on fire. She would live just an average life, sewing her boys' clothes until they wouldn't wear homemade clothing anymore, feeling the small sadness of life when these little boys who called her Mommy would one day holler behind them, “See you later, Mom,” on their way out.

Always when Anna watched the new families leaving for home together, something inside her wanted to stop them and remind them to pay attention to these days. Days when they adored one another, days more precious than the treasures we dream of having in this world.

But what kind of miracle was this? This morning the promise of life seemed more tentative to Anna than ever before. She was the last person who could have stopped the
young husband to tell him that his wife would not live more than a few days longer and that he should memorize her hand in his so he would never forget.

Each family driving away with a new baby is a love story. But Anna Hartman knew that my father's love story was ending. She tried not to let it touch her too deeply, but it was no use. As closely as we can feel another person's fear, she felt the fear of this young mother. The terrible fear that men never really feel the way a woman does when she asks in her sorrow,
Who will care for my children when I'm no longer here?

T
he plan was for Peggy and Dick to take her parents' room on the second floor, but she was never strong enough to make it up the stairs, and so she resumed her place on the daybed in the dining room where, for the first two days, she wouldn't let my father out of her sight. She made him stay next to her. She was trying all over again to believe what he had told her about how everything would get back to normal now and how, before too much longer, she would move back to their brick apartment where she would be forever delivered from her dark fears and back into his hands. Delivered back into his grateful touch.

But even his presence next to her didn't end the loneliness. The loneliness inside her was now part of everything she could comprehend.

What made the days back in her father's house so difficult, what made it such a strange time, a dense and weightless, swirling time like a fever dream, was that everyone was forced to believe things that they could not imagine. Her mother, what was she to believe each of those mornings when she came downstairs from her bedroom and found the sheets on the daybed soaked in blood. How could she wash the blood off her daughter's thighs each morning without thinking about that time they went to the farm together and her
daughter was enchanted by the idea of pickling and jarring so many beets that her hands would be stained red? Her mother, my grandmother, was never the same after she lost Peggy. She raised Peggy's brother and sister, then surrendered to her broken heart, spending her days feeding the cardinals that flew into her yard on School Street. She fed them through the long winters of her life, imagining at times that a certain cardinal who came back each year on Christmas morning was her daughter's soul returning to keep her company.

On those late August days she began to believe the unimaginable, that she would outlive her daughter.

And Peggy's husband, who tried to play records for her, setting up the record player in the dining room, hoping against hope that she would regain enough strength to dance one dance with him, a slow dance to the slow beating of their hearts. A rag doll in his arms. He didn't care about the dance, it was just the chance to hold her again, that's all he really wanted. What could he know for certain except the feeling deep inside that something was being taken from him now and he could not stop it from happening?

His grandmother was in the house every day to help out. She had delivered hundreds of babies and she was driving Peggy crazy, telling Peggy the same thing over and over—If you'd hold your babies, you'd start feeling better.