Of Time and Memory (5 page)

Suddenly he tilts his head back. Light from the sky fills the lenses of his glasses so I can no longer see his eyes. He asks me what time it is. “We don't want to be late for dinner,” he says.

I tell him we have plenty of time. But I can see we aren't going to make it to the hospital where Peggy died, or to the cemetery. I see that the past is not about time at all really. The past is a place. Right here where the hearse was parked.
Here
is the past.

“Maybe we
should
head back,” I say.

When I start up the car he places his hand on my right arm and thanks me. “I can't remember where we used to go on dates. You asked me last night, and I can't remember. I can't
remember where I first met your mother either. I used to know the answers to all those questions, but now I can't remember.”

“It's okay,” I tell him.

“But I do remember that your mother and I weren't together the last night of her life. She wanted to sleep in her mother's bed. She had your granddad carry her to her mother's bed, I remember. And at the funeral, riding to the cemetery, I kept thinking about that.”

I see the tears standing in his eyes. I get the car moving and peel another orange for him, and all I want to do is tell him something that will make his tears go away. I want to tell him that everything is going to be okay, that even with the pain and the awful memories, we'll be all right.

We talk about football that night. It's as close as we can get to anything real. He dreamed of playing football from the time he was five years old. High school and then college football. But he was too skinny. When the Depression came along his family was forced to move, but it was a fortuitous move for him because he ended up in a duplex right next door to Jack Graham, captain of the Lansdale High School football team. Jack took the skinny kid under his wing, introduced him to all the important kids, the pretty girls, the football coach who gave him the job as waterboy. Just to be down on the field during the games was a thrill. Just to be that close to it.

In the morning he makes me breakfast before I leave. Someone from church has sent him grapefruit and oranges from Florida and he insists on cutting up some for me. A bowl of fruit. I'm watching him trying to figure it all out, the right
bowl, the knife, a dish towel to wipe the counter. Starting over, beginning with the orange this time. Where to put the seeds. It takes almost an hour.

At the door we shake hands. He says a prayer that God will keep me safe on the drive home. From the parking lot I look back and see him standing at the door of the apartment building. It reminds me of myself standing outside the front door on Clearspring Road waiting for him to come home from work, to beep the horn once the way he always did when he spotted me there. Thinking of it—what the sound of his horn and the sight of him coming home from work meant to me! I want to take him back to Maine with me. I want to sit him in the wing chair in my living room, in front of the fireplace with all the kids gathering around him. Just keep him in my presence.

A
month passes before I can make another trip down the same highways. I have spoken by telephone with an aunt of my mother's who was very close to her. And two girls from her high school class. Pieces of my mother's life are falling into my own.

Before I drive to my father's apartment this time, I return to Hatfield first, back to the same spot at the curb where the wedding car and the funeral hearse had parked. It is a Sunday morning and on the patch of grass in front of Grace Lutheran Church a young man in a stiff blue suit is changing the letters inside the glass cupboard that tells the times of Sunday school classes and the title of the weekly sermon. He is spelling out next week's sermon one black magnetic letter at a time, and watching me out of the corner of his eye. “The Gift of Grace” is the title. He locks the cupboard with a padlock, glances at me again, then disappears inside the church.

A few minutes pass before a young woman comes down the front steps of the church. The man in the blue suit returns. He says something to her and they both turn to look at me. There is suspicion on his face. He checks the padlock again. We live in crazy times; I suppose someone might break into the glass cupboard and change the letters of the sermon title to spell some obscenity. The young woman at his side is lovely. She has come outside with no coat on and there is
something interesting about her dress. It is pale pink, ruffled, with puffy short sleeves and a big bow in back. A child's Easter dress and she is spilling out of it.

She walks down the cement walkway and up to the car. She has a movie-star face with rouged and sculpted cheekbones, wide-set blue eyes, lots of curls. I roll down the window. She wants to know if she can help me. She leans into the car window a little, her breasts resting against the bottom of the window frame. I am already trying to think of what I can say so she won't try to get me to join her church. I imagine that her stunning beauty once led her down the road to a wayward life, but now she is reformed and always on patrol for others who appear lost.

I tell her quickly why I am here. That my mother was photographed in her wedding car outside this church in 1949, and a few days after my twin brother and I were born, she was in a hearse parked here. I show her the photograph. She studies the picture, then her eyes open wide.

“Wait a second,” she says. “What was your mother's name?”

When I tell her, everything falls into place. “Yes,” she says, “the young mother with twin boys. Someone puts flowers on the altar for her every year, the same Sunday every August.”

“She died in August,” I tell her. She listens to me with a serene and benevolent expression. I am looking into her eyes when the man in the stiff blue suit comes for her. He stops on the cement walkway and calls for her. She smiles and wishes me luck. When she walks away the thought that I will never see her again fills me with an unreasonable sadness.

“The flowers,” I call to her. “Who gives the flowers for the altar every year?”

She turns back to tell me she doesn't know.

.  .  .

It is a twenty-minute drive to the town of Sellersville where the ambulance took my mother in the last hours of her life. But coming upon Grandview Hospital, I see that the building is too modern, too new to be the right place.

The glass doors slide open to a foyer with tall floor-to-ceiling windows, an immaculate room furnished with comfortable chairs and couches. The place is deserted, the information desk unoccupied and the glass-fronted interior offices empty. The men's room floor has been polished with something that gives off a familiar sweet smell and I stand there until I remember that the bathrooms in my elementary school smelled exactly like this.

Out in the corridor now I can hear someone typing on a keyboard beyond the silence. She is a pleasant woman with a quick smile. “I'm holding down the fort,” she tells me.

When I ask her where the old Grandview Hospital is, she walks to a window and points to a square three-story building across a parking lot. “It is a nursing school now,” she tells me.

Walking toward the building I think of the nursing students filling the rooms. Someone up late at night studying for an exam. Someone far from home looking out the window my mother once looked out.

Of course, because of the weekend the building is empty and the front doors are locked. I knock anyway, then step back to take it in. The doors are set back, up three steps, just inside an alcove, a rectangle made of rose granite. Cracks have been filled in with blond cement. The windows on all three floors are framed in granite as well. Above the center windows on the second floor the words nurses' home are carved in tall scrolled letters. There is a flat roof above the third floor.

Around the back of the building just outside a rear door there is a picnic table. Cigarette butts beneath it.

Peering in through the glass door I see a man walking the corridor pushing a broom. It takes him a while to hear me and when he comes to the door he tells me through the glass that the place is closed until Monday morning.

“My mother died here almost fifty years ago, and I've driven all the way from Maine,” I tell him. My voice is hoarse but loud, as if yelling into a dark tunnel.

There is that split second of doubt and fear that surrounds all chance encounters with strangers nowadays. But then he lets me in. When I show him the photograph and tell him the story, he raises one finger in the air and tells me to follow him.

Another old photograph, this one from a desk drawer in a first-floor office. We take it outside and he holds it to match our perspective. I feel a chill run through me. The cedar trees in front of us my mother would have seen as she was carried inside. Her last glimpse of the outside world.

“Wait a minute,” the man says cheerfully. “I can do better than this.”

Inside he makes a telephone call. Then a second call to a woman who used to work here. I am listening to him explaining to the woman why he is calling. “… He says his mother died here in 1950.”

“August,” I tell him. “My mother had just given birth to twins.”

He tells her then pauses suddenly. He turns to me, looks out over the tops of his glasses and says, “Twin boys?”

The twins whose mother died; the woman remembers at once.

But we are in the wrong building. The nurses' home was never a hospital.

.  .  .

Back in Hatfield, I stop at a 7-Eleven to ask directions to the cemetery. A teenager with a nose ring and a ponytail says, “The Lutheran cemetery?”

I'm surprised by this, that a young person would know the religious affiliation of a particular cemetery. “There's more than one cemetery in town?” I ask.

“Down there,” he tells me. “Hang a right on Penn Street.”

Coming upon it I can see the grave markers in the distance.

A flat stretch of pasture behind a dump of old railroad ties and a rusted-out factory that once made something before America began manufacturing only debt. I park at the entrance and walk in a ways. Many of the graves belong to soldiers. Young boys who died in places far from here. Their graves are marked by tiny American flags. The Peterson boy could have read my mother's name carved in a desk at school. The Schultz boy might have watched her walking through town before he left for the war in France.

Of all things unexpected, I come upon my father's name first. Written on the face of a stone buried flat in the ground.
RICHARD SNYDER
. My father for certain, the boy whose mother gave him no middle name. It comes as a shock to me that they share a stone. The plot is so narrow, he will have to be buried on top of her.

His name is on the left of the stone and below it, the year of his birth, 1926, and a space awaiting the year of his death. To the right on the same stone,
PEGGY L. SNYDER
. 1931–1950.

A line of geese crosses the sky. A low breeze makes the tiny flags tremble.

I picture my father on the day of the funeral. How he must have wanted never to leave this place, to crawl into the earth with her, his heart set upon going along with her. My twin brother and me at home a few blocks away waiting for him to return. The house on Market Street so close he could have heard us crying during the funeral service.

I see my father here with his head bowed, his eyes open to the pile of dirt that will cover her.

I kneel down in the brown grass and the pine cones. I have been returning here all my life. I have returned to a place I've never been before. I have come back to a place I never left. It is a place I've been running from all my life, a memory in the center of my bones, a story sewn into my cells, a knowledge beneath the soles of my feet, a scent on my palms, a warning along my shins.

The earth is soft. As I stare at the dates on the marker, the numbers turn in my mind, 1931–1950—until, finally, it strikes me that she was only nineteen years old. Nineteen. A girl.

I'm embarrassed speaking out loud, but I say these words to her: “I don't know where you are, Peggy.”

I
n the nursing home the rooms are behind long carpeted corridors of doors the residents have decorated with photographs of the pets they had to leave behind when they were admitted, and grandchildren who live far away in the noisy, chaotic world that is the exact opposite of this world.

My grandfather has white wavy hair and a steady stream of single women who keep tabs on him. He is ninety years old and has a hard time getting up out of his chair, but other than this, age seems to have taken nothing from him. His son, my uncle Jack, has told him that I would be coming by and from the moment I step inside his door the memories of my mother pour out of him. He has photographs for me that I can keep and framed photographs of her standing on every table and windowsill and on the bureau by his bed. “I dust them all myself,” he tells me. Just as my mother had been carefully and purposefully withdrawn from his house where I visited him and my grandmother when I was a boy, the two small rooms he inhabits now have been transformed into a gallery of Peggy's face. I wonder if at this point in his life, nearing his own death, he is familiarizing himself with his daughter's face, a face he believes he will see in heaven.

We sit in her presence now. It strikes me how odd she would find the two of us, her tough-guy father, now sobbing like a child, and her newborn baby now grown bald on the
top of his head. I look at her father and then at her face frozen in time, trying to imagine how she would look by now at age sixty-six.

“I delivered your mother when she was born, and I was the last person with her when she passed away,” he tells me. “She lifted her hands off the hospital bed and brought them to her head like this and cried out to me, ‘My head! My head!' ”

He puts his face in his hands and begins to cry softly. I haven't seen him since my grandmother's funeral nine years before, and the memories I have of him are standing in his garage workshop surrounded by tools and a shiny new car that he was very proud of.