Of Time and Memory (6 page)

“We never talked about Peggy,” I tell him.

He shakes his head. “It was rough,” he says.

Once he begins, he goes on and on. He tells me about the time that Peggy saved his life. He remembers that in the last days of her pregnancy her feet were so swollen that she couldn't even fit into his slippers. And her sewing, he remembers the way she would stay up all night sewing baby clothes. And the first time he saw her after Dave and I were born, she told him that after seeing us she had decided she was going to have six boys.

“She didn't know how sick she was,” he says as he begins to cry again. This time he battles through the grief until he can think of something else to tell me that will help him find his voice: “Do you know that Dick was helping me build the house on School Street that summer? Every afternoon after work, we'd drive from the print shop straight to School Street. One afternoon we were hurrying to get the roof on before the rain. A big thunderstorm came in. We were still up on the roof and we watched the lightning jump across the heads of the nails … Every afternoon when we were driving over I
would say a prayer that Peggy was feeling better and might be there waiting for your father and me. Every afternoon that was what I prayed for.” He tells me that every year in August he places the flowers at the church altar in Peggy's memory.

When I try to leave, he keeps me another hour standing at the door. He won't say goodbye until I tell him when I will return.

I didn't return the next day as I had promised my grandfather. And I didn't stay in Pennsylvania long enough to visit my father either. The hell of it was that it was just too damned sad; I don't mean for me, I mean for them—for the father who prayed for his daughter to get well and for the ninety-year-old man who Peggy's father had become, and for the young husband coming home from work each afternoon to find his wife still too weak to get out of bed and for the seventy-one-year-old man her husband had become. I had told myself from that first night in the attic with my little girl that I was going to try to learn Peggy's love story and then tell it for my father, as a gift to him at the end of his life. This had felt like the right thing to do until I saw the sadness in his eyes when we were parked in front of the church. It wasn't the wedding that he remembered as we sat there, it was the funeral. How could I have failed to see that it would be this way for my father, that it would always be this way because she never did get well enough to spend much time with him when he was helping her father build his little house on School Street, the house where my brother and I were taken at Christmas every year though we never knew why. Of course the sadness of Peggy's death had eclipsed their love story, and always would in his memory.

And then seeing my grandfather cry, his shoulders shaking as we sat in his room at the nursing home surrounded by pictures of his lost daughter—it was just too damned sad.

Driving home to Maine, north for eight hours, the feeling of returning that I'd had at Peggy's grave was with me again. Maybe we are always returning, and the first step we take, we took long ago. I could still feel this as I stepped onto the moonlit porch of my house. It was midnight. The bare tree branches were rattling in the wind off the sea. It was well below zero and the porch stairs sounded like they were splitting beneath my feet. Above my head, white stars were scattered across a black sky, near enough to show the sharpness of their edges. The same stars from the last night of my mother's life when she lay in her mother's bed, unable to sleep, perhaps sensing the blood storm just ahead of her. And her husband in a separate room lost to grief.

Lost. Lost for so long. Always lost to me.

And maybe better if she were always lost to me.

Maybe it would have been better that way. Or if not better, then certainly easier. One visit to Peggy's grave, a few companionable days with my father.

I was surprised to find Colleen awake when I came upstairs. She was sitting up in bed with her reading lamp on. “I've just had the most wonderful dream,” she said to me. “I dreamed that you found Peggy. You were walking down this beautiful road in the country, not just you, but all four of the kids and I were with you. We were calling her name. I could hear Cara with her high-pitched voice calling for Peggy. And then we saw someone up ahead standing on the side of the road. And it was her. She looked exactly the same, she hadn't
gotten old, and she said she was waiting for us to take her home with us. She'd been waiting a long time. She took Erin's hand and we all turned around on the road and came home to Maine.”

I sat down on the bed and asked her if my father or my grandfather was in the dream. They weren't, she said.

I told her that I was afraid of hurting them and that I had decided to just let things go.

“Audrey called while you were gone,” Colleen said.

My mother's sister, who had been born just ten months before my twin brother and I. Ten months before Peggy died. Audrey had never called me in my life, but I knew exactly why she had called. “It's Granddad, isn't it? She found out that I was at the nursing home.”

I was right. But it was more than this. “Granddad told her that he was worried about you.”

“Worried about
me
? I'm worried about
him
.”

“You didn't go back to see him,” Colleen went on. “He made a list of six people for you to get in touch with. But he told Audrey he was worried it might be too sad for you.”

I told her that it wasn't sad for me. “I stood at her grave and I didn't feel sad.”

“What did you feel?”

“I don't know. Close to her, I guess. I felt like I was finally where I belonged. Right there, next to her.”

“It took you a lot of years to get there,” she said. “Ever since I met you and you told me about your mother, I've wondered why you didn't try to find out about her or at least find where she was buried. If anything happened to me, I wouldn't want our children to just forget me because it was too sad to remember. And this isn't just about your mother's love story with your father. It's about your love story with her.
The story that's been missing for so long. I think you have a duty to find her story. Even if it makes
everybody
on earth sad. She never had the chance to tell her story to anyone.”

I was talking to a dear friend about this a few days later.
Duty
, that was the right word, he agreed. “I'd say it's your solemn duty.”

I
t was cold and there was a hard wind blowing. The people out walking along Main Street in Hatfield had their heads bowed low beneath the winter sky. I was standing at a pay phone, watching everyone who passed me, trying to figure out if they were old enough to have been alive when my mother walked these same streets. As I watched them, I had this mounting desire to whisper my mother's name to each of them as they passed, and then to wait to see who would stop and turn around.

From the pay phone I called the number in the directory for Muriel Schwartz. She was Peggy's aunt who, with her husband, Howard, had lived only a few blocks from the little duplex that Peggy's parents rented on Market Street in Hatfield. I'd been told that she and Peggy spent a lot of time together.

On the telephone she said, “In the days after you were born I came by each morning to give you and your brother your baths.”

I asked her if I could come see her.

She lived alone in a modern complex of small apartments. She was shivering when I went inside. The winter weather bothered her and she told me that she seldom went outside.
There was a photograph of Howard in a frame by the window and when I saw it, I told her how I had always liked him. Those times I was taken to my grandparents' house on School Street around Christmas, Howard and Muriel were usually there. Howard had seen combat in the war. He was the kind of tough guy who naturally appeals to little boys because he told stories about soldiers, he had big muscles and tattoos on his arms and he would pass my brother and me bottles of Coca-Cola like a conspirator, saying with a sly grin, “Don't tell anyone where this came from, boys.” He had died more than ten years ago.

“Are you okay, living here by yourself?” I asked Muriel.

“Oh, I'm fine,” she said brightly. “Lonely, I guess. No one prepares you for how lonely life becomes when you get old. But let's talk about Peggy. Do you know your mother at all, Donald?”

“No,” I said.

She smiled at me. “Well, it's time that you know her. I'm going to tell you who she was.”

I spent a wonderful morning there in her living room. Muriel spoke in soft, measured sentences about my mother's childhood and her high school years when she was becoming a young woman. During those years Muriel had raised three small boys and Peggy was the primary baby-sitter. She helped Muriel care for these boys, and during the war when Howard was gone for three years, Peggy kept Muriel company.

“I considered your mother a close friend,” she told me.

The whole time I listened to Muriel, a picture of my mother began to form in my mind. The first clear picture I'd ever had. I felt so close to her that when it was time for me to leave, and Muriel spoke about the last hours of Peggy's life, I felt the loss of my mother for the first time.

It was a Sunday morning and Muriel had come by as she always did to give Dave and me our baths. It was August 27, sixteen days after we were born, Peggy's seventh day home from the hospital.

“The house was empty,” Muriel recalled. “It was a Sunday and everyone had gone to church. Your mother had been getting weaker and weaker since she came home after your birth. I never saw her hold you boys, not once. She just didn't have the strength. That morning I had this really spooky feeling when I opened the front door. I can't describe it. It was eerie and I can still remember it. There wasn't a sound in the house. The bed in the sitting room where your mother and father slept was empty. I looked at it and it was the first time I didn't see Peggy there. And I knew that wherever she was, she would have been carried from that bed, she was too weak to walk on her own.

“I found her upstairs in her mother's bedroom. She was curled up on one corner of the bed. Her skin was gray, I will never forget that. Awful … She was coughing very faintly. I went over to her and said, ‘Oh, Peggy, you're so sick, aren't you?' She looked into my eyes with such … I don't know, just like she was crying out to me to please help her.

“I called Dr. Paul Moyer, the family doctor, not the doctor she'd had with you boys. Dr. Moyer arrived shortly, took one look at Peggy and exclaimed, ‘This is not the girl I know.' He called for an ambulance while I stayed with Peggy. Her face … She looked like the photographs that we had all been seeing in the news of the people in the Nazi concentration camps.

“I went along to the hospital. Your father's good friend, Bill someone … I can't remember his last name. He drove me to the hospital.

“They took her upstairs. I was in the waiting room. Your father and grandparents arrived very soon after this. Granddad went upstairs with your father to be with Peggy. She died very shortly after this. No more than an hour after we were together at the hospital.

“Your father came to the waiting room to tell us. It was the oddest thing. He had this terrible look in his eyes, and a faint smile, like he was trying to be brave … He was holding Peggy's watch above his head in his right hand. He was walking stiffly across the floor, taking tiny steps. ‘At least I have her watch,' he said. ‘They let me keep her watch.'

“I knew then,” Muriel told me, “that your father might never be the same again.”

T
here were days after this when I had to keep a notebook with me everywhere I went. Driving the car, eating a meal with Colleen and the kids, even standing in front of a classroom teaching college students. Peggy's story was such a presence in my mind and my heart that it poured out of me. I began waking at four in the morning to the sound of her voice, and the sentences that I wrote down weren't coming from inside me, but from somewhere far away. The sentences fell onto each page effortlessly. And whenever I felt Peggy's voice growing faint I telephoned one of her friends from high school whose names my grandfather had given me.

I was exhilarated by each new page. And then I was certain that I should throw the pages away so they would never see the light of day.

Because of my father. Because of the sadness at the center of Peggy's story. For the same reason my father had never spoken to me and my brother about her, I was now convinced that I should let her voice remain silent, locked beyond the heavy door of sorrow that my father and my grandparents and everyone else had closed when Peggy died.

.  .  .

My mother's brother, Jack, came to see me in Maine not long after this. I hadn't seen him in fifteen years. He was sixty years old now and to our astonishment we looked so much alike, we could have been brothers. We walked the beach in Scarborough that day. The waves, when they rose up into the light just before they broke, were a lovely enamel green. I told Jack that I had spoken with his father and with Muriel and that I had begun writing pages but wasn't sure I should take it any further.

“Why not?” he said.

I gave him what was becoming my stock reply, that if I kept going, I was bound to bring back all the sadness again. The sadness that my grandfather and my father had spent their lifetimes trying to outrun.

“Have you asked your dad how he feels about it?”

“Not directly,” I said. “I just don't want to bring him any sadness now, at this time in his life.” I was staring out to sea as I said this to Jack. It was that time of late afternoon when there is a moment of stillness along the shore, just before the last slanting light disappears beyond the high dunes. In that moment I realized something, but I couldn't say anything because Jack was suddenly telling me about the day Peggy died.