Of Time and Memory (8 page)

It had been exhilarating, but if she heeds the polio warnings she will miss the fair this summer. The thought of missing it, of missing the chance to disappear from herself for a few hours and to feel the velocity of life in the people around her, is as much a threat to her as the thought of polio condemning her to a lifetime of metal braces the way it had poor Frances Snyder, whose father owned the Atlantic station on Main Street, a girl exactly Peggy's age who, they said, would never walk again.

From the curb the two of them can see mounds of dirt in the backyard of a small one-story house.

“I bet it's only a swimming pool,” her friend says.

Peggy wants to laugh along with her, but she can't because her grandfather has already told her that the bomb shelter would be finished off with reinforced concrete. The only way in and out will be a round hole in the top with a concrete lid that screws on.

Peggy doesn't want to make a big deal out of this but while her friend is speaking, a fear spreads through her. All Peggy can think about is the houses of her friends, and the dance hall in Pottstown and the Consolidated School and the movie
theaters in Lansdale being blown to smithereens. During the war she used to stand outside with her father at night, keeping watch for enemy airplanes. Her father had a chart that showed the silhouettes of every enemy airplane. He would bring the chart with him each time. She will always remember how he would lean back on his heels and look up at the sky, his suspenders buckling a little on his shoulders. “When it happens,” he had said to her once, “they won't be airplanes, they'll be rockets coming over from Russia. You'll look up into the sky and they'll be like these great huge cigars crossing from the horizon and that'll be the end of everything!”

The air will be full of flying glass, her father told her, and everything will stop.

Her friend is speaking again, telling her that if there is going to be a war with the Russians, the thing that will make her maddest of all is that she never
did
anything.

“You know what I mean, Peg?
With a boy?
Always afraid that somebody would think we were bad girls.”

Peggy keeps looking at the torn-up earth and wonders what kind of man builds a bomb shelter in his backyard anyway. How frightened would a man have to be? Perhaps he was in the last war and he saw something that he never wants to see again.

“Did you hear what I said, Peg? We were too young when the boys left for the war, too young to say goodbye properly. And when they came home we were
too good
to properly say hello.”

Peggy can hear her but she doesn't answer; this has been going on for some time now, the sounds of the real world failing to reach her. Failing to penetrate her thoughts. Her deep thoughts. A teacher in her last year of high school told her that she was a girl who hid
inside
her thoughts and
behind
her
beauty. At the time Peggy wanted to deny this, but couldn't. It has grown worse; at work lately she drifts away without warning, sometimes right in the middle of placing a call. In a room filled with voices and the blinking lights of the switchboards she is able to just vanish.

Aloof
. That is the word one friend accused her of. She's too pretty and too independent for the rest of the world. So she acts aloof.

But she does not feel aloof. She feels inadequate and temporary. Maybe it was the war that had made her feel this way. Or maybe it was just the fear that ran so deep in her, the fear that she might live her whole life waiting for her life to start. This was something she often thought about during the war. How people's lives ended before they had begun. So many of the soldiers were boys really, young and innocent. And the children killed in the bombed-out cities, not just the children on our side, but the Japanese and German children as well. At work there had been talk about the boy from Lansdale who was killed in France. Peggy had wondered at the time if a beautiful French girl with rouge on her cheeks had kissed him before he was killed. She wondered if God forgives the girls who make love to the soldiers that go on to die in war. If God looks upon this as an act of benevolence.

They stop at Inky's ice cream parlor for a cone on the way home. Strawberry for Peggy and even as she is eating it she is planning to take a long ride on her bicycle when she gets home to work off the calories. The diner is packed with high school kids. They all look so sure of themselves to her: Where do they get their self-confidence? Some of the girls, in an act of teenage rebellion, have traded one of their bobby socks
and one saddle shoe for a sock and shoe that don't match. As self-assured and full of themselves as they appear to be, she still wouldn't want to trade places with these girls; high school had been an endless repetition of long days spent trying to take hold of something meaningful,
anything
that would amount to something more than just words delivered by teachers who had forgotten long ago what it was like to be young, to be desperate to join the real world beyond the classroom walls and windows.

In a corner booth a baby has begun to cry and immediately Peggy and her friend are rising from their seats to get a look. Her friend says, Have you noticed that there are babies positively everywhere lately? Gosh, I want one, don't you, Peggy?

Someday, maybe, she replies. There were other things she wanted to do first, and though she couldn't name these things precisely, they belonged to an imagined life that was different from her mother's life of cooking and cleaning up after a family. She hopes to venture far from that kind of hemmed-in life, but in the diner, when the young mother stills her baby's cries, it is a marvelous thing to observe. The baby, sitting on her mother's arm like a puppet, is suddenly smiling and looking around the room with a bright and knowing expression.

How exquisite to be so good at something, to possess a heart that is capable of consoling another human being. This is something real and meaningful in a world of abstractions and uncertainties. A world that Peggy so seldom feels a part of. A world that was proclaiming its heartache in tonight's newspaper headlines that told how the Russian army had begun entrenching along the 38th parallel in Korea. Picture them!
A whole army of men digging holes!
An interminable line of men in uniform bent over shovels on the other side of the world. And on this side another army of young husbands
digging up their backyards to make room for bomb shelters with concrete lids that screw shut. What a strange world it was, so difficult to get inside of. At one moment its heartache was distant and immeasurable, and in the next it was there, right in front of Peggy, on the streets of her small town. Down along Broad Street, past the school yard where the swings move slightly in the soft wind, there is the Wimmer house, the little brick house with the gable above the front door and the flag with its single star in the front window. In the lighted living room on any night, people sit in front of the radio. The war has been over for three years now. The son who used to
live
in this
living room
has been dead for almost four years. The people in this room once waited for him to write to them from the war, and then they waited for his body to be returned from France. Now life is going on without him. The patterns of a day are once again holding together despite the awful loss. This is one of the things that are difficult to make sense of. Isn't this the
definition
of sadness to a young girl like Peggy? The way that life goes on after a loved one is lost seems to be almost as sad as the loss itself.

T
he Grandview Hospital, Sellersville, Pennsylvania. Room 9. A man with a purple face is sleeping on one bed. The other bed is empty. I joke with a nurse that when my generation is old there won't be an empty bed in any hospital in America. “I'll leave you alone,” she whispers.

I see the two large windows that my mother was looking out of when she died on August 27, 1950. Today they are streaked with rain but on a sunny August afternoon they would have showed Peggy green hills, farms and silos, the highway running back home, back to everything that she had known and trusted in her life and believed she would be a part of for a very long time. From this room she could have seen a long, long way.

The hospital records begin with this account:

I am reading these notations for the fifth time when the man with the purple face awakens and looks at me.

Dr. P. T. Moyer is dead. Dr. Peters is dead. Dr. Wright is dead.

“Everyone is dead,” I tell the man with the purple face. “I waited too long.”

He looks at me with bloodshot eyes. I believe that my mumbling has frightened him. I tell him I am sorry and make my way home.

.  .  .

Tom Pugles never heard the story of his sister's sleepover when the girls rode in his father's truck to pick up fruits and vegetables for his market. When I recount this story, it brings a light to his eyes. We are sitting at a square table in Zoto's Diner in Line Lexington and he is telling me about the trip to Canada that he and my father took together after the war, before my father met Peggy. It was a vacation for both of them. They drove in my father's green Chevrolet convertible. They were carefree days, the two of them best friends, sleeping out at night under the stars.

He has a photograph he took of my father when they stopped for a night in Bar Harbor, Maine. In front of a shoe store my father is standing in a pair of enormous shoes, size sixteen or seventeen. He is looking down at his feet and laughing.

Tom's sister, Lorraine, has written me from Florida to tell me about the days when my father was dating her. She was his first date after he returned home from the war. “He was very romantic,” she has written. “He wrote me letters after each date.” On one date they took a picnic supper to the Jersey shore. They stayed late after everyone else had left the beach. My father climbed up into the lifeguard stand and gave a Tarzan yell.

There is another photograph, of my father and Tom and two young women at Greenlake Park where they had gone for my father's twenty-first birthday. Tom is laughing in the photograph as my father sneaks behind one of the girls and puts up two fingers behind her head.

I have no memories of my father as a carefree man. He was always kind, but never carefree. I remember when we lived on
Clearspring Road he had a push lawn mower and I would walk beside him as he mowed the grass. He always mowed from right to left and I walked along beside him, to his right, in the lane he had just made with the mower. There was only the clicking of the blades as they spun through the grass. I would ask him questions and he would answer me, but our conversation quickly lapsed into silent stretches that he never broke. I remember vividly how, on one occasion, he explained to me what a “perfect game” was in baseball.

Then he bought a power mower, and the gasoline engine made too much noise for dialogue. I still walked beside him. I remember seeing his lips move sometimes, and I realized that he was talking to himself as the power mower pulled him along.

Tom Pugles and I are the last to leave the diner. A young waitress is wiping off the tables around us when Tom tells me that after Peggy's death my father confided to him that he was going to kill himself by driving onto the railroad tracks on Broad Street in Lansdale, in front of the express train from Philadelphia. In the weeks after Peggy's death, Tom would sit up all night with my father, drinking coffee and smoking Salem cigarettes. Tom was working as a state trooper in those days. He wanted me to know about one night in particular. He had gone straight to my father's apartment without taking the time to change out of his uniform. When he was walking to the front door he saw my father running from window to window, locking them, and then the front door. “Your father was convinced that I had come to arrest him and put him in jail for Peggy's death,” he tells me.

That night Tom had stood outside the front door calling to my father until he finally opened the door. Then he carefully explained to him that he had not killed Peggy. A few
nights later Tom didn't have time to change out of his uniform before he went to visit my father, and the same thing happened again. In his sadness my father seemed to have lost his mind.

I am sinking into the horror of this image of my father, and the words on my mother's hospital record.…

It is all becoming very real to me for the first time in my life. I can see the waitress standing behind Tom, waiting for us to get up so she can clear our table. Tom is talking about my father before Peggy's death, his great optimism, his smile, and the way he could dance the jitterbug. People always loved to see Dick Snyder coming in their direction. Never a mean thing to say about anyone. Always forgiving.