Of Time and Memory (24 page)

Once she makes up her mind to do something, no one can dissuade her.

Eileen, the nurse, tells her that the old notion of eating for two isn't quite true. You should just eat good nutritional meals, regular portions. And you should expect to gain maybe thirty-five pounds. With your delicate frame, perhaps even as little as twenty-five.

Eileen is sweet, but this is the part of being pregnant that Peggy cannot stand. The public nature of it. There she is in her
condition
. And everyone believes they are qualified to comment about her
condition
.

Why are my fingers swollen when I'm not eating anything at all? She doesn't ask this question, but it runs through her mind as she stares down at her hand.

Maybe you're eating for three! Dick says. She can see a smile light up his face. I was a twin. There are two sets of twins on my side of the family, and one of Peg's aunts had three sets of twins herself.

Well, I hope they like crackers, she says. She has a box of Saltines on her lap and she is eating them one after another, slowly, chewing each one fifty times before she swallows, the way Aunt Anna told her to. She has heard that morning sickness can be cured by always keeping something in your stomach. The crackers do seem to be helping today.

The world sails by outside the car window. Long, even fields and then rolling farmland giving way to scrub pines and the salt scent of the sea. Dick and Bill are talking about the communists in Korea, discussing the chances for war there. We are going to have to take the commies on somewhere, Bill says. It might as well be Korea. Better than here, at home.

The giant billboard on the right-hand side of the road, a puppy pulling down a little child's bathing suit in an advertisement for Coppertone sunbathing oil.

There are so many Chinese communists, they say we'd run out of bullets to gun them all down. We wouldn't be able to make new bullets fast enough to kill the yellow hordes.

Peggy asks them to please stop. Eileen is looking through the pregnancy book which she has brought along to show her. Listen to this, everyone, she announces. She reads the part about the first cells dividing. The cells in salt water. You are carrying an ocean in your belly.

And listen to this, boys. How does the ideal husband behave during his wife's pregnancy? First, last, and always he remembers he has a bigger share of the responsibility than the mere launching of the performance at one end or the paying for it at the other. He should be cheerful and patient—

That's me! Dick sings out.

—relieve his wife of worries, avoid quarrels—

We never quarrel, do we, sweetheart?

—cater to her desires (up to the point where she is merely trying to be mollycoddled), overlook her appearance—

You look beautiful to me!

—and take an interest in their impending acquisition. Any expectant father who accomplishes all this deserves a Congressional Medal.

Pin it on right here, will you, Peg?

From behind she puts her arms around him and lays her head on his shoulder. She kisses his cheek and whispers, Pearls, pearls.

As far as maternity clothing is concerned, Eileen reads on, your clothing should be comfortable, but also attractive to your husband!

More laughter. The sound of it is reassuring. The pale sky is flying past Peggy's window. She can feel herself smile. When are we going to get there, Daddy?

The laughter rises, such a sweet, sweet sound. And she rolls down her window to let the salt air fill the car. A smell as sweet as the sound of laughter.

But there is her hand again, her pudgy fingers; isn't this the lousy way it always is with her and the world, always the collision of her desire to be at peace with the world, to laugh and smile and to embrace the miracles in her midst, her beautiful friends here with her, and her devoted young husband, and her baby growing inside her. But always, just as she is reaching to embrace all of this, there is something more to be afraid of, and to run from.

She doesn't want Dick to turn and see, so she puts her hands beneath her thighs and sits on them the rest of the way.

.  .  .

On the shore they are teasing her—Whose kooky idea was it to come to the beach, anyway? They have to shout to be heard above the wind which is driving in, straight off the sea. It is the kind of weather that makes Peggy feel like she could be swept off the face of the earth in an instant without anyone even realizing that she is gone.

But it feels so good to be near the sea. This is the place where she fell in love with Dick. He and Bill are walking ahead. They still look like boys, not yet men, though they have been to war. Boys really. Slugging each other playfully. Peggy gathers a handful of small stones and surprises Dick by running up behind him and pouring them into his pocket. I don't want you to blow away! I'm weighing you down so you won't blow away!

There is the Steel Pier up ahead where the horse and rider dive from the top of a seventy-foot platform into a pool of water. In New York City on her honeymoon Peggy met a woman who had seen this on
her
honeymoon and she told Peggy never to go see it because it was terrifying for the horse. Peggy has never been able to forget this, the horrible image of a horse falling headfirst.

She takes Eileen's arm and leans close to speak into her ear. The sight of Dick and Bill ahead of her has made her feel certain one more time that this baby is going to be a boy. I want six boys, she tells Eileen, but if I can't get that many, I want at least two to take the places of the brothers Dick lost when he was a boy.

This is the only person she will ever tell.

On the ride home in the back seat Eileen answers some of her medical questions. Your doctor has said no salt because of your high blood pressure which can aggravate the toxemia. Toxemia can be dangerous. In extreme cases it is called
preeclampsia, and can be fatal. Trust your doctor and do whatever he tells you, Eileen says.

That night after Dick had fallen to sleep, Peggy put her long winter coat on over her nightgown and walked out onto the front porch to see if she could hear any sounds coming from the labor room of Elm Terrace. The second floor was dark but she stayed outside and watched for a long time, waiting for a light to go on in the delivery room and for the boys from the volunteer service corps to come dashing down Broad Street, waiting for a baby to be born on her birthday.

But nothing broke the darkness of the night.

I
should conceal this truth. I should turn my back to some of the things that my mother did so this will be a more uplifting story. A story that people can nod their heads to. I should say that Peggy went blithely along, believing in God and fearing nothing. It would be a story about faith that people read again and again when they are blue and when they catch an unexpected glimpse of the truth about their own lives—that they, like Peggy, are only barely hanging on to this life, that a single telephone call can throw our careful lives into unspeakable disorder. I should not say that sorrow awaits us all.

I can just say that Dick went off to work each morning whistling, which is the truth—the neighbors remember this. A skinny young man in khaki pants walking down the cement pathway to his green Chevrolet, whistling. Happy because he had such a beautiful girl for his wife, a girl he never dreamed might be interested in him, a kid who still had pimples on his face and who had false teeth issued to him by the United States Army on his fifth day in boot camp.

I should hide the fact that in April, at the beginning of Peggy's fifth month, there was already enough concern on her doctor's part that he advised against the trip to Washington, D.C., that she and Dick were planning to take with Roy and
Naomi Meyers. The afternoon of her office visit, Dr. Wright's nurse called Dick at Lauchman's print shop. You're not letting your wife eat salt, are you?

My father remembers the doctor forbidding Peggy to eat salt. This is one of the few things he can recall through his amnesia.

And I can write this now because it is also true: This is the only thing he ever knew, the only thing he was ever told about her sickness. Peggy hid it all from him.

Aunt Anna smiled wisely at me when I laid out my theory for her as we sat in her living room on Columbia Street where she spends her days caring for her husband. I told her that I had this nightmare about the five men conspiring, on religious grounds, to force my mother to keep her baby.

“If you had ever known your mother you would understand that no one ever could have done that to her. Peggy made up her own mind to keep you boys. You were real to her. Remember that. To everyone else you were not yet real. And she never told your father about any of it. She made her choice and kept it all to herself.”

My father went off to work whistling each morning because no one ever told him how sick Peggy was. She never told him that during her exam the day before the trip to Washington, the doctor explained that by the end of this month if her condition continued to deteriorate she was going to have to give up her baby because the baby was poisoning her. He believed in taking every precaution. He was a skilled physician and he had never lost a mother.

There is a doctor in Lansdale who was in high school with my mother, one class ahead. He called me in April to say he
needed to speak with me. He told me that he might have been in love with Peggy from a distance, though she never knew he existed. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen and when he was away at medical school and learned that she had died, he told himself that one day he was going to find out exactly what had happened.

Five years after her death he returned to Lansdale to begin his medical practice. On a rainy afternoon he looked up her medical records at Grandview Hospital. He began asking questions discreetly and he found that it was common knowledge among the physicians on the hospital staff that Peggy Snyder had died needlessly. Her doctor, Edward Wright, had done everything within his power to persuade her to give up her baby. But her mind was set, she refused to listen to him.

The doctor invited me to his house for breakfast. He stood at the stove cooking omelettes and telling me everything he remembered. She was young, she had that going for her, and Dr. Wright might have held out a slim hope. But in the early morning hours of August 11, when he delivered Peggy's baby only to discover that there was a second baby inside her, he knew that it was hopeless.

He said that a man like Dr. Wright would have washed his hands of my mother after she refused to follow his warning. And now when Dr. Wright says that he never had my mother for a patient, he believes he is telling the truth. Peggy pushed him out of her life just when she needed him most. He was her last chance to survive.

“When I say she died
needlessly,
” he told me, “I mean she could have lived if she had been willing to lose you and your brother.”

.  .  .

She kept it all to herself. She made up her mind because to her alone we were already real.

But she was angry too. Her swollen hands made her angry. And her swollen feet and her face which was gradually becoming unrecognizable to her.

She was angry at the headaches that woke her from her sleep, and she was angry at her husband who said the same thing over and over when he laid cold washcloths on her forehead to try to numb the pain. You'll be all right, Peggy, just don't put salt on your celery.

It was the only thing he knew to say to her.

She wanted to see the cherry blossoms in Washington. She had gone to the city two years earlier for her senior class trip in high school and she wanted to return just to see if it was as beautiful a city as she remembered it. Were the monuments as white under their night lights as she remembered them? So white they appear covered in snow.

They were beautiful and she was happy and would never forget standing in moonlight before the Lincoln Memorial. And Arlington Cemetery with its rows of white crosses for as far you can see. Identical white crosses that look like sugar cubes on the distant hillsides. Standing there with Dick, she finally knew what the war on the radio had cost.

But she was angry and distracted the whole trip because the doctor had also told her that in another month, six weeks at the most, if she was still determined to keep the baby until its full term, she was going to have to be cared for for the remainder of her pregnancy. She was going to have to move
back into her father's house on Market Street and spend the next three months in bed. Back in her father's house where the progression will fall from her life, the marvelous progression of the past twelve months when she went from being a single girl to an engaged girl to a married woman to a pregnant wife. She can't imagine what she will
do
each day in her father's house. Or how she will find any room there to be alone.

After her return from this trip to Washington she locks herself in her room all day for two days while she takes out all the seams of her maternity clothes because they have become too tight. She has a small scalpel as sharp as a razor, with a tortoiseshell handle and a slightly hooked blade. She cuts the seams one stitch at a time, the anger making her hand into a fist around the scalpel. She won't speak to Dick for these two days because now the marvelous progression which took her from being a high school girl to a pregnant wife feels to her like it has stolen something from her. She didn't even have time to learn what it meant to be a wife and now she is going to have to learn what it means to be a mother. And a fat lady too. A fat lady in her father's tiny half house on Market Street.

But in Washington she recalls her high school trip here. How she could have been kissed by Lawrence Jackman standing in the shadow of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving where they had watched money being made. And in Arlington Cemetery she ends up lying in the grass in her husband's arms. Surrounded by so many dead men. Dead husbands and fathers from the war. All of this was happening while she was learning how to walk in high heels and wear her hair like Ginger Rogers. And it makes her feel stupid now. So stupid. How could she have ever believed that the war was heroic rescues
and parades and illicit love affairs. The war wasn't at all what it had sounded like on the radio. The war was death. Countless graves. With her husband's arms around her, one pale cheek pressed against his shirt collar, she sees the white crosses at ground level spilled across the green fields, each one commemorating a fiancée, wife, and mother whose world has stopped.