Of Time and Memory (7 page)

“I was riding my bike across the street at Snyder's coal and lumber yard. One of the neighbors came across the street and said, ‘Your sister was taken to the hospital this morning.' I said, ‘I know that.' You know the way a twelve-year-old kid doesn't want to let on that he doesn't know everything there is to know about everything. Then she said, ‘She's not coming home, she's dead.'

“Just like that.
‘She's not coming home, she's dead.'
And that's how I learned that Peggy had died. And now I'm sixty years
old and I still have no idea how my sister died. No one ever told me. So when Dad told me that you've been going to Pennsylvania to talk with people about Peggy, I thought, I'm going to tell Don to go to the Grandview Hospital and ask for Peggy's records there. And her death certificate. I already called the hospital and they won't release the records to me. But you can get them.”

Over the next two weeks I told Colleen many times about what I had realized on the beach that day with Jack: From the beginning I thought that I was setting out to discover who my mother was in this world. But now I knew that I was also going to discover my father. Muriel was right; from the moment my father lost Peggy, he was cast into some new person, never again to be the person he was during the ten months he spent with my mother. I wanted to know my father as my mother had known him when she fell in love with him, she the prettiest girl anyone in Hatfield could remember, and he a skinny, poor kid who grew up with no plumbing and already had false teeth by the time he met her in 1948. I wanted to know what she had loved about him and seen in him, and it seemed entirely possible to me that it was something he had never again possessed after her death. Something she had taken with her.

Our lives proceed in one direction for so long and then we take a half turn in another direction and the whole purpose of our lives is suddenly out there in front of us. I believe this now. I believe we are even given glimpses of our destiny. And on the cold winter afternoon when I sat with Muriel, Peggy's aunt, I felt for the first time in my life that my destiny was to know my mother. The events of Peggy's life were easy to
trace, in part because hers was such a short life and it was lived at a time when things were less complicated than they are today, or if not less complicated, then at least less hurried. For example, a girl who worked with Peggy at the telephone company had no difficulty remembering how Peggy described her first date because a first date in 1948 was just a restaurant meal with a young man. A few hours of conversation and then a memory of that evening which contained no secrets.

I laid down the events of my mother's life along a time line. But the events of our lives do not necessarily convey who we are in this world, and in order for me to connect these events so that they revealed the motives that had inspired them, I had to know the emotions beneath them. I am talking about the only way on earth that anyone ever comes to truly know us. By knowing our fears and our desires, the things that are deep and individual in each of us and the things we try hardest to conceal.

Peggy was an intensely private person who took great measures to conceal these things from the people closest to her. And if she had not opened herself to Muriel, I would only have been able to skate across the surface of her days on this earth. I will always remember and be thankful for Muriel's words to me that winter afternoon:
“Let me tell you who your mother was in this world.”
Not only what she did, but how she felt about herself and the life that encircled her.

Muriel's gift to me was inestimable. Without it I would have been left to
imagine
Peggy's feelings. And I might have been wrong as often as I was right. This would not have been good enough. I wanted to
know
my mother. I wanted to know what she was afraid of and what she desired. I wanted to know the precise measurements of her love for my father
so that I could give him back his love story in its true shape and texture.

We are living at a time now when we want to know what is true. In the stories that we read, we want to know what actually happened and what was invented. I don't know why exactly. But in this story of mine, invention was not good enough for me. I had no wish to invent my mother, but to reinstate her.

M
aybe our adult lives begin when we have that first sense that others are oblivious to
our
dreams and
our
desires. Peggy was seventeen when this happened. Later she suspected that it had happened much sooner for her girlfriends; she believed she was late with everything. The season helped—spring itself was a feast to her senses, and that spring of 1948 she could feel the texture of spring for the first time. The way the light struck the cold marble front of the Hatfield Building and Loan on Broad Street. The green grass at the Montgomery County fairgrounds. She was the kind of young girl who walked her own road alone, and she would have felt as if she was taking in the world around her that spring while everyone else was just moving past it, oblivious to the color and the light as well as to how these things registered inside her. I know that she was confused and unsure how this made her feel; on the one hand it gave her an intense and pleasant feeling of freedom and privacy. And on the other hand it made her feel lonely. Even isolated.

That spring of 1948, Peggy awakens early every morning. Long before the first light of dawn she opens her eyes and listens for the sounds of the world which in those days were the whistle of the Philadelphia train running east toward the city and the newspaper delivery truck pulling to the curb in front
of I. C. Detweiler's General Store. She plays a game with herself: if she awakens before anyone else, then she can lay claim to the world beyond the walls and roof of this house which contain her. Her father's house. The train whistle starts her heart. The delivery truck fills her lungs with air.

Every few nights she will rearrange the furniture in her room—the twin bed, the bureau, the bedside table, the stuffed chair. She will move these things at night when the room is dark. Then when she opens her eyes in the morning, she will be somewhere else.
Someone else
.

Out of necessity she has been waking up earlier and earlier in order to beat her grandfather who has recently moved in with her to convalesce from a fall he took off a carpenter's scaffold.

In her room she dresses in darkness. Her flannel nightgown she folds in tissue paper and slips into her drawer, a small act to purify the day. And before she leaves the room she kneels down on the floor of her closet to make sure that none of her shoes is out of place. She places her hand on the back of each shoe and pushes so all the toes are lined up against the baseboard. This small gesture folds into the smooth contours of an ordered life and holds together the symmetry of the world. She can sense this and it calms her. At this hour of the morning, the world, to her, is still a fine painting that she will only make a mess of, marching back and forth across it with paint on the soles of her shoes as the day goes on. That is how she thinks of herself in those days. Ungainly and unsure of herself. Not smart enough. Not pretty enough.

In the hallway she stops at the doorway of her brother's room. Jack is ten years old. She has bought him a cowboy's six-shooter and holster for his birthday and it hangs off the bedpost. She listens to him breathing. Sometime in the last
year while she was growing into her beauty, the sharp angles of her body giving way to roundness, she had begun seeing her brother as more than a pest who plagued her, hiding her lipstick in the mailbox on the front porch, her underwear in the glove compartment of her father's Ford. She had begun to see him as a person who would go on and take his place in the world, and this as much as any other change seemed to indicate that she had finally left behind her girlhood, ducking below the last breaking waves of adolescence, then emerging as a young woman while the turmoil and confusion washed away beneath her feet.

In a bed across from her brother, Aunt Sue is snoring faintly. She works as a nurse in Philadelphia and visits frequently. Her sister, Lilly, lives three doors away and lately has been giving Peggy a course in advanced sewing. Tonight, in front of both these aunts, Peggy will take her place at the Singer machine with the black wrought-iron legs and the little white light glowing beneath its tin shade.

A few steps away she pauses at the door of her mother and father's bedroom. She can smell the printer's ink on the clothes that her father has left on a chair. Tan khakis, top and bottom. A black leather belt. A white T-shirt. In another hour her mother will awaken to go to work in the cafeteria of the Consolidated School. She will put on her white uniform and the hair net that always makes Peggy feel sorry for her because with the hair net on, her mother doesn't look like herself but like a kitchen worker complying with someone's rules. The hair net, something so light that it is almost weightless in her hand, steals her mother from her and Peggy will turn away whenever her mother puts it on in her presence.

In the kitchen on these early mornings, Peggy's grandfather is already sitting at the oak table, his head in his hands. Something
is knocked down inside her when she sees that he has beaten her to the day.

She waits for him to finish his silent morning prayers, then touches his shoulder. Here is a man who dropped thirty feet from a carpenter's scaffolding and landed on his back, the scaffold planks and all his tools crashing down on top of him. When the doctor examined him in the emergency room at Grandview Hospital in Sellersville he exclaimed, “You're in so many pieces, Howard, that I don't know where to start.” He's an early riser out of habit, a carpenter who always prided himself on being the first one at George Snyder's lumberyard each day to pick up his stock. He is an old man with a head of white waves, but his body is as hard as wood. “You have to be strong in this life, Peggy,” he has always told her. It is his battle cry and whenever he says it, it makes Peggy wonder just how strong she is, and will have to be.

He wants to show her what he has made with his big square hands. He is very pleased with himself when he takes it from the vise that he has screwed to the kitchen table so the glue would dry overnight. It's a kind of wedge that he has carved out of wood and attached to the sole of his right shoe to compensate for the leg that has withered since his accident. The doctor had wanted to amputate the leg, but he healed it on his own, though it has shrunk three inches now. “How do you like it, what do you think?” he asks Peggy.

He wants to try it on and give it a test right now. She watches him walk to the sink and back, clomping like a horse. It is Peggy's idea to put it to the real test. A few dance steps—not a slow dance, but the jitterbug.

“The jitterbug?” he asks.

“You have to be strong in this life!” she tells him with her green eyes brightening.

He is whirling her around, smiling back with pride. She has a new move, a little slide step that she has been rehearsing in her room with the door closed. When she shows him, he raises his eyebrows appreciatively. It makes her feel lucky to have been born at a time when the deep, driving bass notes of the dance music of America match so completely the rhythms of her heart.

She lays some coal in the cookstove and makes oatmeal for the two of them. “No cream,” she tells him, “only skim milk.”

“You could afford to put on a little weight. You'll dance it off anyway at the rate you're going these days. Out every night. Do you ever dance with the same boy twice?”

“Haven't found one yet who can keep up with me. Now eat your oatmeal and stop snooping.”

She thinks of him now, the boy she met last Friday night at Sunnybrook in Pottstown. Who's the skinny guy with the angel? she'd overheard someone ask.
The skinny guy and the angel
 … She smiles to herself as she thinks about how he kept hitching up his flannel trousers. Maybe they fit him before he went to the war. From the big bay window in the dance hall he pointed out his new Chevy.

“It's the convertible,” he said with pleasure. “The green one over there.”

It was too dark to see but she told him it looked like a fine automobile.

She had one dance and one glass of punch in cut crystal cups. He offered her a cigarette which she declined.

“So, what do you do with yourself?” he asked her.

She told him that she was working at the telephone company in Lansdale, saving her money to move somewhere.

“Move somewhere?”

“Maybe to a big city like New York.”

A sad look passed over his face, and she would have taken note of this.

But he recovered quickly and said he didn't know why anyone would want to leave this part of Pennsylvania. He was so glad to be back after two years in the army. The first thing he had done when he got home was drive up and down every street in Skippack, where he'd been a boy. Down the streets where he used to deliver newspapers on his bicycle.

He paused then and Peggy thought he had gone down all the old streets to see how things had changed since he'd left for the war.

And what he said next was what she would remember to tell her aunt. He had looked right into her eyes with his lit-up smile and said, “Mostly, I guess I did it to see how
I'd
changed.”

Later that spring she overhears one of the girls at the telephone company telling someone about a man on the Cowpath Road in Lansdale who is building a bomb shelter in his backyard. One afternoon, rather than take the trolley home from work, she rides along with her friend so she can see firsthand.

They park a few blocks away then walk across the street, their heels clacking on the hard macadam road, reminding Peggy that she had spent too much of her first paycheck buying these heels at Stuart's shoe store. All the girls were wearing them now, even to jitterbug in, and they make her feel tall and elegant, but she is still kicking herself for succumbing to the fashion when what she really wanted to do was put the money into her savings account so that one day she could go
clacking down the busy streets of some distant city where no one would know her and where she would be free to do whatever she liked, including spending a whole day just staring out a window, barely moving, just watching people go by in their busy lives. This kind of blessed anonymity she has only felt twice in her life, both times when she went to the Allentown fair and allowed herself the rare pleasure of disappearing into the throngs of people who swept her along in their momentum.