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Authors: Don J. Snyder

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BOOK: Of Time and Memory
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“I'm sure I never went. And here, look at the date of the postmark.”

The envelope was postmarked June 8.

The shower was to take place May 22.

“No one went to her shower because she mailed the invitations two weeks late,” Peg said. “She didn't want anyone to see her, I'm sure of it. This was in what would have been the last three months of her pregnancy.”

Peg let me keep the invitation and the letter. When we said goodbye we held each other outside the restaurant, in the rain.

“There's a lot that no one knows about your mother,” she said to me. “Peggy was very, very private; if she was sick she never would have told anyone, not even your father.
Particularly
not your father. But you have to find out exactly what was going on. Don't stop until you know all that there is to know.”

I used a pay phone at the restaurant to call the woman in the nursing home who was going to set up a meeting for me with the Anna Hartman who had been my mother's nurse at the Elm Terrace Hospital during her delivery. My idea was to drive straight from the restaurant to see Anna. She would remember, I was sure, the young mother who died after giving birth to twins. And I hoped she might also be able to tell me what had happened to Peggy, what had caused her to become so sick.

“This is Don Snyder, Peggy Snyder's son,” I said when she answered the telephone.

“Oh my,” she said. “I called your house in Maine this morning and your wife told me you were here. I'm sorry. Anna Hartman died yesterday.”

.  .  .

I drove fast through the rain to Lansdale with my mother's letter to Peg on the seat beside me. It was raining too hard to read the numbers on the apartments on North Broad Street so I rolled the window down and leaned across the seat. When I thought I had found the right place I pulled the car to a stop on the side of the street and ran out into the pouring rain. I could feel the blood pounding in my head. I was asking myself, “What are you doing?” And it was number 632, not 623. Running back down to the sidewalk, I reached inside the car window I had left open and grabbed the letter. The ink on the envelope had begun to bleed from the rain.

I ran down the street and then across, through the traffic, to number 623. It was a brick walk-up, adjoined on both sides by identical apartments. I knocked hard on the front door and peered through the glass in the door to a dark corridor with a doorway on the right. No one answered and I went to the windows lining the front porch, knocking on each of them, knowing that it was no use because there wasn't anyone home, but knocking anyway. I could see a couch through the windows and two chairs. I could picture Peggy walking through these rooms with my father. Some part of me believed that if I stayed there long enough someone would open the door for me and let me walk through the rooms and I would find something that had belonged to my mother, some small thing that would explain why she was planning even in the first month of her pregnancy to have her baby in Norristown instead of the Elm Terrace Hospital which had stood across the street where there was now an apartment building. Even as I was driving away and holding the letter over the car's heater to dry it before my mother's handwriting disappeared, I was thinking that someday I would know why she had not mailed the invitations to her
baby shower until two weeks after it was supposed to take place.

I drove to the North Penn Hospital next, the hospital that replaced Elm Terrace. A woman in the office where they keep medical records told me that all records from the old Elm Terrace Hospital had been destroyed. “We have nothing here,” she said. “The records are gone.”

I was standing at her desk soaking wet from the rain, asking her about something that had happened almost fifty years ago, long before she was born. I realized that I was leaning over her desk, too close to her, and dripping water on her papers. I had this feeling that she thought I was a lunatic who had wandered inside from the storm. I gave her my mother's letter to read. When she was finished I told her that it was the only thing I had that my mother had ever written and that I had to find out what had happened to her. “She was only nineteen years old?” she said after I had told her my story.

“What about her doctor's records?” I asked. “Dr. Wright. Dr. Edward Wright, whose office was on Broad and Third streets?”

“They would have been disposed of by his family when he died,” she said. “We wouldn't have anything.”

I asked her if she would take my name and telephone number just in case. As she was writing them down she said, “I'm really sorry, sir, but I don't think there's anything I can do to help you.”

I found my father sitting at the dining-room table with the telephone and sheets of notebook paper. I stood inside the door and before I had even taken off my boots I was hitting him with questions. “The word ‘eclampsia,' Dad—did you
ever hear the doctor use that word? How did she die then, Dad? How come no one ever found out how she died! And do you remember the baby shower that she never went to? Here—have you ever seen one of these invitations? And why was she going to have her baby in Norristown? She must have talked with you about this? None of her girlfriends ever saw her when she was pregnant. None of them. What was she hiding from? And your apartment on Broad Street was right across the street from the Elm Terrace Hospital; weren't you there every damned day asking Dr. Wright why she wasn't getting better?”

He looked at me with a puzzled expression. “We weren't living in the apartment on Broad Street, we moved to Grandmother Schwartz's house in Hatfield.”

“I know you did.
Why?

“So Grandmother could help out.”

“Help out with what, Dad? You were living there with Peggy and her mother and father and brother and her grandparents, and God knows, maybe two aunts—all of you crammed into that tiny half of a house, and no one could see that Peggy was dying? No one could pick up the damned telephone and call the doctor? I don't get it … I don't understand how she could get worse every day from the day we were born—”

“On August eleventh,” he said helplessly.

“Right, August eleventh. And they send her home from the hospital on the twentieth and she can't walk on her own—that's what Peg Kirsch told me she had been told. And she'd stopped eating completely. And it goes on for seven more days and no one calls Dr. Wright and tells him to do something? You're going to have to help me figure this out, Dad, because I'm sorry, but I just don't get it.”

I put my boots back on and went outside and smoked a cigarette. When I came back, my father was still at the table. He picked up a piece of paper and said, “I wrote down the names of all Peggy's bridesmaids at the wedding.”

I took a deep breath.

“I called one of the girls and told her that you were writing Peggy's memoirs. She wants to talk to you.”

I took the piece of paper.

“I just wanted to help you, Donnie,” he said to me. “I wish I could remember all these things.”

It was all out of me. I told him I was sorry.

Chapter Fourteen

O
f all things, Peggy's first real fling is with a bookie from Camden, New Jersey. It begins in the heat of July, in the summer of 1948. Actually he sends her a dozen peach-colored roses in May and a wide-brimmed straw hat in June with the same peach-color ribbon around the brim, both of these offerings because he found her voice so pleasant when she helped him take his bets through the switchboard of the telephone company in Lansdale. Some of the girls at work have teased her about this secret admirer, making him out to be a rogue like Rhett Butler in
Gone With the Wind
. He bets on everything, it seems: professional baseball games in both the big leagues and the minor leagues; the women's field hockey world championships which interested Peggy a great deal; the Wednesday-night fights which she found herself listening to on the radio lately, much to the puzzlement of her father who always sat in the stuffed chair listening by himself.

In July the summer Olympic games begin at Wembley Park in England after a lapse of twelve years, and the bookie has drawn her into the excitement surrounding the performance of a Dutch housewife named Fanny Blankers. The thirty-year-old mother of two from Amsterdam has won three gold medals in the hurdles and sprints and the bookie claims to have made a thousand dollars by betting on her.

He makes Peggy a simple proposition: if Fanny captures a fourth gold medal, then she must meet him in Souderton for dinner.

There is something about his voice that makes this offer attractive. Something wise and worldly. There is also the satisfaction of knowing how out of sorts her father would be to know that she had accepted a blind date from a bookie! Lately she has been searching for ways to threaten the principles he is so determined to stand upon. Her sweaters are too tight. She is spending too much time alone in her room. She disappears just when everyone else in the house is sitting down to meals. The dance moves that she rehearses upstairs rattle the pictures on the walls downstairs. And she refuses to date anyone, preferring instead to go out in large packs of girls and boys and then answering his queries about what she'd been doing and where she'd gone with the same vague answer each time he waits up for her: We were messing around, that's all.

Messing around?

Messing around, that's all.

So the Dutch housewife wins her fourth gold medal and Peggy takes the commuter train to Souderton on a Saturday night. She angers her father by wearing jeans rolled up to her knees and a cotton shirt with the tails hanging out, partly to provoke him and partly as a precaution because she has told the bookie that she will be wearing a green sundress; this way she can stand him up at the last minute if he shows up the way one of the girls at work predicted he would, sporting a thin moustache and wearing a zoot suit.

Actually he is dressed rather like a Fuller Brush salesman. A stiff blue suit with a white carnation in his lapel. He has jet black hair ironed straight back from his forehead above his pale gray eyes. He is carrying a newspaper rolled up like a
telescope, which he is tapping against his thigh as he looks around the restaurant. As the diners turn to regard him he gives them each a pleasant half smile and a nod.

Friendly enough, Peggy guesses. So she raises her hand. He walks toward her with quick precise steps, which could be what remains of a march from his war days or which might indicate his eagerness.

They shake hands. His name is Robert Marsh. He calls her Miss Schwartz and tells her to call him Robert.

So, Mr. Marsh, she says. How much money have you made on your bets today?

He unfolds the newspaper and shows her the box scores of last night's ball games. Two dollars here. Three-fifty here.

Do you ever lose, Mr. Marsh?

I could lose tonight, he tells her with a shy expression, placing his elbows on the Formica table, making a little pedestal of his hands and resting his chin on his knuckles.

What is it you're betting on tonight? she asks, though she is aware that she's walking straight into his trap.

I'm betting you'll let me kiss you when I take you home.

The room seems to fall to silence around her.

She leans back in her chair, crossing her arms in front of her.

How much have you wagered, Mr. Marsh?

A great deal. My life's savings.

Maybe I'll let you win if you agree to split the jackpot with me.

He puts out his hand for her to shake. Deal, he says.

On the finger where a wedding ring would be, he is wearing a gold ring with the University of Virginia embossed on its face.

She shakes his hand.

What is interesting about him is that all through dinner he only asks her about herself and her life. She has scarcely been in the presence of a boy before who didn't go on and on about himself.

But this is hardly a boy. Late twenties, nearly thirty years old, she guesses.

And the war? she says finally. Where did you spend the war?

Italy. In a tank division. Chasing around Mussolini. It was boring most of the time, and terrifying the rest. But I did manage to get to Venice. I went to the grave of John Keats and found that visitors had left notes on his headstone. They had written of their own difficulties in life as though they expected that there would be a response. As if seeking the counsel of God himself. I found it very strange. And touching. Do you know the poetry of John Keats, Miss Schwartz?

The poetry of John Keats
. He might just as well have asked her to describe a street in Paris. Any question that exposed the vastness of what she didn't know was a small terror that caused Peggy to withdraw into herself, back to the secret place where she drew comfort from lining up the shoes in her closet and wrapping her clothing neatly in tissue paper, and locking the front door of the house then making herself walk back downstairs to check and see if she locked it. Those crazy acts to purify the day, if performed diligently, can keep the world from ever finding out that she is not worthy of taking up space and air.

But sometimes they are not enough. There is so much in the world that she doesn't know and will never know, and she might hide behind her beauty and her thoughts, concealing from some people her ignorance and her unworthiness, but not from everyone. Not from the people who get too close to her.

Even if the bookie smiles a little half smile meant to reassure this pretty girl, is it enough to keep her from drifting away from this table and this restaurant and his presence? He isn't the first person to try to win her back from herself, to try to call to her before she disappears in a place she would never describe to anyone, a place that might have felt to her like the smooth walls of a vault rising up around her, imprisoning her in a blackness that she cannot climb out of. Like the walls of a bomb shelter, so smooth and so high that they keep her from ever imagining herself as competent as the Dutch housewife winning Olympic medals or as intelligent as this man who understands the poetry of the world. Walls and a cement lid threaded like a bolt that screws down above her.

BOOK: Of Time and Memory
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