Of Time and Memory (13 page)

The house is dark and she can hear the rain again when she awakens. Her father and Muriel are standing inside her bedroom doorway. Muriel is saying that everything is fine—so what if the boys ran off to the lumberyard, the worst they could have done was burn the place down, Dave.

Muriel calls goodbye to her, then her father sits on the end of the bed. He bows his head as if he is praying. She wants to return to him, she wants to come back from where her mind has taken her. She tries to make her mind return to the real world by painting a picture again of the town of Hatfield. The loading platform behind the lumberyard. The train station with its overhanging roof. A few freight cars on side rails, waiting or forgotten. The grocery store with its wood-planked floor, a great circle of yellow cheese on a stool inside the front door, the tall crammed shelves lined with clean white stiff paper. The coffee grinder and scales. The bank with its seven barred windows.

And on and on.

It is much later. After midnight. Her mother is waking her to say that something has happened to her father. The ambulance has taken him to the hospital in Sellersville and she is going now to be with him. Peggy will stay at home with Jack who is sleeping.

When she has finished praying for her father she straightens his shoes in the closet, then folds her mother's nightgown and places it beneath the pillow. Then she makes the bed. She doesn't leave the room until she has smoothed out every wrinkle on the bedspread.

She cleans the rest of the house as well. Sweeping the stairs, dusting and scrubbing the bathroom and kitchen floors. She has just finished when Howard comes by to tell her that it was an appendix and that everything is fine.

So she wakes her brother and they ride to Sellersville with Howard. She has been here twice to visit her friend Peg Kirsch who lives in the Nurses' Home which stands just a little ways from the hospital. She has been terribly homesick since she began nursing school. When she calls home she is always crying to her father to please come take her back
home. But her mother has insisted that she stay until she finishes school, and she has told Peggy, If my daughter calls you, you tell her from me that if she leaves school, I will personally kick her backside all the way back to the hospital!

Peggy climbs the stairs to the second floor. Her father is in a semiprivate room. Dr. Paul Moyer is sitting on the bed, smoking a cigarette and holding a glass ashtray on his thigh. She leans over and kisses her father's forehead. I want you to meet someone, he says.

The skinny boy steps forward.

Dick, this is Peggy, her father says.

He is holding a hat between his hands. He nods his head and smiles at her. Your father just showed me your picture the other day at work, he says.

I told him that you like to dance, her father says.

Showed him my picture!
She is horrified.

Now Dr. Paul joins in. Her father and I delivered her together, how many years ago, Dave?

Seventeen.

Through this, Dick has kept his lit-up smile, nodding his head and turning his hat between his hands. Finally she smiles back at him. From that one dance at Sunnybrook and then when she saw him on Frances's porch, she remembers him as being taller than he really is. If they ever do go out on a date she won't wear high heels.

T
hey were going to see
Mrs. Miniver
, which is playing at the Strand in Lansdale, but when Dick arrives to pick her up she has changed her mind about that. She prefers to keep things on strictly a “get acquainted” basis. No formal date with this boy who stands next to a printing press beside her father five days a week.

He pulls his car up to the curb and comes bounding up the cement walkway, whistling the song “Peg o' My Heart.”

I really don't feel up to a movie and a late night, she tells him at the door.

He doesn't lose his smile. That's fine, he says. He looks into the empty living room. Where is everybody? I thought I'd say hello to your father.

Everybody's next door. My grandparents and my aunt live next door.

That makes it nice, I bet.

My father's afraid I might live at home forever, you see. So whenever I have a date they get out of the way.

A girl like you living at home forever? Not a chance.

Suddenly it begins to rain. When he turns away to the sound of the rain hitting the canvas roof of his convertible she looks him over carefully. His brown wingtip shoes are shined. His flannel trousers are baggy at the knees. He is hipless and his shoulders disappear beneath his tan cable
sweater. With his gold-rimmed glasses and his neatly parted brown hair, he looks more like a college student than a printer.

Well, do you want to take a drive, Peggy? he asks her.

A dash through the rain to his car. It's an enormous car. Like stepping into a living room. Or onto an ocean liner. When he starts the engine, she teases him and asks if he wants her to pull up the anchor.

She likes the sound of his laughter.

They have barely driven a block when the rain comes down harder and the roof begins to leak. If you'd put your hand right there, he says. And your other hand over there.

She presses her palms against the ceiling and the rain runs down her arms.

He's sorry, he tells her. The person who owned the car before him didn't care for the roof properly.

It's a fine car except for the roof, he says hopefully. And whenever the sun's out I just put the roof down anyway.

Who needs a roof? she tells him. She is leaning toward him now to keep the rain from dripping down the back of her neck.

Don't you love the rain? he says. When we were going across the Pacific on the army transport ship it was so hot. We were packed in like sardines and it was so hot you could barely stand it. Whenever a shower would pass over, I'd go up onto the deck, lean my head back and just hold my face up into the rain. Before then I never really thought about rain one way or another.

She sees at once that this is a boy who loves to talk. He talks so much, and so well, that she doesn't have to say anything; he fills the silent spaces for her.

They drive past the train station and the Grace Lutheran
Church. At the red light on Main Street it is raining so hard inside the car that he pulls over and parks and they start walking. He wants to show her the house where his grandmother lives. His grandmother is his favorite person in the world.

It is the Amandus Bergey property. Peggy has been by the house a thousand times. Now they stand on the sidewalk in the rain. There are a few lights on in the house. He tells her that his grandmother lives here. Maybe you have heard of her? She's a midwife who delivers babies all over the county. She delivered me and my twin brother in this house.

You're a twin?

Yes.

Your brother, does he look like you?

He tells Peggy that his brother Robert died. At fourteen months, he contracted pneumonia and died.

I had an older brother, Earl, who died too. It's a long story, he says.

Tell me, she says to him.

It's a long story and he tells it without stopping. His mother was raised in an orphanage with her sister. It was a mean place and they were mistreated. One day someone came and took her sister, just like that. His mother wasn't told who had adopted her sister, only that it was a family in Harrisburg. A year went by and then his mother jumped the orphanage wall and ran away for good. She married a man that same year. She was sixteen years old and made the man promise her that if they ever owned a car, he would drive her to Harrisburg so she could search for her sister.

I was four or five and my brother Earl was ten, I think; so ten more years went by before my mother got the chance to go to Harrisburg. It was a long, long trip from Philadelphia in those days. A whole day of driving. I rode in the back seat
with Earl. I remember my mother telling the two of us that we were going to find her sister, an aunt we never knew we had. Dad thought it was a dumb idea, but my mother was determined to go.

On the way Earl got a high fever. My mother got in the back seat and held him for most of the trip. When we got to Harrisburg, my father stopped the car on some road and said, “Well, where do you want to go now, Ada?” She had him drive from one neighborhood to another. He drove slowly up and down the streets while she went from door to door.

I watched her, he told Peggy that night of their first date. The front door of each house would open and the people would shake their heads, no. We just kept driving up and down streets and she kept going from door to door, and then she knocked on one door and I saw her fall into someone's arms. Just like that. She had found her sister.

His brother got worse on the way home. Three days later he went into a coma and died.

This story, to Peggy, is the most beautiful and sad story that she has ever heard. Part of it is the music in his voice when he talks, and part of it is the thought that his mother lost a son and found a sister in three days' time.

She looks at his face and she can almost see him as a small boy in the back seat of his father's car, watching his mother go from door to door in a faraway city until she found her lost sister's embrace.

Anyway, he says, I was born in this house. My grandmother delivered hundreds of babies but I was born in a veil and she didn't know what to do. It's like this bubble all around the baby. She had someone call the doctor and he told her just to pop it open.

I've never heard of such a thing, Peggy tells him.

Oh, it's true. It's called a veil. It's supposed to mean that God has chosen you for a special life. It used to be that people would save the veil and sell pieces of it to sailors because even a small piece of a veil was supposed to always keep you safe at sea.

They walk on a ways while he explains to her his grandmother's theory about new mothers. After she delivers a baby she stays with the new mother for ten days. Exactly ten days. One day less and the mother is likely to have problems down the road. But after the tenth day, the new mother is on her own.

What kinds of problems? Peggy asks him.

He doesn't have a clue. I'm just telling you what my grandmother told me, he says, and she laughs to herself about this.

A few days later a letter arrives from him. It is on the kitchen table when Peggy comes home from work. Of course, the boy who wrote letters to Lorraine Pugles after each date! How could she have forgotten?

She opens his letter standing at the sink, her coat still on. It is to thank her for taking the walk in the rain with him. He apologizes if he talked too much and he tells her that she was a very good listener. A good listener like you is hard to find, he has written. This brings a smile to her face. She is still smiling when her mother comes through the front door, calling her name.

She wants to show her something. Follow me, she says.

They walk down Market Street, across Main, to School Street. The first stars are bright in the sky. Peggy has Dick Snyder's letter in her coat pocket. She is playing a game with it, running her fingertips across it, then taking her hand out of her pocket and counting to ten below her breath, then
putting her hand back in her pocket to see if it is still there. This makes the letter real. It makes
him
real. She pictures him walking to a mailbox, whistling. Or perhaps driving in his gigantic car with the letter beside him on the front seat. In the two days since the two of them walked through the rain his story has not left her. All day today at work she was trying to think of the precise moments of his life, as if to make his life her own. How they had no plumbing in the house they rented in Skippack when he was a boy and his little sister used to awaken him in the night to take her to the outhouse. She would stand at the door and wouldn't go inside until he had taken the broken handle from an old broom and rattled it around the rim of the seat to clear away the spiders. Then he would remind her to lift up the hem of her nightgown so it wouldn't get dirty.

Peggy fingers the letter in her pocket as she walks down School Street with her mother. She can hear his voice in the rain telling her the story of his mother climbing over the orphanage wall when she was sixteen. And the story of his mother losing her first-born son to pneumonia when he was a boy. How his body lay in his coffin in the living room for two days and how the sound of his mother's weeping filled the house. Her lost boy. Dick was determined to ease his mother's sorrow, so he made a scrapbook of his older brother. On one page he pasted the laces from his brother's last pair of shoes. On another a poem he wrote about the times he and this lost brother used to go sledding down Grumbach's Hill, flying all the way down and hitting the frozen creek at the bottom and gliding across it with their eyes closed so it seemed like they were flying. Sometimes in her sorrow his mother would cry out in her sleep. He would go to her and she would be embarrassed. She would apologize and he would return to his bed
and try to keep awake until he was sure she had fallen back to sleep.

He told his stories with a childlike innocence that made them irresistible. This was his gift to her, stories so full of hope that they could enter her. This young man, born in a veil in his grandmother's bed, the only survivor of his mother's three sons, believed his life was intended for something exceptional. He had already told her that God had some purpose for him.

Peggy and her mother have stopped a little ways down School Street. Right here, her mother tells her. What do you think, Peggy?

She tells her that her father has decided to buy this piece of land and to build a new house here. Two hundred and twenty dollars for the land; two more paychecks and the land will be theirs.

Peggy wants to know why they have decided to build a new house now. I won't be living at home too much longer, Mom. You'll have a lot more room once I'm gone.

Her mother smiles and takes her hand. Not this spring, but the following spring is when they will start building the house, but she has already decided on the layout of the rooms. Here is where I'll have my dining room, Peg. You know how I've always wanted a house with a dining room. I'll have windows above the sink so I can see outside while I wash the dishes. The stove here. The refrigerator here.