Of Time and Memory (30 page)

.  .  .

Five years after her death my father drove us and a pretty girl to Atlantic City for a day on the beach. There was a strong undertow, I remember. We drank orange soda in thick glass bottles. It was the first time in my life I got water up my nose and in my ears. My father showed me how to tilt my head and jump up and down on one leg. By now there was someone new in his life. For a while I thought she was my sister. “Call her Ruthie,” he had told me. “Daddy's Ruthie.” She had been working in an office at the American Tile Company in Lansdale, typing through her tears the afternoon she heard of the death of a nineteen-year-old mother of newborn twins.
The poor family
, she thought.
The poor husband
. She closed her eyes and said a small prayer for him, not knowing that she would one day take my father by the hand and, in her unconditional love for him, help him face the world again,
his world
which had changed forever and yet still held starlight and the warmth of spring.

She made the picnic lunch that day at the beach. When it was time to leave, she must have walked on ahead while my father stopped at the outdoor shower to wash the sand off my feet. I remember a garden hose was hanging from a nail inside the wooden stall. After I was finished, as my father took off his shirt to step under the hose, his wallet fell from his pocket and a photograph dropped to the ground. The black-and-white picture of his young pregnant wife, sitting at the open window of the new Chevy. The sweeping fenders, the hubcaps bright disks of light.

I looked into my father's eyes and asked him who she was. I was frightened by the photograph because I had seen her before, in my bedroom when she came gliding in through the
window, her face atop a column of white light, calling for me by my first and middle names. So I told him that I had seen her, and he looked at me and then washed the sand off my feet with the hose.

He waited a few more years, and then he told me that she had been my mother.

My grandfather told me how she had asked him to carry her upstairs so she could spend that last night beside her mother. She was frightened, and all night she trembled. In the first light of morning she asked her mother to bring the babies to her. She told her mother that she wanted to smell us. We were sleeping when she held us to her face and she kissed our eyelids.

In the hospital my father was down the hallway calling all his friends from high school, asking them to come to the hospital to give blood. He returned to her room once and told her that she had nothing to worry about because he was going to call Jack Graham, the tall, strong tackle from the old high school football team and with Jack Graham's blood in her she would be fine.

My father smiled at her as he left the room. A moment later she cried out, “My head, my head.” She raised her hands up into the air and that was all. Through his tears, her father told the nurse that he had helped bring her into this world and now was sending her on. She took the wedding ring off Peggy's finger and placed it in his hand.

O
n the night of August 14, 1998, I dreamed that I was with my mother. My brother and I were babies again and Peggy was carrying us in her arms. She was happy and strong and we were pressed against her. As she walked along, people stopped her to say hello and to tell her how beautiful her little twin boys were, and then suddenly there was a flash of bright light and we all disappeared. It was a dream so vivid and real that with the flash of light I awoke, and I could not fall back to sleep.

In the morning on the news there was a report of another bombing in Northern Ireland. Not many details were given at first but for some reason I was drawn to the story. I was building a bench in my shop and I kept the radio on all day, listening for more information. Just before dinner I heard that among the twenty-eight people killed in the blast was a mother with twins in her belly two weeks from birth.

No matter how I tried, I couldn't stop thinking about this. Two days later I flew to Belfast and took a train to the small city of Omagh where the bomb had exploded.

From the moment I arrived, I was struck by the silence of the city. The only sound in the streets was the rain striking the plastic wrapping of the thousands of flower wreaths and bouquets that leaned against the storefronts down the length
of the high street from the courthouse, along Market Street, around the corner of the old Dublin Road and across the Drumagh Bridge. There were also hundreds of candles sputtering in the cold wind and the rain. People stopped to pour the rainwater off those that had gone out, then knelt down on the wet bricks and relit them.

My first morning there I found my way to the little farming village of Augher where I walked a narrow road to Saint McCartin's church for two miles through the deep green hills of the Clogher valley, past tin-roofed barns, grazing tan sheep, and cows with noses shining from the wet grass. The little calves ran in fear to their mother's side when I passed by on foot. Inside the ancient black stone walls of the churchyard there was the new grave. Flowers in the shape of teddy bears. Plastic bottles of holy water. Little statues of the Blessed Mother and the pope.

While I was sitting at Avril Monaghan's grave, the sky darkened and it began to rain. It turned to a downpour and then stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and as the sky brightened, I knew why my father had never spoken to me and my brother about Peggy. He had to make himself
not remember
his love story in order to love his sons. If he was to become the great father he turned out to be, a father who was always for his boys, he had to forget that these boys had killed the girl he loved. It was this, or each time he looked at us he would have hated us more.

When I visit him again to tell him this, he is cold and wears a sweater though the temperature is in the nineties. He says a prayer that we will all be together someday and I am thinking about how weary Peggy must have been in the August heat that summer long ago. How do you tell the world that you just can't take another step?

It was two weeks before my father could return to work. The first thing he did was go to the man who owned the print shop and try to give back his paycheck. I didn't earn this, he said to Mr. Lauchman.

Mr. Lauchman told him to keep it. As long as I'm the boss around here, I'll decide who gets paid. All right? Good, now take care of yourself, Dick. You're going to need things for those boys of yours, so I want you to come to me, I want you to get in the habit of coming to me for help.

There were tears in his eyes when he said this.

Before the end of August 1950, my father was notified that his active reserve status had changed, and he was to prepare to go with the army to Korea. But my grandfather appealed on his behalf at the draft board in Philadelphia and my father was granted a hardship discharge. Peggy's death spared him from that war which she was so afraid would take him away from her.

A great sorrow fell over Hatfield, Pennsylvania, when my mother died. I can imagine her great difficulty in the end when her soul was ready to go home but the rest of her wanted to stay and live on. Her soul had traveled years to get here, but I think she was always moving in the wrong direction. Her melancholy, as much a divine and solemn part of her as her heart or lungs, prevented her from being completely in this world. Her soul was always leaning toward its home.

But in the end it still must have been hard for her. The body recalls such wonderful moments and wants to stay. Her legs recalled pumping hard on her first bicycle. Her arms remembered her husband's embrace.

In the end he couldn't grant her last wish. She begged him not to let them take her to the hospital. She wanted to stay
home. When he told her that there was no choice, she asked him to let her ride with him in his car, no ambulance. Even this he couldn't grant her. But he promised her that he would bring her back home before the end of the day. Home before dark, he promised.

The one blessing was that he didn't have to tell us that our mother had died. This wasn't a small thing for which he was grateful; it was a very big thing for which he thanked God in heaven. It seemed like a blessing and he was thankful, always thankful. How awful if we had been older, four, five, or six. He would have had to take us in his arms and explain that the mother we had depended upon and loved was never coming home again. That, he would never have been able to bear.

But I think too that if we had been older, if my brother and I had lived in our mother's presence long enough to absorb her, then my father would have been consoled by this throughout his life—each time he ached for her he could have held one of us, or put his arm around one of us, maybe even spoken to us about her, about some moment recalled so vividly that he might forget for a moment that she was never coming back. Two sons to console him. As it was, when he lost Peggy, he lost everything and he fell to his knees beneath a sorrow as wide as the world.

The last time I saw my father he took my arm and led me to the table in front of the couch. “Sit down,” he said, “I have something to look at with you.”

It was the wedding album.

We sat there for a long time. Before I left I shared with him the words I had written to my mother when I was in
Northern Ireland, sitting at the new grave of Avril Monaghan and her babies.

Away from ourselves, Peggy—this is how we move through life. How far we all go away from ourselves, before we return. Such a long way back the soul must travel through the deep silence of light and shadow. Reversing every mile. Retracing each step. In the hospital when all the visitors had gone, and it was only you there with these babies that were already trying to possess you, could you feel your own beginning in theirs? Counting fingers and toes as your mother once counted yours. In the smallness, the impossible smallness of these babies, was the path made clear to you? The path back through stars and memory that your husband will travel one day to meet you. A lighted way across the oceans of time that your sons, my brother and I, will one day take home to be with you.

Lynn Nesbit and Victoria Wilson brought this book into the world. James Robinson and Jim Wright, dear old friends, were the first to help me believe that I could write Peggy's story, and Colin Harrison persuaded me that it was my duty to write it. Ruth Cramer gave my father hope and filled my mother's absence with love and compassion. James Sullivan took time away from his novel to show me how to structure this book. Colleen and our children, Erin, Nell, Jack, and Cara, gave me my own love story. Johnny Guarino talked with me on the night of September 20, 1997, when my mother's angel visited me in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

I thank them all.

And the many others who supported me: Jack and Roberta Schwartz, Eric Beesemyer, Liz Luisi, Kathleen Kennedy, Katie Long, Edgar A. Beem, Tony Anaman, Bryce Roberts, Bill and Linda LeBlond, Muriel Schwartz, David Schwartz, Robert and Linda Girardi, Paul Mooney, John Hubbard, Callie Curtis, John and Cecelia McQuinn, Ruth Wack, Tom Pugles, Jack Graham, Jean Husted, Ruth Bickhart, Adelle Bedrossian, Peg Kirsch, Anna Harvey, Bill Wack, Julia Kulp, Amber Hartman, Jenny Collins, Lorraine London, Nancy Nau, Evelyn Kinsey, John Woodcock, Naomi Myers, Jere Doherty, John Bradford, Richard Kreible, Pat O'Donnell, Jason Kaufman, Doug Eisenhart, Eric Guckain, Burt Throckmorton, Wes McNair, Melissa Falcon, David Scheier, Tom Grimes, Jesse Workman, James and Kerri White, Audrey Corby, Shaun Sullivan, Ted Eldrege, and my twin brother, David, who took this journey with me.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Fred Ahlert Music Corporation, Fain Music Co., and Williamson Music Co.:
Excerpt from “I'll Be Seeing You” by Irving Kahal and Sammy Fain, copyright © 1938 by Williamson Music, copyright renewed. Williamson Music owner of publication and allied rights throughout the world, excluding the United States; copyright © 1938, copyright renewed 1966 by Fain Music Co. and The New Irving Kahal Music Company. All rights for the extended term of copyright administered by Fred Ahlert Music Corporation on behalf of The New Irving Kahal Music Co. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Fred Ahlert Music Corporation, Fain Music Co., and Williamson Music Co.

Henry Holt and Company, LLC.:
Excerpt from “Revelation” from
The Poetry of Robert Frost
, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, copyright © 1934, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, copyright © 1962 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

The Richmond Organization, Toy Town Tunes Publications, and Warner Bros. Publications Inc.:
Excerpt from “For All We Know,” words by Sam M. Lewis and music by J. Fred Coots, copyright © 1934, 1956 by EMI Feist Catalog Inc., copyrights renewed, assigned to TRO–Cromwell Music, Inc., New York, and Toy Town Tunes Publications, Boca Raton, Florida, for USA only. All rights outside USA controlled by EMI Feist Catalog Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of The Richmond Organization on behalf of Cromwell Music, Inc., Toy Town Tunes Publications, administered by The Songwriters Guild, and Warner Bros. Publications Inc.

 

Read an excerpt from

WALKING WITH JACK
By Don J. Snyder

Available from Doubleday
May 2013

 

PROLOGUE