Of Time and Memory (9 page)

I am listening but I see him locking the door, running from window to window, locking them as well. Each day a small steady decline into a depthless, all-consuming sorrow.

I don't remember getting up from the table that night, or leaving the diner, or driving home.

U
nder the headline “
SON WRITES PARENTS' LOVE STORY
,”
The Reporter
, a daily newspaper for the Hatfield, Pennsylvania, area, ran a front-page story with the photograph of my mother and father in the wedding car. The article requested that anyone who had known Peggy write or call me in Maine.

There were many letters; new ones arrived every morning in the day's mail:

Jack Schwartz, my uncle, had no idea about these letters or what people were writing me about my mother's death. These
words “eclampsia,” “toxemia,” strange words to me then, words I had never heard before in any of Colleen's pregnancies, were adding up to something that I failed to recognize even when Jack called from his home in Vermont to tell me about an article he had just run across in a magazine. “I think I finally know what killed Peggy,” he said on the telephone.

In the January 1998 issue of
Worth
magazine there was a story under the title “The Best Medicine … The AMA doesn't think ordinary Americans can handle the truth about their doctors. Tell that to what's left of the Grossman family.”

The story was about a young pregnant woman who died of eclampsia in 1986. Eclampsia, described as extreme toxemia, killed the woman despite attentive care by her physician, and the additional scrutiny of her own father who was also a physician. The diagnosis, so simple to confirm by taking a patient's blood pressure, is also equally simple to miss. In this story the woman's normal baseline blood pressure was particularly low, and so her blood pressure during pregnancy, which did not appear dangerously high to her physician,
was
.

“I read the article and the whole time I was reading it, something said to me, this is what killed Peggy. I'm probably wrong. But I'm sending you the article anyway,” Jack said.

One of the most helpful letters I received was from an eighty-seven-year-old woman in a nursing home who told me about Anna Hartman, who was the labor and delivery nurse at the Elm Terrace Hospital for thirty-two years. She sent me a newspaper article that had appeared when Mrs. Hartman retired; it contained a thorough description of the Elm Terrace Hospital at the time my mother was a maternity patient there. I wrote her a letter thanking her, and she replied immediately that someone she knew had recently told her that Anna Hartman was still alive. She was going to try to contact
her, and she asked me to call her after a few days if I wanted to speak with Anna Hartman about my mother.

That night I dreamed that I was standing in front of the Elm Terrace Hospital. It was summer and the tall shade trees on the lawn were blowing in a warm wind. On the porch, pregnant girls were sitting in white wicker rocking chairs. I could see inside the front door, a tall heavy door like the door of a church, and beyond into the foyer with the dark scrolled banister and the oak staircase where two men were carrying a woman on a stretcher up to the delivery room on the second floor. She was crying out for someone to help her and I was calling to the pregnant girls in their white wicker chairs on the porch, asking who was on the stretcher, but they couldn't hear me. I ran down Broad Street to the corner of Fourth to Dr. Wright's office in the big Victorian house with white crown molding and gables covered in vines. All the lights were off. But there was a man sitting on the front steps. He was holding something in his hand, gesturing for me to take it. In the light of a streetlamp I could see that he had handed me the medical records from the Grandview Hospital where Peggy died. I read the lines again “… 4:45 p.m. pt. complaining of ‘queer feeling in head' ‘feels hot all over'—blood stopped. Dr. Peters called—respiration becoming extremely labored. 4:48 Caff.Sod.Benz. GR 7½ IV. given by Dr. Peters. 4:50 Patient not responsive—R.H.S. pronounced dead by Dr. Peters.” I ran back down the street to the Elm Terrace Hospital and began telling the pregnant girls that there had been some mistake, that Peggy Snyder couldn't be dead because she was on the stretcher, being carried up the stairs to have her babies. The pregnant girls had their heads bowed. The wicker rocking chairs were still, and the pregnant girls were asleep. I stepped closer to the porch and saw that one of the sleeping
girls was Erin, my twelve-year-old daughter, grown up. Her eyes were closed but there were tears running down her cheeks.

I awoke from this dream and went straight to Erin's room. Her white down comforter had fallen from her bed. When I covered her I thought about how I used to lift her from her crib in the middle of the night to carry her back into my bed so Colleen could feed her. I would wrap her tightly in a small blanket, her arms against her sides inside the blanket. Colleen would turn onto one side, unbutton her nightgown, and place her nipple to Erin's lips. Those days of my daughter's infancy were the unhurried days of my own love story with Colleen, when the three of us would lie in bed all afternoon, enclosed within a tenderness for one another that the world could not diminish.

I looked down at Erin, her long legs beneath the blanket, so improbably long to me. She was coming into her own now, taking voice lessons, auditioning for parts in a children's theater. She would march into the living room on a Sunday afternoon where her brother and I were camped out on the couch watching one football game turn into another and she'd let us have it: “I can't believe you're going to just lie there watching dumb football games all day!”

I have also seen this daughter with a far-off look in her eyes, and I've wondered if she inherited from my mother the same deep, perplexing loneliness that has always been the strongest emotion in me, stronger than love, anger, or ambition, a feeling so persistent that it could convince you in a moment it was a loneliness you had earned and would carry with you because you were worthy of nothing else.

My mother had created me and then re-created herself in my daughter. Tonight, looking down at her in her bed, I wondered
how much of my mother she carried inside her. How much of who she was becoming had been shaped by a person she would never know. I went downstairs and took Erin's baby journal off the bookshelf next to the fireplace. I began reading the pages, searching for the places where I had written to her about Peggy. I read about her first Christmas, her first day of school, the day she learned to ride a bicycle, the afternoon I buried her dog. But there was nothing about Peggy and now there was no room left to write anything.

M
y mother's closest friends from high school have met me at the Heritage Hotel outside Collegeville to tell me about her. Adelle, who played field hockey with Peggy for two years in high school and walked home with her every night from practice. Adelle graduated first in the class, went on to Ursinus College, and learned to fly an airplane. Peg, who was a nursing student at Grandview. She was on duty on the third floor of the hospital on Sunday afternoon, August 27, 1950, but did not find out until the next day that my mother, her dearest friend, had died in semiprivate room 9, one floor below her. Julia, who had met my father before she became friends with Peggy because she was a close friend of my father's cousin Frances, who was paralyzed from polio. And Ginny, who threw an engagement party for Peggy in her basement and for years after her death went to visit my grandmother and grandfather every Sunday afternoon. “First,” she said, “because I needed to, and then after a while because it had become a habit.”

Adelle remembered coming home from college for Christmas and going to see Peggy in the apartment on North Broad Street in Lansdale. It was only a month after Peggy and my father were married, and Adelle asked her what her husband was going to get her for Christmas. “I'm giving Dick big
hints,” Peggy told her. “I pretend to be talking in my sleep, saying, ‘Pearls, pearls, pearls.' ”

I listened to these ladies as they laughed about their high school senior trip to Washington, D.C., and my mother's brief romance with a man who placed bets over the telephone when she was working at the telephone company.

Peg stayed for a while after the other ladies had said goodbye. She spoke at length about my mother and then, with tears in her eyes, she handed me an envelope. “I want you to have this,” she said.

It was a pale green envelope addressed:

The postmark was January 11, 1950, 9:30 a.m.

There was a three-cent stamp in the upper right-hand corner. The
P
s in
Peggy
and
Penna
were fat and rounded, as if they had been written by a small child still thrilled by her newly acquired ability to write in cursive.

Printed on the back of the envelope:

My mother's personal stationery. Her new married name was also printed at the top of the enclosed five-by-eight-inch sheet of paper.

In the only letter I would ever have of my mother's she wrote with the same cursive flourishes:

My eyes filled with tears before I finished.

“I think I was her first friend she told,” Peg said. “It's been so long ago and there's so much that I've forgotten, but when I read the letter I wondered why Peggy says she's going to have her baby in Norristown. She'd already made up her mind in the first month of her pregnancy. Everyone had their babies at Elm Terrace or at Grandview in those days.”

I knew what it meant because of the woman who had written to me after the
Reporter
article appeared, the woman who was so sick in her pregnancy that her doctor, Dr. Wright, sent her to Norristown where her life had been saved.

I told Peg about this and I asked her if my mother had ever said anything to her about being sick when she was pregnant.

“Nothing, but that's something else I wanted to tell you. I never saw Peggy once she became pregnant. Neither did any of her other close friends. We never saw her once during the time she was carrying you twins. And I've brought you something else that's a mystery to me.”

Another envelope addressed in my mother's handwriting with the distinctive fat, round
P:

It was a tiny envelope two-and-a-half-inches-by-three-inches. Inside was a small card with a child's painting of a baby holding a pink umbrella with a blue ribbon tied to its hooked handle.

“Do you remember how my mother seemed at the shower?” I asked Peg.