Of Time and Memory by Don J. Snyder Read Free Book Online Page B

brother and I. Ten months before Peggy died. Audrey had never called me in my life, but I knew exactly why she had called. “It’s Granddad, isn’t it? She found out that I was at the nursing home.”
    I was right. But it was more than this. “Granddad told her that he was worried about you.”
    â€œWorried about
me
? I’m worried about
him
.”
    â€œYou didn’t go back to see him,” Colleen went on. “He made a list of six people for you to get in touch with. But he told Audrey he was worried it might be too sad for you.”
    I told her that it wasn’t sad for me. “I stood at her grave and I didn’t feel sad.”
    â€œWhat did you feel?”
    â€œI don’t know. Close to her, I guess. I felt like I was finally where I belonged. Right there, next to her.”
    â€œIt took you a lot of years to get there,” she said. “Ever since I met you and you told me about your mother, I’ve wondered why you didn’t try to find out about her or at least find where she was buried. If anything happened to me, I wouldn’t want our children to just forget me because it was too sad to remember. And this isn’t just about your mother’s love story with your father. It’s about your love story with her.The story that’s been missing for so long. I think you have a duty to find her story. Even if it makes
everybody
on earth sad. She never had the chance to tell her story to anyone.”
    I was talking to a dear friend about this a few days later.
Duty
, that was the right word, he agreed. “I’d say it’s your solemn duty.”

Chapter Eight
    I t was cold and there was a hard wind blowing. The people out walking along Main Street in Hatfield had their heads bowed low beneath the winter sky. I was standing at a pay phone, watching everyone who passed me, trying to figure out if they were old enough to have been alive when my mother walked these same streets. As I watched them, I had this mounting desire to whisper my mother’s name to each of them as they passed, and then to wait to see who would stop and turn around.
    From the pay phone I called the number in the directory for Muriel Schwartz. She was Peggy’s aunt who, with her husband, Howard, had lived only a few blocks from the little duplex that Peggy’s parents rented on Market Street in Hatfield. I’d been told that she and Peggy spent a lot of time together.
    On the telephone she said, “In the days after you were born I came by each morning to give you and your brother your baths.”
    I asked her if I could come see her.
    She lived alone in a modern complex of small apartments. She was shivering when I went inside. The winter weather bothered her and she told me that she seldom went outside.There was a photograph of Howard in a frame by the window and when I saw it, I told her how I had always liked him. Those times I was taken to my grandparents’ house on School Street around Christmas, Howard and Muriel were usually there. Howard had seen combat in the war. He was the kind of tough guy who naturally appeals to little boys because he told stories about soldiers, he had big muscles and tattoos on his arms and he would pass my brother and me bottles of Coca-Cola like a conspirator, saying with a sly grin, “Don’t tell anyone where this came from, boys.” He had died more than ten years ago.
    â€œAre you okay, living here by yourself?” I asked Muriel.
    â€œOh, I’m fine,” she said brightly. “Lonely, I guess. No one prepares you for how lonely life becomes when you get old. But let’s talk about Peggy. Do you know your mother at all, Donald?”
    â€œNo,” I said.
    She smiled at me. “Well, it’s time that you know her. I’m going to tell you who she was.”
    I spent a wonderful morning there in her living room. Muriel spoke in soft, measured sentences about my mother’s