In the nursing home the rooms are behind long carpeted corridors of doors the residents have decorated with photographs of the pets they had to leave behind when they were admitted, and grandchildren who live far away in the noisy, chaotic world that is the exact opposite of this world.
My grandfather has white wavy hair and a steady stream of single women who keep tabs on him. He is ninety years old and has a hard time getting up out of his chair, but other than this, age seems to have taken nothing from him. His son, my uncle Jack, has told him that I would be coming by and from the moment I step inside his door the memories of my mother pour out of him. He has photographs for me that I can keep and framed photographs of her standing on every table and windowsill and on the bureau by his bed. “I dust them all myself,” he tells me. Just as my mother had been carefully and purposefully withdrawn from his house where I visited him and my grandmother when I was a boy, the two small rooms he inhabits now have been transformed into a gallery of Peggy’s face. I wonder if at this point in his life, nearing his own death, he is familiarizing himself with his daughter’s face, a face he believes he will see in heaven.
We sit in her presence now. It strikes me how odd she would find the two of us, her tough-guy father, now sobbing like a child, and her newborn baby now grown bald on the top of his head. I look at her father and then at her face frozen in time, trying to imagine how she would look by now at age sixty-six.
“I delivered your mother when she was born, and I was the last person with her when she passed away,” he tells me. “She lifted her hands off the hospital bed and brought them to her head like this and cried out to me, ‘My head! My head!’ ”
He puts his face in his hands and begins to cry softly. I haven’t seen him since my grandmother’s funeral nine years before, and the memories I have of him are standing in his garage workshop surrounded by tools and a shiny new car that he was very proud of.
“We never talked about Peggy,” I tell him.
He shakes his head. “It was rough,” he says.
Once he begins, he goes on and on. He tells me about the time that Peggy saved his life. He remembers that in the last days of her pregnancy her feet were so swollen that she couldn’t even fit into his slippers. And her sewing, he remembers the way she would stay up all night sewing baby clothes. And the first time he saw her after Dave and I were born, she told him that after seeing us she had decided she was going to have six boys.
“She didn’t know how sick she was,” he says as he begins to cry again. This time he battles through the grief until he can think of something else to tell me that will help him find his voice: “Do you know that Dick was helping me build the house on School Street that summer? Every afternoon after work, we’d drive from the print shop straight to School Street. One afternoon we were hurrying to get the roof on before the rain. A big thunderstorm came in. We were still up on the roof and we watched the lightning jump across the heads of the nails … Every afternoon when we were driving over I would say a prayer that Peggy was feeling better and might be there waiting for your father and me. Every afternoon that was what I prayed for.” He tells me that every year in August he places the flowers at the church altar in Peggy’s memory.
When I try to leave, he keeps me another hour standing at the door. He won’t say goodbye until I tell him when I will return.
I didn’t return the next day as I had promised my grandfather. And I didn’t stay in Pennsylvania long enough to visit my father either. The hell of it was that it was just too damned sad; I don’t mean for me, I mean for them—for the father who prayed for his daughter to get well and for the ninety-year-old man who Peggy’s father had become, and for the young husband coming home from work each afternoon to find his wife still too weak to get out of bed and for the seventy-one-year-old man her husband had become. I had told myself from that first night in the attic with my little girl that I was going to try to learn Peggy’s love story and then tell it for my father, as a gift to him at the end of his life. This had felt like the right thing to do until I saw the sadness in his eyes when we were parked in front of the church. It wasn’t the wedding that he remembered as we sat there, it was the funeral. How could I have failed to see that it would be this way for my father, that it would always be this way because she never did get well enough to spend much time with him when he was helping her father build his little house on School Street, the house where my brother and I were taken at Christmas every year though we never knew why. Of course the sadness of Peggy’s death had eclipsed their love story, and always would in his memory.
And then seeing my grandfather cry, his shoulders shaking as we sat in his room at the nursing home surrounded by pictures of his lost daughter—it was just too damned sad.
Driving home to Maine, north for eight hours, the feeling of returning that I’d had at Peggy’s grave was with me again. Maybe we are always returning, and the first step we take, we took long ago. I could still feel this as I stepped onto the moonlit porch of my house. It was midnight. The bare tree branches were rattling in the wind off the sea. It was well below zero and the porch stairs sounded like they were splitting beneath my feet. Above my head, white stars were scattered across a black sky, near enough to show the sharpness of their edges. The same stars from the last night of my mother’s life when she lay in her mother’s bed, unable to sleep, perhaps sensing the blood storm just ahead of her. And her husband in a separate room lost to grief.
Lost. Lost for so long. Always lost to me.
And maybe better if she were always lost to me.
Maybe it would have been better that way. Or if not better, then certainly easier. One visit to Peggy’s grave, a few companionable days with my father.
I was surprised to find Colleen awake when I came upstairs. She was sitting up in bed with her reading lamp on. “I’ve just had the most wonderful dream,” she said to me. “I dreamed that you found Peggy. You were walking down this beautiful road in the country, not just you, but all four of the kids and I were with you. We were calling her name. I could hear Cara with her high-pitched voice calling for Peggy. And then we saw someone up ahead standing on the side of the road. And it was her. She looked exactly the same, she hadn’t gotten old, and she said she was waiting for us to take her home with us. She’d been waiting a long time. She took Erin’s hand and we all turned around on the road and came home to Maine.”
I sat down on the bed and asked her if my father or my grandfather was in the dream. They weren’t, she said.
I told her that I was afraid of hurting them and that I had decided to just let things go.
“Audrey called while you were gone,” Colleen said.
My mother’s sister, who had been born just ten months before my twin 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.”
“Worried about me? I’m worried about him.”
“You 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.”
“What did you feel?”
“I don’t know. Close to her, I guess. I felt like I was finally where I belonged. Right there, next to her.”
“It 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.”