In the predawn light of those February mornings I felt like I was trying to pick a thread up off the dark floor. I was close to something, I knew that, but it would never stay between my fingertips long enough for me to hold it to the light. At times it felt like it was something I had once possessed, maybe some knowledge that I had always carried with me.
A neighbor of Peggy’s who lived three doors down Market Street in 1950 told me that though my mother was living there in her parents’ house, she never saw her after April and she didn’t think Peggy went outside at all the whole summer until the morning of August 9 when she saw her hobbling barefoot down the cement walkway in the backyard. She was barefoot, her feet were swollen like blocks of wood and her face was twice its normal size. The neighbor watched Peggy slide into the front seat of her father’s car and drive away. That was the day she went into Elm Terrace Hospital to be delivered.
I planned another trip to Pennsylvania at the end of the winter. My brother was going to meet me there and we were going to go see Dr. Wright. It was my idea not to tell him that we were coming; I was afraid he would find a reason not to be there. And I wrote him a long letter which I hoped would make it easier for him to open his door when we stood there knocking:
I am writing you now to apologize. For the past fifty years some people in the Snyder and Schwartz families have believed that you were negligent during the time when Peggy was your patient. Stories of your disregard for her have stood as truth and were passed on to me and my twin brother across the years. Peggy’s mother, my grandmother, went to her grave believing in her heart that you didn’t care for her daughter and that was why she died.
The story that persisted all these years was that you never should have released Peggy from Elm Terrace. And when she was home for seven days someone finally summoned Dr. Paul Moyer, Peggy’s family physician, who came over and when he saw Peggy, he remarked with anger, “This is not the Peggy I know.” He immediately summoned an ambulance and had Peggy taken to Grandview where she died less than an hour later.
But I have received something in the mail which shows that none of this is true, Dr. Wright. Though all hospital records from Elm Terrace were destroyed when the new hospital was built, I was sent an index card that apparently had marked Peggy’s chart while she was in Elm Terrace as your patient in 1950. The card reads: Peggy Snyder. Admitt. Diag. Pregnancy at term. Preeclampsia. Final Diag. Same. Service of Dr. Edward H. Wright.
That one word, Dr. Wright, preeclampsia, is enough to make me see now that those who have blamed you for my mother’s death are wrong. That one word has compelled me to see in a different light everything else I have learned about Peggy’s life in the last year of my research and writing. It has enabled me to answer so many questions. First, why did Peggy have you instead of Dr. Moyer for her physician; Dr. Moyer had been her doctor since she was a young girl. He had been her mother’s physician less than a year before and had delivered her mother’s baby in October of 1949.
Why? Because when Dr. Moyer examined Peggy for the first time and discovered that she was pregnant, he also discovered in her urine test that there was protein present, and that her blood pressure was unusually high—both told him that she was probably going to face a difficult pregnancy with preeclampsia. So, he referred her to you, a more experienced physician with expertise in obstetrics.
Why did Peggy write to a friend as early as January 1950 that she was going to have her baby in Sacred Heart Hospital in Norristown? Because you advised her that it was a much more sophisticated hospital than Elm Terrace, one where a prematurely delivered baby would have a better chance to survive.
Why does my father remember you telling him not to let Peggy eat any salt?
Because you were right on top of the diagnosis of preeclampsia.
Why did Peggy move back home with her parents in the fourth month of her pregnancy? Because you cautioned her that she was in for a rough time. I believe it is even possible that you told her the only cure for her condition was to have the baby delivered by cesarean, before the seventh month. You told her that if her pregnancy continued any longer than this, her condition could be fatal. But when you told her that the baby might not live if it was delivered early, I believe the Schwartz and the Snyder families, because of their deep religious beliefs, either persuaded Peggy or simply acquiesced to her desire to carry the baby to full term. And if this is true, Dr. Wright, then it explains why the family was never able to face the truth across the years and why you were blamed; anything less would have meant that they were partially responsible for Peggy’s death. They had “placed her in God’s hands,” with their religious belief that the baby was meant to be spared in cases like this. And then when Peggy died, they blamed you.
That is my story, Dr. Wright. The story of Peggy Snyder who died when she was nineteen years old because she carried me and my brother to full term in her pregnancy. I believe that you did everything possible to help her and to save her life but the family’s wishes ran against your recommendation that Peggy’s baby be delivered prematurely.
Again, my sincere apologies to you for the incorrect assumptions and the falsely held beliefs about you all these years. Someday this spring I will try to come see you with my brother, David, so I can apologize to you in person.
Best regards,
I couldn’t be sure of any of this, but I sent the letter anyway and for a little while I pretended to know all the answers and to finally hold the reasons in my hands.
I soon had three wedding photographs to place on the altar beside my bed. Each of them showed Peggy in her wedding dress, and whenever I looked at them they set my heart racing. It had been more than forty years since she visited me in my room, but I remembered that this was the dress that she was wearing when she glided toward me on a column of light, calling me by my first and middle names. White satin. Delicate embroidery across the low neckline. The dress spilling like a pool of milk around her feet.
In the photographs she is holding white satin ribbons at her waist. A flowered headband in her hair holds the white-laced veil.
She only visited me for a brief time in my life. It was 1955. My father had just remarried and the four of us had moved into the little house on Clearspring Road in Lansdale. My brother, Dave, and I shared one of the two bedrooms on the first floor and this is where Peggy visited me. I don’t know why Dave never woke up to see her. I would awaken with the knowledge that she was there, waiting for me to open my eyes. It is the way I’ve often awakened in the night, knowing that it has begun to snow.
I suppose it makes sense that she would have visited when she did; she would have wanted to see what our life was like now that she had been replaced. I imagine she stood over Dick as he slept beside his new wife. She would have seen the lines in his face, how he had aged in the five years since she left him. She would have noticed that he never smiled the way he used to. He never danced like he danced with her.
Long after her last visit to my bedroom, I tried to will her back. One Christmas I asked for an alarm clock. I remember everyone thought this was very strange of me. It was a wind-up clock with a black face and white hands and numerals. I used to set it for two or three o’clock in the morning, and then once it woke me I would make myself stay awake, waiting for her. I didn’t even know who she was. It was four years later before my father told us about her. I didn’t know who she was but I was waiting for her to take me with her. This I remember distinctly. Wanting to go with her wherever she went when she left me in my room.
Staring at her wedding pictures, I know that there are things about her I will never know. I know that she took more than her share of secrets with her. But I could almost hear her now, I could almost hear her voice telling me not to stop searching for her until I knew fully who she had been in this world when she was here among the people who have all grown so unspeakably old in her long absence.