Of Time and Memory Read Online Free PDF Page B

station used to stand. And the lumber and coal yard where he and Peggy’s father got the materials to build his house on School Street. The old Army-Navy recruiting station used to be there on the corner. And the Hatfield Consolidated School where Peggy went through all twelve grades.
    â€œWhen did she graduate?” I ask.
    He does the mathematics in his head. “She worked for the telephone company in 1949. We were married that year. So, she must have graduated in 1948. Yes, 1948.”
    Just a few blocks from the school we pass a church, then turn left onto Market Street. “There,” he says. I stop in front of a duplex house, pale pink. There are five electric meters screwed to the side of the house by the entrance. Apartments.
    â€œIt was a house when your mother and I lived there.”
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œBefore you were born. It was your grandparents’ house; when Peggy got too sick to take care of herself, we left our own apartment in Lansdale and moved in here with Peggy’s mother and father. Her grandfather and grandmother lived inone half of the house, along with an aunt. We lived in the other half with her mother and father. And of course your uncle Jack, he was a little boy then, and his sister Audrey who was born just a few months before you boys.”
    I am watching him closely to see if this is too difficult.
    He tells me that Peggy got very heavy and was filling up with fluids. When you touched her, it was like she was filled with wet sand, your finger left an impression.
    â€œThe hospital where she died, and the cemetery where she’s buried, are they near here?”
    Maybe he hasn’t heard me. “I’ll show you the church,” he says.
    Hatfield is a town whose streets you could memorize the first time through. A few shops downtown. The old granite bank building at the traffic light. Tiny houses with little front and back yards line all the streets, brick row houses built quickly to accommodate the troops coming back from the war. A huge new generation of babies conceived in their little rooms.
    â€œThere must have been pregnant women everywhere you went,” I say to myself.
    â€œYour grandmother just had Audrey before we moved in,” he tells me.
    I guess I already knew this, but now with the picture of the tiny house in mind, it strikes me how impossible it must have been—my father and his pregnant sick wife, her father and mother and their newborn daughter and their little boy. The grandparents and an old aunt. All packed into the place on Market Street in the summer of 1950. And after August 11, add me and my twin brother to the population.
    â€œThe noise level alone must have been something,” I say.
    â€œYour mother had terrible headaches. I used to put wet washcloths across her forehead, I remember.”
    We pull up against the curb in front of the brick church while he is telling me how Peggy would sit up in bed with her hands clamped over her ears.
    It’s the telephone pole up ahead of where we’ve parked that makes me take out the wedding-car photograph. The pole marked by the same numbers 8 over 30 stenciled in white. By chance we have parked in exactly the same spot where their wedding car was parked for the photograph. I am about to tell this to my father when he says, “This is where the hearse was parked. I remember.”
    It sweeps over him then, the great faraway look of weariness which my boyhood memorized.
    I am trying to banish his memory of the hearse. “Here,” I keep insisting, holding the wedding-car photograph in front of him. “The picture you sent me, Dad. Look. See the two houses across the street? There? And the telephone pole? It’s exactly the same. Nothing has changed. Look, count the front steps coming down from the porches. See?”
    Suddenly he tilts his head back. Light from the sky fills the lenses of his glasses so I can no longer see his eyes. He asks me what