"Frederic is waving," Paul said, speaking quickly to cover his emotion. "I think it's time. I think he's ready. Go and be happy, Mom."
She looked at him hard and long again, tears in her eyes, then kissed him on the check.
Frederic crossed the lawn and shook Paul's hand. Paul watched his mother embrace his sister and give Phoebe her bouquet; he watched Phoebe's tentative hug in return. Their mother and Frederic climbed into the car, smiling and waving, amid another shower of confetti. The car disappeared around the curve, and Paul made his way back to the table, pausing to say hello, to one guest after another, keeping Phoebe's figure in sight. When he drew near he heard her talking happily to another guest about Robert and her own wedding. Her voice was loud, her speech a little thick and awk?ward, her excitement uncontained. He saw the guest's reaction—a strained, uncertain, patient smile—and winced. Because Phoebe just wanted to talk. Because he himself had reacted to such conver?sations in the very same way, just a few weeks earlier.
"How about it, Phoebe," he said, walking over and interrupting. "You want to go?"
"Okay," she said, and put her plate down.
They drove through the lush countryside. It was a warm day. Paul turned off the air-conditioner and rolled down the windows, remembering the way his mother had driven so wildly through these same landscapes to escape her loneliness and grief, the wind whipping through her hair. He must have traveled thousands of miles with her, back and forth across the state, lying on his back, trying to guess where they were by the glimpses of leaves, telephone wires, sky. He remembered watching a steamship move through the muddy waters of the Mississippi, its bright wheels flashing light and water. He had never understood her sadness, though he had carried it with him later, wherever he went.
Now it was all gone, that sadness: that life was finished, gone, as well.
He drove fast, edges of autumn everywhere. The dogwoods were already turning, clouds of brilliant red against the hills. Pollen tickled Paul's eyes and he sneezed several times, but he still kept the windows open. His mother would have had the air-conditioning on, the car as chilly as a florist's case. His father would have opened his bag and found the antihistamine. Phoebe, sitting straight in the seat beside him, her skin so white, almost translucent, took a Kleenex from a small pack in her large black plastic purse and of-fered it to him. Veins, pale blue, traced just below the surface of her skin. He could see her pulse moving in her neck, calmly, steadily.
His sister. His twin. What if she'd been born without Down's? Or what if she'd been born as she was, simply herself, and their fa?ther had not raised his eyes to Caroline Gill, snow falling in the world outside and his colleague in a ditch? He imagined his par?ents, so young and so happy, bundling the two of them into the car, driving slowly through the watery streets of Lexington in the March thaw that followed their birth. The sunny playroom adjoin?ing his would have belonged to Phoebe. She'd have chased him down the stairs, through the kitchen and into the wild garden, her face always with him, his laughter an echo of her own. Who would he have been, then?
But his mother was right; he could never know what might have happened. All he had were the facts. His father had delivered his own twins in the middle of an unexpected storm, following the steps he knew by heart, keeping his focus on the pulse and heart rate of the woman on the table, the taut skin, the crowning head. Breathing, skin tone, fingers and toes. A boy. On the surface, per?fect, and a small singing started, deep in his father's brain. A mo?ment later, the second baby. And then his father's singing stopped for good.
They were close to town now. Paul waited for a break in traffic, then turned into the Lexington cemetery, past the gatehouse made of stone. He parked beneath an elm tree that had survived a hun?dred years of drought and disease and got out of the car. He walked around to Phoebe's door and opened it, offering his hand. She looked at it, surprised, then up at him. Then she pushed herself out of the seat on her own, still holding the daffodils, their stems crushed and pulpy now. They followed the path for a while, past the monuments and the pond with the ducks, until he guided her across the grass to the stone that marked their father's grave.
Phoebe traced her fingers over the names and dates engraved in the dark granite. He wondered again what she was thinking. Al Simpson was the man she called her father. He did puzzles with her in the evenings, and brought her favorite albums home from his trips; he used to carry her on his shoulders so that she could touch the high leaves of the sycamores. It couldn't mean anything to her, this slab of granite, this name.
David Henry McCallister. Phoebe read the words out loud, slowly. They filled her mouth and fell heavily into the world.
"Our father," he said.
"Our father," she said, "who art in heaven hallowed be thy name."
"No," he said, surprised. "Our father. My father. Yours."
"Our father," she repeated, and he felt a surge of frustration, for her words were agreeable, mechanical, of no significance in her life.
"You're sad," she observed, then. "If my father died, I'd be sad too."
Paul was startled. Yes, that was it—he was sad. His anger had cleared, and suddenly he could see his father differently. His very presence must have must have reminded his father in every glance, with every breath, of the choice he'd made and could not undo. Those Polaroids of Phoebe that Caroline had sent over the years, found hidden in the back of a darkroom drawer after the curators had gone; the single photograph of his father's family too, the one Paul still had, standing on the porch of their lost home. And the thousands of others, one after another, his father layering image on image, trying to obscure the moment he could never change, and yet the past rising up anyway, as persistent as memory, as powerful as dreams.
Phoebe, his sister, a secret kept for a quarter of a century.
Paul walked a few feet back to the gravel path. He paused, his hands in his pockets, leaves swirling up in the eddies of wind, a scrap of newspaper floating over the rows of white stones. Clouds moved against the sun, making patterns on the land, and sunlight flashed on the headstones, the grass and trees. Leaves tapped lightly in the breeze, and the long grass rustled.
At first the notes were thin, almost an undercurrent to the breeze, so subtle that he had to strain to hear them. He turned. Phoebe, still standing by the headstone, her hand resting on its dark granite edge, had begun to sing. The grass over the graves was moving and the leaves were stirring. It was a hymn, vaguely famil?iar. Her words were indistinct, but her voice was pure and sweet, and other visitors to the cemetery were glancing in her direction, at Phoebe with her graying hair and bridesmaid's dress, her awkward stance, her unclear words, her carefree, fluted voice. Paul swal?lowed, stared at his shoes. For the rest of his life, he realized, he would be torn like this, aware of Phoebe's awkwardness, the diffi?culties she encountered simply by being different in the world, and yet propelled beyond all this by her direct and guileless love.
By her love, yes. And, he realized, awash in the notes, by his own new and strangely uncomplicated love for her.
Her voice, high and clear, moved through the leaves, through the sunlight. It splashed onto the gravel, the grass. He imagined the notes falling into the air like stones into water, rippling the invisible surface of the world. Waves of sound, waves of light: his father had tried to pin everything down, but the world was fluid and could not be contained.
Leaves lifted; sunlight swam. The words of this old hymn came back to him, and Paul picked up the harmony. Phoebe did not seem to notice. She sang on, accepting his voice as she might the wind. Their singing merged, and the music was inside him, a humming in his flesh, and it was outside, too, her voice a twin to his own. When the song ended, they stayed as they were in the clear pale light of the afternoon. The wind shifted, pressing Phoebe's hair against her neck, scattering old leaves along the base of the worn stone fence.
Everything slowed, until the whole world was caught in this sin?gle hovering moment. Paul stood very still, waiting to see what would happen next.
For a few seconds, nothing at all.
Then Phoebe turned, slowly, and smoothed her wrinkled skirt.
A simple gesture, yet it set the world back in motion.
Paul noted how short and clipped her fingernails were, how deli?cate her wrist looked against the granite headstone. His sister's hands were small, just like their mother's. He walked across the grass and touched her shoulder, to take her home.
________________________________________
A PENGUIN READERS GUIDE TO
THE MEMORY KEEPER'S DAUGHTER
Kim Edwards
An Introduction to The Memory Keeper's Daughter
It is 1964 in Lexington, Kentucky, and a rare and sudden winter storm has blanketed the area with snow. The roads are dangerous, yet Dr. David Henry is determined to get his wife Norah to the hospital in time to deliver their first child. But despite David's methodical and careful driving, it soon becomes clear that the roads are too treacherous, and he decides to stop at his medical clinic instead. There, with the help of his nurse Caroline, he is able safely to deliver their son, Paul. But unexpectedly, Norah delivers a second child, a girl, Phoebe, in whom David immediately recognizes the signs of Down's Syndrome.
David is a decent but secretive man—he has shared his difficult past with no one, not even his wife. It is a past that includes growing up in a poor, uneducated family and the death of a beloved sister whose heart defect claimed her at the age of twelve. The painful memories of the past and the difficult circumstances of the present intersect to create a crisis, one in which his overriding concern is to spare his beloved Norah what he sees as a life of grief. He hands the baby girl over to Caroline, along with the address of a home to which he wants her taken, not imagining beyond the moment, or anticipating how his actions will serve to destroy the very things he wishes to protect. Then he turns to Norah, telling her, "our little daughter died as she was born."
From that moment forward, two families begin their new, and separate, lives. Caroline takes Phoebe to the institution but cannot bear to leave her there. Thirty-one, unmarried, and secretly in love with David, Caroline has been always been a dreamer, waiting for her real life to begin. Now when she makes her own split-second decision to keep and raise Phoebe as her own, she feels as if it finally has.
As Paul grows to adulthood, Norah and David grow more and more distant from each other. Norah, always haunted by the daughter she lost, takes a job that becomes an all-consuming career, and seeks the intimacy that eludes her with her own husband through a series of affairs. Feeling as if he's a disappointment to his father, Paul is angry and finds his only release through music. David, tormented by his secret, looks for solace through the lens of his camera, the "Memory Keeper," trying to make sense of his life through the images he captures.
But as The Memory Keeper's Daughter so eloquently shows, life is a moving image, unfolding and changing beyond our control. Despite our desire to freeze a moment or to go back into the past and alter events, time presses us forward. With her heart-wrenching yet ultimately hopeful novel, Kim Edwards explores the elusive mysteries of grief and love, and the power of the truth both to shatter and to heal.
A Conversation with Kim Edwards
1. The Memory Keeper's Daughter is a powerful combination of a tragic and poignant family story as well as riveting page-turner, due primarily to the fact that it centers on such a shocking act by one individual that affects everyone he cares about. How did the idea for this novel come to you?
A few months after my story collection, The Secrets of a Fire King was published, one of the pastors of the Presbyterian church I'd recently joined said she had a story to give me. I was pleased that she'd thought of me, if a bit surprised—I was back in church after a twenty-some year absence, and still quite skeptical of it all. Yet even to my critical eye it was clear that good things were happening: the congregation was vibrant and progressive and engaged; the co-pastors, a married couple who had both once been university professors, gave sermons that were beautifully crafted and thought-provoking, both intellectual and heartfelt. I'd already come to admire them very much. Still, it happens fairly often that people want to give me stories, and invariably those stories are not mine to tell. So I thanked my pastor, but didn't think much more about her offer.
The next week she stopped me again. I really have to tell you this story, she said, and she did. It was just a few sentences, about a man whod discovered, late in life, that his brother had been born with Down's Syndrome, placed in an institution at birth, and kept a secret from his family, even from his own mother, all his life. He'd died in that institution, unknown. I remember being struck by the story even as she told it, and thinking right away that it really would make a good novel. It was the secret at the center of the family that intrigued me. Still, in the very next heartbeat, I thought: of course, I'll never write that book.
And I didn't, not for years. The idea stayed with me, however, as the necessary stories do. Eventually, in an unrelated moment, I was invited to do a writing workshop for adults with mental challenges through a Lexington group called Minds Wide Open. I was nervous about doing this, I have to confess. I didn't have much experience with people who have mental challenges, and I didn't have any idea of what to expect. As it turned out, we had a wonderful morning, full of expression and surprises and some very fine poetry. At the end of the class, several of the participants hugged me as they left.
This encounter made a deep impression on me, and I found myself thinking of this novel idea again, with a greater sense of urgency and interest. Still, it was another year before I started to write it. Then the first chapter came swiftly, almost fully formed, that initial seed having grown tall while I wasn't really paying attention. In her Paris Review interview, Katherine Anne Porter talks about the event of a story being like a stone thrown in water—she says it's not the event itself that's interesting, but rather the ripples the event creates in the lives of characters. I found this to be true. Once I'd written the first chapter, I wanted to find out more about who these people were and what happened to them as a consequence of David's decision; I couldn't stop until I knew.
