The Memory Keeper's Daughter

March 1964

In 1964, during an unusual Kentucky blizzard, Dr. David Henry is forced to deliver his and his wife Norah's first child, with the help of a nurse; Caroline Gill. Their first child, a boy they name Paul, is born, a visibly perfect child, but it then becomes apparent that Norah is giving birth to twins. When the second baby, a girl, is born; David notices immediately she is a mongoloid (a name given at the time for people with Down syndrome). David, recalling the possibility of heart complications and thinking of his sister, June, who died young due to a heart defect; decides that Phoebe will be placed in an institution to spare Norah the suffering June's death caused his own mother. Caroline, the nurse—who has been in love with David since the moment she met him—is charged with the task of carrying the infant to the institution. After assessing the wretched conditions of the place, however, she decides to keep and raise the baby herself. Remembering Norah's mention of the names she had chosen for her baby, both for a boy and a girl, Caroline names the baby Phoebe. While Caroline is at the store buying baby supplies, her car battery dies and she is stranded in the snow with Phoebe. She is picked up by a truck driver, Albert "Al" Simpson; who lets her shelter with Phoebe in his truck before driving them to Caroline's home in Lexington, and eventually staying there for the night. Meanwhile, David lies to Norah and tells her that their daughter died at birth; leaving his passive wife plagued by post-natal depression as those around her refuse to let her talk about the daughter she lost, treating her as if she should be satisfied with Paul and forget about Phoebe's 'death'. She decides to hold a memorial for Phoebe, and place an announcement in the paper without David's knowledge—astonished, Caroline seeks David out after reading it, and after hearing that she had kept the baby rather than take her to the institution, he bids her to do what she thinks is right. Caroline refuses the money he offers her, and leaves for Pittsburgh to make fresh start there—with Phoebe.

[edit] 1965

The 'death' of their daughter has caused a distance between David and Norah, even after they move to a new home, as they now find it difficult to connect with one another. Norah wants another child, but David says no; telling Norah that to have another child would be her way of replacing Phoebe. David thinks a lot about his childhood- the struggles with poverty (he had to catch snakes to pay his way through high school), his younger sister June and her death at the age of twelve, and his parents. Norah is drinking too much, but stops after crashing her car on the night of her and David's anniversary. Norah buys David a camera as an anniversary gift, which rapidly becomes an obsession for him.

Caroline is in Pittsburgh and is hired by a widow named Dorothy "Doro" March, to work as a private nurse for her father, Leo; an oft disagreeable elderly physicist, whose brilliant mind is slowly failing him. Caroline and Phoebe live with Doro and Leo, with Caroline working for room and board. Caroline claims that Phoebe is her daughter, and cares for her as such; staying up all night with Phoebe in a steamy bathroom to relieve her croup. Doro notices Phoebe's slow development, and Caroline tells her that Phobe has Down Syndrome; claiming she ran away from Phoebe's father as he wanted to put Phoebe in an institution: a half-truth. Caroline sends letters and pictures of Phoebe to David. David sends money to Caroline through a PO Box address, and then makes a half-hearted attempt to find out where Caroline and Phoebe live. Al, the truck driver who assisted Caroline on the night of Paul and Phoebe's birth, discovers their whereabouts and begins visiting regularly.

[edit] 1970

The distance between the Henry's has grown even further. David, now is an aspiring photographer with his own darkroom, where he keeps Phoebe's pictures and Caroline's letters hidden; retreats further into himself, immersing himself in his work - whilst Norah, still drinking secretly, is overprotective of Paul and has taken to throwing herself into time-consuming projects and activities to distract herself and fill up her days, applying for a job with a travel agent in an attempt to build a life of her own. Paul, however, is oblivious to this - a happy six-year-old, doing well at school, seeming to have an aptitude for music and singing, and well other than a severe allergy to bees and a broken arm which he sustains falling out of a tree.

In Pittsburgh, contrary to the prediction David made at her birth, Phoebe is growing up a healthy child- she loves butterflies and singing, and attends preschool. Caroline and a group of other women - the Upside Down Society - are petitioning to let their children go to public school. Leo March has died, but Doro - used to Caroline and Phoebe's company - asks her to remain living with them. Al still visits Caroline regularly, and has twice proposed to her - however, she has turned him down both times, doubting not his love for her but his love for Phoebe. Each time he visits, he brings small gifts for her or Phoebe, and her letters - containing money - from David Henry. While playing, Phoebe is stung by a bee, and Phoebe also turns out to be allergic. Al helps get Phoebe to a hospital, and steps in when a nurse's comment about Phoebe's condition makes Caroline see red. At this, Caroline realizes that he really does love Phoebe. Al asks her to marry him for a third time, and she accepts.

[edit] 1977

Paul and Phoebe are now aged thirteen, and Caroline and Al have been married for five years. Phoebe has been confirmed; and Doro has retired to leave on a year-long cruise with her lover, named Trace. Over the years, Caroline has saved the money David Henry has sent her and kept it in trust for Phoebe. David sends Caroline a letter, asking her to let him meet Phoebe and to let Phoebe know her twin brother, Paul. Phoebe disappears briefly, panicking Caroline, who finds her rescuing a kitten from a water drainage pipe. Caroline decides not to contact David again, worried that David might unknowingly hurt Phoebe (as he hurt her, by not noticing or ignoring her love for him) and feeling that he wants too much from her, too late.

Paul is becoming an accomplished musician, playing the guitar and the piano and dreaming of attending Juilliard, while also behaving like a daredevil teenager - experimenting with cannabis and walking on rail tracks. David and Norah, now living almost separate lives, have differing views on what Paul should do when he's older - Norah simply wants her son to be happy, while David pushes for his son to take an interest in basketball and to follow a career path that will guarantee him stability, money and success. Norah Henry is excelling in her work at the travel agency, though she is still frustrated by the distance between her and David, and his apparent lack of love for or interest in her. While on vacation, in Aruba, she has an affair with Howard, a divorcee. Both David and Paul realize what she has done, but neither of them talk about it. David blames the affair on himself and continues to spend more and more time in his darkroom with his photographs.

[edit] 1982

Phoebe and Paul are now both 18.

David has an arts show in Pittsburgh. Caroline turns up and shows him pictures of Phoebe. He has to stop the conversation briefly to answer an art critic. When he's speaking to the critic, Caroline leaves. David is devastated and goes to his parents' abandoned house, where he finds Rosemary, a pregnant 16-year-old, who is squatting in the house. He tells Rosemary his secret. He asks her to come and live with him. Paul and Norah can't believe the way he's behaving. Paul runs away for a couple of days. Paul has been accepted at Juilliard.

[edit] 1988

Rosemary and her son Jack move back to live with her family. Norah and David are now divorced and Norah is dating. Paul is traveling and studying music in France. David dies of a heart attack. When Norah sorts through David's photographs she understands David in a way she never did when he was alive.

Phoebe is in love with Robert, also an individual with Down syndrome, and wants to get married and live in a group home with more independence. Caroline worries about the future and is scared about letting Phoebe live her own life. When Caroline hears of David's death she goes and finds Norah and tells her the truth. Norah and Paul meet Phoebe for the first time. Phoebe and Paul both attend their mother's wedding. Paul takes Phoebe to their father's grave.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Memory_Keeper's_Daughter

THE SNOW STARTED TO FALL SEVERAL HOURS BEFORE HER labor began. A few flakes first, in the dull gray late-afternoon sky, and then wind-driven swirls and eddies around the edges of their wide front porch. He stood by her side at the window, watching sharp gusts of snow billow, then swirl and drift to the ground. All around the neighborhood, lights came on, and the naked branches of the trees turned white.

After dinner he built a fire, venturing out into the weather for wood he had piled against the garage the previous autumn. The air was bright and cold against his face, and the snow in the driveway was already halfway to his knees. He gathered logs, shaking off their soft white caps and carrying them inside. The kindling in the iron grate caught fire immediately, and he sat for a time on the hearth, cross-legged, adding logs and watching the flames leap, blue-edged and hypnotic. Outside, snow continued to fall quietly through the darkness, as bright and thick as static in the cones of light cast by the streetlights. By the time he rose and looked out the window, their car had become a soft white hill on the edge of the street. Already his footprints in the driveway had filled and disappeared.

He brushed ashes from his hands and sat on the sofa beside his wife, her feet propped on pillows, her swollen ankles crossed, a copy of Dr. Spock balanced on her belly. Absorbed, she licked her index finger absently each time she turned a page. Her hands were slender, her fingers short and sturdy, and she bit her bottom lip lightly, intently, as she read. Watching her, he felt a surge of love and wonder: that she was his wife, that their baby, due in just three weeks, would soon be born. Their first child, this would be. They had been married just a year.

She looked up, smiling, when he tucked the blanket around her legs.

"You know, I've been wondering what it's like," she said. "Before we're born, I mean. It's too bad we can't remember." She opened her robe and pulled up the sweater she wore underneath, revealing a belly as round and hard as a melon. She ran her hand across its smooth surface, firelight playing across her skin, casting reddish gold onto her hair. "Do you suppose it's like being inside a great lantern? The book says light-permeates my skin, that the baby can already see."

"I don't know," he said.

She laughed. "Why not?" she asked. "You're the doctor."

"I'm just an orthopedic surgeon," he reminded her. "I could tell you the ossification pattern for fetal bones, but that's about it." He lifted her foot, both delicate and swollen inside the light blue sock, and began to massage it gently: the powerful tarsal bone of her heel, the metatarsals and the phalanges, hidden beneath skin and densely layered muscles like a fan about to open. Her breathing filled the quiet room, her foot warmed his hands, and he imagined the perfect, secret, symmetry of bones. In pregnancy she seemed to him beautiful but fragile, fine blue veins faintly visible through her pale white skin.

It had been an excellent pregnancy, without medical restrictions. Even so, he had not been able to make love to her for several months. He found himself wanting to protect her instead, to carry her up flights of stairs, to wrap her in blankets, to bring her cups of custard. "I'm not an invalid," she protested each time, laughing. "I'm not some fledgling you discovered on the lawn." Still, she was pleased by his attentions. Sometimes he woke and watched her as she slept: the flutter of her eyelids, the slow even movement of her chest, her outflung hand, small enough that he could enclose it completely with his own.

She was eleven years younger than he was. He had first seen her not much more than a year ago, as she rode up an escalator in a department store downtown, one gray November Saturday while he was buying ties. He was thirty-three years old and new to Lexington, Kentucky, and she had risen out of the crowd like some kind of vision, her blond hair swept back in an elegant chignon, pearls glimmering at her throat and on her ears. She was wearing a coat of dark green wool, and her skin was clear and pale. He stepped onto the escalator, pushing his way upward through the crowd, struggling to keep her in sight. She went to the fourth floor, lingerie and hosiery. When he tried to follow her through aisles dense with racks of slips and brassieres and panties, all glimmering softly, a sales clerk in a navy blue dress with a white collar stopped him, smiling, to ask if she could help. A robe, he said, scanning the aisles until he caught sight of her hair, a dark green shoulder, her bent head revealing the elegant pale curve of her neck. A robe for my sister who lives in New Orleans. He had no sister, of course, or any living family that he acknowledged.

The clerk disappeared and came back a moment later with three robes in sturdy terry cloth. He chose blindly, hardly glancing down, taking the one on top. Three sizes, the clerk was saying, and a better selection of colors next month, but he was already in the aisle, a coral-colored robe draped over his arm, his shoes squeaking on the tiles as he moved impatiently between the other shoppers to where she stood.

She was shuffling through the stacks of expensive stockings, sheer colors shining through slick cellophane windows: taupe, navy, a maroon as dark as pig's blood. The sleeve of her green coat brushed his and he smelled her perfume, something delicate and yet pervasive, something like the dense pale petals of lilacs outside the window of the student rooms he'd once occupied in Pittsburgh. The squat windows of his basement apartment were always grimy, opaque with steel-factory soot and ash, but in the spring there were lilacs blooming, sprays of white and lavender pressing against the glass, their scent drifting in like light.

He cleared his throat-he could hardly breathe-and held up the terry cloth robe, but the clerk behind the counter was laughing, telling a joke, and she did not notice him. When he cleared his throat again she glanced at him, annoyed, then nodded at her customer, now holding three thin packages of stockings like giant playing cards in her hand.

"I'm afraid Miss Asher was here first," the clerk said, cool and haughty.

Their eyes met then, and he was startled to see they were the same dark green as her coat. She was taking him in-the solid tweed overcoat, his face clean-shaven and flushed with cold, his trim fingernails. She smiled, amused and faintly dismissive, gesturing to the robe on his arm.

"For your wife?" she asked. She spoke with what he recognized as a genteel Kentucky accent, in this city of old money where such distinctions mattered. After just six months in town, he already knew this. "It's all right, Jean," she went on, turning back to the clerk. "Go on and take him first. This poor man must feel lost and awkward, in here with all the lace."

"It's for my sister," he told her, desperate to reverse the bad impression he was making. It had happened to him often here; he was too forward or direct and gave offense. The robe slipped to the floor and he bent to pick it up, his face flushing as he rose. Her gloves were lying on the glass, her bare hands folded lightly next to them. His discomfort seemed to soften her, for when he met her eyes again, they were kind.

He tried again. "I'm sorry. I don't seem to know what I'm doing. And I'm in a hurry. I'm a doctor. I'm late to the hospital."

Her smiled changed then, grew serious.

"I see," she said, turning back to the clerk. "Really, Jean, do take him first."

She agreed to see him again, writing her name and phone number in the perfect script she'd been taught in third grade, her teacher an ex-nun who had engraved the rules of penmanship in her small charges. Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect. Eight years old, pale and skinny, the woman in the green coat who would become his wife had clenched her small fingers around the pen and practiced cursive writing alone in her room, hour after hour, until she wrote with the exquisite fluidity of running water. Later, listening to that story, he would imagine her head bent beneath the lamplight, her fingers in a painful cluster around the pen, and he would wonder at her tenacity, her belief in beauty and in the authoritative voice of the ex-nun. But on that day he did not know any of this. On that day he carried the slip of paper in the pocket of his white coat through one sickroom after another, remembering her letters flowing one into another to form the perfect shape of her name. He phoned her that same evening and took her to dinner the next night, and three months later they were married.

Now, in these last months of her pregnancy, the soft coral robe fit her perfectly. She had found it packed away and had held it up to show him. But your sister died so long ago, she exclaimed, suddenly puzzled, and for an instant he had frozen, smiling, the lie from a year before darting like a dark bird through the room. Then he shrugged, sheepish. I had to say something, he told her. I had to find a way to get your name. She smiled then, and crossed the room and embraced him.

The snow fell. For the next few hours, they read and talked. Sometimes she caught his hand and put it on her belly to feel the baby move. From time to time he got up to feed the fire, glancing out the window to see three inches on the ground, then five or six. The streets were softened and quiet, and there were few cars.

At eleven she rose and went to bed. He stayed downstairs, reading the latest issue ofThe Journal of'Bone andJoint Surgery. He was known to be a very good doctor, with a talent for diagnosis and a reputation for skillful work. He had graduated first in his class. Still, he was young enough and-though he hid it very carefully- unsure enough about his skills that he studied in every spare moment, collecting each success he accomplished as one more piece of evidence in his own favor. He felt himself to be an aberration, born with a love for learning in a family absorbed in simply scrambling to get by, day to day. They had seen education as an unnecessary luxury, a means to no certain end. Poor, when they went to the doctor at all it was to the clinic in Morgantown, fifty miles away. His memories of those rare trips were vivid, bouncing in the back of the borrowed pickup truck, dust flying in their wake. The dancing road, his sister had called it, from her place in the cab with their parents. In Morgantown the rooms were dim, the murky green or turquoise of pond water, and the doctors had been hurried, brisk with them, distracted.

All these years later, he still had moments when he sensed the gaze of those doctors and felt himself to be an imposter, about to be unmasked by a single mistake. He knew his choice of specialties reflected this. Not for him the random excitement of general medicine or the delicate risky plumbing of the heart. He dealt mostly with broken limbs, sculpting casts and viewing X-rays, watching breaks slowly yet miraculously knit themselves back together. He liked that bones were solid things, surviving even the white heat of cremation. Bones would last; it was easy for him to put his faith in something so solid and predictable.

He read well past midnight, until the words shimmered senselessly on the bright white pages, and then he tossed the journal on the coffee table and got up to tend to the fire. He tamped the charred fire-laced logs into embers, opened the damper fully, and closed the brass fireplace screen. When he turned off the lights, shards of fire glowed softly through layers of ash as delicate and white as the snow piled so high now on the porch railings and the rhododendron bushes.

The stairs creaked with his weight. He paused by the nursery door, studying the shadowy shapes of the crib and the changing table, the stuffed animals arranged on shelves. The walls were painted a pale sea green. His wife had made the Mother Goose quilt that hung on the far wall, sewing with tiny stitches, tearing out entire panels if she noted the slightest imperfection. A border of bears was stenciled just below the ceiling; she had done that too.

On an impulse he went into the room and stood before the window, pushing aside the sheer curtain to watch the snow, now nearly eight inches high on the lampposts and the fences and the roofs. It was the sort of storm that rarely happened in Lexington, and the steady white flakes, the silence, filled him with a sense of excitement and peace. It was a moment when all the disparate shards of his life seemed to knit themselves together, every past sadness and disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty hidden now beneath the soft white layers. Tomorrow would be quiet, the world subdued and fragile, until the neighborhood children came out to break the stillness with their tracks and shouts and joy. He remembered such days from his own childhood in the mountains, rare moments of escape when he went into the woods, his breathing amplified and his voice somehow muffled by the heavy snow that bent branches low, drifted over paths. The world, for a few short hours, transformed.

He stood there for a long time, until he heard her moving quietly. He found her sitting on the edge of their bed, her head bent, her hands gripping the mattress.

"I think this is labor," she said, looking up. Her hair was loose, a strand caught on her lip. He brushed it back behind her ear. She shook her head as he sat beside her. "I don't know. I feel strange. This crampy feeling, it comes and goes."

He helped her lie down on her side and then he lay down too, massaging her back. "It's probably just false labor," he assured her. "It's three weeks early, after all, and first babies are usually late."

This was true, he knew, he believed it as he spoke, and he was, in fact, so sure of it that after a time he drifted into sleep. He woke to find her standing over the bed, shaking his shoulder. Her robe, her hair, looked nearly white in the strange snowy light that filled their room.

"I've been timing them. Five minutes apart. They're strong, and I'm scared."

He felt an inner surge then; excitement and fear tumbled through him like foam pushed by a wave. But he had been trained to be calm in emergencies, to keep his emotions in check, so he was able to stand without any urgency, take the watch, and walk with her, slowly and calmly, up and down the hall. When the contractions came she squeezed his hand so hard he felt as if the bones in his fingers might fuse. The contractions were as she had said, five minutes apart, then four. He took the suitcase from the closet, feeling numb suddenly with the momentousness of these events, long expected but a surprise all the same. He moved, as she did, but the world slowed to stillness around them. He was acutely aware of every action, the way breath rushed against his tongue, the way her feet slid uncomfortably into the only shoes she could still wear, her swollen flesh making a ridge against the dark gray leather. When he took her arm he felt strangely as if he himself were suspended in the room, somewhere near the light fixture, watching them both from above, noting every nuance and detail: how she trembled with a contraction, how his fingers closed so firmly and protectively around her elbow. How outside, still, the snow was drifting down.