The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards

 

Set in the backdrops from 1964 to 1989;  fictionalized from a similar real life story of impoverished farmer  from 1934, The Memory Keeper's Daughter  by Kim Edwards was my 62nd of 2020.                                          

A doctor David Henry is forced to deliver his wife's child in the middle of a raging snowstorm. Twins - the first, a healthy beautiful baby boy; the second, a Downs Syndrome baby girl. The year is 1964, when such children are regularly institutionalized - cause, babies like this rarely survive long anyway, and even if they do, their quality of life is marginal at best. As a doctor, David Henry knows his daughters prognosis full well, and rather than force his young wife Norah to deal with such a tragedy, he makes a snap decision to try and protect her from a lifetime of unspeakable grief. His solution: hand the "defective" daughter to his nurse to deliver to an institution, while he informs his wife of the tragedy - "I am sorry. Our little daughter died as she was born". This was unplanned, the words he had rehearsed carefully had gone.  With that simple little secret, the future is inescapably changed, his doom is sealed - unbeknownst to anyone.

The nurse Caroline Gill, could not bring herself to hand over the child. She was unhappy with the place, and then she thought this was what she was meant to do. She did have a crush of David Henry once. So she flees into hiding to raise the child as her own after discussion with the doctor annoyed to see and obituary in newspaper. Caroline raising "Phoebe" on her own  sets the stage for the terrible secret David must live with and the consequences it has on his family.

Caroline sends letters and pictures of Phoebe to David. David sends money to Caroline and makes a half-hearted attempt to find out where Caroline and Phoebe live. Meanwhile, Al, the truck driver who assisted Caroline on the night of Phoebe's birth, discovers her whereabouts. He and Caroline begin regular visits, and romance begins to bloom between them.

David is now an aspiring photographer with his own darkroom, where he keeps Phoebe's pictures and Caroline's letters locked away. He immerses himself in his work and basically leaves the family, only coming back into their lives to complain about Paul. Norah drinks secretly and becomes overprotective of Paul. Paul is becoming an accomplished guitarist and dreams of attending Juilliard. David and Norah live almost completely separate lives and differ on what Paul should do when he's older. Norah simply wants her son to be happy, while David pushes Paul to follow a career path that will guarantee stability, money, and success. By the time Paul and Phoebe  twenty-five. Norah and David are divorced and Paul is traveling and studying music in France with his own girlfriend. Phoebe is in love with Robert, who also has Down syndrome, and wants to get married and live in a group home, but Caroline is scared to let Phoebe live an independent life. Bree, Norha's sister has been a constant companion to her. It was only David's mother and sister in their family who know about Phoebe but they too passed away soon.

David considers making a confession to Norah about Phoebe but can't bear to go through with it. Soon afterward, he dies from a heart attack  (And this is mentioned in the middle of a paragraph as a passing away reference - may be symbolic of how death could be?) Later, when Norah sorts through David's collection of photographs, she begins to understand him in a way she never did when they were married. Caroline comes to visit Norah and explains that Phoebe never died at all and is living with her. Norah and Paul later visit Pittsburgh and meet Phoebe for the first time. Paul drives Phoebe to their late father's grave. Paul thinks of what his twin sister might have been like if she had not been born with Down syndrome. Norah gets married to a man named Frederic. They plan to move to France, where Phoebe and Paul will visit them for a little while. 

On David's death, church was filled with people, that people had to be standing, when the service was going on. "People seemed to think he was a saint,"  "They weren't married to him," Norah said to Bree. Paul and Norah knew he loved them, but there was a wall between him and them. " That distance. That reserve. That sense of a wall too high to get over. After a while I gave up trying, and after a longer while I gave up waiting for a door to appear in it. But behind that wall, he loved us both. I don't know how I  know that, but I do."  Norah said to Paul when he came days after the funeral and was shocked to know about it.

The doctor’s daughter was a symbolism for happiness. The nurse wasn’t happy with her life, but when she started raising the child as her own, she found her true love and lived happily - there were challenges but mostly she was happy. As for the doctor, he gave happiness away and his relationship with his wife... his family... it started to break apart and he starts to drown in his own regret and guilt. David died and there was no chance of making amends. The ending just seemed to fall flat and nothing redeeming happened. 

It's a tragic book  but the one ray of hope comes unexpectedly, as David Henry confesses everything - no more secrets - to a young woman with child. In the silence David started talking again, trying to explain at first about the snow and the shock and the scalpel flashing in the harsh light. How he has stood outside himself and watched himself moving in the world. How he had woken up every morning of his life for eighteen years thinking maybe today, maybe this was the day he would put things right. She cut paper and listened. Her silence made him free. He talked like a river, like a storm, words rushing through the old house with a force and life he could not stop. At some point he began to weep again, and he could not stop that either. Rosemary made no comment whatsoever. He talked until the words slowed, ebbed, finally ceased. But Phoebe was gone and he couldn't find her, so how could he possibly tell Norah? "All right," she said [at last]. "You're free." And this single act of honesty produces the deepest intimacy he has ever experienced - it's not sexual, but relational - with a human being who knows the very worst about him and yet who does not reject him for it. Finally he fixes the faucets in his bathroom. 

Despite basing an entire story around the mistake of giving up a child because of a mental disability, it gave absolutely no credit to the young girl who has downs syndrome! She's more of a prop than a person, no part of the story is told from her perspective, aside from the desire to marry her boyfriend, never gets the chance to show the world what she wants and feels.  The title gave an expectation that the book was from her angle; but no, though she was the driving force of the novel  yet we really never know her other than glimpses through the eyes of Caroline. Paul, her twin brother, is given thoughts but Phoebe’s mind remains a mystery. One sentence keep echoing : Paul saying "My sister doesn't know how good she's got it"; and the effect it has on his parents, in course of an argument. 

David takes up photography and becomes obsessed with the process. Diving into his hobby, which ultimately brings notoriety to him, he is able to take his mind off his secret, and yet at the same time, focus on the life his lost daughter leads away from him. Photography/snapshots/captured moments are the metaphor for this family and this beautifully written story about one seemingly right decision affecting dozens of lives.