The Memory Palace: A Memoir
by Mira Bartok
Homeless
A homeless woman, let’s call her my mother for now, or yours, sits on a window ledge in late afternoon in a working-class neighborhood in Cleveland, or it could be Baltimore or Detroit. She is five stories up, and below the ambulance is waiting, red lights flashing in the rain. The woman thinks they’re the red eyes of a leopard from her dream last night. The voices below tell her not to jump, but the ones in her head are winning. In her story there are leopards on every corner, men with wild teeth and cat bodies, tails as long as rivers. If she opens her arms into wings she must cross a bridge of fire, battle four horses and riders. I am a swan, a spindle, a falcon, a bear. The men below call up to save her, cast their nets to lure her down, but she knows she cannot reach the garden without the distant journey. She opens her arms to enter the land of birds and fire. I will become wind, bone, blood, and memory. And the red eyes below are amazed to see just how perilously she balances on the ledge—like a leaf or a delicate lock of hair.
Part I
The Order of Things
Every passion borders on chaos, that of the collector on the chaos of memory.
Walter Benjamin, “Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus”
. . . Climb the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the seashores . . . the deep recesses of the earth . . . for in this
way and no other will you arrive at . . . the true nature of things.
Petrus Severinus, 16th century Danish alchemist
The Subterranean World
Even now, when the phone rings late at night, I think it’s her. I stumble out of bed ready for the worst. Then I realize—it’s a wrong number, or a friend calling from the other side of the ocean. The last time my mother called was in 1990. I was thirty-one and living in Chicago. She said if I didn’t come home right away she’d kill herself. After she hung up, she climbed onto the second-floor balcony of my grandmother’s house in Cleveland, boosted herself onto the banister, and opened her arms to the wind. Below, our neighbor Ruth Armstrong and two paramedics tried to coax her back inside. When the call came the next time, almost seventeen years later, it was right before Christmas 2006, and I didn’t even hear the phone ring.
The night before, I had a dream: I was in an empty apartment with my mother. She looked like she had that winter of 1990—her brown and gray hair unwashed and wild, her blouse stained and torn. She held a cigarette in her right hand, fingers crossed over it as if for good luck. She never looked like a natural-born smoker, even though she smoked four packs a day. The walls of the apartment were covered in dirt. I heard a knock.“What do you want?” I asked the stranger behind the door. He whispered, “Make this place as clean as it was in the beginning.” I scrubbed the floors and walls, then I lifted into the air, sailing feet-first through the empty rooms. I called out to my mother, “Come back! You can fly too!” but she had already disappeared.
When I awoke there was a message on my machine from my friend Mark in Vermont. He had been keeping a post office box for me in Burlington, about three hours from my home in Western Massachusetts. The only person who wrote me there was my mother. “A nurse from a hospital in Cleveland called about a Mrs. Norma Herr,” he said. “She said it was an emergency.” How did they find me? For years, I had kept my life secret from my schizophrenic and homeless mother. So had my sister, Natalia. We both had changed our names, had unpublished phone numbers and addresses.
The story unfolded over the next couple days. After the ambulance rushed my mother to the hospital, the red sweater I had sent her for the holidays arrived at the women’s shelter where she had been living for the last three years. Tim, her social worker, brought the package to her in ICU to cheer her up after surgery. He noticed the return address was from me, care of someone in Vermont. He knew I was her daughter. A nurse called information to get Mark’s number and left the message on his machine. How easy it was to find me after all those years. When I called a friend to tell her I was going to see my mother, she said, “I hope you can forgive her for what she did to you.” “Forgive her?” I said. “The question is—will she ever forgive me?”
The night before I left for Cleveland, while Doug, my fiancé, was making dinner, I went to my studio above our barn to gather some things for my trip. I did what I always do when I enter: I checked the small table to the left of my desk to see if I had written any notes to myself the day before. It’s there, on my memory table, that I keep an ongoing inventory of what I’m afraid I’ll forget. Ever since I suffered a brain injury from a car accident a few years ago, my life has become a palimpsest—a piece of parchment from which someone had rubbed off the words, leaving only a ghost image behind.
Above my desk are lists of things I can’t remember anymore, the meaning of words I used to know, ideas I'll forget within an hour or a day. My computer is covered in Post-its, reminding me of which books I lent out to whom, memories I’m afraid I’ll forget, songs from the past I suddenly recall.
I was forty when, in 1999, a semi hurtled into my car while a friend and I were stopped at a construction site on the New York Thruway. The car was old and had no airbag—my body was catapulted back and forth in the passenger’s seat, my head smashing against the headrest and dashboard. Coup-contrecoup it’s called, blow against blow, when your brain goes flying against the surface of your skull. This kind of impact causes contusions in the front and back areas of the brain and can create microscopic bleeding and shearing of neural pathways, causing synapses to misfire, upsetting the applecart of your brain, sometimes forever. Even if you don’t lose consciousness, or, as in my case, don’t lose it for very long.
The next days and months that followed I couldn’t remember the words for things or they got stuck in my head and wouldn’t come out. Simple actions were arduous—tipping a cabbie, reading an e-mail, and listening to someone talk. On good days, I acted normal, sounded articulate. I still do. I work hard to process the bombardment of stimuli that surrounds me. I work hard not to let on that for me, even the sound of a car radio is simply too much, or all those bright lights at the grocery store. We children of schizophrenics are the great secret-keepers, the ones who don’t want you to think that anything is wrong.
Outside the glass door of my studio, the moon was just a sliver in the clear obsidian sky. Soon I’d be in the city again, where it’s hard to see the stars. Hanging from a wooden beam to the right of my desk is a pair of reindeer boots I made when I lived in the Arctic, before my brain injury, when I could still travel with ease. What to bring to show my mother the last seventeen years of my life? How long would I stay in Cleveland? One month? Five? The doctor had said on the phone that she had less than six months to live—but he didn’t know my mother.
What would she think of the cabinet of curiosities I call my studio: the mouse skeleton, the petrified bat, the pictures of co-joined twins, the shelves of seedpods and lichen, the deer skull and bones? Would she think that aliens had put them there or would she want to draw them, like me? I fantasized about kidnapping her from the hospital. I would open the couch bed and let her spend her last days among the plants, the paints, and the books; let her play piano anytime she wanted. I’d even let her smoke. She could stay up all night drawing charts of tornadoes, hurricanes, and other future disasters, like the ones she used to send me through my post office box. But she would never see this place. She probably would never leave her bed.
Lining the walls in my studio was evidence of a life intersecting art and science: books on art history and evolution, anthropology, polar exploration, folklore, poetry, and neuroscience. If I brought her here, would my mother really be happy? There was a cabinet of art supplies, an antique globe, a map of Lapland. I had star charts, bird charts, and a book of maps from the Age of Discovery. Had my mother ever been truly happy? Had she ever passed a day unafraid, without a chorus of voices in her head?
The questions I wrote down before I left for Cleveland: How long does she have to live? Does she have a coat? Will she remember me? How will I remember her, after she is gone?
The next day I flew into Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. I almost always travel with Doug now: he is my compass, my driver, my word-finder and guide. How would I fare in this place without him? When I collected my suitcase from baggage claim, I half expected my mother to appear. She had slept on one of the benches off and on for years. Sometimes people came up to her and gave her money but she never understood why. Once she wrote to say: A kind man offered me five dollars at the airport for some reason. A bright moment in a storm-ridden day. I bought a strawberry milkshake at Micky D’s then pocketed the rest.
I had flown to Cleveland just two months before to go to my thirtieth high school reunion. The day after the reunion, Doug and I drove to Payne Avenue near downtown Cleveland to see the shelter where my mother lived. She had given me her address in 2004, not a post office box number like she had in the past. I had no idea she had cancer then, nor did she, even though her body was showing signs that something was seriously wrong. I live in pain on Payne, she had written to me several times. I am bleeding a lot from below. But how to know what was real? Are you sick? I’d write her; she would respond: Sometimes I am taken out of the city and given enemas in my sleep. It’s what they do to Jews. In her last few letters, she always ended with: If you come to see me, I’ll make sure they find you a bed. Doug and I parked across the street from the shelter; I put on dark sunglasses and wouldn’t get out of the car. “I just want to see where she lives,” I said. “If I go in, she’ll want to come home with me, and then what?” I sank low in the seat and watched the women smoke out in front, waiting for the doors to open. It was windy and trash blew around the desolate treeless road. “I wish I could take her home. It looks like a war zone,” I said to Doug as we drove away. “At least I saw where she lives. It makes it more real. But now what?”
I felt worse, finally knowing where she lived, knowing exactly what the place looked like. How could I turn my back on her now when her sad life was staring me in the face? And if I didn’t do something soon, what was to stop her from moving on yet again, to another shelter, another town?
I had been communicating with my mother’s social worker for the past year about reuniting us, with a third party present for support. I wouldn’t do it without a third party, without my mother living somewhere under close watch, in a halfway house or a nursing home. Even though she was now elderly, in my mind she was still the madwoman on the street, brandishing a knife; the woman who shouts obscenities at you in the park, who follows you down alleyways, lighting matches in your hair.
I had no idea if my sister Natalia would want to see her at all, but planned to ask her when the time came. The organization that was helping my mother, MHS (Mental Health Services for Homeless Persons, Inc.), had been trying to arrange a legal guardianship for her so she could be placed in a nursing home where she could get adequate care. She would finally have an advocate—someone to make decisions for her about finances, housing, and health. But when MHS presented my mother’s case before the court, they lost. It didn’t matter that she slept outside on the wet ground some nights, or that she was incontinent, nearly blind, and seriously ill, or that she had a long history of suicide attempts and hospitalizations. The judge declared my mother sane for three simple reasons: she could balance a checkbook, buy her own cigarettes, and use correct change. It was just like when my sister and I had tried to get a guardianship for her in the past.
I picked up a rental car at the airport and met my childhood friend Cathy at my hotel. We had seen each other for the first time after thirty years when I came to town two months before. Except for a few extra pounds and some faint lines etched around her blue eyes, Cathy hadn’t changed. I could still picture her laughing, leaning against her locker at Newton D. Baker Junior High—a sweet, sympathetic girl in a miniskirt, straight blond hair flowing down to her waist.
As we were going up the elevator at University Hospital, I told Cathy about what the doctor had said to me earlier that day on the phone. He had said that my mother’s abdomen was riddled with tumors, and that he had removed most of her stomach and colon. He explained what stomas were, how her waste was being removed through them and how they had to be kept clean. I said,“He claims she’ll never go back to the shelter. They’ll get her into a good nursing home and make her as comfortable as possible before she dies.”
That’s a relief,” she said, taking my hand.
“I don’t know, Cathy. I still think she’ll just get up, walk out the door, and disappear.”
The door was slightly ajar when we arrived at my mother’s room. I asked Cathy to wait in the hall until I called her in. The lights were off when I entered. I watched my mother sleep for a few minutes; the sun filtered through the slats in the shades, illuminating her pallid face. She looked like my grandfather when he was dying—hollow cheeks, ashen skin, breath labored and slow. Would she believe it was really me? She thought that aliens could assume the shape of her loved ones.
“Mom,” I said.“It’s me. Your daughter, Myra.” I used my old name, the one she gave me. She opened her eyes.
“Myra? Is it really you?” Her voice was barely audible and her cadence strange.
“I brought you a little gift,” I said, and placed the soft orange scarf I had knitted for her around her neck.
I sat down and took her hand. How well could she see? She had always written about her blindness, caused by glaucoma, cataracts, and “poisonous gas from enemy combatants.” I wondered if she could see how I had aged. My dark brown hair was cut in a bob, like the last time I had seen her, but I had a few wrinkles now, a few more gray hairs. I still dressed like a tomboy, though, and was wearing black sweatpants and a sweater.“That’s a good look for you, honey,” she said.“You look sporty. Where’s your sister?”
“She’ll be here in a couple days,” I said.“She sends her love.”
I was relieved that I could say that. What if my sister couldn’t bear to come? What would I have said?
When the nurse came in I asked her how much my mother weighed.
“Eighty-three pounds. Are you her daughter?”
“Yes,” I said, then hesitated. “I haven’t seen her in seventeen years.”
I expected the nurse to reproach me, but instead she was kind. “How nice that you can be together now. I hope you two have a great reunion.”
My mother brought her hand up to shield her eyes. “Turn that damn light off.”
“It’s off,” I said.
“Shut the curtains. It’s too bright in here. Where’s my music? When am I going home?”
“Where do you want to go?” I asked.
“Back to my women.”
Did she mean the women’s shelter? Or did she want to be with my sister and me in her old house on West 148th Street?
“Where’s my little radio? Did someone steal it again?”
The last time I visited my mother in a hospital, it was over twenty years ago. She was in a lockdown ward at Cleveland Psychiatric Institute (CPI) and had asked me to bring her a radio. She had always needed a radio and a certain level of darkness. In her youth, my mother had been a musical prodigy. When I was growing up, she listened to the classical radio station night and day. I always wondered if her need for a radio meant more than just a love of music. Did it help block out the voices in her head?
I pulled the curtains shut over the shades.“Is that better?”
“Yes, honey. You’re a good girl.”
I could smell lunch arriving down the hall—coffee, soup, and bread. Comforting smells in a world of beeping machines and gurneys—the clanking, squeaking sounds of the ICU.
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
“Not that hungry these days,” she said. “You want something to eat? You’re too thin. Go ask them to make you a sandwich. I’ll pay. Bring me my purse.”
My mother was missing all but her four front teeth. I remember her writing me several years before to say that she had had them all removed because disability wouldn’t pay for dental care. According to the Government, teeth and eyes are just accessories, she wrote. Like buying a belt or a brooch.
“Where are your false teeth?” I asked. “They’ll be serving lunch soon.”
“Someone stole them,” she whispered. “They always steal my teeth.”
We sat for a while, holding hands. She drifted in and out of sleep. I put my mother’s palm up to my lips. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t smell cigarettes on her skin. She smelled like baby lotion. She opened her eyes.
“You should be proud of me. I quit smoking,” she said.
“When did you quit?”
“A week ago. When they brought me here.”
“Good for you,” I said. “You know, I always loved you, Mommy.”
It was the first time I had used that word since I was a child. My sister and I always called her Mother, Norma, or Normie, or, on rare occasions, Mom. It was hard to call her anything maternal, even though she tried so hard to be just that. But in the hospital, as she lay dying, Mommy seemed the only right word to use.
“I love you too,” she said. “But you ran away from me. Far away.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“A lot happened,” she said.
“A lot happened to me too. But I’m here now.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m glad you came. Now let me sleep. I’m so very tired.”
On Tuesday, my second day at the hospital, a nurse came in and asked me
how old my mother was. “She just turned eighty in November,” I said.
My mother threw me a nasty look. “It’s a lie!”
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Not that old,” she said.
“I was just kidding,” I said.“Are you in your forties now?” I winked at the nurse.
“A little older but not much. A woman should never reveal her age.”
“She’s fifty-two,” I said to the nurse but mouthed the word eighty when my mother turned away.
Later, the surgeon talked to me outside the room. He said that the pathology report had finally come in. What he originally thought was colon cancer was late-stage stomach cancer, which is more deadly and was moving fast. I bombarded him with questions: “Where else has the cancer spread? Is she too far gone for chemo? How long does she have?”
“Well, the good news is that your mother is doing remarkably well!” How can a dying person do remarkably well? I wondered. He added, “She’s recovering great from the surgery but there’s nothing we can really do for her anymore, just keep her comfortable.”
“Can you explain what you did?” I asked.
The doctor borrowed my notepad and drew a picture. His pen flew over the paper; it was a map of what my mother looked like inside.“Here’s what I did,” he said. “I redirected what’s left of her colon and moved this over here, so that her waste can exit through this stoma, see?”
He spoke too fast for my brain, using words like fistula, ileostomy, and carcinomatosis. I had no idea what he was talking about. It looked like he was drawing the map of a city as seen from above. Was this what is inside us, these roads and byways, these rotaries and hairpin turns?
Excerpted from The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók. Copyright © 2011 by Mira Bartók. Excerpted by permission of Free Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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