The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  Praise for

  The Memory Palace

  “Mira Bartók’s memoir will haunt you with its compassion for people who have mental illness and for the tender vulnerability of their children. Bartók’s writing is at times spare and at times lyrical as she struggles in the unpredictable and unsafe world of being the child of a paranoid schizophrenic. ‘How heavy is a dresser when you’re the only one pushing it against the door?’ she asks, distilling years of nights of fear. Beautifully written, touchingly told, The Memory Palace lingers, radiating with pain and fear, love and freedom.”

  —JANINE LATUS, author of If I Am Missing or Dead: A Sister’s Story of Love, Murder and Liberation

  “The Memory Palace is a stunning meditation on the tenacity of familial bonds, even in the face of extreme adversity, and an artist’s struggle to claim her own creative life. Bartók carries us, room to luminous room, through her memory palace, filling it with stories that link loss to grace, guilt to love, the natural world’s great beauty to the creative act, and tragic beginnings to quietly triumphant closings. This extraordinary book, with its beautiful illuminated images, will stay with me.”

  — MEREDITH HALL, author of Without a Map

  “Schizophrenia is more than a thief of the mind and Mira Bartók gives us the layered understanding to see the illness for all its cruel manifestations when the illness hijacks her mother. The best memoirs illuminate us all, and The Memory Palace left me illuminated with Bartók’s courage and unwavering belief in artistic expression in the midst of a shattered family. The writing is spectacular.”

  — JACQUELINE SHEEHAN, PH.D. New York Times bestselling author of Lost & Found, and Now & Then

  “In The Memory Palace, Bartók’s gilded prose and encyclopedic mind lead the reader through her life’s darkest chambers where debilitating mental illness sends the author’s mother spiraling from a promising career as a concert pianist to years of madness. But Bartók does not merely decorate her palace with humanistic portraits of the mentally ill and the seemingly insurmountable challenges they and their families face. She takes the reader up secret staircases illuminated by her own irrepressible creativity and struggle to survive, her mother’s flashpoints of lucidity, and their equally ravishing intellects. From this great height Bartók shows us that art’s healing powers affect even those that illness has pushed to the shadowiest extremes of the human experience. The Memory Palace is a grand, unforgettable estate.”

  — ELYSSA EAST, author of Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town

  “A disturbing, mesmerizing personal narrative about growing up with a brilliant but schizophrenic mother. . . . Richly textured, compassionate and heartbreaking.”

  — KIRKUS REVIEWS, starred review

  “Neither sensational nor cagily sentimental nor self pitying, this grounded, exquisitely written work . . . requires reading.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “All you’d need is to see my copy to know-I have Post-it notes marking phrases and sentences I wanted to repeat because they were so good. About one-third of the way through, I thought that if this book were a person, I’d consider making out with it.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL BOOK SMACK!, starred review

  “Bartók juggles a handful of profound themes: how to undertake a creative

  life … how we remember … how one says goodbye to a loved one in a manner that might redeem in some small way a life and a relationship blighted by psychosis; and, most vividly and harrowingly, how our society and institutions throw mental illness back in the hands of family members, who are frequently helpless to deal with the magnitude of the terrifying problems it generates. On all counts, it’s an engrossing read.”

  — ELLE magazine”

  Author’s Note

  Nearly all the names of those who appear in this book have remained intact. However, I have changed the names of a couple people so as to protect their privacy. I have also reconstructed various conversations and condensed certain moments from my life.

  This is a book about memory itself as much as it is a book about my relationship with my mother and I have tried my best to follow my own memory’s capricious and meandering path along the way. As for my mother’s diary entries between each chapter—they are her words but my headings.

  Free Press

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com.

  Copyright © 2011 by Mira Bartók

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions

  thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary

  Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Free Press hardcover edition January 2011

  FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers

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  Illustrations by Mira Bartók

  Art photography by Adam Laipson

  Book design by Ellen R. Sasahara

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bartók, Mira.

  The memory palace / by Mira Bartók.

  p. cm.

  1. Herr, Norma Kurap, 1926–2007. 2. Bartók, Mira. 3. Children of the mentally ill—

  United States—Biography. 4. Mentally ill parents—United States—Biography.

  I. Herr, Norma Kurap, 1926–2007. II. Title.

  RC464.H47 2011

  362.2085092—dc22

  [B 2010008399

  ISBN 978-1-4391-8331-1

  ISBN 978-1-4391-8333-5 (ebook)

  Contents

  Prologue: Homeless

  Part I: The Order of Things

  1. The Subterranean World

  2. Medusa

  3. Passionflower

  4. The Eye of Goya

  5. Cave Girl

  6. My Year with Audubon

  7. The Vigilance of Dolphins

  8. Changelings

  9. The Museum of Indelible Things

  10. Death, the Rider

  Part II: The New World

  11. Forgeries and Illuminations

  12. A Hand and a Name

  13. Rabbits

  14. Oracle Bone

  Part III: Palimpsest

  15. In the Palace of Kalachakra

  16. Into the Land of Birds and Fire

  17. A Cabinet of Wonders

  Acknowledgments

  For my mother

  Norma Kurap Herr

  November 17, 1926 – January 6, 2007

  And dedicated to the women

  of the Community Women’s Shelter

  of Cleveland, Ohio

  Child, knowledge is a treasury and your heart its strongbox.

  Hugo of St. Victor, from The Three Best Memory Aids

  for Learning History

  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 ar
ms 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.

  Every passion borders on chaos, that of the collector

  on the chaos of memory.

  Walter Benjamin, “Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus”

  Part I

  The Order of Things

  1

  ... 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 d
ay. 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?”