The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  The other picture, hanging across from my mother’s photograph, is Caravaggio’s painting of the Gorgon Medusa, right after Perseus cut off her head. I remember someone reading Medusa’s story to me when I was a child, about how men turned to stone when they looked at her and how the hero, Perseus, with his helmet of invisibility, his winged sandals, and sword, slayed the terrible Gorgon. Medusa’s children were born from her spilled blood; one of them was Pegasus. For years I dreamed I was a winged horse, watching, from the sky, my mother’s serpentine head float away from her body.

  In 1964 I am five and my sister is six. We live in a second-floor flat on the west side of Cleveland, next to a church with a small crabapple orchard out back. Most of the tenants in our building are transplants from Appalachia. At dinnertime I can hear the sound of fiddle music and TV drifting through the walls. In our own apartment our mother keeps the classical radio station turned up loud. Triskett Road in the early 1960s is full of fast cars and chattering shoppers, families walking to church, the movie theater, Pick ’n Pay, or Kresge’s five and dime. Off Triskett, on West 148th Street where our grandparents live, and Rainbow, Gramatan, and Tuckahoe, a quiet hush shrouds the side streets after the fathers leave in the morning and the children are hurried off to school.

  Our own father, Paul Herr, had disappeared shortly after our mother divorced him in 1963, a few months after I turned four. Once in a while he sends money but has no permanent home or steady job. My mother says he’s living in a South American jungle, eating snake meat and writing his second book. Sometimes she tells me he is painting pictures in Mexico; sometimes she says he is dead. His first book was called Journey Not to End. Does that mean my father can’t find his way home?

  At school, in my kindergarten class at Riverside Elementary, I run and hide in the cloakroom whenever someone asks me to play house. I don’t know how to play; how would I? Mrs. Bemis comes inside to coax me out. I tell her I am a cat. I curl my hands into claws in front of my face. I’m an invisible cat. Mrs. Bemis is kind and gently leads me to the art table. She gives me paper and crayons, or fat wooden beads to string and count. “You don’t have to play if you don’t want to,” she says. Mrs. Bemis teaches me how to plant seedlings in small pots, how to make butter from a cup of cream.

  There is a boy at school who lives in our building on Triskett Road. He’s not in my class at Riverside but I watch him at recess sometimes, running in wild circles by himself. When the other kids see him, they call out, “Retard!” then run away fast. One day, I am looking for my mother but can’t find her anywhere inside our place. I am on the stairs leading down to the basement when the boy plunges a long pole into my face, not because I call him Retard or some other name; I am just standing in his path. I wake up in the hospital, my face covered in gauze.

  For the rest of the year I wear a black patch over my left eye. It isn’t easy to see. I run into furniture and trip over my feet. At home, in our apartment, I pretend I am blind. I close my good eye and walk with my arms stretched out in front of me, circumnavigating the rooms by sound and touch. I pick up random objects on the floor near my mother’s bed and try to guess what they are: Cracked coffee cup. Empty perfume bottle. Cigarette lighter. Scattered pills. “You’re my little Helen Keller!” she says when my fingers find her soft, cool face. She pulls the black patch up; kisses the spot above my big ugly swollen eye.

  I’m in my sister’s and my bedroom when I hear it one day—a low guttural sound followed by strange chattering and laughter. I am playing Helen Keller, eyes shut tight, ears open to the world. There are two small beds in our room and one old dresser with a broken drawer. My grandma told me once that when I was a baby, my mother put me in the drawer to sleep, then forgot she had left me there. Someone shut the drawer and I almost suffocated to death. My grandma had to break the handle to get me out.

  I reach up and touch the objects on our dresser—an old teddy bear, a stuffed horse, and a plastic palomino I call Pony. I pick up the plastic horse, run my fingers over its hard thin legs, its pointy ears and tail. Something isn’t right—the sound, the strange laughter. I feel something grab hold of my breath; I want to hide and don’t know why. I clutch the little horse in my hand. Where’s Rachel? She’s older; she should be the one to see what’s wrong, but she’s not here. Maybe she’s at a friend’s. Rachel is more outgoing than I am. I usually tag along and she always lets me come. She does the things my mother doesn’t do for some reason—fixes my hair, ties my shoes, makes me toast. Where is she now?

  I walk out into the hallway, my good eye open. Who’s there? Is it the man who lives across the way, Mr. Bade, the pimply man with the fat neck and bulbous red nose who leers at our mother when he passes her in the hall? Is it a stranger at the door? The police? I follow the sound to the living room. Is it the radio? The TV? I tiptoe down the hall. Who is she talking to? What is so funny?

  And then I see her. She is stumbling around in her underwear as if she’s drunk, but she’s not. My mother never drinks. Her voice sounds familiar, but it’s not her own. My mother is impersonating a drunk. I recognize the voice from TV—it’s a character from The Jackie Gleason Show called Crazy Guggenheim. I take a step back so she can’t see me and peek around the corner of the hall. Her voice changes again. I know who she is now; she’s Joe the Bartender, a character Jackie Gleason plays on the show.

  “The usual?” says my mother. She pantomimes Gleason wiping down the counter at the bar. “There ya go, pal!” She laughs. “There ya go, there ya go, there ya go!” She keeps repeating the line, then switches back to Crazy Guggenheim, walking in circles. That’s how I remember it, her stumbling around, muttering these things, but who can say for sure? I am only five years old. The girl downstairs says that sometimes the devil crawls inside you when you’re sleeping and only Jesus can get him out. Is the devil inside her body?

  On the real show the joke about Crazy is that he’s mentally impaired, or, as people used to say back then, retarded, like the boy who hurt my eye. He’s a retarded drunk. Jackie Gleason always calls out, “Craz! Come on out here!” and Crazy totters to the bar, tripping over his feet. The audience goes wild. Gleason and Crazy tell a few jokes, Crazy gets drunker and dumber, until finally Joe says, “Hey, Craz, how ’bout a song?” “Okay, Joe,” he says, and Crazy lumbers over to the jukebox every time, pushes a button, and goes back to the bar. Then he takes off his frumpy turned-up hat, places it on the counter, and transforms into someone else. He sings a heartbreaker of a song, a lovelorn Irish ballad in his rich, melodious voice. The audience explodes. He puts his hat back on, says, “’Bye, Joe,” and waddles out the swinging doors. That is how it always is on the show.

  My mother doesn’t know I am there. She struts around the living room, mumbling and shouting, “How ’bout another, Joe?” She rolls her eyes like Crazy Guggenheim, makes her lips droopy like his. “I’m C-C-C-raaaaazy Guggenheim!” She stutters, “I’m C-c-c-c-crazy!”

  To her left is the baby grand piano she had rented for a few months, which will be repossessed in a week or two because she can’t pay the bill. To her right and in front of her are walls lined with the books our father left behind. Will he ever come back to get them? There are big art books—Gauguin, Klee, Picasso, Bosch, and Brueghel, books in Spanish, Russian, Yiddish, and French, plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Ionesco, Beckett, and Shaw, Russian classics, books by all the Beat poets, and Chaucer, William Blake. On the top shelf is The Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends with the story of Medusa and Perseus inside. There’s Oscar Wilde’s Salome, on the cover a madwoman with wild snaky hair. My mother reads it over and over like she rereads Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, searching for prophetic signs.

  Suddenly my mother turns into someone else, someone I can’t recognize from TV. She makes slicing movements in the air. She’s holding something now, something long and shiny. She spins around fast as if someone has just crept up behind her. She is spinning and spinning, obscenities rolling off her tongue, wor
ds I’ve only heard my grandfather use. There is the smell of burnt toast and cigarettes, no music coming from anywhere, no radio or TV. The radio is always on twenty-four hours a day, but today it is silent. Behind my mother is the couch and three big open windows. Can the neighbors below us hear her? Can people see her from the street? Will she jump?

  I don’t know how it ends, this scene—the beginning of knowledge, the knowledge that I have a secret I must keep from the outside world. In this scene, my mother is forever spinning, wielding a knife. My sweet beautiful mother merges with Medusa—they meld into one another, pull apart, and come together again, morphing into other restless creatures—characters from TV shows, mythological monsters, demons from my dreams. She is forever spinning and I am forever watching her with my one good eye—a small child frozen behind a wall, both of us surrounded by so many beautiful books.

  Dreamless Nights

  Sign of Mars, Dreamless nights. Sunshine, continued cool. Go ahead, browse those voice personals and find that special someone. It’s only $1.89 per minute. Tomorrow scattered showers in morning, cloudy the rest of the day. Things I intend to do in the not too distant future—study Braille, leave Chicago, read poetry, continue vocabulary study, talk to a dentist, wear a wig. I would be glad to “let my smile be my umbrella on a rainy day” but to date have not found a dentist with a realistic price. I need new scarves and paint. Should I or should I not enter Goldblatt’s? They sold me bad paint a year ago. When I lived in Cleveland, a young woman told me that Baldwin Wallace College was doing experiments with rats. At times, I have an idea there is life from outer space and with free condoms advertised in the New City paper, some of them might be inside, adopting “human” form. I have no affection for this city. Must think of something neutral to control rage. Birth flower, May, lily of the valley, stemless convallariaceous herb, Convallaria majalis, with a raceme of drooping, bell-shaped fragrant white flowers. Think of something cheerful: a sweet pea. Draw a picture of it.

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  O fall, fall from that burning sky, white blossoms,

  Come down! You insult our Gods, pale phantoms.

  Holier is the saint who has known the abyss.

  Gérard de Nerval, from the “Chimeras”

  Passionflower

  I still paint a picture of it every year: Passiflora, the passionflower. In Latin, passio is “suffering,” flos means “flower” and the verb “to wander.” Passiflora: flower of martyrs and paradise lost. Some say it can cure insomnia, melancholy, even madness. After the tragedies of 9/11, I painted one with crimson petals and sent it to my mother, who had been sleeping in baggage claim at the Cleveland airport before they kicked all the homeless people out. She wrote back: Thank you for the package containing hosiery, warm gloves and the red flower. A ray of sunshine on a storm-ridden day.

  My mother made lists of plants and their medicinal properties in the journals we found at U-Haul. She stopped to draw plants on her walks and kept copious notes on how to make botanical tinctures for when she finally returned home. In her letters, she told me that if she discovered the right remedy, she could cure herself of hair loss, age spots, and the memory lapses she attributed to radioactive gas. She was particularly fond of the roses in the garden behind the house on West 148th Street, and in her diaries, she lamented her loss of the pink azaleas on the front lawn. My greatest regret, she said in one of her last letters to me, was that I never learned how to put something in the ground. Maybe when we all move back to Grandma’s house, you can teach me.

  Two months before I got the call from the hospital, my mother wrote from the women’s shelter: Most plants spend their lives rooted in one place and produce seeds to make new ones. Plant cells have tough, thick walls made of cellulose and contain a special substance called chlorophyll. Almost all plants belong to a group. Rachel has a birthday tomorrow. Where is the birthday girl? Where has everyone gone?

  In my palace, I leave Medusa and my mother behind and pass through a pillared hall of shadows. I enter another room. The ceiling is high and arched like the nave of a small church; the walls are a pale and lustrous gold. On the wall, a passionflower, glowing like an icon. The colors are shades of crimson, ocher, a deep Prussian blue. If you saw the flower from a distance, you might think it a portrait of a saint.

  Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist and grandfather of order and taxonomy, once invented a flower clock. He discovered, after careful observation, certain flowers opened and closed at specific times throughout the day. As a child, I search for sleeping flowers in my grandfather’s garden. I know when they wake up each morning. My favorite looks like a tiny rose, its leaves juicy and small, its petals flashy neon pink: Portulaca grandiflora, the little moss rose. It closes when it’s cloudy and goes to sleep at night.

  I know when all the flowers go to bed, when the neighbors take their naps. When people are sick or sad I paint flowers for them. I make pictures for Mrs. Budd, the lady down the street, who drinks when her husband is away. I leave the pictures taped to her door when I know she is sleeping. I make pictures for my friend Patty’s parents, Ruth and Army Armstrong, who live across the street from my grandparents and hide my sister and me when our grandfather is mean and drunk. When my mother is asleep, I place pictures by her bed so when she wakes up she’ll find them. Maybe if I make enough pictures, pick enough flowers, she will stop talking to people who aren’t there.

  After Medusa arrived on Triskett Road she never left for good. I quickly grasped the order of things. If I heard strange sounds in the living room I never went in there, for who knew what I might find? I told no one about the invisible guests who came late at night uninvited or the ghosts who whispered to her through the walls. On days of agitated pacing and our mother’s fierce conversations with herself, my sister and I stayed out of her way. We’d run to the back of our building, to the parking lot and small yard with the chain-link fence and rusty swing set, the overflowing trash cans, the lone pine. In the weeks leading up to these episodes, our mother would be nearly catatonic; she’d sit on the couch enveloped in blue tendrils of smoke, dismissing my sister and me with a wave of her cigarette if we said we were hungry. In our cupboard, these were our staples: pimiento-stuffed olives, moldy jars of cocktail sauce, TV dinners, stale melba toast.

  “Grandma can feed you,” she’d say. “Or go to a friend’s.”

  Rachel would grab my hand and pull me out to the street, careful to look both ways. She kept an eye out for mean dogs and boys, and hurried me across Triskett Road. We walked the three blocks to our grandparents’ house for the food that we knew would be there—corned beef on rye and kashkaval, the hard salty cheese from the West Side Market, honey-sweet halvah, warm pita with tomatoes and feta, peaches and pears from the yard.

  After stuffing ourselves, we’d slip out the back barefoot and run as fast as we could to the field and woods behind the house. On summer days there was always the scent of rose and honeysuckle in the air. We came and went as we pleased as long as our grandfather wasn’t raging at one of us for misplacing the butter dish, a pencil, or a spoon. “Hillbillies,” kids called us, but I thought of us like sisters of Mowgli from The Jungle Book. If things got worse, Rachel and I could always live in a wolf den in the middle of the woods.

  Sometimes we spent the night at our grandparents’. Rachel and I slept upstairs in our grandmother’s room in two twin beds side by side. We covered ourselves with thin scratchy blankets while Grandma curled up on the love seat in the guest room. Our grandfather slept alone in the master bedroom, in his four-post king-sized bed. No one was to enter uninvited or they’d get the belt. “Good night,” I’d say to him from the doorway, the sinister red rooster lamp glaring at me from his nightstand. “Good night, girlie,” Grandpa would say from his bed, cigarette dangling from his lips, the air around him thick with smoke.

  At breakfast, I’d tilt my head back so Grandpa could spoon orange-blossom honey into my mouth with his callused meaty hands. When I had a cold, he placed a string of gar
lic around my neck. Garlic and honey could cure anything; so could the raw eggs he tossed back in the morning with whiskey, or the yogurt he made in a vat, warm cultures growing beneath his brown leather coat. My grandfather told me what I should eat from his garden to make me strong and healthy—parsley for “the halitosis,” plums for “the constipation,” mint and apples to keep the doctors away.

  Outside the house there was always something stirring in the deep ripe earth—green shoots poking up, rows of tomatoes and green beans, clusters of flowers and herbs. At our grandparents’ there were three yards: the front lawn, tidy for show, with a silver ball on a white plaster pedestal; the middle one, with rose beds, dogwood and plum trees, and the birdbath Grandpa always forgot to fill; and the backyard, where the garden was, a shady magnolia, fruit trees, and a lush carpet of grass. The backyard was connected to the Bentes’ and the Budds’; Rachel and I reigned over all three. Beyond the wall of trees that lined the yards was where the owls and the deer hid. At night I’d think about the quiet deer, and imagined wolves living in warm dark caves, waiting for my sister and me to come.

  In the summer of 1965 I am six and Rachel is seven. Our mother sleeps all day and wakes right before dinner. She paces in the apartment or outside, where everyone can see her muttering under her breath. Will she have to go to the hospital? Who will call? Our grandma is ashamed to call but she’s the only one who does. Grandma says, “What will the neighbors say now?” as the ambulance screeches into the driveway on Triskett Road and muscular strangers come bounding up the stairs. Where does she go? When our mother returns weeks later, she walks like a drifting boat. She says that the Nazis hooked her head up to machines at the hospital; they set her brain on fire.