by Mira Bartók
Love, Mother
My mother sent me postcards from all the art exhibits she went to in Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York during her extended stays at shelters and motels. She went to museums on free days, or right before closing so she didn’t have to pay. I wanted to send my mother postcards from shows but if I did she might find out where I lived or traveled to in the years we were apart. When she lived in Chicago the same time I did in the early nineties we even went to see the same exhibits. I’d always wear dark sunglasses and tuck my hair up in my hat just in case.
Each year for her birthday on November 17, I sent her a museum date book. I found most of them in her storage room at U-Haul. She had made notations each day about the weather and what she ate. She also copied the pictures with oil pastels or colored pencils and glued them onto large collages she called her “posters of intent.” My mother told me about them in her letters, how she would put them up against windows in shelters and motels to block out radioactive gas and the projected thoughts of others.
When my mother sent me one of her drawings or collages, she added commentary on the back. Sometimes she threw away the picture and just sent the commentary: I copied the Dubuffet for you then added a little color. Should have left as is. When I finished the picture I destroyed it. Afterwards, I typed all the M’s in the dictionary, bathed, and contemplated my own labyrinth. Enough said. Mom.
In one letter, ten years after she had been on the street, she enclosed a small drawing of goats. She wrote: You asked about my eye problems. I’ve been legally blind but did not walk with cane until Chicago. Enclosed is a small picture for you of two mountain goats conversing in a field. Someone asked me the other day how a blind person can draw and I said there was a man who was deaf who composed music. His name was Ludwig. I am still not on his level. (But I am not dead yet.) Mother.
My mother and I loved artists and famous people who suffered from horrible afflictions, like Beethoven, Joan of Arc, Frida Kahlo, Anne Frank. Burned at the stake or crippled at birth? We wanted to read about it. I don’t remember talking about our shared obsession; it was just something unspoken. Perhaps she connected viscerally to their suffering, while I tried to understand hers. Beethoven was my mother’s muse, for me it was the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya y Lucientes; both men became deaf late in life. My mother and I were equally fond of Vincent Van Gogh. When my mother had a particularly bad day, she’d write in her journal: Another ear to chop off, Vincennes! Sometimes she just wrote: Another ear!
When I received my first letter from her, two years after she became homeless, I noticed that my mother had written my sister’s name in the corner of the envelope instead of her own. From that point on, she referred to herself from time to time as Rachel N. Herr, the Helen Keller Annie Frank of Chicago—Deaf, Blind, Mute Baby of the War.
At the hotel in Cleveland, while my sister lay sleeping, I searched for pictures in my mind. I was trying to find a particular one by Goya from the Cleveland Museum of Art, hoping it would lead me back to my mother, to a time long ago. I whispered his titles like incantations: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Saturn Devouring His Son, Tantalus... Martyred peasants appeared, tormented souls howled in corners of asylums, winged monsters emerged from clouds of bats. Goya’s dark figures writhed on the black walls of La Quinta del Sordo, the House of the Deaf Man, where, in tortured silence, he conjured demons with cannibal teeth. But none of these pictures were what I was looking for.
I closed my eyes and entered the palace. Through the door, past Medusa and my mother’s photograph, the passionflower glowing in its frame. I paused and turned right, then entered a sunlit room filled with paintings. Straight ahead was a portrait of a man sitting at a desk. The portrait was by Goya. It wasn’t that remarkable—for Goya, that is. If I had seen it in a museum, I might have passed it by. But when I thought of it then, a memory bloomed from when I was nine: I was back in Cleveland in the spring of 1968 and my mother and I were boarding the eastbound Rapid Transit, heading to University Circle and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
As we pull away from the platform we pass the junkyard. I watch big yellow cranes lift rusty cars and another machine smash them flat, then stack them on a pile of metal. One machine looks like a monster with an evil grin; it’s a dragon, and a princess is held captive beneath the mountain. Perseus arrives on his winged horse just in time as we travel far above the banks of the Cuyahoga. I hold my nose because the river smells like rotten eggs; a year later when I am ten, it will catch on fire. I’ll remember the burning river, people running from shore, although I am almost certain I wasn’t there. The fire will be quelled in twenty minutes and no one will be harmed, but I’ll remember it like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch—a hellish river in flames, boiling and black, naked people drowning and crying out in terror. I’ll remember how my mother saw signs before it even happened in the paintings we visited at the museum.
It’s a good day and my mother is taking a nap. She’s not talking to herself or gesturing to the window as if she’s making a point to someone, saying, “Well, he says the CIA’s involved” or “He says another plane’s going to crash” She’s not channeling Crazy Guggenheim or Pearl Bailey, strutting down the aisle, shouting out random punch lines from her act, or impersonating Sammy Davis, Jr., or whispering to my father’s old Chicago pal, Saul Bellow; she’s not swearing at Jesus or God.
When we arrive at the station on the east side of Cleveland, my mother and I make our way past condemned buildings and empty parking lots toward University Circle. Patty and Stephanie and the other kids from our neighborhood don’t even come to this part of town. In 1968 there are shootings here, riots and gangs.
“There it is!” I say. “The lagoon!”
She smiles and reaches down to take my hand. We are almost there—I see the pond sparkling in the distance. It’s a warm afternoon in spring; everywhere there are swans and waterbirds, a maze of trees and winding paths graced with irises and columbines. In front of the museum is a fountain with neoclassic statues and gushing water. It’s warm and my mother and I take off our shoes to dip our toes. She lights up a cigarette while I circle the fountain wall, balancing one foot at a time. We could be any mother and daughter, out for a Sunday afternoon—an exotic beauty in a bright red dress and her shy dark-eyed daughter, knees stained green from sodden grass.
Before ascending the stairs, we pause in front of The Thinker. Rodin’s muscular patinaed nude is hunched over, head in hand, oblivious to the world. My mother laughs softly, says something I can’t make out. Is she talking to me? She suddenly charges ahead, eyes glued to the ground, and tosses her lit cigarette away.
“Come on, kiddo,” she says, “Let’s go inside.”
Inside the museum, we stop at the old stone wishing well. I stand on tiptoes to reach the top and make the same wishes I always do, tossing three pennies in, one by one: Please make my mother happy, make me a great artist, and please end the war in Vietnam. My goal is to hit bottom, dead center. My mother casts her three coins at once. Her face is flat, without emotion. What is it she wishes for?
After the well, we enter the room of Madonnas and illuminated books. There are gilded paintings by Sienese and Florentine artists—stigmataed saints, stern unhappy angels, stiff Madonnas with their baby-men Christs suckling from apple-round breasts. I love the painted books most of all. I touch the glass with my finger, tracing the birds and flowers scrolled around the ancient text. There are Books of Hours painted on vellum, intricate hymnals, Psalters, antiphonals, breviaries, bestiaries, herbals, and luminous Bibles for monasteries and kings. There is even one with a tiny naked man urinating on a large initial letter, surrounded by putti and a pair of fornicating goats. The labels say the manuscripts were painted in egg tempera and illuminated with gold leaf. Where could they have plucked leaves of gold? And paint made from eggs—what kind of eggs? A swallow’s? A hummingbird’s?
After the Middle Ages, my mother and I head straight for Picasso. We stand in
front of his Blue Period painting of emaciated circus performers. My mother bends down, brushes the hair out of my face.
“You’re my little Picasso,” she says. “Someday your paintings will hang on these walls.”
“Why is Picasso so sad?” I ask.
“He wasn’t so sad. He painted sad people.”
When we come to the surrealists, we see a world upside down—a man with no hands and a bull’s-eye for a face, a painting of pink pianos and monstrous things, a field of bizarre forms dissolving into a desolate sandy beach.
“There is something to be said for realism,” says my mother. “Do you remember your dreams?”
“I draw them.”
“Let me see.”
I open my sketchbook that I take with me everywhere and show her pictures of my dreams. I tell her how I fly around the neighborhood just like the floating figures in paintings by Marc Chagall. I travel up the canopy of trees on West 148th Street, but it’s hard to get off the ground so I have to wave my arms up and down really fast to get started. I point to the picture of a horse and explain how I become a different animal every night—a cat, a bird, a swift whitetail deer. I don’t mention that in my dreams she is a predator and I am her prey. Or that sometimes she is a crocodile standing on two feet, trying to devour me whole. Instead I tell her about my other dreams, the ones where I’m a knight who saves her.
“There’s a house and it’s filling up with water and you’re drowning.”
“And you save me?”
“And then we’re in the basement and there’s an evil giant and he’s swinging you around by your hair and you’re screaming, but then—”
“You should have been a boy. Then you could be a knight or a prince.”
“But in my dreams I have a sword. Joan of Arc had a sword.”
“Joan of Arc was a nut. I need a cigarette,” she says.
We wind our way through the bowels of the museum till we come to the place I call the Spanish Room, where my mother leaves me when she goes outside to smoke.
“Don’t move an inch and don’t talk to anyone,” she says. “I’ll be right back.”
In the center of the room stands an equestrian statue. An armored man sits atop a dark horse cloaked in steel, alert and ready for battle. Surrounding the metal horse are solemn seventeenth and eighteenth century paintings: martyrs, saints, prophets, priests, and kings. There’s a greenish gray Christ on a cross by El Greco, his face twisted in pain. I had seen this look before in Mitchell as he lay dying. Next to the El Greco, there’s a portrait of an ancient prophet emerging from shadows. The ominous paintings and dark horse should make the room dismal but sun pours in from the skylight above and envelopes the place with light. In every corner there are flowers and voluminous ferns. It feels more Monet than El Greco or Zurbarán, a room meant to embrace Renoir, my mother’s least favorite Impressionist. “What a faker,” she says whenever we pass one of his pink-cheeked blond and busty French girls.
I sit on a bench in the shadow of the horse so I don’t have to look into the eyes of the portrait across the room. I’m not sure why it bothers me. It’s just a man, a portrait of someone named Juan Antonio Cuervo by Goya, but I think it is Goya because his name is on the label below. The stern-looking man, who I think is Goya so I’ll call him Goya, wears a stiff black coat and holds a compass in his hand. An architect’s plan is spread out before him on a desk. I imagine him watching me. I know he’s not really watching me, but still, there he is. How did the painter learn to do that? I settle in to draw—a horse, a rider, a potted plant with red flowers and pointed white tongues.
The light shifts, clouds pass overhead. I’ve already sketched the horse and rider, the plants, Christ’s tormented face. A case of spiked gauntlets, crossbows, and cranequins. A close-up of my left hand. How long have I been sitting there? Goya’s eyes stare at me from across the room, as if to say, “Your mother’s never going to come. Why don’t you just go home?”
It’s getting late and I want my mother to come back. But what if she never does? I could wait here an hour or a year, set up a bed in the museum. Seasons could change. The weather could get cold, it could snow and still she might never return.
I get up and walk across the floor to Goya. I have to look up and strain my neck to see the man in the picture. What else is there to do but to keep on drawing? I practice what I learned from the art book my mother bought for me—first break the figure down in simple shapes, an oval for the head, a triangle for the torso. I hold up my pencil and squint to judge the distance between his eyes and nose, his nose and mouth. An announcement comes over the loudspeaker, “The museum will be closing soon.”
Somewhere, outside, my mother paces. Where is she? In the rose garden? It’s too early for roses. By the fountain? I want her to come back and take me home and I want her to leave me there and let me finish my drawing, get the details in—the gold brocaded cuffs and collar, those eyes that keep on staring.
When she’s late there’s the dreaded feeling of being found out, that my mother is sick and they will capture her. Like the policemen did that time she cut herself up her arms, right after Mitchell, the sick man, died. Or the time she teetered on Grandma’s balcony, shaking her fist at the sky. Men in white coats didn’t come like they do in the movies, just two policemen with their flashing lights, their guns and clubs, talking to her like she was mentally retarded or a foreigner or a person who is deaf. I imagine her speaking softly to herself in the garden. Does she ever think of me when she wanders? Does she ever talk to me in her head?
They will hurt her; I am always worried about that—the authorities, men in uniforms. I can see a crowd gathering in my mind. I am always afraid of the crowd that gathers. Of the person who says, “Is that your mother?” “No, I don’t know her, why? Does she look like me? Do I look like I’d have a mother like that?”
“The museum is closing in fifteen minutes,” a voice booms from above. I hear the tap-tap of heels against hardwood but they’re a man’s shoes. I slip into the next room, then the next. Why am I running? Someone turns off the lights one by one.
I should return to the Spanish Room, to Goya and the green man on the cross, but instead I find myself in American Decorative Arts, lost in a sea of colonial furniture and pewter mugs. There’s a black velvet rope separating me from an eighteenth century bed covered by a faded red canopy. I slip beneath the rope to the other side. I hear a noise, so I tuck in behind a tapestry hanging on the wall.
“The galleries are now closed,” says the scratchy loudspeaker voice.
Did I mishear her? Maybe she said, I’ll meet you outside. But where? The front? The back? Maybe she’s in the Spanish Room right now and is with the guard, waiting. She’s growling at the guard like an angry mother wolf: I’m not going anywhere without my child!
I travel from Colonial America to Ancient Egypt. I find an ancient stone sarcophagus, and wonder if I should climb inside to hide. Ancient Egypt is a dark hidden place with plenty of nooks and crannies to disappear. That is what I really want, to disappear. To sail up the Nile on a reed boat, searching for mummies in buried tombs. I want to eat figs, run around naked looking for dung beetles. I want to see a real sphinx, see a real live scorpion in the desert sand.
I walk in circles, sneak past Greek and Roman gods, black and red vases, animals carved from stone. I find myself back in the Spanish room with Goya. Light seeps in from the skylight and cuts across his arrogant face.
I can’t stop looking at his eyes. How is it that they follow me wherever I go? Is this what it’s like to be my mother? To feel like objects can read your mind? I get an idea, a strange notion that has to do with magic. I make up magic rules all the time. If I don’t step on a crack, my mother will have a good day. If I cross my fingers when we board the train, she won’t talk to people no one can see. I come up with a new rule: If I can touch one of Goya’s eyes and count to ten, my mother will return.
I stand up on my tiptoes and reach. A bellowing voice
behind me stops my hand in midair. “Don’t touch the art!”
The guard leads me all the way to the front of the museum. I tell him that that’s where my mother said to wait and he believes me. He lets me out and closes the heavy door behind him. It is that easy. The sun is setting. No one is there; I turn and run down the stairs. I get a hunch that she’s in the back. That’s where she usually goes to smoke. I run around the museum to the other side.
There is always this memory: A group of young men walking toward me in the parking lot. They move like one solid body, a single organism, a paramecium of men. I tense up like I do when the neighborhood boys approach me in the field behind my grandparents’ house, or on the way to school when one of them makes fun of my shabby clothes and grabs my violin case and throws it in the mud. The men are getting closer. I say to myself, I will not cry, and form my hands into tight little balls. I imagine I have claws; I am the invisible cat. Then I hear a voice, the sound of wild, cruel laughter. There’s a woman at the far end of the lot marching in my direction. The men look at her and laugh, then veer off toward the street. As she gets closer I can see the woman shaking her fist.
This could have happened: I run to my mother and she hugs me, says, I’m so sorry, sweetheart. She tells me she tried to go back to the Spanish Room but they had already closed up shop. She’ll never leave me again. She says, “Let’s go get some food, how about that cafeteria downtown? You can get a nice grilled cheese.”
But memory is impossible to ensnare, even if you build a palace to contain it. This could have happened too: I run to her but she doesn’t know I’m there. She’s yelling at someone only she can see and he’s going to be with her for a very long time, at least forty more years. He will be telling her what to do, what to think, when to write a letter to the police, when to put a knife inside her purse, when to hide a gun for when the Nazis come knocking. He will be there till the day she dies.