The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  In her bedroom, my mother lounges in a short beige slip among the disheveled sheets. The song “Lemon Tree” plays softly on the radio. She has the heat turned up high; the radiator by the window hisses and spits out steam. Was this what it was like in a primeval jungle, this clammy prison of a room? My mother’s eyes are part wolf, part human: the suspicious eyes that dart from here to there, the red eyes of all-night rants, the prelude to another round of shock treatment.

  “Do you like this song?” she asks.

  “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not Beethoven,” she says, “but I like it. So what do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “You know. An artist.”

  The rain outside that turned to sleet has turned to snow. I can hear wind rattling the loose glass in the window frames. Everything needs fixing in our place—the windows, the stove, the toilet that clogs up.

  “You’ll always be my little Picasso. But don’t you want to get married and have babies too?”

  “I don’t know. I guess.”

  My mother is staring at a stack of magazines at the foot of her bed. She points to them and says, “Pick that up—the one on top. I want to show you something.”

  She lights a cigarette and motions me to climb up beside her.

  “I’m in the middle of a game.”

  My mother pats the bed. “Come on. I’m not going to bite you.”

  I clamber up over her legs gingerly, a vigilant cat, placing myself as far as I can from her sticky flesh.

  “Come closer.”

  She reaches for the magazine I’m holding from the top of the pile.

  “Look,” she says.

  My mother taps her finger hard on a picture that, at first glance, looks like a bunch of people playing Twister. Then I realize it’s a large group of naked white people doing something else. Men and women are licking and thrusting and kissing every possible body part; it’s hard to tell where one person begins and another ends.

  “Do you know what they’re doing?” she asks.

  “No,” I say. “Can I go back now?”

  “Has a man ever done that to you?”

  She points to a bearded blond guy entering a young Barbie-like model from behind. The woman looks a lot like Raquel Welch. Could it be the cave girl I just saw?

  “You don’t know this yet,” she says, “but there are men who want to do that to you. They did it to me. I know they want to do it to your sister. She’s asking for trouble.”

  It’s the same thing my grandfather says only not in so many words. He always warns me, “Boys are rough-and-tumble. They take you down to the river and won’t give you even a glass of water!” When he says that I wonder, Why would I want to drink from a dirty river that caught on fire? What does he mean?

  I don’t want to look at the picture, or my mother, so I stare at the floor. There are plates of old food and stacks of Playboy and Penthouse, piles of books and newspapers everywhere, baskets of dirty laundry, my old green Mr. Magoo sippy cup overflowing with cigarette butts. There is a picture of flowers I made for her, crumbled and coffee-stained, sticking out from beneath the bed. I can hear Ginger whining and scratching at the bedroom door.

  “Ginger has to go,” I say. “She’s crying.”

  My mother sighs; waves me off the bed.

  “Oh, all right. Why don’t you be a good girl and go buy your old lady a pack of Benson & Hedges? I’m all out.”

  I sneak out of the building, so no one can see I have a dog, and we walk down to the corner store. When a man honks his horn at another driver, I jump and Ginger trembles. I bend over to rub the soft white stripe down the front of her face. “It’s okay, girl,” I say, kissing her nose. “It’s okay.” Ginger is jumpy, like me—sensitive to sound and sudden movements. She wasn’t that way at first but one day after we got her, Grandpa told me to stand still outside and hold her leash tight. Then he shot a gun off by our feet several times. “This is how girls learn to obey,” he said. “How to be seen and not heard.”

  I’m nervous at the counter, afraid the clerk will think I’m buying cigarettes for myself. I search my pockets for my mother’s five-dollar bill; there’s money left over, so I get some cherry licorice for Rachel, malted milk balls for me. Ginger and I race home in the dark. It seems I can never finish anything: a game, a drawing, or a song on my violin. By the time I get back, my mother is dozing. The radio is blasting something Cuban, with lots of brass and drums. I put out my mother’s cigarette resting precariously on the edge of an ashtray and shut her door. My sister is already in bed, reading, our board game scattered on the floor. The phone rings in the kitchen. I go to pick it up.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “Myra?”

  The man’s voice sounds uncertain, like he doesn’t quite know who I am, but I know who he is. I know it’s my father, even though I haven’t talked to him since I was four. I barely remember him. He is the man who hid upstairs in his studio for hours and wouldn’t let me up there to play. He is the electrical smell of a train leaving a station, a tall dark-haired man in a suit, photographed laughing at a bar. He is a serious face on the back of a serious-looking book my mother keeps on the nightstand by her bed. My father is a stern figure standing at the edge of a dune, looking out at a cold blue lake.

  On the phone, he says he wants my sister and me to come live with him and says I have to decide right away. Where is he calling from? Is he going to save us? Should I tell him about the man at the movies who leaned forward and smelled my hair?

  “I’ll go get Mom,” I say.

  “No—just tell me yes or no.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Who will take care of her?”

  Does my father tell me that he lives in a strange and beautiful jungle where there are peacocks and tigers and all sorts of monkeys and birds, like the worlds I want to explore? And if I move there we can eat snake meat when we’re hungry, grab breadfruit right off the trees? Does he tell me we can ride wild horses? Are there wolves where he lives? Are there bears?

  “Decide now. I’m calling long-distance.”

  “I can’t... I promised.”

  “All right. If that’s what you want.”

  “Don’t you want to say hi to Rachel? I’ll go get her. Just a sec.”

  “I’m saying goodbye.”

  “Hello? Are you there? Hello?”

  Always there is that memory of holding on to the heavy black phone, whispering, Hello? into a void. And the nothing at the other end, and the waiting for the nothing to become a voice, but it never does, and the creeping back down the hall to bed, the light still on in my mother’s room, radio still blaring, my sister asleep in our room, open book upon her chest, the sound of her little-girl breath soft and steady. She is the only one I can count on in this changing world, to play a game, to race with across the street, to help me write a poem.

  In 1969 I am filled with so many questions: When did the first birds appear? What exactly is a sauropod? When will my mother stop being crazy? Will our father ever return, now that I made him mad? We are entering a new era. I can feel it—something has shifted, is changing fast. When did she start buying those magazines? Why did all the dinosaurs die? How smooth is the surface of the moon? Will I ever reach the Serengeti or the Pole? When will the soldiers come home, Cousin Philip, who is somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam, all of our neighbors’ sons? Who will come to save us now? Will Jesus? Or our father? Will Neil Armstrong and his crew?

  Enchantment

  My only thought yesterday was of the beguiling, deceptive charm of writing and music. One could write a tale of enchantment but I don’t have the inertia. Truth is, my sense of ego when I was young was like the celestial above and I felt the “nothingness” and feeling of nothing extending on and on into the future. A more literate person would say—well, even in “nothing” there is composition. Then, last evening I was typing words from the “I” section of the Dictionary I wish to retain, some which
have legal importance. I lay down to rest a few minutes and had a half-dream or kind of visual picture (not really out of the ordinary when you consider all the possible intrusions into a person’s live-in shelter, i.e. mechanics, radio, photo, all illicit but used). I had a clear picture of myself standing in front of a large monolith with writing inscribed I could not make out, and I was weeping copiously and a kind of presence, a fast image wearing a blue and white checkered suit pulled me away. I went down for coffee, then thought: “The Child is Sleeping.”

  6

  Above you in the still air floats the Pelican... If you endeavor to approach these bird in their haunts, they betake themselves to flight.

  John James Audubon

  My Year with Audubon

  In my memory palace, two pictures hang on the wall of an atrium: the first, a white pelican, looking out toward the sea. The other, a child sitting on the floor, pressed up against a piano, eyes shut tight to stop the room from spinning. Her mother is arched over the keys, fingers flying. She doesn’t know the small child is there, an invisible form, a little dark-haired nothing. The room is a living and breathing machine, an engine of sound behind the walls, inside her bones. The child floats on a flimsy raft alone; it’s like white rapids on a river, all that music crashing through her. This is the closest they will ever be, this shock wave of sound between them. This is what love is.

  But by the time I turned eleven in 1970, our mother was too ill to work even the occasional temp job. We couldn’t pay the bills with the pittance she received from welfare and we hadn’t heard a word from our father in over a year, ever since his call on my birthday. There was no choice but to move from our apartment to our grandparents’ house on West 148th. I don’t remember packing, or much of anything else, only a vague feeling that something would eventually, most certainly, explode.

  Rachel and I took over our grandmother’s room and she moved into the little guest room with the love seat and balcony. At night, our mother tossed a blanket over herself and curled up on the lumpy green couch in the basement. Grandpa stayed where he was, in the master bedroom, alone.

  I tried to be optimistic—we could still walk to Newton D. Baker Junior High, where I had just started seventh grade, my sister the eighth. My dog Ginger could run free in the yard and there was a garden full of flowers and trees. The park was closer to West 148th Street; so was the West Park train station, Patty’s house, and Dairy Queen. But most importantly, at my grandparents’ house, there was a piano.

  When she felt stirred to play, my mother’s fingers hovered above the keys for a moment, then flew across them with fury. She played Beethoven with such ferocity that at times I couldn’t bear to be in the same room. But when she played Bach, a sense of calm filled the house, if only for the length of a prelude. I longed to master Bach like my mother, play the rise and fall of an arpeggio with the same precision, order, and grace.

  In rare moments of lucidity, she taught me scales, chords, and intervals; introduced me pared-down Brahms and Béla Bartók’s pieces for children, his Mikrokosmos. The Bartók melodies sounded like the old folk songs on my grandparents’ records from Russia and Eastern Europe. When I played them, I pictured myself in a snowy field in Siberia, bundled up on a fast moving sled drawn by horses.

  My mother’s white hands fluttered over mine like birds, waiting for mine to make a mistake. She sat on the bench next to me and chain-smoked, ashes falling onto the keys and my small fingers. She tapped her foot like a metronome. It’s allegro, not adagio. Speed it up a bit. Some days she’d start whispering something I couldn’t hear and suddenly get up, slam the door, and bolt outside, heading toward Grapeland Avenue. “Crazy bitch!” my grandfather would shout after her. Where did she go when she ran out the door?

  In one of her diaries from the seventeen years we spent apart, my mother wrote: I am thinking of the song “Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar.” Now, in retrospect, since I have been projected into the future, maybe I am thinking instead of the loss of my piano and my life. The other day I had forgotten the two words in music that mean one voice is stationary while the other is in motion: “Oblique motion.” The closeness in French, obli: forgetfulness; oublier: to forget, influenced my slowness to remember. How many other things will they force me to forget? Was that the problem with my mother’s brain—while one voice was stationary, another could never be at rest?

  One day, my mother told me she had run into her old piano teacher downtown. “Mr. Benjamin said he’d teach you girls for five bucks an hour. You want to take lessons? He’s the best around.”

  Was it true? She told me once that Sammy Davis, Jr., was going to propose to her. “I still have my girlish figure,” she said, explaining his desire for someone outside of show business. Aliens had begun to send my mother “penises from Mars” through the hot dogs Grandma brought back from Pick ’n Pay; she communicated with Moshe Dayan through photographs in Life magazine. She talked to Golda Meir. Did Mr. Benjamin really exist?

  “You girls can start next Sunday,” she said. “And don’t dress like a shtetl waif. Put on a clean blouse and brush your hair.”

  It’s a radiant fall Sunday in 1970, and the air smells like fallen apples after rain. As the train rumbles east from West Park to Cleveland’s Terminal Tower, where we transfer to the bus for Shaker Heights, I watch houses change from small bungalows to stately mansions with manicured lawns. In the vast green yards are old stone fountains and big magestic trees. I wonder if this is what France looks like, or maybe a quaint old town near London.

  My mother asks, “Why didn’t your sister come today? I think she’s on drugs.”

  “What?”

  “She goes to rock concerts with bad girls.”

  “I go too, and so does Cathy.”

  “Cathy’s a good girl. I’m not talking about her. You know what happened to the girls who fraternized with Charles Manson. They listened to rock music and took drugs. They killed an unborn baby.”

  “Rachel’s not going to kill a baby,” I say. “She just likes rock and roll.”

  It was gradual, my mother’s transition from her neglect of us to unremitting intrusion. But when did it first occur? Was it when my sister started fussing with her hair, flirting with boys at school? Or was it my fault? Was I changing too?

  “You wouldn’t take drugs, would you?” she asks. “You wouldn’t let a man see you without your clothes?”

  Mr. Benjamin’s wife greets us at the heavy oak door. She ushers us in, then leaves my mother in the living room to wait. I follow her through the house.

  “I remember the way your mother played. There was no one like her. When she played Beethoven... well, that was long ago. She told me you play violin and piano and that you’re quite a little artist.”

  I nod, embarrassed.

  “My husband loves art too. Would you like to see something beautiful?”

  She leads me down a hall lined with giant pictures of birds, each one illumined by a tiny lamp that makes them glow like the icons in Aunt Toda’s kitchen and my grandfather’s church.

  “John James Audubon,” Mrs. Benjamin informs me. “These are original prints from his Elephant Portfolio—his Birds of America suite.”

  “Oh, yes, Audubon,” I say, as if I know who he is. We pause at each bird on the wall. Mrs. Benjamin names them one by one.

  “This is the painted bunting, that is the swallow-tailed hawk.”

  “Swallow-tailed hawk,” I repeat. I say each name softly so I’ll remember. “Arctic tern. Yellowshank tatler. Great cinereous owl.”

  Bird after bird, our walk down the hall is a largo, walk-pause, walk-pause, in front of each framed print. At the end of the hallway we stop to look at a large white bird. Mrs. Benjamin tells me its name in Latin: Pelecanus erythrorhynchos. The American white pelican. It’s not really that beautiful; there is something about it that is rather cold and severe. But I am curious. What is it looking at? The sky? The sea?

  Mrs. Benjamin confides in me that colle
cting Audubons is her husband’s greatest passion, perhaps even more than music. “The harder one is to get, the more he wants it,” she says. She tells me that sometimes her husband can’t sleep the week before an auction. “Oh, look at the time. He’s waiting,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “Go on downstairs.”

  At the bottom of the basement steps is a small wooden table with a stained-glass Tiffany lamp and a Cleveland Indians bobble-head doll. The heating vent kicks on and makes the mascot’s smiling head waggle. The bobble-head reminds me of President Nixon on TV when the sound is off and you can’t hear him talking. To the left of the staircase is a sleek black Baldwin where Mr. Benjamin waits. Is this where he waited for my mother too, his beautiful young prodigy? The girl destined for Carnegie Hall? My new teacher wears an old-fashioned suit, a starched white shirt, and bow tie. He is a short man with a paunch and small freckled hands.

  “Hello, hello! Come sit down,” he says. “Let’s begin.”

  Mr. Benjamin invites me to play a short waltz I have brought along. The piano has a warm tone and is delicate to the touch. My new teacher follows my every move.

  “How old are you now?” he asks.

  “Eleven and a half.”

  “Play the piece again.”

  He closes his eyes and listens. When I finish, he says, “Anyone can play piano. Not everyone can make music.”

  Does he mean that I can make music or I can’t? A white cat rubs up against my leg and purrs as if to say, Yes, Mr. Benjamin thinks you are good. As if to say, You can stay here with us forever.

  “Let’s try the Bartók.” Mr. Benjamin places some music on the piano. “Listen.”