The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  His fingers are not long and graceful like my mother’s, but he plays with great tenderness and feeling. After he’s done, I scan the music. I take in the page of notes, a gestalt of black birds on a wire. I try to play what I see.

  “Your mother was a good sight reader too,” says Mr. Benjamin. “What a quick study. She was going places. What talent... what...”

  I look down at my feet. Mr. Benjamin clears his throat. “You like kugel?” he asks. He goes to the top of the stairs and shouts to his wife, “Bring some kugel down for the girl. The girl needs a little kugeleh and tea.”

  When we leave, I tell my mother about the birds.

  “I’ve seen them. You can have those birds.”

  She tells me that the birds terrify her; to her they look like the ones she sees in her dreams. She says they remind her of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie.

  “The world is a dangerous place. Birds like that can peck your eyes out.”

  “Mrs. Benjamin says her husband wants to own all the Audubons in the world.”

  “He’s a nice man but just remember, you can never trust the rich.”

  Mr. Benjamin covets other people’s birds and I covet his. I covet his house, the smell of sandalwood and roses in the foyer, the Baldwin in the basement, the Steinway in his den. I covet his life, his little white cat, his quiet world of birds and music, and his dark wooden living room full of leather-bound books. And most of all, I covet his pelican, the universe of sea and sky swirling inside the eye of that terrifying and wondrous bird.

  When my mother was twelve, she had already surpassed her first teacher, the one she had before Mr. Benjamin, or so my grandma had said. By fifteen she was preparing for the concert stage. In the few photographs from that time, something looks a little off, the way her eyes glance sideways, even though her mouth is turned up into a smile. When did the dark shape first form at the back of her brain, force her to sleep all day, spend her nights wrestling with demons? When did the voices first whisper to her through the radio, the clock, and the walls? What did they say that very first time? The Germans are coming, the Germans are coming? The voices told her not to say a word but my mother rebelled: Nobody hears a mute but I hear myself. I will fight them to the end. No one will put me in an oven, not the Nazis, not the Golem, not my father or the CIA. Nobody hears a mute but I hear myself.

  In the beginning, my sister comes along to Shaker Heights. Sometimes we learn duets. I sit on her right, and then we switch places. She plays the right notes but holds something back, the soul of the music. Or is she just afraid to make mistakes? At the house on West 148th, we all have to be careful about every little thing. A misplaced cup could mean the belt or the back of his hand; one wrong note and who knows what our grandfather could do?

  When I play Bach or Mozart, I see colors and dancing shapes inside my head. Something gets stuck in my throat when I listen to Rubinstein playing Rachmaninoff, Caruso singing arias on my mother’s old 78s. Where does the soul of a song reside? In your body? In your hands? When my mother was in music conservatory, before her first breakdown at nineteen, did she see colors when she played? Did her heart swell like mine when she listened to Schumann, Fauré, and Ravel?

  When we lived in our old apartment, I used to go alone on the train all the way to the art museum. My mother wouldn’t know when I left, when or if I returned. But now, sometimes en route to our lessons in Shaker Heights, she shoots out strange new questions to my sister and me for everyone to hear: Are you menstruating yet? Who are you sleeping with? Rachel is almost thirteen and mortified. Do you know how to use a sanitary napkin? The people on the train turn to stare, so we try to shush her, slap our hands over her mouth, or get up and walk down the aisle, pretending she isn’t our mother at all. I’m your mother, she shouts. You can’t run from me! Answer me! Is that sperm on your leg? Pull up your skirt and let me see.

  As winter approaches, Rachel begins to lose interest in the lessons. Why put herself through the unbearable train rides when she could be writing stories, studying at the library, or hanging out with her friends? She tries to find excuses to get out of our grandparents’ house. Both of us do. We love school, even though you are supposed to hate junior high. We want to learn as much as we can, hide in between pages of books at the library, crawl inside our favorite paintings at the museum.

  My sister has her life mapped out at thirteen. She will get straight A’s, get into a good college, and get the hell out of Cleveland. Then she’ll become a famous writer and English professor and live far away from home. She reminds me to do my homework, to not let my grades slip down. She knows this is the only ticket out, the only way we can leave. All I know is that someday I want my mother to see my pictures hanging in a museum. I want to play piano like her, and keep her safe from harm. But sometimes I dream that I live on the other side of the ocean, as far away as possible, so she can’t ask me on the train if I have been raped or if I think my sister is a whore or if someone removed my uterus while I was asleep.

  On those Sundays when Rachel is playing with her friends and my mother is too catatonic to get up, I travel to Mr. Benjamin’s alone. My mother’s old negligence kicks in and I am free to go. She doesn’t ask questions. I am an invisible cat once again. “I am leaving now,” I say, and kiss my mother’s soft cool cheek. Grandpa is passed out on the living room couch and Grandma is watching her shows on TV, her head nodding like Mr. Benjamin’s bobble-head doll, on her lap a big plate of banana cream pie. I tuck money in my boot, extra change in the pocket of my coat. Ginger whines and nips at my ankles to stop me from flying out the door.

  On the train, I tap out Bach and melodies I invent. Alone, I can finally hear the music in my head, not my mother playing, or her ranting on about Nazis. The music I hear is like an Audubon print glowing under glass, or like sitting high in a tree peering into the nest of a bird. It’s the feeling of lying face-up in a field alone, squinting at a cloud moving fast across the sky. Everything is entwined—the soaring birds, the Audubons, the paintings at the museum, the sound of a stream, sun breaking through a cloud, a cloud transforming into an elephant or swan, my fingers gliding across gleaming keys.

  And then, sometimes, I feel something stick in my throat. It nags at me, this small sad pebble of guilt. I think of her, curled in a ball beneath her blanket, her radio blasting, the air thick with smoke. Should I turn back? Should I go home? Will she ever be okay?

  At school, my seventh-grade science teacher introduces us to Linnaeus. We learn about his incredible trip to Lapland, and the strange plants and animals he saw and gave names to in the Far North. I fall in love with his lyrical taxonomy, his reassuring order of things: kingdom, class, order, genus, and species. Linnaeus said there should be two names for everything in life, one to identify each genus and one for each species. When I title my drawings, I emulate his binomial nomenclature by making up my own secret code. Below each drawing I compose a cryptogram, a hybrid of pig Latin, English, and French, neatly labeling each picture in tiny calligraphic script: Binrobatus rouge for red-breasted robin, Chicadeenus chapeaunoir for the little black-capped chickadee.

  My mother tells me that Leonardo da Vinci did the same; he wrote in secret code, backward and upside down. She says a lot of things in the world have hidden meanings—movies, for instance, and advertisements on TV. Years later, in her letters, she will remind me of this from time to time: I read a juvenile book about plants today and retained only one word: photosynthesis. What is said or written is often in code and not what is meant. When I finished the book I fell asleep. In my dream, a fair-haired girl who looked like Rachel was near a lake in darkness. The girl had no time for me and I felt terribly sad. Then a voice said, “I will give you a girl whose sobbing will end with a gag-like sound in her throat.” When I woke up, it was raining in an open window and I have always, religiously, kept my windows tightly shut. Once again: proof that my future was written long ago.

  After a particularly harsh winter, buds finally appeared on the magno
lia tree where sparrows had already begun to nest. In taller trees, crows were staking their territory, sending out sentinels to guard their homes. My grandmother had bought me a watercolor pad with special paper from France, and a paintbrush made from sable. I traveled on my bike, far from West 148th Street, to find birds to paint and draw. Sometimes I asked Cathy to come along. We would sit in a field or beneath a tree, side by side in silence, and draw the world as it unfolded—the shifting clouds and changing light, the rush of some small creature up a tree. Afterward, I rarely invited Cathy back home; I rarely invited anyone at all.

  Once, after a lesson, in the spring of ’71, Mr. Benjamin showed me a book on John James Audubon. He said that when the artist was young, he skipped school and roamed the fields all day in search of specimens, returning home at dinnertime with a basket full of birds’ eggs and nests, lichen, flowers, and stones. He said that when Audubon grew up, he wandered the world in search of birds, risking his life to track them down. I pictured myself as Audubon, traipsing through the wilderness in shaggy buckskin clothes, a box of paints upon my back. Could that be me someday? Could I really leave her so far behind?

  Summer was unbearably hot that year; I remember the sky heavy with clouds, as if something ominous were about to happen. Hundreds of bodies were being sent home from Vietnam in black zippered bags; we watched it all on the television set downstairs—fuzzy black-and-white pictures of caskets draped with flags, Nixon looking concerned on cue, children in thatched huts running from bullets and fire. The war seemed to validate all of my mother’s worst fears and prophesies. She became even more paranoid about Nazis and the CIA infiltrating our home. And there was some doctor in California she wrote obsessive letters to each week, some man she claimed had raped her when she was young. It will happen to you if you don’t watch out, she warned us. It’s only a matter of time.

  One July afternoon a midwestern storm began with the sound of electricity crackling in the air. I watched the sky turn from cobalt-blue to yellow-gray in minutes. All the songbirds near my window suddenly scattered and torrential rains stampeded down. It rained for three days straight, trapping my sister and me in the red brick house. We tiptoed from room to room, careful not to say the wrong word to our grandfather, or put a glass on the shelf where a cup should be, or shut the bathroom door all the way when we had to pee or take a bath, because closed doors were simply not allowed. When I awoke on the fourth day I saw a little black dog clinging to a tire, floating down West 148th Street, which was now a rushing river. The current pulled the dog under, right before he reached the end of our street, and I buried my face in Ginger’s soft warm neck, grateful that she was safe inside. That was the only Sunday I missed my piano lesson, because of the flood, all that water seeping into our homes and dreams, and even then I would have waded in sewer water to the station if the Rapid Transit hadn’t been shut down for the day.

  After the flood, throughout my summer vacation I practiced whenever I could. By the time I started eighth grade in the fall, I knew four pieces by heart. Meanwhile, the leaves on Grandpa’s apple tree had begun to turn vermilion-red. Some birds moved on, but others were still around to draw.

  One day in science class, I hear someone outside, calling my name. The teacher opens a window to see what’s going on. The voice from outside becomes louder and a couple kids go to the window to look. “Someone’s calling you,” the boy next to me says. “Is that your mother?” asks another. Everyone wants to know: “Who is that? Who’s the lady on the bike?” I say nothing; I am invisible, after all—a small form pressed up against a piano, a little dark-haired nothing. The bell rings to save my life and I pretend to look for something lost inside my desk. Her voice drifts up into the classroom: “Where are my children? Someone has kidnapped my children!” After everyone leaves, I go to the window. There she is—two stories down, circling the school on her rusty red three-speed, coatless in the cold autumn rain. It’s pouring down upon her head, but she keeps calling out my sister’s and my name till her voice becomes too hoarse to shout. She rides around and around in circles, ringing her persistent tinkling bell. For many long years, she will ring her little silver bell inside my ear, over and over, until I wake up at night, sweating, hands formed into fists in front of my face.

  Shortly after that day she showed up at school, our mother is admitted to the hospital. Maybe my sister calls this time; or maybe I do. Maybe this is when the two of us begin to take over our grandma’s job of reluctant mother, triage nurse, watch-keeper of the night. When our mother returns from the psych ward, Rachel starts chopping up medicine into her food: first Thorazine, which doesn’t work, then Haldol. When she’s medicated, our mother is dazed and can barely speak without slurring her words. Her throat is dry, her tongue always swollen, her hands trembling and cold. If she sits at the piano, she only stays a moment and stares at the keys, then lights a cigarette and wanders, somnambulant, out the door.

  Despite my mother’s setback, I begin preparing for my first piano recital, to take place late February, on the week I turn thirteen. I am going to perform the pieces I have been working on over the past year: a short rondeau by Couperin, a Mozart fantasia, one of Bach’s Two-Part Inventions, and a movement from a Beethoven sonata my mother had played long ago. The Bach comes easily, but as always I wrestle with Beethoven, my mother’s muse. A couple weeks before school lets out for Christmas, Mr. Benjamin tells me that there is something new he is going to give me to learn over the holidays, a complicated piece by an Armenian composer.

  “It’s a hard one,” he warns. “Not for sissies. I hope you are ready.”

  After the lesson that day, he pulls my mother aside. “I need to talk to you, Norma,” he says, ushering her into the den. I stand outside the door to listen.

  “At least two hours a day she must practice. Are you listening to me, Norma?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t worry about money. She can come for free.”

  “If you say so.” My mother’s voice is completely flat.

  “Soon we start the Khachaturian. Norma, you’re not listening. Look at me, not out the window. She’s almost ready. You need to make sure she sticks with this. She’s starting late. Now go, take care of yourself. Get a permanent, find a nice man. Are you taking care of yourself? Are you seeing a good doctor? Did you hear anything I said?”

  The next Sunday morning I go downstairs to practice. It’s the weekend before Christmas and in the corner of the living room is Grandpa’s sad aluminum tree he has hauled down from the attic. Over the fake fireplace Grandpa has nailed up a pair of Grandma’s nylon stockings. Inside each one he has tossed a few coins, our one holiday gift. Grandma does nothing to celebrate Chanukah, nor does our mother. None of us even knows what a menorah is. “Let the old man have his fun,” my grandma tells me. “Or we’ll pay for it later.” When I was little, I would sit in bed and pray for Santa and his reindeer to save me and take me with them to the North Pole, while my grandfather staggered drunk around the tree in a Santa hat, shouting “Ho, ho, ho!” This year will be no different. There will be an excess of eggnog, turkey, and booze, and I will have to play “Jingle Bells” for him over and over again, his whiskey-hoarse voice bumbling along to the tune, meaty palms pressed down upon my shoulders.

  “Today,” I say to myself, “I will receive the Khachaturian.”

  We eat an early afternoon meal together—my grandfather and grandmother, my mother, my sister and I—chunks of greasy lamb on rice, fried okra, feta cheese, and tomatoes drenched in oil. My grandfather drinks a few beers and a couple shots of Jack Daniel’s to wash it all down. He’s been cooking and drinking since morning. He sits hunched over his plate in his dirty tee, swearing under his breath, just like I draw him in cartoons. No one says a thing; Rachel and I exchange looks as Grandpa noisily sucks the marrow from a bone. Beneath the table, we press our chunks of meat between napkins to squeeze out the grease. Ginger sits at my feet, tail thumping, waiting for something to drop.

 
“Whatchu lookin’ at?” My grandfather snarls at my mother.

  Our mother is staring off into space. She has barely touched her meal. “Eat the lamb,” he says to her. “Finish your goddamn plate.”

  “Not this again,” says my grandma.

  “I cook all day for you whores. Now eat!”

  “I’m not hungry,” my mother says in her small flat voice.

  “You eat what’s on your goddamn plate.”

  “Bastard,” says my grandma under her breath.

  “What did you say, you son-of-a-bitch?”

  “Ignoramus,” says my grandma softly. She starts to laugh her nervous laugh, then says, “Third-grade education. Can’t get a job. Can’t even write a sentence.”

  “I’ll teach you a lesson you won’t forget, you motherfucking bitches,” says Grandpa. “Misery loves company.”

  She laughs hard until her voice chokes with tears. Grandpa pushes his chair back from the table and stomps downstairs. When he comes back up from the basement, he is holding something shiny in his hand; his face the color of beef.

  Grandpa points a gun at my mother’s head and says, “Nobody leaves this room until you eat that lamb.”

  I nudge her plate toward her to stop the sound of all of us holding our breath, but she doesn’t want it, doesn’t want the lamb at all. Her plate is full of greasy meat and bones, and smells of garlic and something I can’t quite remember from the world downstairs where Grandfather keeps his dark and urgent life, his good cigars.

  “Eat the goddamn lamb,” he says again, and takes another step toward the table.

  Later, we are all still alive. When my grandfather falls asleep, I slip down into the basement. Below the stairs there’s a cellar room where Grandfather comes and goes. Above the cellar door, a broken clock and a Mason’s oath of honor. Beside the door a faded print of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father Who Art in Heaven Hallowed Be Thy Name.” For once I find the room unlocked and go inside. There are rows of canned tomatoes, hot yellow peppers, twenty years’ worth of toilet paper and insulation, a hunting knife and a gun. There’s a rifle, ammunition, an arsenal of war in case the Russians bomb us, the Communists, the hippies, or the Cubans and we are left to die here all alone.