The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  “The spirit’s name is Tunghak,” I say to the children. “Some say he lives on the moon.”

  “Where’s the Sky World?” a girl asks. “Is that where the aliens live?”

  “I don’t know much about aliens,” I say, “but I’ll tell you a story instead.”

  I tell them the Inuit myth about Sedna, a woman who lives at the bottom of the sea, and how, when she was trying to escape her angry seabird-husband, his flapping wings conjured a terrible storm. Her parents threw her overboard to save their own lives. Sedna tried to cling to the boat but her father cut off her hands and she slipped away. She sank to the bottom of the sea, where her fingers grew back as fish, whales, walruses, and seals. The creatures made a home in her hair. Without hands she couldn’t comb her long tresses tangled with sea-beasts and fish. All she could do was sit on the sea floor and watch her hair grow longer each day. I tell the children how some people believe that the angakoks, the shamans, swim down to the depths of the ocean to comb Sedna’s hair for her. In gratitude, she sends hunters all the creatures of the sea.

  “Is she beautiful?” asks another girl.

  “I think so,” I say. “But I’m not sure. I’ve never seen her.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see one of the museum’s docents, an elderly woman with a cane, walking toward me. She pulls me aside. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s a lady in Education waiting to see you. She says it’s an emergency. I’d hurry, if I were you.”

  The docent offers to stay and show the children the rest of the show. I tell her to take them down to the art room afterward so they can draw until I return—if I return, I add. “She seemed quite upset,” the woman says. “She says she’s your mother, but I wasn’t sure if that was true.”

  I hurry past the display of Northwest Coast Native American art—cases of transformation masks—birds turning into men, men into bears, bears into otters, otters into whales. What is she doing here, in my refuge, my labyrinth of secret rooms, my cabinet of wonders? How dare she come here? This is my home. I have to run through the large central hall of the museum to get to the staircase on the other side leading down the stairs to Education. The two giant bull elephants, whose solid presence always comforted me in the past, look like monsters now. I break into a run.

  What if someone lets her speak on the PA system, like when I was in high school and she showed up at the football game, calling my name for everyone to hear? Or when she circled Newton D. Baker Junior High on her rusty red bike. She is the relentless silver bell in my ear, even here, where I thought I was safe. Myra, Rachel, where are you? It’s your mother, come home!

  I run to where the docent said my mother was waiting, outside the Education office, but she isn’t there. I search the halls. Not a trace. Then panic grips me. Someone might have told her I was in the Arctic Hall. She could be upstairs. She could be talking to the children if they haven’t already left, interrogating them. Where’s your teacher? Which way did she go? But why should I be afraid? She’d never hurt a child. Or would she? If they aren’t in the art room by now, there will be twenty little children standing in front of a case of sacred hoop masks, waiting to make magic faces from paper plates, feathers, and sticks. I don’t want my mother to scare them.

  My mother is nowhere to be found in any of the rooms in the basement corridor, so I run back to where I began, upstairs by Tunghak and the other Eskimo masks. The children are gone. I look around the exhibit for my mother, but she isn’t there. I head downstairs once again. As I hurry to the Education office I see a woman pacing in the hall, puffing on a cigarette beneath the no smoking sign. She looks up and rushes over to me.

  “I’ve been searching for you everywhere,” she says. “We have to leave right now.”

  My mother is wearing white rubber boots without socks, and her favorite winter coat, the blue one with the brown fake fur trim. Her hair looks like it hasn’t been brushed in days. She is Sedna waiting for someone to comb the beasts from her hair.

  “Why are you here?” I say. “I am working. You have to go.”

  “Something is wrong with Grandma. You have to come home right now. I’ll pay for the bus. This place is full of cameras. It’s all been prescripted. We have to find somewhere safe where they can’t see.”

  “You can’t just get on a bus and interrupt my life.”

  “I’m starving,” she says, grinding her cigarette into the floor with her boot. “I want a corned beef sandwich and a cup of hot coffee. Let’s get out of here. Everywhere I look they have a gun pointed at my head.”

  I take my mother to a little Greek place called the Artist’s Café on Michigan Avenue and watch her devour her food. She acts like she hasn’t eaten in days. She has mustard all over her mouth and doesn’t bother to wipe it off. Her voice is too loud and I feel sick to my stomach about what she could blurt out in public. It could be anything—Nazis, aliens, rape, murder, the forced removal of my womb. I am ten years old again, head hung low; slouching in my seat, hoping no one looks our way.

  “Please keep your voice down,” I say.

  My mother takes a huge gulp of coffee and lights up a cigarette. “If you loved your mother you would come home.”

  “If you loved me you would leave.”

  “Sit up straight or your spine will grow crooked. When’s the last time you had your hair done? It looks awful. You should get a perm.”

  “You have to take the bus home.”

  “Only if you come too.”

  “I can’t. I’ll come visit soon, I promise.”

  “I dropped one of Grandma’s cups and she went crazy. You don’t know how she can get. She blames me for everything. Can you fix the cup? You used to do that kind of thing. If you come home you can have your own room.”

  I don’t know how, but I convince my mother to go back to Cleveland. I beg her, I cajole; I make promises I’ll never keep. She has traveled over three hundred miles to see me but I put her right back on the bus after we eat. I feel profoundly sad for her, and hopeless. I promise that I will come home the following week and help her figure out what is wrong with Grandma. I promise to replace her typewriter ribbon, help her hang a picture on the wall, fix a million broken things.

  “I know what has to be done,” says my mother, as I lead her to the bus. “You have to come home and take charge. Your sister won’t do it. She lives in a fantasy world.”

  “We’ll talk about that when I come,” I say.

  “You’re kicking out your own flesh and blood,” she says, as I help her to her seat. “You don’t love me anymore.”

  “I love you but I’m really mad. You must never, ever do this again. Ever. I could lose my job. Just don’t do this anymore. I’ll see you in a week.”

  I turn and walk away, without kissing her goodbye.

  At the end of December, my sister comes from Massachusetts to visit. Even though my mother has been calling me for weeks, threatening to kill herself if I don’t come home, I decide to throw the New Year’s Eve party I had planned anyway. I am setting out food before the guests arrive when someone rings the doorbell and doesn’t stop. I press the intercom.

  “Who is it?”

  “Your mother, now open up!”

  There is no question about what to do. When the police come, we meet them downstairs and the party goes on without us. Rachel and I spend most of the night at the hospital; our mother stays there a month. I am surprised they keep her so long. When she is released I send her home by herself on the train, heavily sedated and depressed. When I call my grandma to explain what happened, she doesn’t quite understand. Something is definitely wrong with her, whether it is Alzheimer’s or elderly dementia, but regardless, she is too old and tired to take care of our mother. Rachel and I decide that, if we have to, we will take legal action to get our mother a court-appointed guardian to make her medical and financial decisions. She just can’t show up on our doorsteps anymore.

  I imagine my life if nothing is done to change things—I see a pal
e green hospital waiting room at midnight, a television blaring soap opera reruns, and a vending machine dispensing endless cups of burnt coffee and tea. I see myself eternally waiting, unemployed and alone. This will be my purgatory: the knock at the door at midnight, my mother, hair wild as snakes, the sound of sirens and doors slamming shut, the violent rush of arms and hands, my mother placed in restraints and handed over to strangers. And me, sitting in a green room beneath cold fluorescent lights, tapping my foot to a song I played long ago.

  A quote by the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci that I write down in my journal a month after my mother returns home: The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters. If I don’t do something different, who will become the monster, my mother or me?

  The Year of the Horse

  The horse is a large, strong animal with four legs, solid hoofs, flowing mane and tail. Domesticated in pre-historic times, it has long served mankind for drawing and carrying loads and riders. Specifically a full-grown male is called a gelding or stallion, the female is a mare. The horse is of the family Equidae that includes the ass, zebra, etc. It has a long breeding time. A single foal is born after conception in about eleven months. Size ranges from the smallest (falabella, height under 2½ feet) to the largest (shire, height over six feet). Today they are mostly ridden for pleasure and sport. In Chinese astrology, this is the Year of the Horse: a year for self-reliance, independence and travel. As for me, when I don’t have fits of blanking out, which are numerous in this city, I try to be productive. I am working now on covering an old quilt with an abstract sheet. I had sent one to my cousin and would send one to my oldest daughter if I knew where she lived. I decided I needed one for myself to keep warm. They are called “comforters.” From now on, I look after Number One.

  10

  Thou shall fly without wings, and conquer without any sword. Oh, horse...

  Bedouin

  Death, the Rider

  In my memory palace, there is a painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The painting has two titles, The Racetrack and Death on a Pale Horse, but I always misremember it as Death, the Rider. Albert Pinkham Ryder, an American artist and favorite of my mother’s and mine, painted it in the late 1800s. The story behind the painting goes like this: Ryder had a friend, a waiter, and, like Ryder, he was very poor. One day, the waiter mortgaged his house and bet his entire life savings on a horse. He told Ryder that if he lost, he would kill himself. The day of the race came and his horse didn’t win. Ryder mourned the loss of his friend and made the painting shortly after he died. In the picture, Death brandishes a scythe, galloping on horseback the wrong way around a track. Sometimes Ryder referred to the painting as The Reverse. In the background is a dead tree. A snake observes Death from below; above hovers an armlike cloud reaching out to pluck the rider from his seat.

  Ryder had an odd way of painting; he brushed on thick coats of varnish in between layers of wet paint. Consequently, none of his paintings survived very well. The surfaces are cracked and the colors have changed dramatically from their original state. Several years ago, my mother wrote me from a motel to say that she was protecting her “posters of intent” by putting a coat of varnish on them. But now they’re turning yellow, she explained. They are starting to look like Ryder’s painting of Death. What should I do? I wish you were here to teach me. Please advise, Mother.

  The painting of Death and his horse invokes another picture in my mind, a white stallion leaping across an indigo sky. I made the large drawing for my mother when I graduated from art school in 1981. “I hope this cheers you up,” I said when I gave it to her. “I dreamed I was a horse and came to your rescue. You were being carried away, up into the sky.”

  “It reminds me of Chagall,” she said. “What’s it called?”

  “Help Is on the Way. Whenever you’re scared, just look at it and think of me.”

  One of the first signs that my grandmother was suffering from Alzheimer’s was when she began to believe the blue background in the horse picture could move. She stood in front of it one day and pointed.

  “See that water?” she said. “It’s moving. Like a river. Will it spill?”

  She made a small gesture with her fingers, to show how the water was rushing down. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Steve’s not going to like this one bit,” she said. You better hide that whatchamacallit right now.”

  “Grandma,” I said. “Grandpa is dead.”

  “I knew that. I was... I was... when did he die?”

  By 1988, my grandma had begun to forget who people were. I was “The Baby,” my mother was her mother. Lassie was Ginger and other dogs from her past. My mother did her best to help. She cooked the couple meals she had learned how to make in her recovery classes, before the community mental health program shut down. She tried to clean and keep up with the laundry. She straightened up the attic and painted a room in the house. “I am trying,” she told me wearily into the phone. “But life with Grandma makes me tired. It is hard to distinguish between my dreams and the movie version of my life.” How could she keep things in order when the voices in her head instructed her to do otherwise? They sent messages through the walls and windows, through paintings at the museum where she went to escape. Who should she listen to when she couldn’t trust anyone to tell the truth?

  My sister and I set up Meals on Wheels for her and my grandma, and asked an organization for the elderly, called Adult Protective Services (APS), to check up on them at home. Our old neighbor Ruth Armstrong had called to say that APS suspected our mother forgot to feed our grandma sometimes, and that maybe she was pushing her around. They had spotted Grandma wandering in the cold without a coat a few times, her arms covered with bruises. Had she fallen down, or was something else going on? “You’re sending in spies,” my mother said to me on the phone late at night. “Who are these professional manipulators you’ve sent in to check up on me? Who are they really working for?”

  As my grandma’s Alzheimer’s worsened, my mother’s surprise visits to my sister and me increased, as did her disappearances to shelters and cheap motels. It was as if she were in training to be homeless. She’d leave our grandma home alone and disappear for a couple days or call me from the Cleveland airport or bus station, saying that she had gone there to spend the night. Adult Protective Services tried to keep watch over what was going on in the house on West 148th Street, if and when our mother let them in. My mother started sending me angry letters in the mail: Those bitches pose as do-gooders but they’re imposters. If you were a good daughter, you’d move home and help me out.

  In 1988 I moved into a little apartment on Erie Street, a couple miles from my old neighborhood in Wicker Park. It had become too difficult to live with roommates or a boyfriend. Who wants to live with someone when the phone rings twenty-four hours a day or when your mother could show up at any time in a cloud of cigarette smoke, a knife in her hand, pulling her belongings behind her in a cart? My mother tried hard to keep the voices at bay but it was impossible to rein them in—there were so many of them, with so many terrible things to say.

  One winter night, right before Christmas, Ruth Armstrong phoned me at my apartment on Erie. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you earlier but everything happened at once,” she said. “Your mother was on a window ledge and I couldn’t get her down. She stabbed your grandma six times in the back—there was blood everywhere. I had to call the police. But don’t worry, honey. Your grandma’s going to be fine.”

  They kept my mother in the psych ward for observation. Meanwhile, after treating my grandma in the ER for knife wounds, they sent her home in a cab, even though her chart said she had Alzheimer’s. A neighbor out walking her dog found her, incoherent and wandering in the snow, wearing a bloodstained nightgown and socks. I knew that, statistically, schizophrenics were less likely to commit violent crimes than the rest of the population, but who knew what our mother’s voices would command her to do next? Rachel and I had to legall
y separate her from our grandma, and find our grandma a safe new home.

  I don’t remember how it was that, in the winter of ’89, I ended up going to the Cleveland courthouse alone. Why didn’t my sister come? Why hadn’t I asked Agostino to drive me there, to offer moral support? It seemed the older I got, the harder it was for me to involve even my closest friends.

  In the courthouse, I spotted my mother across the room. She had dyed her hair and gotten a perm. She even dressed up for the occasion and wore a bright pink and blue scarf around her neck. If you observed her more closely, though, you could see something was wrong. She couldn’t stop twitching and rocking back and forth; her tongue darted in and out involuntarily, signs of tardive dyskinesia, the long-term effect of antipsychotic medications. She glared at me as I listed the reasons she was too sick to take care of her own mother.

  “She’s starving her to death,” I said, after recounting a Cliffs Notes version of my sister’s and my childhood. “My grandmother hasn’t had a bath in weeks. There are bruises all over her arms. My mother needs care herself. She refuses to take her medication and leaves our grandmother home alone for days. She tried to kill her with a knife. What other proof do you need?”

  My mother lurched forward in her seat. “Traitor!” she yelled, shaking her fist at me. “Turncoat! Liar! Bitch!”

  “You are completely out of order!” said the judge. He turned to my mother’s lawyer. “You need to get control over your client!”

  I wanted the lawyers and the judge to know that this was not my mother deep inside; she was a genius who could make music of infinite beauty. She would give her last dollar to someone in need; she’d put herself in harm’s way to save my life. This was my mother too. The core personality of a schizophrenic always remains, even if it is buried deep inside. In the courtroom, I longed to be a small silent form, pressed against my mother’s piano while she played. This is what love is. Not this public display of drama and betrayal. But instead, I was a loud voice telling the world that my mother had stabbed my grandma in the back.