The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  When the judge finally announced the verdict in my favor, I glanced at my mother across the room. Her face was contorted in rage and I thought that maybe, just maybe, she could kill me if I gave her half the chance. I hurried down the courthouse steps to catch a cab to the Greyhound station. My mother ran after me, shouting, “Traitor! You are no daughter of mine.”

  Social services removed my grandma from the house, along with Lassie and a few belongings. They moved her to a private elder-care facility on the east side of Cleveland, run by a woman named Gloria, an African-American nurse who took care of a handful of Alzheimer’s patients in her large, comfy home. My mother wasn’t allowed to know where her mother lived and could only see her if she contacted the guardianship lawyer. A third party had to be present at all times. Judas, I can hear my mother hissing into my ear, even now, twenty years later. You took my mother away. To take her mother away also meant to remove her financial security; she would no longer be able to write checks from Grandma’s account. How would she get by now with what she called her “once-a-month garbage” from disability?

  “I like it here,” my grandma said, when I came to visit after she moved in.

  “Why’s that, Grandma?”

  “I like to be around my own kind.”

  “What kind is that?”

  “Black folk,” she said. “I’m black and I’m proud.” Gloria and I cracked up. Then my grandma looked at me and said, “You’re a nice lady. Does your family live around here? What’s their name? Maybe I know them.”

  Gloria told me not to get upset if my grandma forgot my name or if she reacted a bit strange to certain things.

  “What kinds of things?” I asked.

  “You can’t give her anything red to wear,” said Gloria. “She thinks it’s blood and that someone’s going to hurt her. She does something else too.”

  “What?”

  “Every day about ten to five she starts getting agitated. Her hand goes up to her mouth like she’s got a cigarette in it. Annie seems to calm herself by pulling out an old checkbook she hides under her chair. She sits there and flips through it. She does that business for about ten minutes, then she’s fine.”

  “A little before five?” I asked. “That’s the time my grandfather picked her up from work. I guess the body remembers, even when we forget.”

  My mother was alone now, for the first time, with no one to watch over her. There was always the same urgent message on my answering machine when I got home to my place on Erie: “Pick up the phone! It’s your mother! This is an emergency!” If I was talking to someone else, she’d have the operator interrupt my call. “I’m letting another party come through,” the operator would say. “She says it’s a matter of life or death.”

  My mother would get on the phone. “Thank God you’re there. Your sister died.”

  “What?”

  “You have to come home right away. Tell that sister of yours to come too.”

  “You just said she was dead.”

  “I meant Grandma. They’re sending poisonous gas in the house where she lives. Something must be done. You’re the only one who knows how to fix things.”

  Sometimes she’d call to tell me not to get on the subway: “Stay home! Someone could push you onto the tracks!” One day she left more than thirty messages saying the same thing: Someone is going to try to murder you today. You have to call the police! When I finally talked to her she said, “A tree is going to fall on you tomorrow. I just know it. Don’t go outside.”

  I said, “It’s the city, Mother. We don’t have trees.”

  If I took the phone off the hook, it was business as usual—she’d call the police to come over to see what was wrong. One day a policeman from the local precinct stopped by. He hung his head, embarrassed. After a lot of throat-clearing, he finally asked if there was any way I could stop my mother from calling their station because it was taking time away from real emergencies. He suggested getting a restraining order or changing my number. “I don’t know how you can stand it,” he said. “It would drive me insane.”

  What the policeman had said gnawed at me. What would happen if I stopped her from calling me all day long? She’d still show up at my door, but what if I lied and told her I moved? Gave her a post office box to write me at? What if I set down some rules, an impenetrable fence or two? What if things were on my terms for once? Would she survive?

  Later that fall, I sent a letter to my mother. I lied and said I had moved and gave her a post office box number in another neighborhood. I changed my phone number; my sister did the same. We instructed all our friends and the places where we worked that they were not to give our information out to anyone, even if the person said it was a matter of life or death. Even if the person said she was our mother. It was hard to believe that it took me this long to learn that my mother must never, under any circumstances, know the names and phone numbers of any of my friends or colleagues. My mother wrote me immediately to say that if I didn’t reveal where I lived, she would have to come to Chicago to track me down and save me from my kidnappers. She said she might have to buy a gun.

  I was still working at the Field Museum and two other museums in town. On the side, I did proofreading for Encyclopedia Britannica. While Eastern Europe was reassembling itself at the end of the 1980s, I was proofreading the history of East and West Germany and the Balkan states. Every few weeks and then, increasingly, every few days, I’d get a call from my boss. “Stop production!” she’d say. “The Berlin Wall just fell!” or “Hold off on Czechoslovakia. I think they’re next.” It was hard to find order even in the book series that created it.

  As for order at home in Cleveland, what little had existed in the house on West 148th Street had completely disintegrated. When I called Ruth to see if she had been to see my mother recently, she said that she and other neighbors were afraid to go near the place. Adult Protective Services no longer stopped by, since my grandma was safe and sound. Colleen hadn’t been able to enter the house in weeks.

  Everything around me—my mother’s safety and future, the geography of the world—was changing at an alarming rate, but my own life felt in limbo. Death was always circling the track—my mother sent me twenty-page letters at my post office box, threatening suicide if I didn’t come home, rambling on about conspiracy theories and how the three of us were on a hit list to be killed. And nothing was moving forward with my mother’s situation. I felt held hostage by her illness and by the backward mental health system that once again was incapable of helping our family in crisis. I longed to be far away, in a place where no one knew me, a place impossible to find.

  When I called my mother on Christmas Day, she told me that she had sold the house the week before. She had been threatening to sell it for weeks but I hadn’t taken her seriously. The new owner was moving in in February.

  “You sold the house?” I said. “How? It’s in Grandma’s name.”

  “Not anymore,” she said.

  Apparently, when my grandmother’s memory had begun to slip, my mother had forged her signature on the deed and had gotten a real estate agent to help her put the house on the market. She told me on the phone that she had already signed the papers and now it was a done deal. She had sold the house and was going to move to a transient women’s residence in Detroit where she had lived for a while after she dropped out of music conservatory. I didn’t know at the time that it was the place where she had had one of her first psychotic breakdowns in 1945, not too long after America dropped the bomb.

  The day after my mother told me her plans, Romania’s dictator was executed in public. With the fall of communism in the East, Tianenman Square, the Iran-Contra Affair, Exxon Valdez, Ted Bundy’s long-awaited electrocution, people dying of AIDS—much happened in 1989 to make my mother paranoid and disturbed, not to mention the fact that she no longer could reach either of her children by phone. But of all the events that happened that year, what stuck in my head was the discovery in Utah of a 150-million-year-old
fossilized dinosaur egg, still inside the mother’s sac. A CAT scan revealed the oldest dinosaur embryo ever discovered. At the end of the excessive and turbulent eighties, I found solace in the little egg, in the knowledge that, even amid all the turmoil, familial and in the world, something so fragile could withstand the test of time.

  Rachel and I decided that we had to get our mother to agree to live in a supervised group home or some kind of treatment facility, and if she wouldn’t agree, we would take her to court and try to declare her incompetent, thus forcing the situation to change. It was the only way we could imagine her being taken care of, staying on medication, and cultivating the life skills she never had the chance to learn. We were afraid that if she didn’t live somewhere safe, she would become homeless.

  My sister couldn’t bear the thought of speaking out against our mother in court, nor could I, so our lawyer read our statements in front of the judge. We didn’t want to ask Ruth or any of our other neighbors to speak at the trial either, when we couldn’t handle going ourselves. Hadn’t they done enough already?

  After two separate hearings and two appeals, the court refused to hear us out anymore. She could buy her own cigarettes, manage a checking account, and cash her disability checks at the bank. According to the judge, those three acts proved she was competent. We were done; we lost the case. This time we were on our own. There was only one thing for us to do. We had to go back to Cleveland and somehow convince our mother to sign the guardianship papers without the help of the court.

  Shortly before we left for Cleveland, I received a letter from my mother informing me that she’d changed her mind about moving to the women’s residence in Michigan. Instead, the three of us would move back into the Stuart House apartments on Triskett Road, where we lived together when Rachel and I were in high school. My sister could drop out of graduate school and I would have to leave Chicago and come home. We’d get another collie because Grandma took her away. We’ll get a puppy just like Lassie. You can go on welfare, she wrote. You’ll paint at home and take care of me, just like when you were young. You need to talk to your sister. She’s probably worried about chores. We can take turns cooking or go to Gene’s for a nice T-bone steak if you don’t want to cook. Get your affairs in order and come home straight away.

  Cleveland is bitterly cold when Rachel and I arrive with Agostino and my sister’s boyfriend Michael in late January 1990. Agostino and I had broken up the year before but were still good friends. I had recently started seeing someone else, a Polish medical student named Robert, but the relationship was too new and I didn’t want him involved.

  My sister’s boyfriend and Agostino can’t be more different from one another—blue-eyed Michael, sweet and blond and clean-cut, and Agostino, intimidating with his long dark hair, black leather jacket, brooding dark eyes. The men can play good cop, bad cop, if we need them to.

  Outside the house on West 148th the bushes have grown wild. What had been my beloved garden is now a wilderness of brambles and frozen weeds. The ivy my grandfather planted more than fifty years before coils thickly around the house like an icy dark-green shroud.

  When the four of us pull into the driveway, our mother runs out to meet us barefoot, wearing a thin dirty nightgown covered with cigarette burns. There’s a flurry of fat wet snowflakes in the chill air but she shows no sign of feeling cold. She’s not wearing her dentures and her face is pinched into the face of someone much older than sixty-four. She bobs back and forth, her tongue darting in and out like it did that day in the courtroom. I feel a stab in my chest. This is my mother, this wild creature before me.

  “Who the hell is that?” she says, pointing at Michael, whom she has never met.

  “His name is Jim,” Rachel lies. “He’s from Chicago.”

  My mother turns to Agostino. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Hello, Norma,” says Agostino. “Nice to see you too.”

  Agostino flashes his warm Abruzzese smile but it doesn’t work any magic; it never has on my mother anyway. She looks like she wants to shoot him. “Go back to Chicago,” she says. “Boys are not welcome here. You two get out!”

  Rachel and I had talked this through beforehand and were prepared. We decided that our mother might trust us more at first if we were alone with her.

  “That’s fine,” I say. “They can go out for a while.”

  We send Michael and Agostino out to shop for food and cleaning supplies. Rachel whispers, “Call us in an hour,” and they leave.

  Inside the house, the smell of shit, cigarettes, and rotten meat hovers in the air. It is obvious that she has been living in total squalor for months. She has been drinking coffee from a filthy pot, eating spoiled food. Her hair is unwashed and it looks like she hasn’t clipped her toenails in months. They look like brittle yellow claws.

  As soon as they are out of sight, our mother rips the kitchen phone from the wall. It’s an old-fashioned rotary-dial phone and heavy. Rachel and I back away, not knowing if she’s going to throw it at us. But our mother grabs a bottle instead, smashes it against the table, and comes after me, chasing me into the living room. Rachel follows behind, in hysterics. Ever since she was a teenager, and my mother came after her with a hot iron to stop her from going out with friends, my sister falls apart when our mother explodes.

  I wrestle my mother to the ground; she lunges toward my face with the bottle. “I’ll kill you,” she says. “I’ll kill you if you try to leave.” I grab on to her arms; she is holding the jagged edge an inch from my neck, while my sister screams for her to stop.

  I shout to Rachel to find a pay phone or a neighbor and call someone, or flag down a police car from the road. She runs out the door for help. I pin my mother to the floor, my hands clenched around her wrists, the weight of my body holding her down.

  “I’m not an animal,” she hisses. “Let me go!”

  I squeeze her wrist hard so she’ll loosen her grip on the bottle.

  “I’m your mother! Let me go!”

  “I’ll let you go when the police come.”

  “They’re full of shit.”

  “Let go,” I say.

  “They’re all in on it together—the police, those bad men you brought, the faith healers, the Christian fascists, the Nazis. I don’t ask for much. I just want you girls home where you belong!”

  “We can talk when you let go of the bottle.”

  Across from me is an empty space where the piano used to be. She had sold it to a stranger a month before. What will happen to this house, these pictures on the wall? Behind me is the horse drawing I’d made for her, Help Is on the Way, without a frame, nailed crookedly to the wall.

  “If you don’t move home I’ll kill myself,” she screams.

  I wonder if help is really on the way. When and if it comes, it will most likely be in the form of two gruff policemen, not well trained for this kind of thing, and they will use handcuffs on her like they had in the past. Why do they always tie her down? Yet here I am, pinning her to the ground. What makes me any different than the nurses and aides in lockdown? If I had a rope, I would tie her hands to stop her from doing something that I know now she could do. Albert Pinkham Ryder’s pale horse flashes in my mind, Death, the rider, going around and around beneath an ominous sky.

  I relax my arms for just a moment and it’s enough for her to break my grip and push the bottle up to my neck. The jagged edge slices into the front of my neck, right below my Adam’s apple, drawing blood. I push her back down again, harder.

  Fifteen minutes or so pass and Rachel comes back to the house, sobbing. She had flagged down a police car on Triskett Road and pleaded with him to help her, but he told her, “That’s a family matter, not police business. Go home and settle it yourself.”

  My mother’s grip on the bottle finally loosens and I wrench it from her hand. I help her to her feet. She is even more enraged than before. She lights a cigarette and starts screaming about what she’ll do if we don’t obey her. A couple minutes later, A
gostino and Michael drive up. I shout to them from the door to get back in the car and the four of us take off together, my mother chasing us down the road, barefoot in the snow, yelling, “Come back here! I’m your mother! Come back!”

  The next day we run from police station to social services office to courthouse, then social services office again and file for our mother to be temporarily committed so we can buy time and figure out what to do next.

  After our meeting with a judge, in which we explain how our mother tried to attack me with the bottle, Rachel says, “You know, she really could have killed you.”

  “I don’t think so,” I say. “I don’t think she could.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  We get all our papers notarized, and then make arrangements at the police station for two officers to come at a specific time the following day to pick up our mother and take her to the hospital. The four of us go back to where we are staying—Rachel and Michael return to their hotel, and Agostino and I drive to his aunt’s house. I fall asleep trying to remember that famous quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night: about the brilliance and versatility of madness, how it is like water seeping through, over, and around a dike. And how it requires the united front of so many people to fight against it. How many people will it take to stop my mother’s illness from devouring us all? It could take an army.

  The police arrive at the appointed time the following day. They show up, sirens wailing, doors slamming, and lights flashing onto the faint dusting of snow. I had hoped for a more subtle entrance. The four of us park down the street so she doesn’t know we are there too. Our plan is to sneak up after she is safely inside the police car. We want her to think that a neighbor had called the police to report her for disturbing the peace. We hide around the side of the house next door. I can hear my mother shouting at the policemen, “This is a family dispute! My daughters just want my money. You have no business here.” She is wearing torn polyester pants and a dirty blouse. It’s cold outside. Where is her sweater? I don’t even know if she owns one. Where have I been all these years? I run from my hiding place to the front lawn.