The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  “We don’t have all day,” the first policeman says to my mother. “Be a good girl and get in the car.”

  My mother is clinging to the front door and won’t let go. The men pry her away; they each take one of her arms and pull her toward their car. Then she sees me. I am standing on the snowy lawn, unsure of what to do. She shouts at me, Traitor! Gestapo! as the men drag her, howling, to the car. The first officer puts his hand on top of her head and guides her into the backseat just like they do on Grandma’s cop shows on TV. The other man gets into the driver’s seat. My mother glares at me through the window. The lights from the squad car spin and flash on the snow as she presses her pale face against the window and mouths the words, Save me. She has no coat, no hat, no purse.

  I run up to the car. “Stop!” I yell. “Wait! Let me get her a coat!”

  One of the men nods, holds up his wrist and taps his watch; I better hurry and not waste his time. I run inside and bound up the stairs to my grandfather’s room, where my mother has slept since he died. I need to find a sweater, something warm. I yank open drawers, the closet door. I can’t find a single sweater, just her old blue coat with the fake fur trim—the one she will repair over and over again for the next twelve years or so, the one she will lose somewhere in a run-down motel in New York, or a bus station bathroom in LA, or on a subway seat en route to sleep at the airport. She’ll write about the tragic loss of the coat in her diaries. She’ll declare it stolen, and file a claim against the city and the motel and anyplace she might have seen it last, asking why did they steal the one and only coat from a woman who has lost her memory, her house, and her children, the only two people she has ever truly loved? I grab the soft blue coat and run back outside, but the officers have already pulled into the street.

  I shout to them, “Wait, please, she needs a coat!” but they turn left on West 148th toward Triskett, taking her in winter like a thief.

  In her letters, my mother always told me what Chinese zodiac sign ruled each year and what each animal sign stood for. A few weeks before the four of us came to Cleveland, my mother had sent me a card at my Chicago post office box: Last year was the Chinese Year of the Snake, the year of deception. 1990 is the Year of the Horse. The Year of the “Metal” Horse, to be exact. Metal Horse people are unyielding, strong and determined. Not bad qualities if you live in a world of shysters, criminals and underhanded spies. In the Year of the Horse, on a cold night in January, after my mother is taken away and the four of us have eaten a much-needed meal, we finally reenter the red brick house shrouded in frozen ivy. On the wall above the fireplace is my Chagall-esque landscape. There are horses floating in the dark blue sky, a red path leading from a house to a human heart. At the center of the picture is the big white horse my mother liked so much, the words “Help is on the way” hovering just above. What kind of help is this, setting her up behind her back, having the police take her by force, their sirens screeching all the way to the psych ward? I stand there, looking at my drawing, while somewhere on the other side of the city doctors are strapping my mother to a bed. She’ll be given an injection to calm her down and make her go to sleep. The next day she’ll feel like a zombie. And then what? Where will she go?

  Once inside, we look around and assess what to do. It will take days to clean this place, or more like weeks. There is garbage all over and a layer of dirt on the countertops and on the floors. How could my mother live here like this? How did I let this happen?

  My sister and I start digging for things while the men clean. We’ve brought packing tape and boxes, garbage bags galore. I turn on the radio; a quiet piano sonata plays in the background. The music calms me. I am glad I didn’t bring Robert or even think twice about it. I wouldn’t want him to see all this sadness and filth. I make a promise to myself: in my new life, there will be none of this.

  “I can’t believe we got through today,” I say. “Great job, everyone.”

  Rachel asks, “How long do you think they’ll keep her?”

  “After all that stuff we said, about her trying to attack me, about her attempted suicides, don’t you think they’ve got to keep her at least a couple weeks?”

  “God, I hope it’s longer than that.”

  As the men scrub, my sister and I rummage through boxes and drawers, searching for things to take back. We are partisans on the move during World War II, ready to spring at the slightest sound. Every time the heater kicks on, Rachel and I jump.

  “It feels good to have a plan,” I say. “With a little work, this house could look pretty nice.”

  “What’s the next step?” asks Michael.

  “We have to get her to sign.”

  “Do you think she will?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe, if she was on medication. But she’s not. I just can’t think about it now.”

  I start sifting through my grandmother’s bureau in the dining room. The first drawer I pull out is stuffed with carbon copies of letters my mother wrote to the psychiatrist in California. I wonder if he ever read them. I always thought he was one of her delusions, but a year before our grandmother started showing signs of Alzheimer’s, she told me that the story was indeed true, that the doctor had really raped our mother, even sodomized her. He had threatened to perform a lobotomy on her if she told anyone that he had forced her to have sex with him every week. My grandma said that after our mother married our father, the doctor wrote a letter admitting to some of the things he had done. I asked if she’d pressed charges since she’d finally had proof. My grandmother said that she took the letter and destroyed it before my mother had a chance. She told me, “I couldn’t let her do that. People would talk.”

  I open the drawer below. There are dozens of photographs scattered at the bottom of the drawer, and others stuffed in two round cookie tins. There’s a stiff 1950s portrait of my grandfather in his red fez hat he wore to secret meetings at the Masononic lodge and a buoyant photo of my mother at sixteen, leaning out of a window, smiling. I find an old newspaper clipping of her in a French school play, at age fourteen. She is Joan of Arc, kneeling before the king. And another photo, and another. Where to begin? A sudden rapping on the back door makes me catch my breath.

  My mother is at the door pounding. “Let me in,” she shouts. “I forgot my key.” How did they let her out? It’s freezing and she has no coat, no hat or gloves.

  “Let me in!” my mother screams. “This is still my house!”

  I call out to the other three, “She’s back! What do we do?”

  My sister shouts, “Don’t open the door!”

  My sister remembers this differently, remembers the door being open, not locked, and my mother letting herself in. She remembers yelling at me to hold the door against our mother to block her entry. But I remember opening the locked door. What else could I do? My mother is cold and has no coat. If I let her in, I betray my sister; if I don’t, my mother might freeze to death.

  Our mother is a tornado. The hospital never even medicated her; they just sent her back out into the streets three hours after she arrived. After all the heartbreak and drama and running around to social services, the courthouse, and the police station, my mother just walks in the door and picks up where she left off.

  “You aren’t going anywhere,” she says, pointing a lit cigarette at my face. “We’ve got business to attend to.” She turns to the men. “You bastards get out!”

  Our mother tells us that she will not, under any circumstances, let us leave. She reiterates the fact that she will kill herself if she has to in order to prove her point. We are to move back to Cleveland into our old apartment on Triskett Road and we will live together again, safe from the outside world. She has it all planned out. She is as determined as a Metal Horse. “I put a deposit down on the place,” she says. “So we can be together again.”

  My sister and I try to reason with her. After all these years of living with this, we are still ignorant about her debilitating disease. I once asked a schizophrenic guy I k
new in Chicago what it was like to be him. He said, “It’s like your head is plugged into every electric socket in every house on every street.” I had gone to therapy, read books, went to support group meetings and conventions on mental illness, and still had no idea how to talk to my mother about getting help.

  “Please sign it. It’s for your own good,” says Rachel. She’s holding the voluntary guardianship document in front of our mother’s face. “Sign it. You’ve got to.”

  “Cut the crap. Tell those boys to leave. They’re not wanted here.”

  “If you don’t sign that paper,” I threaten her, “you will never see us again.”

  In the house on West 148th Street, pandemonium breaks out. Everyone is shouting and waving their arms.

  “Stop,” my sister screams. “I can’t take it anymore.” Michael tries to comfort her, while Agostino shouts at our mother in both English and Italian.

  My mother is enraged. “Who’s controlling you girls? Who are these men?”

  “You have to sign this,” I say, holding out the papers. “Otherwise this is it. You’ll see. We’ll disappear.”

  “You’ve been brainwashed. You’ll do as I say.”

  My mother lunges toward me; I push her away. Rachel and Michael are shouting at her to calm down.

  I run upstairs to use the bathroom, hoping it isn’t clogged like the one by the kitchen. On my way back down I pause by the little nightstand at the top of the stairs. I pull out what’s hidden in the bottom drawer—an old piece of violin rosin I left years ago. I can smell it through the chamois cloth; I slip the rosin into my pocket. Is this the only treasure I will take from my childhood home? Halfway down the stairs, I stop to survey the scene in the living room from above, detached. Agostino is pulling my horse drawing down from the wall. I am disappearing into the stairs; I’m just a shadow, an invisible cat.

  “You don’t deserve this, Norma,” he tells her, yanking it off the nails. “I took care of your daughter better than you ever did.”

  “That’s mine!” she screams.

  “Not anymore.”

  I want to tell him, “Please stop, she is so sick. You’re breaking what’s left of my heart.” I try to call out to him but something catches in my throat. I take short, shallow breaths.

  “You bastard,” says my mother. “You never even gave her a ring.”

  They both grab on to the picture and pull. I can’t breathe—what if we can’t get out? What if we have to stay here forever, locked in this house with her? I feel myself fading away and tumble down the stairs. I see the same scene I always see when I faint—I’m at the bottom of a laundry chute, looking up at piles of dirty clothes raining down upon my face.

  “See what you do to her?” cries Rachel, as she helps me to my feet. “You make her sick.”

  I can hear my drawing starting to tear, but the paper is tough and maybe will withstand their fight. Agostino and my mother give it one more tug, shouting back and forth, while I sneak into the dining room. I am not a cat anymore but a horse, ready to run out of the gate. I can’t be in this place another minute. As chaos explodes all around me, I slip into the dining room and open the bureau drawer again. I pull out a handful of photographs and shove them in a bag.

  I shout to the others to get their things. “Let’s get out of here—NOW.”

  The four of us run to the door, my mother close on our heels, letting the big white horse floating in blue fall to the floor.

  “Come back here! You come back right now!”

  As we pull away in our cars, I turn to watch my mother chase after us, her arms flailing around her as snow clouds gather in the sky. She looks like she is trying to lift off the ground, but just can’t do it. I am worried about my big white horse, trampled on the living room floor. Who will repair it now? Where will my mother go? We get to the corner of 148th and Grapeland and she is a small spot in the middle of the road. We turn the corner and she is out of sight. Later, when I open the bag to see what photos I have rescued, I find I have scooped up pictures of people I don’t even know.

  Part II

  The New World

  Of course I am a wanderer, a pilgrim on this earth.

  But can you say that you are anything more?

  Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

  What Not to Buy in Travel

  What not to buy in travel if you want to save the planet: Do not purchase reptile skins and leathers, commonly used in watchbands, handbags, belts and shoes. No birds and feathers. Never buy ivory souvenirs. Furs from jaguar, leopard, snow leopard, tiger, ocelot, margay and tiger cat. Other cats as well as furs of marine mammals like seals and polar bears. These cannot enter the U.S. legally. Coral is also prohibited. Plants prohibited from import include many cycads, orchids and cacti. Note to self: I never buy or have bought the above anyway. I am homeless.

  11

  As for the world, when you emerge, what will it have become?

  Arthur Rimbaud, The Illuminations

  Forgeries

  and Illuminations

  It’s the moment when I notice a woman opening a window in a small house on a bridge above the Arno that I think of my mother, somewhere across the wide Atlantic. The woman shakes a rug out, dust floats down like flecks of mica, the window slams shut, the light shifts, the river darkens. Where is she? Is she dead? In a letter my mother wrote me not long after our ill-fated visit that January 1990, she said that she had moved to our old Stuart House apartment building on Triskett Road and was waiting for my sister and me to come. I wrote back to say that I was moving overseas. My mother promptly sent a reply to my Chicago post office box: I taped a map of the world to the wall in my room with a note: Ask no questions. They’ll tell you no lies. She added: Where are your belongings—your books, pictures, and bicycle? With all the sales here in Cleveland, I’ll spend some money on you when you return. For myself, I don’t need much, just a small radio, some books, and a lamp.

  Right before I left for Florence that August, I sent one more letter to her. I said that I had a one-person show coming up in Europe that fall, which was true, but didn’t say that the exhibit was in Italy. I told her I had no intention of returning anytime soon from the “European country” I was moving to. My letter came back with “Addressee Unknown” stamped across it. I tried sending another to her after I arrived in Florence. I described where I lived as a vague, imaginary place so as not to reveal my true location. “It’s so sunny here,” I wrote. “There are birds of many colors and the trees are russet and gold.” Once again, my letter came back. If she wasn’t there, where in the world was she?

  The late September light shifts again outside the window at the Uffizi, and the green river sparkles below. I think of the woman in the window on the bridge, how she could be me living another person’s life—a Florentine housewife with a couple of kids, a small white dog, and paunchy husband who sells jewelry in one of the shops below on Ponte Vecchio. My name could be Carlotta or Maria or I could take the name Agostino’s grandparents gave his mother when she was born, Orienta, after a ship they saw pass by the port of Napoli. I could give myself the name of a ship, a vessel bound for the scalloped edge of someone else’s country.

  I turn and walk down the corridor to find Botticelli’s Annunciation. The picture is like a scene from a movie: An angel enters a room, walks between two pillars to where Mary sits. She holds her hand out in a gesture of refusal. Gabriel offers her the job but she doesn’t want it, won’t take the lily from his hand. She is reluctant to be selfless and holy. But it’s the background I’ve come to see, not Mary—the distant hazy purple horizon, the exaggerated perspective to make something look real when it’s really not; the painting’s verisimilitude—truth, besotted with lies.

  I leave Botticcelli to find the round blue room of Mannerists. My favorite is Bronzino’s portrait of Lucrezia, a stoic woman in a scarlet dress. I make a quick sketch of her pale, elongated neck, her chaste, enigmatic stare. Could I steel myself against the world like her? Her
unwavering gaze follows me like Goya’s did years ago. Engraved on her gold necklace are the words Amour dure sans fin. Love lasts eternally. Was she a happy wife and mother? Or was she hiding something, holding back tears?

  In another room I find Caravaggio’s painted shield. Medusa’s eyes glare at me; her serpentine curls hiss: How could you leave me? I sleep on benches, on bridges, on cardboard and leaves. Will I ever let down this burden of guilt?

  I return to the window. The woman is gone, but the river is still bathed in light. I look out at Ponte Vecchio, the one bridge left standing after World War II. Iraq had invaded Kuwait the week before I left for Italy. Saddam Hussein had declared, “The mother of all battles has begun.” Are we about to enter World War III? Shouldn’t I be back in the States, trying to find my mother? But here, it’s hard to imagine war: from the window I can see bridge beyond bridge—Santa Trinita, Ponte alla Carraia, Vespucci, and Ponte della Vittoria in the distance. Is this what it means to wander? Gold, capricious light on water, arches unfurling, all the way to the sea? Is it a heart splitting open? Is it loss? Or is it the seductive verisimilitude of beauty, waving and singing a stranger’s land?

  In my memory palace, there is a long corridor lined with marble statues. The ceilings are decorated with Italian grotteschi: sylvan landscapes of centaurs, nymphs, gargoyles, and swans. Guilded paintings adorn the walls. At the end of the corridor is a map of a make-believe world. In the distance are snow-covered mountains, forests of cypresses and parasol pines. There are ships waiting to leave at every harbor, there are places still waiting to be named.