The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  On Love and Forgetting

  I have forgotten everything I have ever learned. My left hand looks like an over ripe banana and I have momentarily misplaced the continent of Africa yet again. I closely guard what I carry and never ever say, “I’ll be back.” Sometimes, in my room, I am soothed by the FM radio playing Spanish music I like, especially Navarra. It always reminds me of my unused erotic life, that is, unused by me. The Question at hand is: Why did I pick a lemon in the garden of love where only peaches grow?

  13

  Many fathers are gone. Some leave, some are left. Some return, unknown and hungry. Only the dog remembers.

  Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

  Rabbits

  My first memory is not about my mother.

  It’s the summer of 1962; I am three years old and my sister is four. A friend of our father’s from Chicago has lent us a house near the Indiana Dunes by Lake Michigan so our father can take a break from the city and finish his second book, The Amnesiacs. My sister and I find a family of lizards inside the mailbox in front of the house, half hidden by wild asparagus, beach grass, and flowers. We feed the lizards lettuce and bugs and take them out to play. When our parents divorce and we move to Cleveland the following year, I will lie and tell children in my kindergarten class that I used to raise baby dinosaurs by the sea.

  I have three big black dogs with pointy ears. Sometimes the dogs and I slide down a dune to the lake and race along the beach. I collect things that wash up onshore and put them in a bag—shells, driftwood, colored glass. One day the dogs and I follow the sound of birds into the woods. I can’t find the birds; they are hiding in the thick of the leaves. When I get tired I take a nap beneath a tree. The dogs curl up beside me, their breath steady and warm. When I wake up, each has a bloody rabbit in its mouth. I carry the rabbits home so my father can save them, but he is angry and grabs them from my hands.

  The picture left indelible in my brain: A tall dark man tossing three dead rabbits over a dune. It’s a scene in slow motion, like a soldier’s parting embrace. The man’s face is tight and determined as he looks straight ahead. One by one the rabbits sail through the air, landing somewhere below, into the tangle of blackberry brambles, onto a sandy path, or farther out to the deep waters of Lake Michigan.

  When he’s done the man turns, walks in long strides toward the small white house. His hands are stained with blood. He opens the door and goes inside. The little girl slips by unseen. She watches the man open the refrigerator and pour a glass of cool white milk. The girl creeps back outside. Clouds gather. The girl kneels at the edge of a dune. In my palace of memories, the rabbits are safe, hiding in an alcove. Above them hangs a memento—a lock of my mother’s hair; below are the keys to my father’s secret life.

  When I came across my mother’s diaries, I found an undated document my mother had written by hand. Part of it was devoted to her life with my father: My first week in Los Angeles I met Paul Herr and thereafter from the late 40s until 1963, he was the dominant person in my life. I bring this up as technically it could be said that it was an arranged kidnap. Those years I did typing for him; cared for the apartment and worked in an office. I paid for my own clothes and some of the household items. However, I might say that I did have periods of amnesia that lasted a very long time. After we divorced I had no advisor, my furniture disappeared and I reported increasing blindness. I returned to Cleveland to live near my parents. Support checks came six years and then they stopped. I applied for Welfare in 1969. My hospitalizations in Cleveland, beginning in 1964, I attribute to outer environment. At the deepest level, it was a war zone and that should be taken into consideration.

  In the same box, I also found a letter from my father to my grandparents. In his letter, dated July 18, 1960, he describes the evening he and my mother spent with a top editor from Random House and his wife in Manhattan. The editor had offered him a three-book deal based on having read only half of my father’s first novel. At the fancy dinner in New York, there is talk of television and radio shows, of big features in magazines. “As guests of Mr. Geis and his wife,” my father writes, “Norma and I dined on caviar, champagne, and duck.” He goes on to say, “I am very tired of working all day at some difficult job and doing my real work at night. Now I feel free, and it is a very fine feeling.” He closes the letter with the only reference to my sister and I that I have ever seen: “The children are well and growing like weeds. Myra is talking. She also climbs like a monkey. Love, Paul.”

  Who was my father? Why did he disappear?

  Years before Katrina stampeded into New Orleans I decided to go down to Louisiana to look for my father’s grave. It was 1994 and I had been living near Boston for about a year. The stress of living in the same city as my mother had gotten to be too much so I moved east, not far from Cambridge. What spurred the decision to look for my father’s grave was the sudden death of a close friend’s father. At the funeral, I decided that I wanted to know the end of my own father’s story. I also needed a break. I had been working over fifty hours a week on my book series for children, holed up in my apartment writing for months.

  I knew my sister’s spring break from her teaching job was coming up so I checked out flights from Boston Logan. She could drive down from Canton, New York, and we could fly out together. I called up Natalia and told her how much fun it would be to go on vacation, just the two of us, a whole week in New Orleans.

  “A sister vacation,” she said. “I love the idea!”

  “There’s one small hitch, though—I want to find our father’s house and grave.”

  “Whatever I can do to help,” said Natalia. “But just so you know, I made peace with all that years ago.”

  The night before we left, I pulled out the map I bought of New Orleans and looked for Napoleon Boulevard, my father’s last home, not far from the Garden District. I had gotten his address from a copy of the coroner’s report my mother had sent me years ago in 1986 when she first found out about his death. The boardinghouse my father had lived in was only a few blocks from my sister’s and my B&B. Natalia and I could even walk there. Then I found St. Rosalie Cemetery, just west of the city of Kenner, inside Jefferson Parish. I used the legend on my map to measure the distance to the cemetery from our father’s house. Paul Herr was buried off Route 61, not far from the river, only fourteen miles from bed to grave.

  Our first day in town, Natalia and I eat breakfast at an open-air café; we drink café au lait and devour hot doughy beignets like two messy girls, powdered sugar on our faces and our hands. We stroll past pink and yellow antebellum houses with fluted pillars and lacey iron gates, beneath a canopy of rambling trees, their green leafy arms stretched out across wide boulevards. “Those are called live oaks,” my sister informs me. “They stay green all year-round.” She has done her homework about where we are and I haven’t read one single word about this place. I try to keep up with her when we walk. I am slower, more prone to meandering; she moves with a fast clip, hands clasped behind her back, body forward, a professor lost in her thoughts.

  “So when do you want to look for the grave?” I ask.

  “Let’s go later in the week. I’d like to have a little vacation first.”

  While my sister is getting coffee, I people watch in Jackson Square: A beautiful dark-eyed child in a bright red stroller stares into my eyes, while his parents shout at each other in spitfire Italian between bites of muffuletta sandwiches. A woman with long white hair, tattered sundress, and gauze patch over one eye, Mardi Gras beads around her neck, walks in circles around my bench, singing old chansons. She is my mother; she is everyone’s mother, half blind, and lost. An emaciated man without a shirt stumbles by, drunk in the middle of the day, talking to God about a devil in Congo Square. He is my father, drunken nomad, unknown, hungry, and lost. An unfamiliar world is stretched out before me: crowds of tourists and palm readers at every corner, tap dancers, fiddlers, psychics, and shops where people can buy gris-gris and spells.
I’ve only been in Boston a year but I could pick up and move here too; this place is as good as any other. The air is warm and full of music, and there’s a river that leads to secret oceans, enchanted worlds. Any place could be my home. Was that how my father chose this place? Just a random temperate place, a place as good as any?

  Before my sister and I left for New Orleans, I wrote my mother at her most recent post office box to ask if she would tell me more about our father. Did he have other children? Did he ever marry again? My mother wrote back: Your father was a drunk and a louse. I remember nothing else about our years together. I was kidnapped and given chemicals to forget.

  My sister has a New Orleans guidebook she consults daily. She circles things she wants to see: the tomb of voodoo priestess Marie Laveau, the Musée Conti Wax Museum, Preservation Hall, the all day/all night Café du Monde, and the best places to eat chicken étouffée. I follow her lead but am more interested in things we see and hear by chance—the ancient washboard player with the scar across his cheek, the tap-dancing boys at the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse, the zydeco accordion I hear wafting down an alleyway.

  On day three of our trip my sister and I shop for flowery dresses, the kind we’d never buy back home. It’s difficult not to think of my mother, somewhere on the streets of Chicago, or some other large city, carrying her possessions in a cart. Or storing them somewhere in some cold, dark room. It’s hard not to think of things that she might need. When I am in a store, I can’t get her out of my mind: Should I buy my mother the cheap gloves or the expensive insulated ones? The nice ones will keep her warmer when she’s waiting outside a shelter, but what if someone steals them? The cheap ones will be easier to wash. How does a homeless person wash her clothes?

  I look around at all the ruffled dresses in the shop—the big straw hats with bows, espadrilles in every color of the rainbow. Why shouldn’t I get her something frivolous? Why should it always be easy-to-clean socks and shirts, sweaters you don’t have to wash by hand, sturdy hats that can withstand the snow and rain?

  “Can I help you?” asks the clerk. “Is there something that you need?”

  “No, thank you,” I say. But the woman is annoyingly cheerful and pushy; keeps following me around, picking out things for me to try on. I feel like asking her if she has something festive for a woman who is homeless but I hold my tongue.

  Natalia and I try on one dress after another. My sister is ebullient in clothing stores; she is in her element, happy and content. She loves fine fabrics, the latest colors and styles, wearing something stunning and new. Why shouldn’t she? Why shouldn’t I?

  “Now, that looks fabulous!” the clerk says to me, as I step out of the dressing room in a breezy summer dress. “Go look at yourself in the mirror!”

  I stare at myself in the tight frilly dress and am surprised at how good it looks. My mother would approve. Try being a little more feminine. Use a little lipstick and get a new bra, put some rouge on your cheeks. I buy the dress and choose a summer hat for my mother. And a little chiffon scarf with splashes of red, yellow, and green. “That scarf is perfect for you,” says the clerk.

  “Thanks,” I say, imagining it around my mother’s soft, slender neck.

  Later that night, I call up William, the tall, thin poet I had just started dating. We had met in line at the post office in Cambridge. On our first date, he told me his life story—how he had to keep his whereabouts secret from his parents who he said were abusive, how his siblings, all eight of them, were either religious fanatics or drunks. I surprised myself by telling him the story about my mother. We stayed up all night, and in the morning we knew some mysterious and irreversible bond had been forged. The night before I left for New Orleans, we lay on my bed holding hands, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark galaxy I had painted on my ceiling. He cautioned me about digging too deeply in the past. He said, “Sometimes its best to just turn your back on it all and walk away.”

  On the phone, while my sister is reading in bed, I sit in the kitchen of our B&B and tell William about the live oaks, the dogwoods in bloom, and the redwing blackbird I spotted on our second day. I tell him that I want to go deep into the bayou and find an alligator. Or maybe a panther, if there are any left.

  “How are the sisters getting along?”

  “Great,” I say. “I just hope she’s having fun. I like to get lost but she prefers to have a plan.”

  “Have you seen your father’s grave yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “Good luck. It might be tough.”

  My sister hasn’t met William yet but I plan on arranging something soon. I know she’s nervous about him being a poet who is currently unemployed, but hopefully, she’ll come around. She better because, after all, he and I have so many plans for the future: art and poetry collaborations, children’s books we want to write together, a poetry reading series we want to start. I know she’s worried about me but I want her to understand that William’s and my creative projects mean more to me than a pension plan or a brand-new car. And when I’m around him, I don’t feel as much guilt about running away from my mother. “How can you possibly help her?” he insists. “She would destroy your life.” I haven’t felt this way about anyone since Robert. Maybe this is the man with whom I will start a family. We are both thirty-five and don’t have that many years left to decide. Maybe that’s part of why I wanted to come to New Orleans. If we do start a family, shouldn’t I know more about my own?

  Back in the room, my sister looks up sleepily from her bed. “Who was that on the phone?”

  “William,” I say.

  Natalia’s face clouds over. “Well,” she says. “Let’s get an early start tomorrow. We have to leave soon and there’s a lot I’d want to do.”

  “I know, Nat. And there’s still the house and the grave. Don’t forget.”

  Years before my trip to New Orleans, when I was twenty-one, I found out that Social Security would forward a letter from me to my father if I gave them his number. I wrote a short letter to him, telling him that I was an artist and my sister was a writer, and that our mother was still quite ill. I promised that if he wrote back, I wouldn’t reveal his address to her if he didn’t want me to. What if he had another family? What if I had siblings scattered across the country?

  It struck me then that I had never once seen a photograph of my grandparents on my father’s side of the family. I had no idea what their names were, what they looked like, only what my mother said my father had told her when they got married—that his father had been a general in the Hungarian army and that his mother was a gypsy dancer. She said he left home at fifteen because he hated his father and the town of Mulberry, Indiana, where he was born.

  Had my mother made up my father’s story? No one ever talked about him, so how was I to know? My grandmother always said the same thing—he was a genius but couldn’t drive more than a half hour without having a drink. But they were a beautiful couple, she’d say. He was tall and handsome and your mother, what a looker!

  I rarely thought about my parents as a couple. But when I did, I imagined them a little like F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Paul, my brilliant boozy father, holding court each night with Chicago’s intellectual elite—Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, and the rest of his South Side literary pals—and my mother, Norma, exotic, beautiful, and mad, and perhaps even more brilliant than Paul. My father’s first book, Journey Not to End, was compared to Camus when it came out in 1961. Two years later, by the time he and my mother divorced, he had already finished his second novel, was on to his third, and was writing a play with Nelson Algren. My father was a painter as well. I imagined their dinner parties, everyone drinking each other under the table while my mother, sober yet not of this world, played Chopin or Gershwin or Monk on their rented black baby grand. And then in the middle of dinner—a sudden strange outburst, perhaps, a string of obscenities muttered under her breath, or something more theatrical, a little violent. Had her volatility been the source of my father’s inspirati
on? Or had it driven him to drink even more?

  Right after my mother sold the family house in 1989, I got a call from my mother’s old landlord who owned the apartment she and my father had rented on the South Side of Chicago in the late fifties. He was an old man but still owned the same building where I was born. “Your mother called me about an apartment,” he said, after explaining who he was. “She put you down as a reference. She sounded really bad.”

  He said, “She used to come to the door with a black eye, her arms all bruised up. I felt sorry for her. Your father was a very troubled man.”

  The only other person who told me something about my parents’ life together was the late great Studs Terkel, who interviewed my father on his radio show when his first book came out. In 1987, the year after I found out my father died, I heard Studs was doing a book-signing in Chicago, so I went. I introduced myself to him and asked if he remembered a writer in the early sixties named Paul Herr.

  “I interviewed him years ago,” said Studs. “I remember him quite well.”

  “He was my father. But I never really knew him.”

  “Your father was a brilliant man,” said Studs. “I remember your mother too. How is she now? I remember her being quite ill. She was a lovely woman and a gifted musician.”

  “Thanks for asking,” I said. “My mother is still pretty sick. But I always have hope.”

  Studs asked what happened to my father. He said that he was a great writer. I told him that he passed away in 1980. “Bad heart,” I said.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said. “Please give your mother my best.”