The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  If I could track down that interview and listen to my father’s voice, would I remember the voice of the man who tossed three rabbits over the edge of a dune? How far back does the memory of sound go?

  On Friday, the day before we fly back, my sister and I finally rent a car to look for our father’s grave. First we visit his place on Napoleon Boulevard. Natalia is wearing a bright flowery skirt and mustard-colored blouse. I look like a funereal tomboy—baseball cap, black tank top and pants. In the photos we took that day, my sister is frowning, standing on the red steps in front of the peach-colored boardinghouse where our father rented a one-room flat. She is clutching the key to the rental car in her hand, her large overstuffed handbag held close to her side. I look smug and falsely confident: hand on my hip, body relaxed.

  “Should we knock?” I ask. “It doesn’t look like anyone is home, though.”

  “No. It’s too weird. What would we say?”

  “You’re right,” I say, relieved.

  “Okay,” says Natalia. “So we saw where he lived. Let’s go.”

  Before we get in the car I turn back to look at the front porch one more time. What happened before he stumbled out the door that morning at 9:40 a.m.? Had he just popped open a beer? Did he think of us that day? Had the letter I sent through Social Security arrived? His death certificate said he died of marked fatty liver, cardiomyopathy, chronic pancreatitis. Miserable alcoholic, I say to myself. What a sad, sad man.

  “I expected a dilapidated house in a bad neighborhood,” says Natalia, starting up the car. “But this is pretty nice.”

  “I know. I wonder what was inside his room.”

  “Can we go now?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Let’s hit the road.”

  In 1994, although I have my license, I have never owned a car, so Natalia must take care of all of the driving. She has only been driving for four years and has rarely driven in a city. My sister is five-foot-four and tries to sit up as tall as she can in the seat. She drives under the speeding limit, leaning forward to see, like my grandma used to do in her white Chevrolet. “I hope you know your way to the cemetery,” she says.

  “Don’t worry. We’ve got a map. We just head west to Kenner. I think if we keep following this road we’ll hit the highway.”

  “You think?”

  “Don’t worry, Nat. It’s hard to get lost when you have a map.”

  “You’re the navigator, so don’t screw up.”

  When we leave the outskirts of the city it turns out that I am not the best navigator after all. I’m not a driver but a subway taker, a bike rider, and long-distance walker. I don’t know how to use dead reckoning like the old explorers did, or even follow our map. We wander down industrial streets west of New Orleans and past factories and slums. Natalia gets more and more nervous. After driving around in circles, we find ourselves way off track, beneath an overpass, in a desolate section of town. My sister begins to cry.

  “We’re lost!” she says, sobbing. “Where are we?”

  “I don’t know, Nat. But it’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”

  “It’s not okay. We’re really lost.”

  “Nattie, why are you crying? So we’re lost. I’ll ask directions. Don’t worry.”

  “You wanted to do this! Not me. I did this for you.”

  Tears are streaming down her face.

  “Let’s pull in here,” I say. “I’ll find someone to ask.”

  We turn into what looks like a fly-by-night mechanic’s shop. Both of us have to pee, we are thirsty, we can’t read the stupid map, and my sister is on the verge of hysterics. “I can’t believe we’re lost,” she cries.

  I haven’t seen her like this in years. The last time was the day our mother went after me with the broken bottle.

  “Why is this happening to me?” she says. “Why am I crying?”

  I smooth Natalia’s hair and wipe her wet face. I feel terrible. This whole day has been stressful for her, trying to drive in a new city, with no help from me, then getting lost. But it isn’t just that.

  “Why is this happening to me?” she asks again.

  “Nattie, until now, most of my life I’ve barely thought of our father. I was too little when he left. You’ve said all along you were doing this for me but you’re really the one who remembers him. And now I’m dragging you to his grave.”

  “You think that’s why?” she asks. She sobs even harder.

  “Nattie, it’s okay to feel bad. You don’t have to be perfect all the time. Let’s just try to move on. You’ll be okay.”

  I make a face that always makes her laugh, no matter what, a secret look I only share with her and her alone. My sister breaks a tiny smile, then cries a little more, then stops. She lets out a long sigh.

  “I’m really, really tired,” she says.

  “I know. But we’ll get there. Let me ask someone inside where the hell we are.”

  When we arrive at St. Rosalie Cemetery in Kenner, I get out and Natalia stays planted in her seat. She looks a bit shaken and scared. I lean against the passenger door and look at my father’s final home. An elderly black man takes out his garbage from the back of his house. The man glances at me, then carries on with his work. Surrounding the small fenced-in field of mounds are sad yards with plastic baby pools, broken lawn furniture, and trash. On the ground at the entrance there is an Arby’s wrapper, a hubcap, and rusty chicken wire.

  “I’m going in,” I say.

  “I’ll stay in the car.”

  “You sure you don’t want to come?”

  “I don’t like it here. It creeps me out. Try to hurry up.”

  Is she afraid of the neighborhood or the graves? The dark place of despair she might enter if she walked across the field of scattered bottles, buried bones, and trash? I wish I hadn’t convinced her to come. Sometimes things are better left buried, as William would say.

  “Don’t worry, Nat, I’ll try to be quick.”

  I am holding a letter I wrote to my father for this purpose, with a snapshot that must have been taken right before our parents’ divorce. I have a moment of regret—it’s the only copy I own of the photo and now I’m going to stick it on a dead man’s grave. And it’s the only photograph of just the three of us, my father, my sister, and me. I am in a pink dress, dangling my one-eyed teddy bear by its leg. Our father grins at the camera but my sister and I aren’t smiling. We look lost, tired, and cranky. Not unlike how we look now. The letter is simple. I wrote that I forgave him for not helping us and for never trying to find us again. I don’t know what else to say. I signed it, Love, Myra. I used my old name. What do the dead care about names, anyway?

  When I pass through the gate I am confronted with a dilemma. Which grave to place my letter on? None of them have headstones or even small markers with names. I hadn’t thought of that. Of course they would be nameless. This is a potter’s field for the unidentified poor. I walk around and consider the mounds. There aren’t that many; it’s a small field. Whom did he share this lot with, who were the other men without families? I can’t imagine women here, only homeless men or drunks, solitary creatures of the night. Then again, my mother could end up in a place like this.

  I pick the cleanest grave with the softest grass and whisper, “Hello. Is that you in there?” The air is a little sticky, still, and warm. I place the envelope on top of the grave and stand back. A breeze rustles the paper and it moves half an inch. Who knows, it might just blow that letter away to another grave, or out into the street. What then? All of a sudden it strikes me as absurd, walking around these unmarked graves, not knowing which one contains my father’s bones. Absurd and sad. What if there was a flood? Would his body float away? Someday my father could end up at the bottom of the sea or on some distant shore.

  I scan the yard of graves again. It’s not such a bad place after all. Melancholy, but still, quite peaceful. I’m glad I came. I feel like I have left a burden behind, not a heavy one, but a burden just the same. I go back to the car where
my sister is waiting. She rolls down her window.

  “Can we please leave?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go in?”

  “I’m sure. Can we go back now?”

  “Let’s go see something beautiful, Nattie. We rented the car for the whole day. Tomorrow we have to go home. Let’s go see the bayou. I promise, we won’t get lost.”

  “I know. We have a map.”

  My sister and I head south.

  Natalia and I turn off the highway and drive down a lonely sunless road, a dense forest on either side. I am trying to take us to one of the state parks, a big green blotch on my map. As we travel farther into the bayou, there are fewer and fewer places to stop. No gas stations or stores. Not even a McDonald’s. My sister grips the steering wheel. Her knuckles are white. “Are we going the right way?”

  “Well,” I say, “We have some options.”

  “I don’t want to hear options. I want to know if we’re going the right way.”

  “Okay, I’m lost again. But I know there’s a state park nearby. Let’s find a place to eat lunch and ask for directions.”

  The customers at the diner, all of them middle-aged white men, stare at my sister and me when we walk through the door. Some turn around in their booths to get a good look. Natalia and I order shrimp gumbo. This is years before I realize that I have an allergy to shellfish. After lunch I start to feel queasy. We drive in silence for a while, then suddenly I grab my sister’s arm.

  “Pull over! Now!”

  I lose my lunch all over the road.

  “Are you okay? Should we go back? We should go back.”

  “No, Nat. I’ll be fine. We’ve gone this far, please, let’s keep going. I have a feeling we’re almost there.”

  We follow the directions the waitress had given us at the diner: “You can’t get there from here if you girls are looking for road signs.” She had said we have to look for changes in the shape of the land, not the names of streets. Now I am getting nervous. I can’t tell if we are going the right way and soon it will be dark. Natalia and I drive past swamplands and thick dark forests. Bald cypresses, I wonder? The waitress had said something about cypress trees. I don’t know my trees well but in my head I tick off the names of Louisiana plants to calm myself: ground orchid, bull tongue, saw grass, lotus, spike rush, banana lily. Then the birds: ibis, egret, wood duck, redwing blackbird, great blue heron. I can’t remember the Latin names except for the heron: Ardea herodias.

  I have to puke again. We pull off the side of the road.

  “Where the hell are we?” asks Natalia. “We’re lost again and now you’re sick. You told me you knew the way.”

  “Nat, we are so close. I just know it. That woman said it was only twenty minutes away or less. She said it’s a state park and easy to find. Please let’s just keep going for another few miles. If we don’t find it in fifteen minutes, we can turn around, okay?”

  My sister puts the car in drive and clutches even more tightly to the steering wheel. I name all the Louisiana creatures I can recall: nutria, possum, raccoon, black bear, armadillo, alligator, silver-haired bat, swamp rat, turtle, deer.

  It’s almost five when we see the sign for the park. The air is a cloak of steamy wool; we are hot and tired, and the sun will be setting soon. Natalia is reluctant to get out of the car, but finally does. I put my arm around her. “Come on, Nat. Let’s take a little walk.”

  Thankfully, the signs into the wooded swamp are well marked. We walk along a raised wooden path, brackish waters bubbling up on either side. Steam rises off the slick carpet of algae. I can hear a gurgling sound below and the call of some bird in the trees. Something slaps the surface of the swamp. I look down to see a small reptilian eye.

  “Nattie!” I whisper. “It’s a baby alligator—look!”

  The creature comes right up to the boardwalk, then sinks low in the water so we can just see the top of its head and eyes. Its eyelids slide back and forth from left to right, like a secret door. I’ve never seen an alligator in the wild and wonder if its mouth is big enough to bite my foot off, even though it’s just a juvenile. If my mother were here she would warn us about the hurricane that could come and sweep us away, or the man with a gun who is lurking in the woods, waiting to abduct us, but I don’t think of her at all, or our father in his grave, or anything else—just this little ancient head peering up at me, water lilies parting around his body as he moves, the sound of a bird I don’t know, and my sister beside me.

  I take her hand and we walk a little farther, a little deeper into the swamp. We don’t really have much time to go far; dusk is starting to settle in. We stop again and look at the endless swamp encricled by trees. Spanish moss, Tillandsia usneoides, is beardlike and prolific here. Early settlers had thought the moss resembled the bearded Spaniards who had once explored the region, and gave it its name, but it isn’t really a moss at all, or even a parasite. Tillandsia is an epiphyte, a plant that derives its nutrients not from where it is planted but from the air. My sister and I are epiphytes too, like the abundant green canopy dripping down from the trees above our heads.

  “We should go,” says Natalia.

  “Just a couple minutes. Then we’ll head back.”

  “It’s beautiful. I feel so peaceful.”

  “Me too, Nattie.”

  Then, from somewhere up in the canopy, we hear a whooshing, flapping sound of wings. We look across the slow green water to see a flash of gray-blue and black alight upon the mucky bank. It’s a great blue heron, Ardea herodias. He is magnificent—his black feathery crown, his smoky gray and black cape across his shoulders and wings. Natalia and I stare at the bird in silence until it lifts its great wings and flies up into the tangle of darkening green. We listen to the heron’s high bright call, as if it is saying, Nothing to be afraid of, nothing at all. Then I understand—this is the Louisiana lagniappe, the unexpected gift. It’s not what is lost but what is left—my sister, this bird, these trees, this falling light. We turn and head back to the car. This time, driving out of the bayou toward New Orleans, Natalia and I don’t get lost once.

  Over the next couple years, information about our father surfaces: he once lived on a farm in Tuscany, not far from my beloved Cerreto. And, as it turned out, he wasn’t Hungarian after all. His parents were Dutch-German chicken farmers from Indiana who could trace their roots back to the founder of the Mennonites. He had two sisters, now deceased; one lived in Chicago when I lived there but I never knew about her. A few months later, we discovered that my sister and I did indeed have other siblings, at least one—a half-brother named Greg. He was our father’s first child, from the first of three marriages; our mother was his last wife. My father was allergic to feathers like me. I wondered how he felt about shrimp and clams. What else did we share? What other secrets did he keep?

  Here is what I do know: when the landlady cleared out my father’s room, all that was there were six identical brown suits, six pairs of brown shoes, a dusty typewriter without paper, and a large stash of empty beer bottles and cans. No letters, no diaries or books, no manuscripts, nothing. No address book of family and friends, no photographs in frames. No evidence of a life.

  I think of those shoes sometimes, and New Orleans. Those bright red steps leading up to the porch where he fell in winter. Was his house swept away when Katrina came to town? And what happened to those six pairs of shoes? Did someone wear them after him, even though they say it’s bad luck to wear a dead man’s shoes? And the ones he wore in potter’s field? I imagine they were scuffed and out of style, heels black and low. What’s a shoe anyway but just a piece of skin cut from a cow fed from buttercups and clover? A shoe is only stardust, DNA, a host for microbes and the prolific larvae of carrion beetles. A thousand years from now my father’s shoes will rest in what was once a rushing river. They’ll be mute and peaceful in the loam, not like shoes at all but something that feeds the moles and millipedes, bacteria perhaps, or some kind of fungus made from leather, the shifting
of the earth, and time.

  And what of the rabbits? My sister remembers them too. But she says there were no black dogs in Indiana in our house by the lake. I hope, in a way, that they didn’t exist, that each day I left to wander the woods and bleaching sands of Lake Michigan, I dreamed my woodland guardians into being.

  Winter in Paradiso

  It’s Winter in Paradiso, but this past week there’s been a rise in temperature. In fact, it makes me suspicious of ill intent. Soon I will tell all about secret crimes of infancy, drugs to know me out, and the taking of my childhood home. But for now, I spend my time resting, drawing and listening to the radio. Lately they have been talking about global warming. The scientists have really loused things up. The TV at the motel last night cautioned tornado warnings but onscreen showed an avalanche and a fist projecting out from under the snow! Who was buried there? Where are my girls? The manipulators have had a lifetime ball on my defects. Last week I went to see the doctor. He said I have hemorrhoids. The tests were painful; I have chronic fatigue and feel uprooted as a homemaker. In the meantime, I’m just a kid again, living month to month. I sustained some injuries of late, general neglect of water that burned my body and caused lentigo, facial cysts, boils, and then another fall at the train station that was caused by the negligence of others. Also supposedly by water. They always blame it on “water,” on something else. But how can you explain the small dead rat I found in a drainpipe the other day? Who put that there to warn me of what’s to come? You’ve got to have eyes at the back of your head, especially if you’re blind. When the snow falls, no one sees your cane. It’s white against white in winter—you slip and fall and next thing you know you’re following the White Rabbit down into his hole.

  14

  I distrust the forest, or any wilderness, as a place to live. Living in the wilderness, you may well fall asleep on your feet or go mad.