The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  Last Page

  Nov. 16, ’06 Receive package (box) from Myra.

  Nov. 20, ’06 In all day.

  Nov. 21, ’06 Tuesday

  Sagittarius Nov. 22–Dec. 21

  Wednesday, Nov. 22, ’06

  Chica—drink of Peru

  Hecuba—Wife of Priam

  Baroque Palace—?

  16

  Through birds, through fire, but not through glass... that we came to earth to live is untrue; we come to sleep, to dream.

  Aztec

  Into the Land of Birds and Fire

  I awoke to an old familiar smell—stale cigarettes, musty paper, and perfume. My baby book was next to me in the hotel bed, propped open to a photograph of my sister in a playpen, reaching toward someone, a woman’s body just beyond the picture frame. My sister’s face is beaming, her tiny fingers grasping for the woman’s hand holding a brush. It was Saturday, two days before Christmas 2006.

  Natalia and I rushed through breakfast to get to the hospital early in case they decided to move our mother to a nursing home that day. The hospital needed the bed and our mother needed to be in hospice care. When we arrived at the hospital, we found out that they had made arrangements to send her to the worst nursing home in the city, full of drug addicts, the criminally insane, and Cleveland’s neglected poor. Melissa, the woman who had been my mother’s social worker before Tim, told me they were sending her there because she was homeless. I called up the hospital’s social worker in charge.

  “My mother is not going to that place,” I said. “Do not move her until I find a better one. Is that clear?”

  Natalia stayed at the hospital while Cathy and I went to look at two other nursing homes. I almost settled on the first place, a cheerful hospice center that looked like a condo, but changed my mind when I saw the crucifixes hanging in every room. There was also an unlocked door right by the first-floor room she would be given if she moved there. I was still convinced my mother would get up out of bed, walk outside, and disappear into the streets. After all these years of hiding from her, I was terrified she would leave. Finally I chose a place called The Westlake Healthcare Center in Westlake, Ohio. This one looked exactly like a nursing home. It smelled like one too: that faint mingling of urine, iodine, cafeteria food, and coffee. But the staff was warm and friendly and security was tight. My mother could have her own room on their well-monitored second floor.

  After we get our mother settled in to her new home, I run around to stores, collecting things for her room—a lamp, socks, toiletries, nightgowns. For the last seventeen years I have been shopping for my mother, searching for warm practical things she can wear on the streets, looking for art supplies on sale, museum calendars, little postcards she might like, the occasional box of chocolates. It hits me in the store that this is the very last time I will shop for her. I run out of Sears crying.

  I head over to the bank, where I discover my mother has saved $50,000 from when she sold the house. She spent only $10,000 in seventeen years and most of it on storage space at U-Haul. “I was saving it for you girls,” she tells me when I return from my errands. I contact a lawyer so I can get power of attorney to manage her financial and medical affairs. The lawyer drives over to the hospital to explain to our mother what the documents mean. Our mother is willing to sign the medical forms but refuses to sign the POA. She glares suspiciously at the three of us, the lawyer, my sister, and me. Here we go again, I think.

  “Let me try,” says my sister. “I think I can get her to sign.”

  “I doubt she’ll agree,” I say, “But she better. Otherwise, how will we pay for this place?” I leave the room. When I come back a few minutes later, my mother is signing the forms. “How in the world did you get her to sign?”

  “I don’t know,” says Natalia, “I talked to her. She just did.”

  The next day, on Christmas Eve, Natalia will be going back to Canton to spend the weekend with her husband and stepsons. Doug will arrive from Massachusetts the same day she leaves. I am looking forward to seeing him but am very stressed about all the things I still have to take care of before Christmas, when everything shuts down: call up hospice to make sure someone can stop by over the holidays, deal with people from Medicaid and Medicare, and so on.

  “Why don’t you just stop a second and sit down?” says Natalia.

  “I’ve got a lot of things to do now that I have POA.”

  What I don’t say is, You would never want this job. You would never take it on. And then I think about what Doug always says: “I understand your sister. I’m a lot like her. I would have left long ago. She does what she does in order to survive. It’s in her nature. It’s in mine too.”

  I start fussing with my mother’s tray, tidying up, ticking off things I need to do.

  “Stop for five minutes,” says Natalia. “I know you have all these ‘important’ things to do. But can you just stop for a second and sit with her? Why don’t we give her one of her presents now?”

  Natalia looks completely spent. What has she carried these seventeen years? What have I? If I am to be really truthful, there is something in my nature as well, something that, like Natalia, and even our mother, made me choose my freedom and creative life above all else. Maybe I can only help her now because I know there will be an end—a week, two weeks, at most a month. Perhaps there is something restless in our shared DNA. Would our mother really have been happier medicated in some kind of supervised home or hospital ward? We would have been happier, but would she? Would she have studied ancient geology? Memorized all of the state flowers and birds, the bones in the body? Would she have studied the movements of the stars?

  “You’re right, Nat,” I say. “I need to stop.”

  Our mother is too weak to unwrap her gifts, so we take the soft flannel nightgowns out of the box for her. “For me?” she says, surprised. “They’re beautiful. You girls shouldn’t have.”

  For everything we give her, she is overwhelmed with gratitude. We open Chanukah and Christmas cards women have sent from the shelter and show them to her, then hang them on the wall by her bed. Cathy had brought over a large red begonia in bloom and some homemade cookies. She had left a small lamp, a framed embroidery she had made, and a plush burgundy-flowered rug. Our mother’s room is beginning to look homey. The light is soft and her radio is playing Debussy quietly in the background.

  I go into the dining hall to heat up a snack in the microwave, and sit down for a minute to take a break. I can’t remember ever feeling this tired. An elderly man hobbles up to me, confused.

  “I got a bed,” he says.

  “You do?”

  “I got a bed—but no home.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I got a bed but no home. Do you know where I should go now? Do you know what they did to my home?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Should I get someone to help you?”

  “I got a bed,” he says again, and sits down, lost.

  When I return to the room, my mother says, “Have you been to the house yet?”

  “Yes,” I lie once again. “Everything is fine. Everything is just like it was.”

  “Good,” she says. “I hope we can go soon. I want to get the hell out of here.”

  Later in the day, some women from the shelter on Payne Avenue come to visit. Renée, an African-American in her forties, who used to live at the shelter but volunteers there now, is the driver. All of the women who come are black, except for Crystal, who sits in the corner of our mother’s sweltering room, wearing three coats, two hats, and a scarf. She sits without saying much, sipping from her can of Coke.

  “I haven’t known your mama long,” says Cheryl, a tall thin woman the same age as me. “But she made a big impression. I couldn’t be with my own mother when she was dying.”

  Lucille, a vivacious woman in her thirties, tells Natalia and me how she came up to Cleveland from South Carolina to flee her husband.

  “I was living in my car,” she says. �
��I’d been picking cotton since I was five years old. I’m not afraid to work. I got kids back down there but I had to get out. I met Miss Norma my first night at the shelter. It was Thanksgiving and I wanted to be with my kids. Miss Norma gave me such a warm greeting when I walked in. I saw her and saw how old she was and knew if she could make it, so could I.”

  The women congregate around her bed. They massage her feet and hands, offer her spoonfuls of applesauce, and treat her like a baby. They love her and see in her a kind of wisdom I never imagined she had. In my mother’s diaries she sometimes wrote: I miss my women terribly. Which women? The ones from the shelter on Payne, or my sister and me? Or did she long for her own mother whom she didn’t believe was dead, or her lost friends from childhood, the ones listed in the address book she searched for these long years?

  The women gather around her bed while birds gather on the golf course and parking lot in front. According to Cathy, a few years ago much of Westlake was a forest surrounded by wetlands. Now the nursing home sits in the middle of a soulless beige subdivision, surrounded by a shopping center, golf course, hospital, nursing home, funeral parlor, mall, and cemetery. The only green is the empty golf course out in front.

  The women chat about shelter gossip, rub lotion on my mother’s face while she sleeps, fluff her pillows, brush her hair. I indulge in a Hollywood fantasy: the old house is somehow empty or we pay the family who lives there to leave for a few weeks. We gather some of our mother’s furniture from U-Haul and set it up inside. We make it look just like it did in 1990, but nice and neat. I hang up my picture of the big white horse I found in my mother’s storage room. My sister and I move our mother back into her old house; the women from the shelter come too. We take turns cooking. In the evenings, we watch animal shows on TV or listen to the radio. She gets to die in her old bed, what used to be our grandfather’s, the first room on the left at the top of the stairs.

  “Myra?” My mother has just woken up from a nap. “When can I go home?”

  “Soon,” I say. “You have to get better first. Now, will you look who’s here? Look who came to visit you all the way from the east side.”

  After the women leave, I tell my mother I am going out to take a little walk.

  “Don’t go out there!” she says. “It will be dark soon. It’s dangerous!”

  “It’s safe. Don’t worry.”

  “You could get kidnapped. Don’t go!”

  “I’ll just take a quick walk with one of the aides,” I lie. “I won’t go alone.”

  “Come back right away. Don’t wander far. You could get injured, or worse.”

  It’s warm for December and has been raining. I walk along the muddy path surrounding the golf course. Along the path I notice animals tracks—not just from dogs but wilder things—rabbits, raccoons, and foxes. I wonder if there are bears too, and coyotes that refuse to leave. Where do they hide? Everything is flat here; there is no place to go. Before I go back in the building I spy a hawk perched high on a telephone pole, and geese taking flight.

  When I return, my mother is staring at the giant white teddy bear we brought back from U-Haul. It’s propped up on a chair in the corner where Crystal had been. Natalia is getting her hair cut, trying to carve out an hour or two of normalcy, so my mother and I are alone.

  “What’s that?” she asks.

  “You had it at U-Haul. Rachel thought it would be nice to have him here.”

  “What should we name him?”

  “What do you think?”

  She pauses. “Brian.”

  “Brian?”

  “He’s a friend of Santa’s. The man who brings the gifts.”

  “Okay. Brian it shall be.”

  “Is Rachel’s husband Santa Claus?”

  “No, he’s an English professor.”

  “He’s not Santa? She showed me a picture of a man with a beard.”

  “Nope. He’s not Santa.”

  “Oh. Well, maybe I should give Brian to Rachel’s husband as a holiday gift.”

  “That’s very generous of you. But let’s just keep him here for now. He sort of cheers up the place.”

  I’ve set up an appointment to meet a local funeral director that evening. I want to get all of her arrangements out of the way so I don’t have to think about it on the day she dies. Natalia stays with our mother while I go to meet him in the dining hall. The elderly director seems uncomfortable. Is it because he knows my mother is homeless?

  “Thanks for coming down so close to Christmas,” I say. “I really appreciate it.”

  “It’s no problem,” he says. “It’s my job.”

  “My sister and I decided that we are going to cremate her. I can’t really ask her because she’s incapacitated but I think it’s what she would want.”

  The man goes over the prices for cremation, shows me a fancy brochure of urns for her what he calls her “cremains.” Cremains?

  The pictures he shows me resemble the canopic jars from ancient Egypt that held the sacred organs of the deceased. They remind me of the urn that contained the fallen Palace of Kalachakra.

  “That’s okay,” I say. “I’m an artist. I’ll make something for her myself.”

  “What about the funeral?” he asks. “We have a lovely chapel we can offer you for a service. We can even get a minister if you like—Catholic, Baptist, Methodist. Even Pentecostal. And there’s quite a lovely little organ, if you want to sing some hymns.”

  He tells me the price.

  “My mom was, I mean is, Jewish.”

  “Oh,” he says, fumbling with another brochure. “Well, I’m sure we can find a... Jewish minister, if you like.”

  “A rabbi.”

  “Yes, I mean rabbi. My apologies.”

  “She’s not religious, though,” I say. “So that part doesn’t matter.”

  Am I wrong to cremate her? Would it make her think of Auschwitz if she knew? The graveyards in Israel come back to me, how Barbara and I searched for tombs, placed small rocks on the headstones of strangers. Is that what my mother would prefer, to be placed in a box in the earth, or to leave this place by fire?

  “The cost is quite reasonable,” says the man. “For a service, that is. It can be an hour long for two hundred fifty dollars. Longer ones are extra.”

  I am about to say yes to the chapel, for lack of a better idea, but then I remember all the women at the shelter, how far away they are from Westlake.

  “I’m going to have a memorial for her at a women’s shelter in Cleveland,” I say. “It was my mother’s last home. That way visitors can stay as long as they like.”

  The funeral director clears his throat. “Her body is cremated in twenty-four hours. Two to three days later, the obit will appear. If you give me a short bio I can have our secretary write one up for your mother.”

  I think about what my mother’s bio might read like: Norma Kurap Herr: Born into poverty during the Depression, child prodigy slated for Carnegie Hall, lost her mind when America dropped the bomb, wife of aspiring alcoholic writer, homeless schizophrenic for seventeen years, spent last years in a shelter for homeless women.

  “Thank you, but I’ll write it myself.”

  “What about her cremains? Do you want me to send them, since you’re from out of town?”

  I imagine my mother’s ashes getting lost in the mail, ending up on someone else’s doorstep or, worse, lying in a puddle below a bridge in Indiana. I imagine them circumnavigating the globe.

  “Thanks, but my sister and I will pick them up before we leave town.”

  When I return to the room I tell Natalia to take a break for a while. She has been by our mother’s side all day. “Go call Kerry or take a nap in the lounge. Stay as long as you like,” I say. “I’ll be here when you get back.”

  Since my mother arrived at Westlake, she seems to be doing a bit better. I wonder if she’ll hang on longer than we previously thought. She doesn’t seem to be in that much pain, although she is extremely weak and tired all the time. W
hen she needs to urinate, she has to be assisted the few feet to the bathroom very slowly. One of the aides usually helps her, and sometimes my sister and I help too.

  After Natalia leaves the room, my mother wakes up. “I have to make a pee-pee,” she says. I ring for the aide. She runs in to tell me she just got an emergency call and can’t come till later. “I’ll be fine,” I say. “I’ve done this before. Go.”

  After my mother’s finished, I lift up her nightgown and wipe her like a baby as she stands, straddling the toilet, clinging to my arms.

  “What are these?” she asks, looking down at the stomas and the ileostomy bag that drains out her bile.

  “Nothing for you to worry about. They’re just from the operation,” I say. “They’re not going to be there forever. Now, let’s go real slow. Just hold on to me.”

  I walk backward toward the bed, my mother facing me, holding on to my shoulders. She stops after a few small steps, overcome with fatigue. I wrap my arms around her and feel her frail body lean in to mine.

  “So tired,” she says.

  “Let’s wait a second,” I say. “We’ll go when you’re ready. There’s no rush.”

  When was the last time we did this, held each other close, that embrace you give your mother when you walk through the door, that parting hug on your way out? Was it seventeen years? Was it more?

  We stay in the middle of the room for a long time, holding on to each other. I wrap my arms around her tighter. My mother closes her eyes and relaxes into my embrace. A nurse comes in to take my mother’s stats.

  “Is she okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “She’s fine. It’s just that I realized—I haven’t hugged my mother in seventeen years.”

  “I’ll come back later,” says the nurse.