The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  “Thanks,” I say. “That would be great, if you don’t mind. I think I want to stay here for a while.”

  My mother and I stand like that for as long as she can bear to stand, and then we make our way slowly back to the bed.

  On Sunday, Christmas Eve day, Natalia leaves and Doug arrives. “I’m so glad you came,” I say, as we hug at the airport. “I couldn’t imagine her dying without having met you.”

  We drive directly to the Westlake Healthcare Center and go up to her room. My mother is wide awake. “Mommy,” I say. “This is my fiancé, Doug.”

  She eyes Doug with suspicion, but forces a smile and nods. She waves to him from the bed like a queen, then motions me to come closer so she can whisper in my ear.

  “Your sister is kind of dumb, isn’t she?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “She has yet to produce a man.”

  “But Mom, she’s married. Her husband is in New York.”

  “Well, I haven’t seen him, have you? How do we know he really exists?”

  Doug and I spend a quiet day by her side. My mother eats two bites of macaroni and cheese at dinner, then falls into a deep sleep. When she wakes up, she announces, “I want to watch the news. I want to see what’s going on in the world.”

  I flip through the news stations and it is all bad—murders, kidnappings, rapes, hurricanes, the Iraq War, and beached whales. I try the other stations and there’s nothing but reality shows, Spanish soap operas, or reruns of Law & Order—until I find the Animal Planet channel.

  “Look,” I say. “It’s a tiger and a baby deer.”

  The show is about animal “friends,” unlikely companionships between predators and prey. There’s a young female tiger curling up to sleep with a baby deer that has lost its mother. My mother is transfixed. She stares at the tiger and the little deer on the screen. What is she thinking? I’m reminded of her tiger picture in the clock, her Chinese astrology charts. I am a Tiger, she once wrote. Your sister is a Rooster, and you are a Pig. I think we are compatible but I can’t be sure. Tiger people are sensitive, given to deep thinking, capable of great sympathy. They cannot make up their minds and often arrive at sound decisions too late. Tiger people are suspicious of others, but can be powerful and brave. They say Pigs, however, are the bravest of all.

  A commercial for Oscar Meyer wieners comes on TV; a happy family at a cookout stands around the grill smiling.

  “I would like... I would like...” my mother starts to say.

  “What?” I ask. “What can I get you?”

  “What can we get you, Norma?” asks Doug.

  My mother points at her lap and speaks very slowly. “I would like... a hot dog... right here... for me... now. Just a plain one, please.”

  “Let me go look,” I say to Doug. “You stay here with her. I know the staff.”

  It’s after dinner on Christmas Eve and the kitchen is closed. I run around the nursing home, trying to see if anyone has any hot dogs. Nothing. I drive around the neighborhood. All the places nearby are closed. I return an hour later empty-handed.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. “Nothing is open. It’s Christmas Eve.”

  “That’s okay. I’m fine without.”

  “Listen, is there anything you want me to do, you know, anything you want me to take care of for you, besides the house?” I can’t bring myself to say, Do you have any last requests?

  “Yes,” she says. “One thing I’d like you to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s a man named Willard Gaylin, a psychiatrist in New York. I used to know him. I want you to track him down.”

  “Who is he?”

  “We knew each other years ago. He’s very famous now. He wrote a lot of books that helped me.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Tell him what happened. He’ll know what to do.”

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll tell him you’re here. How do you know him?”

  “It’s not important. Let’s just say that after the war, it was not necessarily a champagne bottle-breaking period for everyone.”

  I have no idea what she means, but images flood my brain. That old picture of my mother holding the bottle to my neck comes back to me, and another, a woman breaking a bottle against the bow of a ship, christening a voyage. I imagine my mother clinking glasses with this mysterious man, Willard Gaylin, at the end of the war.

  “I’ll remember that,” I say. “I’ll do my best.”

  I know I need a couple days of rest or I’ll have what I call a brain freeze. I’ve been running on adrenaline and need to stop. I fly back to Massachusetts with Doug on Tuesday, the day after Christmas. I sleep for two days straight. I can barely talk, and when I do, I stutter and can’t find the words for things. When I return to Cleveland, I move into an Extended Stay Hotel close to the nursing home so Natalia and I can be there at a minute’s notice. My sister returns right before New Year’s weekend.

  It has been nearly three weeks after our mother’s surgery and her weight is dropping. I am struck with a macabre thought, one among many—that my grandfather weighed his age too when he died. He was eighty years old, weighed eighty pounds, and died in 1980 on December 18, the day I arrived in Cleveland. If my mother had figured all this out, no doubt there would have been a conspiracy attached to the facts.

  My mother only takes a couple sips of water now and one or two bites of food at mealtime. Mostly, she moves the food around with her gums and then spits it out. She has been concerned all these years with people stealing her teeth and now refuses to put them in. “I don’t need them,” she tells me. “I’m not hungry anymore.” The hospice staff tells us it’s normal, that we shouldn’t force her to eat. It’s the body’s natural state of letting go.

  “This is how we leave our bodies,” I say to Natalia, remembering the year before when Doug and I kept vigil all night while his mother, Shirley, passed away. “Look at her skin, how mottled it’s getting. Feel how cold she is. She won’t be with us long.”

  As terrible as her dying is, it fascinates me. I want to study the process, draw it, and understand its mystery. But still, I am unbearably sad. So is Natalia. She sits by our mother, stroking her hand and crying. I start crying too.

  Our mother is bewildered. “Why are you crying?” she asks. I don’t think she knows that she is dying, or does she, somewhere deep inside?

  “I’m so sorry,” I say.

  “Why are you sorry?”

  Where do I begin? How could she understand? “I’m sorry you’re sick,” I say.

  “I’ll be fine. I just need to go home.”

  When I was in my twenties, I made an etching called “Into the Land of Birds and Fire.” The print had six sections with an image in each one. Beneath each image was a line of text. The last image was a picture of a hand reaching into a woman’s chest to pull out her heart, or perhaps the hand was putting the heart back in. My mother wrote to me about the print once when she was homeless: I am continuously inspired by your print, “Into the Land of Birds and Fire,” especially “Geographies of the Seed.” She always liked when I combined pictures with words in my art.

  I have so many things I want to say. I sit on my mother’s bed. There’s just no time. “I never told you this, but I published some books for children. Now I’m writing a book for adults.”

  “I believe it,” she says.

  “The book will have drawings too. I can’t seem to do anything without pictures.”

  “You can do anything you put your mind to. I always had faith in you.”

  Later, I peek at one of her journals when Natalia and I are back at the Extended Stay Hotel. I find this: What I respect most in this world are those who can combine words and pictures together in the same book or piece of art. If I believed in reincarnation, I’d come back and try my hand at that kind of thing.

  The nursing home is quiet on New Year’s Eve day. Natalia and I get there early so we have all day with our mother. She
sleeps most of the time now. We sit on either side of the bed, watching her. I kiss her forehead softly. She slowly opens her eyes.

  “Happy New Year, Mommy,” Natalia and I say in unison.

  “Do you want anything special today?” I ask.

  “I want something... but I don’t remember what it is.”

  “What does it look like?” I ask.

  “I can’t remember the name. It’s for a holiday.”

  “Something to celebrate?” asks Natalia.

  “Yes. It’s pink.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “You know. Something pink. For ladies; ladies drink it.” She looks at Natalia. “You made me one once. You know what it is.”

  “An umbrella drink!”

  “I don’t need an umbrella. I’m inside.”

  “That’s what they’re called,” I say. “We’ll find one for you.”

  “Don’t bother if it’s too much trouble. Just a little sip of something pink.”

  Later, Natalia and I run out to look for a liquor store. There is only one open in the vicinity. We buy a nip bottle of grenadine.

  “It’s all we could find,” I say. “But have a sip. Let’s make a toast.”

  “I don’t feel like it now,” she says.

  “Happy New Year,” I say.

  My sister holds up our mother’s head while I help her take a sip. “Sorry, no umbrella,” I say. “But at least it’s pink.” The grenadine dribbles out of her mouth onto her nightgown.

  “I’m not in the mood for happy new year,” she says. “Maybe later.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Maybe later.”

  Four days after New Year’s, on Friday, a hard lump appears on our mother’s neck.

  “It’s her lymph node,” says Natalia, distraught. “Is it a tumor?”

  Our mother rubs the lump and moans. “It hurts,” she cries. “Help me. Please.”

  She is very distressed. We are very distressed. It’s the first time she’s been in real pain, as far as we know. We talk to the staff, increase her pain meds. I call the shelter and tell them only two people can come today, no more. It has to be quiet in the room.

  Renée and Cheryl come and the four of us whisper around the bed. I run out at noon to get some lunch for everyone; on my way back I stop to look at the rain-sodden golf course in front. The hawk has returned, and the geese. I have never seen so many geese in my life. The course looks like it must have before the developers came, a marsh of birds enveloped by trees. Then I notice something to the left of the geese. It’s a great blue heron, standing on one leg, like the one I saw in the bayou with my sister. I take a couple steps toward it. The bird ruffles its feathers, and lifts up into the air.

  As the day goes by, the lump grows larger. Her pain is getting worse and nothing seems to be working. Natalia and I kiss her face, her hands; we are helpless.

  “No more kisses!” she says, pushing us away. “No more!”

  We call the emergency hospice nurse to come to the nursing home and check her. We are afraid she’s going to die that night.

  Evening falls and my sister and I wait for the on-call hospice nurse. Outside, a terrible storm is raging. There’s been an accident on the highway but even without the accident or the rain, the nurse is coming from over sixty miles away. Natalia and I don’t know what to do. My sister turns to me, her face streaked with tears, and says, “I’d give anything, anything at all, just to have one more day with her.”

  “I know,” I say. “I don’t know what to do.”

  We haven’t had our mother for seventeen years and now that we finally have her, she could be gone by morning.

  My sister has been in the room all day. Her eyes are bloodshot and she’s been wearing the same outfit for three days in a row. “You need a break,” I say. “Go call Kerry or get something to drink in the dining room. Just get out for a while.”

  “You’re right,” she says. “I’ll be back soon.”

  After my sister leaves, my mother looks up at the ceiling in terror.

  “What is it?” I ask. I look up to where she is staring but there’s nothing there. My mother doesn’t say a word. She raises her arms as if she’s reaching up to touch something or someone. Books on death and dying tell us that at the end of one’s life, often a person sees his or her loved ones floating above them, or they see light or some other vision. But my mother has always had visions, has always seen people who weren’t there. What is it she is staring at now? I don’t want my sister to find her like this.

  My mother is terrified. I grab her hands and pull her arms down to her lap.

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “It’s okay.”

  She makes a sweeping gesture with her hand across her lap. “No more of this,” she says. “No more.”

  “No more of what?”

  “No more of this.”

  My mother is mumbling now, looking off to the side at someone who isn’t there.

  “What are you saying, Mommy?”

  “He says... he says...”

  “What does he say?”

  “He says... he says... he says—he has to go now.”

  “He does? What else does he say? Where is he going? Tell me what he says. Mommy? Mommy?”

  But she doesn’t answer. She never speaks again.

  It is a long night of waiting, of being present, nothing but sitting and counting her breath. There is no white horse in an indigo sky coming to save her in my mind, or Kircher and his Subterranean World, or fossils trapped in rocks. There are no crows taking flight, fairy tales, wild horses, wolves, or red and yellow firebirds. There is no palace of memories, no memories at all, just one moment, then the next, and then the next one. To sit beside the dying is like meditation—sometimes there is only the thought of ending pain, of how slow the breath is and how labored. You begin to count the breath, going in and out, but this time it’s not your own, and you are sitting on the edge of your seat, waiting for the last breath to

  come.

  Later, much later, the hospice nurse finally arrives, and gives our mother a shot. She tells the staff to start administering liquid morphine orally, as much as our mother needs. She fades into sleep. The nurse, my sister, and I go into the hall to talk.

  “I hate to be blunt, but is she going to die tonight?” I ask.

  “I don’t think so. It’s always hard to tell, but really, I think you should get a good night’s rest. I don’t think it will be tonight.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I think so.”

  “Thanks,” I say, relieved.

  “But it could be tomorrow,” she adds.

  Before we leave, I call her social worker Tim and leave a message; I call Cathy too. Cathy has been with me from the beginning of this and I know she’ll want to come one more time. I have a bad feeling tomorrow night will be our mother’s last. My sister leaves messages for Renée and Cheryl. I call Doug to tell him what is going on. “I love you,” he says. “Call me in the middle of the night if you need to. I’ll be here.”

  The following day, everyone comes.

  The red and white amaryllis I bought for her three days before has bloomed three times, one for each day. We keep it on a stand across the room so she can see it. Thanks to Cathy and all her gifts, the room is warm and inviting. I put on a CD of tranquil lute music. One by one people come to stay a short while, then go. My mother appears unconscious the whole time, but who can be sure? We talk to her anyway. Cathy, as always, is still there, the last to leave. I say to her and Natalia, “I know she probably can’t hear me but I’m going to play her some Bach.”

  I go down the hall to the dining room and sit at the blond upright. I play a piece by Purcell and then play one of my mother’s and my favorites, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” by Bach, one of Myra Hess’s signature pieces that she played at her free concerts during the Blitz. I first learned to play it at Mr. Benjamin’s when I was twelve.

  My fingers are clumsy because I’m so tired, and I
stumble over some of the notes. Two of the residents come in the room when they hear the music—a woman named Louise, who forgets who I am after every conversation, rolls in on her wheelchair, and the sad man I met the other day who lost his house slowly makes his way over and sits in a chair behind me. I play more Purcell for them and an air by Handel, then go back, leaving them sitting, staring at the keys.

  When I return, Natalia says, “When you left, I told her you were going to play some Bach. She smiled.”

  “It’s true,” says Cathy. “She really smiled.”

  After Cathy leaves, my sister says, “I want to spend the night.”

  I run back to the hotel to get us toiletries and a change of clothes. When I return, we each take one of our mother’s hands. We don’t know if she can hear us but we talk anyway. They say that the hearing is the last to go. “You are going home,” I say. “Everything is there. Don’t be afraid.”

  “We’re here,” says Natalia. “Don’t worry, you’re not alone.”

  We tell her together that when she goes back home, everything in the garden will be there—the dogwood, the magnolia tree, the peonies, and the pink roses. There will be snapdragons and azaleas. Everything will be in bloom. “We’ll take care of everything,” I say. “Don’t worry about the house. We’ll take care of it all. We are safe now and we have enough to eat. You can go now. It’ll be okay.”

  Natalia and I kiss our mother good night. I offer my sister the love seat, but she curls up on a blanket on the floor. I lie down and pull a blanket over my head to block out the safety light. I leave a CD on, Pablo Casals playing the Bach Cello Suites.

  “Good night, Mommy,” I say. “Good night, Rachel,” using Natalia’s old name.

  “Good night,” my sister says, and turns on her side. I listen carefully. My mother takes a few labored breaths for a minute or so, barely audible beneath the Bach.

  And then she is gone.

  That night—after we call the nurses in and bathe her body, after we rub her face and hands and feet with lotion, after we sit beside her and stare at her face for an eternity, then pick out something soft and new and beautiful for her to wear, and then after we call the funeral home, and they carry her away in the middle of the night on a stretcher as if she were still alive, and they take her to the place where she will be purified by fire, and we drive back to our beds at the hotel—I fall asleep and dream about the birds. They keep hurling themselves against a window and falling ten stories down and still they refuse to die. I wake up the next morning with the words forming in my mouth: “Please, can’t someone save them?”