The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  I turn on the radio. It’s the last movement of Fauré’s Requiem: In paradisum.

  “Listen,” I say to Natalia.

  I sit and try to imagine my mother in heaven. But I can’t imagine a heaven or a hell, only how the geese gathered outside my mother’s room for days, and then the hawk and then the blue heron.

  When I return to Massachusetts two days later, I walk in the woods with my little black dog Sadie like I always do. I think about what people say about the dead, how they’re always with us. But what exactly do they mean? Do they mean that they turn into ghosts, that their souls becomes part of our body? Or do they mean the rustle of a blue jay’s blue-gray wings in winter? How the sound makes you turn so quick and hold your breath? I toss a stick for Sadie, search for redcoats blooming on stumps of rotted pine. Here in the Northeast it is truly winter. The light is different than in Ohio, more lucid and golden. Or is it grief that illuminates each and every thing, the birch I stand beneath, the house through the trees? High above, a pileated woodpecker taps on the bark. Is that you? I ask out loud. Are you there?

  During the day, I retreat to my studio and search through her journals for answers. I am left with so many questions. And my memory of our time together keeps slipping further away. I search my own journals too. In one from a year before, I wrote: “The truth is, I’m not really sure I want to find her, because if I find her, it means I will have to dig up the past. And then, I will have to do something about it. See her, save her, something that requires more than a stamp and postal box in a town where I never lived.”

  I read some of her old letters again; skim through more diaries. What was this tie that bound us so tightly, across oceans and time? Why couldn’t I just let her go, stop writing her, give up? Then I come upon a page from one of my own sketchbooks, eight months before her death. At the top is a small sketch of a trilobite next to a vocabulary list of geological terms, and below that, words she could have easily written herself:

  Think about the Cambrian Explosion—a half billion years ago suddenly animals seemed to come out of nowhere... Have you ever noticed how arthropods, such as trilobites, look like aliens? Note to self: Look up the Valley of the Whales in the Sahara. Make a list of specimens. Imagine this: Darwin’s Tree of Life has branched out for more than four billion years! As Darwin once said, “... whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

  I put the sketchbook down and look around my studio. It’s so peaceful, full of plants and books. I’m certain my mother would have liked it here. Above my desk is a bulletin board covered with my Post-its, memory lists, and postcards, several from my mother’s many trips to museums. I take down a card that a former student sent me after my car accident. On it she wrote, No matter what befalls you, may you always be curious. And then the grandfather of geology, Nicolaus Steno’s words come back to me once again: “Beautiful is what we see. More beautiful is what we understand. Most beautiful is what we do not comprehend.”

  Someplace

  Yesterday I was thinking of what I would do if I had an advisor and the money. I would be content to stay for a long period in a first floor level cabana type house in a temperate warm climate where I could step out onto a sandy, clean beach in the a.m., up early of course. The restaurant service would be like Shoney’s, where one eats a lighter variety of foods, private, and also a section for those who require service. After breakfast, a half-hour on the clean, sandy beach with sand covering my legs. Very therapeutic. The advisor is needed because off hand, I don’t know of any clean beaches anymore. There would be FM radio, I’d rest, continue studying, writing and maybe walk to a well-stocked library with journals, newspapers to bring news of the outer world. Beautiful trees in the distance. Then another half hour sand covering my legs late afternoon. The hot sun is to be avoided. I could pass some pleasant months alone this way. Of course, everything in films and reading is all fiction, but there must be someplace to go.

  17

  Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting— on a process, that is, of subtraction.

  Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire

  A Cabinet of Wonders

  Seven months after my mother’s death, I am at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, standing in the shadow of Sue, the largest T. rex ever found. It’s a hot August day and I’ve come here to meet Dave Willard, the collection manager for the Division of Birds. I am hoping that a tour through the Bird Lab and other behind-the-scenes areas at the museum will jog some old memories from when I worked here. Since my mother died last January, I have been on a quest to visit places from my past.

  I am an hour and a half early, so I buy a ticket for the new dinosaur show. I queue up with a horde of schoolkids and their teachers. The museum has gotten very loud since I worked here: exhibits with videos and interactive games, nonstop sound coming out of every corner. For someone with a brain like mine, all that stimulation makes it impossible to think. I stuff earplugs into my ears and wish I owned a soundproof helmet. The earplugs only slightly muffle the noise, though, so I forgo the exhibit and escape to the forgotten halls of dioramas. No rambunctious children, loud movies, computers, or upbeat lectures about paleontology coming out of speakers, just endless cases of dead animals in situ—hunting, sleeping, fighting, and tending to their young.

  Sometimes, after work, I used to sit and draw the stuffed animals. The halls were almost always empty. You could live here and no one would know. You could set up house, some furniture, a couple of potted plants. It was always dark and peaceful in the halls of the dead, a good place to eat a sandwich and take a nap. Did my mother draw here when she was homeless in Chicago? Did she lay down her head to sleep? Even here, surrounded by dead antelope and bison, I feel her presence. She sits beside me on this timeworn bench, her cold hand in mine.

  When I return to the T. rex, a tall, lean man in his fifties approaches, smiling. “Thanks for meeting me,” I say.

  “My pleasure.”

  Dave leads me up three flights of stairs to the Bird Lab. He knows from our previous conversation that I had a brain injury and I am trying to piece together memories from Chicago. I had done the same when I was in Cleveland for my high school reunion, three months before my mother died. I drove down West 148th Street with Doug, stopped to see the old apartment buildings on Triskett, visited my old schools. I would have gone to the art museum but it had been closed for renovation.

  Dave shows me the main lab where graduate students are preserving bird specimens. “I remember a larger room, with a big vat in the middle. Someone was cooking up something nasty. Could it have been an emu?”

  “Not an emu,” says Dave. “I’ve been here thirty years and I don’t think we’ve ever cooked an emu. It could have been an ostrich, though.” Dave adds, “That might have been me at the vat.”

  I know some of my friends would think my visit here macabre, so soon after my mother’s death. But I find the idea of being here oddly comforting; the cycle of life so viscerally on display makes her death feel part of some greater and mysterious whole. Maybe it’s the same thing that made me draw dead birds when I was a child.

  “What did it smell like here nineteen, twenty years ago?” I ask.

  “Dead things and mothballs,” says Dave.

  “I remember formaldehyde and coffee. And the smell of donuts.”

  Dave smiles when I mention the donuts.

  When our olfactory sensors are stimulated, they transmit a signal that cuts a path right to the emotional center of our brain. When I smell mothballs, I’m in my grandparents’ closet on West 148th Street, hiding from my grandfather and the sting of his belt. When someone lights up to smoke, my mother’s face appears.

  The dull fluorescent light and faint sound coming from a room next door reminds me of some
thing but I’m not sure what. I walk to the door, tilt my head, and listen. I can hear the quiet steady sound of carrion beetles having lunch.

  “We can go in if you like,” says Dave.

  The bug room is where the dermestid beetle, bred in fish aquariums, feeds on carcasses in order to pick the bones clean, a most efficient way of preparing skeletons and skulls. I remember the first time I saw them doing their job. I had just started working at the Field. From a distance, the carcass looked like it was vibrating, with all those bugs masticating away.

  The room smells putrid, even with the ventilator fan. On the worktable against the wall are boxes of dead birds in various states of decay. A scene from my mother’s memorial rises up. I see a woman in a white hat and coat, a troubled black woman in her forties. She had been heartbroken that she wasn’t able to visit our mother before she died. She said, “When I saw Miss Norma the first night I came, a woman that old in a place like this, I thought—I could die here too.” The beetles and dead birds battle for space with the crying woman inside the small foul-smelling room.

  “I think I’ve seen enough,” I say.

  Outside the bug room, in the lab, I notice jars of specimens floating in alcohol. This could be any lab—the laboratory I used for my office years ago, or a lab from my biology class in junior high when my mother used to circle the school. I feel nauseous. Ever since my mother died, I don’t have the stomach I used to for these kinds of things. Before, I loved to draw just about anything from the natural world, dead or alive. But now I get choked up when I see a deer skeleton in the woods. Even a dead squirrel on the road can bring me to tears. “Can we look at some hummingbirds?” I ask.

  “Of course,” says Dave.

  We walk to a hall of white metal cabinets that go straight up to the ceiling. “I remember long wooden cabinets lining dark hallways. Was it ever like that?”

  “Not here. The cabinets used to be black but we changed them to white. Black can be depressing.” I think of my mother, who always loved sitting in blackness, who kept the shades drawn, her little radio by her side.

  Am I thinking of somewhere else? Another museum? Am I remembering wunderkammeren, collector’s cabinets of wonders I’ve never seen? Albertus Seba’s drawers of snakes and birds from centuries ago; his plethora of coral, fossils, and shells? King Rudolf’s palace in Prague? They say it contained rhinoceros horns encrusted with rubies, astronomical compendia and sundials, an amulet made from toads, arsenic, pearls, emeralds, and medicinal herbs. I think of my mother’s own cabinet of wonders, the one at U-Haul that she filled with seventeen years of wandering and loss. It is important to find the right word, she wrote me once. For this, you need a thesaurus. Thesaurus, from the Ancient Greek: thesauros, meaning “storehouse” or “treasury”... I need someone with me. Please come home. We did come home, but perhaps not soon enough.

  Inside the cabinets Dave opens for me there are only birds, thousands of them. All of these dead birds, and the birds that gathered outside my mother’s room, that were so full of life in the rain. It’s hard not to see her face even here, in this cavernous room of stuffed birds, drawers of nests, and rare speckled eggs.

  Dave opens a wooden drawer filled with hummingbirds from Peru. “Koepcke’s Hermit,” says Dave. “In life, it was rather dull.”

  “Dull as in boring?”

  “No.” He smiles. “Dull as in it only had a few iridescent feathers. Iridescent green. It’s bill was dark—the top part was black, the bottom red. See?” He holds the bird up and touches the tip of its beak.

  There are tidy rows of hummingbirds inside the drawer, with a little tag affixed to each bird’s leg, a miniature morgue. I remember drawing here years ago. Pulling out drawers of waterbirds and bones. Dave leads me to a cabinet farther down the hall and pulls out another drawer of hummingbirds. I notice a small open box with a skeleton inside. “Can I look?” I ask. Dave nods. I open up the box. There is a row of numbers written on both sternum and skull. I remember coming into the lab one day and seeing a man hunched over a table, labeling the bones of a minute bird, even the slip of a rib bone. Dave assures me that the most skilled ornithologist would have a hard time labeling every single bone in a hummingbird, especially its rib cage; some are just too small. Could I have dreamt it? I remember thinking, as I watched the ornithologist, how like a Jewish scribe he was, meticulously penning the microscopic scrolls concealed inside the mezuzahs that protect the homes of Jews. I bought my mother a mezuzah when I was in Israel but never sent it. How can you protect your house if you are homeless?

  The last thing I ask Dave to show me is the trumpeter swan. I recall them squished into drawers, sometimes three or four together, or a pair with their fuzzy cloud-colored babies. Dave pulls out a drawer labeled Cygnus buccinator and there they are, just as I remembered them, their legs folded up next to their heads, a lamentation of swans. I remember holding my mother’s hand and watching swans sail across the lagoon in front of the Cleveland Museum of Art. The ones in the drawer look like sleeping birds from a fairy tale, like a story from the book my sister and I found at U-Haul, the one our father gave us. I try to recall the tale, “The Swan-Princess and Tsar Saltan.” There is a prince who lives in exile on an island with his mother. One day he falls in love with a swan swimming close to shore. But how does the story end?

  On my way out, I take a few pictures of a great auk skeleton on a stand. When Dave and I say goodbye, I realize there’s no film left in my disposable camera to take his picture too. I’ve used up all the film on dead things. This too will fade, I think, this memory of Dave’s kind face, and these infinite drawers of birds, their small and tidy bones.

  Later, I am in Ancient Egypt. Not much has changed since I worked here years ago. I put in earplugs to drown out the families and ambient sound. I know I will pay for this tomorrow. To talk to someone for a while, then take in so much stimulation, overwhelms me. I feel lava dripping down the back of my head and worry that I might get lost on my way back to my friend Nancy’s house where I am staying. I know I should go but I have to keep on looking, trying to remember things. And maybe I’m here to comfort myself too, my old familiar way of seeking order in the collection and classification of things around me.

  I pass through a fake mastaba, fashioned after massive structures slaves built above tombs in Saqqara and Giza. The mastaba provided a home for the deceased’s ka, or soul, to live in. I descend a tight circular stairway that leads to the rest of the re-created tomb below. I vaguely remember taking students here years ago and talking about the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

  I walk through a dim corridor, past a coffin decorated with hieroglyphs and the green and black eyes of Horus, falcon son of Osiris, lord of the Underworld, whom Isis put back together after his envious brother tore his body apart. I wonder if I ever got to tell my mother the story, but then, she probably knew it anyway. Was there anything she hadn’t studied those seventeen years? Horus’s eyes are painted on the side of the coffin so he can gaze out on his journey to the Afterlife. I stop to look at canopic jars carved from stone, where ritual priests placed the organs before they embalmed the body. I remember the jar with jackal-headed Dna-mut-ef on top, which was used to hold the stomach. I forget what the other jars stand for, but recall how the ancient Egyptians believed the heart, not the brain, was the sacred seat of reason.

  After circling the exhibit, I end up back where I began. Above my head is a scroll, a painted narrative depicting the Opening of the Mouth Ceremony. There are forty-two gods and goddesses standing by to judge the life of a woman whose name I can’t recall. She doesn’t beg for forgiveness at her trial after death, or confess the things she feels remorse for. Instead she offers an inventory of sins she denies ever committing. Her list is called the “Negative Confession.” The woman recites: “I did not do evil, I did not steal, I never caused anyone to weep, I never abandoned my family in times of need.” At my mother’s memorial, Steven Friedman, the director of MHS at the time, stood up at the end
of the service to thank my sister and me for bringing closure to everyone who knew our mother. He said, “I know of children who have abandoned their parents for much less than you two have gone through.” The Egyptian woman on trial in the scroll assures the gods: I never abandoned my family in times of need. Can I say that now with a clear conscience? Could I have done any more?

  Before the memorial service, the shelter manager, Suellen, asked if Natalia and I wanted to go upstairs and see our mother’s room. We said yes, and followed her to the second floor. “This is where she slept,” said Suellen. The room was only big enough to squeeze in two single beds. It opened into a larger room of bunk beds where many women slept. There was no door to close between the two rooms. Suellen told us that our mother got a little more privacy because she was elderly and ill. My sister and I stood in the entrance and peered in. I thought of us in our grandma’s twin beds, and the trees outside the window that I gazed at each morning. I remembered our grandma’s scratchy blankets, like the one covering our mother’s bed at the shelter, the comforting plunk-plunk of rain on the roof drowning out our mother’s nighttime rants. Her shelter room looked like a room in a barracks, and yet it was her safe house, her refuge, her home. In the end, my mother had one hundred daughters. They watched over her like my sister and I ultimately couldn’t do. We would have had to give up our lives for her, and our art, the two things she taught us to hold most sacred and dear.