The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  When we walked back downstairs, the community room was already full of people—women from the shelter; the director and staff from MHS, social workers, Cathy and her family, Agostino and other old friends, Doug, his daughter Sianna, my sister’s husband, Kerry.

  Many women from the shelter spoke, but the most poignant of all was a woman in her forties whose name I have since forgotten. She had lost her own mother to cancer, and had a sister who suffered from schizophrenia. “If you want to get attention for something, whisper,” she said. “Miss Norma had a life of whispering. She taught me to dismiss the noise. Pay attention to what really matters. The life that Miss Norma had is still going on in all of you. And I want you to know one more thing—I have walked in your shoes in sorrow,” she said. “But I know that God gives us no more than we can bear.”

  I’m too tired to walk along the lake back to Nancy’s, so I hop the 146 going north on Michigan. The bus hums with chattering tourists; outside the open windows the clamoring of Chicago construction and traffic assaults my brain. “Dismiss the noise,” I say to myself. I close my eyes and lean back to rest. I see my mother in a room of women talking loudly. She hears every conversation in her head, the radio next door, shouting from the kitchen, cars and dogs outside on the street. My mother says something barely audible above the noise... he says... he says... he says... the only time in her life that she ever told me what her voices said to her was at her death. My mother, and her sad beautiful life of whispering.

  The next morning I take myself out to breakfast. I notice a homeless man outside the restaurant, leaning against the door. He’s half asleep or drunk. Should I offer him the rest of my eggs? But I’m too embarrassed. He might be insulted that I’m not offering him a meal of his own. Would my mother have taken the plate from my hands?

  I cross the street to sit in the sun in front of the Art Institute. A red van with Jesus stickers all over it stops at the red light in front of the museum; the driver shouts into a loudspeaker, his angry voice spilling out into the street: “Have you received Him? The Man on the cross? The Man who died for your sins?” On the sidewalk nearby, I spot a homeless woman sitting on a milk crate, a cardboard sign saying that she is looking for work and a place to stay. I go up and ask if she needs anything to eat; she tells me she would die for a piece of chocolate cake. I run back to the place where I had breakfast, get her some cake, then return. “My mother was homeless too,” I say. “For seventeen years.” I suddenly want to tell everyone that she was homeless—friends, acquaintances, strangers. I want them to understand about the thin line, the one between their world and ours. I want to tell them that here too, outside this museum of beautiful things, there are also wonders—this woman on her crate, the brain-injured vet on the corner, the homeless man and his little girl sitting at the entrance to the El. I want to tell them what a woman said at my mother’s memorial: “When you die, there are always two dates, the one you were born on and the date you left this earth. The important dates are the ones in between. Whatever you do in this life,” she said, “you’ll be remembered for something.”

  Later, on the plane, my head is splitting and my chest feels tight from grief. I try to summon the Russian fairy tale about the prince in exile and his beautiful swan-princess but all I can see is a drawer of dead trumpeter swans, smashed into a dark space too small for them to fit. I close my eyes to get the dead birds out of my head. I think of cerulean-blue waves, a swirling red skirt and a silver-white moon. A man waiting onshore, the flutter of his lover’s wings approaching. Did my mother read the story to me before she became too sick? Was my sister the only one who told me stories in the dark basement, the sun glinting in from the small window above? If only I could remember the swan, how its feathers turned to flesh, if I could remember how the swan broke the spell. But then, a swan cannot bring my mother back, nor can the mummified heart of a cat, a small box of feathers and bones.

  When I get home, there is a letter waiting from Dr. Budd, the man who lived two doors down from our grandparents, whose wife I drew pictures for when I was a child. Even though he could afford to live in an upscale neighborhood, he never left our street. He always made house calls and treated our family for free. I feel a pang of regret for never thanking him enough, for not keeping in touch with Ruth and Army Armstrong and all the others who helped my sister and me navigate through those troubled years. At U-Haul, I had found copies of letters my mother wrote to Dr. Budd. I thought it was only right that he know how her story ended, but I hadn’t expected him to be alive. He wrote:

  Dear Mira,

  This is a brief response to your letter. I am now in the terminal stages of life, age 99 years. Same address on W. 148th St. Same friends (Norma and others who have not died). I live at home and have daily care. Cannot travel and never leave the house. It is sad but familiar to recall the old 148th Street address of your family. I’ll search for a cassette of Chopin piano music if it exists and send if it is found. Your mother is playing on the cassette.

  Yours,

  Dr. John Budd

  After reading his letter, I turn on my computer. There is an e-mail from a Dr. Willard Gaylin, the man my mother asked me to find, the psychiatrist she said she used to know. I had no idea if he was real or not, but it turns out he is a well-known doctor and author. I had found his e-mail address online and told him about my mother’s death. He wrote back right away:

  I had a very fleeting acquaintance with your mother when we were both at Glenville High School in Cleveland. I was seventeen and she was, I believe, a year or two younger. I remembered her then as a lovely and stable person... Many, many years later... after I began writing... she wrote me. It was obvious from her letters that she was having a serious breakdown, but even through the chaos of those communications, a bright, funny and creative personality was apparent... the enormity of her burdens and her burdens and her struggle for survival and dignity was deeply moving... Please accept my condolences to you and your sister.

  Willard Gaylin

  Among the dozens of e-mails are messages from people I don’t even know, offering their condolences, and in the post, a pile of letters from strangers and friends. After my mother’s death, I had sent an e-mail out about how we had found our mother at the end of her life. I had written about the shelter and the women there, and the people from MHS who roam the streets, looking for mentally ill men and women with no place to stay. I had asked my friends in the letter to please not be afraid and avert their eyes the next time they saw a woman on the street wearing a pile of coats and muttering to herself. Buy a hot chocolate for her, I said, or a sandwich. Tell her where to find the closest shelter. Vote for better legislation. Do something. The letter spread on the Internet and people started sending money to the shelter from all over the world—from Israel, Norway, Italy, the U.S., the Bahamas, everywhere.

  And still, she is gone.

  In my studio, I take down a piece of lichen, a wasp’s nest, and mouse skeleton from the top of my bookshelf, put them in a box, and clear a nice clean space. There, I place some of the things I had collected from my mother’s wunderkammer: a bag of hair, a set of her teeth, my plastic pony with the broken leg, a child’s book about owls. I place a framed photograph of her in her favorite red-flowered dress, smiling, her arms outstretched toward the viewer. It was the last picture Doug and I put in the slide show we made for her memorial. The picture reminds me of what a man named Bert said to me that day. He had been her social worker a couple years before Melissa and Tim. She refused to work with him anymore after he took her to see her mother’s grave. At the memorial, Bert pulled my sister and me aside and said, “I’m so glad you found her. I was always afraid she’d freeze to death on a park bench. In all my years as a social worker, she was the hardest person I ever tried to help.”

  If we had had Bert, Melissa, Tim, and MHS when we were growing up, I wonder if things would have turned out they way they did. Maybe our mother still would have taken to the streets. I’ll never know. Bu
t in the end, as my sister says, we got the best of her back—her sweet essence that not even schizophrenia could take away.

  I set my mother’s paint box next to her photograph on the shelf. All the greens are gone, and the yellows. I place a prayer card I had found in her purse after she died—a prayer to Saint Jude. It begins: “Saint Jude, patron saint of hopeless and difficult cases.” Next to the card, I arrange my mother’s sock filled with her seventeen keys. One of them is the key that opened up her storage room at U-Haul. Another is for a safe-deposit box that her bank had neglected to tell me about until after her death. The next time I go back to Cleveland, I will open up the box and see what’s inside. After that, there will be fifteen keys left. One, I believe, is the key to her old house. What do the rest of them open?

  The last thing I put on the shelf are her ashes. They are still in the white plastic bag I separated from the box my sister has on her shelf in upstate New York. Soon I will make an urn for her, a beautiful Italianate one with painted birds and flowers and, most likely, a tiger and an owl. When the time comes—maybe this summer or next—Natalia and I will spread our mother’s ashes across the country. We will scatter them in all the shelters, motels, bus stations, airports, and parks where she slept for seventeen years. We’ll scatter them in her old backyard where she spent so many nights, sleeping on the wet grass, waiting to be let in. With whatever of her remains, I will come home and plant a pink azalea, or maybe a tall and sturdy pine.

  If memory is a palace, let me live there, forever with her, somewhere in that place between sleep and morning. Without her long nights waiting in the rain, without the weight of guilt I bear when I buy a new pair of shoes. Let me dream a palace in the clear night sky, somewhere between Perseus, the Hero, and Cygnus, the Swan—a dark comforting place. A place lit by stars and a winter moon.

  Behold the fields and caves, the measureless caverns of memory, immeasurably full of immeasurable things... I pass among them all, I fly from here to there, and nowhere is there any end...

  St. Agostine, The Confessions

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is due to the following publications in which some paragraphs, in one form or another, first appeared: Artful Dodge, The Kenyon Review, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, The Bellingham Review, and Another Chicago Magazine. I am also grateful to the following institutions that have given me financial assistance and/or encouragement: A Room of Her Own Foundation, the American Scandinavian Foundation, The Author’s League Fund, The Barbara Deming Money for Women Fund, The Carnegie Foundation, Change, Inc., the Fulbright-Hays Foundation, The Gottlieb Foundation, The Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Pen-American, The Pollock Krasner Foundation and the Ragdale Foundation.

  An enormous heartfelt thanks to all the people who helped forge this book into its final form: University of Massachusetts writing professors Sabina Murray, Dara Wier, and Chris Bachelder for their dedication, support, and insight; Jeremy Church, Brian Baldi, Andre Kahlil, and all my other wonderful colleagues in the M. F. A. Program at UMass, especially Jedediah Berry, whose deft hand as an editor was invaluable to me, and Rob Morgan, who coaxed me closer to the heart of my story. Thanks to Sylvia Snape and Wanda Bak for their good humor and support and to the great staff at University of Massachusetts’s Disability Services. Profound thanks to the following people for championing me at different points along the way: Brenda Miller, Ted Gup, Meredeth Hall, Mary Johnson, Michael McColly, Audrey Niffenegger, Michael Steinberg, and Jody Rein. And much, much gratitude to my dear friends who read parts of or earlier drafts: Ricky Baruc, Alex Chitty, Amy Fagin, Alyssa Dee Krauss, Nancy Plotkin, Jane and Steven Schoenberg, Betsy Scofield and in particular, David Skillicorn, whose insightful editorial suggestions were invaluable to me.

  There are several people without whom, this book would not exist: First and foremost, the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency—in particular, the brilliant Esmond Harmsworth, the sensitive and astute Colleen Rafferty, and last but not least, my agent and dear friend, Jennifer Gates, whose faith in me and whose compassion and dedication carried me through to the completion of this book. I can’t imagine having written it without her. I am also very grateful to Jane Rosenman from Algonquin Press for keen editorial assistance, sensitivity and kindness. I owe the deepest gratitude to the entire editorial team at Free Press for their enthusiasm, commitment, and collaborative spirit: Publisher Martha Levin, Associate Publisher Suzanne Donahue, Maura O’Brien, and everyone else who helped on this book. I am particularly indebted to my two incredibly devoted editors, Dominick Anfuso and Leah Miller, for asking the hard questions, for having faith that I could answer them, and for having the imagination, insight, and patience that helped me wrestle this book into its published form. Much thanks also to Free Press publicity team: Carisa Hays, Nicole Kalian, Giselle Roig and Laura Cooke, and to the design team that made this book beautiful: Eric Fuenticilla for his stunning cover, and Ellen Sasahara for her beautiful interior design and her collaborative and good-natured spirit.

  Special thanks to: The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Jones Library of Amherst, Massachusetts, Janet Poirrier and the Frost Library of Amherst College, illuminator Mary Teichman, photographer extraordinaire Adam Laipson, art history scholars John Varriano and Wendy Watson, Cathy Tedford and the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery at St. Lawrence University, David Willard and the Field Museum of Natural History’s Division of Birds, and to Mary Sherman and Transcultural Exchange. Thanks to Risitiina Nystad, Maia Hætta, and the Sámi community in Guovdageiadnu, Norway; Agostino Cerasuolo, Bea-Britt, Lille Mira, Ida and Michel, Bob Marstall, Zach Lewis, Deb Habib, Levi Baruc, Nick, Gabe, and John Hennessy, Kerry Grant, Lisa Finestone, Mary Ann and Tony Palmieri, Barbara Metz, and the River Valley Illustrators Guild. Boundless thanks to Alex Chitty for technical and artistic advice, and for being the other half of my brain and to Stephen Bauer for putting the bee in my bonnet. To Merrill and Goose for tubeworms and fiddle tunes; to Sadie, Zoe, Topaz, and Sophie; to Mark and Ellie Mesler, David and Barbara Regenspan and all my friends who kept post boxes for me over the years, and to Cathy Oakley Smith (and her family) for being there at the beginning and at the end.

  I am indebted to Dr. Constance Carpenter-Bixler for her support, wisdom and help following my accident and to my amazing attorney, Michael Kaplan without whose assistance I would never have had the funds to write this book, and whose dedication to those suffering from brain injuries goes way beyond the call of duty. Enormous thanks to Diana Smarse from the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission, for all her wisdom and support. I am also immensely grateful to the Mental Health Services of Cleveland, Inc., and the PATH Program, the program that found my mother and gave her safe harbor. Thanks to former director of MHS, Inc. Steven Friedman, to Susan Neth, Suellen Saunders, Renée Parks, Pastor Tricia Gilbert, and to Tim Raymond, Melissa Yuhas, and Bert Rahl for helping my mother in her final years. I have no words to express my gratitude to the staff and residents at the Community Women’s Shelter of Cleveland—without them my mother might have perished on the streets. And much thanks to the dedicated staff at the Westlake Healthcare Center and the Hospice of the Western Reserve who took such incredible care of my mother in her final weeks. I am also forever grateful to the families who helped my mother throughout her difficult life: The Armstrongs, the Budds, the Bentes, the Brunners, the Cerasuolos, Gloria Johnson and family, the Sewells, the Stincics, the

  Sullivans, Philip Smith and family, Mike and Perry Drake, and a host of thousands. I apologize if I cannot remember every name.

  Profound gratitude to Jya and Sianna Plavin, who read earlier drafts of this book, and who have, over the last ten years, provided me with encouragement, love, understanding and comic relief. Immeasurable thanks to Doug Plavin, my best friend, beloved companion and faithful reader—whose love, honesty and unshakable belief in me kept me going until the very end. And finally, to my sister, Natalia Rachel Singer, who wrote her story first, and whose fierce determination to
be a writer, against all odds, will always be an inspiration to me.

  About the Author

  Mira Bartók is a Chicago-born artist and writer and the author of twenty-eight books for children. Her writing has appeared in several literary journals and anthologies and has been noted in The Best American Essays series. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she runs Mira’s List, a blog (www.miraslist.blogspot.com) that helps artists find funding and residencies all over the world. The Memory Palace is Mira’s first book for adults. You can find her at: www.mirabartok.com