The Memory Palace (11 page)

“Go outside and play!” Toda insists, pushing me out of the room. There is no place to go, just a busy street with a tiny front yard. It’s chilly outside and it’s begun to snow. I kick stones down the driveway. I wish my sister were here. We could make games, or sing something from
The Monkees
, like “Another Pleasant Valley Sunday” or a song from a Broadway show. These people don’t even have a tree. More cars pull into the driveway, men slam doors, women kiss each other’s cheeks and give advice, cry and blow their noses, drink endless cups of thick black Turkish coffee. I sit on the stoop and wait.

At the funeral, the priest chants and glides toward Mitchell’s casket; his white and gold robes form a great sparkling bell. The crowd parts to let him pass. He stands over Mitchell’s long thin body and blesses him with holy water, then says a prayer as he swings the silver censer back and forth like a pendulum. The smell of burning spices makes me dizzy. I’ve never seen a
dead body before. I had seen dead birds before and once saw three dead rabbits, but never a man lying face-up, like a mannequin in a box.

Toda leans over and kisses Mitchell’s forehead. “Now you,” she says.

“What?”

“You kiss him. Don’t worry, I help you up.”

“No!”

“Kiss him! People are waiting, now kiss!”

I start to back away but feel my body lifted off the ground. Toda’s big leathery hands are around my waist and she has me pinned against the casket. She pushes my head down so my nose touches Mitchell’s. Pee is trickling down my legs. I can feel everyone staring.

“Kiss him,” says Toda. “Do as I say.”

She hisses something in Bulgarian and pushes me down again. I squirm and kick. I can hear people whispering in the crowd. I’m afraid they will crush me or shove me into the coffin, slam the box shut, and that’ll be that. The line of mourners goes on forever, winding around the corner into the sanctuary of the church. Finally, I slip out of Toda’s sweaty grip and shove my way through the crowd to the door. I heave it open and run around to the back of the church. I pause beneath a crabapple tree and look for a place to hide. But here, in the world of the living, there is only the cold rainy street, the city beyond the hill, the impenetrable sky.

After Mitchell died that fall, our mother was sent to CPI, Cleveland Psychiatric Institute. She had stayed up several nights in a row, walking back and forth down the street in the rain, shouting about some man in California who she said raped her when she was nineteen. “I just want what’s due me,” she said. “That bastard has to pay up.” When she made cuts all the way up her arms, my grandma finally called the police. “What will people think?” was my grandma’s constant refrain.

I visit her in the psych ward with my grandma. At first we can’t find her, but then we see her in a corner of the common room, dressed in a nightgown, smoking and talking to herself, a television game show blaring nearby. Grandma and I start to approach her, but are intercepted by a young woman
with greasy long dark hair. “Did you bring me something? What’d you bring?” the woman shouts. She looks right at me. I grab my grandma’s hand. “Who invited
you
to the party, bitch?”

An elderly white nurse is passing out tiny cups of pills and water. Another nurse, a hefty black woman, doles out cigarettes, one to a patient, then lights them. The nurse with the cigarettes is in earshot. She turns her head.

“Hey, you little slut,” says the dark-haired woman. “Where’s my money?” The woman is coming straight toward me. “Where’s my fuckin’ money?”

The black nurse puts the tray down and walks in long strides over to us. She places her hands on her hips and stands in front of the woman, blocking her path. The dark-haired woman backs off, cowering, and shuffles back to her chair.

Grandma and I go up to my mother and I hug her carefully, as if she were made of glass. She looks up, then quickly looks away, like she is looking for someone who didn’t come.

“He says... he says... They tie you down here,” she says. “They use microphones, camera tricks.”

“I made you some pictures,” I say.

“Where are my cigarettes? Where’s Rachel? You’ve got to get me out of here.”

I offer her a stack of drawings—bunnies, flowers, horses and dinosaurs, Snoopy and Charlie Brown. For years to come I will make pictures and bring them to the hospital, but her smile, when she sees them, will be ever so brief.

My mother ignores the pictures, takes a quick puff on her cigarette. She is trembling and cold. How can I stop her from shaking? I wish I had painted a tiny icon she could wear around her neck—a golden saint lifted up by birds or a Madonna with a wreath of flowers around her head.

“Where’s your sister? You kids have got to get me out of here. They’re poisoning my food. Did someone kidnap Rachel? They’re killing me in this place.”

I wish I had made a towering wall of luminous saints and flowers, a hundred vats of rosewater, a thousand pots of magic tea.

She tells me they’re going to perform a lobotomy on her and take out her womb. “It’s common knowledge they sterilize the poor.”

“Get
ahold of yourself, Norma. You don’t know what I have to contend with,” my grandma tells her daughter, who is rocking back and forth. “It’s hard enough with that bastard, and now I got the girls. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll behave.”

“Give me a cigarette. I’m dying here,” my mother says. “The cheapskates only give you three a day.”

Later, I’m in the garden with Rachel. I don’t want to tell her about the hospital, the zombies in pajamas, the nurses with their long trays of pills. All that suffocating smoke, the windows with bars, the crazy lady going after me. Instead, I open and close the mouth of a yellow snapdragon, pretending it can talk. We are putting on a play using snapdragons as characters. The cast is made of tiny lions; the cluster of colorful stones and violets by our feet is our stage. We are the Queens of the Flowers, rulers of earth and sky. My sister will make up stories with anything at hand. She can’t help herself—a bunch of wilting daisies, a rotten apple, a caterpillar, or a rock. Outside we can do anything, be anything at all. When we finish our play we run fast holding hands across the three adjoining yards, our grandparents’, the Bentes’, and the Budds’. We run out behind the row of spruce and pine trees, out to the fields and woods to no-man’s-land.

We would like to keep running and running away. She could write stories and I would paint pictures and explore the world. We could travel to France or maybe to the Amazon. We could live in the jungle or Paris or London or maybe someplace in Africa where people eat breadfruit and antelope meat. We don’t want to be martyrs or priests, doctors or saints. We would like to be wolf pups or birds. We would like to be fast horses. We want to be all the flowers of the field. How far can we go in this stretch of tall grass and goldenrod? How far in this forest of fragrant trees?

Nobody Hears a Mute But I Hear Myself

Today when I came back to Friendly Towers, the Jesus Hotel, I sat down and tried to study one of Diego Rivera’s “Day of the Dead” paintings from a book I got out from the library. Unusual for me these days as I am slowly going blind. But blindness doesn’t mean muteness. Nobody hears a mute but I hear myself. In the picture I could make out white skeletons floating in the air and the color red, and faces like the masked people I see in the corners of my room. The picture was trying to tell me something. But as I stared at it, a radiologist in the clinic across the street or perhaps the drug pusher next door, or someone from my future who I haven’t seen yet, projected gas into the room and I dozed off with the book in my lap. As they say, the days fly by whether you are in or out of love. Or in my case, a Baby of the War left without a pot to piss in. In regards to pain and sorrow, you might say it is the universal human condition. But I have learned to discipline myself and reserve my pain and sorrow only for sleep time. That said, sometimes in my dreams I am taken out of the city to a place where they monitor the hearts of Jews and other marginalized citizens. Recently, I discovered I was given a pacemaker without consent.

No se puede mirar. (One cannot look.)

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, inscribed below a print from his series
Disasters of War

Once when she was homeless, my mother sent me a postcard from a Chagall exhibit with a letter written on the back of a Dunkin’ Donuts bag:

Dear Daughter:

I am trying to adjust to life with a white cane. Many years ago, there was a man in Cleveland who made a point of rap-tap-tapping by my way but I am a little slow in the game of Simon Says. These days I keep a journal. There is always the continuous anxiety of blanking out again, and I need to be reminded of myself constantly. One can’t always rely on who was there, but on oneself. Within your sphere of interest, the painting you made for me in the 80’s called “Selective Forgetfulness” is missing, stolen or confiscated. I have some Complaints going as you can imagine. By the way, when you translate the message in the above dots, you will learn nine (9) letters of the Braille alphabet. Note to your artist—the color pencils you sent are being used by yours truly. I thank you. P.S. when I have something nice to write about I’ll let you know.

Love, Mother

My mother sent me postcards from all the art exhibits she went to in Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York during her extended
stays at shelters and motels. She went to museums on free days, or right before closing so she didn’t have to pay. I wanted to send my mother postcards from shows but if I did she might find out where I lived or traveled to in the years we were apart. When she lived in Chicago the same time I did in the early nineties we even went to see the same exhibits. I’d always wear dark sunglasses and tuck my hair up in my hat just in case.

Each year for her birthday on November 17, I sent her a museum date book. I found most of them in her storage room at U-Haul. She had made notations each day about the weather and what she ate. She also copied the pictures with oil pastels or colored pencils and glued them onto large collages she called her “posters of intent.” My mother told me about them in her letters, how she would put them up against windows in shelters and motels to block out radioactive gas and the projected thoughts of others.

When my mother sent me one of her drawings or collages, she added commentary on the back. Sometimes she threw away the picture and just sent the commentary:
I copied the Dubuffet for you then added a little color. Should have left as is. When I finished the picture I destroyed it. Afterwards, I typed all the M’s in the dictionary, bathed, and contemplated my own labyrinth. Enough said. Mom.

In one letter, ten years after she had been on the street, she enclosed a small drawing of goats. She wrote:
You asked about my eye problems. I’ve been legally blind but did not walk with cane until Chicago. Enclosed is a small picture for you of two mountain goats conversing in a field. Someone asked me the other day how a blind person can draw and I said there was a man who was deaf who composed music. His name was Ludwig. I am still not on his level. (But I am not dead yet.) Mother.

My mother and I loved artists and famous people who suffered from horrible afflictions, like Beethoven, Joan of Arc, Frida Kahlo, Anne Frank. Burned at the stake or crippled at birth? We wanted to read about it. I don’t remember talking about our shared obsession; it was just something unspoken. Perhaps she connected viscerally to their suffering, while I tried to understand hers. Beethoven was my mother’s muse, for me it was the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya y Lucientes; both men became deaf late in life. My mother and I were equally fond of Vincent Van Gogh. When my mother had a particularly bad day, she’d write in her journal:
Another ear to chop off, Vincennes!
Sometimes she just wrote:
Another ear!

When I received my first letter from her, two years after she became homeless, I noticed that my mother had written my sister’s name in the corner of the envelope instead of her own. From that point on, she referred to herself from time to time as
Rachel N. Herr, the Helen Keller Annie Frank of Chicago—Deaf, Blind, Mute Baby of the War.