The Memory Palace (46 page)

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.

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

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 something 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?