The Memory Palace (15 page)

Enchantment

My only thought yesterday was of the beguiling, deceptive charm of writing and music. One could write a tale of enchantment but I don’t have the inertia. Truth is, my sense of ego when I was young was like the celestial above and I felt the “nothingness” and feeling of nothing extending on and on into the future. A more literate person would say—well, even in “nothing” there is composition. Then, last evening I was typing words from the “I” section of the Dictionary I wish to retain, some which have legal importance. I lay down to rest a few minutes and had a half-dream or kind of visual picture (not really out of the ordinary when you consider all the possible intrusions into a person’s live-in shelter, i.e. mechanics, radio, photo, all illicit but used). I had a clear picture of myself standing in front of a large monolith with writing inscribed I could not make out, and I was weeping copiously and a kind of presence, a fast image wearing a blue and white checkered suit pulled me away. I went down for coffee, then thought: “The Child is Sleeping.”

Above you in the still air floats the Pelican... If you endeavor to approach these bird in their haunts, they betake themselves to flight.

John James Audubon

In my memory palace, two pictures hang on the wall of an atrium: the first, a white pelican, looking out toward the sea. The other, a child sitting on the floor, pressed up against a piano, eyes shut tight to stop the room from spinning. Her mother is arched over the keys, fingers flying. She doesn’t know the small child is there, an invisible form, a little dark-haired nothing. The room is a living and breathing machine, an engine of sound behind the walls, inside her bones. The child floats on a flimsy raft alone; it’s like white rapids on a river, all that music crashing through her. This is the closest they will ever be, this shock wave of sound between them.
This is what love is.

But by the time I turned eleven in 1970, our mother was too ill to work even the occasional temp job. We couldn’t pay the bills with the pittance she received from welfare and we hadn’t heard a word from our father in over a year, ever since his call on my birthday. There was no choice but to move from our apartment to our grandparents’ house on West 148th. I don’t
remember packing, or much of anything else, only a vague feeling that something would eventually, most certainly, explode.

Rachel and I took over our grandmother’s room and she moved into the little guest room with the love seat and balcony. At night, our mother tossed a blanket over herself and curled up on the lumpy green couch in the basement. Grandpa stayed where he was, in the master bedroom, alone.

I tried to be optimistic—we could still walk to Newton D. Baker Junior High, where I had just started seventh grade, my sister the eighth. My dog Ginger could run free in the yard and there was a garden full of flowers and trees. The park was closer to West 148th Street; so was the West Park train station, Patty’s house, and Dairy Queen. But most importantly, at my grandparents’ house, there was a piano.

When she felt stirred to play, my mother’s fingers hovered above the keys for a moment, then flew across them with fury. She played Beethoven with such ferocity that at times I couldn’t bear to be in the same room. But when she played Bach, a sense of calm filled the house, if only for the length of a prelude. I longed to master Bach like my mother, play the rise and fall of an arpeggio with the same precision, order, and grace.

In rare moments of lucidity, she taught me scales, chords, and intervals; introduced me pared-down Brahms and Béla Bartók’s pieces for children, his
Mikrokosmos
. The Bartók melodies sounded like the old folk songs on my grandparents’ records from Russia and Eastern Europe. When I played them, I pictured myself in a snowy field in Siberia, bundled up on a fast moving sled drawn by horses.

My mother’s white hands fluttered over mine like birds, waiting for mine to make a mistake. She sat on the bench next to me and chain-smoked, ashes falling onto the keys and my small fingers. She tapped her foot like a metronome.
It’s allegro, not adagio. Speed it up a bit
. Some days she’d start whispering something I couldn’t hear and suddenly get up, slam the door, and bolt outside, heading toward Grapeland Avenue. “Crazy bitch!” my grandfather would shout after her. Where did she go when she ran out the door?

In one of her diaries from the seventeen years we spent apart, my mother wrote:
I am thinking of the song “Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar.” Now, in retrospect, since I have been projected into the future, maybe I am thinking instead of the
loss of my piano and my life. The other day I had forgotten the two words in music that mean one voice is stationary while the other is in motion: “Oblique motion.” The closeness in French, obli: forgetfulness; oublier: to forget, influenced my slowness to remember. How many other things will they force me to forget?
Was that the problem with my mother’s brain—while one voice was stationary, another could never be at rest?

One day, my mother told me she had run into her old piano teacher downtown. “Mr. Benjamin said he’d teach you girls for five bucks an hour. You want to take lessons? He’s the best around.”

Was it true? She told me once that Sammy Davis, Jr., was going to propose to her. “I still have my girlish figure,” she said, explaining his desire for someone outside of show business. Aliens had begun to send my mother “penises from Mars” through the hot dogs Grandma brought back from Pick ’n Pay; she communicated with Moshe Dayan through photographs in Life magazine. She talked to Golda Meir. Did Mr. Benjamin really exist?

“You girls can start next Sunday,” she said. “And don’t dress like a shtetl waif. Put on a clean blouse and brush your hair.”

It’s a radiant fall Sunday in 1970, and the air smells like fallen apples after rain. As the train rumbles east from West Park to Cleveland’s Terminal Tower, where we transfer to the bus for Shaker Heights, I watch houses change from small bungalows to stately mansions with manicured lawns. In the vast green yards are old stone fountains and big magestic trees. I wonder if this is what France looks like, or maybe a quaint old town near London.

My mother asks, “Why didn’t your sister come today? I think she’s on drugs.”

“What?”

“She goes to rock concerts with bad girls.”

“I go too, and so does Cathy.”

“Cathy’s a good girl. I’m not talking about her. You know what happened to the girls who fraternized with Charles Manson. They listened to rock music and took drugs. They killed an unborn baby.”

“Rachel’s not going to kill a baby,” I say. “She just likes rock and roll.”

It was gradual, my mother’s transition from her neglect of us to unremitting intrusion. But when did it first occur? Was it when my sister started fussing with her hair, flirting with boys at school? Or was it my fault? Was I changing too?

“You wouldn’t take drugs, would you?” she asks. “You wouldn’t let a man see you without your clothes?”

Mr. Benjamin’s wife greets us at the heavy oak door. She ushers us in, then leaves my mother in the living room to wait. I follow her through the house.

“I remember the way your mother played. There was no one like her. When she played Beethoven... well, that was long ago. She told me you play violin and piano and that you’re quite a little artist.”

I nod, embarrassed.

“My husband loves art too. Would you like to see something beautiful?”

She leads me down a hall lined with giant pictures of birds, each one illumined by a tiny lamp that makes them glow like the icons in Aunt Toda’s kitchen and my grandfather’s church.

“John James Audubon,” Mrs. Benjamin informs me. “These are original prints from his Elephant Portfolio—his Birds of
America
suite.”

“Oh, yes, Audubon,” I say, as if I know who he is. We pause at each bird on the wall. Mrs. Benjamin names them one by one.

“This is the painted bunting, that is the swallow-tailed hawk.”

“Swallow-tailed hawk,” I repeat. I say each name softly so I’ll remember. “Arctic tern. Yellowshank tatler. Great cinereous owl.”

Bird after bird, our walk down the hall is a largo, walk-
pause
, walk-
pause
, in front of each framed print. At the end of the hallway we stop to look at a large white bird. Mrs. Benjamin tells me its name in Latin:
Pelecanus erythrorhynchos
. The American white pelican. It’s not really that beautiful; there is something about it that is rather cold and severe. But I am curious. What is it looking at? The sky? The sea?

Mrs. Benjamin confides in me that collecting Audubons is her husband’s greatest passion, perhaps even more than music. “The harder one is to get, the more he wants it,” she says. She tells me that sometimes her husband can’t sleep the week
before an auction. “Oh, look at the time. He’s waiting,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “Go on downstairs.”

At the bottom of the basement steps is a small wooden table with a stained-glass Tiffany lamp and a Cleveland Indians bobble-head doll. The heating vent kicks on and makes the mascot’s smiling head waggle. The bobble-head reminds me of President Nixon on TV when the sound is off and you can’t hear him talking. To the left of the staircase is a sleek black Baldwin where Mr. Benjamin waits. Is this where he waited for my mother too, his beautiful young prodigy? The girl destined for Carnegie Hall? My new teacher wears an old-fashioned suit, a starched white shirt, and bow tie. He is a short man with a paunch and small freckled hands.

“Hello, hello! Come sit down,” he says. “Let’s begin.”

Mr. Benjamin invites me to play a short waltz I have brought along. The piano has a warm tone and is delicate to the touch. My new teacher follows my every move.

“How old are you now?” he asks.

“Eleven and a half.”

“Play the piece again.”

He closes his eyes and listens. When I finish, he says, “Anyone can play piano. Not everyone can make
music.”

Does he mean that I can make music or I can’t? A white cat rubs up against my leg and purrs as if to say, Yes, Mr. Benjamin thinks you are good. As if to say, You can stay here with us forever.

“Let’s try the Bartók.” Mr. Benjamin places some music on the piano. “Listen.”

His fingers are not long and graceful like my mother’s, but he plays with great tenderness and feeling. After he’s done, I scan the music. I take in the page of notes, a gestalt of black birds on a wire. I try to play what I see.

“Your mother was a good sight reader too,” says Mr. Benjamin. “What a quick study. She was going places. What talent... what...”

I look down at my feet. Mr. Benjamin clears his throat. “You like kugel?” he asks. He goes to the top of the stairs and shouts to his wife, “Bring some kugel down for the girl. The girl needs a little kugeleh and tea.”

When we leave, I tell my mother about the birds.

“I’ve seen them. You can have those birds.”

She tells me that the birds terrify her; to her they look like the ones she sees in her dreams. She says they remind her of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie.

“The world is a dangerous place. Birds like that can peck your eyes out.”

“Mrs. Benjamin says her husband wants to own all the Audubons in the world.”

“He’s a nice man but just remember, you can never trust the rich.”

Mr. Benjamin covets other people’s birds and I covet his. I covet his house, the smell of sandalwood and roses in the foyer, the Baldwin in the basement, the Steinway in his den. I covet his life, his little white cat, his quiet world of birds and music, and his dark wooden living room full of leather-bound books. And most of all, I covet his pelican, the universe of sea and sky swirling inside the eye of that terrifying and wondrous bird.

When my mother was twelve, she had already surpassed her first teacher, the one she had before Mr. Benjamin, or so my grandma had said. By fifteen she was preparing for the concert stage. In the few photographs from that time, something looks a little off, the way her eyes glance sideways, even though her mouth is turned up into a smile. When did the dark shape first form at the back of her brain, force her to sleep all day, spend her nights wrestling with demons? When did the voices first whisper to her through the radio, the clock, and the walls? What did they say that very first time?
The Germans are coming, the Germans are coming?
The voices told her not to say a word but my mother rebelled:
Nobody hears a mute but I hear myself. I will fight them to the end. No one will put me in an oven, not the Nazis, not the Golem, not my father or the CIA. Nobody hears a mute but I hear myself.