The Memory Palace (22 page)

In 1986 my mother begins the year by waving a butcher knife around at Boston’s Logan Airport. The story makes national news: “Woman with Knife Threatens Travelers.” Later, she tells me she was on her way to California to kill the doctor whom she said had raped her, but her ticket was bound for Boston, where my sister is living at the time, not L.A. My sister is convinced that our mother was on her way to kill her. I tell her that our mother must have believed she was protecting her from some imaginary harm; my sister isn’t convinced. Hadn’t our mother shown up at her apartment in Seattle the year before? Didn’t she try to choke her on the street? Hire a private investigator to track her every move? And how did she get the money to do that? Is she stealing from our grandma now? What is going on in the house on West 148th?

Our grandmother, at eighty, is now our mother’s reluctant and resentful watchdog. In the six years since Grandpa’s death, we still have not had a reasonable conversation with her about our mother’s tenuous future. And each year, our mother’s condition
gets worse. Whenever Rachel and I broach the subject, our grandma becomes irate: “You girls just want my money.” She hates to be interrupted when she’s sitting in her comfy chair, a bowl of chocolate ice cream on her lap, her new border collie, Lassie, sleeping at her feet: “Marcus Welby’s on,” she snarls. “Can’t you see I’m watching my show?”

We tell Grandma that if she got sick or died, our mother, who has no savings or trust fund, no legal guardian sanctioned by the court to help her, could become homeless. Neither of us wants the job, and besides, Rachel and I both live out of state. But why should our grandma listen? Hasn’t she had enough disappointment, enough drama and grief? “Leave me in peace,” she says. “Who the hell are you to tell me what is what? You girls barely come home anymore.”

When my grandmother does feel like talking about our mother, it’s clear she just needs someone to lend an ear. “What a life,” she says, sighing heavily into the phone. “You girls don’t know what I have here.” I listen as she tells me what it’s like to live with a person who smokes all day in bed, sets chairs on fire, and who believes her heart is being monitored by Nazis. “We can do something,” I say. “What a life,” she says again. “Can’t a person have a little peace?”

When I talk to my mother about her future, she insists that I move back home. “You’re the only one around here who can fix things,” she says. I change the subject and remind her to keep her doctor’s appointments, maybe try a new medication he might suggest. “All he does is hand out prescriptions for cyanide,” she says, “and besides, why should I listen to a guy who weighs five hundred pounds? You call me crazy? I can still fit into a size eight.”

On the surface, my life in Chicago in 1986 is a sharp contrast to the chaos in the red brick house on West 148th Street. I share a spacious three-bedroom apartment on a quiet tree-lined street in Irving Park with two women who are out of the country for most of the year. A gallery in New York is interested in representing me, I have art shows on the horizon, a wide circle of friends, and a handsome Italian boyfriend whom I adore. But underneath there is a growing sense of disorder
and decay. A couple of my friends are tremendously needy and suffer from clinical depression and intense mood swings. Another should be in AA. I can’t seem to stop myself from getting overly involved, ending up in the middle of someone else’s melodrama, just like I did as a child. My relationship with Agostino is also wrought with strife, with me fervently pressing him for a future promise he just can’t provide.

My sense of stability comes from making art and working in museums. I cobble together several part-time jobs but my salvation and sanctuary is the Field Museum of Natural History. I teach about the Arctic, ancient Egypt, and other lands I dreamed of traveling to when I was small. I also do odd jobs for the Department of Education, like order supplies for classes: owl pellets, ladybugs, feathers, preserved invertebrates, and seeds. I don’t have an office, so I share a lab with other freelance educators and naturalists. The lab is quiet and ordered, with shelves lined with stuffed birds and mammals, drawers of insects and butterflies, bird skulls, microscopes, and specimens in jars.

On my breaks at work, I roam the upstairs halls. Behind the public displays and dioramas, the Field is a labyrinth of wonders: in the Division of Birds, I peruse long flat drawers of bird bones and little stuffed bodies carefully classified and tagged. The Division of Mammals contains a sea of cabinets filled with skulls and small furry corpses; in Botany, hundreds of fragile plant specimens, labeled in faded ox gall. Who knew the world could possess so many types of beetles and snakes, butterflies, barnacles, and shells?

Carl Linnaeus introduced a system of classification upon which all natural history was built. He divided the universe of living things into seven categories: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. I remember the sequence by repeating a mnemonic device I learned when I was twelve: K-ing P-hilip C-ame O-ver F-or G-randma’s S-oup. At the Field, I am happy and content, living inside Linnaeus’s methodical, beating heart. When my mother’s phone calls get too much for me to bear, I remind myself of his new world order, I chant my lists of birds, my growing vocabulary of plants.

Years later, my mother will write to tell me how she keeps lists in order to stay calm. She suggests I do what she does to keep sane: carry an almanac, encyclopedia, and dictionary, and thesaurus with me wherever I go.
When making a proper list, it is important to find the right word, she writes. For this, you need a thesaurus.
Thesaurus
, from the Ancient Greek:
thesauros
, meaning
storehouse
or
treasury
. Today I learned that topaz is a mineral, the fluosilicate of aluminum, usually occurring in prismatic orthorhombic crystals of various colors. It is most often used as a gem. By the way, I have seen a girl in Cleveland who looks like Rachel and a girl who looks like you. I need someone with me. Please come home.

After work I draw and paint long into the evening. I grind pigments using a mortar and pestle the way painters used to ground lapis lazuli, burnt sienna, and cerulean blue centuries ago. I make my own egg tempera paint, the same kind monks used on the illuminated manuscripts I loved from the Cleveland Museum of Art, and on the icons in my grandfather’s church. I crack eggs, and roll the yolk back and forth gently between my palms to separate it from the membrane. Then I pierce the sac and let the viscous yellow goo drip into a little glass cup. I mix the egg with water and pure pigment until the color is luminous and the texture smooth. On wooden panels, I paint with tiny meticulous strokes and try hard to ignore the persistent ringing of the phone.

One evening, my mother calls while I am in the middle of a painting.

“How’s that
bad
Agostino? Is he in the Mafia?” She has been suspicious of my boyfriend ever since I brought him home to meet her two years before. “When is that guy going to produce a ring?”

“Can we talk about something else?”

“I called because I have some important news. A lawyer wrote me to say that your father is dead.”

Was she telling the truth? “What?” I ask. “When did he die, and where?”

“Six years ago, the same year as Grandpa. Your father died in New Orleans.”

My mother reads me the letter on the phone. It is so full of legalese and specific facts about my father’s death that it has to be true. The estate
lawyer wrote that my mother was the third and last person to be married to Paul Herr and, having been married to him the longest, she was entitled to his entire estate, $1,500, minus the lawyer’s 30 percent fee. What a strange relief to get news about something real—a set of facts, a list of events. The lawyer said that on December 18, 1980, our father, at age sixty, died of a heart attack on the front porch of a boardinghouse in New Orleans at 9:40 in the morning. His death certificate said he was buried by the state in Kenner, Louisiana, at St. Rosalie Cemetery, just outside the city. Marital status: Unknown. Family: No next of kin. It took the bank six years to find out our father did indeed have a family.

I feel oddly satisfied, not sad. Will sadness follow? Regret?

“I’ll send you a check for three hundred dollars as soon as I get the money,” my mother informs me. “I hope you use it on a dentist. A woman’s smile is her umbrella on a rainy day.”

Not long after I got the news that spring, my mother calls me from a budget motel on the east side of Cleveland and tells me that living with Grandma had gotten to be too much. Did I know that Grandma was losing her memory? That she might have Alzheimer’s? That sometimes she wets the bed?

While we’re talking, my mother sounds like she is getting short of breath. “Are you okay?” I ask. She tells me that she swallowed a bunch of pills a few minutes before to help her sleep. “Where are you? What’s the name of the motel?” I ask. “Help me,” she says. “I think something is wrong. Can you come right away?” She says she is having heart palpitations, sweaty palms, and can’t catch her breath. “Have I been a bad mother to you?” she asks. “Do you still love me? Why won’t your sister call?” My mother finally gives me the name of the motel and tells me what pills she took: an overdose of Navane, her new antipsychotic medication, and Cogentin, to help the flow of blood to her heart, neither of which is for sleeping. I get off the phone and call Ruth Armstrong, who, besides being such a loyal friend and neighbor, is a registered nurse. Ruth takes my mother straight to the ER. How long can I rely on the kindness of neighbors because I am too far away?

I assume the hospital will transfer my mother to the psych ward and keep her for a while, but they only keep her overnight, releasing her early the next day without cab fare or notifying her next of kin. In the fifties and sixties, they kept her for weeks at a time, medicated, electroshocked, and restrained, always with the looming threat that they might perform a lobotomy. Now, in the mid-eighties, they let her out after one day.

A week after the incident, my mother leaves the house again without a note, her bed stained with blood. I get yet another call from a motel, this time late at night.
Your grandma is a bitch,
she says, shouting into the phone. I am standing in the dark, twirling the black phone cord between my fingers, cold bare feet on the kitchen floor, wondering if I should hop on a plane and save her. I have a full week of work ahead of me, and a deadline for a show.
Why don’t you come home?
she says.
I need you here. We have things to discuss. Now be a good daughter and come home.

My mother returns to the house on West 148th Street after a couple of days. I cancel my museum workshops for the week, which means I don’t get paid, and take a train back to Cleveland. Ruth and her husband pick me up, like they always do. What would I do without them? When my mother is sleeping during the day, I meet with her social worker, Colleen, a fervent young Catholic with four children. I strongly suspect that she thinks my sister and I should move back home. “Families should try to stay together, no matter what,” she tells me when she picks me up at the house. She prides herself on keeping homes intact, even when sexual or physical abuse has been an issue. But Colleen promises that she will help us look into voluntary treatment and housing options for our mother, even involuntary ones, if need be. “What does that mean?” I ask. “You’ll have to take your mother to court,” she says. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

Six months later I am standing with a group of children in front of a case of Eskimo shaman masks at the Field Museum. I tell the children how the Eskimo spirit’s pierced palms represent a magic hole in a place called the Sky World, where all animals pass through to repopulate the earth. A calm spreads over me while I’m talking. Even though the night before my mother
had called me twenty-five times to tell me that her enemies keep setting her chair on fire. The Field is the one place where I feel safe: it is sanctuary, order; it is mythic time.

“The spirit’s name is Tunghak,” I say to the children. “Some say he lives on the moon.”