The Memory Palace (24 page)

The painting of Death and his horse invokes another picture in my mind, a white stallion leaping across an indigo sky. I made the large drawing for my mother when I graduated from art school in 1981. “I hope this cheers you up,” I said when I gave it to her. “I dreamed I was a horse and came to your rescue. You were being carried away, up into the sky.”

“It reminds me of Chagall,” she said. “What’s it called?”

“Help Is on the Way.
Whenever you’re scared, just look at it and think of me.”

One of the first signs that my grandmother was suffering from Alzheimer’s was when she began to believe the blue background in the horse picture could move. She stood in front of it one day and pointed.

“See that water?” she said. “It’s moving. Like a river. Will it spill?”

She made a small gesture with her fingers, to show how the water was rushing down. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Steve’s not going to like this one bit,” she said. You better hide that whatchamacallit right now.”

“Grandma,” I said. “Grandpa is dead.”

“I knew that. I was... I was... when did he die?”

By 1988, my grandma had begun to forget who people were. I was “The Baby,” my mother was her mother. Lassie was Ginger and other dogs from her past. My mother did her best to help. She cooked the couple meals she had learned how to make in her recovery classes, before the community mental health program shut down. She tried to clean and keep up with the laundry. She straightened up the attic and painted a room in the house. “I am trying,” she told me wearily into the phone. “But life with Grandma makes me tired. It is hard to distinguish between my dreams and the movie version of my life.” How could she keep things in order when the voices in her head instructed her to do otherwise? They sent messages through the walls and windows, through paintings at the museum where she went to escape. Who should she listen to when she couldn’t trust anyone to tell the truth?

My sister and I set up Meals on Wheels for her and my grandma, and asked an organization for the elderly, called Adult Protective Services (APS), to check up on them at home. Our old neighbor Ruth Armstrong had called to say that APS suspected our mother forgot to feed our grandma sometimes, and that maybe she was pushing her around. They had spotted Grandma wandering in the cold without a coat a few times, her arms covered with bruises. Had she fallen down, or was something else going on? “You’re sending in spies,” my mother said to me on the phone late at night. “Who are these professional manipulators you’ve sent in to check up on me? Who are they really working for?”

As my grandma’s Alzheimer’s worsened, my mother’s surprise visits to my sister and me increased, as did her disappearances to shelters and cheap motels. It was as if she were in training to be homeless. She’d leave our grandma home alone and disappear for a couple days or call me from the Cleveland airport or bus station, saying that she had gone there to spend the night. Adult Protective Services tried to keep watch over what was going on in the house on West 148th Street, if and when our mother let them in. My mother started sending me angry letters in the mail:
Those bitches pose as do-gooders but they’re imposters. If you were a good daughter, you’d move home and help me out.

In 1988 I moved into a little apartment on Erie Street, a couple miles from my old neighborhood in Wicker Park. It had become too difficult to live with roommates or a boyfriend. Who wants to live with someone when the phone rings twenty-four hours a day or when your mother could show up at any time in a cloud of cigarette smoke, a knife in her hand, pulling her belongings behind her in a cart? My mother tried hard to keep the voices at bay but it was impossible to rein them in—there were so many of them, with so many terrible things to say.

One winter night, right before Christmas, Ruth Armstrong phoned me at my apartment on Erie. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you earlier but everything happened at once,” she said. “Your mother was on a window ledge and I couldn’t get her down. She stabbed your grandma six times in the back—there
was blood everywhere. I had to call the police. But don’t worry, honey. Your grandma’s going to be fine.”

They kept my mother in the psych ward for observation. Meanwhile, after treating my grandma in the ER for knife wounds, they sent her home in a cab, even though her chart said she had Alzheimer’s. A neighbor out walking her dog found her, incoherent and wandering in the snow, wearing a bloodstained nightgown and socks. I knew that, statistically, schizophrenics were less likely to commit violent crimes than the rest of the population, but who knew what our mother’s voices would command her to do next? Rachel and I had to legally separate her from our grandma, and find our grandma a safe new home.

I don’t remember how it was that, in the winter of ’89, I ended up going to the Cleveland courthouse alone. Why didn’t my sister come? Why hadn’t I asked Agostino to drive me there, to offer moral support? It seemed the older I got, the harder it was for me to involve even my closest friends.

In the courthouse, I spotted my mother across the room. She had dyed her hair and gotten a perm. She even dressed up for the occasion and wore a bright pink and blue scarf around her neck. If you observed her more closely, though, you could see something was wrong. She couldn’t stop twitching and rocking back and forth; her tongue darted in and out involuntarily, signs of tardive dyskinesia, the long-term effect of antipsychotic medications. She glared at me as I listed the reasons she was too sick to take care of her own mother.

“She’s starving her to death,” I said, after recounting a Cliffs Notes version of my sister’s and my childhood. “My grandmother hasn’t had a bath in weeks. There are bruises all over her arms. My mother needs care herself. She refuses to take her medication and leaves our grandmother home alone for days. She tried to kill her with a knife. What other proof do you need?”

My mother lurched forward in her seat. “Traitor!” she yelled, shaking her fist at me. “Turncoat! Liar! Bitch!”

“You are completely out of order!” said the judge. He turned to my mother’s lawyer. “You need to get control over your client!”

I wanted the lawyers and the judge to know that this was not my mother deep inside; she was a genius who could make music of infinite beauty. She would give her last dollar to someone in need; she’d put herself in harm’s way to save my life. This was my mother too. The core personality of a schizophrenic always remains, even if it is buried deep inside. In the courtroom, I longed to be a small silent form, pressed against my mother’s piano while she played. This is what love is. Not this public display of drama and betrayal. But instead, I was a loud voice telling the world that my mother had stabbed my grandma in the back.

When the judge finally announced the verdict in my favor, I glanced at my mother across the room. Her face was contorted in rage and I thought that maybe, just maybe, she could kill me if I gave her half the chance. I hurried down the courthouse steps to catch a cab to the Greyhound station. My mother ran after me, shouting, “Traitor! You are no daughter of mine.”

Social services removed my grandma from the house, along with Lassie and a few belongings. They moved her to a private elder-care facility on the east side of Cleveland, run by a woman named Gloria, an African-American nurse who took care of a handful of Alzheimer’s patients in her large, comfy home. My mother wasn’t allowed to know where her mother lived and could only see her if she contacted the guardianship lawyer. A third party had to be present at all times.
Judas
, I can hear my mother hissing into my ear, even now, twenty years later.
You took my mother away
. To take her mother away also meant to remove her financial security; she would no longer be able to write checks from Grandma’s account. How would she get by now with what she called her “once-a-month garbage” from disability?

“I like it here,” my grandma said, when I came to visit after she moved in.

“Why’s that, Grandma?”

“I like to be around my own kind.”

“What kind is that?”

“Black folk,” she said. “I’m black and I’m proud.” Gloria and I cracked up. Then my grandma looked at me and said, “You’re a nice lady. Does your family live around here? What’s their name? Maybe I know them.”

Gloria told me not to get upset if my grandma forgot my name or if she reacted a bit strange to certain things.

“What kinds of things?” I asked.

“You can’t give her anything red to wear,” said Gloria. “She thinks it’s blood and that someone’s going to hurt her. She does something else too.”

“What?”

“Every day about ten to five she starts getting agitated. Her hand goes up to her mouth like she’s got a cigarette in it. Annie seems to calm herself by pulling out an old checkbook she hides under her chair. She sits there and flips through it. She does that business for about ten minutes, then she’s fine.”

“A little before five?” I asked. “That’s the time my grandfather picked her up from work. I guess the body remembers, even when we forget.”

My mother was alone now, for the first time, with no one to watch over her. There was always the same urgent message on my answering machine when I got home to my place on Erie: “Pick up the phone! It’s your mother! This is an emergency!” If I was talking to someone else, she’d have the operator interrupt my call. “I’m letting another party come through,” the operator would say. “She says it’s a matter of life or death.”

My mother would get on the phone. “Thank God you’re there. Your sister died.”

“What?”

“You have to come home right away. Tell that sister of yours to come too.”

“You just said she was dead.”

“I meant Grandma. They’re sending poisonous gas in the house where she lives. Something must be done. You’re the only one who knows how to fix things.”

Sometimes she’d call to tell me not to get on the subway: “Stay home! Someone could push you onto the tracks!” One day she left more than thirty messages saying the same thing:
Someone is going to try to murder you today. You have to call the police!
When I finally talked to her she said, “A tree is going to fall on you tomorrow. I just know it. Don’t go outside.”

I said, “It’s the city, Mother. We don’t have trees.”

If I took the phone off the hook, it was business as usual—she’d call the police to come over to see what was wrong. One day a policeman from the local precinct stopped by. He hung his head, embarrassed. After a lot of throat-clearing, he finally asked if there was any way I could stop my mother from calling their station because it was taking time away from real emergencies. He suggested getting a restraining order or changing my number. “I don’t know how you can stand it,” he said. “It would drive me insane.”

What the policeman had said gnawed at me. What would happen if I stopped her from calling me all day long? She’d still show up at my door, but what if I lied and told her I moved? Gave her a post office box to write me at? What if I set down some rules, an impenetrable fence or two? What if things were on my terms for once? Would she survive?

Later that fall, I sent a letter to my mother. I lied and said I had moved and gave her a post office box number in another neighborhood. I changed my phone number; my sister did the same. We instructed all our friends and the places where we worked that they were not to give our information out to anyone, even if the person said it was a matter of life or death. Even if the person said she was our mother. It was hard to believe that it took me this long to learn that my mother must never, under any circumstances, know the names and phone numbers of any of my friends or colleagues. My mother wrote me immediately to say that if I didn’t reveal where I lived, she would have to come to Chicago to track me down and save me from my kidnappers. She said she might have to buy a gun.

I was still working at the Field Museum and two other museums in town. On the side, I did proofreading for
Encyclopedia Britannica.
While Eastern Europe was reassembling itself at the end of the 1980s, I was proofreading the history of East and West Germany and the Balkan states. Every few weeks and then, increasingly, every few days, I’d get a call from my boss. “Stop production!” she’d say. “The Berlin Wall just fell!” or “Hold off on Czechoslovakia. I think they’re next.” It was hard to find order even in the book series that created it.

As for order at home in Cleveland, what little had existed in the house on West 148th Street had completely disintegrated. When I called Ruth to see
if she had been to see my mother recently, she said that she and other neighbors were afraid to go near the place. Adult Protective Services no longer stopped by, since my grandma was safe and sound. Colleen hadn’t been able to enter the house in weeks.

Everything around me—my mother’s safety and future, the geography of the world—was changing at an alarming rate, but my own life felt in limbo. Death was always circling the track—my mother sent me twenty-page letters at my post office box, threatening suicide if I didn’t come home, rambling on about conspiracy theories and how the three of us were on a hit list to be killed. And nothing was moving forward with my mother’s situation. I felt held hostage by her illness and by the backward mental health system that once again was incapable of helping our family in crisis. I longed to be far away, in a place where no one knew me, a place impossible to find.