The Memory Palace (34 page)

Natalia and I try on one dress after another. My sister is ebullient in clothing stores; she is in her element, happy and content. She loves fine fabrics, the latest colors and styles, wearing something stunning and new. Why shouldn’t she? Why shouldn’t I?

“Now, that looks fabulous!” the clerk says to me, as I step out of the dressing room in a breezy summer dress. “Go look at yourself in the mirror!”

I stare at myself in the tight frilly dress and am surprised at how good it looks. My mother would approve.
Try being a little more feminine. Use a little lipstick and get a new bra, put some rouge on your cheeks
. I buy the dress and choose a summer hat for my mother. And a little chiffon scarf with splashes of red, yellow, and green. “That scarf is perfect for you,” says the clerk.

“Thanks,” I say, imagining it around my mother’s soft, slender neck.

Later that night, I call up William, the tall, thin poet I had just started dating. We had met in line at the post office in Cambridge. On our first date, he told me his life story—how he had to keep his whereabouts secret from his parents who he said were abusive, how his siblings, all eight of them, were either religious fanatics or drunks. I surprised myself by telling him the story about my mother. We stayed up all night, and in the morning we knew some mysterious and irreversible bond had been forged. The night before I left for New Orleans, we lay on my bed holding hands, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark galaxy I had painted on my ceiling. He cautioned me about digging too deeply in the past. He said, “Sometimes its best to just turn your back on it all and walk away.”

On the phone, while my sister is reading in bed, I sit in the kitchen of our B&B and tell William about the live oaks, the dogwoods in bloom, and the redwing blackbird I spotted on our second day. I tell him that I want to go deep into the bayou and find an alligator. Or maybe a panther, if there are any left.

“How are the sisters getting along?”

“Great,” I say. “I just hope she’s having fun. I like to get lost but she prefers to have a plan.”

“Have you seen your father’s grave yet?”

“Nope.”

“Good luck. It might be tough.”

My sister hasn’t met William yet but I plan on arranging something soon. I know she’s nervous about him being a poet who is currently unemployed, but hopefully, she’ll come around. She better because, after all, he and I have so many plans for the future: art and poetry collaborations, children’s books we want to write together, a poetry reading series we want to start. I know she’s worried about me but I want her to understand that William’s and my creative projects mean more to me than a pension plan or a brand-new car. And when I’m around him, I don’t feel as much guilt about running away from my mother. “How can you possibly help her?” he insists. “She would destroy your life.” I haven’t felt this way about anyone since Robert. Maybe this is the man with whom I will start a family. We are both thirty-five and don’t have that many years left to decide. Maybe that’s part of why I wanted to come to New Orleans. If we do start a family, shouldn’t I know more about my own?

Back in the room, my sister looks up sleepily from her bed. “Who was that on the phone?”

“William,” I say.

Natalia’s face clouds over. “Well,” she says. “Let’s get an early start tomorrow. We have to leave soon and there’s a lot I’d want to do.”

“I know, Nat. And there’s still the house and the grave. Don’t forget.”

Years before my trip to New Orleans, when I was twenty-one, I found out that Social Security would forward a letter from me to my father if I gave them his number. I wrote a short letter to him, telling him that I was an artist and my sister was a writer, and that our mother was still quite ill. I promised that if he wrote back, I wouldn’t reveal his address to her if he didn’t want me to. What if he had another family? What if I had siblings scattered across the country?

It struck me then that I had never once seen a photograph of my grandparents on my father’s side of the family. I had no idea what their names were, what they looked like, only what my mother said my father had told her when they got married—that his father had been a general in the Hungarian army and that his mother was a gypsy dancer. She said he left home at fifteen because he hated his father and the town of Mulberry, Indiana, where he was born.

Had my mother made up my father’s story? No one ever talked about him, so how was I to know? My grandmother always said the same thing—he was a genius but couldn’t drive more than a half hour without having a drink. But they were a beautiful couple, she’d say. He was tall and handsome and your mother, what a looker!

I rarely thought about my parents as a couple. But when I did, I imagined them a little like F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Paul, my brilliant boozy father, holding court each night with Chicago’s intellectual elite—Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, and the rest of his South Side literary pals—and my mother, Norma, exotic, beautiful, and mad, and perhaps even more brilliant than Paul. My father’s first book, Journey Not to End, was compared to Camus when it came out in 1961. Two years later, by the time he and my mother divorced, he had already finished his second novel, was on to his third, and was writing a play with Nelson Algren. My father was a painter as well. I imagined their dinner parties, everyone drinking each other under the table while my mother, sober yet not of this world, played Chopin or Gershwin or Monk on their rented black baby grand. And then in the middle of dinner—a sudden strange outburst, perhaps, a string of obscenities muttered under her breath, or something more theatrical, a little violent. Had her volatility been the source of my father’s inspiration? Or had it driven him to drink even more?

Right after my mother sold the family house in 1989, I got a call from my mother’s old landlord who owned the apartment she and my father had rented on the South Side of Chicago in the late fifties. He was an old man but still owned the same building where I was born. “Your mother called me about an apartment,” he said, after explaining who he was. “She put you down as a reference. She sounded really bad.”

He said, “She used to come to the door with a black eye, her arms all bruised up. I felt sorry for her. Your father was a very troubled man.”

The only other person who told me something about my parents’ life together was the late great Studs Terkel, who interviewed my father on his radio show when his first book came out. In 1987, the year after I found out my father died, I heard Studs was doing a book-signing in Chicago, so I went. I introduced myself to him and asked if he remembered a writer in the early sixties named Paul Herr.

“I interviewed him years ago,” said Studs. “I remember him quite well.”

“He was my father. But I never really knew him.”

“Your father was a brilliant man,” said Studs. “I remember your mother too. How is she now? I remember her being quite ill. She was a lovely woman and a gifted musician.”

“Thanks for asking,” I said. “My mother is still pretty sick. But I always have hope.”

Studs asked what happened to my father. He said that he was a great writer. I told him that he passed away in 1980. “Bad heart,” I said.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said. “Please give your mother my best.”

If I could track down that interview and listen to my father’s voice, would I remember the voice of the man who tossed three rabbits over the edge of a dune? How far back does the memory of sound go?

On Friday, the day before we fly back, my sister and I finally rent a car to look for our father’s grave. First we visit his place on Napoleon Boulevard. Natalia is wearing a bright flowery skirt and mustard-colored blouse. I look like a funereal tomboy—baseball cap, black tank top and pants. In the photos we took that day, my sister is frowning, standing on the red steps in front of the peach-colored boardinghouse where our father rented a one-room flat. She is clutching the key to the rental car in her hand, her large overstuffed handbag held close to her side. I look smug and falsely confident: hand on my hip, body relaxed.

“Should we knock?” I ask. “It doesn’t look like anyone is home, though.”

“No. It’s too weird. What would we say?”

“You’re right,” I say, relieved.

“Okay,” says Natalia. “So we saw where he lived. Let’s go.”

Before we get in the car I turn back to look at the front porch one more time. What happened before he stumbled out the door that morning at 9:40 a.m.? Had he just popped open a beer? Did he think of us that day? Had the letter I sent through Social Security arrived? His death certificate said he died of marked fatty liver, cardiomyopathy, chronic pancreatitis. Miserable alcoholic, I say to myself. What a sad, sad man.

“I expected a dilapidated house in a bad neighborhood,” says Natalia, starting up the car. “But this is pretty nice.”

“I know. I wonder what was inside his room.”

“Can we go now?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s hit the road.”

In 1994, although I have my license, I have never owned a car, so Natalia must take care of all of the driving. She has only been driving for four years and has rarely driven in a city. My sister is five-foot-four and tries to sit up as tall as she can in the seat. She drives under the speeding limit, leaning forward to see, like my grandma used to do in her white Chevrolet. “I hope you know your way to the cemetery,” she says.

“Don’t worry. We’ve got a map. We just head west to Kenner. I think if we keep following this road we’ll hit the highway.”

“You think?”

“Don’t worry, Nat. It’s hard to get lost when you have a map.”

“You’re the navigator, so don’t screw up.”

When we leave the outskirts of the city it turns out that I am not the best navigator after all. I’m not a driver but a subway taker, a bike rider, and long-distance walker. I don’t know how to use dead reckoning like the old explorers did, or even follow our map. We wander down industrial streets west of New Orleans and past factories and slums. Natalia gets more and more nervous. After driving around in circles, we find ourselves way off track, beneath an overpass, in a desolate section of town. My sister begins to cry.

“We’re lost!” she says, sobbing. “Where are we?”

“I don’t know, Nat. But it’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”

“It’s not okay. We’re really lost.”

“Nattie, why are you crying? So we’re lost. I’ll ask directions. Don’t worry.”

“You wanted to do this! Not me. I did this for you.”

Tears are streaming down her face.

“Let’s pull in here,” I say. “I’ll find someone to ask.”

We turn into what looks like a fly-by-night mechanic’s shop. Both of us have to pee, we are thirsty, we can’t read the stupid map, and my sister is on the verge of hysterics. “I can’t believe we’re lost,” she cries.

I haven’t seen her like this in years. The last time was the day our mother went after me with the broken bottle.

“Why is this happening to me?” she says. “Why am I crying?”

I smooth Natalia’s hair and wipe her wet face. I feel terrible. This whole day has been stressful for her, trying to drive in a new city, with no help from me, then getting lost. But it isn’t just that.

“Why is this happening to me?” she asks again.

“Nattie, until now, most of my life I’ve barely thought of our father. I was too little when he left. You’ve said all along you were doing this for me but you’re really the one who remembers him. And now I’m dragging you to his grave.”

“You think that’s why?” she asks. She sobs even harder.

“Nattie, it’s okay to feel bad. You don’t have to be perfect all the time. Let’s just try to move on. You’ll be okay.”

I make a face that always makes her laugh, no matter what, a secret look I only share with her and her alone. My sister breaks a tiny smile, then cries a little more, then stops. She lets out a long sigh.

“I’m really, really tired,” she says.

“I know. But we’ll get there. Let me ask someone inside where the hell we are.”

When we arrive at St. Rosalie Cemetery in Kenner, I get out and Natalia stays planted in her seat. She looks a bit shaken and scared. I lean against the passenger door and look at my father’s final home. An elderly black man takes out his garbage from the back of his house. The man glances at me, then carries on with his work. Surrounding the small fenced-in field of
mounds are sad yards with plastic baby pools, broken lawn furniture, and trash. On the ground at the entrance there is an Arby’s wrapper, a hubcap, and rusty chicken wire.

“I’m going in,” I say.

“I’ll stay in the car.”

“You sure you don’t want to come?”

“I don’t like it here. It creeps me out. Try to hurry up.”

Is she afraid of the neighborhood or the graves? The dark place of despair she might enter if she walked across the field of scattered bottles, buried bones, and trash? I wish I hadn’t convinced her to come. Sometimes things are better left buried, as William would say.

“Don’t worry, Nat, I’ll try to be quick.”

I am holding a letter I wrote to my father for this purpose, with a snapshot that must have been taken right before our parents’ divorce. I have a moment of regret—it’s the only copy I own of the photo and now I’m going to stick it on a dead man’s grave. And it’s the only photograph of just the three of us, my father, my sister, and me. I am in a pink dress, dangling my one-eyed teddy bear by its leg. Our father grins at the camera but my sister and I aren’t smiling. We look lost, tired, and cranky. Not unlike how we look now. The letter is simple. I wrote that I forgave him for not helping us and for never trying to find us again. I don’t know what else to say. I signed it, Love, Myra. I used my old name. What do the dead care about names, anyway?