The Memory Palace (35 page)

When I pass through the gate I am confronted with a dilemma. Which grave to place my letter on? None of them have headstones or even small markers with names. I hadn’t thought of that. Of course they would be nameless. This is a potter’s field for the unidentified poor. I walk around and consider the mounds. There aren’t that many; it’s a small field. Whom did he share this lot with, who were the other men without families? I can’t imagine women here, only homeless men or drunks, solitary creatures of the night. Then again, my mother could end up in a place like this.

I pick the cleanest grave with the softest grass and whisper, “Hello. Is that you in there?” The air is a little sticky, still, and warm. I place the envelope on top of the grave and stand back. A breeze rustles the paper and it moves half an inch.
Who knows, it might just blow that letter away to another grave, or out into the street. What then? All of a sudden it strikes me as absurd, walking around these unmarked graves, not knowing which one contains my father’s bones. Absurd and sad. What if there was a flood? Would his body float away? Someday my father could end up at the bottom of the sea or on some distant shore.

I scan the yard of graves again. It’s not such a bad place after all. Melancholy, but still, quite peaceful. I’m glad I came. I feel like I have left a burden behind, not a heavy one, but a burden just the same. I go back to the car where my sister is waiting. She rolls down her window.

“Can we please leave?”

“Are you sure you don’t want to go in?”

“I’m sure. Can we go back now?”

“Let’s go see something beautiful, Nattie. We rented the car for the whole day. Tomorrow we have to go home. Let’s go see the bayou. I promise, we won’t get lost.”

“I know. We have a map.”

My sister and I head south.

Natalia and I turn off the highway and drive down a lonely sunless road, a dense forest on either side. I am trying to take us to one of the state parks, a big green blotch on my map. As we travel farther into the bayou, there are fewer and fewer places to stop. No gas stations or stores. Not even a McDonald’s. My sister grips the steering wheel. Her knuckles are white. “Are we going the right way?”

“Well,” I say, “We have some options.”

“I don’t want to hear options. I want to know if we’re going the right way.”

“Okay, I’m lost again. But I know there’s a state park nearby. Let’s find a place to eat lunch and ask for directions.”

The customers at the diner, all of them middle-aged white men, stare at my sister and me when we walk through the door. Some turn around in their booths to get a good look. Natalia and I order shrimp gumbo. This is years before I realize that I have an allergy to shellfish. After lunch I start
to feel queasy. We drive in silence for a while, then suddenly I grab my sister’s arm.

“Pull over! Now!”

I lose my lunch all over the road.

“Are you okay? Should we go back? We should go back.”

“No, Nat. I’ll be fine. We’ve gone this far, please, let’s keep going. I have a feeling we’re almost there.”

We follow the directions the waitress had given us at the diner: “You can’t get there from here if you girls are looking for road signs.” She had said we have to look for changes in the shape of the land, not the names of streets. Now I am getting nervous. I can’t tell if we are going the right way and soon it will be dark. Natalia and I drive past swamplands and thick dark forests. Bald cypresses, I wonder? The waitress had said something about cypress trees. I don’t know my trees well but in my head I tick off the names of Louisiana plants to calm myself:
ground orchid, bull tongue, saw grass, lotus, spike rush, banana lily.
Then the birds:
ibis, egret, wood duck, redwing blackbird, great blue heron.
I can’t remember the Latin names except for the heron:
Ardea herodias.

I have to puke again. We pull off the side of the road.

“Where the hell are we?” asks Natalia. “We’re lost again and now you’re sick. You told me you knew the way.”

“Nat, we are so close. I just know it. That woman said it was only twenty minutes away or less. She said it’s a state park and easy to find. Please let’s just keep going for another few miles. If we don’t find it in fifteen minutes, we can turn around, okay?”

My sister puts the car in drive and clutches even more tightly to the steering wheel. I name all the Louisiana creatures I can recall:
nutria, possum, raccoon, black bear, armadillo, alligator, silver-haired bat, swamp rat, turtle, deer.

It’s almost five when we see the sign for the park. The air is a cloak of steamy wool; we are hot and tired, and the sun will be setting soon. Natalia is reluctant to get out of the car, but finally does. I put my arm around her. “Come on, Nat. Let’s take a little walk.”

Thankfully, the signs into the wooded swamp are well marked. We walk along a raised wooden path, brackish waters bubbling up on either side. Steam rises off the slick carpet of algae. I can hear a gurgling sound below and the call of some bird in the trees. Something slaps the surface of the swamp. I look down to see a small reptilian eye.

“Nattie!” I whisper. “It’s a baby alligator—look!”

The creature comes right up to the boardwalk, then sinks low in the water so we can just see the top of its head and eyes. Its eyelids slide back and forth from left to right, like a secret door. I’ve never seen an alligator in the wild and wonder if its mouth is big enough to bite my foot off, even though it’s just a juvenile. If my mother were here she would warn us about the hurricane that could come and sweep us away, or the man with a gun who is lurking in the woods, waiting to abduct us, but I don’t think of her at all, or our father in his grave, or anything else—just this little ancient head peering up at me, water lilies parting around his body as he moves, the sound of a bird I don’t know, and my sister beside me.

I take her hand and we walk a little farther, a little deeper into the swamp. We don’t really have much time to go far; dusk is starting to settle in. We stop again and look at the endless swamp encricled by trees. Spanish moss,
Tillandsia usneoides,
is beardlike and prolific here. Early settlers had thought the moss resembled the bearded Spaniards who had once explored the region, and gave it its name, but it isn’t really a moss at all, or even a parasite. Tillandsia is an epiphyte, a plant that derives its nutrients not from where it is planted but from the air. My sister and I are epiphytes too, like the abundant green canopy dripping down from the trees above our heads.

“We should go,” says Natalia.

“Just a couple minutes. Then we’ll head back.”

“It’s beautiful. I feel so peaceful.”

“Me too, Nattie.”

Then, from somewhere up in the canopy, we hear a whooshing, flapping sound of wings. We look across the slow green water to see a flash of gray-blue and black alight upon the mucky bank. It’s a great blue heron,
Ardea herodias
. He is magnificent—his black feathery crown, his smoky gray
and black cape across his shoulders and wings. Natalia and I stare at the bird in silence until it lifts its great wings and flies up into the tangle of darkening green. We listen to the heron’s high bright call, as if it is saying,
Nothing to be afraid of, nothing at all.
Then I understand—this is the Louisiana lagniappe, the unexpected gift. It’s not what is lost but what is left—my sister, this bird, these trees, this falling light. We turn and head back to the car. This time, driving out of the bayou toward New Orleans, Natalia and I don’t get lost once.

Over the next couple years, information about our father surfaces: he once lived on a farm in Tuscany, not far from my beloved Cerreto. And, as it turned out, he wasn’t Hungarian after all. His parents were Dutch-German chicken farmers from Indiana who could trace their roots back to the founder of the Mennonites. He had two sisters, now deceased; one lived in Chicago when I lived there but I never knew about her. A few months later, we discovered that my sister and I did indeed have other siblings, at least one—a half-brother named Greg. He was our father’s first child, from the first of three marriages; our mother was his last wife. My father was allergic to feathers like me. I wondered how he felt about shrimp and clams. What else did we share? What other secrets did he keep?

Here is what I do know: when the landlady cleared out my father’s room, all that was there were six identical brown suits, six pairs of brown shoes, a dusty typewriter without paper, and a large stash of empty beer bottles and cans. No letters, no diaries or books, no manuscripts, nothing. No address book of family and friends, no photographs in frames. No evidence of a life.

I think of those shoes sometimes, and New Orleans. Those bright red steps leading up to the porch where he fell in winter. Was his house swept away when Katrina came to town? And what happened to those six pairs of shoes? Did someone wear them after him, even though they say it’s bad luck to wear a dead man’s shoes? And the ones he wore in potter’s field? I imagine they were scuffed and out of style, heels black and low. What’s a shoe anyway but just a piece of skin cut from a cow fed from buttercups and clover? A shoe is only stardust, DNA, a host for microbes and the prolific larvae of
carrion beetles. A thousand years from now my father’s shoes will rest in what was once a rushing river. They’ll be mute and peaceful in the loam, not like shoes at all but something that feeds the moles and millipedes, bacteria perhaps, or some kind of fungus made from leather, the shifting of the earth, and time.

And what of the rabbits? My sister remembers them too. But she says there were no black dogs in Indiana in our house by the lake. I hope, in a way, that they didn’t exist, that each day I left to wander the woods and bleaching sands of Lake Michigan, I dreamed my woodland guardians into being.

Winter in Paradiso

It’s Winter in Paradiso, but this past week there’s been a rise in temperature. In fact, it makes me suspicious of ill intent. Soon I will tell all about secret crimes of infancy, drugs to know me out, and the taking of my childhood home. But for now, I spend my time resting, drawing and listening to the radio. Lately they have been talking about global warming. The scientists have really loused things up. The TV at the motel last night cautioned tornado warnings but onscreen showed an avalanche and a fist projecting out from under the snow! Who was buried there? Where are my girls? The manipulators have had a lifetime ball on my defects. Last week I went to see the doctor. He said I have hemorrhoids. The tests were painful; I have chronic fatigue and feel uprooted as a homemaker. In the meantime, I’m just a kid again, living month to month. I sustained some injuries of late, general neglect of water that burned my body and caused lentigo, facial cysts, boils, and then another fall at the train station that was caused by the negligence of others. Also supposedly by water. They always blame it on “water,” on something else. But how can you explain the small dead rat I found in a drainpipe the other day? Who put that there to warn me of what’s to come? You’ve got to have eyes at the back of your head, especially if you’re blind. When the snow falls, no one sees your cane. It’s white against white in winter—you slip and fall and next thing you know you’re following the White Rabbit down into his hole.

I distrust the forest, or any wilderness, as a place to live. Living in the wilderness, you may well fall asleep on your feet or go mad.

Annie Dillard, “Why I Live Where I Live”

The room I conjure is made of ice—the walls, chairs, table, and bed. On the table—a fragment of bone and a little snow globe. I shake the globe and a blizzard swirls above an Arctic village. I crawl inside it and look up: a fiery comet, a sapphire sky full of flickering stars. A memory shimmers under a carpet of snow:

November 1996. My husband, William, and I are flying over the Arctic Ocean toward the northern coast of Norway. I watch the sky turn from red to royal blue to black at two p.m. Below are icy mountains and the sea. Someone on the plane is talking about an avalanche near Tromsø that happened earlier that day. I am moving to a place where you could get killed by snow. Who would bother to follow me here? Not even my mother. I take out my journal but as soon as I put pen to paper, William asks me to take dictation for a poem. “You can write later,” he says. “This is going to be a good one.” What would my mother think of this tall, gaunt man beside me? Never trust a writer, she would say.
He looks like a Nazi. Is there a parachute on the plane?