The Memory Palace (44 page)

“Myra?” My mother has just woken up from a nap. “When can I go home?”

“Soon,” I say. “You have to get better first. Now, will you look who’s here? Look who came to visit you all the way from the east side.”

After the women leave, I tell my mother I am going out to take a little walk.

“Don’t go out there!” she says. “It will be dark soon. It’s dangerous!”

“It’s safe. Don’t worry.”

“You could get kidnapped. Don’t go!”

“I’ll just take a quick walk with one of the aides,” I lie. “I won’t go alone.”

“Come back right away. Don’t wander far. You could get injured, or worse.”

It’s warm for December and has been raining. I walk along the muddy path surrounding the golf course. Along the path I notice animals tracks—not just from dogs but wilder things—rabbits, raccoons, and foxes. I wonder if there are bears too, and coyotes that refuse to leave. Where do they hide? Everything is flat here; there is no place to go. Before I go back in the building I spy a hawk perched high on a telephone pole, and geese taking flight.

When I return, my mother is staring at the giant white teddy bear we brought back from U-Haul. It’s propped up on a chair in the corner where Crystal had been. Natalia is getting her hair cut, trying to carve out an hour or two of normalcy, so my mother and I are alone.

“What’s that?” she asks.

“You had it at U-Haul. Rachel thought it would be nice to have him here.”

“What should we name him?”

“What do you think?”

She pauses. “Brian.”

“Brian?”

“He’s a friend of Santa’s. The man who brings the gifts.”

“Okay. Brian it shall be.”

“Is Rachel’s husband Santa Claus?”

“No, he’s an English professor.”

“He’s not Santa? She showed me a picture of a man with a beard.”

“Nope. He’s not Santa.”

“Oh. Well, maybe I should give Brian to Rachel’s husband as a holiday gift.”

“That’s very generous of you. But let’s just keep him here for now. He sort of cheers up the place.”

I’ve set up an appointment to meet a local funeral director that evening. I want to get all of her arrangements out of the way so I don’t have to think about it on the day she dies. Natalia stays with our mother while I go to meet him in the dining hall. The elderly director seems uncomfortable. Is it because he knows my mother is homeless?

“Thanks for coming down so close to Christmas,” I say. “I really appreciate it.”

“It’s no problem,” he says. “It’s my job.”

“My sister and I decided that we are going to cremate her. I can’t really ask her because she’s incapacitated but I think it’s what she would want.”

The man goes over the prices for cremation, shows me a fancy brochure of urns for her what he calls her “cremains.” Cremains?

The pictures he shows me resemble the canopic jars from ancient Egypt that held the sacred organs of the deceased. They remind me of the urn that contained the fallen Palace of Kalachakra.

“That’s okay,” I say. “I’m an artist. I’ll make something for her myself.”

“What about the funeral?” he asks. “We have a lovely chapel we can offer you for a service. We can even get a minister if you like—Catholic, Baptist, Methodist. Even Pentecostal. And there’s quite a lovely little organ, if you want to sing some hymns.”

He tells me the price.

“My mom was, I mean is, Jewish.”

“Oh,” he says, fumbling with another brochure. “Well, I’m sure we can find a... Jewish minister, if you like.”

“A rabbi.”

“Yes, I mean rabbi. My apologies.”

“She’s not religious, though,” I say. “So that part doesn’t matter.”

Am I wrong to cremate her? Would it make her think of Auschwitz if she knew? The graveyards in Israel come back to me, how Barbara and I searched for tombs, placed small rocks on the headstones of strangers. Is that what my mother would prefer, to be placed in a box in the earth, or to leave this place by fire?

“The cost is quite reasonable,” says the man. “For a service, that is. It can be an hour long for two hundred fifty dollars. Longer ones are extra.”

I am about to say yes to the chapel, for lack of a better idea, but then I remember all the women at the shelter, how far away they are from Westlake.

“I’m going to have a memorial for her at a women’s shelter in Cleveland,” I say. “It was my mother’s last home. That way visitors can stay as long as they like.”

The funeral director clears his throat. “Her body is cremated in twenty-four hours. Two to three days later, the obit will appear. If you give me a short bio I can have our secretary write one up for your mother.”

I think about what my mother’s bio might read like: Norma Kurap Herr: Born into poverty during the Depression, child prodigy slated for Carnegie Hall, lost her mind when America dropped the bomb, wife of aspiring alcoholic writer, homeless schizophrenic for seventeen years, spent last years in a shelter for homeless women.

“Thank you, but I’ll write it myself.”

“What about her cremains? Do you want me to send them, since you’re from out of town?”

I imagine my mother’s ashes getting lost in the mail, ending up on someone else’s doorstep or, worse, lying in a puddle below a bridge in Indiana. I imagine them circumnavigating the globe.

“Thanks, but my sister and I will pick them up before we leave town.”

When I return to the room I tell Natalia to take a break for a while. She has been by our mother’s side all day. “Go call Kerry or take a nap in the lounge. Stay as long as you like,” I say. “I’ll be here when you get back.”

Since my mother arrived at Westlake, she seems to be doing a bit better. I wonder if she’ll hang on longer than we previously thought. She doesn’t
seem to be in that much pain, although she is extremely weak and tired all the time. When she needs to urinate, she has to be assisted the few feet to the bathroom very slowly. One of the aides usually helps her, and sometimes my sister and I help too.

After Natalia leaves the room, my mother wakes up. “I have to make a pee-pee,” she says. I ring for the aide. She runs in to tell me she just got an emergency call and can’t come till later. “I’ll be fine,” I say. “I’ve done this before. Go.”

After my mother’s finished, I lift up her nightgown and wipe her like a baby as she stands, straddling the toilet, clinging to my arms.

“What are these?” she asks, looking down at the stomas and the ileostomy bag that drains out her bile.

“Nothing for you to worry about. They’re just from the operation,” I say. “They’re not going to be there forever. Now, let’s go real slow. Just hold on to me.”

I walk backward toward the bed, my mother facing me, holding on to my shoulders. She stops after a few small steps, overcome with fatigue. I wrap my arms around her and feel her frail body lean in to mine.

“So tired,” she says.

“Let’s wait a second,” I say. “We’ll go when you’re ready. There’s no rush.”

When was the last time we did this, held each other close, that embrace you give your mother when you walk through the door, that parting hug on your way out? Was it seventeen years? Was it more?

We stay in the middle of the room for a long time, holding on to each other. I wrap my arms around her tighter. My mother closes her eyes and relaxes into my embrace. A nurse comes in to take my mother’s stats.

“Is she okay?”

“Yeah,” I say. “She’s fine. It’s just that I realized—I haven’t hugged my mother in seventeen years.”

“I’ll come back later,” says the nurse.

“Thanks,” I say. “That would be great, if you don’t mind. I think I want to stay here for a while.”

My mother and I stand like that for as long as she can bear to stand, and then we make our way slowly back to the bed.

On Sunday, Christmas Eve day, Natalia leaves and Doug arrives. “I’m so glad you came,” I say, as we hug at the airport. “I couldn’t imagine her dying without having met you.”

We drive directly to the Westlake Healthcare Center and go up to her room. My mother is wide awake. “Mommy,” I say. “This is my fiancé, Doug.”

She eyes Doug with suspicion, but forces a smile and nods. She waves to him from the bed like a queen, then motions me to come closer so she can whisper in my ear.

“Your sister is kind of dumb, isn’t she?”

“Why do you say that?”

“She has yet to produce a man.”

“But Mom, she’s married. Her husband is in New York.”

“Well, I haven’t seen him, have you? How do we know he really exists?”

Doug and I spend a quiet day by her side. My mother eats two bites of macaroni and cheese at dinner, then falls into a deep sleep. When she wakes up, she announces, “I want to watch the news. I want to see what’s going on in the world.”

I flip through the news stations and it is all bad—murders, kidnappings, rapes, hurricanes, the Iraq War, and beached whales. I try the other stations and there’s nothing but reality shows, Spanish soap operas, or reruns of Law & Order—until I find the Animal Planet channel.

“Look,” I say. “It’s a tiger and a baby deer.”

The show is about animal “friends,” unlikely companionships between predators and prey. There’s a young female tiger curling up to sleep with a baby deer that has lost its mother. My mother is transfixed. She stares at the tiger and the little deer on the screen. What is she thinking? I’m reminded of her tiger picture in the clock, her Chinese astrology charts. I am a Tiger, she once wrote.
Your sister is a Rooster, and you are a Pig. I think we are compatible but I can’t be sure. Tiger people are sensitive, given to deep thinking, capable of great sympathy. They cannot make up their minds and often arrive at sound decisions too late. Tiger people are suspicious of others, but can be powerful and brave. They say Pigs, however, are the bravest of all.

A commercial for Oscar Meyer wieners comes on TV; a happy family at a cookout stands around the grill smiling.

“I would like... I would like...” my mother starts to say.

“What?” I ask. “What can I get you?”

“What can we get you, Norma?” asks Doug.

My mother points at her lap and speaks very slowly. “I would like... a hot dog... right here... for me... now. Just a plain one, please.”

“Let me go look,” I say to Doug. “You stay here with her. I know the staff.”

It’s after dinner on Christmas Eve and the kitchen is closed. I run around the nursing home, trying to see if anyone has any hot dogs. Nothing. I drive around the neighborhood. All the places nearby are closed. I return an hour later empty-handed.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “Nothing is open. It’s Christmas Eve.”

“That’s okay. I’m fine without.”

“Listen, is there anything you want me to do, you know, anything you want me to take care of for you, besides the house?” I can’t bring myself to say, Do you have any last requests?

“Yes,” she says. “One thing I’d like you to do.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s a man named Willard Gaylin, a psychiatrist in New York. I used to know him. I want you to track him down.”

“Who is he?”

“We knew each other years ago. He’s very famous now. He wrote a lot of books that helped me.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Tell him what happened. He’ll know what to do.”

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll tell him you’re here. How do you know him?”

“It’s not important. Let’s just say that after the war, it was not necessarily a champagne bottle-breaking period for everyone.”

I have no idea what she means, but images flood my brain. That old picture of my mother holding the bottle to my neck comes back to me, and another, a woman breaking a bottle against the bow of a ship, christening a voyage. I imagine my mother clinking glasses with this mysterious man, Willard Gaylin, at the end of the war.

“I’ll remember that,” I say. “I’ll do my best.”