The Memory Palace (47 page)

The last thing I ask Dave to show me is the trumpeter swan. I recall them squished into drawers, sometimes three or four together, or a pair with their fuzzy cloud-colored babies. Dave pulls out a drawer labeled Cygnus buccinator and there they are, just as I remembered them, their legs folded up next to their heads, a lamentation of swans. I remember holding my mother’s hand and watching swans sail across the lagoon in front of the Cleveland Museum of Art. The ones in the drawer look like sleeping birds from a fairy tale, like a story from the book my sister and I found at U-Haul, the one our father gave us. I try to recall the tale, “The Swan-Princess and Tsar Saltan.” There is a prince who lives in exile on an island with his mother. One day he falls in love with a swan swimming close to shore. But how does the story end?

On my way out, I take a few pictures of a great auk skeleton on a stand. When Dave and I say goodbye, I realize there’s no film left in my disposable camera to take his picture too. I’ve used up all the film on dead things. This too will fade, I think, this memory of Dave’s kind face, and these infinite drawers of birds, their small and tidy bones.

Later, I am in Ancient Egypt. Not much has changed since I worked here years ago. I put in earplugs to drown out the families and ambient sound. I know I will pay for this tomorrow. To talk to someone for a while, then take in so much stimulation, overwhelms me. I feel lava dripping down the back of my head and worry that I might get lost on my way back to my friend Nancy’s house
where I am staying. I know I should go but I have to keep on looking, trying to remember things. And maybe I’m here to comfort myself too, my old familiar way of seeking order in the collection and classification of things around me.

I pass through a fake mastaba, fashioned after massive structures slaves built above tombs in Saqqara and Giza. The mastaba provided a home for the deceased’s ka, or soul, to live in. I descend a tight circular stairway that leads to the rest of the re-created tomb below. I vaguely remember taking students here years ago and talking about the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

I walk through a dim corridor, past a coffin decorated with hieroglyphs and the green and black eyes of Horus, falcon son of Osiris, lord of the Underworld, whom Isis put back together after his envious brother tore his body apart. I wonder if I ever got to tell my mother the story, but then, she probably knew it anyway. Was there anything she hadn’t studied those seventeen years? Horus’s eyes are painted on the side of the coffin so he can gaze out on his journey to the Afterlife. I stop to look at canopic jars carved from stone, where ritual priests placed the organs before they embalmed the body. I remember the jar with jackal-headed Dna-mut-ef on top, which was used to hold the stomach. I forget what the other jars stand for, but recall how the ancient Egyptians believed the heart, not the brain, was the sacred seat of reason.

After circling the exhibit, I end up back where I began. Above my head is a scroll, a painted narrative depicting the Opening of the Mouth Ceremony. There are forty-two gods and goddesses standing by to judge the life of a woman whose name I can’t recall. She doesn’t beg for forgiveness at her trial after death, or confess the things she feels remorse for. Instead she offers an inventory of sins she denies ever committing. Her list is called the “Negative Confession.” The woman recites: “I did not do evil, I did not steal, I never caused anyone to weep, I never abandoned
my family in times of need.” At my mother’s memorial, Steven Friedman, the director of MHS at the time, stood up at the end of the service to thank my sister and me for bringing closure to everyone who knew our mother. He said, “I know of children who have abandoned their parents for much less than you two have gone through.” The Egyptian woman on trial in the scroll assures the gods: I never abandoned my family in times of need. Can I say that now with a clear conscience? Could I have done any more?

Before the memorial service, the shelter manager, Suellen, asked if Natalia and I wanted to go upstairs and see our mother’s room. We said yes, and followed her to the second floor. “This is where she slept,” said Suellen. The room was only big enough to squeeze in two single beds. It opened into a larger room of bunk beds where many women slept. There was no door to close between the two rooms. Suellen told us that our mother got a little more privacy because she was elderly and ill. My sister and I stood in the entrance and peered in. I thought of us in our grandma’s twin beds, and the trees outside the window that I gazed at each morning. I remembered our grandma’s scratchy blankets, like the one covering our mother’s bed at the shelter, the comforting plunk-plunk of rain on the roof drowning out our mother’s nighttime rants. Her shelter room looked like a room in a barracks, and yet it was her safe house, her refuge, her home. In the end, my mother had one hundred daughters. They watched over her like my sister and I ultimately couldn’t do. We would have had to give up our lives for her, and our art, the two things she taught us to hold most sacred and dear.

When we walked back downstairs, the community room was already full of people—women from the shelter; the director and staff from MHS, social workers, Cathy and her family, Agostino and other old friends, Doug, his daughter Sianna, my sister’s husband, Kerry.

Many women from the shelter spoke, but the most poignant of all was a woman in her forties whose name I have since forgotten. She had lost her own mother to cancer, and had a sister who suffered from schizophrenia. “If you want to get attention for something, whisper,” she said. “Miss Norma had a life of whispering. She taught me to dismiss the noise. Pay attention to what really matters. The life that Miss Norma had is still going on in all of you. And I want you to know one more thing—I have walked in your shoes in sorrow,” she said. “But I know that God gives us no more than we can bear.”

I’m too tired to walk along the lake back to Nancy’s, so I hop the 146 going north on Michigan. The bus hums with chattering tourists; outside the open windows the clamoring
of Chicago construction and traffic assaults my brain. “Dismiss the noise,” I say to myself. I close my eyes and lean back to rest. I see my mother in a room of women talking loudly. She hears every conversation in her head, the radio next door, shouting from the kitchen, cars and dogs outside on the street. My mother says something barely audible above the noise... he says... he says... he says... the only time in her life that she ever told me what her voices said to her was at her death. My mother, and her sad beautiful life of whispering.

The next morning I take myself out to breakfast. I notice a homeless man outside the restaurant, leaning against the door. He’s half asleep or drunk. Should I offer him the rest of my eggs? But I’m too embarrassed. He might be insulted that I’m not offering him a meal of his own. Would my mother have taken the plate from my hands?

I cross the street to sit in the sun in front of the Art Institute. A red van with Jesus stickers all over it stops at the red light in front of the museum; the driver shouts into a loudspeaker, his angry voice spilling out into the street: “Have you received Him? The Man on the cross? The Man who died for your sins?” On the sidewalk nearby, I spot a homeless woman sitting on a milk crate, a cardboard sign saying that she is looking for work and a place to stay. I go up and ask if she needs anything to eat; she tells me she would die for a piece of chocolate cake. I run back to the place where I had breakfast, get her some cake, then return. “My mother was homeless too,” I say. “For seventeen years.” I suddenly want to tell everyone that she was homeless—friends, acquaintances, strangers. I want them to understand about the thin line, the one between their world and ours. I want to tell them that here too, outside this museum of beautiful things, there are also wonders—this woman on her crate, the brain-injured vet on the corner, the homeless man and his little girl sitting at the entrance to the El. I want to tell them what a woman said at my mother’s memorial: “When you die, there are always two dates, the one you were born on and the date you left this earth. The important dates are the ones in between. Whatever you do in this life,” she said, “you’ll be remembered for something.”

Later, on the plane, my head is splitting and my chest feels tight from grief. I try to summon the Russian fairy tale about the prince in exile and his beautiful swan-princess but all I can see is a drawer of dead trumpeter swans, smashed into a dark space too small for them to fit. I close my eyes to get the dead birds out of my head. I think of cerulean-blue waves, a swirling red skirt and a silver-white moon. A man waiting onshore, the flutter of his lover’s wings approaching. Did my mother read the story to me before she became too sick? Was my sister the only one who told me stories in the dark basement, the sun glinting in from the small window above? If only I could remember the swan, how its feathers turned to flesh, if I could remember how the swan broke the spell. But then, a swan cannot bring my mother back, nor can the mummified heart of a cat, a small box of feathers and bones.

When I get home, there is a letter waiting from Dr. Budd, the man who lived two doors down from our grandparents, whose wife I drew pictures for when I was a child. Even though he could afford to live in an upscale neighborhood, he never left our street. He always made house calls and treated our family for free. I feel a pang of regret for never thanking him enough, for not keeping in touch with Ruth and Army Armstrong and all the others who helped my sister and me navigate through those troubled years. At U-Haul, I had found copies of letters my mother wrote to Dr. Budd. I thought it was only right that he know how her story ended, but I hadn’t expected him to be alive. He wrote:

Dear Mira
,

This is a brief response to your letter. I am now in the terminal stages of life, age 99 years. Same address on W. 148th St. Same friends (Norma and others who have not died). I live at home and have daily care. Cannot travel and never leave the house. It is sad but familiar to recall the old 148th Street address of your family. I’ll search for a cassette of Chopin piano music if it exists and send if it is found. Your mother is playing on the cassette.

Yours,
            Dr. John Budd

After reading his letter, I turn on my computer. There is an e-mail from a Dr. Willard Gaylin, the man my mother asked me to find, the psychiatrist she said she used to know. I had no idea if he was real or not, but it turns out he is a well-known doctor and author. I had found his e-mail address online and told him about my mother’s death. He wrote back right away:

I had a very fleeting acquaintance with your mother when we were both at Glenville High School in Cleveland. I was seventeen and she was, I believe, a year or two younger. I remembered her then as a lovely and stable person... Many, many years later... after I began writing... she wrote me. It was obvious from her letters that she was having a serious breakdown, but even through the chaos of those communications, a bright, funny and creative personality was apparent... the enormity of her burdens and her burdens and her struggle for survival and dignity was deeply moving... Please accept my condolences to you and your sister.

Willard Gaylin

Among the dozens of e-mails are messages from people I don’t even know, offering their condolences, and in the post, a pile of letters from strangers and friends. After my mother’s death, I had sent an e-mail out about how we had found our mother at the end of her life. I had written about the shelter and the women there, and the people from MHS who roam the streets, looking for mentally ill men and women with no place to stay. I had asked my friends in the letter to please not be afraid and avert their eyes the next time they saw a woman on the street wearing a pile of coats and muttering to herself. Buy a hot chocolate for her, I said, or a sandwich. Tell her where to find the closest shelter. Vote for better legislation. Do something. The letter spread on the Internet and people started sending money to the shelter from all over the world—from Israel, Norway, Italy, the U.S., the Bahamas, everywhere.

And still, she is gone.