The Memory Palace (48 page)

In my studio, I take down a piece of lichen, a wasp’s nest, and mouse skeleton from the top of my bookshelf, put them in a box, and clear a nice clean space. There, I place some of the things I had collected from my mother’s wunderkammer: a bag of hair, a set of her teeth, my plastic pony with the broken leg, a child’s book about owls. I place a framed photograph of her in her favorite red-flowered dress, smiling, her arms outstretched toward the viewer. It was the last picture Doug and I put in the slide show we made for her memorial. The picture reminds me of what a man named Bert said to me that day. He had been her social worker a couple years before Melissa and Tim. She refused to work with him anymore after he took her to see her mother’s grave. At the memorial, Bert pulled my sister and me aside and said, “I’m so glad you found her. I was always afraid she’d freeze to death on a park bench. In all my years as a social worker, she was the hardest person I ever tried to help.”

If we had had Bert, Melissa, Tim, and MHS when we were growing up, I wonder if things would have turned out they way they did. Maybe our mother still would have taken to the streets. I’ll never know. But in the end, as my sister says, we got the best of her back—her sweet essence that not even schizophrenia could take away.

I set my mother’s paint box next to her photograph on the shelf. All the greens are gone, and the yellows. I place a prayer card I had found in her purse after she died—a prayer to Saint Jude. It begins: “Saint Jude, patron saint of hopeless and difficult cases.” Next to the card, I arrange my mother’s sock filled with her seventeen keys. One of them is the key that opened up her storage room at U-Haul. Another is for a safe-deposit box that her bank had neglected to tell me about until after her death. The next time I go back to Cleveland, I will open up the box and see what’s inside. After that, there will be fifteen keys left. One, I believe, is the key to her old house. What do the rest of them open?

The last thing I put on the shelf are her ashes. They are still in the white plastic bag I separated from the box my sister has on her shelf in upstate New York. Soon I will make an urn for her, a beautiful Italianate one with painted birds and flowers and, most likely, a tiger and an owl.
When the time comes—maybe this summer or next—Natalia and I will spread our mother’s ashes across the country. We will scatter them in all the shelters, motels, bus stations, airports, and parks where she slept for seventeen years. We’ll scatter them in her old backyard where she spent so many nights, sleeping on the wet grass, waiting to be let in. With whatever of her remains, I will come home and plant a pink azalea, or maybe a tall and sturdy pine.

If memory is a palace, let me live there, forever with her, somewhere in that place between sleep and morning. Without her long nights waiting in the rain, without the weight of guilt I bear when I buy a new pair of shoes. Let me dream a palace in the clear night sky, somewhere between Perseus, the Hero, and Cygnus, the Swan—a dark comforting place. A place lit by stars and a winter moon.

Behold the fields and caves, the measureless caverns of memory, immeasurably full of immeasurable things... I pass among them all, I fly from here to there, and nowhere is there any end...

St. Agostine,
The Confessions

Grateful acknowledgment is due to the following publications in which some paragraphs, in one form or another, first appeared: Artful Dodge, The Kenyon Review, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, The Bellingham Review, and Another Chicago Magazine. I am also grateful to the following institutions that have given me financial assistance and/or encouragement: A Room of Her Own Foundation, the American Scandinavian Foundation, The Author’s League Fund, The Barbara Deming Money for Women Fund, The Carnegie Foundation, Change, Inc., the Fulbright-Hays Foundation, The Gottlieb Foundation, The Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Pen-American, The Pollock Krasner Foundation and the Ragdale Foundation.

An enormous heartfelt thanks to all the people who helped forge this book into its final form: University of Massachusetts writing professors Sabina Murray, Dara Wier, and Chris Bachelder for their dedication, support, and insight; Jeremy Church, Brian Baldi, Andre Kahlil, and all my other wonderful colleagues in the M. F. A. Program at UMass, especially Jedediah Berry, whose deft hand as an editor was invaluable to me, and Rob Morgan, who coaxed me closer to the heart of my story. Thanks to Sylvia Snape and Wanda Bak for their good humor and support and to the great staff at University of Massachusetts’s Disability Services. Profound thanks to the following people for championing me at different points along the way: Brenda Miller, Ted Gup, Meredeth Hall, Mary Johnson, Michael McColly, Audrey Niffenegger, Michael Steinberg, and Jody Rein. And much, much gratitude to my dear friends who read parts of or earlier drafts: Ricky Baruc, Alex Chitty, Amy Fagin, Alyssa Dee Krauss, Nancy Plotkin, Jane and Steven Schoenberg, Betsy Scofield and in particular, David Skillicorn, whose insightful editorial suggestions were invaluable to me.

There are several people without whom, this book would not exist: First and foremost, the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary
Agency—in particular, the brilliant Esmond Harmsworth, the sensitive and astute Colleen Rafferty, and last but not least, my agent and dear friend, Jennifer Gates, whose faith in me and whose compassion and dedication carried me through to the completion of this book. I can’t imagine having written it without her. I am also very grateful to Jane Rosenman from Algonquin Press for keen editorial assistance, sensitivity and kindness. I owe the deepest gratitude to the entire editorial team at Free Press for their enthusiasm, commitment, and collaborative spirit: Publisher Martha Levin, Associate Publisher Suzanne Donahue, Maura O’Brien, and everyone else who helped on this book. I am particularly indebted to my two incredibly devoted editors, Dominick Anfuso and Leah Miller, for asking the hard questions, for having faith that I could answer them, and for having the imagination, insight, and patience that helped me wrestle this book into its published form. Much thanks also to Free Press publicity team: Carisa Hays, Nicole Kalian, Giselle Roig and Laura Cooke, and to the design team that made this book beautiful: Eric Fuenticilla for his stunning cover, and Ellen Sasahara for her beautiful interior design and her collaborative and good-natured spirit.

Special thanks to: The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Jones Library of Amherst, Massachusetts, Janet Poirrier and the Frost Library of Amherst College, illuminator Mary Teichman, photographer extraordinaire Adam Laipson, art history scholars John Varriano and Wendy Watson, Cathy Tedford and the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery at St. Lawrence University, David Willard and the Field Museum of Natural History’s Division of Birds, and to Mary Sherman and Transcultural Exchange. Thanks to Risitiina Nystad, Maia Hætta, and the Sámi community in Guovdageiadnu, Norway; Agostino Cerasuolo, Bea-Britt, Lille Mira, Ida and Michel, Bob Marstall, Zach Lewis, Deb Habib, Levi Baruc, Nick, Gabe, and John Hennessy, Kerry Grant, Lisa Finestone, Mary Ann and Tony Palmieri, Barbara Metz, and the River Valley Illustrators Guild. Boundless thanks to Alex Chitty for technical and artistic advice, and for being the other half of my brain and to Stephen Bauer for putting the bee in my bonnet. To Merrill and Goose for tubeworms and fiddle tunes; to Sadie, Zoe, Topaz, and Sophie; to Mark and Ellie Mesler, David and Barbara Regenspan and all my friends who kept
post boxes for me over the years, and to Cathy Oakley Smith (and her family) for being there at the beginning and at the end.

I am indebted to Dr. Constance Carpenter-Bixler for her support, wisdom and help following my accident and to my amazing attorney, Michael Kaplan without whose assistance I would never have had the funds to write this book, and whose dedication to those suffering from brain injuries goes way beyond the call of duty. Enormous thanks to Diana Smarse from the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission, for all her wisdom and support. I am also immensely grateful to the Mental Health Services of Cleveland, Inc., and the PATH Program, the program that found my mother and gave her safe harbor. Thanks to former director of MHS, Inc. Steven Friedman, to Susan Neth, Suellen Saunders, Renée Parks, Pastor Tricia Gilbert, and to Tim Raymond, Melissa Yuhas, and Bert Rahl for helping my mother in her final years. I have no words to express my gratitude to the staff and residents at the Community Women’s Shelter of Cleveland—without them my mother might have perished on the streets. And much thanks to the dedicated staff at the Westlake Healthcare Center and the Hospice of the Western Reserve who took such incredible care of my mother in her final weeks. I am also forever grateful to the families who helped my mother throughout her difficult life: The Armstrongs, the Budds, the Bentes, the Brunners, the Cerasuolos, Gloria Johnson and family, the Sewells, the Stincics, the
Sullivans, Philip Smith and family, Mike and Perry Drake, and a host of thousands. I apologize if I cannot remember every name.

Profound gratitude to Jya and Sianna Plavin, who read earlier drafts of this book, and who have, over the last ten years, provided me with encouragement, love, understanding and comic relief. Immeasurable thanks to Doug Plavin, my best friend, beloved companion and faithful reader—whose love, honesty and unshakable belief in me kept me going until the very end. And finally, to my sister, Natalia Rachel Singer, who wrote her story first, and whose fierce determination to be a writer, against all odds, will always be an inspiration to me.

Mira Bartók
is a Chicago-born artist and writer and the author of twenty-eight books for children. Her writing has appeared in several literary journals and anthologies and has been noted in The Best American Essays series. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she runs Mira’s List, a blog (
www.miraslist.blogspot.com
) that helps artists find funding and residencies all over the world.
The Memory Palace
is Mira’s first book for adults. You can find her at:
www.mirabartok.com