The Memory Palace (4 page)

Later that day, my mother suddenly became concerned about her things at the shelter. “Where’s my black backpack? Where’s my purse? Who took them?”

I asked Tim, her shy young social worker from MHS, to retrieve her two large garbage bags from the shelter on Payne Avenue. I assumed these were the only things she owned in the world. In the years that we were apart, she often mentioned in her letters that she still had some of our family things in storage. Was it true or did she just imagine they were locked up somewhere for safekeeping? Sometimes she wrote me urgent letters, begging me to come to Cleveland and help her move her things
from one place to another, but I suspected that it was just a ploy to get me to come back home.

In the hospital parking lot Tim and I rummaged through her bags to see if there was anything she might want. We found her backpack in one of them, filthy and ripped, filled with laundry detergent, toothpaste, damp cigarettes, receipts, a diary, a sketchbook, a medical dictionary, incontinence pads, and a dirty white sock filled with keys. I took the keys and counted them, seventeen in all. Most looked like they went to lockers and storage units. One was a house key. Did it unlock our old red brick house?

Back in her room I showed her the sock. “Where do these go to?” I asked.

“I’m tired. I don’t know. Let me sleep.” Then she motioned me to come closer. “I have Grandma’s diamond rings for you girls. They’re locked up in a safety-deposit box.”

“Where?” I asked. “What box? What are all these keys for?”

“Tell you later. Too tired now. Shut lights. Don’t let them steal my pack.”

That evening, in the hotel room, I picked up the diary I had found in her backpack. It was a pocket-sized purple notebook with red hearts on the cover, like the diary of a ten-year-old girl. I wondered if she had more of them hidden somewhere. I flipped through the coffee-stained pages. The book had the same faint odor of stale smoke and mildew that her letters had. I turned to her last few entries. Two weeks before the paramedics picked her up from the Community Women’s Shelter, my mother wrote:
Magma: Hot liquid rock can be three shapes: spherical, spiral or a rod. It flows out like lava or cools underground.

They had told me at the shelter that when they called 911 that day, she couldn’t stop vomiting and her stomach was distended as if she were about to give birth. “That Norma, she didn’t want to go to the hospital,” one woman had said to me on the phone. “She is one stubborn lady.” She had been sick for months, but wouldn’t see a doctor. Finally, the day the ambulance came to take her to the hospital, the women at the shelter convinced her to go.

In her diary, my mother wrote:
If lava reaches Earth’s surface it turns into igneous rock. Basalt: dark gray rock forms when magma cools into a solid
. My mother had been studying geology. I turned back the pages. Before geology, she had reread all of Edgar Allan Poe. Before that she had turned to the stars:
Recently, I
had a dream of a cataclysm. Was not prepared for study of the planets, which has fevered my imagination once again.

Before I left for Cleveland I had been studying geology too. I was in the middle of a book about Nicolaus Steno, the seventeenth century Danish anatomist, whom some call the grandfather of geology. Steno was fascinated by what the oceans hid and left behind. I had read about how one day, in 1666, young Steno was in an anatomical theater in Florence, Italy, dissecting the head of a shark. It wasn’t just any shark but a great white. The shark was a wonder, and Steno’s patron, the Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici, wanted to know what was inside. This was the time when wonder and scientific inquiry were intricately entwined—when collectors collected the rare and the mysterious, the miraculous and mundane, from the bounty that explorers brought back to Europe from the New World.

When Steno peered into the monster’s mouth he noticed that the shark’s teeth resembled the little stones people called “tongue stones,” or glossopetrae, the mysterious stones Pliny the Elder said fell from the heavens on dark and moonless nights, what the church said were miracle stones left from Noah’s Great Flood. Steno’s mind leapt from shark to sea to a question that plagued him for the rest of his life: why are seashells found on mountaintops? Even his scientific colleagues thought the fossils were signs from God. Nicolaus Steno laid the foundation for reading the archival history of the earth: How crystals are formed, how land erodes and sediment is made over time. How over centuries, seashells become fossils embedded deep inside the bedrock of mountains.

My mother would have liked Nicolaus Steno. She’d marvel at the way his mind flew from one thought to another, uncovering the truth about ancient seas, how he learned to read the memory of a landscape, one layer at a time. The earth is also a palimpsest—its history scraped away time and time again. If my mother were well enough, I would tell her this. She’d light up a cigarette, pour herself a cup of black coffee, and get out her colored pens. Then she’d draw a giant chart with a detailed geological timeline, revealing the stratification of the earth.

That Tuesday night I met my sister, Natalia, at the airport. I spotted her cherry-red coat in the thick throng of hurried holiday travelers. She lugged a huge suitcase behind her, walking a fast clip in high black boots. Like me, it had been close to seventeen years since she had last seen our mother, but my sister had made the painful decision never to write to her. When I had called her about our mother dying, I didn’t know whether or not she would come. Her last vision of our mother was a nightmare, indelible in her mind. I was relieved when, without even deliberating, she said she’d join me in Cleveland.

“Nattie, I’m so happy you’re here.” I ran up to hug her. I had almost called her Rachel, her birth name before she changed it more than a decade before. Being back in Cleveland made her newer name feel strange on my tongue for the first time in years. Just as well. Around our mother, we’d have to be Myra and Rachel one last time.

“How is she?” asked Natalia.

“Don’t be shocked. She looks like a survivor from the camps.”

“I really want to see her. Let’s go first thing in the morning.”

“Before I forget, I wanted to tell you—I found some keys. And receipts from U-Haul. She must have a storage room somewhere.”

“What do you think is in there?”

“I don’t know. But we can go this week and see. I imagine there’s a lot of junk.”

The next morning Natalia woke up early to work out in the gym. She has always kept a strict regimen—a daily exercise routine, a rigorous schedule for writing, teaching, grading her students’ papers before bed. While Natalia was out of the room, I skimmed through my mother’s dairy. She wrote about staying up all night in the rain on a stranger’s porch and trying to sleep at the bus station without getting mugged. Should I read any of this to my sister?

When we walked into our mother’s room at the hospital, she looked up at Natalia and said, “Who are you?” She turned to me. “Who’s this lady?”

How could my mother not recognize her? Did she look that different seventeen years ago? The last time our mother saw her, Natalia was running away from the house on West 148th Street. Maybe that was how our
mother remembered her—a terrified young girl in flight, long hair flying in the cold January wind.

“It’s me. Rachel,” said my sister.

How could we explain that we had changed our names so she could never find us? That we had been so scared of her all these years? She was the cry of madness in the dark, the howling of wind outside our doors. I had changed my name the year after my sister did, reluctantly, giving up the name signed at the bottom of my paintings so I would be harder to find. But I could never relinquish my first name. I simply exchanged a y for an i. My sister couldn’t give up her first name either and kept it sandwiched between the first and the last: Natalia Rachel Singer. She took Isaac Bashevis Singer’s last name, I took Béla Bartók’s.

“Rachel? I thought you were dead.”

“I’m not dead,” said my sister. “I’m here, right beside you.”

“Is it really you?”

Natalia pulled up a chair next to the bed. “It’s really me. How are you feeling?”

“You girls have got to get me out of here! We have to go back to the house. There are criminals inside.”

“Don’t worry, the house is fine,” I lied to her. “Everything is just like you left it. You can go home as soon as you are better.”

After all these years, our mother was still obsessed about her parents’ house she’d sold in 1989. When she signed the papers over to the new owner, she believed that she was only renting it to him for a while. Not long after the sale, and after my sister’s and my last failed attempt to get her a legal guardian and medical treatment, our mother disappeared into the streets.

“Do you have a husband?” my mother asked Natalia. “Are you wearing a ring?”

“Yes,” said my sister. “I’ll tell you all about him.”

Natalia, who had seventeen years of stored-up conversations, began to talk. But after a few minutes, I could tell our mother was too exhausted and frail to listen anymore.

“She can’t tolerate that much talking or sound,” I said. “She gets overwhelmed like me. Just sit with her. That’s enough; she’s happy you’re here.”

Natalia took out a brush from her purse. “Can I brush your hair?” she asked.

“If you like,” said my mother.

I looked at them, mother and eldest daughter, strangers for seventeen years. “I’ll leave you two alone,” I said, and left.

If you glanced in the room at that moment, you would see two women in tranquil silence, one tenderly brushing the hair of the other, as if she had been doing it her entire life.

When I called U-Haul, they confirmed our mother had a storage room there. It was at Kamm’s Corners in West Park, not far from our old neighborhood. Early the next day, on Thursday, before heading over to the hospital, Natalia and I drove to the U-Haul on Lorain Avenue. Natalia sat in the passenger’s seat, clutching the map, nervous about getting lost. I expected to get lost. I got lost nearly every day.

When we arrived, the man at the counter said, “Norma used to change clothes in there sometimes, even in winter. There’s no light or heat in the rooms. She was one tough broad.”

Natalia and I wound our way through the maze of corridors. I could see my breath and regretted not having brought a hat or a pair of gloves. Fluorescent lights hummed, casting a pale, eerie glow on the high metal walls. I wondered how many other homeless men and women used these rooms to store their belongings, to change, or to catch up on sleep. Finally we came to our mother’s room; it was just like all the others, eight-by-eight feet. I pulled the keys out of the sock. We tried them all. The last one fit; the padlock clicked open.

I hesitated for a moment before I looked in. I was terribly curious to know what was inside, but I also wished I never had found the key. I was afraid of what we would find, even more afraid to find out what had been lost. Wasn’t it enough that we were here, now, in her final days? I shone my flashlight into the cold dark room. Things were piled up to the ceiling: furniture, boxes, trash, clothes, books, cans of soup. I imagined her changing clothes in the dark, shivering, cursing to herself, taking off one shirt and
putting on another, then layering on three more for warmth. Natalia and I began to dig.

My sister and I worked fast, sorting things into piles. We needed to get back to the hospital and didn’t have the luxury of taking our time. There was that familiar sense of purpose that I hadn’t felt in years, that old “it’s an emergency, let’s just get the job done” kind of feeling. I was glad not to do it alone.

I first tried to separate all the trash from things that we needed to save. I almost tossed out one of my mother’s old grimy pocketbooks when I felt something hard inside. I pulled out a butcher knife. “Jesus, look at this,” I said.

“Do you think that’s the one she had when the police caught her at Logan Airport?” said Natalia. “I’m sure she was on her way to find me.”

Natalia and I excavated. We found a 1950s Geiger counter, and a bag of our mother’s hair with a note taped to it with instructions on how to make a wig. I found a chart she had drawn showing all the nuclear power plants in the world, similar to one she had sent me when I lived in the Norwegian Arctic ten years before. There were boxes crammed with newspaper articles on cryogenics, alien abductions, radon poisoning, global warming, child abuse, train wrecks, and unsolved murders in Chicago. I discovered a huge box labeled “Scribing Books” filled with notebooks devoted to my mother’s eclectic research: geometry, poetry, chemistry, botany, geography, art history, medicine, fairy tales, zoology, car mechanics, physics, and the Bible. For each subject, she made vocabulary lists with detailed definitions, something I would have done even before my brain injury. Her files could have been my files; her notes, mine.