The Memory Palace (33 page)

At the end of her letter, my mother wrote:
Baruch atah adonai, elohenu melech ha’olam. I am teaching myself Hebrew among other things. Did you know that green plants are primary producers, the first link in the food chain? Did you know that photosynthesis makes things from light?

In my memory palace, I place my mother’s map in an empty sun-filled room the color of sand. I place it next to the khamsa, the little hand charm the woman in East Jerusalem gave me. Next to it is a photograph of me in the desert on a horse, squinting at the sun. The horse is tall and chestnut-brown; the rider is still harboring a secret.

On Love and Forgetting

I have forgotten everything I have ever learned. My left hand looks like an over ripe banana and I have momentarily misplaced the continent of Africa yet again. I closely guard what I carry and never ever say, “I’ll be back.” Sometimes, in my room, I am soothed by the FM radio playing Spanish music I like, especially Navarra. It always reminds me of my unused erotic life, that is, unused by me. The Question at hand is: Why did I pick a lemon in the garden of love where only peaches grow?

Many fathers are gone. Some leave, some are left. Some return, unknown and hungry. Only the dog remembers.

Nick Flynn,
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

My first memory is not about my mother.

It’s the summer of 1962; I am three years old and my sister is four. A friend of our father’s from Chicago has lent us a house near the Indiana Dunes by Lake Michigan so our father can take a break from the city and finish his second book, The Amnesiacs. My sister and I find a family of lizards inside the mailbox in front of the house, half hidden by wild asparagus, beach grass, and flowers. We feed the lizards lettuce and bugs and take them out to play. When our parents divorce and we move to Cleveland the following year, I will lie and tell children in my kindergarten class that I used to raise baby dinosaurs by the sea.

I have three big black dogs with pointy ears. Sometimes the dogs and I slide down a dune to the lake and race along the beach. I collect things that wash up onshore and put them in a bag—shells, driftwood, colored glass. One day the dogs and I follow the sound of birds into the woods. I can’t find the birds; they are hiding in the thick of the leaves. When I get tired I take a nap beneath a tree. The dogs curl up beside me, their breath steady and warm. When I wake up, each has a bloody rabbit in its mouth. I carry the
rabbits home so my father can save them, but he is angry and grabs them from my hands.

The picture left indelible in my brain: A tall dark man tossing three dead rabbits over a dune. It’s a scene in slow motion, like a soldier’s parting embrace. The man’s face is tight and determined as he looks straight ahead. One by one the rabbits sail through the air, landing somewhere below, into the tangle of blackberry brambles, onto a sandy path, or farther out to the deep waters of Lake Michigan.

When he’s done the man turns, walks in long strides toward the small white house. His hands are stained with blood. He opens the door and goes inside. The little girl slips by unseen. She watches the man open the refrigerator and pour a glass of cool white milk. The girl creeps back outside. Clouds gather. The girl kneels at the edge of a dune. In my palace of memories, the rabbits are safe, hiding in an alcove. Above them hangs a memento—a lock of my mother’s hair; below are the keys to my father’s secret life.

When I came across my mother’s diaries, I found an undated document my mother had written by hand. Part of it was devoted to her life with my father:
My first week in Los Angeles I met Paul Herr and thereafter from the late 40s until 1963, he was the dominant person in my life. I bring this up as technically it could be said that it was an arranged kidnap. Those years I did typing for him; cared for the apartment and worked in an office. I paid for my own clothes and some of the household items. However, I might say that I did have periods of amnesia that lasted a very long time. After we divorced I had no advisor, my furniture disappeared and I reported increasing blindness. I returned to Cleveland to live near my parents. Support checks came six years and then they stopped. I applied for Welfare in 1969. My hospitalizations in Cleveland, beginning in 1964, I attribute to outer environment. At the deepest level, it was a war zone and that should be taken into consideration.

In the same box, I also found a letter from my father to my grandparents. In his letter, dated July 18, 1960, he describes the evening he and my mother spent with a top editor from Random House and his wife in Manhattan. The editor had offered him a three-book deal based on having read only half of my father’s first novel. At the fancy dinner in New York, there is talk
of television and radio shows, of big features in magazines. “As guests of Mr. Geis and his wife,” my father writes, “Norma and I dined on caviar, champagne, and duck.” He goes on to say, “I am very tired of working all day at some difficult job and doing my
real
work at night. Now I feel free, and it is a very fine feeling.” He closes the letter with the only reference to my sister and I that I have ever seen: “The children are well and growing like weeds. Myra is talking. She also climbs like a monkey. Love, Paul.”

Who was my father? Why did he disappear?

Years before Katrina stampeded into New Orleans I decided to go down to Louisiana to look for my father’s grave. It was 1994 and I had been living near Boston for about a year. The stress of living in the same city as my mother had gotten to be too much so I moved east, not far from Cambridge. What spurred the decision to look for my father’s grave was the sudden death of a close friend’s father. At the funeral, I decided that I wanted to know the end of my own father’s story. I also needed a break. I had been working over fifty hours a week on my book series for children, holed up in my apartment writing for months.

I knew my sister’s spring break from her teaching job was coming up so I checked out flights from Boston Logan. She could drive down from Canton, New York, and we could fly out together. I called up Natalia and told her how much fun it would be to go on vacation, just the two of us, a whole week in New Orleans.

“A sister vacation,” she said. “I love the idea!”

“There’s one small hitch, though—I want to find our father’s house and grave.”

“Whatever I can do to help,” said Natalia. “But just so you know, I made peace with all that years ago.”

The night before we left, I pulled out the map I bought of New Orleans and looked for Napoleon Boulevard, my father’s last home, not far from the Garden District. I had gotten his address from a copy of the coroner’s report my mother had sent me years ago in 1986 when she first found out about his death. The boardinghouse my father had lived in was only a few blocks from my sister’s and
my B&B. Natalia and I could even walk there. Then I found St. Rosalie Cemetery, just west of the city of Kenner, inside Jefferson Parish. I used the legend on my map to measure the distance to the cemetery from our father’s house. Paul Herr was buried off Route 61, not far from the river, only fourteen miles from bed to grave.

Our first day in town, Natalia and I eat breakfast at an open-air café; we drink café au lait and devour hot doughy beignets like two messy girls, powdered sugar on our faces and our hands. We stroll past pink and yellow antebellum houses with fluted pillars and lacey iron gates, beneath a canopy of rambling trees, their green leafy arms stretched out across wide boulevards. “Those are called live oaks,” my sister informs me. “They stay green all year-round.” She has done her homework about where we are and I haven’t read one single word about this place. I try to keep up with her when we walk. I am slower, more prone to meandering; she moves with a fast clip, hands clasped behind her back, body forward, a professor lost in her thoughts.

“So when do you want to look for the grave?” I ask.

“Let’s go later in the week. I’d like to have a little vacation first.”

While my sister is getting coffee, I people watch in Jackson Square: A beautiful dark-eyed child in a bright red stroller stares into my eyes, while his parents shout at each other in spitfire Italian between bites of muffuletta sandwiches. A woman with long white hair, tattered sundress, and gauze patch over one eye, Mardi Gras beads around her neck, walks in circles around my bench, singing old chansons. She is my mother; she is everyone’s mother, half blind, and lost. An emaciated man without a shirt stumbles by, drunk in the middle of the day, talking to God about a devil in Congo Square. He is my father, drunken nomad, unknown, hungry, and lost. An unfamiliar world is stretched out before me: crowds of tourists and palm readers at every corner, tap dancers, fiddlers, psychics, and shops where people can buy gris-gris and spells. I’ve only been in Boston a year but I could pick up and move here too; this place is as good as any other. The air is warm and full of music, and there’s a river that leads to secret
oceans, enchanted worlds. Any place could be my home. Was that how my father chose this place? Just a random temperate place, a place as good as any?

Before my sister and I left for New Orleans, I wrote my mother at her most recent post office box to ask if she would tell me more about our father. Did he have other children? Did he ever marry again? My mother wrote back:
Your father was a drunk and a louse. I remember nothing else about our years together. I was kidnapped and given chemicals to forget.

My sister has a New Orleans guidebook she consults daily. She circles things she wants to see: the tomb of voodoo priestess Marie Laveau, the Musée Conti Wax Museum, Preservation Hall, the all day/all night Café du Monde, and the best places to eat chicken étouffée. I follow her lead but am more interested in things we see and hear by chance—the ancient washboard player with the scar across his cheek, the tap-dancing boys at the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse, the zydeco accordion I hear wafting down an alleyway.

On day three of our trip my sister and I shop for flowery dresses, the kind we’d never buy back home. It’s difficult not to think of my mother, somewhere on the streets of Chicago, or some other large city, carrying her possessions in a cart. Or storing them somewhere in some cold, dark room. It’s hard not to think of things that she might need. When I am in a store, I can’t get her out of my mind: Should I buy my mother the cheap gloves or the expensive insulated ones? The nice ones will keep her warmer when she’s waiting outside a shelter, but what if someone steals them? The cheap ones will be easier to wash. How does a homeless person wash her clothes?

I look around at all the ruffled dresses in the shop—the big straw hats with bows, espadrilles in every color of the rainbow. Why shouldn’t I get her something frivolous? Why should it always be easy-to-clean socks and shirts, sweaters you don’t have to wash by hand, sturdy hats that can withstand the snow and rain?

“Can I help you?” asks the clerk. “Is there something that you need?”

“No, thank you,” I say. But the woman is annoyingly cheerful and pushy;
keeps following me around, picking out things for me to try on. I feel like asking her if she has something festive for a woman who is homeless but I hold my tongue.