Fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (12 page)

The only rumor we know to be false is that they’ve been terminated. Mrs. Williams is a good housemother, if a bit stern, balancing order, discipline, humor, and kindness. When I first arrived at Claremont, she terrified me. She was solemn and formal, and I never saw her smile. Eventually, I came to see that her smile is a subtle, British sort, which doesn’t raise the edges of her mouth or make her eyes twinkle but pulls her chin down toward her neck and makes her gaunt cheeks sink deeper. She discreetly parcels out affection to those who need it most, with a pat on the back during lights-out or an extra biscuit at teatime. If she delivers the post in the morning, and someone’s got a letter from a chap, Mrs. Williams’s chin goes down, and her eyebrows go up, and she takes great pleasure in keeping everyone in suspense. On the rare occasion that she laughs openly, her chuckle feels worth waiting for.

Mr. Williams isn’t paid to be a houseparent, and he has no duties per se; he is our housefather by marriage. A dapper gentleman, balding with a silver mustache, he wears three-piece suits and looks as though he might smoke a pipe, or at least hold one, were it not for Christian Science. If Mrs. Williams evokes stern, formal propriety most of the time, Mr. Williams is jovial and charming always, adored by everyone. One Saturday early on, when I was feeling particularly homesick, he invited me to bring a friend for high tea at his favorite spot in Esher. I felt like a beloved granddaughter.

After several days of official silence and collective speculation, the mood among the boarders is somber, worry-laden. We still have not seen Mr. and Mrs. Williams, and nobody has told us anything. One morning during Quiet Time, while Mrs. Mills sits in one corner
of the common room reading from her
Science and Health
, a lower-fifth former scribbles something on a piece of paper and passes it to another girl, who is sitting next to her. She reads it and passes it to Susie, who passes it to me.

It’s Mr. Williams and it’s serious.

After Quiet Time we learn from the lower-fifth former that in the middle of the night she woke up hungry, so she snuck down to the kitchen that we use for afternoon tea and last laps. There, she found Mrs. Williams alone at the small table, drinking a cup of hot milk and Horlicks. Mrs. Williams told her that Mr. Williams was working out a problem in Science and that their daughter was on her way home to lend support.

She says Mrs. Williams looks awful.

Later in the day, Mary Williams arrives by taxi while we are having our tea, and she goes directly into her parents’ quarters and shuts the door.

The next morning, an ambulance arrives at the school, and a stretcher is carried by two men up the front steps and the grand staircase and wheeled into the Williamses’ quarters. Several of us are milling about nearby, and Mrs. Mills emerges from her office and tells us to go to our rooms. Minutes later, peering out the windows, we see a very old-looking, motionless Mr. Williams being transferred to the ambulance. Mrs. Williams disappears in the ambulance with him, and Mary follows behind in her parents’ car.

For the rest of the day, we speculate more. We conclude that Mr. Williams must have had a stroke, or maybe a heart attack, because one day he was fine, and the next he wasn’t. We wonder aloud where the ambulance has taken him: to a hospital? or maybe Hawthorne House? Nobody says so, but we are all wondering if we will see him again. I find myself thinking about Grandpa. For the first time his death feels very real, and immediate, as though it happened today, here. I cry on and off all afternoon.

At dinner that night, the headmistress, Miss Doran, says grace as usual.

“Good evening, girls,” Miss Doran says. “Before we sit down to our meal, I know that Mr. Williams is on everyone’s mind. Mrs. Williams has asked me to assure you that he is doing well, and that he is in good care. We can keep the Williamses in our prayers, and hold fast to our understanding of man’s perfection …”

I look around the dining room and see that several other girls are crying. “… Mrs. Eddy states in
Science and Health
that ‘Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need.’ But do you know what she says next? ‘It is not well to imagine that Jesus demonstrated the divine power to heal only for a select number or for a limited period of time, since to all mankind and in every hour, divine Love supplies all good.’

“And now, shall we bow our heads? For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.”

“Amen,” we all say.

“Please be seated.”

I pick at my dinner and, afterward, go back to the dorm and call home, reversing the charges. Mom answers the phone. I want to know if Mr. Williams is at Hawthorne House.

“Lucia, I can’t tell you that.”

“I want to know if he’s okay,” I demand.

“I can’t tell you where he is, but I can tell you—and you know this—that Mr. Williams is the perfect reflection of God. He cannot be sick.”

“Is he going to get better? Did he have a stroke?” I ask this frantically, angrily, not knowing exactly what a stroke is but understanding fully that such a question will not be answered. After a long silence, Mom replies with a familiar Sunday school question:

“Lucia,” she says, “are sin, disease, and death real?”

“Mom! Stop!” I scream.

“Lucia?” The louder I am, the quieter she is.

I am sobbing now.

“Would you like to speak to Dad?” she asks calmly.

“No!”

She waits silently. She is probably praying.

“Mom: James is
dead
! Grandpa is
dead
! Mr. Williams is
sick.
”

“Mrs. Eddy says …” My mother pauses, perhaps searching for the exact quote. “ ‘Sin, disease, and death have no foundations in Truth.’ ”

“Mom, I have to go.”

Two days later, Miss Doran comes to the common room for our Quiet Time—a first. I know, in my bones, why she is here. We stand when she enters the room.

“Good morning, everyone.” Her voice is lower than usual.

“Good morning, Miss Doran,” we say in unison.

“Please, be seated. Last evening, Mr. Williams passed on. For the next several days, Mrs. Williams will not be working in the capacity of housemother, but if you see her, you may offer her some kind words. In the meantime, Mrs. Mills will carry on with house-parenting duties.”

Miss Doran leaves the common room.

There is no memorial service. After several days Mrs. Williams is back at work. I don’t know what to say to her, so I say nothing. Death is not an illusion. It is real.

My parents’ new
home is a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in Hopewell, New Jersey, the next town over from Princeton, where there is a Christian Science care facility called Tenacre Foundation. There, Mom plans to continue the nurse’s training that she started at Hawthorne House, and I suppose Dad’s practice will have a ready supply of patients. He will also commute to Manhattan twice a week to share an office close to Grand Central Terminal with some other practitioners.

I don’t know why they have decided to move again, and why
now; whether happiness—or even the exchange rate, which Dad was always checking in the
Financial Times
—has anything to do with it. If they’ve been less than satisfied with our schooling, they’ve never let on. Maybe they want to be closer to “home” but not too close?

Sherman and I finish the school year in England before joining them; Sherman enrolls in Princeton Day School, which cannot accommodate me in their eleventh-grade class. So I am sent to the Emma Willard School, a girls’ boarding school in upstate New York. I don’t ask why Sherman and I are being allowed to attend non–Christian Science schools. The decision feels to me like a stroke of luck.

“I’m having trouble
seeing the blackboard,” I say to my mother during one of our usual Sunday evening checking-in telephone calls. I’m midway through my first year at Emma Willard.

“Do you want to talk to Dad?” Mom asks. It is a quick, natural assumption for her, but that is not why I am calling.

“No,” I say cautiously. I swallow hard. My mouth is suddenly dry. “I think maybe I should go to an eye doctor.”

There is silence at the other end of the line. I realize I am holding my breath.

I can tell that my mom’s hand is covering the mouthpiece of the phone. There is mumbling, then my mother hands the telephone to my father. My resolve weakens a bit. I’m not sure I can do this.

“Hi, Loosh,” Dad says sweetly. “What’s up?”

“Well, I’m having trouble seeing the board during math class. My teacher thinks maybe I need glasses. And last week, when I took the SATs, I got a really bad headache. After the exam, everything was totally blurry. So … I thought I’d make an appointment with an eye doctor.”

I thought I’d
 … For a brief moment this casually mentioned plan
convinces me that Dad will view it as reasonable. But there is another long silence.

I sit down on the wooden bench in the phone booth. I’m glad I didn’t bring this up face-to-face during the Christmas break. The two-hundred-mile distance between school and home is a comfort.

“Don’t you want to give Science a chance?” my dad asks tenderly. He isn’t angry. He sounds hurt, and I realize I have disappointed him. I feel sort of bad that I am letting him down, but not bad enough to give in. I
am
getting headaches, and the equations on the blackboard
are
fuzzy. But it is also true—and I keep this to myself—that I have always secretly wanted glasses. My best friend in fourth grade had glasses, and braces, and a dad who worked at General Mills, and I coveted all three. And now maybe I actually need them.

“I’ve already tried praying about it,” I say to my father. This is a lie.

“Well, why don’t you give it another shot?” he asks, as though I have double-faulted on the tennis court. “Do you know what Mrs. Eddy says about vision?”

I can picture the framed print of an ageless Mrs. Eddy, a Victorian New England Everygrandmother, on the wall of my father’s study, in three-quarter view, with a somber expression and deep-set brown eyes gazing—not squinting—into the distance.

“She says that eyes are ‘spiritual discernment,—not material but mental.’ If you think about your vision as a God-given ability to see Truth, and if you
focus
on seeing that perfection in everything, then you will understand that clarity must come from your thoughts … not from a pair of glasses. Perhaps it’s your mental outlook that needs correction.”

My father says this delicately, as I imagine he might if he were talking to one of his patients. I concede to myself that he may have a point, and yet I am unswayed.

“I
have
prayed,” I repeat, “the board’s still blurry. And choosing Christian Science,” I remind him, “is up to the individual.”

“You haven’t really tried,” he says firmly, just above a whisper.

“Yes, I
have.
”

“Not really,” he coaxes.

“I just think maybe I should get glasses,” I say, holding my ground.

There is a long pause now.

“What do you want to do
that
for?” he blurts out.

“So that I can read without squinting. So that I don’t get headaches.” I brace myself. I know that mentioning these imperfections is taboo.

“You’re not getting headaches!”
he spits out contemptuously, as though the very possibility is ridiculous. I won’t tell him that the headaches are tolerable.

“You’re just giving in to prevailing erroneous thought!”

His accusation feels disproportionate. It’s not like I’ve been smoking pot, or otherwise caving to peer pressure.

“No, I’m not, Dad,” I say, like I’m bored. But my heart is pounding. I don’t want him to know that his anger is affecting me.

“Now it’s glasses, but next it will be aspirin. And then? Are you going to start taking pills every time you have a problem?”

I think back to England two years before. I was on my way home from Claremont for the weekend, and I stopped at the pharmacy on Hampstead’s High Street and bought a bottle of aspirin, out of curiosity. Heading down the hill toward home, I popped two tablets in my mouth, without water, and nearly gagged on the bitter, powdery taste that stuck tenaciously to the back of my tongue. And then I waited for something mysterious to happen. It didn’t. I am quite sure—even if Dad isn’t—that it is highly unlikely I will take aspirin again anytime soon.

“No, I just think I need glasses. That’s all,” I say, still acting calm, although below the surface I am seething.

“Well, if that’s what you want, go right ahead. But don’t expect me to pay for the doctor, or the glasses!”

“What?” I say, outraged. “How else will I pay for them?”

“Don’t you realize that your going to a doctor is like stabbing me in the back? Do you have any regard for my practice? For the movement? For what I’m dedicating my life to?”

My father’s voice is booming down the phone now. Maybe he’s right, that I don’t have any regard for his practice—but is that indifference such a crime? My pending SAT results feel relevant, so does last night’s dance at Deerfield; and my essay on the Federalist Papers—which isn’t finished but has to be turned in tomorrow morning—feels all too relevant.

“It’s that school, isn’t it? It’s poisoning your thoughts!” my father hisses, and I snort reflexively, which just makes him angrier. “You should have stayed at Claremont!”

My father slams the phone down, and I hear the click of the receiver, then a dial tone. He has hung up on Olivia before, but never on me. I remain in the phone booth, holding the handset. I realize I am shaking. I feel certain that I am right and my father is wrong, so why am I crying? I gently return the handset to its cradle and debate whether to call him back. Reversing the charges, which is how I always call home, feels for the first time demeaning to me. Should I apologize? Have I actually done anything that requires an apology? And his last words sting: that he wishes I were still in England feels more like his desire for greater distance than it does concern for my spiritual well-being.