Fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (15 page)

Aunt Nan and Mary are waiting for us in the foyer afterward. My mother excuses herself to find the bathroom, which is in the basement.

“Do you want me to come with you?” I whisper in her ear, gently rubbing her shoulder. I need to comfort her—and myself—and I want to stay close.

“No,” she answers quietly and heads for the stairwell. She grips the handrail. Slowly she makes her way down.

I turn back toward the foyer. The only person I want to be with now is Mom—not my dad, not Aunt Nan, and not Mary, who I suddenly fear might ask me questions. And if she does, what will I do? To say anything at all will mean either a second betrayal of my mother or an outright lie. I’m not prepared to commit either. Still, won’t Aunt Nan be alarmed by the sight of her sister-in-law? And, if Mary hasn’t already said something to Aunt Nan, won’t she have to now? I hover in a corner of the foyer.

Why is Mom taking such a long time in the bathroom? I wait for her to reappear, and when she doesn’t, and the church is nearly empty, I beckon my father and frantically whisper. “Dad, shouldn’t I check on Mom?”

“No, no,” he answers, trying to sound nonchalant.

“But she’s been downstairs for twenty minutes.”

Dad glances at his watch. I watch him stroll back over to his sister and niece, to tell them to head to the reception, we’ll follow shortly.

I doubt we will. I figure we’ll get Mom back to the apartment as quickly as possible, and Dad will make excuses to his sister later. As the custodian prepares to close up the sanctuary, I resolve to head downstairs to find Mom, but then she appears. The urgency is gone from her face, replaced by an effortful smile. The immediate crisis is over; we go, as planned, to the reception.

We take a cab to my great-aunt’s home, a few blocks away. During the short ride, my father tells me about the elegant dinners that he attended there, served by white-gloved help. Is he attempting to divert my attention from my mother? She winces, clearly in pain again. Turning toward the window, she lowers her head and closes her eyes for several seconds.

Why are we doing this? I want to scream. This is crazy.

At the reception, a butler stands at attention in the entry, taking coats.

“Could you keep these somewhere handy?” my father asks, discreetly. “We won’t be staying long.”

People are milling about in clusters, speaking softly, sipping the drinks they’ve taken from trays being passed by waiters. We spot Aunt Nan and Mary at one end of the dining room, where a table is laid with silver platters of finger food. We head in their direction.

I watch my mother steady herself with one hand on the dining room table as my father chats dutifully with cousins, putting in just enough time before he can leave. His smile is forced, I think, but he looks remarkably relaxed.

Look at my mother! We need a doctor!
Nobody seems to notice anything. I want to shake my father.

I stand with Mary. She points discreetly at a woman I don’t recognize and whispers, “I’m pretty sure that’s Margot Fonteyn!” But
my eyes are on my mother, who moves tentatively from my father’s side to perch herself on a small chair beside a window. I leave Mary, and as I walk toward my mother, she stands up and returns to my father’s side and whispers, “It’s time to go.”

The three of us exit quickly. We say good-bye to no one.

Outside, my mother announces, “I want to walk home.”

“Are you sure, Jo?” my father asks. For the first time there is worry in his voice.

We walk two blocks, very slowly. Then, my mother doubles over.

“Heff, get a cab. I need a cab,” she groans.

I hold her with one of my arms supporting her back, the other clutching her arm. Dad frantically tries to wave down a cab, but there are none in sight.

My mother moans. She is in agony.

“Mom?” I ask, utterly helpless. “Do you need to lie down?”

“Oh, Heff!” she cries.

A cab finally comes to a halt. My father holds my mother and tells me to open the cab door.

“Sit in front,” he orders.

My mother continues to cry. I watch, stunned, as my father, with great effort, helps her into the car, one arm on her back, the other supporting the crooks of her knees while her legs dangle over his forearms.

“The hospital?” the cabbie asks.

Please say yes, Lenox Hill.

“No,” my father says, “between Park and Madison. Number Sixty-one.”

The emergency room is right there!

“Ohhh,” my mother groans. The cabbie eyes my parents in his rearview mirror. I stare straight ahead.
Please, God. Help
. I am praying the most basic, desperate, intercessional prayer, not the kind I’d learned in Sunday school, about Divine Love and Infinite Mind.

Help.

My father hands me his wallet and his keys and starts to help Mom out of the car.

“I hope she’ll be okay,” the cabbie says to me.

In the lobby, I open the door easily, but upstairs at my parents’ apartment, I can’t get the dead bolt. Wrong key.

“Here, I’ll get it,” Dad says. “You take Mom.”

I try to support my mother’s weight as she struggles to remain standing. I’m afraid I might be holding her too tightly. With the door to the apartment finally open, Dad rushes Mom into the bathroom. I sit in the living room and wait.

On the coffee table I see a current copy of
The Christian Science Journal
. Somewhere in the back, in the New York section, I know I can find my father’s name, Frank H. Ewing, followed by the initials C.S.B., the church’s official designation for teacher. I have no idea what the initials stand for. At some point after we moved back from London, Dad was invited to go through something called Normal class, an honor that elevates a journal-listed Christian Science practitioner to the role of teacher, who is authorized to teach the course called Primary class, which trains the practitioners.

That, I realize, is the extent of my knowledge of Christian Science hierarchy.

On the front cover of the publication, I read the familiar words,

H
EAL THE
S
ICK •
R
AISE THE
D
EAD •
C
AST
O
UT
D
EMONS •
C
LEANSE THE
L
EPERS

Do my parents actually
believe
Christian Science can do all this?

After several minutes, my father comes out to the living room.

“Mom’s going to be fine,” he says firmly.

“Dad, can’t we take her to a doctor? The hospital is right down—”

“No, Lucia,” he says without rancor. “Your mother doesn’t want to resort to medicine. Believe me, if she did, I would be the first to take her. She wants to use Science.”

I sit down and bury my face in my hands.

My father comes to my side and puts his arm over my shoulder. I stiffen.

“She’s going to be okay. I think coming to the city was too much for her. But she was determined.”

“I don’t get this,” I say, shaking my head.

“Lucia, you and I both need to affirm your mom’s perfection; her dominion over mortal mind.”

I move away from him.

“Fear needn’t have any hold on you,” he continues.

Shut up. Shut UP!
I want to say. I am so angry—at him, at my inability to act. I am completely immobile, terrified, on the verge of tears, or rage. She could be dying! And we sit here doing
nothing
. I want to call an ambulance. I want to bring my mother to the hospital. I want to get Uncle Jack on the phone. But I can’t even tell my father to shut up with this … this nonsense.

My father is oblivious. He goes on: “Mrs. Eddy states, ‘Error theorizes that spirit is born of matter and returns to matter, and that man has a resurrection from dust.’ ” He quotes slowly, deliberately, “ ‘Whereas Science unfolds the eternal verity, that man is the spiritual, eternal reflection of God.’ ”

There is a long silence. I can tell Dad thinks he’s got me on track.

“And from
Miscellaneous Writings
,” he continues, his eyes closed, chantlike, “ ‘Divine Love is our hope, strength, and shield. We have nothing to fear when Love is at the helm of thought.’ ”

“I want to say good-bye to Mom,” I say.

In fact, I don’t really want to say good-bye; I don’t want to leave her here, but I know there is nothing more I will do.

“I’ll say good-bye for you.” Dad tries to hug me.

Stunned by my own helplessness, I slowly walk to the subway station, two blocks east. Ahead of me stands Lenox Hill Hospital. It takes up the entire block on the south side of the street. Two ambulances are idling in front. Directly across the street, on the north side of the block, is the austere brick façade of Eighth Church of Christ, Scientist.

Yesterday, the space
shuttle
Challenger
blew up.

The private crisis of Mom’s health, which has consumed me for over a month, is now overlaid with the national, yet somehow personal, tragedy of the
Challenger
. I am numbed by the devastating news. I stop at the coffee shop on the street level of my dreary walk-up and take a seat at the counter to read. The front pages of all the papers show the already iconic photograph of a pure white cloud of smoke, with a long tail and the vaguely recognizable shuttle debris. Talk of the tragedy dominates the breakfast conversations around me, and I listen as the regulars—normally a reticent lot—speak mournfully of the schoolteacher astronaut, as if each had known her personally.

As I walk up Third Avenue toward midtown, everyone I see clutches a newspaper.

By nine o’clock, I have fielded three calls from Colette, the picture editor in Munich. At 9:05 the phone rings again.

“German
Vogue
,” I say.

“Hi, Loosh.” My father’s voice is raspy and quivering. Instantly my chest squeezes, and my palms go clammy.

Oh, no. No. I sit down.

“Mom had a bad night,” my father says. There is a muffled sound as he covers the mouthpiece. Is he crying? I realize I have never heard my father cry before.

“Dad?” I say.

“I’m taking her to Tenacre,” he manages, choked up, before surrendering to full-out sobbing.

Oh, my God.

The relief that Mom is still with us is immediately replaced with dread. Tenacre. I’ve driven past the entrance numerous times on my way from Hopewell to Princeton, but I’ve never set foot on the
wooded property. Mom was tight-lipped about her training there, except when she said cryptically, “There are a hundred ways to make a bed: with Love, Principle, Truth, Mind …” She never completed the training, and I never learned why, but it had something to do with her wanting to take art classes in the city.

I wonder if I can suggest again that Mom see a doctor.

I can’t predict what the mention of a doctor might do right now. Maybe, maybe Dad wants an option? But he sounds resolved, and I know how irrational and defensive he becomes when he feels cornered; I know how his self-control can just snap. I remember my Eyeglasses Rebellion and, more recently, the acrimony I created by announcing my intention to get health insurance after college.

“That’s just a slap in my face!” he had wailed. “A stab in the back!”

My father is still sobbing, and I am paralyzed with fear.

“Are you okay, Dad?” I don’t know what else to say. Obviously he isn’t okay.

“Yes, I’m fine,” he says. He sighs loudly, collecting himself, and blows his nose.

“She’d like to see all of you …,” my father says, choking up again.

“Can I talk to Mom?”

There is silence as he hands her the phone. I worry about what I should say. Mom speaks first.

“Hi, dear.” Her voice is strained, like a squeak. I hardly recognize it.

“Hi, Mom.”

“I’m going to be all right,” she says, barely whispering. “Your daddy is taking me to Tenacre.”

She always refers to him as Daddy, I guess because that’s what she used to call her own father. Ironically, we, his children, have never called him that.

“I didn’t want to go,” she confesses, “but now I think it’s best.”

Does she not want to go to Tenacre in the same way that most people don’t want to go to a hospital but do anyway when they have
to? Or does it mean that she’s thought about going somewhere other than Tenacre? A hospital?

“Are you sure, Mom?” I ask, wishing my question were more assertive, more pointed.

“Yes.”

What I want to say is,
Mom, we have to get you to a doctor
. But I can’t.

“I love you, Mom. Whatever you need to do, you know I’m behind you.”

I’m not sure I mean it, but I want her to feel reassured.

“That’s … very … nice.”

Mom’s demeanor is more remote than ever. Should I read something into it? Does she doubt my support? Or does her reply simply require the least effort?

“Can I bring you anything from the city?” I ask.

“No.” My mother hesitates. “Are you going to tell Sherman?”

“Do you want me to?”

My question, or maybe the way I ask it, doesn’t sound to me like a daughter talking to a mother. I feel like I am speaking with someone else, someone much older, less familiar, like a great-aunt.

“It’s Sherman’s concert tonight, isn’t it?” she says. She is weeping now. “We so wanted to go. Don’t tell him about Tenacre until after he’s done singing. I don’t want to spoil his big night.”

Sherman’s band, the Bureaucrats, is playing for the first time in public. He’s the lead singer.
Concert
—a mother’s euphemism—brings a smile to my face for one flickering moment before it is snuffed by the sound of her crying, which I just can’t bear.

“I’ll take notes,” I say, “and tomorrow I’ll give you the full review. I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too, darling.”

Dad is back on the phone.

I’m almost too afraid to ask my next question. “Are you going to tell Grandma?”