Fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (37 page)

In early September 1987
, my father called to announce that he was getting married. I froze. “Do you remember Heather?” he added. He sounded far too chipper for a husband in mourning. It had not even been a
year
. Heather? I racked my brain. A Christian Science nurse—the daughter of a neurologist and a psychologist?—who had been my mother’s friend back in London. She possessed a meekly pious air, was about fifteen years younger than my mother, and had wide-set eyes that crossed asymmetrically, so that it was difficult to know when she was making eye contact. If my mother was Angie Dickinson, Heather was …? To tell the truth, there was no movie star equivalent. Dad told me that, almost like a sign from God, a letter from Heather had arrived while Mom was at Princeton Medical Center. Heather regretted that she had lost touch with both of them and wanted to reconnect; thus began a quiet correspondence. She had known nothing of Mom’s illness. A trip to Europe late that fall, billed as a visit with Ham, had turned out to be a courtship of sorts.

Dad had called to see if Sherman and I would join the two of them for a celebratory dinner on September 9. Olivia was in Arizona, so she was spared the invitation but not the announcement. I literally trembled. September 9 was the one-year mark of Mom’s death. My father’s timing couldn’t have been worse. I declined the invitation, on principle, and because I was still grieving. However, I dutifully met them for dinner a few weeks later, just as I had dutifully met my father for dinner every Tuesday that first year, thinking that he was alone. When he dropped this bomb on me, at first I was offended, then, gradually, relieved.

In the years
immediately following my mother’s death, my sister, my brother, and I each picked up the pieces of our lives and independently
put them back together. Sherman bottomed out with an addiction problem shortly before his twenty-sixth birthday. Since then, with the help of a rigorous recovery program, he has maintained continuous sobriety for more than twenty years. He is a singer-songwriter, lives in Brooklyn, and has a thriving dog-walking business in Manhattan. Olivia is a social worker and a mother and lives in Minnesota with Terry and their son.

Sherman and I enjoy a close relationship, but Olivia and I have had less contact. Geography has made it easy for my sister and me to be apart; our history has made it hard to be together. I hadn’t seen Olivia in almost ten years when, during the summer of 2008, she called to say she was coming with her son to New York City to see Sherman and would I like to meet up. We had a lovely dinner in the East Village. Olivia’s hair had turned silver, she now wore glasses, and she had become elegant in a Gloria Steinem sort of way. I don’t know why, but in the hours leading up to our reunion, I had felt very nervous. After dinner we linked arms and walked to a nearby club to hear Sherman’s band play.

I am a full-time mom, living in New York with my husband and four very active children, two of whom have chronic eczema, food allergies, and asthma. We joke, occasionally, that our family is the loss leader at Oxford Health Plans; rarely a week goes by that we do not have a trip to the pediatrician, the dermatologist, the pulmonologist, or the emergency room. A few years ago, our middle boy, Truckie, was hospitalized with a severe concussion. He went over the handlebars on his bike and—helmeted, fortunately—was thrown headfirst into the pavement. I sometimes marvel at the incontrovertible fact that my Christian Science childhood avoided these kinds of excursions to the doctor. Admittedly, my parents converted to Christian Science after we had received most of the childhood vaccinations. Still, I never had a strep test, and none of us ever needed stitches. We never took Tylenol or aspirin or an antibiotic. (Well, that may not be entirely true. When my daughter, Ellie, was a toddler, I was giving her some bitter-tasting antibiotic that I had hidden in her baby food when suddenly I flashed back to my bout of chicken pox. Was there
crushed St. Joseph’s aspirin for children mixed in with the applesauce Grandma had spooned into our mouths? Had Mom taken us to our grandmother’s house knowing that Grandma might do this?)

When I married my husband, David, in 1990, my father walked me down the aisle of an Episcopal church in Greenwich Village and gave me away in an elegant, traditional wedding. Members of both his family and my mom’s were present; a second cousin on my dad’s side was one of the two ministers officiating. Given the shattered state of my immediate family, the wedding was every bit a fantasy, painting a nearly perfect image for anyone who didn’t know our history. My father paid for the whole thing except for the liquor, which my husband and I took care of. The only misstep was when my father asked that Heather be the last person escorted down the aisle before the ceremony commenced. I balked—this role was reserved for the mother of the bride, not the bride’s widowed father’s second wife—and I had wanted my mother’s absence to be felt, to be honored. In the end, I acquiesced, because I didn’t want to be the cause of an ugly scene.

During the first year of my marriage, I needed an emergency appendectomy; a month later I was hospitalized again, for post-surgical peritonitis. Had my appendix burst when I was a child, I would not have survived.

My father was the first person to visit us in the hospital in March 1993, when our daughter, Ellie, was born. He and Heather greeted each birth with flowers, baby clothes, and an engraved silver cup from Tiffany & Co. While our relationship remained strained, I was unwilling to sever the tie to my father. I wanted some semblance of an extended family, and for my children to have at least one maternal grandparent. For my father’s part, he loved to visit his grandchildren and would meet us for lunch at a nearby diner every six or eight weeks. He and Ellie would share a milk shake, sipping from two straws out of the same frosty aluminum cup. To her delight, he’d magically pull his thumb off his hand and stick it back on. He played peekaboo with our second child, Dwight, and I marveled at how absolutely normal the scene looked.

After one of these luncheonette rendezvous, probably in 1997, I noticed that my father was limping. I wondered if perhaps he had turned his ankle. I didn’t ask him about it because I knew he wouldn’t give me a straight answer. The next time we got together, several weeks later, he was already seated in our usual booth when we arrived, and it wasn’t until he kissed Ellie and Dwight good-bye and turned to walk down Third Avenue that I noticed the limp was more pronounced. I felt instantly ill, unsteady on my own feet. I rushed home, pushing Ellie and Dwight’s double stroller frantically, and called my husband in a panic.

The next time I saw my father was the last time he ever met us for lunch at the diner. Again, he was seated in the booth before we got there. Ellie got her own small milk shake; he ordered a Diet Coke, and when the drinks were brought to the table, he very slowly brought the glass to his lips, cupping it in both of his hands.

Oh, God.

When my mother died, I swore I would never go through such an ordeal again; I wouldn’t allow myself to ever get that close to my father. I had very minimal contact with him during his illness, but it was my father, not I, who severed the tie. In fact, he and Heather had begun their withdrawal from our family long before any illness was apparent. First they sold the house in Hopewell, then the apartment on Seventy-seventh Street and moved twenty blocks south, to an apartment on Sutton Place. I was invited there only once, while they were renovating. When my father’s illness had progressed to the point where its existence was indisputable (at least to any non–Christian Scientist), he and Heather moved to an old farmhouse in Rhinebeck, New York, further removing themselves from us. Sherman and I worried. Olivia didn’t, or wouldn’t show it. She grew remote. Pressing our father and Heather for an invitation, my brother and I drove up to Rhinebeck one afternoon for lunch. It was a chilling visit, reminding us of our mother’s illness. We exchanged awkward, forced chitchat punctuated by long periods of silence. The visit confirmed our fears: our father was confined to a wheelchair
with a blanket over his legs. He didn’t eat. We never saw him use his hands.

Several months passed without any contact at all. Sherman phoned me one day to say that he had tried repeatedly to call the house in Rhinebeck but there was no answer. A few days later, he reported that the phone had been disconnected.

The next morning, David and I got in the car and set out for Rhinebeck, an hour-and-forty-five-minute drive. I wondered where Dad and Heather could possibly be. Could they have fled Rhinebeck without telling us? Could he have died without our being notified?

At their house, David got out of the car and walked up to the front door. I sat in the passenger seat, too shaken, too nervous to move. The curtains on all of the windows were pulled closed, and there were some yellow UPS delivery notices stuck to the front door. David rang the bell several times. No response. Then he walked around the periphery of the house and came back to the car to say that he could hear some music coming from a window in the basement. He returned to the front door and rang the bell again, and then started pounding the door with his fist. He knew there was someone home.

“Heather?” he hollered. “Heather!”

My heart raced.

“I know you’re in there! But your phone has been disconnected and Sherman and Lucia have been trying to reach you.”

David pounded some more.

“Heather, please open up!”

Nothing.

“If you don’t come to the door, I’m going to call the police.”

I was alarmed at my husband’s bold threat, but suddenly, the white lace curtain on one of the windows flanking the front door moved. I saw a hand. David moved toward it, and there was an exchange of words, but I could hear only my husband’s end of the conversation.

“Heather, we’ll leave as soon as we see Heff.”

The door remained closed.

“Please let me in so I can see him. I need to know that he is in there, and that he is all right.”

Heather said something more, and David looked back at me, shrugging his shoulders, before walking around to the side of the house, to a basement window. After several minutes, somebody opened it from inside.

“Heff,” David said loudly enough so that I could hear, “we are here because we couldn’t reach you. Your phone has been disconnected, and Sherman and Lucia were worried.”

David went down on his knees—God bless him—and moved closer to the window so that he could hear better, then pulled back suddenly. Getting up to his feet again, he said, “No, Heff, that’s not why we’re here.”

David walked back to the car, shaking his head in disbelief.

“He thinks we’re here for his money.”

We drove home.

David said my father had looked “pretty bad.” The vague description carried for me a haunting sense of déjà vu.

One night, probably in 1998, after David and I had returned from a dinner, there was a message on our answering machine from Aunt Nan. She said to please call when I got the message, no matter how late it was. My head spun. I dialed the number, my hand trembling. It was nearly midnight. She answered immediately and told me that she’d gotten a call from Heather. Dad had been taken by ambulance to Albany Medical Center. Heather had told Aunt Nan that he did not want any visitors.

Albany Medical Center. My gut reaction was stunned disbelief, followed quickly by vindication: He has gotten what he deserves. Then outrage: How dare he?

I hardly slept that night. I pictured my father in a hospital bed. To capitulate, he must have been close to death. Was he in a coma? On a ventilator? Would I ever see him again? As the night went on, my anger receded, and I resolved that I would go see him. Maybe
there was an opportunity here, not only for his health to be restored but for our hearts to heal as well.

In the morning, David and I got in the car once again, this time to drive up to Albany, 150 miles north. We found my father at the medical center, semi-reclined in a bed, with Heather by his side. His breathing was labored, but he was not on a ventilator, and he was alert. At first, he and Heather acted pleasantly surprised to see us, as though our being there, and their being there, were perfectly normal. It reminded me of Aunt Mary’s first visit to Mom at Princeton Medical Center. I went along with the charade but worried that at any moment it might end, and then what? We sat quietly with Dad for several minutes. Then Heather asked if we’d like to walk with her to the cafeteria for something to eat. After a snack and some unilluminating conversation, we returned to Dad’s room. He mumbled that he would like a few words alone with Heather, so David and I moved into the hallway, and I went to find the nurses’ station. I wanted information. I felt like an undercover cop. I had to feign casual inquisitiveness, so the nurse would think that I was just looking for an update. She glanced at my father’s chart and said he was recovering well. I wanted to ask how long he’d been there; I wanted a diagnosis and the prognosis, and to find out how long a recovery we might expect.

Before the nurse could say more, Heather appeared and told her curtly, in her lofty British accent, that I was not to be given any information on Heff Ewing and that we were not welcome here. Then she turned on her heel and disappeared back into my father’s room.

David walked toward me. Through gritted teeth and tears, I told him what had happened. We decided that he would try to reason with my father. He went back to the room. My father grew very agitated.

“Look, Heff,” David said, his patience tested, “I took a day off from work to drive up here because your daughter was worried about you. But if you want us to leave—if you don’t want Lucia here—just say the word.”

“I don’t want Lucia here.”

I left the hospital, shaking, with my husband’s arm over my shoulder, holding me close, guiding me back to the car. I was a grown woman, yet I felt newly orphaned and powerless.

We heard nothing from Heather or my father for several months. I was going through a stack of mail one day when I found a U.S. Postal Service notification card, the kind one normally sends to magazine publishers to alert them to a subscriber’s change of address. On it, in Heather’s handwriting, was an address in Lakewood, Colorado, a suburb of Denver.