Fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (23 page)

I roll my eyes in exasperation and look over at Stephanie. She can hear nothing of the conversation.

I repeat, “I think I need help, Dad.”

“Help? Help? What
kind
of help? A psychiatrist? You need someone to listen while you complain about your problems? I’ll tell you something, young lady, if you—if you—You’ve not once read the Lesson! You’ve not once gone to church! Your mother happens to be up against some pretty tough odds, and do you think she feels like she’s had any support from you kids? If you just tried, in a
meaningful
way, maybe your mother wouldn’t be—”

There is a pause, and then he slams down the phone.

Moments later, the phone rings.

“For your information,” he continues to rant, “three weeks ago your mother overheard you telling me how I should be handling this, and the next day she plummeted. She was making good progress—she was—until you—”

“Dad, that’s not fair,” I say.

“—until you threatened me. You said I’d be abandoning her if I taught my class! You said that if Mom died while I was away, you’d never speak to me again! Isn’t that right? Isn’t that what you said? And your mother overheard you, and two days later I had to take her back to Tenacre.”

“Not fair,” I repeat.

“Don’t speak to me about fair!”

“Dad, you’re irrational. I won’t talk to you when you’re like this. Mom didn’t overhear me,” I say. “We were talking on the phone. If she heard anything, she heard you yelling.”

“I’m telling you,” my father continues, “I had to take her back to Tenacre. And it wasn’t easy. Sherm knows. He was here. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

My father is sobbing now.

“Mom was never getting better,” I say firmly. “I was home that weekend. I know—”

“See what I mean? See what I mean?” my father says again in a fury. “You don’t know
how
to be supportive!”

Again he slams down the phone. This time, he doesn’t call back.

By now, I’m long past needing to call my aunt. After all, telling Mimi and Aunt Nan in June didn’t lead to anything. Stephanie and I eat the salad she brought. I see a ziplock bag of marijuana on the coffee table—a “sleeping aid” from Sherm—and think about rolling a joint. But I’m already tired. Stephanie listens as I recount in no particular order the various incidents that got me to tonight: Mom’s return to Tenacre; the pressure of the secret of her illness, which in truth I haven’t really kept; the confessions to Aunt Nan and Mimi that led nowhere but made me feel at once both relieved and even more desperate; the phone call to Grandma on the Fourth of July.

We sit in silence for a while. It is after midnight when Stephanie leaves.

I brush my teeth, take a Halcion and a sip of water straight from the faucet, turn out the lights, and go to bed.

The next morning, Ebit, a friend from Emma Willard, calls me at work. I have avoided her, and all my friends, since Mom became sick. I decide to tell her about Mom.

“Do you need to talk to someone?” she asks after I am done. Her father is a Presbyterian minister, and so are two of her brothers. The way Ebit asks me, very gently, makes me feel not only that, yes, I do need to speak with someone, but that doing so is really okay. She gives me the name and telephone number of Rick Spalding, an associate minister at Central Presbyterian Church, on Park Avenue at Sixty-fourth Street, who had once been a student minister under her father. His church is on the same city block as Third Church of Christ, Scientist, one of the grandest branch churches in Manhattan.

I am self-conscious about calling a complete stranger—and am more pessimistic than ever that anyone can help—but I dial the
number during my lunch break from a pay phone on the street corner. I feel as if I am calling a help hotline.

I don’t know where to start, so I just plow my way through. He says nothing while I’m talking. The more I say, the more I wonder why I am even bothering.

“I’m really glad you called, Lucia,” Rick Spalding says. “I’m so sorry for what you’re going through. There are no easy answers here …”

I should have known he couldn’t help.

“… but this is something I’ve learned. When someone is drowning, he—or she—will grab on to the closest thing in reach.”

“Uh-huh.” My throat aches with tightness.

“And they will hold on for dear life, Lucia, even if that thing doesn’t float.”

I stare blankly
at the bulletin board in front of my desk at German
Vogue
, thinking about my father, twenty blocks uptown, bestowing his spiritual understanding of the Science of Christianity on his beloved students. Meanwhile, Mom lies in a bed at Tenacre, alone. As in: without her husband, without us, without the rest of her family. Sherman is still in Hopewell, agonizingly nearby; Mom has asked him not to visit while Dad is away. I try to picture my mother listening to recordings of Christian Science lectures on her Walkman, or reading the Lesson, because the alternative image is unbearable. Is she calling out in pain? Is she confused, like she was at Connie’s?

If she is too weak to sit up, to hold her King James Bible and
Science and Health
, does a nurse sit beside her and read aloud? Is that how a Christian Science nurse cares for patients, when she isn’t making beds or pouring Ensure into paper cups?

The first three mornings of my father’s class, I call my mother at Tenacre right after I get to the office. Each time, a nurse answers the phone.

“Mrs. Ewing’s room.”

“This is Joanne’s daughter. May I speak with her?”

The nurse puts Mom on the phone.
Is she holding the phone to Mom’s ear?
Mom talks to me for less than a minute.

On the fourth day, I call again, this time late in the morning. As before, the nurse puts Mom on. She sounds like I woke her up.

“Hi, dear,” she whispers, weakly clearing her throat.

“Mom? How are you?”

“I’m doing just fine.”

“Mom, can I … help you?”

“No, sweetheart. I have everything I need right here.”

“Can I come see you? I could come out right now.”

“Lucia dear, please don’t ask me again. I am making good progress, you have to trust me.”

I squeeze my eyes tightly shut, and shake my head. “Please, Mom?”

“No. I need to be alone.”

After a long, hopeless silence, with renewed strength my mother utters more words than she has managed in weeks: “Lucia, I’d rather you not call me right now. Please don’t be upset. I am striving to keep my thoughts elevated, and … and … I can’t have any … distractions. You understand, don’t you? Please understand.”

My mother says good-bye. I hold the phone, wondering what to do next.

I don’t understand at all.

I can’t work. I can’t go see Mom. I should call Uncle Jack. But I can’t. I cannot do it.

I tell my boss that I have to take a few days off, and I leave work quickly.

I walk back to my apartment, pack a bag, and take the train out to the Spring Lake beach house. It is midweek, so the house is unoccupied.

The sky is cloudless, the beach is beautiful, and everything is numbingly surreal. When I call Sherm to ask if he’d like to come down for a night, to my surprise and relief, he says yes. We sit on the beach and stare at the ocean, the only two people in sight who are not elated by the perfect day. We talk for hours, mostly about
Mom; but we
do
nothing. In the evening, we call Olivia to touch base, but there is nothing to report, from either end.

She shouldn’t be in Tucson; we shouldn’t be at the Jersey shore. We should all be with Mom.

After we hang up, Sherm rolls a joint, which we smoke. I retreat to my room and bury my head in my pillow.

After two weeks
, Dad finishes teaching his Primary class and returns to Hopewell. Sherm is back at the house too, but Dad now spends every night at Tenacre. He stays in Mom’s room round the clock, returning to Hopewell only to shower in the early morning. Every few days, he asks Sherm to get up at dawn to play an hour of tennis with him. It feels to Sherm that
playing
anything is odd, but my brother obliges because he is trying to be helpful, and this is the only way he is permitted.

Now whenever I call Mom, she is unavailable to talk. Dad whispers that she is “resting comfortably” or that she has had “some discomfort overnight but is sleeping now.”

I ask if I can come see her.

“Gee, honey,” he says, ill at ease. “I don’t know. Mom insists that she doesn’t want any visitors right now. I’m sorry.”

Two days before
Sherm’s twenty-second birthday, Dad calls me at the office.

“Lucia, dear,” he says. His voice is shaking.

My heart stops. Fifty, twenty-seven, twenty-four, twenty-two. We are too young for this.

“I have wrestled with this decision,” Dad says, choking up. He is fighting back tears. “I know I am going against your mother’s wishes. I hope I’m doing the right thing.”

I’m overcome with relief, and surprise, and shock.

“Dad, can we take Mom to a doctor?” I say.

“No! That’s not what she wants! But I think … maybe we should tell Aunt Mary. I think she needs to know,” he says.

Dad tells me he has written Aunt Mary a letter, explaining Mom’s situation and her wish for privacy. He hopes that Aunt Mary, being “a woman of faith,” will honor Mom’s wish. He is sending it today by overnight mail.

“Honestly, I don’t know how I managed to put pen to paper,” he says, “but the words just came.”

I stifle a groan. In the midst of this unequivocal failure of his beloved Christian Science, he is testifying to me—between the lines of our conversation—about its efficacy.

“I think someone in Mom’s family needs to know,” he says.

The next morning
, unable to sleep, I look at my clock radio. It is four-forty-five—an hour earlier in Minnesota. Sometime in the next several hours Aunt Mary will hear the doorbell ring and see the FedEx man standing at her front door.

Yesterday I called Mimi to tell her about the letter. Mimi told me her mom was visiting friends at a cabin in Wisconsin. She tracked her down and told her to drive home because Uncle Heff was sending her an important letter.

I try to imagine what he wrote:

Will Aunt Mary intervene? Is that why Dad is writing to her now? Or has he chosen to write to Aunt Mary, instead of Uncle Jack or Aunt Kay, because she won’t?

Aunt Mary receives Dad’s letter. Out of respect for her sister’s faith, she does nothing.

I have just
arrived at work. I’m about to sit down to read the daily stack of telexes from Munich when the phone rings.

“German
Vogue
,” I say.

“Hi, Loosh.”

It is my father. He clears his throat.

I plant my elbow on the desk and prop the phone between my head and my hand. I close my eyes.

“Hi, Dad.”

“I think you should come …” My father takes a deep breath. “I think you should come home.”

“Are you with Mom? Are you at Tenacre?”

“Yes. She’s right here.”

I wait for my father to tell me more about Mom’s condition, or put her on the phone, but instead he starts talking about the family. At first, I’m confused. What he is saying should be obvious to me, but it is not.

“Aunt Nan and Aunt Lucia are on their way here—I mean, not here, on their way to the house. And … Olivia is flying back … from Tucson. And I think—I think, honey, I think—” He cannot finish his thought.

I close my eyes and shake my head, suddenly aware that what I am hearing is his surrender. I force myself to listen, pressing the phone hard against my ear.

“… Lucia, dear, I—I don’t think Mom’s going to make it.”

You asshole! You fucking asshole!
I want to scream down the phone. But I remain silent. I say nothing, and the mounting rage feels like it will consume me.

Drowning out the voice in my head are my father’s choking sobs. In them, I hear not only his anguish, which is real, and raw, and heartbreaking, but mine.

I take the
E train to Penn Station and catch New Jersey Transit to Princeton Junction. I skip going back to my apartment to pack a bag first. I can’t think beyond today, or even beyond buying a ticket and boarding the correct train.