Fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (39 page)

“That’s right. She was at the hospital. She was waiting there while her room was being cleaned. I asked Joanne if I could examine her. She said yes. I lifted the sheet and turned her gently onto her side. There was a … a …”—my uncle hesitated—“literally a
hole.
” At this he made the shape of a circle with the full circumference of his thumbs and forefingers, and his hands trembled slightly. “An
ulcer
from a bedsore that had been festering for months.”

I felt my chest heaving as I took a deep breath.

“She was lying in a puddle of
feces
,” he went on. “There was no wall between … her vagina and bowel. The cancer had completely eroded it. There was nothing but a … a … 
void
where her bowel should have been.”

I closed my eyes and tried to expel the image from my mind. My uncle sounded shaken, as though it had happened yesterday. He was both expert witness and grieving brother.

“Your father came walking down hall,” my uncle said. “I wanted to kill him.” A cloud of anger moved across his face. “Not kill him,” he corrected. “But I would have beaten the crap out of him, except that he ran away.”

I told Uncle Jack about my father’s call to me right after that; how he had repeated my uncle’s threats hysterically: “I’m gonna
get
you, Heff! I’m gonna
get
you! I’m gonna expose this whole thing!”

My uncle nodded. It occurred to me that if my father hadn’t run away, things might have taken an even more tragic turn.

“I left the hospital and drove to Ten Mile,” Uncle Jack said. Ten Mile Lake was the name of the lake in northern Minnesota where Grandma and Bops had had a cabin; Uncle Jack, Mom, Aunt Mary, and Aunt Kay had spent their summers there as children.

“You mean, Tenacre,” Sherman said.

“Yes, that’s right, Tenacre.”

“I needed to see the place. When I got there, a nurse approached me, and I asked her about Joanne. You know what she said? She said that Joanne was fine until just before she went to the hospital. She said that she and Heff loved to dance, and did so every night, right up until she left.”

I remembered my own conversation with one of the Tenacre nurses, and the image she described of my parents’ dancing.

“Let me tell you,” Uncle Jack went on, “your mother was bedridden for months. She couldn’t walk, and she sure as hell couldn’t dance. That afternoon, I contacted an attorney in Princeton. I told him about Joanne and said I wanted to investigate.”

Sherman and I waited.

“He said I could fight this all the way to the Supreme Court, but I wouldn’t win.”

Uncle Jack looked down at his hands, pressed together finger to finger.

“Your Mom was always stubborn,” he said, looking up. “You know, she and I had big arguments about Christian Science for years. I remember one Thanksgiving—”

“Are you sure it wasn’t Christmas Eve?” I interjected.

“Oh, there were many of these arguments, with your mom
and
your dad; your dad especially. Anyway, she’d talk about Christian Science healings, and I’d send her copies of
The Lancet
and
The New England Journal of Medicine
. I’d say, Joanne, look at this.” Uncle Jack’s right forefinger jabbed his left palm, as though he were
still holding the publications in his hand. “This is scientific data. Not your anecdotal accounts of ‘miracles.’ ”

“But she was so stubborn,” he went on. “Eventually, she told me to back off. So I did.”

Uncle Jack’s expression changed from frustration to a smile.

“Your mom was beautiful. You know that? When she was a teenager, she had these
legs
. And a killer body.”

Decades ago I might have taken offense at his plastic surgeon’s critical eye, but now (as a forty-eight-year-old mother of four with the body to prove it) my uncle sounded to me more like a nostalgic older brother who adored his little sister. He mentioned the time Mom showed up in Grandma and Bops’s driveway with the fellow camp counselor who’d given her a ride back from Colorado; how he (Uncle Jack) had felt so protective of her and towered over the poor guy, staring him down, interrogating him. We all smiled at the picture he painted.

Driving to dinner, Sherman asked if I was okay. My head throbbed, the base of my skull was cramping, and my eyes hurt. I felt overwhelmed. I wanted to get home to my family.

“I haven’t told him about the book deal yet,” I said, as we drove up Woodhill Road. “He still doesn’t know.”

Dinner took the same course as our conversation at Uncle Jack’s house, with two hours of chat about cousin Ted’s upcoming nuptials, Aunt Kay and Uncle Bear’s travels, golf and fishing stories, and questions about our lives in New York. My mother’s siblings and their spouses all looked wonderfully healthy, even Uncle Brad, who I knew was frailer at ninety than he appeared. How would I ever steer the conversation where it needed to go? Uncle Jack told the story of a Sunday afternoon back in the seventies. He and his boys were watching TV in the den when he got a phone call from the Vikings’ trainer. Fran Tarkenton had sliced his face open during a game and had requested that Uncle Jack come down to stitch him up. He raced downtown and put twenty-six stitches in the Viking quarterback’s cheek.

“If you’d done half that many he might have gotten back in the game,” Uncle Bear said with a smile.

“I did twenty-six, and he
did
play the rest of the game. Can you believe that? He got right back in there. And we
won
!”

The waitress brought two chits to the table, one for Uncle Bear to sign, and one for Uncle Brad. Dinner was over, and I hadn’t done what I needed to do. People started pushing their chairs back, when Aunt Mary spoke.

“Just a moment. I know Lucia has something she would like to discuss,” she said. Even after all these years, her posture was as erect as a ballerina’s. Her manner was almost businesslike, but she tilted her head to one side and smiled at me encouragingly. Everyone remained seated. I looked once again to Sherman.

I said I’d been writing a memoir about growing up in Christian Science, and about what happened to Mom. Aunt Kay and Aunt Mary nodded. “It’s going to be published next summer.”

Judy, who was sitting to my right, squeezed my forearm and congratulated me warmly. But it made me feel worse, not better.

“I guess what I want to say, first, is that I feel very strongly that Mom’s story be told. But I am pursuing this with mixed emotions. I have made this decision based on my own readiness, while you have not been given the same choice. You haven’t asked to be part of the story, but you are. And for this, and for any stress this may cause you, I am sorry. I have lived with regret about the way things unfolded. It is regret, not guilt,” I said, shaking my head, but as the words came out, my eyes flooded with tears. When I looked up and saw Uncle Jack, I thought—for the millionth time—about what might have happened had I defied Mom and called him sooner. “I know our hands were tied,” I added, with more conviction than I actually felt. I hurt all over. I was sorry about the book, but more than that, I was sorry about everything.

Uncle Jack spoke. “Lucia, Sherman,” he said, looking at both of us and speaking very slowly, “I want you two, and Olivia, to know
that I don’t blame you now—nor have I
ever
—for your mother’s death. She made her choice.”

His words were almost too much to bear.

After midnight that night at the hotel (we had declined Aunt Kay’s offer to stay with her, anticipating, correctly, that neutral ground would feel safer), I sobbed quietly into my pillow so that Sherman, in the adjoining room, wouldn’t hear me. In the morning, I woke up before dawn, wrecked. I lay in bed and replayed in my head, over and over again, my uncle’s statement:
I don’t blame you
.

Sherman and I drove back to Wayzata for breakfast with Uncle Truckie, our father’s half brother. On the way, we talked about the meeting with Uncle Jack and dinner at Woodhill. Sherman told me he was very proud of me. If he had said as much the day before, I would have come undone. I thanked him for being there with me.

We were met at the door by Uncle Truck, Aunt Adrienne, and their son, little Truck (who was now more than six feet tall, in his forties, and married with two kids). My son is named for Uncle Truck, with good reason: he is smart, grounded, fun-loving, and handsome. Over the years, I have seen my uncle infrequently, but he has sometimes called me out of the blue to check in, and occasionally—especially after he retired and had more time on his hands—we’ve spoken at length.

We chatted for a while about their grandchildren and my kids and Sherman’s music before I told him about the book. He immediately started talking about Dad.

My father, he reminded me, had been a Marine, and several years after he went through boot camp, Uncle Truckie followed in his footsteps.

“Just before I left for Parris Island, which is the camp for Marines on the East Coast, your father came to see me. He told me that basic training nearly destroyed him and he wasn’t exaggerating. Hell, it almost killed
me
, and I was six-two and athletic. But your dad told me that far worse than the physical ordeal was the brutal taunting he had endured for his speech impediment. I can only imagine what
he went through. Then, he shipped out to Korea. I was too young for Korea, and too old for Vietnam. But he was right in it. He had troops dying to his left and right.”

“He never mentioned that,” I said, surprised. “In fact, when I asked him, he said he never saw combat.”

“And he told me,” Sherman added, “that all he did was break eggs and sweep. Break and sweep, that’s what he said.”

“Your dad told me that the only good thing that came out of Korea was that he was cured of his speech impediment.”

My eyebrows went up. “Well, he may have said that, but he wasn’t cured then.”

My uncle was adamant. I told him about Dad’s testimony at church, how he credited Christian Science with that healing. “And we can assure you, Uncle Truck, he stuttered when we were kids.”

Uncle Truck also told us that recently he had been reunited with his half sister, Jane. He couldn’t have known the significance it held for me.

I vaguely remembered that Grandpa had had a kid—or two?—from an earlier marriage.

There had been three, my uncle said, but one had died as a child. He had never known these half siblings. After Grandpa divorced his first wife, the children from that marriage remained with their mother. He and Uncle Nick never spent time with them on vacations or holidays, nor did these children ever really know their own father.

“Anyway,” Uncle Truck said, “we met up. And I gotta tell you, it was the oddest thing, to meet a grown woman, my half sister—as close to me genetically as your aunt Nan or aunt Lucia—except that
this
woman
looked
like me.”

I realized then that my father’s childhood wasn’t the only casualty in his family’s history. There was other collateral damage.

Late Friday afternoon, Sherman and I drove to Red Wing, a small town fifty miles south of Minneapolis, to see Olivia and Terry, and catch their son Hoka’s varsity football game under the lights. When
I had called Olivia, several months before, to tell her about the book deal, she had been reticent, and bitter, in part because she’d heard about it from someone else first. I wanted things to be okay between us.

We arrived at their house just as they were leaving for the football game. I got a glimpse of my sister’s life, which was so different from mine, living within the supportive culture of the Native American community. I had brought her some gluten-free foods from back east. (I’d learned that she, like I, followed a gluten-free diet); she gave me a bag of wild rice and some homemade maple-sugar candy.

Sherman and I sat on the bleachers with Olivia and Terry and cheered every time our nephew ran onto the field. In the two years since I had seen him, Hoka had become a strapping, six-foot-four sixteen-year-old. His team won in a big upset.

In the morning, Olivia drove to Minneapolis for an early breakfast with Aunt Mary and Sherman and me, and when Aunt Mary got up to leave, Sherman walked out with her to run an errand.

“I’m sorry, Liv, that the news of my book upset you, and that you didn’t hear about it from me. I had planned to tell you when the contract was signed.”

Olivia took a sip of coffee from her mug.

“Can you tell me what else is bothering you?” I said. “I know there’s more.”

“I just want you to know,” she said, cautiously, “you, Sherman, and I—we had three very different sets of parents. Your story’s not mine.”

“I know,” I said. But her words stung like an accusation. I had to resist the temptation to feel I was being attacked. After all, there was truth in what she said. I thought of how she had joined the Mother Church at age twelve—the only one of us who did—in what I’ve come to see as an attempt to gain our parents’ love; a love that she understood, long before I did, was the conditional sort.

“And the happy childhood I read about in that draft you sent me ten years ago?” she went on. “Well, that wasn’t my childhood.”

“I know that too. Liv, I don’t want you, or anyone, to think I’m
speaking for you. We were silenced for so long, all three of us. It’s taken me years to do this. But I don’t want my voice to rob you of yours.”

Sherman returned to the hotel coffee shop just as Terry and Hoka arrived. We said warm good-byes, and the four of them—Sherman, Olivia, Terry, and Hoka—headed over to Target Field to take in a Twins game, with tickets from Aunt Kay and Uncle Bear. I left for the airport, eager to return to my family.

I am a worrier
. I tend to see doom behind every door and a crisis lurking around every corner. I have anguished for months—years even—over the risks of publishing this story. To this day, the specter of mental malpractice lies in wait. Will the result be injury to Sherman or Olivia, or to one of my aunts or uncles? My mother had cancer when she was fifty. If I tell this story, might the same happen to me? Sometimes, it is hard to conceive that anything good can come of it. But I feel I am as ready now as I will ever be.