Mary Baker Eddy
There’s a marble bust of a stately Victorian woman sitting on my grandparents’ hearth in Seattle, and for part of my life I thought she was Mary Baker Eddy. The bust’s craftsman detailed each ruffle in her collar, the fine downturned corners of her mouth, a neck tendon—handiwork so thorough and lifelike that, as a child, my mother’s cousin was regularly inspired to jam his finger up her nostril, whispering, “Pickin’ Gramma’s nose, pickin’ Gramma’s nose . . .” The reasons for my confusion were complicated and have to do with the way my family tells and does not tell stories about itself—but these were Eddy’s problems, too.
Reverend Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, is recorded as having been sick for most of her life: anxious, erratic, doubled-over, her frail body racked by mysterious intermittent pains. Eddy’s temper tantrums and day terrors alienated her siblings and forced her parents into a lifelong tiptoe. She required constant rocking as a child, and when she was an adult her family commissioned an oversized cradle in which she spent many of her days.
Harold Bloom describes Eddy as “a kind of anthology of nineteenth-century nervous ailments,” though I suppose many Victorian women could have been characterized that way. Female nervousness was being written prolifically into diagnostic manuals at the time, one strain of which was even called “Americanitis.” Is it surprising? The cognitive dissonance of the 1870s was sharp: the blitz of postwar wealth, a booming middle class, half a million young men dead, and 3 million freed slaves expected to begin anew and forget—along with the emergent progressive majority—that anything had happened at all. We were tripping on the heels of the Industrial Revolution, which had sped everything up, and we were struck dumb by the realization that all Western powers were in cahoots and had been for a long time, and that millions were perishing in their colonial crossfire. Women were indoors getting splinters, dying in childbirth next to the window through which they’d watched the world pass them by. Time was no longer linear, but fragmented. So when Eddy established the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1879, she offered an irresistible alternative: Life, as you suspected, is happening elsewhere. Disease and death are metaphysical glitches. Maybe the members of this new religion could feel it in their marrow, maybe Eddy more than others. After all, as scientist and novelist C.P. Snow asserted in his 1959 Rede lecture “The Two Cultures,” it is scientists who “have the future in their bones.”
It was Eddy’s lifetime of illness, and her subsequent encounters with newfangled medical therapies, that poised her as an instrument of revelation. The Christian Science hermeneutical stance is that the whole Bible is a literal guide toward psychic and physical restoration, and that Eddy, as evidenced by the prophesied “little book” mentioned in Revelations, was uniquely appointed to reveal it through her explication of the Bible, Science and Health with Keys to the Scripture. In it, she writes that “health is not a condition of matter, but of mind,” a conviction undergirding all of Christian Science—the controversial principle blamed for the deaths of those who refused hospitalization for their ailing parents or their kids. But Eddy’s call issues from the belief that Creation is inherently good, and that every physical or psychic aberration is an illusion that can be willed out of consciousness, vaporized by prayer. She saw all manner of disease as requiring only a “re-alignment between Mind and God.” Any perceivable darkness or disorder is the consequence of wandering, as in a dream from which you cannot wake. And rather than believing in the divinity of Jesus, she held that “Christ” is a spirit which flowed through him, and through all men and all women, granting everyone the potential to “demonstrate the Christ,” to be a healer.
The marble bust on my grandparents’ hearth was made, of course, not in the likeness of Eddy but of Mary Stevenson Semple, my fifth-great-grandmother, whose husband founded the shoreline city of Elsah, Illinois, which—for no particular reason having to do with his governance—became the site of Principia College, the world’s only Christian Science university. Maybe this was the source of my confusion. The Semples were Methodists when they arrived in Illinois and Episcopalians later on. And then their only daughter, Lucy, converted to Christian Science following the death of her business-tycoon husband.
Her family worried she’d joined a cult, but Lucy didn’t give a shit. She was rich, a businesswoman in her own right, summering her last decades on a rolling estate overlooking the Missouri River. Meanwhile, her younger brother Eugene had left Illinois, gone farther west, starting but failing to complete all of his entrepreneurial endeavors on the Pacific Coast, as large and optimistic as they were: cedar mill baron, filler of tide lands, canal builder, state printer, police commissioner, appointed governor of the Washington Territory, and three-time Democratic loser for elected offices. When his wife ran off with a businessman and the new baby, Eugene filed as a widower and sent his three young daughters to be raised by Lucy in Illinois. She brought up her nieces, Maude, Zoe, and Ethel, in the Church of Christ, Scientist. Then Ethel begat Lulu, and Lulu begat my grandfather George, who begat my mother. I know all of this now.
But which of my ancestors believed what, and for how long, and how those beliefs faded—in one lifetime, in one generation?—is still unclear to me. Did Eugene’s daughters cleave to Science to salve the wounds of their father’s abandonment? Was Lucy’s conversion to this rather egalitarian religion a radical response to Victorian restrictiveness? And how has the irreligious thrust of my immediate family been informed by the inheritance of a religion whose optimism allows for a near-complete disavowal of pain, of disorder, of chaos? Because there is no spiritual continuity in my ancestry to speak of, and because no one really knew why Lucy converted to Christian Science, I imagine unbroken lines of connection wherever they’ve never explicitly been debunked, and so when I was younger, having Christian Science relatives might as well have made me Eddy’s descendent.
And what if Eddy was my relation—my grandma, even? Being too weak to hold me, she’d ask a relative to set me beside her in a chair designated for children, her cold, thin hands folded in her lap. She wouldn’t even pat my head or crinkle a smile, and she’d be rocking, still rocking, as she had been doing her whole life. I’d listen to her chirp about the various miracles and revelations that had led to the founding of her church: the monastic fasts of her childhood, her experiences in mesmerism, a slip on the ice in Lynn, Massachusetts, that, by one account, left her paralyzed, cured only by reading one of Jesus’ healings—after which she sprung from bed in full form. But origin stories are unstable. Even the New Testament accounts for this. There are, after all, four gospels. Some biographers claim that after the fall in Lynn, Eddy was treated with morphine, and that the injury was not a dire one. In her autobiographical writings, Eddy claims that the revelation happened when she was a child, bedridden by stomach ulcers, and later that it was some other sickly girl, then woman, then man, who’d revealed to her the true spiritual reality.
But that’s all make-believe. It was my wealthy ancestor Aunt Lucy who had the marble bust made of her mother, and it was passed down from household to household until it was set in my grandparents’ living room—a place which, before my lifetime, held all-night parties, endless packs of Pall Malls, jugs of Carlo Rossi on the coffee table, bespoke packing cubes for the VW van, great American novels and psychology tomes, my grandfather’s endless stories, and my grandmother’s tipsy, intellectual wit, which kept everyone from going to bed when they otherwise ought to have—and which is now a tomb of cobwebbed furniture and old bicycle parts. The bust, however, sits in the same place it always has and is, at best, a prompt for jokes and tall tales about the religious zealots from whom we descend.
I am visiting my grandparents in Seattle during winter break from graduate school. My grandfather and I are sitting at the kitchen table, plates scraped clean from dinner. I’ve recently grown interested in Mary Baker Eddy, and Lucy and her brother Eugene—I’m not sure which first—and plan to casually excavate the “Semple Papers,” a trove of correspondence kept deep in a library at the University of Washington. I’ve come, too, in hopes of asking my grandfather what he knows about the Science that trickled down to his mother’s generation before disappearing entirely. But when I ask, he only shrugs and changes the subject to something more pressing.
“GMC is offering me thirteen grand for my Suburban,” he says from behind a tall plastic cup of scotch. “They’ve been sending letters.” Out the window, I can see the giant twenty-year-old rig parked halfway on the pavement. “But I’m not giving it up. Why do you think they want those transmissions so badly? I’m keeping hold of it just in case I want to run off into the mountains . . .”
When he says this, I’m not sure if he’s talking about an apocalyptic flight or just a summer excursion, of which he still imagines there are many to come. He laughs at his own frugal genius, his lifelong pride in beating “the system,” and shifts his eighty-five-year-old body in the chair, uncrossing his bloated ankles, the shattered hips intact only by an intricate act of balancing bones.
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s crazy. But—did your grandmother ever talk to you about Christian Science? She was Eugene’s daughter, wasn’t she?”
“Mmh,” he says. “Now—Robert Semple, Eugene’s eldest brother, he was interesting. He helped start the California Bear Flag Revolt in 1846 . . .”
I listen to the full twenty-five-minute account of the Bear Flag Revolt and the capturing of Alta California before rephrasing my question about Christian Science. I keep hoping that he’ll tell me some story about this grandmother, her undiagnosed schizophrenia, her devotion to Science, or maybe a story she told him about the years when she and her sisters lived with their Aunt Lucy in the mansion on the Missouri River. But his mind wanders to more exciting adventures: the feats of the “Great Mizners,” Eugene Semple going north to the Yukon Gold Rush, his own cross-country bike rides.
When my grandfather was twelve years old he bicycled around the entire perimeter of Seattle, and then later Washington State, and by fifteen he and his friends were hitchhiking out to the new Olympic National Forest and hiking over the pass for days, weeks, after which they’d hitchhike home.
“One time we were coming back from a hike and got a ride, five of us, really squished into the back like sardines.” He chuckles, miming the closeness of the quarters. “And the car lost a tire and rolled over four times. But we were all packed in so tightly that no one was hurt. So I yelled, ‘Everyone OK?’ and then we kind of scooted out of the wreck and thumbed for another ride.” While we’ve been talking, he’s dug up an old photo album out of the back room, and he opens to the first page: There’s a photo of him just after the accident. He’s cavalier, shoulders thrown back, grinning through a shock of black beard, a virtually invincible young man clutching a cardboard sign that says SEATTLE.
The funny thing is that, despite his adventurousness, my grandfather’s body has always been fragile. He was born with a degenerative joint condition. After a childhood of failed reconstructive bone surgeries, his body started really falling apart in his twenties, and he’s lived in denial of this ever since. He speaks now of his exploits very casually, as though everyone in 1948 was cycling from coast to coast for no particular reason. When, at twenty-one, he mounted his three-speed Peugeot with a bedroll and his camel-colored loafers, he wasn’t worried that his hip bones might grind against each other from Seattle to South Salem, New York. He was fearless, and he was looking for something, but unlike his forbears it had nothing to do with God. Instead it was strength, immortality, a way to will his frailness out of existence—something like that.
What did he care about Eddy’s Science? His mother had left Science as a young woman for the more formal pastures of the Episcopal Church. Her husband left their family, so she raised her two boys alone and—the way people talk about it—presided over a life so gentle and without expectation, she never urged either of them to heed any doctrine. She put on her little blue shift and matching jacket and went to church; alone or not, it didn’t matter. So, by my grandfather’s generation and thence on, no one in our family was healing by prayer, nor insisting that their children retain any kind of spiritual education. Religion, it seemed, was a perplexing recessive gene whose raison d’être was not worth remembering. In fact, my grandfather found that one could live a productive and ethical life without it, abiding instead by some inner voice. It was inevitable, really—in his blood. You ended up in the West only if someone in your family was looking for escape, or had gone on some impossible adventure, hauling all of their worldly belongings over the continental divide, or were otherwise looking forward, beyond, away from whence they came: erasing their trail or letting it disappear into the wilderness.
If, any time between 1955 and now, someone asked my grandfather what he wanted for Christmas, his answer was always the same: “Improved human relations.” This was his Apostles’ Creed. And my grandfather’s secular humanism was handed down, tacitly, to my mother: I was raised to value tolerance and pluralism and to believe in the native and potential goodness in everyone. It was a privilege, really, to grow up in Portland, Oregon, and never think twice about the sanctity of gay marriage, women’s reproductive rights, or social safety nets, or to doubt the systemic oppression of American minorities. I was taught to recycle, to distrust the free market, and to eat local produce. If I was sick, I went to counselors, naturopaths, and acupuncturists. If I was healthy, I told other people about how they should go see a counselor, a naturopath, an acupuncturist. I was expected to be healthy. I wanted to be healthy. Health and kindness were the marks of moral superiority.
If my distant Aunt Lucy and Mary Baker Eddy ever met, it would have been on Lucy’s property in Elsah, Illinois, a conference of two wealthy nineteenth-century widows in frothy white tea gowns, praying that the other realizes her nerves are fine, that nervous disease isn’t real, and that there’s nothing really to be nervous about anyway.
Christian Science doesn’t espouse such healings to be miraculous but “scientific,” methodical, an ultimately “proven” rediscovery of Christ’s methods as apparent in the Gospels. Jesus laying his hands on the blind man didn’t restore his sight; it showed, through the correction of spiritual thought, what he could see all along. So Jesus is not the son of God (any more than any of us are God’s sons or daughters), but the model Christian Science practitioner, those individuals who, even today, provide healing services in American business park offices and the like.
But despite her interest in restoring Christ’s first-century healings, Eddy’s accomplishments were much more nineteenth century: trustbusting, free enterprise, dissolving an anthropomorphic God, installing women in positions of leadership. By the turn of the century, some 70 percent of Christian Scientists were female, and the world had risen up to meet them.
The frontier had now been scaled and just as quickly secured, the occasion of its endlessness lasting only as long as the momentary hope that it truly might be. More Americans were running away, looking for gold, land, fur, time, freedom. They believed in God, though belief was more tenuous than ever. Frontier women were hanging out in parlor halls or rearing children in small tar-roof cabins in the woods, all by themselves, while their husbands sought nebulous fortunes. It wasn’t great, but maybe it was better than the civilized yoke of Victorian life—a modern period nearly unparalleled in its restrictiveness, in the stripping away of places for women in public and private life. More women lived farther and farther away from their birthplaces, so, if they survived, they could be anyone. They could run off with businessmen. They could convert to a different religion. Or they could make one. During a time when women were excluded from seminaries, pulpits, and medical and scientific professions, Mary Baker Eddy’s religion created a way that they could occupy nearly all of these roles at the same time.
In a way, there are some strange similarities between that religion of secular humanism I grew up with and Christian Science’s deepest convictions: a self-selecting responsibility for one’s emotions and well-being, and a wholesale rejection of certain evil, not to mention a wariness of Western medicine. And sometimes I wonder if my grandfather has some predisposition for not believing in his own maladies. He never goes to the hospital. He walks with two canes and yet, every summer, makes a point of tilling his entire property into “supersoil,” and he climbs ladders to pick the plums, and the stairs five times a day—one set to the second floor and another set to his tower, a small room he built on the roof the bungalow in the early 1960s.
I remain at the kitchen table after my grandfather leaves, and I clear our plates and scrub the dishes with a one-thousand-year-old sponge. The cabinet doors are splitting and stacked full of unused instruments and expired parmesan cheese. I listen to the house creak as my grandfather lurches to his tower, where he’ll listen to the classical station, mull over the Dow Jones, and thumb through every sheet of paper he’s ever collected just to make sure it’s all still there, until he goes to bed.
I wander out of the kitchen and through the living room, where my grandmother has fallen asleep in her chair with the TV on and her legs elevated, then through the musty front hall, with the ancient dictionary on a book stand, and out the front door. I find my mother sitting on the front porch among empty flower pots, plywood, stacks of newspaper. She’s sipping a cup of tea, looking off into the distance.
“Did you get any good information?” she asks.
“Not really,” I say. “He just kept telling these stories about the Mizners.”
She nods and laughs.
I pull up a seat next to her. “Has he always been hard to keep on track?”
“More since he’s gotten older. But he’s always just, you know, talked like this—” she motions a hard, straight line from her face. “In his own world, on a mission.”
I look at my lovely, slight mother, sitting there in her green fleece, quiet and smiling. We’re high on the hill in Ravenna and the radio towers blink peacefully from the north. She was raised in this very house by these jolly alcoholics. Nowadays, in her fifties, she casually describes their general denial of family dysfunction as a consequence of their drinking, but I always thought it was the other way around. Wasn’t the drinking a cipher for the dysfunction?
She is a flutist, and she has spent her entire adult life working with emotionally disturbed kids, mostly in residential treatment programs, and both her parents were social workers, too. She is a teetotaler, yes, but my mother’s remoteness and tranquility seems also to be her way of keeping inexplicable evils at bay.
“You know,” she says, “in junior high one time, I was invited to compete in Walla Walla for a regional honors student orchestra. And the morning I was going to leave—now, you’re going to think this is just goofy—I woke up and the house was empty, right? So I went down to the kitchen, and on the table there is this tiny note from him folded around a five-dollar bill—” She pauses for effect. “‘I hope it is a trip to remember!’”
And now she looks at me, her mouth agape, as though this were the most extraordinary gesture, Excalibur rising from the lake. She laughs. “I kept it in my wallet for twenty-two years.”
She doesn’t elaborate, but I think I understand: It was a moment when, in a very small and practical way, her father acknowledged the daily, regular world and her own place in it.
Later, when she goes inside, I stay on the porch and call my husband Sweeney on the phone. I tell him about coming up short on ancestral information, and about the echoes of Science I see in my own family. He’s silent at first.
“What?” I say. “Is this not making sense?”
“No, no, it is. But you know,” he says, “the missing piece of this is that you don’t really believe in illness either.”
I feel my neck stiffen.
“That’s the funny part,” he says. “Even though you don’t ever say this outright, you always wear any illness you have—even a cold—as a moral failing. You actually get angry with yourself. And, you know, there is a part of you that believes cancer is caused by repression, and that depression can be solved by bananas and herbal tinctures. You can’t even accept the possibility of your brother’s illness in medical terms.”
I don’t know what to say. I feel an unnamable fury and am also close to tears. “I do accept his illness,” I say, “I do, I do. I just feel like there’s more to it, like there’s more going on than illness alone.”
I hang up.
The subject of my brother feels shrouded in silence, especially between my mother and me, except to comment on how great he is doing, what a long way he’s come, how lucky he’s been. When I was sixteen, Aaron was arrested for arson and armed robbery. Or, first he went AWOL during basic training and later cut off his fingers, and then came the arson and robbery. Or, he had done a lot of hallucinogens in high school and thought he could start a cult, and then all the other stuff happened. Or, he had always been angry and destructive, and no one knew why. Regardless, he was arrested, that’s for certain, when I was sixteen and he was twenty, and after a year in holding and scrupulous work from a high-profile defense team that required all of our family’s savings, he was sentenced to the Oregon State Hospital and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia: the inability to discern between what is real and what is not.
For most of my adult life, the lines drawn around that illness and my brother seemed too simplistic, or didn’t seem to illuminate the complicated guy I knew, whose entire life couldn’t, as far as I was concerned, be described away in a sweep of psychosis. Where was the margin of error? Where was agency? And where did it all fit into the larger ecology of our family? And what—I felt Sweeney’s voice creeping back to admonish me—what was illness anyway?
I do have to face that, much to my chagrin, there is an unchecked part of me that views health as a moral metric, whether or not I mean to, or think consciously about it that way. At the center of my interest in Christian Science and my ancestors are, perhaps, my own reprehensible ideas about health being one’s own responsibility, within one’s own control, and somewhere this overlaps with mental health as it relates to my brother—whose out-of-court diagnosis I’d dismissed early on in the heat of teenage rage. It was a diagnosis that implied helplessness. Helplessness seemed too easy to live with.
Mary Baker Eddy is a complicated figure. She’s portrayed sometimes as a narcissist, a plagiarist, and a hack, whose own account of her life shapeshifts and doesn’t match up with those of others. It’s known for sure, though, that Eddy was married three times—divorced, abandoned, widowed—acquiring three different names before, at sixty years old, her Christian Science “association” became a church, at which she was installed as the universal pastor. Then she started the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, wherein anyone who had what was then the exorbitant fee of $300 could train to become practitioners. She funded new newspapers, not least of which was the Christian Science Monitor. And the religion proliferated as a brand-based operation, with lots of literature, rings, brooches, photos, and even commemorative Mary Baker Eddy spoons, and 423 different editions of Science and Health, which all members were encouraged to purchase—or purchase a dozen of each “if they could afford to.” And despite Eddy’s messianic march toward health, she herself never ceased to be sick.
In his 1907 book-length satire of Christian Science, Mark Twain says, “I was assured by the wise that Christian Science was a fleeting craze and would soon perish.” He says that if Christian Scientists were arriving at their beliefs purely by intellect, rather than by environment, family, or milieu, then the prediction would’ve been true, because eventually they’d realize it made no sense. But of course we almost never come to religion by intellect alone. Echoing a common opinion held by outsiders, Twain casts Eddy as not much more than an infantile, illiterate, potentially deranged theologian and a successful snake oil peddler who scammed her followers until she was very, very rich. But if we can suspend our doubt and allow, for a second, that Eddy did start her church based on genuine belief, that she was the prophet she claimed to be, then she needed money to do the Lord’s bidding. Ministers of other sects are supported entirely by the church body, and Eddy, a woman initially without a following, a presiding order, or an income, didn’t have that option.
But her prophecy, especially as a self-described Christian one, leaves lots of questions—in particular, for me, about good and evil. In the earliest book-length biography of Eddy, coauthored by Willa Cather while she was still a grad student, she’s presented as both business-minded and lunatic, a charlatan and a trailblazer—at best a pragmatist more than a prophet, and at worst an all-around crappy writer and spiritual thinker. Cather looks at the complexity of Eddy’s character: She relies enormously on her friends and mentees but then turns them out, ruins their names. She copies the ideas of the famous mesmerist Phineas Quincy, but the accusations deepen her martyrdom. Abandoned by her husband, she hands her son over to her childless neighbors, denying later—even to him—that she’d ever had a son at all. But even this changes. The biography moves through these elements as the stuff of life, not scandal. Still, Cather wonders if this religion has anything to do with Christianity. Where is the talk of sacrifice, charity, love? And how can all of creation be good? If Cather is disturbed by anything, it’s Eddy’s theology, not her life: “No philosophy which endeavors to reduce the universe to one element . . . can admit the existence of evil unless it admits it as a legitimate and necessary part of the whole. But the keystone of Mrs. Eddy’s Science is that evil is not only unnecessary but unreal.”
There is something familiar to me about that inability to court the possibility of evil, or whatever you want to call it, to accept that it may exist, that it may be in you or me, or down the road somewhere, or in the trees. I guess it’s that almost lethal optimism that binds the Christian Scientist and secular humanist thing together: a hope, a belief that everything in this life will, or at least can, turn out OK, and that all the bad stuff—war, famine, rape, abuse—is accidental, aberration, a deviation from what could otherwise be a perfect world.
The afternoon following my conversation with my grandfather, I trek to the library at the University of Washington to dig through the Semple family correspondence in the special archives. In the archive’s careful silence, I fill out a liability form and give the librarian my driver’s license, and then he motions me to a table where I wait for someone to bring me the letters.
I’m excited. I feel like a sleuth about to crack a case. When the letters do finally arrive, in weathered archival boxes, I stare at them for a long time before finally taking one out.
In short, they’re incomprehensible. Each one is as inscrutable as the next. Most of them are written in a wet, loping cursive that’s impossible to read. And even when I make out a passage or two, they’re references to money that Lucy, the optimistic Christian Scientist, wired her brother Eugene for some failed project or another—exact sums, suggestions for its use, and occasional notes about his daughters’ health.
I take out another and stop looking for anything in particular, instead attaching to things that seem to make contact with common experience: “My dear Edwin died tonight,” “Did you go to the Feast of the Annunciation?” and (in one from their mother) “We all agree with you in thinking Eugene a splendid man, and [who] with judicious management will make his mark in whatever he undertakes. Eugene was always inclined to be a little extravagant . . . you must admonish him not to go beyond his income.” Finally I come across one from Eugene to his daughter Maude: “I’ve made it to the Yukon,” he says, and then he begins to tell of the gold rush, on and on, in this excited, sloppy script. Did he think she cared, this girl he’d abandoned years before with his sister in Elsah, Illinois? Or did it not matter either way, his excitement being so solipsistic that he was oblivious to the fact that she must have felt alone, beached, dispensable, that she might only be scanning the letter for one more mention of her name? “Oh, Maude, how I miss you.”
Under the auspices of his rich sister Lucy, who saw no limits in the divine reality, Eugene more or less abandoned his daughters for his dreams, or even dreamed them away. He was a stubborn man, hypnotized by that soft ghostly glow of the Pacific horizon, missing everything that was immediately in front of him. His children came of age without him. And he failed to complete, at great expense, all of his undertakings, and he finished out his life in cheap rented rooms in Astoria, Oregon, continuing to scheme about how to industrialize the coastline, how to open the tidelands, with plans that proved always too expensive, always the laughingstock of the legislature. He eventually died penniless in an old folks’ home. These days, my mother says she’s pretty sure he was an alcoholic.
It’s raining when I leave the library. My pursuit of the letters now seems ridiculous. I tried posing as a scholar and got nothing—didn’t have the patience to see any of it through, didn’t even know how to use archives. If I’m being honest with myself, I expected to sit down in that library and pick out the letter where Lucy described her conversion to Science in crystal-clear detail, or where Eugene confessed, in perfect nineteenth-century prose, to the creed of manifest destiny, or where either of them echoed Eddy’s words, or my grandfather’s words, or my own.
When I get back to Wyoming after winter break, I contact an archivist at Principia College—the Christian Science university in Elsah, the town my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Eugene and Lucy’s father, founded—to help me track down information about Lucy’s former property on the Missouri River, which has since been absorbed by Principia’s campus. She doesn’t have much information and knows nothing of Lucy being a Scientist, but she does know a lot about her philanthropy and her business exploits. She eventually sends me a scan of a very old photograph, about which she says, “I think you will find this of particular interest.” It’s of two marble busts: Mary Semple’s—the one in my grandparents’ living room—and one of Lucy, facing each other from a tabletop and a windowsill respectively, as though in conversation.
There’s something droll about it. For one, they no longer live together—the busts, that is. Lucy’s sits in the dark archival reaches of Principia College, while Mary’s is in Seattle, dusty and forgotten in my grandparents’ living room. One woman was a Methodist who had to face the necessity of evil in order to believe in redemptive goodness, and the other saw only the divine light, all the time.
The busts, the way they were situated in that musty parlor, closed-mouth on nearby surfaces, face-to-face, remind me of my mother and me.
The thing is, my whole interest in Lucy and Eugene and Christian Science started with my mom, though I’d forgotten this. It was between the cool pink sheets of a bed-and-breakfast in rural Oregon that she first told me about them. We were in the middle of a long open-ended road trip across Oregon following my high school graduation, just she and I, alone at length for the first time in years. We were tucked into twin beds on opposite sides of a room, cheeks to pillows, facing each other. She was talking about a college boyfriend of hers I’d never heard of, and how one day he was just “done” with her, and how she was confused and humiliated and never really spoke to her mother about it. Then, out of nowhere, she said, “Have I ever told you about Eugene Semple?” I shook my head.
“Well, Eugene Semple was your great-great-great-great-grandfather, the governor of the Washington Territory. And when his wife left him for a businessman, he filed for the status of a widower. And he sent his three daughters to live with their rich Aunt Lucy, the Christian Scientist, in Illinois . . .”
I fell asleep that night thinking about Eugene and the scandal of a public figure being left by his wife in such a salacious way, and also our connection to a rogue Protestant sect that still exists in the margins of American life. It seemed like we could still be Scientists, in one way or another, though neither my mother nor I had been given any education in the nature of the atonement, what a messiah’s sacrifice might mean, or, moreover, how it might be related to restoring physical and mental health. If we’d been Christian Scientists, we wouldn’t be lounging around gossiping about our ancestors but would instead be praying over my brother, whose illness would be simple, and who was—at that moment, while we were on that road trip—interned in a state hospital in the city where my mother and father had lived in college, and where, 150 years before that, Eugene Semple wandered into a local tavern for a nightcap and quickly found himself in a fistfight with one of his constituents. (That I know from a book, so maybe my mom is right about the drinking.) If we were Christian Scientists, we wouldn’t have been thinking about any of that. We would have been kneeling by my brother’s bedside, helping him will his mind into alignment with God’s.
My grandmother has been going through all of her old correspondence, including everything I’ve ever written her, but also things from my brother, my uncle, and my aunt, and tying it into bundles with twine and sending them to me. It’s the kind of liquidation that precedes death, though I cannot quite tell from where or when the end is coming. She sits in her old wooden pew at the kitchen table, sunlight coming through the window and shining through her colorful bottle collection, and handpicks which ones I’ll like the most. They arrive in chronological order.
In the most recent bundle, I take out a letter from my mother. It’s from September 1975. She’s nineteen years old. “Dear mother Gale,” it starts out cheekily.
I have been anticipating the writing of this letter for two days now. The reason why I’ve put this off has been to make sure it sounded sane when I wrote it—and three days ago it would have sounded incredibly unstable.
She describes this boyfriend who’s been slowly breaking up with her and hints at a nearly psychotic pain she feels over it. It’s the boyfriend she told me about in the bed-and-breakfast, I realize. She then reveals that she’s writing the letter from Astoria, Oregon, where she’s getting ready to play the flute at a wedding gig with her friend. And she goes on and on about the effect of the ocean on her, the “crazy energy that is transmitted into your body,” and that Astoria “satisfies a romantic part of me.”
There is something about Astoria and Bellingham and Seattle that I feel definite “roots”—Seattle is more home and familiar secure feelings. Astoria and B’ham get me thinking about water + fish—people + history. I start getting an urge to learn about Indians from the area, the very beginning. And (this is crazy) I think about Eugene Semple—my family + the Pacific Northwest and to me it is an important combination. I am intrigued with these ideas of history coming to Astoria—it is such a source—the confrontation of the rivers and the ocean.
My mother knew these stories about our family, about our ancestors, only because my grandfather had been telling them unceasingly her whole life. As a kid, she probably sat next to him on a chair designated for children as he talked and talked without ever looking down, and maybe she was happy just listening. But that note she folded into her wallet for two decades—“I hope it is a trip to remember!”—still rattles in my brain, or rather, it’s the idea of my twelve-year-old mother standing in that silent Formica kitchen, thinking, My God, I exist, I exist.