Читать книгу Seeking Rapture: A Memoir - Kathryn Harrison, Kathryn Harrison - Страница 9

My mother died of breast cancer when I was twenty-four.

I took care of her while she died. I gave her her morphine, her Halcion, her Darvocet, Percocet, Demerol, Zantac, and prednisone. I bathed her and I dressed her bedsores. Though I had to force myself into such communion with disease, I kissed her each morning when she woke and each evening as she fell asleep. Then I went into the bathroom, took a cotton pad soaked with rubbing alcohol, and scrubbed my lips until they burned and bled. Sometimes as I did this I thought of Saint Catherine of Siena, who in 1373 collected into a bowl the pus from the open breast-cancer lesions of Andrea, an older member of the Mantellate lay order to which Catherine belonged. Andrea had caused Catherine much trouble and public censure some years before when she had implied that the saint’s infamous raptures and fasts were a pretense rather than a manifestation of holiness. The bowl’s foul contents stank and made Catherine retch, but both in penance for her disgust and in determination to love her enemy, Catherine drank the old nun’s pus. That night Catherine had a vision of Christ. Her holy bridegroom bade her to His side, and she drank the blood of life that flowed from His wounds.

‘You were named for saints and queens,’ my mother told me when I was young enough that a halo and a crown seemed interchangeable. We were not Catholics yet. Judaism was our birthright, but we had strayed early, and now we were members of the Twenty-eighth Church of Christ, Scientist. Each Sunday, we drove together to the bland, beige sanctuary on Hilgard Avenue in West Los Angeles, where she attended church while I, in a lesser building, went to Sunday school. Above my bed was a plaque bearing these words from the church’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy: ‘Father-Mother good, lovingly Thee I seek, Patient, meek. In the way Thou hast, Be it slow or fast, Up to Thee.’ The little prayer, which I was taught to recite as I fell asleep, worried me. I did not want to die fast. I had asthma, and each attack seemed capable of killing me, so when I was not thinking of my mother, whom I loved without measure, I thought of death and of God. They made my first trinity: Mother, Death, God.

I might have remained immune to the mind-over-matter doctrines of Mrs Eddy and to the subsequent seduction of the saints had I not, when I was six, suffered an accident that occasioned a visit to a Christian Science ‘practitioner,’ or healer. The circumstances were these: my mother, divorced when I was not yet a year old and when she was not yet nineteen, had recently moved out of her parents’ house on Sunset Boulevard, a house where I continued to live, as an only child, with my grandparents. It was the first of my mother’s attempts to make a separate life for herself – a life that did not seem possible to her unless motherhood were left behind – and so now it was my grandfather who drove me to school each day. Though I already knew that my birth had interrupted my mother’s education, I now came to understand that my continued existence somehow distracted her from her paralegal job and, worse, chased off romantic prospects. Each time my mother undressed before me my eyes were drawn to the shiny, pink stretch marks that pregnancy had traced over her stomach; they seemed emblematic of the greater damage I had done. In the afternoons I sat in the closet of her old room, inhaling her perfume from what dresses remained; each morning I woke newly disappointed at the sight of her empty bed in the room next to mine. So, despite my grandfather’s determined cheer, it was a glum ride to school that was interrupted, dramatically, the day the old Lincoln’s brakes failed.

Pumping the useless pedal, my grandfather turned off the road in order to avoid rear-ending the car ahead of us. We went down a short embankment, picked up speed, crossed a ditch, and hit one of the stately eucalyptus trees that form the boundary between Sunset Boulevard and the UCLA campus. On impact, the glove compartment popped open; since I was not wearing my seat belt, I sailed forward and split my chin on its lock mechanism, cracking my jawbone.

My grandfather was not hurt. He got me out of the wrecked, smoking car and pressed a folded handkerchief to my face. Blood was pouring out of my mouth and chin, and I started to cry from fear more than pain. I was struggling against the makeshift compress when, by a strange coincidence, my mother, en route to work, saw us from the street and pulled over. Her sudden materialization, the way she sprang nimbly out of her blue car, seemed to me angelic, magical – an impression enhanced by the dress she was wearing that morning, which had a tight bodice and a full crimson skirt embroidered all over with music notes. Whenever she wore this dress I was unable to resist touching the fabric of the skirt. I found the notes evocative, mysterious; and if she let me I would trace my finger over the spiral of a treble clef or feel the stitched dots of the notes, as if they represented a different code from that of music, like Braille or Morse, a message that I might in time decipher.

My mother was unusually patient and gentle as she helped me into her car. We left my grandfather waiting for a tow truck and drove to UCLA’s nearby medical center, where I was X-rayed and then prepared for suturing. I lay under a light so bright that it almost forced me to close my eyes, while a blue, disposable cloth with a hole cut out for my chin descended over my face like a shroud, blocking my view of my mother. I held her hand tightly, too tightly perhaps, because after a moment she pried my fingers off and laid my hand on the side of the gurney. She had to make a phone call, she said; she had to explain why she hadn’t shown up at work.

I tried to be brave, but when I heard my mother’s heels clicking away from me on the floor, I succumbed to an animal terror and tried to kick and claw my way after her. It took both the doctor and his nurse to restrain me. Once they had, I was tranquilized before I was stitched and then finally taken home asleep.

Later that afternoon I woke up screaming in a panic that had been interrupted, not assuaged, by the drug. My mother, soon exhausted by my relentless crying and clinging to her neck, her legs, her fingers – to whatever she would let me hold – took me to a practitioner whose name she picked at random from the Twenty-eighth Church of Christ, Scientist’s directory.

The practitioner was a woman with gray hair and a woolly, nubbly sweater, which I touched as she prayed over me, my head in her lap and one of her hands on my forehead, the other over my heart. Under those hands, which I remember as cool and calm and sparing in their movements, I felt my fear drain away. Then the top of my skull seemed to be opened by a sudden, revelatory blow, and a searing light filled me. Mysteriously, unexpectedly, this stranger had ushered me into an experience of something I cannot help but call rapture. I felt myself separated from my flesh and from all earthly things. I felt myself no more corporeal than the tremble in the air over a fire. I had no words for what happened – I have few now, almost forty years later – and in astonishment I stopped crying. My mother sighed in relief, and I learned, at age six, that transcendence was possible: that spirit could conquer matter, and that therefore I could overcome whatever obstacles prevented my mother’s loving me. I could overcome myself.

In the years following the accident I became increasingly determined to return to wherever it was I had visited in the practitioner’s lap, and I thought the path to this place might be discovered in Sunday school. Around the wood laminate table I was the only child who had done the previous week’s assignment, who had marked my white-vinyl-covered Bible with the special blue chalk pencil and had read the corresponding snippet from Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. The other children lolled and dozed in clip-on neckties and pastel-sashed dresses while I sat up straight. The teacher had barely finished asking a question before my hand, in its white cotton glove buttoned tight at the wrist, shot up. Sometimes I would see the teacher looking at me with what seemed, even then, like consternation. The lassitude of the other children, their carelessly incorrect answers that proceeded from lips still bearing traces of hastily consumed cold cereal, was clearly what she expected. What was disconcerting was my fierce recital of verses, my vigilant posture on the edge of the red plastic kindergarten chair.

The arena of faith was the only one in which I felt I had a chance of securing my mother’s attention. Since she was not around during the week to answer to more grubby requirements, and since she was always someone who preferred the choice morsel, it was to my mother rather than to my grandparents that the guidance of my soul had been entrusted. On Sundays, after church, we went to a nearby patio restaurant, where we sat in curlicued wrought-iron chairs and reviewed my Sunday school lesson while eating club sandwiches held together with fancy toothpicks. The waiters flirted with my mother, and men at neighboring tables smiled in her direction. They looked at her left hand, which had no ring. They seemed to share my longing for my mother – who already embodied for me the beauty of youth, who had the shiny-haired, smooth-cheeked vitality my grandparents did not have, who could do backbends and cartwheels and owned high-heeled shoes in fifteen colors – who became ever more precious for her elusiveness.

I grew impatient with Key to the Scriptures, and in order to reexperience the ecstatic rise that had for an instant come through the experience of pain, I began secretly – and long before I had the example of any saint – to practice the mortification of my flesh. At my grandfather’s workbench, I turned his vise on my finger joints. When my grandmother brought home ice cream from Baskin-Robbins and discarded the dry ice with which it was packed, I used salad tongs to retrieve the small, smoking slab from the trash can. In the privacy of the upstairs bathroom, I touched my tongue to the dry ice’s surface and left a little of its skin there. I looked in the mirror at the blood coming out of my mouth, at the same magic flow that had once summoned my mother from the impossibly wide world of grown-ups and traffic and delivered her to my side.

My mother converted to Catholicism when I was ten, and I followed in her wake, seeking her even as she sought whatever it was that she had not found in Christian Science. We had failed at even the most basic of Mrs Eddy’s tenets, for by then we routinely sought the care of medical doctors. At first we went only for emergencies, like the accident to my chin, but then my mother developed an ulcer and I, never inoculated, got tetanus from a scrape – physical collapses stubbornly unaffected by our attempts to disbelieve in them.

In preparation for my first Communion, I was catechized by a priest named Father Dove. Despite this felicitous name, Father Dove was not the Holy Spirit incarnate: he chain-smoked and his face over his white collar had a worldly, sanguine hue. Worse, I suspected that my mother was in love with him. She fell in love easily. One Saturday I made my first confession (that I had been rude to my grandmother and had taken three dollars from her purse), and the next day I took Communion with eleven other little girls dressed in white; from that time forward I attended mass in a marble sanctuary filled with gilt angels.

Light came through the stained-glass windows and splashed colors over everything. A red circle fell on my mother’s white throat. Incense roiled around us, and I looked down to compare the shiny toes of my black patent-leather shoes with those of hers. When we left, lining up to shake Father Dove’s hand, I was able to study the faces around me and confirm that my mother’s wide hazel eyes, her long nose, and high, white forehead made her more beautiful than anyone else.

For Christmas the following year I received, in my stocking, a boxed set of four volumes of Lives of the Saints, intended for children. There were two volumes of male saints, which I read once, flipping through the onionskin pages, and then left in my dresser drawer, and two of female saints, which I studied and slept with. The books contained color plates, illustrations adapted from works of the masters. Blinded Lucy. Maimed Agatha, her breasts on a platter. Beheaded Agnes. Margaret pressed to death under a door piled high with stones. Perpetua and Felicity mauled by beasts. Well-born Clare, barefoot and wearing rags. Mary Magdalen de’ Pazzi lying on the bed of splinters she made for herself in the woodshed. Veronica washing the floors with her tongue, and Angela drinking water used to bathe a leper’s sores. I saw that there were those who were tortured and those who needed no persecutors – they were enemies to their own flesh.

Saint Catherine of Siena began by saying Hail Marys on every step she climbed. Soon she slept on a board, with a brick for a pillow. She did not like her hair shirt because it smelled, so she took to wearing an iron chain that bit into her waist. As Catherine’s Dialogue (dictated years later while she was in a sustained ecstasy that lasted weeks, even months) makes clear, she believed earthly suffering was the only way to correct the intrinsic baseness of mankind.

My mother also held forth an ideal of perfection, an ideal for which she would suffer, but hers was beauty. For beauty she endured the small tortures of eyebrow plucking and peel-off facial masks, of girdles and pinched toes, of sleep sacrificed to hair rollers and meals reduced to cottage cheese. I knew, from my mother’s enthusiastic response to certain pictures in magazines and to particular waifs in the movies, that the child who would best complement her vanity was dark-haired and slender and balanced on point shoes. I was blond, robust, and, at thirteen, still given to tree climbing. Because my conception had been accidental, because I ought not to have been there at all, it must have struck my mother as an act of defiance that I was so large a child, taller and sturdier than any other girl in my class.

I wished myself smaller. I began to dream at night of Beyond the Looking Glass potions, little bottles bearing liquids that shrank me to nothing and mushrooms that let me disappear between grass blades. I began, too, to dread Sunday lunches with my mother, who fastidiously observed my fork in its ascension to my mouth.

Saint Catherine was fourteen when her older sister Bonaventura died in childbirth. Catherine blamed herself for her sister’s death. She believed God had punished her and Bonaventura because Catherine had let her big sister tempt her into using cosmetics and curling her hair – because she had let Bonaventura’s example convince her, briefly, that a woman could embrace both heavenly and earthly desires.

Whatever buoyancy, whatever youthful resilience, Saint Catherine had had disappeared when she lost her sister. She became uncompromising in turning away from all worldly things: from food, from sleep, from men. Their mother, Lapa, a volatile woman whose choleric screams were reputedly so loud that they frightened passersby on Siena’s Via dei Tintori, redoubled her efforts to marry her uncooperative twenty-fourth child. Some accounts hold that Catherine’s intended groom was Bonaventura’s widowed husband, a foul-tongued and occasionally brutish man. Catherine refused; she had long ago promised herself to Christ. She cut off her hair and fasted, eating only bread and uncooked vegetables. She began to experience ecstasies, and it is recorded that when she did she suffered a tetanic rigor in her limbs. Then Lapa would lift her daughter from the floor where she had fallen and almost break the girl’s bones as she tried to bend her stiff arms and legs.

Though it had been ten years since my mother moved out, she had yet to find a place that suited her for any length of time, and so she received her mail at the more permanent address of her parents and would stop by after work to pick it up. She came in the back door, cool and perfumed and impeccably dressed, and she drifted into the kitchen to find me in my rumpled school uniform, standing before the open refrigerator. One day I turned around with a cold chicken leg in my hand. My mother had tossed her unopened bills on the counter and was slowly rereading the message inside a greeting card decorated with a drawing of two lovesick rabbits locked in a dizzy embrace. She smiled slightly – a small and self-consciously mysterious smile – and kept the content of the card averted from my eyes. When she had had her fill of it, she looked up at me. She said nothing but let her eyes rest for a moment on the meat in my hand; then she looked away, from it, from me. She did not need to speak to tell me of her disapproval, and by now my habitual response to my mother had become one of despair: muffled, mute, and stumbling. But in that moment when she looked away from me, hopelessness gave way before a sudden, visionary elation. I dropped the drumstick into the garbage can. The mouthful I had swallowed stopped in its descent, and I felt it, gelid and vile inside me as I washed the sheen of grease from my fingers. At dinnertime, after my mother had left for her apartment, I pleaded too much homework to allow time to eat at the table, and I took my plate from the kitchen to my bedroom and opened the window, dropping the food into the dark foliage of the bushes below.

When I was fifteen my mother forsook the parish to which we belonged, and we began to attend one of the few Los Angeles churches that offered Latin mass. It was a romantic choice, I believe, one that justified for her the long and mostly silent drive we took each Sunday. During the celebration of the Eucharist, the priest would place the Communion wafer on my tongue. I withdrew it into my mouth carefully, making the sign of the cross over myself. Back in the pew I knelt and lay my head in my arms in a semblance of devotion, stuck out my tongue, and pushed the damp wafer into my sleeve. I was a little afraid of going to hell, very afraid of swallowing bread. My rules had grown more inexorable than the Church’s; they alone could save me. But the Host was the Host, and I could not bring myself to throw it away. So I kept it in my sock drawer with my other relics: a small fetish of my mother’s hair, stolen strand by strand from the hairbrush she kept in her purse. An eye pencil from that same source. Two tiny cookies from a Christmas stocking long past, a gingerbread boy and girl, no taller than an inch. A red leather collar from my cat, which had died.

I still had my little books of the female saints. I looked at them before bedtime some nights, stared at their little portraits, at bleeding hands and feet, at exultant faces tipped up to heaven. But I read longer hagiographies now, grown-up ones. When Catherine was twenty-four she experienced a mystical death. ‘My soul was loosed from the body for those four hours,’ she told her confessor, who recorded that her heart stopped beating for that long. Though she did not want to return to her flesh, Jesus bade her go back. But henceforth, she was not as other mortals; her flesh was changed and unfit for worldly living. From that time forward she swallowed nothing she did not vomit. Her happiness was so intense that she laughed in her fits of ecstasy; she wept and laughed at the same time.

I began to lose weight and watched with exultation as my bones emerged. I loved my transformed self. I could not look at myself enough, and I never went into the bathroom that I did not find myself helplessly undressing before the mirror. I touched myself, too. At night I lay in bed and felt each jutting rib, felt sternum and hipbone, felt my sharp jaw and with my finger traced the orbit of my eye. Like Catherine’s, mine was not a happiness that others understood, for it was the joy of a private, inhuman triumph and of a universe – my body – utterly subjugated to my will.

My life was solitary, as befits a religious. Too much of human fellowship was dictated by taking meals in company, and what I did and did not consume separated me from others. Since I had not yet weaned myself completely from human needs, I drank coffee, tea, and Tab. I ate raw vegetables, multivitamins, NoDoz, and, when I felt very weak, tuna canned in water. When I climbed stairs I saw stars. I ate with my grandparents when I was forced to, but the mask of compliance was temporary, and upstairs, in my bathroom, I vomited what I had eaten. This will make you pure, I used to think when I made myself throw up. I used ipecac, the emetic kept in first-aid kits that causes a reeling, sweaty nausea that made me wish I were dead.

My grandmother and grandfather, sixty-two and seventy-one at my birth, were now old enough that their ebbing energy granted me freedom unusual for a teenager. Losing their sight, they did not see my thinness. Deaf, they never heard me in my bathroom. By the time I was sixteen and a licensed driver, they sometimes depended on me to buy groceries, and en route to the supermarket I would stop at the mall. ‘Where did you go, Kalamazoo?’ my grandmother would ask when I returned, trying to understand why I was hours late. Sometimes she accused me of secretly meeting boys; she used the word assignation.