by Joan Chase
“Oh, God, I don’t know. But isn’t it the most thrilling thing you’ve ever imagined, this tremendous power right here . . . ours.” Then we would feel it in the same way, through her, as though a prophet had come among us. She studied tirelessly, into the night, made long, long calls to New York to learn from special teachers and practitioners. The faster she could learn, the better. She was in great haste for Aunt Grace’s sake.
Aunt Elinor’s own healing was a triumphant testimony to the power of Truth. “You ask Momma,” she said to Aunt Grace. “Momma, you saw the X-rays. Momma?”
Gram was washing the breakfast dishes, which, she announced regularly, was her contribution to the housework and should be considered enough, after all the years she’d put in, slaving for kids and a good-for-nothing man. Now she didn’t look up from where she was working to answer Aunt Elinor.
“Well. They were clear. All the heart damage? It’s gone. Completely.” Aunt Elinor spoke for Gram to hear too, firmly, trying to be patient with her mother’s peculiar and exasperating reticence.
Gram spoke then over the pot she was scrubbing, her face nearly in the water. “I don’t know nothing about them pictures. Can’t see a thing in them that makes sense.”
Aunt Elinor turned away from Gram and spoke entirely to us. “They were clear. Dr. Alexander said there was no evidence of any damage at all now, and that’s only two years after he said I would always have to live as a semi-invalid. He was as amazed as I was.” We too felt a part of her victory, her voice like a bellows, full, strong and tireless, her vision burning her eyes to topaz. “And I know that I am well; that is what matters.” Her platinum-blond hair, thick-curled in waves, spread above her as though it were a canopy over the temple of the indwelling spirit. We could feel that spirit of hers, a firm foundation for those who were called to believe. We strained to: she was calling us to another, greater victory.
Including us all, still, she drew us into a new, exalted realm of being. It felt as though our entire former lives had prepared us for this. After a while, even Aunt Grace did not question anything during these sessions; her face rapt, she listened, absorbing the power and mystery, the wonder of faith pouring from Aunt Elinor, as over the wooden table bars of sunlight would move, clearing away the dark places until the surface gleamed whole.
Steadily Aunt Grace, her wonder at herself increasing, began to absorb the new metaphysic, to love it, apart from any benefit to herself—for its own sake. She had always been what she called sensible, down-to-earth (although if that was so, why had she married Neil? Aunt Libby asked). But now we glimpsed her bent in study over the books, repeating verses from memory, talking with Aunt Elinor far into the night. Aunt Elinor extended her vacation. The two of them plunged, with what we imagined was a zeal akin to the apostle Paul’s, into the work of conversion. All that summer it seemed hardly to rain, only at night, a little for the earth; the leaves glittered with clean clear light as though the world were hung with mirror fragments—such, Aunt Elinor taught us, was the nature of reality, everything reflecting God.
We went to church with her and Aunt Grace, and sometimes Aunt Rachel and Aunt Libby. Gram wouldn’t go. “I always been Methodist,” she said, although as far as we could tell she wasn’t anything, didn’t go to church, did as she pleased.
Unexpectedly, Anne was fervently attentive, more so than the rest of us. It was not just that Aunt Grace was her mother. It was, as Anne said, that she felt something herself, which must have been spiritual power coming from God, and although she could not really describe it to us, it was something like when she jumped all the way from the top of the haymow and knew she couldn’t miss, could fly, in fact, there being only the tiniest barrier, like a veil of illusion, to prevent her. We found her greatly changed. Subdued and yet, underneath, on fire. We had not felt that. Reading from the Bible, her voice trembled as she uttered the words about the singing of the morning star—as though something within her sang too. The aunts began to regard her with a new seriousness; we heard them say, “She’s a deep one. You never know.” Aunt Elinor presented Anne with her own set of books and took her to the regular Wednesday-evening testimonials at the church.
Gram wanted no part in it; she left the room if Aunt Elinor started to “preach.” “A lot of folks are going to get hurt around here.” But we didn’t pay much attention to an old woman who grumped over the dishpan and arranged to flee away nearly every afternoon and evening of her life. What did she have to do with us?
Aunt Elinor smiled at Gram’s grumbling and said she already had a lot of Science in her, the way worry never got to her. She said the rest of us had some catching up to do. Gram snorted at that, her color-bled eyes cloudy so that she nearly looked blind. Science or whatever you called it, she didn’t care; there was a lot in life you just had to swallow, like it or not.
That whole summer we were absorbed by Aunt Elinor, as if her thought made up our world as God’s made up hers. When we weren’t studying with her, we went on long nature walks, as she called them, or rode the horses into the far woods beyond where we’d ever gone before. She wore satin dressing gowns to the breakfast table and sat for hours drinking cup after cup of coffee, an addiction she had begun to feel guilty about; some mornings she drank plain boiled water. All of us wore something that had been hers at one time—jewelry, gabardine coat dresses, slips, expensive things she had saved and brought home in a special suitcase for us to share. Wearing her things made us feel a part of her glamorous life away from us.
Soon after she would come home on a visit, her sisters disappeared with her into her old bedroom and would begin to bargain over the “spoils.” Late into the night we would hear them, arguing sometimes, or there were exclamations of delight and hysterical laughter over the fittings, Aunt Libby rueful that the dresses that fit Aunt Elinor’s buxom form so perfectly hung on her like sacks, made her look like a flapper. They all had to agree on what was fair. This year Aunt Grace got the prize, a rectangular silver watch with turquoise inlay, which she took for Anne. They had let her have first pick of everything. All these items were lovely, real gifts, generously given. The sisters praised Aunt Elinor to the skies. Then after that there was further excitement over a display of Aunt Elinor’s inarguably superior wardrobe, up to the moment, which they knew would belong to them in due time, certainly soon enough for the glacial progression of fashion to Sherwood.
Every few days Aunt Elinor would talk long-distance to New York. She tried to wait until Gram had left, because Gram couldn’t stop interrupting her, reminding her every minute or two that the call was long-distance. And those calls often stretched beyond half an hour. “Dammit,” Gram would flare up, “you’ve talked long enough.”
Aunt Elinor would put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Mother, I’m paying for it.”
“I don’t care. Nobody needs to talk that long.”
The calls to the Christian Science doctors, who were called practitioners, were necessarily lengthy, the need for an exacting spiritual examination no less acute than for a medical doctor’s to determine the nature of an illness. In this case the treatment was mental—the eradication of error from thought. Then there were many calls about business too, which now Aunt Elinor had to handle from afar.
“Hello, Louie,” she would trill into the phone. We could hear her all over the house, but we were drawn in closer to her, would end up right at her feet, lying on the carpet, so we could listen only to her, feel included in the whole of her enchanted life. Her laugh would come often, a musical leisured interruption of serious discussion. She would smile at us and roll up her eyes, joshing the man on the other end of the line, sweet-talking him but enjoying it too. We figured he was in love with her. Everyone was. Men were always calling or coming to visit, knocking themselves out, Uncle Dan said, to become one of her enthusiasms. Now, he added, they were really out in the cold, having to compete with God.
Listening to Aunt Elinor’s outbursts of hilarity and the firm commands she gave, we were
thoroughly confused and simultaneously enthralled. Finally she might say, “Shoot it,” or “Kill it,” meaning this or that ad, as she would explain later. “Finish that Motorola commercial by tomorrow. Or else!” With more throaty peals of feeling, she would hang up the phone and turn to all of us, released at last to confide the exact details. She would deliver a full account of “the ad game” in New York, her part in it; all this, like her fashions, light-years from our ordinary preoccupations and understanding, was, through her presence, made accessible—the far border of our lives.
She would end our conversations on a sober note, though. “Girls”—and that included her sisters too—“God never fails. When I think of the years on my feet! Well, you have no idea.” She searched our eyes, trying with every fiber of her being to reach us, holding within that passionate stare the meaning and hope that words alone would never convey. The graciousness of Divine Love was evident in the quality of her attention.
Aunt Elinor had an increased authority within the family. She valued her own counsel more highly too, prayer purifying her motives, each thought clarified by the perspective of eternity. The discontent of her sisters was no longer beyond repair; she became impatient with their endless grievances. Whereas before she had insisted they were fools to put up with this or that man’s foolish behavior, now she suggested they should count their blessings, rejoice and be grateful to have husbands to work for them, so they didn’t have to go out and be shopgirls or typists, or have to sit all day in a casting agency. As she had, for years. Although she had heard herself on the radio, she was still nothing but a failed singer, a second-rate actress. But the really important thing she said was, once dissatisfaction had been replaced by gratitude and gladness, the very evils her sisters had denied would disappear, transcended and defeated by Goodness, which always prevailed, like light over darkness. “Doesn’t God want you to be happy?” She asked us that quite sincerely. It seemed blasphemy to disagree.
She reckoned her own increasing success as evidence. In precise detail she told us all the stages of her own career, the developments which had resulted in her present position as creative director with a large advertising agency. She had taken risks, bought stock in various products at just the right times and their values had zoomed with the economy. “Without Science I could not do this, girls. But Science teaches us to hold to the Truth— not for personal gain but for Its own sake. If want and deprivation are your expectations, want and deprivation you will have.” She faced us with these terrible choices, the power over our own lives.
Her force in speaking was such that by emphasis she seemed to capitalize the recurring important words; we could sense them in her pauses, her emphatic diction, and knew these words in themselves conveyed power from God. In her presence they seemed emblazoned in our minds. After a time of listening as she went on with exact and stirring recitations of radical conversions, horrible illness and wondrous healings, all punctuated with her full thrilling laugh and presided over by her aura of luxurious well-being, we sank off our chairs onto the green carpet, which was sun-splashed as if licked by warm and gentle waves of salt water—the medium of creation itself.
But certain though Aunt Elinor was in her faith, never doubting Aunt Grace’s healing, she seemed to appreciate Aunt Grace’s more cautious attitude, her desire to follow the procedures which the doctors recommended to prolong her life as well as to keep up her spirits. Let them do what they can, Aunt Elinor’s calm bearing seemed to say. So all that summer while Aunt Grace was taught by Aunt Elinor, she continued to go to Cleveland for radium and other treatments, which deepened her voice and sprouted black hair on her chin and upper lip—yet we all knew that the important work of healing was to be accomplished at home, all of us working for this and praying. The treatments made Aunt Grace weak and sick so that she was unable to eat and her hair fell out in handfuls. Finally they were discontinued. The doctors dismissed her. Now she was entirely in the hands of Aunt Elinor and God.
We would often see Aunt Grace walking the back farm road, deeply concentrated. Once when we were coming home from the dairy with ice cream, we saw her from the highway against the backlight of the sky, there by the barn hill, for the farm track was slightly higher than we were, and to us it seemed her figure was silhouetted, a shadow, indeed the visible incarnation of a present spiritual being. The newly cut grass was redolent of its raked crop and in the golden and purpling passage of evening light over it we perceived again the incorporeal origins of creation. Aunt Grace seemed to move across the edge of that vast stage as though she were already far beyond us on a quest which had already removed her from us as effectively as death. We watched as if from the other side of a chasm, ice cream dripping down our arms.
Aunt Elinor, spiritualized, had time for everything, an unflagging energy which surpassed the physical. “Let’s take a ride, girls,” she would propose on any afternoon, unmindful of the weather or any demands on her as spiritual guide and New York business executive. And we would be off, two riding double on the bigger horse, one on the pony, Queenie, one on a borrowed horse, and Aunt Elinor astride the high-spirited mount she had leased for herself. Often we went so far, with her in the lead, or in such humid and miserable weather, that all of us were aching and weary, desperate to complain aloud—had God’s world, and Aunt Elinor’s, permitted any such dissatisfactions. Sometimes Uncle Dan said, “I don’t think she notices the difference.” He meant the difference between good and bad, hot and cold; and he spent many of his evenings alone in his attic sitting room, where he said it was peaceful to be miserable, pure and simple. But we extended ourselves to be with Aunt Elinor and to live up to her expectations. Enthralled, we wanted that summer never to end.
Once when we were out on a very long excursion, Anne’s thirst grew beyond her endurance. She mentioned it uneasily to Aunt Elinor. Aunt Elinor was immediately solicitous, recognized it as a natural thing, not in the category of menstrual cramps and head colds, which had to be vigorously denied. Thirst might even be interpreted as reflecting the spirit’s craving for living water. Aunt Elinor was so accessible right then that we all seized the chance to lament our discomforts—guilty that we had ever thought her unsympathetic, that we had misunderstood her. She turned into the first farm road we came to, slid from her horse’s back and strode to the back door, where she greeted the bewildered housewife with queenly courtesy, requesting cold water and a resting spot on the grass.
“What a perfectly marvelous place you have here,” she rejoiced with the woman. “You must never tire of the enjoyment.” It was obvious from her presence that Aunt Elinor never tired of anything.
“Is a nice place.” The woman spoke finally, out of her shy rolling smiles, in rather halting English, patting her disordered hair.
“Why, my dear, you must be Mrs. Chaccio.” Aunt Elinor beamed at the embarrassed woman. “Gino’s mother. And Angelica’s. I taught them in school, you know, years ago, before I went to New York. Of course, you have so many children.” Aunt Elinor hesitated as though Mrs. Chaccio had forgotten about them herself. “And what are they doing now?”
Mrs. Chaccio shrugged, her English or some other inhibition not allowing her to tell it. “The farm. Kids.” She motioned vaguely.
“Why, yes, of course. This wonderful place. And aren’t you fortunate to have them with you. Such a grand family.”
“Yes. Big.” Mrs. Chaccio grinned broadly at what could not be denied. “Eighteen live. Two gone.” Aunt Elinor looked sympathetic for the missing two, yet her expression suggested that there was much to be grateful for in the eighteen who had survived. “They must be a great help to you.” She encouraged Mrs. Chaccio as she encouraged everyone. And Mrs. Chaccio opened the screen door and stood aside for us to enter. We hung back from the darkness inside, but Aunt Elinor marched forward, up the broken steps, wiping her feet on the porch boards before she went in. We could hear her silent urging: Never turn down Experience—the stuff of life. We dragged behind her. A chicken stood i
n the middle of the table; Mrs. Chaccio scooped it aside and spoke to one of the dark-eyed children peeping in at the door. She spoke rapid Italian to the child, who came and took the docile chicken in its arms and carried it out. Aunt Elinor simply beamed then, as if this fluency in Italian were some special gift.
“Buon giorno,” she said happily, for she had studied Italian when her ambition had been to sing with the Metropolitan Opera. Her word of greeting made Mrs. Chaccio giggle and nod.
Beyond restraint, Aunt Elinor admired the large room, the wall of cupboards, the view of the woods and creek. She proclaimed the joy of family life, including each of us in her enthusiasm. Meanwhile we shrank inward. It seemed we were under the influence of a strange and unholy power in that place, which even Aunt Elinor could not combat. We were fixated by the stare of the unchildish baby Jesus from a calendar, Him crucified and bleeding in another picture. Was this Divine Love? Still Aunt Elinor urged us, nodding significantly, as if she understood but would reassure us that, though distorted and grotesque, the images were evidence of man’s eternal striving toward the Infinite. She glowed, smart in the tailored riding habit she wore in Central Park. Mrs. Chaccio began to roll and slice the dough which had been drying on floured cloths. She blew a feather off the table.