Our Father WHO artinheaven HALLOWED beThy name, Thy KINGDOM COME, Thy will be done on EARTH AS IT isin heaven…
I rolled my eyes every time. “It is unfair,” I told you, “and the church’s loss. You’d read normally, and you’d make pastoral calls without covering your face with a handkerchief.” The Right Reverend, whom we referred to as our own Handkerchief Moody, had grasped germ theory too well for his role. There were stories of feverish parishioners shrieking when he entered their rooms, veiled and dressed in black, appearing as though he’d come not to comfort but to reap their souls.
You struggled with all the hypocrisies in religion. You were too smart to embrace passivity, too clearheaded to mistake self-abnegation for humility. You envied the nuns who started their own orders and rules as a way to take control of their spiritual genius. But your good, shrewd mind prevented you from imagining that you could convince yourself of the sanity of the church’s attenuated stance against women simply by reading all the centuries of misogynistic literature. Instead you became the equivalent of a lay nun, devoted to work among the poor. My parents were pitied, because you were so very beautiful. Beautiful women are meant to marry. That Jesus tapped you on the shoulder and asked you to follow him was considered a terrible waste, not to mention tasteless.
Is it awful of me to think that illness suited you? I did think that. You were finally able to simply read and pray all day long. You were on the equivalent of a honeymoon, and besotted. You told me your beliefs if I asked, but you never could speak about your visions. You questioned them fiercely, didn’t want to fool yourself or get carried away by what might be a side effect of medication, or cells shooting up like fireworks in your brain, a purely biological phenomenon. You tormented yourself with this question so relentlessly that I had to intervene and ratify your most extreme experiences, against everything I myself believed. I sat by your bed while you were in your ecstasies and asked what you saw, heard, thought, and I wrote it all down. Your insights struck me as being at the highest level of purity and truth. It’s a quality of truth that it is recognizable even if it’s alien to one’s own experience. You said an ant had as much value as a man, that nature was non-hierarchical in value—a truth that God had misunderstood in his early works. There was only one soul that showed itself in different forms, including the oblivion beyond the outer cosmos. Prayer isn’t necessary. Prayer can come in between God and the truth. Nothing is necessary. All already happened, all is present, and that is all.
You saw the blazing lights that mystics see, but said you could have done without the pyrotechnics. Based on the dictation I’d taken, you came to accept that you really were a mystic, and I accepted it, too.
You died in summer, with our parents and me present. Your last words were harvest moon. After saying that, your face let go into death. I thought you’d have a smile, joining God, but your joy wasn’t the stuff of deathbed scenes. We had a box delivered and a grave dug. Mourners dotted both our property and the Hancocks’。
At your memorial service in Philadelphia so many people came that they lined the streets and we walked along as if it were a royal reception.
I began to weep, recounting this. “Nan? Are you awake?” I touched her shoulder. A murmur, a waved hand, meaning—keep going. So imperious. I brushed my cheeks with my fingers and looked, for steadiness, out the window. The leaves have mostly fallen, so the pines are having their glorious reign. It’s hard to believe they could be greener, but the cold saturates them gorgeously. She shifted her head back to see my face and pointed at my mouth. The lull had been too long. Keep talking, keep talking. How little she must have heard the sound of the human voice to find mine so desirable. We are a perfect pair, middle-aged woman and tiny girl, neither of us with anything else to do but live through an afternoon together. Neither of us very experienced in the world. Though I remember reading that whoever had lived to age four knew everything about the workings of the human heart. So I must. So must she, or nearly.
“All right, you asked for it. Now comes my mother.” I raised my eyebrows portentously. She clutched at poor Star, who arched his back and paddled to be free of her grip. I intervened, worrying for his spine and lungs, by sliding my hand between him and her arms. He hopped across my lap and settled by my leg. She showed no sign that his defection bothered her. “The cow jumps over the moon,” I said, and looked to her for acknowledgment.
“The lil dog waf!” she said.
I finished the verse, and she said the words as best she could. Making up for lost time. When her eyes closed again, I continued my story.
With Elspeth—you—gone, I was alone as I’d never been. I still lived with our parents, but they did not whisper with me at night. I worked harder, both on a new novel and on learning Scherenschnitte—paper cutting. I cut black paper into shapes and pasted it on a plain background. Arduous and fine work, as purposeful as placing a foot correctly when descending a mountain. It required a concentration so fierce as to blot out the small thoughts and distractions that make up so much of what qualifies as an individual personality. I sought to be scoured.
Grace had a heart attack. She was at the Cosmopolitan Club for lunch, in the middle of the full-blown moment of cutlery clinking and perfume and powder wafting and ladies gathering information, when she tipped to her side in the chair and went unconscious. She was taken to the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, where they managed to revive her. A mistake. She didn’t want to live, and never got well again. A year later she had the stroke that killed her. I wasn’t sad when she died, except in a general way. Self-pity, I suppose. Is that not sometimes justified, though?
I kept my supplies in a man’s briefcase I bought for the purpose and sat in different rooms in the house, slowly learning the scissors. I kept at it during Grace’s illness. She frowned when she saw the small cuttings fall through my fingers to the floor. I mollified her by asking if she had any requests. I should have known. She wanted me to do Edmund from his various portraits, and then critiqued the result. “But his nose was never quite this long. His jaw was stronger. He had thicker eyebrows.” I agreed—I couldn’t get him right. She sighed, and left me to keep trying. I cut other shapes for her, but she wasn’t interested. Nurses came and went in the room, but I sat with her, read to her, slept close enough to hear her call, helped her dress for visitors and put on her lipstick when Lachlan was about to come into her room. Yet she felt no special gratitude toward me that I was helping her to appear as her old self to the world. She had no will to live, and no affection left in her.
Our mother had a great deal of trouble being handled privately. I tried to interest her in cards, but she was too listless. She didn’t even want to go to church. It was a matter of waiting for the last day to come. Lachlan and I both sat with her in the final forty-eight rasping hours. Predictably, she said the name Edmund a number of times, and the words Father and Mother, and Catharine, her long-dead sister. Then at the last, she said, “Put on your gloves!”
Grace Brown Lee. A person of her class. A person whose habits and manners stamped out the development of desire and predilection. A person who’d done exactly as she was meant to every day of her life, with the exception of one episode—the time of her mourning after Edmund’s death.