Seeking Rapture: A Memoir. Kathryn Harrison

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       Seeking Rapture

      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 СКАЧАТЬ