Seeking Rapture: A Memoir. Kathryn Harrison

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ