I longed to re-enact significant episodes of the Mary Baker Eddy story. It maddened me to be surrounded by people with (as far as I could see) nothing better to do, but with a fixed resistance to taking direction. I could just about make one flinty physio (‘anything for a quiet life,’ she muttered, though life in the hospital was far too quiet already) act out one side of the crucial dialogue between Asa Gilbert Eddy and the man who had seemed to have a hot line to Mrs Glover’s heart, Daniel Spofford.
He was her blue-eyed boy (the colour of his eyes was intense), a dreamy sort despite his rough history of farm work and service in the Civil War. Asa Gilbert Eddy, biddable, spinsterish, wearing his hair in an eccentric rolled arrangement, was not an obvious choice of husband. Then in 1876 there came a curious conversation between the two men, on the day when the engagement was announced. I coached my pet physio intensively until she could at least deliver Mr Spofford’s line clearly: ‘I confess I am surprised.’
Then as Mr Eddy I simpered, ‘As am I–I have only just received the news myself!’
On the marriage certificate Mrs Glover tactfully subtracted seventeen years from her age, so as to harmonise it with her groom’s, though presumably at the cost of making the ceremony illegal. Lemonade and cake were served.
Mary Baker Eddy’s religion was a bit of a mess in doctrinal terms. As a solo turn I practised saying Mr Dakin’s description of its system of beliefs — ‘a cabinet of theological bric-à-brac!’ — in tones most usually associated, on the English stage, with the incredulous question, ‘A handbag?’
Edible uncut jewels
There was one scene I was particularly keen to stage: Mrs Eddy screaming for help in the middle of the night. This happened a lot. Christian Science had disposed of the possibility of ill health to its own satisfaction, but not every part of Mrs Eddy was convinced. As a child she had been sickly and subject to fits of hysterical rage, but then in her view every symptom was psychosomatic, including obesity (no more than an ‘adipose belief of yourself as a substance’). After all, ‘we have no evidence of food sustaining Life, except false evidence’.
Yet she was never a peaceful person. Her fear and pain had not been abolished by the flourishing of her church. They went into hiding merely, and reappeared in ever more distorted forms. She had banished error, sickness and pain, so if she experienced anything other than full health and happiness there could only be one explanation. Hostile agents were beaming destructive energy at her. The likely culprits were Mrs Eddy’s own disaffected followers. Some of those she had once most relied on were trying to destroy Her (by this time pronouns attaching to her were routinely capitalised) with ‘mental malpractice’.
There were other ways of describing the same destructive force: Electricity of Mortal Mind, The Red Dragon, The Trail of the Fiend, The Sting of the Serpent. The preferred term in Christian Science publications was Malicious Animal Magnetism. The attacks would normally come at dead of night, but if the magnetic assailants expected to find Mrs Eddy undefended they were mistaken. The alarm would go up — a shriek is an effective alarm. Helpers were waiting for the call (they stayed awake in relays of two-hour watches throughout the night, keeping the mental force-field charged). They would rush to Mrs Eddy’s bedside and form a ring around her, bravely facing outwards, human shields against the metaphysical malice, for as long as it took her attackers to lose their destructive concentration, to abandon yet another attempt to incinerate the Pastor Emeritus from a cowardly distance with the emanations of their loathing.
What a tableau! So much more satisfying dramatically than pressing the buzzer (if it has been left within reach) and waiting for a nurse to have a spare moment.
Animal Magnetism was a powerful force. Mrs Eddy suffered from renal calculi — kidney stones — which were really only crystallised malice (I couldn’t help picturing the edible uncut jewels of crystallised ginger). Rays of metaphysical hatred had found tiny cracks in the array of mental armour raised by Mrs Eddy’s helpers. She had to resort to a dentist’s services on a regular basis, in the teeth of her published and preached beliefs, since her upper jaw had been poisoned by the Sting of the Serpent.
I was gradually waking up to the fact that Mary Baker Eddy, elderly, disintegrating and imperious, was exactly the sort of rôle that Dad had had in mind all those years ago, when he had suggested that I could manage rather well as an actor, by playing an old lady in a wheelchair who bossed everybody about. Unfortunately I couldn’t make the rest of the company play along or acknowledge my star quality.
I had to make do with the very limited supplies of curiosity available. A nurse might say, ‘And what did Mary Baker Eddy do today?’ and I’d say, ‘You’ll never guess!’ How could they possibly? She was making it all up as she went along.
What I would really have liked was a tame Christian Scientist to wrangle with. Granny had introduced me to this attractive word, commenting that wrangling was certainly one of my talents, and that it was a shame I wasn’t more gifted in the field of mathematics, since the top student in that subject at her beloved Cambridge University was known as the Senior Wrangler.
Even wrangling of a junior sort was in short supply during my recovery and rehabilitation. Tame Christian Scientists weren’t provided free under the National Health, and unfortunately, because of the very nature of their faith, a hospital was the last place such people would come of their own accord. Perhaps they should have done. At least they wouldn’t be preaching to the converted.
It’s a good job I didn’t come across any patients with kidney stones. I couldn’t have stopped myself from asking, ‘Do you have a lot of enemies? People who might wish you metaphysical harm?’ I’m not that strong. In the watches of the night, do you feel the black searchlights of your foes as they search out the chinks in your walls?
No vapour more easily ignited
My reformulated knee wasn’t supposed to move, and it didn’t, but still it found inventive ways to act up. It was enclosed in a large cast running more or less from hip to ankle, inside which it swelled and gave great pain. Concentrating on Mrs Eddy’s life was increasingly difficult as my own became filled with intensely erroneous sensations. I thought my knee would burst. I pleaded with Mr Arden to remove the cast so as to relieve the pressure, but he said he couldn’t do that. The leg must be held in place. He compromised by having a little window cut in the plaster where the knee was, which allowed the distressed tissue to expand without jeopardising the process of healing. Then it began to itch and I had to poke at the window with anything that came to hand.
During this (third, was it?) rehabilitation my sensitive nose noticed something different in the atmosphere of the hospital. It wasn’t a new smell, exactly, it was the attenuation of an old one. Times were changing. There were fewer volatilised molecules of amylum, that white powder prepared from potato and other vegetable tissue which yields a transparent viscous fluid when boiled — laundry starch, in fact. Starch was still being used in the laundering of nurses’ uniforms, but in significantly smaller quantities. Nurses gave off a less peremptory rustle when they passed. It was almost a soothing whisper.