Cedilla (34 page)

It turned out that she was having one of her good days, though Chicago was far from the Church’s roots in New England. There were three thousand in the audience, on top of the eight hundred delegates. She stood up to speak, and the whole crowd came to its feet. She exported her hysteria in grand style. She released it into the hall and licensed every emotion, every wish.

But how did she do it? What did she say? She started off with the ninety-first psalm:
 ¶He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall
abide under the shadow of the Almighty
. Not one of David’s best efforts, you’d have thought, but experienced reporters were reportedly so spellbound that they forgot to take notes. There are paraphrases, but they don’t give much indication of what the fuss was all about – what it was that made the crowd surge forward, desperate to touch her hand or her dress, while some cried out that their ailments had been mysteriously cured and others that they were (less mysteriously) being crushed.

If ever the guru spoke through her, it was that day – but it isn’t necessary to suppose his presence. A room containing close to four thousand people is a candidate for spontaneous combustion even without the cue of a spark (spontaneous seems the wrong word for something building up so relentlessly). Few in the audience were believers already, which sounds like a disadvantage but was actually an enormous help, since there is no vapour more easily ignited than the desire to believe.

Mrs Eddy spoke, and that was all she needed to do. Whether she was the clapper or the bell, the two parts came together and the clang was immense. There followed a ‘mad rhapsody’ of press coverage, and it never really died down until she died herself, which she declined to do for the next twenty-two years.

The effect of becoming a public figure on this desperately unstable woman was dramatic. She showed a sudden genius for leadership. She developed astoundingly in her ability to direct and manage, to formulate plans and carry them to successful conclusion, to analyse a problem and put her finger on the underlying difficulty.

‘The psychologist holds,’ according to Mr Dakin, ‘that there is no more able and efficient personality than the introvert who through some change of circumstances acquires or develops some extrovert tendencies.’ At first I thought there was a particular psychologist being referred to at this point, but then I realised that it was the statement of a basic principle, even a commonplace. It was still news to me.

Could it really be true? Was this something everybody knew, except the one person who needed to? That person being me. I thought of myself as an extrovert billeted on an introverted body. Introverted bones, above all. Living an introverted life despite myself. Now the possibility was being floated that I might be able to transform myself, becoming so effective in the world as to be virtually unrecognisable. This was no longer a case history of an eccentric and long-dead figure, it was virtually a manifesto. There was plenty to hold me back, but no more than there had been to block Mrs Eddy’s progress. Mrs Eddy had succeeded late in life in unfurling the umbrella of her character and displaying the lurid colours of its lining, and perhaps my own umbrella only seemed to be rusted shut, the catch useless if not actually broken off. I must be prepared to wait, just as she had, and watch for my moment, which would not necessarily be dramatic in any obvious way. When the time came, perhaps all I would have to do, like her, would be to open my mouth and say what I had to say.

Mrs Eddy went on being an inspiration even while it became clear she was a total monster. The two things were logically separate. What she did with her transformed character was her own affair. The inspirational thing was that she had been able to transform it.

Mrs Eddy stood revealed as a master manipulator whose tools were bureaucracy and public relations. The new religion had a particular appeal to the well-off – to people prosperous enough to identify ageing and ill-health as their supreme enemies.

The wealth of its supporters was a great asset to Christian Science. If a newspaper carried a derogatory article, or even if it referred to ‘faith healing’ (though surely there was faith and there was healing?), then complaints would be laid. If apologies were slow to appear then a local
advertiser would telephone the newspaper offices – at a time when the telephone was a great luxury in itself – to express disappointment at such prejudicial expressions. That usually did the trick.

At a time when the church had about sixty thousand members, there were fifty publicity men paid to keep its image gleaming. One publicity man for every twelve hundred or so believers. Quite a tally. Church members were forbidden to reveal the number of believers, so as to give the impression of a vast movement.

Mrs Eddy was in her own way an innovator and inventor – something that Ramana Maharshi never claimed to be. In Hinduism it is always a question of old wine in new bottles, except that from a non-dualistic perspective wine and bottles are necessarily of the same substance and the same age. Mrs Eddy’s innovations, though, were in the field of business studies rather than spirituality.

By the end of her life Mrs Eddy was making $400,000 a year from the movement’s periodicals, and she knew about the importance of revenue. She never put her own money into the church. The flow of cash was quite the other way. In the 1880s she constituted the entire teaching staff of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, which earned her over a million and a half dollars over that decade. A book dictated by God should hardly need revision, but new editions of
Science and Health
appeared very regularly, and each time the faithful were required to buy the new and discard the old, however minor the changes. Even so Mrs Eddy came to feel jealous of the profits made by the printers, and absorbed that aspect of the business also.

When a new Mother Church was built in Boston, it was paid for before its dedication. In fact an appeal had to be made asking that no more donations be made to the building fund. The newspapers couldn’t get over this. They were accustomed to the moaning and wheedling of Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Campbellites seeking to find enough money to pay the preacher and a janitor. They publicised continual fairs, bazaars, ladies’-aid sociables and picnics dedicated to raising funds for a parsonage roof here, a Sunday-school carpet there. And now in three short years this curious sect of Christian Science had built a domed white temple of Bedford stone and granite taller by one foot than the Bunker Hill monument. Some newspapers ran articles every day for a week.

The financial miracle, at least, was well attested. Some vocations require a vow of poverty. Mrs Eddy had made a vow of wealth, and over time poverty took on the status of original sin. When it was suggested that wearing purple velvet and diamonds hardly went with the humility of the Lord’s handmaid, she knew better than to say, ‘If you’ve got it, baby, flaunt it!’ She remarked that the diamonds were a present from someone whose life she had saved, which she had worn round the house until her husband reproached her, saying she was belittling the gesture of the gift. As for the velvet, it was really only velveteen and had cost barely a dollar years and years ago but was mysteriously renewed, ‘like the widow’s cruse’.

Healing was the key ingredient in this new religion – nothing fills a room like the prospect of a miracle cure. It was a stroke of genius for her to make out that healing was a lowly power, and to delegate it. To be sure, Mrs Eddy claimed cures of her own, up to and sometimes including the raising of the dead, but these miracles were long ago and far away, impossible to verify.

As with money, others took the risks but the benefit went to her alone. She took the credit for successful healing, but when things went wrong she disowned the practitioner. There was an outcry in 1888 when a Mrs Corner attended her own daughter in childbirth, and both mother and baby died. Some Christian Science students tried to rally round the (doubly) bereaved woman, who had handled the accouchement in accordance with Christian Science practice, but Mrs Eddy wasn’t sentimental where bad publicity was involved. A statement was issued on behalf of the church pointing out, as if in sorrow, that Mrs Corner hadn’t studied obstetrics at the approved institution. Hardly surprising, since courses in metaphysical obstetrics had only recently been set up. The grieving mother was branded a quack, and the church moved on.

In her long-delayed, long-lasting heyday, Mrs Eddy was less like a person than a confluence of rivers, one of cash and one of prestige. Yet the night terrors never left her.

She depended on charismatic recruits, but was also afraid of them.
Might they not break away or seek to usurp her place? She created insurance policies against rebels and rivals. The bye-laws of the Christian Scientists’ Association included this sublime combination of propositions:

‘
Resolved
, That every one who wishes to withdraw without reason shall be considered to have broken his oath.

‘
Resolved
, That breaking the Christian Scientist’s oath is immorality.’

That took care of the rebels. In 1895 she abolished the post of pastor: instead there would be Readers, whose job was literally Reading, reading aloud from the Bible and (more importantly) from
Science and
Health
. They were required to identify her by name every time they read from her Book. They were to make no explanatory remarks. Nor should there be discussion of any sort afterwards – in any case she was to be notified of any meeting of church members, just to be safe. Rather, individuals should depart ‘in quiet
thought
’. She had sealed the exit doors: now she pumped all the air out of the hall. And that took care of any rivals.

I started toying, idly and then more diligently, with the idea of writing a play about Mrs Eddy. Jimmy Kettle, the pupil at Vulcan who had first sold me on the world-beating genius of Tennessee Williams, had gone on to write a play of his own (or at least to start one) based on something that had happened on school premises. Why shouldn’t I have a go myself? Bearing in mind that no one would write a
tour de force
solo turn for me as an immobile actor with no experience, I would have to do it myself – and in that respect Mary Baker Eddy was a gift of a subject. Power, delusion and speaking on God’s behalf. Hard to go wrong, really.

It would be awkward if my play was put on in a church hall somewhere before Jimmy Kettle’s first masterpiece was presented on Broadway or the West End, but it couldn’t be helped. We were all grown-ups.

It made sense to set my play in Mrs Eddy’s last home, Chestnut Hill in Massachusetts. I had my title already! I wrote the words
Chestnut
Hill
in different styles of handwriting, and also explored the look of it in shorthand (Pitman and Gregg). In fact her previous home, Pleasant View, would have provided a more satisfactory title, but there was
no help for that. I couldn’t play ducks and drakes with the facts of a life, even if the life in question was more of a cautionary tale than a template for virtue or happiness.

There was certainly plenty of material. In fact Mrs Eddy’s velvet-gown-and-diamonds period hadn’t lasted long, and she had begun to withdraw relatively early. She moved to Concord, Massachusetts, some way from the church’s core constituency in Boston. The intention was not to consolidate her mystique by making her unavailable, but that was the happy result.

Mrs Eddy didn’t altogether disappear from public view. She would take a daily drive in a carriage, whatever the weather. Except that she was often too unwell to do so. On those days she would be impersonated on her outing. A white-haired woman muffled up to the ears in fur would take her place in the carriage, unobtrusively adjusting the angle of her parasol so as to shield her face from any observers.

Even so, it seemed there was no safety to be had from malicious animal magnetism. Mailboxes were particularly easily charged with it, so letters would be bundled up for posting far from home. Pleasant View became a place of fear. Mrs Leonard, the woman who had so helpfully impersonated the Pastor Emeritus in her carriage, died of diabetes. She was sixty-nine, quite an age at the time, but living in Science with nothing to fear – and fifteen years younger than She whose place she was taking. It seemed clear that the innocent with the sunshade had paid a terrible price for the service she rendered. The decoy had put herself in the firing line, and her health had been broken by invisible rays meant for Mrs Eddy. The poisoned darts had missed their intended target, but they had landed where they were sent.

Mrs Eddy took the decision to move from New Hampshire altogether. She had been disrespectfully treated by the local press in Concord, to the point where she had been required to demonstrate her mental competence in a court of law. If I had been writing a proper play, with multiple characters, this would have been a scene of wild comedy, with the omnipotent bureaucrat being dragged into court and required to prove that she was in possession of all her marbles,
rather than some confused old dear being manipulated and bled white by those she trusted.

The quest for a new home was an urgent one, the need for secrecy vital. Her trustees found her a suitable nest – this was Chestnut Hill, a stone mansion of some thirty-four rooms, set in twelve acres of woodland. They set about modifying it to her requirements at extreme speed. Hundreds of labourers worked in shifts day and night, with prodigious arc-lights making good the short hours of winter sunlight. Mrs Eddy’s personal chambers exactly reproduced the layout and decor of her rooms at Pleasant View. There was an electric lift to spare her the effort of stairs. Steel safes were set in the walls of the landings, for the safe storage of documents – many of them giving accounts of her past rather different from the approved version. She had steadily been acquiring these for years. In the protected spaces of Mrs Eddy’s safes the urge to suppress information and the urge to preserve it reached a strange equilibrium, a sort of peace.