“Good gracious. Six angel cakes, that makes thirty-six eggs.” While
beating up the whites of eggs for her famous cakes Minnie would ponder
on the power of mind over matter, the healing of physical pain by
faith, and the ultimate purifying grace of the Divine Spirit. One day
she announced that she had joined the Christian Science Church. The
family took the news seriously. Jane’s grandmother turned very white.
She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes and whispered--“Oh,
Minnie dear, I’m so sorry.” Uncle Bradford brought his fist down on
a table with a crash and shouted--“Don’t you do it, Minnie. These
newfangled religions are no good.” Beth wept. Patience said “Hmph.”
Jane didn’t like the new look on her Aunt Minnie’s face, but the
religious mystery behind it had a worrying fascination. She listened
to the talk of her elders hoping to learn about this new faith, but it
was characteristic of them not to argue or discuss things that affected
them deeply, so she learned little, and she was afraid to ask her Aunt
Patience who seemed somehow not at all patient with Minnie just now. So
she was reduced to talking it all over with Fan, her friend, who lived
next door. They would sit astride the fence that divided the two back
gardens and talk about God and their elders.
“Aunt Minnie has got a new religion,” Jane announced. “Religions are
funny things. I don’t think I like them but they do do things to you.”
“Pooh! I know. It’s not half so queer as Mormons and Theosophites and
Dowyites.”
“What’s all that?”
“The Mormons have lots of wives. They live in Salt Lake City and
practice bigamy. The Dowyites are in Chicago. There’s a big church
there full of crutches of all the lame people Dowy has cured by
miracle.”
“Well, Aunt Minnie says there’s no such thing as being lame or sick,
and everything is a miracle.”
“He-he! I’m not a miracle”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Who made you?”
“My mother.”
“How?”
“I dunno.”
“Well, that’s a miracle.”
“Oh, Jane, you are a silly.”
“I’m not silly. I know you’ve got to have a religion or you can’t be
good, but I don’t like it all the same.”
“Who wants to be good?”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d be afraid to die.”
Fan had a complete worldly wisdom that could cover most things, but she
was obliged to admit, though with her nose in the air, that she, too,
would be afraid to die if she went on being very bad up to the last
minute.
Fan Hazeltine was an orphan. She lived with a stepfather who hated
her and sometimes didn’t speak to her for a week. She and Jane had
met on the back fence the day after Jane’s arrival in St. Mary’s
Plains. Jane was six years old then, Fan eight, but I imagine that Fan
was very much the same at that time, as when I met her twenty years
later. She was always a wisp of a thing no bigger than an elf with a
wizened face. Life gave her no leisure for expansion. She was one of
those people who never had a chance to blossom out, but could just
achieve the phenomenal business of continuing to exist by grit and
the determination not to be downed. What she was in her stepfather’s
inimical house that she remained in the larger inimical world, a
small under-nourished undaunted creature, consumed with a thirst for
happiness, hiding her hurts under an obstinate gaiety, a minute lonely
thing steering her bark cleverly through stormy waters, keeping afloat
somehow, sinking and struggling, her grim little heart hardening, her
laughter growing shriller and louder as the years went by. There is no
difficulty about understanding Fan. I can see her astride that fence,
screwing up her face while she told Jane what she was going to do in
the world, and I can see her set about doing it.
“I’m going to have a good time. You wait. You just wait. I tell you I’m
going to have a good time--fun, fun, fun. That’s what I want.”
But Jane did not say what she wanted from life.