As Good As I Could Be by Susan Cheever

Author:Susan Cheever
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology/Parenting
Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Published: 2001-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

MY DAUGHTER SEARCHES FOR GOD

I TAUGHT MY DAUGHTER the Lord’s Prayer, I arranged to have her christened, and I took her to church with me occasionally. With my son I have been less conscientious. He comes to church with me sometimes, just because I invite him. Even the forty-five-minute service gets boring for him, and he wanders out into the nave and plays with the verger or gets a head start on the coffee cake that we serve after communion sometimes. On Christmas Eve we all go to church to watch the Christmas Pageant, a thrilling performance involving some real baby sheep and a live donkey who once bucked off the Virgin Mary in a fit of holy exaltation. My son wears his best sweater and we sing carols. It makes me sad that he doesn’t know the words to the songs—words which were engraved in my childhood brain long before I can even remember.

When my daughter was eleven, I was interviewing someone in Boston and I took her along for company. We stayed in Salem, Massachusetts, and visited the creaky witchcraft museum. We walked around Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. I told her the story of that book, and regaled her with edited stories of our ancestors who had come to the North Shore from Britain a long time before. I didn’t tell her that one of our ancestors had been involved in the witchcraft trials, on the side of the judges. Instead I told her the stories about the China trade that my grandmother had told me when I was a girl. I explained that they had set sail for China with coal and lumber and come home with holds filled with spices and silks and blue and white china used as ballast. I explained that that china, called Canton, was the china in her grandmother’s house which had been handed down through generations of my father’s family. Our visit to Boston was a lovely trip, and the last one we took for a long time. At the end of that year, my marriage began to come apart and we moved to an apartment a mile from the house where we had been living.

Soon after that my daughter turned to God in a big way—only the God she turned to was a different kind of God entirely. A friend had given her a book on witches. She began to read books about witches, about Salem, about Druids, and about other pagan religions. In the fifth grade, she formed a coven of four classmates and held meetings in her bedroom. Some of her friends were told by their parents that they couldn’t join the coven. That didn’t bother my daughter. Soon enough she had set up an altar with a variety of Wiccan artifacts. She found a store on the West Side devoted to various kinds of witchcraft, and she began to hang out there in her spare time. She saved up her allowance for a cauldron.

Her father and stepmother were worried.

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