Authors: Ellen Gilchrist
She knew his devotion to his friends and family. She knew he would kill or die for her or for their child and she knew that
when he wanted to find something out he found it out that afternoon, or, at the latest, the next day.
So when they got to the house she paid the sitter and then left her three-year-old daughter with Little Freddy and Nieman
and went into her office and sent a check for five hundred dollars to a group of Episcopal nuns in Ohio, who pray for cancer
patients in their spare time. In their regular time they run a home for the children of AIDS victims and drug addicts. Even
if the prayers didn’t work, the money would not be wasted.
When she finished that letter, she e-mailed a young monk she knew at the San Francisco Buddhist Center and asked him to get
her an appointment with Lama Doge as soon as possible. She liked Nieman’s friend Henry Wilkins, but if they were going to
call in Buddhists she thought they ought to find one from Tibet.
Stella went back to the room where Nieman was playing with the children.
“You don’t think he could have touched anything in my lab, do you? I don’t mean to guilt you about not gloving him. I just
mean, I ought to go wipe things down if he could have left anything in there.”
“We just came in the door. We didn’t go near the tables. Listen, Scarlett’s hungry and so is Little Freddy and so am I. Let’s
go to Chez Panisse and get some fish and vegetables. It’s a good time of day. No one will be there.”
“Okay. Let’s go. What are they doing over there?”
“He’s playing cards with her. She turns one over and he keeps saying, ‘You win!’ She’s crazy about it.” Nieman went across
the room and picked up his little girl and told Little Freddy to bring the cards. “Hurry up, before Stella changes her mind
and wants to use the money to pay someone’s tuition. She’s letting us go to Chez Panisse.”
* * *
Freddy woke before Nora Jane and lay on his side looking at the cascade of black curls that fell across her shoulders and
down her back. N.J.’s hair had always seemed to him like a dream that had somehow managed to invade his consciousness so he
would believe in beauty.
He rose up enough to see the clock and slipped out of the bed and put on his clothes and shoes and went into the kitchen to
wait for Tammili and Lydia to come home from school. It was past five o’clock. This was the day they stayed late for choir
practice.
I can eat and I can make love and I can see and smell and hear and touch and think, he told himself. I can read and I can
add and subtract and multiply and divide. Ninety-nine percent of me is just fine. All I have to do is help them kill a bunch
of white blood cells that have gone terrorist on me, in me. I never had to go to a war and now I am one. That’s it. I won’t
obsess about this. This can’t have my whole life.
Why hasn’t Nieman come back with Little Freddy?
There was a light blinking on the answering machine and he pushed a button and listened to four messages from Nieman, telling
him they had gone to Chez Panisse because they were hungry. “Stella wrote the nuns and the monks,” the last message said.
“Then she set up a meeting with Lama Doge. This is not a joke. Call when you get this.”
Freddy pushed the button to hear the message again. He felt a great rush of energy and hope fill his body. You bet I’m not
going to die, he decided, and got up and walked across the room and started making a pot of coffee. I’m not going to die and
I’m going to have a cup of coffee in the afternoon.
He left the coffee to brew and went out into the side yard to wait for the girls to come home. I think I’ll get them a new
car tomorrow, he decided. I like to buy cars for people. It’s my vice and I like it. I think I’ll buy Little Freddy one of
those new three-wheeled scooters while I’m at it. I don’t know why I didn’t buy one the first time we saw them at that toy
store. So what in a finite world? It’s time to mix it up around here. It’s time to start making every minute count.
Nora Jane woke up and put on a robe and went out to see if the girls had come back yet. She leaned out the front door and
looked down the driveway and saw Freddy standing by the flower beds with his hands in his pockets, looking absolutely normal
and absolutely well, and then she went into the kitchen and saw the pot of coffee and then she went back into her bedroom
and put on her new red velvet pants and boots and a white shirt with raglan sleeves. And an embroidered vest and long silver
earrings. I’m making cheese grits and an omelet for dinner, she decided. I am really, really tired of healthy food. I am from
New Orleans, Louisiana, and I happen to think fat is good for you if you don’t eat it all the time.
It was a warm spell in October in central Ohio. Blue skies and brilliant fall trees rose above the long hill of crosses where
Sister Anne Aurora went each day at noon to spend an hour after lunch in prayer. At the school the teaching nuns could also
help with the prayers if they found time to do it, but it was not compulsory or even, during school months, expected.
The reason Sister Anne Aurora spent her noon hour at prayer was partly because she was trying to stay thin in case she decided
to go back to secular life. Also, she had always loved to pray. She loved to be down on her knees at the edge of the graves
of the departed nuns. She loved to stand at the very top of the hill and pray while walking in the small circle that had been
worn down by many other praying or mourning feet. She loved to watch the seasons and the weather. She loved to be alone and
wonder if her thoughts could really travel across space and time and somehow add to goodness or to healing.
If I quit teaching it will only be for a while, she told herself today. I must go back to college. I need to know more. My
chemistry is old now. So much is happening. I must go where I can find out all I don’t know. It isn’t vanity to wish for knowledge.
The world needs leaders. I can’t be a leader unless I know what’s going on, can I?
The order of Episcopal nuns to which Sister Anne Aurora belonged was seventy years old. It had been started in Cleveland,
Ohio, and then moved to the small town of Wheeler. There were forty-six sisters in the order. They ran a school and home for
orphans and children of many kinds from many places. Sister Anne Aurora taught science to grades seven through twelve. So
when the letter from Stella came in the mail, Mother Grace took it in hand and walked over to the school and put it into Sister
Anne’s hand. “This is a biochemist in Berkeley, California, asking us to pray for a Jewish bookstore owner there. I thought
it was right up your alley.”
Sister Anne Aurora took the letter and put it into the pocket of the long blue overall that was the usual costume of the teachers.
Not all the sisters wore uniforms. The Order of Saint Jennifer was not strict about such things. Women came and went, women
wore what they chose to wear, women smoked and sometimes drank wine — the work they did was not “insulted” by rules, they
loved to say.
In 2001 they had collected and raised $4,207,000 for their work. In 2002 they had raised $6,510,000. The money was invested
and cared for by a redheaded stockbroker in Fort Smith, Arkansas, who had been raised by the nuns and now had six children
of her own and was the highest-ranking Merrill Lynch broker in the state of Arkansas.
It was counted and audited by the only woman member of the best CPA firm in Jackson, Mississippi, whose husband was an alumnus
of the school.
The teachers could save or spend their small salaries. As long as they were at the school they had no need for money except
for personal things. Sister Anne Aurora had been saving hers for nine years. It had grown to almost $300,000 under the care
of the redheaded stockbroker.
When the nuns took on one of the prayer missions, they were paid extra money, as the prayers cost ninety dollars an hour.
Sister Anne Aurora picked out a place near the top of the hill of crosses and decided to kneel on the cold ground for a while
to see if she could feel the underground river a geologist told her was in this part of Ohio. “It’s as wide as the Ohio, but
deep under the ground,” he told her. “I don’t know why no one ever wants to talk about it.”
Sister Anne Aurora opened the letter from Stella and began to read it. “We do not know why people who are prayed for seem
to heal better but there is documented evidence that it is so. EVEN WHEN THEY DON’T KNOW THEY ARE BEING PRAYED FOR THEY HEAL
FASTER. I have been interested in this for several years. Doctor Andrew Weil is also open-minded about this possibility, and
since, as a scientist, I believe that staying open-minded is the single most important thing a researcher has to strive for,
because it is often the most difficult, I am asking you with an open mind and an open heart to pray for the recovery of our
dear friend Freddy Harwood, of Berkeley, California, from acute myelogenous leukemia. Yours most sincerely, Stella Light-Gluuk,
Professor, University of California at Berkeley.”
The letterhead was from the Department of Biochemistry.
Sister Anne Aurora folded the letter and put it into a shirt pocket near her heart and began to pray. She used prayers she
had memorized as a child, parts of poems she loved, thoughts of the seasons and the rivers and the plant life of southeastern
Ohio, the names of people she had known and loved, the names of children she was teaching, bits of Buddhist and Hindu lore
she had picked up here and there, but mostly she talked to the white cells in Freddy Harwood’s bone marrow and blood. She
directed the red blood cells to seek out and destroy the malignant cells; she told the malignant cells to give up and change
into more useful proteins and amino acids; she worked her way from the chambers of Freddy’s heart to the arteries and capillaries,
and then she decided just to concentrate on the marrow. I need to know about the chemotherapy, she decided. I need to know
what they are giving him. I need more language.
She cut the hour short and hurried back to her office and dashed off an e-mail to Stella before hurrying off to her ninth-grade
biology class.
“Dear Doctor Light-Gluuk… I am the science teacher at the school here and have been assigned the prayers for your friend,
Freddy Harwood. I need more information. Please send me any medical records you think appropriate, especially the names—and,
if possible, natural or man-made sources—of all drugs currently being used to treat Mr. Harwood. I am bending every effort
to add my prayers to those of everyone who loves him. I need data, if you think it is appropriate to trust it to me. Yours
most sincerely, Sister Anne Aurora. (My secular name is Janet McElroy. I have a degree in chemistry from the University of
Arkansas at Fayetteville, Arkansas. I am planning on going back to get a doctorate soon. I study all the time. I study everything
I can get my hands on about chemistry and biochemistry.)”
Freddy was scheduled to go to the hospital on Monday morning to begin the chemotherapy that would lead to a bone marrow transplant.
On Sunday night the Buddhist monk Henry Wilkins, from Greenville, Mississippi, came over to the Harwoods’ house and set up
meditation cushions in the living room. At six o’clock Freddy and Nora Jane and Nieman and Stella sat down upon the cushions
and began to try to concentrate on the breath going in and out of their bodies. Once or twice Little Freddy got away from
his sisters and came into the room and tried to talk to them, but sharp looks from Henry dissuaded him, and his sisters were
able to drag him back into their bedroom by promising to let him watch a video about the animals of the Serengeti.
When the meditation hour was over, Nora Jane served salmon croquettes and green peas and carrots and homemade bread to the
guests, and after dinner they all went out on the balcony and looked at stars and sat around the edge of the almost-finished
hot tub.
“I got an e-mail the other day I want to show you,” Stella told Freddy. “Nieman said I should just keep this to myself, but
I don’t do anything behind people’s backs if I can help it. You want to come in your office a minute and look at this?”
“Sure,” Freddy said. He stood up and extended his hand to Nieman’s wife, and the two of them walked into his office, where
she handed him a copy of the e-mail from Sister Anne Aurora.
“Don’t get mad,” she said. “Nieman’s suffering. I have to indulge him. He’s suffering as much as you are, you know, feeling
helpless.”
“This is great,” Freddy said. “I like her style. Are these the nuns that prayed for Leta Giles?”
“It’s the nun who prayed for her. After I got the e-mail I called the mother superior and asked about this young science teacher
and she told me — 1 had to dig it out of her—that this is the same nun who did most of Leta’s prayers. After I got her going—”
Stella stopped, then kept on telling the whole truth. “Well, I told her I wanted to send more money, as a donation for the
school they run. So then she said she didn’t want to be mystical — imagine a nun saying that — but this Sister Anne Aurora
has some sort of gift for prayer that they all take seriously.”
“They’re not Roman Catholics, Stella. These are a kind of freeform nuns, I think. I’ve heard about them for years.”
Freddy looked down at his hands. He had always been in awe of Stella Light. She was an awe-inspiring woman. “Send her anything
you want. I don’t know what they are going to give me. I’ll find out tomorrow from Herbert Rosenstein.” He started giggling,
then really laughing. “I’ll tell Herbert he needs to send the information to Ohio so in case he doesn’t save my life we can
get some nuns to rev up the process. Can’t you just imagine him trying to be nice about it?”
Nieman was in the door of the room. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Freddy’s in,” Stella said. “Well, is Henry still here? I guess we need to go entertain him, don’t we?”
“Just because meditation doesn’t seem to be doing any good doesn’t mean it wasn’t good,” Nieman said. “Sometimes you just
have to waste some time on it.”
“We’re going to ask Herbert to e-mail data on the chemotherapy to the nuns,” Freddy said. He was still laughing. “Why should
this go through Stella? We’ll just have Herbert put Sister Anne in the pipeline. Maybe I’ll suggest he confer with her.”