The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane Read Online Free PDF Page B

senior year at Radcliffe, in 1966. An affair that Grace had had with her graduate teaching assistant in Eastern religion, it should be said, a fact that Connie regarded with unconcealed disapproval, particularly now that she herself was in graduate school. Leonard Jacobs, called “Leo” by Grace and her friends. Connie’s eye drifted to the top shelf of her desk, where a black-and-white photograph rested, showing a sensitive, moist-eyed young man in a turtleneck, cheekbones high like Connie’s own, with long sideburns and tousled hair. He gazed directly into the camera, unsmiling, a young woman with her straight hair parted down the middle leaning against his shoulder and gazing dreamily off to the side. Grace—her mother.
    Leo’s thoughts about Connie’s imminent arrival had not been recorded for posterity, though Grace always intimated that they had made great, romantic plans. Unfortunately those plans were abbreviated by the machinations of foreign policy. Despite having drawn his research out for as long as he could, Leo finished his degree in 1966. He lost his academic draft deferment and was shipped to Southeast Asia three months before Connie’s birth.
    And while there, he disappeared.
    Connie’s sadness, yellowed with equal parts discomfort and distaste, was so great that she had never discussed it with anyone—not even Liz. When the subject of fathers came up in conversation with friends or colleagues, Connie skated quickly over the topic. Even reflecting on it now in the privacy of her study, her dog snoring under her reading chair, Connie frowned over her tea.
    Grace, meanwhile, had finished school, barely, and then established herself and her small daughter in Concord, not far from Walden Pond. An undistinguished farmhouse with a pronounced list, the collective—for thatis really what it was—had stood hidden behind a few acres of woods, with two knotty apple trees tinting the air in autumn with the pungent smell of cider. Connie suspected that Grace had filled the house with people in part to push away the void that Leo’s loss had left. Whole coteries of warm, earnest young people traipsed through their house: musicians mostly, but also students, poets, women serious about pottery.
    Connie’s first conscious memory was a morning image of the kitchen of this farmhouse, warmed by a woodstove and furnished with a naked picnic table and potsful of thyme and rosemary. She was a toddler, roughly the same height as the table, and she was crying. She remembered Grace bending down until her open, young face was level with Connie’s, long straw-colored hair falling from her shoulders, and saying, “Connie, you need to try to center yourself.”
    Grace’s means of support during Connie’s childhood had been varied and obscure, including at one point a macrobiotic bakery, which failed to appeal to the staid New England matrons of Concord. Once Connie reached adolescence, however, Grace’s interests coalesced around something that she called “energetic healing.” Clients would seek her out, complaining of ailments both physical and spiritual, and Grace would effect a change in them by moving her hands through their biologic energy fields. Connie wrinkled her nose still whenever she thought about it.
    As a teenager, Connie rebelled by building around herself a predictability and order in direct contrast to her mother’s flexibility and freedom. Now that she was an adult herself, Connie viewed Grace with more sympathy. From the comfortable distance that stretched between her haphazard childhood and the chintz reading chair where she now sat, Connie could regard Grace’s eccentricities as being sweet, or naïve, rather than irresponsible and dissolute.
    When Connie left for Mount Holyoke, Grace sold off what remained of the disintegrating farmhouse and moved to Santa Fe. Grace claimed at the time that she was ready to live somewhere “full of healing energy.” Connie scoffed whenever she thought of this