Free American Isis by Carl Rollyson

early August—so she would have a full month to work on her fiction before returning to Smith. But a sinus infection so depleted her that after three weeks at the Belmont she had to quit. A doctor advised her to return home to recuperate.
    When the hotel called to say she could have her job back, Sylvia asked her mother to say it was not certain when her daughter could return. Reflecting on her three weeks at the Belmont, Sylvia realized that she had been caught up in a sort of squirrel cage that she detested. And yet she felt compelled to perform there. Looking at those days now she compared her view of them to lifting a bell jar off a “clockwork functioning community.” Routine ruled, and no matter how trying the repetitive nature of the work, that rigid structure gave purpose to the lives of those within that world. In an 8 July letter to Marcia Brown, Sylvia was already casting a retrospective glow on the Belmont episode, referring to the “blissful routine” of working hard for six hours, the weekends she managed to see Dick, and the girls who she had begun to enjoy and who were sending her nice notes. Now Sylvia had to regenerate her own sense of purpose. She apparently could not remain at home and write. Home, in fact, would never again be a refuge, one that she had forsaken as soon as she entered Smith. She could sense her own depressions reverberating in Aurelia. In effect, Sylvia confided to Marcia, Aurelia empathized too much and prolonged her daughter’s down periods. Returning to the Cape brought her back to the beach and closer to where Dick was working that summer.
    It seemed imperative now to have “a Job,” she confided to her journal. Searching the want ads, she considered the possibilities: painting parchment lampshades, filing, typing, or assisting a real estate agent. She actually spent a day with a realtor, fascinated by the woman’s manipulative methods, but concluding that serving as her Girl Friday was not likely to pay very well. Even waitressing remained an option, but then Sylvia saw an ad for a housekeeper/babysitting position with well-to-do Christian Scientists, the Cantors. In spite of her vow of “NEVER AGAIN” when it came to such jobs, Sylvia liked the sound of Mrs. Cantor’s voice over the phone and enjoyed her interview, she wrote Marcia Brown. This time Sylvia would be in charge of two small children, but would also have the company of the Cantor’s teenage daughter. Sylvia could not resist the comfortable surroundings of this charming family in Chatham, Massachusetts, near the sea—always a draw for her—and a two-hour drive southeast from Wellesley.
    Sylvia was treated well, more like a member of the family than in her previous home care experience. She had long conversations with Mrs. Cantor about Christian Science, which Sylvia enjoyed so much that she attended Sunday school, where she was proud, she wrote Aurelia, of knowing “all the right answers.” A skeptical Sylvia thought she was too much of a materialist to accept a doctrine that proclaimed the material world was a kind of illusion, a human-created evil that could be overcome by fealty to God’s word. But she did not dismiss the faith out of hand because she did believe in the power of good thoughts, in mind over matter, to a certain extent. After all, it was part of her artist’s credo that she could reshape the world. Christian Science, moreover, draws on the Platonic nature of Christianity that posits an irrefutable realm of what Sylvia called “absolute fact.” Individuals by their very nature could not have access to this ultimate source of truth. Sylvia sounds like Saint Paul, echoing his remark on the fallibility of human knowledge when she alludes to the individual’s own “particular grotesque glass of distortion.” In a fascinating journal passage, she compares the individual’s sensibility to a sounding board picking