mother did. I don’t think she’s ever understood it.”
“I’ve never understood it, either,” I said.
There was a tense silence. He was waiting for me to say my line: that I was praying for faith. And I had prayed for it, many, many times.
Perhaps both of us were thinking of our history, or perhaps only I was. I thought of Joseph Smith, who’d had as many as forty wives. Brigham Young had had fifty-five wives and fifty-six children. The church had ended the temporal practice of polygamy in 1890, but it had never recanted the doctrine. As a child I’d been taught—by my father but also in Sunday school—that in the fullness of time God would restore polygamy, and in the afterlife, I would be a plural wife. The number of my sister wives would depend on my husband’s righteousness: the more nobly he lived, the more wives he would be given.
I had never made my peace with it. As a girl I had often imagined myself in heaven, dressed in a white gown, standing in a pearly mist across from my husband. But when the camera zoomed out there were ten women standing behind us, wearing the same white dress. In my fantasy I was the first wife but I knew there was no guarantee of that; I might be hidden anywhere in the long chain of wives. For as long as I could remember, this image had been at the core of my idea of paradise: my husband, and his wives. There was a sting in this arithmetic: in knowing that in the divine calculus of heaven, one man could balance the equation for countless women.
I remembered my great-great-grandmother. I had first heard her name when I was twelve, which is the year that, in Mormonism, you cease to be a child and become a woman. Twelve was the age when lessons in Sunday school began to include words like purity and chastity. It was also the age that I was asked, as part of a church assignment, to learn about one of my ancestors. I asked Mother which ancestor I should choose, and without thinking she said, “Anna Mathea.” I said the name aloud. It floated off my tongue like the beginning of a fairy tale. Mother said I should honor Anna Mathea because she had given me a gift: her voice.
“It was her voice that brought our family to the church,” Mother said. “She heard Mormon missionaries preaching in the streets of Norway. She prayed, and God blessed her with faith, with the knowledge that Joseph Smith was His prophet. She told her father, but he’d heard stories about the Mormons and wouldn’t allow her to be baptized. So she sang for him. She sang him a Mormon hymn called ‘O My Father.’ When she finished singing, her father had tears in his eyes. He said that any religion with music so beautiful must be the work of God. They were baptized together.”
After Anna Mathea converted her parents, the family felt called by God to come to America and meet the prophet Joseph. They saved for the journey, but after two years they could bring only half the family. Anna Mathea was left behind.
The journey was long and harsh, and by the time they made it to Idaho, to a Mormon settlement called Worm Creek, Anna’s mother was sick, dying. It was her last wish to see her daughter again, so her father wrote to Anna, begging her to take what money she had and come to America. Anna had fallen in love and was to be married, but she left her fiancé in Norway and crossed the ocean. Her mother died before she reached the American shore.
The family was now destitute; there was no money to send Anna to her fiancé, to the marriage she had given up. Anna was a financial burden on her father, so a bishop persuaded her to marry a rich farmer as his second wife. His first wife was barren, and she flew into a jealous rage when Anna became pregnant. Anna worried the first wife might hurt her baby, so she returned to her father, where she gave birth to twins, though only one would survive the harsh winter on the frontier.
Mark was still waiting. Then he gave up and mumbled the words I was supposed to say, that he didn’t understand fully, but that he knew polygamy was a principle from God.