The two were now living at 23 Paradise Road in the fishing village of Swampscott, adjoining Lynn. Though their second-floor apartment was attractive enough and the house had a charming garden in which Mrs. Patterson spent hours on fine days, reading and writing, the location may have been deliberately chosen by the dentist to keep his wife farther away from his office and his affairs, professional and otherwise.
Within three weeks of reopening his office he was engaged in the columns of the Weekly Reporter in an unseemly altercation with another dentist who accused him of dunning patients unfairly. It must have seemed to his wife, as the discreditable episodes mounted, that life was taking on the character of the “ghastly farce” she later described material existence as being.172
Yet in a poem entitled “Our National Thanksgiving Hymn,” published in the same paper on December 30, she praised the God
Who giveth joy and tears, conflict and rest,
Teaching us thus of Thee,
Who knoweth best!173
Somewhere, behind the dingy veil of appearances, the unalterable goodness of God persisted. And in another poem “To the Old Year, 1865” she asked
One word, receding Year,
Ere thou grow tremulous with shadowy night—
Say, will the Young year dawn with Wisdom’s light
To brighten o’er thy bier?174
The first thing the New Year brought was the death of Quimby. What Mrs. Patterson called the shadowy night had been gathering about him for some time. An internal tumor, which he is said to have kept under control by his active will for several years, grew worse as his will weakened. Taking on the suffering of a patient who visited him the ● ● ●
172 [See Eddy, Science and Health, p. 272.]
173 [Mary M. Patterson, “Our National Thanksgiving Hymn,” Lynn Weekly Reporter, 30 December 1865, p. 1.]
174 [Mary M. Patterson, “To the Old Year, 1865,” Lynn Reporter, 13 January 1866, p. 1.]