29
Graduation
The program ended and I returned to BYU. Campus looked the way it always
had, and it would have been easy to forget Cambridge and settle back into the
life I’d had there. But Professor Steinberg was determined that I not forget.
He sent me an application for something called the Gates Cambridge
Scholarship, which, he explained, was a little like the Rhodes Scholarship,
but for Cambridge instead of Oxford. It would provide full funding for me to
study at Cambridge, including tuition, room and board. As far as I was
concerned it was comically out of reach for someone like me, but he insisted
that it was not, so I applied.
Not long after, I noticed another difference, another small shift. I was
spending an evening with my friend Mark, who studied ancient languages.
Like me, and almost everyone at BYU, Mark was Mormon.
“Do you think people should study church history?” he asked.
“I do,” I said.
“What if it makes them unhappy?”
I thought I knew what he meant, but I waited for him to explain.
“Many women struggle with their faith after they learn about polygamy,”
he said. “My 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