by Honor Moore
ALSO BY HONOR MOORE
BIOGRAPHY
The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter
POEMS
Red Shoes
Darling
Memoir
PLAY
Mourning Pictures
AS EDITOR
The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems
Amy Lowell: Selected Poems
The New Women’s Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women
THE
BISHOP’S
DAUGHTER
A Memoir
Honor Moore
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York London
For my siblings, each of whom would have another story
for my nieces and nephews and their children,
and to the memory of my parents
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
Part I: FATHER
1.Prophet’s Chamber
2.Guadalcanal
3.Inseparable
4.Holy Matrimony
5.Firstborn
6.Becoming a Priest
7.My Jersey City
8.Four-in-Hand
9.The Oldest
Part II: DAUGHTER
10.Light and Dark
11.Thou Shalt Not
12.In Public
13.Eager
14.The Family Cracks Open
15.Killing Me Softly
16.Art and Life
Part III: REVELATIONS
17.Women and the Kingdom
18.Discovery
19.Wayfarers
20.Andrew Verver
21.Complexity
22.Footsteps
NOTES
A NOTE ON SOURCES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PHOTOGRAPHS
Prologue
It is Easter, and in the darkness of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine the singing soars in descant, the gothic ceiling multiplying the clamor. And now, as if a great storm has ceased, there is no music, and in the silence held by five thousand worshipers, there come three resounding knocks. And as we wait, the massive doors swing open, an ethereal shaft of sunlight floods the dark, the roar of the city breaks the gigantic quiet, and there at the far end of the aisle, in a blaze of morning light, stands the tall figure of a man. My flesh-and-blood father, the bishop.
When I was a child, I accepted my father as a force of imagination that flared and burst and coruscated, an instrument of transformation. During World War II, he had survived a Japanese bullet and had a scar to prove it. “If my heart had been going this way instead of that,” he announced once, rowing me across the lake in the Adirondacks, “you would never have existed!” Remembering his saying that now, I am startled. It was a joke of course, but it was also the text of a lesson that endured throughout our life together. My father had supernatural powers. His fate had determined my existence. I was something he had made and would continue to make. Physical independence from my physical parents was one thing—I got too big to hold my mother’s hand, too big to ride on my father’s shoulders—but it took me decades to escape the enchantment of my father’s priesthood.
On Sundays and feast days, he became a giant in resplendent brocades lifting his arms as he preached. Or on Easter as a child, I am bedecked in my new finery, and there he is, dressed in white, accompanied by vested acolytes, sweeping along the dusty street on his way to the church; I get not a kiss but a blessing—his hand raised, fingers poised and moving through the air in the shape of a cross. At my father’s first parish, the church was right next door; going to church was not a duty but a chance to be with the deepest part of him, to be inside his imagination. In the darkness at the altar rail, I would hold the wafer in my mouth, allowing it to become wet with the wine that burned down my throat. Take, eat, this is my body, my father would say. Just as I came to understand his splendid vestments were not ordinary clothes, I learned that during the Eucharist, the bread and wine were shot through with something otherworldly, something alive that vibrated and trembled, and when I watched my father, enormously tall, the color of his vestments blurry through all the incense in all the candlelight, it seemed to me he brought all this about, up there at the altar, enswirled in the fragrant smoke, the organ thundering, his voice carried by the King James language. It therefore made sense that when he sang Gregorian chant his voice would break and falter. He was being transported by what he called “the presence of God,” a force much more powerful than his physical body. What happened to him seemed also to happen in me, behind my eyes, on the surface of my skin, and when it happened, I didn’t think of how my mother looked with a baby on her hip, how my younger brothers and sisters shouted and screamed, or how awkward I felt at school. Instead, everything became comprehensible—simple, safe, and beautiful.
After the service, after removing the gold and the colors, after lifting the tiny white wafer as high as his long arms could reach, after administering wine at the altar rail and drinking what remained in the consecrated chalice, my father came home. Now wearing his black suit, he burst into the living room, where we all waited, the grownups drinking sherry, joking or talking seriously. I would run to him and he would bend and give me a kiss before going to talk to the others. Dressed in ordinary black clericals and the stiff white collar, he looked almost like other humans, quite normal, though taller than everyone else.
My father’s extreme height made him seem even more distant than he might have had he been of ordinary dimensions. I thought his tallness had to do with the brocades, with the music, the candles, and the gold crosses that preceded him when he walked down the aisle, that it rendered him closer to God than those of ordinary height and therefore closer to enchantment. When I was a child, my father wore civilian clothes only on vacation or when he and my mother went to New York City once a week for their day off. When he dressed like ordinary men, it made me uneasy. I knew what the vestments were for and what his clericals signified. Wearing them, my father was clean and crisp, unsullied by everyday life. But when he wore a tweed jacket and a Brooks Brothers shirt, he became someone else.
The place where my father changed out of his day clothes was called the sacristy, and when we lived in Jersey City he took me there once, down a narrow hallway from the altar. It was a small, silent room, all dark wood that gleamed silkily in the parchment-yellowed light. There were closets that opened like gates and shallow drawers that pulled out evenly with a sound like exhalation. The warm air smelled like wax, bitter and smooth, and as I breathed I began to forget the color of daylight. Here, my father spoke to me in a grave voice and familiar things had other names. Getting dressed was vesting, a scarf was a stole, and the black sculpted hats were birettas. In the sacristy that evening, one of the other priests, a man who lived with us, looked at me with different eyes, as if he did not know me, and quietly folded his vestments. The boys who teased me when we played handball were quiet here, and so I bowed my head and didn’t look at them.
My father showed me what incense looked like dry, and where you put it in the brass censer, which looked like a lantern with holes in it. He showed me the ciborium, the round silver box in which the bread was kept, white wafers that came to be called “the host” when he blessed them. He put on a cassock, buttoning it from his neck down to his ankles, and opened a tall narrow door to pull out a cotta, a white gathered garment with sleeves like wings. Hanging there were smaller cottas for the acolytes and the long cassocks, black for ordinary Sundays and red
for festivals. In another closet were the golden brass crosses and candlesticks on long poles and fat creamy candles and a crucifix that was real gold, with a gold Jesus dead on it, and in a small cupboard with a caged door and a brass lock were communion “vessels”—silver chalices and silver plates kept separate, I thought, so they wouldn’t lose the touch of God.
As my father opened the drawers for me, he explained the colors of the vestments splayed like the clothes of saints I later saw in Italian paintings. Red for blood to commemorate the deaths of martyrs, and red for fire to celebrate the day flames burned on the heads of the apostles without setting their hair on fire. Purple for Advent, the waiting for Christmas, and for Lent when Jesus went to the desert to pray for forty days before he came back to Jerusalem on a donkey, holding a palm as a scepter, a week before his death. Black for Good Friday, the day Jesus died and light went out of everything and every brass cross and icon in the church was veiled with black gauze. That day every year my father led all of us in the church in a procession to each of the fourteen pictures of Jesus carrying the big wooden cross on his way up the hill called Calvary where he would be crucified. There was a story for each picture: Saint Veronica wiped the sweat and dirt from Jesus’s face, and his face appeared on her towel; Jesus stumbled and fell, the cross was so heavy. My father closed the drawer of black vestments and opened another: gold and white for Christmas, for Easter, and for Ascension, when Jesus rose up into the sky, to be in heaven with God, his father.
I believed I had been invited into the sacristy only because I was a little girl, that if I ever became a woman, I would no longer be allowed in, that once I became a woman the smell that would come from me would cause violence to God, as if when I became a woman I would have great stores of violence and sweat, enough to wipe out an entire town. The only female people who came into the sacristy were the women in the altar guild who wore flowered dresses and bowed their heads, or the nuns who wore black, and, my mother said, were married to Jesus Christ. The women in flowered dresses ironed the cottas and, after the priests doused the chalices in a bowl of water and polished them with white linen, put them away. The nuns, my mother told me, had no hair under the crispy white caps beneath their black veils; they cropped their hair like men, she said, in order to sacrifice their vanity to “the Lord.” “What is vanity?” I asked her. “Looking in the mirror too much,” my mother said.
Years later, my father told me that one Good Friday when I was little, after the three-hour service, after hearing him tell the story of the seven last words that Jesus spoke from the cross, of how a storm “rent” the walls of the great temple, of Mary watching her son die, I cried and cried. When he asked why I was crying, I said, Because Jesus died. I don’t remember any of that, but I could tell you the whole story and as I told it I would see the darkness that descended as the rain fell, the light that broke through a gash in the clouds as the sky cleared, how it sounded when the young man on the cross said, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me. I would tell you about the old rich man, Joseph of Arimathea, who offered his own grave for Jesus at the last minute. I could make you see Jesus’s face loosen as he finally died, and what I imagined Mary Magdalene looked like, sitting there on the ground looking up at him, the vials and pots of fragrant ointment on her lap.
In the sacristy, my father left being a father and a husband to become someone more like God, God who had a son but no daughters, God who had had a son without touching a woman. In the sacristy, as my father put on his vestments, I watched him become more like Jesus. When my father put on the long white alb and the colored chasuble over it, and knelt at the altar and raised his arms, he became more like Jesus still, someone without skin, without smell, without weight, in a separate dimension where everything shone from within and existed beyond any sound but music.
In the weeks before my father’s death, the weather in New York was crystalline. It was April, and the leaves were coming in. There were a couple of days when we thought we could actually see the tiny pale green nubbles growing as we sat on the stoop watching people go by, imagining who they were and what they did. “We” were me, my father, and whatever other brother or sister was keeping watch now that the diagnosis was terminal.
I was teaching two classes. On Wednesday evenings I would read Fernando Pessoa or Paul Celan with student poets, and on Thursday mornings lead a workshop where students talked about each other’s nonfiction. Mornings I walked my dog, returned telephone calls, and read student papers. The afternoons I was in charge of my father, I hurried downtown to his house on Bank Street. When he woke up, I might sit with him near the window in the front of his living room and help him go through his mail, tossing empty envelopes toward the wastebasket, which was, inexplicably, several feet away. It was like a childhood game, and when I missed, that old competitive glint came into my father’s eye. But now when he aimed and threw, he missed too, and as I bent to rescue the torn envelope or crumpled letter, we’d both collapse into giggles. Some letters of course he wanted to answer. I’d make a call, regretting an invitation, or take a bit of dictation. Or I might say, “You don’t need to answer this,” and he’d look up in utter astonishment, and I’d say, “Do you really want to spend what might be your last months answering mail?” And then we’d both laugh, knowing there was no “might” about it, and that it would not be months at all.
“But what, but what . . .” he asked more than once, looking at me as if I knew every answer to every question.
“What, Pop?” I said.
“What’s going to . . . happen!?” His eyes were very wide.
“What do you think is going to happen?” I would say, and I’d watch him think.
“I think I’ll just . . . go to sleep,” he’d say, relieved.
As April went on, he was less often awake when I got there, and so, after I checked in, I might wander around the Village, to buy flowers for the house, have a cappuccino, just get out. Afternoons were quiet on those intimate streets, and as I walked, I could feel my father’s love for his life on Bank Street. He had been a fixture here for years, a giant of a man with white hair, tilting from side to side (he had a hip problem), often walking Percy, his tiny Yorkshire terrier. There was a café on the corner, and directly across the street, a one-story shop with tall windows and what looked from the outside like a vaulted ceiling. It must once have been a stable, I thought. Eventually I learned it had originally been a brothel. Now it housed a hairdresser who seemed always to have the most beautiful and exotic flowers in the room where he cut and styled hair.
My hair had gotten too long. There had been no time to have it cut, and now the weather was warm. I’d have my hair done in the room with the flowers, I imagined. One afternoon I went into the shop.
“Can you wash and blow-dry my hair?” The hairdresser looked at his schedule. “My father is dying,” I said absurdly. “Can you wash my hair?”
“Is your father Bishop Moore?”
As he washed my hair later that day, he told me that his partner, the man sitting in the front room talking with a friend, the man in charge of the flower design company responsible for the amazing flowers, was a friend of my father’s, and had recently stopped him on the street to ask him to have supper. “I’m dying, you know,” my father apparently said. When we got out into the front room, the hairdresser said to his partner, “This is Paul Moore’s daughter.”
“Oh, I know Paul,” the partner said.
The hairdresser said, “And you saw him the other day. What was it he said?”
“I’d rather keep it to myself,” the partner said abruptly. I looked at the man’s face. It was long and narrow and showed its years—he must have been about my age. What was my father’s relationship to this man, I wondered. Did my father often have supper with his gay neighbors? When these men said, “Oh, I know Paul,” how did they know him?
For more than ten years I had known that my fathe
r had had secret male lovers all his life, but in spite of that revelation inside our immediate family, the details of his actual gay life remained hidden. My father’s bisexuality had become part of the way I thought about him, but it was not something we talked about, and that silence contributed to the pain and awkwardness of our life together. Now, in the weeks before my father’s death, I had encountered a gay man who seemed to know things about my father’s life that I did not. Had this man who arranged flowers loved my father’s long body, longed for his extraordinary smile, listened to his sufferings? Would he ever talk to me about what my father was like as a gay man? Would I want him to? If my father’s privacy was his privilege, what of his life was I, his daughter, entitled to know?
“I used to do Brenda’s hair,” the hairdresser said, breaking into my reverie. Brenda was my late stepmother. “And he,” he said, pointing to his partner, the florist, “he used to do their flowers.”
The last summer of his life, I visited my father in Stonington. The first morning was gloriously clear, and after we packed a picnic, we headed out, my father piloting me in his Boston Whaler across the Stonington harbor to a sandspit where we anchored in transparent shallows and wandered to a deserted beach. There we sat, he wearing the striped gondolier’s shirt I’d brought him as a present, talking comfortably, looking out at the ocean, swimming, sunning. I asked if he remembered the time when I was tiny and we were at the beach at the foot of his grandmother’s lawn in Massachusetts. We were swimming together, and he walked ahead of me out of the surf, and I was tossed and pulled under by a wave and rescued by a stranger. When I told him this story, my father apologized. He was always apologizing for things he’d done or not done in my childhood, as if by apologizing he might finally correct the brokenness of the past.
For years I had believed the past couldn’t be mended, but that morning on the beach I felt we had finally come to some semblance of the relationship my father always said he wanted, a closeness I now understand I also longed for. In the past, after visiting him, it would take weeks to recover my balance—the chasm of silence between us seemed impossibly wide. I would manage to be courteous, but I was also distant. I was still in the process of identifying my wounds, and I wanted to avoid the rage that seemed always to descend if we differed. But this time he had made such an effort—a dinner party, a trip to my stepmother’s grave—that I could not help but be moved. Before I left, I said stiffly how much I’d enjoyed our time together, and he looked at me, tears in his eyes, fighting emotion, and said, “I hope we’ll see more of each other. It means a great deal to me.”
