by Honor Moore
I watch myself then, a woman in her fifties, in that small sunny room with her father in his eighties. There was so much unsaid between us. Would he ever talk to me about his love for the women he had married, of the nature of his love for men? Would I ever be able to make clear to him that it was safe to talk openly with me, that I wanted to talk about what had pulled us apart and also the complicated experiences of love that might bring us together? Of course I embraced him, and of course I gave him a kiss goodbye, but I couldn’t surrender myself.
In the weeks before my father died, that restraint began to dissolve. At first it took the form of empathy, sadness that he’d never return to the Adirondacks where he’d gone every summer of his life (except one during the war), or that he’d never celebrate mass or preach again. As he got sicker, I spent more and more time at Bank Street, almost running from the subway station to the house. I didn’t question this new urgency, I reveled in it. The longing seemed physical, and its satisfaction came in just being in my father’s presence, taking in his weight, the shape of his head, his posture. And now I was losing him!
As I wrote in a journal each night, I could conjure him, almost, it seemed, bring back the years of our life together, images and dreams unfolding as I remembered. One day, about two weeks after he died, I started this book. “My father always wanted me to write about him,” I wrote, and suddenly he came into view, enormously tall in silhouette on Easter morning in the cathedral doorway. I had turned away from my father, but he had never turned entirely away from me, and now, as the past opened, I was turning back to him.
Part I
FATHER
1
Prophet’s Chamber
* * *
My father often told the story of St. Paul’s conversion. On the road to Damascus, a Pharisee temple official and persecutor of Christians, then known as Saul of Tarsus, is brought to a halt by a sudden effulgence of such radiance, he is shocked to unseeing. Out of the swirling dust, the blinding light, the merciless heat, he hears a voice: “Why do you persecute me?”
“Who are you?” Saul responds.
“I am Jesus, whom you persecute.”
It was clear always, when my father preached this story, that before his own conversion, he considered that he, too, had been Saul, a privileged young man, a good churchman, virtuous enough, suddenly broken open. In the years after he was wounded in the war, he came to believe God had spared his life so that he could become “holy.” My mother reminded him of this when he learned, after recovering from his wound, that there was a chance he would not be sent back into combat. “. . . It is not your fault that you cannot fight now,” she wrote during their wartime courtship, “and because your life was saved it seems to me it might mean that there are other things for you to do . . .”
My father was born in 1919, the beneficiary of vast wealth. He was a grandson of William H. Moore, who, as one of the Moore brothers of Chicago, had made a fortune in corporate mergers at the beginning of the twentieth century. William died in 1923, and my grandfather Paul, for whom my father was named, was a lawyer who sat on the boards of the companies his father and uncle founded; he also did some investing of his own. My father, the last of his four children, was a classic younger son. He was a beautiful child, but sickly as a little boy, awkward and incompetent athletically, especially in the wake of the accomplishments of his older brother, my Uncle Bill, who was a hockey star.
“When Paul was young,” Bill told me, “he had seizures.”
“Seizures?”
“You’d be sitting there at dinner and suddenly his head would be on the table. Jean Watson, who was his governess, once put a pencil in his mouth so he wouldn’t bite off his tongue.”
“Epilepsy?”
“I don’t know what they were. He was just a weak little boy for a few years, and then, just before he went away to school at St. Paul’s, he started to grow, and then he was all right.”
In photographs prominent on the grand piano in the living room at Hollow Hill—the gentleman’s farm in New Jersey where my father grew up and which I visited as a child—Bill wears a St. Paul’s jersey, then a Yale sweater, and holds a hockey stick—a lance of primogeniture—and my father, a sweet-faced blond boy, poses with his dog, a golden retriever called Laddie.
As my father got older, his siblings, one by one, left for boarding school. His older sisters, Fanny and Polly, went to his mother’s alma mater, the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and Bill to St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, and so, for five years, “young Paul” was the only child at home. He was loved, he always remembered, “too much”—not only by his mother, but also by the governess Jean Watson, who was Scottish and had taken care of all four children. After they had all gone off to school, Jean moved out of her room in the big house, but she continued to live on the property, knitting sweaters and socks for her absent charges, their pictures crowding the tables of the small house my grandparents provided, near the greenhouses.
“We were all she had,” Bill said, “and there she was, alone in that house.”
I remember the cookies she gave you if you stopped to visit, and my father’s guilt: “I must go see Jean.” I remember wearing the dark green sweaters striped with bright yellow that she knit for my brothers and sisters and me, and my mother packing away later gifts, blue sweaters and red ones, and sending them to children “who don’t have as much as you.”
My father’s mother was also a source of guilt. He always described his relationship with her as “very close,” but also, with some chagrin, as “suffocating.”
“She had terrible headaches,” he told me in one of the long conversations we had about her. “She was really an invalid for much of my childhood.” In the diary my father kept at St. Paul’s School, I don’t find her taken to her bed, but when he’s invited to go abroad the summer after Bill marries, he doesn’t, because, he writes, “Mother, I am sorry to say, is still lonely and unhappy. I must do something about it.” The happiness of his childhood was disrupted, he said in the oral history he recorded at Columbia University in the 1980s, only by his confusion about the “overwhelming” nature of his mother’s love. On the other hand, it was his mother, he said, who was supportive of his decision to go into the church and “of any choice her children made.”
Until he went away at twelve, my father spent falls until Christmas at Hollow Hill. He went to Peck School, a private school in nearby Morristown, and played with friends he kept for a lifetime, taking long walks and riding his horse on the farm’s hundred acres, tending his dog, his pet roosters, playing tennis and golf. In January, the family migrated to Palm Beach, where they lived in an Addison Mizner villa, Lake Worth on one side of the house, a wide ocean beach on the other. There, between fishing and boating trips with the “captain” and occasional golf with his father, my father was tutored until the family returned home at Easter—to Hollow Hill and to their Manhattan apartment on the eighteenth floor at 825 Fifth Avenue—enormous, with three bedrooms, dining and living rooms, and a view of the seal pond at the Central Park Zoo. Evenings “in town,” he would walk down the avenue to visit his widowed paternal grandmother at 4 East Fifty-fourth Street or accompany his mother to the theater or the opera.
St. Paul’s was an adjustment. At twelve, my father was small for his age—his voice did not change until he was sixteen—and self-conscious about it. How was he to become a man? Match his big brother, already popular with girls and certainly heading to Yale and a big college life? On the New Hampshire campus, my father found himself, he wrote in his diary, “a complete stranger”—none of his school friends from home had chosen St. Paul’s, and his brother, in his final year, held a privileged position as a counselor to the younger boys. Not every student came from a family as rich as the Moores, and while the school could hardly be described as diverse—all male, all white, only a sprinkling of Catholics and Jews—the q
uality of life in the stark, forbidding dormitory of sixty boys—“like something out of an English novel”—brought a leveling. Each boy lived in an alcove with a bed, a bureau, a chest, and one straight-backed chair; minimal personal decoration was allowed.
The austerity of the sleeping quarters was in contrast to the extraordinary natural beauty of the campus, which had ponds for canoeing, playing fields, forests and wetlands for bird-watching. My father soon came to love the routine, the cold morning showers, how his wet hair froze as he raced with a throng of friends to morning prayer in the Gothic chapel, past the larger-than-life war memorial in the entryway, a naked youth dying in the arms of a hooded Saint Gaudens–like figure. Once inside, he banged into carved mahogany pews crowded with boys, landed in an assigned place, then quickly knelt as the rector began morning prayer: “The Lord is in his holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence before him.”
The all-male world he found “a sort of magical utopian place.” The school was an escape from his mother and Jean, but it also represented mental freedom, an entrance into the world of thinking and imagining. My father’s striving to belong was soon relieved by a love of English literature, of Latin and Greek, and by an introduction to religion. St. Paul’s was a church school, the headmaster was called the rector, and a half dozen of the “masters” were Episcopal clergy. My father took to the required sacred studies classes and to a master new to St. Paul’s. Fred Bartrop was alcoholic, Anglophile, and, like many of the faculty, “a bachelor.” Every afternoon at teatime, masters opened their quarters; my father and a few of his friends went often to Mr. Bartrop’s, where their host, smoking his pipe, told them heroic stories of Christian bravery—Brébeuf, the French saint who had converted the Algonquins, burned at the stake by their enemies, the Iroquois; Saint Martin of Tours who stepped from his horse and cut his crimson cloak in half to dress a naked beggar; Saint Francis of Assisi throwing off his fine clothing and giving away his fortune, devoting himself to a ministry for the poor; the Anglican priests who ministered at the London docks at the turn of the century.
Sometimes “Bear,” as they called Bartrop, spirited the boys away on a Sunday to St. John’s Church in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It was there my father first “vested” as an acolyte and walked in a procession ahead of the celebrant, there where he first experienced the Anglo-Catholic strain of the Episcopal Church—a practice different from the church he went to with his mother at home, where there were fewer candles, where brocade vestments were rarely worn, and where, like most Episcopal parishes of the time, the Sunday service was not a communion celebration. To my father and his small group of like-minded friends, “High Church,” as Anglo-Catholicism was known, was threatening because it seemed close to the Roman Catholic Church that they had been brought up to consider alien. But it also had the allure of the forbidden.
My father joined the St. Paul’s choir and was soon “acolyting” at school services. Under Bartrop’s instruction, he became conversant with theology and the liturgy. “Bear” explained the Oxford Movement, which in the nineteenth century restored to the Church of England some of what had been torn away when Catholicism was repressed, first by the soldiers of Henry VIII and later by Queen Elizabeth’s bailiffs—frescoed images of Christ and the saints, carved rood screens, confessionals and candlelight, the sensuality and color of vestments. The movement’s tracts and the teachings of John Henry (later Cardinal) Newman awakened the moribund Church of England to the importance of the sacraments—Holy Communion and confession—as a means of growing personally closer to God. Once, on a family trip to England when I was fourteen, we visited what remained of Rievaulx Abbey. When my father, standing on the bright green grass amidst the rubble of stone cornices and broken arches, pointed out where the altar would have been and described the destruction of the monasteries and the complexities of Henry VIII’s conflicts with the powerful abbots, my imagination raced, filling in color and sound as his must have at Bartrop’s fireplace.
By his fifth form, or junior year, my father and his close friends were having tea or coffee at the Bear’s several times a week. In a diary otherwise marked by adolescent confusion, he is clear and certain when he writes about religion, as when Dr. Drury, the headmaster, “made a spirited and awfully good sermon,” or when he found a High Communion service celebrated by a visiting priest unnerving: “It was well done, but I don’t like it.” The idea of confession scared him, he wrote, but there was no question that he would be among the boys who made appointments with Father Wigram, a member of the Cowley Fathers, a contemplative order founded during the Oxford Movement, when, at Fred Bartrop’s invitation, the British monk visited St. Paul’s the fall of my father’s final year.
Since I always thought I knew the story of my father’s conversion, I never asked him to tell it. But six weeks before he died, at our last dinner out together, I realized I wouldn’t have another chance.
“He was a very, very old man,” my father said, describing Father Wigram. He emphasized the second “very” just as he would have telling a story when I was a child, but now I was a grown-up woman and he himself was a very very old man, his huge familiar hands frail but forcefully gripping the table where we sat in the dark paneled dining room of the Century Club. It was late October, he told me, and the leaves had fallen from the trees, some floating on the surface of the stream which surged over a dam beneath the Prophet’s Chamber where Father Wigram was receiving students.
“So you went into the room?”
“Yes,” my father said quietly. “And we talked.”
“About what, Pop?”
“Oh,” he said, his eyes slowly blinking, “about everything.”
As my father told the story, I could see the monk in his black cape, his black cassock, his strange “shovel” hat. My father had heard him preach at chapel and speak in his sacred studies class, but nonetheless, when he knocked on the door of Prophet’s Chamber, he was apprehensive. How could he possibly tell anyone all the terrible things he had done? Why should he tell his sins to a man rather than directly to God? And he was confused, as he would later say, that his “religious emotion” came only “in spells.”
“We talked,” my father continued, “and then the old man said, ‘I think God wants you to make your confession.’ I couldn’t believe he was asking me to do this!” Now my father was shouting: “No! No!” His voice resounded across the quiet dining room, his eyes blazing. “No, was what I first thought.” He breathed fiercely and then he was silent.
“You were how old?”
“Sixteen.” My father shuddering, that slender blond boy in family photographs, just shy of his seventeenth birthday, shuddering with terror or wonder. “It seemed too Catholic,” he explained, “and the idea of sin was—scary, you know.”
“Sex?” I asked.
“Oh, probably!”
I remember almost crying when I made my first confession at ten, kneeling in the small dark booth, a priest whom I knew solemn on the other side of the screen. My father was frightened not only because of the overpowering idea of disclosing his wrongdoings to a stranger, but also because when he was seventeen, even when I was ten, there was no order in the Episcopal prayer book for individual confession, the sacrament of penitence, in which God, through the medium of a priest, grants forgiveness for one’s sins, an act called “absolution.” In the Episcopal liturgy, absolution ordinarily took place in the context of the communion service, everyone saying the prayer of confession together; one kept one’s sins to oneself and God. What Father Wigram brought to St. Paul’s was indeed, as my father said, “Catholic”—it was a rite that Anglo-Catholic Episcopalians took from the Roman Catholic liturgy, translating it from Latin and adapting it.
I think God wants you to make your confession, said the monk in the room above the waterfall.
“And so I did,” my father said. His calm surprised me. I had forgotten he was dying, and a
fter his shouted “No!”s I expected a more dramatic culmination. He continued. “I said my confession, and . . . and . . .” Then he was speechless, tapping his head. As he searched for the word, I imagined him staggering back from the old monk, everything changed. Now, as my dying father, he was looking at me, his eyes shining. He had forgotten what word he was looking for, and there was nothing on his face, a “nothing” that had the look of that dimension in which he was always alone.
But how did this momentous event happen in the life of a rich boy at St. Paul’s, in the life of this particular boy, my father? He had tossed off my question about sex—“probably,” but he went no further. Who was my father as a boy? I wondered. And I remembered photographs: an impossibly beautiful three-year-old posing with a Guernsey calf, a twelve-year-old in shorts and a tennis shirt reclining with his golden retriever, the later snapshot of an impish beanpole of a teenager in a guide boat in the Adirondacks. That night at the Century, my father told the story of his conversion as an event that happened to that boy suddenly, dramatically, but as he recorded it in his boyhood diary, the conversion was part of a larger narrative.
He was discouraged when he returned to St. Paul’s for his final year. “I haven’t amounted to a damn up here & all because of being young—and lazy.” At first, as in previous years, what took him away from his despair were afternoons rowing on Long Pond with Bartrop or bird-watching with Mr. White, a master who was an amateur ornithologist—“marsh hawk, yellow palm warbler, myrtle warbler, hermit thrush, seagulls, flickers, greater yellowlegs . . .” But in spite of a “good” schedule of classes—Latin, English, history, sacred studies—he was agitated by everyday boarding-school life. When one of his friends got punished for having a Victrola in his room, or when he burned with disapproval of another boy for being “extravagant and weak,” my father turned to Bartrop. But this particular time, Bartrop had turned my father toward confession, a way into an independent spiritual life. Of the conversion that later gained such power, the St. Paul’s student wrote simply that “the father” reasoned with him “until it was good.” And that “impurities were straightened & the whole thing I really understood better than I thought possible.” It surprised me to read that, after the confession, Father Wigram asked a question that would preoccupy my father for the rest of his time at St. Paul’s and all through Yale: “Have you thought of the clergy as a profession?”
