by Honor Moore
“No,” he had replied, but he noted in his diary that he could imagine that answer someday changing. Both at school and at home when he was in New York, he would seek out a confessor. During a weekend that fall, he went downtown to Trinity, Wall Street, only to find no priest—it was the wrong time of day. “A very disappointing thing, but I tried.” Back at St. Paul’s, he read Trollope—Barchester Towers—and James Russell Lowell’s “The Cathedral,” a meditation on the divergence between a religious and scientific way of life, and, at the end of January, commented that Jack Crocker, a visiting priest, had given a magnificent sermon: “It was truly inspiring. He is the kind of man that makes you want to become a clergyman. Incidentally I am in a quandary about that.” During a long talk with his classmate Tony Duke about “life in general,” he was reassured to discover his friend had the same ambivalence.
But my father’s ambivalence never took him very far. On his seventeenth birthday, he was invited to read the lesson at chapel—“which was more fun than I have had in a lifetime”—and when his mother came to pick him up for the weekend of the Yale-Harvard game, he introduced her to Bartrop. In New Haven after the game, a visit to Bill’s Yale room, and seeing John Gielgud in Hamlet—“marvelous”—he drove his mother home to Hollow Hill and, with difficulty, told her about the confession with Father Wigram. I imagine he feared she would realize, as he did, that his experience in the Prophet’s Chamber marked his first real departure from home. He did not note her reaction, but apparently he’d asked her to send Bear a portable communion kit, and when he got back to school the following week it had arrived. After Bartrop died, it was returned—a small silver chalice and ciborium. I remember my father using it once celebrating a family communion in the Adirondacks, his large hands slipping the small silver cup out of its worn leather case.
That spring, his final term at St. Paul’s, he was entirely taken up with the church: “The work goes on everywhere.” he wrote in his diary. In Florida for spring vacation, he reflected that “being home & having a pleasant time makes me wonder about religion and I think less of the priesthood.” But, as it would his entire life, the church retained its power: when he returned to school the week before Easter, he marveled that “Holy Week seems so for the first time,” and on Good Friday, celebrated by a long service with meditations on Christ’s last words, he stayed the entire three hours: “Bartrop did a magnificent job & the service meant everything wonderful.” On Easter, after he and his friends Quigg McVeigh and Tony Duke accompanied Bear to a mass at St. John’s in Portsmouth, his friend Fred Herter confided that because of Good Friday and Easter, he had decided to make a second confession. “I have accomplished something thank God,” my father wrote. In the next few days, he also successfully persuaded McVeigh. Confession seems to lead, he wrote, “to more belief and a new scheme of life, based on God.” But his roommate Watty Dickerman resisted his evangelism—“afraid,” my father was certain, “of strengthening his conscience.”
The night before commencement, the service in honor of those graduating always ended with the rector saying a particular blessing: Oh Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done . . . Afterward, everyone in the school, beginning with the youngest boy in the youngest class and ending with the most senior master, shook hands with each graduating boy in a solemn line in the cloister. “Almost everybody was sobbing,” my father wrote in his diary.
Yale was as much a Moore tradition as St. Paul’s. My father’s ancestor George Beckwith had been a member of the original corporation, and his uncles and father and, of course, his brother had gone there. But none of this soothed the loss my father felt of the security of St. Paul’s. His close friends had gone elsewhere, Tony Duke to Princeton and Quigg McVeigh to Harvard: again, he was a stranger. “The bottom has fallen out of my world with no end in view,” he wrote in his diary; “religion helps but not enough, as I don’t put myself out for it. I defeated last year with its problems . . . by keeping to & following out my ideas . . . Two thoughts today. I am not suffering from unpopularity which is lucky. 2: (this solves all) my end this year will be accomplished only by taking each affair & doing it well & good with prayer. The rest will come. I’ll have no great uplift like new religion to help, but a good staff [of life] in old religion.”
When my father reminisced with me about his years at Yale, he didn’t talk about religion. He talked about his athletic incompetence; about taking Greek; about his secret society, Wolf’s Head; and how he learned to drink. There were stories of being bailed out of jail by J. Press, the New Haven haberdasher; of driving a car up the steps of Widener Library on a Harvard weekend; of being picked up by the police at the end of his grandmother’s driveway one summer in Prides Crossing. He was so much the “party boy” that his brother, Bill, was genuinely surprised when he began to talk about becoming a priest. But there is no doubt in the diary he kept at St. Paul’s and a fragmented notebook whose entries begin in 1939 that while my father wrestled with the idea of a life in the clergy, he never questioned what happened to him that afternoon in the Prophet’s Chamber.
In New Haven, as Bear had advised, he took himself to Christ Church, a renowned Anglo-Catholic parish. In spite of Bartrop’s theology, the services at St. Paul’s had been Low Church and plain; Christ Church was even more Anglo-Catholic than St. John’s in Portsmouth. Its sung liturgy, thick incense, and black-clad nuns made my father wonder if he’d entered a Roman Catholic basilica by mistake. At first the “bells and things” made him so uneasy he begged off becoming an acolyte, but eventually he had a “mellow session” with the priest: “Just like with the Bear. This set me up considerably, as it is an anchor which I thought yesterday was not going to be any good.” Within weeks he declared in his diary that his profession would be teaching religion, “probably at St. Paul’s.”
But he also felt an obligation to “do something for Yale,” a tradition “drilled” into him by his father. For Bill, this had been easy—he was a varsity athlete—but for my father it was problematic. Working the first football match while auditioning for manager, he lost the sweatshirts the team wore after the game and knew then that he would never succeed. But, his father insisted, “at Yale you never quit,” and so my father finished out the term. In the spring, he went out for rowing and won his crew “numerals”—the first athletic insignia of his life. “It meant more to me than most people would imagine.” But eventually he gave up athletics and turned his attention to the Berkeley Association, the Episcopal student group of which he became president, and to Dwight Hall, the Yale community service organization, under whose auspices he was a Boy Scout leader. And he began to find intellectual excitement, first in a course on Alexander the Great taught by Professor Rostovtzeff, a distinguished classicist who “wove in the romanticism of the figure of Alexander into the economic and cultural life of the day.” He continued Latin and Greek, but he ended up majoring in English. His drinking education, which he also took seriously, began with “Cuba Libres,” rum and Coke, his first term in his freshman dormitory, with a group who christened themselves the Duck Club.
But no matter how much he drank on Saturday night, my father went to Christ Church on Sunday morning for “hung mass,” as he and his friends called it. He was still grappling with Father Wigram’s question: “Have you thought of the clergy as a profession?” By temperament, my father was passionate. He wanted to go “all the way for Christ,” as he put it decades later in his oral history, but he didn’t want to give up drinking, he didn’t want to watch his language, and he didn’t want to dress in black all the time as a good Anglo-Catholic priest would. His worship experience had been genuine ever since that first confession, but from time to time he considered the liturgy itself “a little much.” He wanted to have it both ways: “I sort of despised people who were too puritanical about their religion . . . I thought it w
as sort of a good thing to be one of the boys and also to be a Christian.” He served as an acolyte at Christ Church every Tuesday morning and joined Servants of Christ the King, a “rule of life” set out by the Episcopalian Order of the Holy Cross for young people, which required morning and evening prayer, daily meditation, confession four times a year, and retreats. His confessor was encouraging, but “he never sort of backed me into a corner and told me I was totally off base.”
By the end of the summer before his last year at Yale, my father was seriously thinking of making a life in the clergy, and so he had a talk with his father. His brother Bill, now working in one of his father’s businesses, would eventually become a banker; it was my grandfather’s dream that if his younger son refused to go into business, he would become a lawyer. My father’s sincerity about a religious vocation moved him not a bit. A young man in his position should take a year or two in business, my grandfather sternly advised, recalling that at Yale, after reading Browning and Scott, he’d wanted to become an English teacher, had even written some poems. But he’d gotten over it, as he was sure my father would get over this “ridiculous idea” of the priesthood. My father’s overweening interest in the church was a “spiritual problem,” which my grandfather advised he discuss with his grandmother, who had an interest in such things. She had traveled, studied Buddhism and Hinduism, had even met Mahatma Gandhi, and she and my father were very close.
In his diary after the conversation, my father berated himself for not being more definite. “I should have said from the start—I’m going to.” But he also asked himself if his dream of the ministry was selfish. Could he characterize entering the priesthood as Christian “sacrifice” if not becoming a lawyer or a banker laid the entire burden of the family holdings on his brother? If it made his father unhappy? He even asked himself whether he was being unfair to himself in refusing his birthright. “Amusing thought,” he wrote, “going to a directors meeting in a clerical collar.”
That December on a retreat with Yale students, he led a meditation, his notes a neat outline in the same notebook in which he had recorded his conversation with his father. Like the beginning work of a poet that intimates what comes later, this early preaching foretold preoccupations that endured in my father’s theology. Taking The Pilgrim’s Progress as a text, he made a fable of his own story. A pilgrim struggles uphill from “the slough of despond.” He stumbles and falls from weariness but ahead of him sees a column of rough wood rising from the ground. His eyes follow it up and recognize the cross. At twenty, my father had grown in the courage bestowed by his conversion three years before, the courage to live his own sense of possibility, its emblem—I might say metaphor—the cross. “His eye follows it up,” he wrote in the meditation, “and then his burden is rolling away. He is free.”
2
Guadalcanal
* * *
Who is the young man in uniform in the photograph framed in red? “Killed in the war” was a phrase that was repeated often enough when I was a child that it lost all substance: it was both serious—someone who died like that must have been a hero and gone straight to heaven—and not serious—there was no sense of what war was. Most of the other men my father had pictures of in uniform, including himself, were smiling, but George Mead was not. His dark hair is slicked back and in his dark eyes is a searching expression, as if he knew, when the photograph was taken, that he was moving toward his death. George Mead from Dayton, Ohio, lived across the hall my father’s last year at Yale and became his best friend. Together, in early 1941, they’d made a snap decision to enlist in the Marines the day they saw a marine officer driving a convertible coupe across campus, the silver and gold insignia on his bright white cap glinting in the winter sun. When the officer stepped out of the car, my father wrote in his memoir, “the crimson stripe down the side of his blue trousers flashed in the sunshine.” That was enough for him.
After two weeks fighting in the Solomon Islands on Tulagi, my father landed on Guadalcanal in August 1942, and his first evening there, asking after his friend, he was told that George Mead had been killed. “You don’t know what a feeling that was,” he wrote home. “He was such a superb person and so close. I’d been looking forward to seeing him for 2 weeks so we could laugh together about the various happenings. And God to think of him, of all people, dead. I still can’t believe it.” During a battle to control a village, fighting had become fierce—expected reinforcements didn’t arrive—and one of George’s platoon was wounded. “George, as was like him, rushed up to help him out,” my father continued in his letter. “He bent over the wounded man and as he did the Japs opened up. It was instant death, thank goodness. But why did it have to be George?”
I always knew my father had been wounded at a place called Guadalcanal, and as a child I boasted about his medals. I liked to watch the surprise on the faces of boys at school when I told them my father, the priest who wore vestments that flowed to the ground, had been a hero in the war. Anything to mitigate the strangeness of being the daughter of “a priest.” In Jersey City, where we lived close to two huge Roman Catholic churches, I explained that my father dressed like a Catholic priest but that the Episcopal Church was catholic with a small c and therefore priests could marry; in Indianapolis, where the churches nearby were Presbyterian and Methodist, I explained that in spite of my father’s stiff white collar and bright purple shirt, he was definitely Protestant. It was in Indianapolis that I finally learned how my father had won those medals, what he’d really done in the war, just how close he’d come to death.
He won the Silver Star, the Marine Corps citation read, when, “upon seeing two of his men stranded on the opposite bank of the Matanikau River, and unable to withdraw due to their wounds, Second Lieutenant Moore, at great risk to his life, unhesitatingly swam across the river, continually swept by heavy Japanese machine-gun fire, and, with the help of his sergeant, brought the two men back to safety.” For a later battle, he won two more medals, the Purple Heart and the Navy Cross: “Pressing forward in the face of a steady barrage of hostile machine-gun and mortar fire, Second Lieutenant Moore, by aggressive charges and skillful employment of his units, forced the enemy to retreat to the ocean’s edge. As the Japanese fought desperately to survive, he stayed on the line with his platoon, directing its fire under terrific assaults by the enemy, and urged his men forward in a series of hand-grenade and bayonet charges, personally leading their successive attacks. In the final stages of the engagement, although critically wounded by a hand-grenade fragment and lying prostrate and helpless, he continued to encourage his men to keep attacking until he lost consciousness.”
“I won the medal for the whole platoon,” my father told a reporter the spring of 1943; he was home on convalescent leave after nearly five months in military hospitals. The journalist, and no doubt my father, took note of the contrast between the terror of battle and the terrace at Hollow Hill where they sat for the interview—Plowright, the butler, appearing with a tray of iced tea, quietly placing it on a table under a blooming apple tree as “the returned fighter” recalled his three months in the Pacific campaign, the five battles he had fought, the death of his best friend, the six men killed and four wounded out of his platoon of twenty.
As soldier and interviewer gazed out beyond the terrace at the gardener transplanting violets at the end of the lawn, at the “glistening furrows” of a newly plowed field, my father told the whole story. His recollections, the journalist wrote, “came crowding.” Marching from 3 a.m. until six the next evening in terrific heat. One meal a day of canned C ration. Cold rain at night. No sleep, guns on both sides firing. The sick-sweet smell of dead Japanese on the hills, in the river, at water holes. If you were thirsty, you dipped your helmet in “shell hole water”—filthy and scummed with mosquito larvae—treating it before you drank with iodine and chlorine. “Until a man’s temperature passed 104° he was considered well enough to pull the trigger.” Sick marines i
n foxholes, weak from malaria, each holding a gun. Dead marines with flies on them. Japanese prisoners retching. My father leads an assault, his men running across a sandspit at the mouth of the wide, shallow river. Marines wading and mucking, bullets splashing beside them “like rain,” grenades “swishing” overhead, the platoon getting smaller as boys are killed, and then he hears a low gurgle of blood and realizes he himself has been hit.
I knew that the big scars on my father’s chest and back had come from a Japanese bullet that went right through him. I had an image—darkness, blood everywhere, a Japanese soldier standing over him with a rifle. But that is not how it happened. The sandspit was in the open and it was daytime, which was why, when my father rose to his knees to determine where the “troublesome” machine-gun fire was coming from, he got hit—from the front. I knew he got shot through the chest because in the Adirondacks when he rowed with his chest bare, or took us sailing wearing just bathing trunks, his scars were part of the event—his arms rowing, his head turning in pleasure to survey the expanse of the lake, his voice telling the story of how as an eight-year-old he’d been taught to sail when old Louie simply pushed him off from the dock, alone in the sailboat, no paddle, and said, Sail. But I can’t keep my eyes from the scars. My father never told me what the battle was like, but he explained that the scar on his chest was small because that was where the shot had gone in, and that the large, cavernous splat which marked the skin on his back was where it had come out. Did the bullet, I wondered—it was a bullet, not the fragment of a hand grenade—go out my father’s back and wound another soldier? And another?
