by Honor Moore
“Contrary to most of the articles I’ve read,” my father told the reporter, “I found that everyone is more and more scared with each battle until he reaches a point and then cracks.”
“Dear Mother and Dad,” he wrote three days after he was wounded, “No longer where I was because some yellow no-good lined up his sights and squeezed—” The shot had gone through his lung, an inch from his in-beating heart, barely an inch from his spine. “The bullet had my name on it, but I guess they spelled it wrong.”
He was put on a stretcher and transported by jeep to a dressing station where he was given sulfa drugs and blood plasma. “They said if the jeep hadn’t been there, I’d have bled to death before they could have moved me. When the war is over, I want to have a jeep to go fishing,” wrote the twenty-two-year-old who fished for trout in the Adirondacks every summer, for blue marlin in Florida every winter. After the dressing station, the fallen fighter spent the night on a stretcher in a field hospital—“a hot stuffy dugout”—and early the next morning was taken by plane—breathing through his good lung—to a Quonset hut hospital in the New Hebrides. There he and tens of others waited for the hospital ship that would take them to New Zealand. It arrived on November 15, my father’s twenty-third birthday, a bright white oasis entering the harbor, a giant angel, its name the Solace. I remember my father telling the story of being in the New Hebrides hospital for two weeks—how he watched through the windows as his fellow wounded were carried out and onto the ship one by one, how he marveled that he was being rescued on his birthday, how hard it was when he was not taken with the others but left behind, the only patient in the hospital, and given no explanation.
After the first days, he felt no pain, but he had a constant fever and a nightmare that woke him screaming every night: Tojo’s Imperial Army making a frontal attack on his hospital bed. After ten days, the Solace returned. On the ship there was real food, he wrote home, and women nurses—like “beautiful music in a factory”—his own window out onto the Pacific, the excitement of steaming into the harbor at Wellington, New Zealand. I remember certain words. He got malaria. It was treated with quinine. For weeks his fever hovered between 100 and 103 degrees, and then, when his lung abscess kicked up, he was seized with violent coughing and a fever soaring to 105 degrees, days spent with his legs tied higher than his head so his lung could drain. Then the infection began to break, and he was “fine,” by which he meant “no pain, good appetite, etc.”
“You should have seen the oranges,” I can hear him saying, his voice like his mother’s, sliding up an octave of pleasure, his scar hit by the August sun as he rows across the lake.
But in daily family life, my father did not make a practice of talking as he had to the reporter, which is why, once when I was eleven, I made a terrible mistake.
It was September, we had just moved to Indianapolis, my father to become dean of the cathedral there; we’d arrived to some fanfare, and now he was called Dean, rather than Father, Moore. Eli Lilly was the chair of the vestry and my father had been his candidate—the old man had made his millions in drugs and collected his art and his rare books. Now he wanted the prosperous, social, “lily-white” cathedral, a landmark located on Monument Circle, at the very center of the city, to reach out to the surrounding community, poor white people from the Appalachians and poor black people from the South. A dentist in town, Gadi Lawton, who had been a “point” in the battle in which my father was wounded, gave an interview to an Indianapolis paper about the marine heroism of the new dean. My father was irritated that the coverage was about what he’d done in the war. By then he had made a name for himself at the downtown ministry in Jersey City, and it was that work for which he wanted to be known. The conservative Indianapolis newspapers, he growled, were more interested in the Pacific campaign and its convenient racist apparatus than in good housing, integration, and services for the poor. On the southern hem of the Midwest, Indianapolis was a segregated city mere decades from its legacy as a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan.
I was in seventh grade, and I read the newspapers eagerly, considering my father’s irritation false modesty. I learned for the first time that he had rescued the two men at Matanikau, that he had fallen to his knees, continuing to urge on his platoon until he fell unconscious. It made me look at my father differently to think of him as having saved lives, as having continued to give orders as he passed out, as having almost died. But Gadi Lawton, who had a big laugh and a great smile and who my father said was fond of climbing coconut trees on the base at Guadalcanal, also told another story about my father in the Marines. By now, there were four of us children at “grown-up” dinner after the three babies were put to sleep, and because supper at the big table in the dining room was always a theatrical occasion, I joined in when my mother started to rib my father about all the publicity, including Dr. Lawton’s story. “And this big tall guy,” I declared, affecting the joshing of a war buddy, “in a great feat of courage, ran across enemy fire . . . for a pack of cigarettes!”
I thought of this as having happened “long ago”—my heroic father, willing to risk his life not only for others but for a slightly sinful pleasure! But when I began the joke, my father, without a word, lurched from his chair, leaving abruptly vacant the seat at the head of the table where he’d just been merrily talking or carving the chicken. There was, after he left the room, not only vacancy but shocked silence. And I had caused it.
“Go after him,” my mother said. I looked at her. I had never seen her so grave. “Go after him.”
And so I left the dining room, my body so heavy with fear I could hardly walk, my brothers and sisters uncharacteristically quiet and solemn. What would I say to him? If only I could take back what I had said, I would have my father there in his chair, telling his jokes, awkward as he always was when he carved. The house seemed so big. I crossed the wide hallway and looked in the living room where we had evening prayer, but he wasn’t there. Perhaps he had gone out. I looked toward the front door, which was open, the evening sun casting a shadow across the wide summer screen, the driveway outside, my heart pounding. And then I slowly climbed the stairs, made my way along the carpeted hallway to my parents’ bedroom, and knocked. “Come in.” He was sitting on the chaise longue near the window. As I went toward him, I could see he was holding his Bible open, one tissuey, gold-edged page between his long fingers, his hand trembling. Trembling myself, I approached. He looked like a stranger, broken there on the long chaise, his slender legs suddenly fragile in the loose black of his clerical trousers.
“I’m sorry, Pop,” I said.
At first he would not look up, but when he finally did, I could see he’d been crying, and I’d never seen my father cry. I remember sitting down on one edge of the chaise, touching his legs. Even when I crawled up close, he didn’t turn into my father again, he just strangely nodded his head. “His eyes still had the ‘1,000 mile stare,’” he had written his sister after seeing one of the boys he’d rescued. His own eyes had it right then, the thousand-mile stare. I was inside the stare now, meeting a man who was nakedly my father. The only father half close to this one I had ever seen was the man whose voice sometimes nearly broke when he preached about the Crucifixion, as he tried, I now understood, to bring into the church something of what he had learned in that faraway tropical place where he almost died. What was it like living inside this place where I saw him now, this place where, surely, he was always alone? I was scared, but even so, if he had allowed it, if he had cried again or put his arms around me, I would have tried to tell him, even at only eleven years old, that I wanted to know and understand what had happened to him, if only he would tell me about it. But all he could manage was, “I’ll be all right.” And then he touched me as a priest would a worshiper, saying he’d stay upstairs, that I should go back down to supper.
At the end of January 1943, three months after he was wounded, my father was shipped from New Zealand to
San Francisco. “Even the fumes coming up in the ambulance smelt like lilac blossoms,” he wrote home. In April, he was back at Hollow Hill, where the lilacs were real, the narcissus in bloom, the shrubs budded, his parents proud, the press calling. The summer before in Tulagi, the comforts of life at home had come to him in reverie—in a letter, he’d spun a picture of the family at Rockmarge, his grandmother’s seashore house, gathering for her birthday on a beautiful August evening for cocktails on the porch—“all clean and attractive and fond of one another with Granny enjoying each minute of it all and all of us making a justifiable fuss over her.” In the distance, the offshore islands glowed in the sunset, “a sail or two is white on the dark blue sea, the pines a dark green, the lawn long and smooth.” For supper, fish chowder and duck and gooseberry sauce, “the old family gags being cracked,” his eighty-five-year-old grandmother unable to hear but smiling anyway, opening her presents—the dressing gown from her school friend Miss Enders, tea from some “queer Chinaman” to be “raved over and wondered at.” After supper, bowling in the alley in the basement with its “smell of wood” and the next morning a swim from the beach at the foot of the lawn and in the afternoon golf at Myopia, the club down the road.
But on Tulagi, he wrote in the same letter, “before the eye reaches the water’s edge, it must cross the beach and on the beach lie the dead.” More dead in the center of the golf course left by the British colonials, and hanging in the humid air, the familiar sickly fumes of human decay.
Now, at Hollow Hill, there was silence that was not ominous, no ocean of Japanese destroyers to disrupt an evening on the terrace. At first he felt relief and bland pleasure, felt, actually, nothing unusual. But one evening in the book-lined library within days of coming home, having cocktails with his parents, his father in the big chair, his mother dressed for dinner, he feels “a strange lump” at the bottom of his feet; it comes up his legs, he begins to weep, cannot stop “for half an hour.” This happened again and again, whether he was at home at Hollow Hill or in New York, staying at the family apartment. The company of his parents; the concerned tenderness of his old nurse, Jean Watson; the memories of childhood—all of this, when he needed clarity, became suffocating.
He was a stranger again, this time even to himself. Now a man of twenty-three, he had been a boy just a year earlier when he left for the Marines, his references juvenile: “How did Dick Tracy escape?” he had asked in a letter from Guadalcanal. He had been prepared for basic training by playing competitive games as a boy, but nothing had prepared him for combat: “On the third day, I was sitting in the midst of my platoon in position defending the C.P. [command post] when a sniper ran across the field below. We opened fire. It seemed like shooting clay pigeons.” The man fell, and when they reached the body they found photographs of his children in his jacket. “He smelt violently for two days. My hands aren’t bloodless.” My father was aware of the power of language and allusion. My hands aren’t bloodless—he knew his Macbeth; Shakespeare had been his reading on the transport ship. “The Marines changed him,” his brother said. He was no longer even slightly physically soft, and the sweetness he’d had as a child was submerged in the Marine Corps manner of mental toughness. My father’s new self was stronger, but also broken. Eventually, when he and my mother fell in love, he would confide in her, trying to describe what he called his “confusion.” But only in talking to a fellow veteran of combat was there nothing to explain, nothing my father had to do to feel the elemental self he had discovered in battle, a self intimate with the nexus of life and death, where as a matter of course one thing is transformed into another.
Posted to Seattle after he recuperated, my father began, in memory, to observe himself as he had been that spring after coming home, his disconsolate staggering and meandering, those evenings out drinking martinis and smoking cigarettes, the arch, funny chatter fading when across the room he saw a marine in uniform standing at the bar. He’d go over to him, simply to shoot the breeze, maybe buy him a drink, and feel, he wrote, “closer to the stranger than to my own family.” He began to wonder why he had been spared, why on earth the bullet had come so close to his heart and his spine without killing him. Between nights of drinking too much, of parties with navy enlisted women (WAVES) or Seattle girls, of mornings coaching the marine rowing crew, of his fierceness placing this or that “lad” on discipline, he began openly to think that perhaps he had been saved to do something else with his life.
He could dream all he wanted about becoming “holy” after the war, but now, as a marine hero, my father was called upon to give speeches, interviews, and talks in which he not only told, in an upbeat way, the story of his platoon, but also cheered on the war effort: “Out there,” he would say, “we used to promise each other that any of us who got back would tell the people here what war in the Pacific is like, how tough it is. We thought that if people really knew what it’s like, that would hurry production so that our job could be finished and the boys could come home.” In time he grew tired of what he called “Guadalcanal trash” or “the same old thing”; the story he wanted to tell would not fit the blunt rhetoric of the propaganda offensive. When he was approached to write something about a Christian going to war, he quickly agreed. The invitation came from The New Start, the magazine of the Order of the Holy Cross, an Episcopal order of monks that sponsored Servants of Christ the King, a group my father had been part of at Yale. Here was an opportunity, outside the context of the war effort, to wrestle with his anguish over killing.
At his desk at the University of Washington, where he was commander of marine recruits, my father wrote from the private conscience of a young man who took the Ten Commandments seriously but who had killed enemy soldiers, whose best friend had died in combat with that same enemy, and who, he sometimes thought, had himself died. “Perhaps you have noticed the break that comes in a soldier’s voice in the middle of a story,” he wrote, “how his eyes turn away, or how his breath comes deep for a moment. Once in a great while how his eyes fill and his lower lip quivers! He may leave the room, or break a match hard with his fingers. He has seen the face or heard the voice of the dead in that moment . . .” Unable on active duty to use his name, he wrote anonymously and in the third person. He drew on his grief about George Mead’s death, the fellowship he felt in his platoon, with other marines dead and living, with any young man who might approach battle. Without the fear he’d felt writing home, that his letters were too “depressing,” he portrayed himself as a young man who had discovered at seventeen a desire for depth and meaning in a dramatic conversion, who had found in the experience of battle a spiritual resource that could take him forward into adulthood. After the piece appeared in the magazine, he was asked to expand it, and in 1945, thousands of a pamphlet called A Marine Speaks of War were published by the Church of the Advent, in Boston, still without an author’s name.
It was not that my father wrote in the pamphlet things he had never said before, but that the person who was writing was different. The soldier writing home had easily described the Japanese enemy to his five-year-old nephew as “monkeys without tails” or to his sister as “yellow swine.” But the first dead enemy the anonymous marine describes is a “pathetic little Japanese boy curled up by the side of a trail with beardless cheeks and small feet who did not seem like the fierce Japanese soldier he’d read about.” Here, in response to the “violent shame” that came over him in battle, the marine admits that “we” are guilty too and “asks God for forgiveness.” He acknowledges too that when “on a dark beach he heard that his closest friend had been killed trying to rescue another man . . . a burning anger was his only reaction . . . and a desire to fight.”
The last winter of his life, I went to Bank Street to meet my father for supper. He was wearing blue jeans and a red plaid flannel shirt, and though he looked much younger than he was, he was unsteady and I held his arm as we walked to the restaurant. He had just received the news that his melano
ma was probably terminal, but his spirits were high, and he was calculating whether in the time he had left he would be able to finish a new book.
“What is the book, Pop?”
He told me that he’d entered the priesthood not “to have people admire me” or “to do good,” but because he always had a longing to celebrate the Eucharist. I had never heard him say exactly that before. In the book, he would talk about some of his most powerful experiences celebrating, and how the time and place where a particular Eucharist had occurred—Vietnam during the war, in a dry riverbed in India for a hundred thousand people, in Mississippi during the civil rights movement—illuminated its meaning. The restaurant was a small, dark French place in the Village, and as we ate our moules and our rack of lamb, he asked my advice. He had a few chapters, he said. If I were in his situation, what would I do? Would I go back and revise or would I forge ahead? “I have a year or two,” he said. “I’m sure I can finish.”
