The Bishop's Daughter

by Honor Moore

  “Your father was very cruel to me,” Nona continued. “I remember when he left. He was so happy that the war was over and that all the killing might stop. He wrote for quite a while, letters from Idaho, Chicago, and from New York after he got back. How he cared for me and missed me. But after about two weeks the letters stopped and I got a telegram: SORT OF SUDDEN. MARRIED JENNY MCKEAN STOP. I remember how I felt. I could not believe that Paul would do such a thing. There had really been no warning. My mother was fit to be tied. She thought it was absolutely inexcusable. I didn’t know how to defend him to her, and I don’t remember exactly what happened. I could hardly forgive him right then and there, but I will thank him for sparing my finding out from the newspaper.”

  My father a two-timer? My father one of those boys who suddenly break up with you? Never call again? What was I, his twenty-year-old daughter, to make of this information? What could I do to keep the story at a distance? Fiction. In the creative writing class I took the year after that summer in Europe, I wrote a short story using the events as I’d gleaned them from my parents, the events as I recount them here. But it contains no analysis or reflection. The instructor, who liked the story very much, also remarked that he found it “painful,” but I didn’t think about it that way. The occasional spats I’d witnessed between my parents had left no dent in my ideal, and Nona, after all, was part of my father’s past and now, for me, a shimmering intimation, a private dream.

  When I got back from Nona and Switzerland, it was August, and I went straight to the Adirondacks, bringing presents from Europe. I earnestly reported to my father the details of my visit with his old girlfriend, how movingly she’d talked about her husband’s suicide. I did not tell him how much he’d hurt her, and I did not consider what my infatuation with Nona Clark might have reawakened in my mother, who was the same as she always was, buoyant, radiant, curious, given to the sardonic remark. In fact, everything was the same, all of us around the table, the shouting and joking and laughing, my father rowing across the lake or taking one of us for a sail, the family game of prisoner’s base as darkness fell. It would be decades before I learned that the pain in my parents’ marriage had nothing to do with another woman, that my mother’s response to Nona Clark’s stiff neck drew on something she knew nothing of, something sadder and more serious than jealous pique at the rudeness of her husband’s wartime sweetheart.

  When my parents married, my mother had a twenty-one-inch waist. The first time she told me this, she was pregnant, lying on a pale pink bed at Rockmarge. Out the big window the willows along the ocean path were moving in the afternoon breeze, my father’s father in summer whites was walking across a lawn so vast it curved downward like the edge of the world, and the sunlight was doubled in its brightness because the ocean shone it back. My great-grandmother’s house was the white of creamy chalk and too big to count the rooms of, so huge and grand that after she died no one in the family could afford to live in it, and so it was torn down, the oceanfront land sold off in pieces.

  But the day my mother told me the measurement of her bridal waist, the house was still intact, and when I remember how she said it—“I had a twenty-one-inch waist when I got married”—I can see her young. She has grown to her full height, five foot nine, and carries herself with slight awkwardness, as if such tall slenderness might throw her off-balance. It was this precarious girl whom Benny Bradlee wanted to kiss when he took her to see Now, Voyager, but whom Bobby Potter kissed first. Evenings the summer she was fifty years old and dying, Ben and some of the others who had kissed her at the movies, now powerful men, came and sat with her on her porch in Washington, still making her laugh, still wanting her irony and the quiet way she listened and questioned once you got her attention.

  When my mother was four, her mother stood her in front of George Luks, the Ashcan School painter, who made a portrait of her that looked like a Spanish infanta. Almost as soon as she could walk, she would dance even without music, spinning, laughing, spinning, and, when she stopped, drop to the floor and look up to see paintings whirling, the faux Italian furniture rising to the ceiling, edges of light falling out of kilter through the tall windows. They called her Dizzy. At twelve, she turned solemn, and soon after that, beautiful. By the time my mother became beautiful, her mother was almost always in bed in the room at the end of the long hallway, rousing herself for an infrequent meal or gin disguised in a teapot delivered on a tray. My mother talked less about her mother’s drinking than about her inadequacy. “Mama never behaves as a wife to Papa. But then again she never has.” It went without saying that “Mama” was hardly a mother either.

  Once, in a letter to my father, my mother drew a cartoon of a family dinner in the paneled dining room at Prides, the big house where she grew up north of Boston, which was not far from Rockmarge. First she drew a rectangle, in the center of which she printed TABLE. Around the table, instead of stick figures, she wrote little blocks of narrative for each of her family. At one end sat “Mama in tears at table.” From “Mama in tears,” a penciled arrow swooped across the drawing and out a portal labeled DOOR. Also tugged from the table by departing arrows were her brother Shaw, sixteen, whose shouts had caused Margarett’s outburst, and her sister Margie, who collapsed into tears and followed her mother out, which in turn caused Shaw to weep and also leave the table. “Papa” did not cry but rushed out “to comfort Margie.” “Jenny” remained “stationary” and “tearless,” her only company the maid, “in and out with more food continually.”

  As soon as she could, my mother fled to boarding school in Virginia, to the Madeira School. When she did come home, she sat with her father in the library talking hour after hour about what to do about her mother. Her sister, just a year older, escaped into a life my mother was too shy for. While Margie modeled, posing as a “socialite” smoking Camels for magazine ads, Jenny put on red-framed glasses and read. When she wasn’t reading, she was at the stables wearing a tweed riding jacket with velvet lapels, a hard black hat, and jodhpurs tight at her knees. She laughed with the stablemen, mucked stalls, and threw the shiny smooth saddle onto her own mare. Before boarding school, she’d been a champion rider; a newspaper pictured her then, holding Me Too by the bridle, a silver prize cup in the other hand. My mother was a middle child, between her sister and twin brothers—Me too! she must have thought as she galloped the field close to the sea. When her horse took the jumps, she held her seat so easily she was sure she was flying.

  After Madeira, she went to Vassar where she got A’s until the morning she woke up unable to see. My mother always took her glasses off to have her picture taken, so there’s no evidence she had bad eyes. When I think of her then, the Vassar hallway is dark, it’s night, she is alone in her room, and all over are stacks of the books she’s tried to lose herself in. The blinding illness never got a name, and it took a year to get her sight back, not to feel the pain in her head like fists pushing from behind the eyes. She was still recovering, rooming in New York with Ben Bradlee’s sister, Connie, when Paul Moore returned from Guadalcanal the spring of 1943.

  They became inseparable, nights in the city, weekends away. It was sweet for my father to bring a girl home to Hollow Hill, to the slate-roofed country house built just after his parents’ marriage, white stain sloughing from its brick walls so they become pink, clipped hedge, pruned shade trees, lawns just turning green again. The Moores had horses and dogs and played family games of croquet. Cocktails were in a library walled with my grandfather’s leather-bound Scott and Tennyson, Browning and Keats, where he sat, taciturn in an armchair placed like a throne, its back to the center window, and where my grandmother, dressed for dinner in a long velvet skirt, made cheerful, pliant conversation. How sweet to show Jenny the rock garden, the roses, the house he’d so missed. The bullet had my name on it, but I guess they spelled it wrong. Now, with his girl, he climbed the stairs to his childhood room with its four-poster and the sailfish he’d caught in Florida mou
nted above the fireplace, then he ushered her to the guest room where the bed had a mirror headboard. There he kissed Jenny McKean in the midst of his mother’s antiques and colorful decor, so different from the dark Italianate solemnity of the house she’d grown up in. “I love all the luxury,” she wrote him.

  Years later, when my father was married to Brenda and no longer romantic about his marriage to my mother, his tender sympathy vanished and he began to tell stories of her ambivalence and extreme emotion. As always he was a vivid storyteller. At his parents’ house after their engagement, in the room with the mirrored headboard, my mother sits at the dressing table, a mirrored vanity painted with deer and trees. She is quietly looking at herself, making sure her hair is smooth. Giving her nose and cheeks another rush of powder, moistening her lips with one more swish of raven red. My father has his dinner jacket on. “Come on, Jenny, it’s time to go downstairs.” She continues to sit, pushing a coil of hair into place, looking at her face from the right, from the left, cursing to herself that she wears glasses, deciding not to wear them, that it’s not so important to see. Suddenly she begins to cry and my father doesn’t know why. He’d bought her a gold dress for their engagement party in Boston the week before, and her proper grandmother had let her know she disapproved, but “Jenny, you looked beautiful, everyone said so,” he now reassures her. She can’t stop crying, and he gets a little frightened. Finally my mother says she simply can’t face all the people downstairs, and, to my father’s astonishment, when he puts his arms around her, she hits him hard, with her fists. When my father told me this story in the early 1980s, his voice driven by blame and judgment, I didn’t understand why, more than a decade after my mother’s death, in the bloom of his new marriage, his retrospect had no compassion for her.

  My mother kept scrapbooks, and after my father died, I knew I would return to them. But I was surprised, going to Bank Street when the house was being taken apart, to learn that he had saved wartime letters. I was even more surprised at how many there were. Hundreds, enough to overflow one box into another, and another. Bound into packets with string. I first saw them at Bank Street, dusty, the August after my father died, and later, taking inventory at Stonington, I found more, in frayed shoe boxes stacked in old liquor cartons. My father’s letters home from battle, more than a hundred pages; letters between my parents, from Seattle and later, nearly two thousand pages. Eventually all of them ended up tidily Xeroxed, and I had my set bound at a copy shop. It was in these volumes that I began to look for the beginning of the story of my parents’ marriage unrevised by the decades, commentary that introduces them in their early twenties, between the beginning of their romance in the spring of 1943, through the conversation on the willow walk and my father’s year in Seattle, up to my birth in late 1945.

  New York, 1943. The Katharine Dunham dancers, Paul Robeson’s Othello, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! A “set” of friends with last names like Aldrich, Cutler, Fowler, Whitman, and Potter. My mother’s prose fairly clatters with high heels and stylish suits, and I can hear the talk: an exclamatory rush of endearments—“darling,” “dear”—a particular manipulation of the pitch of voice and vowel, an aversion to the direct expression of emotion. I remember these people as tall, as well dressed, as possessing esprit in the use of language and gesture. Those who haven’t died are now very handsome people in their eighties, faded images of the younger selves who vividly enter my imagination as I read the letters. Engagements announced, babies born, leaves given and withheld, casualties, deaths, so many deaths—a war widow, friend of all of them, whom no one can console. The fighting is so part of their lives that in the letters it seems at a remove, but also present, insistent.

  When my father left for Seattle the morning after the encounter on the willow walk, he sent my mother flowers. “They meant so much,” she wrote. “They are nectar to the nostrils and reach my navel.” My mother was sitting at her desk in New York. She wanted to apologize. “I might not have showed too much character . . . I am sorry to have interrupted you by humming, to have acted so violently physically as well as mentally . . . I am so really sorry that I made it so hard for you to say goodbye, and hard for myself.” My father had tried to kiss her goodbye and she had become “violent.” Think of her, barely twenty, the daughter of that mother, a mother who once, my mother confided in a letter to my father, stumbling toward her drunk, threw a telephone receiver, by mistake hitting my mother, breaking the skin on her lip, leaving her mouth bruised and bleeding. Take all that into account when you read what she writes: “I wanted to hurt you—anyone . . . I thought of writing you a letter and saying ‘Steer away from women, Paul, you might break someone else’s heart.’”

  “There was a fault of ignorance on my side, a fault of naïveté on yours,” my father replied. “Perhaps they went together. Perhaps I was ignorant of your naïveté and you of my ignorance.”

  For my mother, though, “the hurt remains physical,” and she tells my father everything. Of flirting “like a wild thing” with Davy Challinor, a former beau whom they both knew—listening with him to “waltzes in a music store booth—yesterday drinking mint juleps at the Stork and teadancing—not to see if I could get out of myself again, but to see if it would soothe the raw edges.” She has “no regrets,” she writes, but her bravado is stiff with pain. She envies my father, in a new place “where listening to ‘I’m in love with a soldier boy’ will not make your throat dry . . .”

  Eventually my father admitted that before he left, he’d felt nothing for her at all; that he had not missed her the week he spent in Washington, but that on the train West, the countryside flying past, he’d realized he felt “less alone” with her than with “anyone I have ever known.” And then, plaintively, “Forgive me Jen, will you?” My mother countered that he “felt nothing” because “as the days went by, my weakness made you strong, I needed you more than you needed me and so the magic for you was gone. But still for me the magic persists . . .” In response, my father accused her of being “subjective & inverted & rather unhealthy.” He didn’t mean to sound “stuffy,” he wrote, but seriously, “there’s no point in worrying the scar tissue.”

  My mother responded with memories: “the weekend at your house and family bridge and the mirrored headboard for the first time—And Sunday night when we read aloud flower catalogues and you looked so rumpled and young and boyish in your blue shirt and you seemed clumsy like I was, and I wanted you so badly . . .” And then, when they were at her family’s at Prides, “unexplainably, it happened . . . as if there were a string from one end of my body to the other and the string broke and every part of me was flooded with something warm and exciting and true.” No wonder my father chose Seattle over New Haven. No wonder he wrote my mother that she was naïve. The downstairs guest room at Prides, its walls blue French silk with a silvery jacquard, was called the Silk Room. In letters after they reconcile, they will refer to what they did there as “silkrooming.”

  In the last years of her life, my mother became a writer and published The People on Second Street, a memoir about our years in Jersey City. When she knew she might die, she began another book, about her childhood and her marriage; in the weeks before her death, she burned much of her writing, but not a passage in which she described herself as having “an intense sexual drive.” She made the admission as if it were an affliction, a deformity, something she had always contended with. It was there already when, at twenty, she wrote my father: “I was just going too fast and you got scared.”

  4

  Holy Matrimony

  * * *

  Neither could stop writing, and after months of correspondence, my father invited my mother to Seattle. Her brother Harry was stationed there and her mother was visiting him, so she could go along without rousing gossip among their friends. My father was nervous. He’d arrested one of his men because he refused to see his wife, didn’t dare face her; did he dare face Jenny McKean in this
new situation? They had always seen each other in the context of their friends and family—here in Seattle they’d be on their own. He wrote her all these fears—she should know he took his job seriously: “Without dramatizing it . . . there is a responsibility to the men these future officers will someday serve.” In spite of his uneasiness, he prepared for the trip—he had his college car, a Buick convertible he called Bovette, and he saved ration cards for gas and for liquor so he could give her a good time. “It doesn’t seem possible I’ll see you within a week,” he wrote, unable to keep from voicing another fear: “I don’t see why the hell you shouldn’t come out & I don’t see what it has to do with MARRIAGE. Don’t misunderstand . . . If you misunderstand, you’ll get sore, so don’t.”

  My mother was thinking of marriage, and their reunion the first night was so romantic, so close to what she had dared to imagine and hope for, that she told him how she felt. But my father lost his wallet, and along with it all his carefully hoarded ration cards—not only could they not drive up into ski country as they’d dreamed in their letters, but it rained all four days, which kept them indoors. Even so there were dinners and parties, among them a cocktail party given by a cousin of my mother’s at her grand house in the Highlands, where Nona Clark’s family also lived. Of course Nona came to the party, but my father never told her that he had been involved with Jenny McKean, the beautiful black-haired girl in the Bergdorf Goodman suit whose glamorous mother was a painter. “Mrs. McKean approached me,” Nona told me, “and said ‘You have the face of an artist.’ But Jenny and I never spoke, not one word.”

  When he saw my mother off at the station, she was what my father described as “stingy” with her goodbye. Reading my mother’s postmortem letter to my father, it’s clear why: