by Honor Moore
The war wasn’t over when my father’s term at Quantico ended, and my mother was two months pregnant; since he had three weeks’ leave, she accompanied him to San Francisco, where he would embark again for the Pacific—the destination, then secret, was Guam; the mission, also secret, training for the invasion of Japan. They registered at the Fairmont, and, the first night, dined and danced at the Top of the Mark. After a few days in San Francisco, my father planned to take his new bride to Santa Barbara to meet his sister Fanny, whose husband had died in the war right before their wedding, and to visit his bachelor uncle, Leonard, in Los Angeles. But when he reported at marine headquarters, he was informed of a sudden change and never got back to the hotel. In the hour he had before departure, he sent my mother carnations. “The lady said, ‘We have only one red one, it will look silly with all the pink ones,’” he wrote. “I want the red one,” he insisted, bursting into tears. A single red bloom punctuated the pink bouquet.
Their first letters crossed: “I waved at you in the sky at about 4 . . . I have been haunted by the fact that I omitted saying goodbye to the commandant,” my mother wrote. “A gripping embrace to him.” Reading, I was amazed at my mother’s sexual candor. “God bless my darling daddy,” she concluded. “I am now crying.” As the transport flew over the Mark, my father waved through the window. “Today has seemed like a day anywhere when I will see you. Still don’t know where we go or when.” His apprehension was leavened by memory of their new life. “You know darling, the more I think of it, the more wonderful the last four months was. What amazes me is that we did so much and came so far in getting together. It is so much a part of me now that even without you nearby, I can’t imagine what not being married was like.” And, “I find myself talking about marriage all the time. It gives one such a pleasant full feeling to talk about it, about the vagaries of women folk and the sanity of men—about how ‘Jenny does this’ or ‘we do that.’” The letter reached my mother in Santa Barbara, where she had gone alone to visit Fanny and her two little boys. “I wish you were here so we could neck. I am hep as an old cat,” she wrote back. But facing a return to the mentality of war, my father left aside talk of sex, longing simply for her companionship: “Last night someone killed a bird for no reason, and I wanted to talk about it to you—about the disgust and revulsion of seeing it and how that feeling was like the old experiences of two years ago . . . One must start some time and I suppose this was as good as any time to start hardening and coarsening and preparing the outer toughness . . . necessary out here.” Part of that “coarsening” involved what my father viewed as a military attitude toward sex—enlisted men, married or not, could sign up for dates with single women. He recounted a generic conversation:
“Where’s your date, Mac?”
“I ain’t that hard up.”
“Boy, I will be when I’m going on my 27th month.”
“That’s no way for a married man to talk.”
“I saw your name on the list, you can’t snow me.”
“Hell, they’re all alike in the dark.”
“If you can get ’em in the dark.”
Was my father’s lack of response to my mother’s seductive talk due to awareness of military censorship, simple discretion, or something else? “He seems so indifferent,” one of my sisters said on reading the letters. But that is not what my mother felt about her husband’s desire. She reported to a girlfriend at the time that their physical relationship was “very passionate”—her personification of his “commandant” and references to her own arousal bear that out. “Had slight insomnia because there was no Daddy to smell,” she wrote the day he left. “I have moved over to your bed which is one of the more vicarious forms of pleasure I have yet encountered . . .”
After Santa Barbara, my mother took the train to Los Angeles to visit my father’s Uncle Leonard. Leonard Hanna had roomed with Cole Porter at Yale, and now he collected Impressionist paintings and invested in plays and movies. When my father was at Yale, he had arranged for my father to visit the set of The Philadelphia Story, and the memory of shaking Katharine Hepburn’s hand sent my father into wide-eyed nostalgia even late in life. That spring Leonard was leasing a villa in Bel-Air; he picked my mother up in his “drive-yourself,” a long black Buick convertible with red leather seats. In her immediate letter to my father, my mother delightedly described a master bedroom with shocking pink walls, the bed eight feet by eight feet, gold cupids on the headboard. The enormous magnolia blossom on the breakfast table was a gift from “Judy” (the actress Judith Anderson, in Hollywood filming Jean Renoir’s The Diary of a Chambermaid), and the first night, Leonard took my mother to supper at Mike Romanoff’s with glamorous friends, including the actor Monty Woolley, another Yale friend of his and the star of the movie The Man Who Came to Dinner. Until an evening bout of morning sickness drove her from the table, my mother’s pregnancy had been a secret she wanted to keep, in spite of my father’s protests—“I don’t understand why women want to keep these things secret!” That Monty Woolley now celebrated my existence vindicated him, and my impending birth became something my father talked about to anyone who would listen. I was “Honor” between my parents, but the proposed name for a daughter was kept secret from everyone else.
My mother now wrote my father daily letters. “Honor” first kicked when she was in the dentist’s chair, and she was so startled by the sensation—“like a bubble bursting near your naughty. It’s all too fascinating!”—that she asked her sister-in-law, Bill’s wife Mouse, pregnant with her third child, if what she’d felt was a baby’s kick, “and Mouse said it’s Honor for sure!” But as time went on, she also worried: How long would it take her to recover from the birth? Would the war really go on for two more years? If it didn’t, perhaps they could paint the crib together. “Yes,” my father replied, “the talk is two more years.” He can hardly bear the boredom of his desk job, or of Guam itself in spite of its physical beauty and temperate climate. Only friends coming through by chance—among them, Tony Duke and Artie Trevor—lift his ennui. “We just heard of Germany’s surrender with complete lack of excitement,” he wrote on May 8. “It seemed extremely natural that there should be no excitement, but when one reflects a little it is quite amazing. People say ‘Did you hear the Germans surrendered’ & you say ‘Yeah’ Period. It seems very far removed from us.” He became romantic describing Paul Muni in “A Song to Remember,” a movie about Chopin.
The music ran through it and was part of it . . . No experience—even our experience of listening for an hour or two to music—is complete unless you are with me my sweet. Jenny, we must live high and strongly. We can’t let the rattling of the days get in the way of what we both see once in a while. We see it clearly. It stands straight. It is tall. It is finely polished. And from it we look up and see, and we look down. Should we stay on it and with it always we may sometime become part of it. Please help me, darling, to keep alive to what we both must do. I’m so vacillating. So weak. I need you, my darling. I need you so badly. Keep praying for us.
As he had in Seattle, my father escaped the routine in cycles of drinking and remorse; he’d write my mother of a binge, then remonstrate with himself, “You must really think me a sinner by now—now that you know what one is committed to in this business. I hope you never slip the way I have.”
My mother’s doubt pulled at her confidence in their marriage. “I have been mentally unfaithful to you. Tell me, darling, if you ever have me? It would make me feel better. I have been bitchy and feel disgusted & superficial. Please, have you ever? Have you? I really do love you though today I worried. Have you ever worried? Don’t get mad, darling, please.” And, later, “I am all upset about God—my mind wanders in church and I don’t think I can ever be a Christian. I am so uncharitable. I wish I could get that from you—you are so wonderful that way. I am crying now so had better go to sleep . . .” In a third letter, she wrote that her insecurity w
as exhaustion and that she needed something to do; she looked forward, she wrote, to going back to Barnard in the spring.
“Come a little preoccupation, your scales of gloom will clatter down,” my father replied. “Possibly Honor’s clattering out will help too. Well, it all adds up to a compromise. Unlike what we thought when we were young”—they are twenty-six and twenty-two!—“we can’t have and experience everything, and so ’tis better to chew and savor the pâté we have than to yearn for caviar . . . a normal person smells a beggar’s dirt, someone else might see the splendor of his ultimate humility. The poor are happier than the rich, etc. etc. Gee what pedantry, apologies.”
By early May, my mother was back from California and living with my father’s parents at Hollow Hill, Mouse her only contemporary. In spite of her affection for her mother-in-law, she was frustrated. “I have been on the verge of hysteria with Mother F. and I have avoided writing you till my mood got better. Instead it is worse . . .” When Mother Fan opened and read two of my father’s letters to her, my mother, furious, packed a suitcase of my father’s clothes and moved them to the apartment she’d just found in New York. My father took less offense at his mother’s intrusion. “If she had a little sleep and a little love, she’d be better.” He was more interested in talking about their future. “Oh Jen, you don’t know how I’m counting on our life together in the church . . . the more time is spent on useless years of war, the more I get hungry for the years to come . . . We have the whole of a wonderful world to look to—I pray for us every time I pray, Jen, as I know you do too. I feel closer to you then.”
At last, after weeks at a desk job and a stint as a battalion operations commander, my father was given a rifle company, which meant doing, he said years later, “what we now call creating community.” Because of censorship, he could not write my mother that he and his company were in the jungle, training to invade Japan, and were about to break camp and board ship for final maneuvers. My father had just emptied his tent—the little table with its photographs of my mother, of their wedding—when there were rumors that the atomic bomb had been dropped. “It seemed like something out of a fairy tale, scuttlebutt that somebody’d started as a joke.” In New York, my mother sat down to write him: “It has just come over the radio about the US bombing in Japan with the bomb the size of a coconut that releases atomic energy. I guess it’s nice in a relative way that we learned how to do it first, but still I wish it hadn’t happened. I am sure we will destroy ourselves.” When my father and his company heard for sure, they were still camped in the jungle, still preparing to embark for Japan, spread out in case they were attacked. “It was after lights, taps . . . and things were quiet,” he later wrote, “and then we heard, way off in the distance, some rifle shots and machine gun fire, and we thought perhaps a group of Japanese had come out from the jungle . . . And then these sounds got closer, and we heard weapons going off near us, nearer and nearer and nearer, and finally, in the unit next to us . . . and then we heard that the Japanese had surrendered.”
It would be six weeks before my father reached New York. “If you get home before Xmas, would you want to study for half a year and then go for a nice Mummy-Honor-Daddy summer?” my mother wrote, excited about finishing college and studying piano before getting pregnant again. “I’d really like to study and be Daddy’s helper & typewrite . . . I want to see you again standing in front of the mirror in your skivvies and shirt tails with your heaven legs . . . I want to dance on board ship somewhere too. I want to dance like mad.” She was putting finishing touches on the apartment, had moved in the bassinet she ordered from the Women’s Exchange, the mustard yellow Regency chairs, their furniture and paintings. “Your apartment in New York is superb,” her brother Shaw wrote my father. “Huge, airy, somewhat Moorey, with a flavor of McKeanishness, but not enough of either to really ruin it.”
In early October, when my mother read that the Third Marine Division in Guam was being broken up, she wrote asking my father to delay his return, not to come home right after the birth. “It doesn’t mean I’m being callous or hard boiled, but the stronger I feel the better time you’ll have . . .” My father’s reply was categorical. “You are being callous & hard boiled. Even if I didn’t want like hell to see you, can you imagine how long you’d stay in California if your first child was sitting in New York & you’d never seen it?!” On the twenty-first of October, from the transient center in Guam, he wrote that he was about to set sail on the USS Wayne for San Francisco. On board my father met an old friend of his brother’s with whom he played chess, between solitary hours spent in his bunk reading and writing a letter to his unborn child, which he dated October 25. Look at the date above, he wrote. You see it is your birthday or a few days before, or even after your birthday. There is no way for me to know, because, as you have heard tell many times, I am at sea, knowing that you, our first child, are about to be born into the family of Jenny and Paul Moore.
Just three years before, my father had been at sea heading for points unknown in the South Pacific. Guadalcanal Diary, a movie released in 1943, was based on a book by a reporter who followed a platoon of marines to the battles of Tulagi and Bloody Ridge. On a ship coursing the Pacific, the platoon awakened one morning to marvel at the sudden appearance of a flotilla of American battleships. “We rose at dawn,” my father wrote of that same moment, “to see a vast armada of warships, transports, destroyers, cargo ships, cruisers, battleships, aircraft carriers . . . It was a strangely moving and beautiful sight.” He had only a few quibbles with the movie—“You don’t see the Jap & you don’t run shoulder to shoulder 6 men deep, obviously,” he wrote my mother, but “the scenes on the transport & in and around the bivouac area (camp) etc. are good—dialogue authentic.” In the film, in recess from what my father described as the “hardening” of preparation, the young men are physically easy, even tender with one another, reclining intertwined on the sunny deck, resting on each other’s bodies, the training-strengthened arms of an older soldier cradling a dozing private, no more than a boy. More than once, in letters to my mother, my father expressed regret that in order to enforce discipline, he had to reprimand a young marine when he would rather “take him in my arms and comfort him.”
It was on board such a transport in the Pacific Ocean that my father learned of my birth. On the morning of October 28, 1945, in New York City, Gordon Wadhams took my mother to the Harkness Pavilion at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where I was born in the late afternoon. The next day, on board the USS Wayne, my father got a telegram announcing the birth of “Honor Moore,” her weight as “7 lbs. 5oz.” Someone had a bottle of champagne and cracked it open, and my father and his firstborn were toasted all around. Later, in his bunk, my father resumed writing the letter. Now, knowing his first child was a girl, he began to outline his ideas about love of men and of women. A woman, he wrote, should know men not only from her own point of view but also as they are of themselves. If she does not understand men without women, her relationship to men—as sister, daughter, lover or wife—will be inadequate. The strength of relationships between women and men, and their potential weakness, he explained, lies in the interlocking of womanly and manly characteristics. As a result of the meshing of those differences, the love a man and a woman have for each other becomes its own entity . . . hiding within it the true nature of a man’s love and a woman’s love.
When I read the letter for the first time, I already knew of my father’s love for men and his refusal to speak about it in any depth. As a result, I brought to the letter a particular frame of reference—my father as a young man struggling to communicate conflicting desires to his unborn child. Nonetheless, I was astounded when, at the bottom of a page, I read, Let me tell you a story or two, first about the love of a man for a man. Quickly, I turned to the next page, where my father’s crooked, spirally handwriting began a narrative. Charles Tokavich lived on a farm in upper New York. His family did not own the farm, they worked o
n it. Before the sun arose in the freshness of Spring, his father— And there the letter ended. Charlie Tokavich was not a name familiar to me, but there is a similar name in my father’s letters, a buddy from Guadalcanal whom he made sure was transferred to his unit in Seattle. Did he love this man? Desire him? Earlier in the letter, my father described the stormy ocean, attributing to it constancy and sameness, no matter that lightning and thunder fling themselves against her. His child might wonder why he spoke at such length of the sea: Perhaps when you finish reading you will understand. My father never finished writing his story of a man’s love for another man, but I think I do understand. What he didn’t tell would have illuminated a distinction he was beginning to make between his love for a woman, my mother, and his love for the man he called Charlie Tokavich. To tell that story he required the tumultuous companionship of the night ocean, but in spite of the ocean, the task undid him. How could he explain to his newborn daughter that he loved her mother and would love her, but that also inside him was another kind of love, a forbidden desire that was part of how he understood himself?
