by Honor Moore
When my father arrived in New York almost two weeks after my birth, my mother and I were ensconced with a baby nurse in the apartment on East Seventy-third Street that my mother had so carefully furnished. As my father reported it, my mother was quiet as she took him to the nursery, turned on the small bedside lamp, and showed him the tiny girl. “I thought I should feel something enormous, but I didn’t feel anything much,” he wrote. His second night home they had a huge fight, “about nothing.” Suddenly my mother was in tears, in a fury. He had reached first for the baby rather than for her, he had not been there to take her to the hospital, was not leaning over her as she had dreamed he would be when she came out of anesthesia.
During the summer, while my father was still away, my mother had written him a desolate letter full of doubt and fear: “I never knew it would be as awful as this—I have felt so terribly alone the last week I have almost gone crazy . . . I need you so badly . . . I’m afraid I kidded myself that everything’s a whole lot easier than it is, and that somehow by a little wrangling you could have your cake and eat it too—I want my daddy to hold me in his arms,—darling—will you be good about drinking when you get home—I really don’t love you then and I worry about it.”
For my mother to explode with fear on his return was probably inevitable, but my father, full of romantic anticipation, was also exhausted. Guam had not been an abandonment like Seattle, he protested. He had not chosen it; he had no power over the war. But the more he tried to excuse himself, the more alone my mother felt, the more desolate, the more angry. My father relived the moment she shouted on the willow walk, the night he announced his departure for Seattle and she hit him with her fists. He was frightened. “I did not appreciate the baby or know how to act with her,” he wrote. “I had been too self-centered to thank Jenny for all she had done.” My father composed those exculpatory sentences for a memoir published decades after my mother’s death. I can extrapolate the apology my mother might have offered from the note she wrote explaining the terrified letter of the summer: “Oh Bliss—I slept 12 hours last night and really feel like a new woman—I’m pleased because I know now I can blame all those hideous thoughts on fatigue.”
Within weeks of his return, my parents were planning their new life. My father visited the bishop of New York, the first step in the process of becoming a priest. He had no idea what he would do once he was ordained. Perhaps he would teach, even become the rector at St. Paul’s School—there were rumors he’d be asked. Or maybe he would write. Gordon Wadhams wanted him to go to Oxford or Cambridge for seminary, but my parents decided it would be too difficult with a one-year-old, and my father’s father, who now accepted my father’s vocation as a priest, was eager that they remain in New York. Eventually my father enrolled at General Theological Seminary, the Episcopal theological school on Ninth Avenue in Chelsea. Since he could not enter until the following fall and since my mother would be finishing at Barnard that spring, she encouraged him to take courses at Union, the interdenominational seminary near Columbia, where the great theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich were teaching. “I favor Union for a year to get a slant on the Liberal set,” my mother wrote. “You’re not the type to get carried away by them, but there’s such a thing as knowing about it.” In the end, my father studied at Union with both Niebuhr and Tillich and, eager to understand the forces that had brought about the war he had just fought, signed up at Columbia for courses in historiography and in Modern European history with Jacques Barzun.
My father had first heard of Niebuhr and Tillich from Truman Hemingway, an independent farmer-priest whom he’d met just after he finished St. Paul’s. Once, as a child, I was sent to stay at his farm in Vermont—the Hemingway daughter, Honoria, was one of the inspirations for my name—and I remember looking down from my cabin on the hillside into a valley of fields, seeing the old priest on a tractor, haying. “There were always three or four people staying there,” my father remembered. “A couple of kids like myself”—he’d worked there the summer before Yale—“and maybe a priest who was getting over being an alcoholic . . . getting over having a nervous breakdown.” Father Hemingway was not only “holy,” as my father put it, but aware of political and social movements and of religious radicals, contemporary practitioners of the kind of activist Christianity Father Bartrop talked about. Therefore, in spite of the fact that he still practiced the family Republicanism and had voted for Dewey in 1944, my father was not averse to my mother’s suggestion that he be exposed to “the Liberal slant.” My mother’s religion professor at Barnard had been Niebuhr’s wife, Ursula, and they had become close enough that she had invited the Neibuhrs to her wedding. Afterward, Mrs. Niebuhr wrote my mother she suspected that “probably you share various feelings & beliefs—you & your husband—very akin to mine. Someday I hope we’ll be able to meet and talk theologically.” They did so during the spring of 1946. When classes started, Paul and Jenny Moore were among the young theological students at the Thursday night gatherings the Niebuhrs held at their apartment in the Union Quadrangle.
My father, a generation younger than Niebuhr, educated in literature and not philosophy, and fresh from battle, had no faith in the capacity of human intellect to formulate solutions to problems like war: “First of all, the world is such an unalterable, stirred up, gory, neurotic, prejudiced, emotional, unstable mess that there is going to be hell to pay for all of us during our whole life and no post-war planning can create peaceful happiness in the near future.” The war had inspired their friend Cord Meyer to attend the UN planning meeting in San Francisco, but my father, loyal to the conservative tradition in which he had been raised, was not so idealistic. “There is no permanent value in building more and more economic, diplomatic, social and political cages for the lion or human beast; rather he’s got to be trained from the inside out, then the cages are immaterial. So—let the diplomats & hot-shots decide their treaties.” For him, there was only one solution: “Our job, as Christians, is to think & pray like hell so that God can someday enter the lion’s heart.”
Niebuhr certainly believed in the efficacy of prayer—he became famous for one in particular, the Serenity Prayer. But his meditations were more than addresses to the divinity—in them, and in his books, he was working out a nuanced theology that encouraged an ethically and spiritually based activism to bring about political and social change. “Wisdom about our destiny is dependent upon a humble recognition of the limits of our knowledge and our power,” he wrote at the time. “Our most reliable understanding is the fruit of ‘grace’ in which faith completes our ignorance without pretending to possess its certainties as knowledge; and in which contrition mitigates our pride without destroying our hope.” At the Niebuhrs’, my father entered a conversation in which “sin” was acknowledged and discussed, not only in the context of theology but also in a framework of philosophy and history. Unlike anyone else then in my father’s life, Reinhold Niebuhr was in the business of integrating the horror my father had just experienced into a livable world.
But Paul Moore, young, idealistic, and a sensualist, approached religion with different needs than the mature, scholarly theologian. Niebuhr would be instrumental in pioneering international cooperation among the Protestant denominations, and he had argued for America’s entrance into the war, not because he believed that war had virtue, but because having witnessed the devout of Germany, his ancestral country, twice fail to restrain the villainy of its rulers, he believed a faith divorced from history, from actual time, could not serve the interests of justice, peace, and community. To Niebuhr, the luxuriant Anglican liturgy my father loved seemed an escape from the urgent conflicts between belief and action at the heart of his thinking.
After exposure to Niebuhr and Tillich, whose course on Luther he took at Union, and to Jacques Barzun, my father was wary of General Seminary. How could this medieval quarter so far downtown rival the high rigor and stimulation of Barzun’s teaching at Columbia? How
could a faculty of British and American Anglicans possibly measure up to the fervor of the Niebuhr evenings at Union, of studying with a figure such as Paul Tillich? And what, after the intensity of his own spiritual evolution at St. Paul’s and Yale and in the war, could the parochial chambers of a denominational education offer beyond a credential for ordination? My mother, for her part, planned to model herself on Ursula Niebuhr, who continued to teach while finding it “a most expensive hobby . . . my family & health have been the most heavily taxed.” But in spite of her one-year-old, Jenny Moore was full of plans. “There are so many things I want to do, like Plato, piano, sewing & having a [second] baby & maybe social work school . . . I wonder if I can get away with not being a solid housewife nurse with the fellow seminarians—I can always find out from Mrs. Niebuhr.”
“Find out,” Mrs. Niebuhr replied, “if your husband wants a cushion or a stimulus, and model your life on that.”
One day, on a walk to show my mother the seminary, my father introduced her to the dean, “a tall, gaunt, slightly stooped man, who looked like an English earl played by Edward Everett Horton.” Hughell Fosbroke peered over his horn-rimmed spectacles at Jenny Moore. “We do not like women at the seminary,” he said, “but we will, I am sure, absorb you.” My parents found the incident hilarious; it would be decades before my mother understood that the dean’s remark exposed a strain of Anglican theology and practice to which even the most progressive clergy, including her husband, were subject. For the time being, though, she and my father dined out on the story, appalled at the regulation that forbade single seminarians from marrying until after graduation. As it happened, the dean who told my mother that General Seminary didn’t like women was my father’s most memorable teacher. When he lectured, he took his students viscerally into an ancient desert world. As he spoke, my father wrote, “we stood with Moses, trembling before the burning bush, sensing the numinous presence of the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in his confrontation with the holy, the total otherness of God.”
6
Becoming a Priest
* * *
Inside my room, the early morning air is almost violet, the slats of the crib rising like stalks in the grainy near-dark. Or downstairs in the kitchen, the brick walls painted white, only a small amount of light coming in through the windows, half-windows that face the street so the room is in shadow, and I am sitting at the table, watching someone’s shoes walk past every once in a while—a woman’s pumps, a man’s oxfords. Or shyly in the doorway I stand, Ernie, my nanny, behind me, the living room crowded with grownups, the smell of cocktails and perfume, my mother wearing dark red lipstick, my father turning toward me.
And so I have come into the story.
At first Ernie takes care of me, lives with us I think, as my parents begin to bring me up in the way they are used to—children looked after by nannies, parents at a distance. My father is at seminary, my mother taking courses in theology at Union and in social work at the New School. In most of my early memories I’m alone, or about to be alone—my mother one morning at the door of my room, and then gone. There are photographs in which I am on her lap, even one I recently saw for the first time, in which I am in her arms and we are smiling, smiling into each other’s eyes. But I don’t remember touch. The clothes I wear in most photographs are pressed linen, the shoes polished, the socks neatly turned down. In one I wear a pale coat that looks to be velvet, with a white fur collar and cuffs, a matching hat; I am not smiling in that photograph—I look anxious. Soon Ernie, the nanny, is no longer there, and someone we call Gagy comes a few days a week.
We are sitting in that half-underground kitchen and the chair she is sitting on is too small for her. She is a big, tall woman with long brown hair she collects and swirls into buns she secures with hairpins at either side of her face. Bright blue eyes and big round arms, big cheeks and a small mouth, big thighs that make soft hills under her apron. She was only in her forties, though I thought of her as old because of her large size, because of how she wore her hair, which I couldn’t stop looking at, especially early in the morning when I might catch her with it down or at night when she pulled her hairpins and it fell to her shoulders. She’d come from Norway at eighteen, from a large family whose Norwegian names lullabied off her tongue like an awkward, beautiful alphabet. Always when she spoke Norwegian, I imagined a small house outside a town near the ocean, green grass between the rocks on the shore, the water bright blue all summer, a place where it was dark most of the day in winter and houses were lit with gas and candles.
“You ate all your spinach!” She is praising me.
“Yes,” I say, “and I want more.”
“Oh, Honor!” she proclaims, as if my eating spinach were evidence of something extraordinary. And after I finish the second helping, I ask again; I’m still hungry, but for the praise.
“I want more,” and she gives me more. “Are you married, Gagy?” She laughs because she knows I know she has three children. She had loved her husband very much, she tells me, and one morning had woken up, turned toward him in their high bed, and found him dead.
“After that it was very hard,” she says, looking at me with a serious expression on her face. “I had to go out and work. I had to go out and work to take care of my children.”
Or I am a bit older, and she takes me to visit our landlord, a painter, who lives upstairs. I remember the tousle of his gray hair, his mustache and glasses—he was painting enormous dark skies with billowy clouds and tiny sand-colored houses. It was the first time I’d seen a desert and I remember thinking it must be Bethlehem: where are Mary and Joseph? I breathed in the smell of his paints, scrutinized the tubes twisted and messy with color in the wooden box next to his easel. Soon I could go upstairs alone, and he would stop painting and tell me the little houses were made of adobe and the big skies were not in the Holy Land but in a place called New Mexico. I found his name strange, Houghton Smith, and his wife Laura’s long, nearly white hair was piled on top of her head. I thought she was beautiful. I had been directed to call them Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but after a while she said, in her Southern accent, her pretty mouth laughing, “Call me Laura.” In a painting Houghton Smith did that hangs now in my apartment, one of those sky-and-clouds paintings is on the easel in his studio, a Roman head sits on a bookshelf, and out a window is the reddish tower of the seminary chapel that I could see from my crib.
Every day my father disappeared into that red-towered place; sometimes from my window I would see him, early in the morning, leap across the street, unlock the gate of the seminary wall, and he’d be gone. Soon I knew that in the Gothic buildings where comings and goings were governed by the bell I could hear from my crib, my father was becoming a priest. He had written my mother of the urgency of his desire to make this life in the church, an urgency that came, it seemed, out of a terror of returning to civilian life: Please help me, darling, to keep alive to what we both must do. I’m so vacillating. So weak. He remembered his convalescent leave, the desolation that could pull him from a nightclub table of laughing friends across the room just to say hello to a marine stranger, his need to drink and drink and drink, even though, as he wrote my mother, he considered drunkenness “sinful.” Now there was the possibility all of that torment could be swept away, he himself transformed.
My father was prepared for the excitement of a community of worship —morning prayer that began at 7 a.m. and evening prayer at the end of the day. The revelation was that one made the effort not for one’s own “subjectivity” but as “heavy work which you rendered to God as a duty and as a form of Thanksgiving day by day.” And he had not anticipated the intellectual ferment he encountered, how his engagement with his vocation would make learning a passion, make what he’d been thinking about ever since St. Paul’s come vividly alive—I can hear his excitement as I read transcripts of the oral history he taped forty years later. Not only Old Testament, which Dean Fosbroke tau
ght with “force and drama,” in the context of Freud, of Marx, of “current intellectual trends,” but also Dogmatics, which Dr. Stewart taught as the chronology of the development of Christian doctrine, always placing it in the context of its origins. In a class called “Liturgics,” my father’s knowledge of the Anglo-Catholic liturgy that had once made him uneasy deepened. And he learned to withstand the ebbs and flows of his faith: as one of his professors said, “It might be harder to believe in God on a cold rainy morning.” As he had been at St. Paul’s, my father was part of a community of men that was virtually monastic. Unlike at Yale, where he was constantly striving to prove himself and partying to relieve the stress, or the Marines, where the requirements of being an officer held him apart, he was one of many, a seminarian among seminarians. And now, also, he was married, with a child.
Once, after supper, my father swept me up into his black seminarian’s cape and across the street for evensong. I remember the starry sky, the cold darkness as we climbed the stairs to the seminary and stepped along the grassy path to the chapel. I could already hear it, something like the rushing of wind, the coming of a storm. We were late, and as we slipped into the pew in the candlelit church full of men, I understood that the rushing sound was singing. Without women or children, the rumbling voices of priests and seminarians, resounding against the stone walls of the small chapel, were otherworldly, even God-like. I was scared and so I leaned against my father, nuzzling the black cape still fresh from night air, but he didn’t look down at me or put his big hand on my head. Now he belonged to something else, this big and strange sound, so deep and loud it made me shake. I could hardly breathe as all the men together spoke words I couldn’t yet understand. And with thy spirit. Ah-men. Alleluia.
