by Honor Moore
My father was holding his prayer book, speaking and singing, his voice disappearing into all the other voices. I tried to speak along with everybody else, hold on to Poppy, keep him from rising, from flying up into the darkness. The room was slowly swinging in the candlelight, and suddenly the organ stopped playing but the men kept singing, and, as if the earth had dropped out from underneath us, the thunder of their voices lifted off, leaving behind the shiny dark wood of pews that smelled of lemon, the feel of my small body, the hardness of the floor. “The church is the house of God,” my father would tell me later, but that evening I was just beginning to talk. I could almost make out what they were singing, but I didn’t know what the sounds meant stretched out by the music, in the sway of those voices and the strange excitement of candles and incense.
After that night, I looked at my father with new curiosity. He was no longer different from my mother just because he was the father and she wasn’t. He was in touch with something that couldn’t be seen but was also real. When he left our apartment, he visited a place where utterance had a use beyond ordinary talk, was something frightening and beautiful. Across the street in the dark, inside the red tower, in the honey light of the candles, was a landscape like a dream, a place to which my father belonged and from which my mother and I were excluded.
It was at seminary, I would learn after his death, that my father had his first full affair with another man—a priest, an instructor also married, his name unknown to the friends of my father who told me the story. Had my father imagined having a wife and baby would erase the conflict he’d felt since childhood? Had he imagined what an extended sexual affair with another priest would be like, how it might lift the barricades between sexuality and spiritual passion, perhaps illuminating each? Was it at seminary that my father’s secret and the shame it brought entered his spiritual struggle, became, as it were, an angel to wrestle with? I imagine him then, in his twenties, working to keep that part of himself firmly enclosed within the walls of the seminary and held just as safely in a separate compartment of his life.
A memory. I am nearly three, and my little brother and I are awake. He is wearing diapers and rubber pants. I am old enough to walk, but I thump down the narrow stairs behind him, both of us on our bottoms. We crawl along the carpeted hall to our parents’ closed bedroom and scratch at the door till my father lets us in. The cloud of my mother’s black hair is on the pillow, and she holds the sheet over her face. My father talks, though I can’t remember what he says and he doesn’t let us onto the bed. Maybe he starts a game. I am worried about my mother, who doesn’t move, but then she does move so she isn’t dead. But she doesn’t speak. My mother is hiding. Had they been fighting? Usually my mother was radiant, smiling, her arms open, already saying something funny, my father laughing with her. Her hair was so black on the pillow. Why couldn’t I just touch her? And why do I remember this? Did I already understand there was something sad and difficult between them or did I just want to see her face?
Eventually, as my mother grew out of girlhood, she began to feel my father’s distance as a sexual complication. Having entered into a marriage of their time, my parents had no language to explore what was wrong with their erotic life. For my father, it was certainly too complicated and painful to consider that his secret existence had an impact on his desire for my mother, or that something she was not even consciously aware of might come to affect her desire for him. Instead, they began to feel disappointed in their intimate life. My mother, being a woman of her time, considered the problem hers, and my father, a man of his time who knew the consequences of revelation could destroy his life, kept his dangerous secret. Decades later, I would learn that by the time we moved to Jersey City, each was visiting a “shrink” in New York—my mother for her “frigidity,” my father to come to terms with, if not change, his sexual nature.
But at twenty-six and twenty-two, they were fueled by the energy and spirit of idealism as they embarked on a new life they took seriously, not only as a mission but as a partnership. My father counted on my mother—Please help me, darling, to keep alive to what we both must do—and he also supported her aspirations. And she looked to him: “The more I think of it the less I want to be detached from what you are doing,” she had written, pregnant with me. Wasting no time, she and some of the other wives formed a group to protest the exclusion of wives from the guest lectures held at the seminary. Finally women were admitted, provided they “didn’t ask questions.”
My parents soon made friends, among them Kim Myers, who was the first to make them aware of the radical ministries in the postwar church that would inspire my father’s ministry and my mother’s intellect. C. Kilmer Myers, whom I called “Father Myers,” had black hair and pale blue eyes and was older than my parents; he taught my father “Patristics”—that is, the history and teachings of the church fathers. He had graduated from Berkeley Seminary, the Episcopal divinity school in New Haven, where innovative theologies from Britain and Europe were being integrated into American Anglo-Catholic practice. In the late 1930s he had spent a postgraduate year at Maria Laach, a monastery in Germany at the center of a movement within the Roman Catholic Church—called the liturgical revival—that was challenging the church to make its rituals relevant and compelling to the man on the street. It was at Maria Laach that some of the work was done to revive pre-Augustinian liturgies that were eventually reintroduced at Vatican II, innovations that led to greater participation by ordinary people in the liturgy. At the end of the war, Father Myers went back to Europe to serve as the Anglican chaplain at the Yalta Conference, offering morning prayer and Sunday services for Roosevelt and Churchill. Now in New York, he was afire with the ideas of the French worker priests, Roman Catholic clergy who went incognito into factories in Paris, Lyon, and Marseille to bring “the word of Christ” to workingmen. First insulted and abused by workers who saw the church as part of the ruling elite, these laborer-priests, receiving no stipend from the church, gained credibility when they took on not only real work but the vulnerabilities of workers—it was when one priest lost his job that his fellows accepted him. Eventually, in the anti-Communist climate of the early 1950s, these priests would be recalled to conventional parish work, but in 1946 their mission was a great innovation in the mission work of Catholic clergy.
Having two children under three (my first brother was born between my father’s first and second year at seminary) did not keep my mother from joining my father one afternoon a week to work at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, a failing parish near the seminary. Kim had become priest in charge there, with a mandate to make the parish relevant to people in the then decaying, impoverished neighborhood. He eschewed the missionary notion of bounty to the poor; his idea was to enter the actual lives of the people who lived near the church, often by working with children. My father tried to talk seriously with his group of boys about “life,” but when that failed, he organized a baseball team and acted as coach. The work was reminiscent of what he’d done with kids at the St. Paul’s summer camp and also of his “ministry” to young marines during the war. My mother had no previous experience to draw on. The people they met, she wrote, were “Puerto Ricans we had seen on doorsteps, some Negroes, and children of those white families too poor to move away.”
By the summer, one afternoon a week had expanded into a full-time program. My mother and other faculty and student wives organized a nursery school for neighborhood children on the seminary grounds, and through the principal at the local school, my mother started a girls’ club in their apartment—the girls couldn’t, one of them explained, join a club that met at St. Peter’s since their families were Roman Catholic. In a scrapbook there’s a photo of the girls, arm in arm, wearing lipstick, tight capri pants, kerchiefs tied at their necks, curly fringe bangs and hair pulled back. By the end of the year they’d made enough money at dances to buy everyone a blue satin jacket with her name in lacy machine-embroidered script.
/> There was one place in New York where these new ideas about the role of the church were already being put into practice. My parents were reading The Catholic Worker, a monthly newspaper started by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in 1933 and sold at a cent a copy. A community of Catholics living in voluntary poverty, the Catholic Worker movement was, by 1946 when it came to my parents’ attention, a network of communal houses and farms that ministered to the destitute, so called to distinguish them from those who took a vow of voluntary poverty. My parents had come upon the paper the first year my father was in seminary and were among those who invited Dorothy Day to address the student body. “She came to the arched gate of the seminary,” my mother wrote, “in ill-fitting, shabby clothes (from the hostel’s clothing room, she told me later).” My mother escorted her to the room where she was to speak and was amazed when Dorothy asked for her prayers: “It made her nervous to make a speech.” She spoke of her bohemian past (which included romantic pursuit by Eugene O’Neill), of joining and resigning from the Communist Party, of converting to Catholicism out of gratitude after the birth of her daughter.
“Afterward she thanked me for my prayers and said they had helped,” my mother wrote. In spite of some embarrassment at their “fancy” furniture, she and my father invited Dorothy back to the apartment for a drink—she came to the apartment but refused the drink. “She said she couldn’t bear the burdens of alcoholics and drink herself.” The evening began a long friendship—Dorothy Day’s grandchildren got some of Jean Watson’s sweaters. My mother was “stunned by her simplicity.” To the daughter of an aristocratic, glamorous Boston modernist and her tweedy husband, Dorothy Day was “a wind from another land—strong, warm and a little frightening.”
In this wind, my parents began to understand what they might be looking for after seminary, a circumstance in which the strong partnership that cradled their marriage might thrive. Reading my mother’s frayed copy of Dorothy Day’s Loaves and Fishes, I found a passage that exactly answered my father’s dispute with his contemporaries who believed the world could be changed by creating economic, diplomatic, social and political cages for the lion or human beast. The Catholic Worker hostels and farms were run by volunteers, money appeared out of nowhere in response to prayer, and people in need were helped. “We were trying to overcome hatred with love, to understand the forces that made men what they are . . . to change them, if possible, from lions into lambs,” Day wrote. “It was a practice in loving, a learning to love, a paying of the cost of love . . . we were not a community of saints but a rather slipshod group of individuals.”
Paul and Jenny Moore would soon become part of another “slipshod group of individuals” and attempt their own “practice in loving.” By the time my father was in his third year of seminary, he and my mother were convinced they wanted to work in the inner city. “It just didn’t feel right,” my father said in the oral history, “to take a job in a posh suburban parish. It might be right for some people, but it wasn’t right for me.” For both my parents, a particular afternoon the fall of 1948 became emblazoned in memory. They were walking along a seminary path when Kim leaned out of his office window and suggested they find a parish where they could do downtown work full-time; by now “they” also included Bob Pegram, a priest from Virginia who taught classics at the seminary.
Within days the discussion was more about how than if. They dispatched letters to several big-city bishops, and eventually Bishop Washburn of the Diocese of Newark offered Grace Church, Van Vorst, in Jersey City, and the summer after my father’s graduation from seminary, on July 1, 1949, we moved to 268 Second Street, blocks from where the movie On the Waterfront was filmed four years later, and just as gritty. I was almost four, my first brother Paul almost two, and my mother eight months pregnant with my first sister, Adelia, named for my father’s beloved grandmother. The ministry included three priests, Kim Myers as priest in charge, my father, and Bob Pegram—my mother was the fourth member of the team.
My father, who had imagined himself the headmaster at St. Paul’s or alone in a room writing books, found himself, with two friends, an intrepid wife with whom he had conceived a life of partnership, and two tiny children, at the threshold of what would be the formative adventure of his career. Like the Marines, which had made him a man but a man he could not have imagined himself becoming, Jersey City would define him as a priest. Though I hardly remember the crowded church and the crush of priests and bishops, I saw my father ordained to the priesthood the following winter in Jersey City, on December 17, 1949; he celebrated his first Eucharist that Christmas.
In the years we lived in Jersey City, having been born into my grandparents’ world of monogrammed linens, tea every day at four, country houses, full-time servants, and chauffeured cars, I became a public school pupil among girls whose Polish and Irish fathers worked the waterfront and factories of Jersey City or whose African-American parents, born in the South, had come North in the Great Migration. “Family and friends asked us with varying degrees of tact how long we would stay in such an area with a family,” my mother wrote. “We told them we didn’t know.” Dorothy Day offered immediate instruction. When my mother, overwhelmed with the children, the house, the church, asked her what to do about the contradiction between Christian service and an orderly household, she replied sharply, “Lower your standards.”
When I remember The Catholic Worker, printed on newsprint and illustrated with dense woodcuts by the Quaker artist Fritz Eichenberg of Christ huddled in the breadline at a soup kitchen, of Christ as a worker or a farmer, I think of my mother, employing her considerable wit and imagination to base a household on Dorothy Day’s ideas and doing all the work with very little help. In the narrow brownstone rectory, we lived on the second floor and Kim Myers and Bob Pegram on the third. The first floor was common, and in the manner of a Catholic Worker house of hospitality, the doors were thrown open. We had what we came to call an “open rectory.” Poor men with nowhere else to go and breath thick with whiskey drank my mother’s homemade soup on the front porch. Families burned out of their apartments outfitted themselves in the “clothes room” in the basement, leaving a child or two to stay with us until the church helped them find a new apartment. All of this was made possible, even necessary, by the pursuit of an ideal that flowed from a belief shared by the team at Grace Church of what being a Christian meant in a modern city—and it included political and social action in behalf of parishioners evicted, jailed, or excluded from illegally segregated federal housing projects. The supper table was crowded not only with random hungry kids or men from “the porch set,” but priests maybe from India or Africa, activists from England or France, the curious among my parents’ East Side friends, or college volunteers. The conversation, to which I avidly listened, asking questions like “What is Communism?” was a weave of politics, religion, wisecracks, and laughter; and the meal, cooked by my mother, was introduced by my father or Father Myers or Father Pegram saying grace, all of us holding hands, thanking God for what we were about to eat. There was always enough; as Dorothy Day said of such tables, “Everybody just takes a little less.”
Soon I was old enough to stay up with the grownups on Christmas Eve. After supper, oyster stew which my mother made with great pride, Father Myers and Father Pegram and my father would leave to vest for the service. Let’s say it’s the first Christmas Eve I am allowed to go to midnight mass. My grandmother has come for the night and friends from New York, and we all wait until about nine to go over to church. The purple that has shrouded everything the four weeks of Advent has been replaced by glistening white; white flowers from the greenhouse at Hollow Hill arranged by the altar guild, with holly, adorn the steps up to the altar, and the almost life-size crèche to the left of the nave is no longer empty. Carved from wood and beautifully painted, Mary and Joseph are there, and the baby, and the shepherds and the animals—the three kings won’t arrive until Epiphany, on January 6. The real hay is from m
y grandmother’s farm. Everyone is wearing their best clothes, and the church is full, the smells of perfume and aftershave mingling with the fragrance of the evergreen that thickens the roof of the crèche, and as we walk to our pew, there are whispered exchanges of “Merry Christmas!” and “God bless you”—the Williamses and the Skippers and the Walkers, who are black, the new Puerto Rican families, and the white old ladies who still come to the church even though there have been so many changes. And I see some of the people who worked here in the summer, and the nuns who have come to teach Sunday school.
Soon Father Penfield is playing the organ—Christmas carols! “Once in Royal David’s City,” “Angels We Have Heard on High”—“Silent Night” will come later. Now the processional: first the acolytes in their red cassocks and white cottas all solemn, carrying a cross or a candle; then Father Myers and Father Pegram and maybe a visiting priest, all in vestments; an acolyte swinging a censer, the smell of incense. And, of course, my father, the tallest, looking gentle and solemn. “His face changed after he became a priest,” Nona Clark said decades later. “It became clear, clear with his purpose.”
On this particular Christmas Eve, I watch my father climb the pulpit. “Merry Christmas,” he says, which is strange since it’s something he would also say outside church, and this raises laughs of quiet delight in the congregation and soft intakes of breath; my father smiles in response. And then, as he begins to speak as a priest, his tone changes and he is preaching. Tonight the sermon is just like a story. Mary is pregnant and lives with Joseph, the father of her child, right near here, but because he has lost his job, they are without a home, and because they are black the motel had turned them away. They are cold and afraid and her time is near as they walk the dark, empty streets until they see an old garage, its door ajar. There Joseph finds an old lantern and a kerosene heater in the corner—and a few old pasteboard boxes and some rags, rags blackened with motor oil that have been used to repair a car. Stretching out his long arms, my father tenderly describes Joseph settling Mary onto a pile of those rags, and he looks down at us, and then, lifting his face, he says, emphasizing certain words: “And as a bright STAR appeared in the SKY, the baby was born. Jesus was BORN.” And, he continues, “the CHRIST CHILD was laid in a box of those rags, by the light of the strange old railroad lantern.”
