by Honor Moore
I could see Mary and Joseph—I could see the shadowy, cold garage, the battered lantern, the kerosene heater. My father was both someone else entirely and just as I knew him; and the story seemed completely true, happening right here in the neighborhood where we lived in the tall, narrow rectory.
I understood miracles—my mother read me the lives of saints, of martyrs, and my father had told the story of Saint Christopher, who carried a child across a river, his weight growing heavier and heavier until Christopher could hardly walk, terrified he might stumble and drown, and drown the child. But he did not stumble or allow the child on his shoulders to fall into the turbulent, stormy current, and when he reached the opposite shore, the child leapt from his shoulders and, standing there in the darkness, was suddenly illuminated, revealed as the Christ child. This Christmas night it seemed that my father, by telling the Nativity story in a new way, had himself created a kind of miracle. He had made me see and smell and feel. When I told him how much I liked his sermon, he looked down at me and smiled.
I don’t remember when I did not carry a sense of the miraculous. I expected such marvels, and I looked for them. In our dining room one day, on the wall, there appeared a piece of paper that looked like the mottled black-and-white cover of a notebook. My mother said that if I stood and looked at it, Jesus would appear. The dining room was toward the back of the house, closed off from the living room by a pair of sliding doors. Tacked to these doors was the black-and-white piece of paper, and I stood there and looked at it, certain the Christ child or the man he became would appear to me, as he had in my father’s sermon, as he had to Mary Magdalene at the empty grave on Easter morning. I was alone there, and I stood, waiting, but no matter how long I looked and waited, I couldn’t see him. My mother rushed in and out of the room doing housework and I stood there. I couldn’t see Jesus. I couldn’t see Jesus’s face, but I kept standing there, looking, because my mother had said, There he is.
7
My Jersey City
* * *
When my mother was home, my favorite place was the kitchen because there were always other people there and I could watch her talk to them and try to do it myself. One day Tom Venable was leaning against the washing machine, which was to the left of the window in the kitchen. Outside the window was a metal fire escape, and beyond the fire escape, the parish hall. Tom Venable was wearing a uniform, an army uniform, a greenish brown get-dressed-up uniform, all pressed. It was a sunny morning. His skin was creamy brown and he talked in an almost Southern accent, although his family lived in the neighborhood. He was back on leave, just about to go to Korea, where there was a war. We had air raids at school, but there was no talk about war, even at supper. There was talk about the unfairness of how poor people lived, and about how prejudice kept black people, whom we called Negroes, from getting places to live, jobs, enough money. I asked my father about Korea, and he explained there was a war there, against “the Communists”—and Ledlie Laughlin, a seminarian, explained that communism with a small c was good, people working together without a boss, but that with a capital C, Communism had leaders who lied and put people in prison for saying what they believed and that Russia and China were Communist with a big C, along with other countries they had conquered.
But that comes later. Now I am in the kitchen, and Tom Venable is smiling and talking. My mother is at the sink with her arms in soapy water and I am standing there, tilting back on my heels looking up into Tom Venable’s smiling, handsome face. He couldn’t have been more than twenty; probably I asked him his age, and he certainly told me it as I tilted, listening as he talked to my mother and to me, answering our questions so buoyantly. “I like the buttons,” I said, looking at his jacket. And he smiled down. “What grade are you in?” He had a way of slapping his hat, an army hat that folded, against his thigh, and laughing. He used words like “sharp” and was very polite to my mother. After a while, he left, and I watched him out the window, jumping down the front stoop, stopping a second to pull his hat from his trouser pocket and place it, so it looked “sharp,” on his head. He was on his way to the war, I thought to myself. Would I ever see him again?
When my father was still in Guam and my mother pregnant with me and they got romantic in their letters, they would muse back and forth. One conversation had to do with a house in the country. Would they have a little farm in Vermont? Would there be meadows and mountains, or ocean? My father wrote my mother a letter that was a story: Let’s go for a picnic, Mummy! he had little Honor say. And then while he biked into town for hamburger, my mother made sandwiches of cold chicken and lettuce & juicy tomatoes. They’d pack grape juice for me and beer for them, and maybe fresh peaches. They’d have to lug the heavy sail-bag out of a sea-smelling closet, but soon we’d all be in the boat. The big whiteness of the sail leaps up from the crumpled cocoon, my father imagined, and soon the last fog has lifted, leaving sky-bright water, clear firs and bright flicks of white houses. Everyone’s pretty excited, especially Honor. The lines are coiled, the life jacket wound around Honor . . . Daddy runs up forward . . . there is a breathtaking lunge, and we are off, bounding along, gunwales awash, breezes blowing. At exactly 12:45, they reach Needles Harbor, as Honor calls it, because she first learned about pine needles there. It’s a nice place to swim and there’s a blueberry patch and a dog. Then while Honor looks for shells, Mummy & Daddy lie in the sun together or read aloud. But by the time I was born, and old enough to ask to name a harbor, we were living in Jersey City, and my father was making stories out of other materials.
Recently a friend of mine, a young man in his twenties, read the book my mother wrote about Jersey City and said, “I think it was terrible of your parents to live in a place like that with all those children.” I protested: “It was the best time of my childhood.” My parents did not, like Dorothy Day, live in voluntary poverty, but the life they made in Jersey City was modest compared to how they could have lived, and they made a commitment to try to share the lives of those they ministered to. In their New York apartment on Twenty-first Street, they’d installed wedding presents, monogrammed linen, inherited paintings and furniture. But for the move to Jersey City they packed most of their things in crates they stored at Hollow Hill. “We wanted the house to be a place where people could feel at home.” With a child’s logic, I didn’t expect Jersey City to be like Hollow Hill, nor did I expect to be attended to by my parents the way I was by Gagy, or even by the extra grownups who gathered around the dinner table every night. By the time I was older, I shared my parents’ dedication—notes I took on “my” Jersey City are filed under the heading “Utopia.”
I want to remember Grace Church as a dream of what is possible among people. When I think of how I listened in the kitchen or around the supper table, I can say, Yes it was. I learned from the extra grownups, but I also learned from my parents, as every night they talked—my father and Father Myers about what was happening with the fair housing campaign, my mother about the book she was reading—Cry, the Beloved Country about South Africa, The Diary of a Country Priest, or a new book by Charles Williams, the English novelist who also wrote theology. Listening to those conversations was how I learned who my parents were, and knowing what they were thinking about made the more intimate times—my father telling us stories, my mother reading me Black Beauty when I was sick—all the more extraordinary.
But for the most part, I made my own way. Having themselves been cared for by servants, my parents had no model for paying the kind of attention one might now expect—they had seen their parents at meals, just before bed, all day long only on vacations; round-the-clock caring was done by others. And so my mother, with only Gagy when she and my father were away and someone to clean once a week, did the best she could while doing everything else, while my father, when he wasn’t out calling, at a meeting, or next door at the church, charmed and delighted us or explained things. It took my mother a long time to learn what a child needed—ti
ll number six or seven. I had no words to protest how alone I felt, and I’m not sure my parents would have heard me. They were on a mission.
The summer we moved to Jersey City I was four, my brother turned two in July, and my first sister was born the end of August. Gagy came once a week from the Bronx by subway and Hudson Tube and stayed for a night or two while my parents had their day off in New York. They’d stay at “825,” the apartment on Fifth Avenue that belonged to my father’s parents. For that thirty-six hours, my father was the Episcopal chaplain at NYU and my mother continued her social work courses at the New School. They saw Gami and, at night, their old friends, and they saw their psychiatrists. My father needed the time off—he was intermittently so tired that some mornings he stayed in bed late, and sometimes when he had a cold, he’d get pneumonia. Without being told, I understood he got sick that way because of the war, that the wound in his lung had made him weak. I couldn’t know then that less than a decade is no time at all, that my grown-up father was at hardly any distance from the wounded marine.
Of course my mother was also tired, but she didn’t look it. “I’m exhausted,” she would say with emphasis on the middle syllable, so it sounded like a joke—she loved to make everyone laugh—and go right on with what she was doing: throwing leftovers into the soup for the men who came to the door, greeting everyone in the kitchen, which was the center of the rectory like the altar was the center of the church, feeding the baby in the high chair, others of us running in and out, then cooking supper. Every night at the table were her husband, her three children, and Father Myers and Father Pegram, not to mention whoever came to stay for a day or two—evicted, burned out, recovering. “Come for supper,” she would say with her dazzling smile. We had fish on Fridays to mark the day Christ died, and my mother always looked for other ways to integrate ordinary life with the story being told in the church next door; it was there that I could go to find my father celebrating mass in the morning before I went to school or when I came home, saying evening prayer, the black letters forming words across the white pages as he read the lessons and psalms.
Once, on my parents’ day off, I told Gagy I couldn’t sleep if I was by myself and so she let me take a nap with her on my parents’ bed. But her closeness scared me. If I allowed myself to fall too close to Gagy, I wondered illogically, would my mother ever hold me again? The light in the room was yellow because the shades were pulled down, and I tried to fall asleep, keeping my body separate from Gagy’s, and then it came to me, something so frightening I was convinced my insides had turned upside down. Gagy was sleeping, and I watched her breathe, a quiet snore coming from her nose, her hair loosening from its pins. I whispered her name, my voice so scared it was too soft to wake her, but now there were tears on my cheeks. And then I was shouting her name, and she was turning toward me, that serious expression on her face, which made me feel I was asking too much. “What’s the matter, Honor?” The sound of her voice made me cry harder. I wanted nothing more than to be just like her, feet on the ground, head in the air, but I felt as if I were permanently upside down. “You’re just dreaming,” she said when I explained.
“No, no! I’m not.” I tried to stop crying. “Gagy, Gagy, when I grow up, will I be like you?” I wanted this awful upside-down feeling to go away, to be able to stand upright.
“No,” she said. “ No.” She was stroking my cheek with one of her big soft hands. “You won’t be like me,” she said, her blue eyes narrowing a little, “you’ll be beautiful.”
Why didn’t my mother ever say that?
The Good Friday I was five, I was wearing a velvet dress with a wide lace collar. The color was somewhere between turquoise and sky blue, and I loved it. As a toddler I’d had blond curls, almost white, my father said, but by the time I was told about them, they were long gone. This particular Good Friday, I was lying on my bed at Hollow Hill, looking at the ceiling and stroking my long hair, standing in front of the mirror that ran the full height of the bathroom door, feeling narrow and maybe even beautiful, turning my head to the side, running my fingers down a straight strand all the way to the end, where it curled a little.
“We’re going to get your hair cut,” my mother said, coming briskly into the room, “and then we’re going to the movies.” It was so unusual to be alone with her that I pretended not to care when the long pieces of hair fell to the floor as she and the hairdresser talked about the shape of my face. The King of Kings was the name of the movie, and it was about Jesus, about what had happened to him this day all those centuries ago. I remember the dark parish hall in the church my grandmother went to, the smell of my mother’s perfume, and the color of the movie, pale gray, the shape of Jesus in his long white robe moving toward us, on a donkey, waving a palm, the crowd, faces I could barely make out. I knew Jesus was going to die, and I couldn’t help crying when the men whipped him and pushed a wreath of thorns onto his head that made his forehead bleed, and when the soldiers nailed him to a cross.
At home there were no long mirrors, but I had a bedroom to myself; it had lots of light and wallpaper with bunches of cherries on it. After supper, my father would come in to tell us a story—my brother would crawl onto my bed, my little sister, and we’d all lie there. Once he asked each of us for a character. My brother asked for an eagle named Daniel and my sister for a rabbit named Peter. I asked for a fairy princess with long blond hair named Josephine, and in the first story Peter and Josephine soared away on the wings of Daniel the eagle. After the story (there was a new installment every night), the others would leave and I’d wait to sleep until Mommy came to kiss me good night as she always did. In the morning, I’d wake up, sit up in my bed, and look around the sunny room, the bunches of bright red cherries popping as if they were real. The house was mostly dark—“like something out of Charles Addams,” my mother always said—but this room was so light and wide that sometimes a guest would sleep there too, in another bed. It also had the biggest closet in the house, and so my mother kept things there—winter clothes, Christmas tree ornaments, extra sheets.
It must have been morning because it was light, and it must have been before I went to kindergarten the January after I turned five. My mother was taking something out of the closet and I asked her a question. I was facing her and she had her back to me. She didn’t stand up, so I asked again, and she answered and I didn’t understand what she said and she asked me to be quiet but I asked again, and suddenly she turned, shouting. There was a sharp sting across my face, the sound of a slap in the air, so hard it made my head turn. It hurt and I was crying. That’s all I can get back. It was a simple moment, and it broke something. Clouds suddenly darken and roll in across the sky, and the sky breaks open with thunder. In the lightning you see everything, but before the image goes to your brain it has vanished, so you see nothing but a warning. It could happen again, is what I suppose I felt, looking up at her. And it did happen again, more than once.
“I can’t cope,” my mother said, putting the Coca-Cola she was drinking down on the table. Everyone laughed—another joke. I remember that moment because “Coke” almost rhymes with “cope” and I didn’t know what “cope” meant. We were sitting around the kitchen table before we had a dishwasher and everyone was in stitches. It was afternoon or a night after supper. I’d gone to school, stood with the other children in the basement corridor looking down at my shoes, at the ochre tile floor. My mother was twenty-six, twenty-seven? She had already cut my hair off, and then she turned and slapped me. Before that I had my body to myself.
Once, in the Adirondacks, long after my mother’s death, my father and I were taking a walk. It was a wet day and so the green of the forest was uninterrupted by splotches of sun as we walked the trail, so narrow he was ahead and I was behind. “I want to apologize to you,” he said, “for not intervening when Jenny fought with you. I was going to a psychiatrist at the time who said not to interfere—mothers and daughters. But I was wrong, and
I’m sorry about it now.” As he talked, images came into my mind of the house in Jersey City, which I still remembered as a happy place, all the extra grownups I could talk to when he and my mother were so busy. I remembered the soup on the stove and that Tony Duke presented the household with a dishwasher after being put to work in the kitchen on a visit. It’s the white enamel of the dishwasher that came back when my father apologized, then the marbleized linoleum kitchen floor, and the narrow stairs that led upstairs. I remembered my fear, I even remembered looking in the mirror after one of those fights with my mother. But I no longer felt anger toward her, just a kind of sadness for her confusion. Why didn’t my father feel that sadness? I had moved on from that pain, and now I had no mother. I didn’t understand that my father actually felt sadness for me.
“You would come to me,” he said, turning on the trail, “and I would so want to comfort you, but I couldn’t.” He was making a gesture with his hands, a gesture interrupted, a pulling back. That day on the trail was not the only time my father apologized; he would do it every few years. Now I understand that he really was trying to make it right, trying to get closer to me even though he knew that I needed to stand up for my mother. He didn’t tell me what I have now put together reading the wartime letters—that she had hit him too, that he too must have been afraid of her violence, and that his own fear may have been another reason he didn’t protect me.
