The Bishop's Daughter

by Honor Moore

  Once, soon after the morning in the room with the cherry wallpaper, my mother and I were both at Hollow Hill and she was driving me somewhere, explaining what a saint was. She often read me the lives of saints from books by a woman named Joan Windham, but now she was telling me about a young girl in France who became a saint, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. My mother explained that Saint Thérèse had learned “self-forgetfulness” and “simple obedience” and that coming to know about this saint had made her ashamed of her bad temper. Her temper was a sin, my mother said, and she was praying to get rid of it. I looked out the window at the rush of trees. I didn’t understand that she was trying to apologize to me. Some of the girls at school had parents who beat them “with the belt” whenever they did something wrong, but when my mother slapped me in the room with the cherry wallpaper and her face got red, it was as if she was not herself. That must be her temper, when she wasn’t herself. And also sin, I thought. Temper, I mouthed. Sin, I thought, looking at her long fingers curled tight around the steering wheel.

  Public School 37 was housed in a big yellow building about seven blocks from where we lived. It’s still there, smaller than it looked then, but still yellow, and with cutouts still pasted on the insides of the windows. There must be children there, though certainly the old wooden desks have been replaced by the bright pale ones, and the wooden floor has been covered with linoleum or tile and the blackboards replaced with green ones. Fifty years ago, the floors were still wood and the desks still bolted to the floor, though in the kindergarten room, to which I first went, there were no desks at all, just chairs we moved into a circle, or pushed to the walls when we were, for instance, learning to curtsy.

  I remember a girl named Carol Suzicki and I remember her yellow frilly dress that flared like a lampshade and her bright glossy black patent leather shoes. Joanie Rostenkowski had on the same kind of dress, only pale blue, and the same kind of shoes. The dress I was wearing was lavender and white checks with embroidery across the chest, a present from Gami, who told me the embroidery was done by hand and called “smocking.” On my feet were brown oxfords and white socks. My dress didn’t stick out and my hair wasn’t curly like the other girls’—it was short, straight, and almost black, with bangs. It was the first day of school, and we were standing in line. Carol and Joanie were speaking English, but I couldn’t follow what they were talking about, boys, ball games, what they were doing after school. When I went home I told my mother I wanted dresses like theirs, but my mother said their dresses were nylon, as if nylon would burn a girl like me, a girl so different from them, a girl with dark straight hair. The teacher, Miss Hart, was tall, her gray hair tightly curled. She wore glasses with shiny jewels in them and red lipstick. Teaching us “left” and “right,” she said, bow to the left, curtsy to the right, which is how, if I am disoriented, I still remember left and right.

  My parents had no experience of a school like this one. My mother was tutored at home until the age of fifteen, when she went to boarding school at Madeira, where you could bring your own horse; and my father, before St. Paul’s, had gone to a private school minutes from Hollow Hill with children who also lived in enormous houses and were served by butlers and maids. My parents wanted us to be free of the limitations of the way they had grown up; they wanted us to lead happier, more expansive lives. Both had been self-conscious about privilege since they were children. There is a story my father told over and over until it became iconic: seeing the poor as he rode in his family’s Rolls-Royce, he dove to the floor because he was so ashamed. So send your children to public school, send them to school with the other children in the neighborhood, send them to the same school as the Negro children they play with.

  But P.S. 37 was not in our exact neighborhood, and there were very few black children there. Most of the children in our neighborhood went to P.S. 2, but P.S. 2 had no toilets—you peed through a hole in the floor. And so I walked the six blocks to “37” escorted by Stella Skipper, who was in sixth grade. In exchange, she came to our house for lunch. She wore her hair back and straightened and her skirts longer than I did. She had a scar on her knee, and because her skin was brown, the scar was almost white. It looked like a mouth, a mouth that was almost laughing, but laughing meanly. Sometimes she wore stockings and so the mouth of her scar was stretched and flattened by the nylon. At lunch in our kitchen when my mother or Gagy wasn’t looking, she’d whisper that the scar was going to “git” me. She must not have liked walking me to school, but it wasn’t possible for her to complain. I couldn’t either. How could I complain about someone with brown skin?

  By the time I was in second grade, my brother Pip was in kindergarten so I became the older one, walking a child to school. He was shy at school, but at home he was a wild, funny, forceful boy with a blond crew cut and big dark blue eyes who moved much faster than I did, always running, making my mother laugh, rabbit-punching my arm, or giving me Indian burns on my wrists. After school, I played mostly with him and his best friend Ralphie Walker, who became my boyfriend when I was seven or eight. We used to stand in the corner between the kitchen and front door and kiss. He was younger than me, his skin was the color of dark wood, and he had dancing eyes with dark brown irises that made their whites really white. Usually he would be making jokes with Pip, but I would get him to be quiet so we could kiss, on the lips; afterward there’d be wet stuff all over my mouth and chin. And then what happened? Back to handball in the front yard, the concrete broken and heaved up so the ball sprang back at an angle from the high brick wall. I remember feeling my whole length as I jumped and that you made a fist and hit the ball, a pink rubber one you’d buy for a quarter at the candy store. We’d play as dusk came, Pip and Ralphie and I, and maybe the Monroe boys, and sometimes I’d win, leaping to the ball, punching it as it zoomed off the wall, stretching my body up into the darkness. Soon there was a time when Ralphie teased me but never kissed me, so Alan Monroe became my boyfriend, a white boy with a crew cut, a little taller and older than I was, with a slow way of talking. I remember us kissing in front of the door to the church, my arms bent around him, bright flannel squares of my shirt at the edge of my sight.

  The afternoons we didn’t play ball, we rode pretend horses; mine was a palomino. At Hollow Hill where there was a television, my brother and I watched Hopalong Cassidy movies and the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers. Playing on Second Street, I was Dale Evans, and the horse came to life as I drew her over and over in my notebook when I was bored at school, her mane flooding back as she galloped, pursued but never caught by the boys on their stallions, who shouted, wielding their cap guns until it was time to go home for supper, gallop up the path to the door, where old men waited for my mother’s soup, dozing or snoring in the retreating light. Good night, Mr. Gould, I would say. Good night, Mr. O’Hara, as I stumbled over their legs, holding my breath to keep from smelling the fumes of alcohol and filth that thickened in the small vestibule.

  Every summer, my mother packed the scrapbook materials she had thrown into boxes all winter and took them up to the Adirondacks, where she would sit on the porch sorting. Now the scrapbooks are stored in a cabinet there. One day last summer, I went up there for a few days to look. I wanted to sort through the visual record, discover how I’d feel all these years later. I had been back to Jersey City a year or so after my father died for the dedication of Bishop Paul Moore Place, the stretch of Second Street between Jersey Avenue and Grove Street where Grace Church is situated. Everything looked very small as I wandered down the gentrified streets from the barely recognizable station where the subway line is now called PATH rather than the Hudson Tube. The ceremony was small, people from the old Grace Church families gathered for a celebration of old times. An African-American woman quite a bit shorter than I was who looked to be in her sixties came up to me. “Hello, Honor.” It was Stella Skipper. Pretty soon her sister Joyce joined us and we got to laughing, and I said to Stella, “You know you had a scar on your knee a
nd you used to tell me it was going to hurt me,” I said. She laughed and I laughed. “Really,” I said, “you scared me.” Affectionately she punched my shoulder and we stood together for the ceremony, watching the deputy mayor climb a ladder and affix the bright green street sign as a photographer took pictures. After some speeches and coffee, the ceremony was breaking up. “Honor,” someone was saying. I turned. It was Stella. “I’m sorry about the scar.”

  As I leafed through the photographs, I saw my parents young, looking to be no more than children, my mother making funny faces, my father with his arm around her. Or my mother serving soup surrounded by black children and looking efficient, her glasses crooked on her nose, and in another picture, my father sitting outdoors, wearing his vestments looking solemn, encircled by children, all of them black except for me, someone’s puppy on his lap. In weekly staff meetings my parents and the two priests became a team, learning to work together and strategizing, my mother set on keeping them honest, always challenging, never content unless she was satisfied they were at the heart of the truth. Pam Morton, who worked there later, found her probing questions unnerving. “What kind of questions?” I asked. “How do you really feel,” Pam told me, “ over and over.” Like my parents, Pam had been brought up never to disclose what she really felt. But there were also plenty of laughs. In another photograph, a souvenir from Coney Island, my parents and Kim Myers and Bob Pegram all embrace each other, my mother’s smile blazing.

  Each spring, Grace Church sent out an annual summer appeal for funds to their well-heeled friends and relatives, my father contributing from a small foundation he had set up with some of his inheritance. “We found there was no program for the children,” read the text the first summer, “and so we set about creating one.” As soon as school was out, before we went to the Adirondacks, we children were dispatched to Hollow Hill with Gagy, and the “summer staff,” idealistic young seminarians or college students, moved into our bedrooms. When the summer program grew to seven baseball teams and winter events and meetings outgrew the parish hall and our living room, the church purchased a brownstone down the street. The parish office moved out of the basement, and after the top floor of the new house was converted into a convent, an order of Episcopal nuns moved in, taking over Sunday school and confirmation instruction, and some of the pastoral work with women my mother had done all by herself.

  When I was nine, I was taken to the Brearley School in New York where the daughters of my parents’ old friends, the Potters, went. I was to be “tested.” I remember the wide hallways and that all the kids were girls and all the girls were white. I remember the big gymnasium. I did well on the tests. My parents felt vindicated and proudly told friends and family that my knowledge was competitive with that of girls my age at the best private school in New York. I stayed at 37 one more semester, and then my parents moved my brother and me to a church school in New York, a short ride away on the Hudson Tube. Pip and I became friends on the subway to and from St. Luke’s. In the mornings friends of our parents drove us to school, but we took the subway back by ourselves. Since we came home at about three, there were very few people on the train, and we got to know the engineers. Sometimes we would stand in the front car gazing out the window into the long, dark tunnel as the train sped under the river, a red light, a green light blinking in the pitch black.

  The fifth-grade class at St. Luke’s was all white except for one African-American boy whose name was Colin, but I had a crush on Jay. He was blond with a close crew cut and big eyes, and he had a girlfriend, Jill, who was small and thin with dark dark hair and skin so pale it was almost blue. She talked to Jay like my mother talked to my father, in sarcastic, oddly pronounced endearments, and he leaned his body up against hers like a Slinky. In class, he and I often raised our hands at the same time, and gave the right answers. After a while, he came up to me and said, “You are smart” or “What do you think about that story Father Weed read us this morning in chapel?” I liked the serious way he talked to me. About the third week of school, the fifth grade went, with the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, to the church camp in Connecticut for a week, all the teachers and all the students. On the bus, I sat near a window and, without my asking, Jay came and sat next to me. I showed him my drawings of horses, and he said he liked them. He talked about where he used to live, in North Carolina; his father was a priest, too. It was a three-hour trip and suddenly, trees whooshing by outside, he said, “I want you to be my girlfriend.” “Okay,” I said, allowing a smile to creep up behind my face. It seemed strange he said that since he was Jill’s boyfriend, but I was so happy he liked me, I said nothing.

  When we got to the camp, we went to the bunkhouse and I unpacked my things onto my cot. Jill was there, and Temma, who had long blond braids. I was quiet, hardly able to contain my excitement. “I’ll meet you in the barn at the dance,” Jay had said, and so, when we got there, I went straight over to him. The music was starting. Jay was standing talking to Jill and some others, but I continued walking, then stopped right in front of them, looking expectantly at him, but he didn’t turn his head toward me for a long time, then Jill looked at me, and then Jay said, “Jill is still my girlfriend,” and, laughing, they walked away.

  As I stood there, I felt my stomach push against the waist of my skirt. Temma was suddenly right beside me, saying something consoling, and then we walked toward the long table with the food on it—spaghetti and salad, stacks of paper plates and napkins, paper cups with red punch in them. I pretended I knew what I was doing, that I had never for one second expected Jay Leach to be my boyfriend. The music was a song called “Sixteen Tons” and across the room I could see Jay and Jill talking—and then they were dancing to another song, hopping around to the music. Jay was narrow like my brother and Jill’s hair flowed down her back. I looked down at my hands and opened one of them. It was wide. I will never have narrow hands, I thought to myself. I will never be able to see the veins under my skin, my cheek flesh will never retreat, allowing a narrow face. I will always have a round face. I will never have a twenty-one-inch waist.

  8

  Four-in-Hand

  * * *

  My grandmother runs down the steps of the vast entrance hall, her arms open, and I fall into them, and she kisses me and says, “Oooooh, how good to see you,” her voice rising in pitch at the word “see,” light through the French doors at the other end casting shadowy shapes on the Persian triclinium carpet that enlivens the room’s entire vastness. We turn into the living room, light playing off tawny pinks and yellows and buoyant greens, the blues of curtains and slipcovers, English paintings on slate blue walls, on creamy walls, a tiny bronze horse, the silver cigarette box, a Chinese snuffbox, chairs and sofas to sink into, sunlight through Palladian windows illuminating porcelain, glinting from silver, from silver-framed photographs, from polished tables, side chairs, the grand piano.

  Even in memory I am rescued by that space and light, by the give of the beds, by the food that came straight from the farm, by Nellie the cook in the enormous kitchen, her fiery brown eyes laughing as she pulls the cookie jar across the counter and says, “Peanut butter or chocolate chip?” After supper, after reading my book, I’d slide between the silky smooth monogrammed sheets and look out wide windows at the trees turning black against the pale summer sky, watching it all darken until I slept.

  When we lived in Jersey City, Hollow Hill was where we children were sent with Gagy for frequent weekends all year or weeks in June or July—refuge for us, a break for my mother from all the cooking and housekeeping at home. My father and mother hardly ever came with us. After he began to work with poor people, my father became embarrassed by Hollow Hill. Its pleasures made him uneasy: how was he to integrate “all of this” with what he had seen in the war, what he saw now in Jersey City—the burnt-out tenements, families evicted from their apartments, black families from the South, Spanish-speaking families from Puerto Rico, men unable to find jo
bs, nothing for the children to do, young men going to jail or into “the service” in Korea. To me, Hollow Hill was proof of the world’s abundance—wasn’t there enough for everyone? Every week Patsy drove the farm truck to Jersey City, delivered flowers, butter, cottage cheese, milk and eggs, fresh chickens and vegetables—so much my mother often gave bottles of milk and cream away.

  When my parents did come with us, we saw them only when we visited cocktail hour in the library where the air smelled of bourbon, gin, cigarette smoke, and Chanel No. 5 or Je Reviens. My grandmother would be in velvet and my mother likewise transformed; free of changing diapers and cooking, she looked like the young queen in her wedding pictures, her hair glossy, a supper dress of velvet or taffeta, her lips dark with Raven Red, on her hand the big diamond engagement ring she never wore in Jersey City. Long legs crossed, a lit Chesterfield between her fingers, her low laugh made you long to be in on the joke. My father also dressed up—oxford cloth shirt, bow tie, tweed jacket—would be leaning forward, or pulling back with a laugh, Camel in one hand, his drink in the other. “Oh, Jenny,” he might be saying. I would kiss my mother and smell her martini, then lean across to kiss Pop, then Gramps, and then Gami, who would be doing needlepoint—signs of the zodiac for the dining room chairs, or squares of Aesop’s Fables for a dreamed-of rug—while nursing one of her two nightly Gibsons. There was never conversation when we children raced in, just oohs and aahs. The grownups ate in the library because Gramps had Lou Gehrig’s disease, although what he had was never discussed or explained. My grandfather didn’t talk much and he didn’t wear shoes—just many layers of socks, his feet on a pillow on the floor. I remember no voice, just the slow smile with a curve like a banana and the glass of bourbon clasped in his hand.