by Honor Moore
In the years of my childhood, I looked at family photographs as if I were part of an athletic team racing for a championship, the Cartier 18-carat gold bangle, engraved with the baby’s name and birth date that my father gave my mother for each new child, a kind of trophy. How many brothers and sisters would I have? How many would it take to win? Now, looking through the scrapbooks, seeing us strung across a lawn or crowded artistically onto an outdoor flight of stairs, I find our sheer numbers literally incredible. But in 1954 when George, the fifth of us, was born, I knew of no other family than one in which children kept coming and coming. I was used to the rationed attention I got from my mother, and for decades no therapist’s questioning cracked the shell of my idealism. “Honor says the family is an institution,” my mother wrote to her friend Pam Morton when I was in eighth grade just after Susanna, number eight, arrived. “The wonderful remark was ‘Poppy and you have made the family a little church, so that’s why Poppy can call the church a family.’” What was my mother thinking when she declared she wanted a family of nine, enough for a baseball team or a small orchestra?
As I became an adult I had my theories, based on her declared adoration of babies: “Susanna is dreamy and my milk floweth. I’m so relaxed I can hardly boil an egg.” Clearly, having children gave her something she didn’t get elsewhere in her life, in her marriage, something that was taken away when a baby became a child. I’d never heard her express a syllable of doubt before I read another letter to Pam, written in 1957: “I’ve been through moments of wishing I had no children, or 3 children, or ought not to have had children—but am slowly regaining my equilibrium—they sure are demanding . . .”
It was an August afternoon working on the scrapbooks in the Adirondacks, photographing, taking notes, that my defenses dissolved. The chronicle of Jersey City had just resumed after the birth of George, when it gave way to pages announcing another birth, of Marian, my third sister and fifth sibling. I would have been ten, in my first year at St. Luke’s. These decades after the fact, the banks of telegrams and notes of congratulation seemed an assault. Suddenly my mother’s jokes about the baseball team and my father’s certainty of the infinity of his inheritance seemed sad and arrogant rather than affirming of some courageous mission. Again I asked myself what on earth they were thinking. What did my parents’ friends, who stopped at four or five children, think as we went on to seven and eight? How could everyone keep sending congratulations? What I hid away or disguised with humor as a child suddenly came clear in an image of myself as a girl of ten coming to terms with the loss of any hope of uninterrupted attention. They sure are demanding.
In the years after my mother died, when my father began to revise his view of her, he always insisted that the number of children had been my mother’s idea. He spoke of her suicidal postpartum depressions, his efforts to stop after five, six, seven. Close friends of my mother’s disputed that she was depressed after her children were born, and I dismissed my father’s blaming her for our numbers as refusal to take responsibility. It wasn’t that they never had unprotected sex: they boasted of their use of birth control, their membership in Planned Parenthood, the timing of births—we came every two years. When, seventeen years after my mother’s death, I learned of my father’s secret life, it came to me that his allowing my mother as many children as she wanted might have been compensation for what he was unable to give her. How much I’d like to ask now what they were really thinking! If they were thinking. How much I’d like to have again the pleasure of them I had when I was little and there were just four or five of us, my father at supper in the Adirondacks wiggling his ears one at a time or telling a story, my mother’s radiant smile, darkness rising on the lake.
I had planned to work until supper and it was midafternoon. As I shut the scrapbook after Marian’s birth, I could hear the living voices of my brothers and sisters, the answering calls of their small children, little feet running along the boardwalk, splashes and shouts from the lake. It was never comfortable for me to take my baby brothers and sisters in my arms, and I never had my own child. Because I was afraid, I now understood, so confused and sad and angry every time another came. Every time another came, I repeated to myself. Who could I have told? I put aside the book, my eyes closed, and the past pulled me into an exhausted sleep.
The summer of 1955, Grace Church had seven baseball teams in city tournaments, and when I came home from St. Luke’s on the Hudson Tube, I still stumbled over the legs of the homeless men who sat on the porch, still answered the phone for “Father Moore” when the police called the rectory to announce one of its boys had been arrested or that someone needed a bed for the night. One boy who hung around and loved to play with us had been arrested and gone to jail. The office typewriter had been stolen, and when the police investigated, the trail led to him, and so, when Stella scared me with her knee or I got into a fight with one of Ralphie Walker’s sisters, I kept it to myself. Some things had changed. Father Myers left to take a Lower East Side mission in Manhattan, and when his replacement, Jim Morton, married Pamela Taylor, they moved to an apartment in St. Christopher’s House, as the newly purchased brownstone down the street was now called. My father and the other priests now had real offices there, and in the rectory there was another bedroom for us.
My parents were starting to consider even more change. I didn’t realize my father’s bouts of exhaustion were becoming more frequent, that his recurring pneumonia now seriously worried both my parents. My mother had come into her own at Grace Church, but now that she had a brood of children, she was beginning to feel the strain of the twenty-four-hour open rectory. In a letter she wrote to Pam Morton when we left Jersey City, she imagined living differently: “I’m more & more looking forward to using my porch-set, telephone-answering, door-answering energy, to spoil Paul and the children.” She and my father had already made a stab at expanding the time we spent as a family. Just after my sister Rosemary was born, they bought an old house outside Kent, Connecticut, where we spent the weekends my father didn’t have to preach, and weeks in the summer when my father’s siblings used the Adirondacks. One summer all of us stayed two months—my father’s doctor had diagnosed him with “cumulative fatigue” and the cure was eight weeks of rest. My first sister Adelia, then called Dee, and Pip and I took an art class at a farm down the road, and every afternoon all of us piled into the car and drove a long dirt road to a swimming hole in the Housatonic River, formed when a long-ago flood washed out a bridge. Often my mother stayed home with the baby, or to take a nap. Later she would say that Kent had been no vacation, all six children to cook and clean for, for help just a high school girl from town.
In my own room in Kent, which was on the first floor away from the others, I spent the summer reading Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales or a book about King Arthur and dreaming. That fall was my first year at St. Luke’s, and when the teacher suggested we write a story, I bought a blank book with a black-and-white cover and began something I called “a novel.” Suddenly there was a way to say what I was thinking—not to my friends or anyone else, but as my father did in stories, and as my mother did when she joked or recounted an anecdote, relishing each word. The notebook is lost, but I remember the story, and that the teacher read it aloud to the class two days in a row. A girl whose mother and father were killed by Indians when she was just a baby has been taken in by another family. She has no idea her mother and father are not her real parents, but every night as she lies on her hard bed, under a bearskin blanket, next to the two little girls she thinks are her sisters, she tries to understand why she alone of the children has to haul wood and cut up vegetables and weed the garden and carry dirty clothes down to the brook for washing. Mrs. Leifert, the teacher, was tall and skinny with salt-and-pepper hair. She wore glasses and spoke with a Southern accent. I didn’t like her then, but I think now that she was very intelligent and that what I didn’t like was her nervousness.
The classroom was a co
nverted parish hall, and I sat in the back near the piano with Temma, as Mrs. Leifert stood reading from my black-and-white notebook. It was very cold and dark, she read, and as Abigail fell asleep, she started to dream about her real mother, who had blond hair. In the dream she was sitting on her mother’s lap; she wondered who this lady was, who was singing to her. And then she woke up. Pa was standing next to the bed. Get up, he said. And she got up. He handed her a pail. Go to the well and fill this up. She started to put on her coat. You don’t need a coat, he said, and pushed her out into the hallway toward the stairs. Her feet were bare and white and there was snow on the ground. Abigail pretended the snow was warm instead of cold as she ran, that the burning was fire instead of ice. The dog barked and she could tell that Pa was watching her from the door. When she got to the well, she had to feel for the hook at the end of the rope and she found it and hung the pail there. Very slowly she let the pail down, but then suddenly it fell off the rope and she could hear it bang in the bottom of the well.
It was ice, Mrs. Leifert read, turning the page, The light was coming as Abigail ran back to the house and pushed open the door. Pa was standing at the fire. Where’s the water? Abigail shivered. Pa, she said, the well was frozen and the pail fell. She was very scared and started to cry as he turned from the fireplace and came toward her. Her feet were so cold. Come here, he said. The bricks on the hearth hurt her feet, almost blue with cold. She knew what would come next and watched Pa unfasten his belt. The buckle shone in the light of the fire. He made her lie down across his knee. Abigail could feel the strap burn into her skin, Mrs. Leifert read, as Pa hit her again and again.
I simply listened. I don’t remember what happened in the room after Mrs. Leifert put my black-and-white notebook down, promising to keep reading as I finished new installments. I didn’t write anymore after she read it, though I knew that in the end, like Sara Crewe in A Little Princess which I had read at Hollow Hill, Abigail would escape and, returned to the embrace of her blond-haired mother, who had not been killed after all, forgive even the cruel foster father she called Pa. Of course, in my own life, my mother had black hair and it was she who inexplicably hit me, not my father. I think I was waiting to write the ending before showing the book to my parents, nervous that what Abigail had endured might tell them more about me than I wanted them to know.
I had begun instruction for confirmation with one of the nuns at St. Christopher’s House. Her name was Sister Ora Mary and she was very tall. I knew that the better I did in confirmation class, the more I would understand about my father, so I worked hard on the Ten Commandments, the sacraments, the lineaments of theology. At my father’s ordination, the old bishop had laid hands on my father’s head, reading prayers that made him a priest and able to celebrate mass. Now Bishop Washburn would lay his hands on my head, and I would become part of the last supper, drinking wine and eating bread like the disciples. (All of us, my father preached, were, in different ways, disciples.) My mother and I had shopped for my confirmation dress, but the Thursday before the Sunday ceremony she’d left for Hollow Hill to await a new baby, and the day before my confirmation, my father called from the hospital with news of Marian’s birth.
My two godmothers came to the service—my father’s sister Polly and my mother’s friend Sylvia, her roommate when she was pregnant with me and my father was away at the war. Aunt Polly gave me a red leather Bible and Aunt Sylvia a red leather prayer book—each stamped in gold with my name and the date. My dress was white and frothy, of dotted Swiss organza, and I felt like a bride sitting there in the front pew as candlelight made the incense gold and the organ rumbled, it seemed, from somewhere beneath the amber floor. At the altar, acolytes in red cassocks and white cottas genuflected, stood up, then genuflected again. Because I had fasted, the white of their cottas burned my eyes.
When it was time for the actual confirmation, the acolytes moved a large thronelike chair into the crossing, and Bishop Washburn took his seat. I could hardly wait. There had been a rehearsal, and so even though I was trembling, I did exactly as Sister Ora Mary had instructed, genuflecting as I left the pew, my father at the edge of my vision as I carefully walked forward and knelt on the cushion in front of Bishop Washburn. Defend, O Lord, this thy child with thy heavenly grace, he began. I bowed devoutly as I had seen my father do, and the bishop lowered his hands onto my veiled head . . . that she may continue thine forever . . . I closed my eyes, so I could listen. Forever? Yes, forever. I was starting to cry. His hands vibrated, seeming, as heat came through them, to hold on to me as if I were earthbound and solid, but they were also heavy and comforting because they were so big and my head was so small. And daily increase in thy Holy Spirit more and more, I could hear him say, his hands getting heavier and heavier, until she come into thy everlasting kingdom. And then he said Amen and lifted his hands, and I sprang to standing, as if without effort, everything shimmering. Surely this was God, I thought in that moment, the heat and heaviness in Bishop Washburn’s hands, the lightness I felt as I stood up.
Days later, I played a princess at St. Luke’s in a play our drama class had written. We were studying ancient history, and the play was called Do the Scales of Egypt Balance? Our drama teacher, Mrs. Melchior, who had red hair and eyeglasses with bluish lenses, was a real actress and the wife of an opera singer. I was to play Maru, the pharaoh’s daughter. The week before the performance, the Hudson Tube went on strike, but my grandmother came to the rescue and Pip and I moved into the apartment on Fifth Avenue with Katherine Burgoyne, who had retired as my grandmother’s upstairs maid. When I told her I needed a costume, she nodded, reassuring me, and the night before the play, she appeared with a lavender silk dress she had made specially. It had a slit skirt and a matching headband with a lavender flower attached that flopped beautifully over my ear. I hadn’t thought I could ever be so happy, even though my mother couldn’t come see the play. She was at Hollow Hill recuperating from Marian’s birth.
Jill played the pharoah’s wife, and we had gotten over our conflict about Jay Leach; she was now one of my three best friends. When I went to spend the night at her house, I’d go to her dancing school and watch the class, all in white ballet-length dresses, dance the mazurka. Her father was a theatrical press agent who wore a suit and tie to breakfast; her mother also worked and her sister was reading The Catcher in the Rye, a book I hadn’t heard of. My friend Debbie played my sister; she had changed her name to Shai—because she was a dancer, she said. Her mother was divorced and a writer who lived with another woman, a singer named Charity Bailey, who was black and the first American woman I ever saw dress in African clothes. I was intrigued by the parents of my St. Luke’s friends even though I didn’t quite understand them—they worked, they didn’t seem to go to church, and when I visited, they asked me so much about myself I was too shy to talk.
My friend Temma was the daughter of painters. The first time I spent the night at her house, we knocked at the door of her father’s studio, which was really just a room in their house. His overalls were smeared with paint and he smiled when we came into the room. He had curly black hair and dark brown shiny eyes that were also a little wild. The air smelled of oil, and stacks of paintings were leaned against the walls. I remember dark colors and shapes that looked almost like people or leaves, the paint so thick it seemed to have a life of its own. I remember dirty rags on the floor, the floor splotched with color but swept clean. Temma called her parents by their first names; her father’s name was Leland, and she called him Lee; her mother, whose name was Luisa, she called Ulla. Ulla was from Iceland and spoke with an accent. She had a narrow pinched face, and she painted with brighter colors than Lee did. Supper was soup and rough bread and some cheese and then stew and salad; the plates were brown and heavy. Once I went to Temma’s for Passover—Lee was Jewish. His parents were there, and we ate horseradish and lamb, and read aloud the story of the Jews being spared by God.
St. Luke’s, on Hudson
Street, was a dozen-block walk downtown from where Temma lived on West Sixteenth Street, past the fishmonger and past every kind of store you could think of, buses racing by as we walked, workmen shouting as trucks lurched against the gray stone curbs and cars zoomed along, their horns honking. My second year, sixth grade, St. Luke’s opened a new building, which had bright new classrooms, a vast art studio, a carpentry shop, a gym, and a cafeteria. I had always painted and drawn at home; now I had an art teacher who was a real painter—she of course said yes when Temma and I asked if we could collaborate on “a mural.” On the pristine floor we unrolled a six-foot sheet of brown paper and planned our farm—a barn, chickens, cows, trees, horses, a girl carrying a bucket from a well toward the house.
Temma knew how to do such things—we drew first, then painted boldly with saturated tempera colors. I learned to imitate the freedom of her drawing, so different from my own restrained accuracy, to see that a cow or a tree you drew would never look exactly like a cow or a tree, that what you were after was a version of the cow or tree that was funnier or prettier or scarier than life. When we finished, which took weeks, our great work was hung on the classroom wall. What would we paint next? We could do anything! During shop class, drawing on a piece of fresh pine, I outlined a toy for my baby sister Marian, a wooden duck whose shape I cut out with a handsaw and painted white, with an orange bill, attaching wheels I also painted orange, to approximate feet.
I became a reader, checking out five books at a time from the new St. Luke’s library, taking them home to read in my room. Misty of Chincoteague. The Black Stallion, Pippi Longstocking, Jane Eyre, anything to do with horses or girls or enchantment. On the top floor at Hollow Hill, I found shelves full of old books. I read ten in the Oz series, and a series about girls during the American Revolution—A Little Maid of Old New York, A Little Maid of New Orleans—my favorite was the one in which the heroine found the Marquis de Lafayette in her family’s farmyard and helped him hide from the British but also from her family, secretly bringing him food and water in the hayloft. My book list was the longest in the class, and I also won the contest in which you had to recite “If” by Rudyard Kipling, whose stories The Jungle Book my father had read us when we were little. Mrs. Rice taught arithmetic by improvising “brainteasers”—begin with the number 37, add 3, divide by 4; she’d spin numbers for as long as twenty minutes, no pencil and paper allowed. Sometimes my St. Luke’s friends came to Jersey City. One spring night when Temma came, the church had rented a sound truck to publicize a four-day preaching mission to be held the week before Easter. Temma and I huddled in the seatless back of the station wagon, and when Father Morton was tired of announcing through the loudspeaker, we sang, our eleven-year-old sopranos piercing the night.
