by Honor Moore
There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall
Where our dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.
One night that spring, my father announced that there would be a family meeting after supper in the room with the cherry wallpaper. We had never had a family meeting. What was next? I wondered as we gathered, the three oldest of the six children, my mother then thirty-three years old, and my father thirty-seven. I was eleven, the other five of us ranged down to a year and a half, and my mother was pregnant again. We were moving, my father announced. He had been “called” to Indiana, where he was to take his mission of social justice to the Midwest as dean of a cathedral. I was already crying. Yes, they assured us, we would go to the Adirondacks; we wouldn’t move till August. Yes, Indiana was in the West and the land was very flat—I imagined there were buffalo, the open plain. No, we wouldn’t have weekends at Hollow Hill, but we would have our own big backyard. Yes, we would miss Gami and Gramps. And, of course, we would miss Gagy, but she would come visit. And so would our friends, Ralphie, who was almost part of the family, and Jill and Temma and Shai. What about Jersey City? What about the important work, the summer staff, the neighborhood? Father Laughlin would stay on, Pam and Jim would move into the rectory, the work would go on as before.
I understood only that a “call” had come; the word made it sound as if the summons had been issued directly from God; Indianapolis is where God wants us to be, my parents said. The only cathedral I knew was huge, St. John the Divine, and the dean there was Jim Pike (later the controversial bishop of California). Being a dean, I realized, was close to being a bishop—this higher position put my father even closer to God, I concluded. It was only in reading his oral history that I learned his health had been a factor in the decision. The sickness his doctor called “cumulative fatigue” had lasted beyond that long summer, and it made the intensity of Jersey City and its round-the-clock requirements too much for my father. He’d been getting stale, he said, arguing with Jim Morton and Ledlie’s ideas: “We tried that five years ago, it didn’t work.” Indianapolis offered a life that he and my mother hoped would mend his health, that she hoped would give her time with her children. But I understood none of this that evening at our family meeting, and each new realization of what might be impossible in this strange place called Indianapolis brought another wave of tears.
Sometime in mid-August, my brother Pip—newly called Paul—and I set out with my father in the station wagon. We would arrive with the moving vans, and after a while, when the new baby, who turned out to be my third brother Daniel, was a little older, my mother would follow by plane with the other kids and with Gagy, who would stay for a while to help us get settled. By the time we pulled away from Second Street, my imagination was focused on the West. My mother stayed behind in Jersey City to check last-minute details, and then Pam and Jim Morton walked her to the Tube. “I loved our walk to the subway & remembering the Rectory dirty & dark, with kids playing ball in the yard,” she wrote to Pam.
Because Paul and I were alone with our father, the harness of family left behind, the trip had the feeling of adventure. As we drove out through the Holland Tunnel, I asked my father to tell the familiar story of how his father had put the entire family in the Rolls-Royce the first time they took the tunnel into New York, preferring, should the engineering marvel collapse, that everyone die at once. I tried to read the book I’d brought along, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off the road and my father driving West. Just before lunch, we came to the edge of New Jersey and signs announced the Pennsylvania Turnpike. “We’ll go all the way to the end of it,” my father told us. How wonderful, I thought, the idea of going to the end of something. Indiana meant Indians. It meant wonder, ending as it did in an a like a woman’s name. We spent the first night near Pittsburgh with a St. Paul’s friend of my father’s, arriving at dusk in time to swim in a pool, sleep in a room with windows that looked out on an endless lawn and a weeping willow—maybe this is what our new house would be like!
The second night we spent with the Meads, the parents of my father’s friend George who had died in the war, and after lunch the third day, we were on Route 40, driving through small Indiana towns with names like New Paris, every few miles a vegetable stand that sold string beans and corn. By late afternoon, we pulled up at 3665 Washington Boulevard. “The Deanery” was an enormous Tudor-style house set in the center of a large lawn on a bright boulevard which had been the shadiest street in town until the Dutch Elm disease killed all the trees. It was very hot and humid, but the house, which had very high ceilings, was cool, even though there were wall-to-wall carpets, something I’d never seen before. The big kitchen had an island of matching cabinets down its center and two ovens set in the wall, a separate laundry with a laundry chute. There was also an enormous dining room, an eating porch—and the house had seven bathrooms!
On the floor of the living room which ran nearly the entire width of the front of the house, my parents would lay Great-granny’s Chinese rug, place Aunt Lily Hanna’s Victorian settee and chairs, and hang Fritz Eichenberg prints that had started life as illustrations in The Catholic Worker. There would be many things in the house that I had never seen before, things stored at Hollow Hill before we moved to Jersey City. My mother always swore that Gami, despairing we’d ever return to a proper life, had given away several crates of their wedding-present glass and china. We were now living in the luxury on which I thought my parents had resolutely turned their backs. The polished walnut paneling in the house, the light color of the refinished pews at the cathedral, the haute excellence of the boys’ choir all seemed temporary, something we were pretending at between acts of the real play. But my parents seemed to take to this odd place as enthusiastically as they had to Jersey City. My father had a secretary who sharpened his pencils and typed his letters and sermons, and his workday ended when he drove home. My mother now had more time for her six children, her seventh infant; she would make her way as an ordinary clergy wife rather than a teammate. Also, she wrote Pam Morton, she and my father were relieved to be out of range of Hollow Hill and Gami’s hovering presence.
Before school started, my mother took me shopping to the largest, “best,” department store in Indianapolis. She stood at the counter in L.S. Ayres and got a temporary charge account and the saleswoman called her Mrs. Moore. There were no stores like this where we lived in Jersey City; we went to the Wonder Store where blouses cost a dollar and your feet were measured with an X-ray machine, and our dressy clothes came in large flat packages from “Best & Co.” in New York, sent by my grandmother. So this was the first time I’d gone shopping for serious clothes with my mother. Over her protests at its narrow cut, I chose a navy blue and black plaid skirt with a matching vest. I undressed and stood in front of the mirror in my underpants and undershirt, first putting on the crispy white blouse the sales lady brought, and then, as she and my mother watched, trying the skirt. It would not pass my hips. “Put it on over her head,” the sales lady suggested, but my mother pulled it off and handed it back to her. “I think it’s too grown-up,” she said abruptly. Moving had been difficult for my mother. She wrote to Pam of those early weeks:
I have had . . . a real dark night of the soul, from which I trust I am now emerging. I became terrified that I was or would become somewhat nuts, and couldn’t seem to get any perspective. Every single characteristic, achievement, act, experience, relationship of the past few years was suddenly reviewed in a very black shadow—with only bad motives apparent etc. I had always thought I was aware of the pitfalls (for the soul) of Jersey City, but it became obvious that I was only aware of them in the most superficial manner. As I looked back on it I was guilty of the worst kind of pride in so many areas. I suppose anyone could have told me, had I sat down and listened. Once I realized that God was kind and would only show me these things briefly and then let me pass on, and once I realized that I
was under a terrible strain for a long time . . . I felt somewhat more able to cope. I was helpless with the children—mostly of course because all seven were at their most demanding . . . I’m sorry to inflict this on you but must share it with Christian friends . . .
In Indianapolis, my mother was closer to us, but my father was further away. In another letter my mother reported to Pam that when my father was home he was really home, but that he was gone a lot of the time. “Paul seems really revived by the change, and when he gets tired, is able to snap back after a night’s sleep.” Like other fathers, mine now disappeared to work early in the morning, but he was also out a few nights a week and most of the weekend; Monday was his day off. Like ordinary children, my brother and I walked to school at seven-thirty, our younger sisters following an hour later. School was P.S. 66, a large brick building five or six blocks away. When you got to Thirty-eighth Street, a traffic boy held his arms out, and when the light turned green, you crossed, which seemed exotic after New York and the Hudson Tube.
My seventh-grade homeroom was filled only with white children, and, unlike at St. Luke’s where we’d all worn black tights and turtlenecks, the girls wore sweaters that matched a straight or pleated skirt, and loafers or “tennis shoes” or “saddle shoes.” The boys wore button-down shirts and khakis, and they had crew cuts. How would I fit into this? At the first recess, I stood next to the window overlooking the school playground with a girl I’d met—we were both watching the kids running across the yard. She had a wide face, long straight hair, and blemished skin and she was the only girl who had befriended me that first day. Suddenly she said, “I don’t believe it, a nigger at 66.”
I had never heard anyone use that word because in my family it was an obscenity, and so when I heard that word out loud, I suddenly did not know where I was. The strange girl standing in front of me, the odd landscape with its porched houses, lawns, straight skirts, and football games, humidity so heavy I could hardly breathe. I looked down at the yard and, yes, there was one black boy outside, wearing a striped shirt, running at a diagonal from one end of the yard to the other. I knew I should say something to the girl, whose name was Ellen Massey, but my heart was pounding and now I could barely see her. I said nothing, and in that moment, I betrayed Ralphie Walker and Tom Venable and Stella Skipper. In that moment I deserted my father and mother. I believed that if I told them what I had not done, they might direct me to confront Ellen Massey, and I did not have the courage to do that. I knew already that to be popular was everything in seventh grade at 66, and I knew that in order to be popular, I would have to leave Jersey City behind.
My father, of course, did not altogether leave Jersey City behind; in fact, he had been brought to Indianapolis to create at the cathedral, a beautiful Indiana limestone church on Monument Circle in the center of the city, a downtown ministry inspired by his work in Jersey City. John Craine, the bishop, his predecessor as dean, had remodeled the church, built its endowment, and attracted a powerful and wealthy vestry. My father was receiving a salary and he was free of fund-raising; all his energy could go into the actual church work. The difference was that he was not altogether in charge. While the bishop supported his work, the vestry were his official employers. About a year into his ministry my father decided to begin efforts to integrate the congregation; the neighborhoods closest to the cathedral were racially mixed or entirely black, but that parish, except for one Negro couple, was, as my father said in his oral history, “pretty much lily-white.” Unlike in Jersey City where the church was next door and its doings part of my daily life, the cathedral was a twenty-minute drive away, and we went there only on Sundays. From my experience with Ellen Massey, I had learned that we were in enemy territory as far as race was concerned. I didn’t know my father understood that until, during his second year at Christ Church, he spent a weekend in retreat with the vestry at the diocesan conference center in the hills of Brown County, south of the city.
My father had been thrilled by the invitation. He looked forward to real conversation and more teamwork with the leaders of the congregation, but instead of affirming what he was doing in the parish, the vestry confronted him about the presence of new black parishioners at Sunday services. Why was it necessary to bring “them” into Christ Church? There was, they reminded my father, a Negro parish nearby. “I kicked over into the role of group therapist unconsciously as we went around the room,” my father remembered in his oral history. He tried to get them all to speak their minds, and after everyone had spoken, he said, “I don’t know what to say. I really feel very strongly that the church has to be open to all people. I haven’t done this carelessly.” He reiterated what he had made clear when he was hired, that he was a member of the NAACP and committed to social action, and that he had Bishop Craine’s support. It turned out that when he was chosen, none of them had heard of the NAACP and couldn’t anyway imagine that a man with my father’s pedigree would hold such radical opinions. Now they associated my father with what was being reported in the news. That autumn Governor Faubus of Arkansas had used the National Guard to keep black children out of Central High School in Little Rock, and in response President Eisenhower had sent in paratroopers and federalized the National Guard to enforce the law. What would the government do next? The Christ Church vestry had concluded the NAACP was a Communist front and that my father had been sent to turn the cathedral into “a nigger church.”
The only member of the vestry absent from the retreat was Eli Lilly, its chairman, who supported my father’s work and who, by virtue of his success in turning his grandfather’s drug company into a powerful pharmaceutical corporation and becoming the city’s great benefactor, occupied the pinnacle of Indianapolis society. The weekend retreat had traumatized my father, and he was still shaky when, days after the confrontation, his secretary announced that Mr. Lilly was at his office door.
“Excuse me, Mr. Dean”—that was Mr. Lilly’s familiar name for my father—“could I have just a few minutes of your time? I know you’re very busy.” My father was immediately disarmed: “Here I was,” he remembered later, “just a green kid . . .”
“Of course, please sit down.”
“Well, I’ve just got one thing to say to you . . . There will never be a Little Rock on Monument Circle. You can paint the cathedral blue with pink polka dots if you wish, and I will stand behind you. Good day, sir.” Mr. Lilly held this position even though his own company at the time hired no black chemists. Later he created a million-dollar endowment to support my father’s work in the diocese—a consortium of downtown parishes to organize inner-city initiatives—and soon the parish voted in a new vestry, younger, more progressive, and enthusiastic about my father’s ambitions for the cathedral’s ministry.
My mother was negotiating her role as the dean’s wife. The first fall, she and the wives of the two other priests in the parish were asked to provide centerpieces for the tables at the parish bazaar, which she reported with a cacaphony of exclamation marks to Pam in a letter. A year later, though, a vestry wife asked her to lead a prayer group, and she wrote Pam asking for suggestions of readings about the desert fathers, the early Christian mystics.
Indianapolis was not a cultural backwater. When I was in high school, my father could take me and a friend to a Bergman or Fellini film at the Zaring Egyptian Theatre, and for a deli sandwich at Sam’s Subway afterward, and my parents’ friends invited them to musicales held by patrons of the Indianapolis Symphony: “the Budapest String Quartet in the Fesslers’ living room, my dear,” my mother wrote Pam. By our third year in Indianapolis, when I was a freshman in high school, my parents had found a community of like-minded friends, great people, based on whom my mother formed a theory that Democrats in conservative states like Indiana were required to have real endurance. In 1958, Martin Luther King Jr. came to speak downtown, and in 1960 Dorothy Day came to stay for a week and gave a talk at our house, and once my mother took me to a discussion ab
out “the Beat Generation” at All Saints, the Anglo-Catholic parish where she went for confession.
My father’s work was gaining national prominence and hardly a year went by when he wasn’t nominated for bishop somewhere, but we were settled and no one, including my parents, had any desire to move. All of us who were old enough were beginning to have gangs of friends, and my father’s spells of illness were less and less frequent. “I sometimes wonder,” my mother wrote Pam, “how anyone can be as happy as we are.”
Part II
DAUGHTER
10
Light and Dark
* * *
In my memory, Jersey City was dark and angular. Even when the sun shone, the darkness remained because of the sharp shadows cast by the church. In the front yard where we played handball, bright pavement always had a black shadow right next to it, and inside the church it was always dark—even when the parchment lanterns were lit, the light they gave seemed to come from darkness. I hear my father’s voice: “The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” There cannot be light without darkness. The house in Indianapolis did not have darkness, and neither did the church with its almost-blond pews. In the car, when we drove to church, the streets were too flat and quiet. There was never traffic, nothing jostled up against anything else.
