by Honor Moore
In a letter toward the end of the summer, he confided that he was being considered for a new position in the Diocese of Washington, D.C.—a suffragan, or assistant, bishop who would expand the diocese’s connections with the inner city. “Mommy is gripped,” he wrote. I was “gripped” too. When I got to the Adirondacks after Elko Lake, the talk was of the likelihood that he would be elected. How thrilling it would be! In a Washington swept with the progressive spirit of the New Frontier, my father’s ideas about the church and the city might have national influence. I was now considered “a grownup” and was allowed to join my parents at cocktails. Suddenly my father was listening to me as if I had something to contribute to the work he was doing. How had “race relations” been at the camp that summer? I spoke of the counselors from the South who were white but also in favor of integration. My mother asked questions too, sitting there with her needlepoint, the Penelope rendering of their honeymoon cottage. What courses would I be taking at Radcliffe?
These Adirondacks talks took place in “the Links”—a small room off the dining room named after one of my grandfather’s New York clubs. We called it “the Animal Room” after the taxidermied menagerie left behind a half century earlier by the previous owners—a bear cub whose fur was thinning, a blank-eyed fisher climbing a tree. My grandmother had hung chintz curtains and with the same material covered the cushions on the wicker chairs; on the walls hung stuffed heads of antlered buck shot by my grandfather and the friends with whom he’d originally bought the camp. This was the place where nothing changed, the only place I could still have three meals a day with my parents. Now, though, I also joined in grown-up conversation. I wanted to hear from my father about the March on Washington, about his dreams for his work there, but I wanted him to be my father, too. “So how are things?” he asked one night when my mother left the room to call the children to supper.
“Great, Pop,” I said, standing there looking down at the old backgammon board, twirling the ice in my gin and tonic. “Supper!” I could hear my mother calling. Whenever he asked what seemed to be a personal question, it made me uncomfortable: how could I tell him about being in love with Chris? I was supposed to be excited about going off to college, but actually I was scared, and I didn’t know how to start that conversation.
My discomfort was swept away as we returned to Indianapolis and I started packing for Cambridge, preparing to leave home. My mother asked her brother’s wife Linda to meet my plane and settle me in at Radcliffe. I was used to accommodating: the last of us, my eighth sibling, Patience, was sixteen months old, and my mother had to get the other seven “booted and spurred” for school. As Aunt Linda drove away, I stood on the steps of my dormitory and waved, but when I climbed the stairs back to my room, I felt myself a stranger, my body awkward, my clothes wrong—my mother had gotten a family friend, good at sewing, to help me make them. I was barely aware of my mother’s Boston Brahmin genealogy, the generations of uncles and great-uncles, of grandfathers and great-grandfathers who had gone to Harvard. My direct descent from Louis Agassiz, the husband of Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Radcliffe’s first president, had been treated as a joke at home, so in my own eyes, I was a public school girl from the Midwest, a rube among private school dorm mates who talked about professors as if they knew them or were promoted out of freshman courses with something I’d never heard of called “Advanced Placement.” In my admissions interview, I’d said that my summer in Pakistan had inspired me to consider international relations or the history of the relationship between Christianity and Islam, but really I didn’t know myself well enough to know what I wanted to study. My mother might ask what courses I planned to take as if I knew, and my father was always ready to have a serious conversation about the relationship between an aspect of Christian theology and the ideas of the civil rights movement, but neither of them thought to guide me in my academic plans.
Nor did I think to consult an advisor. I signed up for a survey course called “Epic and Drama,” for anthropology, for Horace and Catullus (I wanted to continue my Latin), and for a biochemistry course that climaxed with Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA. It was in Horace and Catullus that I had the first glimmer of what an intellectual life might bring. Translating a Catullus love poem, the professor, a devastatingly handsome young classicist named Steele Commager, pointed out a passage in which the poet had placed the name of the beloved, “Lesbia,” between the adjective and noun that the poet used for the bedclothes. Thus, as Commager put it, looking out the window to emphasize his profile, the lines replicated, almost sculpted the tryst. It was the first time I entered a poem.
My first Sunday in Cambridge, I went to the eleven o’clock at Christ Church in Harvard Square—after all, church was where I’d always spent Sunday mornings. The pastor there, my father had told me, was “an old friend” and “a good man.” The church was built of wood, painted gray, and dated from the American Revolution, but even before the service began, it was clear the liturgy was Protestant; it was morning prayer, not mass, and there were few candles, no incense, no colored vestments, none of the Anglo-Catholic elegance I was used to. I wouldn’t have said it then, but I missed my father: church was how I felt close to him, the place where he was present and constant. I shook the rector’s hand and introduced myself as I left the service, and one evening the following week, I went to a Harvard-Radcliffe supper in the parish hall. But I didn’t go to church a second Sunday. On September 17 a telegram arrived from my mother: “Poppy elected.” We would be moving to Washington.
My parents were wildly excited. Many of their old friends were in the Kennedy administration. My father had gone to outing class (day camp) on the North Shore with “Mac” Bundy, the national security advisor, and my mother to Madeira with his wife, Mary. Their old friend Cord Meyer was in the CIA, and Ben Bradlee, who was married to Mrs. Meyer’s sister, Toni, was in Washington at Newsweek. When they went to Washington on their first house-hunting trip in October, a friend of Cord’s on the White House staff arranged for them to see the president. As young men, my father and Kennedy had known each other in Florida, and Kennedy had also been a close friend of George Mead, my father’s friend who had been killed at Guadalcanal. My mother wore a sapphire blue suede dress, and when they shook hands, the president complimented her, “You’re terrific,” he said, with a broad grin. After a few minutes reminiscing and chatting in the Oval Office, they walked outside to the Rose Garden and stood in the sunshine, “Where are the children?” Kennedy asked, laughing. “We’ll bring them the next time,” my father said.
The last time I went to church in Cambridge was on November 22, 1963. I had been in a biology lab when the professor came into the room and announced that the president had been shot. I raced up Garden Street to the dorm, then after supper went out alone. The streets were dark. People of all ages were either standing still and crying or walking fast and silent. There were hardly any cars. I did what I knew how to do, I went to church. In Jersey City, even in Indianapolis, the church would have been filled. My father would have improvised a vigil or a service, but this barren eighteenth-century structure, though open, was dark and practically empty. I knelt down. The message of Kennedy’s inaugural address—“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”—had resonated through my adventures in Pakistan where I’d thought of myself as sort of Peace Corps volunteer in training. In letters home, I had described the exotic architecture but also the one-party political system that masqueraded as democracy and the vast numbers of beggars. I had met Peace Corps volunteers there—a woman who worked in a mental hospital where patients were kept in cages with dirt floors, like animals in a zoo. I wrote home in horror about the former professor she’d found sleeping naked on straw—through her efforts, he now had a desk and a lamp and a bed and books, pencil and paper; soon, recovered from the long, mistaken incarceration, he would emerge into society. I wrote too of the tall ex-marine who was building a school
in a remote village. What would happen to him now that Kennedy had been killed?
On Sunday morning, in our nightgowns at the dormitory television, my friends and I watched as Jack Ruby lunged forward with a gun and shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Later that week, my mother flew, as planned, to Washington with my sister Adelia, her third trip to look at houses. In the airport, they saw U Thant, the secretary-general of the UN, and Adlai Stevenson, leaving Washington after the funeral, and on the way in from the airport, they passed Arlington Cemetery. “It was dark,” my mother wrote me, “so all you could see was a flickering flame on the hillside with the Lee mansion all illuminated behind it.” Early the next morning, they made a special visit to Kennedy’s grave. “It was covered with wreaths and flowers with cards from all the royalty & heads of state,” my mother wrote, “and Mrs. Kennedy’s little bunch of lily-of-the-valley was right next to the flame. Pictures don’t do the site justice . . . a beautiful windswept hillside.”
My father’s letters did not take up the assassination except to say that the time was “rugged” and that he’d been sick in bed. After a meeting of a national church committee, he’d stayed over at a retreat house in New York, to meditate on what lay ahead. “It is wonderful to be ALONE and quiet for two whole days,” he wrote me,
to snooze, read, think, & or pray when you feel like it. You feel like a snake shedding skin after skin of worries, nuisances, obsessions and distractions. And it makes it possible to at least be open to Our Lord—to sort of clean your glasses so you can see Him once more. I hope you go on a Retreat sometime if you have a chance: the first time is a little fidgety but after a while it seems so natural as if you could live no other way.
I think it has helped me put Washington in perspective too. The Bishop business presents itself in so many ways: even being a Suffragan (and thank God I am to be that) has a certain glamour to it, and this hides what it really means. And being in Washington is exciting, and this hides what it really means, and having a position of more superficial influence hides what it really means.
Here on the Retreat though I think it has come through clear and simple and is no different than being a Christian basically except the stakes are higher because more people will be dragged up or down because of one. But what it is is loving, loving, loving with all your might—everyone you can—and returning again and again to God’s love to go out & love some more. And to somehow work it out so the Church is streamlined to show God’s love which is so simple & yet so terribly exciting.
As I read that letter now, coming upon it as if for the first time, I think of my father, then forty-four, entering this new stage of his ministry and actually being nervous. “I always marveled at your father,” a powerful friend of his once said to me. “He was so . . . modest.” When I was eighteen, I wouldn’t have found that description of him as startling as I did three years after his death when I had the conversation with his friend. From childhood, I can remember a modest man, a father who spoke to his seventeen-year-old daughter as someone he could rely on: “. . . I will need all of your help from time to time. Please pray for me about this when you think of it.”
I wonder if I did pray for him—I was excited for him, and I missed being part of everything at home, but my loneliness and prayers had to do with Chris Fleming, who was at college out West. In the photograph of me in the Freshman Register, a kind of catalogue of new Radcliffe girls distributed at Harvard, I look pretty enough, but at the time I had no confidence in my ability to find a new boyfriend, and so my love life was waiting for Chris’s letters, which came, and which I answered, waiting for the next one in his fascinating, awkward handwriting: “Oh Honor, I have so much to say, yet how can I? Keep writing and we’ll get around to talking one day,” he wrote. Or “I feel sad and resigned somehow, but happy.” Eventually I had a sequence of blind dates, and sometime in December, when I began to work in the theater, at the Loeb Drama Center, Harvard’s theater on Brattle Street, Chris faded as I met the boys who acted in King Lear and Julius Caesar and the epic Oresteia we put on at Sanders Theatre.
After freshman year, but before exams, at a cast party, I met Ben Sachs, an upperclassman whom I had never seen in the hallways of the theater and whose name I had never heard. He appeared so suddenly and was so attentive I could hardly believe he really existed. I was wearing a black dress I had just bought, piqué with a deep ruffled V down its back. After we talked for a while, Ben asked if I’d like to leave, and he took me to his sports car. This is a dream or a movie, I thought, as he drove me into the country and stopped at the edge of a vast park where we lay down on a lawn and necked. After that night, we began to go out, and one Sunday in his narrow college bed, as I looked at his face above me, my desire turned to terror as he fell toward me. “Don’t come home pregnant,” my mother had warned before I left for college. That evening, walking up Boylston Street toward Radcliffe, I told Ben that if he could tell me I was special to him, we could “go all the way.” A month later, my second summer at Elko Lake, he appeared unannounced in his Alfa Romeo to tell me I was special, but I barely spoke to him. Like a mating bird that returns each year to the same body of water, I had taken up with the boy who succeeded Chris in the cabin by the lake.
Rick Warner drank beer, in contrast to Chris’s jug wine. And he was not interested in conversation. Instead, with his buddy Ted, also blond and slightly kinder, and Maria, whom Ted was dating, we spent evenings in the cabin, lights out, Chris’s bohemian austerity replaced by college pennants. Rick was pushing me to “give it to him,” and when he was on top of me or wound around me, I wanted to. But, my bold declaration to Ben aside, I didn’t believe it was possible to “go all the way” without getting pregnant, this in spite of my mother’s detailed descriptions of how her diaphragm worked. And anyway, what would this mysterious thing called “going all the way” feel like? I wanted Rick to break through my resistance, but whispering “Not now,” I’d push him away, hoping he’d ask why and help me figure it all out.
Chris’s sister, a counselor that summer, had told me Chris was now “serious” about a girl he’d met at college, but I asked nothing about her when he came for a visit and we took a canoe out on the lake at dusk. He was shocked I’d spend time with Rick, who talked only about cars and who ridiculed the Negro children at the camp. I was ashamed. I couldn’t, of course, tell him that I liked what Rick did, putting his fingers inside me, lying on top of me. Later that night I saw Randolph and Chris walk across the camp’s great lawn after supper, and after breakfast the next morning I saw Chris deep in conversation with Maria in the driveway. Before he left, though, he said I should visit him at his family’s house in Connecticut at the end of the summer. That day at lunch, Rick didn’t speak to me. At first I thought he was preoccupied, but he wouldn’t even look at me, and when I took my girls to the lake to swim, I saw him give Debbie, another counselor, a little spank on her bikinied buttocks. Debbie, Ted told Maria, had given Rick what I would not.
By the end of the summer, the war in Vietnam had entered a new phase. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution had passed in early August, and for the first time, the United States was bombing North Vietnam. When I visited Chris in Connecticut on my way back home, we resumed our long conversations on the town beach, smoking Marlboros, Chris tossing pebbles into the desultory surf of the Long Island Sound. Now he was concerned about the draft, and the war was what we talked about, not his girl out West, or my continuing feeling for him. The last time I saw him was in New York in 1970. I was organizing Black Panther defense, and we had a drink. In Chris’s life, radical politics had replaced hashish and James Baldwin, and now he was far more militant than I was. Two years later, I ran into a girl I’d known in college; she’d had an affair with Chris Fleming. He’d live with her for a while, then disappear. She thought he was building bombs.
The year I was finishing Radcliffe, out of the blue, I got a letter from Rick Warner. He had seen an article in the newspaper recou
nting my father’s civil rights work. Now he understood why I had led him on but refused to “put out.” I thought I was better than him because my father consorted with “niggers.” He was glad we had never gone all the way.
12
In Public
* * *
After we left Jersey City, my father began to write. Of course he always wrote sermons, which he saved, folders and folders precisely dated, beginning with his first, written for preaching class at the seminary, but the earliest image I have of him writing a book is in the Adirondacks, in the Links, which had windows overlooking the lake and another set giving onto the boardwalk. He would be sitting at the game table, from which he had removed the old backgammon set, his tiny Olympia portable in front of him. We were not to interrupt. He wrote after breakfast for two hours or so. We had to wait till he was finished to be taken, one or two of us, fishing, rowing, or climbing a mountain to stand vertiginously on the granite summit as he pointed out, depending on how clear it was, Blue Mountain or Mount Marcy, Tupper or Cranberry Lake, or where the Whitney Camp was. And waiting, we would tiptoe past the screen door, his blurred figure bent over, no sound but his intermittent pecking at the typewriter.
