The Bishop's Daughter

by Honor Moore

  Sometime in July, he went to a service at St. Stephen’s, and in his sermon Bill Wendt preached from a New Testament story in which the disciples fish all day but come back with nothing. “Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets,” Christ encouraged. In spite of himself, my father took the story as a sign. He spoke to my mother, and within twenty-four hours was on a plane to Jackson, Mississippi, to join an ecumenical group of clergy working on voter registration. During the two weeks he was there, bedding down with other clergymen on a cement floor, he went from door to door asking people to register to vote. The atmosphere, he told us when he came home, was like war. He performed communion outside the bombed-out Freedom House in McComb, its front wall torn off, the altar an ironing board; he preached on the spur of the moment at a tiny Baptist church way out in the countryside “to people who were really preaching to me.” The wine was grape juice served in plastic cups, and the host was just bread, but it was one of the great Eucharists of my father’s life, a transforming experience—a tall white man rising to preach to a congregation, all but a few of them black, swaying awkwardly during the singing of spirituals, music that was unnatural to him but which he loved, which made him feel connected to these worshipers for whom the church was a real source of strength. The ironing board as altar in front of the bombed-out house was an easy transformation, perhaps bringing to mind the mass at Guadalcanal, the white sheet draped across a simple table in the jungle clearing; but to replace wine from a silver chalice with grape juice in an individual “plastic cup or something of that kind” was quite alien: how far was a silver chalice from family silver, communion wine from a good vintage at his father’s club? And so, to understand what happened to my father in Mississippi in 1964, I think of him receiving grape juice from a plastic cup and, in that moment, surprised, humbled to find the sacrament there.

  All kinds of barriers were coming down. He told us about a white man, “Red” Hefner, a native Mississippian and an Episcopalian, whose oldest daughter had been Miss Mississippi. When he tried to organize conversations between the whites at his church and Negroes he had come to know through selling them insurance, the family was ostracized, and he was fired from his job. When my father went to visit the Hefners, he had to do it at night, changing cars in the dark to avoid detection by the Klan. After their first drink in the basement family room, Klansmen circling the house, Mr. Hefner apologized for the dangerous circumstances. “I can’t get any of my friends to come to meet you, so I’ve asked the FBI!”—and so the party for the visiting bishop was the Hefners, their younger daughter Carla, and the FBI men who had been assigned to protect them. This was as much of the story as I knew until the summer of 2005, when I visited Carla Hefner, now living in Sussex in a great country house and married to a British M.P. Later that summer, she told me, the Klan firebombed their house, and the family moved to Jackson, but even the high school there was too dangerous, and so my father arranged for her to attend the National Cathedral School, and eventually her parents moved to Washington, going to work for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. “What did my father mean to you?” I asked Carla, touring her gardens forty years later. “He saved our lives.”

  After Mississippi, my father flew into Newark on his way to meet my mother and the younger children at Hollow Hill, and when he arrived at the airport the newspapers were full of the riot that had torn through Jersey City the night before. He called Grace Church, and Father Luce, the rector, asked that he and my mother come right over. That night my mother took charge at the rectory she’d left seven years before, and my father and Father Luce walked toward the neighborhood near the hospital where the riot had taken place the night before, the provocation, police beating a black mother. As the sun set and a crowd began to gather, my father heard a voice out of the darkness, “Hey, Father Moore, how you doin’?” Before long he was in the midst of young men he’d coached in baseball as kids during the days at Grace Church. What began as a joyous reunion soon changed: police cars began to circle, and soon a Coke bottle was thrown, and then another, and then “police repeatedly charged the crowd, waving their night sticks, needlessly harassing innocent bystanders, and firing their pistols, all while the mayor disregarded a highly responsible delegation of young people, clergy of all faiths, and civil rights leaders, who had sought to be mediators early on.”

  My father was now commuting once a month to Mississippi where the National Council of Churches was continuing the work started by the Mississippi summer, an effort called the Delta Ministry, of which he was chair. I was back in Cambridge for my sophomore year, and though I had decided to major in English, my passion was the theater. By December, I was stage-managing Utopia Limited, an obscure Gilbert and Sullivan operetta about a sort of Victorian-era Peace Corps. The director, who seemed already professional to me, was just a class ahead. Timothy S. Mayer had a lean, handsome face, dark, usually dirty hair that fell to his face and that he pushed back as a nervous tic, and dark-framed glasses that were never quite level on his nose. Until he stood up, you didn’t notice his hunchback, an enlargement of his right shoulder, and you quickly forgot it, so caught up were you in his fantastically sophisticated, showbiz way of speaking. He had learned to direct at a semiprofessional Gilbert and Sullivan summer theater on Cape Cod, taking on full productions by the age of sixteen, and he had no trouble maneuvering chorus lines or encouraging a tall sophomore actor, my classmate John Lithgow, to sing despite the fact that he didn’t have what any of us considered a singing voice.

  Before I entered the room for the meeting, I’d fallen in love with Luke’s smile, which I’d seen through a crack in the half-open door on my way up the stairs. “Hi, baby,” Tim said, “this is Marston,” and the tall smiling man shook my hand. “I’m Luke Marston.” It was the spring of my sophomore year, and Tim, deploying inordinate charm, swoops of rhetoric, and a Machiavellian talent for barter, had persuaded the Harvard Gilbert and Sullivan Players to break from their eponymous repertory and allow him to direct The Threepenny Opera. Luke was the producer, I was the assistant director, and Tim managed to get a married Radcliffe junior he’d seen in an Adams House one-act and who lived on Beacon Hill to audition for the role of Jenny. She arrived wearing black, and in a rehearsal room at the Loeb, bare except for a grand piano, Luke and Tim and I watched, David Schloss at the piano, as she took possession of the role. When the show opened in May, Susan Stockard, whom Tim delighted in calling by her married name, Mrs. Channing, took Cambridge by storm.

  As I established myself at Harvard, my father’s life was becoming more public. In January, the SCLC had taken its voter registration campaign to Selma, Alabama. By March, continuing mass arrests at the Selma courthouse prompted Martin Luther King Jr. to put out a call for a march from Selma, fifty-four miles to Montgomery, the state capital. On Sunday, March 7, 1965, as marchers attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the route out of Selma, they met a wall of state police and sheriff’s deputies, who beat them back with nightsticks and tear gas. On March 9, defying a federal restraining order, King led another march across the bridge, but turned back when troops again blocked the way; that night, James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston, was beaten to death as he left a restaurant in Selma. Now King put out a call to the movement at large to come support the marchers.

  Kim Myers was already in Selma, and of course my father wanted to join him, but as supporters responded to King’s call and the threat of violence escalated, it was clear that a presence in Washington was crucial. It became the task of the organization my father led with Walter Fauntroy, the Coalition of Conscience, to convince President Johnson to send federal troops to Selma to protect the marchers—as they pressured the White House for a meeting, the coalition organized a demonstration across from the White House in Lafayette Square, setting up microphones and signs and banners on the portico of St. John’s Episcopal Church, whose conservative vestry had somehow been persuaded to allow the church to be used a
s protest headquarters. It was the first week of Lent, and, by coincidence, my father was scheduled to preach each afternoon at St. John’s. The worshipers expected a simple Lenten meditation from their new bishop; instead demonstrators crowded the pews, and my father did his best, first preaching to the St. John’s devout and later engaging the eager, tumultuous crowd in a strategy session. President Johnson had not offered a meeting, and so the demonstrations continued, the crowd growing all week, as my father and Fauntroy and their steering committee debated: Should they continue with speakers and rallies? Or do something more militant and radical—“like lying down in front of the White House”?

  Since James Reeb’s murder, Selma had become the epicenter of the struggle, and from all over the country, buses filled with demonstrators and clergy, some of whom had never participated in a civil rights action, rolled toward Alabama for the march that was sure to occur. President Johnson, under pressure from both Northern and Southern supporters, continued to hold back from federalizing the National Guard or sending troops, and the coalition continued to insist on a meeting. My mother wrote me of the excitement: “The week of negotiations with HHH & LBJ were incredible with HHH’s office calling at 8 am & then [Assistant Attorney General] Nick Katzenbach on the phone & all sorts of local leaders.” On Friday, March 12, she and my sister Adelia, then fifteen, sent me a telegram: TRY TO COME DOWN SUNDAY BIG RALLY ABOUT SELMA MISS YOU CALL US SATURDAY AT 7 LOVE. Sunday was the day fifteen thousand gathered in Lafayette Square in support of the march, and my father was asked to speak. He followed Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi voting rights activist, whose speech, he said later, was the greatest sermon he’d ever heard. My father had written a “carefully reasoned Anglican counter-attack” to the president’s rationale, but as he mounted the podium, he threw aside his notes “and just took off.” Standing on the podium, posters in the air, the White House behind him, he spoke: “The bodies of white men may be at liberty, but to the extent of their prejudice their souls are in chains. The bodies of Negro Americans are in chains, but those who are in the movement are the freest men in the world, for their souls are free.”

  Busy with The Threepenny Opera, I did not fly to Washington, but my mother wrote me to buy Newsweek. My father had been photographed, as “a leader of the new breed” of clergyman, for the cover. The story, written by his old friend Ben Bradlee, was a report on what the magazine christened “the Church Militant.”

  The day after that Sunday demonstration, President Johnson finally agreed to see a dozen leaders of the Lafayette Square demonstrations, including my father. The meeting was in the Cabinet Room, and my father was seated right across from the president. First Johnson invited those present to say a few words; in the fifteen minutes allotted, each speaking a minute or so, the group laid out an argument for federal troops. “Poppy has notes of their meeting with LBJ,” my mother wrote, “the latter talked 70 minutes without stopping!” The president told them about his youth as a poor student, his work teaching destitute Mexicans, his courtship of Lady Bird. Bill Moyers, then the president’s young press secretary, was dispatched to find the appropriate citation from Isaiah—“Come now, let us reason together . . .” My father lost the notes he took that day, but he always remembered one “Johnsonism”: “You know how a mule arches up his back during a thunderstorm, when the hail comes down, and all he does is stand there? That’s the way I feel when I get the kind of pressure you’re putting on me today.”

  In my Radcliffe dormitory that night, on television, I watched as the president addressed a joint session of Congress, calling for a Voting Rights Act: “This great rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all—black and white, North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are our enemies and not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too—poverty, disease and ignorance—we shall overcome.” A transcript of the speech quotes Johnson as saying “We shall overcome” only twice, but I remember him repeating it as a refrain. We shall overcome: none of us could believe he’d used those words. “Wasn’t Johnson’s speech GREAT?” my mother wrote. Within days the Alabama federal judge lifted the restraining order and enjoined state and local authorities from interfering with the march. On March 21, King led three thousand across the Pettus Bridge under federal military protection, and on the twenty-fifth, a rally of twenty-five thousand welcomed the marchers to Montgomery. Newsweek, dated March 29, came out on Monday, the twenty-second, but because the Russians had walked in space, the photograph of my father was bumped from the cover. “Mr. Bradlee gave us the proof & you’ll flip!” my mother wrote.

  In Cambridge, I was now officially Luke Marston’s girlfriend, and The Threepenny Opera was a hit. Every night after the show, Tim jammed Luke and me and often a few others into the red leather interior of his white convertible and drove us out Storrow Drive to Ken’s of Copley Square, a Las Vegas-like establishment across from Trinity Church where we smoked and drank into the night. There Tim held court, accosting young waitresses with appalling sex talk while conceiving brilliant, fabulous productions of Brecht or Shakespeare as if he were Peter Brook, whose Marat/Sade we had all flown to New York to see, or fabulating, as if he were Orson Welles, how he would next cast “Mrs. Channing,” or, as if he were Irving Thalberg, how he would get Donnie Graham to improve the Crimson reviewing staff. After speeding home across the Harvard Bridge and down Memorial Drive, Luke and I nervous that Tim was too drunk to get us home safely, we’d arrive at the entrance of my dormitory, hours past curfew, Tim still not content to cease his endless flow of commentary: “Do you know, Marston, your girl is socially prominent”—or when I bought a yellow plaid coat with a dropped waistline—“You know Marston? Your girl is low-slung.”

  13

  Eager

  * * *

  Rain. The river outside the window. The small elevator. The apartment: Kitchenette. Bedroom. Double bed. The summer after my sophomore year at Radcliffe, just eight blocks from where I now live. There was desire, the forbidden dark, the tearing off of clothes, my clothes. We were committing a crime, or at least a sin. Both of us thought of it that way.

  But I wouldn’t call it sex, what Luke and I did: nineteen, scared, my fingers slippery with spermicidal gel, sitting on the edge of the bed, my back to him. In spite of my impatience and with Luke’s awkward encouragement, I squeeze the rubbery circle, aim, get the thing in, properly I hope.

  The gynecologist at the Harvard Health Services, a doctor known as lenient with birth control, had turned me down: “I don’t think premarital sex coincides with your worldview,” he said, hands folded on his desk. I knew what a worldview was from reading The Elizabethan World Picture by E.M.W. Tillyard for Herschel Baker’s course in the poetry of the English Renaissance. I left Holyoke Center in tears, and when I told him, Luke cursed. I couldn’t ask my mother for help; solving this was up to me. I walked the Cambridge streets. If I couldn’t manage this, I’d lose Luke. He had a summer movie job in New York, I was going to take art courses, and we were going to make love. My cousin’s wife lived in New York City, and knew someone there. Fifth Avenue is the street I remember crossing. This doctor asked no questions, gave no instructions, just handed me a prescription for a diaphragm, which I quickly filled. I associated the thing with my mother’s bathroom, the half-squeezed tubes that weren’t toothpaste, the faintly medicinal smell, her body losing its youth, my father on top of her when I caught them once in the Adirondacks, bursting into their cabin uninvited: “Poppy and I are cuddling.”

  Luke reached for me. We left the lights on, or it was still light, or this happened on a weekend morning. We’d planned ahead. What I remember is that we somehow missed the connection. Our first time had the mechanical logic that my mother had described to me that time with one of my infant siblings on her lap—penetration, the eager swimming sperm, nothing about pleasure. What had happened to how I’d felt with Rick War
ner? Where was the mystery in this thing I had so longed for, holding back in high school cars while necking and French-kissing? Intercourse is what my mother called it, and those first times it seemed just what that utilitarian word made it sound like. A railroad crossing dependent on correct signals. The name of a small town in Pennsylvania, as the joke went.

  The movie job fell through and Luke was working at Bankers Trust—I’d called my grandmother in tears, a position had been arranged. Luke took the job and bought a new suit, but he resented that he’d let me rescue him. We’d have breakfast at Zum Zum in the Pan Am Building (later the MetLife Building), then he’d go to work and I’d take the subway uptown to the apartment on East Seventy-second Street where I told my parents I was living, which I shared with two Radcliffe friends. Three times a week I’d go downtown to NYU for courses in life drawing and graphic design, and every day at suppertime I’d meet Luke for the evening. “You sound happy & well,” my father wrote at the end of July, “& I envy you the summer in N.Y. with Luke. Mommy & I had a great time there when we dated, doing silly things & going to offbeat places.”

  That’s what made it less criminal: Luke and I would get married as my parents had. I couldn’t see me and Chris, or me and Rick Warner, or me and Ben Sachs in a wedding picture, but I could kind of see Luke in a dinner jacket and me in a bride’s dress, holding hands, beaming at the cameras. I remember slowly spinning on a barstool at Sparks Steakhouse, as I heard the door open. I was wearing my backless black dress, Luke his new summer suit; we drank Johnnie Walker Red at the bar and then had steak in a candlelit booth. We went to the first Philharmonic concert in Central Park, Mayor John Lindsay’s maiden effort to open the park to the city; and for a special night out Luke took me to “21,” where I ate smoked salmon for the first time, the lemon tied with cheesecloth so the juice got through without seeds. We went to Lincoln Center for a John Cage concert, the sound produced by Merce Cunningham dancers whirling past electronically sensitized posts, and alone I went to a Giacometti exhibition, my first at the Museum of Modern Art. My drawing teacher, an Abstract Expressionist painter, had explained how the emaciated figures distorted physical proportion but intensified a sense of human presence, how the spherical, whirling pencil lines that surrounded the figure in Giacometti’s portrait drawings gave the likenesses a third dimension.