The Bishop's Daughter

by Honor Moore

  Weekend mornings when we hadn’t left the city to visit Luke’s parents in Katonah, New York, or his aunt at her beach house in Westhampton, Long Island, or my Uncle Bill and Aunt Mouse on the ocean in Old Lyme, Connecticut, Luke read poems to me, E. E. Cummings and Wallace Stevens, as we sat on the window seat that overlooked the Hudson. One or two nights a week, I think I cooked, and one Saturday we had lunch with Luke’s uncle, his father’s identical twin, glamorous, mysterious, divorced, who was courting a model from Hong Kong. On his way to Greenville, Mississippi, my father wrote me: “I imagine you are thinking about next year & how it will be in Cambridge without L.” Luke had graduated, and I would be a junior; I’d commute to New York most weekends, I thought, and though Luke was fatalistically preoccupied with the draft, I brushed off my father’s concern that given the “South Vietnam bit,” he might be called up. Luke’s friend George Trow, with whom I’d madly fox-trotted at the Spee Club Dance, had joined the Coast Guard to avoid combat; others of Luke’s graduating friends were enlisting in officers’ training to “get it over with.” In March, President Johnson had sent 3,500 marines to China Beach to defend the American air base at Da Nang; by June, there were 23,000 American troops in Vietnam; by the end of the year, there would be 184,000, most of them draftees.

  At the end of the summer, Luke and I drove to the Adirondacks. A boyfriend with me, I finally felt like a grownup, though it went without saying that Luke and I slept in separate cabins. We had cocktails with my parents, and, after the kids were asleep, played bridge, my mother making laconic flirtatious remarks, my father acting paternal toward the young man who might one day be his son-in-law. We all talked about the aftermath of Selma, and about Los Angeles—what the civil rights movement had worked so hard to prevent had happened in Watts, Negroes and police rioting for six days, killing thirty-four, streets in charred ruins. And Luke asked my father about the Marine Corps. My father was not yet against the war, in conversation still putting forward a belief that Vietnam had some equivalence to the war he’d fought.

  In September, I returned to Cambridge and Luke to New York, where he continued at the bank by day and, at night, ran lights for Hogan’s Goat, a hit off-Broadway play by William Alfred, a professor we’d both had at Harvard. But in November, believing it was a responsibility, Luke enlisted in the Marines—he wanted, as my father had said of himself, “to be in the thick of it.” The one weekend I visited him in New York, I sat in the front window on a Sunday morning, pretending to read Wallace Stevens, trying to look beautiful as I gazed out the window. The atmosphere was tense, and we were no longer making love. “Complacencies of the peignoir . . .” Yes, I was reading “Sunday Morning” and wearing a silky negligee of a shimmery print of pale blue flowers. A few weeks later, on Thanksgiving, I arrived home in Washington to find a letter from Luke, breaking up with me. The following week he returned what I’d left in his apartment in a brown paper bag—the negligee and my diaphragm in its leatherette case. The friend he’d designated courier found me at the Loeb, in the dark, watching a rehearsal.

  To keep my life free for Luke and weekends in New York, I’d refused when Tim, wishing to get out of directing The Mikado that fall, asked me to replace him. Now my life was a blank, and the only news of Luke, who would soon leave for basic training at Camp Lejeune, came in chagrined snippets from his friends. In my shock, I associated the breakup not with the war but with my own certain defects; something was surely wrong with me, some unknowable, hellish, female flaw. I carried shame for weeks. “I am really sorry for the way I acted earlier today,” I wrote my father after Christmas vacation.

  All of a sudden I began thinking how much I would love to spend New Year’s Eve with Luke—and in New York and it all came back again and when I started thinking about that, I got ashamed of how I was acting period and mad and so I left the room. I guess that you have to learn some time to stop acting like a child—but it’s really hard—and it’s becoming harder to control myself period because I think about Luke so much of the time and really feel like crying all that time. But I know that I can’t at twenty go on being fourteen or twelve or four forever, but sometimes I just can’t not think of myself and instead of not crying I do cry sometimes—and it goes on but I am sorry—and I’m glad that you and Mom are there and will never stop loving me.

  It was then that my father told me the story of choosing Seattle, of how cruel he’d been to my mother. But I was not comforted. My father was a great hero, and he and my mother were happy and good; they hadn’t committed the crime of sex before marriage. I had thought some magic would render me engaged to Luke by now, freed of any obligation to pursue my own life, that I would be as safe as I thought my parents were, waiting for him to get out of the Marines, for the war to be over, for life to return to normal, but the war was only just beginning, the first wave of soldiers dead, the first reports of massive Vietnamese civilian casualties. I knew Luke was still in basic training, but I heard nothing until one day in the spring when a letter arrived. Just as my parents had twenty-two years earlier, Luke and I reconciled in letters. He wrote of the horrors of basic training, cartoons of yellow faces with slanted eyes pasted above his locker, to be called “geeks.” I did not then know that my father had received equivalent instruction; he had taught us “From the Halls of Montezuma” and I sang it in the same spirit as “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Geeks. Was this my father’s Marine Corps? “We had a fine letter from Luke,” my father wrote me late that spring. “Rough for him to sort out good motivation destroyed by horrid realities. I feel for him. It was so much easier for us in WW II—motivation-wise. But I look back with horror on my simplistic reactions & admire guys like Luke who see things more clearly.”

  As the weeks passed, Luke’s leave and our reunion grew closer. Tim had decided to mount a renegade summer season at Agassiz, a small theater at Radcliffe, to rival what we considered the boring summer fare across the street at the Loeb Drama Center. I was planning a summer in Europe, but I agreed to be the producer until I left in mid-July, raising money from alumni and parents, recruiting techs and costumers, composers and musicians. We opened with Joan Littlewood’s antiwar musical Oh! What a Lovely War, which Tim directed. My mother brought her uncle, who had fought at Verdun, to the opening, and he wept at the old World War I songs; we played to packed houses and great reviews, even in the Boston papers. The second production, The Bacchae by Euripides, was to be directed by Thom Babe, a Harvard graduate legendary among us; days after he returned in April from two years’ study in Cambridge, England, Tim met with him. “I had dinner with Babe,” he said. “He wants to work with us.” Thom was said to be a “great” actor, he wrote poems, and he had written a play called A Pageant of Awkward Shadows. He had a bony, ruddy face and big hazel eyes and a head that seemed outsized for his narrow body. Whenever he spoke to you, he seemed to be entrusting a confidence. I was immediately infatuated, but I had no doubt that as soon as Luke came home in his marine uniform, he would sweep me off my feet, just as my father had my mother.

  He met me at the house on the beach in Manchester, Massachusetts, which my parents had rented for the month of July. He was not wearing a uniform but khakis and a white shirt, and he was very tan, his blond hair shorn to a crew cut. We walked on the beach. It was a moonlit night, we lay on the sand, he kissed me, he touched me, he said over and over again how he’d missed me. I felt nothing but the strangeness of his newly muscular body, and his smile now looked too bright, Thom Babe’s face intervening. Someone should have told Luke and me to have dinner first, to sit across from each other and just talk. When I did not kiss back a second time, he abruptly stood, pulling me up from the sand, and we walked to his dark green car. He had a pet name for me, and that is what he used, romantic, still, unsmiling now, standing there. This was not what I had wanted. I needed time to look at him again, to reassemble the parts of his face that I had seen only in imagination for nearly a year. I wanted to forgive his abrupt rej
ection, the return of the baby blue peignoir and the diaphragm in the brown paper bag. I was crying, trying to kiss him, but he pushed me away, not roughly, but not warmly either. He was supposed to spend the night, I said. My mother was expecting him for breakfast. No. And he got in the car, shut the door, and drove off.

  The next morning, a photographer came to take family pictures, all nine of us, one after the other—me the oldest, almost twenty-one, Patience, the youngest, just four, blond and smiley. Except for Paul and Adelia, I didn’t really know my brothers and sisters. The little girls were flitting presences—when I’d make a face in the mirror to put on my lipstick, I’d hear Rosie and Marian giggle behind me and turn to see them imitating me. “The children loved ogling their big sister,” my mother once wrote. For the sitting, I carefully combed my shoulder-length hair and put on my favorite bright orange turtleneck. The photographs are black-and-white. In the series, which my mother had mounted on eight-by-ten blocks, and which became iconic portraits of the nine of us for the next decade, every one of us but me and perhaps Paul, who was about to start Yale, looks carefree. I’m not smiling. I’m looking at the camera, and, if I didn’t know I’d been trying to hide the fact that I’d cried all night and barely slept, that I’d taken a decisive step I had not intended, at least not consciously, I would describe the look on my face as questioning. The trip to Europe would remove my questions and awkwardness, wipe away the last traces of heartbreak. I didn’t understand what was in store, that Europe’s revelation would be of sensibility—how I looked at things, how I tasted food, how I listened.

  In Paris, I had a fourth-floor room under the eaves of a small hotel on rue Monsieur le Prince, pigeons darting at the rooftops, potted geraniums at windows. If I craned to look out, I could see a Vietnamese restaurant across the street. Even though I’d been to Paris with my parents when I was fourteen, this seemed all new. The croissants and café au lait at breakfast, the water running clear in the cobblestone gutters, hearing French on the street. “I miss the HDC Summer Players,” I wrote my father, “but I feel absolutely free. I can do whatever I want.” In each place, I spent time with friends, but I was traveling alone. I had a Eurail pass, and after Paris I went to London, then to a cabin in the Alps near Berne where Elly, the Dutch exchange student who had lived with us in Indianapolis, was on vacation with her family. In Florence, I had the phone number of Pam Morton’s mother, who ran a finishing school there. In Rome, I’d see a friend of Tim’s who was teaching there, and finally, I’d have a few days in Geneva—the visit with Nona Clark. “I have been twice to the Jeu de Paume now & absolutely am feeling quite ecstatic about the Degas, Manets, and Cézannes there—not to mention the divine Monet room! Tonight I am going to Tartuffe at the Hotel Sully,” I wrote. “Sunday I’m going to the opera to see Tosca and at some point to an Ionesco thing and a Camus thing. I find that although I can speak only a bare minimum of French, I can understand quite a lot . . .” It was Italy that undid me. I remember days in the Uffizzi and the Bargello, the first time I saw a Botticelli and then the flatness of Uccello, which I gazed at mystified, and my disappointment when the drastic edginess of the quattrocento gave way to what I considered the decadent sweetness of Raphael. About Donatello, I wrote Grandma Kean, my mother’s mother Margarett, who had studied in Florence as a girl, and had been a painter long ago. I spent dark afternoons reading in my room at the Florence pensione, Thomas Pynchon (“a crazy book called V”), and Ford Madox Ford (The Good Soldier): I’d found a bookstore where I could trade in paperbacks. “Read Lady Chatterley,” I wrote my father, “and cried for hours. So candid.—I’ve also read The Rainbow and Women in Love this summer and this is so much less ponderous . . .”

  In Cambridge, my aesthetic experience had come through others, chiefly Tim and Thom. They had the courage to do what I was scared of; they took Robert Lowell’s poetry workshop, sat up nights drinking with William Alfred, whose lectures on Beowulf and Joyce had thrilled me as a freshman. I had been locked out of their secret interior, but now I was entering one of my own. I didn’t care what anyone else thought, and, it seemed, I could withstand any fear, the catcalls of Italian men, loneliness on the bus trip I took to Siena, because I would be rewarded: the spectacle of the Colosseum where I could kick a stone that had been there since the gladiators, the Piccolomini Library in Siena where my eye sank through color into the Pinturrichio frescoes, or San Marco in Florence, a monastery where each cell had an ancient fresco, an Annunciation, a Crucifixion. “It’s all been so wonderful,” I wrote my father, “so much exactly what I wanted it to be. A going out into the cold strange world—having time to think and read and be alone—it’s been much happier than I thought it would be—very restful—and exhausting at the same time.”

  I was truly alone—no easy picking up of strangers for me. My friend Ann had been followed by an Austrian painter in Paris who would not rest until she agreed to sit for him, but I froze with terror when I missed Milan and ended up waiting for a mail train back in a tiny station in Reggio Emilia. Sitting on the lone wooden bench alternately reading Robert Lowell and writing a letter to my mother, I concentrated to avoid my panic. “On my right is an ancient Italian woman, who should be saying her rosary, but who is instead muttering things I don’t understand under her breath . . .” Eventually a hovering soldier, tall and in uniform, who looked like Gregory Peck but Italian and my age, approached me. He could not speak English, but he understood my predicament, and waited with me, lifting my suitcases on board when the train came. When I finished the letter home the next day, I made the story a comedy:

  He told me I was a ‘bella signorina’ & I clutched again—but some old man began playing his accordion & we both listened & that was nice—only disturbed by much screaming of children & passing through of various Chianti vendors. After what seemed like hours, we got to Milan—me 4 hours later than expected. He took my suitcases to the taxi stand & decided it was time to bid an affectionate adieu. He kissed me on each cheek (I involuntarily felt pangs of guilt for having mistrusted this pure young man) & then it was all over—hands everywhere—lips—tongue—I finally fought him off “Basta! Basta!” & then laughed and laughed because it must have been such a funny scene.

  In London at the end of the summer, I ran into a boy named Howard who had acted the previous spring in Thom’s production of Wedekind’s Spring Awakening. There he was in the lobby of the Old Vic, where the National Theatre was performing O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock; afterward, we walked all over the city, talking about the actor Colin Blakely as Boyle, the paycock, Joyce Redman as Juno, Ronald Pickup as the son. To see these actors we had only read about, who were our gods! “I’ve seen nine plays and four movies,” I wrote home. Howard was different away from Harvard, more relaxed I thought, as we sat in St. James’s Park talking, taking off our shoes, walking across the grass. We met the next night at see Peter Shaffer’s Royal Hunt of the Sun and had supper afterward at a German restaurant in Soho, and one afternoon we saw Othello, sitting in the highest balcony, afterward talking about the intimacy, the specificity of Laurence Olivier’s portrayal, in blackface. The politics of blackface were complicated, but I allowed art to sweep away all the contradictions so insistent in 1966. From Paris, where I returned to catch my flight home, I wrote again to my father, “I want you to know and understand how much this summer has meant to me. It’s been absolutely wonderful. I will always remember it and love it.”

  Back in Cambridge and a senior, I entered the last months of my term as the first woman president of the Harvard (later Harvard and Radcliffe) Dramatic Club. Tim was in London observing the director Peter Brook, so I was free of the frenetic pace that working on his productions, irresistible to me, always required. I was reading Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in my honors tutorial, and planning to play the soubrette in a Loeb production, the North American premiere of Georges Feydeau’s farce A Flea in Her Ear—it would be my only appearance on a Harvard stage. In a narrow bed in h
is single room in Quincy House, Howard and I had a short affair, two pale-skinned brunettes making love to Mahler through long afternoons.

  My mother had offered me a twenty-first birthday party, and we arranged it at the Cambridge Boat Club on the Charles River—a dinner for twenty, a dance for everyone I knew (I would find a rock-and-roll band), and then scrambled eggs at 4 a.m. I invited everyone, and everyone came—all my theater friends, my parents, my brother and his friends from Yale, professors, girls from my dorm with their boyfriends, Indianapolis friends at college in the East, the friends with whom I’d gone to Pakistan. “I am sorry I can’t be present to dance to the Growth Orchestra”—Grandma Kean telegraphed. The rock band, called Growth, played everything we knew, and in a long gold dress, I danced happily all night, with Howard my date, with George Trow in his Coast Guard uniform, with my father, with any man I wanted to. At the end of the evening Howard escorted me back to my dorm, kissed me good night, handed me my birthday present, a book of Daumier drawings.

  That spring I took a course in American poetry, a seminar called “Wordsworth, Eliot, Coleridge, and Stevens,” and the fiction-writing workshop in which I wrote the story about my father and Nona Clark. Under the tutelage of a graduate student who had taken Robert Lowell’s poetry workshop and who wrote quietly in an apartment on Green Street, I was writing poems. “Ah breakfast, t’would delight me,” began a sonnet I composed when he canceled a date; “But now my tears do flow profuse / For thou didst disinvite me . . .”