The Bishop's Daughter

by Honor Moore

  My mother was not sunning but standing on the porch wearing long pants, her back to the green railing. Behind her was Silver Mountain, and the tree that still juts out over the lake, and of course the lake itself, where at twilight often you hear a loon call its mate as mist rises off the water. But it was morning and so the lake was blue, a pale, intense blue. My father was not in camp, otherwise my mother would never have said what she did that day. I can’t get back much of the conversation, but I remember the sentence and the singular possessive pronoun: “I am having some problems with my marriage.” At twenty-three and with limited information, I had facile explanations for her shattering announcement—she was tired of marriage to my father; Senator McCarthy, who often came over for morning coffee, was much more exciting than an Episcopal bishop in a purple shirt. It would be many years before I learned the deepest secret of my parents’ marriage, but that morning in the Adirondacks, I learned there was a secret and also that I didn’t want to know it, though the fact of it came into my imagination right then, and into my body.

  Because I didn’t want to believe what my mother said, I focused my attention on the fact that she had used the singular pronoun—I am having some problems with my marriage—and since she did not implicate my father in any way, I was angry only at her. Furious. And sad. This was not her marriage, it was our marriage. Weren’t my brothers and sisters and I as much a part of the our as she and my father were? Suddenly this woman, my mother, was a stranger. Her tan skin looked pale and there was a dizzy blankness in her blue eyes and the black of her hair no longer called forth words like obsidian or ebony. When I got to New York, there was a letter from my father—“Things are a little bumpy here, as I guess Mom indicated.”

  That autumn, on the second ballot, my father was elected bishop coadjutor at the convention of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. Coadjutor means “with the right of succession”; “the Episcopal Church,” my mother once wrote, “uses a lot of words you have to look up in the dictionary.” In three years, my father would run the most urban and most influential diocese in the Episcopal Church—this had been his life’s ambition since he became a priest. In the weeks after his election, their differences put aside, my parents traveled to New York for parties, interviews, tours of the bishop’s quarters on the grounds of St. John the Divine. That winter, after one of those trips, my mother visited her mother in Boston—the date was January 10, 1970—and on her way home accepted a ride from the airport in Washington with an old friend. At an intersection not far from Newark Street, his Volkswagen Beetle was struck broadside by a car running a stop sign. My mother was thrown forward, the gearshift stick punching her lower abdomen. When she got home, she complained of stomach pain. By the time she and my father were dressed to go out for the evening, she was in agony on their bed. At the hospital the doctors discovered her body cavity filled with blood, and a surgeon cut away the damage, seven-tenths of her liver; the fraction’s strange specificity is as I remember it.

  My mother spent the next several months in the Washington Hospital Center, first hovering between life and death in intensive care, then recovering in a capacious room in the luxury wing, receiving friends and her children, masses of notes and flowers. She learned how much she was loved, independent of her children and her husband, and she understood it was remarkable that she had survived. For the weeks she lay there, she meditated on her life. There was the family to think about, and my father’s career. At the time, divorce for clergy was allowed by the Episcopal Church only in special circumstances and was unthinkable for a bishop. After the move to New York, she would write another book. She would make an effort to repair the marriage. It would be a new beginning.

  On a luscious evening the June after my mother’s accident, my father met me at a restaurant on Eighth Street in New York City. I was twenty-four and he was forty-nine, not so many years older than my lover, and he was wearing a seersucker suit and a necktie. This is my father, I remember thinking to myself as I looked at him sitting opposite me. Normally he would be wearing a clerical collar and a purple shirt, but tonight he is not, and so somehow he is more present, and I am looking at him, suddenly, as a man. Let’s say I am waiting. Waiting to feel what will come in my direction. What do we talk about? It is not the conversation that I will remember about that night in the restaurant that became a jazz club later in the evening. Instead I will get back a sense, a sense of my father’s presence. He is handsome, I think to myself, handsome and slender, his hair starting to go a little gray, and his haircut is different, his hair maybe a little longer than it had been in Washington. Sexy. I say it to myself: sexy. Yes, my father looks sexy. I was fresh into serious therapy, and I imagined that the next day I would carry this new impression of a sexy father uptown to my psychiatrist like a trophy. I had sought out this psychiatrist when I moved to New York, so sad and confused about what my mother had told me that day in the Adirondacks that I thought I must be crazy like my mother’s mother. I said I was writing poems, but the truth was I hardly knew what to do with myself. I couldn’t say that to my handsome father, or even, for that matter, to my handsome psychiatrist whose analytic couch I lay on twice a week on East Ninety-sixth Street.

  This would be a new gambit: “Look,” I could say, “I had dinner with my father and I thought he looked sexy.” But what was sexy? There was a sheen to my father that night, a glitter as he looked this way and that, and I thought it had to do with me, his daughter in her twenties coming into sexuality and desire, even beauty. I felt both an uncomfortable charge between us and a new distance, which I ascribed to our new circumstances: I was living on my own, and so was he—my mother and the family wouldn’t move to New York until late summer. I had never talked to my father about what my mother had said about the marriage, and so a silence about her hung in the air. It was tempting; here we were in New York City. I finally had my father to myself. The waiter brought our food. I was wearing a very short skirt, crossing and uncrossing my legs. I could feel my new sexual sophistication push it further: my mother had nearly died and my father was turning me on. That phrase had scared me the first time Arnold used it, because his eyes got strange as if I were suddenly not who he was looking at. Now, as my father talked, his skin looked different, more alive. Always, when I remembered that night, I would feel a strange silvery nimbus pulling me in, implicating me in something illicit that excluded who my father and I had always been to each other and that caused me to think thoughts that betrayed my mother. Many summers later, when I learned of my father’s hidden erotic life, that supper on Eighth Street came back to me.

  My mother arrived in New York three months later. Two moving vans carried the possessions of twenty-five years of marriage and of five children north from Washington. “The move was pretty grueling,” she wrote Pam, “but accomplished, in that week of 93°, smog, squatters hurling human you-know-what at the Cathedral doors etc.” My father’s first challenge as coadjutor was a demonstration by squatters in an apartment building owned by the diocese right across Amsterdam Avenue from the cathedral, which was scheduled to be torn down. “But I got through it,” my mother continued, “and have arrived at the strength plateau where one night of sleep cures the day’s fatigue as opposed to 3 days of hysteria.” But she was being optimistic. What no one then understood, including my mother herself, was that she was still too fragile for such a change. It was 1970, and the benefits of a certain kind of post-traumatic health care—vitamins, homeopathy, nutrition, short-term psychotherapy—were not yet generally understood. My mother had always been healthy and athletic—in Washington, she played tennis two or three times a week—and resilient, but the damage to her liver was not an ordinary wound, and recuperating was nothing like recovering from, say, childbirth. After initial optimism, the placement of the children in progressive, integrated private schools, the hiring of a full-time Chinese couple to cook and clean, the glamorous welcomes—Mayor Lindsay and his wife threw a dinner dance for their old
friends, the new bishop and his wife and family, a magical evening at Gracie Mansion—it became clear that my mother had not really recovered.

  The cathedral on Morningside Heights stood at the center of an almost monastic world. My mother was expected to be the bishop’s hostess, while making a new life for herself and a refuge for the five children still at home in two stories of a mammoth stone mansion. The close, as the cathedral grounds were called, was thirteen acres of lawn, gardens, and granite buildings that housed the offices of a nearly entirely male community. Through the leaded windows of the apartment, my mother could see priests walk from office to cathedral, cathedral to office. One of them, bald and bearded, nearly always wore a cassock and an embroidered hat. He was a canon (senior priest) of the cathedral and lived in a cathedral apartment with a rottweiler, which, one day, as my mother watched from a window, attacked a smaller dog, the corgi belonging to my father’s predecessor Bishop Donegan, which had been a gift from the Queen Mother. My mother shouted, called cathedral security, and ran downstairs; by the time she reached the scene, the dog had died. Weeping, she berated my father about the canon’s carelessness, and the incident obsessed her.

  She no longer had the boundless energy required to keep everyone happy, and every day, five children came home from school homesick. A night of sleep no longer revived her. She went first to doctors and then to psychiatrists. She sought out old friends living in New York and took freelance writing assignments for the Washington Post. But she began to long for her lilacs on Newark Street, her rose garden, her circle of friends. In my first consciousness-raising group, I was coming to see her predicament as a woman. I was reading whatever women’s liberation literature I could get my hands on, and I was one of a group of women raising money to free Joan Bird, one of the two women Black Panthers incarcerated in New York. We were writing about her, flyers and analyses to be published in the underground newspapers that would bring to women’s liberation, as feminism was then called, a politics of antiracism. My mother was wary. “Honor,” she wrote Pam, “is a little overboard (I think) on Women’s Lib. & Black Panther fund raising, but who knows.”

  She was trying to write again, and I was encouraging her. The People on Second Street had sold well and an excerpt had appeared in the Washington Post; after publishing several features there, she had a contract for a book on aging. She was forty-seven, she had survived, what came next? She’d done some exploratory interviews with older people, but now she couldn’t bring herself to continue. New friends and some people she had known for years—the group included psychotherapists, actors, and playwrights—were meeting, trying to combine prayer and introspection with some of the new thinking about psychotherapy. After a few meetings, though, my mother left the group. She couldn’t speak openly, she said; she didn’t want to compromise my father. To me her situation was not so complicated: why would she silence herself for a man? I didn’t know that she and my father were trying to figure out how to separate. Later I would believe my mother was having affairs on the sly, and that my father was suffering alone. Actually they had agreed to see other people, and he was dating no fewer than five women, among them, Nona Clark. Once that fall my mother surprised me by asking me when oral sex had come “into vogue.” I had no idea what to say.

  We were sitting in the Palm Court at the Plaza having lunch. The space was open, white floors, high ceilings, palm trees. My mother’s face was impassive, seeming almost to look away as I told her about Johnny, the man I was now seeing, who rode a motorcycle. I would go to his small apartment in Chelsea, a corridor of darkness, one room behind the next. He was my age, and he worked in advertising so he had real furniture, a leather sofa, low wooden tables, shiny lamps that had once been tobacco cans or outdoor lanterns or automobile equipment. One day he said, “I’ll buy a real Tiffany lamp, keep it for a few years, and sell it at a great profit.” My family didn’t sell their antiques, and I wasn’t used to people who talked like that about money; I spent most of my time with radicals who talked about Mao and the end of capitalism. I remember sitting smoking in the dark, each of us with a glass of Scotch. Perhaps we would go out to dinner to some undistinguished restaurant of the kind common then: booth, burger and salad, red wine. And then on the motorcycle we would ride back to his place and have sex, sex in which the silences were vacant, the breathing athletic. One weekend he took me away to the Delaware Water Gap with a couple of his friends and their girlfriends. Each couple had a cabin; the men did the barbecuing and the women made the salad. In our cabin there were two small rooms; Johnny gave me one and took the other; we didn’t have sex, and after that weekend, he never called again. I couldn’t tell my consciousness-raising group that despite the fact that another male chauvinist pig had fucked me over, I was sad, and so that day in the Palm Court, I decided to confide in my mother. But as I talked, she sat there without speaking, her hands in her lap, or fingering her glass.

  I suppose that while she sat looking at her hands my mother was trying to decide what to say to me about Johnny. Usually she was not at a loss for words, but she didn’t say, for instance, “I’m so sorry that happened to you.” If she started to talk, it was probably about my brothers and sisters, for instance, how Susanna and Patience, the two youngest, were getting to Manhattan Country School on East Ninety-sixth Street or how she was having so much trouble getting started on the aging book. I didn’t know she had a lover and so I did not understand what the significance was when she told me that after lunch she was going to visit a man she had mentioned frequently. Years later I would learn she had been involved with this man and that he was the only man for whom she had ever considered leaving my father. Now, though, he was marrying another woman and she was going to meet that other woman. “This is very important,” she said. “It is very important that I meet her, that we become friends.” Perhaps she lit a cigarette, or perhaps she was picking at her food. As I fumbled for something to say, I could hear forks scraping and hitting china as waiters moved across the wide spaces carrying serving plates protected with silver domes.

  Letters between my parents from this period were anguished. The reconciliation they’d hoped New York would bring had not come about, and my father was mystified, desperate with hope my mother would return to their physical life together. Her letters were alternately angry and desiring of reconciliation: “I want to live with you and be your lover.” Beginning to see my mother’s suffering, I now had less sympathy for my father, who seemed to me to have all the power. As my mother came to mistrust my father’s feelings for her, I felt myself internally withdrawing from him, as if putting him on probation. I was not aware they were again struggling, turning over alternative plans: a dual household with residences in Washington and New York; a scenario in which my father would quit his new job, the position he had so longed for, and they would move the family back to Washington.

  Eventually I hear enough from each of them to know all is not well. My mother tells me of her return to the psychiatrist she’d seen when they lived in Jersey City, of lunch with this or that old friend. My father tells me he misses her, her participation in his work. At first, it seems, he will do anything to please her. Does she want to live in an apartment off the close? He buys one on Park Avenue, but she finds it sterile and they never move in. Eventually his pastoral empathy deserts him. He seems to forget she is still in a weakened state; he is angry, even a little vengeful. But she is simply surviving: she has almost died, had lain in that hospital bed for months—what had happened to her life? She meets my psychiatrist at a party: “I met your doctor,” she reports. I ask him what he thinks of her. “Your mother is very seductive,” he replies.

  That October was my twenty-fifth birthday, and my mother asked if I’d like her to give me a party. I could ask anyone I wanted, she said. I invited the members of my women’s consciousness-raising group, new friends, and she invited a woman writer whose parents she’d known in Jersey City, Toni Cade Bambara. I was surprised a
nd pleased that my mother wanted to give me a party, but nothing prepared me for her present. Though I didn’t think of it at the time, it was as if she was trying to repair what her declaration in the Adirondacks had shattered the year before. The box was enormous, and when I opened it I found four leather-bound scrapbooks—orange, blue, yellow, bright apple green—all identically embossed with gold borders. In them were enlargements of perhaps fifty photographs—of the family, of each grandmother and grandfather, of herself and my father when they were children, teenagers, engaged, a wedding picture. And pictures of me throughout my life. Now, of course, the age of twenty-five seems barely the end of childhood, but at the time I believed I’d had a life and gotten myself to the conclusion of one phase of it and to the threshold of the next. I was amazed and delighted when my mother acknowledged this by giving me those four scrapbooks.

  Present-giving is a challenge for a mother of nine children. When does she begin shopping for Christmas? How will she manage to perform the act of imagination necessary to find each child a present that will give him or her the new sense of self we in our family believed a birthday present should represent? Perhaps it seems strange, even melodramatic, this emphasis on birthdays. But think of it. There are nine of us, and there is just one day a year when each is celebrated for who she is independent of the others, and that day is her birthday. You are a child of privilege but one of nine; love is spread thin and so its material demonstrations are especially important. Each Christmas, each birthday as well, you receive several presents, one of which is designated your “big” present “with love from Mommy and Poppy.” It is the “big” present that you scrutinize for clues as to who you are, or at least who your parents think you are.