The Bishop's Daughter

by Honor Moore

  Often, for me, the message was unclear. Our final Christmas in Washington, I had opened with great anticipation a large package. In it, I found sixteen glasses—eight tumblers and eight short glasses. They were rather heavy glass, painted turquoise and gold, and I thought they were hideous. I tried to stretch and distort my mind to find them at least “attractive,” a word we used to denote something that partook of our family aesthetic. Turquoise and gold stripes were an aberration, and I didn’t understand what my mother meant by them. I must have looked, what, shocked? Disappointed?

  “Thank you, Mommy,” I said.

  “Don’t you think they’re good-looking?” she said, reaching for the next child’s present.

  Was I supposed to give cocktail parties? Learn precisely how much alcohol went in what size glass? Or was I supposed to move to the suburbs? Who did she think I was? I wanted to be a writer, and my love life, such as it was, showed no sign of evolving into a suburban marriage. My efforts to disguise my disappointment apparently failed, because, later in the interminable present-opening process—nine of us, one at a time so we could all admire and exclaim, so the list could be kept that ensured a thank-you note went to the correct giver—anyway, sometime after I opened the glasses, my mother disappeared and returned with a small box. “Here,” she said. “I thought you might feel gypped.” The replacement present was extraordinary, a Victorian brooch I had never seen my mother wear, a butterfly, its abdomen a large baroque pearl, its wing a banner of tiny diamonds and different-colored sapphires. It had belonged to her grandmother.

  The jump cut from the ugly glasses to the glorious pin was confusing. It took me decades not to dismiss the butterfly because it was a last-minute idea. The scrapbooks, on the other hand, were remarkable. They represented something I had desired without knowing it, my mother’s individualized and particular time and attention. They were also unusual for a “big” present in that they were specifically from my mother. She had arranged the pictures chronologically, and the colors of the books may have been a reference to The Golden Notebook, the novel we were both reading at the time, in which Doris Lessing’s heroine inscribes her life and thinking in different-colored notebooks. To complete the final book, my mother had snipped out a passage from the end of The Scarlet Letter. Hester Prynne, long past her humiliation and suffering, has become the wise woman who assures young women who come to her “of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world would have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.” This she pasted inside the back cover of the yellow scrapbook, opposite a black-and-white photograph of me that Pop had taken the summer before, smiling, long-haired, wearing a swagger of a hat that I remember was salmon pink and a purple band jacket trimmed with gold—very 1970.

  The party was in the living room of the cathedral apartment, a nearly perfect cube, leaded windows set high in the walls, a granite fireplace in the Gothic style. You entered the room by stepping down three stairs. I was sitting on a sofa as my father came in, kissed the top of my head, said “Happy Birthday,” and tossed into my lap a cheap set of brandy glasses, the kind that come six to a set and are packaged in a light cardboard structure that resembles a six-pack for beer. Glasses again!

  That is when it breaks into the open, the difficulty that had been building between my father and me.

  As I replay the memory—the tall man, fifty years old, coming down the stairs into the room where his eldest daughter is celebrating her twenty-fifth birthday, and tossing a six-pack of cheap glasses into her lap—what I see is not only the stinginess my psychiatrist suggested it was, but indifference bordering on anger. Anger at what? When my mother announced that day in the Adirondacks, I am having some problems with my marriage, I was angry at her, but not at my father. I saw him as victim of her insatiable and inexplicable need for some life independent of us and him. I had not really understood my mother’s situation, and I’d felt terrible for my father. By the time this change played itself out, I would see my father as my mother saw him, and he would see me as he now saw my mother, as a woman who was rejecting him. But I knew none of this the night of my twenty-fifth birthday; his distance only confused me. Why had he tossed those glasses onto my lap?

  In the years to come, I would learn that my father expressed anger easily but rarely in language, and that he knew how to put a passable spin on a hostile message. But back to the brandy glasses. He knew I liked to drink, but he had not stopped to consider whether at the age of twenty-five I drank much brandy. Actually I drank wine, but the glasses were liqueur glasses, so, not only were they cheap, they were of no use to me. They were an insult. “Your father is a little stingy,” my psychiatrist explained, “a little withholding.” If your father were generous, the doctor continued, he would have had some of your poems privately printed in a little book.

  What an idea! I still hold that nonexistent little book in my imagination. It has a rust-colored cover, my name under a title my father has invented. The book is a surprise. Because this imaginary version of my father had always been so interested in my writing, he was always the first person to whom I showed a poem. He’d kept them all in a folder he treasured, and when I turned twenty-five, he’d had this small collection privately printed, the most wonderful gesture of support a father could give a poet daughter. The psychiatrist’s imagining was not so far-flung: it had always been my father to whom I wrote what I was reading, with whom I shared my innermost thoughts, not my mother. So why this sudden shift, this insult? And what did I do with the glasses? Perhaps I had the nerve to toss them into a garbage bin on my way home that evening, but it’s more likely I kept them, allowing them to gather dust in the back of a cupboard.

  15

  Killing Me Softly

  * * *

  At a party in 1969 in the Berkshires the summer after the abortion, the summer I knew Arnold was leaving me, I met a man named Venable. I liked the urgent way he talked to me, saying my name, telling me about himself and the woman he lived with. He had a shock of dark brown hair and blue eyes that were magnified by the round glasses he wore. He looked so young I was surprised to learn that he was forty-two, Arnold’s age and eighteen years older than me. Like Arnold, Venable knew more than one language, and like Arnold, he was a playwright, but he also wrote for the movies. To see him again after that night, I invited him to translate from the French for the press conference I had organized for Eugène Ionesco, whose play Hunger and Thirst the theater I worked for was presenting. This was an English-language premiere by the famous absurdist, and reporters from all over New England came to interview him, Venable interpreting. Afterward, he and I took the playwright and his wife and daughter to an African restaurant in the countryside. At the end of the summer, Venable came to a party I gave. I begged him just to kiss me. “No,” he said, “I can’t do that.” He was living with Jocelyn, who had black curls down her back. “Can we just have lunch?” “No,” he said, “not even lunch.”

  In September, I moved to New York City, into a room at the Chelsea Hotel with a kitchenette and a balcony overlooking Twenty-third Street. A plaque on the door memorialized Dylan Thomas and a few other dead writers as former residents, but Arthur Miller, the last famous writer who’d lived there, had long moved out. I recognized the painting by Arnold’s friend Larry Rivers in the lobby, but not Viva, the Warhol superstar with whom I shared the elevator, nor did I know that the bearded pot dealer upstairs was an Iranian prince who secreted a heroin stash under his sink. I was coproducing the first play by a woman named Tina Howe, an extreme comedy about three girls entertaining their boyfriends in a New York high-rise, and when I wasn’t at the office I was sitting in front of my typewriter at a desk facing Twenty-third Street “writing a novel.”

  No sooner had I settled into a routine than Arnold turned up in New York. We had dinner, and he
spent that night, and the next. Soon he was calling his friends, telling them he was “at the Chelsea,” in town to translate the libretto of Brecht and Weill’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, to be produced on the Lower East Side by the man responsible for their earlier work The Threepenny Opera, which ran for years on Christopher Street and whose marquee I saw every time I left St. Luke’s School and walked to the Hudson Tube. Were Arnold and I back together? I knew he had nowhere else to go (his apartment was sublet), that he’d never contribute to the rent, and that I couldn’t write when he slept half the day, but I wasn’t finished with him. He took me to Bradley’s for supper and jazz, introduced me to musicians like Paul Desmond and Elvin Jones, whom he knew from “the old days at the Five Spot” and who came to our table for a drink, and to the proprietor, who also had a girlfriend in her twenties. He harangued me about the play I was producing—“If it has characters, it can’t be good”—and every few days dove into a doctor’s office on Central Park South for a shot of speed and vitamins while I waited at the wheel of my Corvair. At the “Sweet Sixteen” party Larry Rivers gave for his redhead girlfriend, he disappeared into the back room, leaving me to fend for myself. I was too shy to approach anyone in the glamorous mob of Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art painters, New York School and Beat poets, collectors and girlfriends, so I stood there watching Jackie Curtis, the first drag queen I’d seen up close, dab perspiration from the brow of a be-tuxed “Lennie” Bernstein as onlookers gushed and murmured.

  Some nights Arnold would go out after supper, promise he’d be back by midnight, and never return. Some nights I sat quietly as he and the producer worked through lyrics for Mahagonny, a pianist playing the score. They would draw the Fillmore East audience, Arnold told me; the star would be Linda Ronstadt, whose single “Different Drum” was a recent hit. I thought Arnold and I would marry, I told my psychiatrist, but that came to seem less and less likely. One day, as I wept lying on the psychiatrist’s narrow couch, he told me that Arnold was “exploitative” and possibly a “sociopath.” He asked what my fantasies were, and I told him that sometimes I saw myself standing near a bed, a pistol in my hand pointed at Arnold as he slept. “Is that a fantasy?” I asked.

  By the time Tina Howe’s play closed after one night, Arnold was long gone, and I was finally free to throw myself entirely into the women’s movement and radical politics, writing the rest of the time. One day that fall, near Union Square, Abbie Hoffman had picked me up. I’d read Revolution for the Hell of It, the book he’d published, “Free” his non de plume. It was a manifesto of the Yippies who infused hippie rebellion with politics at events he and Jerry Rubin organized, like a “Be-in” in Central Park. Now he and Rubin and five others including Tom Hayden and David Dellinger, an activist who was my father’s contemporary, were going on trial for conspiring to disrupt the Democratic Convention the summer before in Chicago. The group was originally called the Chicago Eight, but when the case of Bobby Seale, one of the defendants, was severed from the trial, they became the Chicago Seven. At pretrial hearings, they had already demonstrated their plan. By taunting the judge and comically twisting legal rhetoric, they would make the trial an epic tour de force of political theater. “You can produce our movie,” Abbie Hoffman declared right there on the street. The next thing I knew, I had a date for lunch with him and Jerry Rubin. I’ll ask Venable to write the screenplay, I said to myself. Venable had written Alice’s Restaurant, a hit movie of the year before inspired by Arlo Guthrie’s talking blues about being arrested for throwing out garbage and getting out of the draft. The movie’s droll touch helped turn draft resistance into a national phenomenon, grist for satire. I called Venable in Los Angeles and told him I was about to have lunch with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin about a Chicago Seven movie. “Tell them you’ll do it if we can write it as an animated film,” he said. Over lunch at Max’s Kansas City, a place that didn’t look good in daylight, Hoffman and Rubin said they didn’t see their story as a cartoon.

  The following summer, in Stockbridge for a play, I saw Venable briefly, and when I got home to New York, I sent him some of my poems. A few weeks later the telephone rang. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was lying on the mattress and plank bed Arnold had set up in the tiny bedroom of his apartment, which he had sublet to me as compensation for his departure, his return to Chicago, and his hasty marriage to another brunette in her twenties. But I was thinking of Venable, and here he was. He liked the poems, he said, and he’d rented an apartment just around the corner. Had I ever read Pablo Neruda? Would I like to have dinner? He took me to Casey’s, a glamorous restaurant on Tenth Street where I’d gone many times with Arnold, and afterward, back at his apartment, he gave me books by Neruda, and then we went to bed. Or perhaps we went to bed before dinner because I remember light coming through filmy white curtains. I think we had one more evening together, and then he disappeared, back to Los Angeles or to Stockbridge, and I didn’t hear from him again.

  Some of my political friends were moving to St. Louis to live collectively, take “straight jobs,” and do organizing. I was drawn to the people—the woman at the center of the group, just thirty, had five children, and charisma like my mother’s. She said I had “great politics.” It would be like Jersey City, but centered on Marxism instead of the church. “Come on,” she kept saying “come with us. And we’ll get you knocked up. Or maybe you want to be with a woman.” I didn’t move to St. Louis. I didn’t want to get “knocked up” nor did I want to “be” with a woman. I wanted to write, but I had such misgivings: most of my friends had to work—what business did I have, a white girl with money, thinking I could just write? But Venable had liked my poems, and he suggested that I use my money to support myself while doing my own work. And so, late that fall of 1970, declaring myself a writer, I dropped out of my political groups. What I had been doing, as important as it was for “the movement,” felt like my backstage work in the theater; organizing a demonstration like producing a play. I wanted to put forward something of my own. My poems, I promised my comrades, would be my contribution.

  Sometime in the early winter, Venable called again, and, while breaking up with Jocelyn in long agonized telephone conversations, he courted me. He had been in Hollywood writing movies, the entitlement of Alice’s Restaurant’s hit status still clinging to him; now, in New York, he was writing a play about father-daughter incest. Before long nights of making love, he wined and dined me on his Hollywood money, our evenings a primer in food and wine: Spanish at Granados on Bleecker Street, sushi at Kamehachi on Waverly Place, “eau Perrier” at a sandwich shop on Sixth Avenue, Italian at Portofino, where the chef Alfredo Viazzi and his wife, the actress Jane White, boisterously greeted us. Venable spoke Russian and had married a French writer and fathered her child when he was very young. He wore thrift-shop band jackets, which he dyed, striped shirts, and, always, a bow tie. He talked and talked, about books, about the theater, about French poets, about the advertising business where he had gotten his start, how the viciousness of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had inspired him to write his own cruel play, Until the Monkey Comes, which got him the Alice’s Restaurant job. Soon I moved out of Arnold’s apartment and into Venable’s.

  By the beginning of 1971, Venable and I were making a life. With Radcliffe friends, I started a new consciousness-raising group—we were aspiring writers, actresses, filmmakers. Everything was going very fast, but not too fast for Venable: he had a vision. One night, he sat me down in a Greek restaurant and told me I was a real writer, that if I worked very hard, I would publish what I wrote, and that I would make my way as a person in “the New York literary world.” He had once been an editor of Chelsea, a literary journal, and he took me to poetry readings—Denise Levertov, David Ignatow, Jerome Rothenberg. They all greeted him as a returning friend, and he introduced me as Honor Moore, a poet. I barely considered myself a poet, but every day now, watching Venable bent over his desk, I bent over mi
ne. My grandmother had a stroke and the dishwasher / broke down. Neither works anymore, I wrote when Gami lost her speech to a stroke. Those eighty-seven years she owned / are really hers. She is taking them with her. Once a week or so, we took the subway uptown and sat around the living room with my younger brothers and sisters, and my mother, whom Venable called “Jenny.” I was in denial that she was only four years older than the boyfriend I was so proud to have; my consort, I called him. Venable gave me a new way to know my brothers and sisters, five of whom were still at home. He vigorously interviewed every one of them, explaining Freud and Jung, pointing out Oedipal and sexual innuendos in their dreams, doing their numerology, encouraging their painting and writing.

  My mother still seemed unhappy. Just before her birthday in March, she checked into Mount Sinai for tests. When Venable and I got to the hospital room, she was asleep. “Oh, hello,” she said dully, waking up. Her skin was yellow again, as it had been after the accident. The doctors had found “nothing,” she told us. “I’m very tired,” is what I remember her saying as she smiled at Venable. Venable had a way of taking over any situation in which he found himself, and usually I liked to let him, but there in the dark hospital room with my sick mother, his talk about her possible condition seemed too loud and too dire. I wanted to reach out for my mother’s hand, to be the one on whom her eyes rested with the hope of rescue or understanding. I wanted to protect her, climb into that bed, and pull her arms around me. Everything Venable was saying and everything she said or didn’t say further shattered the new family I was just getting used to. My mother was in a hospital bed again, tears in her dark blue eyes, her lashes very black against dank skin. If only she could go back to Washington, she said. What would my father do, I thought, rattling around that big apartment, suddenly a man alone? She turned her head away and continued. She wanted to have a house in Washington again with a garden, life on the leafy street with the children running in and out.