by Honor Moore
On one of my romantic wanderings with Venable through the city, I bought a suit of a big geometric print of maroon and tan jersey, with a fitted jacket and an ankle-length gored skirt. I remember it because one day, after a lunch out, I fell into bed still wearing it and the telephone jolted me from a wine-induced nap. Because it might have been Jocelyn, Venable answered, but he handed the phone to me. It was my father. The doctors, having found “nothing physical,” agreed that my mother was “depressed.” He wanted me to know that she had decided to go into Payne Whitney, the psychiatric ward of New York–Presbyterian Hospital.
A mental hospital! This had been my mother’s lifelong fear. Every time she felt a little down, every time she felt the violence of her temper, she thought of her mother’s years in sanitariums, courses of electroshock doing no good. I shared that fear: it was why I had never taken LSD, why I was now seeing a psychiatrist. My mother, with her buoyant energy, charisma, and presence, had always been my hedge against it. When I hung up, I went right to sleep, not bothering to change out of the suit or turn out the light. Eighteen hours later, I woke up. I tried to pretend that nothing had changed, but everything had changed. My hungry sexual abandon abruptly ceased, and I began to wonder what I was doing, living in an apartment that wasn’t mine with a man almost twice my age whom I barely knew.
I saw my mother once at Payne Whitney, was let in through the locked door, led to what you could only call a cell. She sat at the edge of her narrow bed on a gunboat gray blanket wearing a cardigan and pants. She looked up, her teeth bright but her eyes mournful. I was with Venable, to whom this all seemed inevitable. But it did not seem inevitable to me; I was scared of this creature my mother had turned into, and fighting to keep my tears in. Venable talked to her as I looked on. I kept thinking of her on the telephone in Indianapolis, hearing the latest about her mother: after she hangs up, she painstakingly explains that Grandma Kean is sick, but in her head. Now she herself was sick like that, no longer possessed even of the force with which she slapped me that day in the room with the cherry wallpaper, shouted at me to neaten my room, or wrote letters in that distinct, upright hand, We love you very much.
It got harder for me to hang on to the mother I had known. During the weeks she was at Payne Whitney, she could get mean. On her first day pass, we had a family dinner at a Greek restaurant. When I reached for dessert, a piece of chocolate cake, she told a story she’d heard from a mutual friend about the poet Muriel Rukeyser, overweight, eating an entire chocolate cake at one sitting. “Can you believe it?” my mother exclaimed. Did I know Rukeyser’s poems? Did I admire them? I’d better be careful. This kind of assault was new, and Venable and my psychiatrist wanted to protect me, but they had not known the mother I had always adored, the woman who could turn any room into a theater, everyone laughing, then suddenly still, attentive to what she’d say next.
The sun is out, the sky as blue as a sailor’s pair of trousers, and I walk from the shadowy dark of the mental hospital cell, of the chocolate cake aria, into a past where her smile skews a room’s geometry, noon sun hot and crystalline, its reflection off the lake brightening her teeth, the whites of her eyes, darkening her black-rimmed irises, throwing her tanned skin into shadow. If she is distracted, I bring her back: “Good evening, dear mother, breeze of the summer afternoon,” I say in an actressy voice. And then one of the little ones runs to her, climbs onto her lap, and I watch her fingers move through child-short hair, her engagement diamond blinking in bouncing shards of light.
When I think of her in that room, another memory crowds in. We all sit at lunch, one lazy Susan at my end of the table, the other at hers. Absently I nudge the one at my end and watch as the cut-glass sugar bowls, one of brown and one of white sugar, pass me, slowly spinning toward my brother Pip, who sits across from me. I remember my mother at the head of the table, the sun out, the wind rustling all those millions of leaves, the lake shivery blue through the windows, the island in the corner of the lake a giant pincushion, and now there’s a lull in the conversation, her smile, her head tossed with laughter at someone’s good line. Except for my brother Pip, we are not a family in which anyone tells actual jokes, so my mother is laughing at a characterization or a turn of phrase, a remark that exposes absurdity. We had all competed for that laugh and now someone has won it, and she has thrown her head back.
“Mom,” I hear myself say, “when you smile, it lights up the room.”
There is silence. I remember reflection from the lake dappling the walls.
“Why, thank you, sweetie,” she says, awkward.
No, on second thought I don’t remember her saying anything. I remember silence, just pure silence, though I can’t swear the room was really silent. A space opens between us, a path as straight as a chute, the path I lost when my first sibling was born, the path whose entrance receded further every time my mother and I fought, every time another child pushed out of her and she brought it home. But now it was opening again, that true path from me to her.
And then someone broke the spell. “I’ll bet you never thought of yourself as a lightbulb, Mom.”
I can’t promise that was the sentence that actually began the ridicule, nor do I remember who said it, but a chorus of teasing, a sequence of that sort of remark, burst like pandemonium and obliterated the light, the chute, the path, the momentary view of heaven I had cleared through our history. I have a war with my mother, I wrote in a poem when I grew up. It is longer than the longest war in history, / longer than a hundred years. But when I return to that moment, as I do now, I am at that table again, the willow plates, sunlight fractured by the green mullions of the French doors, the expanse of lake, the mountains, the wide sky, and the fading image, my mother’s tall body folded into the big chair, her laughing face, and me spinning the lazy Susan, watching the cut-glass sugar bowls, waiting for that lull in the conversation.
We are driving, my father and I, down a road somewhere. The landscape is not familiar, but it seems to me that we angle left onto a road whose surface is the color and texture of sand. It’s hot and he’s telling me how sad he is, that he doesn’t know what to do, that he doesn’t know what he’s done, he’s lost her, she won’t talk to him anymore, she keeps saying she wants to go back to Washington. I don’t want to hear how serious it is. Alone, he wrote notes to himself, an inventory of his feelings which I now have: How do I feel about J. Very angry. Hurt. Feels like I have a hard ball inside—sometimes inside my spirit & sort of in my mind, a hard ball you can’t unravel just then. And sometimes in my chest, hurting hurting hurting. In the car that day, I could feel that hard ball, but unable to apprehend my father as hurt, I felt him as weak. What was I to do? I knew I felt something about how my mother was behaving—sadness, confusion—but to call it anger and join him in it seemed too dangerous and not my business. Instead, I spoke as a go-between, asking questions, representing my mother’s point of view in the warmest language I could come up with, what she’d put so clearly, writing to me after Payne Whitney: to see if I can hone down my conscience to live more of a life, and I keep fighting the failure syndrome not really in terms of the life I’ve led because I’ve done that well—but much of it, other than child-bearing & nurture, was not me, i.e. the backbreaking Xtian concept of immolation for everyone else. The great sadness is that I seem closed-in and undemonstrative, when under certain conditions (and I don’t mean merely sexual), that is not the way I am at all.
Now questions that had been unleashed during the summer of 1969—the summer my mother said I am having some problems with my marriage—and quieted that fall by my mother’s near-death in the automobile accident and my father’s election as bishop of New York, were reignited. It seemed crazy to me—the life in Washington had closed down, the house had been sold—but my mother was desperate. She was insisting that my father buy another house in Cleveland Park. She needed time to recover. She needed her old friends. In Washington, she was already
a person in her own right; at home there, she could make her way. My father resisted. What about the children? He was their father. “I think the person who wants to leave should do the leaving,” he wrote in the inventory of his feelings. Was he actually supposed to quit his job? If he didn’t, it would seem to the children that “I put my career first.” By midsummer, a decision was made. My father would buy a house in Cleveland Park, and my mother would move back with the five children who still lived at home. My father would commute for two days a week; Washington would be a second residence.
In a public letter to the diocese, he framed the separation as they had agreed: I wish to thank all of you for your prayers and thoughtfulness over the last few months of Jenny’s illness. It has been a rough winter for our family following last year’s accident and hospitalization. After consultation with the doctor, we have concluded that Jenny should be in a quiet, familiar place where she can regain her strength and where it is easier to take care of the children. The new house was diagonally across the street from 3400 Newark Street, where we’d lived when my father was suffragan. My mother redecorated 3319, built on a large living room, planted a rose garden, and installed a sprinkler system. The children were enrolled in local schools. My mother was profoundly relieved and grateful: My life alone—and relationship with Poppy—are reconstructed in a way I never dreamed possible—albeit somewhat Jamesian and I feel an inner joy and clarity—
Was it true what I remembered? That after near-death and the rages of long sadness and anger in Payne Whitney, that after she entered her new independent life, the mother I had never been able to trust made her way toward me in friendship? Dear Honor, I tried to call this evening but no answer—really to hear your voice and tell you that I love you. You’ve been so generous with your brothers and sisters this year which has been so fragmented for all of us . . . It must be hard to think of us all leaving after you’ve established yourself so deeply and well in the family. I feel so right about it at this time that there seems to be no other course of action to take, but we will all miss seeing you as naturally & casually as we have this year . . . you have taught me a lot by your courage, unerring sense of your direction—and your tireless search for yourself . . . Do know that I will always come flying if you need me or want me to . . . She was writing a play and had “unearthed” ten thousand words of a novel she wrote before the accident: I’m thunderstruck at how well it reads. And she had applied to the master’s program in writing at Johns Hopkins— because I think getting really out will help my double mother writer life. She flew to New York for a poetry reading I gave: I loved being there last night and I felt you did an excellent job under conditions hardly human—distance & darkness of audience etc. . . . I really do want copies of those you’d like to have me have, & especially & soon the last one you read about “the life I live” for my bathroom bulletin board.
She was also looking to married women friends who had made creative lives, like Toni Bradlee, Ben’s wife, who made sculptures she found stern and quite beautiful—white concrete on wooden blocks—and she does every bit of them herself (by that I mean the carpentry as well as the casting). And she was reading—Woolf, de Beauvoir, the first issues of Ms.: “Have you seen the latest issue?” she asked in a phone call. “Something called Combat in the Erogenous Zone by a young writer named Ingrid Bengis? So courageous. Do you know her?”
As I made my way with Venable, my mother made hers without a husband, but late in 1972 she wrote me in confidence that she was having a love affair. She didn’t mention that she and my father had again agreed to see others, nor did she tell me who her lover was. I now know it was Artie Trevor, also married, “whom I would have married if it hadn’t been for your father.” I opened the letter of announcement, now lost, at my desk on Twenty-second Street, in my study in the duplex Venable and I had moved into together. I was looking out at the trees, at the backs of the brick houses across the garden. Of my cautiously supportive reply, also lost, my mother wrote, I loved your letter (a) because it was honest (b) because it was so clear and intelligent . . . on the “high risk” we are very careful—never have dinner in town etc. etc. Also, he has an apt. so no motel-life is needed . . . In New York my father was dating a few women, but in Washington he cowered, desperate to please my mother, though to me it seemed clear she didn’t want him around. I was sure of my parents’ good intentions, but not certain how good their awkward visits were for the children still at home.
At its convention in the spring of 1971, the Diocese of New York had taken initial steps toward the ordination of women to the priesthood, and one night after supper in Washington, my father and I began a conversation about it. It will happen, he said, but it is important to go slowly, not to “rock the boat.” If we wait until the boat sails in calm water, I said, we’ll wait another two thousand years! The women’s movement, I argued, is nothing less than a reconfiguring of exactly the kind of hierarchy the church represents. “I hear you,” my father replied, restrained and pastoral. I wanted him to come to a radical position, and I was about to push further when my mother, who had been quietly listening, began to pound the table with her fist. “Why would women want to be priests?” she shouted. I began to explain how I imagined the nature of the church would be changed by women’s ordination, but my mother wasn’t listening. She was in a fury. “The church,” she said, almost hissing, “the church is just second-rate,” and then, weeping, she left the room. My father said nothing. Their differences were clearly deeper than I imagined.
In September 1972, Bishop Horace Donegan retired, and my father was installed as diocesan bishop of New York, with my mother, in spite of her ambivalence, and most of his children in attendance. For its Christmas issue, Newsweek celebrated by putting the new bishop on the cover, photographed in color in a red cope and miter, holding a gold crozier or bishop’s crook, stained glass behind him. He looked like a Christmas card. In the photograph, his face looks a little sad, and there is something close to the bone about the cover line, “The Church Faces Life,” and about the title of the article, “An Activist Bishop Faces Life.” The “life” under discussion was not that of our family, but the new reality the Christian church faced with the end of the heady 1960s. The article opened with a description of my father’s installation service and went on to discuss the uphill battle the new bishop faced in his huge diocese and his plan to launch major fund-raising efforts for ambitious initiatives in urban work. “In the Cathedral’s soaring Gothic nave,” the reporter wrote,
the cast of the rock musical Godspell danced and sang through the traditional Anglican Holy Communion service. Outside 5,000 well wishers—blacks and Puerto Ricans from nearby Harlem and the WASPish well-to-do from Wall Street and Park Avenue picnicked on the broad Cathedral close. Promptly at 3 p.m., the most solemn moment of the day began. With a fanfare of trumpets, the great bronze cathedral doors swung open to admit a procession of prelates in brightly colored vestments. When it was all over, a rock band joined the choir in a joyous Gloria in Excelsis from a mass written by the composer of Hair, and the Episcopal Diocese of New York had a new bishop—the Rt. Rev. Paul Moore, Jr.
Accompanying the article were photographs of my father performing a confirmation in Harlem, marching with Martin Luther King Jr. for Home Rule in Washington in 1968, fleeing tear gas at a Saigon peace rally in 1970. Of my parents standing together at my sister Adelia’s wedding in the Adirondacks two months earlier, and a game of touch football in the Washington yard, “with Jenny and the children.” The family’s unconventional living situation was ascribed to my mother’s having “collapsed and ended up in a psychiatric clinic” after nearly dying in an automobile accident. “I obviously couldn’t cope with New York City and five kids under 17,” my mother told the interviewer. “It was too big a burden to carry.” My father was characterized as a “commuting father.”
“I was ‘on’ with the Newsweek article,” my mother wrote me from Washington in Jan
uary after attending her first consciousness-raising meeting; “not its results but the conflict of being interviewed for it—& feeling I had to ‘protect’ throughout . . .” On my twenty-seventh birthday that October, she came to visit. Venable and I had taken over the house in Kent as a weekend retreat and, in lieu of rent, we were restoring it. My mother arrived the day before my birthday, a Friday, with a painted tin box about eight inches square, which she immediately put into the refrigerator. On Saturday, my birthday, she took the box out and opened it. In it was a walnut torte she had baked in Washington and transported on the plane and in the rented car she’d driven up from LaGuardia. She whipped some cream and slathered it on the cake. After supper, she presented me with a package in which there was a flimsy magenta binder. I opened it, and in it, awkwardly pasted on loose-leaf pages, were pictures of roses she’d cut from a garden catalogue. Ten of them. “The bushes will arrive in March,” she said, “and you and Venable will plant them.”
At breakfast the next morning, she and I discussed where I might put my rose garden. “You’ll want to be able to see it,” she said, “when you’re working in the kitchen.” We decided on a place out back, just outside the screen porch. As we washed the lunch dishes, she noted my lack of silver flatware—for my sister Adelia’s wedding present, my mother had collected antique silver, rather than “a boring old set from Tiffany’s.” She knew that Venable was not yet divorced, and that we were “against” marriage. “But that’s no reason you shouldn’t have silver,” she said. “I’ll start looking.” After lunch, Venable carried her suitcase down the front steps, and after we kissed her goodbye, we stood on the porch under the ancient twin wedding maples as she got into her white rented car. We were waving, and then she drove away, and as I watched the car disappear, I began to cry, and I couldn’t stop. “Don’t worry,” Venable said, putting his arm around me. “She’ll come back.”
