The Bishop's Daughter

by Honor Moore

  At the first breakfast at the colony, I noticed a man, an American painter who lived in Paris. Daniel, pronounced the French way, had also lived in Moscow, I found out. He was fluent in Russian, knowledgeable about Russia’s history, and had made documentary films in the Soviet Union. I told him about the trip Venable and I had taken and described how powerfully Russia had affected me. Daniel understood: “Yes! Yes!” he said, waving his arms, looking down at me in the snowy dark. As we walked the frigid New Hampshire forests, he told me of his Uzbek wife, whom he had gotten out of the Soviet Union, and when I described Leningrad, the brilliant gold domes, buildings that looked like French palaces painted yellow, green and orangey pink and reflected in canals that crisscrossed the city, the dark of Dostoevsky’s apartment, the paneled elegance of Pushkin’s, and how, after sunset, the darkness seemed to rise from the ground, he would turn to me and say, “You! You understand Russia!” Then he told me he had fallen in love with me, and very soon his passion, his extreme physical beauty, and his romantic manliness swept me up. I imagined traveling with him to the Greek island where he had a house with a blue door on a narrow street and baking bread in bare feet. My writing? I wasn’t sure. “I want to get you pregnant,” he said, kissing me and lifting me from the snowy forest path. He left the colony before I did, and as I stood shivering on the platform, watching the train grow smaller and disappear, a sickle moon hung orange in the sky.

  At home, no viable writing done during my month away, I closed the door of my skylit studio and read Daniel’s letters, watched the telephone, willing it to ring, conjuring my lover calling from Paris. Have Daniel’s child? Bake bread barefoot in a tiny house in Greece, the Aegean sparkling below? I no longer took tea breaks with Venable. “When you left for MacDowell, you were one person,” he finally said after days of stilted silence, and burst into tears. Horrified at what I had done and that I had hurt him, I tried to tell myself that Daniel was a passing fancy. Venable really did love me, but when he asked what had happened, I couldn’t tell him. “You can do whatever you want, Wonz,” he said as I cried, too, holding him tight. A month later, Venable asking no questions, I met my paramour in the south of France. His wife was having another child, he told me, and went out alone to the film production meetings he’d promised to take me to, leaving me in the hotel. “I don’t want any gossip,” he said. In bed, he turned away from me—the great romance, such as it was, was apparently over. Chastened, devastated, embarrassed, I went home to Venable. Downstairs in our bedroom, I was desperate to get back what we’d once had; upstairs in my studio I wrote poems, an epic inspired by the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Poem of the End” in which a line of mine played with one of hers: Did you think love was just a chat at a small table?

  I was looking for ways to get Mourning Pictures produced elsewhere, and I’d heard of a woman director who’d done an extraordinary evening of Sylvia Plath in Los Angeles. We began to talk on the telephone. She would be very interested in directing my play, she said after reading it. Victoria Rue was her name, and she and her lover, Jeremy, also a woman director, had both left Roman Catholic convents for the theater—Victoria had been a novice, Jeremy a nun. Based on a combination of her low voice and the look of the nuns I had known in Jersey City, I formed an image of Victoria as a mousy, dowdy character; that spring, I traveled West to meet her. My first night in Los Angeles I was taken to a performance by prison inmates that Victoria and Jeremy had directed. Standing in the courtyard before the play, I saw, across the crowd, a tall woman with black hair and a blazing smile. “Is Victoria here?” I asked the friend who’d brought me. “There she is,” she said, pointing at the woman with the black hair. Again, I went home to Venable, but I was haunted by my two-hour meeting with Victoria, the vividness of her intelligence, the silkiness of her hair, blacker than my mother’s, the glancing fun in her dark brown eyes.

  Nothing happened with Victoria’s plans to revive Mourning Pictures in Los Angeles, but six months later I heard that she and Jeremy had broken up, and that spring when she visited New York, I invited her to stay at Twenty-second Street. “Have you ever had a relationship with a woman?” she asked one afternoon as we sat talking, sitting at opposite ends of the bed in the guest room. “No,” I said firmly, and launched into the story of Daniel, the snowy woods, the south of France, and, half lying, told her that Venable and I had managed to repair our relationship, and that we were very happy. That fall, 1977, Victoria moved to New York to pursue her career in the theater, and she came to visit Venable and me in Kent.

  All weekend, I looked at her, trying to imagine what it might be like to go to bed with her, not being able to imagine it, so palpable still was the dream of Daniel, whose letters from Paris now only fitfully arrived, bringing back the athletic hardness of his body, a rebuke to Venable’s warm softness. But Victoria’s question, asked playfully, in her low, velvety voice, reverberated. One night I took her to a women’s dancing party in Brooklyn to introduce her to some of my lesbian friends. In Adrienne Rich’s poems now, and in the lives of many of the young women who read her, the monster in the sky was finding herself transformed in the face of her woman lover. Victoria and I danced, and when she danced with another woman, I found myself jealous, Not long after, in a loft bed in her sublet on Waverly Place, we made love. Very late that night I went home to Venable, but the feeling of Victoria’s body, a woman’s body as strange, unknown terrain, had illuminated a new dimension of my imagination.

  In the days that followed, I met Victoria when I could, feeling exhilarated as we walked the city. What could be wrong with this? I asked myself. Why shouldn’t I be able to freely love whomever I wanted to, I wondered as, climbing the stairs of the Fifty-third Street subway station, I boldly put my arm around Victoria, kissing her as she turned to me with that smile. I wasn’t sure I would love another woman aside from Victoria, but I knew I had to tell Venable what had happened, and I began to know I would leave the life we had together.

  Ms. had another assignment for me: Would I write about what it was like to have a father whose loyalties were divided between the church and his family? Certainly, I said. It was November 1977; this would be the first conversation I’d have with my father since our battle over the Chinese carpet. The interview, in his office, took place a week after Victoria and I became lovers, and, in a coincidence I took as a sign, the most recent controversy to surround my father involved a lesbian. A year before, in 1976, as he’d predicted, the issue of women’s ordination had come up before the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, and two favorable resolutions had overwhelmingly passed—one reinstating the validity of the irregular Philadelphia ordinations, the other clarifying canon law to allow women to be ordained priests and consecrated bishops.

  My father’s first ordination of a woman to the priesthood took place on January 9, 1977, at the cathedral and passed without controversy, but on January 10, at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Chelsea, he ordained two more women, one of whom had been honest about her lesbian orientation. I was not at the ordination, but I read the prominent newspaper coverage—the diocese had not publicized the event, but a right-wing priest who’d left the church in the 1960s over the issue of integration sent out a press release.

  Nothing my father had ever done had caused so much controversy. Ellen Marie Barrett was honest about her orientation, but not actively gay. My father, as bishop, and the standing committee, a quasi-judiciary panel of four clergy and four laypeople elected by the diocese which had to approve candidates for the priesthood, had found her “spiritually, morally, and intellectually qualified.” Many gay people who kept their orientations secret had been ordained. Why should a candidate be punished for being honest? But no matter how many times my father declared that Ellen Barrett had been selected in accordance with canon law, opposition to her ordination continued to build. My father returned to the standing committee and asked if they wanted to withdraw their approval, but the chair was o
utraged even at the suggestion. The ordination was to go forward. “I have never felt that it was the responsibility of a pastor to protect his people from the confusion that comes to them from the World and the Church,” my father wrote in Take a Bishop Like Me, the book he published about the controversy. His responsibility was, he continued, “rather to give them strength and wisdom and compassion to deal with that confusion. Compared to the hurt and confusion of homosexual Christians over the years, the quandary of a few insecure and respectable people seems minor.”

  By the time he and Brenda traveled to Florida for the annual meeting of the House of Bishops eight months after Barrett’s ordination, talk was mounting that my father would be censured for ordaining her, an action that could lead to his being stripped of his orders. His opponents accused him of breaking faith; the bishops had laid out a timetable to discuss the ordination of gay people. My father stood by his argument: Why should a person honest about her orientation be penalized? He and Kim Myers, now bishop of California, were in despair as to what to do when Brenda wondered aloud what on earth had happened to the courageous radicals she’d heard so much about. That night, with her help, my father drafted a defense. “I have broken no canon law,” he proclaimed, reminding his fellow bishops that Ellen Barrett had been found qualified for the priesthood.

  Please carefully listen to the possible consequences of this proposed action. Aspirants for holy orders who sense a vocation within themselves will be encouraged to lie to their psychiatrist, Standing Committee, Ministries Commissions, and bishop. Ordained clergy of the church who have declared themselves to be gay will be left wondering when charges of deposition will be brought against them. The Episcopal Church may become the scene of a McCarthy-like purge, rife with gossip, charges, and counter-charges . . . There has been much talk here about freedom of conscience . . . Given this principle . . . do you then proceed to censure or deplore a Bishop and Standing Committee acting with full canonical scrupulosity in ordaining someone whom they believed qualified and whom most of you have never met? I think such an action is outrageous . . .

  My sisters and I, together for a weekend in Washington, heard that our father was in danger of being defrocked, and sent a telegram of support. He called to tell us he had received a long ovation and that the resolution to censure him had been voted down, but the controversy about inclusion of openly gay people in the ministries of the Episcopal Church was just beginning.

  When I sat down in his office two months after the Florida meeting, my father was still putting out fires stoked by the ordination. I was looking forward to hearing about his adventures, but I had also prepared a list of questions. The editor at Ms. had assumed conflict between us, but now, for the first time since the end of my parents’ marriage, we seemed to have no differences; there seemed to be no gap at all between the father I desired and the father I had. Our talk was an interview, but it was also a reunion and a reconciliation. Listening to the old cassette thirty years later, I hear first our formality—he declares himself “very proud” of me “professionally” and I respond in kind. Since Ms. wanted to know about my relationship to a bishop-father, I first asked what he felt about the fact that none of his children had a relationship to the church. It had disappointed him, he said, that none of us were active Christians, but he’d come to realize that what was more important was that each of us had serious vocations—mine, for instance, poetry, but also social action as a feminist. “It would have been fun, though, if one of you had been in the clergy,” he said wistfully.

  When he began to talk about Ellen Barrett’s ordination, the formality gave way to the familiar pleasure of hearing my father tell a story. He and Brenda had arrived at Holy Apostles to find the Chelsea street mobbed with television cameras and were led through a back entrance. He told me about the simple power of the service itself; the thousand letters that had poured into his office, two-thirds of them against what he had done; the parishes that threatened to withhold their contributions to diocesan work. When I asked how he’d managed to bear up, he described his visit to the Church of the Ascension three days after the ordination to preach for Integrity, the organization of gay Episcopalians. Seeing the church full, he presumed for another service, he found the parish hall empty, and panicked that he had the night wrong. “We’re expecting you, Bishop,” said a man who suddenly appeared and led him into a church packed to capacity.

  Some of the protest had been so vicious my father was gun-shy: he’d requested no publicity and had expected a small, easy group. “Don’t worry, Bishop,” he was told. Word had spread that he was coming and that Ellen Barrett would be there. The congregation was gay people and their families and supporters of all faiths, Roman Catholic priests, rabbis, women and men and their companions, children, old men with, he said, “years of anguish” on their faces. Wanting to steer clear of controversy, he preached about love and suffering, how close the two are, concluding, as he often did, by reminding his listeners of the Resurrection, of “the new life that follows after redeemed pain, how the Church would be filled with new life when we were finally able to love everyone as he or she was made.” His voice filled with the wonder I remembered from childhood as he described the sacred feeling of the Eucharist that night, how people took their time receiving communion, how his purpose as a bishop and pastor came back to him in the midst of the love he felt, and in what people said to him afterward. One man pulled him aside. “Until now,” he said, “the church has only offered to ‘help’ us. That is the very worst insult of all. We don’t want to be bundled off to a psychiatrist. Now someone in the church, a bishop, our bishop, has ordained one of us. It’s beautiful, man, beautiful.”

  I asked him about his first knowledge of homosexuality, and he talked about being a late bloomer at St. Paul’s, and a terrible athlete. “It was agony.” And the panic when two boys were discovered having sexual contact. “The worst thing you could be called was a sissy,” he said. “Which, of course, I realize now, had to do with fear of homosexuality. And, of course,” he added, “there was Fred Bartrop. You answered the telephone . . .”

  Immediately I knew the call he meant. “That was Fred Bartrop?”

  I was five or six, and it was Sunday, after mass, in Jersey City, the cocktail hour at home after the coffee hour in the parish hall. “Hello?” A twisted, barking voice. “Is Father Moore there?” I ran to my father. I was used to these phone calls—he got them from people who wanted money, from people whose houses had burned down, women whose husbands had gone to jail, from people who were hungry or sad or drunk. He went immediately to the phone, sat down, turned toward the window, the receiver to one ear, a finger in his other, all the grownups drinking sherry. My mother was there and Freddie Bradlee and Joanna Smith, who wore wide belts and full skirts and was acting the lead in the church play. When we sat down for lunch, my father was still on the telephone. Roast chicken, let’s say. The grownups were laughing, doing what my parents called “setting up gags.” A couple of seminarians, some old friends from New York. When my father finally hung up, he slipped into his chair at the head of the table and rejoined the conversation.

  Now my father told me the voice had been Fred Bartrop and that he had been drunk. I could hardly believe it. The Fred I knew was courtly, silver-haired, always beautifully dressed, a gold watch on a chain in his waistcoat I played with as he balanced me on his knee; he looked right at me and spoke carefully, the way people who love language do. I knew he had been my father’s teacher. I did not know then that he had once been a priest, the chaplain who encouraged my father to make his first confession, to whom he first confided his conversion; that he had been a teacher my father was so close to he called him “Bear.” Now my father was telling me that Fred Bartrop had been defrocked, court-martialed, and kicked out of the army. On an evening walk, he had reached out, “in loneliness and love,” my father said, and the soldier had reported him. To my father, then twenty-four, homosexuality was a mo
ral failing, like drunkenness. “People shouldn’t despise, but pity,” he had written my mother about Bartrop in 1943. “When he took holy orders, he was taking on a tremendous fight, bravely, because he knew the strength of his temptations . . . I can never repay him, none of us can—for the thing on which we will live our whole lives. That stuff is dynamite.”

  I had my father back. I was stunned and moved as I walked up Amsterdam Avenue after the interview to meet Victoria for Greek food at the Symposium. I told her everything he had told me, how he now believed he’d been wrong about the Philadelphia ordinations, that he now felt the action had been a good thing because there had been time for deep discussion before the convention vote. I told her, too, because it was the most powerful thing he said that night, how he believed that in the human psyche, religious emotion and sexual feeling come from “the same mysterious, undifferentiated source,” how “the human life of love and the divine life of love,” as he wrote later, “are not separate, but part of the scope of God’s love that sweeps through His creation. The love of a man for a woman, of a parent for a child, of a man for a man, a woman for a woman . . .” Victoria knew exactly what I was talking about. She’d left the convent when she was forbidden to go home for her grandmother’s funeral. Decades later, as a dissident Roman Catholic, she would integrate her lesbian activism and theater work with worship. In 2005, she would become a “womanpriest,” ordained on a ship in the international waters of the St. Lawrence Seaway by women bishops from Germany and Austria who had been consecrated in secret by rebel Catholic bishops in Europe who believed the ordination of women should be in the hands of women.