by Honor Moore
The reason that my father was telling his children this story in detail was that news of the investigation, which he had assumed and expected would be kept confidential, had not been kept confidential, and facts about his life that he had tried to keep private were now known in church circles. He had refused on principle to discuss Ellen Barrett’s personal life. I remembered, too, as a child, understanding that there were confidences my father kept as a sacred trust. It was almost impossible for me to imagine that someone in the church had been so careless with the reputation and feelings of a colleague. That day in Hartford, my father refused to speak against anyone, but I was angry.
“This must make you hate New York,” I said.
“It makes me hate the Episcopal Church,” he said.
I thought of his love for the church, what he had given the church, his tolerance for its shortcomings. I thought of all the sermons in which he promised the Savior’s forgiveness, of his arms opening in welcome as he looked down at a congregation. But right now my father was not opening his long arms, he had made himself small. In spite of my own shaky sense of self where love was concerned, I felt stronger in that way than he then seemed. Oh my sweet one, I thought. What change would this experience bring to the man who had always found in the tangle of human weakness and cruelty a path through to the succor of what he understood as God’s love? Now his head was bent in shame—how excruciating for him to have to make a confession like this to his children. Feeling the familiar, sickening inability to take him in my arms, I touched his hand. How could they have done this to my father? Followed by, Why not? Why should he be spared what others were not spared?
I remembered a call from a pay phone. I was dead asleep. Her plaintive voice, Would I pick her up? She was my lover, on and off, and this night she had driven from Kent, where she lived, to New Haven with a friend of ours, a gay man, who had wandered off with a trick, leaving her in the bar. Now it was after midnight, and she was at a pay phone on a deserted street. I drove the ninety minutes and picked her up at the intersection we’d agreed on. It was 2 a.m. We parked the car in an illuminated lot next to a bar and then took a walk to see if we could find a shop—cigarettes, matches, a place to sit down. Nothing open. When we returned to the bar parking lot, there was a message scrawled in the dust on the trunk of the car. DYKE. KILL THE DYKE. We took it in, the violence of the epithet and the threat. There were no further consequences of my driving out in the night to meet my woman lover, but in that parking lot in New Haven I was subject to what any woman who has sex with another woman is subject to. And now my father had been subject to what any man who has sex with another man is subject to.
But this is not what I said sitting next to the old man with the missing tooth that day in Hartford. What I said was, “I am so sorry that you have to go through this.” And I repeated it over and over, taking in his white hair, his sadness, and his shame. “It makes me think of Fred Bartrop,” I said, thinking of his unrecognizable voice that long-ago Sunday in Jersey City, and how my father had told and written the story. Now I thought of the silver communion set his mother had given Bartrop all those decades ago at St. Paul’s, how Fred had returned it to my father when he was stripped of his orders, how, years later, my father had seen to it that Bartrop was reinstated as a priest, how he’d had the communion set refurbished and engraved, returning it as a gift when Bartrop celebrated his first Eucharist in twenty-five years, how he had chosen “Bear,” newly reinstated, as one of the presenters when he was consecrated bishop in Washington. The darkness where my father’s tooth had been was the mark of his kinship with his old teacher, with the men to whom he had given communion that night at Integrity, with those whose names he’d read at the AIDS requiem. And it was evidence, evidence of his vulnerability to forces I’d imagined him free of, us free of. Although my father looked terrible and sad, he had no intention of leaving the priesthood. He would ride it out.
When I got to my car, I sat for quite a while before starting the engine, tears burning my face in the close June heat. If I had not had a headache earlier, I got one then; all I wanted was not to have seen my father in a condition of such suffering. “Gay and proud,” came the words out of my mouth—not a locution I’d ever uttered about myself or about my father—but now I took the phrase in. I had understood for some time that there had been tentativeness in my own homosexual existence. Whatever I am, I must make my way to it, I thought to myself, pulling into the traffic. In spite of my openness about my relationships with women, I felt in myself an avoidance, a turning away from forces that moved in my spirit, an angry wanting I kept secret even from myself.
My father had not kept his equivalent desire secret from himself, but the events he recounted to me on the bench in Hartford were vindication of the precarious wisdom of the choice he had made to keep his homosexual life secret from others. He had not exaggerated when he imagined the worst consequences of revealing the entirety of who he was. This terrible consequence was central to the story of the bargain my father had struck. As I drove the familiar Connecticut roads, all my rage at him about his secrecy and deceit now seemed small, even sentimental. If I continued to sit in judgment of him, then I was no better than his enemies.
19
Wayfarers
* * *
When I sat in tears that day in my car in Hartford, thinking of my father’s lost tooth, making a pledge to come to terms with my sexuality, I did not expect I would return to men. But that winter, after years of intermittent flirtations with men that always unsettled my relationships with women, a man began to pursue me, and we went out for several months. Eventually I found myself free to fall in love. I met Raphael when I moved back to New York in late 1998, and we saw each other for nearly a year. In retrospect, I see that he was both available and unavailable; in the end, he turned cruelly from me, but our months together were filled with pleasure, and hope. It was the collapse of that relationship that took me back to therapy, and that therapist who said one day, as I wept at some twist in a story I was telling, “You must once have loved your father very much.” And that day that I shouted, “No! Absolutely not.”
“Okay,” the therapist said.
And I fell to weeping again, remembering the feeling of possibility I’d had with Raphael, the wonderful dinners we made for friends at his house on Martha’s Vineyard, the laughs, hours spent in New York museums as we talked and talked about his childhood in Rome, his architectural study at Harvard, his interest in my writing. In the rush of its beginning, this love seemed a solution, a way to repair all my years of failure with men and with women. Perhaps, with Raphael’s protection, I might even repair my relationship with my father. And so, when the love affair ended, I was faced with everything I had put aside. When I tried to write, I could write only fragments and transcriptions of dreams. It was as if I had to make myself all over again. I had time and no alternative, and so I committed myself. After several months of work, my therapist suggested I try again to bring my father in for a few sessions.
“Why do I have to do this?”
“You don’t have to,” the therapist said gently. “But I think it would help you.”
“How? He’ll just shout at me.”
“But I’ll be here. I think you’ll be able to say what you need to say.”
There were reasons I was still so angry. During the summer of 1997, my father had sent each of his children the galleys of Presences, a memoir of his life and career to be published the following December. I remembered when he began writing it; we were in the Adirondacks and he was reading the published version of John Cheever’s diaries in which details of the writer’s gay life are recounted. “I’m afraid I can’t be as candid as Mr. Cheever,” he said when I asked how he liked the book, and turned back to it like a boy to an adventure story. As time went on, we had periodic conversations about how his writing was going. His editors, he told me, kept asking him to make the book “
more personal.” At least once, I suggested that if he told the truth about his sexual conflicts, his book would be profoundly “personal” and a great culmination of his ministry. I said I’d learned the power of self-revelation from him. “I just can’t,” he said. He had hurt Brenda so much, and there were his brother and sister to think of. At the time, I was disappointed in his lack of courage, but after our conversation in Hartford, I realized that perhaps I had been asking too much of him. I could write what I wanted to, but I was from a different generation, I had no spouse or children, and, most important, I did not have a public life as a religious leader.
But when I read the actual text in bound galleys, I saw that, under pressure to be personal, my father had disclosed painful details of my mother’s life—her collapse after the accident, her time in Payne Whitney. I was furious. Without disclosure of his own sexual secret, his description of my mother made her seem selfish and irrational. He did not admit to having been unfaithful, therefore it was inexplicable that she had banished him from their marriage bed. “Even now I do not know what came between us,” he wrote. She’d had a great life as a mother, had been a friend to many and a partner in his work—why did she feel her life had been worthless? I found his account of their life together utterly self-serving, and so did many of my siblings. How could he lay bare our mother’s vulnerability without taking any responsibility for his part in the collapse of their marriage? She was not here to tell her side of the story, and furthermore, she had protected him! For years she had known of his sexual relationships with men, but, in pain herself and sensing his suffering, had never confronted him. Nor had she betrayed him by revealing what she knew to any of us. Our collective anger, held in check the years since our mother’s death, rose in a tidal wave of fury. In the end, he removed some details but not others.
Now, six months after the book’s appearance, I was living in New York and my father was calling. He wanted to see me, but I was still angry and I didn’t return his calls. “He’s just an old man,” one of my friends said. “Call him back.” I felt threatened. Still in pain at the loss of Raphael, how could I risk that abrupt barking anger of my father’s? In therapy, I was putting together the loss of Raphael with the history of my relationship with my father, and I was beginning to go out with other men. I dreamed of my father standing with me, the house in Kent disintegrating, submerged in floodwater; of Raphael returning, of myself unable to choose between women’s clothes and men’s clothes, of men with female bodies, of women with male bodies. If my New York phone rang, I’d pick it up, terrified it would be my father, and, sitting in restaurants, I’d see a man I was sure was Raphael talking animatedly with another woman, and then he’d turn his head. People my age whom I passed on the street looked old; I felt old and defeated. So much that had been familiar turned alien; the therapist’s tiny office was my only refuge. I came to understand that I had moved to Connecticut not only to write my book but to escape the confusion of my sexuality and of my relationship with my father. I was learning that I spent days in bed not from exhaustion but from sadness, from depression, that my headaches were apt to follow family phone calls or visits. I cried for hours at a time.
It was also a difficult time for my father. He was beginning, at least intuitively, to understand that Brenda was leaving him—not walking away, but drinking herself away, falling down, her broken bones never healing, lying on the sofa at Bank Street or in Stonington, just lying there, drinking, her face set in unhappiness. My father felt guilty and responsible and he missed her ebullience and humor. The last time I saw her was at a family Christmas party. She looked seventy though she was only fifty-six; she had shrunken back to her bones. I had found two tiny objects for her, a miniature green wire basket, a tiny Chinese ceramic bird. I watched her open them, barely able to work her fingers, and then she looked up, lifted herself, and stumbled over to me. “Oh, you know me so well. It is so extraordinary to be known so well,” she said, and kissed me, her hot breath dense with alcohol.
Eventually my father’s persistence wore me down. “I just wanted to be sure you’d gotten the message,” came his voice on the answering machine. One day, I decided to write him. I admitted I had been avoiding him and asked if he’d come to therapy with me. He quickly agreed.
To the first session he wore a garish black-and-white tweed suit, a mustard-colored shirt, a matching handkerchief fluttering from the chest pocket. He was very solemn, greeting my therapist as “Doctor” and giving me a kiss of greeting. The therapist spoke quietly, announcing to my father that there were things I wanted to say, and then he said, “Perhaps you can tell me, since I don’t know you, something about the history of your marriage and of your relationship with Honor.”
My father began to talk like a movie voice-over. I looked at my therapist, intent as my father told the formulaic story, falling in love with my mother after he was wounded, his decision to go to Seattle, how his decision to marry my mother was reached on his trip home, the details, as familiar to me now as certain sequences from the Book of Common Prayer.
When the therapist asked me to speak, I told my version of our story and my mother’s story, integrating the fact of my father’s bisexuality. I spoke of my anger at his refusal to take responsibility for his role in the breakup of his marriage to my mother, his insistence since her death on blaming her, painting her in his memoir as a depressive lunatic, all to keep his complicated secret. And then my father began to shout.
“Please don’t shout,” I said quietly.
“If you weren’t so GODDAMN oversensitive.”
“Yes, I am sensitive. Please don’t shout.” And then he was weeping. I reached for him.
I remember being able to speak clearly, and I remember that he listened. Of course, my father was used to listening—but after a while he didn’t seem to be listening like a pastor. I said everything that had hurt me, the words flowing out of me in sentences, paragraphs. I saw across what seemed a long distance that my father loved me and that he had missed me. It had hurt him when I withdrew after my mother’s death, he said. That didn’t surprise me. But what he said next amazed me. Why hadn’t I come home to take care of the youngest children after my mother died? When I answered—“Pop, you never asked me! And I had my own life!”—he looked bewildered. What comes back so clearly from those ten hours is looking at him, reaching for him as he cried, and coming to understand who it was I was going to have to love if I was going to love my father. And the relief I felt that he hadn’t given up on me.
Summer was coming, and I asked for some time. We had torn down the old house and dug up the field. In the fall we would begin again.
But then Brenda became very ill, and then she went into the hospital. My father was so beset, I thought the last thing he’d want was a therapy session with me, and so, characteristically, I didn’t bring it up and, equally characteristically, neither did he. By the following spring, it was clear that Brenda was dying, of liver failure. When I got to the hospital with my youngest sister, Patience, she was unconscious, thin, yellow, a husk. Within a month, she died. Days after the funeral, I took my father out to dinner at a French bistro on MacDougal Street. I wanted to let him know that I was with him. We talked about what he was planning to do. He’d thought about leaving Bank Street, he said, but he was too sad, it was too soon—he was going to stay “for the time being.” And then he asked about my love life. “There are a few men,” I said.
“Men?” he said. “I’m surprised,” and he leaned back, the evening sun playing off his face. He’d met several men I’d seen. He’d met Raphael. How could he have forgotten?
“Yes, men. I am seeing men, now.”
“Well,” he said, lifting a glass, “to the future!”
Our reunion was short-lived. The selling of the Kent house and the end of my Connecticut life in the fall of 2001 just weeks after 9/11, a new teaching job, deaths of friends, all combined to postpone a return
to our therapy, and at the end of 2002, when my therapist and I were talking about trying again, my father, unable to recover from a long bout with pneumonia, had a chest X-ray. A spot on his lung, and on New Year’s Eve, a diagnosis of melanoma. But he had no intention of dying. “They’ll have to shoot you at one hundred and fifty,” was a remark he liked to repeat, something a doctor said after a physical he had in his late seventies. The diagnosis gave him a new lease on life. It was as if he were Henry James’s Lambert Strether, the hero of The Ambassadors, freed of all restraint. Yes, I will live all I can. It is a mistake not to. As his children muttered in awe, my father sped around the country, even the world. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? Lambert Strether proclaimed to his young friend Bilham. My father postponed a brain scan so he could go fishing in the Amazon, a lifelong dream. “Don’t you think I should go?” he asked. “Of course you should,” I said. He hired a guide and went by himself. As a precaution, the doctors had given him Decadron, a drug to prevent swelling should he have tumors in his brain, to keep him from having seizures—Decadron’s side effect is euphoria. And my father was euphoric, sending home wild, misspelled, miscapitalized e-mails, “countless peACOCK BASS. BUTERFLY BASS, PIRANHA, CAIMEN (cROCODILES), PARROTS MONKEYS MACAWS sTORKS, ETC ETC lOVE pop.”
