by Honor Moore
I wanted to hold his hand and he didn’t resist, so I took it. Now there were not many sentences he could make. He would begin and then, when he couldn’t form the next word, say, “Oh shit,” and we’d giggle. But he had one remaining sentence: “What do you think?”
And now he said it to me. “What do you think?”
“That I love you very much,” I said, squeezing his hand, feeling him squeeze back as, sad, I said, “I’m sorry it’s been so hard,” meaning our life together, which is I’m sure what he understood. I kept hold of his hand, his long, slender fingers, the sun in the room making everything beautiful. He tried to say something else, “We—” and then all he could do was mumble, but he kept looking at me, and I kept crying, which felt safe. This moment will always bring tears, I thought to myself, because in it was the lost land, the place we could have had a life together as father and daughter all our lives. Perhaps what is meant by the land of milk and honey is this room with the sun falling across my tall, lanky father, catching the white of his hair. Time was shifting, the years of obstruction falling away. We race to the house on Bank Street as if we are still, or have become again, the children who are proud to tell our friends that our father is six feet four and three quarters, who love to see him in his vestments sweeping down the aisle.
And then one night, after helping him to the bathroom, bathing and changing him, putting him to bed, my sister Susanna and the hospice nurse left his room for just a moment, and he bolted from bed, falling, crushing the mahogany rocker, the last piece of furniture from his grandmother’s big house in Chicago. Now, for the first time, he had pain, and for it, liquid morphine. “The surge of life,” is what the hospice worker called his great leap, another marker of the nearness of death.
It was May 1, May Day, festival day of revolutionaries, signal of emergency. I was startled awake at six-thirty. It was a teaching day. I don’t remember how I got up to Columbia, but I had an office hour, and then forty-five minutes into class, my cell phone rang: “They say it’s imminent.” I leapt into a taxi. When I got to his room, Pop was laboriously breathing, his skin chalky, no more radiance. My sister Patience was in a chair next to the bed. I kissed her hello and took his hand. The blinds were pulled against the light, no chance of another trip downstairs, no sentences left. Patience left the room, and Rosie came in, then Abdillahi arrived. Rosie and I left Abdillahi alone with Pop for a few minutes—Abdillahi, a Somali from Kenya, an unofficial adopted tenth child for the last forty years.
After a few minutes, Rosie and I came back into the room and Abdillahi left. Then my father spat something up, and I wiped his cheek. Rosie left the room to call a friend who was going to a Tibetan prayer service, to ask her to pray for Pop, and then I noticed his chest had stopped rising, that he was not breathing. I was holding his hand. I wondered if this was death.
And then he breathed again. And I said, “I really love you, Pop. We all really love you. And we love each other. We really do, and we love you.” Then, wanting to tell the truth, “You taught us love . . . in all its colors.” What I meant was, even the dark, cruel colors. “And we will be all right.” I couldn’t tell if he could hear me, but I said it anyway. “And so you can go, when you’re ready.”
And then he took a big breath, like a baby opening his mouth for a breast. And he didn’t breathe again.
The living room was getting dark. My brother Dan was standing against the wall, I was sitting down, Marian was sitting down, and Rosie was on the sofa. The funeral people, Tommy and Anita, were small. “Is there anyone else coming?” Marian asked when they arrived. We wondered how these two little people would get our father’s long body down the stairway. We’d foraged his closet for vestments and I’d chosen his rochet and chimere—the scarlet overvest that fell to the ground over the flowing white chemise, long sleeves gathered at the wrist. He looked beautiful in that, and I found a black tippet and a white brocade stole with IHS embroidered in gold and black and crimson. I remember so well Pop solemnly explaining those initials as Greek letters signifying Jesus, but now they looked tender and familiar and small.
Downstairs we waited. There was light on the wall along the stairwell, the creamy yellow of incandescent electricity, and the narrow balusters cast faint shadows. First we heard it, a thumping, and then between the white of the balusters and the ghostly creaminess of the bare wall appeared the black of a body bag, a very long body bag, nosing down the carpeted stairs, my father in a black plastic bag in a slow fall, the stripes of the balusters a ripple between all of us waiting there and him leaving us, shiny and black against the bare white wall.
20
Andrew Verver
* * *
My father died in May, and in early November, a truckload of boxes and a few pieces of furniture were delivered to my apartment on Riverside Drive. The apartment was small, but in spite of my having chosen, I thought, a minimum of things from the estate, there were many boxes to be unpacked. As the day went on, I developed a horrific headache. I continued unwrapping china anyway, filling the sink with hot, soapy water, washing Staffordshire pitchers which had gathered dust for decades, first at Hollow Hill and later at Bank Street. It felt a little like Christmas. Out of a flat mirror box came a big watercolor of the living room at Hollow Hill, in which I could see the very pitchers I was unwrapping lined up on the shelves of a tall New England cupboard. Now I was thinking of Gami racing toward me down the steps, sun streaming into the entrance hall, and of my father as a child packed up and waiting in that same entrance hall for the chauffeured car that would take him to St. Paul’s. And of my grandmother later, her language lost to a stroke, sitting on the sofa in that living room, her darkly freckled hand reaching for me, wedding diamond sparkling, the gold necklace I now wear resting in the folds of her old-fashioned flowered blouse.
Overcome by the headache, I lay down in my bed and looked up at the bookshelves—the green leather-bound Buxton Forman Keats my father gave me when I read Keats as a junior at Harvard, the bright look on his face, as if he were handing me a treasure. He was handing me a treasure. The pressure of the headache and slight nausea cut into my thinking. When had I last eaten? When had I last read Keats? I thought of getting up and taking one of the books from the shelf. The headache must be sadness. The headache must be an allergy to all this old dust, all this memory.
As it happened, it was my father’s birthday, and my father’s absence still sailed through me like a dark ship, alternating with images of his dying, the visceral sense of his love that afternoon in his sunny bedroom days before he died, when I sat watching him, along with Rosemary and Adelia, all of us imagining what our family might have been had we always had the love from him we felt that day.
Then the telephone rang.
“This is Andrew Verver.” He had a confident voice.
Andrew Verver was the only name in my father’s will that was unfamiliar when we sat in the lawyer’s office the day before the funeral. The moment had passed without comment, but later Rosie identified Andrew as the man who had gone with my father to Patmos the summer before. “I need someone to look after the tickets, you know,” my father said at the time.
“Yeah, right,” said Marian when we talked about it.
“How was the trip, Pop?” Rosie asked after he returned.
“Great.”
“How was Andrew?”
“He worried about his girlfriend the whole time.”
“Yeah, right,” I said to Rosie. Then laughter. And sadness: Why couldn’t he tell us the truth?
“This is Andrew Verver,” said the voice on the telephone.
Two months earlier, I had gone to the cathedral press office to pick up copies of my father’s obituaries, and among them had been a letter from Andrew Verver dated the day after the funeral. He had been a “very close” friend of my father’s for nearly thirty years, he wrote in a crooked but clear hand. Thir
ty years? Yes, thirty years. He would like to visit my father’s grave. He would like to see the videos that had been shown at the reception after the funeral.
Reading the letter, I’d felt like I had when my father was dying—nothing in my body or mind but a pull translating to Take care of him. What if this man on the telephone had been my father’s lover? How would it be for me if I had been the secret lover of a “great man,” of a man as protected as my father was? Suddenly there is no access. Had Andrew Verver come to the funeral? Alone? How far back had he had to sit? And afterward, who had been there for his grief? I wrote him back that day. Of course you can visit Pop’s grave—I will try to get directions for you—I would also very much like to meet you. I’d love to hear about the trip to Patmos. My # is . . . He had not called in September, but now it was my father’s birthday, and here he was.
His voice was soft in texture.
The beginning of the conversation was formal.
“Your father was a close friend of mine.”
“Yes.”
“For almost thirty years.”
“Yes. You said so in your letter—”
“I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner.”
“I was just about to—”
“I had . . . feelings.”
“Today is his birthday!”
“Yes. Oh, I didn’t know that. Right. His birthday.”
Andrew had been a student at Columbia, a Roman Catholic. “I was considering being received into the Episcopal Church,” he said. “I went to your father for advice. He was very helpful. At first it was a pastoral thing,” Andrew continued, “and after a while, we became friends.” He had an accent I couldn’t place. Boston? Near Boston, it turned out. “We were very close friends,” he repeated. “Paul came to my father’s funeral. My family knew him. He even came all the way out to Brooklyn, to my new apartment.”
Rosie and I had laughed about that. “Where are you going, Pop?” she asked him after a lunch on her birthday. “I’m going to visit a friend in Queens.” “Queens?” “Yes, I’m going to visit a friend there, who’s a teacher.” When Rosie repeated this to me, I had an image of my father, his tall, white-haired, black-suited self, on the subway, then walking down a narrow street lined with row houses, bending to ring a doorbell. I couldn’t visualize the man who opened the door, but I saw the inside of the apartment. Modest. Afternoon sun. A cup of coffee offered. My father carrying a small package, a house gift. Of course, I didn’t know then that the man had just moved into the apartment, that this was the first time my father had visited Andrew at home, that the package was a jar of very good black caviar, or that it wasn’t coffee that was offered but vodka.
“He even came to my new apartment,” Andrew repeated.
“I’m so happy to be talking to you,” I said.
“I would have called sooner—”
“I understand,” I said. Then there was silence. “I want to hear about Patmos,” I said.
“I had been there before,” Andrew said, “but Paul hadn’t. I had had a spiritual experience in the cave, where Saint John wrote the Book of Revelation. And Paul wanted to see it, so we went there.”
Should I write this down? Though my headache was almost unbearable, I had no desire to hang up. I reached for a notebook, and a pen. Andrew was silent, but I could hear him there. I couldn’t get over his humility, the calm in his voice. And how he could wait through a silence.
“Your father was a good friend to me,” he said.
“I’m so glad,” I repeated. Good friend, I wrote. We had been talking for about twenty minutes. I kept being afraid he would hang up, that he would stop talking about my father, telling me these things. Oh, please don’t hang up.
“Your father told me a great deal,” Andrew said in that gentle voice, that accent with the broad New England vowels.
“Yes,” I said. And then suddenly I realized I should take advantage of talking to this man who was so close to my father.
“Did he tell you about us? About . . . me?”
“You had some problems with each other.”
“Yes,” I said, “we did.”
So my father had had someone to talk to, someone with whom he had talked about his children who was a tender, sympathetic person. Had this man been my father’s lover? The fact that my father had bequeathed Andrew his bedside table seemed almost too bad a joke.
“Tell me more about Patmos.”
“It was wonderful. I couldn’t keep up with Paul.” I loved the way he said Paul. As if he had loved him. “We climbed the volcano. He ran up the hill. There he was, in his eighties, and I could hardly keep up with him. We went to the cave. Your father was carrying the book around, of Revelation, preparing. ‘This guy is crazy,’ he said.” Andrew was laughing, not with derision or even amusement. It was the laugh inside a secret, the kind children laugh, the kind you laugh when you share something with a lover.
Now there was another silence. “We should get together sometime,” I said. And he gave me his phone number. “We could go to his grave,” I said, “together.”
This man had loved my father, whom he had no obligation to love. This man missed my father, whom he had no obligation to miss. I missed my father.
“That would be great,” Andrew said.
“Sometime after Christmas,” I said.
“We were so close, your father and I. He told me a lot of things.” He didn’t want to get off the telephone either.
“About—”
“About your family. About his life. We missed our boat to Patmos, and we had to spend the night on Samos, another island. Something about the missed connection freed Paul, and we really talked that night. It was a beautiful night, we sat outside, we ate fish.” I could hear Andrew breathing. I could imagine this man holding on to my father’s hand with the tenderness with which he was staying on the telephone, waiting. The silence opened, my headache throbbed. All over the floor was the crumpled newspaper.
“Did he talk to you about his sexual life?” Two men in Greece in the bright evening sun.
“I was his sexual life,” Andrew said.
“You were?” We both began to laugh.
“For a long time.”
“I am so happy he had someone like you,” I managed to say.
“Of course there were other men,” he said.
Andrew, a student at Columbia, had been having trouble with the Catholic Church. Young, gay, tired of the church’s hypocrisy about homosexuality. “I thought the Episcopal Church would be better.” I laughed.
“Was it?” He was laughing too.
“A little.”
It was 1975. Andrew, having read about my father, wrote to him at the cathedral, and my father wrote back—I would be glad to see you but it may take me 2–3 weeks to open up an appointment because I’m pretty clobbered right now . . . However, if you want to see somebody more quickly than that, I can recommend one of our clergy. But Andrew, I would learn, is a determined person. He wanted to see my father and eventually it was my father whom he got in to see, and after several meetings, long conversations about Andrew’s anger at the Catholic Church, in which Andrew revealed that he was gay, they became friends, and one day, Andrew said, “He asked me to go to bed.” That quiet laughter again. I held on to the telephone. Nineteen seventy-five was also the year my father married Brenda. The friendship became an affair. Which continued.
“Your father met my family,” Andrew said. “He came all the way to Massachusetts for my father’s funeral. After he died, my brother said, ‘Paul really loved you.’” And then, again, as if he had to prove something to me, Andrew said, “My family knew him.”
Nothing Andrew was saying upset me. On the contrary, it made me terribly happy.
“Your father was just getting to know Brenda then,” Andrew said.
It surprised me that my father had been able to choose someone kind. I would have expected someone with a harsh sense of humor, like Brenda, even like my mother. This man was witty, but he was also gentle. I had forgotten that tender part of my father. I knew from the will that Andrew was “a teacher and therapist.” After years in the school system, he now worked with autistic children, he told me. Children under three years old. He had dropped out of Columbia, coming to terms with his homosexuality, his family’s disapproval. When he talked to the university therapist about his anger at the Catholic Church, at the priests who had seduced him as a teenager and then refused to acknowledge it or help him when he himself was coming out, Columbia referred him to the Catholic chaplain on campus. “Can you believe that!?” Andrew said. It was then he called my father. At the same time that he met my father, he told me later, he was working for Allen Ginsberg, and he laughed.
“After a while I thought to myself, Which of these two men shall I get to know? Two roads diverged . . . I took the one less traveled by . . . It was like the Robert Frost poem, it really was! Paul Moore, I decided,” and again a peal of that laughter.
“Did you feel pushed when my father asked you to go to bed?”
“Yes, I did, but, you know, I’m a strong person.”
“What made you say yes?”
“Your father was a hard man to say no to,” and Andrew laughed again.
