The Bishop's Daughter

by Honor Moore

  “Did you want to say no?”

  “No,” Andrew said.

  “You saw him while he was married to Brenda.”

  “Yes, and then for a while, no. She didn’t understand,” Andrew said.

  “She didn’t know, and then she found out,” I said.

  “Your father didn’t believe that making love with a man was cheating on his wife,” Andrew said. “He believed it was a different thing.”

  “And so you saw each other.”

  “We saw each other when we could. I often went with him on Sundays when he went out to churches. That was how we worked it out. Even though I couldn’t drive. He always took someone along to drive, and he told me to say, if anyone asked, that I was his driver.” I, too, had driven my father to confirmations. I could hear it made Andrew happy to tell me these things.

  On those Sunday trips they talked of theology and homosexuality, and about whether Andrew should be received into the Episcopal Church. At first my father thought Andrew should work things out in his own church. But Andrew was a serious gay activist, and he couldn’t bear how Catholicism shut him out.

  “I began to go to St. Luke’s, in the Village,” he said. “And then, one day I wrote to your father that I thought it was time for me to be received.”

  You can’t imagine how happy this makes me, my father replied in a letter Andrew later showed me.

  “But he also talked to you about the family.”

  “Yes, he did. I didn’t always agree with him, you know,” Andrew said. “I sometimes took your side, or the side of one of your brothers and sisters. Sometimes I’d argue and argue and then your father would say—you know what he was like, he’d get very stern, wave me off and almost shout at me, ‘I don’t want to talk about it!’” My father enraged when disagreed with—shouting, even cursing. That part of him, which terrified me, seemed to amuse Andrew.

  “Was there any significance to the table my father left you in his will?”

  “Only that it was next to the bed!” he said, and we laughed. “Your father had a sense of humor. We were on the sofa once talking,” Andrew continued, “and Paul took off his bishop’s ring and put it on my hand for a minute. The New York bishop’s ring has windmills on it, and your father smiled and said, ‘I’m your Dutch uncle.’” My father, this man my age, whom I have never seen, next to him. Playfully, tenderly, he slips the heavy gold ring from his finger and puts it on Andrew’s. The Dutch uncle as lover—twenty-five years of letters which support, respond, confide, reach out, extend invitations, encourage, advise, convey affection, gratitude, desire, even love.

  In one of Andrew’s silences, I remembered the day Raphael announced abruptly that he was returning to Los Angeles, that he did not want me to come with him, that he was considering reconciling with his wife, that he had never intended romance with me. We were having lunch at our favorite restaurant downtown—a reunion: I’d been away for three weeks writing. It seemed so sudden! We’d been seeing each other for a year, he’d been out of touch with his wife for months, they hadn’t lived together for two years. “People are assuming,” he declared, “that you are coming with me to Los Angeles. As if we were having a great romance,” and then he paused. “I hope you don’t think so.” How far this cold man with the strange contorted face was from the man whose opulent mouth I loved.

  My therapist was very pragmatic. He nursed me through months of agony and encouraged me to meet other men, which I gamely tried to do, dreams coming that confused Raphael with my father, dreams in which he was present but just out of reach. Finally, when I began to see another man who seemed to have no ambivalence whatsoever, Raphael began to call again.

  It was nearly two years after the breakup that I had lunch with Harold, an old friend from Harvard who was gay, who was like a brother to me, who had helped me to give up alcohol, a process during which you can have no secrets. After a while our work became mutual, me telling him my life, him telling me his. Sometimes he had startling intuitions, as when a few years earlier he’d said, “You’ll be ready for a new sweetheart soon,” and I’d said “Yes,” and he’d said, “It’ll be a man, you know.”

  I’d blushed. “Yes,” I said. How had he known that? It was still just a feeling, something I’d barely let into my own mind, much less spoken of.

  But now that was years ago and Harold and I were catching up, our conversation a ripple of disclosure and giggles, when, abruptly, he went silent and looked at me.

  “I have something to tell you.” It was unexpected for Harold to get solemn like this; usually our conversation erupted in cascades of laughter. I was unnerved. Perhaps he was going to tell me he wanted to borrow money or that he had AIDS, or that his mother, at long last, had told him what she really thought of his sexual preference.

  “I love you, Honor,” he said, “and I don’t want to hurt you, but I think this will help you.” Something about my father? He wasn’t looking at me, just talking. He’d had dinner just days before with a friend of his, a gay man recently left single, who, after months of grieving, was beginning to meet men, in particular men he met on the Internet. It was still early as far as Internet dating was concerned, and Harold, who always declared himself “a Luddite and proud of it,” was intrigued. “What kind of men do you meet there?” he wanted to know. “Interesting men,” his friend said, the most recent, an independent curator from Los Angeles.

  “Oh my God, is what I thought,” Harold said, “and then I asked the name. Raphael Benedict.”

  Raphael Benedict. My stomach turned, my eyes filled.

  “And so,” Harold continued, “I asked some questions.” Raphael, the friend said, was “very passionate.” Apparently it hadn’t been the first time for him; he had been with men on and off his whole life, even while he was married. He had wanted to see Harold’s friend again, but the friend hadn’t wanted to see him. “He said Raphael was too confused, too ambivalent.”

  I could hardly believe it, but I felt oddly relieved. I wanted to laugh. After all this time, all the hours of tears, of incomprehension. I remembered having suspicions, when Raphael was so hot and cold about sex, that he might be gay. The thought had faded away, though, when, after the initial breakup, we began to see each other again when he came to town from Los Angeles. But now I remembered something. After the lunch when Raphael told me he did not want me to move to Los Angeles with him, he stayed behind at the restaurant bar for a quick meeting. I was still there when the man he was meeting arrived, and Raphael made introductions. But his focus entirely shifted. I hardly recognized the man I knew in the small talk he made with this man who was “a venture capitalist,” an art collector, and a former Olympic swimmer. As they talked about hotels in Eleuthera and golf courses in Scotland, I meekly said I had to leave, and truly, as I slipped out, trying to keep my composure, I felt I was hardly noticed.

  “You found the perfect man with whom to work through your relationship with your father,” my therapist said when I told him the news. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, I had managed to choose a man who lived a hidden gay life identical to my father’s. If therapy were graded, I thought to myself, I’d be an A+ student!

  Andrew was still there, on the other end of the line. “Your father told me that you were a lesbian,” he said.

  “Did he tell you I’d gone back to men?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Ten years ago,” I said.

  “Your father could never accept it,” Andrew said. “His homosexuality.”

  “I knew that,” I said, remembering the end of one of our therapy sessions, the one to which he’d worn the terrible black-and-white suit with the mustard-colored shirt and matching handkerchief. He looked so tall in that suit, I remembered, too big for the chair. People would come up to him, he said, after he’d given a reading from his memoirs and congratulate him. “You’ve had su
ch an extraordinary life,” they’d say. As my father reported this, the saddest, most disgusted look came over his face. “If only they knew the truth,” he said, eyes reddening, bending his head to his hand, pulling the handkerchief from his pocket, trying to recover himself.

  “Your father could never accept that he desired men,” Andrew Verver repeated.

  “Even at the end?” I remembered the male ballet dancer who’d moved in “to take care of things” at the end of his life, rumors my brothers and sisters had heard.

  “At the end, he was becoming more gay. And I,” Andrew said, “I was going in the other direction.” Now, his voice quiet, he was telling me about the woman he was engaged to marry.

  “A woman?” No one will ever believe this story, I thought to myself.

  It was late July, and Rome was erotic with decay, oleander and wild lavender, towers and gleaming store windows, and I could still feel his mouth, Raphael’s luxurious mouth, the body I’d left behind when I left for Italy, what I had seen on his face the first time his hand fumbled down my cheek.

  A middle-aged woman, returning to Rome after decades. I was walking down a street with my friend Emily. She was newly in love, finally happily, with a woman. We were telling each other stories about falling in love, she with Lauren, I with Raphael.

  It was our first afternoon and the late sun burned a slant of white cut sharp by the orange buildings, leaving the portion of sidewalk in shadow nearly black.

  “You’re quiet, sweetie,” Emily said. I didn’t like it when she called me sweetie. It reminded me of the embarrassing moment when she had announced that she was in love with me, just at the time I was beginning to leave women.

  “I’m preoccupied,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I didn’t want to talk.

  “Do you still consider yourself a lesbian?” Emily had a way of blurting things out, like a child.

  “I can’t think that way,” I said, nervous. I was going to have to learn how to answer these questions.

  “Don’t you feel disloyal?” she said.

  I crossed the narrow deserted street, stopped at the curb, and turned back toward her. Emily was almost invisible in the glare. “I’m the same person,” I said.

  “In a way you’ve betrayed us,” she said.

  “If you believe that, then you don’t know me,” I said. The shade gave no refuge. “I have lived with women for fifteen years. I have given my life to women.” I was shouting.

  “But sweetie—” She crossed the street and put out her hand.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “The lives of lesbians are dangerous,” she said. I remembered the night in New Haven, the words fingered across the trunk of my car.

  “A woman who loves a man gets raped and killed as easily as a lesbian,” I said.

  And a woman who moves from a woman to a man, what do they do to her?

  My father had led a complicated life, I was thinking after Andrew Verver and I hung up. But, I realized, so had I. I was again looking at the ceiling of my apartment, at the green and gold leather-bound Keats, and now my eye caught a cross of my father’s, red-painted wood on red, green, and yellow wooden beads. I’d recovered it when we scavenged Bank Street after the funeral and hung it on my doorknob. It had been years since those days I’d spent in bed the week after what I’d come to call “the revelations.” I thought of the conversation on the carved oak bench at Adelia’s house in Hartford, of Fred Bartrop’s unrecognizable voice on the phone in Jersey City when I was a little girl. And I remembered my question to my father that September day, Did you love any of them?

  In the months following Andrew’s call, reading my parents’ letters, my father’s oral history, and rereading his books, I began to put together the evolution of his sexual attitudes and to make out the path of his questioning search. To my Marine Corps father, homosexuality had been a moral failing, but after Jersey City and ministering to people there whose sexual mores he described in his oral history as “rather free” and undertaking psychotherapy with Bertram Schaffner, he became less judgmental about sex, and, one might say, about his own sexual nature. “And yet,” he wrote of himself then in Take a Bishop Like Me, “I still believed that all sexual activity outside marriage was per se sinful. This conflict between my intuitive understanding and moral conviction continued. I held them in tension, but it became increasingly difficult.” Later, he was able to say that even those who had sex outside of marriage did not “offend against the commandment of love, as long as no one was being betrayed or hurt by their sexual acts.” I remembered the sermon he preached in Jersey City in 1999, on the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination. Christ is incarnate among us, he said, with us if we are poor or sick, if we are suffering or confused, when we celebrate or mourn. Christ is present, he declared, with a woman in the agony of giving birth, in the infant’s cry, and in the act of loving sex.

  On the first anniversary of my father’s death, Andrew and I drove to Stonington, and after finding the place where his gravestone would be installed, next to Brenda’s, we drove to the house that had been my father’s and parked the car. Next to it is a large town green that gives onto the Long Island Sound, and we walked through the gate and down to the water. From where we stood, we faced the funny ruffled awning Brenda had installed over the deck where she and my father sat out in the evening with their martinis. After some time, we both turned away. “It’s too sad to look at the house,” I said. Andrew nodded, and we stood in silence watching the small waves lap at the sand, foaming up, and then Andrew climbed out on the rock breakwater that extended into the sound. He stood for a while, then he came back.

  “Are you sad?”

  Andrew nodded. “I stayed with him here. We’d drive up from the city in that Volkswagen, and I’d take the train back.” And then he said, “Are you sad?”

  I’d thought it would be dramatic to come back here with Andrew. I thought I would feel my father’s presence again, but instead, I felt empty.

  “Let’s go to lunch,” I said. And we got back into the car and drove to a café. When we sat down, Andrew pulled out a thick folder of letters, and I began to leaf through.

  Glad to see you’ve come back to life—a line in my father’s handwriting jumped out.

  “What is this?”

  “We hadn’t seen each other for a while,” Andrew said. “There was a mistake. My name was on the list of those dead of AIDS read at that mass in 1986, and Paul heard my name, that I had died. It was a mistake. A friend of mine had died, and I’d submitted his name.”

  “What happened? Did you go up to him afterward?”

  “I couldn’t get to him, but he called me that night.”

  I had been at that service, and it was during the sermon that night that I’d felt my father almost transfigured in the power of his preaching. It was also that night, years before the discovery of his hidden life, that, feeling the love coming from him as he preached, I had decided to accept who he was, to take the love he gave when he was his truest self, when he was preaching. Now I’d learned that my father had preached that night believing a man he loved had died.

  21

  Complexity

  * * *

  It was not until my father was dying that I took in the full weight of what he said bitterly in one of the therapy sessions, looking away, “I can’t help how I was made.” I could hardly bear the sadness. What was wrong with how he was made? I remembered a passage in my own sexual grief. Looking out the back porch in Kent at a hillside of trees, their leaves turned bright yellow, their black branches gnarled and jagged, I suddenly understood that what had created those trees, so ragged in their beauty, had also created me. Looking at my father bent in sobs, I reached for his hand, tears blurring my sight. Hadn’t he taught me all creation was perfect?

  I wanted to say everything to him, to want to say everything, but some
thing held down my chest.

  “Fear?” the therapist had suggested.

  “What I have to say is all that I am; if I say it to him, I will be nothing.”

  “That’s what he’s taken away from you.”

  And now my father is actually in the room with my therapist and me, and looking at him, at the long legs bent at the knee, the socks slightly loose at the ankle because his legs are very thin, the weird shiny loafers with their floppy tassels, I feel sadness which then becomes nothing more than childhood memory of khaki, how it creased and wrinkled, became battered, lost its polish. But this was black-and-white tweed, the mustard handkerchief bursting from his jacket pocket, a rebuke to the elegance of khaki, of battered penny loafers, of worn athletic socks.

  That his hair was white never ceased to surprise me.

  We were talking about my mother. “We didn’t have a very good time in the sack,” my father said, “but we had a great partnership”—and then he looked at me—“and all you children.” He was starting to cry. “I was very angry at her. I didn’t understand why she left.” He was describing the weekend in 1969, just before her announcement to me at the Adirondacks, when she asked to sleep separately. “Of course sex was something we never, never talked about when I was a child,” he said, lifting his face to the therapist, as if this should explain everything.

  “How did your homosexuality affect your life with Honor’s mother?” the therapist kindly asked.

  I knew my father found this entire mode of discourse barely tolerable, but he forged ahead. He talked about his overprotective mother, his distant father, the voice-over again. I became impatient—there are, after all, many men with distant fathers and overprotective mothers who don’t become homosexual—but I watched him try to explain.

  “Jenny never talked to me about it,” he said. “She didn’t know.”

  “She did know,” I said.

  “She never talked to me about it.”