by Honor Moore
“She knew,” I repeated. He turned to me angrily.
“She didn’t know.”
“I’m telling you she did know. I know that she knew because she told a couple of close friends, who told me. I’m telling you that if you can place her knowledge of your homosexuality in the frame of your life together, you might be less angry.” He looked at me, earnest, speechless, and then repeated that sentence, “We didn’t have a very good time in the sack.” Didn’t he understand that it was all over now? That when she reached for him from her deathbed, she was forgiving him?
“She loved you,” I said. “She was protecting you.”
The note was in blue ink on white notepaper. She would love to have lunch, supper, would love to see me. It was a year after my father’s death, and I went to Boston to see her. I had reserved at a French restaurant on Beacon Hill. I got there first—the room was small, bright, and painted tawny yellow—pine tables, amber-colored wood floors. There was a garden out back, visible through French doors, and because the walls were bedecked with Chinese-import porcelain, the room could have been, as Emma and I later agreed, a breakfast room in one of our family houses. I hadn’t seen her since the funeral, hadn’t talked to her since I held her in my arms, both of us weeping, the sunny morning she’d seen my father for what turned out to be the last time.
She asked me about the book I was writing. “He told me he was ambi—” she said, “ambidextrous.” (She meant bisexual.) I was surprised my father had been so intimate with her. Emma Black was a woman whom he had known since he was young—my mother mentions her in letters written during the war. She had been married to a Yale classmate of my father’s who had become an authority in medieval history and a professor at the University of Wisconsin. There are names of family friends that evoke the whole dead world of my parents’ pasts, the war, Jersey City, my childhood. “Emma Black” is one of them; and she is one of the fierce, intensely alive survivors. When I gave readings in the Berkshires, near where she spent summers, she always turned up. She was not a woman I saw simply because she was one of my parents’ friends; I found her fascinating. Her marriage to the medievalist had been unhappy and eventually, after three children, they divorced. She’d become a philanthropist, a writer, had “years and years” of therapy and family therapy with her children. A second husband had died a decade ago.
“He told me he was ‘ambi—’” she repeated.
“I’m glad he could tell you,” I said.
She asked if I was planning to “tell everything” in my book, this book, and when I replied that telling the story required breaking the silence about my father’s hidden life, she said, “Of course, he never would have wanted you to.” In that restaurant room, so aesthetically redolent of all the familiar blankness, the old repression surged up, and all my hard-won thinking dissolved. I kept looking at Emma’s face, her scarlet lipstick, her honey blond 1940s pageboy, the large, deep diamond on her hand, her old-fashioned blouse. I felt my hands folded on the table, and as I told her calmly that I disagreed with her and that I believed in my story, I felt callow and overearnest. What did I think I was doing?
“He said it embarrassed him,” Emma said, “shamed him.” I could see them sitting in the capacious Stonington living room, or on the porch in summer at sunset, respective vodkas in their hands, him telling her this. I didn’t want my father to be embarrassed and it still hurt that he was ashamed.
My father and I had many conversations in which he communicated a desire to tell the truth. “I’ve thought about it,” he said at lunch at Le Refuge when I encouraged him to do so in Presences, “but I don’t want to hurt Brenda.” And at dinner, after Brenda died, “I’ve thought about it, but I don’t want to hurt Polly and Bill,” his surviving brother and sister. And another time, “I wish I could.”
“He told me he’d never been in love with a man,” Emma said, and waited for my reply. I did not mention Andrew Verver, or the other men with whom I now knew my father had had relationships, or at least relations. Instead, I explained to Emma that I had been with women for fifteen years of my life and that telling the story of my father and myself was necessary to my understanding him, to altering the pattern of sexual unhappiness that I had inherited. I told her that I believed sexuality to be a crucial aspect of existence, that my father had considered sexuality and faith to coexist in the same realm of the spirit. I told her I had struggled with whether or not to tell this story since I learned it, that I had written it in pieces for years and years, but that no narrative became clear until the days before he died when I was able to tell my father I loved him.
I thought about his letters to Andrew Verver: I love you, my father had written to a man with whom he was physically intimate. What does “in love with” mean anyway?
“You’re with men now?” Emma Black was asking. I had almost forgotten I was in the restaurant.
“Yes,” I said.
She looked genuinely mystified. I explained that I had fallen in love with a man nearly a decade before, fifteen years after my first lesbian affair, and as a result had returned to therapy to resolve what had been, during my years with women, a duality I’d hidden from, a nub of confusion and pain that I was never free of. I had been in love with women, authentically, but almost always, simultaneously, there had been desire for men, usually a particular man—a married man, the husband of a friend, a man who lived far away. I kept the seriousness of these crushes secret, even from myself, as in fantasy I enacted them.
“Are you, I mean, do you,” Emma asked, “still think about women?”
“Only as part of a past life,” I said. How strange it was to be having this conversation with Emma Black, whose wedding picture had hung in one of those red frames over the bathtub in Jersey City. I explained to her that while I had sincerely fallen in love with women for those years, I hadn’t understood, until I knew about my father’s secret life, the alienation that always disquieted my commitment to them. I told her about the men I’d dated in Connecticut, and about Raphael, how shattering that breakup had been, how in therapy since, I had grappled with the difficulty of my relationship with my father and the fear of my desire for men, and how gradually that fear had fallen away. I told her that when I learned that Raphael himself had secret relationships with men, I came to understand that my own sexual development was inextricably tied up with my father’s complicated erotic life, and that I thought that story important for me to understand. I said that because I was a writer, understanding meant telling.
“So you have to write this for your integrity,” Emma said.
“Yes,” I answered. When the waiter came, we ordered, and then Emma began to talk about her own father, how remote and unknowable he’d been, and then, seeming to contradict her disapproval, she said how lucky I was to have known anything at all about my father’s interior life.
Exquisite plates of salad were placed in front of us. “I can’t get over this place,” Emma exclaimed, delighted, looking around at the porcelain-hung walls, the mere five tables.
“And you,” I said. “Are you alone, or is there—”
“The only man for whom I’ve felt anything since Rob is your father.” She looked at me, then down at the table.
I was stunned. My father’s life as a Shakespearean problem play? My father as the sexual trickster! I wanted to laugh, but I could see that for Emma Black, my father had been, if not a great love, a serious one. As I recovered my composure, I remembered embracing her at the foot of the stairs at Bank Street a few days before my father died. She had been wearing an aubergine suit—I could feel the roughness of the bouclé as I held on to her and she shook with sobs. “He was such a lovely guy,” I remember her saying. Now I realized that for a woman like that, an upper-class WASP of my father’s generation, using the word “guy” carried desire with it; her sobs had expressed more than the loss of an old friend. “We were going to Engl
and together in June,” she had said, plaintive and weeping, “to look at gardens.”
“Was your friendship with him a romance?” I asked her now.
“Yes, it was,” she answered. “We saw each other in Stonington. I stayed there often.”
“Yes,” I said.
Did you love any of them?
“He told me he’d never fallen in love with a man.”
It was an addiction, my father had said that night we talked in Kent after the revelation to the family of his bisexuality, disgust in his voice both for his own homosexual life and, I felt, for mine as well. Emma Black was a woman of depth and substance; I was surprised and impressed my father had loved her. The morning she’d come to see him while he was dying, I’d instinctively backed out of his bedroom, wanting them to have privacy. Would they have needed privacy if she had been a mere family friend? It was one of those sunny days, and I watched from the doorway as she bent over him. After she left the room and I returned to him, he lifted his arms from the bed surface. “We have to—we have to—g-g-g-et her—come back,” he said, arms falling back onto the bed, as if relieved of great exhaustion, and I’d run downstairs and Emma had come back, and as she bent over him a second time, I backed again out of the room.
After Brenda died, my father had begun to “date,” as he sardonically put it. The worldly among my friends joked that “every woman in New York” of “a certain age” would be “lined up for Bishop Moore.” But my father, when asked, said that he didn’t know if he wanted to marry again. I was relieved, thinking that he might find his way freely into his homosexuality; in fact he had not been able to keep his pledge to Brenda—he and Andrew had resumed their hidden relationship after a while. But after Brenda died and he was seeing Andrew and other men more freely, he came to family events—a sister’s concert or play reading—with a woman on his arm, always, it seemed, a woman he had known in the past, the widow of a priest he had known, the divorced wife of one of his oldest friends. “We had fun,” he might say if I asked about one or the other. Or, alternatively, “There was no chemistry.” He even went to Mexico, and then to Switzerland, to see Nona Clark, and she came to Stonington to see him. “How was it with Nona?” I asked. “We’re friends,” he said, “wonderful friends.”
In the years of Brenda, my father and Nona were sporadically in touch. I knew that he had gone to see her the summer after my mother died, and in going through letters after his death, I learned that he’d begun an affair with Nona in 1971, even before my mother got sick, in the wake of her discovery of his love affairs with men, her announcement to me that the marriage was no longer working—that anguished period when both were seeing other people. The tenor and abundance of Nona’s letters, and how my father talked about her, made it clear that they were seriously involved from 1971 until after my mother’s death. What I imagined now made sense, that by the end of his life, Nona had become a dear and close friend, and, I assumed, nothing more.
“I think I understood more than most people about your father’s conflicts,” Nona said. We were talking on the telephone when I called to tell her he had died—I hadn’t seen her since that long-ago visit to Geneva. To me “your father’s conflicts” meant the split in his sexuality. I imagined that since Nona was in her late seventies and he in his early eighties, their recent closeness had not included going to bed together. I pictured them sitting looking at the sea, talking over old times. I remembered the quality of sympathy Nona had, her ability to listen, to draw one out. I thought of my father, white-haired, reclining, his long legs stretched out, on the beach, and I pictured her, red-haired, protecting her pale skin from the sun in some filmy silken thing.
I was curious about this friendship that had endured for more than sixty years, and so, two years after my father died, I went to see Nona in Crans-Montana, in the Alps above Sierre in French Switzerland, where she now spent springs and summers. It was early August, a clear day, and her concierge, Monsieur Dragon, picked me up in a Mercedes for the half-hour drive up a steep road to her apartment on the side of a mountain. As we pulled into the driveway, she waved from the balcony, and when I emerged from the elevator, she opened the door as she had all those years ago, and immediately showed me to a small guest room and bath in the modest apartment, out its window a view in the close distance of a wall of mountains, snow in the crevasses and already gathering at the summits. Nona had the same laugh that had charmed me all those years ago and the same look of sympathetic inquiry, the same intelligence in her blue eyes. “You are much more beautiful than you were then,” she said, having taken stock. “Then” was when I was twenty!
“Thank you,” I said, ascribing her illusion to a Greek tan, the five-week break from life in New York.
“No, no, no,” she insisted, “it’s something in your face. You’ve become a woman.” Her way of speaking English, marked by forty years speaking French in French Switzerland, and her sincerity disarmed me. Imagine what she might have said to a lover! To my father, for instance, a man certainly vulnerable to admiration, and to sincerity.
“Do you want anything?” she asked. We had a cup of tea.
Nona did not dress like a woman of eighty-one, which she now was. In our planning phone call, she’d told me she’d broken her back in a fall, but I saw no evidence of it. I remembered the conversation we’d had when I called to tell her my father had died. “At the end, we worked everything out,” she said. That night, as we drove down the mountain to dinner, we began to put together a chronology. Yes, they had seen each other in 1971 for a couple of years, when he and my mother were separated, and again after my mother died. And after Brenda died, they saw each other twice in Mexico, in Connecticut, and a few times in New York. She herself had never married again, never wanting “the burden” of a domestic relationship. Instead she’d had several enduring affairs with distinguished European men and one prominent American politician.
“When Paul came to Mexico the first time in 2000,” she said, “we made love, and afterward in bed, he said, ‘You’re so forgiving.’ ‘Well, Paul,’ I told him, ‘I’ve had a wonderful life.’”
Now as she drove the curving switchback down into the village, I was marveling. A wonderful life. In that sentence were confidence and self-possession. I remembered my father saying of another woman he courted after my mother died, “She doesn’t need a man.” Was it self-possession that confused him in a woman? That confused him in me, his eldest daughter, who had made a life as a writer, without children, a woman without “a family of her own”?
Montana, the next town over from Crans, Nona explained, had opened a casino which she pointed out as we drove past, a building that looked like a cross between a luxurious motel and a Los Angeles health club. Crans was more traditionally Swiss, chalet roofs, balconies. “It’s perfectly beautiful in winter,” Nona said as we parked in front of the restaurant, a large open place crowded with August travelers.
“I miss your father,” Nona said, “and so it is wonderful to have you here.” She leaned toward me.
“I remember clearly the time I saw you last,” I said, “our conversation on the balcony, and wasn’t your dressing gown pale green?”
“How do you remember that?”
“I wrote about it then, and I still have the story.” Her eyes widened. “I know that you and Pop continued to know each other, and you said you thought I should talk to you, because you felt you understood his conflicts.” She had sounded proprietary when she made that declaration.
“Yes,” she said.
“You said that you had worked things out with him at the end.” She nodded and then, almost abruptly, spoke again.
“What about Brenda?” She took a sip of wine. “Were they happy?”
“Well, she drank,” I said.
“Were they happy?”
“I think in the beginning, but then—”
Even later in
the evening I couldn’t get back what question of hers prompted what I said next. “So he told you he was gay?” She didn’t acknowledge what I’d just said. She hasn’t heard me, I thought, though not from any impairment of her hearing. She leaned forward a little. “That he was gay,” I repeated. I saw her face shift, first to confusion, some fear, a shudder.
“Your father was—”
“He was gay, or bisexual. I thought you knew. I thought he must have told you at the end, that when you said you understood his conflicts, that’s what you meant.”
“No,” she said, looking down, then looking again at me. “But this explains a great deal. You see, we lived together in Mexico in 2000”—she meant they shared a bed. “When we had our first reunion after all those years, we felt great love. I remember him in the hallway after dinner the night he arrived, holding me and saying over and over, Nona, I love you, I love you, I love you. The mask was down. It was as it had been after the divorce—”
“Divorce?”
“From your mother.”
“They never divorced. They separated.”
“Yes, separation. Our bodies worked together then. We traveled together to Paris, and he came here, and to Geneva, and I saw him in New York—and Connecticut. We went to a motel, a wonderful motel in Connecticut.”
“Before my mother died.”
“Yes. And he came here that summer, and we began to talk about going on together, to make plans to see one another again. And then”—she looked down and then up again, the surprise still on her face—“he called and said he was marrying someone named Brenda.”
“The same thing. He did the same thing again!” I exclaimed, and she nodded, and we almost laughed. Now we were women together.
“Yes,” she said, “but now I understand.”
“You would eventually—”
“I would have known. He wouldn’t have been able to hide it from me.”
“Why did you see him again after Brenda died?” I asked.
