The Bishop's Daughter

by Honor Moore

  My father and Andrew Verver also had an adventurous journey. They flew from Athens to the island of Samos, where they missed the last boat to Patmos. “We had a wonderful evening there,” Andrew told me. They checked into a hotel and went out to dinner, and sitting on a terrace overlooking the sea, they talked for hours. “Paul was very relaxed,” Andrew said.

  Imagining my father’s excitement in Greece, I wished I had taken that trip, any trip, with him as an adult. I would never have asked—after he and Brenda married, they took a series of extraordinary trips, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. There seemed to be no end to the places they traveled—Russia, the South Pacific, a cruise up the Turkish coast, a barge on the Rhine, the Nile, all over Europe. My father had a boyish enthusiasm when he talked about a trip, a delighted vivacity like his mother’s when she led you through the rose garden at Hollow Hill. He’d begin an anecdote, and suddenly it would be the moment when light and smell hit you in a new place, before your mind engages, before you start to think, before you begin to worry if you’ll find the hotel. I imagine that was how my father was with Andrew that night in Samos, his first vacation with a male lover—but the stories he told Andrew that night were from a part of his life he never opened to me. Of his desire for men, its dawning at St. Paul’s when ordinary sexual play brought erotic dreams not of girls but of boys, of his first experience with a male pickup in Paris before the war, his first love affair with a man, a married instructor at General Seminary. Of his marriages, how he did not consider his sexual relations with men adultery. By then he and Andrew had known each other for more than twenty-five years, and had talked of many things. Now they were outside of time. My father was not married and no longer the bishop of New York, was in fact considering inviting Andrew to live with him. But Andrew had made an important decision, a decision he shared with my father. He had met a woman he hoped to marry.

  Patmos is known to be “a sacred island.” Even now, if you build a hotel you are required also to build a church, and so on an island ten miles long and five wide, there are said to be 366 churches, one for every day of the year, and a spare. My hosts on Patmos were friends of mine who had never known my father, a couple much younger than I, with a ten-month-old son. Christoph’s Austrian parents had first come to the island in the 1950s when his uncle, an archaeologist, had given Christoph’s mother “a ruin” in the hill town of Chora as a wedding present. The “ruin” was now a simple but capacious house in the shadow of the fortress-like monastery of St. John the Evangelist, first built in the eleventh century. Standing on one of its terraces, looking down, the monastery behind you, you see first the town of Skala, and the harbor, beyond it in the blue mist the mountainous expanse of the sea-horse-shaped island, and in the distance smaller atolls. On a clear day, you can make out the coast of Turkey, what, in his stories from the pulpit, my father referred to as “Asia Minor”—Ephesus, where Saint Paul preached, to whose congregants he wrote the Epistle to the Ephesians.

  If I imagine him with me on Patmos, my father is wearing a seersucker suit and sitting, lanky and eager with us on the terrace, which has a view of the harbor and the mountains beyond that rise where the island curves. He is drinking a vodka, charmingly asking questions. Christoph and his wife, Marie-Charlotte, a devout Catholic, smile back as my father, very much a bishop on holiday, inquires first about their lives, then about the truth of the Apocalypse. Do those on the island believe that Saint John and his secretary, Prochorus, actually worked in the cave which is now the chapel? Did John write his gospel there, as well as the Book of Revelation? Christoph shrugs, laughing. Yes, that is what those on Patmos believe, though there are scholars who disagree. And in return, he asks my father if he, the bishop, considers the author of the Apocalypse John the brother of James, John the Apostle and author of the gospel, John the Evangelist, or, as most contemporary scholars would have it, another John altogether? My father thinks the latter, but, he says, the truth doesn’t really affect his feeling that this is a sacred island. And then I ask which John it is who is called “Saint John the Divine,” and my father, exasperated at the profusion of saints named John, throws up his hands, and we all laugh, and I promise Christoph and Marie-Charlotte that I will take them to the cathedral at 110th Street the next time they come to New York.

  Not for a week do Christoph and Marie-Charlotte and I begin sightseeing, first at the monastery, which is a short walk up a narrow stone street between whitewashed walls, the wares at icon booths flashing in the sunlight as we wheel baby Johannes over the stones, pulling and pushing the stroller up several sets of stone stairs. I am thinking what I would tell Pop—how the ancient, unbroken Greek Orthodox tradition infuses the atmosphere, more integrated and yet lighter than the Catholicism of Italy; and the other sense I have, that the Holy Land is so close, that while there is no record of Saint Paul on Patmos, he certainly could have come here, since he visited Ephesus, easily reachable by boat. Of course that is true, my father would say, reminding me that the New Testament was written in Greek.

  My reverie is interrupted as Christoph, Marie-Charlotte and the baby, and I enter the courtyard of the monastery, stone arches curving over us, the surprise above us not the vaulted ceiling of a nave, but an open, piercing blue sky. The Greek Orthodox monk standing at the entrance to the chapel speaks American English, strange in contrast to the icons the sun illuminates, their Byzantine formality, which usually seems so stiff, strangely animated in the daylight. When Christoph asks if I think about my father when in such places, I deny it, remembering a moment on my first trip to Italy with Venable, when he accused me of an obsession with churches because of my father. “No,” I had protested, “the churches are where the art is.”

  But how could I not have been thinking of my father when I gazed at frescoes in which his tellings of New Testament stories came so vividly to life? And now that he is dead and I am confronted with the austere faces of the Byzantine saints, their long necks, their solemn, penetrating eyes, the colors of their vestments, how am I not somehow in his presence? In the chapel, I light a candle for him—even if I don’t believe, this is an ancient tradition, sacred purely through the repetition of this gesture by hundreds of years of supplicants.

  With us in the chapel are a group of tourists, and sitting, bent on prie-dieux, several Greek men. “Here is the skull of Saint Thomas,” Christoph says, leading me to a vitrine in which a tiny skull, darkened with age, rests next to the supposed sandals of Saint Christodoulos, the founder of the monastery in which we now stand. I scoff, but Christoph is insistent, “Research has been done,” he says.

  The first time I met Andrew in person, he brought his fiancée Zofia with him—she had come from Poland two years before, and he had met her through his teaching. His decision to open himself to women had come gradually, and he had found it possible. “I did not want to continue as a gay man,” he said. “There was no life for me there.” Zofia nodded with a smile as Andrew introduced me. “We are getting married this summer,” he said. I ordered a cappuccino.

  “Can we talk?”

  “Yes,” Andrew said, taking Zofia’s hand. “She knows everything.” I smiled at her again, and she smiled back. “She’s learning English and I’m making my way with Polish!” From his briefcase, Andrew pulled an album of photographs which he laid on the table and opened. He flipped pages. “Here’s Paul,” he said. And there they were, Andrew and my father in Patmos—standing together in front of the entrance to the Cave of the Apocalypse where John was said to have written the Book of Revelation, each in shorts, my father holding a guidebook.

  Looking at the funny, modest photograph, I was suddenly embarrassed to witness my father’s private life. I turned the page. “This is the night in Samos,” Andrew said. His face is in near-darkness, the photograph certainly taken by my father as they dined at sunset on that terrace overlooking the sea. Another of Andrew, the dying sunlight on his face. These were the photographs you take
, one, then another and another, as if to sear the lover’s face and that moment into your memory.

  I closed the scrapbook and looked at Andrew’s wistful face, his gray eyes. “Your father had desire right up until the end,” he said. “I could hardly keep up with him.” Pop had told my sister that Andrew had talked about his girlfriend the whole time they were on Patmos. I looked at Zofia. “Were you involved with Zofia when you went to Patmos?”

  “We had just met,” Andrew said. So my father had been telling the truth.

  I looked again at the scrapbook. “On Patmos I couldn’t keep up with him,” Andrew repeated. “He raced up those steep paths, and I was behind, out of breath.” I remembered that about Pop, his long legs taking him up Silver, the highest mountain on our land in the Adirondacks, faster than anyone else. And now Andrew laughed. I’d taken a mountain hike on Patmos, and from the path I had seen the great stone at Petra, where monks retired to meditate, fasting, drinking only the water caught in the small cavity when it rained.

  On our last day on Patmos, Christoph and Marie-Charlotte and I drove to the Cave of the Apocalypse, bringing the baby along because his name is Johannes, German for John—all week in the midst of German speakers, I had heard the author of Revelation called “Johannes.” Again we climb stone stairs in the blazing sun, the sky stark blue, a south wind bringing humidity into the air. Into the vestibule, past the white drinking fountain with its bright blue fixtures, into the dark chapel where a tour group is being told, in Greek-accented English, the legends of Saint John’s authorship, first of the gospel—“In the beginning was the Word”—and then of the Book of Revelation.

  The room is small, actually a cave, pale granitelike stone forming a wavy ceiling above our heads. I want just silence, to stand in the shadowy stillness, but Christoph is pointing out a round hole in the stone, the aperture decorated with silver relief. This naturally occurring cavity is where John is said to have rested his head, the better to hear the words of Christ reverberate through the stone. In spite of myself, I am taking the story in. Next to it is a smaller hole, also braceleted with silver, in which it is said Saint John put his hand to pull himself up from his knees. A bit further along is a naturally formed stone shelf, an ancient book resting there on an altar cloth: it is here that Saint Prochorus is said to have placed the papyrus while taking down the evangelist’s words.

  I think again of my father—of the attention with which he would have scrutinized all of this, and of the tenderness with which he always directed me to look at such marks of the invisible, the finally unknowable. We would both have been in a condition of amazement, he at what remains, I at the idea of a religious tradition that includes a writing surface. And of course we would have discussed the discrepancies—the certainty that Prochorus lived in the fourth or fifth century, not at the end of the first when John, in exile from Domitian’s scourge of the Christians, lived and worked on Patmos. “Does it matter?” I imagine asking him. “Isn’t the ledge what matters?”—I point to the book, to the altar cloth resting on the stone—“That it was, at some point, recognized as bearing resemblance to a writing surface?” I am standing in front of it, extending my writing hand to see if the height works.

  Now I turn toward the corner of the cave where John knelt, and looking again at the smaller of the two silver-lined apertures, I think not of the hand of the evangelist lifting himself from his knees those thousands of years ago, but of my father’s hand—holding the bishop’s crozier, the shepherd’s crook, lifting the chalice to my lips, his hand trembling just slightly as he places the host in my hand, my father in red and white, the vestment in which I chose to have him cremated. What is the sacred but evidence of the repetition of meaningful human gesture? And what is the silver-rimmed cavity in a wall of stone but a reminder that a man who has knelt for hours does not rise to his feet with ease?

  “And here,” Christoph interrupts, a bit of nervousness in his voice because of my earlier dismissal of Saint Thomas’s remains. He is pointing to a triune crease in the stone ceiling of the cave, “the sign of the Trinity, which was supposed to have come when Johannes had his revelation.”

  What if I had taken such trips as this with my father? Would I still have become this ersatz pilgrim following his elusive trail, or would I have stayed at home, contented to reenact such gestures as the cooking of food or the laying of a table for supper? Instead I come half around the world, climb stone steps in the late July heat of Greece, gaze at Byzantine faces, some worn away by sun and wind, others darkened by candle smoke, some so vivid you lose track of time. Andrew has told me that neither he nor my father had a spiritual experience when they visited the cave together that last summer. Was that because of a crush of tourists? Or was it that neither Andrew nor my father was in a condition of sufficient longing to overcome temporal interruption, the baroque overlay, the too obviously human legend?

  In the chapel of the Apocalypse, I light a candle for my father, and another for my work on this book. When I am out of range of the sand-filled container where the candles flicker, looking at the altar, at the sarcophagus of Saint Christodoulos, the eleventh-century founder of the monastery, I see out of the corner of my eye the tall, black-clad monk blow out the candles of the pilgrims, barely burnt. He pulls them from the sand and tosses them into a bin.

  At the closing of my father’s funeral, the celebrant gave the blessing, and nearly five hundred priests and deacons and bishops and nuns and monks, men and women, and acolytes and choirs, filed up the aisle of St. John the Divine, and at the end of the procession, slowly moved the pallbearers carrying the plain pine coffin, my father’s grandchildren over fifteen, all boys but for one girl leading, the grand organ thundering a recessional. The service had lasted three hours, the cathedral which seats three thousand had been packed. My father’s brother, Bill, and some of his old friends who had flown in had to leave before it was over. I was in the dream of it. I had spoken from the pulpit, five of his children had. “My father wore robes of crimson and gilt, of green, of purple, of black, of white and gold,” I’d said, summoning my little-girl sense of this great figure, summoning too my father on his deathbed, passing along our last moments together, making of the release of his death what he might have had he been preaching, a kind of lesson.

  Now as his coffin passed me, I stepped out into the aisle and joined the crush of family—there are nearly forty of us now. The organist was playing Bach, a saxophone spinning a descant into the dark reaches of the arched Gothic ceiling, faces from my whole life whirling in my peripheral vision, and then I look up, and the cathedral doors, the doors that open only at Easter for the bishop’s entrance, are now wide open, throwing a shaft of light onto the pale surface of the pine coffin, the waxy shine reflecting daylight radiance.

  And as we move out through the doors, the coffin leading us, I see that the stairs of the cathedral, scores of stairs that spill downward from the arched entrance, are crowded with bishops and priests and nuns and monks, in their vestments and habits, their red and their white, their African or Asian vestments, their Trappist and Franciscan habits and rope sashes, their tippets, cottas, surplices, and cassocks, and they are clapping as my father’s coffin is borne slowly down the stairs, clapping, not applauding, and not exactly rhythmically clapping either, solemnity on their faces, as if a medieval guild were bidding farewell to one of its own, their hands coming together, the sound both very loud and barely audible, as I stand there, eyes burning, and the coffin, the light of the white sky blazing from it, slides into the open trunk of a black hearse.

  And then I understand that this is the end of my father, that inside the coffin is his body, and that when I see him again he will be ashes, and so, as the clapping continues, I fly down the final steps, the attendants moving away from the open doors of the hearse, and I touch the wood, alone there I touch the coffin, at the same time seeing myself in black, a woman bending toward a coffin, her hand reaching.<
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  NOTES

  Quotations from Paul Moore are from my diaries, my memory of our conversations, and from his books or his oral history unless otherwise noted. Quotations from the Episcopal liturgy are from The Book of Common Prayer (1948), and hymns are from The Hymnal of the Protestant Episcopal Church (1940).

  1: Prophet’s Chamber

  page 23: in the diary my father kept PM’s St. Paul’s Diary is in the Archives of the Episcopal Church (hereafter cited as AEC).

  page 33: his notes notebook, AEC.

  2: Guadalcanal

  page 35: Marine Corps citation AEC.

  page 36: “the medal for the whole platoon” Unattributed clipping in family papers (hereafter cited as FP).

  page 43: The New Start and A Marine Speaks of War FP.

  4: Holy Matrimony

  page 65: “Things very near my heart” Undated letter from Fanny Hanna Moore (FP).

  5: Firstborn

  page 90: “Wisdom about our destiny” Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Part II (New York: Scribner’s, 1943), p. 321; quoted in Elisabeth Sifton’s valuable book about her father, The Serenity Prayer (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. 228.

  6: Becoming a Priest

  page 99: “Puerto Ricans we had seen” My mother’s quoted recollections in this chapter are from The People on Second Street (New York: William Morrow, 1968).

  page 100: “We were trying to overcome hatred” Dorothy Day, Loaves and Fishes (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 47.