by Honor Moore
I could hardly bear it—I feared, we both feared, that he might not have that much time. “What would you do?” he asked. I told him that if I had a limited amount of time, I would keep writing. Now he was like one of my students, suddenly with a little encouragement full of inspiration. “What are you working on?” he asked.
“Poems,” I said.
“I thought you were writing a novel.”
“I put it aside.” He nodded.
A little while later, he asked again with the same intensity what I would do in his situation. He didn’t know he was repeating himself. “I would forge ahead, Pop, I really would.”
“Okay,” he said with relief. “That’s what I’ll do.” And he began to tell me again about the dry riverbed in India, the hundreds of thousands of worshipers, and the time in the 1960s when, at a retreat with Roman Catholics, having spent an evening in discussion that ended in sadness that intercommunion was forbidden, the group spontaneously knelt for a Eucharist after my father, just told of the sudden death of a friend, broke into tears. “This is what matters to me,” he said, opening his big arms as if at an altar, “you know?”
Sunday fell on the fifth day of combat on Guadalcanal. The Eucharist was celebrated by the chaplain, who was Roman Catholic. The service took place in blinding sunlight on a flat field near the beach where the dead lay, hundreds of dirty marines kneeling. “Mud was on their clothes, perhaps blood on their hands. The musty smell of the tropics and of the dead was in the breeze. Everything was rotten. Many men had seen close friends killed. All had gone through too much already. Some leaned on their rifles. Others had laid their pieces carefully beside them.” This was a different voice than the one in which he’d described that morning in a letter home: “Catholic Mass near the cemetery with a tin roof to support the altar. Many dirty Marines as Congregation. The Priest wore an immaculate chasuble—probably the only clean thing on the island. One could hear firing in the distance.” Writing as the anonymous marine, my father took the chasuble as an emblem. “They knew that despite their experience, the part of their soul that was God’s would be white . . . Perhaps the simile is sacrilegious, but that first Mass seemed more like taking a bath than anything else. For those who had not been able to go to confession, this was our first real strong contact with the living God.” And then, as the anonymous narrator of A Marine Speaks of War, my father came into the voice that years later marked his power as a preacher. “Living, that was it. God was alive, had been alive, would be alive, alive, alive. It is hard to tell what that would mean. There was a lesson. Man could fall sick, bleed, die, rot. But God was alive. God could not rot. God was clean and alive. The living God. The resurrection. When God did die, when Christ suffered the unholy indignity of death, it was for us, that we might overcome death.” Reading the old pamphlet, I could hear his voice, his fist pounding the pulpit. Now “the boy was learning,” my father wrote of himself. “He was growing hard to the sights and the feelings of war, but he was growing deeper . . .”
3
Inseparable
* * *
It was near twilight, the glossy time when you can’t imagine the lake is ever bright blue or its surface ever roughened by wind, or that the wind can blow so hard in one direction you can’t row against it. We were moving tranquilly, the prow of the old amber guide boat opening a path through black water, my father rowing, oars dipping one at a time, making the only sound in a silence so encompassing even occasional shouts from the shore seemed a form of quiet. He was wearing “ordinary clothes,” was dressed like the Yale man he was, as if these were the same faded khakis he’d worn in New Haven in 1939, the same Lacoste tennis shirt, gray-green Shetland sweater the worse for wear, and worn white sneakers. I was ten, or maybe eleven, and it began as a game: Poppy, tell me about your old girlfriends! I expected to hear again about “Lois,” whom he had dated in Seattle during the war, about whom my mother teased him mercilessly. He stopped rowing, let the boat glide, and told a story.
After the months in the New Zealand military hospital when he came home, my father found himself at parties with Jenny McKean, four years younger than he was, just nineteen, black hair to her shoulders curled under and so smooth that in photographs it looks polished. He had known her summers when he went to Rockmarge, and his parents and Jenny’s were in the same social group; the McKeans lived in Beverly, just miles away. Through her father, Quincy Adams Shaw McKean (“Shaw”), Jenny was descended from Thomas McKean, who had signed the Declaration of Independence, and Louis Agassiz, the scientist. Her mother, Margarett Sargent, a modernist painter and sculptor who had exhibited in New York, was one of the first in Boston to collect modernist art, a fourth cousin of the painter John Singer Sargent, and a granddaughter of Horatio Hollis Hunnewell, a Boston philanthropist and horticulturalist who’d made a fortune in railroads in the years after the Civil War. By the spring of 1943, when my father began to court Jenny McKean, her family had all but fallen apart. Her mother, who had always had extramarital affairs with both men and women, was an undiagnosed manic-depressive who drank to medicate herself, and she hadn’t had an exhibition in nearly a decade. Within two years she would enter a sanitarium, and within five she and Shaw would be divorced and Shaw married again.
My parents always said they first met at a dog show on the McKeans’ lawn and first noticed each other in a Vermont drugstore. By 1943, when my father was back from the Pacific and recuperating, Jenny was at Barnard in New York, and one night, when he met his old friend Cord Meyer for a drink, Jenny was Cord’s date. My father let his admiration be known by aiming a siphon bottle and shooting seltzer at her from across the table, all of them collapsing into laughter. Later he asked Cord if Jenny was his girl, and if not, he’d take her out. On their first date, my father took my mother to the St. Regis, where they danced to “I’m in Love with a Soldier Boy.” Later, in the darkness of the Kretchma, a Russian café on East Fourteenth Street, they talked and talked and talked. “If a man can tell someone else of his fear,” my father later wrote of that evening in a letter to their unborn child, “he lessens it.” As he lit Jenny McKean’s Chesterfield, his hand touched hers, and they fell in love.
“She was so beautiful,” he always said, repeating the story. During the summer of 1941, he’d known her as just a kid, one of “the younger set,” a group of friends who went to parties together; she’d been his friend Potter’s girl, and they’d all called her “Nutty Brown” because of her tan and because her navel, exposed by her fashionable two-piece bathing suit, reminded someone of a nut. Now she was almost twenty, so sophisticated my father was shocked when she told him she was only nineteen. In a newspaper photo, they smile for the photographer, sitting on the banquette at LaRue, a favorite bistro; she is wearing shiny black and white stripes, and he is in uniform. “Marine hero, Boston socialite,” reads the caption. The gunshot wound had healed enough for them to dance the fox-trot, and their long, searching conversations continued—his guilt at having killed Japanese soldiers, her shame about the mother who drank alone in a huge dark room hung with paintings of empty courtyards and white horses. “Everyone thought we were engaged,” my mother said. She was certain that after his leave my father would choose a post at the Marine training program in New Haven so they could spend weekends together. But sometime in early July, they went for a walk at Rockmarge, down the willow path to the ocean.
“All of a sudden he looked at me,” my mother remembered.
“I probably won’t see you so much this summer,” my father announced. “I’ve been posted to Seattle.” After he told her this, my mother cried for two days.
Telling me his version of the story that evening on the lake, my father seemed a bit embarrassed, certainly full of regret. “I wrote her about a girl I picked up in a bar in Minneapolis,” he said. “An awful girl. Everything Jenny wasn’t. Coarse, uncivilized, voluptuous, a tart.”
“He wrote to me in detail about a
girl he picked up in a bar,” my mother said.
“I wrote your mother continually,” my father said, “until I got to Seattle, and then, after a while, I met Nona.”
Nona. I looked out across the lake. “Like the song?”
“Yes,” he said.
And then we both sang: “Nona is like a dream come true / So sweet and unaffected.” He told me more—about her family’s enormous house outside Seattle, about tennis games and weekend dinner parties, how he might have married her if she hadn’t been Catholic. An Episcopal priest, he explained, couldn’t have a Roman Catholic wife.
The next time I heard about Nona Clark was in the dining room of the Pierre Hotel in New York. Gami, my father’s mother, had taken us, my father and me, out to dinner at the beginning of my junior year in college. The waiters, in Raj costume, tried to feed us chicken curry. I think we all had lobster Newberg. I made some comment about a pretty blonde across the room looking at my father as if she knew him, and Gami, almost eighty, took up the teasing: “Yes,” she said gleefully, “and you went to the St. Regis to meet that woman from Seattle who telephoned. Went to meet her, even though you didn’t think you should!”
“That was after Nona Clark’s husband shot himself,” my father explained evenly. “She needed to talk.”
I imagined the scene: hotel bar, a beautiful woman with red hair—he’d told me she had red hair—dressed in mourning, soothed by conversation with a tall young man she’d known as a marine before both married others. I next heard about Nona not long afterward when Luke, my first serious boyfriend, was drafted and broke up with me before enlisting in the Marines, a choice inspired by my father. It was 1966, and the Vietnam War was just reaching the consciousness of students like me. I had “lost my virginity” to Luke the summer before in his Riverside Drive sublet. (Of course, I did not tell my father I had slept with Luke—marriage was a “sacrament,” premarital sex was a “sin.”) In his pastoral voice, my father reassured me: he’d married my mother even though he’d gone to Seattle before they were engaged; and even though he’d gone out seriously with Nona Clark, he found that he was still in love with my mother. Seattle had been a choice, he explained—he could have taught in the East to be “near Jenny,” but he needed “more life on his own.” Perhaps, he suggested, my boyfriend Luke also “needed freedom from all his burdens.” That my father considered my mother burdensome passed unquestioned into my mind, as did his characterization of me as part of what he called Luke’s “knapsack of stones.”
Planning a trip to Europe a year later, the summer before my senior year in college, I saw that I could pass through Geneva and asked my mother if she thought I could visit Nona Clark. The name had come up again, and with it the sense I had that night on the lake that I might finally come to know my father, though now it seems to me I also wanted to know something about my parents’ marriage. My mother encouraged me, but it must have been difficult. Nona’s name had come up again because, weeks before, she had come for a drink on her way through Washington. “We, I mean they, talked for an hour,” my mother said, reporting with sarcasm that she’d made a point of sitting next to Nona, whom she’d met only briefly twenty years earlier. Apparently Nona never turned to face her, looked only at my father, who sat across from her in the blue easy chair. She’d called my mother the next day and apologized—her neck had been stiff. To me, then, just twenty, “Nona Clark” was part of a distant past, but of course my father and Nona had been involved fewer than twenty-five years before, which I now understand is no time at all.
Nona was the only child of a lumber tycoon’s son who had married a Catholic and converted. Sheltered and adored at her family’s estate in the Highlands, Seattle’s version of Tuxedo Park, she made her debut both at home and in San Francisco and went East to Radcliffe. But the United States entered the war, trains were commandeered for soldiers, and she left college after her sophomore year. Soon the Pacific campaign brought West the pick of Harvard and Yale, including my father. All his life, Paul Moore had navigated New York and Boston parties where the same last names, and sometimes the same first ones, had turned up for generations. My father hadn’t had many girlfriends, and even though he was powerfully drawn to Jenny McKean, she was part of what he knew. From the way he said Nona Clark’s name, I could tell he considered her something else. “I’ve met,” he wrote his brother, Bill, “a typical girl of the Golden West.”
When she opened the door, I could smell her perfume. She was tall, a woman you would describe as willowy, with pale skin; her wavy red hair was not long, but not short either. We sat down immediately, and she leaned forward, her fragrance becoming more intense. “What about you?” she asked. I’d been to Florence, I told her, and she asked what I had seen. I said I’d seen the Brancacci Chapel, and she asked what I had liked about it. I talked to her about the size of the figures and about the expressiveness in the bodies of Adam and Eve, how they bent in shame leaving the garden. She asked if I’d seen Santa Maria Novella and I said yes, and if I’d liked the Uffizi, and whether I had gone to Siena. Eventually I asked how she met my father. “I met Paul at a party,” she said, “in Seattle.” And then she smiled, breaking into a wistful melodic laugh, rose from the sofa, escorted me to a small bedroom, and left me to unpack.
Halfway through the week, Nona took me to a cocktail party where everyone spoke French, or English with an international accent. Our host, Nona told me en route, was a prince from Liechtenstein whose family had suffered “tragic losses” in the war. The party was at his “cottage,” a substantial stone house on the outskirts of the city. The women wore silk suits and larger pieces of jewelry than I’d ever seen. The men were nothing like my father; they did not wear Brooks Brothers seersucker, and some of them had deftly trimmed mustaches. Nona introduced me as her friend from “the States,” and once in a while the man or woman who shook my hand was a count or countess, and “very rich,” Nona would later whisper. Nona was being courted by an international financier famously wanted by the United States government, and there he was, free to walk across the room, take her hand and kiss it. Since by then she had told me how sad she was about her husband’s suicide, I was surprised when I saw her sitting with the financier on the veranda, a loose silk blouse falling off one narrow shoulder as she leaned toward him, then threw back her head and laughed.
Another night, Nona took me out to dinner. We sat in the back of her big car as the chauffeur drove us along the lake and through the countryside to a small village, and up a narrow street to a tiny restaurant with white tablecloths, upholstered chairs, the smell of flowers in the air. Nona was greeted as “Madame,” I as “Mademoiselle.” I wore the slender lime linen dress with a hot pink welting that my grandmother had bought me in New York. Nona was dressed in silk, gray or off-white, and I remember, because it was the first time I’d seen them, that she wore stockings paler than her skin—when she crossed her legs, I could see her freckles. She spoke about the men at the party, exiles, international businessmen. Her move to Geneva had been an adventure, she said. “But by coming here I wasn’t escaping, you see. I was bringing my children to a totally new life—one that we could begin together, with our pain behind us.”
She did not speak of my father until the last morning at breakfast on the balcony overlooking the city, the lake, Mont Blanc. The sky was hazy and the air warm. An intermittent breeze lifted strands of her hair and the shoulders of her sea green dressing gown. She had a way of looking at me with such attention that I was completely at ease. “You remind me a great deal of your father,” she finally began. “The way we can talk. I remember so well talking to him—on those long summer days. He was a much better listener than most of the servicemen I met at the Officers’ Club. Seattle is so lovely in the summer, and that one was no exception, even though the war was on and many of us had lost people in the fighting. Paul was one of many soldiers in Seattle then. We saw each other for a little more than a year, I think. W
e were even a little in love. I’m sure marriage to Paul crossed my mind, but he never mentioned it, and there was the war. My mother, who was a grande dame of sorts and quite a difficult woman, liked him a great deal, and I think would have let me marry him even though he wasn’t Catholic. I don’t know whether she was more impressed with his mother’s Cleveland connections or his father’s large interest in the American Can Company. But marriage certainly wasn’t my primary concern, and most certainly wasn’t his.
“We talked about books,” Nona continued, “about Auden and Eliot. About the war and about our families. He never talked about Jenny although I knew there had been other girls—that there were other girls in the East. We played tennis, went sailing, swam, danced, went to parties.” Nona barely paused as she told the story, as if by telling it she might regain who she had been before she married, before her husband’s suicide altered her experience of life. “I remember,” she continued, “sailing out to a little island we had off the mainland and taking a picnic and I remember a drunken songfest in a police station.” And then she stopped talking and looked at me. My hands were on the table between us, and she took one of them. “Look, you can see the mountains rather clearer now; that’s where I take the children skiing in the winter. You must come with us sometime. I’ll give you a winter holiday.”
I was being invited to look at my father in relation to a woman other than my mother. My father and Nona, dressed in tennis clothes, for instance. Picnicking and reading poetry to each other. They liked to talk, Nona said. He had said that, too. I did not report what my father had said that night on the lake, that he might have married Nona had she not been Catholic.