The Bishop's Daughter

by Honor Moore

  Did it ever occur to you that it might be more to the point to stay in your own room at the U. and take a nap if you are in a bad mood, instead of rationalizing your tangents of disposition by saying to me “God, you’re so in love with me,” or “I really hate you tonight”? Either say in a nice voice that you want to nap or be quiet—and I will leave off pleasant chatter, and lay a cool hand on your forehead. I don’t blame you for your moods, but we weren’t in a house, I was too rested to take a nap myself and didn’t relish sitting in a bathroom.

  Though my father finally apologized for his rudeness, my mother asked that he not write her again: “If you ever come East let me know, and we can have a good time with nothing else in mind. So love & happy hunting, sweetheart.” In his reply, my father seems chastened:

  I have never said anything substantial because I knew the wind would blow it away & didn’t want to kid either you or myself therefore I never could REALLY let myself go . . . here’s a last and deeply sincere apology for letting you down & being so abominably selfish . . . I am glad VERY glad you took the initiative to chop. I never had the will-power & didn’t want to anyhow . . . Maybe I can’t love.

  I have a photograph of my mother taken in the library of her parents’ house. She is wearing a long-sleeved velvet dinner dress, dark red is the color I imagine it, and she is tilted toward the tall young man who sits next to her, leaning in toward her. The picture is in one of the red frames in which she loved to hang eight-by-tens of friends’ weddings, and it ended up in the boxes of things that came to me after she died. The young man is Artie Trevor, with whom my mother went out for several months after her disastrous visit to Seattle. In the photo, Artie Trevor has a long face and a lanky body, but he looks more like a grownup than my father did in his twenties, his flirtatious smile one of bemused delight. “I would have married him,” my mother said once, “if it hadn’t been for your father.”

  Twenty-five years later, after my parents began to live separately, my mother and Artie Trevor fell in love again. I know this because she wrote then to tell me there was someone in her life, and though she didn’t reveal his name, she later identified him. She was writing me this, she explained, because she wanted me to know that my father had not been her only lover and because she wanted me to be free to have sexual happiness. After she died, I hung the picture of her with Artie Trevor in the house in Connecticut, which I then shared, on alternate weekends, with my father and Brenda, my stepmother. I hung the picture because it reminded me of my mother alive and happy: her hair long and loose, the shine of her skin against the dark velvet, the angle at which she held the cigarette between her fingers, her confident smile. “How could you,” my father once said, months later when we were fighting, “hang that picture of your mother and Artie Trevor? Didn’t you know it would hurt my feelings?”

  It did not occur to me then that a photograph of my mother with Artie would hurt my father’s feelings—after all, he was in a happy new marriage and things with my mother had ended badly. But writing now, older than he was when my mother died, I understand that what goes unresolved never loses its power. My father was hurt because my mother’s romance with Artie Trevor occurred the first time he felt he might lose her, and now she was dead and he had lost her for good.

  Studying at Barnard, living on the East Side, and engaged in a busy social life, Jenny McKean was becoming, as a friend of her mother’s said, “vital, amusing, charming, and beautiful,” and you can see it in a picture taken of her and Artie during those months. Among the tattered letters, I found a cache of Artie Trevor’s, written to my mother in 1944 after he left for the Pacific in July. He calls her Muffin and she calls him Bunny. Though her side of the correspondence does not survive, his indicates that among the subjects they seriously discussed were the possibility of a world organization of nations, their mutual friends including my father, Artie’s adventures on shipboard, and that she sent him presents and books, including C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, which she later sent to my father. Artie was besotted. “Why,” he wrote on July 22,

  can’t you remember the difference between Little Necks and Cherrystones? Why do you get all A’s and deny you’re a great brain? Why do you have sad eyes? Why do you wear sneakers at cocktail parties? Why do you always walk behind people? Why do you read the Real Estate page in the Sunday paper? Why do you say, ‘say something nice’ when I am saying something nice? How can you perform this great series of marvyisms? For I am undone by them. They make you the original wonderful heart along with 9,000 other you-nesses—

  Her new beau gave my mother confidence and she wielded a bit of it with Paul Moore. When he wrote that he’d be back East soon, she replied, “I hope I can stagger my lovers so I will have time for U. I don’t know where Nona gets this jag that you are so superior on the sofa. I thought Artie was better than you once I got him trained. He didn’t get carried away so quick as u. SO I had a better time.” That she had initiated the break this time was exhilarating. “You have to toe the line, do the wooing, it’s your gamble, you have to think clearly, if you do or don’t want to is your business. It’s your worry, your problem, your project. So the tables have turned.” My father had little ammunition with which to return fire: “There’s a rather cheap little secretary who works down at the gym called Dixie, who may provide a little trouble . . .” My mother’s riposte: “Why don’t you have something with Dixie. It would be good for you.”

  There were many ostensible reasons for my father’s “vacillating” about marriage to Jenny McKean. After my mother’s death and his remarriage, he was apt to defend his early caution as a response to her “instability,” which was how he characterized her emotional intensity, and at the time my mother heard gossip that “Mrs. Moore” didn’t want her son to marry Jenny McKean because of Margarett McKean’s “lesbian reputation, affairs, drink etc.” Of course, my father was used to pathologizing women’s disappointment, accustomed to feeling guilt for letting them down. Even though his mother was now active in museum work and was running Hollow Hill, he still felt in her the depression that always had made him vulnerable to her love and need. It had intensified with the war. My father saved and labeled “revealing” a letter he got after a visit home before he went overseas. “Things very near my heart were hard to say,” his mother wrote, “but I am glad we had those 15 minutes in the dark in your room . . . Deep love passeth all understanding, words are superfluous . . . What a poor instrument speech is. I think the look in one’s eyes does express the soul, don’t you?”

  But what of his own sexuality—the homosexual desire of which he was already aware? I find no tidy quotation to prove those sexual secrets were an element in the chaos of his courtship of my mother or of his life in Seattle, to suggest that among the WAVES, the Nonas and Dixies and Loises, there were nights with men. The only clue to a possible conflict, and this from Nona Clark, was that during their evenings together he was drunk more than he was sober. Later he told me he’d had “those feelings” for as long as he could remember, but let us take my twenty-four-year-old father at his word. Eventually he found himself in love with my mother, his misgivings about her and his other desires subordinate to his quest for a partner in the life he was becoming more and more determined to pursue, a life in the church.

  And what of my mother’s willingness to turn back toward a man who had been so indecisive when she had no shortage of more ardent admirers, Artie Trevor in particular? Her consistent flirtation and sexual provocation in letters to my father had gone largely unresponded to, at least in his letters that survive; my father’s tone was alternately adolescent—off-color humor and penciled cartoons—and romantic or earnest. Sexual banter came naturally to my mother—she was used to her mother’s seductive nature, which, intensified by alcohol, sexualized the atmosphere in which she grew up. In a way my father was perfect—he had a manner that was sweet and kind, but also, like her mother the artist, he was a mysterious, mercu
rial person who sought relief and steadiness in the unseen. Nor was he overtly cruel as Margarett could be, and he did not rage at my mother as her mother did, but he did drink too much and he did have moods. My mother was used to being preoccupied with Margarett’s well-being at the expense of her own, but she had also learned to dismiss other people’s moods and move on. While she associated Margarett’s late conversion to the Catholic Church with her mother’s desperation and mental illness, my father’s interest in the church seemed to express an intriguing part of him; instinctually my mother felt he had discovered something in his belief. Before long, her need for someone with whom to share a serious approach to existence would become more important than virtuosity “on the sofa.” The source of that new seriousness would come not from inside their relationship, but from outside. It would come when my mother joined the Episcopal Church.

  “I never asked you about God,” she wrote my father after their first breakup; in her grief, she longed for something that could help her emerge from her sadness and from the volatility of her family, Margarett in particular: “Mama has taken up hiding sherry under the bed in the silk room—wet tumbler found rolling round the floor. It was hideous having her in the drugged condition at Saturday breakfast. I have lost the antagonistic attitude and am merely terribly terribly sorry.” Months earlier, before the trip to Seattle, she had visited the chaplain at Columbia. At home afterward, there was, by coincidence, a letter from my father: why didn’t she get “organized about religion.” She should go see Gordon Wadhams, the priest at the Church of the Resurrection, on East Seventy-fourth Street, the church where my father went in New York: “Father Wadhams is deeply spiritual, damn brilliant, sense of humor . . . He really KNOWS what the score is & can explain better than anyone I can think of what the Church is all about.” In her prompt reply, my mother was self-conscious: “I would rather go to the man at college than someone I have no connections with . . . Probably the old shyness, but I can feel the sweat on the palms already . . .”

  I always assumed my mother had a pro forma Episcopalian upbringing—I knew about Margarett’s dramatic departure from old-fashioned Boston Unitarianism, but I assumed Shaw, my mother’s father, was at least an occasional Episcopalian. Here my mother explained that Senny, the Irish Catholic governess, was “the only person who ever told me there was a God even.” Her father, whom she described as “nothing” when it came to belief, had feared that Margarett would “convert all of us” to what he considered a predatory religion. Nonetheless, Senny had taken my mother and her sister to Sunday mass, given them Catholic prayer books, taught them the Hail Mary. The Episcopal Church therefore always seemed to my mother “sort of fake Catholic—they took communion and didn’t believe the same thing . . .” She was embarrassed to admit that in matters of the spiritual life, she was as naïve as my father had always accused her of being:

  . . . It has often worried me because I detest ignorance more than anything else, and even if I do not get faith I care for the knowledge. And ignorance of that is apt to scare you, at least it does me, for you think you are alone in your ignorance and that it is therefore shocking. I believe in a child’s sort of wonder way, but that is all and it is not much good, for it holds little comfort—the fear became more when I knew you—I suppose because I knew you didn’t have the ignorance—and I was scared of little things like going to church with you for fear I shouldn’t know what to do—for I know and understand the Catholic Mass but not the other . . . But I didn’t dare tell you. And I’m sure I never would have dared to had you not asked me to. I am very grateful that you did. It all sounds sadly childish as I read it over. Baring the soul like that makes me feel very emotional and you very near.

  My father replied immediately, eager to put her at ease—the letter, different in tone from others, is striking for its maturity, for the clarity of his handwriting (which usually tended toward the curlicued and illegible), and for the solemn directness of its language. He wrote her to continue with the Columbia chaplain if she wanted to, but that he believed Father Wadhams had the capacity to “make the most awkward attempt of anyone to speak to him about anything seem completely natural . . .” He advised her not to worry about dogma just now, explaining that he believed “Catholicism of some sort would be far more congenial than benevolent, vague, love-thy-neighbor Protestantism.” Protestantism was what Columbia offered, and it was analogous to the plain Episcopalianism in which my father had been raised. He wanted Jenny to join him in the Anglo-Catholic strand of the Episcopal Church, which had enabled him to make such an emotional connection with God.

  Amazingly, given the conversations they’d had about the war when they first courted, this was the first time they talked about what was so central to my father’s life. Now they brought to their correspondence a language that could place the events of their life together in a larger, resonant context, and the effort changed and deepened their relationship. “If one believes in the creed as it is written,” my father continued, “there is no way out of believing as a Catholic: the Mass, Confession, a disciplined life of prayer.” For an intellectually gifted young woman born into a complicated family and a world of foxhunting, dog breeding, art collecting, and assured marriage to one of the limited array of young men in her tribe, the possibility of belief and a life of prayer seemed to offer a more adventurous opportunity for meaning and constancy. But it was not until her definitive rejection of my father after Seattle that she took his advice. She found her way one Sunday in April 1944 to the Church of the Resurrection, and to Gordon Wadhams.

  In early June, newly baptized and confirmed an Episcopalian, she wrote to my father, breaking their months-long silence. He had once told her that experiences never seemed more real or wonderful than when they were shared. Now she too had had an experience that needed sharing, and since he was partly responsible, she had decided to write him about it. She’d made her first confession: “I practically flew the nine blocks home I felt so pure. And then this morning early was first Communion and afterwards we all went down to the Parish Hall for breakfast. Father W. had told us that meal would be as wonderful and should mean as much as receiving the Sacrament and until now I did not quite see why.”

  My father’s reply was immediate. “I was very touched by your writing, and, more than that, tremendously happy that you have found your way to the Church. The feeling you described of light-footed purity after the sacrament of penance is one of the things that seems so valid and authentic an experience as to justify in itself the existence of the Church . . . The whole business of the Church, prayer, the Eucharist, etc. never came home to me until after my first Confession in the fall of my 6th form year.” He went on to explain his commitment to the Anglo-Catholic tendency in the Episcopal Church: “There is a fire and a challenge to it, a sense of humor in most of its disciples, a warmth and human quality, and above all a definite and strong framework on which to build and on which to learn . . . I am awfully interested in all this of yours . . . How did you go about ‘breaking the ice’ about which you had so much trepidation?” He signed the letter, simply, “God bless you, Paul,” as if, in this role, he were a person other than her sometime suitor.

  My mother also wrote Father Wadhams—true to her upbringing, a thank-you note—and he immediately replied: “The more I review the events of the past few weeks—your coming to me, your quick, but I am sure real, grasp of spiritual values, your confirmation and all that has followed—the more aware I am of God’s hand in all this and of your happy prospects in the life of grace. I know that as your understanding grows, so will your sense of dedication to our Lord and to the work he has called you to.” He suggested that for fifteen minutes a day she undertake “non-critical, breath-catching reading” of The Imitation of Christ and The Confessions of St. Augustine—“both classics, indispensable.”

  For the moment, the spiritual work my mother was called to was in her family: “I think,” she wrote my father sometime aft
er her confession, “that compassion would be a better approach to Mama and Margie”—her mother was weighing the decision to go into a sanitarium; her sister, twenty-one with a small child, was contemplating divorce. Both circumstances were threatening to my mother’s already tenuous sense of security. Eventually her life in the church would not only leaven her dealings with her family but profoundly affect her intellectual life, as her curiosity and enthusiasm drew her to apply her considerable intelligence to evolving a theology and practice, to making spiritual metaphors from her own life. By the time she and my father married, she was as much Gordon Wadhams’s protegée as he was, and she took her religious vocation every bit as seriously as he did. While she pursued a life of service in partnership with him, her spiritual life was independent and entirely her own. It was as if two artists, one a painter and one a sculptor, had decided to marry and live together—the relationship would be one of mutual criticism and inspiration, but the work would remain separate.

  While my mother was writing him about her first confession, my father wooed with another letter of apology for his behavior in Seattle. “There was a tenseness and a rush and too many hotels and restaurants for clear thinking & acting. I’m made up in such a manner that when something gets a little too involved to see completely clearly,” he wrote, “I’m rather inclined to obey the emotion that says ‘to hell with it.’ Not an admirable trait.” He was taking responsibility, but my mother’s reply was harsh: “Isn’t it high time you did?” In his next letter, my father met the challenge—“Your letter also made me very nostalgic and lonely—we did have a grand time, what?” In his nervousness, he affected leading-man rhetoric: “To coin a phrase, my dear, it’s water over the dam.” It took a long sequence of sentences for him to come clean: “You know, life is a very funny business. I hesitate to tell you this, but I think you’d get a laugh out of it—I’m rather jealous about your dating”—after which he conceded to his rival: “If Trevor is the gentleman in question you have my highest approval. I think he is probably one of the best people who ever drew the breath of life.”