The Bishop's Daughter

by Honor Moore

  His letter had the desired effect. Even before she saw Artie Trevor off in early July, my mother was making her way back to Paul Moore. In June she noted it was nearly “four months since our brief kiss in the Seattle station” and that she was now “just plain not sure” whether “all or nothing” was a good “scheme of things.”

  “Thanks for your change of heart,” my father replied, assuring her that he was “trying like hell to get rid of the ‘I’ that has been too big for a while.” In an August letter, my mother asked who he had “kist” since their breakup, and in response to his list of five women, explained that she started “going steady” with Artie in the spring, but that he hadn’t “attacked” (i.e., kissed) her until just before he left. Of his newest girl, my father wrote, “I’ve been datin’ Lois pretty heavy & having a grand old time. She is not an intellectual giant—just a big healthy and rather attractive animal. Grand for the summer months as Nona is not enough of an extrovert for warm weather . . .”

  But even Lois didn’t keep him from writing my mother nearly every day, much more frequently than ever before, and on September 1 he telephoned collect, and they talked, nervously, for ten minutes—telephone time was rationed and often a long-distance call did not go through:

  . . . You probably wouldn’t believe it, but I was nervous as a cat waiting in the little booth, and then a long time with no answer.—and then finally U. It was like hearing a familiar lilt of past seasons—seasons that were so much fun and so good that the memory of their passing is sad. But the beautiful difference was that your voice was not a memory. And I love to hear you laugh. The reason I was useless was that I was nervous and giggly. But maybe you liked it too; I hope so . . . I could kick myself for being nasty out here. Oh well—won’t go into that again . . . I want to see you more now than ever before . . . Maybe I’m crazy but I don’t think so.

  There’s a full moon caught in the branches—can you see it motoring home through Chebacco Woods? Shining over the lake by the old ice house? Or are you coming home along the shore to catch it whitening the swamp land between the road and the Knowles and glistening the harbor beyond?

  But he mailed the letter without enclosing money for the call, and in a subsequent note enclosed with the check, he was suddenly self-conscious about the openness of his letter: “Hope you weren’t surprised and/or shocked by my somewhat unusual lack of casualness.”

  “Of course I wasn’t shocked by the post phone letter,” she wrote, “It’s high time you started slinging a little crap like that. Everyone else does (in my long list).”

  “Play hard to get,” was the only advice my mother ever gave me about men, but if she was playing hard to get here, she misfired. My father wrote back, barely controlling his rage. “I write as nice a letter as I know how & the only reference from you is ‘It’s high time you started slinging a little crap like that’ . . . My feelings aren’t bruised very easily, but don’t you think that’s a little callous?” He’d considered calling her. Had she sent a letter he missed? Abject when she read his “blast,” my mother wrote an apology on a narrow card, as if now unworthy of a full sheet of paper:

  I wish you were

  home now. NO letter

  was lost, I really am

  sorry, I have no ex-

  cuse. Darling, really

  I want to write nice

  things I don’t know what

  got into me. I’m not

  trying to butter you

  up. Please call up so

  I can apologize again.

  I wish we were to-

  gether now, I mean it.

  Please say it’s all right.

  I’m a shit when you

  have taken so much

  from me in the last

  months. Call me, darling . . .

  But she called him, and he immediately forgave her while admitting he was so angry he hadn’t felt like writing:

  . . . pure hurt, and the old impersonal feeling that comes with it—and the loneliness . . . You see, your letter sounded as if you thought me insincere, and I thought you knew by now that I express sentiment of that kind so rarely that it could not be insincere . . .

  A week later, he wrote he now had “no romantic feeling” for Nona, who had made it clear she cared for him, and offered to “cease all honkin’”—that is, necking with others—if my mother wanted him to. Two weeks later, he tried to call again (“I wanted to hear your throaty, pulsating voice”), and in his next letter reported his landlady had kidded him about Lois but quipped that “of course the girl in the East is the one.” When he explained his disapproval of war marriages, the landlady was matter-of-fact: “Just go where you heart leads you.” Back East, my mother dreamed they were married and wrote my father that sitting on the sofa in the library where they first necked, she thought of him. My father’s reply sounds like Jimmy Stewart: “Your letter was awful nice, Jen. Don’t fight any feelings. I’d hate to admit how eager I’m getting to see you. Gee whiz, if we can’t be as attractive to each other on the spot as we are in our letters, to hell with it.”

  The story my father told of deciding to marry my mother did not change from the time I first heard it as a child. He loved to tell it, casting it always as inevitable and very romantic. After he had been in Seattle for a year, he had leave before a change of assignment. On the journey home, which took more than a week, he wavered—“Over Idaho, yes, I’ll marry her. Over South Dakota, no. Over Ohio, yes”—until he saw the New York skyline and the yes became definite. Within nights of his return, sitting across from her in a nightclub called Fefe’s Monte Carlo, he proposed. Telling me the story, he left out Nona Clark, who also got love letters postmarked Idaho, South Dakota, Ohio, even New York. And he left out the war, how he drank too much, how battle returned to him in dreams. But both of them, as my mother put it in a final letter, had “buried the hatchet.”

  It was an element in the arc of my father’s romantic narrative that my mother was startled when he leaned across a table at Fefe’s Monte Carlo and proposed, startled and incredulous: he was drunk, so drunk she insisted he call her in the morning to confirm he meant what he said. She was deep into an exciting term at Barnard which she wasn’t eager to abandon—an International Studies seminar, Blake to Byron, Religion and Contemporary Social Issues with Ursula Niebuhr, and a graduate history course, Europe 1914–1944. But she did quit Barnard, and her version of the courtship narrative was always tinged with regret, even after she’d gone back to get her degree and graduated with her first baby, me at nearly one year old, on her hip: “I wish I had taken a year to work at Life magazine, or something,” she wrote during her first pregnancy. Thirty years later, during the first weeks of her final illness, I was sitting next to her hospital bed when, out of the blue, she said, “Do you think you’ll get married?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Don’t,” she said. “You love your independence too much.”

  There was barely a week to celebrate before my father had to report for duty, teaching at the Officers’ Training School at Quantico. On November 15, his twenty-fifth birthday, settled in temporary quarters, Paul Moore sat down and began a letter to his fiancée: “This is the first time I’ve had to write and the first time ever on paper I’m able to relax completely and tell you how I’ve missed you, how I love you and how I’ve missed you & loved you over the last 9 months.” He closed the letter with his fondest hope. “And so, my darling, will we always be able to talk? We can pray that we always will wish to talk.”

  “Your wonderful letter was amBROOOOSIA after a hideous day in the pouring rain,” my mother immediately replied. “It is so wonderful to get a letter from you where no one feels frustrated and there is nothing lacking. I get more excited every day about being with you . . .”

  As my father adjusted in Virginia to workdays that started a
t 7:30 a.m., my mother, in New York, planned their precipitous wedding, to be held on November 26. Since her own mother was in a depression, she had only her prospective mother-in-law, whom she called “Mother Fan,” to turn to. Later she would tell me that during those weeks Fanny Moore became “the only mother I ever knew.” The affection was mutual. As my mother spent more and more time at Hollow Hill, whatever misgivings the Moores had about their son’s choice vanished. In New York she was rooming with her sister, and, Margie remembered, “All that week we ran into people on the street and invited them to the wedding.” When the enormous engagement diamond arrived, my mother got my father on the phone to open it with him. He had some pangs about not putting it on her finger himself: “We’ve missed so much of the little fun things of getting married.”

  Denied special leave, my father was late to the rehearsal dinner the night before the Sunday ceremony, and the wedding “orchestra” was a pickup combo pulled in for the evening. But my mother wore her grandmother’s 1881 slipper satin wedding gown, quickly altered to fit her, and, observing tradition, got dressed, surrounded by her girlfriends, first posing in lacy silk underwear, hands on her hips, one thrust forward, grinning for the photographer. But as much as it was a wartime wedding, as much as it was a gathering of friends, as much as it was the culmination of a dramatic courtship, my parents’ wedding was the performance of a sacrament. “In times such as these the fact of being bound to each other often seems ever a greater miracle,” Mrs. Niebuhr wrote my mother.

  It was the wish of both my parents that the wedding service be a nuptial mass, and Gordon Wadhams sang the liturgy as the pungent fragrance of incense filled the small church, the newlyweds receiving communion. The longest wedding anyone had ever been to, friends joked for decades. Father Wadhams was so enthralled he swore in his post-nuptial letter that if these vows didn’t hold he’d renounce his orders, a promise my parents told as a story every time his name came up. For him, a celibate who would later leave the Episcopal Church for Roman Catholicism, the union between my parents transcended the quotidian, even the mortal. “I shall never forget what it was to turn about, look down on you two kneeling there,” he wrote. “What yesterday gave of promise—this, I think, no one of us can tell. Promise—not only for you two, but for the Body of Christ, the Church.” These young people were his handiwork, “two persons, of a mind about things that matter, penitents, disciplined communicants, willing in the presence of ‘this company’ to witness to their faith in ‘the means of grace and the hope of glory.’”

  In a photograph taken in the back of a car after the ceremony, my father is grinning, leaning back in dress blues, and my mother’s smile is blindingly radiant. They are chauffeured from the church to the Cosmopolitan Club, and when they enter the ballroom, the guests turn and applaud. You can hear the festive tenor of the talk just by looking at the tiny black-and-white photographs, young women with hair brushed back and up and pulled behind their ears like Betty Grable’s, skirts to the knee that flattered waists and buttocks, mule pumps with languorous silk flowers flopping over open toes, young men in uniform or dinner jackets. Mother Fan had brought flowers from the Hollow Hill greenhouses to render the Cosmopolitan Club ballroom pretty if not luxurious. In one snapshot, my parents’ grandmothers are deep in conversation; they had known each other for thirty years, but not until that evening did they enter into something that might be called friendship: “Will you call me Ada?” Mrs. Moore asked. “If you will call me Marian,” my mother’s grandmother replied. All four parents were there, and, Margie said, “It was the most lovely wedding.”

  Sometime that day, my father took time to send the telegram to Nona Clark she described to me twenty years later, and that same day, somewhere on the Pacific, Artie Trevor sat down in his berth to respond to my mother’s letter announcing her engagement to his old friend. “The news of you and Paul is the most really good thing that’s happened in the war . . . Something I could never quite understand about you two was why, being so completely in love . . . you apparently made yourselves so miserable. I love the picture of Paul, who really hates any scene or effort, coming charging across the continent full of fire and determination.” He didn’t want her to have any guilt: “I think we both agreed that my interest in the third economic conference of the Baltic states would never exactly fascinate you and surely you can’t forget that sort of hunted glassy stare of mine that used to appear when you mentioned the church.”

  As the band played the marine hymn, my tall parents stepped out onto the dance floor, and later my father cut the wedding cake with his Marine Corps sword and fed a frosted square to his laughing bride. The next morning, the newlyweds embarked for their first residence, a low white outbuilding on a Virginia plantation, close to the Marine Officers’ Training School—the property, called “Beauclair,” had belonged to George Washington’s brother, so they said they were living on the plantation of “the uncle of our country.” To get there, they flew to Washington. They tried to be discreet, but when my father took off his Marine Corps cap on the plane, wedding rice spilled on his blues and the other passengers burst into applause.

  5

  Firstborn

  * * *

  My parents’ honeymoon cottage in Virginia came with seven cats that shrieked in the night throughout the four months they lived there. There are photographs, but the cottage in Fredericksburg is far more vivid in my mother’s needlepoint. Her mother’s painting had given her ambition to be a writer—she’d written short stories at Vassar—but my father’s mother, who ran an exemplary house, gardened, and did needlepoint, inspired my mother in the domestic arts. I imagine her embarking on the project, drawing a picture of the cottage, cats stationed like sentries out front and in the bushes, having the image transferred to buckram, ordering wool and needles, asking her mother-in-law for a demonstration. The stitching took twenty-five years. “Oh my God, I’ll never finish,” my mother would say every summer in the Adirondacks as babies climbed onto her lap and she put aside her needle and wool. Summers passed, and still the honeymoon cottage lay in an embroidery bag, unfinished, my mother its Penelope. When she began to stitch, cottage and cats appearing, my parents’ marriage was new, her new husband home each evening. What was my mother’s dream? What did she imagine as she knotted and stitched white for clapboard and cat, brown for tree trunk, green for grass, blue for patches of sky. Why did it take her so long to bring the cottage back into view?

  When my father carried my mother over the threshold and dropped her on the wedding bed, it collapsed, but omens aside, the four months in Fredericksburg seem to have been a honeymoon—in letters afterward, both spoke of their surprise and delight in being married. Before seven, six mornings a week, my father went off to teach at the officers’ school in Quantico, and my mother fed the cats, which they had named for the mothers of their friends, and figured out what to make for supper. She had never cooked nor had any instruction in cooking. “I didn’t know how to keep house,” she always said. Her mother could tell what was wrong with a sauce someone else prepared, but she did not cook herself, and she could not lay a shirt, collar first, on the ironing board and tell her daughter where to start pressing. Raised with servants, my mother and her newlywed friends made housekeeping a frontier, a protest against their parents’ outmoded way of life, which my mother described in her letters as “so pre-war.” Both my parents believed that if they lived differently, they would have a happier married life than either set of parents. “I want you to promise not to feel that I’m lonely and unentertained at all in Quantico because being able to make you even half happy would make me completely so,” my mother wrote my father a week before they married.

  The cottage at Beauclair was a baptism by fire for my mother, the housewife—there was no hot-water heater, no furnace. My father chopped the wood, my mother boiled water for baths, shaving, and laundry and did the first cooking of her life on a woodburning stove—heat came from that stove
and one other. After my father left for work and after her chores, my mother, alone in the cottage filled with wedding presents, wrote thank-you notes, pasted photographs and letters in the scrapbook, did needlepoint, and took a stab at the laundry. Close friends like Quigg McVeigh came to visit, as did my mother’s brother Shaw, and, at Christmas, her father—Margarett had finally entered Four Winds, a sanitarium in Katonah, New York.

  After two months, when the war had not ended, and when it was clear that in April my father would be posted again to the South Pacific, my parents decided to conceive a child. If it was a boy, it went without saying that he’d be named Paul Moore III; the possible daughter was named Honor before conception. I was always told I was named after no one in particular but that each of my parents had a friend named Honor. “We just liked the name,” they said. But it was an unusual name, and it attracted the young man who’d almost lost his life in battle, the young woman idealistic about what she might accomplish in the world. “I could not love thee, Dear, so much, / Lov’d I not Honour more” were lines they both knew, lines that would be quoted in scores of telegrams friends sent at my birth. Like the cavalier speaker of Richard Lovelace’s poem, my father would soon be “going to the Wars.” But in addition to its suggestion of an ideal, the poem is a clear statement of a theme that would bedevil my parents’ marriage. What was the “honour” that my father, always off to various wars, would love more?

  When I had a birthday away from home, my mother would always call: “How does it feel to be twenty?” she might say, but with an edge that assured me both that the world was filled with the unexpected and that during the year of my new age, I should anticipate wonderful things. And then she’d say, “Something riveting is on its way to you,” and I would feel a surge of excitement as she continued with news of home. The call might end with another reference to the birthday package, and a characteristic hint of insecurity—“I hope you like it.” After my mother died, my father took over these calls. Usually he’d throw in a reference to my being his “first born.” There was always a lot of charge as he said that word, his voice rising on “first” and culminating in “born,” but I didn’t know what it meant to him. I thought it was just something affectionate to say, or later, when things were combative or awkward between us, a way of keeping me at a distance while referring to a time when neither of us was ambivalent. In our therapy together decades later, I learned that my parents’ decision to have a first child had indeed been tied up with my father’s relationship to war; as he put it in his memoir, published in 1998, I was conceived because “we had some romantic notion that if I were killed, at least I would have left behind a child.”