by Honor Moore
My father gave my mother a fiftieth birthday party that March at the F Street Club in Washington. At the very long table were seated many of their close friends. Venable and I flew down from New York; I wore a long navy blue wool dress and a sapphire bracelet my mother had given me. Standing, I sang the words I’d written to the Kurt Weill–Ira Gershwin song, Jenny made her mind up, and my father his to Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek”: Heaven, we’re in heaven / And her heart keeps beating so that she can hardly speak / For we seem to find the happiness we seek / Now that Jenny Moore / Has finally reached her peak. There were toasts and dancing, and toward the end of the evening the pianist struck up “Cheek to Cheek,” and my parents turned toward each other. Soon they were the only couple on the floor, my mother in a long, brightly flowered dress, the nine gold bangles on her wrists, my father in a suit and necktie, the two of them smiling. In spite of all I now know, I like to think that dance was when they decided to try to reconcile. “It will not be easy but we must have faith in each other,” my mother had written my father a year before. “I need to lie in your arms & tell you everything . . . I want to be in Washington for a time in order to grow—and not to escape from you—I want to be whole & to be your wife and lover.” And he had written her, “I want to retract my part of the conversation about the future. I am going to hang in, as it were, for the foreseeable future.”
Days after the party, I got a thank-you letter. My mother loved the towels I’d given her for the house in Virginia, and my song. She hadn’t been feeling well at the party, and was going to have more tests. Am nervous about the hospital—it ticks off so many eras—some pleasurable like babies, others—the final page of the letter is lost. She and my father spent the weekend after the party together in the house she’d bought with her book royalties in the country in Virginia, talking about the future of their relationship. The following Friday, Venable and I drove to Kent and spent Saturday planting the rosebushes. Late that night, I was wakened by a call from my father. My mother had cancer of the colon which had spread to her liver. I flew to Washington and in the following days we learned that she had six months to live. There was no chance chemotherapy could save her life and little chance it would give her more time.
“Everything was just starting,” my mother said, weeping, as I sat with her, helplessly, in the hospital. Another public letter was sent to the diocese, and my father took a leave and spent some months, the spring and the summer, seeking out alternative cures all over the country. My sister Rosemary was in Washington, living with a boyfriend, and she and a nurse and friends of my mother’s who arrived for weeks at a time, produced wheatgrass juice from a juicer and administered pills under the care of a medical doctor who had converted to naturopathy when he cured himself of cancer.
Often that summer, she was very well. “Mom really looked beautiful in the turquoise caftan & turquoise beads. God I hope she doesn’t die. I almost can’t keep my hands off her,” I wrote in my diary. Some evenings, as we sat on the porch after supper, her childhood friend Ben Bradlee, now editor of the Washington Post, would arrive with tantalizing hints of what the paper would break the following morning about the evolving Watergate scandal, and one afternoon my mother and I watched Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in “the tennis match of the century.” The surgeon who had proclaimed there was no hope was amazed at her strength, and the naturopath said that if he could keep her alive till mid-October, she’d survive.
But one night in Kent in late September, an inordinately heavy wind raced through the limbs of the giant maples, and Rosie called to say my mother was in the hospital and that this time it was different. Venable and I packed the next morning, jumped into the car, and were on the shuttle by evening, a bouquet of roses from the new garden in my arms. During the days that followed, my mother slipped in and out of a coma, and one day all nine of us and my father stood around her hospital bed. “See you tomorrow,” I said the next afternoon, kissing her goodbye.
“I don’t think we need any Custers,” she answered.
“Custards?” I asked.
“No, Custers.” And then, “Goodbye, darling.”
The October 3 entry in my diary reads, “Mom died 4:45 a.m. Pop called me at 5:20 & we went over to the hospital.” She’d had her last stand by herself, with the night nurse.
“Room peaceful. Purged,” I wrote.
The funeral was in the National Cathedral. Already I was carrying my mother inside me. She had been slender as a girl those weeks at home in the big double bed, raising her arms in the air “conducting” as Roberta Flack sang “Killing Me Softly,” which she got us to play again and again, the sound of her fingers brushing against each other like dry grass. Whish. The service she planned would be an “Agape,” an early Christian rite; everyone, not just confirmed Episcopalians, could greet each other, drink the wine, and eat the bread, which was carried down the aisle in huge baskets. The cathedral was full; aunts and uncles and cousins, friends from all over, busloads from Indianapolis and Jersey City. My mother’s mother, Margarett, swathed in black lace in a wheelchair; Dorothy Day, now very old, who had taken the bus from New York; my old boyfriend, Luke Marston. One of my friends imagined my mother sitting at the foot of the altar in blue jeans, watching as the men who were her close friends—Bob Potter, Ben Bradlee, Artie Trevor, her writing teacher Astere Claeyssans, Blair Clark, and Roger Wilkins—bore her pine coffin down the aisle.
There is a newspaper photograph of all of us on the steps of the cathedral before the funeral, my father’s long hair lifted by the wind as he holds on to the younger children. Some days before my mother died, I had found myself alone with him in a hospital waiting room. “I remember her on the sheets,” he said, “she was so beautiful.” And then he wept and wept, and I held him.
16
Art and Life
* * *
The roses my mother sent survived the winter and bloomed again the following summer. I saved the tin box she’d brought the cake in, and the four scrapbooks she so lovingly put together exist outside the charged realm of imagination I reserve for the things of which I’ve been deprived. All these years later, their leather covers—orange, blue, green, yellow—are perfectly intact: I’ve never lost them, have always meticulously replaced the photos I’ve removed for any purpose. They are strangely buoyant, these large, brightly colored books, and, with the butterfly pin and a particular letter, are evidence that her love for me came to have substance: I often think of you in the early morning—Susanna and I have a half hour before everyone else gets up. She feeds Lucy—and we eat and talk—about things like the branches against the light of winter sky—and that her favorite colors are “bright black and silver”—She reminds me of you—and I wish I’d had the peace and composure to talk in those days when you were twelve. I remember we made coffee cake in Jersey City—and made artificial flowers but not under conditions of a bright winter sky! There are so many times in life when you really don’t know what you’re doing!
In her will, written the last weeks of her life, my mother left me her writings. I was to use or develop them in any way I saw fit. I took this bequest as her blessing of the life on which I was already embarked, the life of a writer, and when I left Washington after her funeral, I rented a car for the journey home, loading it with cartons of her manuscripts. Not only, I believed, had she left me what she had started to write, she’d left me her ambition, her dreams, her imagination. In my top-floor studio in Chelsea, I found refuge. Carefully, I filed her manuscripts and stored her letters to me in an Italian-paper document box.
But what would I write now? Looking for women writing about their mothers, I found Simone de Beauvoir, writing of her mother’s death: “as violent and unforeseen as an engine stopping in the middle of the sky.” I was at the edge of a crater rapacious with darkness, at my typewriter holding on to its keys, beneath me my great-grandmother’s Chinese rug. I wrote my first attempts with
purposeful melodrama: How will it impress itself on this cruel world that I am bereft of my mother? And in dreams, she returned, black-haired, breathing the death rattle from the dark of her hospital bed, or radiant, enthroned in a bright green field. And I dreamed of myself, on the lawn in Kent, trying to fix the dishwasher. The dishwasher broke down / My grandmother had a stroke. Now it was my mother I would approach in writing: a series of poems, taken from this journal, about Mom, I wrote in my diary that week after her death. First get it out, then give it form.
The four children still at home stayed on in Washington, my father with them, still on leave from the job in New York. A weekend after the death, I visited to help my sister Rosemary clear out my mother’s bureau and closets. My father was bereft, at a loss as to what he should do. How could he uproot my two youngest sisters again? They were ten and twelve, and their mother had died. But could he resign his job and live in Washington? One morning, I walked into the guest room where he was staying—no one was sleeping in the bed wreathed with baby pictures, the room my mother died from. My father was bending over, putting something into a suitcase. I asked a question. “Do you think you’ll marry again, Pop?” He looked up. “I don’t want to marry again quickly,” he said. “It’s so easy to get caught.”
In my dreams, my mother became insistent, night after night turning toward me, her face gaunt. Or reaching for my hand, hers in the cuff of a white Irish sweater, and I would wake, waking Venable. “Just go upstairs and write,” he would say. I read and reread Adrienne Rich. “A woman in the shape of a monster / a monster in the shape of a woman / the skies are full of them.” And then one day, I began. On a shuttle to Washington right after my mother was diagnosed, I had written, Ladies and gentlemen, my mother is dying, imagining myself walking the airplane aisle, past business travelers bent over newspapers. Now I made a poem, then poems, my friends offering support. One sent a silver letter opener that had belonged to her mother, dead when my friend was in her teens; another framed a photograph of Gertrude Stein. Paul Schmidt, who had stayed in the apartment over the summer, wrote: As I always do when I’ve been to your house, I come away very peaceful and full of strong literary resolve. Tell Venable his prodding has so far produced 15 pages which I am tempted to call a memoir—the inner me, in English at last. Venable had encouraged him to write the truth about his bisexual life. Now Venable was prodding me, too.
12/23 Washington. I am not sure that I am any more able to go pick out a gravestone for Mom than Poppy is. My father had asked that Rosemary and I go to the cemetery and decide between marble and granite. He was turning away from my mother, and, as I turned toward her in my writing, I could feel him also turn from me. Was he leaving me because I still loved her? Had he forgotten the day I remembered so clearly the week before she died? They had reconciled, he’d told me, radiant. Had found each other again. But now, he no longer talked to me about what he was feeling. In this way, my writing, the dimension in which I was most alive, the part of my life in which my mother was present, came to exclude my father.
12/24 Washington. I feel as if I must have full time for writing—and I don’t. I must go back and write every day or else, which the holidays, the terrible millstone of the family has helped me let slip . . . Irritation. Sickness. My poem. The most terrible missing of Mom. It is almost grotesque to sit around the table without her. The whole thing is undynamic without her, static. Cleaning up the various living rooms. The debris of death choking everything. At the typewriter, my fingers slipped from the keys. “Why are you doing something so private when you are such a public person?” asked a friend from Yale, a public woman herself. “It is difficult to write poems about one’s dead mother,” proclaimed the distinguished poet, a man who had been my mentor. “Keep going, Wonz,” repeated Venable, using his nickname for me. “You must do this,” said the older woman writer I barely knew. And I walk around my studio, my feet bare, Granny Moore’s Chinese carpet soft under my feet, its blue and creamy colors vibrating in the early winter light. Again I press the keys: If she could only sleep. Condense. Count syllables. Make poems.
For a reading in mid-January, I chose not only “My Mother’s Moustache,” my triumphant just-published poem, but the unfinished new ones about her death: Ladies and gentlemen, my mother is dying, I read, If she could only sleep . . . As I continued to read, silence thickened in the dark, and when I finished, there was prolonged clapping. Afterward, in the gathering of my excited friends, something like a scene from a Hollywood movie: a woman approaches, asks if I might like to see these poems on the stage, with music? Yes.
Reading my journals now, I am in search not of the story of my mother as I was in 1974, but of the story of my father and me. I find it, embedded.
The morning of my mother’s funeral, I stood in the kitchen, next to my father. Making coffee? Washing dishes? Suddenly my sister Adelia, married a year before, burst into the room and announced to him that she was pregnant. My father, turning, said something like, “Oh, how wonderful,” and leaned to hug and kiss her. I stood back and watched the embrace, her smile, his effort to be present. Why had she not been able to wait another day? What did I have to offer on this day of burial?
I took this tangle of rage, envy, and grief to my therapist, who after introducing the idea of “the good daughter,” told me he found it difficult to imagine someone of my temperament without a child. Within days I had a dream, which I recorded in my diary: I see Paul Schmidt in a field. He says he always goes to bed with the wrong person. I tell him I’ve had a dream. In it Hecuba is lying in a bed in a dark room, fat, distended, diseased, the mourning mother. Athena/Minerva (My-nerva) stands & transforms from dark to blond. I do not go to bed with Hecuba; it is Minerva who knocks me out. I go to bed with her. At the time, in the wake of my psychiatrist’s remark about my suitability for motherhood, I thought the dream spoke to my vocation as a writer. Hecuba had mothered fifty children, her sons had died in the Trojan War; I choose to be a childless woman, born from the brain of my father—from my own brain. But could it be that even then I knew of the turbulence in my father’s spirit? That this other Paul, Paul Schmidt, who loved men and had loved and married a woman, was a stand-in? That it was my father Paul who was always going to bed with the wrong person?
I had encountered, and repressed, the fact of my father’s homosexual desire only once. I was in college, home in Washington for a vacation, and it was an evening after supper. Perhaps my parents were out, because I walked into their bedroom. The giant bed was on the right as you came in, and in red frames, arranged around its semicircular headboard, the baby photographs of their nine children—an altar to the generative power of my parents’ marriage. Though the room was not off limits, I rarely went into it except to talk to one of them. Why was I alone there? I could have been looking for a safety pin or a Kleenex, but this night, the light in my father’s study, an alcove off the large bedroom, was on, and suddenly, mysteriously, I was in search of something else. First I looked at the little shelf above the built-in desk where my father kept small objects brought back by his grandmother from her trips around the world, two of which he later gave me. One of those he gave me was a lapis elephant, the other was a small Chinese figure carved of white jade—two men, one on top of the other, heads and feet at opposite ends so that the sculpture is of four men, the third and fourth, each squatting, composed of the head and feet of one of the others. A beast of two backs. Four backs?
Then I turned to leave. I don’t remember if the book of photographs was already open, or if I opened it, but the image it was opened to was unlike anything I’d ever associated with my father. The photograph, in black and white, was of a young man, naked, standing on a stony beach. The texture was almost grainy, and the youth was beautiful, dreamy, almost sullen. I remember that he stood, three quarters turned from me, facing out to the sea so his genitals were obscured. I understood that if I turned the page, there would be another photograph like this one, th
at this was a book of such photographs, but I did not want to see another photograph like this one, nor did I want to be caught looking at the book, even though it was out there, maybe even open, on the neatly painted white surface.
It was soon after I saw the book of photographs, the photograph of the naked young man, that my mother became certain my father had lovers outside their marriage, and that the lovers were men. She made the discovery, I was told by a friend in whom she confided, not as the result of a single event, but from putting things together—a series of suspicions suddenly becoming in her mind enough of a certainty for her to consider leaving my father, for her to make a dramatic announcement to her oldest child during the summer of 1969: I am having some problems with my marriage. Until she reached that conclusion, she had not seriously considered that my father had been unfaithful to her, or that he might have another sexual preference. She confided her new belief only in her sister, her brother’s wife, and Bette, a woman she became close to before her death.
My mother had struggled with what she and my father agreed were their sexual problems, and he had gone to a psychiatrist, my mother assumed for depression related to the war. In fact, I learned years later, the psychiatrist my father had first seen was Bertram Schaffner, homosexual himself, a pioneer who had counseled gay men drafted into World War II on how to avoid the draft or to live undetected in the armed services and one of the psychoanalytic profession who had worked hardest to get homosexuality removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which happened in 1973, the year my mother died and a few years after I saw the open book of photographs. But my foray that night into my father’s study took place before my mother’s announcement of her discontent, and so I was ignorant of the fissures that would eventually break my parents’ marriage. There was no context in my conscious mind to conclude, from seeing the book of photographs, any new information. I believed that my parents took Christian marriage seriously, and I assumed they did not argue with the commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”