by Honor Moore
At home that night, I wrote in my journal: “Quite wonderful interview with Pop. Felt really warm after. Think it’s really extraordinary how open he is: he said he wouldn’t have any negative reaction that he knows of if one of his daughters were a lesbian.”
I still hadn’t told my father about my new life when he went to India in February to preach at the Maramon Convention, an annual gathering in the province of Kerala. These were Mar Thoma Christians, whose tradition is that Doubting Thomas, one of the apostles, had traveled to India to found a church fifty years after the death of Christ. My father was to preach a series of sermons on Christianity and social justice. Beginning weeks in advance, canopies of bright-colored silk and cotton were erected in a dry riverbed, and as the opening day approached, hundreds of thousands gathered, camping at the site, dressed in hot pinks, blues, and reds and greens, bearded, veiled, chanting hymns, and every morning before the sun got too hot, my father preached. Bob Potter, my father’s longtime friend and the chancellor, or lawyer, of the Diocese of New York, and his wife accompanied my father and Brenda on the trip, and one day at lunch “Potter,” as my father called him, leaned toward my father and said, “Hey, Paul, did you know that Honor has a girlfriend?” His goddaughter whom I knew slightly had heard the news and passed it on, and when he got home from India, my father had asked my sister Rosemary if it was true.
But he never asked me. I had been waiting to tell him. Waiting until I was sure. Waiting until Venable and I decided what to do. But now we had made our decision. I never had a serious conversation with my father about this great change in my life, and because of that, the new sense of connection between us dissolved. Venable and I split the apartment. I moved upstairs into my studio and the adjoining guest room, and Venable stayed downstairs. About a year later, I moved again, and it was in that new place that I introduced my father to Victoria and there that he and I came to an accommodation about his grandmother’s rug. I’d bought a renovated loft in Tribeca, the only requirement in the search a space large enough for my magic carpet, 141⁄2 by 22 feet. We sat on my inherited Victorian furniture which I had reupholstered sea blue velvet, and I served cookies and espresso in delicate antique cups given to me by my mother. When I passed the tray to Brenda, she knocked her cup from its gold-edged plate, shattering it on the rug. We all laughed, Brenda quickly gathering up even the tiniest shards and promising to have it repaired. It took two years, but she returned the cup, cracks invisible, virtually like new.
Now, living alone, I had an enormous room of my own where light spilled through huge warehouse windows onto a creamy ground where indigo and cerulean grapevines and flowers spiraled and intertwined. I had both solitude and my beautiful black-haired lover with whom I spent most nights. Here, in a pioneering neighborhood close to the world of artists, to which I carted groceries from blocks away, I would renew my writing life. I would make more serious poems, and, to inure myself and other women against the costs of the bold life on which I and many of my friends were now embarked, I would write the life of my mother’s mother, an artist who had gone mad when she stopped painting, a woman who had had many lovers, of both sexes, a woman I had always been said to resemble.
“Are you sure you’re not making this place for someone else’s approval?” Venable asked when he visited and we sat on Aunt Lily Hanna’s Victorian settee, which with its companion chairs looked quite odd in the enormous space. Perhaps he knew me better than I knew myself. There were tasks at hand beyond the ones I acknowledged: to mourn the loss of a man I had loved but with whom I no longer wanted to live, and, at the same time, to establish myself in a new sexuality. I all but ignored them as I set forth on my “romance of alone.” In the years that followed, as my new world of women deepened and evolved, fractured and split, and as I wrote the life of Margarett Sargent, I created, in spite of my loneliness and my desire to find an ideal love, a way of living on my own.
18
Discovery
* * *
In 1984, I left New York and moved to Connecticut. I could not write the book about my grandmother in the city. Or that’s what I told myself. I would leave for a year, sit alone in the house in Kent; even if I wrote just a page a day, it couldn’t take more than a year to produce the book. But my life came with me, and my sadness. I had left behind a broken history of lovers. I hadn’t been able to make a commitment to Victoria, or to Diane, whom I left her for. I left Diane for a woman who lived in California, who spent much of her time traveling as a performer and who declared herself unwilling to be monogamous. I didn’t believe her, and the obsession lasted for years. But in Connecticut I found a new life, and new friends. In particular, I became close to a couple a generation older than I was, both accomplished artists. By watching them and coming to know them, I learned what an enduring life of creative work required.
In the early years, my father visited once or twice a year, and I gave spectacular dinner parties, inviting my new friends, proffering my amazing father. When he and I were alone together, I tried to keep our conversation away from family controversy. It had become clear that Brenda was an alcoholic, and she had made it clear she only barely tolerated my father’s children. Now, for instance, my father came to the Adirondacks by himself. Perhaps because I had stopped drinking alcohol, I began to notice that my father’s charming tipsiness often had a slightly out-of-control quality. “We’ve switched to vodka,” he joked once. “Gin fights are just too vicious.” Brenda began to gain weight, the prettiness of her face to coarsen. Now when I saw them or anyone in my family, I could feel disturbance roiling beneath the surface. As my siblings and I passed through our twenties and thirties and into our forties, Brenda still treated us as adolescents, and my father allowed her to rail against us, often in the presence of friends who told us about it later.
Sometimes my father’s need to please Brenda took the form of disloyalty to my mother—he had taken to psychoanalyzing her, denigrating her, particularly to the younger ones who had been so young when she died. Once he told a friend of mine it worried him that I idealized my mother, that she had been, at the very least, an indifferent parent to me and often even cruel. I was willing to listen to my father’s stories about my mother when he took responsibility for his part in the difficulties of their marriage, but it enraged me when he blamed her, and because he consistently blamed her, I defended her. She became my cause. It was then that I took out my mother’s letters and reassured myself that whatever had happened between us during my childhood, she had made amends before she died. And then, once when he visited, my father turned on me in a rage. I was explaining the point of view of one of my sisters in a family fight, trying to make peace, and he began to shout, even curse. I asked him not to speak to me that way, and he quickly apologized, begging me to keep his outburst between us. “Please, please don’t tell them,” he said. Now my feeling for my father included fear of that temper.
When I moved to Connecticut, the AIDS epidemic was intensifying, and the world I had been part of in New York was under siege. In early January 1986, I went to an AIDS memorial service at the cathedral. It was a Eucharist, a requiem, and as part of the liturgy, names of the dead were recited, a process that took more than an hour. As I listened, I heard the names of friends, actors and poets and artists I had known, and then my father preached. In his white chimere and crimson rochet, he climbed the pulpit and began. It was a sermon about sexual freedom, about the lives these dead men had lived, about the presence of Christ’s sacrifice in human suffering. This was not a new subject for him, but I had never heard him so fierce, so passionate, so loving. What came to me was this: Here is where I can come to find my father’s love. There is, I told myself, magnificence in how he can give, opening his long arms, practically weeping on behalf of these men dead of a plague: here in his preaching I can be close to my father. In 1988, when my first book of poems was published, I dedicated it to him, taking it uptown and making a presentation. After h
is death, I found a note he wrote me then but never sent, “You are a VERY GOOD POET. Someday we’ll talk about them.”
The following spring, my father announced that he would retire two years later, after twenty-five years as bishop of New York. I remember, when he gave me the news, seeing a kind of resigned sadness cross his face; it seemed strange to me that he would give up what he loved most, what gave him life. He was getting old, he said, but he was only sixty-eight. Even when I reflected that twenty years was a long time, I couldn’t get the expression I’d seen on his face out of my mind. He had that beaten look, which I associated with his domestic life but never with his priesthood. He convinced me, though. He had books to write, other things to do; he wanted to spend more time with Brenda, traveling, which was when they had their best times together, and at the house they’d bought in Stonington on the Connecticut coast after giving up Martha’s Vineyard. Also he wanted to get to know his grandchildren.
In New York, he and Brenda would move to the small townhouse in Greenwich Village they’d bought a decade before with the proceeds from the sale of a painting by George Caleb Bingham which my father had inherited. Brenda had begun the renovation. The details of their moving plans came to me and my siblings from their accountants. Brenda, who was studying antiques appraisal, had inventoried every possession they planned to “deaccession” and listed it in a crisp twenty-page document, along with cash values. A cover letter informed us we could purchase any piece we wished, in advance of a public auction.
There had always been a tradition in the Moore family of passing things on; now, apparently, that had changed. My father and Brenda led a luxurious life, and he had always been a magnanimous philanthropist, but could their finances be that bad? The list included pieces of both actual and sentimental value, antiques we had grown up with and furniture from the house at Hollow Hill which had been dismantled when Gami died several years before. Also listed, at a wildly high value, was the wire head of my mother as a child done by Alexander Calder, who had been a great friend of her artist mother; my mother had left it to my father in her will. A sick joke, we all thought—Brenda puts her predecessor’s head on the auction block.
Some of my sisters and I decided to try to buy it, but when I called to make an appointment for an independent appraisal, Brenda answered. Immediately she put my father on the phone, and he hung up on me before I could pose the question. It seemed that every time I reached a new accommodation, another impossibly sad and enraging predicament would arise. In spite of years of trying to understand the dynamics of alcoholism, of trying to accept Brenda for who she was and my father for who he had become, I was still embroiled in a melodrama that never seemed to end. Each of my father’s children had a way of dealing with it. I’ll face this after I finish, I said to myself as I struggled with the book about Margarett. I was also teaching writing workshops in my living room in Kent, and as my students wrote, I wrote with them, producing pages and pages about my mother, about my father, about the past. It never occurred to me that these strange reversals in the way my father approached the world were the consequence of real suffering of which I had no knowledge.
One day in April 1990, I was standing in the Washington kitchen of my mother’s friend Bette, who lived in our old neighborhood in Washington. For years I had confided in her my disappointment in my father, bringing forth the latest Brenda outrage. Bette was wonderfully patient, and like most of my mother’s close friends, she saw my point of view. She was also able to manage compassion for my father, even though, as a woman who would never deny her children anything, she found his behavior incomprehensible. It was helpful to talk to her—during our conversations I felt I almost had my mother back, undistorted by what had happened in our family since she died. By now, these talks with Bette required little ornament. On this particular day, I remember that she was filling the teakettle, and I said, “What did she think about him?” And Bette, knowing the she was my mother, the he my father, turned from the sink and said, “She thought he was the most unhappy man she had ever known, and she thought he was homosexual.” I tried to take in what she said. It had been almost twenty years since my mother’s death, and I was hearing this for the first time. I guessed Bette thought I was ready.
“When did she tell you that?”
“Toward the very end.” Bette lived close by; only a five-minute walk through a neighbor’s yard and she could be at my mother’s bedside. She had grown up Communist and Orthodox Jewish in Michigan, and when she met my mother, she had no use for her. “Another rich girl,” she said. But in the last months of my mother’s life, they became close friends, and since my mother’s death, Bette had become family to me and to my brothers and sisters.
“Was it something he told her?”
“No,” Bette said. “It was something she put together, something that became clear to her over time.”
“Do you remember when it was that she said it became clear?”
“I would say before her accident.” The news did not shock me, but also I couldn’t quite take it in. Instead, I shelved it, adding it to the chaotic morass of feeling I was putting off until later. Another fact, I thought, to include if I ever undertook to make a portrait of my parents’ marriage.
During the summer of 1990, I went to Europe for the first time in years. I traveled with friends in Ireland and visited others in London—it was the summer Iraq invaded Kuwait. When I got home to Kent in August, there were messages on my answering machine from two of my brothers. I decided to call them back the following day, but the next morning, before I got to it, the telephone rang. It was my father: “Are you by yourself?”
“Yes,” I said. It was an unusual question.
“I have something to tell you.”
“I’m here,” I said, wondering at the shakiness in his voice. There was a silence, and then he spoke.
“It’s come out that I’ve had gay affairs,” he said.
How to describe the moment—I was not remembering Bette’s announcement, so what my father said came as a shock, my stomach turning over. It embarrasses me, but what I first thought was that this forced admission of his would present us with the opportunity to talk intimately again, for me finally to know my father. And then I thought of him, of the terrible pain of living a double life.
“Do people know?”
“Only in the family,” he said. “It is not public, and,” he said with a nervous laugh, “you are NOT going to write a short story about it.” I was so disoriented, all I could think was, Doesn’t he know I don’t write fiction? And then he said, “I’d like to come see you and talk about it.”
“Oh yes, yes,” I said. “I would like that.”
And then, “Does Brenda know?”
“Yes, Brenda knows. She’s very hurt and it’s pretty rough, but I hope we’ll work it out. I’ll tell you more when I see you.” I told him how sorry I was that it was so rough, that I knew he’d get through it. He named a date in September for his visit.
Jet lag gave me an excuse to spend that day in bed. And the next. Lying there, my father’s contradictions came crashing in, blurring any clarity I’d had about our family past. I knew I wanted to protect him, so I confided in only one close friend. I remember telling her it was as if the light which had been pink was now green—I meant the ambient light through which I saw the world. Pink and green! If you wore pink and green on Thursdays at Shortridge High School, you were definitely “queer”! How impossibly sad and painful, to live a whole life torn in two, to move forward as husband and father while kept from another kind of desire. And as a priest! Every angry feeling I’d ever had toward my father dissolved, but then, as I considered what he’d withheld in our so-called intimate conversations, a new anger rose up. My father a liar? My father, the priest, a liar? And then I saw his guilt, his weeping when my mother died, how he said of Brenda, She’s very hurt, and it’s pretty rough. And I though
t of Brenda’s adoring love of him, her nicknames, her eyes sparkling, how she looked after him.
And the conversation with Bette came back, and with it, in spite of my effort to hold it off, anger on behalf of my mother. And he blamed her for the difficulties in their intimacy? I thought of her in Payne Whitney, of her admission over lunch at the Roma, of her struggles to be honest and kind during their separation. He blamed her? In telephone calls with my sisters and brothers, I gathered new information that continued to shatter the emotional chronology I had so painstakingly constructed in the years since my mother’s announcement in the Adirondacks. I watched the light play on the ceiling, turned to sleep, to waking, unable to believe what I now knew. That my mother had known my father’s secret when I walked toward her in the Adirondacks: I am having some problems with my marriage. That in the painful years she spent separating from my father, she never confronted him or betrayed his secret to us, in spite of the agony it must have caused her. And I remembered her cheeks wet with tears, her rage that women might want to be Episcopal priests, how, nearly spitting in anger at my father, she had shouted, “The church is just second-rate,” pounding the dining room table.