by Honor Moore
“I loved him,” she said with a half smile, both of us understanding that particular helplessness. “But after the first time in Seattle, when I cried for weeks, I never let myself be hurt like that by him again. Or by any man.”
When I was twenty, she hadn’t told me she’d cried, and I hadn’t asked, not wanting to intrude or look any more closely at the impact my father had on a woman other than my mother. Nona had seemed to me then above ordinary female suffering, and in spite of what I took to be fragility, seemed, in her independence, to have triumphed. Of course, in 1965, I had no understanding beyond instinct of the notion of a woman’s independence. Now I stepped out of myself to watch us there in the resort restaurant, each nearly forty years older than when we first met and she opened my imagination and curiosity to the fact that my father had a life, a sexual life, outside the realm of his relationship with my mother, outside of the family. In all the years since, I’d held an image—Nona tossing her head and laughing, her admirer leaning toward her as I, twenty years old and innocent of that kind of flirtation, studied her from across the terrace, and as I had studied Garbo in Camille when I was sixteen watching Frances Farmer Presents at Andra Crawford’s, eating pizza. I had not seen a woman like that before. Robert Taylor as the young lover returns to the bedside of Marguerite, his courtesan mistress, the lady of the camellias, and she is dying of tuberculosis. His father had importuned her to reject the young man so he could make a proper marriage, and out of love for him she had agreed, but now as they reunited, tears were streaming down my face. I couldn’t have articulated then that what I saw in the way Garbo tossed her head or heard in the catch in her throat was a kind of dignity and power.
At twenty, I’d thought of Nona in relation to my mother. With her long, slender body, her delicacy, her pale redhead skin, she seemed to me the fragile one. I was intrigued that she wore the motherhood of five, lightly, almost gaily. My mother, with nine children, seemed more serious and strong, with her raven hair, her fierce inquiring mind, her conscientious direction of the lives of her children. But now, forty years later, I understood that Nona was the survivor, that the intensity of my mother’s relation to experience which had seemed so strong to me as a girl, actually had made her vulnerable.
“Did he act on it? I mean, did your father have male lovers?” Nona was asking. By now we were back at the apartment, sitting at the dining table in the near-dark, having a cup of tea.
“There were many men, but there was one man with whom he was involved for thirty years. His name is Andrew.” A look of relief came across Nona’s face. “Oh, Honor, I’m glad he had that.”
“Yes,” I said.
“When did you learn of this part of his life?” she now asked.
I told her the story—my return from Europe the summer of 1990, the unusual urgent messages from my brothers, the awkward call from Pop: “You see I was with women then,” I continued, “and so I thought that this new discovery about him would bring us closer.” And then I described our visit that September, how hopeless and angry I’d felt when he refused to talk about love.
“I can see how this has been terrible for you,” Nona said.
“And terrible for him,” I said. “But also I am grateful to have had a father who lived his passion.”
She laughed. “Well, certainly he did that.”
“And terrible for you,” I said.
“Good for me,” she said. “Good that you told me. Helpful.”
In the morning, I emerged from my bedroom to find Nona in the living room, already stylishly dressed in slacks. “Honor,” she said, “I am reeling.” She stretched out the e’s as an onomatopoeia, and I imitated her.
“Reeling. Yes,” I said.
“I have been thinking,” she said. “I remember something. When your father came to Mexico the second time, he invited himself. I was happy he wanted to come back, and of course I welcomed him, but I told him that the son of a friend would join us after a few days. Two things happened. When James arrived, your father’s attention shifted. This was a very beautiful young man, of about thirty. And then after dinner, in the hallway, he took me in his arms and said he hoped that James’s visit wouldn’t prevent our being together—he meant sleeping together. But it wasn’t the same after that.”
I always believed my father when he said, “I was in love with your mother.” And I believed what Emma Black said in the restaurant, that he’d told her he’d never been “in love” with a man. “In love” is what a man is with a woman. Even before I knew about my father’s homosexual relationships, I remember his taking the position that homosexual love was “something else,” that the sacrament of marriage sanctified the relationship between a man and woman. This was a conversation we would have had had he lived into 2003 for the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision, the sacramental festivity of the gay marriages the subsequent February in San Francisco. As my father lived his sexuality with men, it certainly was “something else”—something that moved beneath the surface of the life he lived with his wives, with his children, with parishioners and colleagues; something that moved between the interstices of language in the charged realm of desire, of imagination, of relationship with the unseen, informing his theology and his compassion.
If my father had disclosed that existence to his wives and children, he would have had to give up one life or the other—which is what eventually happened. After Brenda found out about his homosexual relationships, my father met Andrew in Central Park to say goodbye. Andrew should write him only to his retirement office at General Seminary. One of my father’s replies to Andrew during that time reads, “I wish I could see you, but I can’t—such is life.”
22
Footsteps
* * *
There are no bins in the train station in Wiltshire. Because of the July 7 bombings, is what the woman at the café tells me; no place to drop my empty water bottle, and so I stand there, holding it. It is a cloudy summer day in 2005, and I am waiting for someone I have barely met—one conversation at the edge of the Thames, a tall, handsome Anglican priest of my age, smiling and saying that, with the election of an openly gay man as Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, the Anglican communion is confronting further revelation of the nature of God. It was a blustery November day, and I wrote furiously in my notebook as he stood there, blue-eyed, smiling intently, insistent in his belief, which seemed not only Christian faith, but the integration of his own sense of the meaning of existence with a belief in the force of the unseen, the movement of the divine. Now, nearly two years later, I have tracked him down, and he is on his way to my train, which, I have telephoned to inform him, is thirty minutes late. As I stand on the platform, I wonder again what on earth I’m doing in search of my father’s hidden life. Perhaps those friends of his who have heard rumors of what I am writing and now barely speak to me are correct: This is no business of mine. Let the dead rest.
But for me my father is not at rest. I can still see his long frame, his head in his hand, myself sitting on the therapist’s sofa in a rage of grief that anyone should have to suffer that degree of pain. If they only knew the truth, he had said just seconds earlier, his body moving in large waves of sobbing. Now there was silence except for the roar of his sadness which took me full in the chest. I understood I was incapable of taking away his pain, but I hoped he understood I wanted to be in it with him. How could any truth be this painful and unrelieved? It was he who had preached his understanding of the Resurrection, that such darkness is transfiguring. If only they knew the truth, he had said, thinking of people who praised his life. I had always felt my father’s need as a pull downward, a threat to my own existence, but now, in the modesty of my therapist’s office, he was humbled and human, and so was I. I reached out my hand and touched my father’s arm, then his knee, tentative, asking, and he put out his hand.
The news of the election of an openly gay man as Episcopal
bishop of New Hampshire came to me exactly five weeks after my father’s death, while I was on retreat, writing. My cell phone rang—it had to be urgent: everyone knew I needed this solitude. The priest, a man named Gene Robinson, had stood at the front of the church with his partner and his two daughters, my friend Carolyn tells me, her voice filled with wonder. My father was still powerfully with me, and of course I thought of him, of the life we might have had if that openly gay bishop had been him. But could I visualize my father moving Andrew or another male lover into Bank Street? Not really. “He is a prince of the church,” a priest and lifelong friend of my father said, days before his death. And some months later, Louie Crew, who founded Integrity, the gay Episcopal organization, “Your father was born into a certain time, came to maturity after the war. He had certain ambitions about what he wanted to do in the church, and marrying is what one did. Or becoming a monk. Don’t judge him for that.” I had taken the train to Newark to have this conversation. “And what you told me your father said, ‘They were all nice people.’ For a man like your father, that was a powerful announcement. It means that he had relationships.”
Carolyn began to send me press coverage, first about the American bishop, next the news of the appointment by the archbishop of Canterbury of an openly gay man as bishop of Reading, near Oxford in England. In the ensuing days and weeks, the protests mounted, not only from within the United States and the United Kingdom, but from many Anglican provinces in other parts of the world—Africa, South America, Pakistan—where tolerance of homosexuality has no place in ordinary life. By the middle of September, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, a man whom my father greatly admired, had called a special meeting at Lambeth Palace, his London residence, of all the primates of the Anglican Communion, and I had managed to get The Nation to send me there as a reporter. It was on that assignment that I first met Colin Coward.
On the south bank of the Thames in the shadow of the palace, red stone fourteenth-century walls, a barricaded archway, within it the green grass of a courtyard, the flash of Episcopal purple, then nothing. I positioned myself behind the bright yellow police barriers and introduced myself to a clutch of BBC reporters, cameras on backs, mobile phones in hand. Soon a crowd began to gather, and with them, throughout the day, I moved from one side of Lambeth Palace Road to the other. It was cold, and often we gathered in a small jerry-built cafeteria where the tea was hot and the sandwiches were wholesome. Men and women in clericals, journalists evident in their informal, even hip, work clothes, men in ties and Turnbull & Asser striped shirts whom I later learned were conservative American laymen, moved up and down the river, some striking poses for television cameras, others, like me, engaging in conversation. I spoke to many people, a Trinidadian woman priest attached to nearby Southwark Cathedral; the tall dean of Southwark, a progressive; an American priest from the Diocese of Utah, to whom I introduced myself by name.
“Are you . . . ?” he asked, looking into my face.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m Paul Moore’s daughter.” He embraced me.
“Your father was a saint in our church,” he said. I smiled, tears coming. Would he change his judgment if he knew the truth about my father’s life?
“Why are you here?” I asked him.
“I am here to bear witness to this extraordinary moment in our church. I thought it was important that those who support Gene Robinson’s election be here, as well as those who oppose it.”
My father’s shame, it seemed, was not shared by those coming up behind him in the church; the progressive forces my father rallied for so long were again moving forward. “The American church has thrown the tea in the harbor,” a gay British theologian had said to me earlier. I said goodbye to the American priest from Utah and moved through the crowd. It was as if my father were still alive and I was searching out stories to tell him when I got home, listening carefully so that I could report in his language, the language of theology, that the life he had lived had been a courageous one, that the truth of it needn’t bring him shame. And there, suddenly, was a tall, blue-eyed priest, a man my own age. When I got home, I found the notes I’d taken talking to him. The more, he said, that the church comes to include homosexuals and women as priests and bishops—that is, to accept “us” as fully human—the more clearly the image of God is revealed. This was a sentence that echoed much that my father had written in his defense of Ellen Barrett’s ordination. Shame is powerful, I thought to myself, in the force with which it can divide us from what we know.
When I met Colin Coward that day at the edge of the Thames, he was dressed in clericals; now, coming toward me, he is wearing shorts and a ratty shirt. It’s raining and I carry an umbrella I’ve just bought in Paris. It seems extraordinary to me that this man, who could barely remember meeting me and who had never heard of my father, is willing to give me time on a summer afternoon. Colin introduces me to the young black man who accompanies him. “Here from Ghana,” he says, and the younger brother of his partner. “Oh yes,” I say, remembering Colin that day on the Thames, describing the happiness of what was then a new love. But now, he tells me that his partner was killed a year before in an automobile accident on a trip home to Ghana. As I give my condolences, I tell him how vividly I remember his description of his beautiful African lover, and he smiles, thanking me. When we are finally seated, our food in front of us, I explain to Colin that it is his theology, as he talked about it that day two years before, which has brought me here. And I explain why, outlining my father’s life, what I’ve told here, including my father’s hidden sexuality, its impact on his life, my life, the life of our family. The food is modest, the day hot, and I am a bit self-conscious, but as I continue, I feel Colin Coward’s listening intelligence.
Our conversation goes on for four hours, first my story and then my father’s, then Colin’s—the understanding in childhood that he was gay, his study to become an architect, his eventual vocation as a priest. At first, he was curate of a parish in Southwark, and then a vicar. During those years he was not open about his sexuality, but when his first partner died of AIDS, “the people in the parish went through that suffering with me.” Eventually, in 1998, he was invited to help represent the progressive position on gay and lesbian ordination at the Lambeth Conference, the once-a-decade convocation of Anglican bishops from all over the world. Out of his work at that conference, he was “called” to the ministry he now pursues in Changing Attitude, the organization he founded that sends people, including gay men and lesbians, who support inclusion of gay people at all levels of the church, into parishes to answer questions and form friendships—to change attitudes toward gay people at the grass roots.
“What a different world my father lived in,” I say. Colin takes note of my inquiring expression.
“You might understand,” he tells me, “that your father had to make a choice. It seems to me that he understood that he could accomplish his work only with that concealment.” The waitress brought more tea, two more sandwiches. I had been thinking that surely Colin must have other things to do, but now I understood that I was part of his ministry, and that he was giving me answers I had been seeking.
What had always seemed to me a pragmatic choice with terrible consequences now seemed instead a bargain with the circumstances of the time in which my father entered his ministry. What Colin offered echoed what Louie Crew had said, that Pop could never have accomplished what he did, had he come out as a gay man.
But what of the suffering? It was my father’s sacrifice and his gift. It was, as he had once told Andrew Verver, what kept his ministry alive, what made his faith necessary. When I asked Colin Coward about suffering, “about Jesus, if you will,” he winced.
“I haven’t quite worked that out,” he said.
“Well, try,” I said.
“Crucifixion, resurrection. The death of Christ in that humiliating way is a constant reminder that we all must die,”
he said. “And resurrection tells us that everything can be transformed. Think about art—that’s the way you do it.”
Yes, I thought, my father’s work is barely comprehensible without knowledge of his suffering. If only I had been able to tell him so that day in the therapist’s office. If only I had been able to communicate what I now understood, that to me his living of his passion was heroic. Isn’t it just inevitable, I might have asked, that such courage comes at a cost? Isn’t that what it is to be human? Don’t we just do the best we can, and don’t we sometimes fail?
I was in search on that summer journey of a way into the hidden truths of my father’s life. Before I left for Europe, I’d asked Andrew Verver again about their time in Patmos the last summer of Pop’s life.
“I’d like to take you on a trip,” my father had said to him. “Where would you like to go?”
“Patmos,” Andrew said. So Patmos had been Andrew’s idea, and the trip had been my father’s gift to him.
Once in the hired car, baggage in the trunk, tickets in hand, on the way to the airport, my father looked at Andrew and said, “This is pretty wild!” It was the first trip they had ever taken together.
The journey to Patmos is arduous. There is no airport on the island and the ferry schedules are notoriously difficult to procure in advance. I flew from London to Athens and then to the island of Kos, from which I planned to catch a hydrofoil to Skala, the port town of Patmos. At the hotel in Kos, where I arrived at midnight after a delayed flight, there was no one to help carry my bags, packed for six weeks, up the stone stairs, and in my frugal room, the fluorescent light turned on when you put your key tag in a slot near the door. When morning came, the sun was halogen-bright, and I sat for my buffet breakfast on a terrace shaded by an overhang. I had been told the “Flying Dolphin” would leave for Patmos at ten-thirty. I reached the pier an hour early, only to find that the boat promised for ten-thirty had left at eight and would arrive in Patmos at ten-thirty! In the café where I settled with my bags, I was told another boat would not leave until one, or perhaps two. The Moldovan waitress smiled sympathetically and brought first eggs and then yogurt with honey and nuts.