The Bishop's Daughter.(Essay)

It is Easter, and in the darkness of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine the singing soars in descant, the Gothic ceiling multiplying the clamor. Now, as if a great storm had ceased, there is no music, and in the silence held by three thousand worshippers there come three resounding knocks. And, as we wait, the massive doors swing open, an ethereal shaft of sunlight floods the dark, the roar of the city breaks the gigantic quiet, and there at the far end of the aisle stands the tall figure of a man. My flesh-and-blood father, the bishop.

When I was a child, I accepted my father as a force of imagination that flared and coruscated, an instrument of transformation. During the Second World War, he had survived a Japanese bullet, and he had a scar to prove it. "If my heart had been going this way instead of that," he announced once, rowing me across a lake in the Adirondacks, "you would never have existed!" It was a joke, of course, but it was also the text of a lesson that endured throughout our life together. My father had supernatural powers. His fate had determined my existence. I was something he had made and would continue to make. Physical independence from my parents was one thing--I got too big to hold my mother's hand, too big to ride on my father's shoulders--but it took me decades to escape the enchantment of my father's priesthood.

In the weeks before my father's death, the weather in New York was crystalline. It was April, and the leaves were coming out. There were a couple of days when we thought we could actually see the tiny pale-green nubbles growing as we sat on the stoop of my father's house on Bank Street. "We" were me, my father, and whatever brother or sister was also keeping watch, now that the diagnosis was terminal.

"But what, but what . . ." he said more than once, looking at me as if I knew every answer to every question.

"What, Pop?" I said.

"What's going to . . . happen?" His eyes were very wide.

"What do you think is going to happen?" I would say, and I'd watch him think.