Frances and Bernard

November 20, 1962

Dear Bernard—

So I’m denied the privilege of resuming a dialogue with you because of your wife’s juvenile paranoia. I am once more again glad that I have never married.

You are contenting yourself to love someone who appears warm because she works with words, and words are not numbers, but she is, I think, essentially cold, colder than I ever was. I think she loves only herself, according to details that have been passed along to me, unsolicited, as if in condolence—in condolence to me and, by proxy, to you. I knew girls like her in high school. I bet she was one of those girls who pretended to like the nuns and then snickered behind their backs about how they were all probably lesbians, since none of them could summon the courage to tell the nuns straight to their faces that they were full of nonsense. She’s like the girls I saw at the nunnery: humorless beautiful girls who made a game of shifting allegiances among the other humorless beautiful girls in order to snatch more men or better jobs. It was blood sport but they were so beautiful and groomed, their hair in chignons, it looked just like ballet. What does she know about the human heart?

Also, Ted tells me she roasts a piece of meat like the Irish girl she is: by boiling it.

Don’t worry. I won’t ever write you again. If I were as schooled in blood sport as your wife, however, I would have sent this letter to your house.





December 1, 1962

Frances—

Please believe me when I tell you I asked for death several times while writing that letter. I might have written it too quickly and emphasized some feelings at the expense of others, and you might not have known how sincere I was. But you have put me in a difficult position—you are making me feel that I owe you loyalty and certain confessions, but I can’t give those things to you. Not only because of what I owe Susan, but because of what I owe you. My intentions might not be worthy of you. I might have seduced you and then asked you to keep your distance, and then where would we be?

I must still feel too many things for you if I ask that we not speak to each other.

Bernard





December 3, 1962

Frances—

I was sitting in my doctor’s office waiting for an appointment and I heard the receptionist call out two surnames, one right after the other—Francis, and then Reardon. I looked up and a tall colored gentleman and then a short overweight woman with a cane rose and headed to the back. It was something right out of your books. I felt a sort of premonition, something I have never felt before, when I heard those names, and I needed to know that you were all right.

Bernard





December 8, 1962

Bernard—

Thank you for your concern, but it’s really no business of yours any longer how I am doing.

Please do not write me again.





December 15, 1962

Dear Claire—

Would you believe me if I told you I saw Bernard at a party when I went to New York for my reading? Would you excuse me for not having told you the moment it happened? I think I have tried to pretend that he no longer exists—and if he no longer exists then I shouldn’t be talking to you about him—but when he materialized in front of me, I fell to pieces.

It has caused me no end of grief. So much grief that I can’t even write about it.

After he and I put ourselves through some small talk, I said to him, apropos of nothing but my own shame and hurt feelings: “It was as if you were dead.” You know I don’t believe in demonic possession, but Jesus, Mary, Mother of God, how ugly the thing that came out of my mouth. His response: raised eyebrows, a bit of a smirk—and I was put on notice that he knew I was trying to get him to go through his paces. One of the publicists came by and made a fuss over the two of us. “Isn’t she a love?” she said to Bernard. Bernard, trying to hose down the house fire, said, not without an arch of an eyebrow: “Who doesn’t love Frances?”

He was gentleman enough to suggest that I am indeed lovable across all time and by all categories of person when the truth is that I put that fact into serious doubt. His expression meant I know why you are putting on this show, and you should be scolded for trying to solicit a response, and yet I am going to give it to you, because I did love you once.

He made me wonder if he didn’t love me still, but then he cleared that up for me directly. I think I wrote him the bitterest letters I’ve ever written in my life, and it is making me nauseated every time I remember how bitter those words were. I think I have sinned greatly in being so bitter and in inflicting that bitterness on another.

I haven’t been able to concentrate. I was in the middle of a lecture on Orwell yesterday and I stopped to look in the book to find a passage that was going to help me make my point, and when I looked back up at the girls, I couldn’t remember where I was or what I had been saying, so I said, “Well, that’s enough for today, just go home and work on your final papers,” and they all stared at me like they’d just been told their mothers used to skinny-dip. Then they gathered their things and ran out of there, afraid I’d suddenly regain possession of my mind and retract my dismissal.

Claire, maybe I can come out to see you. I’ve got some money saved, the semester is almost over, Ann’s doing fine, and my aunts have offered to look after my father if I want to get out of town. And I do like your friends. It would be nice to talk about the British novel with people who do not think Jane Austen is, and I quote, “a huge snooze.” After a while I start to see what these girls mean.

Should I come in the middle of the month?

Love to you and Bill.

Yours,

Frances





January 29, 1963

Dear Claire—

Thank you again for hosting me. It was very cheering to spend time with you and Bill and the rest. Lake Michigan in winter is another proof of God’s existence, I think.

The students are status quo. Sometimes there are sniffy principessas but this semester’s batch seems to be willing to go along to get along. Thank God. Thank God also I am teaching three courses that I’ve taught before so I can pretty much draw on previous reserves. Seeing you was a vitamin B shot, but I’m still feeling a little unresponsive to stimuli.

I am sending you pictures of small Alice, as requested. These were taken at Christmas. My favorite is the one where she looks stunned by the tree: What is this thing you have set me in front of, with its many blinking eyes and drooping whiskers of tinsel? What you will not see is a picture of her trying to eat the baby Jesus out of Peggy’s crèche and the ensuing five-alarm terror. I was the one who took it out of her mouth. Ann wants me to tell you that you are now Alice’s honorary aunt, and she thanks you for the clothes you sent back with me.

All my love,

Frances





May 30, 1963

Dear Claire—

I’m sorry I wasn’t around yesterday when you called. I’m sorry I haven’t responded to your last two letters. I’ve not been feeling myself.

I guess you know Bernard’s new book is out. It’s been out since March, I think. I saw it in a bookstore downtown and stood in front of it for a good long minute before I actually opened the cover. They are poems about his loss of faith. I scanned the first few pages but finally could not read them. It was too painful. I felt a possessiveness that I knew was misplaced, and a regret that I knew was not.

I left the store and started crying on the street. I used to see women do this in New York all the time—on the subway, or while I waited in line at Horn and Hardart, and I would always give them a clean handkerchief if I had one—and now I was one of them. Actually, I believe I was, if you will pardon my using so forceful a word, sobbing. There was a church on the corner near the store, and the doors were open, so I walked in and sat down in a pew. I kept sobbing. There was snot coming out of my nose and I did not have a clean handkerchief. I ripped a page out of a missal and made do.

Since then I have been doing a lot of crying for no reason. At my office, in bed, in the kitchen while making dinner. My aunts must know why, because they do not ask what is wrong with me.

I haven’t spoken too much about this to you, because I fear it would sound like whining, but I think that what happened with Bernard was a wound that I have not healed from. It hurts too much; it feels like sin. As I sat in that pew, the hurt that had taken root months ago suddenly shot up into a tree that looked like it had been blasted by a storm, its gnarled black branches twisting out faster and faster, the tips of the branches upturned like a hand begging answers from the sky. And no peace being poured into it. Crying in public! Still losing my place in lectures. Losing my place at home. I put my grade book in the freezer and shoved a frozen meat loaf into my school bag, and I didn’t notice until I got to campus. I berated my father for forgetting that I am not his wife but his daughter, with Peggy having to take me aside and tell me to get a hold of myself, which was as good as a spanking.

So I sat in the pew and looked at Christ on the cross and spoke to this figure the way I have never spoken to it before: Lord, I am in pain, and I need you to send me a sign that I was right to have never married. Do for me what my aunts claim you have done, day in and day out, for them. I am behaving like a child in my stubborn sadness so I am begging you to treat me like a child who needs signs and wonders to believe in your power. Reward me for never having been a child.

Then Ash Wednesday came, and I understood the psalm in a way I never had before.





Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy great mercy. And according to the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my iniquity. For I know my iniquity, and my sin is always before me. To my hearing thou shalt give joy and gladness: and the bones that have been humbled shall rejoice.





So I took up that refrain: If you’re not going to give me some spectacular sign, just let me hear of joy and gladness. My sins are too much before me, they are causing an unholy din, so please let me hear of joy and gladness. I can’t speak to you respectfully at this moment, so I ask you to open my ears and give me a tune I can follow.

And still it’s been all storm, no sign. On Easter Sunday I actually gave myself over to the metaphor of the season. I prayed that God would create a calm heart in me, and that spring would come and I would be as good as new, content in the knowledge that his eye is indeed on the sparrow. But I could tell it wasn’t going to take. The lilies at the altar stared at the congregation with a waxiness that seemed even more gauche than usual. The priest seemed even more like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Everyone had a look of hazy discomfort, the look you have when you’re in a Greyhound station waiting for your hours-late connection. I almost walked out, but out of respect for Ann and my aunts, I stayed put.

Still, I make myself go to Mass. I sit there clinging to the liturgy, letting it climb round me like a vine and keep me in its grip. I am trying not to knock impatiently like one of those virgins locked out of the party but to sit in Mass quietly so I can better hear the words I have heard thousands of times before, and I try to remember to be moved when the wine is held up and we are reminded that this is his blood, which is shed for many unto the forgiveness of sins. Also, I’m exhausted from my own stupidity, so it’s about all I can do right now, sit and receive. I like to think of this verse from John: And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself. There’s a sound of mercy ringing through those words, and I am meditating on that. He will draw all people to himself. Even this incredibly bitter one.

That is really all I can hope for. If you know a prayer from a saint that I might carry around with me, please send it.

Love,

Frances





July 1, 1963

Dear Sister Josephine—

I hope you don’t mind me writing you when you are visiting your family in Michigan. I hope everyone is well and that you are enjoying the Lake. I’ve seen it only once in my life, and it made an impression.

I am writing to you because I am in dire need of some spiritual direction. I have never said or written those words to anyone, but I have been experiencing feelings that I know are not right, and I want to find a way to put them behind me. I have not spoken of what I’m about to tell you with my family. Their faith has never wavered. I am 99 percent sure they would tell me to talk to our priest. I have never gone to a priest about anything in my life. I don’t think I need to explain to you why.

This is about a person I was in love with and whom I have discovered I am still in love with. I must be, if I am behaving this way.

I have a friend, Claire, whom I have talked to about this, but she has told me only what any friend would tell someone in this situation, which is that he and I were not meant to be. I know she believes this. I try to believe it myself, but I can’t. Also, I do not want to burden her any longer with my despair. I know that eventually my despair will exasperate her the way a child’s fear of the dark eventually exasperates its parents, and I want to avoid that.

I am writing to you because I believe that you carry a peace within you that is a sign of real faith, and I know from our conversations that you are no stranger to loss. I am experiencing a loss, belatedly, and it has shown me that my faith is flimsier than I’d imagined. And I fear that the real loss I’m mourning here may be the idea of myself as an imperturbable wise child. If you could read this letter and provide some counsel, that would be much appreciated. I am in need of wisdom that is not tainted by the interests of family, friendship, or the Church.

I think I’ve told you about my friend Bernard. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned to you that he proposed to me and that I turned him down. Though it killed me to do it, I did not regret it then. Now I am filled with a corrosive, debilitating regret.

I cheated myself out of what might have made me happy, while he seems very happy indeed.

My thoughts are not my own. They are a pot bubbling ferociously with jealousy and rage. I wish I had a reason to go to New York so I could accidentally run into him while wearing a dress that just happened to show me off in a way that would cause Bernard to forget his wife and smuggle me to Paris on the spot. I wish I could write a book that casts his wife as the heroine’s foil, a foil the heroine destroys with her wit and virtue to applause from the characters in the book and the critics who review it. I want to write him a letter apologizing for my shortsightedness, which then forces him to write me a letter in which he admits I was the only one he ever loved. I want to write him a letter calling him out on his cowardice in not coming to get me a second time, which then forces him to write me a letter in which he admits I’m the only one he ever loved. I want to write him a letter telling him how beautiful his poems are, which would force him to admit he wrote them all for me. I want to write him a letter telling him how unhappy I am, which would be done in the hopes that he would, for even just a day, be destroyed by the notion that he is the cause of that unhappiness. Just one day. I’m a writer; I could do all those things. I would have art—“Art”—as my excuse. But I’m a Christian, so I could never do any of those things. To do those kinds of things you have to believe in yourself more than you believe in anything else. But I supposedly believe in God more than anything else. And to God, “Art” is never an excuse.

I have never experienced such a derangement of my thoughts. My thoughts, except for a similar episode in college, have mostly been my own. What saved me in college was that I had an unshakable faith in my writing. The story I was truly interested in was the story of myself as a writer, as someone who was going to prove to her family that she did not need to be a mother to be a force for good in the world. So I could very easily put the college boy I was losing in perspective. And this boy very quickly proved himself to have been unworthy of my tears. Things are different now. Now I am thirty, unmarried, living in Philadelphia and not New York, working on a third book that, unlike the first two, feels dead inside. Or maybe it’s that I’m dead inside.

Forgive me.

What I have learned about myself is that I have a talent for self-pity. It is like finding that you have a talent for theft, or betrayal. I have learned that I am a Romantic after all, and I have not learned to move to the next stage of first-person suffering, the more noble way of suffering, which would be existentialism and which would have me in a quarrel with the nature of being and time, rather than, like an adolescent, in a quarrel with God, or Bernard. If I were a different kind of writer I would find a way to channel this into a novel. And this is where I am still Romantic—art is a temple, and I shouldn’t sully it with my wounded realizations. I think that great writers can write to compensate for the losses they endure in real life. I am not sure that I am great. I used to think I might be, but now I’m not so sure. (This, actually, is not the problem. Accepting that I am less than great has been a relief, and I’ve been writing more because of it.)

I’m a writer—I should find a better way to describe the unrelenting pain I’m in, but I’m in pain, and my creative faculties are dulled. This hurt has been more destructive than the hurt I experienced watching my father fade away from us into senility. And for that I’m ashamed. There was some rage there when I saw my father failing and would not admit to myself what was happening, but it is different from the rage I direct toward myself because I made a mistake. Or the rage I direct toward Bernard for not allowing me to have some contact with him still.

Oh, Sister. There is a lot of anger in this letter. I may not even be making any sense. Forgive me.

You may have noticed that I have not mentioned God much in this letter. This is the problem. I will sit in Mass, sit in pews, trying to stop the flow of feelings, but those feelings—have you ever seen pictures of a squid letting loose its ink in the ocean? That’s what I feel like. I put myself in the pew, I say God’s name, but he is blotted out by a rapidly issuing cloud of the blackest thoughts. I thought God was the one who told me to refuse Bernard—I went to St. Patrick’s for two weeks straight and rose up from the paddocks thinking I’d been given direction. And now I wonder. I used to believe in his mercy and that maybe suffering was a form of his mercy. Not anymore. Some of us have a talent for suffering—but I guess I don’t. What is the point of God if he cannot soothe us? What is the point of believing in something all-powerful if he cannot give you the strength to go on at this very moment? What is the point of other people if you cannot keep your hands on them? I refuse to think, as my aunts might suggest, that these are God-given lessons. That just makes God a scold, and I refuse to believe that he is.

And then I am dismayed at the very adolescent nature of these objections. This is all I could come up with? I must really be losing my mind. Also, I am a hypocrite. I once warned Bernard about becoming God’s disgruntled customer, and here I am.

Sister, I thank you if you can read even a quarter of this. Now you know what it is like to have a teenage daughter. You must have thought you were escaping this through the convent. My sincere apologies.

Yours,

Frances





July 1, 1963

Frances—

Hello! I hope this letter finds you and your family well.

I know it must be strange for you to hear from me, since it has been years since we’ve spoken, but I saw your most recent book in the windows of the bookstore in Harvard Square, went in and bought it, started to read it that night, finished it the next day, and I have been thinking of you ever since. The book is terrific. Kudos. You know I’ve stopped reading current fiction—once I headed for law school, I decided that I would read only history, biography, reportage, and political thought, and I have never felt anything remotely like a hole in my soul since, which means that I was right to give up writing for lawyering. Maybe once a year I’ll read Our Mutual Friend, when Kay and I go to Maine, but that’s it. From what I remember, current fiction used to be pretty insipid, and I’m betting it’s pretty insipid now too. But your book is fantastic. Every sentence is a whip crack.

Reading your book made me think that it’s about time I got something off my chest, and that maybe you could take it. I’m well aware that what I’m about to write could make you angry, because it’s betraying someone’s confidence and would assume a certain amount of lingering feelings on your part. You might understandably take offense at someone assuming you’ve got even two drops of regret over Bernard.

Bernard told me what happened between you two last fall. He was pretty torn up about it. I told him that he shouldn’t have engaged you. You shouldn’t have engaged with a married man either. I’m not saying it’s wrong, I’m just saying it’s wrong for you. I don’t think you have the constitution. I can just imagine your Catholic blood boiling over that bit of amoral reasoning. But I do believe that what he wrote you afterward—at least, what he told me he wrote you—came out of a real struggle with his conscience. He was not toying with you.

Let me get to the point of why I’m writing. If you do have any lingering feelings of regret about not marrying Bernard, you should not. He tries to be faithful to Susan, and I think he does love her, but he’s fooled with one girl a year for every year of their marriage. These girls are notable only for their conventional prettiness (they wear very tiny hair bows, I’ve noticed) and their lack of wit. It’s a little embarrassing how indistinguishable they are from each other, and it’s a little embarrassing how they resemble you (physically) more than they resemble Susan. It happens every spring. It predicts every hospital visit. He gets a girl in his cross hairs, usually a student; he starts coming home late, and sometimes not at all. Three months later, he’s in the hospital, and Susan has to tell the girl to go home, he can’t come out to play. He might have told you this, in which case I’ll tell you this again so that he’s corroborated. What he might not have told you but that you might have heard is that Susan has had to, at least once that I know of, plead his case in front of the president of Columbia University to keep him from being fired.

At one point I thought that you were the only one for him, but now I think you were lucky. You wouldn’t have been his wife; you would have been a game warden. Even I was blinded to the reality of what life with Bernard would be. And I’d picked him up off bar floors and kept him from fights. I should have known better than to cheer the both of you on. But I’d been picked up from bar floors by him as often as he’d been picked up by me, so I thought his big stupid heart and his big stupid generosity would make up for his insanity. All the sentimentalism I’ve spent my life trying to hide broke out on me like a big red pimple at the sight of you two together. I was actually peeved when he proposed to Susan, and she could tell. Now I silently ask her forgiveness whenever I see her and she seems not to want to shoot me. But Susan never had anything in her that needed protecting from Bernard. There’s no art in her. Take it from someone who doesn’t have any art in himself, either. If this were 1914, she would be a war nurse. Things being what they are in 19-whatever-this-is, with you ladies able to do pretty much what you damn please without being forced into the convent in order to exercise your minds, she married Bernard.

You were right not to marry him but he won’t ever love anyone the way he loved you. He can’t tell you this, and he shouldn’t tell you this, so I will.

Ever yours,

Ted





October 5, 1963

Dear Ted—

Thank you so very much for your letter. I was not offended. I was grateful. It’s a long story, but it came at just the right time. It saved me from sending one to another friend, one that I might have been sorry to have signed my name to. As an atheist, would you be offended if I said that your letter might have been an answer to prayer?

I don’t know what to say, exactly, to your letter—this is why it’s taken me a little while to write back to you. I have decided that I don’t feel comfortable saying much other than I am grateful for your candor. I think in this position a lady should keep the many thoughts and feelings occasioned by such a letter to herself and just try to make it clear that she is grateful. I hope you understand. You sound buoyant, as usual, and that makes me happy. Thank you also for reading my book. You know I feel the same way about Current Fiction, so your praise means a great deal to me.

If you ever find yourself in Philadelphia, please do let me know. It would be my honor to stand you a drink. My greetings to Kay.

With love,

Frances





March 20, 1964

Dear Claire—

You sneaky Claire. Thank you for sending me the Julia Child book for my birthday. I have been circling it like a hawk—well, a slightly intimidated hawk, if such a thing exists—ever since it was published, but now that I have it there are going to be no more excuses. It is time now to Contend with the French.

This seems to be a theme lately. I have been seeing a gentleman from France. A professor at Penn. Of French literature. I think it’s a joke, actually, that I am seeing a gentleman from France, but we get on, and keep getting on. His name is—I can’t write it, as it seems like a joke too, a parody of the echt-French. Like Jean Valjean. Or Jean-Luc Godard. Or Pepé Le Pew. I’ll write it: his name is Alain. I can’t say his name aloud. If we keep seeing each other, I am going to have to figure out how to avoid addressing him by his Christian name. Nevertheless, we have been to the cinema, the cinema again, to the cinema one more time, and to Fairmount Park. I have started to wonder if God does indeed give us gifts other than the gift of forbearance.

I apologize for not having told you this immediately—one would think that, with you and I having been friends for so many years, I’d know by now that you don’t mind anything I tell you, but I wasn’t sure if it would pan out into anything worth mentioning.

I met him at a lecture at Penn. I took a copy of Story of a Soul with me—I’ve been reading it for this talk I have to give next month. He was sitting next to me, and I noticed that he seemed to be looking at the book before the lecture started. When I got up he said, “Excuse me, miss.” Meese. “Is that Saint Thérèse you’re reading?” I said yes, and he said, “Do you love her?” I heard the accent. He had the face I always associate with the echt-French—olive-skinned; slight flush to the cheeks; horizontal, heavy black brows; long nose. The kind I always imagine will pucker into some mocking impression of my sickly accent or my cheap plastic American sunglasses.

I was a little taken aback—the question must have meant that he loved her, and my answer was going to be less enthusiastic than he might have hoped for. “May I say that I’m not sure?” I said. He laughed.

“Do you love her?” I said. “Oh yes, I do,” he said. “It’s not fashionable at all, and I keep it a secret from my colleagues. She’s the kind of girl Balzac would punish for her innocence by sending her to Paris and turning her into a corrupt chorus girl.” I laughed.

“Do you know she wrote poems?” he asked. No, I said. “If any young man writes you poems like Saint Thérèse, you must marry him. They’re quite passionate.”

I think he interpreted the look on my face as meaning he’d said the wrong thing, but that wasn’t it—really, I was trying not to laugh. “Pardonnez”—he began—“pardon me,” he ended. Did he want to get a coffee? He did.

I have learned to like my solitude, but I like his company just as much—if not more. He laughs with pure delight much more than I imagined the French would—I guess this would be the part of the French soul responsible for champagne? And yet I have not spoken a word of French to him. I dare not.

Everyone sends love.

xx

Frances