Frances and Bernard

March 1, 1958

Bernard—

Dear God, Bernard! Such strenuous effort. I got worn out from reading about it. A Trappist monastery! I see how lazy a Christian I have been. Your letter gave me a complex. But I think you and I have a little something in common.

When I was about eight, there was a nun who was out to get me. She answered me with sarcasm when I asked questions and in general behaved as if I were an unwanted foundling strapped to her already overburdened back. Even as a kid, I knew this sister had it in for me because I asked questions. I was always polite when I asked them, but I asked them, and this drove her crazy because it meant that I was onto her small mind.

One day she started to ask a question of the class—I forget what it was—and in my eagerness to answer I spoke before she finished her sentence. “Frances,” she snapped, looking straight at me, “that’s enough out of you.” That was the last straw. I shot up from my desk. “Sister, why are you talking this way to me?” I said.

“And what way is that?” she said, the tips of her fingers resting on the desk, standing tall, waiting in insolence for more insolence.

Apprehensive, anticipatory silence from the girls behind me. “You’re being mean to me for no reason.”

“But you interrupted me.”

“Sister,” I said, “if we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” It was a passage from John that had been read to us at Mass the week before. It seemed like a shotgun you could pull out to use on people when they got out of line.

I was sent to the Reverend Mother. My father had to go in and smooth it all over. He told me I could not talk back to any of my teachers until I went to college because his part-time job as the church groundskeeper—he worked at a printing press during the week—allowed me and my sister, Ann, to go to the school for free. “Those nuns aren’t holier than the rest of us,” my father said to me. “They’ve never known the love of anyone but God, if that. But they have been charitable to us, and you need to be kind to them. You’ll never lose anything in being kind, Frances.” I felt no kindness toward them, but I bit my tongue after that. I did it for my father, not for the nuns. I like to think Jesus has forgiven me that sin because I had only just lately arrived at the age of reason. I think if my sister, Ann, had been kicked out and gone to public school, my father wouldn’t have minded so much. But he was intent on my earning a scholarship and getting for myself what he couldn’t give me. He loved us both—loves us both—but he was not very good at hiding his delight in my brain. And Ann is not very good at hiding her mistrust of it. “The only way those books will keep you warm is if you burn them,” she likes to say. She thinks I’m no better than those nuns after all. I often fear she may be right.

But I don’t want to forget to say that it’s a common mistake to confuse severity for spiritual radiance. I think many religious folk mistakenly champion the importance of being ramrod. Especially religious folk who have coagulated into a group.

Yours,

Frances





March 10, 1958

Frances—

I feel a kinship with your father: I delight in your brain as well.

If we had been schoolchildren together, you would have barely tolerated me. When you heard me talking my head off in class you would have given me the look you gave all of us at the colony whenever you heard us making plans to drive to a bar in town. A look that would have been even more formidable coming from the large blue eyes in a small girl’s face.

I delight also in your continuous chide. And here I rewrite myself. Regarding what I wrote in my previous letter: No one has been able to stop me, not even God. What I mean is that not even God has been able to save me from myself. This is one thing I despair of. I plunge myself into something, seeing and hearing only my will, and I have to crash into something else to stop—Maria, the monastery, the Catholic Worker. So I don’t know if I can say that I have ever heard God’s voice. I wonder if it was only my own will, speaking loudly, that led me to the monastery, the Catholic Worker, even conversion. I wonder if you think we can ever hear God’s voice. I suspect you would call me naive for imagining such a thing is possible.

It’s good to have people around me to put their hands on my shoulders and get me moving forward again. Maria may have been trying to but I could not hear her. But I can frequently hear Ted. Ted came to visit me at the Catholic Worker. We were sitting in the kitchen having coffee while people made dinner, and a fight broke out over how much meat to use in the soup, and he said: “I think the people here have problems. And by people, I mean you.” I didn’t, and don’t, think Ted’s entirely right, because he comes from a family whose coal companies bust unions, but this was right after the girl scolded me, so what he said—about me—seemed right.

Your story reminded me that I, too, love John best. There is a verse of his that presses on me: This then is the message which we have heard of him and declare unto you; that God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. I can grow dark. I grow black. It is not, I think, what defines me, this blackness, but it is something that runs through me and can overtake me. The blackness is a hand that passes over my face to draw me a bath of heavy, ache-riven sleep, and if I want to come out of it I have to make a constant effort to see what is going on around me and then decide if I want to care about where to put my feet and hands. Impatient only for something to drag me off into unconsciousness. No desire even to write. I look at typewritten drafts, and the sentences slide off the paper and trail off into the distance; the sentences break up into letters, hovering like a cloud of gnats over my typewriter. This hand can also draw me a bath of drink, or send me crashing into people. I have stood on street corners fantasizing about being hit by a car—about being taken out instantly. Stood asleep on street corners summoning dreams of traffic accidents. I was once fantasizing about this on a corner somewhere in Cambridge and at that same moment, one traffic light down, two cars crashed into each other, and I fainted from the shock of hearing sounds I’d been practicing summoned—but not summoned close enough. And then came to in an emergency room hammering down rudeness on the nurses because I was still alive.

I wonder if I should have even described this to you, if I have scared you. But I imagine knowing you for a long, long time, and I have felt this blackness for a long, long time, and I don’t want to hide any part of my self from you.

Yours,

Bernard





March 13, 1958

Bernard—

You don’t scare me. I have not experienced feelings like that myself, but I think my mother suffered from them. I don’t think I can tell you anything that can lift you out of this blackness—here is where I may have a little blackness myself, in refusing to believe that humans can bulldoze each other out of despondency by applying the force of uplifting sentiment—but please don’t be afraid to write to me about it.

You’re right. I probably would have given you that look had we been classmates—and yes, I was giving all of you that look at the colony, but not really you specifically, although there was that one night I saw you fingering Lorraine’s necklace while you were all making plans to drive out, and I have to tell you I always thought you were too nice to Lorraine. I assumed it was because she was the only pretty thing there, and you couldn’t help yourself around pretty things. I know I can judge like an Irish mother-in-law, but I don’t think I was too far off. However, feel free to contest.

But back to school: I would have quoted scripture to you, too, if I thought you liked the sound of your own voice too much: If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, but have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkly cymbal. I would have nicknamed you the Sounding Brass. And you could have called me Tiny Methuselah.

Do I think we can ever hear God’s voice? Well, this goes back to what I said earlier—I think it might be dangerous to believe we hear him. I am suspicious of what we take to be signs—they may be only our own desires reflected back to us in an ostensibly fortuitous event. Simone Weil horrifies me, but I also believe a great deal of what she says is from God. Your question makes me think of something she has written: “But this presence of Christ in the host is not a symbol either, for a symbol is the combination of an abstraction and an image; it is something which human intelligence can represent to itself; it is not supernatural.” Whatever we may think we hear will be corrupted, or as she would say, debased.

To ask to hear God’s voice, to ask for signs—this seems to me impertinence of the highest order.

My aunts and my sister, however, would cluck their tongues at me and say that I have intellectualized myself out of one of the great pleasures of the Catholic faith: signs and wonders, and a network of saints to arrange for them. They certainly do believe God talks to us, and with a megaphone. My grandmother was big on praying for parking spots. “Help me out here, Lord,” she’d say when circling for one. “What if you’re dialing him and he’s busy?” I used to say. She’d laugh and tell me “Oh, hush,” and Ann would snip at me when we got out of the car, say that it wasn’t right to talk that way. Ann has snipped at me all her life. My aunt Peggy believes in the song of Bernadette and helps raise money for people to go to Lourdes. Ann can always turn a disappointment into a sign of God’s promise that something better will come along. The women in my family certainly do feel that his will will be done. My aunts all think that it’s God’s will that my mother died when she did. They have to. They have intimated to me and Ann that she was “unhappy.” I have figured out that what they mean is that she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown right after she married my father. I overheard them talking one day two years ago. They do not know I know this, and I am curious to see if they will ever bring it up. My father never will. And I won’t—to him, at least. Who knows what he went through? I can’t bear knowing, and I don’t think he could bear explaining. It’s none of my business. I believe that he loved us as fiercely as he did as a way to extinguish the sorrow.

Forgive me. I didn’t mean to go on that long. Bernard, I have a sneaking suspicion that one day you will get me to confess to all sorts of things without my realizing it.

But then there’s prayer and discernment. Prayer is a mystery I should not approach. I’m not very good at it. I don’t really do it unless I have it written out for me. Anything I came up with on my own would sound like my asking for a pony for Christmas.

Speaking of prayer, here’s something about Simone Weil that kills me. She says that it’s sort of humorous, the line “Our father, who art in heaven.” To think that we, so far from him, really could knock and receive him, when the distance is so great. I’m the last person to want to describe God as a constantly available warm lap, but this strikes me as self-abasement taken to an absurd degree. And then she writes: “Each time that we say ‘Thy will be done’ we should have in mind all possible misfortunes added together.” But her line is what seems like a joke to me—to say that God’s love always makes Jobs out of us. It’s like something Mencken or Twain would put in the mouth of a cynical reverend. I do believe with her that suffering is one way to hear God, or to know God. Or maybe we hear God when, per John, we sense that we are making him out to be a liar and his word is not in us. When we are aware of the distance between God and ourselves, because we are sinning, then we hear him—he emerges when we are ashamed of our nakedness, so to speak.

Then there are times that I think her theology might have sprung fully formed from her migraines.

Bernard, I do not want you to feel black. My prayers may be faulty, but know that whenever I pray I will be praying for your sky to rarely look ominous.

Yours,

Frances





March 31, 1958

Frances—

I’m so very sorry about your mother. I say all sorts of terrible things about mine, but if she died I think it would be as if there were, finally, no God. I am very glad, though, that you were as loved as you were.

Thinking about calling you Tiny Methuselah makes me considerably less black. Thinking about you in general makes me considerably less black.

I like to think of you praying such a lovely prayer. Thank you.

No, no, I do like pretty things. It’s the thorn in my flesh, as Paul would say. Lorraine wanted to be looked at, and I liked looking at her, in the way you can like looking at a view—you don’t need the view, but it’s nice that it’s there and you’ve come upon it, so it wasn’t as if I were robbing her of her virtue just by looking at her. Looking at someone who wants to be looked at—you know that’s not real sin, Frances, and you shouldn’t be jealous.

I have read Weil, and I do think she is right, mostly, as you say. She is right for this, too: “Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt. To accept the fact that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God. I am also other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.”

When I read this, I wince. Whenever I have imagined anyone to be other than what he or she is, whenever I have imagined myself to be other than what I am—here is where I have run into the most trouble in my life. That is when, as you say, I am ashamed of my nakedness. But I grow blind about that nakedness so easily.

She’s right, but you’re right about her too! I read her and think—if the Lord’s prayer is a joke, are the Psalms a joke? What is joy to her? All her ecstasies are in self-negation. She’s completely neurotic about the pull of other people, people as idols. I feel that we are reading someone castigating herself for having loved too much, or having been wronged by her own faith in another. And yet how can I complain about her? Who hasn’t idolized and in that idolizing come to grief? She is a seer like John. She’s the voice of Jesus when he says I have come to divide houses against each other. When I complain about her severity, it’s because I want my sin.

Or is that true?

Still, I think there’s too much Buddhism in her for me. And too much of Augustine in me to appreciate her—to think that love, happiness, and joy aren’t as intelligible, and truly evident, as suffering.

Yours,

Bernard





April 5, 1958

Bernard, I am not jealous. I believe that thought, to borrow a phrase from Sr. Weil, is a creature of your imagination. I laughed out loud when I read it. Oh, Bernard. Surely you know not every girl’s worth looking at. And not every girl is a jealous girl. Surely in your net-casting you have discovered this. I wasn’t jealous. I was, I repeat, being judgmental. You were two people playing at affection, it seemed, and as someone who reserves affection for only a select few, I thought this comfort on the stage was a little disturbing.

But this was before I knew you. I have to admit that at lunch that day, and for some time after, I had an idea that you might be something of a cad. I don’t think you’re a cad now. But perhaps there is too much of Augustine in you!

I do have great affection for Augustine, even if I don’t understand his appetites and the power they had over him.

Yours,

Frances





April 17, 1958

Dear Frances—

I’m going to read that last line of your last letter to mean that you also have great affection for me. This pleases me immensely.

Unfortunately, I have been a cad. Blindness makes for caddishness. Cruelty’s not the only way to be a cad. Although I have been cruel too.

I am curious—have you ever singled out someone for your affection? I’ve been wanting to ask this. Do not misunderstand my tone here; I ask with all the tenderness and innocence of a brother. Imagine me asking: Frances, what did you read as a child? And that is how I am asking this question.

You have made me uncharacteristically circumspect. I like that very much.

Yours,

Bernard





April 27, 1958

Dear Bernard—

There was a young man for whom I had affection at Iowa. He is now married to the woman who was my best friend at the time. That is all I will say about that.

Except to tell you that I found my dearest friend, Claire, because of this young man. I was in the ladies’ room during a dance crying in a stall because the young man had chosen this particular evening to break it off, and Claire happened to be in the next stall over. I kept flushing the toilet because I didn’t want anyone to hear me, because I was so ashamed of crying over him, and in public, but she heard the keening of self-pity above the tsunami of flushing and knocked on the stall. “Are you all right over there?” she said. “Can I get you some water, or an aspirin, or a drink?” I didn’t answer right away and she said, “Are you crying over someone?” That made me cry even harder, and Claire came out of her stall, washed her hands, and waited for me. “I don’t want to tell you how many times I’ve cried in the ladies’ room at dances,” she said through the door. “It’s revolting, I know. You hate yourself for it.” I liked that she used the word hate. I came out of the stall and saw a tall blonde in an emerald-green shantung shift, her hair swept up on top of her head. She looked at me and said: “What a fetching dress!” I told her I’d made it myself. Now it’s two years later and I don’t know what I’d do without her. That was the first and last school dance I ever attended, by the way. I’d rather go to a funeral.

Now, tell me what you read as a child.

Yours,

Frances





May 7, 1958

Dearest Frances—

I’ve done some shabby things, but I’ve never thrown a girl over for her friend. I pray I never do. But it sounds like you won, in the end, if such a thing as Claire transpired shortly after.

Permit me to lecture for a moment: Uncle Bernard says that unless you, like Kierkegaard, are desiring and capable of basing a whole system of philosophy around this rejection, you should fall in love again. And again and again, if you have to. It is one of life’s greatest pleasures.

I can hear your eyes rolling all the way up here in Boston. Your blue, blue eyes.

As commanded: here is what I read as a child, ranked in order of moral and aesthetic influence.

The Bible. All the way through at seven years old and then repeatedly, daily, as of noon today, at breakfast. Psalm 51. King James Version.

Paradise Lost. At eleven years of age. My affinity for the devil was almost as terrifying to me as the idea of him.

The Iliad and The Odyssey. Eight. With these words he led the way and the others followed after with a cry that rent the air, while the host shouted behind them.

Bulfinch’s Mythology. Eight.

Hamlet, at twelve.

Dickens’s A Child’s History of England. At seven. I began by imagining myself as Alfred, but by the end worshiped Cromwell, because he was a Puritan, too, and I drafted the neighborhood boys into a New Model Army. There was a mutiny soon after, I don’t think I need to tell you, that sent me indoors for the rest of the summer reading—

Treasure Island.

Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen. Read them over and over when I was six, which is when I decided that I wanted to marry a mermaid. I had a habit of swimming too far out to find them and would have to be dragged bodily out of the Atlantic by my father. After one of these episodes, while I shivered on the sand wrapped in a tartan blanket, I heard my grandmother, my mother’s mother, who sat immobilized beneath a parasol like an iceberg dressed in black, more tartan blankets covering the diabetic gangrenous foot that I was always told to keep out of the way of, say: “The only way you’re going to get that boy to behave is by running him over with a car. Pity you can’t.” And then she winked at me. I have often thought that my father was frightened by what he imagined was the beginning of the disease of lovesickness—the same disease that had had him panting after my mother, who by this point in their marriage had turned like milk; now she was a materialistic withholding scold. But I more than made up for whatever softness he feared by a period of prepubescent pugilism, a reign of terror in which I pulped anyone who wouldn’t let me take charge or have my way. This subsided, mostly, in high school, though I did, my first year at Harvard, throw a punch at Ted. I missed. He, in response, knocked me out. This is why I conscripted him into a friendship. We cannot for the life of us remember why I threw a punch at him. Ted likes to say it was because we showed up to the bar wearing the same dress.

When I ask my freshmen what they have read, they all stare at me for a moment, and then talk about television and comic books. Could a gap of eight or so years really make that much difference? I suppose you and I could have been listening to cereal-sponsored serials on the radio, but we didn’t—or did you? I can tell you, however, that Superman is actually quite an amazing read, should you find yourself at a drugstore lunch counter with all the day’s papers sold out.

Love (may I?),

Bernard





May 8, 1958

Dear Frances—

I wrote and mailed, forgetting that I’d wanted to ask the following.

Would you like to contribute to the Charles Review? I can’t pay you, but I can offer you publication in an esteemed journal, your words jostling alongside those of Pulitzer winners and expatriate literary lions. I won’t put you near the Iowan chaff.

Yours,

Bernard





May 16, 1958

Dear Uncle Bernard—

Your niece Frances—a four-eyed, French-plaited platypus awaiting the evaporation of her baby fat—thanks you very much for the romantic advice. But I’ve never been one to spend time thinking about why men and women take to each other, or why they don’t. I think it can turn a lady neurotic, a term I despise but also am loath to have turned in my direction.

I think I read more like your students! I had a period where I was reading lots of comic books—one of my uncles drove a truck for a magazine distributor and always brought home tons of whatever didn’t sell. So I agree—Superman is really quite an amazing read. As an excuse for this, I’m going to say that in my child’s mind, comic books were as potboiling and morally clear as Bible stories, and that was why I ate them up. I read a lot of Nancy Drew too, even though I knew it was the same story over and over again. When I’d read all of them and back again, my aunts piled a lot of Judy Bolton on me, thinking I’d love that too. Not the same. I read them all, though, in a summer, hoovering like they were Cracker Jack. Fell asleep reading them on the beach down the shore and got sunburned. And I didn’t really even like them. Sometimes I wonder if the automatic way I consumed them, one after the other, thinking of nothing but getting to the next one but without real appreciation for the taste, means I have it in me to be an alcoholic. Then I think that reading—something, anything—was maybe a way to hide in a family where I was always required to be in plain sight. Nobody approved of being antisocial. Anyway. I didn’t read Treasure Island, but I did read The Swiss Family Robinson. Robinson Crusoe too. I really did love Little Women, although I could not stand that the girls called their mother something so sissy as Marmee, and you will not be surprised to hear that I identified with Jo and pictured Ann whenever Amy popped up. Little Women was one of several books my mother had owned and that my aunts gave me the Christmas I was eight; the others were Heidi, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre. The next Christmas, my father gave me the books he’d read in childhood—and that was how I read nearly all of Dickens. I am looking at these old books on my shelf as I write to you. Their leather is as dark as dirt now, and the tops of the spines are fraying. If this place burned down they would be the first thing I grabbed.

I did not read Paradise Lost until about a year ago, I’m afraid. (I have to say, I agree with you about Satan being the draw. Adam and Eve: Who cares?) Can you find it within yourself to keep up a correspondence with this northeastern hillbilly? Uncle Bernard, maybe you should send me a box full of Greek tragedy—perhaps this is what I really need, more than advice for the lovelorn. Or perhaps Greek tragedy is advice for the lovelorn! You tell me.

As to your second letter: I would love to be published in the Charles Review. I’m enclosing a chapter from the novel. If this offends, no offense taken. Will I also receive a handsome muffler with the Charles Review stitched into it? I look best in green and gray.

Yours,

Frances





May 28, 1958

Dear Frances—

Am so pleased that you will contribute. I warn you, I will edit.

Since the last time you wrote, I’ve grown a little dark. Ted has proposed to, and been accepted by, this woman who will, very shortly after they marry, certainly seduce him into going to law school. Which will not be difficult, because Ted’s novel has been rejected by several houses, and he doesn’t have the confidence to keep going. He should keep going, but I think he will escape from this catastrophe—what he feels to be a catastrophe, because he’d told himself that if he couldn’t publish this book, he would give up on writing—into domesticity. He was waiting to be saved into writing but now has to ask this woman to save him into the next thing, which will be a comfortable haute bourgeois existence, with children, just like the one his parents led. Ted doesn’t need much, but he does need to look extremely capable, and he knows he could lawyer and he knows he could make money, because his family has been making money for generations. (Ted, against my vociferous rumblings, ran a lucrative poker game out of our rooms at Harvard. I don’t mind gambling on my own physical strength, or talent, or attractiveness, but there’s something about gambling away money that makes me queasy. Must be the Puritan in me.) I haven’t said anything to him about this woman. But I think he knows what I think, and this is making the apartment strangely, portentously quiet.

Kay is the daughter of a congressman from Mississippi. I almost wrote clergyman, and I think that there is some provincial parsimony dripping off her aquiline nose. She’s too beautiful to be a harridan, but she has the soul of one. One weekend when she came to visit and Ted and I ran out for more liquor, she emptied all of our ashtrays on the floor, sat waiting at the dining room table for us to come back, and said: “I’ll clean this all up but I wanted you two to understand how disgusting it is to live as you do, especially from a lady’s standpoint.” “I’ll clean it up, lady,” he said, with an emphasis on that last word, and she and I stared each other down while Ted went to get the broom. I can see why Ted’s in love with her. She possesses the tenderness of a portrait of Dora Maar, and the forceful will to conquer realities that has been exhibited by all the southern women I have met.She looks like the daughter of a sixteenth-century Spanish innkeeper and views her life’s journey as akin to Sherman’s march to the sea. She is beautiful. I should despise Ted, because it’s the kind of marriage you’d make if you needed money or wanted to get into politics, and Ted sure as hell doesn’t need money and thinks politics is a game utopians follow because baseball bores them. (As I write, I hear you wondering, as I sometimes wonder: Why am I friends with Ted? Well, he’s one of the smartest people I know, and when I met him I felt that our blood boiled at the same temperature, even though it might not be set to boil by the same writers, the same injustices, or the same women. It is one of those relationships in which a semi-inexplicable current of respect for the other’s intensity and strength is responsible for the bond.) So I don’t despise Ted, even though I think what he is doing is setting himself up to follow the family line out of a lack of courage. The old story, and still an enraging story. No, I despise her.

Frances, tell me if I am in the wrong here. I don’t trust any of the women I know in Boston to tell me the truth.

Love,

Bernard





June 4, 1958

Dear Bernard—

I’m very sorry to hear about Ted. I’m going to take Shakespeare a little out of context: “Go to, I’ll no more on ’t; it hath made me mad. I say, we will have no more marriages.”

The women on my mother’s side of the family, my three aunts and my grandmother, they all married well enough and out of the immigrant melodrama of innumerable babies and strife, but growing up I saw how they seemed to do nothing but cook, clean, scold, and sew. It appeared that mothering was being maid and confessor to three to seven people. Or more, if you took your Catholicism seriously. Which, as I have already established, my aunts did. They were always giving safe harbor to the kids in the neighborhood who did live in the strife—inviting them for dinners, cutting their hair, giving them my cousins’ castoffs. My aunts ran an ad hoc mission out of their homes. Ann, who would marry a stray dog if she could, has a great deal of them in her. This is why I won’t marry. I am not built for self-abnegation. If I’m built for anything, it’s writing. I can’t even teach! I had to, when I was at Iowa, but I was not very good at hiding my displeasure at mental sleepiness and mediocrity. And if anyone gets my self-abnegation, it needs to be the Lord. He’s been waiting a very long time for it. He’ll be pleasantly surprised one of these days if it ever shows up.

I approve wholeheartedly of the marriage of Claire and Bill— Claire is a reporter and Bill teaches Latin at an expensive Catholic boys’ school, and I don’t think I’ll ever see two people as in love with each other as they are. It makes me think that a marriage of true minds—to again quote S.—is in many ways just dumb luck. Two of my childhood friends have married men I think are complete dullards. One of them I might even describe as a lout. This husband, drunk at their Christmas party, said that he’d always wondered if I was a lesbian but that I must not be because a lesbian couldn’t possibly look that good in black velvet. I told him that he didn’t know much about lesbians then. But the wives do not seem to mind the way I mind. They do not see their husbands as extensions of their personalities; they see them as means to motherhood and material comfort. They seem happy with their children, happy with their dresses and their homes. They seem happy and oblivious. Sometimes I think they have happened upon a spiritual discipline I might do well to adopt. When I do not think they’re fools.

I wonder if Ted isn’t just after his own version of this happiness? I know that thinking of it this way is no consolation. I have never been good at thinking myself out of disappointment, so take this for what it’s worth. Some people don’t need more than what’s in front of them. Mostly I feel just fine about not having this talent but sometimes (see above)—well, I’ll just say “but sometimes,” and leave it at that. I don’t know Ted, but if he can talk back to this lady, I think he knows what he’s about.

I’m going to shut up now. You’re not in the wrong.

Yours,

Frances