Frances and Bernard

August 15, 1960

Dear Claire—

This will be a very short letter because I have to polish a story before Monday. But I wanted to tell you that Bernard paid a visit to Philadelphia last week, and he was a very big hit. The rotter.

My father, after dinner, took me out back to tell me that if he died, he would not mind leaving me in Bernard’s hands. It was a little unnerving. I wanted to ask him if perhaps this was an excess of feeling due to the fact that I’d never brought anyone home before, but I think he really meant it. My aunts exclaimed over him as if he were Errol Flynn. “Jeez, Frances,” said Ann. “You sure do know how to make up for lost time.” (I have to admit some glee in making Ann a little jealous.) A small cousin of mine demanded to run her toddler hands through his hair, and he let her, grinning like an idiot all the while. That girl was delighted to be in his arms, and she made a big, unselfconscious fuss of showing it.

I was a little chastised. No man should give of himself the way he does to me and receive mere acquiescence in return. It was a lesson, seeing him bear up so good-naturedly under all that noise and fuss and behave as a perfect gentleman in the middle of the circus I come from. What kind of Christian am I if I can’t make my appreciation known? What kind of woman?

I find I do miss him now that he’s away. I’m a little bored with all the little things I do to plump my nest—do the laundry, clean the kitchen, organize my drafts, flip through cookbooks, draw up a budget, go for walks. It’s all starting to seem like an old maid’s cross-stitching.

My love to Bill as he girds up for another tour of duty with Seneca et al.

Love,

Frances





August 21, 1960

Bernard—

With you away it’s like the Empire State Building’s gone out. Come home sooner than soon.

xx Frances





August 27, 1960

My love—

I have your postcard resting on the windowsill in front of my desk. I read it several times a day. I slip it in whatever book I am reading by the pond to use as a bookmark and read it a few more times in the sun. Even though I have removed myself from you I am still distracted. But I wrote twenty solid lines today and know that there will be probably a hundred more before I leave, so here I am, drinking whiskey and luxuriating in the thought of you.

What I miss most of all is your face, flushed and happy, after you come. Eyes bright like a girl with a secret she can’t bear to keep.

I want you flushed and happy, and then I want you on my lap afterward, naked, warmed by the sun coming through the window, both of us coming back into our speaking selves, my kiss on your shoulders as you talk of some story you saw transpire on the subway that morning.

I want you on the street in a dress an hour later, quiet, sated, taking my hand as we walk to dinner. You in your white lace dress, your hair a little damp around your cheeks, still sweaty from the bedroom and sweaty from the heat, something succulent but starched. I will wear my wrinkled khakis and a short-sleeved work shirt that I have refused to let you iron, and I will lead us through the carnival that is the Village, knowing that we may appear as chaste as the maiden and her unicorn but smiling in triumph because you are my secret I can’t bear to keep, my beatific girl, all mine to kiss wherever and however I please.

What a perfect summer we had.

When I come back to New York, I will not let you out of my sight.

All my love,

Bernard





September 23, 1960

Ted—

Throw this away if you can’t be bothered. I wanted these thoughts and deeds on paper so I could see exactly what kind of ass I have been. Then I wanted to exorcise the whole thing by destroying the evidence, but burning it seemed histrionic, and throwing it out not extermination enough—so I decided to mail it to you. You will have something to say about this, and I know what it will be, so don’t trouble yourself with a reply.

I said a cruel thing to Frances. We were, of course, at a party—a party thrown by Margaret, Russell’s wife. Frances does not like Margaret much—I think she thinks Margaret is an empty chinoiserie vase of a woman, too brittle and gilded for her tastes—and I think she was made diffident by having to be there.

Now, I must first blame Margaret before blaming Frances. No: I must first blame someone’s wife, I don’t know whose, before blaming Margaret. If this wife had not spoken, Frances might not have been moved to say what she did. I left Frances to go find us some drinks, and when I returned this wife was saying: “That’s nice, a novel. I had one too, before I got married.”

Said Frances: “A novel that vanishes probably should not have existed in the first place.”

I knew then that the evening was officially over. I excused us by saying we had to go say hello to the hostess. Frances, insulted by the wife’s insinuation that she was on the road to noble failure, refused to say a word to anyone who stopped to talk to us. Which angered me more and more as the night went on. I felt it was a refusal to think of how she might reflect on me, and therefore a refusal to think of herself as belonging to me. Comes along Margaret, who ignores Frances to ask if I’ve seen Jim Schultz lately, which I knew she was asking because she’d been sleeping with him but now he wasn’t returning her calls. But Frances cannot stand being snubbed. She thinks there’s a verse in Matthew with Christ forbidding it, right after he suffers the little children to come unto him.

I elegantly hedged—I hedged to make it appear as if I had seen him, when really I hadn’t, just to torture Margaret. Then Frances finally spoke. “Anyone who sleeps with Jim Schultz is buying a raffle ticket to win the clap.”

Margaret stiffened as if shot from behind. “Everybody out!” she shouted. “Out! Out! Thank you for coming!” Thank God the place had been loud enough that no one could detect where the offense had come from. She left us standing where we were and began shoving people in the direction of her bedroom, where the coats were. She pulled two people up from the chairs they were chatting on. A glass shattered. “No, I’m not kidding! Get your things! It is finished! Thank you for coming!”

“Whoops,” said Frances as we followed the crowd to the back of the apartment to get our coats. I have to admit that even though I was angry with Frances, the scene was amusing.

Frances waited until we got a few blocks away from the dispersed partiers, until we were standing at the corner of Lexington and Sixty-Third, to speak.

“Why didn’t you tell me they were sleeping together?” she said. Her voice was soggy with remorse.

“That was very row home stoop of you,” I said. I wanted to punish her for having made an insufficient show of wanting to belong to me.

She grabbed my arm and turned me around to face her, stumbling a little from the effort of trying to force me, losing a shoe in the process. The city, hanging blackly cavernous about her, and this man who loves her turning on her. She bent down, picked up the shoe, and threw it at me. Then she hailed a cab. “We don’t even have a stoop, you bastard,” she said, and got in. I fell in love with her again.

The next day, at the end of the day, I showed up at her office with the shoe in a paper bag and a red scratch down my right temple where the heel had scraped me. I stood in her doorway, manifesting the air of a penitent thief. She was not manifesting the air of clemency. Without saying a word, she got up from her desk and walked out the door, her skirts brushing against my knees. After five minutes she came back, grabbed her purse and coat, shut the lights off with me standing there, and left. I followed her out to the elevators.

She would not look at me once we were down on the street. “I know you didn’t mean what you said,” she said as we walked. “You couldn’t possibly.” And then: “If you are excited by me throwing a shoe at you, please know that it does not excite me.”

She was lying about that.

The subject was dropped.

I am finding it hard not to insult her in other ways.





October 10, 1960

Dear Claire—

Bernard and I have had what I suppose you would call a fight. Well, we have had two fights. I will not tell you about the one that ended in me throwing my shoe at him.

We were at a party, two nights ago. It was crowded, and dark, and loud, and when he got tired of shouting over the crowd, Bernard started to kiss me. I stopped him. I didn’t want him to kiss me in public. Bernard argued that no one would care what we did; I argued that he should care about what I thought. We argued some more—I think he may have told me to grow up. I have been feeling that he is trying to make a request of me in these two fights but he will not name it. I walked away from him in the middle of something he was saying. I put my coat on and walked out on the street and got a cab. The second time in a month. I heard him call my name. That is one of the things I love about New York. If you wish to get away from an unpleasant situation immediately, there are cabs everywhere, ready to make you feel, at least for five minutes, that you are having the last word, by way of the very satisfying sound of a slammed car door.

Bernard followed me home. He must have taken a cab too, because he got there shortly after I arrived. I was sitting on the couch reading and waiting for the kettle blow for tea when I heard a whistle from down on the street. About thirty seconds passed. Then I heard what I thought was a coin thrown at the window. And then another. And another. I opened the window. Bernard was standing there, hands in his pockets. He was wearing the face of a child looking up at a clock that he fears might tell him that he has missed his train. “Will you let me up?” he said. I saw the child he must have been, the child of a woman who let her mother-in-law name her baby because he was a boy, not a girl, and she was too disappointed by that fact to care what he was called. I did as he asked.

I closed the door behind us. I didn’t say anything. We looked at each other. “Why don’t you love me?” he said.

“That’s not it,” I said. Silence. “Bernard, you know I did not grow up being petted,” I said.

“Neither did I, Frances,” he said. “Do you think God wants you to love this way?”

“No,” I said.

“No one will love you like I love you,” he said. What do you do when you know this is true? I’m a thirteen-year-old girl with vinegar where my blood should be. He came toward me and I found my back against the front door. He moved in closer and took hold of my arms. I thought he might shake me but he stood very still. He tightened his grip. “Marry me,” he said. I couldn’t believe that he didn’t see that proposing to a woman when her back was literally against a wall was not a harbinger of a happy union. “No!” I said. I sounded shrill, like a patient panicked by the approach of a needle. I’m not proud of that. As if I thought raising my voice would wake him up and stop him from making this mistake. He pushed me up against the door. “Let me go,” I said. He did. “I think you should go,” I said, and he did.

I’ve called him at work and at home, but I haven’t heard from him. I went to his apartment last night and rang the buzzer and no answer. I can’t sleep.

Frances





October 27, 1960

Dear Claire—

I am writing this to you from Payne Whitney, where Bernard is now staying, while I wait for visiting hours to begin. I thought about calling you but I don’t trust myself to speak coherently about this.

I stayed late at work to write two Thursdays ago and when I came home—this was about eight o’clock—I found Bernard lying on his back on the street, asleep, mouth open, outside the door to my building. I had not seen him since we’d fought. (The college hadn’t seen him either, I have since learned.) I walked upstairs, called the police, and asked if they would take him home. I told them they would need a few extra men because he would probably put up a fight. Then I went back down the stairs and sat on the street beside him. He smelled like a dog who’d been drinking from a mud puddle made of whiskey and ashes. I looked at his hair. I wanted to finger some tangles loose but I thought that if stirred, he’d become violent. So I sat there listening to him breathe, praying he’d stay asleep until the police arrived. Mostly we were ignored, but one woman walking by, loaded down with shopping bags and wearing the kind of shoes my grandmother used to wear, frowned right at me and muttered, “Damn beatniks.” When the police came, I stood up and backed away and they got to work. “Where is she?” Bernard said. “Where is she?” “She doesn’t want to talk to you, sir,” one officer said, and I wish he hadn’t. He was very young, short, with jug ears and black hair slicked back with a heavy hand. I bet he had sisters who used to beat him up. They started to try to pack Bernard into the car, and, as expected, he sent someone to the ground with a punch, and then the officers clotted around him like blood in a wound, cuffing his hands behind him and wrestling him to the pavement, chest down, an officer’s foot on his back. I thought of Saint George with his foot on the dragon. I noticed people gathering behind the police to watch. Then Bernard saw me. He gave me a look of pure hatred. “I am the vine,” he said, “and you are my bride. You think I am the serpent but I am the vine, and because you are lukewarm I will spit you out of my mouth.”

And then he said: “The dragon has his foot on the saint, but soon I will send my son and he will wrestle the dragon and the bride will rise up to meet me.”

I couldn’t help but think he had read my mind. A chill went through me so quickly and deeply it left me nauseated. “We need to take him to Bellevue, I think,” I told the police. “He’s my friend; I’m not his family. What do I need to do?” They said they would take him and then call another car for me. I told them no, that I would ride with Bernard, but they wouldn’t let me. “Miss,” said a cop, bleary but firm, “you can tell him you love him when he’s done thinking he’s Jesus.” Everybody was reading my mind. I went back upstairs and called John Percy, who said he’d meet me at the hospital. Another cop came back and then drove me over. I cried in the car. I prayed that God would guard me against the egotism that is guilt. The cop kept driving and said nothing. He bought me a cup of coffee at a grocery before taking me inside.

Bernard has now been at Payne Whitney two weeks. (It is more than a little sepulchral in here.) Sullivan told me to take November off, that he could get a niece of his to fill in. So I have been visiting Bernard every day. We don’t talk much. I read to him, or we take whatever walk we can. I ended up teaching him how to play hearts. Sometimes we will just sit next to each other, and he will put his hand on my knee and then attempt to kiss my forehead, with varying degrees of accuracy. I am trying for once in my life to shut up and see what that is like. I think Bernard might be trying an experiment like that himself.

The day before yesterday he put his head in my lap. After a while he began to cry. A nurse, overhearing him on her way down the hall, came in and whispered to me that I should probably go for the day. When she pulled him away from me, he slid onto the floor and stayed there, crying. She nodded to me—if a nod could be said to be wise and absolving, this one was—and then turned her back and knelt down to him. In that moment I felt as if someone had rolled a stone over a tomb, and I would always be standing outside that tomb, deaf to the pain within. I called Peter from a pay phone in a hallway and I got drunk in the Village—the first time in my life I got drunk on purpose. I did not even think about going to a church. Apparently at the end of the evening I kept telling Peter I was no good, no goddamn earthly good. Final proof, in case I was wondering, that I am indeed and irrevocably Irish.

How many hospitals will I be writing you from?

I wish you were here.

Love,

Frances





November 23, 1960

Dear Frances—

This is for you to read on the train home to your family.

There are several ways I want to begin this letter, and I can’t decide which one to take up.

So I will begin with the abject: Forgive me.

My love for you is real. It is much more real than the love I had for God. When I think of you going about your life innocently and in full freedom and then being conscripted into my madness, I want to commit myself to an institution forever. How can I ever atone for having distorted you into an allegory?

My madness is also real, but it is not as real as my love for you.

There is no one in this world who delights me as you do. Your mind is sturdily aflame, your thoughts constantly at a temperature that will scald the sleepers. You think with your mind and your soul, which is why those thoughts burn the way they do. I love you because of it. And I want the responsibility of making you incarnate. You say you do not want to marry but I think that is an attempt to escape the tedious daily struggle to love another human being. (I think this explains some of your antipathy toward teaching too.) If you remain alone in the city, your only duties will be to your writing and to God, and those duties take the form we want them to take. We give them the shape we understand, even when we think we are giving them dominion over us. To wit: you go to Mass daily but sit right in front, so as not to have to witness the mass delusion that is the rote childish piety of little old ladies.

Frances, you feel like a home to me. When you whisper my name, the world becomes still, and I with it.

I know I’ve gone about saying these things in the wrong way—this is what I meant when I asked you to marry me. It came out as a command because I was frightened of losing you.

I would not ask you to have a family—I realize that with my illness I am child enough for you. We will have your family fill our house with their lively warmth; we will have our friends do the same.

I ask for you to have faith that God wants you for me in addition to himself. Please have faith that God is putting me in your way because he thinks you are capable of loving more than you have ever known.

Please be as brave as I think you are.

Bernard