Frances and Bernard (15 page)

Thank God for my father. “Sister John is Sister Anne, isn’t she?” We were out on a walk after dinner. Yes, I said. “And Sisters Monica and Barbara are your aunt Mary and uncle Tom.” Yes, I said. He laughed. And then he said: “They’ll never know.” And laughed again.

Some reviews are in—
Time
decided they didn’t hate it enough to fully trounce it, but the reviewer seemed subconsciously disappointed that it was not a different book entirely, and since he did not realize the nature of his disappointment, he could not write a review that exposed the book’s true flaws and strengths. His review just exposed his wish not to be reading a novel about a bunch of nuns.

The Old Testament metaphors are coming fast and thick. Someone else said that I “wielded prose like Judith, head of Holofernes triumphantly in hand.” Lord. And yet another person wrote approvingly that the book “throbbed with the kind of wicked wisdom deployed by King Solomon when, in the book of 1 Kings, two women came to him, each claiming to be the mother of a baby boy, and he declared that the only thing to be done was to cut the boy in half.” Am I a Hun and just don’t know it?

Am I from Pittsburgh and just don’t know it? Someone else misidentified my city of birth as Pittsburgh.

In my actual city of birth, the
Inquirer
declared that “Miss Reardon has a disturbingly tidy sense of justice that is, even as it disturbs, piquant.” Why, thank you.

Re the
Times:
I’m relieved.

Thank you again.

Love,

Frances

March 12, 1960

Ted—

Thank you, as always, for the visit. I’m sorry you had to leave early on Saturday because of that deposition. You always say lawyers give lousy parties, and we could have taken you to the party for this new journal Carl is putting out. The party was a hydra-headed rugby scrum of all the usual suspects, but no less entertaining because of it.

Do you remember Betsy, that friend of Caroline who sipped at only one Manhattan that long night we went out for Caroline’s graduation? She had been seeing a young man I introduced her to, Robert, a graduate student in philosophy who sat in on one of my classes. He took to me because, I think, he does not have a father and his older brothers are far-flung and all in the armed services. He came to my office one day a couple of weeks ago asking for some advice and so we got a drink. He told me a story: He was helping to teach a philosophy course presided over by a professor emeritus and while he’d been sitting there, tending the wan fire that was the old man’s drone, tossing in a spark of clarification here and there whenever the flames threatened to go out for good, he noticed this girl sitting in the middle distance of the lecture hall, red hair wound back in a bun, with a placid, impassive, and sometimes dismissive expression that flared up in a way that made Robert start to have ideas about her own fire, and then afterward she asked him for advice on a paper, and so they went to a café and they ended up talking for a few hours, and the girl told him her whole life story: doubly orphaned by polio, lost at Hunter. He finds himself wanting to touch this girl as she talks, finds himself alive—my paraphrasing, because Robert was too removed from his own appetites to know what he was succumbing to—finds himself alive to beauty with the idea that beauty noticed must be beauty consumed (which I don’t think he has followed to its logical conclusion, because if he had, he wouldn’t be as alive to it in this momentarily problematic way). He knows, however, that he loves Betsy. But the redhead doesn’t know that, because Robert hasn’t had the heart to bring it up.

So he reaches out and takes this girl’s hand over the table, and, wouldn’t you know it, Betsy has taken off work early to surprise him with a visit. Alas,
she
gets the surprise when she sees them in the window in the café on her way to the office—sees them just at the moment Robert reached for this girl’s hand—and she reacts as if Robert’s Don José and this girl’s Carmen, and she leaves and calls him up and breaks it off. She hasn’t been, Robert told me, with very many men, and so, he suspects, she was acting in the way she’d heard you should when you find a leak in the boat, without even bothering to determine how big the leak is. I felt pity for Robert when we talked. His anxious eyes behind his glasses—it was like looking through the cracked windowpanes of a looted store, as if someone had broken in and robbed him of any sense, and I could hear the shattered glass still tinkling on the recently stampeded floor of his brain. Betsy knew no other response to this scene but to prosecute and deport, and he knew no other response to her response but to become a hermit in a cave of guilt. “Have neither of you ever heard of the word
peccadillo
?” I said to him. I’d be attracted to Betsy too, I think, except that she is too wilting a stem for me. Betsy is a girl who is receptive, passive, the kind of girl who sang madrigals in college because it allowed her to gambol in a field that had not yet been carpeted over with the weeds of Weltschmerz, and who will marry in order to build herself a castle against the invasion of Weltschmerz, children her moat, husband her drawbridge. There is a sweetness she was trying to overcompensate for by prosecuting Robert. And with him, shame overtook his passion for Betsy. Someone needed to get these two talking to each other because they were both too committed to their own righteousness, both twenty-four years old and not out of the nursery quite yet.

So I invited Betsy to this party, and then I invited Robert, assuring them both that I had not invited the other, assuring them both that I knew for a fact that the other would not be there because they’d each told me they had plans. And there they were. I stood in a corner and watched. I pulled Frances over too and she claimed she didn’t want any part of this, but I held her by the arm and anchored her to the spot, and she stayed and watched as the two of them stared at each other like stunned deer. “She’s going to bolt first,” said Frances, and Betsy did, but Robert reached out for her arm to make her stay (here Frances pulled away from my own grip) and Betsy began crying—crying!—and Robert took her into his arms. “Don’t think you have a talent for this sort of thing,” said Frances as we walked away to get another cocktail. I am very pleased, and, yes, more than a little proud, and Robert tells me all has been forgiven. Including me for my Prospero-esque conjuring. I can’t stand for people to be weak-willed and stiff-necked on principle.

But this was what I meant to tell you. Frances was really very pleased to see you and was really very touched by your taking us to the Oak Room in her book’s honor. (What she won’t tell you is that when you and I came back from the men’s room, I saw her slipping a cocktail stirrer into her purse.) I know you told me that if I confessed to her what I confessed to you, she would never talk to me again, but Ted, I am starting to feel that she may eventually be receptive. That night I had the extreme pleasure of watching Frances betray what I thought just might be one filament of jealousy. At the party there was a girl who interviewed me for the
Paris Review
last year. A black-haired girl, rounded and tall like a caryatid, a little too stiff and erect as well, with something suggesting she’d be quite comfortable shouldering greatness, something suggesting she could see from your present into your future and then into your past and back again, each eye a steady, blank forbidding lake—but an expansive air about her when she gets talking, and during the interview we’d debated for some time about the merits of E. M. Forster. I couldn’t see it, because, having actually loved Christ, having spent so much time on the sea with Ulysses, it is very hard for me to view Bloomsbury as anything more than an incestuous séance cocooned in an anti-Victorian Victorianism that makes me cede greatness to your actually eminent Victorians, though by the end of the interview she made me understand that at the very least I might prefer Forster to Woolf. She introduced herself to me again at the party and I thanked her for her piece. She asked me what I had been reading lately and I told her.

I had not detected anything flirtatious in her manner, but then Frances came by while we were talking about Philip Larkin (I envy his control, but it’s the kind of envy that transpires when you recognize your own fundamental inability to become the thing you envy, which then leaves you to settle freely into unqualified respect). The girl, I thought, stiffened, I suppose because Frances had arrived and was standing there in a silence of aplomb that suggested she and I shared daily proximity. I then took Frances by the hand and said, “This is Frances Reardon. She’s just written a beautiful novel.” “I’ve heard about your book,” said the girl, leveling a gaze at Frances and then issuing a very perfunctory “Congratulations.” “You’ve got nothing to worry about,” said Frances. “He’s not mine.” “I’m not worried at all,” said the girl. Although she did look a little taken aback. “I’m going to leave you two,” said Frances, and then she did. It was very hard not to laugh. Sometimes I wish women would just go ahead and throw the punch. If that were the case, I’d bet every time on Frances.

Yours,

Bernard

April 5, 1960

Dear Frances—

I want to write this so you know that I’ve thought this over and am telling you what I feel in a slightly cooler moment. I would call you but I fear you would hang up on me. Or that you might not pick up at all.

I’m writing this between classes. It’s 10:30. A student just floated his head in the window pleadingly but I waved him off. I hear collegial repartee and purposeful footsteps outside the door. I see Lexington Avenue below me through the window to my right. I see all the children still in their winter coats crossing and recrossing the street in a pattern that makes me think of the hedges in gardens in Florence.

I am not sorry that I kissed you. Again. So now I will tell you that I want you in an unseemly, criminal, animal way.

I speak to make myself clear. I speak, admittedly, to stir you, if there is something in you to be stirred.

You will think I’m going mad again. I know I’m not. If I were mad, this would be rhyming.

Call me when you get this letter.

Bernard

June 1, 1960

Dear Claire—

Please forgive me for not having replied to your past two letters.

Bernard and I have been engaging in what might in a court of law be called an affair. I have seen him many nights for many weeks. I have slept in his bed. Claire, this person has gotten me into his bed. In a nightgown, I assure you, but into his bed. He says that he is in love with me. I believe that he thinks he is. He may actually be. I have not told him that I am in love with him. Because I don’t know what I think. He says he does not mind this. He knows me, he says, and he knows that I need to get my mind around it before I start making pronouncements. He is right. But I am scared. I am scared even to describe to you what it has felt like, the enjoyment I take in being described as something beautiful. That’s right: he calls me beautiful. I want to laugh myself sometimes when he says it.

I don’t know if I love him, but I do know that I love being called beautiful by Bernard. This is a confusion. I feel shame. I think I now need to be easier on my sister. I could never tell Ann about this or ask her advice. It would be like asking an alcoholic how to get off the sauce.

I don’t think that there’s sin here. That’s not it. Not even in forgetting—perhaps forgiving—that he says he does not believe. The sin will come because I sin against Bernard’s hopes. Or if I get hopes and then he sins against them. For my part, I am determined to not have hopes. I would rather be sinned against than sinning. I could not bear to hurt him. I feel like I am the only one who can know the truth about what is happening between us, and it’s up to me to be on the lookout for any signs of his tiring, or his illness. Do you remember that night after we gave that party and, because Ed was genially drunk, we insisted on his staying? And then you went to bed and he insisted, genially, on kissing me, and I found that I could not refuse him? I knew he was kissing me because he was upset about losing out on the fellowship and confused about Ellen’s demands and wanted comfort and power the only way he was used to getting it away from the typewriter: from women. It was like giving blood to the Red Cross—I let him draw what he needed from me while I waited patiently, unmoved, for it to be over, and after he left I went to the kitchen and ate a doughnut.

There’s some of that here.

I find I can’t say much more than this about it to you. And you are my truest friend. I’m afraid I might offend you, or annoy you and burden you with the dramatic irony of my confessions. (I said one thing, but you, Claire, knew all along that it was just the opposite. This has already happened—I wrote you a letter a while back saying that I was not in love with him. And now look.)

I am just as idiotic about human love as the nuns who raised me. A normal woman would know what to feel and why she was feeling what she felt, or she’d just say, To hell with feelings, I’ll take the money and run. I don’t know how these things work, and this is making me panic some. There’s a part of me that thinks Bernard just might get tired of me and, come September, when he has to start teaching, pack his desire for me away. You hear about these things. I know that he is not like that, that he has to have the girl remove herself or be forcibly removed from the girl, but I do worry that I am a mirage in the middle of some spree, and this makes me hesitant.

Please advise.

Love,

Frances

June 10, 1960

F—

For God’s sake! First: He’s in love with you! Let’s put that question to rest. I saw the way he looked at you the night we went out to celebrate your book. Like a dog that’s spent one minute too long on a chain. He also looked high—and that was long before we all got hammered. He looked like an amusing bit of mess—a mess
you
made. Repeat after me:
Bernard is in love with Frances.

Second: Do take enjoyment in being called beautiful. We’ll all be wizened apples soon enough.