Frances and Bernard (20 page)

You are not as excited as I’d hoped you would be about my marriage. I know that we will remain friends above it, because you have been a witness to all my mistakes, but I am asking you to try to be kind to her. I know she can be cold initially, but I think the more you know her, the more you will appreciate her. She loves Trollope almost as much as you do. Could you start there? About her coldness—I think she may be sensing that you are measuring her against someone else, and when she senses that, or senses that she is in a roomful of people who are acutely aware that she is not someone else, she shuts people out in defense, before they have a chance to shut her out. With three sentences she can split my mind like the atom, and the words I need tumble forth, and forth, with the speed and heat I need from them. Her intelligence never fails. It organizes and protects; it clears paths for heart’s ease. I think this unrepentant steadiness has tamed me. You yourself have remarked upon the change. So I am asking that you trust that we will love each other as long as we can and that you’ll be generous of spirit, which is your nature, when you are around her.

Bernard

May 16, 1961

Dear John—

I hope you are enjoying Miami. Very perverse and un-Percy, a vacation in Miami. I send my regards to Julia and her family. Peel an orange on a patio for me.

I am writing to tell you that I have proposed to Susan. I suppose I could have told you when you returned to the city, but I am very happy and did not want to wait. My mother approves. “Has he told you that he’s been in mental institutions?” she asked Susan at dinner one night. Susan said yes, and my mother said, “Well, it’s up to you now to make sure he doesn’t get back in there, you know.” “Bernard’s a man,” said Susan, “not a dog, Mrs. Eliot,” and do you know, my mother laughed? “Susan,” she later told me, “will not put up with your nonsense.” I am thinking she made this leap purely because Susan showed she would not put up with my mother’s own damn nonsense, but it’s true, Susan does not put up with my nonsense, and I am enjoying this reprieve from my mother’s almighty glower. Susan says my mother wants an adversary but doesn’t want her power dimmed by mine or sapped by my father’s, which is why she can show Susan affection even as she is challenged by her. This is what I have thought since childhood. Also, Susan knows how to play up to my mother’s vanity, in the subtlest of ways, so I don’t have to.

My father says that Susan is a pretty girl with a good head on her shoulders. For what that’s worth.

We’re going to get married at city hall next month. I have written to Frances to tell her. I know you said that it would not be a good idea to write to her, but I thought she should hear it from me before she heard it from anyone else. I don’t expect to hear back. I did not, of course, mention that you had told me about her father’s senility. If any one thing would move me to take up prayer again, it is the thought of Frances losing her father’s recognition.

Please write when you can.

Yours,

Bernard

May 23, 1961

Dear John—

How is New York? You know, I did not think I would miss it when I left to come back to Philadelphia, but I do. I miss the endless variety of faces to be studied on the subway, for one. Please also say hello to Julia.

You were so kind to write and see if I was writing. I am not, currently. Five stories finished but nothing else seems to be coming to mind. I would like to write two or three more by the end of the year, but I think I might squeeze just one more out of these next six months. What is strange is that I am not bothered by the fact that my brain feels like a Dust Bowl farmhouse left vacant after the Depression. But do you know there’s a pleasantness to it? I am imagining my mind as the upper room before the disciples piled in, readying itself for the Holy Ghost. I am trusting that something will come rushing in at some point soon. I’m reading a lot, though, because I’ve been teaching, have just finished teaching, English-survey courses at my alma mater, Germantown College—or, as I like to call it, the College of Mary Pat. Being that there are so many of them—Mary Pats, that is. It’s a very small girls’ school run by the Sisters of Saint Joseph in a town just north of the city. They asked me to come teach for them, and I could not afford to turn them down. Reading and talking about reading for money made more sense than writing ridiculous ad copy for money. I never expected to feel warmth toward a bunch of nuns—my reflex when confronted with a bunch of nuns, as you know, is to wish for a trapdoor to open up right under my feet—but warmth is what I find myself feeling at the College of Mary Pat. These nuns have read enough to cure themselves of superstition and spite. They hired me knowing exactly what my novel was about, so they really must be cured of it. Although one sister did say to me, at a tea for parents, that she had read my book, and then told me: “I was angry like you when I was young, but after a while the Holy Spirit took that anger away from me.” I changed the subject. There is another sister, in her sixties, who teaches French and who swims every morning in the pool of a neighboring military academy. I think we have become friends. She asked me to introduce her to Kierkegaard, and we are reading
Diary of a Seducer
together. She has introduced me to Balzac. Where has he been all my life? I know: buried under Tolstoy.

Thank you also for asking after my father and sister. My father—senility is terrible, but it is especially terrible in that his doctor says there is nothing physically wrong with him. And that is what it seems like. So my father is fine. My sister is fine as well. She’s been working nights at Whitman’s chocolate factory. She takes care of my father during the day, and I take care of him at night when she goes off to her shift. And then my aunts help us along. If you do ever want to leave New York for a day, we would love to have you. I would like to introduce you to Sister Josephine, she of the morning swims.

Thank you again for writing to me. Your letter was cheering.

Yours,

Frances

May 25, 1961

Dear Claire—

Thank you for your letter, and for the recipes from the test kitchens of the
Tribune.
Ann would like me to tell you that she thanks you too, because she’s getting tired of my weeknight reliance on hamburger. She’s getting tired of a lot of things, but that is her right as a pregnant lady.

What would I do without you? When I get a letter from you I rejoice, because it means there is wisdom in this world, and it did not get wiped out by the automobile.

I wanted to write and tell you that Ann will be marrying Michael. He’s always been respectful to everyone here, and she tells me he’s devoted to his mother. (
Al Capone was devoted to his mother too,
I wanted to say.) She’s dated a series of salesmen—Ann and her appetite for flash—so her dating a man with an actual trade might mean that she knew what she was doing with this one.

But the fact that he did not propose right away when she found out she was pregnant worries me. The night he came over to do it, I took him into the kitchen between coffee and dessert, sat him down at the table, and told him that he did not need to marry her if he didn’t love her, because her aunts and I would take care of her. He looked straight at me and said that they loved each other. What can you say to that? If a person looks straight at you with solemn eyes and says he loves your sister, and you see your sister suffering because she has not been proposed to, and you think the suffering may be because she is afraid she might lose someone she loves, not because she would be without material support—then you have to let him back out into the dining room to finish his coffee.

We are going to his parents’ house for dinner next week. His mother—her name is Theresa—telephoned and invited us all over. Her tone was determined and cheerful without being unctuously chipper. This invitation is a good sign, I think—it means that they are not going to punish them, or us, for this. Ann seems happier now. In a way, it’s good my father is senile and has no idea what is happening, because I think he would be more wounded than Ann is by how her marriage came about.

Since Ann is out of some danger for now, I will worry about her only when I absolutely have to. And I can actually read again. My love, by the way, to Bill. Tell him I just bought
The Magic Mountain
and I am going to start in on it.

Love,

Frances

October 15, 1962

Dear Ted—

I hope being in Los Angeles for a month overseeing depositions is not destroying you. I think I myself could take Los Angeles for only a month before I converted back to Catholicism again in revolt against its surfaces. But I’d love that first month. The sun like a punishment from a god. This is a thinly veiled request for you to invite me out there.

A few weeks ago I went to a party for Harrow. I told you this when you called the other day. What I didn’t tell you was that I saw Frances while I was there. Why did I not tell you this? I remembered the forbidding stare you gave me last Christmas when I began a sentence with her name. I am telling you now because I am in some tumult.

She was in town visiting John and giving a reading for the new book, and we ran into each other. I had no idea she would be there. Although if I’d thought twice about it, I would have admitted it was a possibility. She was there with John’s wife, Julia, and a woman John had just signed up. I wanted to congratulate her—because that book most definitely deserves congratulations, and it deserves one of these corrupt awards and if they put me on the committee next year I am going to demand that they nominate it—but she was avoiding me, I could tell. I walked in and we caught each other’s eye—she was standing right near the bar with Julia and this woman—and after I checked my coat, I went back to find her, but she was gone. Every time I was freed from a conversation, I walked around the party trying to find her, and every time I found her, there she was, entangled in some conversation herself, and I’d send her a look inviting her to step outside that conversation, but then she would slip away from that knot, and I would have to go find her again. It took four attempts, but I finally cornered her. She was nervous. She kept drinking her drink, even after she’d drunk it down to the ice. I told her I wanted to say hello to her and congratulate her and she tilted the drink back one tilt too far so that the ice fell out of her glass and ran down her dress. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. And then she laughed. “How are you?” she said, casually, as if it had been a week since she’d seen me, not almost two years. “How does it feel to be nominated for such an illustrious award?” she said. She was not ready to be genuinely interested in me.

So I decided to force us into honesty. “I do miss you,” I said. And that was true. I didn’t think it would cost us anything for me to say it.

She waited a moment or two, and then said: “It was as if you were dead.”
It was as if
—voice rising up onto its toes on the
if,
putting the accent on that syllable, and then a pause before coming back down to deliver the blow—
you were dead.
She took a drink again but there was still nothing in the glass. Frances cannot pull off hauteur. Her secret vice of self-hatred makes itself known.

Then one of the publicists came by, a girl who John lets do his dirtiest work, clearly intoxicated from drink. “Bernard Eliot! Bernard Eliot!” she said. I stared at her with a thunderous glare, hoping that she would move along. She turned to Frances. “Isn’t she a love?” she said to me. “Such a love!” Frances looked as if she wanted to strangle this girl. “Yes,” I said, conscripting myself into chivalry. “Who doesn’t love Frances?” I meant it, but it did come out a little curdled around the edges. And the publicist took off, leaving the two of us staring at each other.

There is something about Frances still that makes me want to court her. And she’s the one who left me! Just seeing her—she looked just the same, as bright as a bunch of day lilies sprung up erect and chaste in the middle of an unkempt lawn, growing erect and green, green and apart from everything dull—made me want to pay her the tribute of my undivided attention. What did I do, after she tried unsuccessfully to make me think she was doing just fine? I took up chivalry again and offered to take her out for a drink. “May I take you out for a drink?” I said. “Yes,” she replied, after thinking about it. And her eyes did appear to soften. “Let’s go to the St. Regis,” I said. I got our coats and led her out by the hand. She took her hand away, and then I grabbed it again. Ted, I know what you are thinking. But remember you have had your own temptations.