Frances and Bernard (23 page)

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

September 5, 1965

F—

Bill and I say it’s official: you have won a prize. And your aunts dote on him like the Vatican sent him. I doubt Helen will ever call him anything other than Allen. Poor guy. Please tell Peggy that we were devastated to get to the end of the lunch she packed us for the drive home. Bill sends his love.

Frances, I have to tell you I was worried that you felt the need to settle. When you first wrote me about Alain, I didn’t think you were really going to fall in love with him. You seemed more bemused than smitten. I had a fear that you were going to drift into something that looked perfectly sensible to everyone around you—so bloody sensible that you’d never argue yourself out of it, and you’d just pull him over you like a blanket and go to sleep. It’s unfair, I know, but I often thought that only your being pursued by Gregory Peck would have put my worries at ease.

What’s also unfair is that I wanted marriage for you only because I myself could not tumble along without it. You never did hanker after it the way I did, so why should I be anxious for you if your life was leading you places other than the altar? My job is a party I go to every day. I need to be in the middle of a commotion that isn’t children, and the paper is exactly that and no more. And then I have Bill, my roaring home fire. You rely on your books for things the rest of us search for in people. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think it’s a gift, maybe even your one true spiritual discipline. Go ahead, roll your eyes.