Frances and Bernard (5 page)

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

June 10, 1958

Dear Frances—

Your letter did help. I know that this is probably just a boy’s recalcitrance to accept the fact that romance takes different shapes among us. What makes Ted feel like he’s alive is not what makes me feel alive, and it may be that Ted doesn’t need to be as alive as I do, and I have to accept that. When a friend stops reflecting you back to yourself in a way that keeps your vanity buffed and shined—that’s all this is, I suppose. There is something in my bones that senses eventual divorce, however.