Frances and Bernard (11 page)

I have prayed for Bernard every minute of every day. I am going to see him this week. I am staying with his friend Ted and Ted’s wife.

Still, I am very angry with him. Please pray for me that this anger dissipates, because I know it is not right to be angry when my friend is suffering. I am very angry with him because in his mania he has confused me with a saint. I itch writing that sentence. I am angry with him because he did something to me in his mind, something that now makes me wonder what else had been in his mind before he said what he did. It’s making it very hard to write—to the point where I don’t know what’s weighing heavier on my conscience, the blank page that’s resulting from my anger or the anger itself. I sit in front of the typewriter and type and then start looking out the window, worrying about Bernard and then fuming at Bernard. And so he’s turned me into a crazy person too—he’s led me into the realm of
what if
and
who’s there
?

Love,

Frances

April 15, 1959

Dear John—

Your office called and told me you are in England for a few weeks on business. I hope all is going well with you, and you are enjoying your time there.

You asked me to tell you what happened when I saw Bernard.

Hospitals are horrible places, and this sort of hospital in particular—it’s supposed to be expensive, but it feels like a dump.

I walked into the common room and there was a baseball game on—the sound of it like flies buzzing over the heads of the bodies slumped in vinyl padded chairs. Gray linoleum, navy blue vinyl. I had baked Bernard some chocolate chip cookies at Ted’s apartment—Ted said that Bernard was starving and had been making the staff miserable in his loud complaining about the food. So I walked into this awful, cloudy, bruise-colored room and saw Bernard’s big curly head over the collar of a cheap red velour bathrobe the color of port. “Bernard,” I said to the back of his head, and he got up and came to me. He looked exhausted. The bathrobe hung on him like something shaggy and ancient, but he still looked regal, like a chieftain robbed of his scabbard. “Bernard,” I said, and took his hand. “No, no, that’s not enough,” he said. He took the package out of my other hand, put it down on a chair, and then pulled me to him. He was right. That wasn’t enough.

That over, we took our seats. We didn’t say anything for a while. I smelled the smell of that place—stale, a film of body odor, dust. Ammonia at base. The baseball game droned. I didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t sound inappropriate in its smallness or patronizing in its sincerity. “I made you some cookies,” I said, “because Ted said you had been inciting riots at dinner.” Bernard smiled. But his smile came slower than it usually does, and I realized that he must be swimming through the Thorazine. I started to cry and he saw this. “Now I know you love me,” he said.

I brought
The Tempest
and I thought I could read him some of it. I should have realized that perhaps this was not the best choice. After a while he asked me to stop. “Are you afraid of me, Frances?” he said. “No,” I said. “I’m not afraid of you. I want you to get well.”

“You waited too long to come,” he said.

I said nothing. That seemed the gracious thing to do.

“Please pray for me,” he said. I told him I had been praying for him all this time.

I saw his parents on my way out—I heard his mother arguing with the nurses. I think they had gotten confused about his schedule and she wanted to be allowed to see him even though visiting hours were over. I see where Bernard gets the fire in the gut to demand better institutional dining. He has her face too. “Watch my purse,” she said in ill temper to a nurse bustling by. She’s the pier and Mr. Eliot is the dinghy tied to it, bobbing away in oblivion. I suppose I should have introduced myself but I didn’t think it would go well.

I’m going next weekend. I’ll give you another report then.

Yours,

Frances

April 15, 1959

Dear Claire—

How are you?

I just wrote a letter to John Percy about my visit to Bernard in which I seem to have left out some of my more cowardly feelings. I know that many people think that their editors exist solely to absorb those kinds of feelings, but I would be ashamed if John thought that I was less than stoic, as he seems so stoic himself.

It was very difficult to see Bernard. He is being given a drug called Thorazine, which is an extremely powerful sedative that is supposed to prevent psychosis. This means that when you talk to him, there is often a pause of several seconds before he answers—it is as if you are a customer in a dusty old general store, and he’s the mummified cashier who has to remember where he’s put whatever it is you’re looking for or whether he even has it. This drug also makes his hands tremble. This started at the end of the visit, when I was reading to him, and when it did, he looked at me helplessly, panicked, as if to say
I don’t know what’s happening but I know I don’t want you to watch it happen.
He finally sat on them. I didn’t know what else to do but kiss his head. “Perhaps I should be institutionalized more often,” he said.

I have never, in my twenty-six years, seen anyone laid out in a casket—I was kept away from my mother’s funeral—but looking upon Bernard in the hospital, I imagined it was not dissimilar. I have never seen anyone I was fond of that altered physically. He is gray and crumpled. His eyes are dull. It took all that I had to keep looking at him straight on. I was determined not to be a child in front of him.

On the way out I asked a nurse how often he was given the drug, and how. She looked at me warily, and then explained: He is stripped down, strapped to a table, and then injected four times, in four different places. I nodded, thanked her, and then ran into a ladies’ room stall to hide until I regained my composure. What humiliation. I’d have killed myself by now, if this were me. Do I mean that? Let’s hope we never find out. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but this has made me somewhat glad my mother passed away when she did, because if she’d lived any longer she might have ended up in a place like that.

When Ted picked me up, I asked him to pull over at the first church we saw. He said of course. I went in and asked that my fear not render me helpless. I asked forgiveness for the anger I had toward Bernard. Then Ted drove us home and poured us each a martini. I said I wasn’t sure I wanted one—it was three in the afternoon, and I thought I might try to get some revisions done—but he kept right on shaking and stirring. “You’ll be no good to anyone if you don’t,” he said, and handed me a drink. “It doesn’t make all that wine any less transubstantiated, if that’s what you’re worried about.” I do feel grateful for Ted.

I’ll end this letter here.

Love,

Frances

May 1, 1959

Dear Frances—

Will you smuggle me in more books next weekend? My mother did not bring me the Shakespeare I asked for—she brought some Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr instead. “Your mind must be tired,” she said, “and I don’t think it’ll do to be revving it up with Shakespeare. I know you won’t watch television but I thought some whodunits might be entertaining.”

I can’t stand mysteries. In the same way I can’t stand science fiction. Why pretend we’re somewhere else? Forensics is a feint. Why distract ourselves from the eternal questions with set dressing? Salad dressing.

Would you mind bringing me copies of
Cymbeline
and
The Winter’s Tale
? My mother offers one pudding and Ted another: Ted says there’s no better time than losing your mind to cleave to the decencies and unremarkable sentences of the Victorian novel, sentences bearing plot to the reader like freight car after freight car carrying cargo to its destination in Leeds. The way he has described the work of Trollope and Gissing and Thackeray, I now want the oasis of decency and plain English the way I want a roast chicken: there is secret opulence in both. Ted says not to worry; if I like these books it doesn’t mean I’ll end up married like him. That broke my heart, to hear Ted already joking but not joking about the death that is marriage. Do you know I have never read
Vanity Fair
? In my mind I had confused it with your
Little Women,
but Ted assures me that it’s only a girls’ book if you think Becky Sharp is a role model. It’s really a pirate novel, he says.

The people here are all crushed cigarette stubs of people. Bent, white, ashen, diminished. Myself included.

I sleep the way some people commit suicide.

The priest here is, as you might say, a perfect ninny. He gave me a book by Bishop Sheen. That made me go black for a day or two. I started to think that maybe God is as small as the minds who love him blindly.

All there is to do here is sleep, read, eat, stare out the window, or write Frances a long letter.

I wonder if God is playing a joke on me—the girls here are caricatures of all the women I’ve been with, or wanted to be with. There’s a girl with yellow braids and a severe brow who’s always carrying a copy of
Imitation of Christ
; a dark-haired girl who touches my feet under the table at meals but ignores me in the hall; a girl with auburn hair who speaks to me only in puns. Now I think I know what the nunnery must have been like for you. The psychiatrist who’s analyzing me will tell you that these girls are all variations on my mother. I don’t want to believe him, because how could I have been so obviously Oedipal? Aren’t we much more than a collective impulse to frustrate and be frustrated? But I wonder now if it’s not free will but the unconscious that we have been given. I wonder what of your mother was encoded in you without your knowing; what of your life is a letter she wrote you that you have just opened and will take your whole life to read.

Love,

Bernard

May 15, 1959

Dear Frances—

Thank you for bringing me those books. How beautiful the sight of you in your green and white striped dress. I suppose you’d say I’m only saying that because I’m in a nut house, and you were the only person who had washed in a week and was not catatonic. But I am going to say it again: how beautiful. Like cream, like clover blossoms. Your face says so much in so little time, you let everything you’re thinking bloom upon your face, and I can’t think of anything else I’d rather watch than you pass through five moods in five minutes. What glorious weather.

I think you have forgiven me. Have you forgiven me?

It’s three in the afternoon, between herdings to and from meals, and I’m finding myself in a moment where I needed to talk to someone I love. I don’t talk much to the other patients here. I don’t really want to talk to anyone here, for fear it is revealed just how deep the similarities are between me and the old woman who pops out of her window every day at noon crying
cuckoo
across the quad. The narcissism of small differences, I suppose. I am forcing myself to read, even though I have to fight to stay interested past the first few pages. I keep it up, even if an hour goes by between pages, because I don’t want this drug to have the last word on the strength of my spirit. I need to prove to myself that I can willingly inhabit worlds other than my own.

I don’t like to look at myself in the mirror either. I have aged overnight. Some days I look gaunt as El Greco’s Saint James, others I look as bejowled as my grandmother. In general I appear as cratered and evacuated of sense as the moon. My hair annoys me. Full, unruly, standing at attention, suggestive of robust and hardy vegetation, it seems to me an accessory left behind from a costume I’d been renting out. I leave it uncombed as punishment for its mockery of my otherwise gelatinous state. The nurses are always trying to get at it.

But I am very glad to hear that John is delighted by the novel. This is a thought I have been returning to, because it brings me what feels like happiness.

I’ll take my leave now. I only want to keep writing about how beautiful you are, and I do not want to risk your censure. How beautiful, and yet you suffer this Polyphemus groping for you from his dark cave.

Love,

Bernard

May 21, 1959

Dear Bernard—

I will see you in a few days, but I wanted you to have something to read in the meantime that wasn’t a mimeographed sheet telling you what not to take with your orange juice. I want to get this in the last mail, so it will be short.

Please keep reading. I think that is a good idea. I wanted to tell you that I have been reading
Cymbeline
too—I’ve never read it, which I’m sure you can believe—and in fact I just finished it, so when I see you we will talk about it some. They say it’s a clunker, but I do like this line, from the end: “Pardon’s the word to all.”

I think you look as kind as you have always looked.

Yours,

Frances

PS. Although I think you should let the nurses at your sagebrush.

If only for your mother’s sake. And maybe mine?

June 1, 1959

Dear John—

I hope this letter finds you still enjoying England. If you have found any books over there that merit looking into, would you let me know?

I told you I would write you again about visiting Bernard, so here I am. They’re letting him out on the fifteenth, and it seems like he’s going to stay with his parents for the rest of the summer before moving to New York to take a teaching job at Hunter College. I think this may be one of those times where even ineffectual parents are better than no parents at all. Bernard is just humbled enough now to accept their care, and they seem humbled enough to swallow their objection to his being Bernard instead of an obedient son.

He seems better. Although I have no idea what
better
means, in this context. I think what I mean is that he seems eager to leave the hospital and resume his life, and that the people who run the hospital are going to let him. I worry about him a little because I sense that he is afraid of himself—that he thinks of himself now as a loaded gun likely to go off at anytime without warning. All I can do is pray for him and try to make him laugh when I see him—and not mind how feeble those two gestures are.