Frances and Bernard (14 page)

It was too hard, having seen this physical vigor, to see him as he was in the hospital.

I’m a little nervous at us being in close proximity when he starts teaching at Hunter College—Bernard is overwhelming even through the post—but am very glad he is returning to his usual routine.

What are you reading now? I am reading the Philip Roth you recommended. I don’t know, Claire.

Roth makes me think of Ann. Of how she might get trapped. Sometimes when I listen to her, I think she’s Yeats (prostration to an ideal despite its being a poison) and Maud Gonne (impervious to having done the poisoning) in one. It makes me want to slap her sometimes. Oh God. The older we get, the more I worry about her and her appetites. When I was younger they made me angry. She’d eat seconds when dinner was supposed to last us until next day’s lunch, borrow my dresses without telling me, take money from my wallet (at least she’d leave a note, with apologetic exclamation marks, promising to pay me back) to go out with friends after she’d spent her own paycheck. You know all of this. Now they make me fear for her happiness. I fear that her pleasures will make her unhappy because she won’t have work that will keep her from boredom, because her inability to see the emptiness of beauty will lead her to choose poorly when she chooses a husband. My father indulged her—he was the younger of two, the second to a studious favored older brother, and I think he let my sister do as she liked because, even as he favored me for my studiousness, he knew that he was doing to her what had been done to him. Whenever I complained about some unpunished scam of hers, my father always said her sins were harmless ones, and asked me to try not to be so upset with her—and this was from a man who never made demands of anybody. Still, Ann thinks I’m my father’s favorite, and I keep silent when she goes down that road. I know that I am. I’m his favorite because I’m the priest, studious and abstemious, that his brother never became. He loves Ann with ferocity, though. Through spoiling and flirting and tossing her rotters off of the porch. He loves me like a son and Ann like a daughter. And I have taken care of both of them like a mother. I don’t mean to sound bitter there. I’m not.

I don’t know why exactly I went on like this. You know all this. Ann’s been on my mind. I have just invited her to come visit me—can you believe she has never come to visit me in New York? I think she’s jealous that she isn’t here too. Or maybe she has stayed away from some sort of spite. We don’t say this to each other, but we have a silent pact: I took care of my father for years, and now Ann must stay behind and do it. For at least a little while. Anyway, I’ve invited her to come visit, and I think I worry about us having a good enough time. Although I know this isn’t about me having a good time. I want her to have a good time.

Claire, these thoughts are exactly the ones that will keep me from having a family. When I think of what family is I can see only boredom, chronic misunderstanding, loss, bickering, abuse, burdens that are borne out of duty but never bear love as their fruit. I’m sorry—you know I don’t mean that I don’t understand why you and Bill might want to have one. You know I am talking purely of my own jaundiced stance.

Well, I should go now. Look at all I’ve written. I should get to bed. Thank you again for my visit.

Love,

Frances

September 13, 1959

Dear Claire—

I am sending you a book that we are publishing that for once I am not disgusted by. Have you heard of this woman? This is her second novel; I’d never heard of her. It’s about a group of older women living out their last days in a London boarding house during the war. This novel is short, about two hundred pages, and there is authority in the writer’s conviction that she knows her characters well enough, and can draw them well enough, that she doesn’t need to go on that long to get what she needs out of them. But perhaps this spoke to me purely because of having lived at the henhouse.

Ann came to visit. I think she enjoyed herself. She met me at the office for lunch one day, and I introduced her to everyone. “You two are sisters?” said Old Man Sullivan. Peter, whom I think I’ve told you about, said the same thing. By which they meant:
Why aren’t you that pretty, Frances?
“Frances is such a good cook,” Ann responded both times. I think she was trying to advertise that I had a dowry too. I heard one young editor whistle appreciatively when we left the office he shares with a few other boys. Then at lunch we found her a dress at Bonwit Teller. I pitched in a few dollars. But the differences between us give me a kind of heart attack whenever they present themselves. Sample anecdotes: We are walking along Central Park West, on our way to the park. My sister sees an actor from a television show. “Oh, it’s X,” she says, clutching my arm. “Oh,” I say, and keep walking. “No, no, I’m going to get an autograph.” “Oh no you’re not,” I say. “Why not?” Ann says. “Aunt Peggy and Aunt Helen would think it’s a hoot.” I say: “It’s groveling for something that’s not even admirable to begin with!” “Oh, stop it,” Ann says. “Come with me.” “No!” I say. I take my arm away from her hand and stop walking. I turn into the seven-year-old I think she’s being. “You’re such a sourpuss,” she says, and strides off to this actor and the woman he’s with. I can’t even watch. When she comes back she’s waving the receipt from the grocery store we stopped in. It has his autograph. “See! He was very nice,” she says. “He has family in Philadelphia.” She says this like it means something, like she has really made a connection with him. It’s like being with an old woman who still believes in Santa Claus. Next street anecdote: We go take a walk after dinner to get ice cream and we are about to pass a very old couple, probably in their eighties, both short, frail, the man in a short-sleeved pressed shirt and slacks, very neat, glasses, and he is pushing his wife, in a short-sleeved dress with huge flowers on it, in a wheelchair. Since the street we’re on has a bit of an incline, Ann thinks we should offer our help. He doesn’t look as if he is wrestling with the incline, and still she says to me, “Oh, do you think we should offer to help?” “Oh, I don’t know,” I say, shy, because perhaps they will think us young people patronizing, because perhaps they will resent our pity of their age and fragility. But Ann says to them, brightly, a chipmunk in a blue-checked dress, “Do you need help?” “No,” says the man, without interest, but with no frost either. And so I’m proved right. And I wish I hadn’t been. I see Ann: willing to insert herself into the world to help, unafraid of how it will be received, just knowing that as a Catholic she must be kind, and me hanging back, afraid of being seen as smug in my small offer of help when everyone needs so much help all the time, the amount of help needed is too big, and so I turn away in despair.
Keep yourself hid, Ann,
I am always saying to her, and
Frances, you are a miser,
she is always saying to me. It’s like liturgy. But unlike liturgy, no change comes about from repeating the phrases. There’s comfort in it, but no change.

She also told me that she is seeing someone. She didn’t say much about him—by now Ann knows that I will probably disapprove of whomever she is seeing. I should feel bad about that but I like to think that it will do some good one day. His name is Michael, and she met him, she said, at the engagement party of one of the girls from work. She said he’s going to school for surveying at night and working as a manager at the Acme during the day. He’s another Italian. Ann likes Italians. My aunts tease her about it. They’re so warm, she says. They’re such warm people.

I should get this in the mail. Bernard is coming for dinner and has hinted that he wants me to bake him something; meanwhile, it’s four p.m. and I am still in a nightdress.

Love,

Frances

September 14, 1959

Dear Frances—

Now that we live in the same city, I guess we won’t be writing to each other anymore. But I wanted to send you a note after seeing you last night. Thank you for making me dinner. I don’t know what you were talking about with that pound cake—there was absolutely no way that a kitten tied to it and thrown in a river would sink to the bottom instantly. I can’t cook at all, and I am starting to see the wisdom of the henhouse—three squares for the feckless. If I were any more shameless, I would ask if I could come to dinner once a week. You could think of yourself as the Red Cross. Christian Aid. The YMCA. I would pay for the groceries.

See, we can keep up a conversation without God at the center: Roth, Updike, my students, your coworkers, your work, my work, your father, my mother, your landlord. I mean to keep you in my life. And I see that you don’t want me leaving either. I see how you smile when I am around—your lips purse, and then they tilt to the left, like a boat lifted by the swell of a wave.

I am glad that you let me sit at your table again. And that you let me toast your beautiful, fearsome book.

Love,

Bernard

February 20, 1960

Dear Claire—

I can’t thank you enough for coming to New York. John Percy thought you were fantastic, and Bernard did too. “Claire,” he said, “has Pre-Raphaelite vapors curling around her Katharine Hepburn angles.”

Thank you for coming to that dinner. I always feel like I need to keep the drool off the front of my dress around John. He still makes me nervous, even though I make him laugh, but I think that’s good. Thank you for charming Sullivan too, Claire. I’m sure you stupefied him with your Pre-Raphaelite vapors. And I’m sure Bernard would have been twice as drunk if you hadn’t been there. And would have given a speech that was three times, not just two times, the length of John’s. (Bernard. I have to admit, his testimony on my behalf made me blush, and if he had not been at that table I would have experienced a great sadness. Although I was glad John finally cut him off.) As you know, I am not the world’s best celebrant. I hope I appeared grateful. I was grateful. But I don’t know how to bring off being the center of attention or how to accept the mantle of honored guest. I will take a Pulitzer through the mail, however. That is fine. But I kept wanting to get up and clear the table.

I went home last weekend for a visit and my sister told anyone who would listen: “Frances has just published a novel!” At church, on the street, in the grocery store. More inability to gracefully accept being the center of attention. But then also annoyed by others’ inability to gracefully accept my being the center of attention! “Oh, I’ve written a book
,
”
says a woman, middle-aged, white acrylic cardigan, handbag on arm, standing out on the steps after Mass. And then, of course, it turns out it’s St. Aloysius’s parish cookbook. And from someone else: “Oh, my brother’s written a book”—a six-hundred-page novel retelling their family’s flight out of Ireland that he has refused to send to publishers. Next: “Oh, I’ve written a book”—a handbook for CCD teachers. People refuse to be simply impressed or to express congratulations. It’s as if they feel threatened by something that is arguably more real than their efforts, or perhaps they are embarrassed by not knowing what to ask an Artist—and I’m not even saying that I am one!—so they turn the conversation back to themselves. And/or they are narcissists. I would never say to someone who paints,
Oh, I enjoy taking an easel to the park,
or say to a surgeon,
Oh, in high school I could dissect an infant pig in thirty seconds flat.
Look, I would rather people not know what I’ve done in the first place. Indifference would be better.

And when people tell me they’ve bought a copy—people who know my father and Ann tangentially, people who have only
Reader’s Digest
in the house—I’m mortified. Why have they done this for me, a stranger? If Bill’s sister wrote a book, I don’t think I’d buy it. No offense. And these people will be mystified and horrified when they actually open it. They’re going to wonder if they’ve accidentally bought something that’s on the Index of Forbidden Books.

My aunts, of course, are making a concerted effort to behave as if I’ve done nothing at all—at home they embraced me briskly and asked pointedly about my job. Fine by me. I would rather not talk about it with them either. Ann gave my aunt Helen a copy—which I told her not to do, but Ann is a pushover, and my aunt Helen is a manipulator—and Helen told Ann she could not finish the book because she was so upset by how mean I was being to the nuns. I think Peggy and Mary and Helen have always wondered what I really believe, and now, based on the testimony of my aunt Helen, they will suspect that they’ve been raising an infidel all this time. They will cluck and sigh for my soul among themselves. They don’t know what to do with a book about God that does not stink of piety the way Thérèse of Lisieux stank of roses. They would not be able to see that the nuns brought their calamities unto themselves, and that we are always and everywhere, every single one of us, as sinful as those nuns. They will feel only persecuted because it will seem that I am persecuting the thing that they have been taught never to question.