Frances and Bernard (19 page)

I wish you were here.

Love,

Frances

November 23, 1960

Dear Frances—

This is for you to read on the train home to your family.

There are several ways I want to begin this letter, and I can’t decide which one to take up.

So I will begin with the abject: Forgive me.

My love for you is real. It is much more real than the love I had for God. When I think of you going about your life innocently and in full freedom and then being conscripted into my madness, I want to commit myself to an institution forever. How can I ever atone for having distorted you into an allegory?

My madness is also real, but it is not as real as my love for you.

There is no one in this world who delights me as you do. Your mind is sturdily aflame, your thoughts constantly at a temperature that will scald the sleepers. You think with your mind and your soul, which is why those thoughts burn the way they do. I love you because of it. And I want the responsibility of making you incarnate. You say you do not want to marry but I think that is an attempt to escape the tedious daily struggle to love another human being. (I think this explains some of your antipathy toward teaching too.) If you remain alone in the city, your only duties will be to your writing and to God, and those duties take the form we want them to take. We give them the shape we understand, even when we think we are giving them dominion over us. To wit: you go to Mass daily but sit right in front, so as not to have to witness the mass delusion that is the rote childish piety of little old ladies.

Frances, you feel like a home to me. When you whisper my name, the world becomes still, and I with it.

I know I’ve gone about saying these things in the wrong way—this is what I meant when I asked you to marry me. It came out as a command because I was frightened of losing you.

I would not ask you to have a family—I realize that with my illness I am child enough for you. We will have your family fill our house with their lively warmth; we will have our friends do the same.

I ask for you to have faith that God wants you for me in addition to himself. Please have faith that God is putting me in your way because he thinks you are capable of loving more than you have ever known.

Please be as brave as I think you are.

Bernard

December 1, 1960

Dear Bernard—

I have been thinking of all you have written, and all we have said.

I am moving back to Philadelphia. I am doing this to put distance between us, and also because I learned over the holiday that Ann is pregnant.

I will never be able to be the wife you need, and it would be too painful for me to remain your friend while you fall in love with the woman who really should be your wife. So I am going to ask that we stop speaking to each other.

I do believe you when you say that you feel your love for me is more real than your madness, but I am afraid that for me, standing outside your illness, your madness might eclipse your love. I think, too, that your disease is a gift, even as it is an awful burden, because when you are not ill, you move forward with a fever that is a shadow of your mania, and that fever gives you poems, and teaching, and storytelling, and the ability to argue your love for me. I do not have an equivalent engine. It would require all of my spirit to take care of you the way you need to be taken care of—the way I wish I could take care of you, which would be the way God would require me to take care of you if I were to become your wife. There would be no spirit left for my books.

I have left work in the middle of several days to sit in St. Patrick’s and pray about this, and whenever I get up from the paddock I feel an undeniable rock in my gut weighing me down and away from marriage. It is, I think, a heaviness from God. Writing is the only thing I feel at peace while doing. If I were taken from it, I would be a bitter, bitter woman.

I am going to trust that you want my books to be in the world as much as you want me to be in the world, and I pray you can keep their well-being in mind.

I hope I can forget how much I love you.

Frances

May 15, 1961

Dear Claire—

Thank you for coming to visit. Ann in particular liked having you here. And my father, even through his senility, could tell you were something special. “Have her back,” he said. “You should have her back. It’s nice for you girls to have someone to play with.”

I wish you could come more often. I am now beginning to see why people marry. It’s necessary to have a bulwark against family—to have someone who is not imprisoned in the insanity and yet is close enough to it that his or her observations on the inmate population have the ring of objectivity. Although I would not want to put a husband through this. I was short-tempered enough with my father before I was forced to admit that the senility I suspected was the truth, and I fear that I would foist the short-temperedness onto a husband. Peggy, however, says that I am still young and that I shouldn’t say things like that. I used to turn incredibly sour when my aunts told me what I shouldn’t say, but now I find their voices comforting. These people are stronger than me. They cry at the drop of a hat, but they’re still stronger than me. I think their proficiency in emotion means that they will never be undone by it.

Thank you also for coming to talk to my classes about newspaper reporting. These girls never let their enthusiasm show, but they were, pretty much all of them, sitting at attention as you talked. Of course: you were a living Weegee photo, and usually I am trying to get them to see that an opinion is not an argument. They’re perfectly pleasant, as you saw, but these girls, many of whom should just ditch the pretense of college and marry themselves off immediately, show a distressing incomprehension of their mother tongue on paper. It’s the way I am with French—I can speak it and read it, but please don’t make me write it. I stand around with bunches of
y
s and
du
s in my hand, scratching my head and wondering where to plug up the holes. They have as much trouble with the possessive apostrophe as I have with the rascally prepositions and articles of French. But I have to say, teaching is, and I can’t quite believe this, something I enjoy. It is a losing battle, but unlike the losing battle of tending to my father and his illness, I can see just enough enlightenment in their eyes to make me want to show up to the next class. Of course, I also like being in charge and being paid for it.

That letter from Bernard that came just as you were leaving contained news of his engagement. He felt he should tell me so that I did not hear it from John or other mouths. This girl is someone who interviewed him a while ago for a magazine. She works at the Morgan, I guess, as some sort of curator or librarian, and she lives in the city too. He said very little about her other than that. I met her twice before I left the city, and if I remember her right, she’s tall, black-haired, white-skinned, somewhat beautiful. I think she’s black Irish, from lawyers, and those Irish have always fascinated—as mine have been fitfully to modestly employed, bards given laryngitis by the superstructure. The second time I met her was at a party, and she had an expensive-looking dress on, gray tweed, shaped modestly but dramatically with simple, severe lines, and she was listening intently to another guest. A friend of mine. When the friend saw me, he called me over. He introduced me to her and she smiled, very quickly and tightly, and I got the sense that smiling for her was as devoid of meaning as sneezing. I wondered if she remembered the first time we met. I think she did.

She did seem no-nonsense, which is good for him. I remember looking at her in that dress and thinking that there was something of a dog trainer about her, and that if you stepped out of line, she would very easily get you to heel. It must have been the tweed dress and the patient listening and the hair in a bun. Young Elizabeth at Balmoral, etc. I could say this only to you, but while I am shocked at how soon this all happened, I am relieved that he is happily paired off.

I read back over this and I hear self-pity. Claire, forgive me. I ask God every day to help me look at my father the way he looks at me now—with some joy merely because here is someone with whom to have coffee and look at the birds. Sitting with him and watching the birds is not spending time with my father. It’s paying respects to a monument. No teasing, no stories from him. No laughter when I tell him how I put some functionary or other in his place, because I don’t tell him those things anymore. I just have to sit there, telling myself that I am loving him by paying him respect for having raised me. There’s no real pleasure in it. There’s a great deal of anger and sadness, because my father with all his particulars has now faded into a philosophical problem: How should we love those whom we have loved for their particulars when those particulars are no longer present? I don’t mind God being a philosophical problem—I never thought of him as my heavenly father anyway—but I don’t want Frank Reardon to be.

I used to think
Story of a Soul
was not really Thérèse’s autobiography but a novel for children—its heroine so ludicrously good, like Pollyanna, that you had to wonder if someone had made her up as a parody of the genre and sniggered as she did it. (I admit, I sniggered when I read it.) But I no longer laugh at Thérèse and her Little Way. It helps with the students. And I am using her to endure the
Ed Sullivan Show
. The trick here is to be hemming something or grading papers while it airs. The other night when the theme song klaxoned up like an air-raid siren, and I settled into the couch alongside my father, Ann made a crack as she ate her third bowl of ice cream that evening. “I think the real show,” she said to me, finishing off a spoonful, “is you being able to sit through this without drinking.”

All my love again,

Frances

May 16, 1961

Ted—

I have so many times forced you to do favors for me—I am writing now to formally ask one of you.