Frances and Bernard (22 page)

December 15, 1962

Dear Claire—

Would you believe me if I told you I saw Bernard at a party when I went to New York for my reading? Would you excuse me for not having told you the moment it happened? I think I have tried to pretend that he no longer exists—and if he no longer exists then I shouldn’t be talking to you about him—but when he materialized in front of me, I fell to pieces.

It has caused me no end of grief. So much grief that I can’t even write about it.

After he and I put ourselves through some small talk, I said to him, apropos of nothing but my own shame and hurt feelings: “It was as if you were dead.” You know I don’t believe in demonic possession, but Jesus, Mary, Mother of God, how ugly the thing that came out of my mouth. His response: raised eyebrows, a bit of a smirk—and I was put on notice that he knew I was trying to get him to go through his paces. One of the publicists came by and made a fuss over the two of us. “Isn’t she a love?” she said to Bernard. Bernard, trying to hose down the house fire, said, not without an arch of an eyebrow: “Who doesn’t love Frances?”

He was gentleman enough to suggest that I am indeed lovable across all time and by all categories of person when the truth is that I put that fact into serious doubt. His expression meant
I know why you are putting on this show, and you should be scolded for trying to solicit a response, and yet I am going to give it to you, because I did love you once.

He made me wonder if he didn’t love me still, but then he cleared that up for me directly. I think I wrote him the bitterest letters I’ve ever written in my life, and it is making me nauseated every time I remember how bitter those words were. I think I have sinned greatly in being so bitter and in inflicting that bitterness on another.

I haven’t been able to concentrate. I was in the middle of a lecture on Orwell yesterday and I stopped to look in the book to find a passage that was going to help me make my point, and when I looked back up at the girls, I couldn’t remember where I was or what I had been saying, so I said, “Well, that’s enough for today, just go home and work on your final papers,” and they all stared at me like they’d just been told their mothers used to skinny-dip. Then they gathered their things and ran out of there, afraid I’d suddenly regain possession of my mind and retract my dismissal.

Claire, maybe I can come out to see you. I’ve got some money saved, the semester is almost over, Ann’s doing fine, and my aunts have offered to look after my father if I want to get out of town. And I do like your friends. It would be nice to talk about the British novel with people who do not think Jane Austen is, and I quote, “a huge snooze.” After a while I start to see what these girls mean.

Should I come in the middle of the month?

Love to you and Bill.

Yours,

Frances

January 29, 1963

Dear Claire—

Thank you again for hosting me. It was very cheering to spend time with you and Bill and the rest. Lake Michigan in winter is another proof of God’s existence, I think.

The students are status quo. Sometimes there are sniffy principessas but this semester’s batch seems to be willing to go along to get along. Thank God. Thank God also I am teaching three courses that I’ve taught before so I can pretty much draw on previous reserves. Seeing you was a vitamin B shot, but I’m still feeling a little unresponsive to stimuli.

I am sending you pictures of small Alice, as requested. These were taken at Christmas. My favorite is the one where she looks stunned by the tree:
What is this thing you have set me in front of, with its many blinking eyes and drooping whiskers of tinsel?
What you will not see is a picture of her trying to eat the baby Jesus out of Peggy’s crèche and the ensuing five-alarm terror. I was the one who took it out of her mouth. Ann wants me to tell you that you are now Alice’s honorary aunt, and she thanks you for the clothes you sent back with me.

All my love,

Frances

May 30, 1963

Dear Claire—

I’m sorry I wasn’t around yesterday when you called. I’m sorry I haven’t responded to your last two letters. I’ve not been feeling myself.

I guess you know Bernard’s new book is out. It’s been out since March, I think. I saw it in a bookstore downtown and stood in front of it for a good long minute before I actually opened the cover. They are poems about his loss of faith. I scanned the first few pages but finally could not read them. It was too painful. I felt a possessiveness that I knew was misplaced, and a regret that I knew was not.

I left the store and started crying on the street. I used to see women do this in New York all the time—on the subway, or while I waited in line at Horn and Hardart, and I would always give them a clean handkerchief if I had one—and now I was one of them. Actually, I believe I was, if you will pardon my using so forceful a word, sobbing. There was a church on the corner near the store, and the doors were open, so I walked in and sat down in a pew. I kept sobbing. There was snot coming out of my nose and I did not have a clean handkerchief. I ripped a page out of a missal and made do.

Since then I have been doing a lot of crying for no reason. At my office, in bed, in the kitchen while making dinner. My aunts must know why, because they do not ask what is wrong with me.

I haven’t spoken too much about this to you, because I fear it would sound like whining, but I think that what happened with Bernard was a wound that I have not healed from. It hurts too much; it feels like sin. As I sat in that pew, the hurt that had taken root months ago suddenly shot up into a tree that looked like it had been blasted by a storm, its gnarled black branches twisting out faster and faster, the tips of the branches upturned like a hand begging answers from the sky. And no peace being poured into it. Crying in public! Still losing my place in lectures. Losing my place at home. I put my grade book in the freezer and shoved a frozen meat loaf into my school bag, and I didn’t notice until I got to campus. I berated my father for forgetting that I am not his wife but his daughter, with Peggy having to take me aside and tell me to get a hold of myself, which was as good as a spanking.

So I sat in the pew and looked at Christ on the cross and spoke to this figure the way I have never spoken to it before: Lord, I am in pain, and I need you to send me a sign that I was right to have never married. Do for me what my aunts claim you have done, day in and day out, for them. I am behaving like a child in my stubborn sadness so I am begging you to treat me like a child who needs signs and wonders to believe in your power. Reward me for never having been a child.

Then Ash Wednesday came, and I understood the psalm in a way I never had before.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy great mercy. And according to the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my iniquity. For I know my iniquity, and my sin is always before me. To my hearing thou shalt give joy and gladness: and the bones that have been humbled shall rejoice.

So I took up that refrain: If you’re not going to give me some spectacular sign, just let me hear of joy and gladness. My sins are too much before me, they are causing an unholy din, so please let me hear of joy and gladness. I can’t speak to you respectfully at this moment, so I ask you to open my ears and give me a tune I can follow.

And still it’s been all storm, no sign. On Easter Sunday I actually gave myself over to the metaphor of the season. I prayed that God would create a calm heart in me, and that spring would come and I would be as good as new, content in the knowledge that his eye is indeed on the sparrow. But I could tell it wasn’t going to take. The lilies at the altar stared at the congregation with a waxiness that seemed even more gauche than usual. The priest seemed even more like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Everyone had a look of hazy discomfort, the look you have when you’re in a Greyhound station waiting for your hours-late connection. I almost walked out, but out of respect for Ann and my aunts, I stayed put.

Still, I make myself go to Mass. I sit there clinging to the liturgy, letting it climb round me like a vine and keep me in its grip. I am trying not to knock impatiently like one of those virgins locked out of the party but to sit in Mass quietly so I can better hear the words I have heard thousands of times before, and I try to remember to be moved when the wine is held up and we are reminded that this is his blood, which is shed for many unto the forgiveness of sins. Also, I’m exhausted from my own stupidity, so it’s about all I can do right now, sit and receive. I like to think of this verse from John:
And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself.
There’s a sound of mercy ringing through those words, and I am meditating on that. He will draw all people to himself. Even this incredibly bitter one.

That is really all I can hope for. If you know a prayer from a saint that I might carry around with me, please send it.

Love,

Frances

July 1, 1963

Dear Sister Josephine—

I hope you don’t mind me writing you when you are visiting your family in Michigan. I hope everyone is well and that you are enjoying the Lake. I’ve seen it only once in my life, and it made an impression.

I am writing to you because I am in dire need of some spiritual direction. I have never said or written those words to anyone, but I have been experiencing feelings that I know are not right, and I want to find a way to put them behind me. I have not spoken of what I’m about to tell you with my family. Their faith has never wavered. I am 99 percent sure they would tell me to talk to our priest. I have never gone to a priest about anything in my life. I don’t think I need to explain to you why.

This is about a person I was in love with and whom I have discovered I am still in love with. I must be, if I am behaving this way.

I have a friend, Claire, whom I have talked to about this, but she has told me only what any friend would tell someone in this situation, which is that he and I were not meant to be. I know she believes this. I try to believe it myself, but I can’t. Also, I do not want to burden her any longer with my despair. I know that eventually my despair will exasperate her the way a child’s fear of the dark eventually exasperates its parents, and I want to avoid that.

I am writing to you because I believe that you carry a peace within you that is a sign of real faith, and I know from our conversations that you are no stranger to loss. I am experiencing a loss, belatedly, and it has shown me that my faith is flimsier than I’d imagined. And I fear that the real loss I’m mourning here may be the idea of myself as an imperturbable wise child. If you could read this letter and provide some counsel, that would be much appreciated. I am in need of wisdom that is not tainted by the interests of family, friendship, or the Church.

I think I’ve told you about my friend Bernard. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned to you that he proposed to me and that I turned him down. Though it killed me to do it, I did not regret it then. Now I am filled with a corrosive, debilitating regret.

I cheated myself out of what might have made me happy, while he seems very happy indeed.

My thoughts are not my own. They are a pot bubbling ferociously with jealousy and rage. I wish I had a reason to go to New York so I could accidentally run into him while wearing a dress that just happened to show me off in a way that would cause Bernard to forget his wife and smuggle me to Paris on the spot. I wish I could write a book that casts his wife as the heroine’s foil, a foil the heroine destroys with her wit and virtue to applause from the characters in the book and the critics who review it. I want to write him a letter apologizing for my shortsightedness, which then forces him to write me a letter in which he admits I was the only one he ever loved. I want to write him a letter calling him out on his cowardice in not coming to get me a second time, which then forces him to write me a letter in which he admits I’m the only one he ever loved. I want to write him a letter telling him how beautiful his poems are, which would force him to admit he wrote them all for me. I want to write him a letter telling him how unhappy I am, which would be done in the hopes that he would, for even just a day, be destroyed by the notion that he is the cause of that unhappiness. Just one day. I’m a writer; I could do all those things. I would have art—“Art”—as my excuse. But I’m a Christian, so I could never do any of those things. To do those kinds of things you have to believe in yourself more than you believe in anything else. But I supposedly believe in God more than anything else. And to God, “Art” is never an excuse.

I have never experienced such a derangement of my thoughts. My thoughts, except for a similar episode in college, have mostly been my own. What saved me in college was that I had an unshakable faith in my writing. The story I was truly interested in was the story of myself as a writer, as someone who was going to prove to her family that she did not need to be a mother to be a force for good in the world. So I could very easily put the college boy I was losing in perspective. And this boy very quickly proved himself to have been unworthy of my tears. Things are different now. Now I am thirty, unmarried, living in Philadelphia and not New York, working on a third book that, unlike the first two, feels dead inside. Or maybe it’s that I’m dead inside.

Forgive me.

What I have learned about myself is that I have a talent for self-pity. It is like finding that you have a talent for theft, or betrayal. I have learned that I am a Romantic after all, and I have not learned to move to the next stage of first-person suffering, the more noble way of suffering, which would be existentialism and which would have me in a quarrel with the nature of being and time, rather than, like an adolescent, in a quarrel with God, or Bernard. If I were a different kind of writer I would find a way to channel this into a novel. And this is where I am still Romantic—art is a temple, and I shouldn’t sully it with my wounded realizations. I think that
great
writers can write to compensate for the losses they endure in real life. I am not sure that I am great. I used to think I might be, but now I’m not so sure. (This, actually, is not the problem. Accepting that I am less than great has been a relief, and I’ve been writing more because of it.)