Frances and Bernard (4 page)

Yours,

Frances

March 10, 1958

Frances—

I feel a kinship with your father: I delight in your brain as well.

If we had been schoolchildren together, you would have barely tolerated me. When you heard me talking my head off in class you would have given me the look you gave all of us at the colony whenever you heard us making plans to drive to a bar in town. A look that would have been even more formidable coming from the large blue eyes in a small girl’s face.

I delight also in your continuous chide. And here I rewrite myself. Regarding what I wrote in my previous letter: No one has been able to stop me, not even God. What I mean is that not even God has been able to save me from myself. This is one thing I despair of. I plunge myself into something, seeing and hearing only my will, and I have to crash into something else to stop—Maria, the monastery, the Catholic Worker. So I don’t know if I can say that I have ever heard God’s voice. I wonder if it was only my own will, speaking loudly, that led me to the monastery, the Catholic Worker, even conversion. I wonder if you think we can ever hear God’s voice. I suspect you would call me naive for imagining such a thing is possible.

It’s good to have people around me to put their hands on my shoulders and get me moving forward again. Maria may have been trying to but I could not hear her. But I can frequently hear Ted. Ted came to visit me at the Catholic Worker. We were sitting in the kitchen having coffee while people made dinner, and a fight broke out over how much meat to use in the soup, and he said: “I think the people here have problems. And by
people,
I mean you.” I didn’t, and don’t, think Ted’s entirely right, because he comes from a family whose coal companies bust unions, but this was right after the girl scolded me, so what he said—about me—seemed right.

Your story reminded me that I, too, love John best. There is a verse of his that presses on me:
This then is the message which we have heard of him and declare unto you; that God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.
I can grow dark. I grow black. It is not, I think, what defines me, this blackness, but it is something that runs through me and can overtake me. The blackness is a hand that passes over my face to draw me a bath of heavy, ache-riven sleep, and if I want to come out of it I have to make a constant effort to see what is going on around me and then decide if I want to care about where to put my feet and hands. Impatient only for something to drag me off into unconsciousness. No desire even to write. I look at typewritten drafts, and the sentences slide off the paper and trail off into the distance; the sentences break up into letters, hovering like a cloud of gnats over my typewriter. This hand can also draw me a bath of drink, or send me crashing into people. I have stood on street corners fantasizing about being hit by a car—about being taken out instantly. Stood asleep on street corners summoning dreams of traffic accidents. I was once fantasizing about this on a corner somewhere in Cambridge and at that same moment, one traffic light down, two cars crashed into each other, and I fainted from the shock of hearing sounds I’d been practicing summoned—but not summoned close enough. And then came to in an emergency room hammering down rudeness on the nurses because I was still alive.

I wonder if I should have even described this to you, if I have scared you. But I imagine knowing you for a long, long time, and I have felt this blackness for a long, long time, and I don’t want to hide any part of my self from you.

Yours,

Bernard

March 13, 1958

Bernard—

You don’t scare me. I have not experienced feelings like that myself, but I think my mother suffered from them. I don’t think I can tell you anything that can lift you out of this blackness—here is where I may have a little blackness myself, in refusing to believe that humans can bulldoze each other out of despondency by applying the force of uplifting sentiment—but please don’t be afraid to write to me about it.

You’re right. I probably would have given you that look had we been classmates—and yes, I was giving all of you that look at the colony, but not really you specifically, although there was that one night I saw you fingering Lorraine’s necklace while you were all making plans to drive out, and I have to tell you I always thought you were too nice to Lorraine. I assumed it was because she was the only pretty thing there, and you couldn’t help yourself around pretty things. I know I can judge like an Irish mother-in-law, but I don’t think I was too far off. However, feel free to contest.

But back to school: I would have quoted scripture to you, too, if I thought you liked the sound of your own voice too much:
If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, but have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkly cymbal.
I would have nicknamed you the Sounding Brass. And you could have called me Tiny Methuselah.

Do I think we can ever hear God’s voice? Well, this goes back to what I said earlier—I think it might be dangerous to believe we hear him. I am suspicious of what we take to be signs—they may be only our own desires reflected back to us in an ostensibly fortuitous event. Simone Weil horrifies me, but I also believe a great deal of what she says is from God. Your question makes me think of something she has written: “But this presence of Christ in the host is not a symbol either, for a symbol is the combination of an abstraction and an image; it is something which human intelligence can represent to itself; it is not supernatural.” Whatever we may think we hear will be corrupted, or as she would say, debased.

To ask to hear God’s voice, to ask for signs—this seems to me impertinence of the highest order.

My aunts and my sister, however, would cluck their tongues at me and say that I have intellectualized myself out of one of the great pleasures of the Catholic faith: signs and wonders, and a network of saints to arrange for them. They certainly do believe God talks to us, and with a megaphone. My grandmother was big on praying for parking spots. “Help me out here, Lord,” she’d say when circling for one. “What if you’re dialing him and he’s busy?” I used to say. She’d laugh and tell me “Oh, hush,” and Ann would snip at me when we got out of the car, say that it wasn’t right to talk that way. Ann has snipped at me all her life. My aunt Peggy believes in the song of Bernadette and helps raise money for people to go to Lourdes. Ann can always turn a disappointment into a sign of God’s promise that something better will come along. The women in my family certainly do feel that his will will be done. My aunts all think that it’s God’s will that my mother died when she did. They have to. They have intimated to me and Ann that she was “unhappy.” I have figured out that what they mean is that she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown right after she married my father. I overheard them talking one day two years ago. They do not know I know this, and I am curious to see if they will ever bring it up. My father never will. And I won’t—to him, at least. Who knows what he went through? I can’t bear knowing, and I don’t think he could bear explaining. It’s none of my business. I believe that he loved us as fiercely as he did as a way to extinguish the sorrow.

Forgive me. I didn’t mean to go on that long. Bernard, I have a sneaking suspicion that one day you will get me to confess to all sorts of things without my realizing it.

But then there’s prayer and discernment. Prayer is a mystery I should not approach. I’m not very good at it. I don’t really do it unless I have it written out for me. Anything I came up with on my own would sound like my asking for a pony for Christmas.

Speaking of prayer, here’s something about Simone Weil that kills me. She says that it’s sort of humorous, the line “Our father, who art in heaven.” To think that we, so far from him, really could knock and receive him, when the distance is so great. I’m the last person to want to describe God as a constantly available warm lap, but this strikes me as self-abasement taken to an absurd degree. And then she writes: “Each time that we say ‘Thy will be done’ we should have in mind all possible misfortunes added together.” But her line is what seems like a joke to me—to say that God’s love always makes Jobs out of us. It’s like something Mencken or Twain would put in the mouth of a cynical reverend. I do believe with her that suffering is one way to hear God, or to know God. Or maybe we hear God when, per John, we sense that we are making him out to be a liar and his word is not in us. When we are aware of the distance between God and ourselves, because we are sinning, then we hear him—he emerges when we are ashamed of our nakedness, so to speak.

Then there are times that I think her theology might have sprung fully formed from her migraines.

Bernard, I do not want you to feel black. My prayers may be faulty, but know that whenever I pray I will be praying for your sky to rarely look ominous.

Yours,

Frances

March 31, 1958

Frances—

I’m so very sorry about your mother. I say all sorts of terrible things about mine, but if she died I think it would be as if there were, finally, no God. I am very glad, though, that you were as loved as you were.

Thinking about calling you Tiny Methuselah makes me considerably less black. Thinking about you in general makes me considerably less black.

I like to think of you praying such a lovely prayer. Thank you.

No, no, I do like pretty things. It’s the thorn in my flesh, as Paul would say. Lorraine wanted to be looked at, and I liked looking at her, in the way you can like looking at a view—you don’t need the view, but it’s nice that it’s there and you’ve come upon it, so it wasn’t as if I were robbing her of her virtue just by looking at her. Looking at someone who wants to be looked at—you know that’s not real sin, Frances, and you shouldn’t be jealous.

I have read Weil, and I do think she is right, mostly, as you say. She is right for this, too: “Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt. To accept the fact that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God. I am also other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.”

When I read this, I wince. Whenever I have imagined anyone to be other than what he or she is, whenever I have imagined myself to be other than what I am—here is where I have run into the most trouble in my life. That is when, as you say, I am ashamed of my nakedness. But I grow blind about that nakedness so easily.

She’s right, but you’re right about her too! I read her and think—if the Lord’s prayer is a joke, are the Psalms a joke? What is joy to her? All her ecstasies are in self-negation. She’s completely neurotic about the pull of other people, people as idols. I feel that we are reading someone castigating herself for having loved too much, or having been wronged by her own faith in another. And yet how can I complain about her? Who hasn’t idolized and in that idolizing come to grief? She is a seer like John. She’s the voice of Jesus when he says I have come to divide houses against each other. When I complain about her severity, it’s because I want my sin.

Or is that true?

Still, I think there’s too much Buddhism in her for me. And too much of Augustine in me to appreciate her—to think that love, happiness, and joy aren’t as intelligible, and truly evident, as suffering.

Yours,

Bernard

April 5, 1958

Bernard, I am not jealous. I believe that thought, to borrow a phrase from Sr. Weil, is a creature of your imagination. I laughed out loud when I read it. Oh, Bernard. Surely you know not every girl’s worth looking at. And not every girl is a jealous girl. Surely in your net-casting you have discovered this. I wasn’t jealous. I was, I repeat, being judgmental. You were two people playing at affection, it seemed, and as someone who reserves affection for only a select few, I thought this comfort on the stage was a little disturbing.

But this was before I knew you. I have to admit that at lunch that day, and for some time after, I had an idea that you might be something of a cad. I don’t think you’re a cad now. But perhaps there is too much of Augustine in you!

I do have great affection for Augustine, even if I don’t understand his appetites and the power they had over him.

Yours,

Frances

April 17, 1958

Dear Frances—

I’m going to read that last line of your last letter to mean that you also have great affection for me. This pleases me immensely.

Unfortunately, I have been a cad. Blindness makes for caddishness. Cruelty’s not the only way to be a cad. Although I have been cruel too.

I am curious—have you ever singled out someone for your affection? I’ve been wanting to ask this. Do not misunderstand my tone here; I ask with all the tenderness and innocence of a brother. Imagine me asking: Frances, what did you read as a child? And that is how I am asking this question.

You have made me uncharacteristically circumspect. I like that very much.

Yours,

Bernard

April 27, 1958

Dear Bernard—

There was a young man for whom I had affection at Iowa. He is now married to the woman who was my best friend at the time. That is all I will say about that.

Except to tell you that I found my dearest friend, Claire, because of this young man. I was in the ladies’ room during a dance crying in a stall because the young man had chosen this particular evening to break it off, and Claire happened to be in the next stall over. I kept flushing the toilet because I didn’t want anyone to hear me, because I was so ashamed of crying over him, and in public, but she heard the keening of self-pity above the tsunami of flushing and knocked on the stall. “Are you all right over there?” she said. “Can I get you some water, or an aspirin, or a drink?” I didn’t answer right away and she said, “Are you crying over someone?” That made me cry even harder, and Claire came out of her stall, washed her hands, and waited for me. “I don’t want to tell you how many times I’ve cried in the ladies’ room at dances,” she said through the door. “It’s revolting, I know. You hate yourself for it.” I liked that she used the word
hate.
I came out of the stall and saw a tall blonde in an emerald-green shantung shift, her hair swept up on top of her head. She looked at me and said: “What a fetching dress!” I told her I’d made it myself. Now it’s two years later and I don’t know what I’d do without her. That was the first and last school dance I ever attended, by the way. I’d rather go to a funeral.