Frances and Bernard (7 page)

Then I watched her kneel and cross herself at Mass and she was so intent and yet unselfconscious in her movements it was as if I were watching a doe settle itself down in a green hush. Standing next to her in the pew, I felt that God truly lived within her. I didn’t want to seduce her. I just wanted to settle down by her side and drink at this stream with her.

And then I sang the Agnus Dei too loudly for her tastes, and she shushed me with a shush worthy of the gargoyles at the Bodleian. At lunch afterward I must have asked her one too many questions about Etienne Gilson and she put down her knife and fork in exasperation and said, “Bernard, God is not proctoring an exam!”

She is a girl, but she is also an old man, and I see that there is intractability in her heart that may never be shattered. Perhaps that is because she grew up among women who love harder than they think, and she has strengthened her innate intractability in order to keep tunneling toward a place where she could write undisturbed by the demands of conventional femininity. So she may always think harder than she loves.

I make her smile—in spite of herself, I can tell. This appeals to the part of me that needs a conquest. That is romance enough, I think, in this particular situation. And she is wise. She might have picked that up from the women who raised her, though she might not admit it. I have not met many women who seem wise. I have met women who are shrewd, but that is a different story.

Maybe you’ll meet her soon. I think you’d like her, very much. Maybe we could kidnap her and bring her to Maine and have her cook for us and tease us into submission.

Yours,

Bernard

August 26, 1958

Dear Claire—

Thank you for your letter. I wish you lived here. Or I lived there. Well, no. I don’t think Chicago is for me. Those people are too damn nice! How do you stand it?

Bernard Eliot came to visit this past weekend. I think I can call him a friend. We could not stop talking. Talking to him was like talking to you—only I don’t roll my eyes out of sheer exhaustion when I talk to you. So we talked. We spent five hours in a bar talking, two nights in a row. We talked. We talked, and walked. He thinks walking is “a purification,” and so we walked all the way around the city, setting out from Sixty-Third and Lexington, going down the East Side, curving around the tip of the island, then all the way back up to the West Side and through Central Park and home. He lived here a few years ago and so I did enjoy seeing the city from all different angles, and being shown these angles by someone who knew the ones that made the city look its best. Though I whined a little—you know me, I love to walk, but sometimes my slothful nature makes me want to sit down somewhere and then lie down on the floor with a box of crackers within reach. When I’m done, I’m done. Especially in August. So when I whined too loudly once he put us in a cab and took me for oysters at the Oyster Bar and insisted on buying a bottle of champagne—at the counter, where he told me what he thought I ought to look for in a husband. According to Bernard, and he’s thought a lot about this, I need to marry someone with money, which is not something he believes in usually, but he thinks I have the constitution for it, and the world, he said, needs my books. He says this, of course, having read one chapter of my first and only one. And after he’s heard me say several times that I do not want to marry. If this had come from someone else I would have been offended, but here it amused, because Bernard loves to pontificate and regrets not having had siblings he could pontificate to. His students aren’t enough. Right after he made this pronouncement he gave me a look like a taxidermist trying to decide where to start skinning and said, “I can see exactly how you would have looked in pigtails.” Which means there is no enchantment afoot.

So. We went to the Cloisters. We went to Mass. (He was too boisterous a singer during the Agnus Dei and I elbowed him and reflexively whispered a shush, though I was touched because he really does seem grateful, even desperate, for God’s mercy, and he just elbowed me back and kept singing.) He came to dinner two nights at the henhouse, and the girls ate him up, he was so solicitous of their aspirations, romantic and otherwise. Now, where had they gone to school? Did the young man they were dating seem serious? People are oxygen to him. It’s the part of him that can stand up in front of a classroom and teach. Whereas I think being around all those kids is going to give me some sort of disease of the mind—some degenerative disease contracted from contact with their undercooked brains. He told me later, half jokingly, that he’d chatted with the girls because he wanted to thaw me out in front of them. It was hilarious. Also a little maddening. I found myself jealous of those girls! Those sorority girls! Which makes no sense. Or maybe it was that I was jealous of his ability to charm and be gracious and make it seem effortless, make it seem an extension of his intelligence. While I tend to silently judge, or make an untimely crack.

Have you seen his picture somewhere in your reading? If not: big head, long straight nose rubbery at the tip, wide forehead, large mouth, finished off by open American eyes and a mild shock of brown hair. The bigness of his head, the calm of it, filled with what it is filled with, brings to mind a marble bust that might be trying to get itself on a pedestal.

But his mind and his heart seem free of cruelty—as he talked, I saw them as two gears connected by the same belt, a belt running at top speed, frequently hiccupping and flapping at the speed and the strain before correcting itself and grinding on.

That is Bernard.

My love to Bill.

Love,

Frances

September 1, 1958

Frances—

For the month of October I am going to live on Michael Lynch’s farm in West Virginia. I think you must know Michael from Iowa; he taught poetry there a few years ago. The idea is that I am going to pray and do manual labor. I’ve been feeling too cosmopolitan and scattered on the wind. A novelist, a girl from Kenyon, might show up too. Michael’s wife, Eliza, is also a poet, and they have a young daughter named Karen. Here’s my address:

Route 32, Box 2

Ravenswood, WV 26164

I hope New York is not killing you in this heat. I would ask you to come to the farm but I think I know what your answer would be.

Yours,

Bernard

September 8, 1958

Mr. Hair Shirt—

Since you know what my answer will be, I will not be reticent in letting you know what I think of Michael Lynch and his wife. He had a small crowd of acolytes that floated with him everywhere. Everyone thought that because I was Catholic and not an eighty-year-old Italian woman, I would love him too, but this was not the case. Michael and Eliza (she taught undergraduate poetry classes and taught piano too; I know you know all this, but did you know her real name is
Eileen?
) had faces that seemed cold with self-regard and I think what they imagined to be beatitude from their constant engagement with the upper regions of Catholic thought. Ugh. I read who they read, but I didn’t wear what they wore. Their trying so hard to look the part of conscientious objectors made me suspicious of their purity. Pardon me—I
didn’t
read exactly what they read. Dostoevsky was another Evangelist to them, the Grand Inquisitor chapter in
Bros. Karamazov
being the Sermon on the Mount. This gave me an antipathy for D. that I have just recently overcome. Eliza once came up to me after Mass and asked if I wanted to join them in praying the rosary on Sunday evenings. I demurred. When you grow up with women who pray the rosary as regularly as they do the laundry, with women to whom the laundry was a form of the rosary, it cannot be a project to reclaim it for your fancy piety. I hear that on his farm you live in sheds with the cows and piss out your window as if you were a medieval peasant.

That said, I hope you enjoy your time there. You have been busy this year, and you do deserve some rest. If you figure out a way to pray without ceasing—by which I mean without starting to wonder what you can fix for dinner—write me.

Yours,

Frances

September 16, 1958

Frances, you crank. I’ll pray for your soul while I’m there. On a rosary.

Affectionately,

Mr. Hair Shirt

October 6, 1958

Bernard—

I hope your writing is going well.

I hope you do not mind me interrupting your solitude with a letter, but I turned my novel in today and wanted to tell someone who would understand that particular achievement. I am thoroughly sick of it, but I’m not sure that the people who now have it will be able to do anything to make it better. Now that the initial surprise and excitement of having a book contract have worn off, fear of the ineptness of my new editor has set in. She has recently used the word
irregardless
in a letter to my agent.

The henhouse has turned gothic. Some of the sorority girls are now bitter. “You’ll do anything for a steak,” I heard one of them say last week at dinner, “but then that’s not all they want you to eat, the steak.” So there is the suggestion that they are now choking the men down along with the steak; that both delicacies, steak and sex, have become repulsive. Then there is Regina. She is studying to be an actress and is working as a secretary. She’s from Brooklyn. She has three sweaters and three skirts, she told me, which she bought to combine in six different ways. And a good black wool dress, she said, for when she has to go somewhere nice. She offered to loan me the dress once when I mentioned I had to go to a dinner for work, but I’m not keen on treating my closet like a lending library, so I said that I would prefer not to wear something that had a Dewey decimal number sewn into it. She did not laugh. It seems that several girls have gone in on that dress, but Regina paid the most, so it hangs in her closet. One night at dinner she leaned over to me and said: “Do you see that girl?” It was a girl across the room; she was talking and eating, nothing out of the ordinary. “She got in trouble,” Regina said, “for using too many condiments at dinner.” Then she says: “That girl and I moved here at the same time. We used to eat together, but she found those girls”—I looked at those girls, and they did seem a little more shampooed than Regina, who is bohemian manqué, like Marjorie Morningstar, only Italian, Catholic, and with an acoustic guitar—“and then that was the end of that.” Regina kept looking at the girls. I kept eating. “You see the girls here turn,” she said. “You see them fall prey to New York. Their hair is different, the clothes get showier, they’re talking all high class where they used to talk regular, and suddenly they’re not sitting with you at dinner. They’re going out with men.” Abruptly Regina went sour: “You just see them turn.” I decided not to sit with Regina anymore, and now I have the uneasy feeling that she is going to find some other girl to turn to, then locate me in the dining room, point me out, and tell this new girl that I hoard dinner rolls and silverware. Or she may come after me with one of the dull dinner knives, scratched out of its luster by endless runs in the dishwasher, and serrate me to death in my sleep.

Then there is a woman reading her way to Christian Scientism. Her name is Sarah. From Ohio. She is overweight. I’ve gone to visit her room and seen a few family photographs, so I know she was once slender. You can see how she might have been a pretty chorus-girl type—sweetheart face, big eyes, blond Veronica Lake waves, rosebud lips. Her eyes are the eyes of a girl who knows she believes lies but can’t do anything other than believe them. She moved in ten years ago—she wanted to sing in musicals—and she has never left. She never did really sing onstage—“Now I never will, I guess,” she says, referring to her weight—but she helps run the kitchen in return for room and board. If anyone is hoarding dinner rolls, it’s Sarah. She says she thanks the Lord for making this room available to her. She says she feels now that the Lord meant for her to sit quietly and figure out his mysteries through her reading, and she wouldn’t exchange that opportunity for anything. Her room is full of books by people who have radio hours. It’s the gospel according to Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, and Aimee Semple McPherson—American dynamism gilded into a platform for individual redemption. It’s religion as detergent. I thank God I was born Catholic. At least our fairy tales involve eyes being put out and women being stretched out on racks—suggesting there is no evasion of pain and suffering. That there is no redemption without suffering, and that suffering is sometimes the point.

Where was I? Forgive me. Sarah haunts me. I think I see Ann in her. Ann isn’t in the sorority girls; I was mistaken. Ann is in Sarah. They have the same eyes. Right before I left home, Ann and I had a fight. Did I tell you about this when you came? Earlier last year, my sister met a man at a dance. He was, she said, a men’s-clothing buyer for Wanamaker’s, and after that dance they spent a few evenings together. She fell for him. He was an Italian, handsome and traveled, and of course he dressed very, very well. He came for dinner. He was not overly ingratiating. He had manners. He asked my father about his job. He asked me what Iowa was like—he had family out there farming and couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live in a place like that. But I watched him with Ann and there was an air of the waiting room about him—I got the sense that she was not a specific person to him, just someone pretty he had started chatting with while waiting to be called in for his annual. As someone who often cannot bear to be around even those people she loves, I will never understand this kind of personality—the just-dropping-by-out-of-boredom. I didn’t think it was manners that kept him from looking at her with desire or with the kind of adoration that is subdued because it is in public but still obvious nevertheless. I don’t know anything about romance, but I have my ideas about how people should show that they prefer each other over the vast horde. My father thought he seemed like enough of a gentleman, and to that I said yes, enough to come into a middle-class house and share a meal with strangers, but not so much that he’s going to carry Ann out of here on some steed the way she wants. My father said nothing, and for a moment I regretted saying what I’d said. My father reveres romance—he thinks he and my mother had a great one—and he wants that for Ann the way he wants success for me. The problem is that Ann suspects she’s beautiful but doesn’t truly know it. If she did, she could be dumb and scheming like Undine Spragg and we wouldn’t worry about her.