Frances and Bernard (8 page)

Some weeks later, this gentleman got a job in Baltimore. She wrote him. After a few letters, though, he stopped writing back. But she kept it up. She wrote a letter a month for six months. When I saw her on the sixth letter—yes, I kept count—I couldn’t take it anymore. “Stop it!” I said to Ann as she sat in the kitchen writing another one. “Ann, he is never going to write back! If he’s not dead, you are dead to him!”

She stood up. She looked at me in a way I had never seen her look at me—as if I were dead to her. Then she walked out to the living room, took her coat, and went for a walk. We didn’t talk for a week after that.

The faith that sent Ann to her pen is the same faith that had her lighting candles for me and my book.

And I haven’t even told you about the girl I saw putting paraffin on her teeth in the bathroom one Saturday night. I asked her what she was doing—this seemed like something out of a courtesan’s toilette circa Versailles—and she said it covered the discoloration and crookedness of her teeth. Or the old lady who’s been here for twenty years, who wears a tiny, violet-colored, violet-sprigged hat with a veil to dinner and an inordinate amount of face powder—you can see the face powder on her smart little jackets—and reportedly has papered every inch of her room with pages from movie magazines.

I think I need to move out of here. I’m five helpings of mashed potatoes away from turning into a matronly mountain that will move nowhere toward its goal.

Yours,

Frances

October 18, 1958

Frances—

I am getting you out of that nunnery! Mark, a friend of mine who has been living in New York, is moving to New Hampshire to live deliberately. This leaves his apartment vacant. I spoke to him about you and he said he’d tell his landlord that he should give the apartment to you. If all goes well you can have his room—it’s in the West Village, there’s a Murphy bed in the wall—as of November 15. Call the school at St. Frances Xavier on Sixteenth Street—or Fifteenth Street, I forget which—and ask for Mark Fitzgerald.

Love,

Bernard

PS. I got asked to leave the farm; I’ll tell you about it later.

Write me in Boston when you write next.

October 30, 1958

Bernard—

Thank you. Thank you. I called Mark and went over and met with his landlord and I will be moving in with my books and percolator on November 15. This was the only time in my life that I was glad of being the weaker sex—I think my new Italian landlord is relieved to have what he imagines to be a proper lady occupying that room, and he gave me the place on the spot. A proper
Catholic
lady—I shamelessly asked Mr. Bellegia where I should go to Mass because I thought this might make him look favorably upon me. And I was right. It was just after this that he said the place was mine. I hope the Lord doesn’t mind that I took his name in gain. I’d like to believe that the Lord thought I was being wise as serpents. Mmm. Probably not.

I like this neighborhood very much. I like the river, I like the gray and brick, I like the tumult of people on the crosshatching of narrow streets.

Your very grateful friend,

Frances Reardon

PS. What did you do?!

November 10, 1958

Frances—

Now you are a real New Yorker, cushioned no longer by mashed potatoes and the
muy
loco in loco parentis of the Barbizon. I salute you! Those winds off the Hudson are strong. Be warned. Will they blow you up my way? I wonder.

I am enclosing the proofs of your story. It should be in the spring issue. I am allowing you ten corrections in total. It’s my policy: everyone gets up to ten corrections; more than that and the piece is pulled. I am imagining everyone as correction-mad as myself. This is why my book has taken this long to come out. I was on my fourth set of proofs when I saw you this summer. John Percy, my editor, has said that between the third and the fourth, the production department made a Wanted poster out of my author photo. I look forward to seeing this.

I have to come to New York in the next few weeks—am dropping off my pages. I can’t wait for those winds to blow me your way—may I visit?

What happened at the farm is that they caught me and the novelist—the novelist was a girl—swimming without suits in the pond at night. The girl didn’t mean anything to me, but they could not quite believe that. The girl was a little crazy; she had these huge eyes and was terribly thin, and whenever I looked at her I always felt she was trembling, but that was only an optical illusion brought on by the fact that she was talking incessantly, so much it made my teeth chatter, about being a vegetarian and Tolstoy and Gandhi and celibacy and a Russian professor of hers who was married and who kept writing her at the farm. “He is married,” she kept saying while giving me a look that I was supposed to understand meant that he’d slept with her, or was trying to, and I could too, if I wanted to. I didn’t do much to convince them I most certainly did not want to. The girl wanted to stay because she was broke and had nowhere else to go, and I think they’re going to keep her on, to take care of their daughter. Michael is probably a much better Christian than me—if I were as godly, I would not have decided to celebrate my last week of summer by swimming naked at night, but have you ever seen the moon waxing crescent, hanging low and white in the sky, and heard the breeze blow through the bushes and trees? You feel as ripening and shining as the night you are in, and it’s excruciating to stand there enduring nature—God’s instantiation, God’s invitation—as a spectator when you can plunge yourself in the middle of it. That felt sinful, to not plunge myself in the middle of it. It made me think of Augustine:

God, then, the most wise Creator and most just Ordainer of all natures, who placed the human race upon earth as its greatest ornament, imparted to men some good things adapted to this life, to wit, temporal peace, such as we can enjoy in this life from health and safety and human fellowship, and all things needful for the preservation and recovery of this peace, such as the objects which are accommodated to our outward senses, light, night, the air, and waters suitable for us, and everything the body requires to sustain, shelter, heal, or beautify it: and all under this most equitable condition, that every man who made a good use of these advantages suited to the peace of this mortal condition, should receive ampler and better blessings, namely, the peace of immortality, accompanied by glory and honor in an endless life made fit for the enjoyment of God and of one another in God—

Light, night, the air, and waters suitable for us.
That was what was in front of me, and I felt that I should make good use of them.

I quoted this passage to Michael as explanation, but he said I was perverting the text. That I was out of my mind to think that the passage legitimized my pagan gesture. I quoted Paul to him—you know, if you want to eat meat, eat meat; if you don’t, don’t, etc.—and then he said that my concept of sin was too precious and he quoted Paul back to me by reminding me that I was living according to the flesh, that I was too alive to sin and too dead to Christ. (Yes, the girl added luster to the evening, and I’ll confess to you that maybe I liked that there was something Edenic about the two of us in the water, and it occurred to me that I was indeed too alive to sin in that moment, but I was not interested in making anything more of our nakedness than a picture in my mind.) Michael and I went on for an hour, quoting scripture back and forth to each other, voices getting louder, which brought Eliza to the shed. She entered the room like Yul Brynner inspecting the slaves’ quarters or some such in
The Ten Commandments
(now I’m infected with your disdain, goddamn you) and put her hand on my arm, and while her touch was just a touch, just four fingers on my forearm, it put silence into me, because she was also looking at me with cold iron-gray-blue eyes, and then she said: “I think you are too great a disturbance to this house,” and asked me to leave. Ted thinks she got her moral authority purely from the fact that she’d thought I’d harassed a girl, not because I’d sinned. I laughed, but I think he’s wrong. Mostly.

Do you know we have now been writing to each other for just over a year?

Love,

Bernard

November 17, 1958

Bernard—

Thanks for the proofs. I have availed myself of all ten permissible corrections. I hope that rewriting a paragraph counts as a correction. Because four out of the ten are that. The rest was correcting what your proofreaders should have corrected. But I know you’re corralling glamour-seeking Harvard grads to do that stuff, so I can’t expect them to actually give a rat’s ass about doing their work. I think I smelled gin on these pages. Were these proofread at a cocktail party?

Bernard. You do realize that you have been kicked out of two Catholic communities for what looks like an inability to control yourself around women? I trust you left this out of your account because this goes without saying? I guess I should bring up Augustine again to scold you—you are still pre-conversion!—but this makes me laugh. Part of me thinks Ted just may be right. I like to think of your excesses as God visiting a judgment on these people’s fervor. That you have come to show them that the Church is the only house that could gather us sinners together in peace.

Please do come to visit my Catholic community of one. There are no chores except for making coffee and washing five dishes. Is this labor purging enough for you? I now have a small wooden table that I picked up off the street, with two wooden chairs, and I have taught myself how to make crepes. I have made them for my office mates—there was a small fire at the end of the evening when one Peter from publicity tried to turn a few into a flambé with his bottle of whiskey, and some of my bangs got singed off. But I stand undaunted with my spatula and would love to make some for you.

Yours,

Frances

November 27, 1958

Frances—

Yes, I do realize why I have gotten, as you say, kicked out of those two Catholic communities. I pray every day to have a calmer heart. I have been praying to the Holy Spirit. I’m not ashamed, but I am confused as to why this keeps happening. Why I go blank to reason, to self-control, to the purity God asks of me. Why I think I am doing the thing God wants me to do. Why I would not feel ashamed for him to find me in the middle of what I am doing. I take comfort in Paul: I do the things I do not want to do, and never do things I know I should. I take comfort also in Augustine, it’s true: the long, slow grudging, confused progress to God. The detour through the sin he thought was light.

I take comfort in the fact that you have borne with me.

I hear that the
Paris Review
wants to do an interview with me on the occasion of the publication of my book. It’s supposed to be a conversation on how the classics have informed my work (their phrasing). I would rather they talk about how Catholicism has informed my work, because that is the real story, but the
Paris Review
doesn’t know what to do about God taken up in earnest by someone who is not a demagogue or a rube. They are sending a young Barnard grad up to Boston to do it. They are doing a bright-young-things issue, and it appears that I am one of their favorites. I told them that you are one of my favorites. I sent them a copy of your story.

What are you doing for Thanksgiving? There is no avoiding going home for dinner. It will involve aunts and uncles and cousins, and soup tureens, and heirloom silver, and ivory linens scalloped at their edges with yellowing lace, and my mother will sit next to my father, who will be at the head of the table, and castrate him with a dozen nearly imperceptibly cutting remarks, some of which he will laugh at because, although he will sense that he is being demeaned, he will not have the strength of intelligence necessary to seize on the nature of the complaints. He needs my mother to anchor him and make him feel that he has done his duty as a man. Which is: to marry someone suitable and fill the house his forebears have had possession of since the eighteenth century with his own family. Having done this, he has felt free to float indefinitely in the uneventful heaven of middle mercantilism, falling further and further asleep into the past, where my mother was tempestuous but not yet sour. “Is it time for feeding?” he’ll say, walking into the kitchen, where my mother and my aunts will be furiously battening down the hatches. Few will have read, and no one will have understood, my book. “Bernard,” my mother will say, “these poems do give me a headache. But I trust that the people in New York know what they’re doing.” My father will not have read them at all. He will feel threatened by them, because even though he does not care for the life of the mind, he knows that somewhere in the life of the mind, his son is a success in a way he never was, and he paid for all the education, but he never meant for the education to mean anything; for him, Harvard was a convention to be observed the way church was a convention for my mother. But he enjoys feeling me out for poverty to see if he can’t compromise me with an offer of his money. I’ve caught him inspecting the bottoms of my shoes for holes. Back to dinner. If my grandmother were still alive she would say that it’s a good thing my mother didn’t have a girl because any girl my mother had would have had to spend her whole life in exile from the dessert table. And then she’d cut me an extra-large slice of pie. My uncle George will ask me why I’m not wearing a collar if I’m a priest, and I will have to remind him again that I didn’t end up going to seminary. And he will say, like he always says, that I’m much better off that way because I know the Catholic Church is filled with greasy, immigrant blood-drinking pagans, don’t I, and it would be like serving a mission in Africa if I had to pastor that herd. This is my father’s brother. His daughter, my cousin Caroline, however, will ask me about my teaching and tell me that she will try to read my book, and I will ask her about her teaching and then try to remember if I have met any young men who are tender enough for her. Caroline teaches kindergarten at a progressive school in Boston—she’s an Alcott daughter brought up by bankers. She has Walden Pond in her eyes but some schoolmarm in her heart, so she won’t stray too far from the Eliot ethos, which is mulish pursuit of respectability and material comfort. She and Ted once had an abortive, though charming, interlude that ended because Ted needs a little less Walden Pond and a little more Mediterranean tempest, and she needs a little less crank and a little more complacency.