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 appet.i.tes 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 circ.u.mspect. 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.
Now, tell me what you read as a child.
Yours, Frances.
May 7, 1958.
Dearest Frances-.
I"ve done some shabby things, but I"ve never thrown a girl over for her friend. I pray I never do. But it sounds like you won, in the end, if such a thing as Claire transpired shortly after.
Permit me to lecture for a moment: Uncle Bernard says that unless you, like Kierkegaard, are desiring and capable of basing a whole system of philosophy around this rejection, you should fall in love again. And again and again, if you have to. It is one of life"s greatest pleasures.
I can hear your eyes rolling all the way up here in Boston. Your blue, blue eyes.
As commanded: here is what I read as a child, ranked in order of moral and aesthetic influence.
The Bible. All the way through at seven years old and then repeatedly, daily, as of noon today, at breakfast. Psalm 51. King James Version.
Paradise Lost. At eleven years of age. My affinity for the devil was almost as terrifying to me as the idea of him.
The Iliad and The Odyssey. Eight. With these words he led the way and the others followed after with a cry that rent the air, while the host shouted behind them.
Bulfinch"s Mythology. Eight.
Hamlet, at twelve.
d.i.c.kens"s A Child"s History of England. At seven. I began by imagining myself as Alfred, but by the end worshiped Cromwell, because he was a Puritan, too, and I drafted the neighborhood boys into a New Model Army. There was a mutiny soon after, I don"t think I need to tell you, that sent me indoors for the rest of the summer reading- Treasure Island.
Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen. Read them over and over when I was six, which is when I decided that I wanted to marry a mermaid. I had a habit of swimming too far out to find them and would have to be dragged bodily out of the Atlantic by my father. After one of these episodes, while I shivered on the sand wrapped in a tartan blanket, I heard my grandmother, my mother"s mother, who sat immobilized beneath a parasol like an iceberg dressed in black, more tartan blankets covering the diabetic gangrenous foot that I was always told to keep out of the way of, say: "The only way you"re going to get that boy to behave is by running him over with a car. Pity you can"t." And then she winked at me. I have often thought that my father was frightened by what he imagined was the beginning of the disease of lovesickness-the same disease that had had him panting after my mother, who by this point in their marriage had turned like milk; now she was a materialistic withholding scold. But I more than made up for whatever softness he feared by a period of prep.u.b.escent pugilism, a reign of terror in which I pulped anyone who wouldn"t let me take charge or have my way. This subsided, mostly, in high school, though I did, my first year at Harvard, throw a punch at Ted. I missed. He, in response, knocked me out. This is why I conscripted him into a friendship. We cannot for the life of us remember why I threw a punch at him. Ted likes to say it was because we showed up to the bar wearing the same dress.
When I ask my freshmen what they have read, they all stare at me for a moment, and then talk about television and comic books. Could a gap of eight or so years really make that much difference? I suppose you and I could have been listening to cereal-sponsored serials on the radio, but we didn"t-or did you? I can tell you, however, that Superman is actually quite an amazing read, should you find yourself at a drugstore lunch counter with all the day"s papers sold out.
Love (may I?), Bernard.
May 8, 1958.
Dear Frances-.
I wrote and mailed, forgetting that I"d wanted to ask the following.
Would you like to contribute to the Charles Review? I can"t pay you, but I can offer you publication in an esteemed journal, your words jostling alongside those of Pulitzer winners and expatriate literary lions. I won"t put you near the Iowan chaff.
Yours, Bernard.
May 16, 1958.
Dear Uncle Bernard-.
Your niece Frances-a four-eyed, French-plaited platypus awaiting the evaporation of her baby fat-thanks you very much for the romantic advice. But I"ve never been one to spend time thinking about why men and women take to each other, or why they don"t. I think it can turn a lady neurotic, a term I despise but also am loath to have turned in my direction.
I think I read more like your students! I had a period where I was reading lots of comic books-one of my uncles drove a truck for a magazine distributor and always brought home tons of whatever didn"t sell. So I agree-Superman is really quite an amazing read. As an excuse for this, I"m going to say that in my child"s mind, comic books were as potboiling and morally clear as Bible stories, and that was why I ate them up. I read a lot of Nancy Drew too, even though I knew it was the same story over and over again. When I"d read all of them and back again, my aunts piled a lot of Judy Bolton on me, thinking I"d love that too. Not the same. I read them all, though, in a summer, hoovering like they were Cracker Jack. Fell asleep reading them on the beach down the sh.o.r.e and got sunburned. And I didn"t really even like them. Sometimes I wonder if the automatic way I consumed them, one after the other, thinking of nothing but getting to the next one but without real appreciation for the taste, means I have it in me to be an alcoholic. Then I think that reading-something, anything-was maybe a way to hide in a family where I was always required to be in plain sight. n.o.body approved of being antisocial. Anyway. I didn"t read Treasure Island, but I did read The Swiss Family Robinson. Robinson Crusoe too. I really did love Little Women, although I could not stand that the girls called their mother something so sissy as Marmee, and you will not be surprised to hear that I identified with Jo and pictured Ann whenever Amy popped up. Little Women was one of several books my mother had owned and that my aunts gave me the Christmas I was eight; the others were Heidi, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre. The next Christmas, my father gave me the books he"d read in childhood-and that was how I read nearly all of d.i.c.kens. I am looking at these old books on my shelf as I write to you. Their leather is as dark as dirt now, and the tops of the spines are fraying. If this place burned down they would be the first thing I grabbed.
I did not read Paradise Lost until about a year ago, I"m afraid. (I have to say, I agree with you about Satan being the draw. Adam and Eve: Who cares?) Can you find it within yourself to keep up a correspondence with this northeastern hillbilly? Uncle Bernard, maybe you should send me a box full of Greek tragedy-perhaps this is what I really need, more than advice for the lovelorn. Or perhaps Greek tragedy is advice for the lovelorn! You tell me.
As to your second letter: I would love to be published in the Charles Review. I"m enclosing a chapter from the novel. If this offends, no offense taken. Will I also receive a handsome m.u.f.fler with the Charles Review st.i.tched into it? I look best in green and gray.
Yours, Frances.
May 28, 1958.
Dear Frances-.
Am so pleased that you will contribute. I warn you, I will edit.
Since the last time you wrote, I"ve grown a little dark. Ted has proposed to, and been accepted by, this woman who will, very shortly after they marry, certainly seduce him into going to law school. Which will not be difficult, because Ted"s novel has been rejected by several houses, and he doesn"t have the confidence to keep going. He should keep going, but I think he will escape from this catastrophe-what he feels to be a catastrophe, because he"d told himself that if he couldn"t publish this book, he would give up on writing-into domesticity. He was waiting to be saved into writing but now has to ask this woman to save him into the next thing, which will be a comfortable haute bourgeois existence, with children, just like the one his parents led. Ted doesn"t need much, but he does need to look extremely capable, and he knows he could lawyer and he knows he could make money, because his family has been making money for generations. (Ted, against my vociferous rumblings, ran a lucrative poker game out of our rooms at Harvard. I don"t mind gambling on my own physical strength, or talent, or attractiveness, but there"s something about gambling away money that makes me queasy. Must be the Puritan in me.) I haven"t said anything to him about this woman. But I think he knows what I think, and this is making the apartment strangely, portentously quiet.
Kay is the daughter of a congressman from Mississippi. I almost wrote clergyman, and I think that there is some provincial parsimony dripping off her aquiline nose. She"s too beautiful to be a harridan, but she has the soul of one. One weekend when she came to visit and Ted and I ran out for more liquor, she emptied all of our ashtrays on the floor, sat waiting at the dining room table for us to come back, and said: "I"ll clean this all up but I wanted you two to understand how disgusting it is to live as you do, especially from a lady"s standpoint." "I"ll clean it up, lady," he said, with an emphasis on that last word, and she and I stared each other down while Ted went to get the broom. I can see why Ted"s in love with her. She possesses the tenderness of a portrait of Dora Maar, and the forceful will to conquer realities that has been exhibited by all the southern women I have met.She looks like the daughter of a sixteenth-century Spanish innkeeper and views her life"s journey as akin to Sherman"s march to the sea. She is beautiful. I should despise Ted, because it"s the kind of marriage you"d make if you needed money or wanted to get into politics, and Ted sure as h.e.l.l doesn"t need money and thinks politics is a game utopians follow because baseball bores them. (As I write, I hear you wondering, as I sometimes wonder: Why am I friends with Ted? Well, he"s one of the smartest people I know, and when I met him I felt that our blood boiled at the same temperature, even though it might not be set to boil by the same writers, the same injustices, or the same women. It is one of those relationships in which a semi-inexplicable current of respect for the other"s intensity and strength is responsible for the bond.) So I don"t despise Ted, even though I think what he is doing is setting himself up to follow the family line out of a lack of courage. The old story, and still an enraging story. No, I despise her.
Frances, tell me if I am in the wrong here. I don"t trust any of the women I know in Boston to tell me the truth.
Love, Bernard.
June 4, 1958.
Dear Bernard-.
I"m very sorry to hear about Ted. I"m going to take Shakespeare a little out of context: "Go to, I"ll no more on "t; it hath made me mad. I say, we will have no more marriages."
The women on my mother"s side of the family, my three aunts and my grandmother, they all married well enough and out of the immigrant melodrama of innumerable babies and strife, but growing up I saw how they seemed to do nothing but cook, clean, scold, and sew. It appeared that mothering was being maid and confessor to three to seven people. Or more, if you took your Catholicism seriously. Which, as I have already established, my aunts did. They were always giving safe harbor to the kids in the neighborhood who did live in the strife-inviting them for dinners, cutting their hair, giving them my cousins" castoffs. My aunts ran an ad hoc mission out of their homes. Ann, who would marry a stray dog if she could, has a great deal of them in her. This is why I won"t marry. I am not built for self-abnegation. If I"m built for anything, it"s writing. I can"t even teach! I had to, when I was at Iowa, but I was not very good at hiding my displeasure at mental sleepiness and mediocrity. And if anyone gets my self-abnegation, it needs to be the Lord. He"s been waiting a very long time for it. He"ll be pleasantly surprised one of these days if it ever shows up.
I approve wholeheartedly of the marriage of Claire and Bill- Claire is a reporter and Bill teaches Latin at an expensive Catholic boys" school, and I don"t think I"ll ever see two people as in love with each other as they are. It makes me think that a marriage of true minds-to again quote S.-is in many ways just dumb luck. Two of my childhood friends have married men I think are complete dullards. One of them I might even describe as a lout. This husband, drunk at their Christmas party, said that he"d always wondered if I was a lesbian but that I must not be because a lesbian couldn"t possibly look that good in black velvet. I told him that he didn"t know much about lesbians then. But the wives do not seem to mind the way I mind. They do not see their husbands as extensions of their personalities; they see them as means to motherhood and material comfort. They seem happy with their children, happy with their dresses and their homes. They seem happy and oblivious. Sometimes I think they have happened upon a spiritual discipline I might do well to adopt. When I do not think they"re fools.
I wonder if Ted isn"t just after his own version of this happiness? I know that thinking of it this way is no consolation. I have never been good at thinking myself out of disappointment, so take this for what it"s worth. Some people don"t need more than what"s in front of them. Mostly I feel just fine about not having this talent but sometimes (see above)-well, I"ll just say "but sometimes," and leave it at that. I don"t know Ted, but if he can talk back to this lady, I think he knows what he"s about.
I"m going to shut up now. You"re not in the wrong.
Yours, Frances.
June 10, 1958.
Dear Frances-.
Your letter did help. I know that this is probably just a boy"s recalcitrance to accept the fact that romance takes different shapes among us. What makes Ted feel like he"s alive is not what makes me feel alive, and it may be that Ted doesn"t need to be as alive as I do, and I have to accept that. When a friend stops reflecting you back to yourself in a way that keeps your vanity buffed and shined-that"s all this is, I suppose. There is something in my bones that senses eventual divorce, however.
All right, all right, enough, enough. I will keep in mind what Frances the Spiritual Director has suggested.
Love to you-.
Bernard.
June 26, 1958.
Bernard-.
I got a job in New York. Did you know I can type like a demon? Well, I can, and this talent has led me to be hired as Alfred Sullivan"s secretary at Sullivan and Shields. Jeanette, a friend of mine from Iowa who lives in New York mingling among the literary, has been keeping her ear to the ground for me and when she heard of this she thought I would be perfect for it. Alfred Sullivan, as you know, is seventy-nine and almost senile but still vain about his father"s name, and thus he needs to be placated so he"ll keep paying everyone. Alfred Sullivan needs a secretary. Or the illusion of a secretary, and here"s where I come in. The old one died. She was sixty-seven. She"d been with him for thirty years. She might even have been his mistress, but no one"s saying. And if he dies after a year, at least I will have gotten to New York. Her name was Frances too. I believe Mr. Sullivan is a superst.i.tious, sentimental old Irish fool.
Which I am very grateful for, because his patronage is making it possible for me to stay at the Barbizon. Do you know this place? Actresses, writers, models, secretaries, convented away from menfolk so they can play at being career girls without being molested before they get married-when they"ll be molested legally. Another nunnery. But I get my own room, and meals are provided, and it"s clean and cheap. Mr. Sullivan wrote me a letter of reference, and he got another big shot at the house to write one for me too. I think, after nearly a year of waitressing and keeping house for my father and Ann, I will allow myself to enjoy a certain amount of paternalism.
This job has come at the right time. When I begin to be short with my father at the dinner table, I know things have gone sour.
I thought you might like to know this news. I hope you"re feeling better.
Yours, Frances.
July 2, 1958.
Dear Frances-.
I laughed out loud at your letter. I congratulate you. If a writer has to have a job, serving as handmaiden to the obsolete is the best kind to have. This nunnery, however, sounds ridiculous. Make me proud and get kicked out of there, won"t you?
And I"ve read your chapter. It"s fantastic. I have one thought: the ending is too abrupt. I think the problem is that you, the author, know what"s coming next in the book and can rest easy in that knowledge, but maybe there"s a way that you can adjust for those who don"t have that privilege. No, I have a second thought: I am hungry for Sister to say one thing that gives evidence of her theology-that she has a theology.
I really do think it"s wonderful. You make me ashamed of all my words.
Yours, Bernard.
July 9, 1958.
Dear Bernard-.
I can"t tell you how glad I am that you liked what I sent you. But I don"t want to change a thing. If there is lingering discomfort at the end, all the better.
I write you from my s...o...b..x in the Barbizon. I have a tiny window. It looks out onto Sixty-Third Street, and since I am up high, the sunsets have been lovely evening companions. This place is very clean, which I require. But why are women so awful? Everyone"s perfectly nice-which is the problem. At dinner, the only thing they can think to ask me about, after my job, is whether I"m going with anyone. When I answer no, cheerfully, and keep eating, you can feel the pity and suspicion tiptoeing around in their silence. Since they can"t make their pity or suspicion public, they have to be encouraging: "Oh, you"ll find someone, I"m sure. It"s a big city!" It"s like eating dinner with my sister, only multiplied by eight to ten. Though my sister knows how to make a joke. These girls have some money-they"re daughters of doctors and lawyers and bankers-and I think money eliminates the need for the catharsis of humor. Kierkegaard says that comedy transpires in the gap between the eternal and the temporal, and I think that these girls, because they have not known the disappointment of being caught between what one hopes for and what one actually receives, can"t make jokes. But you know more rich people than I do, so correct me if I"m wrong.
The job is a joke.
I can"t invite you up to my chamber, but I could have you to dinner if you come to visit. Do you like instant mashed potatoes? I do. They are on offer every night.
Yours, Frances.
July 16, 1958.
Dear Frances-.
I"m so glad you"re happy. That place sounds as ridiculous as I imagined. I send you my pity, made public. But women are awful for the same reason men are awful: limited scope. And the rich can too make jokes. About their help, in whom they are constantly disappointed.
I see your point about the ending. I suppose I ask for more clarity in prose than I ask for in poetry. That is chauvinistic of me. You"re lucky I like you. Otherwise I would stare you down. As I have had to stare down even the expatriate literary lion, over a line of Latin he had incorrectly translated.
I would like to come and see you very much. There are a number of people I could stay with. I don"t have much to do this summer, seeing as how I"ve been given the fall semester off to start this new book.
I do sometimes wish we were in the same city. I do often wish we were in the same city.
Where are you going to church?
Yours, Bernard.
July 27, 1958.
Bernard-.
I"m going to church at Our Lady of Peace, which is on Sixty-Second Street. There"s very little to recommend it other than it"s convenient. The organist pounds away like she"s at a Yankees game, which amuses me. The last time I went I saw the priest, making his way back down the aisle at the end of the Ma.s.s, give a little start and then purse his lips when the force of the first bars of the benediction clapped him from behind. I enjoyed that little hiccup of fallibility. But I don"t think I need anything from the other people around me. I"m there for the liturgy and the host. I don"t even need the homily. Like you as a child in your Congregational church.
I went to an honest-to-goodness literary c.o.c.ktail party the other night, courtesy of my employer. Despite the fact that it brought back the feeling I had at the colony of being a teetotaling toddler among the lotus-eaters, I enjoyed myself. I had a substantive conversation with another secretary at the company about what we"d been reading lately. But my favorite part of the evening? Overhearing conversations about (a) a writer whose fiancee left him for the actor hired to play him in the movie version of his autobiographical novel; (b) a writer whose publisher flew her out to Los Angeles and put her up in the Amba.s.sador Hotel to get her away from a jazz musician who was making it impossible for her to finish her second novel; and (c) the husband half of a pair of married writers, less successful and less prolific than his wife, who apparently confessed to his editor that he"d thrown out her diaphragm and gotten her drunk one night in an attempt to get her pregnant and out of the limelight for a couple of years.
Do you know that I could not catch any of the names of these people? Drat. Was being polite and trying to look interested when spoken to. Somehow I"d gotten the impression-this must have come from Iowa, where everyone paired up out of boredom and was mostly too frozen to fire up scandal-that the modern way is for writers in love to cheer each other on from their matching Scandinavian desks. But this is not the case, at least in New York. Those coolly modern Scandinavian desks do not hide the fact that things are still very barbarous between men and women.
To my point: I know you remember Jim Schultz, the Esquire editor who told that story at dinner one night at the colony about having his publisher expense the wh.o.r.ehouses Jim visited while reporting in Vietnam. Well, he came up to me at the bar when I was getting another drink and said, "Is this Frances Reardon?" "Yes," I said. "You look a shade less impregnable than last summer," he said, tapping my collarbone (I had on a boat-necked dress-forgive me if you don"t know what that is; for a moment I forgot that I was writing to you and not Claire). "You look a shade more sober," I said. He laughed. It was true: hair less greasy, suit less creased. "You know my nickname for you was f.a.n.n.y Price," he said. "If that"s an overture," I said, "I feel compelled to inform you that the door is padlocked." He raised his gla.s.s to me and then I pointedly ignored him while I waited for my drink. I have nothing to add to that anecdote, only that it is offered up in the spirit of having suffered through the same people during a summer.