Yours, Frances July 12, 1959 Dear Claire- Do you know what heaven must be like? I mean, a child"s conception of heaven-a place you dread being caught dead in because it must be everlastingly quiet and mirthless? It must be like Proper Boston. Which is where Bernard"s parents reside. Every time I took a step in their house I swear I heard the china and silverware rattle-no doubt an alarm to let the ancient Proper Bostonians know that some Irish servant girl"s descendant was trespa.s.sing on their grounds, possibly with the intent to burgle-and in the deep silence a grandfather clock ticked off every eternal second. The house looked like the Colonial-era period rooms I remember staring into at the art museum: mahogany chests sitting like thrones in every room, discreet whispers of pewter and white lace. Bernard"s parents were perfectly civil, but they seemed to have no actual life in them. His mother asked questions but didn"t seem to care how you answered, and his father fell asleep at the table just before coffee was brought out. Bernard then woke his father up by whistling through his fingers, which is how he said his father used to wake him up when he was a teenager. "Do you want to give your father a heart attack right now, Bernard?" his mother said, floating toward the table with the coffee tray in a haze of matriarchal serenity. I just let Ted and John make the small talk.
We spent much of the visit in their small backyard, which featured many handsome rosebushes. (I couldn"t help but notice they did not look as bug-eaten as the ones my father always tries to get going in milk cans outside our front door.) I could not say for sure but I thought Bernard seemed rested and close to something like well. He said he was writing, and had written seventy pages of something that didn"t seem a failure. He joked, he listened attentively, he pried some gossip out of John (no man hath greater love than this, that he lay down his scruples for his friend Lazarus). After half an hour or so he sent Ted and John away-"Go talk to my father about the war," he told them, and they obliged-and then I panicked, wondering if he was going to become romantic. He took my hand, brought it to his mouth, and kissed it with no small amount of grief. I stopped panicking and felt grief too. He kissed my hand even harder, and then eventually set it down on my knee without letting it go. "It"s terrible," he said. "You answered a letter and befriended a monster." At this his mother arrived in the yard. She clucked her tongue and both of us looked up, startled. (I have never seen Bernard startled. He"s usually the thing doing the startling.) "Stop that this instant," she said to him, and I noticed her chin trembling. "You are no such thing." Neither of us said a word. "Now, would you two like something to drink?" she said. By this time he had composed himself. I didn"t think people"s chins actually trembled, but hers did. "No, thank you, Mother," he said. And I could tell that he was pleased that she had intervened in some way on his behalf because of the note of gratified surprise in his voice. From what he"s told me, that kind of protective, affectionate rap on the knuckles was rare. We were silent for a few moments, and then he began to stroke my hair, and I let him, even though I thought he might have been trying to push his luck. I didn"t have the heart to crab about it. After a while Ted came into the yard and gave me a look that told me I was doing the right thing. "Time"s up, Dante," he said. "I came back here because John was too nice to. Come on, reward us by rejoining the household."
Later there were another few minutes of panic. After lunch, when the men had gone out back to smoke their various tobacco items, I was left alone at the table with Mother Eliot. Who said, as if two hours hadn"t gone by between the yard and lunch: "He"s grown self-pitying. I"ll have none of it." It"s true that Bernard"s penchant for exaggeration is trying, and it"s true that I was glad she rapped his knuckles so I didn"t have to, but her lack of compa.s.sion gave me the crazy thought that I needed to get him home so my aunts could swaddle his convalescence in good cheer. Before I knew what I was doing I heard myself replying: "If there was ever anything to be self-pitying about, losing your mind might be it." She gave me a look that chilled my blood. At the time I thought it chilled my blood because it did not differ much from the looks Bernard gave me that day in March. There was a kind of glazed fire behind her eyes, and it wiped out any sense that she was speaking to another human being, let alone a human being who had a point worth considering. But now I"m not sure I saw what I thought I did.
I was glad to be in a car with Ted and John shortly after that. Although Bernard did seem very happy to see us. And I was happy to see him that way.
So that is the news. That and the tops of my feet are peeling something fierce because I went out to Rockaway Beach for the day with a girl from work and I forgot to put Coppertone on them. Send me some of your news, and soon.
Love, Frances July 12, 1959 Dear Frances- So now you have seen the Eliot manse. What did it look like through your eyes?
I felt so lucky to have the three of you here. Did you notice the way John gave up the gossip on Carl and Nancy? I actually think John rather enjoyed setting that story out-the way his smile grew deeper and ever more sly at each piece of information he divulged it was as if he were proudly spreading caviar over a very long loaf of pumpernickel for us all.
I think I need to apologize for petting your hair as I did. I do, don"t I?
What is there to say? I miss you already. Now what. My mother is trying to get me to quit smoking by throwing out the packs of cigarettes she finds lying around the house. There are many, because I lose them moving from bedroom to kitchen to yard and I have to buy more to replace them, and so on and so forth. She didn"t like you, I have to say. I find this amusing. "Where did you meet that girl again?" she said yesterday, and I could hear the rest of that thought hanging in the air: It surely wasn"t Smith College. I think she can tell that you take pains not to know your place, and she wants to know who or what encouraged this wildness. I think she can also tell that I love you for it.
I"m glad to be recovering in the summer. Isn"t that silly? I"ve lived most of my life on an academic schedule, so I am used to being set loose to loaf during these months. I can pretend that being set loose to recuperate is not that different. And there are many other people on furlough from their lives now-I can tell myself that I have not fallen too far out of step with the rhythms of reality.
Now that I am off the drug, I can sit in the sun. I come out in the garden every day to celebrate this fact. My mother has just opened a window to tell me to put some zinc on my nose. It is noon now, and I think I may be out here until the sky ripens into a peach-bottomed plum, just because I can.
I would have prayed to be delivered from that drug if I"d had the ability to conceive of words that expressed preference, or hope. I didn"t care that I wasn"t writing because I didn"t care about anything. That was similar to what I"d felt during various depressions-words always out of reach. Words on a shelf too high for my lazy, faithless arms; words blurred and smeared around the sides of the errant crucible that was my mind; words a thing I had been smitten with now betraying me with their dullness. But this was worse. My mind was a ball of steel wool and lard.
When they took me off the drug, I had a few panic attacks, it appears, waiting for my will to return. I did not think it would. But here I am, at my parents" house, sitting in the sun, in their yard, writing you. I don"t feel cured, but I do feel glad to go to bed without wishing for sleep to extinguish me. I did not think that was possible. I see that I may have my family in me after all-the other day my father said that everyone"s been concerned for my health, but "no one likes a layabout." I would never have said a thing like that, but I am interested in, I am committed to, as he might say, moving along. It"s not unlike the difference between nausea and health: when you"re well you can"t imagine what it"s like to be ill, you"ve forgotten the exact dimensions of the squirming la.s.situde, and when you"re ill, you pant for wellness, whose st.u.r.dy contours now seem the unimaginable thing. The sane you, the real you-it must have been real, why else the innumerable vivid scenes of leaving your house and ending up exactly where you intended, of speaking swiftly and unselfconsciously and being understood, of being enchanted by small joys, your own and others"? You know it must have been real, but now you are not so sure-that dependable, uninterrupted flow of thought and action now seems a fiction, not your broken mind. But here I am in the yard. Here are birds. I"m writing, and I"ve written more than I thought I would. The neighbors" sweetly rotund daughter is making a halting mess of Schumann on the piano. And now a church bell comes in, tolling "This Is My Father"s World," and she gives up the Schumann to play along with hygienic Sunday school zeal. I want to tell her that may be a wise choice, to take refuge from one of the most Romantic of the Romantics in the orderly march of hymns. I close my eyes, then open them, and the scene is fixed; it does not spin or buckle. I close my eyes, then open them, and: the same. So I keep on writing.
Frances, you too are fixed for me, you do not spin. You won"t again, if I can help it.
Neither one of us really wants to speak of what happened now that we are in the light, I can tell, and I think that"s best. Here is one case, Frances dear, in which I am glad of your reticence. I"ve spent enough time lately trying to figure out how my parents, and their parents, and their parents, etc., created the conditions that led me to the hospital. In the beginning I was glad of the chance to blame. When it comes to blaming one"s parents, everyone loves the feel of a lighted torch in the hand, especially when it appears that torch is being handed to you by a Harvard-laureled pract.i.tioner of one of the West"s great interpretive frameworks. But that flame died quickly and I felt crushed by the weight of my parents" blindness. I now feel sorry, somewhat, for my mother and father. I"m trying to feel sorry for them so that I don"t feel sorry for myself.
Don"t feel sorry for me, or afraid of me. Please remain my friend.
Love, Bernard July 20, 1959 Dear Bernard- I was very much moved by your letter.
I will of course remain your friend.
What did I think of the Eliot manse? Well, it was impressive in the way it came off as both austere and lavish. Should there ever be a Marxist revolution on American soil, your parents will be safe, as their people taught them how to hide in plain sight. But really and truly, I was most jealous of your mother"s splendiferous roses. If I one day happen to have a yard all my own, splendiferous rosebushes will be the first order of business. The yellow ones were my favorites-pale and frothy, as if they would smell of eggnog and not roses.
Let"s just say that your mother and I seem to have decided that we will not have a mutual admiration society.
You"re right-I do feel hesitant to talk about what happened. My people, for better and for worse, taught me how to hide what was too difficult to bear. I feel shy as I write to you. I don"t want to say anything that"s beside the point. One of the things I want to say I know is childish, but I mean it with my whole heart: I hope you never have to take Thorazine again.
I want you to feel hope more than you feel despair. That is what I have been praying for.
Yours, Frances July 30, 1959 Frances, my dearest dear. My mind might be a little potholed right now, but I think my heart is as st.u.r.dy as ever. Don"t handle me lightly. Tell me what you"re thinking.
I have a feeling that after you read this you"re going to take me at my word, and with a vengeance.
When I read your letter and thought about you praying for me, I felt that I needed to confess some thoughts to you. I have been thinking-it is all I can do here-and you are the only person to whom I can write these thoughts. You won"t like them, but I have to confess them to you.
Do you remember what you wrote about Simone Weil? How she wrote that it"s sort of humorous, the line "Our father, who art in heaven"? I am beginning to see that it is indeed humorous. That it is ludicrous. That I was deluded in my imagining that I could communicate with him. I think you, rightly, keep this in mind as a way of remaining humble, of purging your faith of craven obedience-if he can"t answer you, he can"t hold anything over you. I wanted to have this sort of humility and patience myself. Now I think I never did, and so perhaps I really never did receive him.
I have been thinking about the letter you wrote to me after the book came out. You did not say that I was poetizing my love for G.o.d, but I see now that"s what I was doing. I wonder how deeply his word had a place in my life. I wonder how deeply he had worked his way in. I wonder what I was doing when I was praying. When the abbot saw me-now I see what he saw.
Who was I praying to? Was I straining, and did the straining lead to silence? Did my straining serve only myself? I wanted to feel something. So I trumpeted loudly, waiting for the selfishness in me to fall. Another Old Testament metaphor: I built myself a G.o.d who was not G.o.d, who was only myself made boundless. When I review all the things I did while I thought I was in the throes of what I might have called the Holy Spirit, I see everything I did as one more gold earring tossed into the fire. My fervor was self-adornment.
When I think about all my fervor, and realize that G.o.d is an image thrown up by my illness, it"s very hard for me to understand my faith as anything other than a fever dream. Especially when I am said to have said what I did during my episode. Faith is now inextricably linked to madness for me. This is a great sorrow. I wish very much for you to believe that it is a great sorrow.
I will never be the sort of person who despises religion.
And my faith also might have been fueled by a great fear-I wanted an ancestry that would not be the meaningless ancestry of my family: blood, land, money. I wanted a lineage, and what better church in which to seek a lineage?
So all of this is seeming very much like fear, obstinacy, vanity, and illness.
To go on in it would be like going on in a marriage after one discovers unfaithfulness. I know some people would dig in to the marriage, would fight for what they believed to be the truth about the marriage, which was that it was a good thing that has been wounded, and they would use their love to stanch the flow. But I see the uselessness of that kind of love now-that love may not be love, but fear. I could not stand under G.o.d now with a pure, expectant heart. After all that"s happened, I think my heart still has something pure and hopeful in it-if it didn"t I wouldn"t be writing you. But I don"t want to think that there"s a supernatural tone whose object is to extract purity from me. I went back and read Augustine last week and his own need for G.o.d is his own need for G.o.d-I am not moved. I am moved by the tenderness with which he comes to philosophic problems of memory, of time, and metaphors of creation, but I do not feel moved to capitulate as he capitulated. I once met a former priest-turned atheist by the war-who told me that every time he read the Confessions he found himself lured back to a desire for belief because of Augustine"s description of a G.o.d who would not give up on us. But I am utterly immune to the chords he"s playing.
I am sorry.
Love, Bernard August 5, 1959 Dear Bernard- I wrote two other versions of this letter but then I decided to proceed as if your heart is indeed as st.u.r.dy as you say it is.
If you"re so focused on your own selfishness-your own sin-you will of course lose your faith. If you concentrate on your need for faith as display, you will never find him.
This is more attention paid to self, the notion that because you were selfish, your love was never really love. I have heard you speak, Bernard. And even though I will agree with you and say that yes, occasionally I thought exactly what you have said-that G.o.d was sometimes merely a conduit for feelings and thoughts that were too large even for your poems-I never, ever thought that you were deluding yourself in a love of him. Or that you were acting. I saw you as someone who was truly trying to love G.o.d.
A word on parishioners: Parishioners are not Christians. They are parishioners. Their allegiance is not to G.o.d but to their priest, whom they think is G.o.d. It"s like Heart of Darkness with Kurtz. And often priests are not Christians either, because they have too much of Kurtz in them. When a friend of mine was about fourteen, she found herself followed around the neighborhood by a young man who"d recently been discharged from the army after he"d had a nervous breakdown. He was the son of a man who owned a large grocery store and who gave a lot of money to the church school. The young man"s attentions were troubling my friend, and when it got to the point where he parked his car outside her house one night with the lights off, her father went to the priest and asked him to talk to the family about it. The priest said that it would be impossible to bring this up because it might offend the man whose generosity kept the church"s mission going. This man"s generosity was necessary, but the safety of my friend was not. My friend"s father eventually moved them a few towns over to get away from this boy. I am enraged by stories like this, and I"ve heard many of them. But if I decided to let this be the last word on G.o.d"s nature I would be no better than this priest who decided to let the supermarket king define what charity was. There is the church and there is the Church.
As far as loving your neighbor, you have always done a better job of that than I have, or ever will. Please do not berate yourself for not inventing the Catholic Worker.
I wonder if you should meditate some on the idea that G.o.d is eternal and bides his time. You once wrote to me of taking Augustine"s slow, blind journey to belief as an example. I am praying for you to see once again that we will never be made perfect in this lifetime, and that"s how G.o.d wants it. Perfection is what comes after this lifetime. You know your Paul. So you should know this.
If G.o.d is eternal he stands outside your illness. He cannot be corrupted by it.
Also, I think that psychoa.n.a.lysis is reinforcing whatever selfishness you think you are crippled by. If you say you are suffering from a wish to be a hero, and that this wish has corrupted your faith, I don"t see how this system will disabuse you of that wish. It seems to me that it will keep putting you front and center of your own myth. Why is the unconscious any better than free will? What does it serve us to imagine ourselves enslaved to impulses? If you never imagined that we were enslaved to sin, why imagine that we are enslaved to drives and paralyzed by frustrations that we had no hand in making? This seems like nihilism.
I"m sending you this prayer to Saint Anthony that I hope might p.r.i.c.k your conscience. I realize how much that makes me sound like my aunts and the nuts who buy Bishop Sheen"s books. But I am willing to take up the weapons of spiritual warfare used by the Irish banshees of Kensington if it means you might come back to the fold.
Love, Frances August 16, 1959 Dear Frances- The card with Saint Anthony on it is now in my wallet. I intend it to stay there for all time.
Nevertheless, I can"t help what I am thinking and feeling now. These thoughts and feelings are truths piling up like rocks against the deluge of my previous whims; they feel like something to build from. Whatever I thought I knew scatters and drifts when I ask myself: Who and what did all this performance serve? I think this is perhaps the first time in my life that I can be said to know my own mind. I wish this acquaintance could have been made in a less disastrous way, but I am glad of it nevertheless. And there is still something in me that wants to say G.o.d has orchestrated this revelation. See, Frances, I am no complacent, smugly Buddha-minded, excessively rational indifferent atheist. Don"t worry, I won"t say Freud"s the orchestrator here.
I don"t want this parting of practice to sever our friendship. Am I naive to think it won"t? I still want you to make me laugh, and I want to make you laugh, and I want to read your work and see how it is coming into being, and help you strengthen it if you want me to, and I want you to take your pen to my work and see on what points I might be silent. I want the ruthlessness of your last letter riding my work to bits. When I look at you without my faith, I still see you, Frances, shining-eyed, penetrating, sound-hearted. I know that what you love me for is not G.o.d within me but me-or am I also naive in thinking that you did love me for me? It would fill me with sorrow to think that you and I could not ever again walk by the Hudson together and talk until the sun went down. We may not ever take communion together like we did that August, or that March, but could we not make New York City our sanctuary?
Write when you feel you can.
Love, Bernard August 25, 1959 Dear Bernard- I have been thinking about faith, and your faith, and what might be helpful for you to hear at this moment. You might not want to hear about what I"ve been thinking, and it might sound hollow to you, but just write me and tell me if so. I"ve told you when I haven"t wanted to hear from you, so maybe it"s time I have a dose of my own medicine.
I think often of this sentence from Kierkegaard: "It is beautiful that a person prays, and many a promise is given to the one who prays without ceasing, but it is more blessed always to give thanks." We should love him but without expecting his love in return. This way we know we are not loving him out of fear. Love then becomes a creative act, one in which each day we are responsible for moving forward into a more perfect practice of self-forgetting.
He loves us by letting us take a very long time to make that practice perfect. Otherwise known as: grace. He lets us, and lets us in the freest free will, make mistakes and keep trying. The fact that I am still standing and have not yet been reduced to a smoking pile of ash is some proof that grace is his nature. If you need to take a long time to figure out whether you love him, he will not be impatient.
And maybe I won"t be impatient. If you ever find yourself wandering forgetfully into a prayer, please pray for that. I can be too harsh. Harsher than G.o.d, which is pride. I was a little harsh in my last letter, and you were gracious enough not to remark upon it if you thought so.
What I think is that your fear is the problem here. Your fear, and the notion that you failed the Church because your sin eclipsed your love. (I"m relieved that you don"t think the Church failed you because then you would be leaving a disgruntled customer, which would be a much harder position to dig out from. Resentment, and I should know, is a toxin that causes paralysis, if not eternal enmity.) But I want you to think that perhaps you could be a knight of faith. You are the only person I have ever met who ever seemed capable of inhabiting and living up to Kierkegaard"s term. I don"t want to flatter you, but maybe you need a little bit of flattery right now.
Maybe you should leave off the Augustine and turn again to Kier-kegaard and Dostoevsky. I know we"ve talked about these two a lot, but I want to repeat myself. The gospels tell us Christ suffered, but all we have as proof is the stained-gla.s.s triptych of Christ"s suffering in Mark-the temptation in the desert, the praying in the garden of Gethsemane, crying out to G.o.d on the cross. It is helpful to know that Christ struggled with temptation-I am glad it is on the record-but sometimes it can feel like a bit of catechism we repeat without ever truly comprehending what he actually endured. But those two writers I think come closest to giving us the best modern articulation of what it means to struggle with what we have been charged with. They are poets of the agony that is doubt and of the burden that is conscience.
Bernard, I am about to flatter you again, but I think you could come up with an articulation that is as good as theirs. I think that if you wrote of this struggle, if you wrote of yourself, Bernard Eliot, born 1932, in Boston, Ma.s.sachusetts, with all your very particular temptations and fears, and your craving for G.o.d"s mercy, and the death that comes on from feeling so far from it, without glorifying yourself as a hero conquering this death but as someone in chains, it would be as powerful. I"ve said this to you before but I think you might need to hear it again. What I haven"t told you before, because I thought your head was big enough without your hearing this, was that the first time I heard your poems, at the colony, I thought of John Donne. Perhaps you could look at his poems.
I think I have written enough, and maybe too much.
Love, Frances August 30, 1959 Frances, my favorite. If G.o.d exists, he exists only in you.
All my love, Bernard September 5, 1959 Dear Claire- Thank you for having me last week. I was very glad that Old Man Sullivan let me out of his clutches long enough for me to escape to you and Bill. Please give Bill my love. I am very appreciative of how he smiles with us, and at us, and then drifts off to his work as if out of respect. And I am very appreciative of how he and I can sit and have coffee while you sleep and feel like friends too. He is also a whiz at finding delicious uses for the many sausages that populate Chicago. You are a very lucky woman, as I have said before.
I still feel a little ashamed of the way I refused to go on that hike when I saw the Doberman hanging around the entrance to the trail. Your car makes a nice place in which to nap. Bill was very nice about that too. Don"t tell anyone. I try to make like I have steel intestines. I don"t know what"s gotten into me about dogs.
Could you send me the recipe for that pound cake you made for dessert on Sat.u.r.day? Although I have a feeling mine will turn out to be a brick the first few times-you"ve always had a lighter touch than I when it comes to baking. I am convinced it is because you don"t hold grudges.
Speaking of which. Thank you for listening to me talk about Bernard. But I reject your suggestion that I may be in love with him. When I try to conceive of who he is to me-and you know I never like to spend too much time brooding about what anyone other than family means to me, because that way lies disappointment and self-righteousness-I conceive of him as an older brother. I see him too clearly to be in love with him.
I maintain that the force of my feeling is familial-that whatever I feel for him is as protective and exasperated as what I feel for Ann, and perhaps even more intense, as it explodes with frequent awe of his brain. And with pain, when I think of his tired gray face, a face that was his but not his, steamrollered by drugs and exhaustion.
I cannot comprehend what he is going through. So my mother died when I was four-what real pain is that? I think my words and my presence offer no more solace to him than the solace offered a dog in petting his head. I"m just standing there, petting Bernard, ineffectually. Why should he want to hear from someone in, as it were, Rude Health? What could I have to say that would make any sense to him? And yet I wrote him, twice, imagining I did have something to say. I think I am starting to feel some guilt for the way I responded to him last spring. I rejected him, and yet he still calls me his favorite. He really must be crazy to do that.
Now I will confess I do think Bernard"s handsome. You"re Claire; I can"t lie to you. He has physical vigor that appeals. He swims with an obliviously sloppy love of water, as if the ocean is a piece of paper he"s ripping in half. I"ve seen him climb trees in the middle of a walk just to climb them, and I"ve seen him tear legs off steaming turkeys with no care for the heat because he could no longer wait to eat them. His brute force makes me laugh, and it makes me feel affection-affection-for him.
It was too hard, having seen this physical vigor, to see him as he was in the hospital.
I"m a little nervous at us being in close proximity when he starts teaching at Hunter College-Bernard is overwhelming even through the post-but am very glad he is returning to his usual routine.
What are you reading now? I am reading the Philip Roth you recommended. I don"t know, Claire.
Roth makes me think of Ann. Of how she might get trapped. Sometimes when I listen to her, I think she"s Yeats (prostration to an ideal despite its being a poison) and Maud Gonne (impervious to having done the poisoning) in one. It makes me want to slap her sometimes. Oh G.o.d. The older we get, the more I worry about her and her appet.i.tes. When I was younger they made me angry. She"d eat seconds when dinner was supposed to last us until next day"s lunch, borrow my dresses without telling me, take money from my wallet (at least she"d leave a note, with apologetic exclamation marks, promising to pay me back) to go out with friends after she"d spent her own paycheck. You know all of this. Now they make me fear for her happiness. I fear that her pleasures will make her unhappy because she won"t have work that will keep her from boredom, because her inability to see the emptiness of beauty will lead her to choose poorly when she chooses a husband. My father indulged her-he was the younger of two, the second to a studious favored older brother, and I think he let my sister do as she liked because, even as he favored me for my studiousness, he knew that he was doing to her what had been done to him. Whenever I complained about some unpunished scam of hers, my father always said her sins were harmless ones, and asked me to try not to be so upset with her-and this was from a man who never made demands of anybody. Still, Ann thinks I"m my father"s favorite, and I keep silent when she goes down that road. I know that I am. I"m his favorite because I"m the priest, studious and abstemious, that his brother never became. He loves Ann with ferocity, though. Through spoiling and flirting and tossing her rotters off of the porch. He loves me like a son and Ann like a daughter. And I have taken care of both of them like a mother. I don"t mean to sound bitter there. I"m not.
I don"t know why exactly I went on like this. You know all this. Ann"s been on my mind. I have just invited her to come visit me-can you believe she has never come to visit me in New York? I think she"s jealous that she isn"t here too. Or maybe she has stayed away from some sort of spite. We don"t say this to each other, but we have a silent pact: I took care of my father for years, and now Ann must stay behind and do it. For at least a little while. Anyway, I"ve invited her to come visit, and I think I worry about us having a good enough time. Although I know this isn"t about me having a good time. I want her to have a good time.
Claire, these thoughts are exactly the ones that will keep me from having a family. When I think of what family is I can see only boredom, chronic misunderstanding, loss, bickering, abuse, burdens that are borne out of duty but never bear love as their fruit. I"m sorry-you know I don"t mean that I don"t understand why you and Bill might want to have one. You know I am talking purely of my own jaundiced stance.
Well, I should go now. Look at all I"ve written. I should get to bed. Thank you again for my visit.
Love, Frances September 13, 1959 Dear Claire- I am sending you a book that we are publishing that for once I am not disgusted by. Have you heard of this woman? This is her second novel; I"d never heard of her. It"s about a group of older women living out their last days in a London boarding house during the war. This novel is short, about two hundred pages, and there is authority in the writer"s conviction that she knows her characters well enough, and can draw them well enough, that she doesn"t need to go on that long to get what she needs out of them. But perhaps this spoke to me purely because of having lived at the henhouse.
Ann came to visit. I think she enjoyed herself. She met me at the office for lunch one day, and I introduced her to everyone. "You two are sisters?" said Old Man Sullivan. Peter, whom I think I"ve told you about, said the same thing. By which they meant: Why aren"t you that pretty, Frances? "Frances is such a good cook," Ann responded both times. I think she was trying to advertise that I had a dowry too. I heard one young editor whistle appreciatively when we left the office he shares with a few other boys. Then at lunch we found her a dress at Bonwit Teller. I pitched in a few dollars. But the differences between us give me a kind of heart attack whenever they present themselves. Sample anecdotes: We are walking along Central Park West, on our way to the park. My sister sees an actor from a television show. "Oh, it"s X," she says, clutching my arm. "Oh," I say, and keep walking. "No, no, I"m going to get an autograph." "Oh no you"re not," I say. "Why not?" Ann says. "Aunt Peggy and Aunt Helen would think it"s a hoot." I say: "It"s groveling for something that"s not even admirable to begin with!" "Oh, stop it," Ann says. "Come with me." "No!" I say. I take my arm away from her hand and stop walking. I turn into the seven-year-old I think she"s being. "You"re such a sourpuss," she says, and strides off to this actor and the woman he"s with. I can"t even watch. When she comes back she"s waving the receipt from the grocery store we stopped in. It has his autograph. "See! He was very nice," she says. "He has family in Philadelphia." She says this like it means something, like she has really made a connection with him. It"s like being with an old woman who still believes in Santa Claus. Next street anecdote: We go take a walk after dinner to get ice cream and we are about to pa.s.s a very old couple, probably in their eighties, both short, frail, the man in a short-sleeved pressed shirt and slacks, very neat, gla.s.ses, and he is pushing his wife, in a short-sleeved dress with huge flowers on it, in a wheelchair. Since the street we"re on has a bit of an incline, Ann thinks we should offer our help. He doesn"t look as if he is wrestling with the incline, and still she says to me, "Oh, do you think we should offer to help?" "Oh, I don"t know," I say, shy, because perhaps they will think us young people patronizing, because perhaps they will resent our pity of their age and fragility. But Ann says to them, brightly, a chipmunk in a blue-checked dress, "Do you need help?" "No," says the man, without interest, but with no frost either. And so I"m proved right. And I wish I hadn"t been. I see Ann: willing to insert herself into the world to help, unafraid of how it will be received, just knowing that as a Catholic she must be kind, and me hanging back, afraid of being seen as smug in my small offer of help when everyone needs so much help all the time, the amount of help needed is too big, and so I turn away in despair. Keep yourself hid, Ann, I am always saying to her, and Frances, you are a miser, she is always saying to me. It"s like liturgy. But unlike liturgy, no change comes about from repeating the phrases. There"s comfort in it, but no change.
She also told me that she is seeing someone. She didn"t say much about him-by now Ann knows that I will probably disapprove of whomever she is seeing. I should feel bad about that but I like to think that it will do some good one day. His name is Michael, and she met him, she said, at the engagement party of one of the girls from work. She said he"s going to school for surveying at night and working as a manager at the Acme during the day. He"s another Italian. Ann likes Italians. My aunts tease her about it. They"re so warm, she says. They"re such warm people.
I should get this in the mail. Bernard is coming for dinner and has hinted that he wants me to bake him something; meanwhile, it"s four p.m. and I am still in a nightdress.
Love, Frances September 14, 1959 Dear Frances- Now that we live in the same city, I guess we won"t be writing to each other anymore. But I wanted to send you a note after seeing you last night. Thank you for making me dinner. I don"t know what you were talking about with that pound cake-there was absolutely no way that a kitten tied to it and thrown in a river would sink to the bottom instantly. I can"t cook at all, and I am starting to see the wisdom of the henhouse-three squares for the f.e.c.kless. If I were any more shameless, I would ask if I could come to dinner once a week. You could think of yourself as the Red Cross. Christian Aid. The YMCA. I would pay for the groceries.
See, we can keep up a conversation without G.o.d at the center: Roth, Updike, my students, your coworkers, your work, my work, your father, my mother, your landlord. I mean to keep you in my life. And I see that you don"t want me leaving either. I see how you smile when I am around-your lips purse, and then they tilt to the left, like a boat lifted by the swell of a wave.
I am glad that you let me sit at your table again. And that you let me toast your beautiful, fearsome book.
Love, Bernard February 20, 1960 Dear Claire- I can"t thank you enough for coming to New York. John Percy thought you were fantastic, and Bernard did too. "Claire," he said, "has Pre-Raphaelite vapors curling around her Katharine Hepburn angles."
Thank you for coming to that dinner. I always feel like I need to keep the drool off the front of my dress around John. He still makes me nervous, even though I make him laugh, but I think that"s good. Thank you for charming Sullivan too, Claire. I"m sure you stupefied him with your Pre-Raphaelite vapors. And I"m sure Bernard would have been twice as drunk if you hadn"t been there. And would have given a speech that was three times, not just two times, the length of John"s. (Bernard. I have to admit, his testimony on my behalf made me blush, and if he had not been at that table I would have experienced a great sadness. Although I was glad John finally cut him off.) As you know, I am not the world"s best celebrant. I hope I appeared grateful. I was grateful. But I don"t know how to bring off being the center of attention or how to accept the mantle of honored guest. I will take a Pulitzer through the mail, however. That is fine. But I kept wanting to get up and clear the table.
I went home last weekend for a visit and my sister told anyone who would listen: "Frances has just published a novel!" At church, on the street, in the grocery store. More inability to gracefully accept being the center of attention. But then also annoyed by others" inability to gracefully accept my being the center of attention! "Oh, I"ve written a book," says a woman, middle-aged, white acrylic cardigan, handbag on arm, standing out on the steps after Ma.s.s. And then, of course, it turns out it"s St. Aloysius"s parish cookbook. And from someone else: "Oh, my brother"s written a book"-a six-hundred-page novel retelling their family"s flight out of Ireland that he has refused to send to publishers. Next: "Oh, I"ve written a book"-a handbook for CCD teachers. People refuse to be simply impressed or to express congratulations. It"s as if they feel threatened by something that is arguably more real than their efforts, or perhaps they are embarra.s.sed by not knowing what to ask an Artist-and I"m not even saying that I am one!-so they turn the conversation back to themselves. And/or they are narcissists. I would never say to someone who paints, Oh, I enjoy taking an easel to the park, or say to a surgeon, Oh, in high school I could dissect an infant pig in thirty seconds flat. Look, I would rather people not know what I"ve done in the first place. Indifference would be better.
And when people tell me they"ve bought a copy-people who know my father and Ann tangentially, people who have only Reader"s Digest in the house-I"m mortified. Why have they done this for me, a stranger? If Bill"s sister wrote a book, I don"t think I"d buy it. No offense. And these people will be mystified and horrified when they actually open it. They"re going to wonder if they"ve accidentally bought something that"s on the Index of Forbidden Books.
My aunts, of course, are making a concerted effort to behave as if I"ve done nothing at all-at home they embraced me briskly and asked pointedly about my job. Fine by me. I would rather not talk about it with them either. Ann gave my aunt Helen a copy-which I told her not to do, but Ann is a pushover, and my aunt Helen is a manipulator-and Helen told Ann she could not finish the book because she was so upset by how mean I was being to the nuns. I think Peggy and Mary and Helen have always wondered what I really believe, and now, based on the testimony of my aunt Helen, they will suspect that they"ve been raising an infidel all this time. They will cluck and sigh for my soul among themselves. They don"t know what to do with a book about G.o.d that does not stink of piety the way Therese of Lisieux stank of roses. They would not be able to see that the nuns brought their calamities unto themselves, and that we are always and everywhere, every single one of us, as sinful as those nuns. They will feel only persecuted because it will seem that I am persecuting the thing that they have been taught never to question.
Thank G.o.d for my father. "Sister John is Sister Anne, isn"t she?" We were out on a walk after dinner. Yes, I said. "And Sisters Monica and Barbara are your aunt Mary and uncle Tom." Yes, I said. He laughed. And then he said: "They"ll never know." And laughed again.
Some reviews are in-Time decided they didn"t hate it enough to fully trounce it, but the reviewer seemed subconsciously disappointed that it was not a different book entirely, and since he did not realize the nature of his disappointment, he could not write a review that exposed the book"s true flaws and strengths. His review just exposed his wish not to be reading a novel about a bunch of nuns.
The Old Testament metaphors are coming fast and thick. Someone else said that I "wielded prose like Judith, head of Holofernes triumphantly in hand." Lord. And yet another person wrote approvingly that the book "throbbed with the kind of wicked wisdom deployed by King Solomon when, in the book of 1 Kings, two women came to him, each claiming to be the mother of a baby boy, and he declared that the only thing to be done was to cut the boy in half." Am I a Hun and just don"t know it?
Am I from Pittsburgh and just don"t know it? Someone else misidentified my city of birth as Pittsburgh.
In my actual city of birth, the Inquirer declared that "Miss Reardon has a disturbingly tidy sense of justice that is, even as it disturbs, piquant." Why, thank you.
Re the Times: I"m relieved.
Thank you again.
Love, Frances March 12, 1960 Ted- Thank you, as always, for the visit. I"m sorry you had to leave early on Sat.u.r.day because of that deposition. You always say lawyers give lousy parties, and we could have taken you to the party for this new journal Carl is putting out. The party was a hydra-headed rugby scrum of all the usual suspects, but no less entertaining because of it.
Do you remember Betsy, that friend of Caroline who sipped at only one Manhattan that long night we went out for Caroline"s graduation? She had been seeing a young man I introduced her to, Robert, a graduate student in philosophy who sat in on one of my cla.s.ses. He took to me because, I think, he does not have a father and his older brothers are far-flung and all in the armed services. He came to my office one day a couple of weeks ago asking for some advice and so we got a drink. He told me a story: He was helping to teach a philosophy course presided over by a professor emeritus and while he"d been sitting there, tending the wan fire that was the old man"s drone, tossing in a spark of clarification here and there whenever the flames threatened to go out for good, he noticed this girl sitting in the middle distance of the lecture hall, red hair wound back in a bun, with a placid, impa.s.sive, and sometimes dismissive expression that flared up in a way that made Robert start to have ideas about her own fire, and then afterward she asked him for advice on a paper, and so they went to a cafe and they ended up talking for a few hours, and the girl told him her whole life story: doubly orphaned by polio, lost at Hunter. He finds himself wanting to touch this girl as she talks, finds himself alive-my paraphrasing, because Robert was too removed from his own appet.i.tes to know what he was succ.u.mbing to-finds himself alive to beauty with the idea that beauty noticed must be beauty consumed (which I don"t think he has followed to its logical conclusion, because if he had, he wouldn"t be as alive to it in this momentarily problematic way). He knows, however, that he loves Betsy. But the redhead doesn"t know that, because Robert hasn"t had the heart to bring it up.
So he reaches out and takes this girl"s hand over the table, and, wouldn"t you know it, Betsy has taken off work early to surprise him with a visit. Alas, she gets the surprise when she sees them in the window in the cafe on her way to the office-sees them just at the moment Robert reached for this girl"s hand-and she reacts as if Robert"s Don Jose and this girl"s Carmen, and she leaves and calls him up and breaks it off. She hasn"t been, Robert told me, with very many men, and so, he suspects, she was acting in the way she"d heard you should when you find a leak in the boat, without even bothering to determine how big the leak is. I felt pity for Robert when we talked. His anxious eyes behind his gla.s.ses-it was like looking through the cracked windowpanes of a looted store, as if someone had broken in and robbed him of any sense, and I could hear the shattered gla.s.s still tinkling on the recently stampeded floor of his brain. Betsy knew no other response to this scene but to prosecute and deport, and he knew no other response to her response but to become a hermit in a cave of guilt. "Have neither of you ever heard of the word peccadillo?" I said to him. I"d be attracted to Betsy too, I think, except that she is too wilting a stem for me. Betsy is a girl who is receptive, pa.s.sive, the kind of girl who sang madrigals in college because it allowed her to gambol in a field that had not yet been carpeted over with the weeds of Weltschmerz, and who will marry in order to build herself a castle against the invasion of Weltschmerz, children her moat, husband her drawbridge. There is a sweetness she was trying to overcompensate for by prosecuting Robert. And with him, shame overtook his pa.s.sion for Betsy. Someone needed to get these two talking to each other because they were both too committed to their own righteousness, both twenty-four years old and not out of the nursery quite yet.
So I invited Betsy to this party, and then I invited Robert, a.s.suring them both that I had not invited the other, a.s.suring them both that I knew for a fact that the other would not be there because they"d each told me they had plans. And there they were. I stood in a corner and watched. I pulled Frances over too and she claimed she didn"t want any part of this, but I held her by the arm and anch.o.r.ed her to the spot, and she stayed and watched as the two of them stared at each other like stunned deer. "She"s going to bolt first," said Frances, and Betsy did, but Robert reached out for her arm to make her stay (here Frances pulled away from my own grip) and Betsy began crying-crying!-and Robert took her into his arms. "Don"t think you have a talent for this sort of thing," said Frances as we walked away to get another c.o.c.ktail. I am very pleased, and, yes, more than a little proud, and Robert tells me all has been forgiven. Including me for my Prospero-esque conjuring. I can"t stand for people to be weak-willed and stiff-necked on principle.
But this was what I meant to tell you. Frances was really very pleased to see you and was really very touched by your taking us to the Oak Room in her book"s honor. (What she won"t tell you is that when you and I came back from the men"s room, I saw her slipping a c.o.c.ktail stirrer into her purse.) I know you told me that if I confessed to her what I confessed to you, she would never talk to me again, but Ted, I am starting to feel that she may eventually be receptive. That night I had the extreme pleasure of watching Frances betray what I thought just might be one filament of jealousy. At the party there was a girl who interviewed me for the Paris Review last year. A black-haired girl, rounded and tall like a caryatid, a little too stiff and erect as well, with something suggesting she"d be quite comfortable shouldering greatness, something suggesting she could see from your present into your future and then into your past and back again, each eye a steady, blank forbidding lake-but an expansive air about her when she gets talking, and during the interview we"d debated for some time about the merits of E. M. Forster. I couldn"t see it, because, having actually loved Christ, having spent so much time on the sea with Ulysses, it is very hard for me to view Bloomsbury as anything more than an incestuous seance coc.o.o.ned in an anti-Victorian Victorianism that makes me cede greatness to your actually eminent Victorians, though by the end of the interview she made me understand that at the very least I might prefer Forster to Woolf. She introduced herself to me again at the party and I thanked her for her piece. She asked me what I had been reading lately and I told her.
I had not detected anything flirtatious in her manner, but then Frances came by while we were talking about Philip Larkin (I envy his control, but it"s the kind of envy that transpires when you recognize your own fundamental inability to become the thing you envy, which then leaves you to settle freely into unqualified respect). The girl, I thought, stiffened, I suppose because Frances had arrived and was standing there in a silence of aplomb that suggested she and I shared daily proximity. I then took Frances by the hand and said, "This is Frances Reardon. She"s just written a beautiful novel." "I"ve heard about your book," said the girl, leveling a gaze at Frances and then issuing a very perfunctory "Congratulations." "You"ve got nothing to worry about," said Frances. "He"s not mine." "I"m not worried at all," said the girl. Although she did look a little taken aback. "I"m going to leave you two," said Frances, and then she did. It was very hard not to laugh. Sometimes I wish women would just go ahead and throw the punch. If that were the case, I"d bet every time on Frances.
Yours, Bernard April 5, 1960 Dear Frances- I want to write this so you know that I"ve thought this over and am telling you what I feel in a slightly cooler moment. I would call you but I fear you would hang up on me. Or that you might not pick up at all.
I"m writing this between cla.s.ses. It"s 10:30. A student just floated his head in the window pleadingly but I waved him off. I hear collegial repartee and purposeful footsteps outside the door. I see Lexington Avenue below me through the window to my right. I see all the children still in their winter coats crossing and recrossing the street in a pattern that makes me think of the hedges in gardens in Florence.
I am not sorry that I kissed you. Again. So now I will tell you that I want you in an unseemly, criminal, animal way.
I speak to make myself clear. I speak, admittedly, to stir you, if there is something in you to be stirred.
You will think I"m going mad again. I know I"m not. If I were mad, this would be rhyming.