Who is this Peter?! Bernard, I sigh. And then laugh at you and your persistence in imposing romance where there is none. Peter is a young man with whom I work. He likes whiskey and Edmund Burke. That is all I can tell you. When I find out that I really am in love with him, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d, in spite of myself, I will let you know. Dear G.o.d.
In return: How sharp and fetching was the Barnard grad?
Thanksgiving was pleasant. I went home on the train and helped my aunts make dinner, as I have always done. There are so many of us there need to be Sterno cans on the dining room table. This year I was in charge of the pies. All seven of them. I made a mincemeat pie for my father, which he ruined by eating a slice before it came out from behind the wings. Mincemeat is a pie for old people. My cousins and their children vastly preferred the whipped chocolate cream cheese pie, the recipe for which I got off the back of the Ann Page cream cheese package. This is slumming for me, the supermarket directive, but I do sometimes-sometimes-want to please a crowd. So as to better camouflage my dissent. My father raised a gla.s.s to my book being turned in, and everyone loudly cheered. I wanted to hide. There"s an aunt and an uncle who show up in the book as a battle-ax and the stone that ax loves to grind itself on, but I doubt they"ll read it. Or if they do, I bet they won"t be able to recognize themselves as two old nuns. A cousin said she was glad to see that I hadn"t gotten uppity since I moved to New York. I said I was glad I hadn"t gotten sold into white slavery. But it was a fine time in general.
Thank you for sending my work on to those people. Never expect more than a handful of people to understand what you are about when you are writing about G.o.d. Or care.
Your immigrant blood-drinking pagan friend, Frances.
December 8, 1958.
Bernard-.
So I have had a talk with my agent about my editor. I can"t take it anymore. This woman is dead set against mystery. She is asking me to articulate why things are happening when they are happening. She is asking me to explain what I want the reader to realize by acc.u.mulation. "Why is Sister John so mean?" she says. "I don"t understand it. You need to tell us why." She won"t bring herself to tell me to give the book a happy ending but she is talking around it. I think she thinks I can turn the book into The Nun"s Story. She says that if I want to persist in my obscurity-she calls it obscurity-then I can go to one of those smaller houses that print difficult books.
She should not have put that thought into my head.
I do not like to ask favors of people, but threats to my work make me lose all scruples, and I have to protect my book. I humbly ask: Is there any way that you might speak to John on my behalf?
My grat.i.tude to you.
Yours, Frances December 15, 1958 Dear John- I got the copies of the book. It looks wonderful. I don"t, however. In that author photo I look like someone told me to think of Aristotle"s Poetics and then, on the count of three, snapped the picture. Why did I not see this before? Why did you not mention this to me? My mother might have told me as much but I still can"t hear her when she tells me I"m being stubborn, selfish, or smug. Oh well. That"s the least of my worries, this picture. All that matters is what"s on the pages, and I can find no fault there.
Thank you for getting production to make those last changes. Book publishing is depressingly bureaucratic. And philistinic. I don"t see how you can stand it. I can barely stay awake in faculty meetings. People have discussions about pedagogy. They delect in the hashing out of various ways to programmatically open the mind and consolidate insight. "Well," I said one day when one discussion had stopped at a crossroads that had been reached by a painfully democratic and glacially moving airing of multiple but finally identical methodologies, "the Greeks thought you could get pretty far with pederasty." The chair sighed deeply. I had forgotten where I was and said what occurred to me. Have you ever had the experience of being so bored that you feel only your eyes in your head? That you"re only eyes, and the rest of you has diffused away into a roving gas? I don"t imagine you have. That was the state I was in when I spoke. This is why you have the job you do, and I evaporate into a roving gas with eyes at whatever job I have. But I do love the students, and to get to the students I have to wade through a slough of middle-mindedness. It feels like wading through concrete fresh from the mixer. With the students, I experience one of the purest states of being I know. I can float into the cla.s.sroom as that gas after some dreadful meeting, and then as we talk I solidify into wholeheartedness. Single-mindedness. As you know: Purity of heart is to will one thing. Everything-worry, anger, sloth, frustration-falls away in the talking. I feel G.o.d in the room in the pure exchange of ideas, and their awakening to ideas.
Speaking of middle-mindedness. Frances Reardon-the young woman I told you about from the colony-needs a new editor. I think her house is more grown over with bureaucracy and philistinism than yours, and her book needs you. Her editor, who took over the book after Frances"s original editor left to marry a banker, sent the ma.n.u.script back to her with only ten marks on it, seven of them arbitrary deletions, and a letter in which this editor asked if Frances could lessen the religious themes, because they might be off-putting, and said that she didn"t know whether she should like the protagonist or not, which was bothering her. I think her editor is a girl who has her job because she is tenacious and vapid-the tenacity masking the vapidity, and the vapidity fueling her ascendancy because vapidity frees the mind from bothersome, c.u.mbersome self- examination. Let me know what we can do.
Yours, Bernard December 16, 1958 Frances- I"ve written to John about you. He"s going to get in touch with your agent.
I"m sending you a copy of my book. With all my love. I wonder what you will think of it. Whatever judgment you deliver will be G.o.d"s grace.
Yours, Bernard December 20, 1958 Bernard- I want to thank you for getting me out of the nunnery and possibly getting me out of this other house of horrors.
And: thank you for your book. It"s handsome. But please do not mistake me for someone who has direct communication with G.o.d. Also, I"m a fiction writer. My judgments are the judgments of a mortal, and they are hobbled by my earthbound obstinate insistence on the concrete. You know what I"ve told you before. You and I are so very different: I am one word at a time, one foot in front of the other, slowly, always testing how sure my footing is before proceeding to the next sentence, with ruminative breaks for b.u.t.tered toast and coffee. Your poems make the old feeling of cowdom come over me: stalled in a vast unconquerable field, alone, ruminating. While you"re Christopher Wren. You"ve made me commit the grave sin of hyperbole in trying to convince you of my esteem-Christopher Wren! Dear G.o.d. So be flattered.
Yours, Frances January 15, 1959 Dearest Claire- Happy new year!
Well, it seems that I will now be edited by John Percy at Harrow, through the intervention of Bernard. Bernard would want to say it was G.o.d who arranged it all, but I am content to leave it at his creatures" human kindness. That said, it does feel a certain blessing, to be rescued from the blind. John reminds me of Bill. Right down to the plaid work shirts. Only John does not safety-pin the cuffs back on when they wear themselves off the sleeves. I kept wanting to tell John about the time Bill pinned his wrist to the shirt accidentally, but John has a bit of primness about him, and I was trying to pretend that I was a Serious Artist.
This has made me indescribably relieved, but I am worried about something. I read Bernard"s book of poems, and Claire, I am afraid that while Christ is all over these poems, hidden in historical figures, alluded to, quoted, and then expanded on as a way to reach Bernard"s own impressive imagery, Christ is not really in these poems. He is too on the surface of them to be actually moving within them. I do not doubt that Christ is in Bernard-and very deeply. When Bernard speaks of the Church he speaks of it with humility and pa.s.sion. But Christ is buried-in Bernard"s poems and in his heart-under striving for world-historical Meaning and Complexity. I hear, in the poems, shields and lances clanking against the limitations of this imperfect world. Christ being the shield and lance-Bernard"s weapon against nihilism. I fight that war myself. This is why Bernard is necessary to me. But I also think the symbolism is a cover for what Bernard might really want to talk about, which is his own history. He is encoding his own struggles with purity, desire, and despair in the symbols of religion, and then sometimes the Greeks, for good measure. (What do I know about the Greeks? I know what I know mainly from Aquinas. Bill could read these and tell us for sure.) I wonder if a better weapon against nihilism might be one man"s life. One man in a struggle, and in that one particular struggle we more clearly apprehend the real. I suppose that is why I write fiction: character as argument. I suppose that is why I love Augustine. And Kierkegaard: one man in a war against despair directing us in our own hobbling away from it.
Also from Aquinas: the intellect is G.o.d present in his creation. The intellect should be a servant to revelation, but Bernard is thinking that the intellect itself, ama.s.sed on the page, is revelation.
I suppose I should write these things to Bernard. I don"t know why on this occasion I find myself unable to say what I think. You and I could not be friends if you had not told me that I needed to stop being so silent in workshops, and I had not told you that if you did not marry Bill you would be a fool. I don"t think what I am saying could possibly put a dent in him. Bernard"s self-confidence is as impervious as a redwood. My words will be as the gnawing of a squirrel at its base. He can"t hear things-in the way that he can"t hear that it"s his own confusion, not Christ"s voice, speaking through the poems. I doubt he could hear what I am saying. But at least I will have said it. I feel obligated to do so.
Do I think, all this aside, that what he has done is beauty ama.s.sed on the page? I am not saying that he is a genius, but I do think that genius has something to do with ma.s.s and velocity, and the sheer torrent of words, the prolixity, the constant barrage of image and Shakespearean syntax, all coming so effortlessly-this feels to me something like genius. Without a doubt. There is so much intelligence and force that it razes my own will to create. In the way that talking with Bernard can raze my will to speak. I couldn"t write for a week after reading the book. But I know Bernard wants beauty and truth, and the truth is getting a little mangled by the whirring blades of his mind.
And now-I think, after writing this to you, I can write these things to Bernard.
Love, Frances February 11, 1959 Frances- Thank you for your letter.
How I wanted you to love what I had done. That was very childish of me, wasn"t it? I think I knew what you would think of it. I think I wanted you to tell me what you told me, which is why I referred to your judgment as G.o.d"s grace.
But you do think it"s beautiful, even while in error, and that means a great deal to me. I"m not ashamed of what I"ve done. I"m still pleased with it. To turn on it would be to despair over it, which, as you know, is a sin. And I have you as a reader. So that"s joy. And this is just my second book. So there"s hope.
Thank you for not referring to me in your critique as the Sounding Bra.s.s.
Love, Bernard February 15, 1959 Dear Bernard- Please always remember this: that whatever else I think about your poems, I will also be thinking that they are beautiful. If I didn"t make it as clear as I should have that I was honored to read them: I was honored to read them. Very, very honored. I"m a little ashamed, because your letter reminded me of the flak I used to get in workshops for not being as complimentary as I could be. At the time I couldn"t give a rat"s a.s.s because I didn"t care about anyone in the workshop but Claire. Now things are very different. I should have perhaps been a little less forceful in pressing my point of view.
February in New York City is the very heart of darkness. Spring seems as far away as Fiji. I am wondering-would you come to visit in the next few weeks to liven it up around here? If you come, we can talk more about your poems. The offices are cold. People are wiping at their noses and look as if they haven"t slept or washed their hair in days. On Friday, I snapped at Sullivan when he asked me for the third time where he was supposed to go to lunch. I"ve been reading too much because it"s too cold to go out. I"ve gone through three Hardy novels in two weeks.
But I have some good news. There is a prospect of getting published in the New Yorker. They have one story and want another. Although: a pox on the New Yorker. John was told that they already have a Catholic woman writer-probably Elizabeth Pfeffer, because I think she"s published with them two or three times-with a story slated to run this year, and they don"t know if they can have two Catholic women in it within twelve months, so either my story will b.u.mp hers or hers will b.u.mp mine, and they"ll hold on to what I"ve given them if I let them. But the two of us are so very different, as you know-she does the domestic ecstatic-so there"s no chance that publishing us in what they consider to be rapid succession will make it look like the Vatican has annexed the New Yorker"s fiction department and is using it as a back office for nihil obstating. Perhaps you or John should write and tell the New Yorker editors that several prominent Catholics refuse to believe I"m Catholic! Thank goodness that working in publishing has made me privy, and therefore inured, to the unrelenting boneheaded arbitrariness that is supposed to pa.s.s for good taste. Thank goodness I at least have the stamina to write around a job. And, ahem, at the job. When Sullivan dies, I am in trouble. If they keep me, they might decide to give me to someone who actually needs my help.
Please do come and visit. I will bake you a cake that I have been itching to conquer.
Yours, Frances February 20, 1959 Frances, dear- I would love to plunge with you into that heart of darkness. Alice and Tom will put me up. I"ll be in on the Friday night train on March 6. Is that too soon? Or too far away? I"ll call you when I get in.
Frances, my dearest dear, don"t trouble yourself so much about the New Yorker. There"s room for everybody when the work is at your level. Actual talent keeps the doors opening. If they don"t take your story, John or your agent will make sure some other periodical of repute does. And you have that job, which makes this even less of a problem, because you are not dependent on the New Yorker to increase either people"s awareness of you or your bank account. (For now-like I said, you need to be looking for a husband with a steady income and a pa.s.sing interest in books. Someone like Ted. If he hadn"t squandered himself on Kay, I"d already have married you off to him.) You have me, you have John, and you have your agent, whose name I am always forgetting, and your work is a miracle. Don"t be surprised if the New Yorker ends up publishing the housewife. Think about it: your sorority sisters from the Barbizon subscribe! But don"t be troubled about it either. I have never published there, as you know. I doubt I will. Just write what you need to.
Your Bernard February 27, 1959 Dear Bernard- March 6 is too far away! But I can make it until your visit. I feel a little less trapped in my own garret now because the weather has warmed just a little, and I have awoken to the sound of birds. Actual birds! Where are they coming from? I dare not ask.
Well, I thank you for your words of encouragement re the New Yorker. That seems about right. (But: Oh, Bernard. A miracle? This is always the difference between you and me.) I do feel lucky having John now as my editor. I feel a certain amount of security and confidence about my (near) future because of it. But Bernard, I am compelled to remind you that you are successful enough to have a constant stream of teaching offers and so can turn down the money your parents are always offering you. This isn"t envy talking, it"s the desire to put your nose in the face of the facts, which you often push to the margins. Irish girls from North Philadelphia can"t afford to think that they will be fine without the benevolence of the New Yorker, even as they give the New Yorker a Bronx cheer. And if I get wind of the fact that I am up against someone-oooh, I hate to lose. I really hate to lose. Especially when I know I"m the better bet.
I do have your friendship, though, and this Irish girl from North Philadelphia is quite grateful for your benevolence in extending it.
Yours, Frances March 9, 1959 Dear Frances- I still don"t know whether I should apologize to you or whether you should apologize to me.
I did not come to New York intending to kiss you. It happened because there was one moment in a boisterous, warm, convivial bar full of laughter, one moment containing one boisterous, almost wicked smile that I thought might have been because of me, or intended only for me, and I couldn"t help myself.
I feel so very much for you and I wonder what it means. I have always felt this way-from the beginning-and now I wonder if I have been lying to myself about what it is that I feel.
I know this will make you even angrier than you were after I kissed you, but I often find myself wanting to call you my love. My love. Two words. Because you smile down the subway car at some waving child on a lap as we tunnel through thunder. You stand riveted in front of a Turner at the Met while tourists clog the room, and you mindlessly straighten your blue skirts as if they were hounds rustling at your feet waiting for the next command. You stare out the kitchen window while you do supper"s dishes, making up comic-strip stories about the windows across the alley. I think this is partly why I want to call you my love: you are not turned inward.
Would it insult you or be a relief to you if I describe what I did as mere reflexive male jealousy? I could lie and say I did it because you had been talking too long to Peter. You have a great deal of pride, but it would not be insulted that way. You would probably be relieved if I said that, because it would mean I did it out of spite, out of sport, and not because I desired you. This makes me hate you a little. Because I have pride too, and I want to feel that you want me or need me. Because I need you. And I don"t know who you would ever need. You wrote a letter asking me to come see you, making it clear that you wanted my company in particular, but I think deep down you don"t really need anyone. If you did, you would have fallen in love with someone by now. That"s not an insult. That is a thought that came to me as I wrote. I don"t mean it as an insult. I haven"t been in love with anyone, really, either. Everything"s fallen apart. But I know I need people. You don"t know how to need people.
If we say we love each other, what does it matter? It does not mean that we have to marry each other. It means only that we need each other, that we look out for each other. That our lives without each other would be less. And it"s because I love you that I"m writing you this letter. I do think G.o.d sent you to me. I have plenty of people to talk to about poetry, but I don"t want to talk to anyone, not even John, about G.o.d and art the way I want to talk to you about G.o.d and art. I need to know that you have the things in mind that I have in mind. I have been misunderstood but you don"t misunderstand me-at least intellectually. I think G.o.d sent me to you because Claire can"t break you. I think she"s tried, from what you tell me, but you two are too much like an old married couple now for your barbs to really rend the flesh. She"s married, and has her own life to build. She will find it less necessary to carve out of you what needs to be carved out because she has someone else now who needs her knife. In the same way Ted isn"t around to carve out what needs to be carved out of me because he"s about to be married and has his own life to build. So I think you and I found each other at precisely the right moment.
You will probably refuse to write me or see me after you read this letter. But I believe in absolute honesty. I believe also that our friendship will withstand my confusion and your horror.
Bernard March 15, 1959 Bernard, you have knocked some wind out of me, and I need to make sense of it.
Please don"t write back to this letter. I"ll write you a longer one when I"m ready. Anything I say now is going to sound like a gavel coming down on your head, and I have fondness for you, a great deal of it, so I have to go away to be as kind as I believe the Lord wants me to be here. That"s something I"ve never felt, and perhaps my fondness for you has made me feel it: the conscious impulse to shut my mouth for Jesus"s and/or another person"s sake.
My life without you would certainly be less. That is one thing I know.
Yours, Frances March 31, 1959 Claire- I hope you"re well.
I"m writing to tell you something I still can"t quite believe.
The Sunday before last, Bernard showed up in the city, unannounced. I was sitting in church before five o"clock Ma.s.s started- there were only about ten of us-and while sitting there, I felt a hand clap on my shoulder. It was Bernard. It was barely fifty degrees that day but he was not wearing a coat. He was wearing a blue seersucker jacket and a b.u.t.ton-down shirt, with his tan corduroys held up by his braided leather belt. He was clearly enduring something beyond his usual dishevelment. There was a hole the size of a quarter in the knee of his right pant leg. His hair was standing up a half inch higher than usual, and his eyes were looking at me as if I were one tree of many in a forest. Scratches on his bare ankles-he had not put on socks with his oxfords. His fingernails were laced with grime.
He pushed himself into the pew, shoving me to the right with his hip. "Frances," he said. "Your landlord said you would be here."
I couldn"t speak. I just stared at him. I knew something awful was going to happen but I didn"t know what. I could not push my mind past a repet.i.tion of the phrase Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy, Lord, have mercy, Lord, have mercy. My mind resting in that one thought like a bike chain gone slack. He put his hand on my knee. I didn"t know what to say, so I put my hand over his. "It"s your birthday," he said, and he held my hand tighter.
Somehow I got some presence of mind. "Why don"t we go outside and walk around for a bit?" I said. Then he said a very strange thing: "It"s your birthday, your feast day, and this is why I have come. Today is the day of Frances Reardon, orphaned child of Brigid"s isle, patron saint of frigid knees. Of unmet wishes, of idees fixes, of withering eyes, of docile guise." He had continued staring at me as if I were one tree in a forest of many, but after he delivered this speech his look sharpened into something cruel. I"d felt what he was saying to me was cruel, and the look confirmed it.
Then he stood and started walking up the outer aisle. He began to shout, and said even stranger things. He said that this place-meaning the church-was no better than a bar room. "This place is a place where the people come to drink," he shouted. "They drink to forget, to die to what is real, they slump over in prayer, drinking and drinking in remembrance of me." I sorely wished for the gift of fainting from shock. He went down the center aisle. "I am turning you out!" he said. Two women got up and hurried out of the church, and at this point I found the courage to get up and walk as fast as I could to find the priest. I walked back to the door that leads from the sanctuary to the church office, and there stood the priest, white head bowed, shrugging on his robe. It"s always like seeing them in their underwear when you see them in their belted slacks and dress shoes. He looked up. I saw eyes that were younger than his hair, and I felt relief. I told him what was happening and he went out with me, and this small white-haired Irish man managed to wrestle Bernard to the ground. The organist, who is a statuesque, almost stout, redhead, helped the priest keep Bernard there. At least they did for as long as it took for me to run out and find a cop, who then called an ambulance. When I came back in, Bernard had of course escaped the bonds of the priest and the organist and was throwing missals everywhere. It took four ambulance attendants to get him on a stretcher. He bit one of them. And now Bernard is in a hospital outside of Boston. He has been there for nine days.
John Percy, who has been to see him, tells me the doctors say he suffered a manic episode. When I think about all I have known of Bernard, and what I have now read of his disease, I see how his illness has been lying in wait for him. It will come for him again, and again.
As far as John can tell, Bernard came down on the train that afternoon. He told me that Bernard rang him up shortly before he came to see me and told him some addled things. John said he called me to tell me this and was going to offer to come over because he had a bad feeling about Bernard but I had already left for Ma.s.s. Apparently Bernard told John that he had received a revelation in a church in Boston that I was a saint, that I was the only pure thing in New York City, couldn"t John tell, couldn"t John tell that there was light around me because I had not sinned, I had not been touched, that I knew the true purpose of the Church, I was its defender, I was not drinking the blood like milk, the host was solid food for me, that I was a saint and when my book was published everyone would know that. John has been to see Bernard and tells me that Bernard does not remember saying any of this. When John told Bernard what he"d said, Bernard groaned and put his face in his hands and did not speak for a long while. John asked me to go see him because he thinks if Bernard does not hear from me he will not do as well as he might. John Percy does not say much, so if he tells me this, I can be reasonably a.s.sured that it is a real possibility.
I have prayed for Bernard every minute of every day. I am going to see him this week. I am staying with his friend Ted and Ted"s wife.
Still, I am very angry with him. Please pray for me that this anger dissipates, because I know it is not right to be angry when my friend is suffering. I am very angry with him because in his mania he has confused me with a saint. I itch writing that sentence. I am angry with him because he did something to me in his mind, something that now makes me wonder what else had been in his mind before he said what he did. It"s making it very hard to write-to the point where I don"t know what"s weighing heavier on my conscience, the blank page that"s resulting from my anger or the anger itself. I sit in front of the typewriter and type and then start looking out the window, worrying about Bernard and then fuming at Bernard. And so he"s turned me into a crazy person too-he"s led me into the realm of what if and who"s there?
Love, Frances April 15, 1959 Dear John- Your office called and told me you are in England for a few weeks on business. I hope all is going well with you, and you are enjoying your time there.
You asked me to tell you what happened when I saw Bernard.
Hospitals are horrible places, and this sort of hospital in particular-it"s supposed to be expensive, but it feels like a dump.
I walked into the common room and there was a baseball game on-the sound of it like flies buzzing over the heads of the bodies slumped in vinyl padded chairs. Gray linoleum, navy blue vinyl. I had baked Bernard some chocolate chip cookies at Ted"s apartment-Ted said that Bernard was starving and had been making the staff miserable in his loud complaining about the food. So I walked into this awful, cloudy, bruise-colored room and saw Bernard"s big curly head over the collar of a cheap red velour bathrobe the color of port. "Bernard," I said to the back of his head, and he got up and came to me. He looked exhausted. The bathrobe hung on him like something s.h.a.ggy and ancient, but he still looked regal, like a chieftain robbed of his scabbard. "Bernard," I said, and took his hand. "No, no, that"s not enough," he said. He took the package out of my other hand, put it down on a chair, and then pulled me to him. He was right. That wasn"t enough.
That over, we took our seats. We didn"t say anything for a while. I smelled the smell of that place-stale, a film of body odor, dust. Ammonia at base. The baseball game droned. I didn"t know what to say that wouldn"t sound inappropriate in its smallness or patronizing in its sincerity. "I made you some cookies," I said, "because Ted said you had been inciting riots at dinner." Bernard smiled. But his smile came slower than it usually does, and I realized that he must be swimming through the Thorazine. I started to cry and he saw this. "Now I know you love me," he said.
I brought The Tempest and I thought I could read him some of it. I should have realized that perhaps this was not the best choice. After a while he asked me to stop. "Are you afraid of me, Frances?" he said. "No," I said. "I"m not afraid of you. I want you to get well."
"You waited too long to come," he said.
I said nothing. That seemed the gracious thing to do.
"Please pray for me," he said. I told him I had been praying for him all this time.
I saw his parents on my way out-I heard his mother arguing with the nurses. I think they had gotten confused about his schedule and she wanted to be allowed to see him even though visiting hours were over. I see where Bernard gets the fire in the gut to demand better inst.i.tutional dining. He has her face too. "Watch my purse," she said in ill temper to a nurse bustling by. She"s the pier and Mr. Eliot is the dinghy tied to it, bobbing away in oblivion. I suppose I should have introduced myself but I didn"t think it would go well.
I"m going next weekend. I"ll give you another report then.
Yours, Frances April 15, 1959 Dear Claire- How are you?
I just wrote a letter to John Percy about my visit to Bernard in which I seem to have left out some of my more cowardly feelings. I know that many people think that their editors exist solely to absorb those kinds of feelings, but I would be ashamed if John thought that I was less than stoic, as he seems so stoic himself.
It was very difficult to see Bernard. He is being given a drug called Thorazine, which is an extremely powerful sedative that is supposed to prevent psychosis. This means that when you talk to him, there is often a pause of several seconds before he answers-it is as if you are a customer in a dusty old general store, and he"s the mummified cashier who has to remember where he"s put whatever it is you"re looking for or whether he even has it. This drug also makes his hands tremble. This started at the end of the visit, when I was reading to him, and when it did, he looked at me helplessly, panicked, as if to say I don"t know what"s happening but I know I don"t want you to watch it happen. He finally sat on them. I didn"t know what else to do but kiss his head. "Perhaps I should be inst.i.tutionalized more often," he said.
I have never, in my twenty-six years, seen anyone laid out in a casket-I was kept away from my mother"s funeral-but looking upon Bernard in the hospital, I imagined it was not dissimilar. I have never seen anyone I was fond of that altered physically. He is gray and crumpled. His eyes are dull. It took all that I had to keep looking at him straight on. I was determined not to be a child in front of him.
On the way out I asked a nurse how often he was given the drug, and how. She looked at me warily, and then explained: He is stripped down, strapped to a table, and then injected four times, in four different places. I nodded, thanked her, and then ran into a ladies" room stall to hide until I regained my composure. What humiliation. I"d have killed myself by now, if this were me. Do I mean that? Let"s hope we never find out. I can"t believe I"m writing this, but this has made me somewhat glad my mother pa.s.sed away when she did, because if she"d lived any longer she might have ended up in a place like that.
When Ted picked me up, I asked him to pull over at the first church we saw. He said of course. I went in and asked that my fear not render me helpless. I asked forgiveness for the anger I had toward Bernard. Then Ted drove us home and poured us each a martini. I said I wasn"t sure I wanted one-it was three in the afternoon, and I thought I might try to get some revisions done-but he kept right on shaking and stirring. "You"ll be no good to anyone if you don"t," he said, and handed me a drink. "It doesn"t make all that wine any less transubstantiated, if that"s what you"re worried about." I do feel grateful for Ted.
I"ll end this letter here.
Love, Frances May 1, 1959 Dear Frances- Will you smuggle me in more books next weekend? My mother did not bring me the Shakespeare I asked for-she brought some Agatha Christie and John d.i.c.kson Carr instead. "Your mind must be tired," she said, "and I don"t think it"ll do to be revving it up with Shakespeare. I know you won"t watch television but I thought some whodunits might be entertaining."
I can"t stand mysteries. In the same way I can"t stand science fiction. Why pretend we"re somewhere else? Forensics is a feint. Why distract ourselves from the eternal questions with set dressing? Salad dressing.
Would you mind bringing me copies of Cymbeline and The Winter"s Tale? My mother offers one pudding and Ted another: Ted says there"s no better time than losing your mind to cleave to the decencies and unremarkable sentences of the Victorian novel, sentences bearing plot to the reader like freight car after freight car carrying cargo to its destination in Leeds. The way he has described the work of Trollope and Gissing and Thackeray, I now want the oasis of decency and plain English the way I want a roast chicken: there is secret opulence in both. Ted says not to worry; if I like these books it doesn"t mean I"ll end up married like him. That broke my heart, to hear Ted already joking but not joking about the death that is marriage. Do you know I have never read Vanity Fair? In my mind I had confused it with your Little Women, but Ted a.s.sures me that it"s only a girls" book if you think Becky Sharp is a role model. It"s really a pirate novel, he says.
The people here are all crushed cigarette stubs of people. Bent, white, ashen, diminished. Myself included.
I sleep the way some people commit suicide.
The priest here is, as you might say, a perfect ninny. He gave me a book by Bishop Sheen. That made me go black for a day or two. I started to think that maybe G.o.d is as small as the minds who love him blindly.
All there is to do here is sleep, read, eat, stare out the window, or write Frances a long letter.
I wonder if G.o.d is playing a joke on me-the girls here are caricatures of all the women I"ve been with, or wanted to be with. There"s a girl with yellow braids and a severe brow who"s always carrying a copy of Imitation of Christ; a dark-haired girl who touches my feet under the table at meals but ignores me in the hall; a girl with auburn hair who speaks to me only in puns. Now I think I know what the nunnery must have been like for you. The psychiatrist who"s a.n.a.lyzing me will tell you that these girls are all variations on my mother. I don"t want to believe him, because how could I have been so obviously Oedipal? Aren"t we much more than a collective impulse to frustrate and be frustrated? But I wonder now if it"s not free will but the unconscious that we have been given. I wonder what of your mother was encoded in you without your knowing; what of your life is a letter she wrote you that you have just opened and will take your whole life to read.
Love, Bernard May 15, 1959 Dear Frances- Thank you for bringing me those books. How beautiful the sight of you in your green and white striped dress. I suppose you"d say I"m only saying that because I"m in a nut house, and you were the only person who had washed in a week and was not catatonic. But I am going to say it again: how beautiful. Like cream, like clover blossoms. Your face says so much in so little time, you let everything you"re thinking bloom upon your face, and I can"t think of anything else I"d rather watch than you pa.s.s through five moods in five minutes. What glorious weather.
I think you have forgiven me. Have you forgiven me?
It"s three in the afternoon, between herdings to and from meals, and I"m finding myself in a moment where I needed to talk to someone I love. I don"t talk much to the other patients here. I don"t really want to talk to anyone here, for fear it is revealed just how deep the similarities are between me and the old woman who pops out of her window every day at noon crying cuckoo across the quad. The narcissism of small differences, I suppose. I am forcing myself to read, even though I have to fight to stay interested past the first few pages. I keep it up, even if an hour goes by between pages, because I don"t want this drug to have the last word on the strength of my spirit. I need to prove to myself that I can willingly inhabit worlds other than my own.
I don"t like to look at myself in the mirror either. I have aged overnight. Some days I look gaunt as El Greco"s Saint James, others I look as bejowled as my grandmother. In general I appear as cratered and evacuated of sense as the moon. My hair annoys me. Full, unruly, standing at attention, suggestive of robust and hardy vegetation, it seems to me an accessory left behind from a costume I"d been renting out. I leave it uncombed as punishment for its mockery of my otherwise gelatinous state. The nurses are always trying to get at it.
But I am very glad to hear that John is delighted by the novel. This is a thought I have been returning to, because it brings me what feels like happiness.
I"ll take my leave now. I only want to keep writing about how beautiful you are, and I do not want to risk your censure. How beautiful, and yet you suffer this Polyphemus groping for you from his dark cave.
Love, Bernard May 21, 1959 Dear Bernard- I will see you in a few days, but I wanted you to have something to read in the meantime that wasn"t a mimeographed sheet telling you what not to take with your orange juice. I want to get this in the last mail, so it will be short.
Please keep reading. I think that is a good idea. I wanted to tell you that I have been reading Cymbeline too-I"ve never read it, which I"m sure you can believe-and in fact I just finished it, so when I see you we will talk about it some. They say it"s a clunker, but I do like this line, from the end: "Pardon"s the word to all."
I think you look as kind as you have always looked.
Yours, Frances PS. Although I think you should let the nurses at your sagebrush.
If only for your mother"s sake. And maybe mine?
June 1, 1959 Dear John- I hope this letter finds you still enjoying England. If you have found any books over there that merit looking into, would you let me know?
I told you I would write you again about visiting Bernard, so here I am. They"re letting him out on the fifteenth, and it seems like he"s going to stay with his parents for the rest of the summer before moving to New York to take a teaching job at Hunter College. I think this may be one of those times where even ineffectual parents are better than no parents at all. Bernard is just humbled enough now to accept their care, and they seem humbled enough to swallow their objection to his being Bernard instead of an obedient son.
He seems better. Although I have no idea what better means, in this context. I think what I mean is that he seems eager to leave the hospital and resume his life, and that the people who run the hospital are going to let him. I worry about him a little because I sense that he is afraid of himself-that he thinks of himself now as a loaded gun likely to go off at anytime without warning. All I can do is pray for him and try to make him laugh when I see him-and not mind how feeble those two gestures are.
I know Bernard would love to see you when you get back. Your letters have been cheering. If you want to make plans to visit him, let me know and Ted McCoy will drive us out.