Frances and Bernard Part 7

And then he said: "The dragon has his foot on the saint, but soon I will send my son and he will wrestle the dragon and the bride will rise up to meet me."

I couldn't help but think he had read my mind. A chill went through me so quickly and deeply it left me nauseated. "We need to take him to Bellevue, I think," I told the police. "He's my friend; I'm not his family. What do I need to do?" They said they would take him and then call another car for me. I told them no, that I would ride with Bernard, but they wouldn't let me. "Miss," said a cop, bleary but firm, "you can tell him you love him when he's done thinking he's Jesus." Everybody was reading my mind. I went back upstairs and called John Percy, who said he'd meet me at the hospital. Another cop came back and then drove me over. I cried in the car. I prayed that G.o.d would guard me against the egotism that is guilt. The cop kept driving and said nothing. He bought me a cup of coffee at a grocery before taking me inside.

Bernard has now been at Payne Whitney two weeks. (It is more than a little sepulchral in here.) Sullivan told me to take November off, that he could get a niece of his to fill in. So I have been visiting Bernard every day. We don't talk much. I read to him, or we take whatever walk we can. I ended up teaching him how to play hearts. Sometimes we will just sit next to each other, and he will put his hand on my knee and then attempt to kiss my forehead, with varying degrees of accuracy. I am trying for once in my life to shut up and see what that is like. I think Bernard might be trying an experiment like that himself.

The day before yesterday he put his head in my lap. After a while he began to cry. A nurse, overhearing him on her way down the hall, came in and whispered to me that I should probably go for the day. When she pulled him away from me, he slid onto the floor and stayed there, crying. She nodded to me-if a nod could be said to be wise and absolving, this one was-and then turned her back and knelt down to him. In that moment I felt as if someone had rolled a stone over a tomb, and I would always be standing outside that tomb, deaf to the pain within. I called Peter from a pay phone in a hallway and I got drunk in the Village-the first time in my life I got drunk on purpose. I did not even think about going to a church. Apparently at the end of the evening I kept telling Peter I was no good, no G.o.dd.a.m.n earthly good. Final proof, in case I was wondering, that I am indeed and irrevocably Irish.

How many hospitals will I be writing you from?

I wish you were here.

Love, Frances November 23, 1960 Dear Frances- This is for you to read on the train home to your family.

There are several ways I want to begin this letter, and I can't decide which one to take up.

So I will begin with the abject: Forgive me.

My love for you is real. It is much more real than the love I had for G.o.d. When I think of you going about your life innocently and in full freedom and then being conscripted into my madness, I want to commit myself to an inst.i.tution forever. How can I ever atone for having distorted you into an allegory?

My madness is also real, but it is not as real as my love for you.

There is no one in this world who delights me as you do. Your mind is st.u.r.dily aflame, your thoughts constantly at a temperature that will scald the sleepers. You think with your mind and your soul, which is why those thoughts burn the way they do. I love you because of it. And I want the responsibility of making you incarnate. You say you do not want to marry but I think that is an attempt to escape the tedious daily struggle to love another human being. (I think this explains some of your antipathy toward teaching too.) If you remain alone in the city, your only duties will be to your writing and to G.o.d, and those duties take the form we want them to take. We give them the shape we understand, even when we think we are giving them dominion over us. To wit: you go to Ma.s.s daily but sit right in front, so as not to have to witness the ma.s.s delusion that is the rote childish piety of little old ladies.

Frances, you feel like a home to me. When you whisper my name, the world becomes still, and I with it.

I know I've gone about saying these things in the wrong way-this is what I meant when I asked you to marry me. It came out as a command because I was frightened of losing you.

I would not ask you to have a family-I realize that with my illness I am child enough for you. We will have your family fill our house with their lively warmth; we will have our friends do the same.

I ask for you to have faith that G.o.d wants you for me in addition to himself. Please have faith that G.o.d is putting me in your way because he thinks you are capable of loving more than you have ever known.

Please be as brave as I think you are.

Bernard December 1, 1960 Dear Bernard- I have been thinking of all you have written, and all we have said.

I am moving back to Philadelphia. I am doing this to put distance between us, and also because I learned over the holiday that Ann is pregnant.

I will never be able to be the wife you need, and it would be too painful for me to remain your friend while you fall in love with the woman who really should be your wife. So I am going to ask that we stop speaking to each other.

I do believe you when you say that you feel your love for me is more real than your madness, but I am afraid that for me, standing outside your illness, your madness might eclipse your love. I think, too, that your disease is a gift, even as it is an awful burden, because when you are not ill, you move forward with a fever that is a shadow of your mania, and that fever gives you poems, and teaching, and storytelling, and the ability to argue your love for me. I do not have an equivalent engine. It would require all of my spirit to take care of you the way you need to be taken care of-the way I wish I could take care of you, which would be the way G.o.d would require me to take care of you if I were to become your wife. There would be no spirit left for my books.

I have left work in the middle of several days to sit in St. Patrick's and pray about this, and whenever I get up from the paddock I feel an undeniable rock in my gut weighing me down and away from marriage. It is, I think, a heaviness from G.o.d. Writing is the only thing I feel at peace while doing. If I were taken from it, I would be a bitter, bitter woman.

I am going to trust that you want my books to be in the world as much as you want me to be in the world, and I pray you can keep their well-being in mind.

I hope I can forget how much I love you.

Frances May 15, 1961 Dear Claire- Thank you for coming to visit. Ann in particular liked having you here. And my father, even through his senility, could tell you were something special. "Have her back," he said. "You should have her back. It's nice for you girls to have someone to play with."

I wish you could come more often. I am now beginning to see why people marry. It's necessary to have a bulwark against family-to have someone who is not imprisoned in the insanity and yet is close enough to it that his or her observations on the inmate population have the ring of objectivity. Although I would not want to put a husband through this. I was short-tempered enough with my father before I was forced to admit that the senility I suspected was the truth, and I fear that I would foist the short-temperedness onto a husband. Peggy, however, says that I am still young and that I shouldn't say things like that. I used to turn incredibly sour when my aunts told me what I shouldn't say, but now I find their voices comforting. These people are stronger than me. They cry at the drop of a hat, but they're still stronger than me. I think their proficiency in emotion means that they will never be undone by it.

Thank you also for coming to talk to my cla.s.ses about newspaper reporting. These girls never let their enthusiasm show, but they were, pretty much all of them, sitting at attention as you talked. Of course: you were a living Weegee photo, and usually I am trying to get them to see that an opinion is not an argument. They're perfectly pleasant, as you saw, but these girls, many of whom should just ditch the pretense of college and marry themselves off immediately, show a distressing incomprehension of their mother tongue on paper. It's the way I am with French-I can speak it and read it, but please don't make me write it. I stand around with bunches of ys and dus in my hand, scratching my head and wondering where to plug up the holes. They have as much trouble with the possessive apostrophe as I have with the rascally prepositions and articles of French. But I have to say, teaching is, and I can't quite believe this, something I enjoy. It is a losing battle, but unlike the losing battle of tending to my father and his illness, I can see just enough enlightenment in their eyes to make me want to show up to the next cla.s.s. Of course, I also like being in charge and being paid for it.

That letter from Bernard that came just as you were leaving contained news of his engagement. He felt he should tell me so that I did not hear it from John or other mouths. This girl is someone who interviewed him a while ago for a magazine. She works at the Morgan, I guess, as some sort of curator or librarian, and she lives in the city too. He said very little about her other than that. I met her twice before I left the city, and if I remember her right, she's tall, black-haired, white-skinned, somewhat beautiful. I think she's black Irish, from lawyers, and those Irish have always fascinated-as mine have been fitfully to modestly employed, bards given laryngitis by the superstructure. The second time I met her was at a party, and she had an expensive-looking dress on, gray tweed, shaped modestly but dramatically with simple, severe lines, and she was listening intently to another guest. A friend of mine. When the friend saw me, he called me over. He introduced me to her and she smiled, very quickly and tightly, and I got the sense that smiling for her was as devoid of meaning as sneezing. I wondered if she remembered the first time we met. I think she did.

She did seem no-nonsense, which is good for him. I remember looking at her in that dress and thinking that there was something of a dog trainer about her, and that if you stepped out of line, she would very easily get you to heel. It must have been the tweed dress and the patient listening and the hair in a bun. Young Elizabeth at Balmoral, etc. I could say this only to you, but while I am shocked at how soon this all happened, I am relieved that he is happily paired off.

I read back over this and I hear self-pity. Claire, forgive me. I ask G.o.d every day to help me look at my father the way he looks at me now-with some joy merely because here is someone with whom to have coffee and look at the birds. Sitting with him and watching the birds is not spending time with my father. It's paying respects to a monument. No teasing, no stories from him. No laughter when I tell him how I put some functionary or other in his place, because I don't tell him those things anymore. I just have to sit there, telling myself that I am loving him by paying him respect for having raised me. There's no real pleasure in it. There's a great deal of anger and sadness, because my father with all his particulars has now faded into a philosophical problem: How should we love those whom we have loved for their particulars when those particulars are no longer present? I don't mind G.o.d being a philosophical problem-I never thought of him as my heavenly father anyway-but I don't want Frank Reardon to be.

I used to think Story of a Soul was not really Therese's autobiography but a novel for children-its heroine so ludicrously good, like Pollyanna, that you had to wonder if someone had made her up as a parody of the genre and sn.i.g.g.e.red as she did it. (I admit, I sn.i.g.g.e.red when I read it.) But I no longer laugh at Therese and her Little Way. It helps with the students. And I am using her to endure the Ed Sullivan Show. The trick here is to be hemming something or grading papers while it airs. The other night when the theme song klaxoned up like an air-raid siren, and I settled into the couch alongside my father, Ann made a crack as she ate her third bowl of ice cream that evening. "I think the real show," she said to me, finis.h.i.+ng off a spoonful, "is you being able to sit through this without drinking."

All my love again, Frances May 16, 1961 Ted- I have so many times forced you to do favors for me-I am writing now to formally ask one of you.

You are not as excited as I'd hoped you would be about my marriage. I know that we will remain friends above it, because you have been a witness to all my mistakes, but I am asking you to try to be kind to her. I know she can be cold initially, but I think the more you know her, the more you will appreciate her. She loves Trollope almost as much as you do. Could you start there? About her coldness-I think she may be sensing that you are measuring her against someone else, and when she senses that, or senses that she is in a roomful of people who are acutely aware that she is not someone else, she shuts people out in defense, before they have a chance to shut her out. With three sentences she can split my mind like the atom, and the words I need tumble forth, and forth, with the speed and heat I need from them. Her intelligence never fails. It organizes and protects; it clears paths for heart's ease. I think this unrepentant steadiness has tamed me. You yourself have remarked upon the change. So I am asking that you trust that we will love each other as long as we can and that you'll be generous of spirit, which is your nature, when you are around her.

Bernard May 16, 1961 Dear John- I hope you are enjoying Miami. Very perverse and un-Percy, a vacation in Miami. I send my regards to Julia and her family. Peel an orange on a patio for me.

I am writing to tell you that I have proposed to Susan. I suppose I could have told you when you returned to the city, but I am very happy and did not want to wait. My mother approves. "Has he told you that he's been in mental inst.i.tutions?" she asked Susan at dinner one night. Susan said yes, and my mother said, "Well, it's up to you now to make sure he doesn't get back in there, you know." "Bernard's a man," said Susan, "not a dog, Mrs. Eliot," and do you know, my mother laughed? "Susan," she later told me, "will not put up with your nonsense." I am thinking she made this leap purely because Susan showed she would not put up with my mother's own d.a.m.n nonsense, but it's true, Susan does not put up with my nonsense, and I am enjoying this reprieve from my mother's almighty glower. Susan says my mother wants an adversary but doesn't want her power dimmed by mine or sapped by my father's, which is why she can show Susan affection even as she is challenged by her. This is what I have thought since childhood. Also, Susan knows how to play up to my mother's vanity, in the subtlest of ways, so I don't have to.

My father says that Susan is a pretty girl with a good head on her shoulders. For what that's worth.

We're going to get married at city hall next month. I have written to Frances to tell her. I know you said that it would not be a good idea to write to her, but I thought she should hear it from me before she heard it from anyone else. I don't expect to hear back. I did not, of course, mention that you had told me about her father's senility. If any one thing would move me to take up prayer again, it is the thought of Frances losing her father's recognition.

Please write when you can.

Yours, Bernard May 23, 1961 Dear John- How is New York? You know, I did not think I would miss it when I left to come back to Philadelphia, but I do. I miss the endless variety of faces to be studied on the subway, for one. Please also say h.e.l.lo to Julia.

You were so kind to write and see if I was writing. I am not, currently. Five stories finished but nothing else seems to be coming to mind. I would like to write two or three more by the end of the year, but I think I might squeeze just one more out of these next six months. What is strange is that I am not bothered by the fact that my brain feels like a Dust Bowl farmhouse left vacant after the Depression. But do you know there's a pleasantness to it? I am imagining my mind as the upper room before the disciples piled in, readying itself for the Holy Ghost. I am trusting that something will come rus.h.i.+ng in at some point soon. I'm reading a lot, though, because I've been teaching, have just finished teaching, English-survey courses at my alma mater, Germantown College-or, as I like to call it, the College of Mary Pat. Being that there are so many of them-Mary Pats, that is. It's a very small girls' school run by the Sisters of Saint Joseph in a town just north of the city. They asked me to come teach for them, and I could not afford to turn them down. Reading and talking about reading for money made more sense than writing ridiculous ad copy for money. I never expected to feel warmth toward a bunch of nuns-my reflex when confronted with a bunch of nuns, as you know, is to wish for a trapdoor to open up right under my feet-but warmth is what I find myself feeling at the College of Mary Pat. These nuns have read enough to cure themselves of superst.i.tion and spite. They hired me knowing exactly what my novel was about, so they really must be cured of it. Although one sister did say to me, at a tea for parents, that she had read my book, and then told me: "I was angry like you when I was young, but after a while the Holy Spirit took that anger away from me." I changed the subject. There is another sister, in her sixties, who teaches French and who swims every morning in the pool of a neighboring military academy. I think we have become friends. She asked me to introduce her to Kierkegaard, and we are reading Diary of a Seducer together. She has introduced me to Balzac. Where has he been all my life? I know: buried under Tolstoy.

Thank you also for asking after my father and sister. My father-senility is terrible, but it is especially terrible in that his doctor says there is nothing physically wrong with him. And that is what it seems like. So my father is fine. My sister is fine as well. She's been working nights at Whitman's chocolate factory. She takes care of my father during the day, and I take care of him at night when she goes off to her s.h.i.+ft. And then my aunts help us along. If you do ever want to leave New York for a day, we would love to have you. I would like to introduce you to Sister Josephine, she of the morning swims.

Thank you again for writing to me. Your letter was cheering.

Yours, Frances May 25, 1961 Dear Claire- Thank you for your letter, and for the recipes from the test kitchens of the Tribune. Ann would like me to tell you that she thanks you too, because she's getting tired of my weeknight reliance on hamburger. She's getting tired of a lot of things, but that is her right as a pregnant lady.

What would I do without you? When I get a letter from you I rejoice, because it means there is wisdom in this world, and it did not get wiped out by the automobile.

I wanted to write and tell you that Ann will be marrying Michael. He's always been respectful to everyone here, and she tells me he's devoted to his mother. (Al Capone was devoted to his mother too, I wanted to say.) She's dated a series of salesmen-Ann and her appet.i.te for flash-so her dating a man with an actual trade might mean that she knew what she was doing with this one.

But the fact that he did not propose right away when she found out she was pregnant worries me. The night he came over to do it, I took him into the kitchen between coffee and dessert, sat him down at the table, and told him that he did not need to marry her if he didn't love her, because her aunts and I would take care of her. He looked straight at me and said that they loved each other. What can you say to that? If a person looks straight at you with solemn eyes and says he loves your sister, and you see your sister suffering because she has not been proposed to, and you think the suffering may be because she is afraid she might lose someone she loves, not because she would be without material support-then you have to let him back out into the dining room to finish his coffee.

We are going to his parents' house for dinner next week. His mother-her name is Theresa-telephoned and invited us all over. Her tone was determined and cheerful without being unctuously chipper. This invitation is a good sign, I think-it means that they are not going to punish them, or us, for this. Ann seems happier now. In a way, it's good my father is senile and has no idea what is happening, because I think he would be more wounded than Ann is by how her marriage came about.

Since Ann is out of some danger for now, I will worry about her only when I absolutely have to. And I can actually read again. My love, by the way, to Bill. Tell him I just bought The Magic Mountain and I am going to start in on it.

Love, Frances October 15, 1962 Dear Ted- I hope being in Los Angeles for a month overseeing depositions is not destroying you. I think I myself could take Los Angeles for only a month before I converted back to Catholicism again in revolt against its surfaces. But I'd love that first month. The sun like a punishment from a G.o.d. This is a thinly veiled request for you to invite me out there.

A few weeks ago I went to a party for Harrow. I told you this when you called the other day. What I didn't tell you was that I saw Frances while I was there. Why did I not tell you this? I remembered the forbidding stare you gave me last Christmas when I began a sentence with her name. I am telling you now because I am in some tumult.

She was in town visiting John and giving a reading for the new book, and we ran into each other. I had no idea she would be there. Although if I'd thought twice about it, I would have admitted it was a possibility. She was there with John's wife, Julia, and a woman John had just signed up. I wanted to congratulate her-because that book most definitely deserves congratulations, and it deserves one of these corrupt awards and if they put me on the committee next year I am going to demand that they nominate it-but she was avoiding me, I could tell. I walked in and we caught each other's eye-she was standing right near the bar with Julia and this woman-and after I checked my coat, I went back to find her, but she was gone. Every time I was freed from a conversation, I walked around the party trying to find her, and every time I found her, there she was, entangled in some conversation herself, and I'd send her a look inviting her to step outside that conversation, but then she would slip away from that knot, and I would have to go find her again. It took four attempts, but I finally cornered her. She was nervous. She kept drinking her drink, even after she'd drunk it down to the ice. I told her I wanted to say h.e.l.lo to her and congratulate her and she tilted the drink back one tilt too far so that the ice fell out of her gla.s.s and ran down her dress. "Oh, for G.o.d's sake," she said. And then she laughed. "How are you?" she said, casually, as if it had been a week since she'd seen me, not almost two years. "How does it feel to be nominated for such an ill.u.s.trious award?" she said. She was not ready to be genuinely interested in me.

So I decided to force us into honesty. "I do miss you," I said. And that was true. I didn't think it would cost us anything for me to say it.

She waited a moment or two, and then said: "It was as if you were dead." It was as if-voice rising up onto its toes on the if, putting the accent on that syllable, and then a pause before coming back down to deliver the blow-you were dead. She took a drink again but there was still nothing in the gla.s.s. Frances cannot pull off hauteur. Her secret vice of self-hatred makes itself known.

Then one of the publicists came by, a girl who John lets do his dirtiest work, clearly intoxicated from drink. "Bernard Eliot! Bernard Eliot!" she said. I stared at her with a thunderous glare, hoping that she would move along. She turned to Frances. "Isn't she a love?" she said to me. "Such a love!" Frances looked as if she wanted to strangle this girl. "Yes," I said, conscripting myself into chivalry. "Who doesn't love Frances?" I meant it, but it did come out a little curdled around the edges. And the publicist took off, leaving the two of us staring at each other.

There is something about Frances still that makes me want to court her. And she's the one who left me! Just seeing her-she looked just the same, as bright as a bunch of day lilies sprung up erect and chaste in the middle of an unkempt lawn, growing erect and green, green and apart from everything dull-made me want to pay her the tribute of my undivided attention. What did I do, after she tried unsuccessfully to make me think she was doing just fine? I took up chivalry again and offered to take her out for a drink. "May I take you out for a drink?" I said. "Yes," she replied, after thinking about it. And her eyes did appear to soften. "Let's go to the St. Regis," I said. I got our coats and led her out by the hand. She took her hand away, and then I grabbed it again. Ted, I know what you are thinking. But remember you have had your own temptations.

At the St. Regis, it took a while for her to relax. She sat on her stool like a parakeet perched on the bar in its cage. She sat holding her beauty to herself in the complacent, oblivious way old women hug their purses to their laps on the subway. All those New York women around her, thoroughbreds whinnying at the gate, and: Frances. Everything that was so beloved to me about the whiteness of her skin, pure and undulating, freckled and plush, came back in an instant as she lifted her chin to drink. I had to talk to shake it off. I told her about you, told her about teaching, told her what I was thinking of writing next, told her what I thought of her book, went on and on about her book. I felt that she was looking at me for hints of decrepitude. Looking and sipping her drink, and I realized again what I have thought many times since then, which is that she was sent by G.o.d to show me myself. "Bernard," she finally said, finally giving up the chill, putting a hand on my arm, "you do not need to keep talking." I brought her hand to my lips and that was the end of it. I told her to put her coat on. "Oh, no no no no no," she said. But I dragged her by the hand again, out to the street, hailed a cab, and told the cabdriver to drive us to Coney Island and back, that I'd pay him three times the tab for his trouble, and on the return trip into the city I tried to force myself on her, but of course she stopped me. She had never let me get away with that in a cab before, and she wouldn't let me now.

In the cab outside her hotel she started crying. She was trying to hide it but I saw tears on her face. "What's wrong?" I said. "I didn't know how much I would miss you," she said. "Well, write me," I said. "There's no harm in writing." "I don't know," she said. Then the cabdriver said: "Mister, I don't want to have to charge you four times the fare for this trip." She laughed. "Goodbye," she said, and then she ran up the stairs of her hotel and into her lobby without looking back. I wondered if I had made her do something she didn't want to do. But there was some note of query in her response to me-something leaf-green and nascent at the bottom of her deep blue reserve.

We drove to my building, and I felt an inexpressible sadness when I got out of the cab. I stood there on York Avenue in front of the apartment, reluctant to go in. I almost hailed another cab back to Frances's hotel. I started cursing her for getting in the cab with me. I did not want to sleep next to Susan. I slept on the couch and m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed, cursing both Susan and Frances. The next morning Susan said: "Is something wrong?" I said no, nothing. She did not believe me, but since I was coming home every night, made sure to come home every night, she let the subject drop.

I do miss her. I even miss her rigidity. It is a self-containment that to me mimics the sublime. It's not hysterical, as Susan's now seems-and that's unfair, because I've made Susan hysterical. Looking at Frances, I had the realization that I had been both her lover and her brother. With most people, you settle into being one or the other. I feel related to her still, familial, because she knew me when I was at my most Bernard and I knew her when she was at her most Frances. We'd read each other like books we were endlessly fascinated by. Frances, of course, hiding her fascination beneath the covers of intellectual exchange and perhaps some subconscious notion that we were enacting a holy friends.h.i.+p like that of Teresa of avila and John of the Cross.

She is-was-the familial and yet the sublime.

I am determined for once in my life not to hurt a woman if I can help it. I know I will do it again in a rage, but while I am sane at this moment, I want to be good-that insipid word which should be sacred. And yet I feel myself wanting to see what Frances is like now, see if this pliancy I sense in her is softness or sadness, and I tell myself that if I undertook this mission, it would be sacred because it's Frances-it would be forgiven by the laws of G.o.d and man because it is Frances. If I wrote her, I know that I would be trying to get her in front of me again so I could consume as much of her as she would allow. A panic is gathering, a clutch of wild conjecture that's sending me out walking for hours between teaching and home, and I don't know whether it means I have to reach toward her or turn away from her, or check myself in somewhere. No, I know I don't need to be checked in somewhere-I have a very clear sense here that I am a moral animal. I half wish that I were about to break down so I would not need to feel that burden.

Bernard October 16, 1962 Dear Bernard- I hope this letter finds you well. I was glad to see you. You might not have been able to tell, but I was. Very much so.

You suggested I write. I am about to start two cla.s.ses on Milton. Maybe you could tell me what I shouldn't miss in pitching my softb.a.l.l.s to the girls at the College of Mary Pat.

Thank you for reading my book.

Yours, Frances November 12, 1962 Frances- Dear Frances.

I don't think we should write each other. Starting up a correspondence with you would be too dangerous for me.

Susan saw your return address on the envelope, which she found in a book that I'd left in the kitchen-I should have been more careful about this, it's true, because she is a ruthless tidier-and she went out of her mind in a way that was difficult to witness.

I want to explain to you why I am saying this. Susan is extremely jealous of you. She has not been jealous of the women I have taken up with when I have been ill. She understood that those girls really were just wreckage from episodes-minor players in a nightmare-but if she thought I were about to start a dalliance with you, she would think something else entirely. She would think I had changed my mind in broad daylight, while sane, and that my love for her had truly disappeared. I remember you once wrote me that you could judge like an Irish mother-in-law. Well, Susan, I think, may have you beat there. She is hysterically jealous for this reason: When she and I had been together for five months, we were at a reading. I was off somewhere, I forget where, and Susan got stuck talking to the a.s.sistant that John had to fire because he caught her writing a novel at her desk (I can hear you now-Doesn't that girl know she needs to get hired by an octogenarian if she wants to keep up that sort of thing?). This girl told Susan that she used to work for John and, not knowing who Susan was, and I think in an attempt to proffer some impressive c.o.c.ktail party gossip, said that she'd once overheard Julia telling John that she'd always wished you and I would get married. And then the girl went on to say that she always thought the same thing whenever you and I would stop by the office together to say h.e.l.lo; she thought we looked so handsome together, and she thought it was terrible that you'd spurned me-her word-and wasn't it tragic. Susan left the girl without saying a word and dragged me into a corner and told me to come clean about what I felt for you. "If there's some great love you're not over, then we need to end this right now," she said. It did not help that I was laughing a little when she told me the story. You are both the eldest, beloved by your fathers-Jove's gray-eyed daughters, you have known nothing but wors.h.i.+p-and you girls do not take kindly to being in second place. My mother is one of them too. I didn't know Susan well enough to feel for her like I should have; instead, I saw her as a character in a story, maybe one of your stories, who, while snared in the comically coincidental, was being served with the uncomfortable truth of comeuppance. "You awful child," she said, and slapped me. It made an impression.

I sent Ted your book and your letters for safekeeping soon after. I do not have them in the house because if I'd kept them, she would think that I'd been lying to her that night. (I had John send your new book to me at Columbia and I am keeping it in my desk here, where she will never look. I am writing you now from Columbia.) I did lie to her that night, because I was ambivalent, but eventually I saw that she loved with constancy. I saw how she tended to her parents and her two brothers. And then things changed. Or, rather, I decided to love her.

I think it's true what you said-that I needed someone to care for me and only me. I didn't see it then but I do see it now. And Susan takes care of me. Her mind latches on to my sentences and can weed out the ones that have turned in on themselves. She keeps the house spotless so that I feel a calm I never felt before-the calm of the order of things and how an order of things radiates a peace-and can hear myself think in a way I haven't before. She has made an art of bullying a hospital staff. It's a bit embarra.s.sing, but I'm thankful.

Do you remember what you wrote to me when we parted? That you wanted me to keep the well-being of your books in mind? Frances, you were right to tell me no. I would have cheated on you the way I have cheated on Susan. What would you have done about that? You said that you have had trouble writing while you've been taking care of your father-what words would you lose if you had to suffer adultery, which would bring indignity along with sorrow? What words would have been swallowed in locking me out of the house in the winter and then dragging me in from the steps in the morning, in calling me at Columbia to make sure I am at Columbia and not somewhere else, in coming to a bar where you have a suspicion I will be with a girl whom you suspect I have slept with, in shouting at me for days and then going silent, your voice hoa.r.s.e and your heart stopped?

When John sent me your book, I read that first sentence and I thought what I have always thought: She can do anything. Do everything, then. Do it without me.

Love, Bernard November 20, 1962 Dear Bernard- So I'm denied the privilege of resuming a dialogue with you because of your wife's juvenile paranoia. I am once more again glad that I have never married.

You are contenting yourself to love someone who appears warm because she works with words, and words are not numbers, but she is, I think, essentially cold, colder than I ever was. I think she loves only herself, according to details that have been pa.s.sed along to me, unsolicited, as if in condolence-in condolence to me and, by proxy, to you. I knew girls like her in high school. I bet she was one of those girls who pretended to like the nuns and then snickered behind their backs about how they were all probably lesbians, since none of them could summon the courage to tell the nuns straight to their faces that they were full of nonsense. She's like the girls I saw at the nunnery: humorless beautiful girls who made a game of s.h.i.+fting allegiances among the other humorless beautiful girls in order to s.n.a.t.c.h more men or better jobs. It was blood sport but they were so beautiful and groomed, their hair in chignons, it looked just like ballet. What does she know about the human heart?

Also, Ted tells me she roasts a piece of meat like the Irish girl she is: by boiling it.

Don't worry. I won't ever write you again. If I were as schooled in blood sport as your wife, however, I would have sent this letter to your house.

December 1, 1962 Frances- Please believe me when I tell you I asked for death several times while writing that letter. I might have written it too quickly and emphasized some feelings at the expense of others, and you might not have known how sincere I was. But you have put me in a difficult position-you are making me feel that I owe you loyalty and certain confessions, but I can't give those things to you. Not only because of what I owe Susan, but because of what I owe you. My intentions might not be worthy of you. I might have seduced you and then asked you to keep your distance, and then where would we be?

I must still feel too many things for you if I ask that we not speak to each other.

Bernard December 3, 1962 Frances- I was sitting in my doctor's office waiting for an appointment and I heard the receptionist call out two surnames, one right after the other-Francis, and then Reardon. I looked up and a tall colored gentleman and then a short overweight woman with a cane rose and headed to the back. It was something right out of your books. I felt a sort of premonition, something I have never felt before, when I heard those names, and I needed to know that you were all right.

Bernard December 8, 1962 Bernard- Thank you for your concern, but it's really no business of yours any longer how I am doing.

Please do not write me again.

December 15, 1962 Dear Claire- Would you believe me if I told you I saw Bernard at a party when I went to New York for my reading? Would you excuse me for not having told you the moment it happened? I think I have tried to pretend that he no longer exists-and if he no longer exists then I shouldn't be talking to you about him-but when he materialized in front of me, I fell to pieces.

It has caused me no end of grief. So much grief that I can't even write about it.

After he and I put ourselves through some small talk, I said to him, apropos of nothing but my own shame and hurt feelings: "It was as if you were dead." You know I don't believe in demonic possession, but Jesus, Mary, Mother of G.o.d, how ugly the thing that came out of my mouth. His response: raised eyebrows, a bit of a smirk-and I was put on notice that he knew I was trying to get him to go through his paces. One of the publicists came by and made a fuss over the two of us. "Isn't she a love?" she said to Bernard. Bernard, trying to hose down the house fire, said, not without an arch of an eyebrow: "Who doesn't love Frances?"

He was gentleman enough to suggest that I am indeed lovable across all time and by all categories of person when the truth is that I put that fact into serious doubt. His expression meant I know why you are putting on this show, and you should be scolded for trying to solicit a response, and yet I am going to give it to you, because I did love you once.

He made me wonder if he didn't love me still, but then he cleared that up for me directly. I think I wrote him the bitterest letters I've ever written in my life, and it is making me nauseated every time I remember how bitter those words were. I think I have sinned greatly in being so bitter and in inflicting that bitterness on another.

I haven't been able to concentrate. I was in the middle of a lecture on Orwell yesterday and I stopped to look in the book to find a pa.s.sage that was going to help me make my point, and when I looked back up at the girls, I couldn't remember where I was or what I had been saying, so I said, "Well, that's enough for today, just go home and work on your final papers," and they all stared at me like they'd just been told their mothers used to skinny-dip. Then they gathered their things and ran out of there, afraid I'd suddenly regain possession of my mind and retract my dismissal.

Claire, maybe I can come out to see you. I've got some money saved, the semester is almost over, Ann's doing fine, and my aunts have offered to look after my father if I want to get out of town. And I do like your friends. It would be nice to talk about the British novel with people who do not think Jane Austen is, and I quote, "a huge snooze." After a while I start to see what these girls mean.

Should I come in the middle of the month?

Love to you and Bill.

Yours, Frances January 29, 1963 Dear Claire- Thank you again for hosting me. It was very cheering to spend time with you and Bill and the rest. Lake Michigan in winter is another proof of G.o.d's existence, I think.

The students are status quo. Sometimes there are sniffy principessas but this semester's batch seems to be willing to go along to get along. Thank G.o.d. Thank G.o.d also I am teaching three courses that I've taught before so I can pretty much draw on previous reserves. Seeing you was a vitamin B shot, but I'm still feeling a little unresponsive to stimuli.

I am sending you pictures of small Alice, as requested. These were taken at Christmas. My favorite is the one where she looks stunned by the tree: What is this thing you have set me in front of, with its many blinking eyes and drooping whiskers of tinsel? What you will not see is a picture of her trying to eat the baby Jesus out of Peggy's creche and the ensuing five-alarm terror. I was the one who took it out of her mouth. Ann wants me to tell you that you are now Alice's honorary aunt, and she thanks you for the clothes you sent back with me.

All my love, Frances May 30, 1963 Dear Claire- I'm sorry I wasn't around yesterday when you called. I'm sorry I haven't responded to your last two letters. I've not been feeling myself.

I guess you know Bernard's new book is out. It's been out since March, I think. I saw it in a bookstore downtown and stood in front of it for a good long minute before I actually opened the cover. They are poems about his loss of faith. I scanned the first few pages but finally could not read them. It was too painful. I felt a possessiveness that I knew was misplaced, and a regret that I knew was not.

I left the store and started crying on the street. I used to see women do this in New York all the time-on the subway, or while I waited in line at Horn and Hardart, and I would always give them a clean handkerchief if I had one-and now I was one of them. Actually, I believe I was, if you will pardon my using so forceful a word, sobbing. There was a church on the corner near the store, and the doors were open, so I walked in and sat down in a pew. I kept sobbing. There was snot coming out of my nose and I did not have a clean handkerchief. I ripped a page out of a missal and made do.

Since then I have been doing a lot of crying for no reason. At my office, in bed, in the kitchen while making dinner. My aunts must know why, because they do not ask what is wrong with me.

I haven't spoken too much about this to you, because I fear it would sound like whining, but I think that what happened with Bernard was a wound that I have not healed from. It hurts too much; it feels like sin. As I sat in that pew, the hurt that had taken root months ago suddenly shot up into a tree that looked like it had been blasted by a storm, its gnarled black branches twisting out faster and faster, the tips of the branches upturned like a hand begging answers from the sky. And no peace being poured into it. Crying in public! Still losing my place in lectures. Losing my place at home. I put my grade book in the freezer and shoved a frozen meat loaf into my school bag, and I didn't notice until I got to campus. I berated my father for forgetting that I am not his wife but his daughter, with Peggy having to take me aside and tell me to get a hold of myself, which was as good as a spanking.

So I sat in the pew and looked at Christ on the cross and spoke to this figure the way I have never spoken to it before: Lord, I am in pain, and I need you to send me a sign that I was right to have never married. Do for me what my aunts claim you have done, day in and day out, for them. I am behaving like a child in my stubborn sadness so I am begging you to treat me like a child who needs signs and wonders to believe in your power. Reward me for never having been a child.

Then Ash Wednesday came, and I understood the psalm in a way I never had before.