Frances and Bernard

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 God’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 Brass.

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 ass 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 bump hers or hers will bump 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 pass 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 passing 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 God 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 God and art the way I want to talk to you about God 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 God 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 Mass 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 button-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 repetition 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 idées 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 Mass. 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 assured 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 shaggy 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 institutional 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 institutionalized 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 passed 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