Frances and 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 God 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 God. 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 classes 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 class. 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 God 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 God 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 Thérèse’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 sniggered as she did it. (I admit, I sniggered when I read it.) But I no longer laugh at Thérèse 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, finishing 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 institutions?” 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 damn 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 hello 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 rushing 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 superstition 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 shift. 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 appetite 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 god. 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 hello to her and congratulate her and she tilted the drink back one tilt too far so that the ice fell out of her glass and ran down her dress. “Oh, for God’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 illustrious 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 glass. 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 God 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 masturbated, 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 friendship like that of Teresa of Ávila 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 God 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 classes on Milton. Maybe you could tell me what I shouldn’t miss in pitching my softballs 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 assistant 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 cocktail 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 hello; 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 worship—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 embarrassing, 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 hoarse 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