Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,13
understand his appetites and the power they had over him.
Yours,
Frances
April 17, 1958
Dear Frances—
I’m going to read that last line of your last letter to mean that you also have great affection for me. This pleases me immensely.
Unfortunately, I have been a cad. Blindness makes for caddishness. Cruelty’s not the only way to be a cad. Although I have been cruel too.
I am curious—have you ever singled out someone for your affection? I’ve been wanting to ask this. Do not misunderstand my tone here; I ask with all the tenderness and innocence of a brother. Imagine me asking: Frances, what did you read as a child? And that is how I am asking this question.
You have made me uncharacteristically circumspect. I like that very much.
Yours,
Bernard
April 27, 1958
Dear Bernard—
There was a young man for whom I had affection at Iowa. He is now married to the woman who was my best friend at the time. That is all I will say about that.
Except to tell you that I found my dearest friend, Claire, because of this young man. I was in the ladies’ room during a dance crying in a stall because the young man had chosen this particular evening to break it off, and Claire happened to be in the next stall over. I kept flushing the toilet because I didn’t want anyone to hear me, because I was so ashamed of crying over him, and in public, but she heard the keening of self-pity above the tsunami of flushing and knocked on the stall. “Are you all right over there?” she said. “Can I get you some water, or an aspirin, or a drink?” I didn’t answer right away and she said, “Are you crying over someone?” That made me cry even harder, and Claire came out of her stall, washed her hands, and waited for me. “I don’t want to tell you how many times I’ve cried in the ladies’ room at dances,” she said through the door. “It’s revolting, I know. You hate yourself for it.” I liked that she used the word hate. I came out of the stall and saw a tall blonde in an emerald-green shantung shift, her hair swept up on top of her head. She looked at me and said: “What a fetching dress!” I told her I’d made it myself. Now it’s two years later and I don’t know what I’d do without her. That was the first and last school dance I ever attended, by the way. I’d rather go to a funeral.
Now, tell me what you read as a child.
Yours,
Frances
May 7, 1958
Dearest Frances—
I’ve done some shabby things, but I’ve never thrown a girl over for her friend. I pray I never do. But it sounds like you won, in the end, if such a thing as Claire transpired shortly after.
Permit me to lecture for a moment: Uncle Bernard says that unless you, like Kierkegaard, are desiring and capable of basing a whole system of philosophy around this rejection, you should fall in love again. And again and again, if you have to. It is one of life’s greatest pleasures.
I can hear your eyes rolling all the way up here in Boston. Your blue, blue eyes.
As commanded: here is what I read as a child, ranked in order of moral and aesthetic influence.
The Bible. All the way through at seven years old and then repeatedly, daily, as of noon today, at breakfast. Psalm 51. King James Version.
Paradise Lost. At eleven years of age. My affinity for the devil was almost as terrifying to me as the idea of him.
The Iliad and The Odyssey. Eight. With these words he led the way and the others followed after with a cry that rent the air, while the host shouted behind them.
Bulfinch’s Mythology. Eight.
Hamlet, at twelve.
Dickens’s A Child’s History of England. At seven. I began by imagining myself as Alfred, but by the end worshiped Cromwell, because he was a Puritan, too, and I drafted the neighborhood boys into a New Model Army. There was a mutiny soon after, I don’t think I need to tell you, that sent me indoors for the rest of the summer reading—
Treasure Island.
Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen. Read them over and over when I was six, which is when I decided that I wanted to marry a mermaid. I had a habit of swimming too far out to find them and would have to be dragged bodily out of the Atlantic by my father. After one of these