episodes, while I shivered on the sand wrapped in a tartan blanket, I heard my grandmother, my mother’s mother, who sat immobilized beneath a parasol like an iceberg dressed in black, more tartan blankets covering the diabetic gangrenous foot that I was always told to keep out of the way of, say: “The only way you’re going to get that boy to behave is by running him over with a car. Pity you can’t.” And then she winked at me. I have often thought that my father was frightened by what he imagined was the beginning of the disease of lovesickness—the same disease that had had him panting after my mother, who by this point in their marriage had turned like milk; now she was a materialistic withholding scold. But I more than made up for whatever softness he feared by a period of prepubescent pugilism, a reign of terror in which I pulped anyone who wouldn’t let me take charge or have my way. This subsided, mostly, in high school, though I did, my first year at Harvard, throw a punch at Ted. I missed. He, in response, knocked me out. This is why I conscripted him into a friendship. We cannot for the life of us remember why I threw a punch at him. Ted likes to say it was because we showed up to the bar wearing the same dress.
When I ask my freshmen what they have read, they all stare at me for a moment, and then talk about television and comic books. Could a gap of eight or so years really make that much difference? I suppose you and I could have been listening to cereal-sponsored serials on the radio, but we didn’t—or did you? I can tell you, however, that Superman is actually quite an amazing read, should you find yourself at a drugstore lunch counter with all the day’s papers sold out.
Love (may I?),
Bernard
May 8, 1958
Dear Frances—
I wrote and mailed, forgetting that I’d wanted to ask the following.
Would you like to contribute to the Charles Review? I can’t pay you, but I can offer you publication in an esteemed journal, your words jostling alongside those of Pulitzer winners and expatriate literary lions. I won’t put you near the Iowan chaff.
Yours,
Bernard
May 16, 1958
Dear Uncle Bernard—
Your niece Frances—a four-eyed, French-plaited platypus awaiting the evaporation of her baby fat—thanks you very much for the romantic advice. But I’ve never been one to spend time thinking about why men and women take to each other, or why they don’t. I think it can turn a lady neurotic, a term I despise but also am loath to have turned in my direction.
I think I read more like your students! I had a period where I was reading lots of comic books—one of my uncles drove a truck for a magazine distributor and always brought home tons of whatever didn’t sell. So I agree—Superman is really quite an amazing read. As an excuse for this, I’m going to say that in my child’s mind, comic books were as potboiling and morally clear as Bible stories, and that was why I ate them up. I read a lot of Nancy Drew too, even though I knew it was the same story over and over again. When I’d read all of them and back again, my aunts piled a lot of Judy Bolton on me, thinking I’d love that too. Not the same. I read them all, though, in a summer, hoovering like they were Cracker Jack. Fell asleep reading them on the beach down the shore and got sunburned. And I didn’t really even like them. Sometimes I wonder if the automatic way I consumed them, one after the other, thinking of nothing but getting to the next one but without real appreciation for the taste, means I have it in me to be an alcoholic. Then I think that reading—something, anything—was maybe a way to hide in a family where I was always required to be in plain sight. Nobody approved of being antisocial. Anyway. I didn’t read Treasure Island, but I did read The Swiss Family Robinson. Robinson Crusoe too. I really did love Little Women, although I could not stand that the girls called their mother something so sissy as Marmee, and you will not be surprised to hear that I identified with Jo and pictured Ann whenever Amy popped up. Little Women was one of several books my mother had owned and that my aunts gave