Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,15

me the Christmas I was eight; the others were Heidi, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre. The next Christmas, my father gave me the books he’d read in childhood—and that was how I read nearly all of Dickens. I am looking at these old books on my shelf as I write to you. Their leather is as dark as dirt now, and the tops of the spines are fraying. If this place burned down they would be the first thing I grabbed.

I did not read Paradise Lost until about a year ago, I’m afraid. (I have to say, I agree with you about Satan being the draw. Adam and Eve: Who cares?) Can you find it within yourself to keep up a correspondence with this northeastern hillbilly? Uncle Bernard, maybe you should send me a box full of Greek tragedy—perhaps this is what I really need, more than advice for the lovelorn. Or perhaps Greek tragedy is advice for the lovelorn! You tell me.

As to your second letter: I would love to be published in the Charles Review. I’m enclosing a chapter from the novel. If this offends, no offense taken. Will I also receive a handsome muffler with the Charles Review stitched into it? I look best in green and gray.

Yours,

Frances

May 28, 1958

Dear Frances—

Am so pleased that you will contribute. I warn you, I will edit.

Since the last time you wrote, I’ve grown a little dark. Ted has proposed to, and been accepted by, this woman who will, very shortly after they marry, certainly seduce him into going to law school. Which will not be difficult, because Ted’s novel has been rejected by several houses, and he doesn’t have the confidence to keep going. He should keep going, but I think he will escape from this catastrophe—what he feels to be a catastrophe, because he’d told himself that if he couldn’t publish this book, he would give up on writing—into domesticity. He was waiting to be saved into writing but now has to ask this woman to save him into the next thing, which will be a comfortable haute bourgeois existence, with children, just like the one his parents led. Ted doesn’t need much, but he does need to look extremely capable, and he knows he could lawyer and he knows he could make money, because his family has been making money for generations. (Ted, against my vociferous rumblings, ran a lucrative poker game out of our rooms at Harvard. I don’t mind gambling on my own physical strength, or talent, or attractiveness, but there’s something about gambling away money that makes me queasy. Must be the Puritan in me.) I haven’t said anything to him about this woman. But I think he knows what I think, and this is making the apartment strangely, portentously quiet.

Kay is the daughter of a congressman from Mississippi. I almost wrote clergyman, and I think that there is some provincial parsimony dripping off her aquiline nose. She’s too beautiful to be a harridan, but she has the soul of one. One weekend when she came to visit and Ted and I ran out for more liquor, she emptied all of our ashtrays on the floor, sat waiting at the dining room table for us to come back, and said: “I’ll clean this all up but I wanted you two to understand how disgusting it is to live as you do, especially from a lady’s standpoint.” “I’ll clean it up, lady,” he said, with an emphasis on that last word, and she and I stared each other down while Ted went to get the broom. I can see why Ted’s in love with her. She possesses the tenderness of a portrait of Dora Maar, and the forceful will to conquer realities that has been exhibited by all the southern women I have met.She looks like the daughter of a sixteenth-century Spanish innkeeper and views her life’s journey as akin to Sherman’s march to the sea. She is beautiful. I should despise Ted, because it’s the kind of marriage you’d make if you needed money or wanted to get into politics, and Ted sure as hell doesn’t need money and thinks politics is a game utopians follow because baseball bores them. (As I write, I hear you wondering, as I sometimes wonder: Why am I friends with Ted? Well, he’s one of the smartest people I know, and when I met him I felt that our blood boiled at the same temperature, even though it might