Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,16
not be set to boil by the same writers, the same injustices, or the same women. It is one of those relationships in which a semi-inexplicable current of respect for the other’s intensity and strength is responsible for the bond.) So I don’t despise Ted, even though I think what he is doing is setting himself up to follow the family line out of a lack of courage. The old story, and still an enraging story. No, I despise her.
Frances, tell me if I am in the wrong here. I don’t trust any of the women I know in Boston to tell me the truth.
Love,
Bernard
June 4, 1958
Dear Bernard—
I’m very sorry to hear about Ted. I’m going to take Shakespeare a little out of context: “Go to, I’ll no more on ’t; it hath made me mad. I say, we will have no more marriages.”
The women on my mother’s side of the family, my three aunts and my grandmother, they all married well enough and out of the immigrant melodrama of innumerable babies and strife, but growing up I saw how they seemed to do nothing but cook, clean, scold, and sew. It appeared that mothering was being maid and confessor to three to seven people. Or more, if you took your Catholicism seriously. Which, as I have already established, my aunts did. They were always giving safe harbor to the kids in the neighborhood who did live in the strife—inviting them for dinners, cutting their hair, giving them my cousins’ castoffs. My aunts ran an ad hoc mission out of their homes. Ann, who would marry a stray dog if she could, has a great deal of them in her. This is why I won’t marry. I am not built for self-abnegation. If I’m built for anything, it’s writing. I can’t even teach! I had to, when I was at Iowa, but I was not very good at hiding my displeasure at mental sleepiness and mediocrity. And if anyone gets my self-abnegation, it needs to be the Lord. He’s been waiting a very long time for it. He’ll be pleasantly surprised one of these days if it ever shows up.
I approve wholeheartedly of the marriage of Claire and Bill— Claire is a reporter and Bill teaches Latin at an expensive Catholic boys’ school, and I don’t think I’ll ever see two people as in love with each other as they are. It makes me think that a marriage of true minds—to again quote S.—is in many ways just dumb luck. Two of my childhood friends have married men I think are complete dullards. One of them I might even describe as a lout. This husband, drunk at their Christmas party, said that he’d always wondered if I was a lesbian but that I must not be because a lesbian couldn’t possibly look that good in black velvet. I told him that he didn’t know much about lesbians then. But the wives do not seem to mind the way I mind. They do not see their husbands as extensions of their personalities; they see them as means to motherhood and material comfort. They seem happy with their children, happy with their dresses and their homes. They seem happy and oblivious. Sometimes I think they have happened upon a spiritual discipline I might do well to adopt. When I do not think they’re fools.
I wonder if Ted isn’t just after his own version of this happiness? I know that thinking of it this way is no consolation. I have never been good at thinking myself out of disappointment, so take this for what it’s worth. Some people don’t need more than what’s in front of them. Mostly I feel just fine about not having this talent but sometimes (see above)—well, I’ll just say “but sometimes,” and leave it at that. I don’t know Ted, but if he can talk back to this lady, I think he knows what he’s about.
I’m going to shut up now. You’re not in the wrong.
Yours,
Frances
June 10, 1958
Dear Frances—
Your letter did help. I know that this is probably just a boy’s recalcitrance to accept the fact that romance takes different shapes among us. What makes Ted feel like he’s alive is not what makes me feel alive, and it may be that Ted doesn’t need to be as alive as I do, and I have to accept that. When a friend stops reflecting you back to yourself in a way that keeps your vanity buffed and shined—that’s all