Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,18

make jokes. But you know more rich people than I do, so correct me if I’m wrong.

The job is a joke.

I can’t invite you up to my chamber, but I could have you to dinner if you come to visit. Do you like instant mashed potatoes? I do. They are on offer every night.

Yours,

Frances

July 16, 1958

Dear Frances—

I’m so glad you’re happy. That place sounds as ridiculous as I imagined. I send you my pity, made public. But women are awful for the same reason men are awful: limited scope. And the rich can too make jokes. About their help, in whom they are constantly disappointed.

I see your point about the ending. I suppose I ask for more clarity in prose than I ask for in poetry. That is chauvinistic of me. You’re lucky I like you. Otherwise I would stare you down. As I have had to stare down even the expatriate literary lion, over a line of Latin he had incorrectly translated.

I would like to come and see you very much. There are a number of people I could stay with. I don’t have much to do this summer, seeing as how I’ve been given the fall semester off to start this new book.

I do sometimes wish we were in the same city. I do often wish we were in the same city.

Where are you going to church?

Yours,

Bernard

July 27, 1958

Bernard—

I’m going to church at Our Lady of Peace, which is on Sixty-Second Street. There’s very little to recommend it other than it’s convenient. The organist pounds away like she’s at a Yankees game, which amuses me. The last time I went I saw the priest, making his way back down the aisle at the end of the Mass, give a little start and then purse his lips when the force of the first bars of the benediction clapped him from behind. I enjoyed that little hiccup of fallibility. But I don’t think I need anything from the other people around me. I’m there for the liturgy and the host. I don’t even need the homily. Like you as a child in your Congregational church.

I went to an honest-to-goodness literary cocktail party the other night, courtesy of my employer. Despite the fact that it brought back the feeling I had at the colony of being a teetotaling toddler among the lotus-eaters, I enjoyed myself. I had a substantive conversation with another secretary at the company about what we’d been reading lately. But my favorite part of the evening? Overhearing conversations about (a) a writer whose fiancée left him for the actor hired to play him in the movie version of his autobiographical novel; (b) a writer whose publisher flew her out to Los Angeles and put her up in the Ambassador Hotel to get her away from a jazz musician who was making it impossible for her to finish her second novel; and (c) the husband half of a pair of married writers, less successful and less prolific than his wife, who apparently confessed to his editor that he’d thrown out her diaphragm and gotten her drunk one night in an attempt to get her pregnant and out of the limelight for a couple of years.

Do you know that I could not catch any of the names of these people? Drat. Was being polite and trying to look interested when spoken to. Somehow I’d gotten the impression—this must have come from Iowa, where everyone paired up out of boredom and was mostly too frozen to fire up scandal—that the modern way is for writers in love to cheer each other on from their matching Scandinavian desks. But this is not the case, at least in New York. Those coolly modern Scandinavian desks do not hide the fact that things are still very barbarous between men and women.

To my point: I know you remember Jim Schultz, the Esquire editor who told that story at dinner one night at the colony about having his publisher expense the whorehouses Jim visited while reporting in Vietnam. Well, he came up to me at the bar when I was getting another drink and said, “Is this Frances Reardon?” “Yes,” I said. “You look a shade less impregnable than last summer,” he said, tapping my collarbone (I had on a boat-necked dress—forgive me if you don’t know what that is; for a moment I forgot that I was writing to you and not Claire). “You look a shade more sober,” I said. He laughed. It was