Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,19

true: hair less greasy, suit less creased. “You know my nickname for you was Fanny Price,” he said. “If that’s an overture,” I said, “I feel compelled to inform you that the door is padlocked.” He raised his glass to me and then I pointedly ignored him while I waited for my drink. I have nothing to add to that anecdote, only that it is offered up in the spirit of having suffered through the same people during a summer.

I should also tell you that I sold my book! To Scribner’s. The girl who bought it seems a little young, but my agent assured me that she is, as they say, Going Places.

Why don’t you come to visit next month? I would be so very pleased to celebrate a little with you and thank you for your kindness toward my prose.

Yours,

Frances

August 2, 1958

Dear Frances—

Your book! I wish you could have seen the smile that broke across my face when I opened your letter and read the news. I’m smiling now to think of it. I hope you had your agent make them pay you what it’s worth, and then some. But I’ll pry the exact amount out of you when I see you.

Your description of this evening made me pant to be in New York with you, going to parties. I have to say that I’m a little surprised you took as much enjoyment as you did in that parade of envy, malice, and ambition. I suppose I imagined you would have only disparagement for those sins, that you’d leave the rejoicing in the horrors and wonders of that parade to me! You know, I think I heard that story about the diaphragm too. But I can’t remember who the perpetrator was. As you said: Drat. So let me come and visit you—I would love to come and visit you—so we could go to one of these parties together and pretend to listen to each other while we eavesdrop on everyone else’s conversations. You know I know where the bleeding will be heaviest.

I will admit that I heard Jim Schultz call you Fanny Price several times. Compared with what he called Lorraine, Fanny Price was downright chivalrous.

New York must have hard-boiled your heart in a cauldron of urbane indifference if Jim Schultz now touches your collarbone and you don’t turn him into scrapple. I am somewhat shocked. (A former student has recently alerted me to the existence of scrapple and told me that it is beloved in your native city, which is his city too. Frances, I have to say that scrapple now makes me understand why you referred to yourself as a northeastern hillbilly. Speaking of barbarous.)

What about the weekend of the twenty-second?

Yours,

Bernard

August 25, 1958

Frances—

Thank you for letting me visit. Here is a postcard I bought at the Cloisters for you. This is Clare of Assisi as a girl receiving a palm on Palm Sunday from her bishop. They say that after this moment she disappeared from the world and gave herself over to Saint Francis and his men.

Please do not ever disappear from me.

Love,

Bernard

August 26, 1958

Ted—

Here are the books that you asked for. Painting as a Pastime? Your love of Churchill knows no bounds. According to this curio, he and I agree on what the soul of an artist requires: “The first quality that is needed is Audacity.” You’re reading like a plutocrat these days, Ted—heavy on the military history and light on novels. Is Kay that distracted by decorating your place that you need this entertainment? Although I suppose we’ll now have sheets. But did we need sheets?

While I’m writing I’ll tell you: that visit with Frances Reardon was quite wonderful. I took her all over the city—she hadn’t dug into it yet, so we did it together. You have posited that she may have, as you like to say, a thing for me, but I don’t think she does, and I am fairly sure I don’t have one for her. I kept looking at her from different angles and examining my response. Various types of affection flared up in her presence, but not romance. I looked at her face while eating dinner at the Barbizon (that aqueduct built to conduct the flow of girls from Westchester straight into Connecticut while keeping them far above the catacombs full of dead dreams), her pretty milkmaid face flowering among all the pretty, iridescent silk-stockinged girls. And I did not find myself thinking her more beautiful than these, who were