Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,21

We went to the Cloisters. We went to Mass. (He was too boisterous a singer during the Agnus Dei and I elbowed him and reflexively whispered a shush, though I was touched because he really does seem grateful, even desperate, for God’s mercy, and he just elbowed me back and kept singing.) He came to dinner two nights at the henhouse, and the girls ate him up, he was so solicitous of their aspirations, romantic and otherwise. Now, where had they gone to school? Did the young man they were dating seem serious? People are oxygen to him. It’s the part of him that can stand up in front of a classroom and teach. Whereas I think being around all those kids is going to give me some sort of disease of the mind—some degenerative disease contracted from contact with their undercooked brains. He told me later, half jokingly, that he’d chatted with the girls because he wanted to thaw me out in front of them. It was hilarious. Also a little maddening. I found myself jealous of those girls! Those sorority girls! Which makes no sense. Or maybe it was that I was jealous of his ability to charm and be gracious and make it seem effortless, make it seem an extension of his intelligence. While I tend to silently judge, or make an untimely crack.

Have you seen his picture somewhere in your reading? If not: big head, long straight nose rubbery at the tip, wide forehead, large mouth, finished off by open American eyes and a mild shock of brown hair. The bigness of his head, the calm of it, filled with what it is filled with, brings to mind a marble bust that might be trying to get itself on a pedestal.

But his mind and his heart seem free of cruelty—as he talked, I saw them as two gears connected by the same belt, a belt running at top speed, frequently hiccupping and flapping at the speed and the strain before correcting itself and grinding on.

That is Bernard.

My love to Bill.

Love,

Frances

September 1, 1958

Frances—

For the month of October I am going to live on Michael Lynch’s farm in West Virginia. I think you must know Michael from Iowa; he taught poetry there a few years ago. The idea is that I am going to pray and do manual labor. I’ve been feeling too cosmopolitan and scattered on the wind. A novelist, a girl from Kenyon, might show up too. Michael’s wife, Eliza, is also a poet, and they have a young daughter named Karen. Here’s my address:

Route 32, Box 2

Ravenswood, WV 26164

I hope New York is not killing you in this heat. I would ask you to come to the farm but I think I know what your answer would be.

Yours,

Bernard

September 8, 1958

Mr. Hair Shirt—

Since you know what my answer will be, I will not be reticent in letting you know what I think of Michael Lynch and his wife. He had a small crowd of acolytes that floated with him everywhere. Everyone thought that because I was Catholic and not an eighty-year-old Italian woman, I would love him too, but this was not the case. Michael and Eliza (she taught undergraduate poetry classes and taught piano too; I know you know all this, but did you know her real name is Eileen?) had faces that seemed cold with self-regard and I think what they imagined to be beatitude from their constant engagement with the upper regions of Catholic thought. Ugh. I read who they read, but I didn’t wear what they wore. Their trying so hard to look the part of conscientious objectors made me suspicious of their purity. Pardon me—I didn’t read exactly what they read. Dostoevsky was another Evangelist to them, the Grand Inquisitor chapter in Bros. Karamazov being the Sermon on the Mount. This gave me an antipathy for D. that I have just recently overcome. Eliza once came up to me after Mass and asked if I wanted to join them in praying the rosary on Sunday evenings. I demurred. When you grow up with women who pray the rosary as regularly as they do the laundry, with women to whom the laundry was a form of the rosary, it cannot be a project to reclaim it for your fancy piety. I hear that on his farm you live in sheds with the cows and piss out your window as if you were a medieval peasant.

That said, I hope you enjoy your time