you want me or need me. Because I need you. And I don’t know who you would ever need. You wrote a letter asking me to come see you, making it clear that you wanted my company in particular, but I think deep down you don’t really need anyone. If you did, you would have fallen in love with someone by now. That’s not an insult. That is a thought that came to me as I wrote. I don’t mean it as an insult. I haven’t been in love with anyone, really, either. Everything’s fallen apart. But I know I need people. You don’t know how to need people.
If we say we love each other, what does it matter? It does not mean that we have to marry each other. It means only that we need each other, that we look out for each other. That our lives without each other would be less. And it’s because I love you that I’m writing you this letter. I do think God sent you to me. I have plenty of people to talk to about poetry, but I don’t want to talk to anyone, not even John, about God and art the way I want to talk to you about God and art. I need to know that you have the things in mind that I have in mind. I have been misunderstood but you don’t misunderstand me—at least intellectually. I think God sent me to you because Claire can’t break you. I think she’s tried, from what you tell me, but you two are too much like an old married couple now for your barbs to really rend the flesh. She’s married, and has her own life to build. She will find it less necessary to carve out of you what needs to be carved out because she has someone else now who needs her knife. In the same way Ted isn’t around to carve out what needs to be carved out of me because he’s about to be married and has his own life to build. So I think you and I found each other at precisely the right moment.
You will probably refuse to write me or see me after you read this letter. But I believe in absolute honesty. I believe also that our friendship will withstand my confusion and your horror.
Bernard
March 15, 1959
Bernard, you have knocked some wind out of me, and I need to make sense of it.
Please don’t write back to this letter. I’ll write you a longer one when I’m ready. Anything I say now is going to sound like a gavel coming down on your head, and I have fondness for you, a great deal of it, so I have to go away to be as kind as I believe the Lord wants me to be here. That’s something I’ve never felt, and perhaps my fondness for you has made me feel it: the conscious impulse to shut my mouth for Jesus’s and/or another person’s sake.
My life without you would certainly be less. That is one thing I know.
Yours,
Frances
March 31, 1959
Claire—
I hope you’re well.
I’m writing to tell you something I still can’t quite believe.
The Sunday before last, Bernard showed up in the city, unannounced. I was sitting in church before five o’clock Mass started— there were only about ten of us—and while sitting there, I felt a hand clap on my shoulder. It was Bernard. It was barely fifty degrees that day but he was not wearing a coat. He was wearing a blue seersucker jacket and a button-down shirt, with his tan corduroys held up by his braided leather belt. He was clearly enduring something beyond his usual dishevelment. There was a hole the size of a quarter in the knee of his right pant leg. His hair was standing up a half inch higher than usual, and his eyes were looking at me as if I were one tree of many in a forest. Scratches on his bare ankles—he had not put on socks with his oxfords. His fingernails were laced with grime.
He pushed himself into the pew, shoving me to the right with his hip. “Frances,” he said. “Your landlord said you would be here.”
I couldn’t speak. I just stared at him. I knew something awful was going to happen but I didn’t know what. I could not push my mind past a repetition of the phrase Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy, Lord, have mercy, Lord, have mercy. My mind