Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,35

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I just wrote a letter to John Percy about my visit to Bernard in which I seem to have left out some of my more cowardly feelings. I know that many people think that their editors exist solely to absorb those kinds of feelings, but I would be ashamed if John thought that I was less than stoic, as he seems so stoic himself.

It was very difficult to see Bernard. He is being given a drug called Thorazine, which is an extremely powerful sedative that is supposed to prevent psychosis. This means that when you talk to him, there is often a pause of several seconds before he answers—it is as if you are a customer in a dusty old general store, and he’s the mummified cashier who has to remember where he’s put whatever it is you’re looking for or whether he even has it. This drug also makes his hands tremble. This started at the end of the visit, when I was reading to him, and when it did, he looked at me helplessly, panicked, as if to say I don’t know what’s happening but I know I don’t want you to watch it happen. He finally sat on them. I didn’t know what else to do but kiss his head. “Perhaps I should be institutionalized more often,” he said.

I have never, in my twenty-six years, seen anyone laid out in a casket—I was kept away from my mother’s funeral—but looking upon Bernard in the hospital, I imagined it was not dissimilar. I have never seen anyone I was fond of that altered physically. He is gray and crumpled. His eyes are dull. It took all that I had to keep looking at him straight on. I was determined not to be a child in front of him.

On the way out I asked a nurse how often he was given the drug, and how. She looked at me warily, and then explained: He is stripped down, strapped to a table, and then injected four times, in four different places. I nodded, thanked her, and then ran into a ladies’ room stall to hide until I regained my composure. What humiliation. I’d have killed myself by now, if this were me. Do I mean that? Let’s hope we never find out. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but this has made me somewhat glad my mother passed away when she did, because if she’d lived any longer she might have ended up in a place like that.

When Ted picked me up, I asked him to pull over at the first church we saw. He said of course. I went in and asked that my fear not render me helpless. I asked forgiveness for the anger I had toward Bernard. Then Ted drove us home and poured us each a martini. I said I wasn’t sure I wanted one—it was three in the afternoon, and I thought I might try to get some revisions done—but he kept right on shaking and stirring. “You’ll be no good to anyone if you don’t,” he said, and handed me a drink. “It doesn’t make all that wine any less transubstantiated, if that’s what you’re worried about.” I do feel grateful for Ted.

I’ll end this letter here.

Love,

Frances

May 1, 1959

Dear Frances—

Will you smuggle me in more books next weekend? My mother did not bring me the Shakespeare I asked for—she brought some Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr instead. “Your mind must be tired,” she said, “and I don’t think it’ll do to be revving it up with Shakespeare. I know you won’t watch television but I thought some whodunits might be entertaining.”

I can’t stand mysteries. In the same way I can’t stand science fiction. Why pretend we’re somewhere else? Forensics is a feint. Why distract ourselves from the eternal questions with set dressing? Salad dressing.

Would you mind bringing me copies of Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale? My mother offers one pudding and Ted another: Ted says there’s no better time than losing your mind to cleave to the decencies and unremarkable sentences of the Victorian novel, sentences bearing plot to the reader like freight car after freight car carrying cargo to its destination in Leeds. The way he has described the work of Trollope and Gissing and Thackeray, I now want the oasis of decency and plain English the way I want a roast chicken: there is secret opulence in both. Ted says not to worry; if I like these books it doesn’t mean