Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,36

I’ll end up married like him. That broke my heart, to hear Ted already joking but not joking about the death that is marriage. Do you know I have never read Vanity Fair? In my mind I had confused it with your Little Women, but Ted assures me that it’s only a girls’ book if you think Becky Sharp is a role model. It’s really a pirate novel, he says.

The people here are all crushed cigarette stubs of people. Bent, white, ashen, diminished. Myself included.

I sleep the way some people commit suicide.

The priest here is, as you might say, a perfect ninny. He gave me a book by Bishop Sheen. That made me go black for a day or two. I started to think that maybe God is as small as the minds who love him blindly.

All there is to do here is sleep, read, eat, stare out the window, or write Frances a long letter.

I wonder if God is playing a joke on me—the girls here are caricatures of all the women I’ve been with, or wanted to be with. There’s a girl with yellow braids and a severe brow who’s always carrying a copy of Imitation of Christ; a dark-haired girl who touches my feet under the table at meals but ignores me in the hall; a girl with auburn hair who speaks to me only in puns. Now I think I know what the nunnery must have been like for you. The psychiatrist who’s analyzing me will tell you that these girls are all variations on my mother. I don’t want to believe him, because how could I have been so obviously Oedipal? Aren’t we much more than a collective impulse to frustrate and be frustrated? But I wonder now if it’s not free will but the unconscious that we have been given. I wonder what of your mother was encoded in you without your knowing; what of your life is a letter she wrote you that you have just opened and will take your whole life to read.

Love,

Bernard

May 15, 1959

Dear Frances—

Thank you for bringing me those books. How beautiful the sight of you in your green and white striped dress. I suppose you’d say I’m only saying that because I’m in a nut house, and you were the only person who had washed in a week and was not catatonic. But I am going to say it again: how beautiful. Like cream, like clover blossoms. Your face says so much in so little time, you let everything you’re thinking bloom upon your face, and I can’t think of anything else I’d rather watch than you pass through five moods in five minutes. What glorious weather.

I think you have forgiven me. Have you forgiven me?

It’s three in the afternoon, between herdings to and from meals, and I’m finding myself in a moment where I needed to talk to someone I love. I don’t talk much to the other patients here. I don’t really want to talk to anyone here, for fear it is revealed just how deep the similarities are between me and the old woman who pops out of her window every day at noon crying cuckoo across the quad. The narcissism of small differences, I suppose. I am forcing myself to read, even though I have to fight to stay interested past the first few pages. I keep it up, even if an hour goes by between pages, because I don’t want this drug to have the last word on the strength of my spirit. I need to prove to myself that I can willingly inhabit worlds other than my own.

I don’t like to look at myself in the mirror either. I have aged overnight. Some days I look gaunt as El Greco’s Saint James, others I look as bejowled as my grandmother. In general I appear as cratered and evacuated of sense as the moon. My hair annoys me. Full, unruly, standing at attention, suggestive of robust and hardy vegetation, it seems to me an accessory left behind from a costume I’d been renting out. I leave it uncombed as punishment for its mockery of my otherwise gelatinous state. The nurses are always trying to get at it.

But I am very glad to hear that John is delighted by the novel. This is a thought I have been returning to, because it brings me what feels like happiness.

I’ll take my leave now. I only want to keep writing about how beautiful you are, and