I’m going to get an autograph.” “Oh no you’re not,” I say. “Why not?” Ann says. “Aunt Peggy and Aunt Helen would think it’s a hoot.” I say: “It’s groveling for something that’s not even admirable to begin with!” “Oh, stop it,” Ann says. “Come with me.” “No!” I say. I take my arm away from her hand and stop walking. I turn into the seven-year-old I think she’s being. “You’re such a sourpuss,” she says, and strides off to this actor and the woman he’s with. I can’t even watch. When she comes back she’s waving the receipt from the grocery store we stopped in. It has his autograph. “See! He was very nice,” she says. “He has family in Philadelphia.” She says this like it means something, like she has really made a connection with him. It’s like being with an old woman who still believes in Santa Claus. Next street anecdote: We go take a walk after dinner to get ice cream and we are about to pass a very old couple, probably in their eighties, both short, frail, the man in a short-sleeved pressed shirt and slacks, very neat, glasses, and he is pushing his wife, in a short-sleeved dress with huge flowers on it, in a wheelchair. Since the street we’re on has a bit of an incline, Ann thinks we should offer our help. He doesn’t look as if he is wrestling with the incline, and still she says to me, “Oh, do you think we should offer to help?” “Oh, I don’t know,” I say, shy, because perhaps they will think us young people patronizing, because perhaps they will resent our pity of their age and fragility. But Ann says to them, brightly, a chipmunk in a blue-checked dress, “Do you need help?” “No,” says the man, without interest, but with no frost either. And so I’m proved right. And I wish I hadn’t been. I see Ann: willing to insert herself into the world to help, unafraid of how it will be received, just knowing that as a Catholic she must be kind, and me hanging back, afraid of being seen as smug in my small offer of help when everyone needs so much help all the time, the amount of help needed is too big, and so I turn away in despair. Keep yourself hid, Ann, I am always saying to her, and Frances, you are a miser, she is always saying to me. It’s like liturgy. But unlike liturgy, no change comes about from repeating the phrases. There’s comfort in it, but no change.
She also told me that she is seeing someone. She didn’t say much about him—by now Ann knows that I will probably disapprove of whomever she is seeing. I should feel bad about that but I like to think that it will do some good one day. His name is Michael, and she met him, she said, at the engagement party of one of the girls from work. She said he’s going to school for surveying at night and working as a manager at the Acme during the day. He’s another Italian. Ann likes Italians. My aunts tease her about it. They’re so warm, she says. They’re such warm people.
I should get this in the mail. Bernard is coming for dinner and has hinted that he wants me to bake him something; meanwhile, it’s four p.m. and I am still in a nightdress.
Love,
Frances
September 14, 1959
Dear Frances—
Now that we live in the same city, I guess we won’t be writing to each other anymore. But I wanted to send you a note after seeing you last night. Thank you for making me dinner. I don’t know what you were talking about with that pound cake—there was absolutely no way that a kitten tied to it and thrown in a river would sink to the bottom instantly. I can’t cook at all, and I am starting to see the wisdom of the henhouse—three squares for the feckless. If I were any more shameless, I would ask if I could come to dinner once a week. You could think of yourself as the Red Cross. Christian Aid. The YMCA. I would pay for the groceries.
See, we can keep up a conversation without God at the center: Roth, Updike, my students, your coworkers, your work, my work, your father, my mother, your landlord. I mean to keep you in my life. And I see that you don’t want me leaving either.