Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,55

that his illness is about to erupt. Sometimes I think I see it about his face. About his apartment. Dishevelment; neglect; impassioned responses to small daily events, from a piece in the Times that seems to be vaguely conceding to the right wing, to whatever I am up to in the kitchen, to a student paper filled with exceptional insights. A mountain of dishes in the sink, cigarette butts floating in a pan. His dress shirts stuffed in the linen closet with worn bath towels—I am surprised he even has bath towels and does not dry himself off with newspaper. (He says Ted’s mother gave them to him out of alarm.) No shower curtain. Papers all over his bed; when he’s not sleeping in it, his bed is a credenza, with a dozen different mugs and whiskey tumblers beside it. He cut his foot a couple of weeks ago because he was hung over and forgot to steer clear of them when getting out of bed. He will call four separate times at work; I can’t answer it the first three times, and the fourth time, when I pick up, he’ll say: “Why didn’t you pick up before? You’re Florence Nightingale, you’re supposed to pick up. I could be bleeding on a field in Turkey.” We laugh, it’s funny, but the fact remains: He has called four times in a row in the span of five minutes. “I wanted to hear your voice in the middle of this day,” he’ll say. Or: “What’s the soonest possible hour we can meet this evening?” Or: “If I had to assign a poem from Hopkins today, what poem should it be?” It makes me want to hide from him sometimes in embarrassment—I have maybe a tenth of his energy, and I often wonder when he will realize that he’s in love with a slug. Whirlwinds can’t love slugs. They need other whirlwinds, don’t they? Or mountains.

When I was about six or seven I was convinced that my father would pass away suddenly because my mother needed him with her in what I guess I was calling heaven—I would wake up thinking, Today might be the day, and then we will have to go live with our aunts. It was a pain I woke up with many mornings. I had forgotten that I used to feel this way, but I’m feeling something like this now. I wake up every morning with an obscure worry that eventually takes the shape of this sentence: Is today the day that Bernard will disappear? Each morning I wake to think the view I see outside is a sign of storm: leaves flipped over to show their dull underside, shoved there by a wind tugging thunder and rain behind it. And then I dress and find myself on the street, in the sunshine, and I make my way to the subway, and the sun and the crowds soak up my worry.

I wrote this at work. I should now get back to writing my story.

My love to you—

Frances

August 15, 1960

Ted—

I envy you, still up in Maine. I’m writing you from the colony. Which is perfectly fine, but no Ted, no ocean, no lobster. I called them up last week to see if they could give me two weeks here, because I want to get a head start on this next book before I begin teaching, and they said, “Be our guest.” So I’ll be spending the last two weeks of the summer here, and then back to New York, and then classes begin.

I wish you had come with me to Philadelphia to visit Frances’s people (that is what she calls them, her people) because I think they are like your people—boisterous, welcoming—only without money. I would have liked to see you tell these people they don’t deserve pensions.

Just how did I get there? It began this way. “My aunts want to meet you,” said Frances a few weeks ago. “I have had a phone call. They are commanding me to bring you home, because my father is too gentlemanly to make the request. Are you ready to be smothered by the loudest hospitality north of the Mason-Dixon?”

She wasn’t kidding. The women, her mother’s sisters and their daughters, all laugh in the same key—they throw their heads back and rasp out nine notes in rapid succession, nine eighth notes spilling down the scale. And they laugh quite a lot. They turn ruddy and have to fan themselves with their hands while