Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,63

think we are giving them dominion over us. To wit: you go to Mass daily but sit right in front, so as not to have to witness the mass delusion that is the rote childish piety of little old ladies.

Frances, you feel like a home to me. When you whisper my name, the world becomes still, and I with it.

I know I’ve gone about saying these things in the wrong way—this is what I meant when I asked you to marry me. It came out as a command because I was frightened of losing you.

I would not ask you to have a family—I realize that with my illness I am child enough for you. We will have your family fill our house with their lively warmth; we will have our friends do the same.

I ask for you to have faith that God wants you for me in addition to himself. Please have faith that God is putting me in your way because he thinks you are capable of loving more than you have ever known.

Please be as brave as I think you are.

Bernard

December 1, 1960

Dear Bernard—

I have been thinking of all you have written, and all we have said.

I am moving back to Philadelphia. I am doing this to put distance between us, and also because I learned over the holiday that Ann is pregnant.

I will never be able to be the wife you need, and it would be too painful for me to remain your friend while you fall in love with the woman who really should be your wife. So I am going to ask that we stop speaking to each other.

I do believe you when you say that you feel your love for me is more real than your madness, but I am afraid that for me, standing outside your illness, your madness might eclipse your love. I think, too, that your disease is a gift, even as it is an awful burden, because when you are not ill, you move forward with a fever that is a shadow of your mania, and that fever gives you poems, and teaching, and storytelling, and the ability to argue your love for me. I do not have an equivalent engine. It would require all of my spirit to take care of you the way you need to be taken care of—the way I wish I could take care of you, which would be the way God would require me to take care of you if I were to become your wife. There would be no spirit left for my books.

I have left work in the middle of several days to sit in St. Patrick’s and pray about this, and whenever I get up from the paddock I feel an undeniable rock in my gut weighing me down and away from marriage. It is, I think, a heaviness from God. Writing is the only thing I feel at peace while doing. If I were taken from it, I would be a bitter, bitter woman.

I am going to trust that you want my books to be in the world as much as you want me to be in the world, and I pray you can keep their well-being in mind.

I hope I can forget how much I love you.

Frances

May 15, 1961

Dear Claire—

Thank you for coming to visit. Ann in particular liked having you here. And my father, even through his senility, could tell you were something special. “Have her back,” he said. “You should have her back. It’s nice for you girls to have someone to play with.”

I wish you could come more often. I am now beginning to see why people marry. It’s necessary to have a bulwark against family—to have someone who is not imprisoned in the insanity and yet is close enough to it that his or her observations on the inmate population have the ring of objectivity. Although I would not want to put a husband through this. I was short-tempered enough with my father before I was forced to admit that the senility I suspected was the truth, and I fear that I would foist the short-temperedness onto a husband. Peggy, however, says that I am still young and that I shouldn’t say things like that. I used to turn incredibly sour when my aunts told me what I shouldn’t say, but now I find their voices comforting. These people are stronger than me. They cry at the drop of a hat, but they’re still stronger