Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,7

college’s hiring of a right-wing ideologue whose work was a tract against welfare. I passed out on the third day. My father threatened to stop paying the bills if, as he said, I pulled “a stunt like that again.” And I did all this thinking of Christ. I did not go to church, but I kept Christ in mind as I acted. Whatever you have done unto the least of my brethren, you have done unto me. Whoever helps one of these little ones in my name, helps me.

Maria. Maria was in a class of mine when I was a junior. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale—some great fire from within had consumed her and then expired, leaving her white and stark. Maria was Russian, from Brooklyn. She and I slept together quite a bit. I didn’t think that I loved her but I knew I liked sleeping with her. I thought she was beautiful, and I wanted to have something beautiful. But then I got the feeling I was an amusement for her. Like Babe the Blue Ox—some big strong dumb American animal who put its blind trust in what it believed, charging and snorting all over the place, rushing toward goals it would never achieve. Her grandfather had been put to death by Stalin and she thought that to be politically engaged was the height of naiveté. She once told me that she thought I might one day be great but that I had to stop thinking God was going to have anything to do with it. She thought that my belief in God made me a child, that only a spoiled child could think God existed. This was invigorating but it also drove me mad. I had started to believe that I might love her in some way. I came to her room late at night once when I was drunk, shouting, throwing myself at her because I wanted her to respect me more than I thought she did. I wanted her to want me more than she did—I mean, I didn’t want her to look at me as if I were a child, I wanted her to look at me with hunger. She tried to kick me out. I called her a whore. I woke up the next morning outside her door with blood crusted around my nostrils and over my upper lip—the remains of a bloody nose. She told me later that she’d pushed me away, and when she did my legs twisted up beneath me, which sent me crashing to the floor, which gave me the bloody nose. She told me she’d thought about calling the police but then decided that that was an overreaction. She wanted nothing more to do with me. I used to get in fights all the time in school—anyone without an older brother, I came to his defense, and this was partly a function of my being an only child and missing the chance to be heroic for a younger sibling—but this was different. I had been violent toward a woman. This made me sick. I started to feel nauseated when I thought about how bellicose, how thunderous, I’d been all my childhood—and I saw my time at Harvard as childhood. I thought I had been growing up by unleashing my strength and mind onto the world, by imposing myself and not being afraid of it, but this suddenly began to seem like a lifetime of tantrums. I’d gotten used to having too much, at having whatever I willed become real, which had made my will promiscuous. Not strong at all.

My mother had a story she would occasionally tell me whenever I refused to go to some family engagement or to dress up for these engagements, or when I rejected their offers of money or their ideas about law school. “When you were about four years old,” she would say, “someone gave you a scooter for a present. And one afternoon, when you were out with your father, you kept trying to see how far you could go.” At one point my father told me to come back, but I just kept rolling on. “No one can stop me,” I am supposed to have said, “only God.” I thought about that story many times after what happened with Maria. I started to feel that I needed to stop thinking only God could stop me. Perhaps I should try to submit myself to God, rather than try to be him.

Then, at