must really be losing my mind. Also, I am a hypocrite. I once warned Bernard about becoming God’s disgruntled customer, and here I am.
Sister, I thank you if you can read even a quarter of this. Now you know what it is like to have a teenage daughter. You must have thought you were escaping this through the convent. My sincere apologies.
Yours,
Frances
July 1, 1963
Frances—
Hello! I hope this letter finds you and your family well.
I know it must be strange for you to hear from me, since it has been years since we’ve spoken, but I saw your most recent book in the windows of the bookstore in Harvard Square, went in and bought it, started to read it that night, finished it the next day, and I have been thinking of you ever since. The book is terrific. Kudos. You know I’ve stopped reading current fiction—once I headed for law school, I decided that I would read only history, biography, reportage, and political thought, and I have never felt anything remotely like a hole in my soul since, which means that I was right to give up writing for lawyering. Maybe once a year I’ll read Our Mutual Friend, when Kay and I go to Maine, but that’s it. From what I remember, current fiction used to be pretty insipid, and I’m betting it’s pretty insipid now too. But your book is fantastic. Every sentence is a whip crack.
Reading your book made me think that it’s about time I got something off my chest, and that maybe you could take it. I’m well aware that what I’m about to write could make you angry, because it’s betraying someone’s confidence and would assume a certain amount of lingering feelings on your part. You might understandably take offense at someone assuming you’ve got even two drops of regret over Bernard.
Bernard told me what happened between you two last fall. He was pretty torn up about it. I told him that he shouldn’t have engaged you. You shouldn’t have engaged with a married man either. I’m not saying it’s wrong, I’m just saying it’s wrong for you. I don’t think you have the constitution. I can just imagine your Catholic blood boiling over that bit of amoral reasoning. But I do believe that what he wrote you afterward—at least, what he told me he wrote you—came out of a real struggle with his conscience. He was not toying with you.
Let me get to the point of why I’m writing. If you do have any lingering feelings of regret about not marrying Bernard, you should not. He tries to be faithful to Susan, and I think he does love her, but he’s fooled with one girl a year for every year of their marriage. These girls are notable only for their conventional prettiness (they wear very tiny hair bows, I’ve noticed) and their lack of wit. It’s a little embarrassing how indistinguishable they are from each other, and it’s a little embarrassing how they resemble you (physically) more than they resemble Susan. It happens every spring. It predicts every hospital visit. He gets a girl in his cross hairs, usually a student; he starts coming home late, and sometimes not at all. Three months later, he’s in the hospital, and Susan has to tell the girl to go home, he can’t come out to play. He might have told you this, in which case I’ll tell you this again so that he’s corroborated. What he might not have told you but that you might have heard is that Susan has had to, at least once that I know of, plead his case in front of the president of Columbia University to keep him from being fired.
At one point I thought that you were the only one for him, but now I think you were lucky. You wouldn’t have been his wife; you would have been a game warden. Even I was blinded to the reality of what life with Bernard would be. And I’d picked him up off bar floors and kept him from fights. I should have known better than to cheer the both of you on. But I’d been picked up from bar floors by him as often as he’d been picked up by me, so I thought his big stupid heart and his big stupid generosity would make up for his insanity. All the sentimentalism I’ve spent my life trying to hide broke out on me like a big red pimple