Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,9

because I had learned a lesson, I thought, and I had had a sign, which was that I did not need to be constrained within the bounds of a religious community, whether lay or ordered, to live a Christian life.

Then I spent the last year before the colony in New York, reading manuscripts and writing. And then I went to the colony, where I met you.

Yours,

Bernard

March 1, 1958

Bernard—

Dear God, Bernard! Such strenuous effort. I got worn out from reading about it. A Trappist monastery! I see how lazy a Christian I have been. Your letter gave me a complex. But I think you and I have a little something in common.

When I was about eight, there was a nun who was out to get me. She answered me with sarcasm when I asked questions and in general behaved as if I were an unwanted foundling strapped to her already overburdened back. Even as a kid, I knew this sister had it in for me because I asked questions. I was always polite when I asked them, but I asked them, and this drove her crazy because it meant that I was onto her small mind.

One day she started to ask a question of the class—I forget what it was—and in my eagerness to answer I spoke before she finished her sentence. “Frances,” she snapped, looking straight at me, “that’s enough out of you.” That was the last straw. I shot up from my desk. “Sister, why are you talking this way to me?” I said.

“And what way is that?” she said, the tips of her fingers resting on the desk, standing tall, waiting in insolence for more insolence.

Apprehensive, anticipatory silence from the girls behind me. “You’re being mean to me for no reason.”

“But you interrupted me.”

“Sister,” I said, “if we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” It was a passage from John that had been read to us at Mass the week before. It seemed like a shotgun you could pull out to use on people when they got out of line.

I was sent to the Reverend Mother. My father had to go in and smooth it all over. He told me I could not talk back to any of my teachers until I went to college because his part-time job as the church groundskeeper—he worked at a printing press during the week—allowed me and my sister, Ann, to go to the school for free. “Those nuns aren’t holier than the rest of us,” my father said to me. “They’ve never known the love of anyone but God, if that. But they have been charitable to us, and you need to be kind to them. You’ll never lose anything in being kind, Frances.” I felt no kindness toward them, but I bit my tongue after that. I did it for my father, not for the nuns. I like to think Jesus has forgiven me that sin because I had only just lately arrived at the age of reason. I think if my sister, Ann, had been kicked out and gone to public school, my father wouldn’t have minded so much. But he was intent on my earning a scholarship and getting for myself what he couldn’t give me. He loved us both—loves us both—but he was not very good at hiding his delight in my brain. And Ann is not very good at hiding her mistrust of it. “The only way those books will keep you warm is if you burn them,” she likes to say. She thinks I’m no better than those nuns after all. I often fear she may be right.

But I don’t want to forget to say that it’s a common mistake to confuse severity for spiritual radiance. I think many religious folk mistakenly champion the importance of being ramrod. Especially religious folk who have coagulated into a group.

Yours,

Frances

March 10, 1958

Frances—

I feel a kinship with your father: I delight in your brain as well.

If we had been schoolchildren together, you would have barely tolerated me. When you heard me talking my head off in class you would have given me the look you gave all of us at the colony whenever you heard us making plans to drive to a bar in town. A look that would have been even more formidable coming from the large blue eyes in a small girl’s face.

I delight also in your continuous chide. And here I rewrite myself. Regarding