Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,1

Here I frown: could be a sign of delusions of grandeur, when a Puritan turns to Rome. He said an astounding thing at lunch. He asked me if I had a suitor—his word—and I said no. I was pretty sure this was just to start conversation. Then, after a pause, while I was shaking some ketchup out over my french fries, he said, chin in hand, as if he were speaking to me from within some dream he was having, “I think men have a tendency to wreck beautiful things.” I wanted to laugh. I couldn’t figure out what kind of response he wanted—was he trying to determine if I was the kind of girl who had experience with that kind of wreckage and who would then be a willing audience for a confession of some of his own, or was he laying a flirtatious trap to see how much of his own wreckage I’d abide? Instead I asked him if he wanted the ketchup. “Actually, yes, thanks,” he said, and then, while shaking it out over his own fries, “Have you ever been to Italy?” He asked if he could write me while he was there. I did like him. Though I think he comes from money, and has read more at twenty-five than I will have read by the time of my death, he seemed blessedly free of pretension. Grandiose statements about romance notwithstanding.

Tell me of Paris. Send my love to Bill. When can I visit you in Chicago?

Love,

Frances

August 20, 1957

Dear Ted—

I’m packing for Italy, and sorry that I won’t get a chance to see you before I leave and you come back from Maine. Say hello to your mother and father for me. Will you finally make a conquest of that lobsterman’s daughter? I think you’re making this effort only to weave a line about it into the final ballad of Ted McCoy, just so your sons and grandsons have something to which they might aspire. Which I applaud. It’s as good as catching a mermaid.

It’s a damn shame that you didn’t get accepted to the colony. I’ve said it before and there, I said it again. They decided to give all the fiction spots to women this round. Everyone there was a thoroughgoing hack. There was a pert, kimono-wearing Katherine Mansfield type to flirt with, but she wasn’t smart enough to consider doing anything serious about. Which was all for the best. She couldn’t remember my name until the second week of our stay. She insisted on calling me Anton. “I’m sorry, you remind me of—” but she would never say who this Anton was. I wanted to know! She meant to give off an air of mystery—instead she gave off an air of distracted imbecility.

I met a girl I quite liked—but not in that way. I think you’d like her too. She looks untouched, as if she grew up on a dairy farm, but she’s dry, quick, and quick to skewer, so there’s no mistaking that she was raised in a city. Philadelphia. Her name is Frances Reardon. Was a little Mother Superiorish. She’s just escaped from the workshop at Iowa. She was the only other real writer there. Her novel is about a hard-hearted nun who finds herself receiving stigmata. It sounds juvenile, but it’s very funny. (I stole a look at some pages in her bag at lunch when she’d gone to get us some coffee.) Clearly someone educated by bovine-minded Catholics taking her revenge—but for God. A curious mix of feminine and unfeminine—wore a very conventional white dress covered in the smallest of brown flowers and laid her napkin down on her lap with something approaching fussiness, but then thumped the bottom of a ketchup bottle as if she were pile driving. At one point said that “reading the verse of Miss Emily Dickinson makes me feel like I’m being suffocated by a powder puff full of talc” but avowed that she did like Whitman. “Does that give me the soul of a tramp?” she said, smiling. Very charming, and without meaning to be. A rare thing. Also a very, very good writer. She made me laugh quite a bit. And yet she is religious. Also very rare. I think I might try to make her a friend.

I know you’re not a letter writer, but drop me a postcard or two.

Yours,

Bernard

September 20, 1957

Dear Frances—

I hope this letter finds you well and still pleasurably hard at work.

I write to you from outside Florence,