Frances and Bernard (17 page)

When I was about six or seven I was convinced that my father would pass away suddenly because my mother needed him with her in what I guess I was calling heaven—I would wake up thinking,
Today might be the day, and then we will have to go live with our aunts.
It was a pain I woke up with many mornings. I had forgotten that I used to feel this way, but I’m feeling something like this now. I wake up every morning with an obscure worry that eventually takes the shape of this sentence:
Is today the day that Bernard will disappear?
Each morning I wake to think the view I see outside is a sign of storm: leaves flipped over to show their dull underside, shoved there by a wind tugging thunder and rain behind it. And then I dress and find myself on the street, in the sunshine, and I make my way to the subway, and the sun and the crowds soak up my worry.

I wrote this at work. I should now get back to writing my story.

My love to you—

Frances

August 15, 1960

Ted—

I envy you, still up in Maine. I’m writing you from the colony. Which is perfectly fine, but no Ted, no ocean, no lobster. I called them up last week to see if they could give me two weeks here, because I want to get a head start on this next book before I begin teaching, and they said, “Be our guest.” So I’ll be spending the last two weeks of the summer here, and then back to New York, and then classes begin.

I wish you had come with me to Philadelphia to visit Frances’s people (that is what she calls them, her people) because I think they are like your people—boisterous, welcoming—only without money. I would have liked to see you tell these people they don’t deserve pensions.

Just how did I get there? It began this way. “My aunts want to meet you,” said Frances a few weeks ago. “I have had a phone call. They are commanding me to bring you home, because my father is too gentlemanly to make the request. Are you ready to be smothered by the loudest hospitality north of the Mason-Dixon?”

She wasn’t kidding. The women, her mother’s sisters and their daughters, all laugh in the same key—they throw their heads back and rasp out nine notes in rapid succession, nine eighth notes spilling down the scale. And they laugh quite a lot. They turn ruddy and have to fan themselves with their hands while wheezing out the last bits of laughter. They like to make one another laugh, but no one steps over anyone’s joke to do so. Frances does not laugh, but she likes to make them laugh. I saw her sitting back, watching, eyes dancing, waiting for her chance to nonchalantly offer up the one thing that would set everyone off again, waiting in a supreme confidence that what she was about to say would of course set everyone off again—a polo player swooping in on his horse at the last moment to give the ball the winning crack.

Her father laughs too, but he laughs mostly with his eyes—I think he has given this to Frances. Where her aunts will use jokes to tell stories, he’ll tease you. Though he won’t tease Ann, her sister, I’ve noticed, who is quite beautiful. Long, strawberry-blond hair, big blue eyes like Frances’s, slender, though plump in the necessary places, limbs rounded and smooth—comely fruit in a basket. When they stand side by side, in silence, you cannot see where they are sisters, their coloring and dress are so different. One is as resplendent (pink-and-white shoes intricately tooled, clusters of pearls in the ears, that strawberry-blond hair as proudly displayed and arranged about the shoulders as an ermine cape, all of it suggesting a child’s delight in hoarding treasure) as the other is pin-tucked (chaste fabrics suitable for nightgowns; a face authoritative but shy, sheltering itself under reddish-brown bangs; feet shod in ladylike, unremarkable shoes; no jewelry but her eyes). It’s like Helen of Troy next to Joan of Arc. Ann’s prettiness makes her a cartoon—it makes Frances disappear for a little while—she is so emphatically a confection that it turns her into a cipher, and she may be complicit in that. She has a sense of humor, but that is overtaken by a sense of propriety. “Daddy!” Ann said in a hissing whisper like a switch on his behind when her father said, upon meeting me: “Where did you think you were going to hide him, Frances? He’s as tall as Lincoln.” And Frances standing next to me, smiling, smiling, smiling—a playwright standing in the wings, thrilled by her characters complying for the hundredth time.

But then when she and Ann start talking and laughing together, there’s an eerily identical duet of inflections and motions that wake their faces up into resemblance. “You and your sister may be more alike than you admit,” I said to her later. “Oh,” she said. “That part’s no different from being in a family band—we can harmonize at the drop of a hat, but I will go to my grave shaking my head over her.”

A victory, one of several that day: A girl of about five, a daughter of one of the cousins, whose names I could not keep straight, asked if she could touch my hair. I lifted her up and said, “Go ahead,” which gave her great pleasure. And myself, I have to admit. I can understand why certain dogs let certain children dress them in baby bonnets. She stared at me, mesmerized, grabbing two fistfuls of brush where my horns might be, scrunching her nose up to denote how serious and scientific this application of force was. Those blue, blue eyes again! I was starting to think that I had stumbled into a Celtic folktale that was going to end with one of these blue-eyed sorceresses turning me into a tree. “Kitty!” a woman said, calling out from across the crowded living room. That row home was so packed and electric with people of various ages, voices, and purposes—talking, cooking, drink-fixing, nut-eating, sport-betting, child-minding, dog-petting—it was like Washington Square on a Saturday afternoon. “Stop messing with Frances’s friend’s hair! You’ll hurt him!” Frances came and took the girl off me. “Come on, Kitty,” she said. “That man has nice hair,” said Kitty as she sailed down to the ground. “Yes, he does,” I heard Frances say, her back to me, before giving Kitty a kiss and sending her off into the crowd. I gloated to myself. Now if I could only get her to say those things to my face.

While sitting on the couch next to Ann, discussing baseball, thinking that I’d shown myself to be civilized enough, I asked: “Am I the only gentleman Frances has ever brought home?” Ann hesitated, and then, I believe, flat-out lied to protect her sister. “Oh, no,” she said. “You’re probably the third or fourth. Yes, probably the third or fourth. But you’re certainly the most fun.” I gave her a look that was intended to quash undue flattery. “You are!” she said. The coquette I’d heard about emerged. “What, you can’t take a compliment? A big man like you?” (I know that our taste in women often diverges, but neither of us would get in a fight over Ann. The fire she has is sheer petulance and wounded vanity, I think, not true passion.)

I dared not tell Frances that I couldn’t keep her aunts’ names straight either. “So Frances tells us that you teach,” said Aunt Helen. Or Mary, or Peggy. All nervous with purpose—paying you the utmost attention but behind their eyes troubled by a sheet somewhere that needs hospital corners. Three notes chiming together in a chord. “How do you like it?” they asked. “And you’re from Boston? Why, where’s your accent? What do your parents do? How do you like our Philadelphia? Frances tells us you’re an only child. Have we split your eardrums yet? We bought a bottle of aspirin just for you, it’s in the medicine cabinet. Frances tells us you like roast beef, so we had Mary make her special one. Frances must not be cooking for you, otherwise you’d be green around the gills.” (Had she even told them about my hospitalization? She must not have, I concluded. When I asked her about it later, she neither confirmed nor denied and instead said, “That’s none of their business.”) Then, a joke after dinner. One of the aunts brought out a towering flaked coconut cake, set it down without ceremony, said, “Now, who wants some dessert?” and began serving. Then another aunt brought out a rectangular slab of what looked like spiced meat, gray in the main but crisped brown at the edges, set it down next to the cake, and started to carve it up. “Bernard,” this other aunt said, putting a slice of this on my plate, “you’re having scrapple for dessert. Frances said you’d love it.” Laughter all round. “Oh, give him the cake,” someone said. I refused it. Then a husband of one of her cousins, who I believe might have been a fireman, ate some along with me in sympathy. I made a big show of enjoying it. Damned if I had two slices. It’s actually quite good. As I put the last forkful of it in my mouth, Frances gave me the most caressing look she’s ever given me.

Her father drove us to the train station after dinner. While Frances was off buying a paper, he turned to me. I saw sympathy, intelligence, and curiosity in his face, as well as, I am fairly sure, approval. He’s a head shorter than me but he’s broad-shouldered and confident, brusque and pointed in his movements but generous and fluid in his speech, and I can sense the absolute goodness in him. He would have been a priest, I think, had he perhaps had the intractability of his daughter. Whatever makes Frances indefatigable, she must get it from him. Whatever makes her intractable must come from her mother and the aunts. “That cake is off-limits!” I’d heard one bellow from the kitchen. “I’m assuming you’re attracted to the idea of an early death?” I have no doubt she was talking to a man.

“I think it’s nice, you two,” her father said at the train station. “I think it’s nice, two writers. I bet you keep each other good company.” “We do,” I said.

Frances returned. “Bring her home again soon,” he said. “We miss her dearly.”

I watched her embrace her father—she shut her eyes, the better to commit this moment to memory, I suppose, should it turn out to be their last, and hung on to him for a few long seconds in a way that made me think she’d throw herself in front of a train for him. I was, of course, jealous. I was also jealous because she had a father who was not afraid of what he did not understand and who would find a way to talk to you about it. I don’t think you’ll be surprised when I tell you how difficult it was to be around people who made a point to weave themselves together because they had poured out their blood among one another. They may be annoyed with each other, but they do not hate each other. They understand that annoyance is a fair price to pay for the strange protective love of family. I do not often covet what other people have, but I did find myself wishing that I had known something like it.

I saw also that Frances is perfectly suited to family life, that she swims about her people like a fish in their waters, that she is happy when she bathes in their love and their noise, and I think she knows this about herself, that she could quite easily spend her days cooking, cleaning, and corralling children, that she could quite easily be charmed into a life in which she gave order to other lives, not words, and I think this is why she is so strict with herself on the point of marriage. She does not know anyone who has written and mothered, so she thinks it impossible. (I actually don’t either—all the women writers I know are libertines.) But she needs to be in control, and she has chosen to be in control of the people in her stories.

We stood on the platform. “Thank you very, very much,” she said. I got another caressing look. No sign of intractable Frances. Was it the exhaustion of having successfully fought her way through one of the most difficult maneuvers on the battlefield of romance—the visit home? It’s one thing to be able to undo Frances in bed—and I have compromised her there, in telling you that, that’s what kind of hold she has on me, that I give a damn about discretion—but it’s wholly another for her to, fully clothed and upright, make her preference for me known. Then another caressing look. I am sure she was trying to tell me that she loved me. I didn’t know what to say, which alarmed me. I was exhilarated, but could not speak.

She said hardly anything on the train. But she took my hand, and then fell asleep, her head resting on my shoulder. I wanted to propose to her.

I love her. But no sign from her that she’s as in love with me. If she were another sort of woman I might suspect her of having someone else in the wings. And I’m not even competing with God for her hand! That I might find acceptable.

Apologies for the length. But that’s what you get for not living near me at this crucial juncture. And I had to keep writing because there’s a girl from Texas here who’s been giving me the eye over the past hour as I sit in the dining hall, and as long as I’m writing she won’t come and talk to me. I’m trying to be worthy of my impossible love.

Love,

Bernard

August 15, 1960

Dear Claire—

This will be a very short letter because I have to polish a story before Monday. But I wanted to tell you that Bernard paid a visit to Philadelphia last week, and he was a very big hit. The rotter.

My father, after dinner, took me out back to tell me that if he died, he would not mind leaving me in Bernard’s hands. It was a little unnerving. I wanted to ask him if perhaps this was an excess of feeling due to the fact that I’d never brought anyone home before, but I think he really meant it. My aunts exclaimed over him as if he were Errol Flynn. “Jeez, Frances,” said Ann. “You sure do know how to make up for lost time.” (I have to admit some glee in making Ann a little jealous.) A small cousin of mine demanded to run her toddler hands through his hair, and he let her, grinning like an idiot all the while. That girl was delighted to be in his arms, and she made a big, unselfconscious fuss of showing it.

I was a little chastised. No man should give of himself the way he does to me and receive mere acquiescence in return. It was a lesson, seeing him bear up so good-naturedly under all that noise and fuss and behave as a perfect gentleman in the middle of the circus I come from. What kind of Christian am I if I can’t make my appreciation known? What kind of woman?

I find I do miss him now that he’s away. I’m a little bored with all the little things I do to plump my nest—do the laundry, clean the kitchen, organize my drafts, flip through cookbooks, draw up a budget, go for walks. It’s all starting to seem like an old maid’s cross-stitching.