Frances and Bernard (6 page)

All right, all right, enough, enough. I will keep in mind what Frances the Spiritual Director has suggested.

Love to you—

Bernard

June 26, 1958

Bernard—

I got a job in New York. Did you know I can type like a demon? Well, I can, and this talent has led me to be hired as Alfred Sullivan’s secretary at Sullivan and Shields. Jeanette, a friend of mine from Iowa who lives in New York mingling among the literary, has been keeping her ear to the ground for me and when she heard of this she thought I would be perfect for it. Alfred Sullivan, as you know, is seventy-nine and almost senile but still vain about his father’s name, and thus he needs to be placated so he’ll keep paying everyone. Alfred Sullivan needs a secretary. Or the illusion of a secretary, and here’s where I come in. The old one died. She was sixty-seven. She’d been with him for thirty years. She might even have been his mistress, but no one’s saying. And if he dies after a year, at least I will have gotten to New York. Her name was Frances too. I believe Mr. Sullivan is a superstitious, sentimental old Irish fool.

Which I am very grateful for, because his patronage is making it possible for me to stay at the Barbizon. Do you know this place? Actresses, writers, models, secretaries, convented away from menfolk so they can play at being career girls without being molested before they get married—when they’ll be molested legally. Another nunnery. But I get my own room, and meals are provided, and it’s clean and cheap. Mr. Sullivan wrote me a letter of reference, and he got another big shot at the house to write one for me too. I think, after nearly a year of waitressing and keeping house for my father and Ann, I will allow myself to enjoy a certain amount of paternalism.

This job has come at the right time. When I begin to be short with my father at the dinner table, I know things have gone sour.

I thought you might like to know this news. I hope you’re feeling better.

Yours,

Frances

July 2, 1958

Dear Frances—

I laughed out loud at your letter. I congratulate you. If a writer has to have a job, serving as handmaiden to the obsolete is the best kind to have. This nunnery, however, sounds ridiculous. Make me proud and get kicked out of there, won’t you?

And I’ve read your chapter. It’s fantastic. I have one thought: the ending is too abrupt. I think the problem is that you, the author, know what’s coming next in the book and can rest easy in that knowledge, but maybe there’s a way that you can adjust for those who don’t have that privilege. No, I have a second thought: I am hungry for Sister to say one thing that gives evidence of her theology—that she has a theology.

I really do think it’s wonderful. You make me ashamed of all my words.

Yours,

Bernard

July 9, 1958

Dear Bernard—

I can’t tell you how glad I am that you liked what I sent you. But I don’t want to change a thing. If there is lingering discomfort at the end, all the better.

I write you from my shoebox in the Barbizon. I have a tiny window. It looks out onto Sixty-Third Street, and since I am up high, the sunsets have been lovely evening companions. This place is very clean, which I require. But why are women so awful? Everyone’s perfectly nice—which is the problem. At dinner, the only thing they can think to ask me about, after my job, is whether I’m going with anyone. When I answer no, cheerfully, and keep eating, you can feel the pity and suspicion tiptoeing around in their silence. Since they can’t make their pity or suspicion public, they have to be encouraging: “Oh, you’ll find someone, I’m sure. It’s a big city!” It’s like eating dinner with my sister, only multiplied by eight to ten. Though my sister knows how to make a joke. These girls have some money—they’re daughters of doctors and lawyers and bankers—and I think money eliminates the need for the catharsis of humor. Kierkegaard says that comedy transpires in the gap between the eternal and the temporal, and I think that these girls, because they have not known the disappointment of being caught between what one hopes for and what one actually receives, can’t make jokes. But you know more rich people than I do, so correct me if I’m wrong.

The job is a joke.

I can’t invite you up to my chamber, but I could have you to dinner if you come to visit. Do you like instant mashed potatoes? I do. They are on offer every night.

Yours,

Frances

July 16, 1958

Dear Frances—

I’m so glad you’re happy. That place sounds as ridiculous as I imagined. I send you my pity, made public. But women are awful for the same reason men are awful: limited scope. And the rich can too make jokes. About their help, in whom they are constantly disappointed.

I see your point about the ending. I suppose I ask for more clarity in prose than I ask for in poetry. That is chauvinistic of me. You’re lucky I like you. Otherwise I would stare you down. As I have had to stare down even the expatriate literary lion, over a line of Latin he had incorrectly translated.

I would like to come and see you very much. There are a number of people I could stay with. I don’t have much to do this summer, seeing as how I’ve been given the fall semester off to start this new book.

I do sometimes wish we were in the same city. I do often wish we were in the same city.

Where are you going to church?

Yours,

Bernard

July 27, 1958

Bernard—

I’m going to church at Our Lady of Peace, which is on Sixty-Second Street. There’s very little to recommend it other than it’s convenient. The organist pounds away like she’s at a Yankees game, which amuses me. The last time I went I saw the priest, making his way back down the aisle at the end of the Mass, give a little start and then purse his lips when the force of the first bars of the benediction clapped him from behind. I enjoyed that little hiccup of fallibility. But I don’t think I need anything from the other people around me. I’m there for the liturgy and the host. I don’t even need the homily. Like you as a child in your Congregational church.

I went to an honest-to-goodness literary cocktail party the other night, courtesy of my employer. Despite the fact that it brought back the feeling I had at the colony of being a teetotaling toddler among the lotus-eaters, I enjoyed myself. I had a substantive conversation with another secretary at the company about what we’d been reading lately. But my favorite part of the evening? Overhearing conversations about (a) a writer whose fiancée left him for the actor hired to play him in the movie version of his autobiographical novel; (b) a writer whose publisher flew her out to Los Angeles and put her up in the Ambassador Hotel to get her away from a jazz musician who was making it impossible for her to finish her second novel; and (c) the husband half of a pair of married writers, less successful and less prolific than his wife, who apparently confessed to his editor that he’d thrown out her diaphragm and gotten her drunk one night in an attempt to get her pregnant and out of the limelight for a couple of years.

Do you know that I could not catch any of the names of these people? Drat. Was being polite and trying to look interested when spoken to. Somehow I’d gotten the impression—this must have come from Iowa, where everyone paired up out of boredom and was mostly too frozen to fire up scandal—that the modern way is for writers in love to cheer each other on from their matching Scandinavian desks. But this is not the case, at least in New York. Those coolly modern Scandinavian desks do not hide the fact that things are still very barbarous between men and women.

To my point: I know you remember Jim Schultz, the
Esquire
editor who told that story at dinner one night at the colony about having his publisher expense the whorehouses Jim visited while reporting in Vietnam. Well, he came up to me at the bar when I was getting another drink and said, “Is this Frances Reardon?” “Yes,” I said. “You look a shade less impregnable than last summer,” he said, tapping my collarbone (I had on a boat-necked dress—forgive me if you don’t know what that is; for a moment I forgot that I was writing to you and not Claire). “You look a shade more sober,” I said. He laughed. It was true: hair less greasy, suit less creased. “You know my nickname for you was Fanny Price,” he said. “If that’s an overture,” I said, “I feel compelled to inform you that the door is padlocked.” He raised his glass to me and then I pointedly ignored him while I waited for my drink. I have nothing to add to that anecdote, only that it is offered up in the spirit of having suffered through the same people during a summer.

I should also tell you that I sold my book! To Scribner’s. The girl who bought it seems a little young, but my agent assured me that she is, as they say, Going Places.

Why don’t you come to visit next month? I would be so very pleased to celebrate a little with you and thank you for your kindness toward my prose.

Yours,

Frances

August 2, 1958

Dear Frances—

Your book! I wish you could have seen the smile that broke across my face when I opened your letter and read the news. I’m smiling now to think of it. I hope you had your agent make them pay you what it’s worth, and then some. But I’ll pry the exact amount out of you when I see you.

Your description of this evening made me pant to be in New York with you, going to parties. I have to say that I’m a little surprised you took as much enjoyment as you did in that parade of envy, malice, and ambition. I suppose I imagined you would have only disparagement for those sins, that you’d leave the rejoicing in the horrors and wonders of that parade to me! You know, I think I heard that story about the diaphragm too. But I can’t remember who the perpetrator was. As you said: Drat. So let me come and visit you—I would love to come and visit you—so we could go to one of these parties together and pretend to listen to each other while we eavesdrop on everyone else’s conversations. You know I know where the bleeding will be heaviest.

I will admit that I heard Jim Schultz call you Fanny Price several times. Compared with what he called Lorraine, Fanny Price was downright chivalrous.

New York must have hard-boiled your heart in a cauldron of urbane indifference if Jim Schultz now touches your collarbone and you don’t turn him into scrapple. I am somewhat shocked. (A former student has recently alerted me to the existence of scrapple and told me that it is beloved in your native city, which is his city too. Frances, I have to say that scrapple now makes me understand why you referred to yourself as a northeastern hillbilly. Speaking of barbarous.)

What about the weekend of the twenty-second?

Yours,

Bernard

August 25, 1958

Frances—

Thank you for letting me visit. Here is a postcard I bought at the Cloisters for you. This is Clare of Assisi as a girl receiving a palm on Palm Sunday from her bishop. They say that after this moment she disappeared from the world and gave herself over to Saint Francis and his men.

Please do not ever disappear from me.

Love,

Bernard

August 26, 1958

Ted—

Here are the books that you asked for.
Painting as a Pastime
? Your love of Churchill knows no bounds. According to this curio, he and I agree on what the soul of an artist requires: “The first quality that is needed is Audacity.” You’re reading like a plutocrat these days, Ted—heavy on the military history and light on novels. Is Kay that distracted by decorating your place that you need this entertainment? Although I suppose we’ll now have sheets. But did we need sheets?

While I’m writing I’ll tell you: that visit with Frances Reardon was quite wonderful. I took her all over the city—she hadn’t dug into it yet, so we did it together. You have posited that she may have, as you like to say,
a thing
for me, but I don’t think she does, and I am fairly sure I don’t have one for her. I kept looking at her from different angles and examining my response. Various types of affection flared up in her presence, but not romance. I looked at her face while eating dinner at the Barbizon (that aqueduct built to conduct the flow of girls from Westchester straight into Connecticut while keeping them far above the catacombs full of dead dreams), her pretty milkmaid face flowering among all the pretty, iridescent silk-stockinged girls. And I did not find myself thinking her more beautiful than these, who were clearly nothing more than fish bred to stock the pond.