Free Frances and Bernard by Carlene Bauer

papered every inch of her room with pages from movie magazines.
    I think I need to move out of here. I’m five helpings of mashed potatoes away from turning into a matronly mountain that will move nowhere toward its goal.
    Yours,
    Frances
     
    October 18, 1958
    Frances—
    I am getting you out of that nunnery! Mark, a friend of mine who has been living in New York, is moving to New Hampshire to live deliberately. This leaves his apartment vacant. I spoke to him about you and he said he’d tell his landlord that he should give the apartment to you. If all goes well you can have his room—it’s in the West Village, there’s a Murphy bed in the wall—as of November 15. Call the school at St. Frances Xavier on Sixteenth Street—or Fifteenth Street, I forget which—and ask for Mark Fitzgerald.
    Love,
    Bernard
     
    PS. I got asked to leave the farm; I’ll tell you about it later.
    Write me in Boston when you write next.
     
    October 30, 1958
    Bernard—
    Thank you. Thank you. I called Mark and went over and met with his landlord and I will be moving in with my books and percolator on November 15. This was the only time in my life that I was glad of being the weaker sex—I think my new Italian landlord is relieved to have what he imagines to be a proper lady occupying that room, and he gave me the place on the spot. A proper
Catholic
lady—I shamelessly asked Mr. Bellegia where I should go to Mass because I thought this might make him look favorably upon me. And I was right. It was just after this that he said the place was mine. I hope the Lord doesn’t mind that I took his name in gain. I’d like to believe that the Lord thought I was being wise as serpents. Mmm. Probably not.
    I like this neighborhood very much. I like the river, I like the gray and brick, I like the tumult of people on the crosshatching of narrow streets.
    Your very grateful friend,
    Frances Reardon
     
    PS. What did you do?!
     
    November 10, 1958
    Frances—
    Now you are a real New Yorker, cushioned no longer by mashed potatoes and the
muy
loco in loco parentis of the Barbizon. I salute you! Those winds off the Hudson are strong. Be warned. Will they blow you up my way? I wonder.
    I am enclosing the proofs of your story. It should be in the spring issue. I am allowing you ten corrections in total. It’s my policy: everyone gets up to ten corrections; more than that and the piece is pulled. I am imagining everyone as correction-mad as myself. This is why my book has taken this long to come out. I was on my fourth set of proofs when I saw you this summer. John Percy, my editor, has said that between the third and the fourth, the production department made a Wanted poster out of my author photo. I look forward to seeing this.
    I have to come to New York in the next few weeks—am dropping off my pages. I can’t wait for those winds to blow me your way—may I visit?
    What happened at the farm is that they caught me and the novelist—the novelist was a girl—swimming without suits in the pond at night. The girl didn’t mean anything to me, but they could not quite believe that. The girl was a little crazy; she had these huge eyes and was terribly thin, and whenever I looked at her I always felt she was trembling, but that was only an optical illusion brought on by the fact that she was talking incessantly, so much it made my teeth chatter, about being a vegetarian and Tolstoy and Gandhi and celibacy and a Russian professor of hers who was married and who kept writing her at the farm. “He is married,” she kept saying while giving me a look that I was supposed to understand meant that he’d slept with her, or was trying to, and I could too, if I wanted to. I didn’t do much to convince them I most certainly did not want to. The girl wanted to stay because she was broke and had nowhere else to go, and I think they’re going to keep her on, to take care of their daughter. Michael is probably a much better Christian than me—if I were as godly,