Free Frances and Bernard by Carlene Bauer Page B

Augustine again to scold you—you are still pre-conversion!—but this makes me laugh. Part of me thinks Ted just may be right. I like to think of your excesses as God visiting a judgment on these people’s fervor. That you have come to show them that the Church is the only house that could gather us sinners together in peace.
    Please do come to visit my Catholic community of one. There are no chores except for making coffee and washing five dishes. Is this labor purging enough for you? I now have a small wooden table that I picked up off the street, with two wooden chairs, and I have taught myself how to make crepes. I have made them for my office mates—there was a small fire at the end of the evening when one Peter from publicity tried to turn a few into a flambé with his bottle of whiskey, and some of my bangs got singed off. But I stand undaunted with my spatula and would love to make some for you.
    Yours,
    Frances
     
    November 27, 1958
    Frances—
    Yes, I do realize why I have gotten, as you say, kicked out of those two Catholic communities. I pray every day to have a calmer heart. I have been praying to the Holy Spirit. I’m not ashamed, but I am confused as to why this keeps happening. Why I go blank to reason, to self-control, to the purity God asks of me. Why I think I am doing the thing God wants me to do. Why I would not feel ashamed for him to find me in the middle of what I am doing. I take comfort in Paul: I do the things I do not want to do, and never do things I know I should. I take comfort also in Augustine, it’s true: the long, slow grudging, confused progress to God. The detour through the sin he thought was light.
    I take comfort in the fact that you have borne with me.
    I hear that the
Paris Review
wants to do an interview with me on the occasion of the publication of my book. It’s supposed to be a conversation on how the classics have informed my work (their phrasing). I would rather they talk about how Catholicism has informed my work, because that is the real story, but the
Paris Review
doesn’t know what to do about God taken up in earnest by someone who is not a demagogue or a rube. They are sending a young Barnard grad up to Boston to do it. They are doing a bright-young-things issue, and it appears that I am one of their favorites. I told them that you are one of my favorites. I sent them a copy of your story.
    What are you doing for Thanksgiving? There is no avoiding going home for dinner. It will involve aunts and uncles and cousins, and soup tureens, and heirloom silver, and ivory linens scalloped at their edges with yellowing lace, and my mother will sit next to my father, who will be at the head of the table, and castrate him with a dozen nearly imperceptibly cutting remarks, some of which he will laugh at because, although he will sense that he is being demeaned, he will not have the strength of intelligence necessary to seize on the nature of the complaints. He needs my mother to anchor him and make him feel that he has done his duty as a man. Which is: to marry someone suitable and fill the house his forebears have had possession of since the eighteenth century with his own family. Having done this, he has felt free to float indefinitely in the uneventful heaven of middle mercantilism, falling further and further asleep into the past, where my mother was tempestuous but not yet sour. “Is it time for feeding?” he’ll say, walking into the kitchen, where my mother and my aunts will be furiously battening down the hatches. Few will have read, and no one will have understood, my book. “Bernard,” my mother will say, “these poems do give me a headache. But I trust that the people in New York know what they’re doing.” My father will not have read them at all. He will feel threatened by them, because even though he does not care for the life of the mind, he knows that somewhere in the life of the mind, his son is a success in a way he never was, and he paid for all the