Have mercy on me, O G.o.d, according to thy great mercy. And according to the mult.i.tude of thy tender mercies blot out my iniquity. For I know my iniquity, and my sin is always before me. To my hearing thou shalt give joy and gladness: and the bones that have been humbled shall rejoice.

So I took up that refrain: If you're not going to give me some spectacular sign, just let me hear of joy and gladness. My sins are too much before me, they are causing an unholy din, so please let me hear of joy and gladness. I can't speak to you respectfully at this moment, so I ask you to open my ears and give me a tune I can follow.

And still it's been all storm, no sign. On Easter Sunday I actually gave myself over to the metaphor of the season. I prayed that G.o.d would create a calm heart in me, and that spring would come and I would be as good as new, content in the knowledge that his eye is indeed on the sparrow. But I could tell it wasn't going to take. The lilies at the altar stared at the congregation with a waxiness that seemed even more gauche than usual. The priest seemed even more like a ventriloquist's dummy. Everyone had a look of hazy discomfort, the look you have when you're in a Greyhound station waiting for your hours-late connection. I almost walked out, but out of respect for Ann and my aunts, I stayed put.

Still, I make myself go to Ma.s.s. I sit there clinging to the liturgy, letting it climb round me like a vine and keep me in its grip. I am trying not to knock impatiently like one of those virgins locked out of the party but to sit in Ma.s.s quietly so I can better hear the words I have heard thousands of times before, and I try to remember to be moved when the wine is held up and we are reminded that this is his blood, which is shed for many unto the forgiveness of sins. Also, I'm exhausted from my own stupidity, so it's about all I can do right now, sit and receive. I like to think of this verse from John: And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself. There's a sound of mercy ringing through those words, and I am meditating on that. He will draw all people to himself. Even this incredibly bitter one.

That is really all I can hope for. If you know a prayer from a saint that I might carry around with me, please send it.

Love, Frances July 1, 1963 Dear Sister Josephine- I hope you don't mind me writing you when you are visiting your family in Michigan. I hope everyone is well and that you are enjoying the Lake. I've seen it only once in my life, and it made an impression.

I am writing to you because I am in dire need of some spiritual direction. I have never said or written those words to anyone, but I have been experiencing feelings that I know are not right, and I want to find a way to put them behind me. I have not spoken of what I'm about to tell you with my family. Their faith has never wavered. I am 99 percent sure they would tell me to talk to our priest. I have never gone to a priest about anything in my life. I don't think I need to explain to you why.

This is about a person I was in love with and whom I have discovered I am still in love with. I must be, if I am behaving this way.

I have a friend, Claire, whom I have talked to about this, but she has told me only what any friend would tell someone in this situation, which is that he and I were not meant to be. I know she believes this. I try to believe it myself, but I can't. Also, I do not want to burden her any longer with my despair. I know that eventually my despair will exasperate her the way a child's fear of the dark eventually exasperates its parents, and I want to avoid that.

I am writing to you because I believe that you carry a peace within you that is a sign of real faith, and I know from our conversations that you are no stranger to loss. I am experiencing a loss, belatedly, and it has shown me that my faith is flimsier than I'd imagined. And I fear that the real loss I'm mourning here may be the idea of myself as an imperturbable wise child. If you could read this letter and provide some counsel, that would be much appreciated. I am in need of wisdom that is not tainted by the interests of family, friendship, or the Church.

I think I've told you about my friend Bernard. I don't think I've ever mentioned to you that he proposed to me and that I turned him down. Though it killed me to do it, I did not regret it then. Now I am filled with a corrosive, debilitating regret.

I cheated myself out of what might have made me happy, while he seems very happy indeed.

My thoughts are not my own. They are a pot bubbling ferociously with jealousy and rage. I wish I had a reason to go to New York so I could accidentally run into him while wearing a dress that just happened to show me off in a way that would cause Bernard to forget his wife and smuggle me to Paris on the spot. I wish I could write a book that casts his wife as the heroine's foil, a foil the heroine destroys with her wit and virtue to applause from the characters in the book and the critics who review it. I want to write him a letter apologizing for my shortsightedness, which then forces him to write me a letter in which he admits I was the only one he ever loved. I want to write him a letter calling him out on his cowardice in not coming to get me a second time, which then forces him to write me a letter in which he admits I'm the only one he ever loved. I want to write him a letter telling him how beautiful his poems are, which would force him to admit he wrote them all for me. I want to write him a letter telling him how unhappy I am, which would be done in the hopes that he would, for even just a day, be destroyed by the notion that he is the cause of that unhappiness. Just one day. I'm a writer; I could do all those things. I would have art-"Art"-as my excuse. But I'm a Christian, so I could never do any of those things. To do those kinds of things you have to believe in yourself more than you believe in anything else. But I supposedly believe in G.o.d more than anything else. And to G.o.d, "Art" is never an excuse.

I have never experienced such a derangement of my thoughts. My thoughts, except for a similar episode in college, have mostly been my own. What saved me in college was that I had an unshakable faith in my writing. The story I was truly interested in was the story of myself as a writer, as someone who was going to prove to her family that she did not need to be a mother to be a force for good in the world. So I could very easily put the college boy I was losing in perspective. And this boy very quickly proved himself to have been unworthy of my tears. Things are different now. Now I am thirty, unmarried, living in Philadelphia and not New York, working on a third book that, unlike the first two, feels dead inside. Or maybe it's that I'm dead inside.

Forgive me.

What I have learned about myself is that I have a talent for self-pity. It is like finding that you have a talent for theft, or betrayal. I have learned that I am a Romantic after all, and I have not learned to move to the next stage of first-person suffering, the more n.o.ble way of suffering, which would be existentialism and which would have me in a quarrel with the nature of being and time, rather than, like an adolescent, in a quarrel with G.o.d, or Bernard. If I were a different kind of writer I would find a way to channel this into a novel. And this is where I am still Romantic-art is a temple, and I shouldn't sully it with my wounded realizations. I think that great writers can write to compensate for the losses they endure in real life. I am not sure that I am great. I used to think I might be, but now I'm not so sure. (This, actually, is not the problem. Accepting that I am less than great has been a relief, and I've been writing more because of it.) I'm a writer-I should find a better way to describe the unrelenting pain I'm in, but I'm in pain, and my creative faculties are dulled. This hurt has been more destructive than the hurt I experienced watching my father fade away from us into senility. And for that I'm ashamed. There was some rage there when I saw my father failing and would not admit to myself what was happening, but it is different from the rage I direct toward myself because I made a mistake. Or the rage I direct toward Bernard for not allowing me to have some contact with him still.

Oh, Sister. There is a lot of anger in this letter. I may not even be making any sense. Forgive me.

You may have noticed that I have not mentioned G.o.d much in this letter. This is the problem. I will sit in Ma.s.s, sit in pews, trying to stop the flow of feelings, but those feelings-have you ever seen pictures of a squid letting loose its ink in the ocean? That's what I feel like. I put myself in the pew, I say G.o.d's name, but he is blotted out by a rapidly issuing cloud of the blackest thoughts. I thought G.o.d was the one who told me to refuse Bernard-I went to St. Patrick's for two weeks straight and rose up from the paddocks thinking I'd been given direction. And now I wonder. I used to believe in his mercy and that maybe suffering was a form of his mercy. Not anymore. Some of us have a talent for suffering-but I guess I don't. What is the point of G.o.d if he cannot soothe us? What is the point of believing in something all-powerful if he cannot give you the strength to go on at this very moment? What is the point of other people if you cannot keep your hands on them? I refuse to think, as my aunts might suggest, that these are G.o.d-given lessons. That just makes G.o.d a scold, and I refuse to believe that he is.

And then I am dismayed at the very adolescent nature of these objections. This is all I could come up with? I must really be losing my mind. Also, I am a hypocrite. I once warned Bernard about becoming G.o.d's disgruntled customer, and here I am.

Sister, I thank you if you can read even a quarter of this. Now you know what it is like to have a teenage daughter. You must have thought you were escaping this through the convent. My sincere apologies.

Yours, Frances July 1, 1963 Frances- h.e.l.lo! I hope this letter finds you and your family well.

I know it must be strange for you to hear from me, since it has been years since we've spoken, but I saw your most recent book in the windows of the bookstore in Harvard Square, went in and bought it, started to read it that night, finished it the next day, and I have been thinking of you ever since. The book is terrific. Kudos. You know I've stopped reading current fiction-once I headed for law school, I decided that I would read only history, biography, reportage, and political thought, and I have never felt anything remotely like a hole in my soul since, which means that I was right to give up writing for lawyering. Maybe once a year I'll read Our Mutual Friend, when Kay and I go to Maine, but that's it. From what I remember, current fiction used to be pretty insipid, and I'm betting it's pretty insipid now too. But your book is fantastic. Every sentence is a whip crack.

Reading your book made me think that it's about time I got something off my chest, and that maybe you could take it. I'm well aware that what I'm about to write could make you angry, because it's betraying someone's confidence and would a.s.sume a certain amount of lingering feelings on your part. You might understandably take offense at someone a.s.suming you've got even two drops of regret over Bernard.

Bernard told me what happened between you two last fall. He was pretty torn up about it. I told him that he shouldn't have engaged you. You shouldn't have engaged with a married man either. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm just saying it's wrong for you. I don't think you have the const.i.tution. I can just imagine your Catholic blood boiling over that bit of amoral reasoning. But I do believe that what he wrote you afterward-at least, what he told me he wrote you-came out of a real struggle with his conscience. He was not toying with you.

Let me get to the point of why I'm writing. If you do have any lingering feelings of regret about not marrying Bernard, you should not. He tries to be faithful to Susan, and I think he does love her, but he's fooled with one girl a year for every year of their marriage. These girls are notable only for their conventional prettiness (they wear very tiny hair bows, I've noticed) and their lack of wit. It's a little embarra.s.sing how indistinguishable they are from each other, and it's a little embarra.s.sing how they resemble you (physically) more than they resemble Susan. It happens every spring. It predicts every hospital visit. He gets a girl in his cross hairs, usually a student; he starts coming home late, and sometimes not at all. Three months later, he's in the hospital, and Susan has to tell the girl to go home, he can't come out to play. He might have told you this, in which case I'll tell you this again so that he's corroborated. What he might not have told you but that you might have heard is that Susan has had to, at least once that I know of, plead his case in front of the president of Columbia University to keep him from being fired.

At one point I thought that you were the only one for him, but now I think you were lucky. You wouldn't have been his wife; you would have been a game warden. Even I was blinded to the reality of what life with Bernard would be. And I'd picked him up off bar floors and kept him from fights. I should have known better than to cheer the both of you on. But I'd been picked up from bar floors by him as often as he'd been picked up by me, so I thought his big stupid heart and his big stupid generosity would make up for his insanity. All the sentimentalism I've spent my life trying to hide broke out on me like a big red pimple at the sight of you two together. I was actually peeved when he proposed to Susan, and she could tell. Now I silently ask her forgiveness whenever I see her and she seems not to want to shoot me. But Susan never had anything in her that needed protecting from Bernard. There's no art in her. Take it from someone who doesn't have any art in himself, either. If this were 1914, she would be a war nurse. Things being what they are in 19-whatever-this-is, with you ladies able to do pretty much what you d.a.m.n please without being forced into the convent in order to exercise your minds, she married Bernard.

You were right not to marry him but he won't ever love anyone the way he loved you. He can't tell you this, and he shouldn't tell you this, so I will.

Ever yours, Ted October 5, 1963 Dear Ted- Thank you so very much for your letter. I was not offended. I was grateful. It's a long story, but it came at just the right time. It saved me from sending one to another friend, one that I might have been sorry to have signed my name to. As an atheist, would you be offended if I said that your letter might have been an answer to prayer?

I don't know what to say, exactly, to your letter-this is why it's taken me a little while to write back to you. I have decided that I don't feel comfortable saying much other than I am grateful for your candor. I think in this position a lady should keep the many thoughts and feelings occasioned by such a letter to herself and just try to make it clear that she is grateful. I hope you understand. You sound buoyant, as usual, and that makes me happy. Thank you also for reading my book. You know I feel the same way about Current Fiction, so your praise means a great deal to me.

If you ever find yourself in Philadelphia, please do let me know. It would be my honor to stand you a drink. My greetings to Kay.

With love, Frances March 20, 1964 Dear Claire- You sneaky Claire. Thank you for sending me the Julia Child book for my birthday. I have been circling it like a hawk-well, a slightly intimidated hawk, if such a thing exists-ever since it was published, but now that I have it there are going to be no more excuses. It is time now to Contend with the French.

This seems to be a theme lately. I have been seeing a gentleman from France. A professor at Penn. Of French literature. I think it's a joke, actually, that I am seeing a gentleman from France, but we get on, and keep getting on. His name is-I can't write it, as it seems like a joke too, a parody of the echt-French. Like Jean Valjean. Or Jean-Luc G.o.dard. Or Pepe Le Pew. I'll write it: his name is Alain. I can't say his name aloud. If we keep seeing each other, I am going to have to figure out how to avoid addressing him by his Christian name. Nevertheless, we have been to the cinema, the cinema again, to the cinema one more time, and to Fairmount Park. I have started to wonder if G.o.d does indeed give us gifts other than the gift of forbearance.

I apologize for not having told you this immediately-one would think that, with you and I having been friends for so many years, I'd know by now that you don't mind anything I tell you, but I wasn't sure if it would pan out into anything worth mentioning.

I met him at a lecture at Penn. I took a copy of Story of a Soul with me-I've been reading it for this talk I have to give next month. He was sitting next to me, and I noticed that he seemed to be looking at the book before the lecture started. When I got up he said, "Excuse me, miss." Meese. "Is that Saint Therese you're reading?" I said yes, and he said, "Do you love her?" I heard the accent. He had the face I always a.s.sociate with the echt-French-olive-skinned; slight flush to the cheeks; horizontal, heavy black brows; long nose. The kind I always imagine will pucker into some mocking impression of my sickly accent or my cheap plastic American sungla.s.ses.

I was a little taken aback-the question must have meant that he loved her, and my answer was going to be less enthusiastic than he might have hoped for. "May I say that I'm not sure?" I said. He laughed.

"Do you love her?" I said. "Oh yes, I do," he said. "It's not fashionable at all, and I keep it a secret from my colleagues. She's the kind of girl Balzac would punish for her innocence by sending her to Paris and turning her into a corrupt chorus girl." I laughed.

"Do you know she wrote poems?" he asked. No, I said. "If any young man writes you poems like Saint Therese, you must marry him. They're quite pa.s.sionate."

I think he interpreted the look on my face as meaning he'd said the wrong thing, but that wasn't it-really, I was trying not to laugh. "Pardonnez"-he began-"pardon me," he ended. Did he want to get a coffee? He did.

I have learned to like my solitude, but I like his company just as much-if not more. He laughs with pure delight much more than I imagined the French would-I guess this would be the part of the French soul responsible for champagne? And yet I have not spoken a word of French to him. I dare not.

Everyone sends love.

xx Frances September 5, 1965 F- Bill and I say it's official: you have won a prize. And your aunts dote on him like the Vatican sent him. I doubt Helen will ever call him anything other than Allen. Poor guy. Please tell Peggy that we were devastated to get to the end of the lunch she packed us for the drive home. Bill sends his love.

Frances, I have to tell you I was worried that you felt the need to settle. When you first wrote me about Alain, I didn't think you were really going to fall in love with him. You seemed more bemused than smitten. I had a fear that you were going to drift into something that looked perfectly sensible to everyone around you-so b.l.o.o.d.y sensible that you'd never argue yourself out of it, and you'd just pull him over you like a blanket and go to sleep. It's unfair, I know, but I often thought that only your being pursued by Gregory Peck would have put my worries at ease.

What's also unfair is that I wanted marriage for you only because I myself could not tumble along without it. You never did hanker after it the way I did, so why should I be anxious for you if your life was leading you places other than the altar? My job is a party I go to every day. I need to be in the middle of a commotion that isn't children, and the paper is exactly that and no more. And then I have Bill, my roaring home fire. You rely on your books for things the rest of us search for in people. I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it's a gift, maybe even your one true spiritual discipline. Go ahead, roll your eyes.

Whenever you talked about marrying Bernard, you had trepidation rumbling through you like an earthquake tremor. I had the feeling that if you did marry him, your sister's shotgun marriage would have been happier than your freely chosen one, and that was an irony I did not want to have to watch deepen over the years. But I don't see any of that when you talk of marrying A., and I don't think it's because you've been cutting deals with yourself. He's very funny and he's very wise. What was it you said he told you? "Your books need no help from me. They are for you alone." If a man has no delusions about what he is going to be to you-and you have no delusions about what you need from him-it may be that you have a true love on your hands.

Why haven't I said these things to you before? You didn't need me poking around where you were sore. And I thought the right thing to do was to keep quiet, because deep down, I trusted you to do whatever was right for you. Which you did. To that I say cheers, and drink up.

All my happiest love, C.

April 20, 1966 Dear Ted- So, that award ceremony. It left me sadder than I imagined it would. I was sadder than I thought I would be even upon seeing her. I notice, the older I get, that the sadness is coming in regularly like the tides, eroding my reserves of joy. My illness has done nothing to help this. Some days, it's not so terrible. I feel like those dinosaurs in the natural history museum, viewed with Bess on my hand: stripped bare of defenses, ready to collapse into an incoherent meaningless heap should someone jounce it the wrong way, but somehow still standing, with a few props, and in its suggested outline still a thing to stand under and wonder at. I feel this way most often when I am in front of the students. They are paying to find wisdom at the feet of an elder. Mostly they are good, serious children. If they rubberneck, it's in spite of themselves. I can see one girl, the best student this semester, looking away from me when she talks to me during office hours; she keeps her hands in her lap, speaks very quickly, forgets her coat or bag when she leaves, and I am fairly sure it's because she's heard I might put my hand up her dress, though she doesn't want to believe it-she wants to think I am a noncorporeal oracle uncle interested only in poetry, but she knows she has to act on what might be lore in order to get home safe and not be accused of being a bewitcher herself. It's touching to see her struggle-she is willing to go into the monster's cave in order to clarify her thoughts on the freeing of verse. And I can't say anything without d.a.m.ning myself to a.s.sure her she's safe, and that she's safe because she looks like Susan.

All the men I know come out of their offices rubbing their faces, looking as if they have just been unceremoniously roused from sleep. Each wife's face is fallen and crumpled into a spider web of worry lines. Everyone looks at each other sidelong, exhausted, refusing to name the things that nail them down. I wish they would, though. I long ago decided psychoa.n.a.lysis was not a long-term solution, but I do think everyone needs a talking cure now and then, especially if it's administered by a sympathetic layperson. Even the people I used to count on to throw depth charges into the state of things prefer to steer clear of that adventure. Truth be told, it's no longer an adventure-it's more of an inventory of an increasingly empty larder. The other night I was out with Russell and when, after the drinks had been set down before us, I asked, in all sincerity, "How are you?" he looked at me with befuddled scorn and said, "We're here to talk about my book."

I am glad that Frances won this award. I didn't read this last book, and I won't, and I don't think I will read the next ones, but I am still proud of her. I took a look at the first sentence and saw she was still able to tack into the wind with a sure hand. That's all I wanted to know.

Her husband-a professor-appears to be an intelligent man. I still can't quite believe she married a Frenchman. I suppose I always imagined Frances much too American, and much too committed to the culture of her own idiosyncrasies, to marry someone who would continuously force her into possibly destabilizing acts of translation. After we filed out of the auditorium, he shook my hand with confidence. Not prurience. She stood next to him with her hands clasped behind her back as he did so. She did not show him any more affection than she showed me when we were in a public place. I did not want to be relieved about this, but I was.

We were able to stand near each other smiling for the photographs. Near, and not next to, because she put another poet and a playwright between us. While the pictures were being taken, Susan went to the restaurant ahead of us, I think so she would not have to see how I would respond to Frances's presence. But neither of us was interested in being alone with each other. There was nothing left to say.

To think we might have been standing together in another ceremony entirely. But here we are as ghosts to each other, the sight of the other stirring nothing but skittishness. I saw her enter the building and I tucked my head down, pretending that I needed something from my wallet. When we were finally forced to speak, I touched her arm and she pulled away.

This is what the world asks of us-to move about as the dead as penance for having dwelt in an improbable pa.s.sion. The metaphors for love-metaphors of illness, of madness. In this way we pardon ourselves for our lapses in duty, hoping that no one will ever disparage us by saying that we were not sufficiently contented by the world as it is. But love is another law, too, and it will judge you if you do not bend to it when it asks. I think it has already judged her, and now it is judging me.

I hear Susan ribbing me as I write for, as she likes to say, turning tubercular with sentiment like Keats-whenever I mourn the breaking up of a pair of my students for whatever reason, Susan clucks her tongue at me. It's better that they learn now that it's silly to fall so hard, she'll say. They've gotten it out of their systems and next time they'll be wiser. Or if I speak without censure of friends or acquaintances who find themselves in adulterous positions, if I try to have sympathy for both parties-so long, of course, as both parties have not done anything vindictive-she'll accuse me of being a moral relativist. (Whenever she says this, I have to bite my tongue to keep from repeating to her your theory that if a woman accuses an adulterer of moral relativism, it's because she was never considered worth an affair in the first place.) She may also think that my sympathy with the romantically confounded is my madness at its lowest boil.

Sometimes I will see a girl on campus, or in the back of cla.s.s, who has the look of one of the episodic girls. On those days, when I feel that I am Bluebeard sensing the blood pooling behind lock and key, pooling and about to creep out from under the door, I will find a confessional at my earliest convenience. A formality, but one I am glad to submit to when I cannot convince myself I am a man who means well, at least when I am sane. That's about as far as I can go these days in giving myself credit. I leave it to Bess to make more of me than I am.

I don't blame Susan-I blame myself for not having the courage to leave her. I think she knows that my staying with her is an attempt at atonement. Even as I say I don't believe, I see that my higher law, when it cannot be love, is G.o.d, whose law demands self-sacrifice. It's a form I can submit to. Even in my poetry, I cannot escape submitting to form.

After the dinner, I did what a responsible husband would do, which was to drink a great deal with other people in order to forget she ever happened and to present back at home a fulfilled and dedicated heart to my wife. If Frances is someone I will have to spend my life occasionally drinking to forget, that seems like too fair a bargain.

Bernard June 11, 1968 Dear Bernard- It has been a very long time. I hope you don't mind my writing. John sent me your new book-I asked for it-and I felt moved to write to say how very much I enjoyed it. "For Bess" especially. The last two lines have followed me around for the past week or so. John might have told you, but I have a daughter now. She's almost nine months old, and her name is Katherine, after my mother. I have read her your poem several times, and she approves.

I don't expect that you'll answer this letter. I'll understand if you don't.

My best to you.

Sincerely, Frances.

September 20, 1968.

Dear Frances-.

Thank you for your note. It tumbled out of a pile of mail I was picking up during some harried office hours, and I couldn't have been happier to see your name on the left-hand corner of the envelope.

Congratulations on your Katherine. John did mention her arrival to me. I think G.o.d has favored us by giving us daughters. They are music in the house.

That poem was for Bess, but it was also for you. I had been wanting to write you a letter but couldn't. It turned into a poem.

Keep me in your prayers, won't you?

Yours, Bernard.

Acknowledgments.

It is my incredible good fortune to have had PJ Mark and Jenna Johnson believing in this book the way they did, and thinking as hard about it with me as if it were their own. My grat.i.tude to PJ for his early enthusiasm and his a.s.siduous, astute readings; my grat.i.tude to Jenna for editing me with an exceedingly sharp and imaginative eye, and for her indefatigable faith, hope, and verve. I am very lucky to have both of them on my side.

I can't thank Houghton Mifflin Harcourt enough for their support of this book-especially Elizabeth Anderson, Carla Gray, Summer Smith, and Lori Glazer. I salute copyeditor Tracy Roe and executive ma.n.u.script editor Larry Cooper because they are exemplars of their craft.

Many, many thanks to Donna Freitas and Lauren Sandler for their crucial (and pa.s.sionate!) insights.

Thanks also to Mary Ann Naples, who told me to keep going.

And to Dan and Ilona McGuiness, for teaching me more than writing.

As always, I owe more than I can say to my parents, my sister, and Mr. John Williams, who has redefined the word gentleman for the twenty-first century.

About the Author.

CARLENE BAUER is the author of the memoir Not That Kind of Girl, described as "soulful" by Walter Kirn in Elle and "approaching the greatness of Cantwell" in the New York Post. She has written for the likes of n+1, Slate, Salon, and the New York Times.

Visit www.sharetheloveletters.tumblr.com to browse famous (and not so famous) correspondence and share your own!.

http://hmhbooks.com/francesandbernard/send.html.

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