Frances and Bernard Read Online Free Page B

them. He reminded me that Maritain was not a priest.
    Then, seeking a way to be prostrate before God while also in the world, I went to a Catholic Worker, the one in the East Village. And soon I got asked to leave. This involved a girl. A girl who lived there thought I liked her too much. She was bothered by the fact that I had written her a few poems. (Yes, I suppose that can look rather menacing if the one writing is well past his teenage years.) She once told me that the amount of time I spent in confession had convinced her that I saw it not as an opportunity for contrition but as a chance to perform an aria. This girl was a blonde. She wore her hair in braids. Her name was Ellen. Her soul seemed clean and well ordered, and now that I think about it, I might have gotten that impression solely from her braids, her tightly, very tightly, woven brass-gold braids. They had me thinking of the purity and severity of childhood. With those braids, and her padded pink-and-ivory face, forehead an imperiously vaulted arch, I’d turned her into a long-lost virgin companion of Saint Ursula—have you seen those Flemish busts at the Cloisters? Now I see that I mistook her severity for true spiritual radiance, but at the time, when I was convinced I was in love with her, I told myself that perhaps the abbot had been right, and God had led me out of the monastery because he knew celibacy would be disastrous for me. Because I thought I was in love with this girl, and I was writing poems in this place, where I was also doing good, I hoped. So even after I was asked to leave, I was undaunted, because I had learned a lesson, I thought, and I had had a sign, which was that I did not need to be constrained within the bounds of a religious community, whether lay or ordered, to live a Christian life.
    Then I spent the last year before the colony in New York, reading manuscripts and writing. And then I went to the colony, where I met you.
    Yours,
    Bernard
     
    March 1, 1958
    Bernard—
    Dear God, Bernard! Such strenuous effort. I got worn out from reading about it. A Trappist monastery! I see how lazy a Christian I have been. Your letter gave me a complex. But I think you and I have a little something in common.
    When I was about eight, there was a nun who was out to get me. She answered me with sarcasm when I asked questions and in general behaved as if I were an unwanted foundling strapped to her already overburdened back. Even as a kid, I knew this sister had it in for me because I asked questions. I was always polite when I asked them, but I asked them, and this drove her crazy because it meant that I was onto her small mind.
    One day she started to ask a question of the class—I forget what it was—and in my eagerness to answer I spoke before she finished her sentence. “Frances,” she snapped, looking straight at me, “that’s enough out of you.” That was the last straw. I shot up from my desk. “Sister, why are you talking this way to me?” I said.
    “And what way is that?” she said, the tips of her fingers resting on the desk, standing tall, waiting in insolence for more insolence.
    Apprehensive, anticipatory silence from the girls behind me. “You’re being mean to me for no reason.”
    “But you interrupted me.”
    “Sister,” I said, “if we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” It was a passage from John that had been read to us at Mass the week before. It seemed like a shotgun you could pull out to use on people when they got out of line.
    I was sent to the Reverend Mother. My father had to go in and smooth it all over. He told me I could not talk back to any of my teachers until I went to college because his part-time job as the church groundskeeper—he worked at a printing press during the week—allowed me and my sister, Ann, to go to the school for free. “Those nuns aren’t holier than the rest of us,” my father said to me. “They’ve never known the love of