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anyone but God, if that. But they have been charitable to us, and you need to be kind to them. You’ll never lose anything in being kind, Frances.” I felt no kindness toward them, but I bit my tongue after that. I did it for my father, not for the nuns. I like to think Jesus has forgiven me that sin because I had only just lately arrived at the age of reason. I think if my sister, Ann, had been kicked out and gone to public school, my father wouldn’t have minded so much. But he was intent on my earning a scholarship and getting for myself what he couldn’t give me. He loved us both—loves us both—but he was not very good at hiding his delight in my brain. And Ann is not very good at hiding her mistrust of it. “The only way those books will keep you warm is if you burn them,” she likes to say. She thinks I’m no better than those nuns after all. I often fear she may be right.
    But I don’t want to forget to say that it’s a common mistake to confuse severity for spiritual radiance. I think many religious folk mistakenly champion the importance of being ramrod. Especially religious folk who have coagulated into a group.
    Yours,
    Frances
     
    March 10, 1958
    Frances—
    I feel a kinship with your father: I delight in your brain as well.
    If we had been schoolchildren together, you would have barely tolerated me. When you heard me talking my head off in class you would have given me the look you gave all of us at the colony whenever you heard us making plans to drive to a bar in town. A look that would have been even more formidable coming from the large blue eyes in a small girl’s face.
    I delight also in your continuous chide. And here I rewrite myself. Regarding what I wrote in my previous letter: No one has been able to stop me, not even God. What I mean is that not even God has been able to save me from myself. This is one thing I despair of. I plunge myself into something, seeing and hearing only my will, and I have to crash into something else to stop—Maria, the monastery, the Catholic Worker. So I don’t know if I can say that I have ever heard God’s voice. I wonder if it was only my own will, speaking loudly, that led me to the monastery, the Catholic Worker, even conversion. I wonder if you think we can ever hear God’s voice. I suspect you would call me naive for imagining such a thing is possible.
    It’s good to have people around me to put their hands on my shoulders and get me moving forward again. Maria may have been trying to but I could not hear her. But I can frequently hear Ted. Ted came to visit me at the Catholic Worker. We were sitting in the kitchen having coffee while people made dinner, and a fight broke out over how much meat to use in the soup, and he said: “I think the people here have problems. And by
people,
I mean you.” I didn’t, and don’t, think Ted’s entirely right, because he comes from a family whose coal companies bust unions, but this was right after the girl scolded me, so what he said—about me—seemed right.
    Your story reminded me that I, too, love John best. There is a verse of his that presses on me:
This then is the message which we have heard of him and declare unto you; that God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.
I can grow dark. I grow black. It is not, I think, what defines me, this blackness, but it is something that runs through me and can overtake me. The blackness is a hand that passes over my face to draw me a bath of heavy, ache-riven sleep, and if I want to come out of it I have to make a constant effort to see what is going on around me and then decide if I want to care about where to put my feet and hands. Impatient only for something to drag me off into unconsciousness. No desire even to write. I look at typewritten drafts, and the sentences slide off the paper and trail off into the distance; the sentences break up into letters, hovering like a cloud of gnats over my typewriter. This hand can also draw me a bath of drink,