Frances and Bernard Read Online Free PDF

or send me crashing into people. I have stood on street corners fantasizing about being hit by a car—about being taken out instantly. Stood asleep on street corners summoning dreams of traffic accidents. I was once fantasizing about this on a corner somewhere in Cambridge and at that same moment, one traffic light down, two cars crashed into each other, and I fainted from the shock of hearing sounds I’d been practicing summoned—but not summoned close enough. And then came to in an emergency room hammering down rudeness on the nurses because I was still alive.
    I wonder if I should have even described this to you, if I have scared you. But I imagine knowing you for a long, long time, and I have felt this blackness for a long, long time, and I don’t want to hide any part of my self from you.
    Yours,
    Bernard
     
    March 13, 1958
    Bernard—
    You don’t scare me. I have not experienced feelings like that myself, but I think my mother suffered from them. I don’t think I can tell you anything that can lift you out of this blackness—here is where I may have a little blackness myself, in refusing to believe that humans can bulldoze each other out of despondency by applying the force of uplifting sentiment—but please don’t be afraid to write to me about it.
    You’re right. I probably would have given you that look had we been classmates—and yes, I was giving all of you that look at the colony, but not really you specifically, although there was that one night I saw you fingering Lorraine’s necklace while you were all making plans to drive out, and I have to tell you I always thought you were too nice to Lorraine. I assumed it was because she was the only pretty thing there, and you couldn’t help yourself around pretty things. I know I can judge like an Irish mother-in-law, but I don’t think I was too far off. However, feel free to contest.
    But back to school: I would have quoted scripture to you, too, if I thought you liked the sound of your own voice too much:
If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, but have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkly cymbal.
I would have nicknamed you the Sounding Brass. And you could have called me Tiny Methuselah.
    Do I think we can ever hear God’s voice? Well, this goes back to what I said earlier—I think it might be dangerous to believe we hear him. I am suspicious of what we take to be signs—they may be only our own desires reflected back to us in an ostensibly fortuitous event. Simone Weil horrifies me, but I also believe a great deal of what she says is from God. Your question makes me think of something she has written: “But this presence of Christ in the host is not a symbol either, for a symbol is the combination of an abstraction and an image; it is something which human intelligence can represent to itself; it is not supernatural.” Whatever we may think we hear will be corrupted, or as she would say, debased.
    To ask to hear God’s voice, to ask for signs—this seems to me impertinence of the highest order.
    My aunts and my sister, however, would cluck their tongues at me and say that I have intellectualized myself out of one of the great pleasures of the Catholic faith: signs and wonders, and a network of saints to arrange for them. They certainly do believe God talks to us, and with a megaphone. My grandmother was big on praying for parking spots. “Help me out here, Lord,” she’d say when circling for one. “What if you’re dialing him and he’s busy?” I used to say. She’d laugh and tell me “Oh, hush,” and Ann would snip at me when we got out of the car, say that it wasn’t right to talk that way. Ann has snipped at me all her life. My aunt Peggy believes in the song of Bernadette and helps raise money for people to go to Lourdes. Ann can always turn a disappointment into a sign of God’s promise that something better will come along. The women in my family certainly do feel that his will will be done. My