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aunts all think that it’s God’s will that my mother died when she did. They have to. They have intimated to me and Ann that she was “unhappy.” I have figured out that what they mean is that she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown right after she married my father. I overheard them talking one day two years ago. They do not know I know this, and I am curious to see if they will ever bring it up. My father never will. And I won’t—to him, at least. Who knows what he went through? I can’t bear knowing, and I don’t think he could bear explaining. It’s none of my business. I believe that he loved us as fiercely as he did as a way to extinguish the sorrow.
    Forgive me. I didn’t mean to go on that long. Bernard, I have a sneaking suspicion that one day you will get me to confess to all sorts of things without my realizing it.
    But then there’s prayer and discernment. Prayer is a mystery I should not approach. I’m not very good at it. I don’t really do it unless I have it written out for me. Anything I came up with on my own would sound like my asking for a pony for Christmas.
    Speaking of prayer, here’s something about Simone Weil that kills me. She says that it’s sort of humorous, the line “Our father, who art in heaven.” To think that we, so far from him, really could knock and receive him, when the distance is so great. I’m the last person to want to describe God as a constantly available warm lap, but this strikes me as self-abasement taken to an absurd degree. And then she writes: “Each time that we say ‘Thy will be done’ we should have in mind all possible misfortunes added together.” But her line is what seems like a joke to me—to say that God’s love always makes Jobs out of us. It’s like something Mencken or Twain would put in the mouth of a cynical reverend. I do believe with her that suffering is one way to hear God, or to know God. Or maybe we hear God when, per John, we sense that we are making him out to be a liar and his word is not in us. When we are aware of the distance between God and ourselves, because we are sinning, then we hear him—he emerges when we are ashamed of our nakedness, so to speak.
    Then there are times that I think her theology might have sprung fully formed from her migraines.
    Bernard, I do not want you to feel black. My prayers may be faulty, but know that whenever I pray I will be praying for your sky to rarely look ominous.
    Yours,
    Frances
     
    March 31, 1958
    Frances—
    I’m so very sorry about your mother. I say all sorts of terrible things about mine, but if she died I think it would be as if there were, finally, no God. I am very glad, though, that you were as loved as you were.
    Thinking about calling you Tiny Methuselah makes me considerably less black. Thinking about you in general makes me considerably less black.
    I like to think of you praying such a lovely prayer. Thank you.
    No, no, I do like pretty things. It’s the thorn in my flesh, as Paul would say. Lorraine wanted to be looked at, and I liked looking at her, in the way you can like looking at a view—you don’t need the view, but it’s nice that it’s there and you’ve come upon it, so it wasn’t as if I were robbing her of her virtue just by looking at her. Looking at someone who wants to be looked at—you know that’s not real sin, Frances, and you shouldn’t be jealous.
    I have read Weil, and I do think she is right, mostly, as you say. She is right for this, too: “Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt. To accept the fact that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God. I am also other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.”
    When I read this, I wince. Whenever I have imagined anyone to be other than what he or she is, whenever I have imagined myself to be other than what I am—here is where I have run into the most trouble in my life. That is