Frances and Bernard

Frances and Bernard

Carlene Bauer

Language: English

Pages: 208

ISBN: 0544105176

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Frances and Bernard meet in the summer of 1957. Afterward, he writes her a letter. Soon they are immersed in the kind of fast, deep friendship that can change the course of our lives.

They find their way to New York and, for a few whirling years, each other. The city is a wonderland for young people with dreams: cramped West Village kitchens, parties stocked with the sharp-witted and glamorous, taxis that can take you anywhere at all, long talks along the Hudson as the lights of the Empire State Building blink on above.

Inspired by the lives of Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell, Frances and Bernard imagines, through new characters with charms entirely their own, what else might have happened. In the grandness of the fall, can we love another person so completely that we lose our dreams?

In witness to all the wonder of kindred spirits and bittersweet romance, Frances and Bernard is a tribute to the power of friendship and the people who help us discover who we are.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and ivory linens scalloped at their edges with yellowing lace, and my mother will sit next to my father, who will be at the head of the table, and castrate him with a dozen nearly imperceptibly cutting remarks, some of which he will laugh at because, although he will sense that he is being demeaned, he will not have the strength of intelligence necessary to seize on the nature of the complaints. He needs my mother to anchor him and make him feel that he has done his duty as a man. Which is: to

hold grudges. Speaking of which. Thank you for listening to me talk about Bernard. But I reject your suggestion that I may be in love with him. When I try to conceive of who he is to me—and you know I never like to spend too much time brooding about what anyone other than family means to me, because that way lies disappointment and self-righteousness—I conceive of him as an older brother. I see him too clearly to be in love with him. I maintain that the force of my feeling is familial—that

on Cary Grant. I was not the kind of girl who had crushes on movie stars—that was my sister, who had a framed picture of Tyrone Power on her dresser. But Grant seemed like someone out of a novel rather than a creature cobbled together on a studio lot. What is it? He is refined but also given to the ridiculous, and the ridiculousness never erases his refinement. Well, I shouldn’t lie. I still have a girlhood crush on Cary Grant. He may be the cement in my relationship with my aunt Peggy. She will

that I kissed you. Again. So now I will tell you that I want you in an unseemly, criminal, animal way. I speak to make myself clear. I speak, admittedly, to stir you, if there is something in you to be stirred. You will think I’m going mad again. I know I’m not. If I were mad, this would be rhyming. Call me when you get this letter. Bernard June 1, 1960 Dear Claire— Please forgive me for not having replied to your past two letters. Bernard and I have been engaging in what might in a

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

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