The Bridges of Madison County

“Robert Kincaid was as alone as it’s possible to be—an only child, parents both dead, distant relatives who had lost track of him and he of them, no close friends. He knew the names of the man who owned the corner market in Bellingham and the proprietor of the photographic store where he bought his supplies. He also had formal, professional relationships with several magazine editors. Other than that, he knew scarcely anyone well, nor they him. Gypsies make difficult friends for ordinary people, and he was something of a gypsy.”

The author stresses that Robert lives a lonely life. His travels restlessly, searching for the beauty of the world, alone with his thoughts and dreams; few will ever know him well. Solitude prepares him, and the reader, for the contrasting intensity of the connection he will feel with Francesca.

“Robert, there’s a creature inside of you that I’m not good enough to bring out, not strong enough to reach. I sometimes have the feeling you’ve been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you’ve dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about.”

Robert’s now-and-again Bellingham girlfriend recognizes his loneliness, but it’s too deeply entrenched. Robert is aware of what she discerns, but he doesn’t reveal it deliberately. His cool exterior belies the banked fires within. Later, Robert himself will allude to the possibility of past lives, underscoring the character’s preoccupation with impermanence.

“‘Blue’ was one of his favorite words. He liked the feeling it made on his lips and tongue when he said it. Words have physical feeling, not just meaning, he remembered thinking when he was young. He liked other words, such as ‘distant,’ ‘woodsmoke,’ ‘highway,’ ‘ancient,’ ‘passage,’ ‘voyageur,’ and ‘India’ for how they sounded, how they tasted, and what they conjured up in his mind.”

The words that inspire Robert fairly sing of his yearning for adventure. He loves the drama of the big, silent natural world all around him, and words that suggest travel and exploration inspire him. Were he to find that thrill in his interactions with a woman, his sense of awe and wonder for the world would focus on her with feelings of love and intimacy.

“It’s clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty humming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another.”

Not long after they meet, Robert sends Francesca a love letter; he expresses his deep affection for her and the astonishing feeling of connection between them. Their encounter brings to life ideas and feelings that have percolated in the back of his mind since he was young. In a way, his work as a photographer has been a search for her. He believes they were fated to find each other, and that their meeting completes their lives.

“The eyes, the voice, the face, the silver hair, the easy way he moved his body, old ways, disturbing ways, ways that draw you in. Ways that whisper to you in the final moment before sleep comes, when the barriers have fallen. Ways that rearrange the molecular space between male and female, regardless of species. The generations must roll, and the ways whisper only of that single requirement, nothing more. The power is infinite, the design supremely elegant. The ways are unswerving, their goal is clear. The ways are simple; we have made them seem complicated. Francesca sensed this without knowing she was sensing it, sensed it at the level of her cells. And there began the thing that would change her forever.”

Francesca reacts powerfully to Robert’s presence. Within moments of meeting him, she knows something important is going on between them. Her sudden understanding makes clear and obvious things that usually fill people with doubt. It’s like nothing she’s felt before, and she realizes that this encounter is much more powerful than the conscious mind can control. The passage’s sense of simultaneous fulfillment and inevitability articulate the ongoing theme of destiny.

“She was about five feet six, fortyish or a little older, pretty face, and a fine, warm body. But there were pretty women everywhere he traveled. Such physical matters were nice, yet, to him, intelligence and passion born of living, the ability to move and be moved by subtleties of the mind and spirit, were what really counted. That’s why he found most young women unattractive, regardless of their exterior beauty. They had not lived long enough or hard enough to possess those qualities that interested him.”

Robert isn’t drawn to women simply for their bodies; he searches for smarts and sensitivities, for someone who notices things and can appreciate their finer points. To him, young people haven’t yet refined their perspectives, nor have they been tempered by difficulties. The author thus places Robert in the category of a serious man; he’s letting the reader know that the affair that’s about to unfold isn’t frivolous but profound.

“He handed her a bottle and raised his in a half salute: ‘To covered bridges in the late afternoon or, better yet, on warm, red mornings.’ He grinned. Francesca said nothing but smiled softly and raised her bottle a little, hesitantly, awkwardly. A strange stranger, flowers, perfume, beer, and a toast on a hot Monday in late summer. It was almost more than she could deal with.”

Francesca already knows she wants Robert and that she doesn’t really know what she’s doing. This confusion is itself part of the passionate feelings rising up in her. The moment highlights the hurtling speed of the events overtaking her. The scene is ironic, since, on the surface, it’s a calm evening shared with an interesting stranger, while, underneath, vast emotional tides are surging.

“Brandy, two glasses, on the table. While she arranged the coffee, he opened the bottle and poured just the right amount into each glass. Robert Kincaid had dealt with after-dinner brandy before. She wondered in how many kitchens, how many good restaurants, how many living rooms with subdued light he had practiced that small trade. How many sets of long fingernails had he watched delicately pointing toward him from the stems of brandy glasses, how many pairs of blue-round and brown-oval eyes had looked at him through foreign evenings, while anchored sailboats rocked offshore and water slapped against the quays of ancient ports?”

As their quiet evening grows more intimate, Francesca’s literary soul combines with her fears and a bit of jealousy to imagine the romance of Robert’s life. Her thoughts become romantically sensual as her childhood fantasies of ships sailing her to exotic lands blend with her burgeoning fantasy of being swept up into Robert’s arms.

“She was more of a business partner to [her husband] than anything else. Some of her appreciated that. But rustling yet within her was another person who wanted to bathe and perfume herself… and be taken, carried away, and peeled back by a force she could sense, but never articulate, even dimly within her mind.”

Passions held in check for decades rise up in Francesca as she sees clearly now the difference between what she’d hoped for in marriage and what she has missed. Robert’s visit paints vividly that contrast, and she can no longer simply turn away when a chance for happiness drives right into her life. She attempts, once again, to articulate that certain something that both she and Robert can sense but can’t quite point to. It’s the surprising, utterly unique feeling of falling deeply in love with someone whose soul cries out to you and you answer it.

“Even though his sense of humor was well developed, if a little bizarre, he had a fundamentally serious mind and took things seriously. His mother had always said he was an adult at four years of age. That served him well as a professional. To his way of thinking, though, it did not serve him well around women such as Francesca Johnson.”

Francesca does something to Robert that throws him off. Normally easy-going, he feels tongue-tied when he sees her. This is a key indicator that Robert’s deepest feelings surface when she’s nearby. Something important is going on between them.

“He was on his knees northeast of the bridge, with the tripod low. He held out his left hand without taking his eye from the viewfinder, and she gave him the camera, watching his hand close about the lens as he felt it touch him. He worked the plunger on the end of the cord she had seen hanging out of his vest yesterday. The shutter fired. He cocked the shutter and fired again.”

The author crafts his sentences to create deliberate double entendres that suggest the sexual tension building between Robert and Francesca. Everything they do now serves a dual purpose: Robert’s photographic work and Francesca’s assistance are at once sober and flirtatious, their mutual attraction intensifying rapidly, as if their minds will soon be overpowered by desire.

“He imposed his will on the scene, countering changes in light with different lenses, different films, a filter occasionally. He didn’t just fight back, he dominated, using skill and intellect. Farmers also dominated the land with chemicals and bulldozers. But Robert Kincaid’s way of changing nature was elastic and always left things in their original form when he finished.”

Francesca watches Robert work, admiring his skill and confidence. She’s awed by his ability to transform the world around him into photographs while leaving that world unaltered. His is a strength that doesn’t force things, a confidence without arrogance, and this kind of masculinity captivates her.

“The locker rooms and stag parties and pool halls and segregated gatherings of their lives defined a certain set of male characteristics in which poetry, or anything of subtlety, had no place. Hence, if eroticism was a matter of subtlety, an art form of its own, which Francesca knew it to be, it had no place in the fabric of their lives. So the distracting and conveniently clever dance that held them apart went on, while women sighed and turned their faces to the wall in the nights of Madison County.”

Life in the Iowa farmlands of 1965 has a comforting, if somewhat dull, familiarity, and Francesca’s yearning for a more open and sensual relationship can find no purchase on the smooth walls of her husband’s cautious worldview. Madison County is a place of sturdy reliability, not poetic eroticism. Francesca must look elsewhere if she is to fulfill her longings.

“The curse of modern times is the preponderance of male hormones in places where they can do long-term damage. Even if we’re not talking about wars between nations or assaults on nature, there’s still that aggressiveness that keeps us apart from each other and the problems we need to be working on. We have to somehow sublimate those male hormones, or at least get them under control. It’s probably time to put away the things of childhood and grow up. Hell, I recognize it. I admit it. I’m just trying to make some good pictures and get out of life before I’m totally obsolete or do some serious damage.”

Robert describes to Francesca his beliefs about the limits of masculinity and his personal efforts to reconcile his own maleness to modern times. Though in many ways a throwback, Robert also is open-hearted about the problems of society; he’s a man’s man who sees the importance of things that many women in 1965 wish their own men could understand. His sober observations find their way across a bridge of understanding between him and Francesca.

“He felt so good to her. She wanted this to run forever. More old songs, more dancing, more of his body against hers. She had become a woman again. There was room to dance again. In a slow, unremitting way, she was turning for home, toward a place she’d never been.”

Francesca lets her heart open up fully, and she allows herself feelings she’s always possessed but never been able to express. She arrives at a place at once new and familiar, where emotions that beg to be free can finally unleash their full power. The sudden rush of all these feelings is new, but she knows each of them from her hopes and dreams.

“It was hot. The humidity was up, and thunder rolled far in the southwest. Moths plastered themselves on the screens, looking in at the candles, chasing the fire.”

Everything around Robert and Francesca now seems to point to their passionate feelings for each other. Heat and humidity roll off of everything, including them; the distant thunderstorm rumbles a warning of approaching intensity, an aural counterpoint to the soft music on the radio; the bright heat of the candles, a universal symbol of love, lures the moths as the lovers lure each other. These sensations, combined with the dance embrace, overwhelm their emotions and launch them unstoppably on their course.

“[…] she could smell rivers and wood-smoke, could hear steaming trains chuffing out of winter stations in long-ago nighttimes, could see travelers in black robes moving steadily along frozen rivers and through summer meadows, beating their way toward the end of things.”

As Francesca and Robert make love, she gets an overwhelming sense of him as atavistic and “leopardlike,” evoking wildness and distant times. Her feelings range far beyond anything she expected and into a wild country far removed from her normal life. The images that flash through her mind make direct and vivid her impressions of Robert, and it becomes clear to her that she, too, has possessed that wildness all along.

“Robert Kincaid’s long search came to an end. And he knew finally the meaning of all the small footprints on all the deserted beaches he had ever walked, of all the secret cargoes carried by ships that had never sailed, of all the curtained faces that had watched him pass down winding streets of twilight cities. And, like a great hunter of old who has traveled distant miles and now sees the light of his home campfires, his loneliness dissolved. At last. At last.”

His lifelong quest to find the essence of love somewhere in the world takes Robert to Francesca, who welcomes him into her heart after waiting an equally long time. While he knew what he wanted but didn’t know where it was, she didn’t know how much she wanted that intense connection with another person until he appeared. Again, the author uses images that evoke the unfamiliar and the primal, as if to say that what people truly yearn for lies in the deepest, most ancient regions of the soul.

“‘I’m no longer sitting next to you, here on the grass. You have me inside of you as a willing prisoner.’ He replied, ‘I’m not sure you’re inside of me, or that I am inside of you, or that I own you. At least I don’t want to own you. I think we’re both inside of another being we have created called ‘us.’ Well, we’re really not inside of that being. We are that being. We have both lost ourselves and created something else, something that exists only as an interlacing of the two of us.’”

Though Francesca freely admits her sudden, deep devotion to Robert, he gently turns aside her assertion that she is his to possess. Instead, he sees their connection as something that enfolds them both, that transforms them into a single emotional entity. Neither of them leads or follows because, in a sense, they are each other, so tightly interwoven are their feelings.

“God, she loved him so. Loved him then, more than she thought possible, loved him now even more. She would have done anything for him except destroy her family and maybe him as well.”

Twenty-two years after the affair, Francesca still thinks of Robert, her heart still his alone. Her tragedy is that their lives moved on different paths and couldn’t join together for more than that one brief time, at the intersection of those paths. The universe brought them together and then tore them apart, perhaps for mysterious reasons incomprehensible to humans, but the encounter grants them the reassuring certainty that there is someone with whom they can share a great and abiding love.

“I move in Dimension Z; the world goes by somewhere else in another slice of things, parallel to me. As if, hands in my pockets and bending a little forward, I see it through a department store window, looking inward.”

Robert’s short essay, contained in the package sent to Francesca after his death, describes his life since her as an existence not quite of this world. He returns to a loneliness made all the more distinct by the contrast between his reserved interactions with everyone else and his intimate connection to her. His sense of being the last of his kind, of being an alien visitor to the modern world, becomes more poignant when he thinks of her, the one person who made his life truly worthwhile.

“In a way, he was not of this earth. That’s about as clear as I can say it. I’ve always thought of him as a leopardlike creature who rode in on the tail of a comet. He moved that way, his body was like that. He somehow coupled enormous intensity with warmth and kindness, and there was a vague sense of tragedy about him. He felt he was becoming obsolete in a world of computers and robots and organized living in general. He saw himself as one of the last cowboys, as he put it, and called himself oldfangled.”

Francesca’s letter to her children, which they read after she dies, explains to them her hidden emotional life. It distills her image of him as a powerful, yet gentle, man of great vision who was somehow alien to normal human life. Her purpose is to explain clearly Robert’s qualities that pulled her so suddenly into his orbit.

“The paradox is this: If it hadn’t been for Robert Kincaid, I’m not sure I could have stayed on the farm all these years. In four days, he gave me a lifetime, a universe, and made the separate parts of me into a whole. I have never stopped thinking of him, not for a moment. Even when he was not in my conscious mind, I could feel him somewhere, always he was there.”

Her letter to her children continues with the surprising observation that, if not for her affair with Robert, she might have left the family. Knowing, however, that she has seen and felt the most intense experience possible between two people means she no longer had to search for it. She knew where it was. This gave her the freedom to choose to stay home and complete her life with her family.