Raw Silk (9781480463318)

by Burroway, Janet

  This time at St. Margaret’s Jill scrambled out of the car, flapped a hand at me and didn’t look back. I was delighted at her accomplished adjustment, truly delighted, and I broke all the speed limits back to the solace of East Anglian, having altogether forgotten that we would have a new file clerk, part time.

  She looked younger than her twenty years. She had a rather long face and a “strong” jaw, but excess of flesh concealed this, and made her head seem merely large. Not grotesquely so, not cretin-large, but big enough to suggest a certain clumsy disproportion. Her eyes were also large, but they were never fully open, so that we mainly saw half spheres of translucent eyelid. Really her skin was very fine, of the porcelain-English sort, but its underlight was unhealthy, gray, and sometimes her cheeks would show a rake of parallel scratches as if she had dragged her fingernails down them. That’s what it looked like, but for a while I didn’t realize it was the case. She wore an unvarying uniform, a blue-black harsh-surfaced sweater that concealed everything a sweater can conceal except a shadow of flesh at the elbow where the knit had worn thin, and a gray flannel skirt sliced off at the kneecap)—the only hemline on the entire length of the female leg that could not be considered fashionable that year. Likewise her hair was chopped brutally at the earlobe, ragged across the nape; a hairstyle no one has ever chosen who had a choice. Sneakers and heavy socks. No variation, no ornament.

  This is an effort. Certain things stand in my memory as stark as Clare Bridge in the sun, but the arrival of Frances is not one of them. I’ve changed my mind about people and seen people change before, but in my experience these changes tend to disillusion. I’ve never before begun bored with someone that I ended loving. I remember that she was heavy, that her heaviness was as much a quality as a fact, and that the dull-footed dumb misery she brought in with her that Monday morning laid us flat.

  Nor have I seen anyone make such an effort to be unobtrusive, and fail so wholly. She was not, as it turned out, particularly inefficient. She was painfully slow, slow-motion slow, as if every lifting of her hand were an effort against paralysis. But then she was needed with no very great urgency, and Dillis set her to a housekeeping job, replacing all the tattered manila folders in a wall’s worth of files. Little by little this was accomplished, every fresh folder identified in a meanly meticulous hand, and nothing ever lost, inaccurate or out of place. From time to time she disappeared into the W.C. to cry. I don’t know how we knew this, because we never saw her eyes. At first we invited her to share our coffee breaks, and she sat taut over a cup of plain tea, which she raised to her mouth at intervals without ever appreciably affecting the level of liquid in it. When the break was over she spilled it down the sink and rinsed the cup. We began by trying to include her in our habit of offhand intimacy—I told a truncated version of the spoon incident, I recall—but such intimacy won’t survive an odd man out. Humor was the glue we used on each other’s nicks and cracks, and humor was indecent in the presence of that amorphous agony.

  “You were at Cambridge, weren’t you?” I asked one morning. She lowered her head slightly in what must have been meant for a nod. “A while,” she said indistinctly, in a voice fairly deep but without definition, without tongue or teeth or force of breath.

  “What did you study?”

  “SPS.”

  I tried to imagine this apathetic creature learning to deal with social and political sciences. It was like setting a slug onto the study of evolution.

  “Did you not like it?” Dillis pursued pleasantly, and Frances shrugged, slow motion, expelled a guttural breath and opened fully for us where they lay in her lap two very large and bony, scratched, nail-bitten hands. It was not a rebuke or refusal, it was a plea we should understand, that the enormity of her not liking it, the weight and depth and darkness of her not liking it, bore no relation to any words she might offer on the subject.

  After two or three of these exchanges she politely excluded herself from the coffee breaks, with the effect that we also gave them up. We all worked as mute as she until one o’clock, when she went home and we escaped to the refectory, gulping mouthfuls of outdoor air and stretching our shoulders.

  Jesus, she was intolerable! We hated her, of course—who wants a steady fog of tear gas in his room? But equally, of course, we were dishonest about our dislike. Her grief was so genuine that any attitude but concern would have revealed us as ugly, crass. Our vocabulary was heavily spiced with words like “neurotic,” “paranoia,” “depression”; concepts we appropriated to ourselves in the facetious assumption that anybody who was not a little mad in the modern world must be unbalanced. Frances’s earnest, unaesthetic struggle challenged our right to use such terms.

  “I’ll tell you,” I told them one noon, “when I’m around Frances it occurs to me that I’m not a very serious person.” This, as it happens, was disconcertingly true, without altering the fact that I knew it would produce from Malcolm, as it did, “You just hang onto your frivolity, baby.”

  “She’s really sick.” That was Mom, the closest any of us came to judgment.

  “Yes, but she really is sick,” admonished Malcolm. “I’ve seen some lollapaloozin’ depressed kids in my time, but that one needs help.”

  “Is she getting any?” Nobody knew. We knew nothing about her. So it was decided that one of us should talk to Nicholson, and that since he would be more likely to discuss family matters with a woman, and since I was the woman he knew best of us, it should be me.

  I made an appointment, which I thought would give a certain gravity to my request, and I perched formally on the chair across from him, ready to resist the charm of his expansive bobblings.

  “I wanted to know a little about Frances Kean.”

  “Oh me,” he commiserated, bobbling. “Is she messing things up for you down there?”

  “No,” I said, rather sharply, “her work is fine. It’s slow, but fine. But she’s very unhappy and she doesn’t seem to be able to talk about it. We thought if you could tell us something about her background, we’d know better how to help her.”

  He laid his head on the side and enveloped me in a beatifical smile. “You really are too good, Ginny,” he murmured, and for a minute the warm undertow tugged at me and I felt myself suffused with my own benevolence.

  “Do you know of anything that happened to her at Cambridge, why she quit?”

  “She lost Jesus, I believe,” he said, considered this and seemed to find it a trifle embarrassing but, uh, on the other hand, right. “Yes, her family down in Dorset, very close-knit and Christian. University just got to be too much for her, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “But did anything happen? An unhappy love affair, or drugs or anything?”

  “Well, there may …” he shifted uncomfortably, “… there may have been a little period of … experimentation. All over now. None of that now. You realize there are very few of these modern students that don’t have a go at drugs.”

  I said I realized that and asked if there were anything more. But he couldn’t think of anything, except to screw the cap off his pen and screw it on again.

  “Do you know if she’s having psychiatric help? Because if not, I know of two or three people …”

  “Oh, I don’t believe that’s needed.” The unusually brief smile with which he punctuated this statement gave it the nature of a directive. I saw how effectively he might deal with a subordinate who didn’t fall so splendidly in with his plans as I.

  Let me make clear again that I like George Nicholson. He is just and spunky and he has a joyfully infectious dedication to cloth. He felt, simply and clearly, that loyalty to his wife’s family demanded that Frances should have a job, but it did not require him to become involved. In order that he should not become involved the wife of his commercial manager should not become involved. And that was that.

  “Well, thanks,” I said. It seemed to me that I’d learned nothing at all.

  But when I presented my few scraps of information and we turned them
over, Malcolm was able to come up with a credible history.

  “Look, suppose you come out of a respectable county family in Dorset. High Church and middle-middle class; that’d be right, wouldn’t it?”

  “Mrs. Nicholson married up,” Mom Pollard confirmed.

  “Right, and you have all the secure sort of rules, curfews, decent dress, the lot. Say she’s never been on a vacation except a couple of weeks in Penzance with her folks. So she gets a scholarship out of the local grammar school, and comes up to study SPS at the great ivory tower, first time she’s been away from home. What happens? A lot of peer-group pressure to smoke pot and sleep around, maybe LSD, and she’s got digs on her own with nobody to check whether she’s in or out. She’s thrown into a whole social thing with no bounds on her freedom at all, and on top of that some snot-nosed junior philosophy don whips Jesus out from under her in the first term. You know there’s nothing they like better than demolishing Christianity.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s very like what happened to me, though. I had a history teacher that chewed Martin Luther up into little pieces my freshman year, and it rocked me all right, but it didn’t do that to me.” Even as I said this I remembered what it had done instead; I wasn’t so much robbed of Martin Luther as converted to Jay Mellon.

  “You could take it and she couldn’t,” Malcolm shrugged. “Doesn’t that make sense?”

  It turned out eventually that his guess was accurate in every particular, except that for Frances no mere event could be relevant to her state. “Rot is me,” she said. “Void is me. If I could set causes to it, it would go away.”

  But a damp spring and the beginning of an indifferent summer passed before she began saying such things to me. They passed piecemeal, in the absence of significant truce or significant skirmish at home. The part of my life I looked forward to was the four hours between Frances’s departure from East Anglian and my own, but it could also be said that the salutary effects of St. Margaret’s had filtered through to Eastley Village—that Oliver, Jill and I were better behaved than we used to be; we had learned our manners.

  Some periods were clearly positive—when the strawberries came in, the sightseeing weekend we spent in Edinburgh—and at such times I had a tendency to say things of the Oliver-couldn’t-we-start-over sort, and Oliver to reply with things of the I-don’t-know-what-you-mean sort, and although these exchanges had an animus mundi familiarity about them, as being fundamental to the male-female experience, still I could not for the life of me decide whether Oliver-male in such situations really did not know what I-female was talking about or simply didn’t want to talk about it.

  Other periods were hostile in a more or less open way, especially when Oliver mocked my friends in Design Print. If he had occasion to mention Dillis, she was always “little Dillis.” He took to calling Malcolm “your friend Malcolm,” and later, “your dear queer friend.” He also began to suggest, quite without foundation, that the house and garden were not so well kept as when I was at home to oversee their maintenance. In particular, Mrs. Coombe was neglecting to dust the skirtings, and I had better have a word with her about it. I said coolly that Mrs. Coombe had never dusted the skirtings, in the second place she was old and found it hard to stoop, and in the third place I had never pretended to be capable of handling servants. If he wanted the servants handled he would have to look after it himself. Having taken this militant stand, I took a dustcloth and wiped the skirtings one night when he wasn’t home.

  Meanwhile (for a good part of my childhood I believed that “meanwhile” referred to a period of vindictive time) St. Margaret’s began to earn its eleven hundred annual pounds. Gradually at first, and then with increasing speed and confidence, Jill learned new math, horsemanship and the Graces. She became, what every parent hopes for and all discipline is intended to create, a miniature adult. When, sunnily polite, one toe dragging in a becoming suggestion of modesty and her hands cupped carefully under the edges of a crystal plate, she handed round the onion dip, our friends could not find sufficient praise for her. These adult functions filled her with shy excitement, and she was shiny with it—her explosive eyes, scrubbed cheeks, her patent shoes and velvet shift, her two long plaits that caught the candlelight. “She’s absolutely dazzling, Virginia,” someone would say. And in truth I was dazzled; at the balletic suppleness of her flight to the kitchen to fetch the peanut dish, at the mimetic perfection of her “Good evening, Mrs. Kitto.”

  But that was the point: mimesis. Every artist knows that beauty is generated in the conjunction of opposites. Because she was a child, Jill’s performance was poignant in the extreme. But then I would see her at the age of Mrs. Kitto, her eyes caught in a tessellation of those wrinkles that come from too many years of smiling, and that one foot still left behind, perhaps. I had seen many women drag a foot that way like a declaration of incipient withdrawal: I can retreat instantly if you wish me to; you see that I do not stand on my own two feet. And this aging woman who had been to the best schools and therefore knew what a woman was, no longer playing at it or, worse, no longer knowing that she was playing … I would see this woman my daughter would become, and she was a woman I could not talk to, could not like.

  So that when Jill lapsed into straightforward childish greed or sulkiness, when she whined for candy or refused to put on her raincoat, I was relieved. I was comfortable. But wasn’t there something wrong with me, if I preferred my daughter in her worst moods?

  And that was not the worst. The worst was that Jill seemed determined to pass civilization on to me. “Your language is revolting,” she would say imperiously at my least “goddam.” She herself locked the bathroom door and developed an obsession for closing others. Once when Phaideaux crapped on the back doormat she informed me that I kept “an unsanitary house.” Once when we sat on the Backs together, me in a low-cut summer cotton, she poked a finger toward my cleavage and whispered, “Pull your dress up, Mummy!” There flashed into my mind a moment from the summer when I was twelve, on the bus from Seal Beach to L.A., when my mother had said the same thing, with the same emphasis.

  “Jesus,” I said to Oliver. “All my childhood my folks were passing moral judgments on me, and now I’m getting it from below. Any day now she’s going to start lecturing me on the evils of drink and fornication; I can feel it in the air.”

  But Oliver did not see the humor of it, maybe because he knew I wasn’t joking—did Oliver still know when I was joking? “When parents and children pass the same judgments,” he said, hypothetical, “maybe there’s something in them.”

  8

  FRANCES REMAINED THE SAME, Malcolm’s insight into her trouble couldn’t be verified and had no use, because we couldn’t establish contact with her. When it was humanly possible to be silent, she was silent. Any work that could be done in a corner, she did in a corner. At such intervals as could be considered decent and necessary, she went into the W.C. to cry.

  But one day the four of us left her in the office when we went to lunch. She was dittoing a memo to the bleachers and twisters, and Mom had asked her to finish the run before she left. We were all the way to the refectory before Dillis remembered that she hadn’t told her to lock the door.

  “Do you think she’d know to?”

  “How do you know what she’d know?” said Malcolm.

  “I’ll go check,” I said. “I can do with the walk anyway.” I ambled back, taking my time. The locking of the door was a company rule, but I couldn’t see much danger of appliance-looting at high noon. I tried the knob, and it was open, all right, so I stepped in to twist the lock on the other side.

  Frances was still there, on the floor beside the filing cabinet. She was on her knees, her forehead pressed into the rug and her weight thrown onto her elbows, her forearms reaching up with all the veins and sinews in relief, hands clenched open as if she were digging into air. Except for the claw-held hands it was the attitude of classic abjection, the kowtow to the East, the suppliant before the throne. Sinc
e she happened to be facing me this put me in a disconcerting position of eminence, and I hesitated, not knowing whether I should stay or go, not wanting to startle her and not knowing how to embarrass her least.

  “Frances?”

  I sat down on the carpet in front of her and was shocked by the sudden proximity of her hands, which were not just chapped and scratched but covered with thread-thin cuts in both directions. It was as if the backs of her hands were covered with a gauze of dry blood. The cuts had been made with a razor blade or an X-Acto knife; nothing else would have made them so straight and fine. When she straightened up and sat back on her haunches I also realized that she had lost weight. It was strange I hadn’t noticed it because I usually notice such things, but I suppose I had avoided looking at her directly. Even now the sweater and skirt were so formless that the loss was mainly evident in her face. Her hair, very dark and straight and badly cut, had grown halfway down her neck, and with her mouth moronically open to gulp air, her cheekbones made prominent, she was almost gaunt.

  “I’m sorry,” she gasped.

  “Don’t be sorry. It’s a relief. You’ve been trying not to bother us but you do bother us. You make us feel shut out. Don’t think it’s kind.” I’m glad, looking back on it, that I was able to begin on this irritably honest note. It wasn’t always so easy, but it wasn’t always so crucial either. She stared at me warily. Open, her eyes were Orphan Annie eyes, blank as a cartoon. I couldn’t know if she had taken any of that in, but at least she didn’t apologize again. I cast around for something else to say and came up with the obvious thing.