Raw Silk (9781480463318)

by Burroway, Janet

  So I worked with the explosive beauties of plant disease. Under the microscope some of these were more lush than flowers. One day, inspired, I sent to the Division of Agriculture at Whitehall for slides of the rubigo. They referred me to a research team at Leeds who were so flattered by my request that they sent me, free, a padded envelope of spores, stomate and haustoria cross sections together with a two-hundred-page brochure full of such artistic information as that “their mycelium consist of hyphae located between cells of host tissues and usually have haustoria; they form no basidiocarp.” I had much more sympathy with The Young Lady’s Book of Botany, and this made me feel not only like a Victorian female, but a fraud. What was I doing with a microscope of my own, at company expense? Moreover, when I had painstakingly prepared my surprise design for Frances, a red rust fungus spore flowing through a leaf stomate into an air cavity, Frances dully observed that it was “not a very handsome disease.” Deflation made me angry. What was her opinion anyway? I put it back in the portfolio, determined to foist it on the presses and the industry.

  Frances lost weight and words. She bused in from her digs at Migglesly, and the bus stop was on the other side of Admin, so that perpetual rain brought her perpetually bedraggled in to us, smelling of wet wool otherwise infrequently washed. Stupidly, she began to be beautiful. Sickness had brought her bones out, her eyes were deep-set as naked sockets. Her hair hung damp and heavy to her shoulders, and even the clumsy skirt slipped down to anchor on her hipbones, hiding her knees, an austere version of the fashionable midi. But she was bad. She cried less, she bent double less often; she sat or stood most of the time tensely inert, as if the loss of fat from her frame had made it brittle. The harder I tried, the less she said, and what little she said veered toward the conventionally insane. Suddenly, looking away, “It’s dark in here.”

  “The lights are on.”

  Palms to her face, “In here.”

  The things that would have relieved me, to stroke her or to shake her, to tell her how differently I saw her than she saw herself, would have seemed to Frances a contemptuous intrusion. I dared not make her recoil. I felt sometimes as if I were immobile by a salt lick, waiting for the animals to trust me. In fact, I covered this feeling with an inexpedient tendency to talk while she held herself wary, elsewhere. When I urged her again to see a psychiatrist she wouldn’t argue; she had no new arguments and I had heard the ones she had.

  “Every day is a difference for you. My walls are the same place. You know everywhere there is with me.”

  10

  ON THE FOURTH THURSDAY in November, having brought the milk bottle in off the windowsill and poured as usual a saucerful for Mrs. Lena Fromkirk’s four tabby cats, Frances unwrapped a new X-Acto blade and scarified the lifeline of her left palm past its natural termination point and into the fresh territory of her wrist, where the blood welled enough faster that she didn’t know what to do with it except let it spill curling into the cat’s milk, but not fast enough to prove conclusively that it would not coagulate. Frustrated, she stabbed her thigh through the flannel skirt. The X-Acto knife having no more than a half inch of blade surface, this was not a fatal gesture either, but the point struck bone and the pain alarmed her; alarm welled into nausea, and the gash made mess enough—skirt, eiderdown, thirsty floorboards—that she did not, simply, feel capable of cleaning it up. She went to her shelf and chewed down a bottle and a half of non-habit-forming Mogadon that any GP could have told her, and it’s very likely her GP did tell her, would make her very, very sick, but probably wouldn’t kill her. She locked the door and lay down to bleed and sleep.

  This was on Thanksgiving Day, though I don’t suppose Frances knew that; it’s not her sort of irony. I was aware of it only because the Jeremy Jeromes, whose sabbatical from Scripps was extending into the vague, had suggested we should celebrate; otherwise our boarding school daughters would get no turkey and no civics lesson. I’d agreed, but argued we could cheat forward a day to Friday, which would make it more likely that we could get the girls for an extra weekend. There turned out to be no trouble about this, in spite of St. Margaret’s previous admonitions to the contrary; I ought to have known that Miss Meridene would be the last to thwart the observation of a patriotic rite. So it had been arranged: I’d cook and the Jeromes would fetch Maxine and Jill home on Friday.

  When Frances didn’t come into East Anglian on Thursday, we discussed whether we should check on her but decided it was overprotective. Her defection was rare but not unprecedented; besides, everybody was out with flus and colds in this stinking weather. In the evening I boiled cranberries and tossed stuffing, whatever would cut down on the last-minute panic, and most of Friday morning I spent instructing Mrs. Coombe on roasting times and temperatures. I could have stayed home altogether, but I had an inconveniently pressing idea about how to incorporate an aphid into a pattern of leaf virus, and I didn’t want to let it wait till Monday. When I got in about noon the others were waiting for me, to decide whether to call Frances’s digs.

  On the whole I was against it. I was nervous of suffocating her. But Dillis thought just the opposite, that she might want to know we’d noticed.

  “And anyway, mother, you know she’s down. There’s always the chance she’ll pull something.”

  So I looked up the number of Mrs. Fromkirk’s house in Migglesly, and inquired of the flat female whine at the other end whether I might speak to Frances.

  “Who wants to know, please.”

  “My name is Mrs. Marbalestier. I work in the same office with her. We were worried …”

  “You can find her up at Migglesly Victoria, Mrs. Marblest. But I’ll not have it again, and if you’re her boss an’ that, you can tell her so.”

  “Won’t have what?”

  “Her cutting herself up on the premises and bringing the p’lice on me. Swallowing pills.”

  “Oh my God.”

  Guilt lives so near my surface, puddled in my shallow pores, that this sour, accusatory news hardly struck me as out of tone. Mrs. Fromkirk might have been saying: What did you expect? What did you think she’d do? Cutting and premises and p’lice went by me in a B-grade blur, and I thought I would be sick. Then I thought this would be a fairly useless thing to do. What did I expect?

  “Is Frances alive, Mrs. Fromkirk?”

  “Alive.” She was peevishly logical. “If she want alive I’d not be worrying about having it again, would I? You can ask at the hospital, they’ll tell you she’s alive right enough.”

  “Please. What happened?”

  “I don’t know as I’m at liberty to say. You call up to Migglesly, that’ll be the best thing for you to do.”

  I gave the others what I had and we sat for a minute letting the if-onlies and we-should-haves hang unsaid. I had trouble changing directions, as always when the unexpected thing occurs. The child out of the apple tree, death, dogbite, blizzard—half your mind is dealing with it before the other half has given up its canceled plans. I had the smell of sage on my hands and a very clear notion of how, in a minute, I was going to position the strangely articulated legs of the aphididae on a mottling of green-gray mold, which it was also clear I was not going to do because the rest of today had been appropriated in a way I had not yet taken in.

  In the interstices of this effort I discovered how my feelings for Frances had come full circle. In the beginning I had simply wanted to be rid of her, a dreary intrusion on my working day; and then I had felt compassionate toward her with a great deal of self-consciousness, always straining after a sympathy I only imperfectly felt. And when the monotony of her misery did not abate I began to perceive that she was living out a kind of courage I had never thought of, which was visible perhaps only to the four of us and from which we were nevertheless excluded, because our wanting to help her did not help. Without my knowing it her passive struggle had become an important success to me, and I now discovered that if she killed herself I would mind very much. I would be, in fact, grief-stricken.
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  I speak of discovery, and yet at the same time it was no surprise that I should feel discovery. We were all four of us too experienced, too perceptive, too well read, not to know that it takes the threat of loss to make things precious, and that guilt is the inevitable companion of the threat. Yet we were guilty of nothing but ignorance, inattention, mistake. I had been slicing mushrooms and testing the freshness of my herbs while Frances went through whatever she had gone through and had done whatever she had done. But it didn’t matter. I could no more have prevented it than I could, by now, prevent Jill’s gradual metamorphosis into an English lady.

  We sat distortedly half grinning as if we’d been caught out in a cliché, and only Mom had the simplicity to say “She told us so.”

  “Call,” said Malcolm.

  I called, and a nurse fended me off from knowing anything but that Frances was resting, that she could be waking anytime, and if I was coming by, would it be possible to stop off and pick up her things? A nightgown, a toothbrush, whatever might make her feel at home? The last thing I wanted at the moment was to further my acquaintance with Mrs. Lena Fromkirk. But what could I do?

  “Will one of you face the Good Samaritan with me?” I pleaded.

  But it was better, if Frances waked, to find somebody there. I was the one who’d choose her things with the best sense of what she’d want. Malcolm and Dillis should go to the hospital, Mom would hold the fort. Reasoning like this is almost wholly accidental. We might just as well have decided that I should be there, that Mom could get her toothbrush, or that Malcolm should go with me first to her digs, or Dillis, or any of the other possibilities within the combination of four, any one of which could have been justified by an equal number of reasons. No doubt there are causes and probabilities at work as well; even inevitabilities and devils. But except for the arbitrary accident that I went to Frances’s room alone, it would have been no more than an interesting detour; no telling it ages hence, no paths diverging, no regret that I could not travel both and be one traveler.

  The terrace of houses was at the industrial end of Migglesly, where the streets are meanly laid and the alleys between the back “gardens” are fenced head-high, barely wide enough to walk a bicycle. People do grow sprouts and tomatoes, even dahlias, in these dingy plots. I don’t know how. I don’t know when there’s sun enough to cut a shadow. The front of the terrace was a single brick fortification one block and seventeen sharp shingle peaks long, the seventeen doors opening onto a stone walk no wider than their arcs.

  No doubt the architects of these Edwardian terraces were right, given the stipulation of shared walls, to work for an illusion of unity. But it goes against nature; even human nature wants to body forth its variety. Here the façade had been sliced into painted fronts and fronts left brick; pink doors with apple-green doorposts, brown with yellow, black eaves on mud-gray peaks, somebody fond of blue to the enameling of his water-pipes. The edges of the paint on the painted houses ran raw down the middle of bricks. Those in their original brick and cream were the peeling, don’t-care ones, probably the grumble and scandal of the neighborhood. Number 5 was one of these, and opened onto cabbage and cat piss, the smells of Occidental poverty.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Mrs. Marbalestier. I spoke to you a while ago from East Anglian.”

  “Yes?”

  Mrs. Fromkirk was an unusually small woman, like a husk, whose natural convexities—chin, breast, belly, knees—had been sucked hollow. Her skin, under a frizzle of colorless hair trapped in a net, had seen still less light than Frances’s and had the waxed quality of crumpled butcher wrapping. Neither of her yeses had been an affirmative, but when she took me in, the door jerked wider and her hand wandered defensively over her bosom to clutch at her cardigan.

  “Wonch’ come in,” she said, backing toward the wall in a courteous crouch, and I realized that I—suede boots, double knit, silk scarf—smelled of money at this end of town more pungent than the cabbage.

  “The hospital asked if I would come by and pick up a few of Frances’s things.”

  She led me back through the hall, waterstained graywash, linoleum buckling at the stairwell, into a parlor, a paradigm, a parody of an English parlor, everything mean and misguided and doomed and still struggling. It was all there, gewgaw, whatnot, fretwork, antimacassar, tatting, needlepoint, macramé, appliqué, blown glass, bisque, pinchbeck, knickknack, gimcrack. A vase of peacock tails bound into imitation flowers, a framed bird fashioned out of seashells. It was all there. Four walls and four wallpapers, a density, a frenzy of decor, of which every particle pinched out of a pension book contradicted every other, to a total effect of unutterable dreariness. Mrs. Fromkirk sat in a rocking chair, and instantly from somewhere, clever among the bric-a-brac, two cats appeared, patterned in the same dour intricacy as the room. One went to weave around her ankles; another, a tom, leaped into her lap and lay open to expose his balls, which Mrs. Fromkirk calmly proceeded to massage.

  I had thought she’d resist my intrusion into Frances’s personal things. On the contrary, her whole purpose seemed to be to get me to clear the place out.

  “Y’ull understand I bear her no ill will.” The stridency tuned out and the whine turned up to pitiful. “But I’ve got my reputation to think about, living alone here year on year, and it’s the lodgers come and go. I usually take young men, but I thought a girl would be good for a change. I thought, quieter. You’ld have noticed there’s somewhat queer about her?”

  “The hospital said she’d cut herself pretty badly,” I lied.

  “Oh, scandalous.” Lifting and letting the tom’s furry scrotum flop on her palm. “A terrible mess even in the cats’ dish, and the pills on top of that.”

  “How many would you say she took?”

  “I’m sure I haven’t any notion, only I heard mention of a stomach pump when they came to get her. She’ld be for the other world now, I shouldn’t wonder, only Lollygag missed his milk. The two of ’em, Lollygag and Purrup, ’wauling outside her door in the middle of the night, which I didn’t think anything of till it was getting on for seven and her still not up.”

  “She loved the cats,” I guessed.

  “She’s a gentle soul, I’m not saying not, and never missed a day for bringing them some bit of something or other. Not scrap and that; bought things.”

  “You know, Mrs. Fromkirk, I think it would be very hard on Frances to come out of hospital and find she had no home.” I meant this. I also thought that she should get out of Mrs. Fromkirk’s glass menagerie as soon as she was able, but I leaned with sentimental weight on the sound of “home.”

  “I’m not one to put a body out on the street, Mrs. Marblest, believe you me. But what am I to do? There’s the gas due Tuesday week and the chimney needing doing out for the winter. How long is she to be there? I can’t get by without that eight pounds ten, I’m sure I can’t. And even so it’ll be a week before I can set the room to rights, what with her daubing the walls, and the eiderdown I was six months in the patching of to go for cleaning.”

  I got the idea. I’m very quick. I had an uneasy premonition of the way I’d stumble when Oliver found a canceled check for (twice eight pounds ten is seventeen times two is) thirty-four pounds to Mrs. Lena Fromkirk and asked me what was that. But I shoved it out of mind and took out my checkbook. Responding perhaps to some tension in his mistress’s thighs, Lollygag jumped down.

  “Supposing I pay you for a month in advance, and then we’ll see how Frances is and go on from there.”

  “There’s the eiderdown …” Mrs. Fromkirk said doubtfully. I had another look at her crumpled-paper face, and I thought that if Malcolm wanted a model, here was one of his Survivors. It was a strange setting for Frances to give up in.

  “I’ll make it for thirty-six,” I said. I handed her the check, which she blew on, though I’d written it with a ball-point. She went to the mantel, opened a cut-glass aurora borealis dish by strangling the swan on its lid, and extracted a key. This sh
e handed to me without any suggestion I should return it, as if I had now become the proprietor of Frances’s room.

  “The door facing just at the top of the stairs,” she said, and nodded me out.

  There were three cats on the stair now, all of identical tabby dinge, and they followed me up to nudge the doorframe while I ground the key in the dry lock. When it finally gave the three of them slithered in ahead of me. I hoped I might accurately identify something that would make Frances feel at home in hospital: some book, perhaps? Would she be likely to keep a stuffed animal, photographs? The room was darker than the stairwell, dun-colored and shuttered. I fumbled against the doorframe till I found the light.

  “My walls are the same place. You know everywhere there is with me.” Did she credit me, then, with some sort of imagination that I ought, as an artist, to have had? Frances’s room was very bare, furnished only in the stripped bed, a deal table, a basin, a set of shelves, and paintings. Everywhere. There were unframed canvases and posterboards tacked up, but most of them were on the walls themselves, thrust into every available space—under the basin, between the shelves—fierce brushstrokes that overshot the cornices and corners. Even so I stood confused, adjusting my eyes and mind to the realization that Frances, who did nothing, who could not drink a cup of tea or comb her hair, that Frances had painted these things, and she could paint.

  She could paint. I closed the door behind me and sat down, instinctively, because that’s where I sat with Frances, on the floor. Across from me a life-sized mural of an old East Anglian loom incorporated the window into its breastbeam and reached with the frame bed toward the room. The warp threads were metallic black, transforming them into bars, and behind them a stippling of ash gray and ocher suggested eyes and mouths, features dislocated and half finished, waiting in the wall. On the bed of the loom, under a blur of ponderous shuttle, bodies and faces were taking form, and where the fabric poured from the edge it became a flood of umber, burgundy, hunter, madder—poison colors. Dumb hollow-eyed people were drowning there, vindictive and suffering, hands flailing for a hold beyond their reach. The technique was hot and harsh but had that inexplicable accuracy of eye that makes distortion pass for realism: a muscle under such strain, a skin texture so precisely caught, that you could feel the deformed nostril breathe. The wall to my left was dominated by an enormous eye, the iris contorted so that its tessellations became a spider web, the pupil trapped at its own sticky center. Around that, randomly, were studies of the heads and bodies on the loom: a stretched neck, with the head bent back so there was no face but mouth; cavernous eyes on an otherwise featureless face; skeletons straining through skin; insect parts sprouting from human infants—some of these scribbled over with a half-inch brush. A frog dying of no visible wound ballooned its throat membrane toward a murderous water lily.