Raw Silk (9781480463318)

by Burroway, Janet

  “Know what? Know what? Know, know, know, know. Nobody knows.”

  “Tell me then.”

  “I thought I could. Do.”

  “Could tell me?”

  “No, do. Something.”

  I waited. Even in the half light I could see that her gaunt features were losing their stylishness. A haggard fold hung over her cheekbones, her forehead was marked with tension. She was twenty-one and she was aging.

  “What did you think you could do?”

  “A thing. An action, see?”

  “No, I don’t see. Explain to me.”

  “I was, he. Holloway.”

  “Yes?”

  “He was surprised I’m good.”

  She peered at me urgently. She grunted. “See?”

  “Frances, please try to tell me.”

  “See, here.” She reached to the nightstand and brought the sketch pad to her knees, turning the pages by pushing roughly at them with the ball of bandage. Page after page was covered with the jelly fetuses, set now in alabaster eggs, now in steel, now in woodgrain, now in flint. They varied in nothing but texture: grain and veining and density.

  “See? This is obsidian.”

  “What happened?”

  “Dr. Holloway said he would look at them. He thought he might learn from them, about me, but it. Was not. That. He was, surprised.”

  “He was impressed.”

  “Im-pressed. Im-pression. They made a pressure on him.”

  “And that pleased you very much.”

  “I came back here. He says I wanted to punish my hand. The other times all right. But not then. They say I wanted to be sorried for. The other times, but not then. I am not fantasizing!”

  “I believe you.”

  “I felt I could do. And I have not done. For so long I could not take, you see, you see, you see, you see, an action.”

  “Yes.”

  “So I went to the window and I broke the pane.” She clenched her face to me, rocking her torso with the effort to be understood. “I broke the pane. I broke the pane!”

  “You broke the pain. Your pain.”

  “Yes! Yes!” sung whining from her and she gulped mouthfuls of wet air. She shook her arms at me, fingers of the free hand flapping. She pushed at the sketchbook pages and I saw that blood was seeping through the bandage. “But he says. And he says he does not believe I am trying to be born. I am trying to be born! But I can’t be born if I am unbearable!”

  “Oh, Frances.”

  Her shouting had brought Miss Gavin, and an older nurse with a tray of pills.

  “Don’t leave me!” Frances reached for me.

  “Just pop this in your mouth, that’s a good girl.”

  “No! Don’t let them make me!”

  “Please,” I said, “give her a minute. She’ll calm down. I shouldn’t have asked her …”

  “That’s the girl.” The nurse bustled between us and put a firm hand on the nape of Frances’s neck. “You don’t want to make me give you an injection now, do you.” She picked up a cup of water and gestured to Miss Gavin to hold her arms.

  “I won’t! Won’t!” Frances struggled and looked imploringly at me, but the nurse performed some sleight of hand with the pill and the water, on which Frances gagged; water dribbled off her chin and the pill was down.

  “There now. That’s much better.”

  Frances huddled and sobbed. They said I would have to go.

  I knocked on the door of Dr. Holloway’s cubicle and pushed in. It was little larger than a linen cupboard and had shelves to the ceiling stacked with meticulous files like laundered sheets. I sat without being asked and took out one of my emergency cigarettes.

  “Ah, Mrs. Marbalestier. You’ve been to see Miss Kean, no doubt.”

  “Yes. I’m afraid I upset her.”

  “I shouldn’t worry about it too much. She’s in an excitable state.”

  “I could see that.”

  He was writing something on a stenciled form, and had scarcely glanced up from it. Now he signed it, folded it into a manila envelope and took out an ashtray, which he squared on the desk in front of me.

  “Well,” he said, and smiled, which made the fleshfolds on either side of his mouth swell with apparent sympathy. I took a drag and cleared my throat.

  “I wonder if you are aware that, Frances believes you have, misinterpreted her … action.”

  The flesh pouched, flattened. “Putting a fist through a window is not a very ambiguous gesture, Mrs. Marbalestier.”

  “No. I see that. But Frances believes it was positive. She has felt capable of doing so little, you see, that to do something, even something destructive, was a means of manifesting, well, improvement.” This was not right. Holloway said nothing and expressed nothing, which I found threatening. “She lives in such apathy that the fact she could … perhaps it was anger, but, no. I don’t think it was anger.” He said nothing. “She was feeling … better … capable. And to be able to express, something. With an action. Which is positive, even if …” I gave up. Holloway emptied the two flicks of ash in the ashtray.

  “Mrs. Marbalestier, I praised her drawings, which was perhaps unwise of me. Frances is not capable of receiving praise, and she very predictably—very naturally, if you like—delivered and carried out a sentence on the hand that had committed the drawings. She has cut herself before.”

  “This is different.”

  “Do you honestly believe that, with seventeen stitches in her hand?”

  “I don’t know, I … yes, I do. I do believe it. She broke the windowpane, and she saw it as breaking her own pain, her suffering. She uses puns that … are not frivolous to her.”

  “Of course. It’s a common trait of schizophrenia.”

  “Is Frances a schizophrenic, then? Is that what she is?”

  The flicker of fleshfold again. He lined up his pen beside the manila envelope. “She is, but it’s not a category that I find very useful. We are all of us, to one degree or another, schizophrenic.”

  “I understand that.”

  “No, it is more useful to think of her in terms of a passive-aggressive. I myself am a compulsive-obsessive.” He gestured self-deprecatingly toward the neatness of his desk and emptied the ashtray again in demonstration. “But the passive-aggressive personality is characterized by extreme dependency, together with extreme resentment. The dependency produces the resentment, which manifests itself in self-abnegation, in martyrdom, in some cases to the point of self-inflicted punishment. The punishment is itself the aggression, a means of manipulating, though it in turn reinforces the dependency.” I saw I had been sidetracked.

  “Did you know she’s in love with you?” I asked, aggressing.

  “Transference of emotional need to the doctor is so common as to be almost inevitable.”

  “I know that too. I’m always in love with my gynecologist.” The bloodhound flesh acknowledged a pleasantry. “But what I’m saying is that emotion is a very significant and dangerous thing for Frances.”

  “Certainly.”

  “And for her to feel that you don’t believe her now, may be more painful than she can stand.”

  “You suggest I pretend to believe her?”

  “Dr. Holloway, don’t you think that you have to rely, to a certain extent, on what people think they feel?”

  “I wish it were so simple. Unfortunately emotions are most deceptive at their sources.”

  “I know that too.” I ground out my cigarette.

  “It is much more uncommon to deceive thy neighbor than thyself. You, for instance, at the moment ‘feel’ rather nervous, perhaps even frightened of me. But the fact is, you are very angry.” He showed me, before he tipped it into the wastebasket, the twisted stub of my cigarette. I sat back and put a hand over my eyes.

  “Frances ‘loves’ me, as you say, and is dependent upon me, but she has a potent self-destructive force which makes it impossible to receive such positive impulses toward her as I can return. So she perfo
rms a destructive act upon herself, and incidentally upon the hospital, which in turn makes her more dependent upon the curative function that I represent. The cycle must be broken.”

  I should have shouted then. I had my hand over my eyes. I couldn’t shout with my hand over my eyes. “Broken how?” I said.

  “She will have to be transferred.”

  “Oh, God.” I should have shouted then. His seeing my anger had brought it to the surface but his seeing my anger had rendered it impotent, like a child’s taunt of I-know-what-you’re-thinking.

  “Oh, my God. Transferred to where?”

  “I’ve spoken to her family, and they would naturally like to have her nearer them. There’s a state institution at Bly in Dorsetshire, but unfortunately there’s a long waiting list and it might be several weeks, even months, before we could get her in.”

  “No! Don’t send her to one of those places.”

  “Truly, Mrs. Marbalestier.” He leaned forward to me, pouching at the eyebrow as well as at the mouth. Feeling sincere, no doubt. “The public has a very distorted impression of state mental institutions. They are better equipped to handle Frances’s illness there.”

  “You know she won’t survive it.”

  “I know nothing of the sort.”

  “Please, couldn’t she at least go into a private home? I’ll pay for it.”

  “Well that, of course, provided her family agreed, would be a different matter. But are you prepared to stand at expense of three thousand pounds a year?”

  “Three thousand pounds.”

  “We would be talking of a figure in that vicinity.”

  “I don’t know. I’d have to think.” I was thinking wildly, but I wasn’t thinking wildly enough to suppose I could save three thousand pounds a year out of the housekeeping money.

  “Mind you, it’s not an urgent decision. We’ll keep her here for the time being while we shop around, and if she behaves herself we may be able to wait for the opening in Dorsetshire. But you’ll also understand that we can’t deal with too many broken windows.”

  I felt that I had been dismissed. Perhaps Dr. Holloway would say that, more accurately, I felt I had been fired. I stood.

  “How bad is her hand? Will she be able to draw?”

  “I think you can rest easy on that. There’s no musculature involved. She is not wholeheartedly competent, at her self-destructiveness.”

  The mouth again. I was not going to smile with him over Frances.

  “She’s very good, you understand,” I said, taking a last strength from the only sphere in which I knew my authority. “You saw only a few sketches, but I’ve seen a good deal of her work. You understand her talent is not an ordinary one.”

  “That’s a point of hope,” he conceded. “She has an outlet if she can consider it as such.”

  “Dr. Holloway.” I hesitated in the cramped space between the chair and the threshold. “I thought it might encourage her, if I submitted one of her designs to East Anglian. It could be anonymous if she chose, but I thought if she had a sketch accepted, it would be a proof of her, well, acceptance.”

  “Oh, I’m afraid not, Mrs. Marbalestier.” He polished the ashtray with a paper handkerchief and deposited it back in the drawer. “That isn’t a risk I’d like to take at the moment. If she can’t accept a word of casual praise from me, you see, she might not be able to handle anything on that scale at all. No, on the contrary, as you say, your visit upset her, and I think what she needs now is total quiet. I think you might do her the greatest kindness by not seeing her for some time. I’m afraid I shall have to insist on it.”

  I went out. There was no point my reiterating that if he were wrong, if his praise had given her strength and in the strength she had broken her pain, then to know about the weaving of her design might help her too. There was nothing I could do at this point to stop the making of the cloth. And I didn’t know whether he was right, that it would be dangerous to tell her. I didn’t know, I don’t know, and I won’t know. All I knew or know is that I could not do so in the face of his explicit prohibition.

  I thought. I made some calculations. Three thousand pounds is about what I make in a year. I could not spend it on Frances’s hospitalization and continue to live with Oliver. But if I left Oliver to spend it on Frances’s hospitalization I would not have anything to live on and would become for the first time, in financial fact, dependent upon Oliver. This is what my calculations came to, however many times I worked them through.

  I thought about money, and proceeded halfheartedly with my economies against the day that Mrs. Fromkirk’s rent would be due. I thought about the fact that I earned three thousand pounds a year, and was encouraged to spend it freely, and yet owned none of it for the simple reason that Oliver handled the mechanics of our joint account. Once or twice I had made some passing reference to “my money,” and Oliver corrected me, “our money,” not unpleasantly, as an admonishment of marital union. Yet our money was his money as long as I could not write a check without explaining it.

  I thought about the public’s distorted impression of state mental institutions and tried to find some comforting justice in the notion. But I had seen a few state mental institutions whose concrete walls, barred windows, gray corridors and gray inhabitants had needed very little distortion to seem grotesque. And Frances’s particular genius was for distortion.

  I thought about Frances exaltedly gashing her hand on window glass, and about Dr. Holloway in his linen cupboard. One of his sentences in particular ran through my head like a foolish tune. It is more useful to think of her in terms of a passive-aggressive. It is more useful to think of her in terms of a passive-aggressive. It is more useful to think of her in terms of a frog being murdered by a water lily. It is more useful to think of her in terms of a fetus in obsidian. It is more useful to think of her in terms of blighted wheat: the golden hue is altered to a dead white, checking and exhausting the current of the sap.

  I also worked, gave dinner parties, wrote to Jill, paid Frances’s rent in February and in March, took Phaideaux for cold walks in the meadow, and watched the Rubigo being loaded into the trucks for distribution. The deeper colors were even more successful than the light. The “rotting greens” I had ordered came through with the shimmering darkness of dense forest. I also then let it dawn on me that I had bumbled into criminality. I had submitted as my own, and would presumably accept payment for, a sketch plagiarized from the collection of another artist. If I had not intended to deceive the artist, she was nevertheless deceived, and I had in any case intended to deceive the manufacturer. No doubt I could be jailed. And no doubt I would get away with it.

  I telephoned Miss Gavin for news of Frances, but she spoke to me in furtive vaguenesses. She had been reprimanded for calling me and Frances had been quarantined against visitors. Frances was doing “fairly well,” she was eating “a little,” she was seeing Holloway “sometimes,” she was “on a waiting list.”

  15

  THERE WAS A GATHERING of the storm: Osaka vs. Migglesly. The spoolers, beamers, twisters, dyers, bleachers, overlookers and finishers came out with the weavers against expansion. Vastly outnumbered, the employees in distribution, advertising and research declared for merger. Designers and secretaries were not organized. Most of it was mere mumbling, and the first demonstrations had the Punch and Judy atmosphere that has lurked behind all British politics since the disbanding of the Empire. The women weavers marched on the Admin building one afternoon, drawing toddlers by the hand and pushing pushcarts as they had seen the anti-Vietnam radicals do in previous years on Grosvenor Square. But out of a sense of the significance of the occasion they had pressed, polished, brushed and bedecked both themselves and their children, and their spirits were so high that the whole outing took on the air of an Easter parade. Besides, Nicholson received them, eloquently cordial, and Nicholson was known to be on their side.

  More to the point, the Power Loom Overlookers and Amalgamated Engineers announced a traffic blo
ckage on the A-1 on a Saturday when a special meeting of the Board of Directors had been called. Unfortunately, even apart from the fact that most of the directors traveled by rail, it was the afternoon of the Leeds-Manchester game on television, and only fifteen cars showed up. Eleven defected when they saw they were in for a defeat. Two Morris Minors, a Volkswagen and a Deux Chevaux, then, went round and round on a roundabout just outside Cambridge, until a bobby stepped over the lead car and asked them to move on. Unfortunately, again, this was picked up by a local crew from ITV, which duly broadcast a thirty-second interview with the demonstration leader, who was wearing a tweed suit, a rep tie and muttonchops, and who said that the policeman had been “jolly polite.” The item ended with a “this England” grin from the anchor man, and the newscast passed on to genuine news.

  That lives and careers were nevertheless in the balance was clear enough at East Anglian. The controlling financial interests of the Board were firm for merger; Lady Linley made moneyed noises from her pelican pouch. Tyler Peer, who was production manager and therefore Oliver’s only “equal,” fence-sat. The rest of the salaried executives tended to follow Nicholson’s line. Only Oliver sided with the stockholders. I knew this. I found out how clearly the unions knew it mainly from Dillis, who passed it on to me from her carpenter lover. Construction was not directly party to the quarrel since the plan involved double shifts instead of building. New labor in the area would mean some profitable small housing, but there was plenty of work in construction at the moment anyway, and a lot of the builders had spooler and weaver wives; they were emotionally inclined to support the weavers. Jake Tremain, who was chairman of the Transport and General Workers local, would embroil himself in any fray with the establishment he could find.

  “See, according to Jake, a commercial manager is a natural enemy of labor anyway. Research and development, distribution, advertising—all the things Oliver’s wrapped up in. Construction will do a sympathy strike for the weavers if it comes to it, and he’ll have the whole Transport and General against him. It’s a lot of enemies for Oliver to make, you know?”