Raw Silk (9781480463318) (16 page)

When Frances waked it was into a state of drugged torpor, her eyes uncertain and unfocused. When she recognized me she grimaced and turned away. I couldn’t take hold of the bandaged hand so I patted her awkwardly on the elbow.

“It’s okay, Frances. You’ll be okay.”

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled as she had that first day on the office floor, and like that first day I said, “Don’t be sorry. I’m sorry. I want to help but I’m no good at it.”

She shook her head and tried to hide her face from me, but that put it toward the bright window and made her wince.

There was no conversation to have, and I sat with her a while, fingers on her elbow, looking at the raw blunt nails of her bandaged hand, while she looked through nearly closed eyes at the foot of the bed. It was a barred white-painted iron frame, rather like the warp section of a loom, which made the blanket its loom bed, with Frances woven into it. I hoped this would not occur to her.

I said finally, “I went to your room, to get your things.” She glanced at me, alarmed, and I lifted the sketch pad. “You can paint.”

Her head thrashed slightly. “It’s nothing. It isn’t what I mean.”

“It never is,” I began, but stopped myself.

“You were clever to land here,” I said instead, which was equally forced but destroyed nothing I might not later be able to repair. “I know this hospital because Jill was born here. It’s a good place to start. Or maybe start over?”

“I’ve just made more trouble for you,” she mumbled; angrily, I thought.

“Look, you’ve got a television set. And the garden is beautiful from up here. There’s a whole wall of winter jasmine, and the rose arbor is still blooming. I brought paints for when you’re feeling better.”

“No,” said Frances.

“We all want you to live. It turns out to matter to us.” I tried to smile at her but she turned away again, uncomfortable at my strained cheer, uncomfortable at my being there, embarrassed that she had tried to kill herself. I stayed with her until embarrassment had worn her out and she fell asleep again.

I
T WAS TWILIGHT WHEN
I pulled in the drive, and it wasn’t until I saw the Jeromes’ fat red beetle that I remembered Thanksgiving and was hit by a wave of dread. It obliterated all the other feelings of the afternoon. Curious, isn’t it? Oliver’s anger, which used to be an incident, proceeding from misunderstanding, and diminishable like those imaginary boxes we used to diminish between our hands in the courtyard of the Seal Beach Elementary School until, minuscule on the palm of one hand—poof!—it’s gone, it was never really there anyway; Oliver’s anger, which I used to face with my dukes up in high confidence that we’d soon clear the air …

The air can’t be cleared now. We live in marital Los Angeles. This is the air.

I stuck Frances’s sketch pad under the seat and locked the door. I went in the back door hoping for a moment to myself, but they were all in the kitchen, pretty Mabel clattering at the stove, Jeremy ready to greet me with his sloppy thrust of tongue (I had mentioned this habit to Oliver as a “defensive offensive,” but it’s very likely I was boasting too), Jill hopping up and down flopping her pigtails, “Mummy, you were so
long
! You’re very
late
!” and curly adorable Maxine simpering at me like an ad for Smarties.

“Where the hell have you been?” Oliver looked up from a pitcher of eggnog, rigid around the mouth but with a surface of surly camaraderie for which I was indebted to the Jeromes and the occasion.

I made a significant shushing gesture toward him, said in general, “I’m so sorry,” and to Jill, “I got hung up at work, sweetie,” but Oliver was not going to give me any credit of that sort.

“Where
were
you?”

Okay, in front of the children. I took a you-asked-for-it breath. “At the hospital. Frances Kean tried to kill herself.”

I burst into tears. The Jeromes, who had never heard of Frances Kean, laid out ready comfort, Mabel with an “Oh, how dreadful,” Jeremy with a sudden eggnog in his hand. “Sit down, Ginny. Do you want something stronger?” The two girls stared warily at the phenomenon of a gasping and snuffling mother. Oliver held himself still.

“You look done in.” Jeremy bristled my cheek with his beard as he hugged me. “Drink up. Who’s Frances Kean?”

I brushed at my face, sucked at the eggnog, apologized to Mabel for her having to do all the … what is it she was doing,
heating
the
cranberry
sauce? … and deprecated my tears to the girls. “Don’t worry, I’m just very tired.” Mabel shooed them out to find some holly for the table and sat down beside me while Jeremy perched on the breakfast bar.

“She’s a file clerk in our office. She fights depression all the time, and it looks as if she slashed her wrist and took sleeping pills both. Yesterday, and wasn’t discovered until this morning …”

So I talked, entirely to the Jeromes, in words approximate to events that were trivialized in the telling, my back to Oliver who was the center of my attention. Jeremy drew me on, patting my hand, “God-dam. What a thing to happen on Thanksgiving,” his head an elongated heart from the balding hairline to the point of his beard. Under the circumstances I couldn’t have asked for a better listener than Jeremy, who is drawn to any sentiment that is on the grand scale. Jeremy does massive marble sculptures which he has the affectation to call “tactures.” “Lie on it! Caress it!” he’ll cry, exhibiting a nubile abstract,
Prostrate Nude,
on the university Backs. “It’s meant to be
han
-dled!” Some of the undergraduates are a little charmed. Others are a little embarrassed. Nobody cares a whole lot except Jeremy and Mabel, who stands skittishly by, tearing paper cups into crenellated towers.

Mabel was crimping and smoothing a piece of aluminum foil now, drawling in her soft Alabamian, “Well, what
is
she, a schizo-
phren
-iac?”

“I don’t know, Mabel. Or a manic-depressive without the manic. Those things don’t mean much to me. She’s just bitterly unhappy in a way she can’t get rid of.”

“They say Napoleon was a manic-depressive,” Jeremy put in, “only he was manic about ninety percent of the time. So was Hitler,” he added.

“I’ll tell you what she is,” Oliver chuckled, entirely to the Jeromes. I recognized the tone. I steeled myself to hear that she was a hysterical cow. “She’s just another one of those sloppy self-indulgent kids who thinks the world owes her a living. She’d be a draft dodger if she was eligible for the draft, which as a matter of fact would be the best thing for her.”

“She needs help,” I said to Mabel.

“What would
help
her, is to be thrown out on the rotten job market, instead of having it handed to her on a silver platter.”

“Well, but Ahlivah,” Mabel mouthed, “if she tried to
kill
herself …”

“Oh, she didn’t try to kill herself, that’s just a play for sympathy.”

When Jeremy, this time, started to protest, I jumped in, “I think it’s partly that. But I think when somebody goes that far for sympathy they must need a lot of it.”

Oliver joined us with the eggnog pitcher and an extra fifth of rum, saying in lethal imitation of husbandly indulgence as he spiked a round, “You see, the trouble is that Virginia’s mother raised her up to be Shirley Temple. Two dimples, a soft-shoe routine and a lollipop is the way to cure the world.”

“What?” said Mabel.

“Though as a matter of fact …” Rum and adrenaline lent him a little of his old loose style, which I found irrelevantly attractive. “… as a matter of fact, it is very peculiar for her to turn out to be a one-man welfare state, because she comes from a long line of conservative self-reliers.”

“Shirley Temple is a conservative,” Mabel said.

“Whereas Oliver’s family”—I imitated his waggish tone—“always voted Labour, though as a matter of
fact
his father never got over six months of being a sergeant, and thought that the way to build character was to kick anybody who fainted on parade drill.”

“I never saw anybody faint twice,” Oliver said.

The girls burst in complaining that there was holly but no berries, and we took dinner into the dining room, dry turkey, hot cranberries, mischosen plates and a severely truncated sense of holiday. I tried not to find myself alone with Oliver, but when I had to come back to the kitchen for a stuffing spoon he followed me in and took hold of my arm.

“You’ll do exactly as you please, won’t you?” he whispered, hot and cold.

“Can’t we leave it till later?”

“You’ll do exactly as you please.”

“Look, Oliver, somebody I know nearly died, and it made me late to dinner. Do you really mean to be such a bastard?”

“Innocent, innocent. Are you pretending you don’t know how I feel about this?”

“No,” I said, “I know how you feel, I just don’t know how you justify it. I don’t know what you can gain by it except just keeping me in line.”

“Nicholson told you to leave her alone and I told you to leave her alone.”

“That’s what I said.”

“And you’ll defy me, won’t you?”

The funny thing is that I had “obey” knocked out of the wedding ceremony with Oliver’s entire concurrence. It was already fashionable. I stared marveling at his mouth, pursed up so there was a whole sunburst of indignant wrinkles around it, and hard marbles of muscle at the corners holding it in that moue. I focused on this expression, which I associated with schoolmarms and dowagers, colonels and connoisseurs, and something about my own fascination scared me right down my thighs. I wanted to say: yes, I’ll defy you. I gave up Jill and got nothing for it. I won’t give up Frances. I meant this and I wanted to say it. But I couldn’t. All I said was, “It’s not that,” and fled with the stuffing spoon.

Did you know that the true cranberry is native only to the acid bogs of the northern United States and Canada? Did you know that the establishment of Thanksgiving as a national holiday is credited to Sarah J. Hale of
Ladies Magazine,
who pestered President Lincoln with letters and editorials until he proclaimed it in 1863? Did you know that in Canada Thanksgiving is celebrated on the second Monday in October? Jeremy was an encyclopedia of enlightening information. Did you know that Thanatos was the Greek god of death, that the city of Thanjavur is famous for its repoussé work, and that the
U
in U Thant stands for “uncle,” a title of Burmese respect? Enough of these tidbits slipped out during second helpings that Jeremy, accused, admitted he’d been reading up on Thanksgiving in the
Americana.
Mabel was fascinated by all of it, including Thanom Kittikachorn and the Thar Desert. What mainly interested Maxine was that whereas she was one hundred percent American, Jill was only half. In her opinion Jill should only get half a piece of pie. Scornful, Jill pointed out that she had two nationalities whereas Maxine had only one. “You’re a half-breed,” said Maxine. “You’re a foreigner,” said Jill. Let us give thanks for our survival through the bitter winter and for this bountiful harvest.

I drank a lot of wine. I couldn’t eat much and I couldn’t stop watching Oliver eat. He didn’t get rid of that expression all the way through dinner; it interfered with the working of his mouth. He cut very small bites and chewed them like he was being filmed for a hygiene and nutrition class, half a dozen rolling thrusts of his jaw to the left and around, half a dozen to the right, a tuck of his chin and a hop of his Adam’s apple: there. When he bit into an iced celery stick I could hear it all the way from my end. I could also hear the squeak of his knife down the back of his fork and across his plate as he made each precise slice of breast. He cut his stuffing into a checkerboard the same way before he picked up the cubes of it one by one. He didn’t look so much like he was eating his food as like he was sentencing it to death.

“Wouldn’t you say, Virginia?”

“What? Sorry, Jeremy.”

“I say it doesn’t so much matter what country you belong to, the important thing is to love your country.”

“I love two countries,” Jill scowled.

“Yes, but she hasn’t been across the ocean, has she, Daddy? She hasn’t been across the At
lan
tic Ocean!”

“You don’t have a queen!” yelled Jill. “I’m going to tell Miss Hyde-Smith you don’t have any right to sing ‘God Save the Queen!’”

“They’re exhausted,” I said. “Why don’t you let Maxine bed down here and pick her up in the morning?”

“I’m not exhausted,” the girls said in near-unison.

“If you can stop fighting you can watch a half hour of telly. Jill, honey, go get your nightgown on and give one to Maxine.”

“You’re not to!” Jill screamed, blue blitzkrieg out of her eyes. “You’re
not
to!”

I don’t know what Shirley Temple does in such circumstances. I bounded up and picked her from her chair, pinning her arms in front of her. A thrash of her head flipped one braid into the cranberry dish and drew a jellied path across the tablecloth on the backswing. I knee-bended her out of the room, hoisted her under one arm and up the stairs, where I drew her not very gently by the pigtail to the bathroom basin. All of which convinced her of something or other.

“Hold still.” She held still. I washed out the cranberries, undid both braids and pushed her into her nightgown and into bed.

“Now what’s all this? You’re always begging for Maxine to stay over.”

“I want her to stay over.”

“Then what is it that I’m not to do?”

“You’re not to talk about nightgowns in
front
of people.” She focused miserably on her counterpane.

“I never heard such nonsense.”

“It’s not nonsense, you’re nonsense. You’re very
rude
.” It was clear from her mumble and a scared catch of breath that this was one of the worst accusations in her vocabulary.

“Do you think the Jeromes never heard of a nightgown before?”

“I don’t care.”

“Fine. I don’t care either. But if I hear another word out of you, you’ll see just how rude I can be.” I went to the door and snapped out the light.

“Daddy’s mad at you!” she blurted. It was not a threat, it was an explanation. I pressed my forehead into the doorframe for a second and then went back to sit on her bed.