Free Raw Silk (9781480463318) by Janet Burroway Page B

way, heavy on the historical allusions. Consequently Malcolm and Gary kept their social lives distinct, each among his own professional colleagues, as if they were not prey to the jealousies, anxieties and resentments of a more conventionally cohabiting couple. However, they were in love.
    “You poor old thing,” Dillis bitched at him benignly. “Nothing keeping you together but passion, and we have all the glory of the Institution.”
    Dillis, whom strangers always took for “the artist” because of her startling eyes and drapable bones, wore the square gold rims that were back in fashion and jersey dresses that slipped around her little frame like glaze. I’d never exchanged a nonprofessional word with her before, and supposed she was about nineteen. In fact she was twenty-eight, and was married to an architectural engineer both sterile and inclined to assign the blame for it. On Migglesly Victoria Gynecological Unit, scungy test tubes, barren test rabbits, the medical community at large or, preferably, Dillis. She dealt with this scourge in a dollybird version of the old muddle-through. “I’m off early today, to the gynecology lab. Gotta check up the charts and take home some kind of proof there’s something wrong with me.”
    “Why do you do that to yourself?” I asked. Dillis had a rabbit-wrinkling nose that was her only visible concession to emotion.
    “Well, I’m not a rebel,” she said. “What options have I got? I either make the best of it or go out and rip up paving stones, you know what I mean?” I knew what she meant. “I like my work all right.” She pumped me for stories of Jill with an open sentimentality, out from under which her feelings burst now and again in a petulant, “But you’ve got her once a month!”
    Mom Pollard, on the other hand, lived in a family extended beyond the bounds of reason, with generations insufficiently at gap, where the youngest of one was always younger than the eldest of the following; a renovated farmhouse so compounded of past and future shock that a certain aunt had once administered smelling salts to a twelve-year-old unconscious from sniffing glue. “We got a wog household and that’s a fact,” Mom said.
    All the same, I observed once over the coffee and biscuits, we were an effete crew because not one of us worked primarily for money. Dillis and I were here to escape empty houses, Mom a house too full. Malcolm’s Gary would rather have preferred to keep him than otherwise.
    “You work for your independence’s sake, “ I said.
    “Independence is a side effect,” said Malcolm. “It’s my work. If I did it at home for nothing, it’d still be my work.”
    “Maybe so,” I conceded, “but I don’t think it’s mine. I’d never have gone into design if it hadn’t been for Oliver. I wanted to paint.”
    “You do paint!” He gestured exasperation. “What is it you think you do? Let’s face it, your best stuff comes off a microscope slide. Your eye isn’t scaled to canvas. You do fine where you are.”
    “All right, I understand that, but you’ve got to let me see it as a compromise. Grant me a little nostalgia for the time I was going to shake the world.”
    “You Americans. Such a pack of aristocrats.”
    “You’d better run that one by me,” Dillis murmured.
    “Two things essential to an aristocrat,” Malcolm said, warming up. He sat in a canvas chair, scattering shortbread crumbs every time he took a bite, and flicking them from his trousers with finesse. “Two things: a passion for the best, and an unshakable conviction that the best comes out of the past. Now the past you get all your grandeur from is straight talk and simple truth. That’s your tradition, your empire. That’s your crest: plain folks rampant on a sock in the jaw, argent.”
    I saw what he meant. There’s a kind of honesty dead and dying that Truman carried into the presidency in a cracker barrel, but which was daily fare in homes like mine: I won’t do a