The Lace Reader
The Lace Reader
Brunonia Barry
Drawn by family. Driven by fear. Haunted by fate.Would knowing the future be a gift or a burden? Or even a curse…?The Whitney women of Salem, Massachusetts are renowned for reading the future in the patterns of lace. But the future doesn’t always bring good news – as Towner Whitney knows all too well. When she was just fifteen her gift sent her whole world crashing to pieces. She predicted – and then witnessed – something so horrific that she vowed never to read lace again, and fled her home and family for good. Salem is a place of ghosts for Towner, and she swore she would never return.Yet family is a powerful tie and fifteen years later, Towner finds herself back in Salem. Her beloved great-aunt Eva has suddenly disappeared – and when you’ve lived a life like Eva’s, that could mean real trouble. But Salem is wreathed in sickly shadows and whispered half-memories. It’s fast becoming clear that the ghosts of Towner’s fractured past have not been brought fully into the light. And with them comes the threat of terrifying new disaster.A literary page-turner with depth, narrative power and a story that novels like ‘The Thirteenth Tale’ can only dream of, ‘The Lace Reader’ is a bewitching and tightly plotted read.
BRUNONIA BARRY
The Lace Reader
To my wonderful husband, Gary, and to my sister-in-law Joanne’s magical red hair
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 (#u75869f1e-64ca-5dbd-bc97-d4f63bbd23e6)
Chapter 2 (#ud670635f-db58-5b66-a343-f6108ec742cc)
Chapter 3 (#u69dd572a-6522-530d-8d87-f76ececb4400)
Chapter 4 (#u20504f3d-ab9d-5218-9ec7-ac72a3efe280)
Chapter 5 (#ua3f7ca9d-09b6-5b85-b2d1-f00ffc4ce348)
Chapter 6 (#u5fc71c22-3e77-54a0-844b-ca76b60faaeb)
Chapter 7 (#ueb45a49d-e4a9-5c64-bfcc-ab0da340df32)
Chapter 8 (#u755950a3-9113-5fe3-8bad-f29a1f87687e)
Chapter 9 (#ueb513a39-36f9-55be-a2fd-ab8b83fd25c4)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Disclaimer (#litres_trial_promo)
To Learn More About The Lace Reader (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)
MY NAME IS TOWNER WHITNEY. No, that’s not exactly true. My real first name is Sophya. Never believe me. I lie all the time.
I am a crazy woman…That last part is true.
My little brother, Beezer, who is kinder than I, says the craziness is genetic. We’re from five generations of crazy, he says, as if it were a badge he’s proud to wear, though he admits that I may have taken it to a new level.
Until I came along, the Whitney family was what the city of Salem fondly refers to as “quirky.” If you were old Salem money, even if that money was long gone, you were never referred to as “crazy.” You might be deemed “unusual,” or even “oddball,” but the hands-down-favorite word for such a condition was “quirky.”
Throughout the generations the Whitney men have all become famous for their quirks: from the captains of sea and industry all the way down to my little brother, Beezer, who is well known within scientific circles for his articles on particle physics and string theory.
Our great-great-grandfather, for example, parlayed a crippling preoccupation with ladies’ feet into a brilliant career as a captain of industry in Lynn’s thriving shoe business, creating a company that was passed down through the generations all the way to my grandfather G. G. Whitney. Our great-great-great-grandfather, who was a legitimate captain in his own right, had a penchant for sniffing cinnamon that many considered obsessive. Eventually he built a fleet of spice-trading ships that traveled the globe and made Salem one of the richest ports in the New World.
Still, anyone would admit that it is the women of the Whitney family who have taken quirky to a new level of achievement. My mother, May, for example, is a walking contradiction in terms. A dedicated recluse who (with the exception of her arrests) hasn’t left her home on Yellow Dog Island for the better part of twenty years, May has nevertheless managed to revive a long-defunct lace-making industry and to make herself famous in the process. She has gained considerable notoriety for rescuing abused women and children and turning their lives around, giving the women a place in her lace-making business and home-educating their children. All this from a raging agoraphobic who gave one of her own children to her barren half sister, Emma, in a fit of generosity because, as she said at the time, there was a need, and besides, she had been blessed with a matching set.
And my Great-Aunt Eva, who is more mother to me than May ever has been, is equally strange. Running her own business well into her eighties, Eva is renowned as both Boston Brahmin and Salem witch when, really, she is neither. Actually, Eva is an old-school Unitarian with Transcendentalist tendencies. She quotes Scripture in the same breath as she quotes Emerson and Thoreau. Yet in recent years Eva has spoken only in clichés, as if use of the tired metaphor can somehow remove her from the inevitable outcomes she is paid to predict.
For thirty-five years of her life, Eva has run a ladies’ tearoom and franchised successful etiquette classes to the wealthy children of Boston’s North Shore. But what Eva will be remembered for is her uncanny ability to read lace. People come from all over the world to be read by Eva, and she can tell your past, present, and future pretty accurately just by holding the lace in front of you and squinting her eyes.
In one form or another, all the Whitney women are readers. My twin sister, Lyndley, said she couldn’t read lace, but I never believed her. The last time we tried, she saw the same thing I saw in the pattern, and what we saw that night led her to the choices that eventually killed her. When Lyndley died, I resolved never to look at a piece of lace again.
This is one of the only things Eva and I have ever vehemently disagreed about. “It wasn’t that the lace was wrong,” she always insisted. “It was the reader’s interpretation that failed.” I know that’s supposed to make me feel better. Eva never says anything to intentionally hurt. But Lyndley and I interpreted the lace the same way that night, and though our choices might have been different, nothing that Eva says can ever bring my sister back.
After Lyndley’s death, I had to get out of Salem and ended up in California, which was as far as I could go without falling off the end of the earth. I know that Eva wants me to come home to Salem. It’s for my own good, she says. But I can’t bring myself to do it.
Just recently, when I had my hysterectomy, Eva sent me her lace pillow, the one she uses to make the lace. It was delivered to the hospital.
“What is it?” my nurse asked, holding it up, staring at the bobbins and the piece of lace, a work in progress, still attached to it. “Some kind of pillow?”
“It’s a lace maker’s pillow,” I said. “For making Ipswich lace.”
She regarded me blankly. I could tell she had no idea what to say. It didn’t look like any pillow she had ever seen. And what the hell was Ipswich lace?
“Try holding it against your sutures if you have to cough or sneeze,” she finally said. “That’s what we use pillows for around here.”
I felt around until I found the secret pocket hidden in the pillow. I slipped my fingers in, looking for a note. Nothing.
I know that Eva hopes I will start reading lace again. She believes that lace reading is a God-given gift, and that we are required to honor such gifts.
I imagine the note she might have written: “Of those to whom much is given, much is expected—Luke 12:48.” She used to quote that bit of Scripture as proof.
I can read lace, and I can read minds, though it isn’t something I try to do; it is something that just happens sometimes. My mother can do both, but over the years May has become a practical woman who believes that knowing what is in people’s minds or their futures is not always in anyone’s best interest. This is probably the only point upon which my mother and I have ever agreed.
When I left the hospital, I stole the pillowcase off one of their pillows. The Hollywood Presbyterian label was double stamped on both sides. I stuffed Eva’s lace pillow inside, hiding the threads, the lace, and the bonelike bobbins that were swinging like tiny Poe pendulums.
If there was a future for me, and I was not altogether certain there was, I wasn’t going to risk reading it in the lace.
Each Reader must choose a piece of lace. It is hers for life. It might be a pattern handed down through the generations or a piece chosen by the Reader for its beauty and familiarity. Many Readers prefer the handmade laces, particularly those of old Ipswich or the laces made today by the women of Yellow Dog Island.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE
Chapter 2 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)
WHEN THE PHONE CALL COMES IN, I am dreaming of water. Not the warm blues and greens of the California beach towns where I live now, but the dark New England Atlantic of my youth. In my dream I am swimming to the moon. Like all dreams, it seems logical. The idea that there is no pathway between sea and moon never occurs.
I swim my own combination: part breaststroke, part drownproofing: slow and purposeful, a rhythm remembered from another lifetime. The movement is all efficiency, with just nose, ears, and eyes protruding above the water, mouth submerged. With each forward stroke, tiny waves of salt enter my open mouth, then recede again as I slow, mirroring the larger surrounding ocean.
I swim for a long time. Past Salem Harbor and the swells. Past any sight of land at all. I swim until the sea becomes still and clear, too calm to be any real ocean. The light from the full dream-moon etches a clear path on the black water, a road to follow. There is no sound save my own breath, slow and steady as I swim.
This was once my sister’s dream. Now it is only mine.
The rhythm of movement gives way to a sound rhythm as the telephone rings again and then again. This is one of the only phones that actually rings anymore, and part of the reason I agreed to take this house-sitting job. It is the kind of phone we might have had on our island. That’s the one interesting thing about what has happened to me. I am encouraged to rewrite my own history. In the history I am writing, May actually has a phone.
My therapist, Dr. Fukuhara, is a Jungian. She believes in symbols and shadows. As do I. But my therapy has stopped for the time being. We have come to an impasse, was the way Dr. Fukuhara put it. I laughed when she said it. Not because it was funny but because it was the kind of cliché that my Aunt Eva would use.
On the fourth ring, the answering machine picks up. The machine is old also, not as old as the phone, but the kind where you can screen calls and hear a little bit of the message before you decide whether it’s worth it to actually speak to a live person.
My brother’s voice sounds tinny and too loud.
I stretch to pick up, pulling the surgery stitches that are still inside me, the ones that haven’t yet dissolved.
“What?” I say.
“I’m sorry to wake you,” Beezer says.
I remember falling asleep on this couch last night, too tired to get up, hypnotized by the smell of night-blooming jasmine and the sound of Santana playing over the hill at the Greek.
“I’m sorry,” he says again. “I wouldn’t have called you, but…”
“But May’s in trouble again.” It’s the only time Beezer ever calls these days. At last count, May has been arrested six times in her efforts to help abuse victims. Recently my brother informed me that he’d put the number of the local bail bondsman on his speed dial.
“It’s not May,” he says.
My throat tightens.
“It’s Eva.”
Dead, I’m thinking. Oh, my God, Eva is dead.
“She’s missing, Towner.”
Missing. The word has no meaning. “Missing” is the last word I expected to hear.
Palm fronds clatter against the open window. It’s already way too hot. Clear Santa Ana sky, earthquake weather. I reach up to pull the window shut. The cat runs scratches across my legs as it lunges for the freedom of the canyon, leaping through the window as it slams, catching just a few tail hairs, the last trace of what was here just moments ago and is now gone, that fast. Immediately the cat scratches on my legs begin to welt.
“Towner?”
“Yeah?”
“I think you’d better come home.”
“Yeah,” I say, “yeah, okay.”
It is called Ipswich lace, or bobbin lace, or bone lace. It is made on bolster pillows held on the laps of the women. The pillows are round or elliptical and most resemble the muffs that Victorian women later carried to keep their hands warm while riding in their carriages. Each woman makes her own pillow, and those pillows are as individual as the women themselves. In old Ipswich the pillows were pieced together from bits of fabric, then stuffed with beach grass.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE
Chapter 3 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)
THE SALEM NEWS HAS ALREADY picked up the story about Eva’s disappearance: “Elderly Woman Missing Ten Days” and “Lace Reader of Salem Vanishes.” Eva used to send me the Salem paper. It was around the time that May started making the headlines. For a while I actually read them. My mother’s clashes with the police over her tactics for saving abused women were becoming famous and made for good copy. Eventually I stopped reading the papers and would leave them on the porch in their wrappers until my landlord would get fed up and take them to Santa Monica for recycling or, if it was winter, roll them up tightly and burn them in her fireplace like logs.
The paper speculates that Eva just wandered away. A woman interviewed from the Salem Council on Aging suggests tagging the elderly residents of Salem. It evokes an interesting image—cops with ear tags and tranquilizer guns rounding up old people. Realizing she’s gone too far with her suggestion, the woman goes on to say: “This kind of thing happens all the time. Salem is a small city. I’m sure she couldn’t have gotten far.”
The woman clearly didn’t know my aunt.
The ferry from Boston lets me off on Derby Street, a few blocks from the House of the Seven Gables, where Nathaniel Hawthorne’s cousin grew up. I am named after Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia Peabody, although the spelling is different; my name is spelled Sophya. I was brought up to believe that Ms. Peabody was a distant relative, but I found out from Eva that we weren’t related to the Peabodys at all, that May simply found Sophia interesting, and appropriated her as our own. (So now you see which side of the family the lying thing comes from.) By the time it would have bothered me, May and I were hardly speaking anyway. I had already moved in with Aunt Eva. I had changed my name to Towner and wouldn’t answer to anything else. So it didn’t matter all that much.
I’m walking for a long time. The estrogen patch on my arm begins to itch. I have a rash from it, but I don’t know what to do about that, short of ripping the damned thing off. I figure the rash is probably from the heat. I’d forgotten how hot it can get in New England in the summer, and how humid. Ahead of me tourists swarm. Buses line the lot at the Gables, jamming the side streets. People move in groups, snapping photos, stuffing souvenirs into bags that are already far too full.
Around every corner of Salem lurks a history lesson. Dead ahead as I walk is the Custom House with its gold roof. This is where Hawthorne worked his day job, an appointed position as clerk. Using the locals as subject matter, revealing their secrets, Hawthorne basically wrote his way out of this town, escaping west to Concord before the townspeople remembered their talent with the old tar and feathers. Still, now they celebrate Hawthorne as their own. The same way they celebrate the witches, who never existed at all in the days of the witch trials but who thrive here in great numbers now.
A kid steps in front of me, asking directions to the common. There are three kids actually, two girls and a boy. All in black. Goths, is my first thought, but no, definitely young witches. What gives it away finally is the BLESSED BE T-shirt worn by one of the girls.
I point. “Follow the yellow brick road,” I say. Actually it’s a tour line painted on the street, and it’s red, not yellow, but they get the idea. A man in a huge Frankenstein head walks by, handing out flyers. I want to call for the continuity person, but this isn’t a movie set. A cruiser slows, the cop looks at the kids, then at me. The boy spots the witch logo on the side of the police car, gives the cop a big thumbs-up. Frankenstein hands each of us a Freaky Tours flyer and sneezes inside his big hollow head. “Universal tours without the budget” is what Beezer calls this place. I heard from my brother that Salem is trying to shed its image as Witch City. He told me last year that they were attempting to pass an ordinance to limit the number of haunted houses that can be erected within one city block. From the look of things, the ordinance didn’t pass.
The second girl, the shorter of the two, grabs the side of her head, pulling it slowly until her neck cracks. Celtic-knot tattoo on the nape of her neck, hair way too dark for her pale skin. “Come on, let’s go,” she says to the guy, and grabs his arm, leading him away from me. “Thanks,” he says. Our eyes meet, and he flashes a quick smile. She steps between us then, turning him wide like a big ship she’s trying to keep on course. I follow them, walking in the same direction toward Eva’s house but leaving a safe distance so she won’t think I’m after him.
It’s a long walk toward the common. I hear the music before I see the crowd—it’s nature music, New Age. We could be back in Woodstock except for the preponderance of black clothing. I’m wondering what holiday it is, what Pagan celebration. I count the days and realize that it’s some kind of summer-solstice thing, though it’s about a week too late. Living in L.A. has made me forget the seasons. Here the arrival of summer is something for everyone to celebrate, Pagan or not.
Salem Common, with its huge oaks and maples and the Gothic cast-iron fence, triggers a lost school memory. There used to be tunnels under the common, sometime after the witches but before the Revolution. The shipping merchants probably used the tunnels to hide trade bounty from their English tax collectors; that was the theory anyway. After the war for independence finally started, the tunnels were used by the privateers, who were the same thing as pirates, really, but with the government’s permission. Not England’s permission—it was the British ships they were stealing—but permission of the new government. I’m told they also hid ammunition there, and saltpeter. Beezer and I used to search for the tunnels when we were little, but Eva told us that they’re all filled in now.
I turn the corner by the Hawthorne Hotel and see the low blue flame from the old glassed-in popcorn machine, which is still on the corner across from the hotel, as it has been every year since my mother was a little girl. There’s also a makeshift stand selling wands and crystals, but that’s new. Across the street stands the imposing statue of Roger Conant, who, after failing to realize his original goal in Cape Ann, ended up founding the city that would become Salem. I’m reminded of the cliché Eva used to repeat at least ten times a week: There are no accidents. And the one that inevitably followed. Everything happens for a reason.
The cops are everywhere: on bicycles, talking to people, asking for fire permits. “You can’t do that here,” I hear one of them say. “If you want to have a bonfire, you have to go up to Gallows Hill, or to the beach.”
I cross the street. I open the gate to Eva’s house, catching a whiff of flowers, peonies, coming from her gardens. There are hundreds of them now, tree peonies on small bushes that die back every winter. Eva has done well with her gardens. She used to leave a key for me in a peony blossom when she knew I was coming. Or she would place it in one of the daylilies if it was later in the season and the peonies were no longer blooming. I’d forgotten that. But there are too many flowers now. I could never find a key here, and of course she hasn’t left a key this time, because she wasn’t expecting me.
The brick house is much larger than I remember. More imposing and older. Huge chimneys list to windward. Off the back, away from the crowds of Salem Common, is the coach house, which is connected to the main house by the winter porch. The coach house is more damaged than the main house—probably from the weather or from neglect—and it seems to be leaning on the porch, which is showing its age and sagging under the weight. Still, its windows with their wavy old glass are sparkling, not spotted with salt from the sea air, which means that Eva washed them not too long ago, as she does with all the windows she can reach (eighty-five years old or not), the same way she washes them every April when she does her spring cleaning. She gets to all the first-floor windows and the insides of all the upper floors. The outside windows of those upper floors remain filmy and salted, because Eva has the frugality of an old Yankee and refuses to pay anyone for services she thinks she should be able to perform herself. When Beezer and I lived in town with Eva, we offered to wash the windows, but she wouldn’t buy a ladder and said she didn’t want us climbing up on ladders anyway, so Beezer and I got used to distortion and haze. If you wanted to see clearly, you had to either look out the first-floor windows or climb all the way up to the widow’s walk.
The perfect line of first-floor windows gleams back at me from the winter porch. I catch my reflection in the wavy glass, and I’m surprised by it. When I left here, I was seventeen. I haven’t been back for fifteen years. I knew my reflection in the glass when I was seventeen, but today I don’t recognize the woman I see there.
The hours of Eva’s tearoom are posted on the front door. A sign that reads SORRY WE ARE CLOSED leans against one of the side panes.
A young girl sees me walking to the house. “There’s no one there,” the girl says, assuming I’m one of the witches. “I already checked.”
I nod and walk down the stairs. When she’s out of sight, I walk around to the back of the house, figuring I’m going to have to break in and not wanting to be seen.
When we were kids, my sister, Lyndley, and I could break into any house. I was a master at picking locks. We used to break into people’s houses just to sit in them—“like Goldilocks tasting porridge and sampling beds,” Lyndley used to say. For the most part, we limited our break-ins to the summerhouses. Down at the Willows one time, we broke into a house and actually cleaned it. That’s the kind of thing only a girl would do. Outlaw certainly, but homemaker, too.
I walk around the back of the coach house to a less visible spot half hidden by the garden. There is a small pane in the door, bull’s-eye glass, already cracked. Once I’m inside the coach house, getting into the main house is a snap. I pick up a rock, wrapping the sleeve of my shirt over it. A quick tap and the crack spreads. I pull the glass fragments out carefully and wedge my hand through the small space, twisting the dead bolt that has been the only thing holding the door in alignment. Either because the lock is so rusty or because I am, I don’t anticipate the way the door heaves as it opens. It pulls my arm with it, cutting through my cotton shirt, drawing blood. I watch the blood pool. It’s not too bad; there’s not very much of it, not after what I’ve gotten used to anyway. “Just a flesh wound, Copper,” I say aloud in my best Jimmy Cagney. Then, ridiculously on cue, a police cruiser actually pulls up, and, even more ridiculously, the father of my first boyfriend, Jack, climbs out of the car and walks toward the house. This is strange, since Jack’s father is not a cop, he’s a lobsterman. I’m having one of those moments when you’re pretty sure you’re dreaming but you don’t want to count on it. I regard Jack’s father as he approaches me, his face screwed up into half concern, half joy, looking stranger than anything in my dream life ever did.
“You should have called the station,” he says. “We have a key.” It is not Jack’s father’s voice but his younger brother’s that I finally recognize.
“Hi, Jay-Jay,” I say, getting it, remembering now that Beezer had told me Jay-Jay was a cop.
He hugs me. “Been a while,” he says, thinking, I’m sure, how bad I look and running through a list of possibilities in his head. I fight the urge to tell him I’ve just had my uterus cut out, that I almost bled to death before the emergency surgery.
“You’re bleeding,” he says, reaching out for my arm. The cops here aren’t as scared by blood as the cops in L.A. are.
“Just a flesh wound, Copper,” I say too loud. He leads me inside and makes me sit down at the kitchen table. I’m bare-armed now, holding a paper towel to my forearm.
“You need stitches,” Jay-Jay says.
“It’s fine.”
“At least get some Neosporin on it. Or some of that herbal crap Eva sells.”
“I’m fine, Jay-Jay,” I say, just a little too sharply.
A long silence. “I’m sorry about Eva,” he says finally. “I wish I had something new I could tell you.”
“Me, too.”
“That Alzheimer’s stuff is all crap. I saw her a week before she disappeared. She was still sharp as a tack.” He thinks a minute. “You need to talk to Rafferty.”
“Who?”
“Detective Rafferty. He’s your man. He’s the one who’s handling the case.”
He looks around the room as if there’s something here, something he wants to say, but then he changes his mind.
“What?”
“Nothing…. I’ll tell Rafferty you’re here. He’ll want to talk to you. He’s in court today, though. Traffic court. Whatever you do, don’t drive with him. He’s the worst driver in the world.”
“Okay,” I say, wondering why Jay-Jay thought driving with Rafferty was even a possibility. We stand there awkwardly, neither of us knowing how to follow that last thread of conversation.
“You look good,” he says finally. “For an old lady of…what? Thirty-one?”
“Thirty-two.”
“For thirty-two you look great,” he says, and laughs.
I don’t go into the main part of the house until Jay-Jay leaves. As soon as I open the door, I realize that everyone has made a big mistake.
Eva’s right here in this house. I can feel her. Her presence is so strong that I almost run after Jay-Jay to tell him to call off the search, that she has come back, but the cruiser has already turned the corner, so I’ll have to call the station.
But first I have to see my Aunt Eva. She must have gone on a trip and not told anyone. She probably doesn’t even know the whole town’s looking for her.
“Eva?” I call to her. She doesn’t answer. Her ears aren’t very good, not anymore. I call again, louder. Still no answer, but I know she’s here. She’s up on the widow’s walk or down in the root cellar mixing up a new kind of tea, something with bergamot and kumquat essence. Or maybe she never left, is what I’m thinking, though I know that’s not possible. They must have searched the house. At least I assume they did. Didn’t anyone come in here, for God’s sake? Didn’t May? No, she wouldn’t, damn her. But the cops would. Or my brother. Of course Beezer would have looked. Of course that’s the first thing they would have done. Eva wouldn’t have been reported missing unless she actually was missing, right? But now she’s back. It’s as plain as the nose on your face, I think, laughing out loud because I’m still channeling Eva’s clichés.
“Hey, Eva,” I call to her, knowing how deaf she’s gotten, but giving it a try anyway. “Eva, it’s me.”
I’m not sure where to start looking. I stand there, in the foyer. Ahead are two matching parlors with black marble fireplaces facing each other from the ends of the long rooms. One of the rooms is closed off; that’s the one Eva uses as her tearoom. I enter the other one. It’s more like a ballroom than a parlor. The fireplaces look empty with neither flames nor Eva’s usual arrangements of flowers in them. Chairs are placed symmetrically and strategically, like pieces on a chessboard. I look at the huge suspended staircase. I know that my next move should be up, but I decide to check the tearoom first, then the other kitchen, and the root cellar, where she blends the teas. I’m calling to her, talking as I go, speaking loudly so that she’ll hear me. I don’t want to sneak up and scare her into having a heart attack or something.
She’s probably upstairs. I’m not supposed to be climbing stairs yet, but I’m yelling to her now, and I realize I’m going to have to get up there. I use the railing to pull myself, but it’s easier to climb now than it was a few days ago, even though I can still feel the pull of the stitches with each step. When I reach the second-floor landing, I’m dizzy and have to sit down on a bench and wait until everything stops spinning. Finally I make my way to Eva’s room. Old canopy bed in the corner, fireplace, armoire. The bed is made, the pillows fluffed. I pick up a pillow and smell it, expecting Eva’s scent. Instead it smells of orange water, which is what Eva uses to rinse her linens. She must have changed the sheets recently. I check the walk-in closet. Everything hangs perfectly on the hangers. There is no laundry in the bins, which means that she has already washed the old sheets.
I spent a lot of time in this room when Eva took me in, a lot of time in this closet, actually, which Eva probably found odd but which she never mentioned. Eva is not my blood relation; she was my grandfather G.G.’s second wife, and no relation at all. Still, she understands me in the way a mother should and my own mother never has.
There are six other bedrooms on the second floor. She keeps all but one of them closed up for the winter. Actually, she rarely opens any of them now unless she’s expecting company, which happens more and more infrequently—or so she tells me every week, when she calls. Slowly I move through each of the rooms, looking for her, talking as I go. The ghost furniture stands pale, covered in sheets against the dust.
Exhausted, I climb to the third floor. Even now, at eighty-five, my aunt has more energy than I do. Somehow I know she is up here on the third floor. “Eva,” I say again. “It’s me, Towner.” I ascend the narrowing stairs heavily, holding both railings. I’m so tired.
This third floor is my floor. Eva gave it to me the winter I moved in with her, partly to appease me for having to move off Yellow Dog Island, which I loved so much, and partly because the third floor had the widow’s walk, and she knew I could use it to keep an eye on things, like May still alone out there on the island, refusing to come in. Except for an occasional climb to the widow’s walk, Eva doesn’t use these rooms at all now, and, as she tells me often, she hasn’t changed them since I moved. “They’ll be ready when you are,” she always says, and follows with some other zinger such as, “There’s no place like home.”
I climb the widow’s walk first, because I know it’s the only place Eva would go if she came up here. But there’s no sign of her. The only thing up here is a gull’s nest; I can’t tell whether it’s a new one or something left behind. I stand alone at the top of what was once my world. How many nights have I sat up here, checking on May, making sure her kerosene lamp went on in early evening, then off again when she finally went to bed? Every night of that one winter I spent here.
Salem Harbor has changed. There are a lot more boats than there used to be, and more houses around the perimeter on the Marble-head side, but Yellow Dog Island looks the same. If I squint my eyes and look past the harbor, I can imagine that I am a kid again and that at any minute I’ll see the sail from Lyndley’s yacht as it rounds Peach’s Point and heads toward our island for the summer.
I go back down to the third floor, where my rooms are. This is the only place I haven’t yet looked for Eva and the only place left where she could be. There are four rooms on this floor, which is gabled and smaller than the second floor, but the furniture up here is not covered with sheets, which seems odd, since Eva didn’t know I was coming. One room is a small library filled with all my school things: my desk, cotillion invitations, report cards. There were books required for school, and books that Eva required me to read when she didn’t think the school curriculum went far enough, old leather-bound books from the big library on the first floor: Dickens, Chaucer, Proust. Across the hall is the room that Beezer slept in on Christmas and during his winter vacations from boarding school. The last two rooms were my private suite, a sitting room with two fluffy couches and a little Chinese table between them. At the far end of the room, through French doors, is my bedroom. Since I’ve looked everywhere else, and since I know she’s got to be in the house somewhere, I figure this is where Eva has to be.
I push open the door, scanning the floor first, suddenly afraid. Maybe she didn’t come back. Maybe she’s been here all along, and they just didn’t check well enough. Maybe she has fallen somewhere up here and she’s just been lying here in horrible pain the whole time. “Eva,” I say again, dreading what I’m going to find as I open the door to what is the last room in the house, the last place she could be. “Eva, answer me.”
I’m afraid I’ll see her sprawled on the floor with broken bones, or worse. I close my eyes against the thought. But when I open them, there is nothing. Just the room as I left it the year I turned seventeen: the same Indian-print bedspread that Lyndley bought me in Harvard Square, one of Eva’s patchwork quilts folded into a triangle at the bottom of the bed. On the wall across from the bed is a painting that Lyndley did for me the year before she died, all shades of blues and blacks with a golden path leading into deep water. It is a painting of the dream we shared, entitled Swimming to the Moon.
I walk over and stare at the painting, and I remember a lot of other things then, like the time Lyndley stole a huge bunch of flowers from Eva’s gardens and got in trouble for it, too, because she almost wiped out Eva’s annuals. She had my whole room on Yellow Dog Island completely decorated with those flowers when I got home that day, and she’d really overdone it; they were everywhere. May said it was too much, that it smelled like a funeral parlor. It made her sick to her stomach, she said. Lyndley thought that was an accomplishment in itself, making anyone sick with her artistic renderings. For some reason she found that very funny. It gave her an idea. She made me put on a dress and actually lie down on the bed like a corpse holding flowers on my belly, like Millais’s painting of Ophelia, and she said I looked beautiful as a dead person, and she started sketching me, but I ruined it because I couldn’t stop laughing, which made the flowers shake too much to draw.
I am jolted back to present time by the sound of footsteps on the stairway.
“Well, there you are,” Eva says, not even winded. I reel around. She’s wearing an old flowered housedress, one I remember, and she doesn’t look a day older than the last time I saw her, the year she came to L.A. with some garden-club group to see how the Rose Bowl floats were made.
I start to cry, I am so relieved to see her. I take a step toward her, but I’m dizzy from turning so quickly.
“You’d better sit down before you fall down,” Eva says, smiling, reaching out a hand to steady me, leading me toward the bed. “You look like something the cat dragged in.”
“I’m so glad you’re all right,” I say, collapsing onto the bed.
“Of course I’m all right,” she says, as if not a thing has happened.
She covers me with the quilt. Though it is far too hot, I do not protest. This is a ritual of comfort; she has done this more than once.
“I thought you were dead,” I say, sobbing now, with relief and with exhaustion. There’s so much to say, but she’s shushing me, telling me she’s “right as rain” and that I should get some rest now, that “things will look better in the morning.” I know I should tell her to call Jay-Jay and also Beezer and let them know that she’s okay, but her voice is hypnotic, and I’m starting to fall asleep.
“Rest your weary bones,” she says, reading my mind the same way she’s always been able to read my mind, pulling the concerns right out of it, putting peaceful images in their place. “Things will look better in the morning,” she says again.
She starts toward the door, then turns back. “Thank you for coming,” she says. “I know this must have been difficult for you.” Then she takes something out of the pocket of her dress and lays it down on the bedside table. “I meant to send this with the pillow,” she says. “But I am old, and memory isn’t what it once was.”
I struggle to see what she put on the table, but my eyes are heavy with sleep. “Pleasant dreams,” she says as she walks out the door.
On her command I begin to dream, drifting up the stairs and out the widow’s walk, then out over the harbor where the party boat is coming back from its cruise to nowhere, carrying a load of sunburned tourists. The sun is going down, and a new moon is rising behind Yellow Dog Island, our island, and I can see some women there on the dock, though I don’t recognize them. Then I hear the blast from the party boat as it makes its turn, and I’m grounded back in the bed again, sleeping there. Two blasts as it heads into port. You can set your watch by those horns. Three times a day, you hear the horns as the boat comes back to Salem after each run—at noon and six, and again at midnight, on its last run of the night.
Like the muffs they resemble, the lace pillows were gathered and tied on each end. Traditionally, each pillow also had a pocket, and the women of Ipswich used the pockets to hold their treasures. Some held beautiful bobbins imported from England or Brussels, too precious to ever use. Other pockets held small pieces of finished lace, or herbs, or even small touchstones. Some hid poetry written in the owners hand, or love letters from a suitor, which were read over and over until the parchment began to tear along its creases.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE
Chapter 4 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)
WHEN I WAKE UP, I look on the bedside table, expecting to find a note. Instead I see my braid where Eva left it last night. Almost waist length the day Eva cut it, today it would reach only to my shoulders. I pick it up. The hair is fine, more like Lyndley’s hair than my own. The length shows bands of color like the rings of a tree, a summer’s sun, a winter’s darkness. At one end is a faded ribbon, tied in a double-knotted bow. At the other, fine hair curling up around it, is a dried-out rubber band Eva put on after she cut the braid from me. It is wound very tight, as if to hold everything still and together.
Hair is full of magic, Eva always says. I don’t know if that’s true for everyone, but at least it’s true for my mother, May.
May would never leave Yellow Dog Island for long. For this reason she didn’t take us to Salem for haircuts, but to a barber in Marble-head who had a shop only a few feet from the public landing.
Old Mr. Dooling always smelled strongly of stale whiskey and fried food and vaguely of camphor. He was likely to wound you anytime before noon. Rumor had it he’d once slashed a kid’s ear right off. My mother insisted she’d never believed that story. Still, May always booked our hair appointments in the afternoons, when the barber’s hands were steadier and his alcohol haze had burned off along with the harbor fog.
May’s haircuts were Marblehead’s version of a magic show. The townie kids used to form lines up and down Front Street to watch as Mr. Dooling pulled the rattail comb through my mother’s hair. With each pull, the comb would snag on something, then stop. As he reached into the mass to unwind the tangle, he would find and remove everything from sea glass to shells to smooth stones. In one particularly matted tangle, he found a sea horse. Once he even found a postcard sent from Tahiti to someone in Beverly Farms. On it were two Polynesian women, bare breasts covered discreetly by long, straight hair. I never figured out if he was sighing because of the girls and their various attributes or because of their straight, untangled hair that—although it might not have yielded treasures like my mother’s—wouldn’t have required a full bottle of conditioner for a single haircut.
The day my mother and I began to break apart was over a haircut—not hers, but mine. My mother had finished. Beezer had gone next, getting the Whiffle Deluxe, which cost $4.99 and came with a tube of stick-up for the front.
I had never liked having my hair cut, partly because of the wharf rats hanging around outside watching the whole thing and partly because Mr. Dooling’s hands shook so much. On one occasion I covered my ears with Band-Aids before we got to town, figuring they’d be harder to lop off if the barber made a mistake. But May caught me and made me remove the bandages.
Although I wasn’t fond of haircuts, they had never actually hurt me until that day. I watched as Mr. Dooling fished the scissors out of the blue gook and wiped them on his apron. The first cut sent a jolt through me like an electric shock. I let out a cry.
“What’s wrong?”
“It hurts!”
“What hurts?” May examined my scalp, my ears. Finding nothing amiss, she asked again. “What hurts?”
“My hair.”
“The hairs on your head?”
“Yes.”
“Individual hairs?”
“I don’t know.”
She examined me again. “You’re fine,” she said, motioning for him to continue.
Mr. Dooling picked up a lock of hair, fumbled, dropped it. He stopped, put down the scissors, wiped his hands on his apron, then reached for the scissors again, this time dropping them on the floor.
“Jesus Christ,” Beezer said. May shot him a look.
The barber went to the back room to get another pair of scissors, unwrapping them from their brown paper and making several practice snips in the air before he reached my side.
I gripped the chair arms, bracing as he picked up another lock of hair. I could hear him breathing. I could feel the chafing of cotton against cotton as his arm reached forward. And then I had what the doctors would later cite as my first full-blown hallucination. Visual and auditory, it was a flash cut to Medusa and thousands of writhing snake hairs. Snakes screaming, still moving as they were cut in half. Screaming so loudly that I couldn’t make them stop; terrible animal screams like the time one of the dogs on our island got its leg caught in the tractor blade. I covered my ears, but the snakes were still screaming…. Then my brother’s face, scared, pale, pulled me back, and I realized that the screaming was coming from me. Beezer was standing in front of me calling my name, calling me back. And suddenly I was out of the chair and lunging for the door.
The group of kids on the porch parted to let me through. Some of the smaller kids were crying. I ran down the stairs, hearing the door behind me open and slam a second time and Beezer yelling for me to wait.
When he reached the Whaler, I already had the bow and stern lines untied, and he had to make a running jump to get into the boat. He landed facedown, his wind knocked out. “Are you okay?” he wheezed.
I couldn’t answer him.
I saw him looking back at May, who was out on the porch with Dooling, arms folded across her chest, just watching us.
I had to choke the engine three times before it caught and started. Then, ignoring the five-miles-per-hour limit, I opened it up, and my brother and I headed out to sea.
We talked only a few times about what had happened that day. May made two ill-fated attempts to get me to see reason, taking me to town once to talk to Eva about it and the other time calling someone at the Museum of Science in Boston and asking him to explain to me that there were no nerve endings in hair and that it couldn’t possibly hurt when it was cut.
Sometimes, when you look back, you can point to a time when your world shifts and heads in another direction. In lace reading this is called the “still point.” Eva says it’s the point around which everything pivots and real patterns start to emerge. The haircut was the still point for my mother and me, the day everything changed. It happened in an instant, a millisecond, the flash of a look, the intake of breath.
For two years no one cut my hair. I went around with one long side and one short.
“You’re being ridiculous,” May said to me once, coming at me with a pair of scissors, attempting to finish the haircut and take back her power. “I won’t have it.” But I didn’t let her near me then or anytime after that.
We had family dinners every night, sandwiches mostly, because May would shop on the docks only once a month when she went to town. The sandwiches were always served in the formal dining room on the good china and were followed by a small Limoges plate of multivitamins, which my mother referred to as “dessert.” This final course could take a long time to finish, because May required us to eat the vitamins with a dessert fork, all the while practicing polite dinner conversation, something she had learned from Eva.
“I have a question,” I said, balancing two vitamins on my knife.
May gave me “the look.” I put my knife down. “Yes?” she said, waiting for me to ask in the small-talk style we had developed in order to keep from really talking about anything.
“Why did you give away my sister?”
Beezer’s eyes widened. It wasn’t the kind of thing we talked about. Ever.
May started to clear the table. I thought I could see a tear forming in the corner of her eye, but it never fell.
After dinner I went to my room. My haven. No one came in anymore. Every night I wore a ski hat to bed with one of May’s nylon stockings under it, covering my scalp, so that she couldn’t come in and trim my hair at night. I rigged my room with booby traps: strings, bells, crystal glasses I’d stolen from the butler’s pantry—anything that would wake me at the first sign of an intruder. It worked. My mother gave up. Once, my dog Skybo, whom Beezer had given to me for protection the summer before, got so badly tangled in the strings that we had to cut him free, but no one else bothered me. After a while May stopped coming into my room at all, but I never let my guard down, not for one minute.
It was Eva who finally fixed things. One day in late summer, I went to see her at her shop, begging for a lace reading. Except on my birthday, which was a family tradition, I didn’t usually ask Eva to read for me. I didn’t really like to be read—it made me feel creepy—but I was desperate. I’d lost Skybo. He was an unfixed male, and he had a tendency to wander. He was one of the island golden retrievers, trained by Beezer as a puppy, so even though he was tame enough for the house, he still had a wild streak. He was a great swimmer. Whenever I swam or took the boat, he followed me. Sometimes he set out all by himself.
I was a mess. I’d looked everywhere on Yellow Dog Island. I took the Whaler to town. I searched the wharf, the marine-supply store, and even some of the fishing fleet but turned up nothing. Finally I headed for Eva’s.
She was working on a piece of pillow lace, sitting beside a fireplace that was filled with chrysanthemums instead of flames.
It was late in the season, and the water was really cold. I was frantic. I told her the story, told her I feared the worst—hypothermia, maybe, or that he had been caught in a shipping lane and run over. Eva looked at me calmly and told me to get myself a cup of tea.
“I can’t drink tea. My dog is missing,” I snapped.
Like May, Eva had also mastered “the look.” I made the tea. She kept working. Every once in a while, she would glance up and gesture to the tea. “Don’t let it get cold,” she said. I sipped.
After what seemed a very long time, Eva put down the lace pillow and walked over to where I was sitting. She had a small pair of scissors in her hand, the ones she used to cut the lace free when she finished a piece, a technique Eva had invented. Instead of cutting lace, she reached over and cut off my braid.
“There,” she said. “The spell is broken. You are free.”
She put the braid down on the table.
“What the hell?”
“Watch your mouth, young lady.”
I stood and glared at her.
“You can go now,” she declared.
“What about my dog?” I snapped.
“Don’t worry about your dog,” she said.
I walked back to the Whaler, wondering if everyone I knew was crazy. I knew I was. May was pretty far gone, getting more reclusive by the minute. And Eva, whom I usually found so logical, was not acting the way she should, not at all.
When I got to the Whaler, Skybo was sitting in the bow. He was wet and tired and covered with burrs, but I was so happy to see him that I didn’t even care where he’d been.
The women created their own patterns made of parchment, but thicker parchment than for the love letters, more enduring. Pins were pressed into the parchment, creating a pricking pattern that could be used over and over. For the lace making, the pins stayed in, holding the patterns to the pillow, and the lace was woven pin to pin. If there was any limiting factor to the production of more intricate laces, it was the expense and scarcity of pins.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE
Chapter 5 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)
IT IS JUST AFTER SUNRISE. I cannot get back to sleep. Placing the braid of hair in the drawer of the bedside table, I quietly make my way downstairs. I start to dial Beezer’s number, then decide to wait an hour. I want to tell him that Eva’s all right. Beezer has been great. He doesn’t need this, not now. My brother and his longtime girlfriend, Anya, are about to be married. As soon as exams are over, they will be flying to Norway, where her parents live. After the ceremony they are going to travel around Europe for the summer. They will be so relieved, I think, both that Eva is okay and that they don’t have to change their wedding plans.
I’m making mental notes. Call May. Call the cops. Although none of them deserves a call. I don’t know how any of them could be so stupid that they couldn’t find an eighty-five-year-old woman in her own house.
I let myself into the tearoom, with its frescoed walls painted by a semifamous artist my great-grandfather had flown in from Italy. I can’t remember the name. Small tables crowd the room. Lace is everywhere. Some of the pieces bear May’s company label, The Circle, but most of them Eva has made herself. A glass counter in the corner holds canisters with every kind of tea imaginable—commercial teas from all over the world, as well as several flower and herb potions that Eva blends. If you want a cup of coffee, you won’t find it here. My eyes scan the teas looking for the one she named after me. She gave me that tea as a present one year. It’s a blend of black tea and cayenne and cinnamon, with just a hint of cilantro, and some other ingredients she won’t reveal to me. It has to be drunk strong and very hot, and Eva tells me it is too spicy for some of her older customers. “Either you’ll love it or you’ll hate it,” she told me when she gave it to me. I loved it. I used to drink whole pots of it, winters when I lived with Eva. On the canister it’s called “Sophya’s Blend,” but its nickname, just between Eva and me, is “Difficult-Tea.”
Behind the canister is a notebook, its cover a poem I recognize, the Jenny Joseph poem that is getting so popular. “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple / With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me….” Stuck inside the notebook are some photos, one of Beezer and May and one of me when I first got to California, my forced smile slackened from the Stelazine I was still taking.
From the look of things, Eva has a children’s party set up for today. I check the calendar on the wall, but it’s a lunar calendar, not a regular one, and it’s difficult to read. The slivered phases of the moon are printed in shades of gray on the corresponding dates. Just when I begin to think I have it figured out, I spot a different kind of moon, a bright red full moon stuck halfway through the month. It’s a little larger than the other moons and doesn’t correspond to any of their cycles. It takes me a minute to realize it’s not a moon but a hat. I remember Eva telling me about the Red Hats who were inspired by the poem. The ones who wear purple and come for tea and lace readings here at least once a month.
The tables are already set. Each table has a different pot, with different teacups and saucers set on individual circles of lace. The pots are very fanciful and colorful. If you choose to come for tea on a regular day, one that’s not already booked for a private party, the lace at your table setting, once you use it, is yours to keep. You pay for it, whether or not you have a lace reading done. Many people just take their lace pieces home and use them as doilies. This never bothers Eva, even though I’ve always thought it was a waste, that the lace circles are pieces of art and should be framed.
Most of Eva’s customers come for tea really hoping to get a lace reading. Eva never does more than two readings a day anymore; she says it wears her out, particularly now that she’s getting older. She does not keep any money from her readings. All the money she collects for the lace and the readings goes directly to the Circle.
She’ll do more than two readings if she has to. And if she senses real disappointment, or something urgent that the seeker should know, she’ll even do the reading for free. But what she’s most interested in is teaching the women to read for themselves. “Pick up the lace and look at it,” she says. “Squint your eyes.” If you follow her instructions, you start to imagine that you see pictures in the lace, the way Eva does. “Go ahead,” she encourages them. “Don’t be afraid. There is no wrong answer. This is your own life you’re reading, your own symbols.”
I find a teaspoon with the Whitney monogram and look around for my favorite teapot, which is actually an old china coffeepot that Eva has converted. I warm the pot, then brew the tea. I grab a cup and the lunar calendar and go to the only table in the room that isn’t already set. On the table is Eva’s worn first edition of Emily Post.
Before my great-aunt opened the tearoom, she taught manners classes to the children of Boston’s North Shore. Kids from Marble-head, Swampscott, Beverly Farms, Hamilton, Wenham, and as far away as Cape Ann came to Eva for refinement. She’d set one of the tables in the parlor for a formal dinner, and the children would arrive in their little suits and dresses to brush up on their table manners. She taught polite dinner conversation, tricks to avoid the shyness that descends on children during such events.
“Keep asking questions,” she advised. “It gets the conversation going and keeps the focus off you. Find out what they’re interested in and what their preferences are. Offer something of yourself in the question; it’s more intimate that way. For example, appropriate dinner conversation might be to turn to the person next to you and say, ‘I like soup. Do you like soup?’”
She made the kids practice asking each other if they liked soup, invariably prompting giggles because the question was so inane. But it broke the ice. “There,” she would say after such an exercise. “Don’t you feel more comfortable already?” And the kids had to admit they did. “Now ask another question, and make sure you really listen this time for the answer,” she would say. “One of the secrets of good manners is learning to listen.”
I drink a whole pot of tea. At seven o’clock I call Beezer. No answer. I make another pot of tea.
I try Beezer again at eight. Still no answer. I decide to make Eva a pot of tea and take it up to her.
Someone knocks on the tearoom door. At first I think it’s Beezer, but it’s not. A girl, not much older than eighteen (if she’s that), stands there, backpack across her shoulders, greasy hair parted on the side and hanging shoulder length, half covering a huge strawberry-colored birthmark that runs down the left side of her face. My immediate thought is that this is just another kid looking for a room or a reading, but when I glance out at the common, the festival is over. The only people left out there now are dog walkers and some Park & Rec guys cleaning up. I start for the door, wanting to answer it quickly, to keep things quiet for Eva, but then the teapot screams, and I rush back to silence it, burning my hand as I grab the handle.
She bangs again, louder this time, more urgently. I start back toward the door. I can see her through the wavy glass. There is a look on her face that reminds me of my sister, Lyndley. Or maybe it’s the way she bangs on the door, pounding it hard, as if she might punch right through it. As I hurry toward the door, I spot the police cruiser patrolling, trying to find a space to pull into. I see the girl look over her shoulder at the cruiser. By the time I reach the door, she is halfway down the steps. As she turns to go, I see that she is pregnant. I open the door, but she is too fast for me. She slips down the alley away from the street just as the cruiser pulls in.
I put the teapot and cups on the tray and start upstairs when there’s another knock at the door. Cursing, I put the tray down on the step and go to the door. My brother stands in front of Jay-Jay and some other guy I don’t recognize.
“I’ve been calling you,” I say to Beezer. I’m trying not to look excited, trying not to give it away.
They come in, and Beezer hugs me, holding it too long. I pull away then, to tell him that everything’s all right, that Eva is here.
“I was just going to try you again—” I tell him.
“This is Detective Rafferty,” Beezer says, interrupting me.
There is a long pause before Rafferty speaks. “We found Eva’s body,” he says finally, “out a little past Children’s Island.”
I stand still. I can’t move.
“Oh, Towner,” Beezer says, hugging me again, as much to keep me standing up as to commiserate. “I can’t believe she’s dead.”
“Looks like she drowned,” Rafferty says. “Or went hypothermic. Sadly, it’s not uncommon at her age, even outside the water.” His voice breaks slightly on that last part.
I run up the stairs, doubling over in pain as I reach the first landing, leaving them all standing there looking startled, not knowing what to do. I stumble into Eva’s room, but she’s not there. Her bed is still made, untouched since yesterday.
As quickly as I can, I move through the maze of rooms. Eva is old now, I’m thinking; maybe she doesn’t sleep here anymore. Maybe she’s chosen some other room to sleep in, something smaller. But even as I’m thinking it, I’m starting to freak out. I’m moving frantically from one room to another when Beezer catches up with me. “Towner?” I hear his voice getting closer.
I stop dead in the middle of the hallway.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
Clearly I’m not.
“I just came from identifying the body,” he says.
I can hear their voices, cops’ voices, echoing up the stairs, but I can’t hear what they’re saying.
“May knows,” he says, giving me practical details, trying to ground me. “Detective Rafferty went out there to tell her this morning.”
I am able to nod.
“She and Emma are waiting for us to come out,” Beezer says.
I nod again, following him downstairs. The cops stop talking when they see me.
“I’m so sorry,” Jay-Jay says, and I nod again. It’s all I can do.
Rafferty’s eyes meet mine, but he doesn’t say anything. I notice a quick reach of his hand, comforting, automatic. Then he catches himself and pulls it back. He puts it in his jacket pocket as if he doesn’t know what else to do with it.
“I should have stopped her,” Beezer says, his guilt overtaking him now. “I mean, I would have if I’d known. She told me she had given up swimming. Last year sometime.”
Because they were imported from England, pins were costly. The fewer pins used, the simpler the pattern, and the faster the lace maker could work. The thread was imported, because although the New England spinners were very good, they could not achieve the delicacy of the fine European linen or Chinese silk thread. Still, on average, each of the Ipswich lace makers produced upwards of seven inches of lace per day, a higher rate than the Circle produces today, and the Circle has the luxury of its own spinners and all the pins they could ever want.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE
Chapter 6 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)
RAFFERTY IS A NICE MAN. He gives us a ride to Derby Wharf so we can pick up the Whaler. He circles the block looking for a space, then finally pulls onto the public walkway, getting us as close as possible to Eva’s boathouse. “I’d have one of the guys in the police boat take you all the way out,” he said, “but the last time they went out there, May shot at them.”
You’ve probably heard of my mother, May Whitney. Everyone else has. I’m sure you remember the UPI picture a few years back, the one with May leveling a six-gauge at about twenty cops who had come to her women’s shelter on Yellow Dog Island with a warrant to take back one of her girls. That picture was everywhere. It was even on the cover of Newsweek. What made the photo so compelling was that my mother looked uncannily like Maureen O’Hara in some fifties western. Cowering behind May in the photo was a terrified-looking girl who couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, with a large white bandage on her neck, rescued from a husband who’d gotten drunk and tried to slit her throat. Her two little children sat behind her playing with a litter of golden retriever puppies. It was quite a scene. If you saw it, you’d remember.
In fact, it was that picture, coupled with a flair for public relations—both seemingly out of character for May—that revived the entire Ipswich lace industry. In a series of well-chosen interviews, she condescended to speak to the press, not about the newly rescued girl, which was the story they came out there to get, but about the bobbin lace that the other women, or “island girls” (as the locals called them), created. They called themselves “the Circle,” after the old-time ladies’ sewing circles, and that was the name that appeared on their labels.
May took the press on a tour of the cottage industry that she and her island girls were re-creating. First she took them to the spinning room, which was located in the old stone kennel. It had been built by my grandfather, G. G. Whitney, in an effort to breed and domesticate the island dogs, but he could never get them to go near the place, so it had stood empty until May’s girls took it over. Once inside the stone kennel (if you ignored the anachronism of jeans and other modern garb), you could have been in a medieval castle. The women sat at the old spinning wheels and at the bobbin winders, silent except for the whirring and occasional creaking and clicking. This spinning room was where the new girls came, the newly rescued, those who were still too skittish to join the others. May often spun with them. They wove flax mostly, to make linen thread, and sometimes May wove yarns from the yellow dog hair, but that was rare. Although some stayed in the spinning room, most of these abused women went on to join the circle of lace makers in the old red schoolhouse as soon as they felt strong enough to be with people again.
May ended her tours at the schoolhouse, where the women sat with their pillows on their laps, making lace and chatting softly or listening to a reader (often my mother herself, who had a beautiful speaking voice and loved to read poetry aloud). Enchanted by the world May had created and the spell-like web of lace May spun around them, the reporters ended up forgetting the story they came out to get. Instead they went back to their papers and wrote about the Circle. The story resonated with their female readers, and women all over the country began sending money to purchase this new Ipswich lace.
Beezer lets me drive the Whaler. When we get to the island, the tide is dead low and the ramp is up. We could land at the float, but we’d have no way to get onto the island with the ramp up like this. For just a minute, I consider trying to land at Back Beach, which is impossible at low tide and hardly possible at any other time. The tide would have to be turning high and the sea dead calm to even attempt such a landing. So I figure I’ll just have to land at the float and sit there waiting until someone notices us and lowers the ramp.
People who live on islands like their solitude. I don’t mean islands like the Vineyard or Nantucket. People on those islands are so far from shore that they need to attract tourists just to survive. But people on these border islands generally like to be left alone, and they pull up their ramps because they are vulnerable. An island is a landing point for anyone who happens by. People assume that islands are public property: They picnic, they litter. They walk up to your front door and ask to use the phone, never considering for a moment that you probably have neither phone nor electricity. And so island people learn to pull up their ramps. Usually it’s only a few feet, but it makes all the difference. At high tide the difference between the float and the ramp may be only five or six feet. Most people could make it, if they are willing to take that leap of faith, but few will. When the tide is dead low, the ramp is another ten feet down, and that’s when you really feel your privacy.
Yellow Dog Island is more private than most. The whole square-mile figure eight of it is set high on a granite plateau with spires of rock shooting up from the surrounding water, giving the impression of an ancient fortress. Unless you know about Back Beach, the island is impenetrable. Because of the sheer drop of the cliffs, the dock was built about forty feet in the air, which makes the distance from the ramp down to the float even longer. It takes a hydraulic winch to lower the ramp, and this is one of the only spots on the island that has a generator, which also runs the saltwater pump to the houses for the plumbing, such as it is. When we still attended school on the island and my mother would give us a reading assignment, I would sit in the pump house and read by the one lightbulb on the island until the generator ran out of gas or I fell asleep. That one bulb represented all of civilization for me, and I took good care of it.
There are several outbuildings on the island, but only two real houses, one on each end, belonging to May and to my Auntie Emma Boynton, who is Eva’s daughter, May’s half sister, and my sister Lyndley’s legal mother. My aunt’s house is the larger of the two Victorians, but May’s is the only one that is winterized. Until Emma’s “accident,” while she and Cal were still married, Auntie Emma and her “daughter,” Lyndley, were summer people, and I guess my Uncle Cal was, too, if you want to count him, which I don’t.
These days the women of the Circle all live at May’s house. They catch rainwater in cisterns for drinking. They grow vegetables for food and flax for the lace, and they even have a cow, which, according to Eva, had to be airlifted onto the island by the coast guard. They tried for a while to keep sheep on what used to be a makeshift baseball diamond, but the dogs kept running the sheep, so they had to give that up. Now they get by on vegetables and the occasional rabbit, and, of course, fish and lobsters. I don’t know what they do in the winter. I’ve never asked. I know as much as I do only because Eva has written me letters about it.
Beezer and I have been sitting on the float for about twenty minutes before anyone comes to lower the ramp. Finally it is my Auntie Emma, and not my mother, who shows up. She walks with her head bent forward, moving more slowly than I remember, partly from her infirmity and partly from age. She is much older than the last time I saw her, almost fifteen years older, come August. My heart catches when I see her; and though she cannot see me, she suddenly realizes I am there. It’s like the take Melanie does in Gone with the Wind when she sees Ashley come back from the Civil War and suddenly recognizes that beaten-down man as her beloved husband. My aunt doesn’t rush to me—she cannot do that—but her feelings rush forward, and they knock the breath right out of me.
By the time we reach her, she is crying. We stand there for a long time, hugging each other. She is crying and saying things like, “I knew you’d come,” and “I told her so.”
My heart sinks for a moment. She is so happy to see me that I wonder if she thinks I am her daughter, Lyndley. In a way it would be more likely. Because even though I know the physical laws of this strange planet and the impossibility of such a thing, I also know that it would be less of a miracle for my sister, Lyndley, dead more than fifteen years now, to come back here than it was for me.
We walk together up the ramp in slow motion, frame by frame. She’s too weak to walk fast anymore, and I’m having so much trouble catching my breath that I can’t even speak. But that’s okay, because I wouldn’t know what to say if I could. Ahead of us, at the top of the ramp, some gulls knock over one of the garbage cans. It rolls several feet, then stops just before reaching the edge of the cliff.
“May is waiting for you,” Auntie Emma says, pointing to the old schoolhouse at the crest of the hill. She starts to walk with me, then takes Beezer’s arm. She rests her head on his shoulder and cries softly.
“I’m so sorry about Eva,” Beezer says.
I am surprised to realize that she knows and understands what has just happened to Eva. The “accident” that blinded her also left my aunt with brain damage.
Sometimes Emma knows who I am, sometimes not, Eva told me more than once.
The door to the red schoolhouse is open. I can see the Circle. They are sitting with their lace pillows on their laps. Some are working hard, passing bobbin over bobbin, winding their lives into the patterns as they go. Others are barely working at all but are listening, staring off at something not quite there, captivated by the reader’s voice, my mother’s, strong and clear. Quoting from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience:
Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down, And dews of the night arise;…
Her voice catches when she sees me in the doorway. It is so slight she doesn’t miss a single beat but goes on…
Your spring and your day are wasted in play, And your winter and night in disguise.
As May closes the book and takes a step in our direction, I hear another voice, one that’s even stronger than my mother’s.
“There are no accidents,” Eva says as Beezer and I step through the door.
What distinguishes Ipswich lace from all other handmade laces are the bobbins. The colonial women could not afford the heavier decorative bobbins used by European women. Like everyone else in the Colonies, the lace makers had to make do with what was at hand. And so the bobbins they wound the thread upon were lighter, sometimes hollow, fabricated from beach reeds or occasionally bamboo that came in on the Salem ships as packing material, or even from bones.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE
Chapter 7 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)
WE’RE ALL AT MAY’S HOUSE NOW. Beezer’s fiancée, Anya, got here last night. They were supposed to leave for Norway tomorrow, for the wedding (which is only a week away). However, the trip has been postponed for a few days, until after Eva’s funeral. Anya is clearly not happy about it; really, why should she be? I think she’s being a pretty good sport about things, under the circumstances. I know how uneasy this place makes her. She told me that when she accompanied Beezer to California on a lecture tour that included Caltech. I have a certain respect for Anya’s honesty, but I still don’t like her. I think that’s partly because she doesn’t like me—doesn’t like any of us, really, besides Beezer. I wonder about it, about how much my brother has told her, but Beezer isn’t a talker. When I asked him how things went—when he identified Eva’s body for instance—he muttered something about it being very difficult and about “crustaceans.” I knew if I wanted to know more, I’d have to ask him, point by point, but I was put off by his choice of words and decided I didn’t want to know.
This morning Beezer and Anya are sleeping in, but the rest of us are here, in the red schoolhouse, waiting for the minister to get here to meet with us and make arrangements for the service at the Unitarian church where Eva was a member. Dr. Ward will be arriving by water taxi. He has come out of retirement for Eva’s funeral. They were friends, those two. For a number of years. We can see the boat, still far away, but getting closer.
No one’s talking except for two small children, a boy and a girl, who are seated on the schoolhouse floor in the far corner, playing jacks. The floor is tilted with age and disrepair, and every time they bounce the ball, it rolls away from them. The kids find this very amusing. They giggle and scramble to reach it before it rolls out the door.
A nervous young woman, presumably their mother, watches them do this two or three times before the sound of the bouncing ball begins to grate on her nerves. Unable to stand it any longer, she walks over and takes the ball away. The little girl begins to cry; this in turn makes the mother cry. Seeing this, the women of the Circle move in, comforting the young mother, surrounding her.
“Let them play,” one of the older women suggests. “Play is good.” The woman takes the ball from the mother and hands it back to the little girl, who looks at it suspiciously.
Then one of the women spots the water taxi at the float and someone getting out of it. I recognize the minister immediately, even after all these years, but this woman doesn’t, and I see her tense.
“It’s okay.” May puts a comforting hand on her shoulder. “He’s here to see me.”
The nervous young mother lets herself be led back to the Circle. The women are talking to her quietly now, saying things I can’t make out, until they finally coax a smile from her. The little girl doesn’t resume playing but puts the ball down intentionally and watches it roll slowly toward the open door, where it stops momentarily, then bounces down the granite steps, popping up twice before it disappears out of sight. The only picture left in the frame of the open doorway is that of May hurrying toward the dock to meet the minister.
May thinks it’s better if we bring Dr. Ward to the main house, away from the women, who are skittish (at best), plus “they’re working on the lace anyway, and we shouldn’t interrupt them with our business.” When we get to the house, Beezer and Anya are finally up. He’s had his coffee and now gets some for the minister. Anya doesn’t help, but she is attached to him, as usual. He compensates for it, like someone with a disability does, learning to move with her, forgetting after a while that this isn’t the way he has always walked.
“We’re thinking of a change of venue,” says Dr. Ward, stirring in another teaspoon of sugar, clinking the sides of the cup with his spoon. “Probably move the funeral down the street, to St. James’s.”
“Why would we do that?” asks May.
“Because there are just so many attendees. The Catholic church is the only place that can accommodate so many people.”
“How many people?” May has a bad feeling about it already.
“We think about two hundred,” he says, “give or take.”
“Two hundred people?” Anya is amazed. “I wouldn’t get two hundred people at my funeral if I died.”
“Give or take,” he says again.
I can almost see May’s skin crawling at the thought of so many people. She can’t stay seated but gets up and starts to move around.
“Two hundred people,” Anya says again.
“Eva had a lot of friends,” Beezer tells her, partly to shut her up. “All those etiquette classes.”
“All those witches,” May says, frowning.
The minister shifts uncomfortably. Some people, certainly the Calvinists, would consider May to be one of “those witches.” Even more so now that they call themselves “the Circle.” He remembered it from when they’d changed their name, their business name, officially from “the Island Girls” to “the Circle.” He hadn’t liked it then, and he’d told Eva so. It had a certain connotation, that name, and he thought they should stay away from it. He’d always wondered—well, everybody wondered, really—what actually went on out here. Some people would consider these women a coven. It was logical, with witches everywhere in Salem now, to consider any group of women a coven, especially a group that refers to itself as “the Circle.” Eva had laughed at him when he’d told her that, telling him to get with it, that it wasn’t named after witches but after the old-time ladies’ sewing circles that women used to have. Still, he thought it could be misinterpreted. “Career-limiting” were his actual words, but they went ahead and did it anyway. And as far as he could see, it hadn’t been limiting at all. Eva had started to sell the lace made by the Circle in her tearoom shortly after that, and it had been selling well ever since. Well, you’d have to be crazy, wouldn’t you, to take business advice from a minister? Still, he was sort of relieved now, to realize that not only was May not a witch herself but that she didn’t seem even to like the witches. In that way, he thought, she was like the Calvinists.
“Who are the Calvinists?” I ask, unaware until I say it that I have been reading him. He startles. Dr. Ward’s mind is so easy to read, so open, that I can’t help it. That’s the way it is sometimes with holy people. Their thoughts are right out there for the world to see, not guarded like the rest of ours.
May was really agitated now. I thought at first that maybe she was angry because I was reading the minister without being invited; that was another of Eva’s etiquette rules. You don’t read anyone’s mind unless they invite you—it’s intrusive, like trespassing. But I knew that if I could read this man so easily, then May could read him as well; we are all readers to some extent, although May won’t admit to it. She will acknowledge that she’s incredibly intuitive, which I would argue is almost the same thing. So either she is still angry about the witches, which I don’t understand at all, or she is angry at me for reading the minister. In any case, her anger is palpable. Even he can feel it.
“What do you think?” Dr. Ward is waiting for an answer.
“You already know what I think,” May says. “I don’t think we should have a funeral at all.”
“I think Eva would have wanted some kind of a ceremony,” Dr. Ward says.
“A ceremony would be nice.” These are the first words that Auntie Emma has spoken.
“Eva was quite religious, you know,” Dr. Ward offers.
“Eva? Religious?” May laughs out loud.
Although I’d rather side with Dr. Ward than May any day, even I have to agree with my mother on this one. Eva was a church member, but she wasn’t what anyone would call religious. In the summertime she did the flowers for the First Church. And she could debate Scripture with the best of them. But she seldom attended services. She told me once that her idea of spirituality was working outside in her garden or swimming.
“Well, I think she would have wanted something,” Dr. Ward says. His voice has a bit of an edge to it, which he quickly hides under a forced smile.
“Then I think you should be the one to do the planning,” May says, and walks out. And now I’m angry, because this is just like May, to leave us all sitting here this way. My mother has been known to hold off the county sheriff, the Salem police, and a dozen aggressive reporters all at the same time. She can run a thriving business or give a great interview to Newsweek, but when it comes to family, she can’t handle anything.
“I don’t know why anyone is even asking her opinion.” I say a bit too harshly. “I’ll bet you ten to one she won’t even show up for the funeral if we do have one.”
“You showed up, didn’t you?” Beezer’s voice also has an edge. He quickly feels guilty. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but can we please not do this?”
“Sorry,” I say, and mean it.
“Maybe we should just have it at the Unitarian church as planned,” Dr. Ward says. “On a first-come, first-served basis.”
I am picturing a deli counter where everyone takes a number. I keep the image to myself.
There is a long silence.
“Are you all right?” Dr. Ward finally asks me.
“I’m sorry,” I repeat, not knowing what else to say.
“We’re all sorry,” Dr. Ward says, his eyes tearing up just a little. He reaches out a ministerial hand to touch my arm, but the tears have thrown his vision off, and his hand grasps at empty air.
Later, when they think they’re alone in the house, I hear Anya talking to Beezer. “You have the strangest family,” she says. She means it affectionately; it’s supposed to be a little joke.
I know his expression without seeing his face. He doesn’t smile.
When I was in the bin, after Lyndley killed herself, I signed myself up for shock therapy. It was against Eva’s wishes and certainly against May’s (which was part of the reason I did it), but the doctors recommended it highly. I’d been in the hospital for six months. They’d tried all the standard drugs for depression, though this was pre-Prozac, so the drugs they had to work with weren’t all that effective. Plus, they put me on an antipsychotic for the hallucinations. I was on so much Stelazine that I couldn’t swallow. I could barely speak. And the medication didn’t help that much. My waking images were still of Lyndley posed on the rocks, leaning into the wind like the figurehead on an old sailing ship, ready to jump. My night terrors pictured Lyndley’s father, Cal Boynton, being ripped apart by dogs. I had begun by this time to realize that this last image was hallucination, though when I’d been admitted, I actually believed that the dogs had ripped Cal apart, that he was dead. The doctors called it some kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy.
Well, Cal wasn’t dead, but Lyndley was. And no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get either image out of my mind. I thought, and the doctors told me, that they could finally rid me of the image with shock therapy, so I signed up. I was almost eager for it. May’s response to this new development was to send me a copy of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. She didn’t bring it, mind you; she never once came herself to see me at the hospital. Instead she sent the book in with Eva, who had instructions to read it aloud to me if necessary.
“I’m doing this,” was all I said to Eva.
It wasn’t horrible; at least my experience of it was not. And it worked. It took several treatments, but eventually the images began to recede. The image of Cal went back to being a nightmare, one I could often wake myself from before things got really ugly. And although the image of Lyndley didn’t go away completely, it shrank down to the size of a little black box that stayed fixed in the left-hand corner of my peripheral vision. It’s not that it was gone, exactly; it’s just that I didn’t have to look at it directly anymore. I could look at something else if I chose to, and I did.
For the first time I could remember, I had a plan. I was going to move out to California. Since I had already applied to and been accepted at UCLA, I told the hospital that I was going to go to college as originally planned. The doctors were delighted. They took it as a sign that I was cured, that their new and improved electronic medicine had worked on me.
Before I’d had the shock therapy, in a final attempt to talk me out of it, Eva had said something strange. She wasn’t upset by my visions. In her profession as reader, visions were what you wished for. “Sometimes,” she said, “it’s not the visions that are wrong, but the interpretation of those visions. Sometimes it’s not possible to understand the images until you gain some perspective.” She was advocating more talk therapy and no shocks—at least that’s what I thought at the time. What she really meant, and what she told me years later, was that she had seen the same images herself. She had seen both images in the lace, the one of Lyndley and the one of the dogs. But she had seen them as symbols, while I saw them as real.
“I blame myself,” Eva said, already starting to speak in clichés. “I should have known.”
We all find means of anesthesia.
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” Eva told me with a sad smile.
The shock therapy took away most of my short-term memory. It hasn’t come back. I remember very little of what happened that summer. Which is probably just as well—it’s what I signed up for. What it also did—what is really unusual, one in a thousand statistically—is that it took away a lot of my long-term memory, too. They assured me that it would come back, and much of it has. Unlike most people, who lose memory over the years, I remember more as time passes. It usually comes back in fragments, sometimes in whole stories. I wrote some of them down when I was at the hospital, but by the time I got to UCLA, I had run out. I didn’t last past the first semester. I told Eva I was dropping out because of the Stelazine, that I had double vision and couldn’t read, which was true. I took my first house-sitting job for a film director, and he got me a job reading scripts, first for him and later for one of the studios.
For a while Eva tried to talk me into going back to UCLA. Or into coming back and going to school in Boston.
Today the women of the Circle create their bobbins from the bones of the birds that once lived on Yellow Dog Island. The lightness of these bones makes the thread tension uneven, and it is this, more than anything else, that gives this new Ipswich lace its unusual quality and lovely irregular texture and makes it so easy to read.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE
Chapter 8 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)
I WOULD HAVE WON THE BET. May never shows up for Eva’s funeral. Auntie Emma is there, escorted by Beezer and Anya, one on each arm. But May doesn’t even bother to come.
“May has her own way of paying her respects,” Anya feels the need to explain. “This morning she scattered peony petals to the four winds.”
I don’t comment. Anything I could say would sound sarcastic.
When we get to the church, people are lined up outside waiting to get in.
Rafferty’s there, standing in the back of the church, under the organ, which extends two stories to the roofline. He looks awkward in his dark suit, more awkward in his knowledge that everyone is staring at him. Actually, it’s only the women who are staring. Rafferty is a good-looking man, a fact that just makes him more self-conscious in this mostly female crowd.
This is an old church, the First Church in Salem, but Puritan in its origins. Two of the accused witches were in its congregation. This is also the church that excommunicated Roger Williams after he went on strike and refused to act as pastor or even attend services unless it cut off all dialogue with the Church of England. He fled not only the church but Massachusetts Bay Colony, escaping banishment and going on to found Rhode Island, the test state for religious tolerance.
Today Salem’s First Church is Unitarian and about as far from its Puritan roots as a church can get. Still, those roots go deep. The last in a succession of meeting places, the Essex Street structure has changed considerably over the years. In the mid-1800s, when substantial shipping money came to Salem, the church was rebuilt in stone and mahogany, with hard wooden pews down the middle and soft, velvet-covered boxes (private seating for the shipping families) lining the walls. The light comes mainly through the huge, almost floor-to-ceiling Tiffany windows, which cast a film of ashy rose over the interior, making everything look beautiful, if slightly surreal.
The church has the kind of stark elegance found only in this part of the New World.
We sit off to the side in the Whitney box, with its horsehair cushions and dusty velvet covers, once a deep wine color, now a crushed, fraying pink. The seats in the center of the church have been restored, and that is where the congregation sits. Even today, when it is so crowded that people are forced to stand in the back, the only box open is ours. This is probably due to liability issues rather than segregation, but it seems somehow to be a way of setting us apart from the crowd. Because we face the people and not the pulpit, it feels as if we’re sitting in a display case. I see people stealing glances at us when they think we’re not looking. Maybe that always happens at funerals, those looks, maybe it happens all the time, but the families never notice because they’re facing forward, looking at the coffin and not the congregation.
Already it’s almost ninety degrees outside. “Too early for this,” I hear one woman say as she comes in. Her tone is mildly accusing, and I turn around to see who she’s talking to, but it’s a general comment meant for no one in particular, or maybe for God, whose house this is supposed to be. It’s as if she’s documenting something, going on record. People do that in this part of the country—they register weather extremes the same way they balance their checkbooks, making sure they get credit for everything and don’t incur any charges that don’t belong to them, as if the weather itself were controlled and obliged to produce a finite and determinable number of hot, snowy, or rainy days that must not be exceeded.
The church is filled with women, all wearing hats and linen sundresses, almost southern-looking, out of place here against the cold stone architecture. My eye is drawn to the center of the church and a group of women, each one dressed in a different shade of purple and wearing a red hat. These are Eva’s regulars at the tea shop, a group she considered friends.
People fan themselves when they first come in, using whatever they can find: a sun hat, a program from last Sunday that has fallen to the floor. Their sighs are audible. The stone church is not air-conditioned but holds the dank feeling of a New England fieldstone cellar, damp and cool, with a memory scent of apples from last fall’s Harvest Days and spruce left over from Christmas. The people get calmer as they finally begin to cool down; they stop fanning and fidgeting. There are even some momentary smiles of recognition tossed back and forth and then covered with the more appropriate somber demeanor. “Try to act as if you’re wearing black,” I once heard a Hollywood director say to one of his actors. That’s what these people are doing.
The only people who actually are wearing black are the witches, but they wear black all year. They are also the only ones who are not treating this as a solemn occasion. They talk quietly among themselves, greeting others as they come in. Death isn’t the same for the witches, Eva told me once; she said it was because they don’t attach the prospect of eternal damnation to it.
Dr. Ward gives the eulogy. He talks about Eva’s good works, about all the people she helped. “People are defined, finally, by the good works they do.” He runs through a list of Eva’s works, things I never knew about my aunt, things she might have boasted about if she’d been another type of person. I realize the selfishness of children. We love them, and we revolve around their universes, but they don’t revolve around ours. I left here when I was a child, and in some ways I haven’t grown up yet. That I didn’t know these things about my aunt speaks to that fact. I feel sorry about that as I sit here. I feel sorry about a lot of things today.
Dr. Ward clears his throat. “Eva Whitney swam every day, beginning in the late spring. Before many of the boats were in the water, she would be there. People started putting their boats in when Eva started her daily swims, because they knew that the weather would stay warm, that the season was upon us. Eva’s first swim of the season was this town’s version of Groundhog Day. When she went into the water that first time, we held our collective breaths. If she went back again the next day, we’d put away our snow shovels for good—spring had sprung.” He looks around the room, making eye contact. “And now the season has changed. Summer is here again, but Eva is no longer among us.” He looks at Auntie Emma, then at Beezer and me. Beezer shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “‘To every thing,’” Dr. Ward says, “‘there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.’”
He doesn’t finish the verse but steps down, gesturing to Ann Chase, who moves toward the pulpit, her speaker’s notes in hand, black robes brushing against the corner of our box as she passes. Dr. Ward remembers his manners, extends an arm to her, helping her up the steps, a polite gesture from an old gentleman. As she takes his arm, I can see that her hand is the supporting one. She’s helping him down more than he’s helping her up. Dr. Ward walks slowly to the front row and takes a seat facing the coffin. He looks straight ahead.
I haven’t seen Ann Chase since the summer that Lyndley died. She is a little bit older than I am, maybe four or five years. She looks slightly muted but otherwise unchanged these last fifteen years. Her features are less clearly defined, like a copy of an old master done by an art student, one off, more suggestion than reality.
She doesn’t introduce herself. She doesn’t have to. With the exception of Laurie Cabot, Ann Chase is the most famous witch in Salem and a direct descendant of Giles and Martha Corey, who were once prominent members of the First Church (until they were executed as witches during the hysteria). They were not witches, of course. Their pardons hang now in the back of this church for everyone to see, pardons issued by Queen Elizabeth II at the end of this century, way too late for Giles and Martha and (some people would say) too late for Ann as well. “The sins of the fathers,” someone whispers, loud enough for everyone to hear. But if Ann hears it, she doesn’t flinch.
Most people in this town think that Ann became a witch as some kind of family protest taken to the extreme, a “can’t beat ’em, so join ’em” kind of justice, an “I have the name, so I might as well have the game” type of thing. I’m not sure about that. Ann Chase was already practicing witchcraft by the time I left town, living in a hippie house down by the Gables, growing herbs, and brewing magic-mushroom tea for all her friends. She didn’t wear black then; she wore long, flowing Indian-print skirts made out of the same kind of material as the bedspreads Lyndley and I bought in Harvard Square. She usually went barefoot and had henna tattoos across her knuckles and a toe ring that wound all the way up her ankle like a silver vine. Part of the time, Lyndley and I thought she was very exotic. The rest of the time, we thought she was just plain strange. Like that day we saw her way out at the end of Derby Wharf standing huge against the tiny lighthouse, incanting love spells for her girlfriends, who followed her around like puppies. We used to spy on them from out in the harbor, from the Whaler parked on someone else’s mooring. We would laugh as we watched them, covering our mouths so they wouldn’t hear us. But those spells must have worked in the end, because Ann’s friends started having little hippie babies, which they dressed in tiny tie-dyed T-shirts and nursed in public places. Never mind that the sixties were long over by then. “The sixties didn’t arrive in Salem until the seventies,” Lyndley used to say, and of course she was right. But when the sixties finally did arrive in the old port of Salem, Ann Chase was one of the first to jump on board. And when that ship sailed away again, Ann stayed behind waving from the beach. She had found her home port.
Back then everyone could do a little magic, but Ann took it to a new level. Instead of reading tarot cards or throwing the I Ching, she took up phrenology. She could tell your fortune by reading the bumps on your head. She would grab your head with both hands and press it as if she were buying a melon at the market. In the end she could tell you when you were going to marry and how many kids you were going to have. Lyndley went to her a couple of times, but I never did, because I didn’t like having my head touched, and besides, I had Eva to tell my fortune if and when I needed it.
What Ann was best at were the oils. She grew herbs in window boxes and began brewing remedies and distilling essential oils. One by one, as her roommates moved on, turning into yuppies first, then later into soccer moms, Ann replaced them with cats. She opened an herbal shop down at Pickering Wharf before it was a high-rent district, and she was successful enough to stay on when it became the fashionable place to shop. Eventually, as the shop got more and more successful, she stopped trying to grow her herbs in the window boxes and started purchasing them from Eva instead. That was when they became friends.
Ann’s evolution into “Town Witch” was gradual. To hear Eva tell it, you’d think that Ann just woke up one day and realized that she was a witch. In fact, it wasn’t a decision; it was an evolution. But her family history was what made her famous. The witches of Salem—the locals who have taken up the practice or the ones who’ve been practicing and have come to Salem because it has been declared a safe haven for witches—have all rallied around Ann Chase. They wear their association with her like a badge of courage, one that proves that the Salem witches really did exist here all along, a kind of “look how far we’ve come” thing. It proves nothing of the sort, of course (because Giles and Martha Corey were not witches, just unfortunate victims), but the connection, once made, was difficult to erase. I wonder as I sit here how Ann feels about being their mascot.
She has been talking now for several minutes: about Eva’s gardens and her plant conservation, which has been written up in magazines I’ve seen over the years. I want to hear what Ann has to say, but that same person is whispering again, and it’s interfering with my concentration. I look around, but I can’t find the source, and so I try again to concentrate on Ann’s speech and on the details of my aunt’s life.
“Eva saved at least one plant species that I know of from extinction,” Ann says.
“Wild exaggeration, load of malarkey,” the same voice whispers, loud enough for me to hear this time. I reel around, shushing the women to my left, thinking it’s one of them. They look at me strangely. “As if you have two heads,” the voice whispers in my ear, louder this time, much closer. I recognize the voice. It is Eva. She is speaking loudly enough to fill the church, or at least to be heard in the rows around me, but it is clear that I am the only one hearing her voice.
“Eva Whitney was one of us,” Ann begins, and some of the witches clap. “Not officially, of course, but she was.”
I’m looking at the reverend now, which is where Eva wants me to look. I don’t know how I know this, but I do. He was a good friend. I have memories of him at the house, discussing Scripture and literature late into the night.
I look at Dr. Ward. I can tell he’s distraught. He’s trying to hold himself together for the sake of the congregation.
“I am reminded of a quote that was a favorite of Eva’s,” Ann says. “‘The grass will grow green again next year. But you, beloved friend, will you return?’” Ann looks right at me as she speaks that line.
Ann is stepping down now, and Dr. Ward is heading back toward the coffin. As Ann descends the stairs, her dark robes inflate, and I am reminded of flight, and of witches on broomsticks. Then Eva tosses me a snippet of memory, of us all sitting here—Beezer, and Eva, and me—“the day the man flew,” or at least that’s how Beezer always referred to the incident.
It was Christmas Eve. Dr. Ward was new then, and Eva was showing her support for him by making sure everyone attended services. Beezer had been selected to play the bells that year, along with twelve other children, who all wore matching red robes. Each child had one bell, and together they played an oddly timed “Ode to Joy,” each child lifting his bell on cue and shaking it as if his very salvation depended on it. When Beezer finished, he made his way back to the booth. He was blushing from all the attention and from the heat, which Dr. Ward had cranked high to make sure the children stayed warm in the drafty old building.
The pews in the center aisle are slightly elevated, about six or seven inches, which is unusual, and if you forget about it for even a minute, it can be treacherous. I remember sitting in this box with Beezer that night. The service was ending. The choir was singing, just as it is now. An older gentleman, in a hurry to get home and seeing a break in the procession, violated protocol and jumped in line, but he must have forgotten about the step down. What I remember most is the look on Eva’s face as the man came hurtling into our box, headfirst, as if he were flying, his legs almost parallel to the floor. Beezer spotted it before the rest of us and yelled “Holy shit!” which was something Eva would have slapped him for if we’d been at home, but before she could reach him, he was down on the floor of the box pulling me with him. Everyone in the church turned in time to see Eva reach both hands up over her head and grab the old man midflight, like a gymnastics coach spotting a vaulter. It changed the man’s trajectory and probably saved him from a broken neck. And for a moment, before he came down, the man was weightless and flying. I remember thinking he’d be okay if he could just believe he was really flying and not that he was about to get hurt. But the old man lost it, his face contorted, bracing. He landed hard, half on Eva’s lap and half on the gate to the box, shattering the mahogany as he did. By some miracle the man wasn’t hurt. And neither was Eva. I remember how impressed Beezer had been by Eva’s catch and by her courage. He talked about it for days.
“Holy shit!” the voice whispers then, and I see Beezer smile. I realize that this memory was meant for him, not me. He’s half laughing now, half crying as he remembers. Then the soloist begins to sing “Raglan Road,” which is an odd choice but a good one, one that my brother picked out and that I know Eva would have liked.
I see Ann smile as she passes, her robes still flowing, and there’s movement as Eva’s spirit jumps from our box to Ann. I look at Beezer to see if he has noticed, but he’s up and moving toward the coffin along with the other pallbearers, and he hasn’t seen anything.
We follow the coffin then, all of us. As the massive church doors open, the cool inside air condenses into a fine mist, steaming as it releases us to the burning pavement below. But before we go, there’s a moment when everything stops. No one wants to go back outside. A step outside is the end of something, a huge change. We can all feel it. Never mind that it feels like about ninety-seven degrees out there. This is something else. For a moment the threshold seems too high to step over, not only for the pallbearers but for everyone else as well. No one wants to be the first to take that step. Eternity is in this one moment, and we are all suspended in it. It is finally Dr. Ward who breaks the spell and steps outside.
Waves of heat rise off the asphalt driveway, distorting the figures of the people as they step into sunlight, blurring everybody’s edges then, not just Ann’s. It’s as if we were all spirits and the coffin with its dark horizontal lines is the only thing that has any true weight and mass. People move slowly, deliberately, down the steps, their eyes adjusting to the bright sun.
There is no hearse waiting. Instead the pallbearers have opted to carry the coffin to the graveyard—Beezer, Jay-Jay, and some other young men I don’t recognize, friends of Eva’s, maybe.
A few doors down at the Witch House, a group of day-camp kids, preschoolers, is lined up on either side of a thick yellow rope with loops every few feet. Each child holds on to a loop with one hand; some are absently sucking thumbs with the other. A few of the older ones, more used to the buddy system than to the rope, clutch a loop with one hand while holding hands under it, not taking any chances. It would be difficult to walk this way, but they’re not walking now, they’re just standing in line waiting to get inside. I wonder at their teachers, bringing them here to the house of Jonathan Corwin, who was one of the hanging judges, though he was far more skeptical and less committed to the sad practice than were the rest. The kids won’t get it. They’ll think, as I did at their age, that the Witch House is a place where witches lived. If they think of anything, they’ll think of Halloween and candy and what their costumes are going to be for next year. They won’t get the rest of the dark story, which is just as well. Some are sleepy with the heat, distracted, looking for something to pull them out of their dazed state. Their eyes catch the coffin as it moves slowly out of the church driveway, and they watch as it bobs down the street, locking onto it, going for a ride with their eyes, unaware that they shouldn’t. They have no frame of reference for death; to them it’s just part of a tour they got tickets for, or perhaps they think we’re like the street performers they’ve seen wandering the town doing skeleton skits, trying to lure you to the Salem Witch Museum or the Witch Dungeon or even one of the haunted houses.
We pass the gardens of the Ropes Mansion. The cars are stopped in both directions as we cross Essex Street and head up Cambridge toward Chestnut Street, which was Eva’s favorite street in town. The Whitneys had originally lived on it, before politics drove them down to Washington Square with the rest of the Jeffersonian Republicans. It is Beezer’s intention to turn right on Chestnut Street and pass the old Whitney house before turning up Flint Street and down Warren, then looping back up Cambridge Street again toward the Broad Street graveyard. It’s an idea that sounded good at the time (and would have made Eva happy), but it is far too ambitious. The heat makes it almost impossible. Already I’m exhausted and out of breath. I’m thinking it would be better if they went straight and didn’t make the detour at all. I try to send Beezer that thought, but when the procession gets to Chestnut Street and Hamilton Hall, Beezer steers them right, as planned, and the coffin follows, the back end swinging wide like the stern of a boat.
Chestnut Street is decked out for summer with window boxes and flowering planters on the front steps of the old Federal houses. It’s beautiful at any time, but it’s never been the easiest place to walk. The old brick sidewalks are like waves dipping up and down to accommodate the twisted tree roots and frost heaves of the last two centuries. It’s a moment in time, this street, but it’s as uneven as Salem Harbor in a storm tide, and the coffin bobs along as if it were floating on the water. A tourist trolley pulls around the corner, and some of the visitors, sensing a photo opportunity, lean out to snap pictures as they pass. As the trolley rings its bell, an older man playing solitaire at a window table shoots a look of tolerant annoyance at the trolley, only to be surprised as the coffin floats by his window at eye level, our entire parade behind it. He gets up, walks to the window, and closes the Indian shutters.
Broad Street Cemetery sits high on a hill and falls in a subtle slope toward the church. It is not far “as the crow flies,” but it is too distant for the pallbearers in this heat. I can see the strain of it on Beezer’s face; he is wondering if this was a bad idea. We are coming to the burial hill now, the relatives in front with some of the hatted ladies. The cemetery is just up ahead, but the road dips down before it rises up again. Although I can see the gravestones on the hillside, I can no longer see the entrance to the cemetery, so I have no idea what everyone is looking at until I’m almost on top of it. The witches, who are on the rise behind us and can still see the whole picture, have stopped cold and are staring at something in their path.
“What’s going on?” the pastel woman asks her friend. “What are they looking at?”
I can feel the protesters before I see them, and it feels like a wall, or a locked gate. Then I spot the signs: big ones, handwritten on poster board with Magic Markers: NO CHRISTIAN BURIAL and SORCERY IS AN ABOMINATION UNTO THE LORD.
Detective Rafferty, who looks as if he’s been expecting trouble all along, is already on his cell phone, calling for backup. One of the pallbearers, who managed to navigate the sidewalks of Chestnut Street without a false step, stumbles now, although we’re back on solid pavement. He almost falls but recovers at the last second. The ripple of unbalance moves through them, and for a quick moment I think they’re going to drop the coffin right there on the sidewalk.
“Move along,” Rafferty is saying to the protesters as another squad car pulls up. Two officers jump out, blocking the way of the protesters so that the coffin may pass. The pallbearers start up the hill, but it is steep. I can see the sweat soaking through their jackets.
“I don’t understand,” one of the women in pastel says to one of the Red Hats. “Who are those people supposed to be?”
“They’re Calvinists,” the Red Hat replies. I’m suddenly feeling the way Beezer looks. I realize I probably should have eaten something before we came, but I couldn’t. It’s as if I’m looking at the whole thing through binoculars held wrong side out, so that everything in view moves far away into the distance.
“As in old-time Puritans?”
The Red Hat moves carefully past the protesters, sidestepping so she doesn’t get in their way but not daring to turn her back on them.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” the pastel woman says, both to the hatted woman and to the demonstrators. Getting no response, she hurries to catch up. In the distance the sound of a siren draws closer.
“Let them pass,” Rafferty says again, tougher this time, now that reinforcements are on the way. “You want to protest, that’s your right, but you’re not doing it inside this cemetery.” Rafferty steps between the Calvinists and the witches. The witches move together in a silent group, and I can feel something shift. One man crosses himself as they pass, an old superstition from his previous Catholicism, as if he’s not sure (in a pinch) that this new religion he has adopted will hold. Even I can tell that these men are afraid of the witches. Their fear shifts the balance of power, and now the witches feel strong enough to pass; they know that these guys are afraid of them, especially in such a large group.
Anya takes Auntie Emma’s arm, directing her up to the top of the hill, where the Whitney family plot is. I walk behind, keeping an eye on the Calvinists. From below I can see more police cars pulling up.
The wind is blowing off the water. Once we’re at the top of the hill, the air finally begins to move. It smells of salt ocean and low tide. I can feel the stitches from my surgery, still undissolved, throbbing from every uphill step. I look around for a place to sit down, but there is nothing. I want to cry, know I should want it, but it isn’t possible for me, not here with these people who are all watching us. Watching me.
In front of me is the tall Whitney monument and then the small markers that surround it. I look down at the marker in front of me, my grandfather’s stone, G. G. Whitney. Everyone you meet in Salem can tell you a story about my grandfather. But it is not G.G.’s marker I am looking for today, it is Lyndley’s. By the time my sister was buried, I was already in the hospital. I glance down at the end of the row, to the newest-looking stone, hers.
Eva’s marker stone has already been cut. It lies on its side next to the open grave. Anya is ranting about it. She is very angry, because they got the name wrong. They spelled it “Eve,” not “Eva.” It may be an honest mistake, but she wants someone to pay for it. “And look at the way they spelled the word ‘died,’” she says. “They spelled it with a y. Like hair dye. Where did you find these people?”
She isn’t talking to me. Or to anyone who can do anything about it. The same family has done the Whitney gravestones for years, stonecutters from Italy, marble cutters G.G. brought over. I’ve known them since I was a little girl. They did the intricately carved center monument. They did all the granite sculptures in Eva’s gardens: carving delicate rose petals and ferns from the hard New England granite that was so different from the soft marble they were used to. They are great stonecutters, if not great spellers, and I won’t have Anya saying anything bad about them.
I walk down the rows of Whitney markers. When I get to Lyndley’s, I stop and stare. Lyndley’s name is spelled wrong, too. They got the last name right, Boynton, but they spelled her first name with an s instead of an l (“Lyndsey” instead of “Lyndley”). I feel a bit sick, standing here. And dizzy.
When I get back to the group, Anya is holding Auntie Emma’s arm. She has remembered herself and has stopped ranting.
Dr. Ward is reading prayers at the graveside. He keeps glancing at Auntie Emma as he reads, directing the reading to her. But she doesn’t seem to notice. She is not looking at the minister but at the piles of dirt by the open grave. Still, I don’t think she has any idea that we are burying her mother today. The day I arrived, she seemed to know. But today she seems oblivious. Her eyes remain fixed as we recite the Twenty-third Psalm. She does not appear sad or even terribly curious about what we all are doing here.
The ceremony is over now, and some of the people are leaving. But none of us wants to leave Eva here aboveground, not with the protesters still out there below. So some of us stay behind, waiting until she is lowered, each taking a ritual handful of earth or flowers and putting them down with Eva.
And then, when it finally is over, when we all turn to go, there is a gasp from one of the red-hatted women. I reel around in time to see one of Cal’s disciples walking toward the cemetery. He’s robed and sandaled, and his hair is long and flowing. He has a beard. Even Dr. Ward cannot help staring. Then I see Rafferty step in front of him, blocking his way. The group of protesters moves in, and the police cars converge. I can see Rafferty’s face all twisted up as if he’d just tasted bad fish or something
“Jesus Christ!” the pastel woman says.
“Hardly,” says one of the Red Hats.
“That’s not Jesus, that’s John the Baptist,” another Red Hat chimes in.
“And that’s Cal Boynton,” says a second in a far less jocular voice. She gestures to a man wearing a black Armani suit.
“How dare he!” says one of the other Red Hats.
The crowd goes still as Cal passes. He stops in front of my aunt.
“Hello, Emma,” he says to my aunt. She stiffens. “And hello, Sophya,” he says to me without turning, without having to look at me. “Welcome home.”
The ground spins, and Beezer grabs my arm.
Before I can think what to do, Rafferty is there. “Move along,” Rafferty says to Cal, who doesn’t budge.
“Relax, Detective Rafferty,” Cal says. “I’ve just come to pay my respects like everyone else.”
Anya has taken Auntie Emma’s arm and is leading her away from the crowd. “Come on,” Anya says. “It’s over.” Beezer looks at me. He stays by my side as Anya walks my aunt down the other side of the hill and out the back gate of the cemetery toward the harbor.
Beezer gestures for me to go ahead of him. “Let’s go home,” he says.
Rafferty stays behind, keeping an eye on Cal, making sure he doesn’t follow us.
At its peak, there were six hundred women making and selling Ipswich lace, which was shipped out of the town harbor to ports all over the world.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE
Chapter 9 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)
ANYA ACCOMPANIES AUNTIE EMMA back to Yellow Dog Island. When Anya gets to Eva’s house, she goes directly to the pantry and pours herself a drink. Besides May and my aunt, Dr. Ward is the only one who doesn’t come back to the house. He sends his apologies via note, explaining that he’s not feeling very well and promising that he’ll stop by later in the week to see me. All the rest of the mourners show up at the house, including all the witches. The Calvinists might just as well have shown up themselves, because they are everyone’s main topic of conversation. The nerve of them, everyone says, showing up like that at the cemetery. I’m still stunned by the whole thing, and I can tell that Beezer’s angry at me for it, or at least frustrated. He keeps insisting that I shouldn’t be surprised about this. He says I knew about Cal and how he had all these followers who dress up like the apostles and think he’s the Second Coming. Even though it was shocking and sick and everything, Beezer said, it really shouldn’t surprise me that much, because I knew about all of it already. We had talked about it more than a year ago, he said, and I’d told him it didn’t bother me.
I have no recollection of any such conversation, and I tell him so.
“Remember Eva sent you all those newspapers?” he said, as if that should do it. “She sent them to you because they had articles about Cal in them.”
I’m still looking at him blankly.
“For God’s sake, Towner, it was ATH.”
That’s how Beezer and I refer to my history. BTH was “before the hospital,” and ATH was after. When I first got out, Beezer helped me reconstruct my memories. A lot of the stories and images I have come directly from my brother, his own memories superimposed on the thin skeleton of my own. He came to California that next summer, on his school vacation, and he tried to help me. He was even thinking of staying out there for college, applying to Caltech, but then one day the whole thing got to be too much for him, and he had to leave. He only had a week left before he had to go back to prep school. He told me that Eva wanted him to come back early to get ready. I could tell he felt bad about it. I could also tell that it was a lie. Remembering was a difficult process. It got worse as it went on, especially when we started to talk about Lyndley. I remember suggesting that maybe we should have known about the abuse, or known at least that Lyndley was in trouble, that maybe we could have helped her. There were signs everywhere, I told him: the bruises, the precocious sexuality, the acting out. I could see Beezer’s face tighten as I went on and on about my sister. I could see him shutting down from it. This wasn’t something he could talk about; it was too much for him, as it might have been for any healthy person, anyone who wasn’t obsessed with the whole thing the way I was. I wanted to let it go, but I was powerless in the face of the scraps of memory I did have. I clung to them as if they were a life raft, and it was just too much for my brother to handle.
Beezer is very patient with my BTH lapses, but he cannot tolerate any lapses ATH. I had no shock therapy ATH and no more extended hospitalizations, with the exception of my recent surgery, but that was physical, not mental (although my ex-shrink might be the first one to dispute that point). The newspapers, the ones my brother kept referring to as proof that I knew about Cal’s new vocation, were the ones I had never opened. So Beezer’s proof meant nothing to me. I don’t remember talking about Cal with my brother at all. It is starting to piss me off, actually, the way Beezer keeps telling me how I feel and that it doesn’t bother me. I know he needs me to be okay with it, and I respect that, but come on. For God’s sake, I think I would have some recollection of being told that my uncle, Cal Boynton, was a fundamentalist preacher whose followers believed he was the new Messiah. I think I would have remembered something like that.
When the crowd thins out a bit, Beezer goes down and raids Eva’s wine cellar, coming back with some sweet sherry, a dusty Armagnac, and some amontillado.
“Oh, goody,” Anya says, “how very Foe.”
The pastels and the Red Hats are glad to see the sherry, and they pour tiny glasses for everyone. I put on some tea in Eva’s honor, and people settle around the little tables with their lace doilies as if it were a regular day at the tearoom and not the day of Eva’s funeral. I’m thinking I should make cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off, the way Eva would have, but there isn’t any food in the house besides the things that people brought, plus the sherry and the tea. Looking back, I realize that Eva forgot to teach me death etiquette, because, with the exception of Lyndley, no one in the family has died since G.G. and my grandmother, but both happened when I was a small girl and too young to attend services. I didn’t go to Lyndley’s funeral because I was in the hospital by then, but I suppose that they must have had one and that they probably came back here afterward. Where else would they go?
One of the pastels has had too much of the sherry. Her face is red, and she is starting to cry. She is talking about Eva and how she helped her son. She’s talking about dancing school and how hopelessly clumsy he was as a boy, and somewhere in her rambling monologue I realize that her son has “passed on,” that he died in the Gulf War. “Friendly fire,” she says, smiling strangely, “as if there is any such thing.” And then she turns to me. “You can’t let her gardens die,” she says urgently, grabbing my arm. “Promise me you won’t let them die.”
I nod because I don’t know what else to do, and because the two are somehow tied together in her mind, Eva’s gardens and her dead son, but I can’t quite figure out how they are connected, so I just nod stupidly and promise.
The whole group is quiet. One of the Red Hats takes the crying woman’s hand, and then Ruth, the only one who is still wearing her hat, takes it off and presents it to the crying woman, holding it out, offering it like an old-fashioned elixir guaranteed to cure any ill. I don’t know if it is the hat itself or the childlike innocence of the gesture, but it works. The crying matron doesn’t put the hat on her head but runs her hands over it, as if it were some beloved cat who had just jumped up on her lap to be petted. It seems to calm her. After a minute she manages to smile through her tears.
“You can put it on,” the Red Hat says.
And before the crying woman has a chance to refuse, Ruth takes the big floppy pastel hat off the woman’s head and replaces it with the oversize red one. And then, like the Circle (the women on the island), the group surrounds their new friend.
When the Red Hats leave, they go in a group, the same way they arrived. The women wave as they go, their voices chorused together in condolence and compliments, fading like music, then splitting into single notes as they move to their separate cars. I don’t notice until later the lone hat propped against the mantel. I don’t see it until the grieving woman has already driven away, but by then it is too late, so I leave it there.
Someone has switched on the radio, looking for NPR, but the radio is old and the signal is weak, and WBUR has been hijacked by some stronger station, one that favors show tunes. This one’s playing South Pacific, Ezio Pinza singing “Some Enchanted Evening.”
By the time Rafferty stops in, most of the people are gone. He walks over to Jay-Jay, the only person here he really knows. I watch Jay-Jay trying to straighten up as Rafferty approaches. By then both Jay-Jay and Beezer are getting pretty drunk, because while everyone else has been drinking one form of sherry or tea, Beezer and Jay-Jay have appropriated the Armagnac for themselves and are carrying the bottle around refilling their snifters. I’ve never seen Beezer drunk, and it has never even occurred to me that he might drink, but Anya seems comfortable with it. She’s walking again as if she were attached to his hip, carrying her drained glass of sweet sherry upside down like a little dinner bell she’s about to ring to summon her guests to the table.
Jay-Jay pours himself another drink.
“Where are the tea ladies?” Rafferty asks.
“You’ve just missed them,” I say, and he looks relieved.
“Have the Calvinists gone back to their cages?” Jay-Jay wants to know.
“Trailers,” Rafferty corrects him, “and yes, they have, for now.”
I detect a trace of a New York accent.
“Your mother’s not here?” Rafferty asks me, eyes scanning the room. Considering he’s a cop, it takes him a while to notice things.
“No.”
He seems surprised. Obviously he doesn’t know May very well. “You’re not staying in this house all alone, are you?”
I don’t answer that kind of question, even from a cop.
“Anya and I are staying with Towner,” Beezer says, jumping in to rescue me.
“Oh, of course,” Rafferty says, suddenly realizing how it sounded. “Sorry.”
“Were you asking as an officer of the law or merely a concerned citizen?” I say, trying to make light of it.
“More like an attempt at small talk,” he says.
“Then you need a drink.” Beezer goes for a glass, offering the Armagnac.
Rafferty holds up a hand, declines.
“AA,” Jay-Jay mouths in exaggerated pantomime to Beezer, but we all catch it, including Rafferty, who rolls his eyes.
“Tea?” I offer.
“God no,” he says, horrified, and we both laugh.
Beezer figures I’ve got it covered and turns back to Anya and Jay-Jay.
Rafferty is looking for something to say to me. His eyes scan the room. Finally he settles on the obvious. “I’m sorry about your grandmother,” he says. “She was a nice lady.”
“She was my great-aunt, actually,” I say, and I can tell he doesn’t know what to say to that, “but thank you.”
We stand there awkwardly, neither knowing what to say next.
“How did you two know each other?” I finally ask.
“I used to come here for lunch,” he said.
I think of the lunch fare on Eva’s menu: finger sandwiches, cucumber and dill on dainty white crustless bread, date-nut bread with cream cheese. It seems unlikely.
“I’m a big fan of the fancy sandwich,” he explains.
It’s the last thing I’d expect him to say, and it makes me smile.
I seem to remember Eva mentioning that she was good friends with a cop. For some reason I had pictured her friend as much older.
Rafferty is trying to figure out what I’m thinking. He looks at me strangely.
I’m searching my Eva training for something to say when I notice that he still has nothing to drink. “How about a soda?” I offer. “I think I saw some in the pantry. I don’t know how old it is, though.”
“Any vintage after 1972 is okay with me.”
I go to the kitchen and get some ice, coming back with both glass and soda. Jay-Jay has started pulling boxes of old photographs out of the bottom drawer of the buffet. He and Beezer have them spread out on every available surface, and there’s no place to pour. I hand the glass to Rafferty and unscrew the cap of the soda. It snaps when the seal breaks, so I know it’s still good—too good, actually. When I start to pour, it fizzes up and over the side of the glass. I don’t know if it’s because it is so hot in the pantry or because I’ve put too much ice in the glass, but before I reach the halfway point, it’s fizzing up and over the rim of the glass and is about to land on the Aubusson when Rafferty sticks a finger in the glass to stop it.
We stand there stupidly, Rafferty with his index finger in the glass up to the second knuckle, me looking around frantically for something to put under it. “It’s okay,” he says. “It stopped.”
“Sorry,” I say to him. Then, looking at his finger, I comment, “Nice trick.”
“I used to be a beer drinker,” he says, “in my last life.”
Beezer and Anya take a pile of the old photos to the window seat, begin shuffling through them. Jay-Jay, who’s invasive by nature, walks around the room, opening up cabinets and picking out objects he remembers from childhood. He spent a lot of time in this room when he was younger. He and Beezer played board games and poker in here when Beezer was home on vacation. They’d clear off one of the bigger tables and spread their stuff out, and I remember that it would drive Eva crazy. They would get rid of all the lace in the room, hiding it in drawers and under cushions, and she would still be looking for pieces for weeks after Beezer had gone back to boarding school.
“Remember this?” Jay-Jay says, holding up a teapot in the shape of a bird.
“I remember when you broke it,” Beezer says, looking it over, pointing out the crack.
“She made us work off the debt serving high tea.” Jay-Jay goes back into the cabinet, digging deeper.
“You got a search warrant to do that?” Rafferty says to him.
“Oh, Towner doesn’t mind,” Jay-Jay says.
Rafferty looks at me, checking. I shrug.
“Curiosity killed the cat,” Rafferty says, then smiles.
“And satisfaction brought it back,” Jay-Jay retorts.
Rafferty shakes his head.
“It probably makes him a good cop, though,” I say to Rafferty.
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” It’s so genuine and unfiltered that I can’t help but laugh. He looks immediately sorry. The doorbell rings.
“Saved by the bell,” he says, and rolls his eyes again. It’s as if Eva were in the room, channeling clichés through us.
It’s the woman who forgot her hat. I grab it, head to the door. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry? I think, but I don’t say it out loud this time.
“Sorry,” the woman says. “I got all the way to Beverly before I realized I’d left it here.” I walk her across the porch. “Eva would have been so happy you came back,” she says. “I hope you don’t mind me saying so.” She doesn’t wait for an answer.
It is finally cooling. Somewhere in the park, someone is playing a violin.
They’re telling stories about Eva when I return. Prompted by the photos. Every picture is a story. They’re one-upping each other, Beezer and Jay-Jay, playing to Anya or to Rafferty or to anyone else who will listen.
“It’s starting to sound like an Irish wake.” Rafferty hands me the empty soda glass, not wanting to put it down amid all the photos.
“More?” I ask, surprised that he’s finished it so fast. He holds up a hand—he’s had enough. “Eva was part Irish,” I say.
“You’re kidding,” he says, and I can tell he is surprised.
“On her mother’s side.” I remember that Eva used to tell us that our Irish blood is what made all of us good “readers,” that all Irish people have the gift of blind sight, or at least all Irishwomen do. But I don’t have any Irish in me. My grandmother was G.G.’s first wife, Elizabeth, who died giving birth to my mother. May is quite psychic as well, though she goes out of her way to deny it. So the gift must come from both sides of the family.
The stories from the other end of the room are getting too loud for us to carry on any other conversation.
“Remember the time she told the Republican candidate for governor not to run?” Jay-Jay says, and Beezer does a spit take. “What was it she said to him?”
“No good could come of it,” Beezer says.
“Yeah, that’s it.” Jay-Jay turns to Anya. “The guy had a ton of money. People thought he actually had a shot at winning. A week before the election, he slipped on one of his glossy four-color campaign flyers and ended up spending six weeks on his back in some Podunk hospital out in East Cupcake that he didn’t dare leave because he was afraid he would, quote, ‘alienate his constituents.’”
“Who voted straight Democrat anyway,” Beezer tells Anya.
“So he lost?” Anya asks in disbelief.
“A Republican? In Massachusetts? Of course he lost. Doesn’t take a psychic to predict that one.” Jay-Jay is laughing his ass off.
“You think we should tell him about our recent run of Republican governors?” Rafferty asks, then decides against it. Anya and Beezer are laughing so hard they can’t tell him either.
“What?” Jay-Jay says, but Beezer’s got his whoop laugh going now, and no one is immune to it.
Rafferty looks at me. The whole party is laughing now. Beezer laughs silently, his face in a grimace that looks like something out of a horror film. The only noise he makes is on the intake, a big whooping wheeze that sounds like he’s kidding, but he’s not. People start to calm down, and then he whoops, and they are off again, weak with laughter and release.
Jay-Jay’s girlfriend, Irene something-or-other, comes running up to us.
“Where’s the bathroom,” she says urgently. “I think I’m gonna pee my pants.”
“Great,” I say, pointing to the hall, and I follow to make sure she gets there.
Rafferty follows me out into the hall.
“The last door,” I point, and she goes in.
Rafferty and I are in the hallway then, where it is slightly quieter, the voices muffled. He seems grateful for the quiet. He looks relieved, then awkward, searching for words.
“This was a hard case,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“This case. Eva’s. Usually when somebody disappears without a trace, it’s Eva I go to.”
“Really?”
“She’s helped us more than once, actually.”
I remember Eva talking about her friend the cop. How she had done a reading that helped him find a missing boy. So I was right; the friend she’d talked about was Rafferty.
“She was a hell of a lady.”
“I’m glad you knew her.”
“She talked about you all the time.”
I hate the thought of Eva talking about me, and he can tell. I try to cover, but it’s too late.
“All nice things,” he said, but I can tell he knows more than all nice things. Everyone in this town knows more than nice things about me; they’re public knowledge. I can’t imagine the discussions he might have had about me with Eva—about my hospitalization. God, if he got curious and looked up my police records, he’d have enough material to talk about me for the next year.
“I need to sit down,” I say, realizing it’s true only as I say it. I feel a little sick. It’s been a long day, and I’m not supposed to be having long days. My head is reeling with the noise of everything in this room that isn’t being said. I have no more strength to push away people’s thoughts. I can hear all their unspoken questions: Why the hell did she come back? How crazy is she, do you think? Before Rafferty has a chance to protest, I escape back inside.
I cross the room, putting distance between us, going to a table in the bay window. Rafferty comes in a minute later. He scans the crowd until he sees me, then walks over and leans down.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “That was another poor attempt at small talk.”
I don’t have it in me to smile.
“Eva kept telling me over and over how bad I was at this kind of thing.”
I feel some compassion for him. He is trying. I look at him and realize that his secret thoughts, whatever they might be, are probably the only ones in this room that I’m not reading tonight.
“She kept telling me she’d give me a discount on one of her manners classes,” he says.
There is a long pause. He shifts awkwardly. “I guess I should have taken her up on it.”
I’m still trying to think of something to say back to him, something polite but not personal. Finally I get it. I speak to him in Aunt Eva’s own words. “I like soup. Do you like soup?”
It is a test. To see how much he knows. If he has talked to Eva as much as I suspect he has, he will know the expression. It was one of her favorites. Especially if they were talking about the skill of making small talk or his lack thereof. Learning to talk about soup was the first lesson Eva taught.
He looks at me curiously. I’m watching his eyes, waiting for signs of recognition. He shows nothing. “Excuse me?” he says slowly, deliberately.
I’m staring at him now, trying to read his thoughts. His mind is either intentionally blank or unreadable. His eyes are steady. He might be telling the truth, or he might be just a hell of a good cop. I can’t decide which.
Irene comes back into the room then, fluffing her skirts down as she goes. “What’d I miss?”
“Tell her about the statue,” Jay-Jay says to Beezer. “Hey, Reenie, you gotta hear this one.”
“I was telling Anya about the time Cal tried to get the statue of Roger Conant removed,” Beezer explains.
Irene smiles, remembering.
“Because it looks like a witch?” Anya asks.
“Because it looks like it’s masturbating,” says Irene.
“What?” Anya says, peering out the window at the statue of Salem’s founding father, which is right across the square. “Oh, please, it does not.”
“Swear to God.” Jay-Jay crosses his heart.
Irene goes to the window and tries to point it out to Anya, who’s squinting into the gathering darkness, trying to make herself see it.
“Where?” Anya says.
“Right there. The way he’s holding his staff.”
“More like his rod,” Jay-Jay says, and even Irene thinks he’s gone too far.
“I’ve gotta get back to work,” Rafferty says then. I start to get up to walk him to the door. “You want me to take him with me?” He gestures to Jay-Jay.
“He’s okay,” I say.
Rafferty shrugs.
“Thank you for coming,” I say.
“We’ll see each other again.”
“Yes,” I say.
I walk him to the door, watch as he walks down the steps to the black unmarked car. He sits there for a minute, then starts the engine and does an illegal U-turn on the square, barely missing a parked car.
Ann Chase is cleaning up, gathering dishes off the tables, taking them to the kitchen. I follow her.
“See? There? It really does look like he’s jerking off.”
“Does not,” Anya says, but she’s laughing now, a hearty Norwegian sort of laugh.
“Does too,” Lyndley’s voice says in my mind, flashing a random memory. It was the summer before Lyndley died that she discovered the statue of Roger Conant. I don’t mean she literally discovered it—we’d been looking at that statue all our lives. But that summer when she looked at it, she saw something completely different. She was laughing so hard she almost couldn’t tell us what she was laughing at. She stood on the curb directing us, making us walk around and around the statue, looking at it from all angles until we saw what she had seen. It was Beezer who saw it first, and his face turned bright red. He was so embarrassed he actually went back inside the house, although I’m sure he wouldn’t remember that now. It took me a lot longer. By the time I saw it, cars were stopped, tooting their horns at me, and Lyndley was laughing, yelling back at the cars, telling them not to “get their panties in a wad,” a southern expression she’d picked up over the winter and one she used for everything. Finally a driver laid on the horn; and Lyndley gave him the finger. It was then that I caught the right angle on old Roger Conant, and I just started laughing hysterically. I don’t know if it was the expression on the driver’s face or on Lyndley’s or the sight of our distinguished founding father all robed and holding a staff that from the back right angle looked like an erect penis. I don’t know which thing set me off, but I didn’t stop laughing until Eva came and got me off the sidewalk and made me come back to the house. She didn’t ask me what I was laughing at. I had the impression that she didn’t want to know.
“I’m not seeing it,” Anya says.
“You can’t see it so well from here,” Beezer says to Anya. “It’s better from outside.” Then he tells her the story about how Eva single-handedly saved that statue and how it pissed Cal off royally but made Eva a town heroine from that moment on.
I grab some more dishes and follow Ann Chase to the kitchen. She is standing at the sink, carefully peeling off a piece of lace that has gotten itself stuck to the bottom of a saucer.
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Brunonia Barry
Drawn by family. Driven by fear. Haunted by fate.Would knowing the future be a gift or a burden? Or even a curse…?The Whitney women of Salem, Massachusetts are renowned for reading the future in the patterns of lace. But the future doesn’t always bring good news – as Towner Whitney knows all too well. When she was just fifteen her gift sent her whole world crashing to pieces. She predicted – and then witnessed – something so horrific that she vowed never to read lace again, and fled her home and family for good. Salem is a place of ghosts for Towner, and she swore she would never return.Yet family is a powerful tie and fifteen years later, Towner finds herself back in Salem. Her beloved great-aunt Eva has suddenly disappeared – and when you’ve lived a life like Eva’s, that could mean real trouble. But Salem is wreathed in sickly shadows and whispered half-memories. It’s fast becoming clear that the ghosts of Towner’s fractured past have not been brought fully into the light. And with them comes the threat of terrifying new disaster.A literary page-turner with depth, narrative power and a story that novels like ‘The Thirteenth Tale’ can only dream of, ‘The Lace Reader’ is a bewitching and tightly plotted read.
BRUNONIA BARRY
The Lace Reader
To my wonderful husband, Gary, and to my sister-in-law Joanne’s magical red hair
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 (#u75869f1e-64ca-5dbd-bc97-d4f63bbd23e6)
Chapter 2 (#ud670635f-db58-5b66-a343-f6108ec742cc)
Chapter 3 (#u69dd572a-6522-530d-8d87-f76ececb4400)
Chapter 4 (#u20504f3d-ab9d-5218-9ec7-ac72a3efe280)
Chapter 5 (#ua3f7ca9d-09b6-5b85-b2d1-f00ffc4ce348)
Chapter 6 (#u5fc71c22-3e77-54a0-844b-ca76b60faaeb)
Chapter 7 (#ueb45a49d-e4a9-5c64-bfcc-ab0da340df32)
Chapter 8 (#u755950a3-9113-5fe3-8bad-f29a1f87687e)
Chapter 9 (#ueb513a39-36f9-55be-a2fd-ab8b83fd25c4)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Disclaimer (#litres_trial_promo)
To Learn More About The Lace Reader (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)
MY NAME IS TOWNER WHITNEY. No, that’s not exactly true. My real first name is Sophya. Never believe me. I lie all the time.
I am a crazy woman…That last part is true.
My little brother, Beezer, who is kinder than I, says the craziness is genetic. We’re from five generations of crazy, he says, as if it were a badge he’s proud to wear, though he admits that I may have taken it to a new level.
Until I came along, the Whitney family was what the city of Salem fondly refers to as “quirky.” If you were old Salem money, even if that money was long gone, you were never referred to as “crazy.” You might be deemed “unusual,” or even “oddball,” but the hands-down-favorite word for such a condition was “quirky.”
Throughout the generations the Whitney men have all become famous for their quirks: from the captains of sea and industry all the way down to my little brother, Beezer, who is well known within scientific circles for his articles on particle physics and string theory.
Our great-great-grandfather, for example, parlayed a crippling preoccupation with ladies’ feet into a brilliant career as a captain of industry in Lynn’s thriving shoe business, creating a company that was passed down through the generations all the way to my grandfather G. G. Whitney. Our great-great-great-grandfather, who was a legitimate captain in his own right, had a penchant for sniffing cinnamon that many considered obsessive. Eventually he built a fleet of spice-trading ships that traveled the globe and made Salem one of the richest ports in the New World.
Still, anyone would admit that it is the women of the Whitney family who have taken quirky to a new level of achievement. My mother, May, for example, is a walking contradiction in terms. A dedicated recluse who (with the exception of her arrests) hasn’t left her home on Yellow Dog Island for the better part of twenty years, May has nevertheless managed to revive a long-defunct lace-making industry and to make herself famous in the process. She has gained considerable notoriety for rescuing abused women and children and turning their lives around, giving the women a place in her lace-making business and home-educating their children. All this from a raging agoraphobic who gave one of her own children to her barren half sister, Emma, in a fit of generosity because, as she said at the time, there was a need, and besides, she had been blessed with a matching set.
And my Great-Aunt Eva, who is more mother to me than May ever has been, is equally strange. Running her own business well into her eighties, Eva is renowned as both Boston Brahmin and Salem witch when, really, she is neither. Actually, Eva is an old-school Unitarian with Transcendentalist tendencies. She quotes Scripture in the same breath as she quotes Emerson and Thoreau. Yet in recent years Eva has spoken only in clichés, as if use of the tired metaphor can somehow remove her from the inevitable outcomes she is paid to predict.
For thirty-five years of her life, Eva has run a ladies’ tearoom and franchised successful etiquette classes to the wealthy children of Boston’s North Shore. But what Eva will be remembered for is her uncanny ability to read lace. People come from all over the world to be read by Eva, and she can tell your past, present, and future pretty accurately just by holding the lace in front of you and squinting her eyes.
In one form or another, all the Whitney women are readers. My twin sister, Lyndley, said she couldn’t read lace, but I never believed her. The last time we tried, she saw the same thing I saw in the pattern, and what we saw that night led her to the choices that eventually killed her. When Lyndley died, I resolved never to look at a piece of lace again.
This is one of the only things Eva and I have ever vehemently disagreed about. “It wasn’t that the lace was wrong,” she always insisted. “It was the reader’s interpretation that failed.” I know that’s supposed to make me feel better. Eva never says anything to intentionally hurt. But Lyndley and I interpreted the lace the same way that night, and though our choices might have been different, nothing that Eva says can ever bring my sister back.
After Lyndley’s death, I had to get out of Salem and ended up in California, which was as far as I could go without falling off the end of the earth. I know that Eva wants me to come home to Salem. It’s for my own good, she says. But I can’t bring myself to do it.
Just recently, when I had my hysterectomy, Eva sent me her lace pillow, the one she uses to make the lace. It was delivered to the hospital.
“What is it?” my nurse asked, holding it up, staring at the bobbins and the piece of lace, a work in progress, still attached to it. “Some kind of pillow?”
“It’s a lace maker’s pillow,” I said. “For making Ipswich lace.”
She regarded me blankly. I could tell she had no idea what to say. It didn’t look like any pillow she had ever seen. And what the hell was Ipswich lace?
“Try holding it against your sutures if you have to cough or sneeze,” she finally said. “That’s what we use pillows for around here.”
I felt around until I found the secret pocket hidden in the pillow. I slipped my fingers in, looking for a note. Nothing.
I know that Eva hopes I will start reading lace again. She believes that lace reading is a God-given gift, and that we are required to honor such gifts.
I imagine the note she might have written: “Of those to whom much is given, much is expected—Luke 12:48.” She used to quote that bit of Scripture as proof.
I can read lace, and I can read minds, though it isn’t something I try to do; it is something that just happens sometimes. My mother can do both, but over the years May has become a practical woman who believes that knowing what is in people’s minds or their futures is not always in anyone’s best interest. This is probably the only point upon which my mother and I have ever agreed.
When I left the hospital, I stole the pillowcase off one of their pillows. The Hollywood Presbyterian label was double stamped on both sides. I stuffed Eva’s lace pillow inside, hiding the threads, the lace, and the bonelike bobbins that were swinging like tiny Poe pendulums.
If there was a future for me, and I was not altogether certain there was, I wasn’t going to risk reading it in the lace.
Each Reader must choose a piece of lace. It is hers for life. It might be a pattern handed down through the generations or a piece chosen by the Reader for its beauty and familiarity. Many Readers prefer the handmade laces, particularly those of old Ipswich or the laces made today by the women of Yellow Dog Island.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE
Chapter 2 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)
WHEN THE PHONE CALL COMES IN, I am dreaming of water. Not the warm blues and greens of the California beach towns where I live now, but the dark New England Atlantic of my youth. In my dream I am swimming to the moon. Like all dreams, it seems logical. The idea that there is no pathway between sea and moon never occurs.
I swim my own combination: part breaststroke, part drownproofing: slow and purposeful, a rhythm remembered from another lifetime. The movement is all efficiency, with just nose, ears, and eyes protruding above the water, mouth submerged. With each forward stroke, tiny waves of salt enter my open mouth, then recede again as I slow, mirroring the larger surrounding ocean.
I swim for a long time. Past Salem Harbor and the swells. Past any sight of land at all. I swim until the sea becomes still and clear, too calm to be any real ocean. The light from the full dream-moon etches a clear path on the black water, a road to follow. There is no sound save my own breath, slow and steady as I swim.
This was once my sister’s dream. Now it is only mine.
The rhythm of movement gives way to a sound rhythm as the telephone rings again and then again. This is one of the only phones that actually rings anymore, and part of the reason I agreed to take this house-sitting job. It is the kind of phone we might have had on our island. That’s the one interesting thing about what has happened to me. I am encouraged to rewrite my own history. In the history I am writing, May actually has a phone.
My therapist, Dr. Fukuhara, is a Jungian. She believes in symbols and shadows. As do I. But my therapy has stopped for the time being. We have come to an impasse, was the way Dr. Fukuhara put it. I laughed when she said it. Not because it was funny but because it was the kind of cliché that my Aunt Eva would use.
On the fourth ring, the answering machine picks up. The machine is old also, not as old as the phone, but the kind where you can screen calls and hear a little bit of the message before you decide whether it’s worth it to actually speak to a live person.
My brother’s voice sounds tinny and too loud.
I stretch to pick up, pulling the surgery stitches that are still inside me, the ones that haven’t yet dissolved.
“What?” I say.
“I’m sorry to wake you,” Beezer says.
I remember falling asleep on this couch last night, too tired to get up, hypnotized by the smell of night-blooming jasmine and the sound of Santana playing over the hill at the Greek.
“I’m sorry,” he says again. “I wouldn’t have called you, but…”
“But May’s in trouble again.” It’s the only time Beezer ever calls these days. At last count, May has been arrested six times in her efforts to help abuse victims. Recently my brother informed me that he’d put the number of the local bail bondsman on his speed dial.
“It’s not May,” he says.
My throat tightens.
“It’s Eva.”
Dead, I’m thinking. Oh, my God, Eva is dead.
“She’s missing, Towner.”
Missing. The word has no meaning. “Missing” is the last word I expected to hear.
Palm fronds clatter against the open window. It’s already way too hot. Clear Santa Ana sky, earthquake weather. I reach up to pull the window shut. The cat runs scratches across my legs as it lunges for the freedom of the canyon, leaping through the window as it slams, catching just a few tail hairs, the last trace of what was here just moments ago and is now gone, that fast. Immediately the cat scratches on my legs begin to welt.
“Towner?”
“Yeah?”
“I think you’d better come home.”
“Yeah,” I say, “yeah, okay.”
It is called Ipswich lace, or bobbin lace, or bone lace. It is made on bolster pillows held on the laps of the women. The pillows are round or elliptical and most resemble the muffs that Victorian women later carried to keep their hands warm while riding in their carriages. Each woman makes her own pillow, and those pillows are as individual as the women themselves. In old Ipswich the pillows were pieced together from bits of fabric, then stuffed with beach grass.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE
Chapter 3 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)
THE SALEM NEWS HAS ALREADY picked up the story about Eva’s disappearance: “Elderly Woman Missing Ten Days” and “Lace Reader of Salem Vanishes.” Eva used to send me the Salem paper. It was around the time that May started making the headlines. For a while I actually read them. My mother’s clashes with the police over her tactics for saving abused women were becoming famous and made for good copy. Eventually I stopped reading the papers and would leave them on the porch in their wrappers until my landlord would get fed up and take them to Santa Monica for recycling or, if it was winter, roll them up tightly and burn them in her fireplace like logs.
The paper speculates that Eva just wandered away. A woman interviewed from the Salem Council on Aging suggests tagging the elderly residents of Salem. It evokes an interesting image—cops with ear tags and tranquilizer guns rounding up old people. Realizing she’s gone too far with her suggestion, the woman goes on to say: “This kind of thing happens all the time. Salem is a small city. I’m sure she couldn’t have gotten far.”
The woman clearly didn’t know my aunt.
The ferry from Boston lets me off on Derby Street, a few blocks from the House of the Seven Gables, where Nathaniel Hawthorne’s cousin grew up. I am named after Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia Peabody, although the spelling is different; my name is spelled Sophya. I was brought up to believe that Ms. Peabody was a distant relative, but I found out from Eva that we weren’t related to the Peabodys at all, that May simply found Sophia interesting, and appropriated her as our own. (So now you see which side of the family the lying thing comes from.) By the time it would have bothered me, May and I were hardly speaking anyway. I had already moved in with Aunt Eva. I had changed my name to Towner and wouldn’t answer to anything else. So it didn’t matter all that much.
I’m walking for a long time. The estrogen patch on my arm begins to itch. I have a rash from it, but I don’t know what to do about that, short of ripping the damned thing off. I figure the rash is probably from the heat. I’d forgotten how hot it can get in New England in the summer, and how humid. Ahead of me tourists swarm. Buses line the lot at the Gables, jamming the side streets. People move in groups, snapping photos, stuffing souvenirs into bags that are already far too full.
Around every corner of Salem lurks a history lesson. Dead ahead as I walk is the Custom House with its gold roof. This is where Hawthorne worked his day job, an appointed position as clerk. Using the locals as subject matter, revealing their secrets, Hawthorne basically wrote his way out of this town, escaping west to Concord before the townspeople remembered their talent with the old tar and feathers. Still, now they celebrate Hawthorne as their own. The same way they celebrate the witches, who never existed at all in the days of the witch trials but who thrive here in great numbers now.
A kid steps in front of me, asking directions to the common. There are three kids actually, two girls and a boy. All in black. Goths, is my first thought, but no, definitely young witches. What gives it away finally is the BLESSED BE T-shirt worn by one of the girls.
I point. “Follow the yellow brick road,” I say. Actually it’s a tour line painted on the street, and it’s red, not yellow, but they get the idea. A man in a huge Frankenstein head walks by, handing out flyers. I want to call for the continuity person, but this isn’t a movie set. A cruiser slows, the cop looks at the kids, then at me. The boy spots the witch logo on the side of the police car, gives the cop a big thumbs-up. Frankenstein hands each of us a Freaky Tours flyer and sneezes inside his big hollow head. “Universal tours without the budget” is what Beezer calls this place. I heard from my brother that Salem is trying to shed its image as Witch City. He told me last year that they were attempting to pass an ordinance to limit the number of haunted houses that can be erected within one city block. From the look of things, the ordinance didn’t pass.
The second girl, the shorter of the two, grabs the side of her head, pulling it slowly until her neck cracks. Celtic-knot tattoo on the nape of her neck, hair way too dark for her pale skin. “Come on, let’s go,” she says to the guy, and grabs his arm, leading him away from me. “Thanks,” he says. Our eyes meet, and he flashes a quick smile. She steps between us then, turning him wide like a big ship she’s trying to keep on course. I follow them, walking in the same direction toward Eva’s house but leaving a safe distance so she won’t think I’m after him.
It’s a long walk toward the common. I hear the music before I see the crowd—it’s nature music, New Age. We could be back in Woodstock except for the preponderance of black clothing. I’m wondering what holiday it is, what Pagan celebration. I count the days and realize that it’s some kind of summer-solstice thing, though it’s about a week too late. Living in L.A. has made me forget the seasons. Here the arrival of summer is something for everyone to celebrate, Pagan or not.
Salem Common, with its huge oaks and maples and the Gothic cast-iron fence, triggers a lost school memory. There used to be tunnels under the common, sometime after the witches but before the Revolution. The shipping merchants probably used the tunnels to hide trade bounty from their English tax collectors; that was the theory anyway. After the war for independence finally started, the tunnels were used by the privateers, who were the same thing as pirates, really, but with the government’s permission. Not England’s permission—it was the British ships they were stealing—but permission of the new government. I’m told they also hid ammunition there, and saltpeter. Beezer and I used to search for the tunnels when we were little, but Eva told us that they’re all filled in now.
I turn the corner by the Hawthorne Hotel and see the low blue flame from the old glassed-in popcorn machine, which is still on the corner across from the hotel, as it has been every year since my mother was a little girl. There’s also a makeshift stand selling wands and crystals, but that’s new. Across the street stands the imposing statue of Roger Conant, who, after failing to realize his original goal in Cape Ann, ended up founding the city that would become Salem. I’m reminded of the cliché Eva used to repeat at least ten times a week: There are no accidents. And the one that inevitably followed. Everything happens for a reason.
The cops are everywhere: on bicycles, talking to people, asking for fire permits. “You can’t do that here,” I hear one of them say. “If you want to have a bonfire, you have to go up to Gallows Hill, or to the beach.”
I cross the street. I open the gate to Eva’s house, catching a whiff of flowers, peonies, coming from her gardens. There are hundreds of them now, tree peonies on small bushes that die back every winter. Eva has done well with her gardens. She used to leave a key for me in a peony blossom when she knew I was coming. Or she would place it in one of the daylilies if it was later in the season and the peonies were no longer blooming. I’d forgotten that. But there are too many flowers now. I could never find a key here, and of course she hasn’t left a key this time, because she wasn’t expecting me.
The brick house is much larger than I remember. More imposing and older. Huge chimneys list to windward. Off the back, away from the crowds of Salem Common, is the coach house, which is connected to the main house by the winter porch. The coach house is more damaged than the main house—probably from the weather or from neglect—and it seems to be leaning on the porch, which is showing its age and sagging under the weight. Still, its windows with their wavy old glass are sparkling, not spotted with salt from the sea air, which means that Eva washed them not too long ago, as she does with all the windows she can reach (eighty-five years old or not), the same way she washes them every April when she does her spring cleaning. She gets to all the first-floor windows and the insides of all the upper floors. The outside windows of those upper floors remain filmy and salted, because Eva has the frugality of an old Yankee and refuses to pay anyone for services she thinks she should be able to perform herself. When Beezer and I lived in town with Eva, we offered to wash the windows, but she wouldn’t buy a ladder and said she didn’t want us climbing up on ladders anyway, so Beezer and I got used to distortion and haze. If you wanted to see clearly, you had to either look out the first-floor windows or climb all the way up to the widow’s walk.
The perfect line of first-floor windows gleams back at me from the winter porch. I catch my reflection in the wavy glass, and I’m surprised by it. When I left here, I was seventeen. I haven’t been back for fifteen years. I knew my reflection in the glass when I was seventeen, but today I don’t recognize the woman I see there.
The hours of Eva’s tearoom are posted on the front door. A sign that reads SORRY WE ARE CLOSED leans against one of the side panes.
A young girl sees me walking to the house. “There’s no one there,” the girl says, assuming I’m one of the witches. “I already checked.”
I nod and walk down the stairs. When she’s out of sight, I walk around to the back of the house, figuring I’m going to have to break in and not wanting to be seen.
When we were kids, my sister, Lyndley, and I could break into any house. I was a master at picking locks. We used to break into people’s houses just to sit in them—“like Goldilocks tasting porridge and sampling beds,” Lyndley used to say. For the most part, we limited our break-ins to the summerhouses. Down at the Willows one time, we broke into a house and actually cleaned it. That’s the kind of thing only a girl would do. Outlaw certainly, but homemaker, too.
I walk around the back of the coach house to a less visible spot half hidden by the garden. There is a small pane in the door, bull’s-eye glass, already cracked. Once I’m inside the coach house, getting into the main house is a snap. I pick up a rock, wrapping the sleeve of my shirt over it. A quick tap and the crack spreads. I pull the glass fragments out carefully and wedge my hand through the small space, twisting the dead bolt that has been the only thing holding the door in alignment. Either because the lock is so rusty or because I am, I don’t anticipate the way the door heaves as it opens. It pulls my arm with it, cutting through my cotton shirt, drawing blood. I watch the blood pool. It’s not too bad; there’s not very much of it, not after what I’ve gotten used to anyway. “Just a flesh wound, Copper,” I say aloud in my best Jimmy Cagney. Then, ridiculously on cue, a police cruiser actually pulls up, and, even more ridiculously, the father of my first boyfriend, Jack, climbs out of the car and walks toward the house. This is strange, since Jack’s father is not a cop, he’s a lobsterman. I’m having one of those moments when you’re pretty sure you’re dreaming but you don’t want to count on it. I regard Jack’s father as he approaches me, his face screwed up into half concern, half joy, looking stranger than anything in my dream life ever did.
“You should have called the station,” he says. “We have a key.” It is not Jack’s father’s voice but his younger brother’s that I finally recognize.
“Hi, Jay-Jay,” I say, getting it, remembering now that Beezer had told me Jay-Jay was a cop.
He hugs me. “Been a while,” he says, thinking, I’m sure, how bad I look and running through a list of possibilities in his head. I fight the urge to tell him I’ve just had my uterus cut out, that I almost bled to death before the emergency surgery.
“You’re bleeding,” he says, reaching out for my arm. The cops here aren’t as scared by blood as the cops in L.A. are.
“Just a flesh wound, Copper,” I say too loud. He leads me inside and makes me sit down at the kitchen table. I’m bare-armed now, holding a paper towel to my forearm.
“You need stitches,” Jay-Jay says.
“It’s fine.”
“At least get some Neosporin on it. Or some of that herbal crap Eva sells.”
“I’m fine, Jay-Jay,” I say, just a little too sharply.
A long silence. “I’m sorry about Eva,” he says finally. “I wish I had something new I could tell you.”
“Me, too.”
“That Alzheimer’s stuff is all crap. I saw her a week before she disappeared. She was still sharp as a tack.” He thinks a minute. “You need to talk to Rafferty.”
“Who?”
“Detective Rafferty. He’s your man. He’s the one who’s handling the case.”
He looks around the room as if there’s something here, something he wants to say, but then he changes his mind.
“What?”
“Nothing…. I’ll tell Rafferty you’re here. He’ll want to talk to you. He’s in court today, though. Traffic court. Whatever you do, don’t drive with him. He’s the worst driver in the world.”
“Okay,” I say, wondering why Jay-Jay thought driving with Rafferty was even a possibility. We stand there awkwardly, neither of us knowing how to follow that last thread of conversation.
“You look good,” he says finally. “For an old lady of…what? Thirty-one?”
“Thirty-two.”
“For thirty-two you look great,” he says, and laughs.
I don’t go into the main part of the house until Jay-Jay leaves. As soon as I open the door, I realize that everyone has made a big mistake.
Eva’s right here in this house. I can feel her. Her presence is so strong that I almost run after Jay-Jay to tell him to call off the search, that she has come back, but the cruiser has already turned the corner, so I’ll have to call the station.
But first I have to see my Aunt Eva. She must have gone on a trip and not told anyone. She probably doesn’t even know the whole town’s looking for her.
“Eva?” I call to her. She doesn’t answer. Her ears aren’t very good, not anymore. I call again, louder. Still no answer, but I know she’s here. She’s up on the widow’s walk or down in the root cellar mixing up a new kind of tea, something with bergamot and kumquat essence. Or maybe she never left, is what I’m thinking, though I know that’s not possible. They must have searched the house. At least I assume they did. Didn’t anyone come in here, for God’s sake? Didn’t May? No, she wouldn’t, damn her. But the cops would. Or my brother. Of course Beezer would have looked. Of course that’s the first thing they would have done. Eva wouldn’t have been reported missing unless she actually was missing, right? But now she’s back. It’s as plain as the nose on your face, I think, laughing out loud because I’m still channeling Eva’s clichés.
“Hey, Eva,” I call to her, knowing how deaf she’s gotten, but giving it a try anyway. “Eva, it’s me.”
I’m not sure where to start looking. I stand there, in the foyer. Ahead are two matching parlors with black marble fireplaces facing each other from the ends of the long rooms. One of the rooms is closed off; that’s the one Eva uses as her tearoom. I enter the other one. It’s more like a ballroom than a parlor. The fireplaces look empty with neither flames nor Eva’s usual arrangements of flowers in them. Chairs are placed symmetrically and strategically, like pieces on a chessboard. I look at the huge suspended staircase. I know that my next move should be up, but I decide to check the tearoom first, then the other kitchen, and the root cellar, where she blends the teas. I’m calling to her, talking as I go, speaking loudly so that she’ll hear me. I don’t want to sneak up and scare her into having a heart attack or something.
She’s probably upstairs. I’m not supposed to be climbing stairs yet, but I’m yelling to her now, and I realize I’m going to have to get up there. I use the railing to pull myself, but it’s easier to climb now than it was a few days ago, even though I can still feel the pull of the stitches with each step. When I reach the second-floor landing, I’m dizzy and have to sit down on a bench and wait until everything stops spinning. Finally I make my way to Eva’s room. Old canopy bed in the corner, fireplace, armoire. The bed is made, the pillows fluffed. I pick up a pillow and smell it, expecting Eva’s scent. Instead it smells of orange water, which is what Eva uses to rinse her linens. She must have changed the sheets recently. I check the walk-in closet. Everything hangs perfectly on the hangers. There is no laundry in the bins, which means that she has already washed the old sheets.
I spent a lot of time in this room when Eva took me in, a lot of time in this closet, actually, which Eva probably found odd but which she never mentioned. Eva is not my blood relation; she was my grandfather G.G.’s second wife, and no relation at all. Still, she understands me in the way a mother should and my own mother never has.
There are six other bedrooms on the second floor. She keeps all but one of them closed up for the winter. Actually, she rarely opens any of them now unless she’s expecting company, which happens more and more infrequently—or so she tells me every week, when she calls. Slowly I move through each of the rooms, looking for her, talking as I go. The ghost furniture stands pale, covered in sheets against the dust.
Exhausted, I climb to the third floor. Even now, at eighty-five, my aunt has more energy than I do. Somehow I know she is up here on the third floor. “Eva,” I say again. “It’s me, Towner.” I ascend the narrowing stairs heavily, holding both railings. I’m so tired.
This third floor is my floor. Eva gave it to me the winter I moved in with her, partly to appease me for having to move off Yellow Dog Island, which I loved so much, and partly because the third floor had the widow’s walk, and she knew I could use it to keep an eye on things, like May still alone out there on the island, refusing to come in. Except for an occasional climb to the widow’s walk, Eva doesn’t use these rooms at all now, and, as she tells me often, she hasn’t changed them since I moved. “They’ll be ready when you are,” she always says, and follows with some other zinger such as, “There’s no place like home.”
I climb the widow’s walk first, because I know it’s the only place Eva would go if she came up here. But there’s no sign of her. The only thing up here is a gull’s nest; I can’t tell whether it’s a new one or something left behind. I stand alone at the top of what was once my world. How many nights have I sat up here, checking on May, making sure her kerosene lamp went on in early evening, then off again when she finally went to bed? Every night of that one winter I spent here.
Salem Harbor has changed. There are a lot more boats than there used to be, and more houses around the perimeter on the Marble-head side, but Yellow Dog Island looks the same. If I squint my eyes and look past the harbor, I can imagine that I am a kid again and that at any minute I’ll see the sail from Lyndley’s yacht as it rounds Peach’s Point and heads toward our island for the summer.
I go back down to the third floor, where my rooms are. This is the only place I haven’t yet looked for Eva and the only place left where she could be. There are four rooms on this floor, which is gabled and smaller than the second floor, but the furniture up here is not covered with sheets, which seems odd, since Eva didn’t know I was coming. One room is a small library filled with all my school things: my desk, cotillion invitations, report cards. There were books required for school, and books that Eva required me to read when she didn’t think the school curriculum went far enough, old leather-bound books from the big library on the first floor: Dickens, Chaucer, Proust. Across the hall is the room that Beezer slept in on Christmas and during his winter vacations from boarding school. The last two rooms were my private suite, a sitting room with two fluffy couches and a little Chinese table between them. At the far end of the room, through French doors, is my bedroom. Since I’ve looked everywhere else, and since I know she’s got to be in the house somewhere, I figure this is where Eva has to be.
I push open the door, scanning the floor first, suddenly afraid. Maybe she didn’t come back. Maybe she’s been here all along, and they just didn’t check well enough. Maybe she has fallen somewhere up here and she’s just been lying here in horrible pain the whole time. “Eva,” I say again, dreading what I’m going to find as I open the door to what is the last room in the house, the last place she could be. “Eva, answer me.”
I’m afraid I’ll see her sprawled on the floor with broken bones, or worse. I close my eyes against the thought. But when I open them, there is nothing. Just the room as I left it the year I turned seventeen: the same Indian-print bedspread that Lyndley bought me in Harvard Square, one of Eva’s patchwork quilts folded into a triangle at the bottom of the bed. On the wall across from the bed is a painting that Lyndley did for me the year before she died, all shades of blues and blacks with a golden path leading into deep water. It is a painting of the dream we shared, entitled Swimming to the Moon.
I walk over and stare at the painting, and I remember a lot of other things then, like the time Lyndley stole a huge bunch of flowers from Eva’s gardens and got in trouble for it, too, because she almost wiped out Eva’s annuals. She had my whole room on Yellow Dog Island completely decorated with those flowers when I got home that day, and she’d really overdone it; they were everywhere. May said it was too much, that it smelled like a funeral parlor. It made her sick to her stomach, she said. Lyndley thought that was an accomplishment in itself, making anyone sick with her artistic renderings. For some reason she found that very funny. It gave her an idea. She made me put on a dress and actually lie down on the bed like a corpse holding flowers on my belly, like Millais’s painting of Ophelia, and she said I looked beautiful as a dead person, and she started sketching me, but I ruined it because I couldn’t stop laughing, which made the flowers shake too much to draw.
I am jolted back to present time by the sound of footsteps on the stairway.
“Well, there you are,” Eva says, not even winded. I reel around. She’s wearing an old flowered housedress, one I remember, and she doesn’t look a day older than the last time I saw her, the year she came to L.A. with some garden-club group to see how the Rose Bowl floats were made.
I start to cry, I am so relieved to see her. I take a step toward her, but I’m dizzy from turning so quickly.
“You’d better sit down before you fall down,” Eva says, smiling, reaching out a hand to steady me, leading me toward the bed. “You look like something the cat dragged in.”
“I’m so glad you’re all right,” I say, collapsing onto the bed.
“Of course I’m all right,” she says, as if not a thing has happened.
She covers me with the quilt. Though it is far too hot, I do not protest. This is a ritual of comfort; she has done this more than once.
“I thought you were dead,” I say, sobbing now, with relief and with exhaustion. There’s so much to say, but she’s shushing me, telling me she’s “right as rain” and that I should get some rest now, that “things will look better in the morning.” I know I should tell her to call Jay-Jay and also Beezer and let them know that she’s okay, but her voice is hypnotic, and I’m starting to fall asleep.
“Rest your weary bones,” she says, reading my mind the same way she’s always been able to read my mind, pulling the concerns right out of it, putting peaceful images in their place. “Things will look better in the morning,” she says again.
She starts toward the door, then turns back. “Thank you for coming,” she says. “I know this must have been difficult for you.” Then she takes something out of the pocket of her dress and lays it down on the bedside table. “I meant to send this with the pillow,” she says. “But I am old, and memory isn’t what it once was.”
I struggle to see what she put on the table, but my eyes are heavy with sleep. “Pleasant dreams,” she says as she walks out the door.
On her command I begin to dream, drifting up the stairs and out the widow’s walk, then out over the harbor where the party boat is coming back from its cruise to nowhere, carrying a load of sunburned tourists. The sun is going down, and a new moon is rising behind Yellow Dog Island, our island, and I can see some women there on the dock, though I don’t recognize them. Then I hear the blast from the party boat as it makes its turn, and I’m grounded back in the bed again, sleeping there. Two blasts as it heads into port. You can set your watch by those horns. Three times a day, you hear the horns as the boat comes back to Salem after each run—at noon and six, and again at midnight, on its last run of the night.
Like the muffs they resemble, the lace pillows were gathered and tied on each end. Traditionally, each pillow also had a pocket, and the women of Ipswich used the pockets to hold their treasures. Some held beautiful bobbins imported from England or Brussels, too precious to ever use. Other pockets held small pieces of finished lace, or herbs, or even small touchstones. Some hid poetry written in the owners hand, or love letters from a suitor, which were read over and over until the parchment began to tear along its creases.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE
Chapter 4 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)
WHEN I WAKE UP, I look on the bedside table, expecting to find a note. Instead I see my braid where Eva left it last night. Almost waist length the day Eva cut it, today it would reach only to my shoulders. I pick it up. The hair is fine, more like Lyndley’s hair than my own. The length shows bands of color like the rings of a tree, a summer’s sun, a winter’s darkness. At one end is a faded ribbon, tied in a double-knotted bow. At the other, fine hair curling up around it, is a dried-out rubber band Eva put on after she cut the braid from me. It is wound very tight, as if to hold everything still and together.
Hair is full of magic, Eva always says. I don’t know if that’s true for everyone, but at least it’s true for my mother, May.
May would never leave Yellow Dog Island for long. For this reason she didn’t take us to Salem for haircuts, but to a barber in Marble-head who had a shop only a few feet from the public landing.
Old Mr. Dooling always smelled strongly of stale whiskey and fried food and vaguely of camphor. He was likely to wound you anytime before noon. Rumor had it he’d once slashed a kid’s ear right off. My mother insisted she’d never believed that story. Still, May always booked our hair appointments in the afternoons, when the barber’s hands were steadier and his alcohol haze had burned off along with the harbor fog.
May’s haircuts were Marblehead’s version of a magic show. The townie kids used to form lines up and down Front Street to watch as Mr. Dooling pulled the rattail comb through my mother’s hair. With each pull, the comb would snag on something, then stop. As he reached into the mass to unwind the tangle, he would find and remove everything from sea glass to shells to smooth stones. In one particularly matted tangle, he found a sea horse. Once he even found a postcard sent from Tahiti to someone in Beverly Farms. On it were two Polynesian women, bare breasts covered discreetly by long, straight hair. I never figured out if he was sighing because of the girls and their various attributes or because of their straight, untangled hair that—although it might not have yielded treasures like my mother’s—wouldn’t have required a full bottle of conditioner for a single haircut.
The day my mother and I began to break apart was over a haircut—not hers, but mine. My mother had finished. Beezer had gone next, getting the Whiffle Deluxe, which cost $4.99 and came with a tube of stick-up for the front.
I had never liked having my hair cut, partly because of the wharf rats hanging around outside watching the whole thing and partly because Mr. Dooling’s hands shook so much. On one occasion I covered my ears with Band-Aids before we got to town, figuring they’d be harder to lop off if the barber made a mistake. But May caught me and made me remove the bandages.
Although I wasn’t fond of haircuts, they had never actually hurt me until that day. I watched as Mr. Dooling fished the scissors out of the blue gook and wiped them on his apron. The first cut sent a jolt through me like an electric shock. I let out a cry.
“What’s wrong?”
“It hurts!”
“What hurts?” May examined my scalp, my ears. Finding nothing amiss, she asked again. “What hurts?”
“My hair.”
“The hairs on your head?”
“Yes.”
“Individual hairs?”
“I don’t know.”
She examined me again. “You’re fine,” she said, motioning for him to continue.
Mr. Dooling picked up a lock of hair, fumbled, dropped it. He stopped, put down the scissors, wiped his hands on his apron, then reached for the scissors again, this time dropping them on the floor.
“Jesus Christ,” Beezer said. May shot him a look.
The barber went to the back room to get another pair of scissors, unwrapping them from their brown paper and making several practice snips in the air before he reached my side.
I gripped the chair arms, bracing as he picked up another lock of hair. I could hear him breathing. I could feel the chafing of cotton against cotton as his arm reached forward. And then I had what the doctors would later cite as my first full-blown hallucination. Visual and auditory, it was a flash cut to Medusa and thousands of writhing snake hairs. Snakes screaming, still moving as they were cut in half. Screaming so loudly that I couldn’t make them stop; terrible animal screams like the time one of the dogs on our island got its leg caught in the tractor blade. I covered my ears, but the snakes were still screaming…. Then my brother’s face, scared, pale, pulled me back, and I realized that the screaming was coming from me. Beezer was standing in front of me calling my name, calling me back. And suddenly I was out of the chair and lunging for the door.
The group of kids on the porch parted to let me through. Some of the smaller kids were crying. I ran down the stairs, hearing the door behind me open and slam a second time and Beezer yelling for me to wait.
When he reached the Whaler, I already had the bow and stern lines untied, and he had to make a running jump to get into the boat. He landed facedown, his wind knocked out. “Are you okay?” he wheezed.
I couldn’t answer him.
I saw him looking back at May, who was out on the porch with Dooling, arms folded across her chest, just watching us.
I had to choke the engine three times before it caught and started. Then, ignoring the five-miles-per-hour limit, I opened it up, and my brother and I headed out to sea.
We talked only a few times about what had happened that day. May made two ill-fated attempts to get me to see reason, taking me to town once to talk to Eva about it and the other time calling someone at the Museum of Science in Boston and asking him to explain to me that there were no nerve endings in hair and that it couldn’t possibly hurt when it was cut.
Sometimes, when you look back, you can point to a time when your world shifts and heads in another direction. In lace reading this is called the “still point.” Eva says it’s the point around which everything pivots and real patterns start to emerge. The haircut was the still point for my mother and me, the day everything changed. It happened in an instant, a millisecond, the flash of a look, the intake of breath.
For two years no one cut my hair. I went around with one long side and one short.
“You’re being ridiculous,” May said to me once, coming at me with a pair of scissors, attempting to finish the haircut and take back her power. “I won’t have it.” But I didn’t let her near me then or anytime after that.
We had family dinners every night, sandwiches mostly, because May would shop on the docks only once a month when she went to town. The sandwiches were always served in the formal dining room on the good china and were followed by a small Limoges plate of multivitamins, which my mother referred to as “dessert.” This final course could take a long time to finish, because May required us to eat the vitamins with a dessert fork, all the while practicing polite dinner conversation, something she had learned from Eva.
“I have a question,” I said, balancing two vitamins on my knife.
May gave me “the look.” I put my knife down. “Yes?” she said, waiting for me to ask in the small-talk style we had developed in order to keep from really talking about anything.
“Why did you give away my sister?”
Beezer’s eyes widened. It wasn’t the kind of thing we talked about. Ever.
May started to clear the table. I thought I could see a tear forming in the corner of her eye, but it never fell.
After dinner I went to my room. My haven. No one came in anymore. Every night I wore a ski hat to bed with one of May’s nylon stockings under it, covering my scalp, so that she couldn’t come in and trim my hair at night. I rigged my room with booby traps: strings, bells, crystal glasses I’d stolen from the butler’s pantry—anything that would wake me at the first sign of an intruder. It worked. My mother gave up. Once, my dog Skybo, whom Beezer had given to me for protection the summer before, got so badly tangled in the strings that we had to cut him free, but no one else bothered me. After a while May stopped coming into my room at all, but I never let my guard down, not for one minute.
It was Eva who finally fixed things. One day in late summer, I went to see her at her shop, begging for a lace reading. Except on my birthday, which was a family tradition, I didn’t usually ask Eva to read for me. I didn’t really like to be read—it made me feel creepy—but I was desperate. I’d lost Skybo. He was an unfixed male, and he had a tendency to wander. He was one of the island golden retrievers, trained by Beezer as a puppy, so even though he was tame enough for the house, he still had a wild streak. He was a great swimmer. Whenever I swam or took the boat, he followed me. Sometimes he set out all by himself.
I was a mess. I’d looked everywhere on Yellow Dog Island. I took the Whaler to town. I searched the wharf, the marine-supply store, and even some of the fishing fleet but turned up nothing. Finally I headed for Eva’s.
She was working on a piece of pillow lace, sitting beside a fireplace that was filled with chrysanthemums instead of flames.
It was late in the season, and the water was really cold. I was frantic. I told her the story, told her I feared the worst—hypothermia, maybe, or that he had been caught in a shipping lane and run over. Eva looked at me calmly and told me to get myself a cup of tea.
“I can’t drink tea. My dog is missing,” I snapped.
Like May, Eva had also mastered “the look.” I made the tea. She kept working. Every once in a while, she would glance up and gesture to the tea. “Don’t let it get cold,” she said. I sipped.
After what seemed a very long time, Eva put down the lace pillow and walked over to where I was sitting. She had a small pair of scissors in her hand, the ones she used to cut the lace free when she finished a piece, a technique Eva had invented. Instead of cutting lace, she reached over and cut off my braid.
“There,” she said. “The spell is broken. You are free.”
She put the braid down on the table.
“What the hell?”
“Watch your mouth, young lady.”
I stood and glared at her.
“You can go now,” she declared.
“What about my dog?” I snapped.
“Don’t worry about your dog,” she said.
I walked back to the Whaler, wondering if everyone I knew was crazy. I knew I was. May was pretty far gone, getting more reclusive by the minute. And Eva, whom I usually found so logical, was not acting the way she should, not at all.
When I got to the Whaler, Skybo was sitting in the bow. He was wet and tired and covered with burrs, but I was so happy to see him that I didn’t even care where he’d been.
The women created their own patterns made of parchment, but thicker parchment than for the love letters, more enduring. Pins were pressed into the parchment, creating a pricking pattern that could be used over and over. For the lace making, the pins stayed in, holding the patterns to the pillow, and the lace was woven pin to pin. If there was any limiting factor to the production of more intricate laces, it was the expense and scarcity of pins.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE
Chapter 5 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)
IT IS JUST AFTER SUNRISE. I cannot get back to sleep. Placing the braid of hair in the drawer of the bedside table, I quietly make my way downstairs. I start to dial Beezer’s number, then decide to wait an hour. I want to tell him that Eva’s all right. Beezer has been great. He doesn’t need this, not now. My brother and his longtime girlfriend, Anya, are about to be married. As soon as exams are over, they will be flying to Norway, where her parents live. After the ceremony they are going to travel around Europe for the summer. They will be so relieved, I think, both that Eva is okay and that they don’t have to change their wedding plans.
I’m making mental notes. Call May. Call the cops. Although none of them deserves a call. I don’t know how any of them could be so stupid that they couldn’t find an eighty-five-year-old woman in her own house.
I let myself into the tearoom, with its frescoed walls painted by a semifamous artist my great-grandfather had flown in from Italy. I can’t remember the name. Small tables crowd the room. Lace is everywhere. Some of the pieces bear May’s company label, The Circle, but most of them Eva has made herself. A glass counter in the corner holds canisters with every kind of tea imaginable—commercial teas from all over the world, as well as several flower and herb potions that Eva blends. If you want a cup of coffee, you won’t find it here. My eyes scan the teas looking for the one she named after me. She gave me that tea as a present one year. It’s a blend of black tea and cayenne and cinnamon, with just a hint of cilantro, and some other ingredients she won’t reveal to me. It has to be drunk strong and very hot, and Eva tells me it is too spicy for some of her older customers. “Either you’ll love it or you’ll hate it,” she told me when she gave it to me. I loved it. I used to drink whole pots of it, winters when I lived with Eva. On the canister it’s called “Sophya’s Blend,” but its nickname, just between Eva and me, is “Difficult-Tea.”
Behind the canister is a notebook, its cover a poem I recognize, the Jenny Joseph poem that is getting so popular. “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple / With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me….” Stuck inside the notebook are some photos, one of Beezer and May and one of me when I first got to California, my forced smile slackened from the Stelazine I was still taking.
From the look of things, Eva has a children’s party set up for today. I check the calendar on the wall, but it’s a lunar calendar, not a regular one, and it’s difficult to read. The slivered phases of the moon are printed in shades of gray on the corresponding dates. Just when I begin to think I have it figured out, I spot a different kind of moon, a bright red full moon stuck halfway through the month. It’s a little larger than the other moons and doesn’t correspond to any of their cycles. It takes me a minute to realize it’s not a moon but a hat. I remember Eva telling me about the Red Hats who were inspired by the poem. The ones who wear purple and come for tea and lace readings here at least once a month.
The tables are already set. Each table has a different pot, with different teacups and saucers set on individual circles of lace. The pots are very fanciful and colorful. If you choose to come for tea on a regular day, one that’s not already booked for a private party, the lace at your table setting, once you use it, is yours to keep. You pay for it, whether or not you have a lace reading done. Many people just take their lace pieces home and use them as doilies. This never bothers Eva, even though I’ve always thought it was a waste, that the lace circles are pieces of art and should be framed.
Most of Eva’s customers come for tea really hoping to get a lace reading. Eva never does more than two readings a day anymore; she says it wears her out, particularly now that she’s getting older. She does not keep any money from her readings. All the money she collects for the lace and the readings goes directly to the Circle.
She’ll do more than two readings if she has to. And if she senses real disappointment, or something urgent that the seeker should know, she’ll even do the reading for free. But what she’s most interested in is teaching the women to read for themselves. “Pick up the lace and look at it,” she says. “Squint your eyes.” If you follow her instructions, you start to imagine that you see pictures in the lace, the way Eva does. “Go ahead,” she encourages them. “Don’t be afraid. There is no wrong answer. This is your own life you’re reading, your own symbols.”
I find a teaspoon with the Whitney monogram and look around for my favorite teapot, which is actually an old china coffeepot that Eva has converted. I warm the pot, then brew the tea. I grab a cup and the lunar calendar and go to the only table in the room that isn’t already set. On the table is Eva’s worn first edition of Emily Post.
Before my great-aunt opened the tearoom, she taught manners classes to the children of Boston’s North Shore. Kids from Marble-head, Swampscott, Beverly Farms, Hamilton, Wenham, and as far away as Cape Ann came to Eva for refinement. She’d set one of the tables in the parlor for a formal dinner, and the children would arrive in their little suits and dresses to brush up on their table manners. She taught polite dinner conversation, tricks to avoid the shyness that descends on children during such events.
“Keep asking questions,” she advised. “It gets the conversation going and keeps the focus off you. Find out what they’re interested in and what their preferences are. Offer something of yourself in the question; it’s more intimate that way. For example, appropriate dinner conversation might be to turn to the person next to you and say, ‘I like soup. Do you like soup?’”
She made the kids practice asking each other if they liked soup, invariably prompting giggles because the question was so inane. But it broke the ice. “There,” she would say after such an exercise. “Don’t you feel more comfortable already?” And the kids had to admit they did. “Now ask another question, and make sure you really listen this time for the answer,” she would say. “One of the secrets of good manners is learning to listen.”
I drink a whole pot of tea. At seven o’clock I call Beezer. No answer. I make another pot of tea.
I try Beezer again at eight. Still no answer. I decide to make Eva a pot of tea and take it up to her.
Someone knocks on the tearoom door. At first I think it’s Beezer, but it’s not. A girl, not much older than eighteen (if she’s that), stands there, backpack across her shoulders, greasy hair parted on the side and hanging shoulder length, half covering a huge strawberry-colored birthmark that runs down the left side of her face. My immediate thought is that this is just another kid looking for a room or a reading, but when I glance out at the common, the festival is over. The only people left out there now are dog walkers and some Park & Rec guys cleaning up. I start for the door, wanting to answer it quickly, to keep things quiet for Eva, but then the teapot screams, and I rush back to silence it, burning my hand as I grab the handle.
She bangs again, louder this time, more urgently. I start back toward the door. I can see her through the wavy glass. There is a look on her face that reminds me of my sister, Lyndley. Or maybe it’s the way she bangs on the door, pounding it hard, as if she might punch right through it. As I hurry toward the door, I spot the police cruiser patrolling, trying to find a space to pull into. I see the girl look over her shoulder at the cruiser. By the time I reach the door, she is halfway down the steps. As she turns to go, I see that she is pregnant. I open the door, but she is too fast for me. She slips down the alley away from the street just as the cruiser pulls in.
I put the teapot and cups on the tray and start upstairs when there’s another knock at the door. Cursing, I put the tray down on the step and go to the door. My brother stands in front of Jay-Jay and some other guy I don’t recognize.
“I’ve been calling you,” I say to Beezer. I’m trying not to look excited, trying not to give it away.
They come in, and Beezer hugs me, holding it too long. I pull away then, to tell him that everything’s all right, that Eva is here.
“I was just going to try you again—” I tell him.
“This is Detective Rafferty,” Beezer says, interrupting me.
There is a long pause before Rafferty speaks. “We found Eva’s body,” he says finally, “out a little past Children’s Island.”
I stand still. I can’t move.
“Oh, Towner,” Beezer says, hugging me again, as much to keep me standing up as to commiserate. “I can’t believe she’s dead.”
“Looks like she drowned,” Rafferty says. “Or went hypothermic. Sadly, it’s not uncommon at her age, even outside the water.” His voice breaks slightly on that last part.
I run up the stairs, doubling over in pain as I reach the first landing, leaving them all standing there looking startled, not knowing what to do. I stumble into Eva’s room, but she’s not there. Her bed is still made, untouched since yesterday.
As quickly as I can, I move through the maze of rooms. Eva is old now, I’m thinking; maybe she doesn’t sleep here anymore. Maybe she’s chosen some other room to sleep in, something smaller. But even as I’m thinking it, I’m starting to freak out. I’m moving frantically from one room to another when Beezer catches up with me. “Towner?” I hear his voice getting closer.
I stop dead in the middle of the hallway.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
Clearly I’m not.
“I just came from identifying the body,” he says.
I can hear their voices, cops’ voices, echoing up the stairs, but I can’t hear what they’re saying.
“May knows,” he says, giving me practical details, trying to ground me. “Detective Rafferty went out there to tell her this morning.”
I am able to nod.
“She and Emma are waiting for us to come out,” Beezer says.
I nod again, following him downstairs. The cops stop talking when they see me.
“I’m so sorry,” Jay-Jay says, and I nod again. It’s all I can do.
Rafferty’s eyes meet mine, but he doesn’t say anything. I notice a quick reach of his hand, comforting, automatic. Then he catches himself and pulls it back. He puts it in his jacket pocket as if he doesn’t know what else to do with it.
“I should have stopped her,” Beezer says, his guilt overtaking him now. “I mean, I would have if I’d known. She told me she had given up swimming. Last year sometime.”
Because they were imported from England, pins were costly. The fewer pins used, the simpler the pattern, and the faster the lace maker could work. The thread was imported, because although the New England spinners were very good, they could not achieve the delicacy of the fine European linen or Chinese silk thread. Still, on average, each of the Ipswich lace makers produced upwards of seven inches of lace per day, a higher rate than the Circle produces today, and the Circle has the luxury of its own spinners and all the pins they could ever want.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE
Chapter 6 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)
RAFFERTY IS A NICE MAN. He gives us a ride to Derby Wharf so we can pick up the Whaler. He circles the block looking for a space, then finally pulls onto the public walkway, getting us as close as possible to Eva’s boathouse. “I’d have one of the guys in the police boat take you all the way out,” he said, “but the last time they went out there, May shot at them.”
You’ve probably heard of my mother, May Whitney. Everyone else has. I’m sure you remember the UPI picture a few years back, the one with May leveling a six-gauge at about twenty cops who had come to her women’s shelter on Yellow Dog Island with a warrant to take back one of her girls. That picture was everywhere. It was even on the cover of Newsweek. What made the photo so compelling was that my mother looked uncannily like Maureen O’Hara in some fifties western. Cowering behind May in the photo was a terrified-looking girl who couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, with a large white bandage on her neck, rescued from a husband who’d gotten drunk and tried to slit her throat. Her two little children sat behind her playing with a litter of golden retriever puppies. It was quite a scene. If you saw it, you’d remember.
In fact, it was that picture, coupled with a flair for public relations—both seemingly out of character for May—that revived the entire Ipswich lace industry. In a series of well-chosen interviews, she condescended to speak to the press, not about the newly rescued girl, which was the story they came out there to get, but about the bobbin lace that the other women, or “island girls” (as the locals called them), created. They called themselves “the Circle,” after the old-time ladies’ sewing circles, and that was the name that appeared on their labels.
May took the press on a tour of the cottage industry that she and her island girls were re-creating. First she took them to the spinning room, which was located in the old stone kennel. It had been built by my grandfather, G. G. Whitney, in an effort to breed and domesticate the island dogs, but he could never get them to go near the place, so it had stood empty until May’s girls took it over. Once inside the stone kennel (if you ignored the anachronism of jeans and other modern garb), you could have been in a medieval castle. The women sat at the old spinning wheels and at the bobbin winders, silent except for the whirring and occasional creaking and clicking. This spinning room was where the new girls came, the newly rescued, those who were still too skittish to join the others. May often spun with them. They wove flax mostly, to make linen thread, and sometimes May wove yarns from the yellow dog hair, but that was rare. Although some stayed in the spinning room, most of these abused women went on to join the circle of lace makers in the old red schoolhouse as soon as they felt strong enough to be with people again.
May ended her tours at the schoolhouse, where the women sat with their pillows on their laps, making lace and chatting softly or listening to a reader (often my mother herself, who had a beautiful speaking voice and loved to read poetry aloud). Enchanted by the world May had created and the spell-like web of lace May spun around them, the reporters ended up forgetting the story they came out to get. Instead they went back to their papers and wrote about the Circle. The story resonated with their female readers, and women all over the country began sending money to purchase this new Ipswich lace.
Beezer lets me drive the Whaler. When we get to the island, the tide is dead low and the ramp is up. We could land at the float, but we’d have no way to get onto the island with the ramp up like this. For just a minute, I consider trying to land at Back Beach, which is impossible at low tide and hardly possible at any other time. The tide would have to be turning high and the sea dead calm to even attempt such a landing. So I figure I’ll just have to land at the float and sit there waiting until someone notices us and lowers the ramp.
People who live on islands like their solitude. I don’t mean islands like the Vineyard or Nantucket. People on those islands are so far from shore that they need to attract tourists just to survive. But people on these border islands generally like to be left alone, and they pull up their ramps because they are vulnerable. An island is a landing point for anyone who happens by. People assume that islands are public property: They picnic, they litter. They walk up to your front door and ask to use the phone, never considering for a moment that you probably have neither phone nor electricity. And so island people learn to pull up their ramps. Usually it’s only a few feet, but it makes all the difference. At high tide the difference between the float and the ramp may be only five or six feet. Most people could make it, if they are willing to take that leap of faith, but few will. When the tide is dead low, the ramp is another ten feet down, and that’s when you really feel your privacy.
Yellow Dog Island is more private than most. The whole square-mile figure eight of it is set high on a granite plateau with spires of rock shooting up from the surrounding water, giving the impression of an ancient fortress. Unless you know about Back Beach, the island is impenetrable. Because of the sheer drop of the cliffs, the dock was built about forty feet in the air, which makes the distance from the ramp down to the float even longer. It takes a hydraulic winch to lower the ramp, and this is one of the only spots on the island that has a generator, which also runs the saltwater pump to the houses for the plumbing, such as it is. When we still attended school on the island and my mother would give us a reading assignment, I would sit in the pump house and read by the one lightbulb on the island until the generator ran out of gas or I fell asleep. That one bulb represented all of civilization for me, and I took good care of it.
There are several outbuildings on the island, but only two real houses, one on each end, belonging to May and to my Auntie Emma Boynton, who is Eva’s daughter, May’s half sister, and my sister Lyndley’s legal mother. My aunt’s house is the larger of the two Victorians, but May’s is the only one that is winterized. Until Emma’s “accident,” while she and Cal were still married, Auntie Emma and her “daughter,” Lyndley, were summer people, and I guess my Uncle Cal was, too, if you want to count him, which I don’t.
These days the women of the Circle all live at May’s house. They catch rainwater in cisterns for drinking. They grow vegetables for food and flax for the lace, and they even have a cow, which, according to Eva, had to be airlifted onto the island by the coast guard. They tried for a while to keep sheep on what used to be a makeshift baseball diamond, but the dogs kept running the sheep, so they had to give that up. Now they get by on vegetables and the occasional rabbit, and, of course, fish and lobsters. I don’t know what they do in the winter. I’ve never asked. I know as much as I do only because Eva has written me letters about it.
Beezer and I have been sitting on the float for about twenty minutes before anyone comes to lower the ramp. Finally it is my Auntie Emma, and not my mother, who shows up. She walks with her head bent forward, moving more slowly than I remember, partly from her infirmity and partly from age. She is much older than the last time I saw her, almost fifteen years older, come August. My heart catches when I see her; and though she cannot see me, she suddenly realizes I am there. It’s like the take Melanie does in Gone with the Wind when she sees Ashley come back from the Civil War and suddenly recognizes that beaten-down man as her beloved husband. My aunt doesn’t rush to me—she cannot do that—but her feelings rush forward, and they knock the breath right out of me.
By the time we reach her, she is crying. We stand there for a long time, hugging each other. She is crying and saying things like, “I knew you’d come,” and “I told her so.”
My heart sinks for a moment. She is so happy to see me that I wonder if she thinks I am her daughter, Lyndley. In a way it would be more likely. Because even though I know the physical laws of this strange planet and the impossibility of such a thing, I also know that it would be less of a miracle for my sister, Lyndley, dead more than fifteen years now, to come back here than it was for me.
We walk together up the ramp in slow motion, frame by frame. She’s too weak to walk fast anymore, and I’m having so much trouble catching my breath that I can’t even speak. But that’s okay, because I wouldn’t know what to say if I could. Ahead of us, at the top of the ramp, some gulls knock over one of the garbage cans. It rolls several feet, then stops just before reaching the edge of the cliff.
“May is waiting for you,” Auntie Emma says, pointing to the old schoolhouse at the crest of the hill. She starts to walk with me, then takes Beezer’s arm. She rests her head on his shoulder and cries softly.
“I’m so sorry about Eva,” Beezer says.
I am surprised to realize that she knows and understands what has just happened to Eva. The “accident” that blinded her also left my aunt with brain damage.
Sometimes Emma knows who I am, sometimes not, Eva told me more than once.
The door to the red schoolhouse is open. I can see the Circle. They are sitting with their lace pillows on their laps. Some are working hard, passing bobbin over bobbin, winding their lives into the patterns as they go. Others are barely working at all but are listening, staring off at something not quite there, captivated by the reader’s voice, my mother’s, strong and clear. Quoting from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience:
Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down, And dews of the night arise;…
Her voice catches when she sees me in the doorway. It is so slight she doesn’t miss a single beat but goes on…
Your spring and your day are wasted in play, And your winter and night in disguise.
As May closes the book and takes a step in our direction, I hear another voice, one that’s even stronger than my mother’s.
“There are no accidents,” Eva says as Beezer and I step through the door.
What distinguishes Ipswich lace from all other handmade laces are the bobbins. The colonial women could not afford the heavier decorative bobbins used by European women. Like everyone else in the Colonies, the lace makers had to make do with what was at hand. And so the bobbins they wound the thread upon were lighter, sometimes hollow, fabricated from beach reeds or occasionally bamboo that came in on the Salem ships as packing material, or even from bones.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE
Chapter 7 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)
WE’RE ALL AT MAY’S HOUSE NOW. Beezer’s fiancée, Anya, got here last night. They were supposed to leave for Norway tomorrow, for the wedding (which is only a week away). However, the trip has been postponed for a few days, until after Eva’s funeral. Anya is clearly not happy about it; really, why should she be? I think she’s being a pretty good sport about things, under the circumstances. I know how uneasy this place makes her. She told me that when she accompanied Beezer to California on a lecture tour that included Caltech. I have a certain respect for Anya’s honesty, but I still don’t like her. I think that’s partly because she doesn’t like me—doesn’t like any of us, really, besides Beezer. I wonder about it, about how much my brother has told her, but Beezer isn’t a talker. When I asked him how things went—when he identified Eva’s body for instance—he muttered something about it being very difficult and about “crustaceans.” I knew if I wanted to know more, I’d have to ask him, point by point, but I was put off by his choice of words and decided I didn’t want to know.
This morning Beezer and Anya are sleeping in, but the rest of us are here, in the red schoolhouse, waiting for the minister to get here to meet with us and make arrangements for the service at the Unitarian church where Eva was a member. Dr. Ward will be arriving by water taxi. He has come out of retirement for Eva’s funeral. They were friends, those two. For a number of years. We can see the boat, still far away, but getting closer.
No one’s talking except for two small children, a boy and a girl, who are seated on the schoolhouse floor in the far corner, playing jacks. The floor is tilted with age and disrepair, and every time they bounce the ball, it rolls away from them. The kids find this very amusing. They giggle and scramble to reach it before it rolls out the door.
A nervous young woman, presumably their mother, watches them do this two or three times before the sound of the bouncing ball begins to grate on her nerves. Unable to stand it any longer, she walks over and takes the ball away. The little girl begins to cry; this in turn makes the mother cry. Seeing this, the women of the Circle move in, comforting the young mother, surrounding her.
“Let them play,” one of the older women suggests. “Play is good.” The woman takes the ball from the mother and hands it back to the little girl, who looks at it suspiciously.
Then one of the women spots the water taxi at the float and someone getting out of it. I recognize the minister immediately, even after all these years, but this woman doesn’t, and I see her tense.
“It’s okay.” May puts a comforting hand on her shoulder. “He’s here to see me.”
The nervous young mother lets herself be led back to the Circle. The women are talking to her quietly now, saying things I can’t make out, until they finally coax a smile from her. The little girl doesn’t resume playing but puts the ball down intentionally and watches it roll slowly toward the open door, where it stops momentarily, then bounces down the granite steps, popping up twice before it disappears out of sight. The only picture left in the frame of the open doorway is that of May hurrying toward the dock to meet the minister.
May thinks it’s better if we bring Dr. Ward to the main house, away from the women, who are skittish (at best), plus “they’re working on the lace anyway, and we shouldn’t interrupt them with our business.” When we get to the house, Beezer and Anya are finally up. He’s had his coffee and now gets some for the minister. Anya doesn’t help, but she is attached to him, as usual. He compensates for it, like someone with a disability does, learning to move with her, forgetting after a while that this isn’t the way he has always walked.
“We’re thinking of a change of venue,” says Dr. Ward, stirring in another teaspoon of sugar, clinking the sides of the cup with his spoon. “Probably move the funeral down the street, to St. James’s.”
“Why would we do that?” asks May.
“Because there are just so many attendees. The Catholic church is the only place that can accommodate so many people.”
“How many people?” May has a bad feeling about it already.
“We think about two hundred,” he says, “give or take.”
“Two hundred people?” Anya is amazed. “I wouldn’t get two hundred people at my funeral if I died.”
“Give or take,” he says again.
I can almost see May’s skin crawling at the thought of so many people. She can’t stay seated but gets up and starts to move around.
“Two hundred people,” Anya says again.
“Eva had a lot of friends,” Beezer tells her, partly to shut her up. “All those etiquette classes.”
“All those witches,” May says, frowning.
The minister shifts uncomfortably. Some people, certainly the Calvinists, would consider May to be one of “those witches.” Even more so now that they call themselves “the Circle.” He remembered it from when they’d changed their name, their business name, officially from “the Island Girls” to “the Circle.” He hadn’t liked it then, and he’d told Eva so. It had a certain connotation, that name, and he thought they should stay away from it. He’d always wondered—well, everybody wondered, really—what actually went on out here. Some people would consider these women a coven. It was logical, with witches everywhere in Salem now, to consider any group of women a coven, especially a group that refers to itself as “the Circle.” Eva had laughed at him when he’d told her that, telling him to get with it, that it wasn’t named after witches but after the old-time ladies’ sewing circles that women used to have. Still, he thought it could be misinterpreted. “Career-limiting” were his actual words, but they went ahead and did it anyway. And as far as he could see, it hadn’t been limiting at all. Eva had started to sell the lace made by the Circle in her tearoom shortly after that, and it had been selling well ever since. Well, you’d have to be crazy, wouldn’t you, to take business advice from a minister? Still, he was sort of relieved now, to realize that not only was May not a witch herself but that she didn’t seem even to like the witches. In that way, he thought, she was like the Calvinists.
“Who are the Calvinists?” I ask, unaware until I say it that I have been reading him. He startles. Dr. Ward’s mind is so easy to read, so open, that I can’t help it. That’s the way it is sometimes with holy people. Their thoughts are right out there for the world to see, not guarded like the rest of ours.
May was really agitated now. I thought at first that maybe she was angry because I was reading the minister without being invited; that was another of Eva’s etiquette rules. You don’t read anyone’s mind unless they invite you—it’s intrusive, like trespassing. But I knew that if I could read this man so easily, then May could read him as well; we are all readers to some extent, although May won’t admit to it. She will acknowledge that she’s incredibly intuitive, which I would argue is almost the same thing. So either she is still angry about the witches, which I don’t understand at all, or she is angry at me for reading the minister. In any case, her anger is palpable. Even he can feel it.
“What do you think?” Dr. Ward is waiting for an answer.
“You already know what I think,” May says. “I don’t think we should have a funeral at all.”
“I think Eva would have wanted some kind of a ceremony,” Dr. Ward says.
“A ceremony would be nice.” These are the first words that Auntie Emma has spoken.
“Eva was quite religious, you know,” Dr. Ward offers.
“Eva? Religious?” May laughs out loud.
Although I’d rather side with Dr. Ward than May any day, even I have to agree with my mother on this one. Eva was a church member, but she wasn’t what anyone would call religious. In the summertime she did the flowers for the First Church. And she could debate Scripture with the best of them. But she seldom attended services. She told me once that her idea of spirituality was working outside in her garden or swimming.
“Well, I think she would have wanted something,” Dr. Ward says. His voice has a bit of an edge to it, which he quickly hides under a forced smile.
“Then I think you should be the one to do the planning,” May says, and walks out. And now I’m angry, because this is just like May, to leave us all sitting here this way. My mother has been known to hold off the county sheriff, the Salem police, and a dozen aggressive reporters all at the same time. She can run a thriving business or give a great interview to Newsweek, but when it comes to family, she can’t handle anything.
“I don’t know why anyone is even asking her opinion.” I say a bit too harshly. “I’ll bet you ten to one she won’t even show up for the funeral if we do have one.”
“You showed up, didn’t you?” Beezer’s voice also has an edge. He quickly feels guilty. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but can we please not do this?”
“Sorry,” I say, and mean it.
“Maybe we should just have it at the Unitarian church as planned,” Dr. Ward says. “On a first-come, first-served basis.”
I am picturing a deli counter where everyone takes a number. I keep the image to myself.
There is a long silence.
“Are you all right?” Dr. Ward finally asks me.
“I’m sorry,” I repeat, not knowing what else to say.
“We’re all sorry,” Dr. Ward says, his eyes tearing up just a little. He reaches out a ministerial hand to touch my arm, but the tears have thrown his vision off, and his hand grasps at empty air.
Later, when they think they’re alone in the house, I hear Anya talking to Beezer. “You have the strangest family,” she says. She means it affectionately; it’s supposed to be a little joke.
I know his expression without seeing his face. He doesn’t smile.
When I was in the bin, after Lyndley killed herself, I signed myself up for shock therapy. It was against Eva’s wishes and certainly against May’s (which was part of the reason I did it), but the doctors recommended it highly. I’d been in the hospital for six months. They’d tried all the standard drugs for depression, though this was pre-Prozac, so the drugs they had to work with weren’t all that effective. Plus, they put me on an antipsychotic for the hallucinations. I was on so much Stelazine that I couldn’t swallow. I could barely speak. And the medication didn’t help that much. My waking images were still of Lyndley posed on the rocks, leaning into the wind like the figurehead on an old sailing ship, ready to jump. My night terrors pictured Lyndley’s father, Cal Boynton, being ripped apart by dogs. I had begun by this time to realize that this last image was hallucination, though when I’d been admitted, I actually believed that the dogs had ripped Cal apart, that he was dead. The doctors called it some kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy.
Well, Cal wasn’t dead, but Lyndley was. And no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get either image out of my mind. I thought, and the doctors told me, that they could finally rid me of the image with shock therapy, so I signed up. I was almost eager for it. May’s response to this new development was to send me a copy of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. She didn’t bring it, mind you; she never once came herself to see me at the hospital. Instead she sent the book in with Eva, who had instructions to read it aloud to me if necessary.
“I’m doing this,” was all I said to Eva.
It wasn’t horrible; at least my experience of it was not. And it worked. It took several treatments, but eventually the images began to recede. The image of Cal went back to being a nightmare, one I could often wake myself from before things got really ugly. And although the image of Lyndley didn’t go away completely, it shrank down to the size of a little black box that stayed fixed in the left-hand corner of my peripheral vision. It’s not that it was gone, exactly; it’s just that I didn’t have to look at it directly anymore. I could look at something else if I chose to, and I did.
For the first time I could remember, I had a plan. I was going to move out to California. Since I had already applied to and been accepted at UCLA, I told the hospital that I was going to go to college as originally planned. The doctors were delighted. They took it as a sign that I was cured, that their new and improved electronic medicine had worked on me.
Before I’d had the shock therapy, in a final attempt to talk me out of it, Eva had said something strange. She wasn’t upset by my visions. In her profession as reader, visions were what you wished for. “Sometimes,” she said, “it’s not the visions that are wrong, but the interpretation of those visions. Sometimes it’s not possible to understand the images until you gain some perspective.” She was advocating more talk therapy and no shocks—at least that’s what I thought at the time. What she really meant, and what she told me years later, was that she had seen the same images herself. She had seen both images in the lace, the one of Lyndley and the one of the dogs. But she had seen them as symbols, while I saw them as real.
“I blame myself,” Eva said, already starting to speak in clichés. “I should have known.”
We all find means of anesthesia.
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” Eva told me with a sad smile.
The shock therapy took away most of my short-term memory. It hasn’t come back. I remember very little of what happened that summer. Which is probably just as well—it’s what I signed up for. What it also did—what is really unusual, one in a thousand statistically—is that it took away a lot of my long-term memory, too. They assured me that it would come back, and much of it has. Unlike most people, who lose memory over the years, I remember more as time passes. It usually comes back in fragments, sometimes in whole stories. I wrote some of them down when I was at the hospital, but by the time I got to UCLA, I had run out. I didn’t last past the first semester. I told Eva I was dropping out because of the Stelazine, that I had double vision and couldn’t read, which was true. I took my first house-sitting job for a film director, and he got me a job reading scripts, first for him and later for one of the studios.
For a while Eva tried to talk me into going back to UCLA. Or into coming back and going to school in Boston.
Today the women of the Circle create their bobbins from the bones of the birds that once lived on Yellow Dog Island. The lightness of these bones makes the thread tension uneven, and it is this, more than anything else, that gives this new Ipswich lace its unusual quality and lovely irregular texture and makes it so easy to read.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE
Chapter 8 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)
I WOULD HAVE WON THE BET. May never shows up for Eva’s funeral. Auntie Emma is there, escorted by Beezer and Anya, one on each arm. But May doesn’t even bother to come.
“May has her own way of paying her respects,” Anya feels the need to explain. “This morning she scattered peony petals to the four winds.”
I don’t comment. Anything I could say would sound sarcastic.
When we get to the church, people are lined up outside waiting to get in.
Rafferty’s there, standing in the back of the church, under the organ, which extends two stories to the roofline. He looks awkward in his dark suit, more awkward in his knowledge that everyone is staring at him. Actually, it’s only the women who are staring. Rafferty is a good-looking man, a fact that just makes him more self-conscious in this mostly female crowd.
This is an old church, the First Church in Salem, but Puritan in its origins. Two of the accused witches were in its congregation. This is also the church that excommunicated Roger Williams after he went on strike and refused to act as pastor or even attend services unless it cut off all dialogue with the Church of England. He fled not only the church but Massachusetts Bay Colony, escaping banishment and going on to found Rhode Island, the test state for religious tolerance.
Today Salem’s First Church is Unitarian and about as far from its Puritan roots as a church can get. Still, those roots go deep. The last in a succession of meeting places, the Essex Street structure has changed considerably over the years. In the mid-1800s, when substantial shipping money came to Salem, the church was rebuilt in stone and mahogany, with hard wooden pews down the middle and soft, velvet-covered boxes (private seating for the shipping families) lining the walls. The light comes mainly through the huge, almost floor-to-ceiling Tiffany windows, which cast a film of ashy rose over the interior, making everything look beautiful, if slightly surreal.
The church has the kind of stark elegance found only in this part of the New World.
We sit off to the side in the Whitney box, with its horsehair cushions and dusty velvet covers, once a deep wine color, now a crushed, fraying pink. The seats in the center of the church have been restored, and that is where the congregation sits. Even today, when it is so crowded that people are forced to stand in the back, the only box open is ours. This is probably due to liability issues rather than segregation, but it seems somehow to be a way of setting us apart from the crowd. Because we face the people and not the pulpit, it feels as if we’re sitting in a display case. I see people stealing glances at us when they think we’re not looking. Maybe that always happens at funerals, those looks, maybe it happens all the time, but the families never notice because they’re facing forward, looking at the coffin and not the congregation.
Already it’s almost ninety degrees outside. “Too early for this,” I hear one woman say as she comes in. Her tone is mildly accusing, and I turn around to see who she’s talking to, but it’s a general comment meant for no one in particular, or maybe for God, whose house this is supposed to be. It’s as if she’s documenting something, going on record. People do that in this part of the country—they register weather extremes the same way they balance their checkbooks, making sure they get credit for everything and don’t incur any charges that don’t belong to them, as if the weather itself were controlled and obliged to produce a finite and determinable number of hot, snowy, or rainy days that must not be exceeded.
The church is filled with women, all wearing hats and linen sundresses, almost southern-looking, out of place here against the cold stone architecture. My eye is drawn to the center of the church and a group of women, each one dressed in a different shade of purple and wearing a red hat. These are Eva’s regulars at the tea shop, a group she considered friends.
People fan themselves when they first come in, using whatever they can find: a sun hat, a program from last Sunday that has fallen to the floor. Their sighs are audible. The stone church is not air-conditioned but holds the dank feeling of a New England fieldstone cellar, damp and cool, with a memory scent of apples from last fall’s Harvest Days and spruce left over from Christmas. The people get calmer as they finally begin to cool down; they stop fanning and fidgeting. There are even some momentary smiles of recognition tossed back and forth and then covered with the more appropriate somber demeanor. “Try to act as if you’re wearing black,” I once heard a Hollywood director say to one of his actors. That’s what these people are doing.
The only people who actually are wearing black are the witches, but they wear black all year. They are also the only ones who are not treating this as a solemn occasion. They talk quietly among themselves, greeting others as they come in. Death isn’t the same for the witches, Eva told me once; she said it was because they don’t attach the prospect of eternal damnation to it.
Dr. Ward gives the eulogy. He talks about Eva’s good works, about all the people she helped. “People are defined, finally, by the good works they do.” He runs through a list of Eva’s works, things I never knew about my aunt, things she might have boasted about if she’d been another type of person. I realize the selfishness of children. We love them, and we revolve around their universes, but they don’t revolve around ours. I left here when I was a child, and in some ways I haven’t grown up yet. That I didn’t know these things about my aunt speaks to that fact. I feel sorry about that as I sit here. I feel sorry about a lot of things today.
Dr. Ward clears his throat. “Eva Whitney swam every day, beginning in the late spring. Before many of the boats were in the water, she would be there. People started putting their boats in when Eva started her daily swims, because they knew that the weather would stay warm, that the season was upon us. Eva’s first swim of the season was this town’s version of Groundhog Day. When she went into the water that first time, we held our collective breaths. If she went back again the next day, we’d put away our snow shovels for good—spring had sprung.” He looks around the room, making eye contact. “And now the season has changed. Summer is here again, but Eva is no longer among us.” He looks at Auntie Emma, then at Beezer and me. Beezer shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “‘To every thing,’” Dr. Ward says, “‘there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.’”
He doesn’t finish the verse but steps down, gesturing to Ann Chase, who moves toward the pulpit, her speaker’s notes in hand, black robes brushing against the corner of our box as she passes. Dr. Ward remembers his manners, extends an arm to her, helping her up the steps, a polite gesture from an old gentleman. As she takes his arm, I can see that her hand is the supporting one. She’s helping him down more than he’s helping her up. Dr. Ward walks slowly to the front row and takes a seat facing the coffin. He looks straight ahead.
I haven’t seen Ann Chase since the summer that Lyndley died. She is a little bit older than I am, maybe four or five years. She looks slightly muted but otherwise unchanged these last fifteen years. Her features are less clearly defined, like a copy of an old master done by an art student, one off, more suggestion than reality.
She doesn’t introduce herself. She doesn’t have to. With the exception of Laurie Cabot, Ann Chase is the most famous witch in Salem and a direct descendant of Giles and Martha Corey, who were once prominent members of the First Church (until they were executed as witches during the hysteria). They were not witches, of course. Their pardons hang now in the back of this church for everyone to see, pardons issued by Queen Elizabeth II at the end of this century, way too late for Giles and Martha and (some people would say) too late for Ann as well. “The sins of the fathers,” someone whispers, loud enough for everyone to hear. But if Ann hears it, she doesn’t flinch.
Most people in this town think that Ann became a witch as some kind of family protest taken to the extreme, a “can’t beat ’em, so join ’em” kind of justice, an “I have the name, so I might as well have the game” type of thing. I’m not sure about that. Ann Chase was already practicing witchcraft by the time I left town, living in a hippie house down by the Gables, growing herbs, and brewing magic-mushroom tea for all her friends. She didn’t wear black then; she wore long, flowing Indian-print skirts made out of the same kind of material as the bedspreads Lyndley and I bought in Harvard Square. She usually went barefoot and had henna tattoos across her knuckles and a toe ring that wound all the way up her ankle like a silver vine. Part of the time, Lyndley and I thought she was very exotic. The rest of the time, we thought she was just plain strange. Like that day we saw her way out at the end of Derby Wharf standing huge against the tiny lighthouse, incanting love spells for her girlfriends, who followed her around like puppies. We used to spy on them from out in the harbor, from the Whaler parked on someone else’s mooring. We would laugh as we watched them, covering our mouths so they wouldn’t hear us. But those spells must have worked in the end, because Ann’s friends started having little hippie babies, which they dressed in tiny tie-dyed T-shirts and nursed in public places. Never mind that the sixties were long over by then. “The sixties didn’t arrive in Salem until the seventies,” Lyndley used to say, and of course she was right. But when the sixties finally did arrive in the old port of Salem, Ann Chase was one of the first to jump on board. And when that ship sailed away again, Ann stayed behind waving from the beach. She had found her home port.
Back then everyone could do a little magic, but Ann took it to a new level. Instead of reading tarot cards or throwing the I Ching, she took up phrenology. She could tell your fortune by reading the bumps on your head. She would grab your head with both hands and press it as if she were buying a melon at the market. In the end she could tell you when you were going to marry and how many kids you were going to have. Lyndley went to her a couple of times, but I never did, because I didn’t like having my head touched, and besides, I had Eva to tell my fortune if and when I needed it.
What Ann was best at were the oils. She grew herbs in window boxes and began brewing remedies and distilling essential oils. One by one, as her roommates moved on, turning into yuppies first, then later into soccer moms, Ann replaced them with cats. She opened an herbal shop down at Pickering Wharf before it was a high-rent district, and she was successful enough to stay on when it became the fashionable place to shop. Eventually, as the shop got more and more successful, she stopped trying to grow her herbs in the window boxes and started purchasing them from Eva instead. That was when they became friends.
Ann’s evolution into “Town Witch” was gradual. To hear Eva tell it, you’d think that Ann just woke up one day and realized that she was a witch. In fact, it wasn’t a decision; it was an evolution. But her family history was what made her famous. The witches of Salem—the locals who have taken up the practice or the ones who’ve been practicing and have come to Salem because it has been declared a safe haven for witches—have all rallied around Ann Chase. They wear their association with her like a badge of courage, one that proves that the Salem witches really did exist here all along, a kind of “look how far we’ve come” thing. It proves nothing of the sort, of course (because Giles and Martha Corey were not witches, just unfortunate victims), but the connection, once made, was difficult to erase. I wonder as I sit here how Ann feels about being their mascot.
She has been talking now for several minutes: about Eva’s gardens and her plant conservation, which has been written up in magazines I’ve seen over the years. I want to hear what Ann has to say, but that same person is whispering again, and it’s interfering with my concentration. I look around, but I can’t find the source, and so I try again to concentrate on Ann’s speech and on the details of my aunt’s life.
“Eva saved at least one plant species that I know of from extinction,” Ann says.
“Wild exaggeration, load of malarkey,” the same voice whispers, loud enough for me to hear this time. I reel around, shushing the women to my left, thinking it’s one of them. They look at me strangely. “As if you have two heads,” the voice whispers in my ear, louder this time, much closer. I recognize the voice. It is Eva. She is speaking loudly enough to fill the church, or at least to be heard in the rows around me, but it is clear that I am the only one hearing her voice.
“Eva Whitney was one of us,” Ann begins, and some of the witches clap. “Not officially, of course, but she was.”
I’m looking at the reverend now, which is where Eva wants me to look. I don’t know how I know this, but I do. He was a good friend. I have memories of him at the house, discussing Scripture and literature late into the night.
I look at Dr. Ward. I can tell he’s distraught. He’s trying to hold himself together for the sake of the congregation.
“I am reminded of a quote that was a favorite of Eva’s,” Ann says. “‘The grass will grow green again next year. But you, beloved friend, will you return?’” Ann looks right at me as she speaks that line.
Ann is stepping down now, and Dr. Ward is heading back toward the coffin. As Ann descends the stairs, her dark robes inflate, and I am reminded of flight, and of witches on broomsticks. Then Eva tosses me a snippet of memory, of us all sitting here—Beezer, and Eva, and me—“the day the man flew,” or at least that’s how Beezer always referred to the incident.
It was Christmas Eve. Dr. Ward was new then, and Eva was showing her support for him by making sure everyone attended services. Beezer had been selected to play the bells that year, along with twelve other children, who all wore matching red robes. Each child had one bell, and together they played an oddly timed “Ode to Joy,” each child lifting his bell on cue and shaking it as if his very salvation depended on it. When Beezer finished, he made his way back to the booth. He was blushing from all the attention and from the heat, which Dr. Ward had cranked high to make sure the children stayed warm in the drafty old building.
The pews in the center aisle are slightly elevated, about six or seven inches, which is unusual, and if you forget about it for even a minute, it can be treacherous. I remember sitting in this box with Beezer that night. The service was ending. The choir was singing, just as it is now. An older gentleman, in a hurry to get home and seeing a break in the procession, violated protocol and jumped in line, but he must have forgotten about the step down. What I remember most is the look on Eva’s face as the man came hurtling into our box, headfirst, as if he were flying, his legs almost parallel to the floor. Beezer spotted it before the rest of us and yelled “Holy shit!” which was something Eva would have slapped him for if we’d been at home, but before she could reach him, he was down on the floor of the box pulling me with him. Everyone in the church turned in time to see Eva reach both hands up over her head and grab the old man midflight, like a gymnastics coach spotting a vaulter. It changed the man’s trajectory and probably saved him from a broken neck. And for a moment, before he came down, the man was weightless and flying. I remember thinking he’d be okay if he could just believe he was really flying and not that he was about to get hurt. But the old man lost it, his face contorted, bracing. He landed hard, half on Eva’s lap and half on the gate to the box, shattering the mahogany as he did. By some miracle the man wasn’t hurt. And neither was Eva. I remember how impressed Beezer had been by Eva’s catch and by her courage. He talked about it for days.
“Holy shit!” the voice whispers then, and I see Beezer smile. I realize that this memory was meant for him, not me. He’s half laughing now, half crying as he remembers. Then the soloist begins to sing “Raglan Road,” which is an odd choice but a good one, one that my brother picked out and that I know Eva would have liked.
I see Ann smile as she passes, her robes still flowing, and there’s movement as Eva’s spirit jumps from our box to Ann. I look at Beezer to see if he has noticed, but he’s up and moving toward the coffin along with the other pallbearers, and he hasn’t seen anything.
We follow the coffin then, all of us. As the massive church doors open, the cool inside air condenses into a fine mist, steaming as it releases us to the burning pavement below. But before we go, there’s a moment when everything stops. No one wants to go back outside. A step outside is the end of something, a huge change. We can all feel it. Never mind that it feels like about ninety-seven degrees out there. This is something else. For a moment the threshold seems too high to step over, not only for the pallbearers but for everyone else as well. No one wants to be the first to take that step. Eternity is in this one moment, and we are all suspended in it. It is finally Dr. Ward who breaks the spell and steps outside.
Waves of heat rise off the asphalt driveway, distorting the figures of the people as they step into sunlight, blurring everybody’s edges then, not just Ann’s. It’s as if we were all spirits and the coffin with its dark horizontal lines is the only thing that has any true weight and mass. People move slowly, deliberately, down the steps, their eyes adjusting to the bright sun.
There is no hearse waiting. Instead the pallbearers have opted to carry the coffin to the graveyard—Beezer, Jay-Jay, and some other young men I don’t recognize, friends of Eva’s, maybe.
A few doors down at the Witch House, a group of day-camp kids, preschoolers, is lined up on either side of a thick yellow rope with loops every few feet. Each child holds on to a loop with one hand; some are absently sucking thumbs with the other. A few of the older ones, more used to the buddy system than to the rope, clutch a loop with one hand while holding hands under it, not taking any chances. It would be difficult to walk this way, but they’re not walking now, they’re just standing in line waiting to get inside. I wonder at their teachers, bringing them here to the house of Jonathan Corwin, who was one of the hanging judges, though he was far more skeptical and less committed to the sad practice than were the rest. The kids won’t get it. They’ll think, as I did at their age, that the Witch House is a place where witches lived. If they think of anything, they’ll think of Halloween and candy and what their costumes are going to be for next year. They won’t get the rest of the dark story, which is just as well. Some are sleepy with the heat, distracted, looking for something to pull them out of their dazed state. Their eyes catch the coffin as it moves slowly out of the church driveway, and they watch as it bobs down the street, locking onto it, going for a ride with their eyes, unaware that they shouldn’t. They have no frame of reference for death; to them it’s just part of a tour they got tickets for, or perhaps they think we’re like the street performers they’ve seen wandering the town doing skeleton skits, trying to lure you to the Salem Witch Museum or the Witch Dungeon or even one of the haunted houses.
We pass the gardens of the Ropes Mansion. The cars are stopped in both directions as we cross Essex Street and head up Cambridge toward Chestnut Street, which was Eva’s favorite street in town. The Whitneys had originally lived on it, before politics drove them down to Washington Square with the rest of the Jeffersonian Republicans. It is Beezer’s intention to turn right on Chestnut Street and pass the old Whitney house before turning up Flint Street and down Warren, then looping back up Cambridge Street again toward the Broad Street graveyard. It’s an idea that sounded good at the time (and would have made Eva happy), but it is far too ambitious. The heat makes it almost impossible. Already I’m exhausted and out of breath. I’m thinking it would be better if they went straight and didn’t make the detour at all. I try to send Beezer that thought, but when the procession gets to Chestnut Street and Hamilton Hall, Beezer steers them right, as planned, and the coffin follows, the back end swinging wide like the stern of a boat.
Chestnut Street is decked out for summer with window boxes and flowering planters on the front steps of the old Federal houses. It’s beautiful at any time, but it’s never been the easiest place to walk. The old brick sidewalks are like waves dipping up and down to accommodate the twisted tree roots and frost heaves of the last two centuries. It’s a moment in time, this street, but it’s as uneven as Salem Harbor in a storm tide, and the coffin bobs along as if it were floating on the water. A tourist trolley pulls around the corner, and some of the visitors, sensing a photo opportunity, lean out to snap pictures as they pass. As the trolley rings its bell, an older man playing solitaire at a window table shoots a look of tolerant annoyance at the trolley, only to be surprised as the coffin floats by his window at eye level, our entire parade behind it. He gets up, walks to the window, and closes the Indian shutters.
Broad Street Cemetery sits high on a hill and falls in a subtle slope toward the church. It is not far “as the crow flies,” but it is too distant for the pallbearers in this heat. I can see the strain of it on Beezer’s face; he is wondering if this was a bad idea. We are coming to the burial hill now, the relatives in front with some of the hatted ladies. The cemetery is just up ahead, but the road dips down before it rises up again. Although I can see the gravestones on the hillside, I can no longer see the entrance to the cemetery, so I have no idea what everyone is looking at until I’m almost on top of it. The witches, who are on the rise behind us and can still see the whole picture, have stopped cold and are staring at something in their path.
“What’s going on?” the pastel woman asks her friend. “What are they looking at?”
I can feel the protesters before I see them, and it feels like a wall, or a locked gate. Then I spot the signs: big ones, handwritten on poster board with Magic Markers: NO CHRISTIAN BURIAL and SORCERY IS AN ABOMINATION UNTO THE LORD.
Detective Rafferty, who looks as if he’s been expecting trouble all along, is already on his cell phone, calling for backup. One of the pallbearers, who managed to navigate the sidewalks of Chestnut Street without a false step, stumbles now, although we’re back on solid pavement. He almost falls but recovers at the last second. The ripple of unbalance moves through them, and for a quick moment I think they’re going to drop the coffin right there on the sidewalk.
“Move along,” Rafferty is saying to the protesters as another squad car pulls up. Two officers jump out, blocking the way of the protesters so that the coffin may pass. The pallbearers start up the hill, but it is steep. I can see the sweat soaking through their jackets.
“I don’t understand,” one of the women in pastel says to one of the Red Hats. “Who are those people supposed to be?”
“They’re Calvinists,” the Red Hat replies. I’m suddenly feeling the way Beezer looks. I realize I probably should have eaten something before we came, but I couldn’t. It’s as if I’m looking at the whole thing through binoculars held wrong side out, so that everything in view moves far away into the distance.
“As in old-time Puritans?”
The Red Hat moves carefully past the protesters, sidestepping so she doesn’t get in their way but not daring to turn her back on them.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” the pastel woman says, both to the hatted woman and to the demonstrators. Getting no response, she hurries to catch up. In the distance the sound of a siren draws closer.
“Let them pass,” Rafferty says again, tougher this time, now that reinforcements are on the way. “You want to protest, that’s your right, but you’re not doing it inside this cemetery.” Rafferty steps between the Calvinists and the witches. The witches move together in a silent group, and I can feel something shift. One man crosses himself as they pass, an old superstition from his previous Catholicism, as if he’s not sure (in a pinch) that this new religion he has adopted will hold. Even I can tell that these men are afraid of the witches. Their fear shifts the balance of power, and now the witches feel strong enough to pass; they know that these guys are afraid of them, especially in such a large group.
Anya takes Auntie Emma’s arm, directing her up to the top of the hill, where the Whitney family plot is. I walk behind, keeping an eye on the Calvinists. From below I can see more police cars pulling up.
The wind is blowing off the water. Once we’re at the top of the hill, the air finally begins to move. It smells of salt ocean and low tide. I can feel the stitches from my surgery, still undissolved, throbbing from every uphill step. I look around for a place to sit down, but there is nothing. I want to cry, know I should want it, but it isn’t possible for me, not here with these people who are all watching us. Watching me.
In front of me is the tall Whitney monument and then the small markers that surround it. I look down at the marker in front of me, my grandfather’s stone, G. G. Whitney. Everyone you meet in Salem can tell you a story about my grandfather. But it is not G.G.’s marker I am looking for today, it is Lyndley’s. By the time my sister was buried, I was already in the hospital. I glance down at the end of the row, to the newest-looking stone, hers.
Eva’s marker stone has already been cut. It lies on its side next to the open grave. Anya is ranting about it. She is very angry, because they got the name wrong. They spelled it “Eve,” not “Eva.” It may be an honest mistake, but she wants someone to pay for it. “And look at the way they spelled the word ‘died,’” she says. “They spelled it with a y. Like hair dye. Where did you find these people?”
She isn’t talking to me. Or to anyone who can do anything about it. The same family has done the Whitney gravestones for years, stonecutters from Italy, marble cutters G.G. brought over. I’ve known them since I was a little girl. They did the intricately carved center monument. They did all the granite sculptures in Eva’s gardens: carving delicate rose petals and ferns from the hard New England granite that was so different from the soft marble they were used to. They are great stonecutters, if not great spellers, and I won’t have Anya saying anything bad about them.
I walk down the rows of Whitney markers. When I get to Lyndley’s, I stop and stare. Lyndley’s name is spelled wrong, too. They got the last name right, Boynton, but they spelled her first name with an s instead of an l (“Lyndsey” instead of “Lyndley”). I feel a bit sick, standing here. And dizzy.
When I get back to the group, Anya is holding Auntie Emma’s arm. She has remembered herself and has stopped ranting.
Dr. Ward is reading prayers at the graveside. He keeps glancing at Auntie Emma as he reads, directing the reading to her. But she doesn’t seem to notice. She is not looking at the minister but at the piles of dirt by the open grave. Still, I don’t think she has any idea that we are burying her mother today. The day I arrived, she seemed to know. But today she seems oblivious. Her eyes remain fixed as we recite the Twenty-third Psalm. She does not appear sad or even terribly curious about what we all are doing here.
The ceremony is over now, and some of the people are leaving. But none of us wants to leave Eva here aboveground, not with the protesters still out there below. So some of us stay behind, waiting until she is lowered, each taking a ritual handful of earth or flowers and putting them down with Eva.
And then, when it finally is over, when we all turn to go, there is a gasp from one of the red-hatted women. I reel around in time to see one of Cal’s disciples walking toward the cemetery. He’s robed and sandaled, and his hair is long and flowing. He has a beard. Even Dr. Ward cannot help staring. Then I see Rafferty step in front of him, blocking his way. The group of protesters moves in, and the police cars converge. I can see Rafferty’s face all twisted up as if he’d just tasted bad fish or something
“Jesus Christ!” the pastel woman says.
“Hardly,” says one of the Red Hats.
“That’s not Jesus, that’s John the Baptist,” another Red Hat chimes in.
“And that’s Cal Boynton,” says a second in a far less jocular voice. She gestures to a man wearing a black Armani suit.
“How dare he!” says one of the other Red Hats.
The crowd goes still as Cal passes. He stops in front of my aunt.
“Hello, Emma,” he says to my aunt. She stiffens. “And hello, Sophya,” he says to me without turning, without having to look at me. “Welcome home.”
The ground spins, and Beezer grabs my arm.
Before I can think what to do, Rafferty is there. “Move along,” Rafferty says to Cal, who doesn’t budge.
“Relax, Detective Rafferty,” Cal says. “I’ve just come to pay my respects like everyone else.”
Anya has taken Auntie Emma’s arm and is leading her away from the crowd. “Come on,” Anya says. “It’s over.” Beezer looks at me. He stays by my side as Anya walks my aunt down the other side of the hill and out the back gate of the cemetery toward the harbor.
Beezer gestures for me to go ahead of him. “Let’s go home,” he says.
Rafferty stays behind, keeping an eye on Cal, making sure he doesn’t follow us.
At its peak, there were six hundred women making and selling Ipswich lace, which was shipped out of the town harbor to ports all over the world.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE
Chapter 9 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)
ANYA ACCOMPANIES AUNTIE EMMA back to Yellow Dog Island. When Anya gets to Eva’s house, she goes directly to the pantry and pours herself a drink. Besides May and my aunt, Dr. Ward is the only one who doesn’t come back to the house. He sends his apologies via note, explaining that he’s not feeling very well and promising that he’ll stop by later in the week to see me. All the rest of the mourners show up at the house, including all the witches. The Calvinists might just as well have shown up themselves, because they are everyone’s main topic of conversation. The nerve of them, everyone says, showing up like that at the cemetery. I’m still stunned by the whole thing, and I can tell that Beezer’s angry at me for it, or at least frustrated. He keeps insisting that I shouldn’t be surprised about this. He says I knew about Cal and how he had all these followers who dress up like the apostles and think he’s the Second Coming. Even though it was shocking and sick and everything, Beezer said, it really shouldn’t surprise me that much, because I knew about all of it already. We had talked about it more than a year ago, he said, and I’d told him it didn’t bother me.
I have no recollection of any such conversation, and I tell him so.
“Remember Eva sent you all those newspapers?” he said, as if that should do it. “She sent them to you because they had articles about Cal in them.”
I’m still looking at him blankly.
“For God’s sake, Towner, it was ATH.”
That’s how Beezer and I refer to my history. BTH was “before the hospital,” and ATH was after. When I first got out, Beezer helped me reconstruct my memories. A lot of the stories and images I have come directly from my brother, his own memories superimposed on the thin skeleton of my own. He came to California that next summer, on his school vacation, and he tried to help me. He was even thinking of staying out there for college, applying to Caltech, but then one day the whole thing got to be too much for him, and he had to leave. He only had a week left before he had to go back to prep school. He told me that Eva wanted him to come back early to get ready. I could tell he felt bad about it. I could also tell that it was a lie. Remembering was a difficult process. It got worse as it went on, especially when we started to talk about Lyndley. I remember suggesting that maybe we should have known about the abuse, or known at least that Lyndley was in trouble, that maybe we could have helped her. There were signs everywhere, I told him: the bruises, the precocious sexuality, the acting out. I could see Beezer’s face tighten as I went on and on about my sister. I could see him shutting down from it. This wasn’t something he could talk about; it was too much for him, as it might have been for any healthy person, anyone who wasn’t obsessed with the whole thing the way I was. I wanted to let it go, but I was powerless in the face of the scraps of memory I did have. I clung to them as if they were a life raft, and it was just too much for my brother to handle.
Beezer is very patient with my BTH lapses, but he cannot tolerate any lapses ATH. I had no shock therapy ATH and no more extended hospitalizations, with the exception of my recent surgery, but that was physical, not mental (although my ex-shrink might be the first one to dispute that point). The newspapers, the ones my brother kept referring to as proof that I knew about Cal’s new vocation, were the ones I had never opened. So Beezer’s proof meant nothing to me. I don’t remember talking about Cal with my brother at all. It is starting to piss me off, actually, the way Beezer keeps telling me how I feel and that it doesn’t bother me. I know he needs me to be okay with it, and I respect that, but come on. For God’s sake, I think I would have some recollection of being told that my uncle, Cal Boynton, was a fundamentalist preacher whose followers believed he was the new Messiah. I think I would have remembered something like that.
When the crowd thins out a bit, Beezer goes down and raids Eva’s wine cellar, coming back with some sweet sherry, a dusty Armagnac, and some amontillado.
“Oh, goody,” Anya says, “how very Foe.”
The pastels and the Red Hats are glad to see the sherry, and they pour tiny glasses for everyone. I put on some tea in Eva’s honor, and people settle around the little tables with their lace doilies as if it were a regular day at the tearoom and not the day of Eva’s funeral. I’m thinking I should make cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off, the way Eva would have, but there isn’t any food in the house besides the things that people brought, plus the sherry and the tea. Looking back, I realize that Eva forgot to teach me death etiquette, because, with the exception of Lyndley, no one in the family has died since G.G. and my grandmother, but both happened when I was a small girl and too young to attend services. I didn’t go to Lyndley’s funeral because I was in the hospital by then, but I suppose that they must have had one and that they probably came back here afterward. Where else would they go?
One of the pastels has had too much of the sherry. Her face is red, and she is starting to cry. She is talking about Eva and how she helped her son. She’s talking about dancing school and how hopelessly clumsy he was as a boy, and somewhere in her rambling monologue I realize that her son has “passed on,” that he died in the Gulf War. “Friendly fire,” she says, smiling strangely, “as if there is any such thing.” And then she turns to me. “You can’t let her gardens die,” she says urgently, grabbing my arm. “Promise me you won’t let them die.”
I nod because I don’t know what else to do, and because the two are somehow tied together in her mind, Eva’s gardens and her dead son, but I can’t quite figure out how they are connected, so I just nod stupidly and promise.
The whole group is quiet. One of the Red Hats takes the crying woman’s hand, and then Ruth, the only one who is still wearing her hat, takes it off and presents it to the crying woman, holding it out, offering it like an old-fashioned elixir guaranteed to cure any ill. I don’t know if it is the hat itself or the childlike innocence of the gesture, but it works. The crying matron doesn’t put the hat on her head but runs her hands over it, as if it were some beloved cat who had just jumped up on her lap to be petted. It seems to calm her. After a minute she manages to smile through her tears.
“You can put it on,” the Red Hat says.
And before the crying woman has a chance to refuse, Ruth takes the big floppy pastel hat off the woman’s head and replaces it with the oversize red one. And then, like the Circle (the women on the island), the group surrounds their new friend.
When the Red Hats leave, they go in a group, the same way they arrived. The women wave as they go, their voices chorused together in condolence and compliments, fading like music, then splitting into single notes as they move to their separate cars. I don’t notice until later the lone hat propped against the mantel. I don’t see it until the grieving woman has already driven away, but by then it is too late, so I leave it there.
Someone has switched on the radio, looking for NPR, but the radio is old and the signal is weak, and WBUR has been hijacked by some stronger station, one that favors show tunes. This one’s playing South Pacific, Ezio Pinza singing “Some Enchanted Evening.”
By the time Rafferty stops in, most of the people are gone. He walks over to Jay-Jay, the only person here he really knows. I watch Jay-Jay trying to straighten up as Rafferty approaches. By then both Jay-Jay and Beezer are getting pretty drunk, because while everyone else has been drinking one form of sherry or tea, Beezer and Jay-Jay have appropriated the Armagnac for themselves and are carrying the bottle around refilling their snifters. I’ve never seen Beezer drunk, and it has never even occurred to me that he might drink, but Anya seems comfortable with it. She’s walking again as if she were attached to his hip, carrying her drained glass of sweet sherry upside down like a little dinner bell she’s about to ring to summon her guests to the table.
Jay-Jay pours himself another drink.
“Where are the tea ladies?” Rafferty asks.
“You’ve just missed them,” I say, and he looks relieved.
“Have the Calvinists gone back to their cages?” Jay-Jay wants to know.
“Trailers,” Rafferty corrects him, “and yes, they have, for now.”
I detect a trace of a New York accent.
“Your mother’s not here?” Rafferty asks me, eyes scanning the room. Considering he’s a cop, it takes him a while to notice things.
“No.”
He seems surprised. Obviously he doesn’t know May very well. “You’re not staying in this house all alone, are you?”
I don’t answer that kind of question, even from a cop.
“Anya and I are staying with Towner,” Beezer says, jumping in to rescue me.
“Oh, of course,” Rafferty says, suddenly realizing how it sounded. “Sorry.”
“Were you asking as an officer of the law or merely a concerned citizen?” I say, trying to make light of it.
“More like an attempt at small talk,” he says.
“Then you need a drink.” Beezer goes for a glass, offering the Armagnac.
Rafferty holds up a hand, declines.
“AA,” Jay-Jay mouths in exaggerated pantomime to Beezer, but we all catch it, including Rafferty, who rolls his eyes.
“Tea?” I offer.
“God no,” he says, horrified, and we both laugh.
Beezer figures I’ve got it covered and turns back to Anya and Jay-Jay.
Rafferty is looking for something to say to me. His eyes scan the room. Finally he settles on the obvious. “I’m sorry about your grandmother,” he says. “She was a nice lady.”
“She was my great-aunt, actually,” I say, and I can tell he doesn’t know what to say to that, “but thank you.”
We stand there awkwardly, neither knowing what to say next.
“How did you two know each other?” I finally ask.
“I used to come here for lunch,” he said.
I think of the lunch fare on Eva’s menu: finger sandwiches, cucumber and dill on dainty white crustless bread, date-nut bread with cream cheese. It seems unlikely.
“I’m a big fan of the fancy sandwich,” he explains.
It’s the last thing I’d expect him to say, and it makes me smile.
I seem to remember Eva mentioning that she was good friends with a cop. For some reason I had pictured her friend as much older.
Rafferty is trying to figure out what I’m thinking. He looks at me strangely.
I’m searching my Eva training for something to say when I notice that he still has nothing to drink. “How about a soda?” I offer. “I think I saw some in the pantry. I don’t know how old it is, though.”
“Any vintage after 1972 is okay with me.”
I go to the kitchen and get some ice, coming back with both glass and soda. Jay-Jay has started pulling boxes of old photographs out of the bottom drawer of the buffet. He and Beezer have them spread out on every available surface, and there’s no place to pour. I hand the glass to Rafferty and unscrew the cap of the soda. It snaps when the seal breaks, so I know it’s still good—too good, actually. When I start to pour, it fizzes up and over the side of the glass. I don’t know if it’s because it is so hot in the pantry or because I’ve put too much ice in the glass, but before I reach the halfway point, it’s fizzing up and over the rim of the glass and is about to land on the Aubusson when Rafferty sticks a finger in the glass to stop it.
We stand there stupidly, Rafferty with his index finger in the glass up to the second knuckle, me looking around frantically for something to put under it. “It’s okay,” he says. “It stopped.”
“Sorry,” I say to him. Then, looking at his finger, I comment, “Nice trick.”
“I used to be a beer drinker,” he says, “in my last life.”
Beezer and Anya take a pile of the old photos to the window seat, begin shuffling through them. Jay-Jay, who’s invasive by nature, walks around the room, opening up cabinets and picking out objects he remembers from childhood. He spent a lot of time in this room when he was younger. He and Beezer played board games and poker in here when Beezer was home on vacation. They’d clear off one of the bigger tables and spread their stuff out, and I remember that it would drive Eva crazy. They would get rid of all the lace in the room, hiding it in drawers and under cushions, and she would still be looking for pieces for weeks after Beezer had gone back to boarding school.
“Remember this?” Jay-Jay says, holding up a teapot in the shape of a bird.
“I remember when you broke it,” Beezer says, looking it over, pointing out the crack.
“She made us work off the debt serving high tea.” Jay-Jay goes back into the cabinet, digging deeper.
“You got a search warrant to do that?” Rafferty says to him.
“Oh, Towner doesn’t mind,” Jay-Jay says.
Rafferty looks at me, checking. I shrug.
“Curiosity killed the cat,” Rafferty says, then smiles.
“And satisfaction brought it back,” Jay-Jay retorts.
Rafferty shakes his head.
“It probably makes him a good cop, though,” I say to Rafferty.
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” It’s so genuine and unfiltered that I can’t help but laugh. He looks immediately sorry. The doorbell rings.
“Saved by the bell,” he says, and rolls his eyes again. It’s as if Eva were in the room, channeling clichés through us.
It’s the woman who forgot her hat. I grab it, head to the door. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry? I think, but I don’t say it out loud this time.
“Sorry,” the woman says. “I got all the way to Beverly before I realized I’d left it here.” I walk her across the porch. “Eva would have been so happy you came back,” she says. “I hope you don’t mind me saying so.” She doesn’t wait for an answer.
It is finally cooling. Somewhere in the park, someone is playing a violin.
They’re telling stories about Eva when I return. Prompted by the photos. Every picture is a story. They’re one-upping each other, Beezer and Jay-Jay, playing to Anya or to Rafferty or to anyone else who will listen.
“It’s starting to sound like an Irish wake.” Rafferty hands me the empty soda glass, not wanting to put it down amid all the photos.
“More?” I ask, surprised that he’s finished it so fast. He holds up a hand—he’s had enough. “Eva was part Irish,” I say.
“You’re kidding,” he says, and I can tell he is surprised.
“On her mother’s side.” I remember that Eva used to tell us that our Irish blood is what made all of us good “readers,” that all Irish people have the gift of blind sight, or at least all Irishwomen do. But I don’t have any Irish in me. My grandmother was G.G.’s first wife, Elizabeth, who died giving birth to my mother. May is quite psychic as well, though she goes out of her way to deny it. So the gift must come from both sides of the family.
The stories from the other end of the room are getting too loud for us to carry on any other conversation.
“Remember the time she told the Republican candidate for governor not to run?” Jay-Jay says, and Beezer does a spit take. “What was it she said to him?”
“No good could come of it,” Beezer says.
“Yeah, that’s it.” Jay-Jay turns to Anya. “The guy had a ton of money. People thought he actually had a shot at winning. A week before the election, he slipped on one of his glossy four-color campaign flyers and ended up spending six weeks on his back in some Podunk hospital out in East Cupcake that he didn’t dare leave because he was afraid he would, quote, ‘alienate his constituents.’”
“Who voted straight Democrat anyway,” Beezer tells Anya.
“So he lost?” Anya asks in disbelief.
“A Republican? In Massachusetts? Of course he lost. Doesn’t take a psychic to predict that one.” Jay-Jay is laughing his ass off.
“You think we should tell him about our recent run of Republican governors?” Rafferty asks, then decides against it. Anya and Beezer are laughing so hard they can’t tell him either.
“What?” Jay-Jay says, but Beezer’s got his whoop laugh going now, and no one is immune to it.
Rafferty looks at me. The whole party is laughing now. Beezer laughs silently, his face in a grimace that looks like something out of a horror film. The only noise he makes is on the intake, a big whooping wheeze that sounds like he’s kidding, but he’s not. People start to calm down, and then he whoops, and they are off again, weak with laughter and release.
Jay-Jay’s girlfriend, Irene something-or-other, comes running up to us.
“Where’s the bathroom,” she says urgently. “I think I’m gonna pee my pants.”
“Great,” I say, pointing to the hall, and I follow to make sure she gets there.
Rafferty follows me out into the hall.
“The last door,” I point, and she goes in.
Rafferty and I are in the hallway then, where it is slightly quieter, the voices muffled. He seems grateful for the quiet. He looks relieved, then awkward, searching for words.
“This was a hard case,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“This case. Eva’s. Usually when somebody disappears without a trace, it’s Eva I go to.”
“Really?”
“She’s helped us more than once, actually.”
I remember Eva talking about her friend the cop. How she had done a reading that helped him find a missing boy. So I was right; the friend she’d talked about was Rafferty.
“She was a hell of a lady.”
“I’m glad you knew her.”
“She talked about you all the time.”
I hate the thought of Eva talking about me, and he can tell. I try to cover, but it’s too late.
“All nice things,” he said, but I can tell he knows more than all nice things. Everyone in this town knows more than nice things about me; they’re public knowledge. I can’t imagine the discussions he might have had about me with Eva—about my hospitalization. God, if he got curious and looked up my police records, he’d have enough material to talk about me for the next year.
“I need to sit down,” I say, realizing it’s true only as I say it. I feel a little sick. It’s been a long day, and I’m not supposed to be having long days. My head is reeling with the noise of everything in this room that isn’t being said. I have no more strength to push away people’s thoughts. I can hear all their unspoken questions: Why the hell did she come back? How crazy is she, do you think? Before Rafferty has a chance to protest, I escape back inside.
I cross the room, putting distance between us, going to a table in the bay window. Rafferty comes in a minute later. He scans the crowd until he sees me, then walks over and leans down.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “That was another poor attempt at small talk.”
I don’t have it in me to smile.
“Eva kept telling me over and over how bad I was at this kind of thing.”
I feel some compassion for him. He is trying. I look at him and realize that his secret thoughts, whatever they might be, are probably the only ones in this room that I’m not reading tonight.
“She kept telling me she’d give me a discount on one of her manners classes,” he says.
There is a long pause. He shifts awkwardly. “I guess I should have taken her up on it.”
I’m still trying to think of something to say back to him, something polite but not personal. Finally I get it. I speak to him in Aunt Eva’s own words. “I like soup. Do you like soup?”
It is a test. To see how much he knows. If he has talked to Eva as much as I suspect he has, he will know the expression. It was one of her favorites. Especially if they were talking about the skill of making small talk or his lack thereof. Learning to talk about soup was the first lesson Eva taught.
He looks at me curiously. I’m watching his eyes, waiting for signs of recognition. He shows nothing. “Excuse me?” he says slowly, deliberately.
I’m staring at him now, trying to read his thoughts. His mind is either intentionally blank or unreadable. His eyes are steady. He might be telling the truth, or he might be just a hell of a good cop. I can’t decide which.
Irene comes back into the room then, fluffing her skirts down as she goes. “What’d I miss?”
“Tell her about the statue,” Jay-Jay says to Beezer. “Hey, Reenie, you gotta hear this one.”
“I was telling Anya about the time Cal tried to get the statue of Roger Conant removed,” Beezer explains.
Irene smiles, remembering.
“Because it looks like a witch?” Anya asks.
“Because it looks like it’s masturbating,” says Irene.
“What?” Anya says, peering out the window at the statue of Salem’s founding father, which is right across the square. “Oh, please, it does not.”
“Swear to God.” Jay-Jay crosses his heart.
Irene goes to the window and tries to point it out to Anya, who’s squinting into the gathering darkness, trying to make herself see it.
“Where?” Anya says.
“Right there. The way he’s holding his staff.”
“More like his rod,” Jay-Jay says, and even Irene thinks he’s gone too far.
“I’ve gotta get back to work,” Rafferty says then. I start to get up to walk him to the door. “You want me to take him with me?” He gestures to Jay-Jay.
“He’s okay,” I say.
Rafferty shrugs.
“Thank you for coming,” I say.
“We’ll see each other again.”
“Yes,” I say.
I walk him to the door, watch as he walks down the steps to the black unmarked car. He sits there for a minute, then starts the engine and does an illegal U-turn on the square, barely missing a parked car.
Ann Chase is cleaning up, gathering dishes off the tables, taking them to the kitchen. I follow her.
“See? There? It really does look like he’s jerking off.”
“Does not,” Anya says, but she’s laughing now, a hearty Norwegian sort of laugh.
“Does too,” Lyndley’s voice says in my mind, flashing a random memory. It was the summer before Lyndley died that she discovered the statue of Roger Conant. I don’t mean she literally discovered it—we’d been looking at that statue all our lives. But that summer when she looked at it, she saw something completely different. She was laughing so hard she almost couldn’t tell us what she was laughing at. She stood on the curb directing us, making us walk around and around the statue, looking at it from all angles until we saw what she had seen. It was Beezer who saw it first, and his face turned bright red. He was so embarrassed he actually went back inside the house, although I’m sure he wouldn’t remember that now. It took me a lot longer. By the time I saw it, cars were stopped, tooting their horns at me, and Lyndley was laughing, yelling back at the cars, telling them not to “get their panties in a wad,” a southern expression she’d picked up over the winter and one she used for everything. Finally a driver laid on the horn; and Lyndley gave him the finger. It was then that I caught the right angle on old Roger Conant, and I just started laughing hysterically. I don’t know if it was the expression on the driver’s face or on Lyndley’s or the sight of our distinguished founding father all robed and holding a staff that from the back right angle looked like an erect penis. I don’t know which thing set me off, but I didn’t stop laughing until Eva came and got me off the sidewalk and made me come back to the house. She didn’t ask me what I was laughing at. I had the impression that she didn’t want to know.
“I’m not seeing it,” Anya says.
“You can’t see it so well from here,” Beezer says to Anya. “It’s better from outside.” Then he tells her the story about how Eva single-handedly saved that statue and how it pissed Cal off royally but made Eva a town heroine from that moment on.
I grab some more dishes and follow Ann Chase to the kitchen. She is standing at the sink, carefully peeling off a piece of lace that has gotten itself stuck to the bottom of a saucer.
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Brunonia Barry
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Drawn by family. Driven by fear. Haunted by fate.Would knowing the future be a gift or a burden? Or even a curse…?The Whitney women of Salem, Massachusetts are renowned for reading the future in the patterns of lace. But the future doesn’t always bring good news – as Towner Whitney knows all too well. When she was just fifteen her gift sent her whole world crashing to pieces. She predicted – and then witnessed – something so horrific that she vowed never to read lace again, and fled her home and family for good. Salem is a place of ghosts for Towner, and she swore she would never return.Yet family is a powerful tie and fifteen years later, Towner finds herself back in Salem. Her beloved great-aunt Eva has suddenly disappeared – and when you’ve lived a life like Eva’s, that could mean real trouble. But Salem is wreathed in sickly shadows and whispered half-memories. It’s fast becoming clear that the ghosts of Towner’s fractured past have not been brought fully into the light. And with them comes the threat of terrifying new disaster.A literary page-turner with depth, narrative power and a story that novels like ‘The Thirteenth Tale’ can only dream of, ‘The Lace Reader’ is a bewitching and tightly plotted read.