Czytaj książkę: «The Lace Reader»
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
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part Two
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part Three
Part Four
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part Five
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Part Six
Chapter 33
Acknowledgments
Author’s Disclaimer
To Learn More About The Lace Reader
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
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
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
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
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
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.
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