The Lace Reader

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

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.