The Lace Reader

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.

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

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

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.