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.
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 E
va’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 bot
her 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.
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