The Lace Reader

by Brunonia Barry

  Broad Street Cemetery sits high on a hill and falls in a subtle slope toward the church. It is not far “as the crow flies,” but it is too distant for the pallbearers in this heat. I can see the strain of it on Beezer’s face; he is wondering if this was a bad idea. We are coming to the burial hill now, the relatives in front with some of the hatted ladies. The cemetery is just up ahead, but the road dips down before it rises up again. Although I can see the gravestones on the hillside, I can no longer see the entrance to the cemetery, so I have no idea what everyone is looking at until I’m almost on top of it. The witches, who are on the rise behind us and can still see the whole picture, have stopped cold and are staring at something in their path.

  “What’s going on?” the pastel woman asks her friend. “What are they looking at?”

  I can feel the protesters before I see them, and it feels like a wall, or a locked gate. Then I spot the signs: big ones, handwritten on poster board with Magic Markers: NO CHRISTIAN BURIAL and SORCERY IS AN ABOMINATION UNTO THE LORD.

  Detective Rafferty, who looks as if he’s been expecting trouble all along, is already on his cell phone, calling for backup. One of the pallbearers, who managed to navigate the sidewalks of Chestnut Street without a false step, stumbles now, although we’re back on solid pavement. He almost falls but recovers at the last second. The ripple of unbalance moves through them, and for a quick moment I think they’re going to drop the coffin right there on the sidewalk.

  “Move along,” Rafferty is saying to the protesters as another squad car pulls up. Two officers jump out, blocking the way of the protesters so that the coffin may pass. The pallbearers start up the hill, but it is steep. I can see the sweat soaking through their jackets.

  “I don’t understand,” one of the women in pastel says to one of the Red Hats. “Who are those people supposed to be?”

  “They’re Calvinists,” the Red Hat replies. I’m suddenly feeling the way Beezer looks. I realize I probably should have eaten something before we came, but I couldn’t. It’s as if I’m looking at the whole thing through binoculars held wrong side out, so that everything in view moves far away into the distance.

  “As in old-time Puritans?”

  The Red Hat moves carefully past the protesters, sidestepping so she doesn’t get in their way but not daring to turn her back on them.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” the pastel woman says, both to the hatted woman and to the demonstrators. Getting no response, she hurries to catch up. In the distance the sound of a siren draws closer.

  “Let them pass,” Rafferty says again, tougher this time, now that reinforcements are on the way. “You want to protest, that’s your right, but you’re not doing it inside this cemetery.” Rafferty steps between the Calvinists and the witches. The witches move together in a silent group, and I can feel something shift. One man crosses himself as they pass, an old superstition from his previous Catholicism, as if he’s not sure (in a pinch) that this new religion he has adopted will hold. Even I can tell that these men are afraid of the witches. Their fear shifts the balance of power, and now the witches feel strong enough to pass; they know that these guys are afraid of them, especially in such a large group.

  Anya takes Auntie Emma’s arm, directing her up to the top of the hill, where the Whitney family plot is. I walk behind, keeping an eye on the Calvinists. From below I can see more police cars pulling up.

  The wind is blowing off the water. Once we’re at the top of the hill, the air finally begins to move. It smells of salt ocean and low tide. I can feel the stitches from my surgery, still undissolved, throbbing from every uphill step. I look around for a place to sit down, but there is nothing. I want to cry, know I should want it, but it isn’t possible for me, not here with these people who are all watching us. Watching me.

  In front of me is the tall Whitney monument and then the small markers that surround it. I look down at the marker in front of me, my grandfather’s stone, G. G. Whitney. Everyone you meet in Salem can tell you a story about my grandfather. But it is not G.G.’s marker I am looking for today, it is Lyndley’s. By the time my sister was buried, I was already in the hospital. I glance down at the end of the row, to the newest-looking stone, hers.

  Eva’s marker stone has already been cut. It lies on its side next to the open grave. Anya is ranting about it. She is very angry, because they got the name wrong. They spelled it “Eve,” not “Eva.” It may be an honest mistake, but she wants someone to pay for it. “And look at the way they spelled the word ‘died,’” she says. “They spelled it with a y. Like hair dye. Where did you find these people?”

  She isn’t talking to me. Or to anyone who can do anything about it. The same family has done the Whitney gravestones for years, stonecutters from Italy, marble cutters G.G. brought over. I’ve known them since I was a little girl. They did the intricately carved center monument. They did all the granite sculptures in Eva’s gardens: carving delicate rose petals and ferns from the hard New England granite that was so different from the soft marble they were used to. They are great stonecutters, if not great spellers, and I won’t have Anya saying anything bad about them.

  I walk down the rows of Whitney markers. When I get to Lyndley’s, I stop and stare. Lyndley’s name is spelled wrong, too. They got the last name right, Boynton, but they spelled her first name with an s instead of an l (“Lyndsey” instead of “Lyndley”). I feel a bit sick, standing here. And dizzy.

  When I get back to the group, Anya is holding Auntie Emma’s arm. She has remembered herself and has stopped ranting.

  Dr. Ward is reading prayers at the graveside. He keeps glancing at Auntie Emma as he reads, directing the reading to her. But she doesn’t seem to notice. She is not looking at the minister but at the piles of dirt by the open grave. Still, I don’t think she has any idea that we are burying her mother today. The day I arrived, she seemed to know. But today she seems oblivious. Her eyes remain fixed as we recite the Twenty-third Psalm. She does not appear sad or even terribly curious about what we all are doing here.

  The ceremony is over now, and some of the people are leaving. But none of us wants to leave Eva here aboveground, not with the protesters still out there below. So some of us stay behind, waiting until she is lowered, each taking a ritual handful of earth or flowers and putting them down with Eva.

  And then, when it finally is over, when we all turn to go, there is a gasp from one of the red-hatted women. I reel around in time to see one of Cal’s disciples walking toward the cemetery. He’s robed and sandaled, and his hair is long and flowing. He has a beard. Even Dr. Ward cannot help staring. Then I see Rafferty step in front of him, blocking his way. The group of protesters moves in, and the police cars converge. I can see Rafferty’s face all twisted up as if he’d just tasted bad fish or something

  “Jesus Christ!” the pastel woman says.

  “Hardly,” says one of the Red Hats.

  “That’s not Jesus, that’s John the Baptist,” another Red Hat chimes in.

  “And that’s Cal Boynton,” says a second in a far less jocular voice. She gestures to a man wearing a black Armani suit.

  “How dare he!” says one of the other Red Hats.

  The crowd goes still as Cal passes. He stops in front of my aunt.

  “Hello, Emma,” he says to my aunt. She stiffens. “And hello, Sophya,” he says to me without turning, without having to look at me. “Welcome home.”

  The ground spins, and Beezer grabs my arm.

  Before I can think what to do, Rafferty is there. “Move along,” Rafferty says to Cal, who doesn’t budge.

  “Relax, Detective Rafferty,” Cal says. “I’ve just come to pay my respects like everyone else.”

  Anya has taken Auntie Emma’s arm and is leading her away from the crowd. “Come on,” Anya says. “It’s over.” Beezer looks at me. He stays by my side as Anya walks my aunt down the other side of the hill and out the back gate of the cemetery toward the harbor.

  Beezer gestures f
or me to go ahead of him. “Let’s go home,” he says.

  Rafferty stays behind, keeping an eye on Cal, making sure he doesn’t follow us.

  At its peak, there were six hundred women making and selling Ipswich lace, which was shipped out of the town harbor to ports all over the world.

  —THE LACE READER’S GUIDE

  Chapter 9

  ANYA ACCOMPANIES AUNTIE EMMA back to Yellow Dog Island. When Anya gets to Eva’s house, she goes directly to the pantry and pours herself a drink. Besides May and my aunt, Dr. Ward is the only one who doesn’t come back to the house. He sends his apologies via note, explaining that he’s not feeling very well and promising that he’ll stop by later in the week to see me. All the rest of the mourners show up at the house, including all the witches. The Calvinists might just as well have shown up themselves, because they are everyone’s main topic of conversation. The nerve of them, everyone says, showing up like that at the cemetery. I’m still stunned by the whole thing, and I can tell that Beezer’s angry at me for it, or at least frustrated. He keeps insisting that I shouldn’t be surprised about this. He says I knew about Cal and how he had all these followers who dress up like the apostles and think he’s the Second Coming. Even though it was shocking and sick and everything, Beezer said, it really shouldn’t surprise me that much, because I knew about all of it already. We had talked about it more than a year ago, he said, and I’d told him it didn’t bother me.

  I have no recollection of any such conversation, and I tell him so.

  “Remember Eva sent you all those newspapers?” he said, as if that should do it. “She sent them to you because they had articles about Cal in them.”

  I’m still looking at him blankly.

  “For God’s sake, Towner, it was ATH.”

  That’s how Beezer and I refer to my history. BTH was “before the hospital,” and ATH was after. When I first got out, Beezer helped me reconstruct my memories. A lot of the stories and images I have come directly from my brother, his own memories superimposed on the thin skeleton of my own. He came to California that next summer, on his school vacation, and he tried to help me. He was even thinking of staying out there for college, applying to Caltech, but then one day the whole thing got to be too much for him, and he had to leave. He only had a week left before he had to go back to prep school. He told me that Eva wanted him to come back early to get ready. I could tell he felt bad about it. I could also tell that it was a lie. Remembering was a difficult process. It got worse as it went on, especially when we started to talk about Lyndley. I remember suggesting that maybe we should have known about the abuse, or known at least that Lyndley was in trouble, that maybe we could have helped her. There were signs everywhere, I told him: the bruises, the precocious sexuality, the acting out. I could see Beezer’s face tighten as I went on and on about my sister. I could see him shutting down from it. This wasn’t something he could talk about; it was too much for him, as it might have been for any healthy person, anyone who wasn’t obsessed with the whole thing the way I was. I wanted to let it go, but I was powerless in the face of the scraps of memory I did have. I clung to them as if they were a life raft, and it was just too much for my brother to handle.

  Beezer is very patient with my BTH lapses, but he cannot tolerate any lapses ATH. I had no shock therapy ATH and no more extended hospitalizations, with the exception of my recent surgery, but that was physical, not mental (although my ex-shrink might be the first one to dispute that point). The newspapers, the ones my brother kept referring to as proof that I knew about Cal’s new vocation, were the ones I had never opened. So Beezer’s proof meant nothing to me. I don’t remember talking about Cal with my brother at all. It is starting to piss me off, actually, the way Beezer keeps telling me how I feel and that it doesn’t bother me. I know he needs me to be okay with it, and I respect that, but come on. For God’s sake, I think I would have some recollection of being told that my uncle, Cal Boynton, was a fundamentalist preacher whose followers believed he was the new Messiah. I think I would have remembered something like that.

  When the crowd thins out a bit, Beezer goes down and raids Eva’s wine cellar, coming back with some sweet sherry, a dusty Armagnac, and some amontillado.

  “Oh, goody,” Anya says, “how very Poe.”

  The pastels and the Red Hats are glad to see the sherry, and they pour tiny glasses for everyone. I put on some tea in Eva’s honor, and people settle around the little tables with their lace doilies as if it were a regular day at the tearoom and not the day of Eva’s funeral. I’m thinking I should make cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off, the way Eva would have, but there isn’t any food in the house besides the things that people brought, plus the sherry and the tea. Looking back, I realize that Eva forgot to teach me death etiquette, because, with the exception of Lyndley, no one in the family has died since G.G. and my grandmother, but both happened when I was a small girl and too young to attend services. I didn’t go to Lyndley’s funeral because I was in the hospital by then, but I suppose that they must have had one and that they probably came back here afterward. Where else would they go?

  One of the pastels has had too much of the sherry. Her face is red, and she is starting to cry. She is talking about Eva and how she helped her son. She’s talking about dancing school and how hopelessly clumsy he was as a boy, and somewhere in her rambling monologue I realize that her son has “passed on,” that he died in the Gulf War. “Friendly fire,” she says, smiling strangely, “as if there is any such thing.” And then she turns to me. “You can’t let her gardens die,” she says urgently, grabbing my arm. “Promise me you won’t let them die.”

  I nod because I don’t know what else to do, and because the two are somehow tied together in her mind, Eva’s gardens and her dead son, but I can’t quite figure out how they are connected, so I just nod stupidly and promise.

  The whole group is quiet. One of the Red Hats takes the crying woman’s hand, and then Ruth, the only one who is still wearing her hat, takes it off and presents it to the crying woman, holding it out, offering it like an old-fashioned elixir guaranteed to cure any ill. I don’t know if it is the hat itself or the childlike innocence of the gesture, but it works. The crying matron doesn’t put the hat on her head but runs her hands over it, as if it were some beloved cat who had just jumped up on her lap to be petted. It seems to calm her. After a minute she manages to smile through her tears.

  “You can put it on,” the Red Hat says.

  And before the crying woman has a chance to refuse, Ruth takes the big floppy pastel hat off the woman’s head and replaces it with the oversize red one. And then, like the Circle (the women on the island), the group surrounds their new friend.

  When the Red Hats leave, they go in a group, the same way they arrived. The women wave as they go, their voices chorused together in condolence and compliments, fading like music, then splitting into single notes as they move to their separate cars. I don’t notice until later the lone hat propped against the mantel. I don’t see it until the grieving woman has already driven away, but by then it is too late, so I leave it there.

  Someone has switched on the radio, looking for NPR, but the radio is old and the signal is weak, and WBUR has been hijacked by some stronger station, one that favors show tunes. This one’s playing South Pacific, Ezio Pinza singing “Some Enchanted Evening.”

  By the time Rafferty stops in, most of the people are gone. He walks over to Jay-Jay, the only person here he really knows. I watch Jay-Jay trying to straighten up as Rafferty approaches. By then both Jay-Jay and Beezer are getting pretty drunk, because while everyone else has been drinking one form of sherry or tea, Beezer and Jay-Jay have appropriated the Armagnac for themselves and are carrying the bottle around refilling their snifters. I’ve never seen Beezer drunk, and it has never even occurred to me that he might drink, but Anya seems comfortable with it. She’s walking again as if she were attached to his hip, carrying her drained glass of sweet sherry upside down lik
e a little dinner bell she’s about to ring to summon her guests to the table.

  Jay-Jay pours himself another drink.

  “Where are the tea ladies?” Rafferty asks.

  “You’ve just missed them,” I say, and he looks relieved.

  “Have the Calvinists gone back to their cages?” Jay-Jay wants to know.

  “Trailers,” Rafferty corrects him, “and yes, they have, for now.”

  I detect a trace of a New York accent.

  “Your mother’s not here?” Rafferty asks me, eyes scanning the room. Considering he’s a cop, it takes him a while to notice things.

  “No.”

  He seems surprised. Obviously he doesn’t know May very well. “You’re not staying in this house all alone, are you?”

  I don’t answer that kind of question, even from a cop.

  “Anya and I are staying with Towner,” Beezer says, jumping in to rescue me.

  “Oh, of course,” Rafferty says, suddenly realizing how it sounded. “Sorry.”

  “Were you asking as an officer of the law or merely a concerned citizen?” I say, trying to make light of it.

  “More like an attempt at small talk,” he says.

  “Then you need a drink.” Beezer goes for a glass, offering the Armagnac.

  Rafferty holds up a hand, declines.

  “AA,” Jay-Jay mouths in exaggerated pantomime to Beezer, but we all catch it, including Rafferty, who rolls his eyes.