The Lace Reader

by Brunonia Barry

  “Are you all right?” Anya says to me. She takes my arm.

  I have been staring at the attorney. I think my expression reads.

  There is anxiety in the room. Not just from the attorney. Everyone’s picking up the energy. Or maybe it’s the occasion.

  “Would you like some water?” May bends over and asks me. She and my aunt are the only ones in the room who are not nervous—my aunt because she is oblivious and May, I realize only now, because she already knows what the attorney is going to say.

  She pours me a glass, slides it across the table to me as if it were a piece on a chessboard. Although I’m thirsty, I do not pick it up.

  The room goes silent as the lawyer reads the document aloud. When he finishes, no one speaks for a long time. He clears his throat. Then, as if our shocked collective expressions indicate a lack of understanding, he does the color commentary, paraphrasing what we just heard. “The will is simple in its intent,” he says. “With the exception of the family land in Ipswich, which will be left to the First Church for the express purpose of constructing a camp for blind children, the bulk of the estate has been left in trust to Sophya…to disburse as she sees fit.”

  “What…?” Anya says. She is the only one unguarded enough to say it aloud. What about Auntie Emma? is the last part of that thought. To her credit, she stops midsentence.

  I look at May, who meets my eyes but does not waver. “You knew about this?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you approved?” I am as shocked as Anya.

  “It was Eva’s money. It is not up to me to approve or disapprove.”

  “Actually, May was a witness to the signing.” The lawyer shows me May’s signature.

  “Why?” I ask.

  May looks away.

  “She obviously expects you to stay and take care of Emma,” Beezer answers.

  I see the look on my Aunt Emma’s face.

  “No one has to take care of Emma,” May says. “Emma takes care of us most of the time. Isn’t that right?”

  Emma tries to smile.

  “Emma is her daughter,” Anya says. “I would have imagined a trust or something.”

  “You seem to have thought this through.” May’s tone is icy.

  “I just meant…” Anya starts.

  “I would like you to stay,” Emma says. “It would be so nice.”

  I cannot speak.

  “You don’t have to stay,” May says. “You can always refuse the inheritance.”

  “What would happen if I refused?” I ask the attorney.

  “If you refuse, the entirety is to go to the church.”

  “Not to Emma?”

  “Eva was very specific.”

  Dr. Ward looks alarmed. “I don’t think that was Eva’s intention. I am sure she would want to see Emma provided for.” He turns to May for confirmation.

  “Don’t look at me. It’s all up to Sophya.”

  Check and mate.

  In 1820 the first machines for making lace were brought to Boston, and for a few years the two lace industries thrived together. By 1825 it was all over. The tide of industry had turned, just as the sands of the Ipswich River had drifted in and closed the mouth of the harbor, leaving the shipping trade to towns like Salem and Boston. Ipswich turned back then to its agrarian beginnings and the women of Ipswich to being the wives of farmers, and lace making became simply a pastime to be handed down to daughters—like sewing and bread baking (though less important than either).

  —THE LACE READER’S GUIDE

  Chapter 11

  I STAY UP ALL NIGHT packing the lace. I take every piece off each table and out of every drawer. The only piece I don’t get is the canopy off Eva’s bed, because that is where Anya and Beezer are sleeping, and I don’t want to wake them.

  When I am finished, I wrap the lace pieces in white paper and tie them with a silver ribbon I found in Eva’s closet. It looks like a wedding gift. I put their names on it.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” I hear Anya asking Beezer as I come down the stairs.

  Beezer makes a face. Anya realizes I’m there, turns to me.

  “It’s nice of you, Towner, it really is. It’s just that I’m not a lace person.”

  She hugs me. I try to smile.

  The cab is late. Beezer tries to get the cab company on the phone, hangs up frustrated.

  A horn blasts from outside. “They’re here.” Anya starts for the door.

  “You sure you can’t come to the wedding?” Beezer is asking me.

  “I don’t have a passport.” I told him that just last night.

  “Nobody doesn’t have a passport.” Beezer smiles. “Except you.”

  “And probably May,” I say.

  “Yeah, probably.”

  I hug him again, then her. “Best wishes,” I say to her, aware that it sounds formal but remembering what Eva told me, that you never congratulate the bride.

  “It’s okay to sell the house,” Beezer said. “I know that Eva was trying to get you to stay, but it was a bad idea.”

  He can always read me.

  “No one will blame you,” he says.

  “Think about it anyway,” he says after a minute.

  I nod and say, “Call me after the ceremony.” He’s got all three bags, and is still managing to hold the door for Anya to pass through.

  The wrapped lace remains on the table in the hall.

  PART TWO

  There is lace in every living thing: the bare branches of winter, the patterns of clouds, the surface of water as it ripples in the breeze…. Even a wild dog’s matted fur shows a lacy pattern if you look at it closely enough.

  —THE LACE READER’S GUIDE

  Chapter 12

  OLD HOUSES CATCH THREADS OF the people who have lived in them in the same way that a piece of lace does. For the most part, those threads stay quietly in place until someone disturbs them. An old cleaning woman reaching for cobwebs reveals the dreamy dance of a girl home from a first cotillion. Dance card still dangling from her wrist, the girl closes her eyes and twirls, trying to hold the moment, the memory of first love. The old cleaning woman knows the vision better than the girl herself does. It’s the one she has longed for but never lived.

  In the web of threads, it is possible for the two worlds to come together. For the girl who lived it, grown now, all but the feeling is forgotten. She cannot recall the name of the young man. Her memories hold other things, things more important to her, finally: the man she married, the birth of a child.

  But for the cleaning lady, the thread is stronger. It is part vision, part the fulfillment of a wish long gone but never forgotten. She finds herself breathless and has to sit for a minute on the girl’s bed. Eva’s bed.

  The place where the threads connect has tied the two women together. The cleaning woman has no way of knowing that the young girl was Eva, now middle-aged. The woman is not from here. She did not know Eva as a girl. But even without this knowledge, something has changed between them. When the cleaning woman finishes and comes down the stairs, for the first time ever, Eva offers her a cup of tea. The old woman doesn’t take it, of course; it wouldn’t be proper, and even if it were, she is a shy woman and not given to conversation. It would be uncomfortable, if not impossible, to change their relationship this late in their lives. Still, something has changed, and they both know it.

  Today Eva is showing me many of her memory threads, at least one from every decade of her life: the farm in Ipswich where she grew up, her wedding to G.G., Emma’s birth. The creak of an opening door becomes Eva’s voice with its Brahmin accent. The voice poses questions, as if Eva were trying to read the lace to find out what has come to pass. “I died? I am gone? My life has ended?”

  “Yes,” I say aloud, and the answer pings around the room, echoing off the walls. “You have died. I am here to go through your things so that no one else will. No stranger will touch those things you most treasured. I am doing this not because I want to—what I
want is to leave this place and never look back. No, I am not doing this because I want to but because I know that it is what you would have wanted.”

  The Reader must first clear the lace, then the Seeker, then herself. This step is taken to remove both past influences and future expectations. It is into this clear space that the question is cast.

  —THE LACE READER’S GUIDE

  Chapter 13

  I HAVE BEEN IN EVA’S CLOSET for most of the morning, sorting through her things. It is my ritual, something I have done every day for the last few weeks. I have boxes piled everywhere in this house: some for Beezer and Anya, some for my mother, and some for the Circle, the women of Yellow Dog Island. Today I have packed a small box, a final one, light enough for me to carry. In it are the things I will take with me.

  To a stranger cleaning out this closet, Eva would have been defined by the things she left behind, though it would be impossible to tell whether those things were treasures or simply miscellaneous items tucked away because she could never find a place for them. To a stranger they would take on meaning. They might appear to be the signs of dementia. Which is why I have to do this job before I go. I can’t bear the thought of anyone judging Eva. I know what it feels like to be judged.

  The shoe boxes are a great example. There are at least sixty of them in this closet. I find the shoes that my grandfather, G.G., had given to each of us that last Christmas he was alive. The memories flood back: all of us standing in the bathtub together in our new shoes, soaking them. “Let them dry around your feet,” G.G. ordered. We walked through the house wet all day, making squishing sounds, leaving little snail trails of wet across the marble floors and the Oriental rugs. When they hadn’t dried by nightfall, he made us stay. We went to bed with our shoes on, waking in the morning to perfect custom fits and more than a few sniffles.

  In the back of the closet, on the floor, are other shoe boxes, all alike, bearing the label of G.G.’s shoe factory but otherwise unmarked. Inside are the gifts we gave Eva as children. Christmas and birthday gifts. There’s the comb-and-brush set I decorated with rhinestones. Far too garish for Eva’s refined tastes, but I remember her telling everyone how beautiful it was and how creative. I find a sculpture I made for her another year, a topiary, covered with shells and beach glass. It’s nothing Eva could use, but nothing she could bear to part with either. “We have a budding artist in our midst,” is what she said when she unwrapped that gift. But she’d been wrong about that. Lyndley was the budding artist, not me. Still, the topiary had held a proud place on her mantel for years, until its glue dried up and shells began to fall off, leaving strange spaces of framed neon-looking green where the Styrofoam showed through. When too many of the shells had fallen off, Eva wrapped the topiary in the same colored tissue paper she had used for her Bible markers and placed them in pretty boxes tied with French ribbons. The fallen shells lay in the folds of the tissue paper, next to the body of the dead topiary, like favorite items placed by loved ones in the coffin of the deceased.

  I open the next box, which is full of photos. There are many more matching boxes, and I lift the lids of the next two to see if this is the only box of photos, but no, all these boxes are full of them. There are pictures of my mother, May, from the time she was a little girl. And a photo of May’s mother, my grandmother Elizabeth, G.G.’s first wife, who died giving birth to May. My mother’s wild hair, tamed with ribbons and braids, still manages to escape and curl around her head like a halo. There are more pictures of my grandmother and several of her husband leaning up against his car or playing golf. Later there are photos of G.G. with Eva, his second wife and Emma’s mother. In one box are group photos, even a few with Cal in them, in the early years when he was married to Emma, before all hell broke loose.

  There is a box of photos of Eva’s flowers: her roses, lacecap hydrangea, peonies. At first I think there is no order to the pictures, but as I open the fourth box, I realize that they are actually quite organized. Each box contains one theme. When the photos are of family, each box focuses on one of us, or primarily one, along with the people who surround us. Planets in little solar systems. Like the one of my brother, Beezer, at his second birthday party, with all of us there and with him sitting at the head of the table, his tiny hand sunk up to the wrist in the cake frosting and the rest of us laughing as if it were the funniest thing we’d ever seen.

  I haven’t found Lyndley’s boxes yet, or any pictures of Auntie Emma except for the one with Cal. And not really that many of me yet either. There are far more of Beezer and my mother. I know how Eva’s mind worked; I know there must be full boxes dedicated to each one of us.

  I reach for another, larger, box. It weighs more than I anticipate, and it falls to the floor, raising dust in a little cloud as it lands. It is filled not with photos but with books.

  I recognize the old family Bible, its passages marked with bits of faded tissue paper that protrude above the binding. I pick it up. It’s heavier than it looks. In fact, you need two hands to lift it properly. I misjudge its heft, and it flops from my hand, tumbling over, sending the papers falling soundless and weightless as October leaves.

  I open the Bible to the marked passage.

  John 15:13: “No greater love hath any man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

  I put the Bible aside. Someone in the family should have this—Emma, probably, or maybe Beezer and Anya. There are two other books, matching red journals with leather covers. Both look familiar. I open the first. It is written in Eva’s hand. I have seen it before. It is full of Eva’s thoughts and of readings she has done. It is part journal, part fancy, part instruction manual. On the front inside cover she has scrawled a title: “The Lace Reader’s Guide.” I open to a random page.

  READING THE BRIDE ON HER WEDDING DAY

  The bridal veil is the most joyful of lace to read. Every possibility is in it. Because of the sacramental nature of marriage, there is seldom anything disturbing in the bridal veil; rather it is possible to see the beauty of a life as it stretches only forward. The children’s faces can often be seen in the lace at this time and sometimes even the grandchildren the couple will have.

  Where there is a long train of lace that needs to be carried, it is often possible to see the full figures of the ancestors carrying the train, which appears to float in places where the laws of gravity would dictate otherwise. A bride’s excitement on this occasion will often correspond to the number of persons attendant on the veil.

  It all seems so familiar. I have read it before. I must have. I flip through the rest of the book. Sometimes Eva details specific readings, sometimes she writes about different types of lace. If tea was served with a particular reading, the tea blend is sometimes described in detail, with brewing instructions. Interspersed with the readings are daily notes, usually about her flowers. There are observations about her hyacinths and her Cornish roses. There are also bits of the old sayings, written into the margins. Lines of poetry: Goethe, Spenser, Proust. Clichés blend with news of weather and tides, but each entry always ties back to the lace like a thread moving through a piece of intricate Belgian lace, then returning with symmetry to its center.

  I feel Eva with me. I am crying again. Maybe this packing thing isn’t such a good idea. It is too much. I feel a hand on my shoulder. Comforting. I do not turn to look. I know it is Eva. She directs my gaze to the second red book. My hand picks it up. Though they are twins in color and size, this book seems much heavier than the first. Too heavy to hold. I almost drop it. The hand reaches to help me. I open the journal.

  It is the journal I wrote at McLean. Dosed with Stelazine, my face hanging and drooping, I wrote my history as I remembered it. The handwriting is the opposite of what you might expect—small and forced, controlled. The history was my ticket out of the hospital, as it turned out. I have no idea how much of it was true. When I didn’t remember something, I made it up. I filled in the gaps.

  I cannot read the journal. It i
s too painful. Instead I take it, along with Eva’s journal and the family Bible, and hide these books with the other things I will bring with me when I go: the lace pillow, Lyndley’s painting, and a canister of Difficult-Tea.

  When the Realtor finally arrives, she has brought the house inspector with her, “just to make sure there are no surprises,” she says. I spot a For Sale sign in the back of her Volvo.

  “I don’t want a sign,” I say.

  “It’s much easier to sell the house if you have a sign.”

  “Nevertheless…” I say in a voice I recognize as Eva’s. She doesn’t notice but shrugs and leaves the sign in the car. The inspector stays outside walking the perimeter, looking at the house from all angles.

  Five minutes of small talk follow. She says it’s a shame to sell a house like this, that someone will probably condo it. Then, realizing she might be talking herself out of a sale, she adds, “I wouldn’t move back either, not if I lived in sunny California.”

  Outside, the inspector pulls a ladder from his truck and carries it to the building, stepping over flower beds.

  “The perennial gardens are great,” the Realtor says, “a real selling point.” She makes a note of it, as well as some other things she sees, including the slate roof.

  “How many bedrooms?”

  “I don’t know. Ten? Twelve? Some of them she was using for other things.”

  “How many closets?”

  I’m totally blank.

  “That’s how we define a bedroom, by whether or not it has a closet.”

  “Oh,” I say. It doesn’t help.

  “FYI,” she says.

  I follow her around the house. She looks in every closet, writes “7” in the blank next to bedrooms. She looks in cabinets, under eaves. She stops short of opening Eva’s drawers.