The Lace Reader (41 page)

Authors: Brunonia Barry

BOOK: The Lace Reader

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May says that Emma is like the other abused women in that regard. They often blame themselves. The beatings don’t start overnight. Most abuse begins slowly. An offhand remark, something de-The Lace Reader 381

rogatory that the woman already believes about herself. It starts with the undermining of already fragile self-esteem. Then isolation. It is a scenario May has seen again and again. It is a gradual process you hardly notice. Until the actual beatings start. By that time the victim is usually so shaky and unsure of herself that she is no longer capable of escape.

There is another specialist coming to town sometime next week. Someone Rafferty found who has written a book on grief counseling in twins. And another who specializes in long-term sexual abuse in children. The best doctor I see is someone my own shrink set me up with, a classmate of hers from Harvard. I started seeing him while I was still at Mass General, and I go into Boston twice a week now that I’m out. Sometimes I take the train. Sometimes Rafferty drives me, and we stop in the North End for lunch or maybe an early dinner and some gelato if he doesn’t have to get back to work. I am grieving. For Eva. For my real mother, Emma, and everything that has happened to her. And for Lyndley. I am asked to sit with my grief, to feel it. It is difficult. It breaks through at times, but I am so accustomed to feeling nothing that even the pain itself feels distanced, as if it were happening to someone else. But I make the effort.

I have taken the house off the market. I cannot sell, not yet. Some of the reasons are practical. One whole wing of it was burned in the fire. It’s surprising how little of it was lost, considering the intensity and scope of the fire. About a quarter of the house was gutted, the part with the tearoom in it. I’ve hired a builder to restore it, someone recommended by the Peabody Essex Museum. They are very interested in restoring the tunnels, if they can talk the town of Salem out of filling them in. I’ve donated the chinoiserie to the museum. We’ll see about the rest. For now Byzy and I are living in the coach house. 382 Brunonia

Barry

Going back and forth to the main house as we need something, but sleeping in the little house where it’s cozy, more like the caves he’s used to.

We have to stay for May’s trial. It will be sometime next year, probably in the spring.

I have seen Ann Chase on several occasions. She wants to open Eva’s tearoom again, though somewhere else, in some commercial space downtown. She and her girls have started reading lace. As part of my therapy, I have taken up painting. I sit for long hours at the easel Eva set up for me the year I painted
Swimming to
the Moon.
I paint the harbor and the common. Sometimes I try to paint the flowers. If there is one thing that all the doctors agree upon, it is that I have no talent whatsoever. But they urge me to keep trying, convinced that the talent must be inside me somewhere, the same way they believe that Lyndley was inside me. And so I sit. It is getting cold. Tomorrow is Halloween. All this month the Fright Train has been running from Boston to Salem, bringing the tourists here for what has turned out to be the busiest season for the merchants. People in monster costumes serve mixed drinks to the commuters. I sit and watch them sometimes and think about free enterprise and just how creative it can get. Mom-and-pop haunted houses crop up on every corner this time of year, with no legislation to limit them. That law didn’t pass. It failed for the same reason that Rafferty says the Calvinists would have ultimately failed if they hadn’t done themselves in. It failed because Salem is a town of tolerance—religious, social, and even economic. Maybe it doesn’t achieve perfect peace. Such a thing is difficult to imagine in today’s world. But in the end Salem is a town that doesn’t take itself too seriously, because it learned early on, way back in the 1600s, what can happen when you do.

The Lace Reader 383

The limos are already lining up in front of the Hawthorne Hotel. The Witches Ball is tonight. It is formal, and I understand from Ann that it is a beautiful event, the highlight of their social season. Across the street on the common, there are three thousand pumpkins, all carved and lit up, lining the pathways or sitting on tree limbs. It is something to see. A couple of days ago, the weather got too warm—it went up into the eighties for a day or two—and Rafferty was worried that the pumpkins would rot and not last until Halloween, when his daughter would get a chance to see them. But then it got cold again, so he need not have worried. He told me his daughter wanted to get a lace reading, that she’s always wanted one. She doesn’t know about Eva and what happened to her; she just saw Eva’s sign once on one of her trips up here and thought it would be fun to have her fortune told.

I think about Jack a lot. He has moved away from here, to Canada, where he always wanted to live. And I think about Eva. I even think about Cal, and I wonder about forgiveness. I know it is what must happen. Every book I read tells me that. As does Dr. Ward. All forgiveness is self-forgiveness. That’s what he says. But I do not yet know how to forgive. Or who, in the end, really needs to be forgiven. Beezer and Anya are staying around for a while. They’re still living in Cambridge, but they come out here a lot to help out. She is nicer than I believed. They want to have children. May is thrilled at the thought. She wants to be a grandmother. She says she’ll be better at it than she ever was as a mother, and Beezer says that’s not far to go, but I don’t know. May was a good mother to Beezer; she gave him what he needed. And she was a good mother to me when my own mother couldn’t be, when she was too weak and wounded to act as a mother anymore.

I don’t know if Emma knows what has happened. Or if she even recognizes me as her daughter. Sometimes I think she does, but I can’t be sure. It is enough for me that I recognize her. That she is still 384 Brunonia

Barry

alive and, I would say, finally happy in her world as she understands it. We are given gifts, I realize. Small ones and big ones. I have finally read my journals. And the book Eva wrote:
The
Lace Reader’s Guide.
Pulling apart the pages and finding her faint hand. Each page reveals another secret, like when we were kids and we used to make disappearing ink out of lemon juice and then hold it over a lightbulb to be read. I am doing my best to restore it, laying my handwriting over hers. Its gaps mimic my own, and I work at filling in the pages the same way I work at filling in my own history. Slow going. A lingering process. Good work for the long winter that is coming.

I notice one curious thing as I work. As my pen moves over Eva’s and the words on the page grow darker and easier to read, my image of Eva begins to grow dimmer. It is as if the two have somehow traded places, one moving into the foreground as the other fades back. Still, I do get visits from Eva on some occasions. Today I was taking something inside, up the old staircase, and I ran into Eva coming down. She was dressed for her swim, in a beach robe and a bathing cap, a towel slung over her shoulder. She still does this; she goes for her swim. It’s the only time I see her. She doesn’t speak anymore. And her image is very faint. As she passes me, she smiles as always and then does something else that she always does. She checks her pockets as if she’s looking for something.

I put the things away in Eva’s room. My room now. I’m a little tired. I decide to lie down for just a minute on the canopy bed, for a quick sleep and maybe a dream. I don’t worry about the dreams anymore; the nightmares have stopped. Propped against the other pillows is the lace pillow that Eva sent to me before she died. I pick it up to move it to the bedside table, so I can lie down. And I think of Eva checking her pockets. I remember the pocket on the lace pillow; I checked it before. I checked it the day I got the pillow, expecting to find a note, surprised when there wasn’t one. I check The Lace Reader 385

it again now, thinking maybe I missed something that first time, that this is what Eva is trying to tell me when she keeps checking her pockets. But the pocket is empty. And then I see her again in my mind’s eye. Checking her other pocket. One, two. Everything in twos. But traditionally these lace pillows had only the one pocket. I know that. It is something I have learned. Still, I turn the pillow all around, and under the gathering on its opposite end I find the second pocket. Inside is the little set of scissors I recognize from childhood, the ones Eva used to cut off my pigtail. I also find the note.
Dear Towner:

I’m doing it. I’m swimming to the moon. I will finish
what your sister started so long ago. I can’t think of any
other way to help you out of your downward spiral but
this—I will swim to the moon. I will do for you what your
sister ultimately could not. I will take your place.
Live a long and happy life. . . . And trust your gift. It
is true.

Eva

I cry for a long time. When I finally wipe the tears from my eyes, I pick up the scissors and cut the lace free from the pillow. I hold it up to the light, turning its crazy patterns and looking at it from all perspectives, seeing each of its imperfections. And then I say back to Eva the same words she said to me so many years ago, when she cut my braid. Maybe it wasn’t true then, or not lastingly true anyway. But it is true now. The words I say back to her are the same words she said to me that day so long ago:
The spell
is broken. You are free.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank the following:

– Alexandra Seros for years of help and friendship.

– My agent, Rebecca Oliver, for believing and making it all happen. Brian Lipson for having the vision. The Endeavor Agency.

– Laurie Chittenden for being such a champion of this story. Laurie Chittenden and Clare Smith for great notes and inspiration. All of the great people at William Morrow/HarperCollins. And a special thanks to Lisa Gallagher for reading the manuscript at Heathrow Airport.

– My mother, June, for her prescience and gift of second sight that told me to keep writing. My father, Jack, who always believed in the good guys. And good dogs. And me.

– Pal and Pal: Whitney Barry and Emily Bradford for reading and commenting on numerous drafts, for their unwavering faith, and for their incredible gift of
The Lace Reader
’s garden.

– The Warren Street Writers: Jacqueline Franklin and Ginni Spencer for five years of support and suggestions.

– Diane Stern for all her help.

– Kelley and Hall for their PR expertise.

– Tami Wolff and the Deer Island APS English class for my first reading.

388 Acknowledgments

– Rema Badwan for generously sharing her vast knowledge of the publishing industry.

– Jim McAllister for checking historical accuracy and Salem trivia.

– Early editing: Tom Jenks for notes on point of view. Ed Chapman and Norma Hoffman for their editing expertise. Also, Laura Vogel and Ruth Greenberg.

– And the readers: Mandee Barry, Mark Barry, Susan Marchand, Donna Housh, Ed Trotta, Marcia Goodstein, Dottie Dennesen, Andy Postman, Jeannine Zwoboda, Carol Cassella, Gloria Kelley, Jocelyn Kelley, and Megan Hall.

. . . and last but not least, to Byzy, great warrior and super pup. AUTHOR’S DISCLAIMER

The Lace Reader
is a work of fiction. Still, the sense of place is very real, and many of the locations do exist.

However, a few of the locations are fictional extrapolations of real places. Yellow Dog Island does not exist, but its geography and topography closely resemble that of the real Children’s Island, where I once worked. Eva’s house is a compilation of one that we considered buying in Salem, the one we ended up buying, and my grandmother’s house, which was not in Salem but in Swampscott. Eva’s gardens were inspired by the gardens at the historic Ropes Mansion. Cutting the lace free is something Ipswich lace makers do not do, since the threads are wound around pins. If you cut the actual thread used to make the lace, it would unravel the lace and ruin the piece. Eva invented the technique of tacking the lace to the pillow in order to hold the work in progress securely in place. This was done with a sewing needle and a separate thread that could later be cut. I have taken some liberties with the time frame of the book. It is loosely set in 1996, but I have combined Salem details I found interesting from other years in the same decade: the pumpkins in the park, the progress on the
Friendship,
and so on. In general, when historical events are cited, every effort was made to present them as 390 Author’s

Disclaimer

accurately as possible, provided that in doing so the integrity of the fictional narrative was preserved (i.e., this is a novel, not a history book).

My apologies to Roger Conant, who was never in danger of being removed from his podium for lewd behavior and would no doubt have been appalled at the thought.

Oh, and I’ve never seen any rats near Salem Harbor (or anywhere else in Salem, for that matter).

About the Author

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Brunonia

Barry studied literature and creative writing

at Green Mountain College in Vermont and

at the University of New Hampshire. She has

created brain teaser puzzles for Smart Games

and lives in Salem, Massachusetts, with her

husband and their beloved golden retriever,

Byzantium.

www.LaceReader.com

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Credits

Jacket photographs: cliff © by Jan Stromme/Getty Images; woman © by Digital Vision/Art Life Images

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE LACE READER. Copyright © 2006 by Brunonia Barry. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader June 2008

ISBN 978-0-06-169609-1

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