Chapter One
My name is Towner Whitney. No, that’s not exactly true. My real first name is
Sophya. Never believe me. I lie all the time.
I am a crazy woman…. That last part is true.
My little brother, Beezer, who is kinder than I, says the craziness is
genetic. We’re from five generations of crazy, he says, as if it were a
badge he’s proud to wear, though he admits that I may have taken it to a new
level.
Until I came along, the Whitney family was what the city of Salem fondly
refers to as “quirky.” If you were old Salem money, even if that money was long
gone, you were never referred to as “crazy.” You might be deemed “unusual,” or
even “oddball,” but the hands-down-favorite word for such a condition was
“quirky.”
Throughout the generations the Whitney men have all become famous for their
quirks: from the captains of sea and industry all the way down to my little
brother, Beezer, who is well known within scientific circles for his articles on
particle physics and string theory.
Our great-great-grandfather, for example, parlayed a crippling preoccupation
with ladies’ feet into a brilliant career as a captain of industry in Lynn’s
thriving shoe business, creating a company that was passed down through the
generations all the way to my grandfather G. G. Whitney. Our
great-great-great-grandfather, who was a legitimate captain in his own right,
had a penchant for sniffing cinnamon that many considered obsessive. Eventually
he built a fleet of spice-trading ships that traveled the globe and made Salem
one of the richest ports in the New World.
Still, anyone would admit that it is the women of the Whitney family who have
taken quirky to a new level of achievement. My mother, May, for example, is a
walking contradiction in terms. A dedicated recluse who (with the exception of
her arrests) hasn’t left her home on Yellow Dog Island for the better part of
twenty years, May has nevertheless managed to revive a long-defunct lace-making
industry and to make herself famous in the process. She has gained considerable
notoriety for rescuing abused women and children and turning their lives around,
giving the women a place in her lace- making business and home-educating their
children. All this from a raging agoraphobic who gave one of her own children to
her barren half sister, Emma, in a fit of generosity because, as she said at the
time, there was a need, and besides, she had been blessed with a matching set.
And my Great-Aunt Eva, who is more mother to me than May ever has been, is
equally strange. Running her own business well into her eighties, Eva is
renowned as both Boston Brahmin and Salem witch when, really, she is neither.
Actually, Eva is an old-school Unitarian with Transcendentalist tendencies. She
quotes Scripture in the same breath as she quotes Emerson and Thoreau. Yet in
recent years Eva has spoken only in clichés, as if use of the tired metaphor can
somehow remove her from the inevitable outcomes she is paid to predict.
For thirty-five years of her life, Eva has run a ladies’ tearoom and
franchised successful etiquette classes to the wealthy children of Boston’s
North Shore. But what Eva will be remembered for is her uncanny ability to read
lace. People come from all over the world to be read by Eva, and she can tell
your past, present, and future pretty accurately just by holding the lace in
front of you and squinting her eyes.
In one form or another, all the Whitney women are readers. My twin sister,
Lyndley, said she couldn’t read lace, but I never believed her. The last time we
tried, she saw the same thing I saw in the pattern, and what we saw that night
led her to the choices that eventually killed her. When Lyndley died, I resolved
never to look at a piece of lace again.
This is one of the only things Eva and I have ever vehemently disagreed
about. “It wasn’t that the lace was wrong,” she always insisted. “It was the
reader’s interpretation that failed.” I know that’s supposed to make me feel
better. Eva never says anything to intentionally hurt. But Lyndley and I
interpreted the lace the same way that night, and though our choices might have
been different, nothing that Eva says can ever bring my sister back.
After Lyndley’s death, I had to get out of Salem and ended up in California,
which was as far as I could go without falling off the end of the earth. I know
that Eva wants me to come home to Salem. It’s for my own good, she says. But I
can’t bring myself to do it.
Just recently, when I had my hysterectomy, Eva sent me her lace pillow, the
one she uses to make the lace. It was delivered to the hospital.
“What is it?” my nurse asked, holding it up, staring at the bobbins and the
piece of lace, a work in progress, still attached to it. “Some kind of pillow?”
“It’s a lace maker’s pillow,” I said. “For making Ipswich lace.”
She regarded me blankly. I could tell she had no idea what to say. It didn’t
look like any pillow she had ever seen. And what the hell was Ipswich lace?
“Try holding it against your sutures if you have to cough or sneeze,” she
finally said. “That’s what we use pillows for around here.”
I felt around until I found the secret pocket hidden in the pillow. I slipped
my fingers in, looking for a note. Nothing.
I know that Eva hopes I will start reading lace again. She believes that lace
reading is a God-given gift, and that we are required to honor such gifts.
I imagine the note she might have written: “Of those to whom much is
given, much is expected-Luke 12:48.” She used to quote that bit of
Scripture as proof.
I can read lace, and I can read minds, though it isn’t something I try to do;
it is something that just happens sometimes. My mother can do both, but over the
years May has become a practical woman who believes that knowing what is in
people’s minds or their futures is not always in anyone’s best interest. This is
probably the only point upon which my mother and I have ever agreed.
When I left the hospital, I stole the pillowcase off one of their pillows.
The Hollywood Presbyterian label was double stamped on both sides. I stuffed
Eva’s lace pillow inside, hiding the threads, the lace, and the bonelike bobbins
that were swinging like tiny Poe pendulums.
If there was a future for me, and I was not altogether certain there was, I
wasn’t going to risk reading it in the lace.
Chapter Two
When the phone call comes in, I am dreaming of water. Not the warm blues and
greens of the California beach towns where I live now, but the dark New England
Atlantic of my youth. In my dream I am swimming to the moon. Like all dreams, it
seems logical. The idea that there is no pathway between sea and moon never
occurs.
I swim my own combination: part breaststroke, part drownproofing: slow and
purposeful, a rhythm remembered from another lifetime. The movement is all
efficiency, with just nose, ears, and eyes protruding above the water, mouth
submerged. With each forward stroke, tiny waves of salt enter my open mouth,
then recede again as I slow, mirroring the larger surrounding ocean.
I swim for a long time. Past Salem Harbor and the swells. Past any sight of
land at all. I swim until the sea becomes still and clear, too calm to be any
real ocean. The light from the full dream-moon etches a clear path on the black
water, a road to follow. There is no sound save my own breath, slow and steady
as I swim.
This was once my sister’s dream. Now it is only mine.
The rhythm of movement gives way to a sound rhythm as the telephone rings again
and then again. This is one of the only phones that actually rings anymore, and
part of the reason I agreed to take this house-sitting job. It is the kind of
phone we might have had on our island. That’s the one interesting thing about
what has happened to me. I am encouraged to rewrite my own history. In the
history I am writing, May actually has a phone.
My therapist, Dr. Fukuhara, is a Jungian. She believes in symbols and
shadows. As do I. But my therapy has stopped for the time being. We have
come to an impasse, was the way Dr. Fukuhara put it. I laughed when she said
it. Not because it was funny but because it was the kind of cliché that my Aunt
Eva would use.
On the fourth ring, the answering machine picks up. The machine is old also,
not as old as the phone, but the kind where you can screen calls and hear a
little bit of the message before you decide whether it’s worth it to actually
speak to a live person.
My brother’s voice sounds tinny and too loud.
I stretch to pick up, pulling the surgery stitches that are still inside me,
the ones that haven’t yet dissolved.
“What?” I say.
“I’m sorry to wake you,” Beezer says.
I remember falling asleep on this couch last night, too tired to get up,
hypnotized by the smell of night-blooming jasmine and the sound of Santana
playing over the hill at the Greek.
“I’m sorry,” he says again. “I wouldn’t have called you, but …”
“But May’s in trouble again.” It’s the only time Beezer ever calls these
days. At last count, May has been arrested six times in her efforts to help
abuse victims. Recently my brother informed me that he’d put the number of the
local bail bondsman on his speed dial.
“It’s not May,” he says.
My throat tightens.
“It’s Eva.”
Dead, I’m thinking. Oh, my God, Eva is dead.
“She’s missing, Towner.”
Missing. The word has no meaning. “Missing” is the last word I expected to
hear.
Palm fronds clatter against the open window. It’s already way too hot. Clear
Santa Ana sky, earthquake weather. I reach up to pull the window shut. The cat
runs scratches across my legs as it lunges for the freedom of the canyon,
leaping through the window as it slams, catching just a few tail hairs, the last
trace of what was here just moments ago and is now gone, that fast. Immediately
the cat scratches on my legs begin to welt.
“Towner?”
“Yeah?”
“I think you’d better come home.”
“Yeah,” I say, “yeah, okay.”
Excerpted from The Lace Reader
by BRUNONIA BARRY
Copyright © 2008 by Brunonia Barry.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
William Morrow
Copyright © 2008
Brunonia Barry
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-162476-6
