The Lace Reader

She bangs again, louder this time, more urgently. I start back toward the door. I can see her through the wavy glass. There is a look on her face that reminds me of my sister, Lyndley. Or maybe it’s the way she bangs on the door, pounding it hard, as if she might punch right through it. As I hurry toward the door, I spot the police cruiser patrolling, trying to find a space to pull into. I see the girl look over her shoulder at the cruiser. By the time I reach the door, she is halfway down the steps. As she turns to go, I see that she is pregnant. I open the door, but she is too fast for me. She slips down the alley away from the street just as the cruiser pulls in.

I put the teapot and cups on the tray and start upstairs when there’s another knock at the door. Cursing, I put the tray down on the step and go to the door. My brother stands in front of Jay-Jay and some other guy I don’t recognize.

“I’ve been calling you,” I say to Beezer. I’m trying not to look excited, trying not to give it away.

They come in, and Beezer hugs me, holding it too long. I pull away then, to tell him that everything’s all right, that Eva is here.

“I was just going to try you again—” I tell him.

“This is Detective Rafferty,” Beezer says, interrupting me.

There is a long pause before Rafferty speaks. “We found Eva’s body,” he says finally, “out a little past Children’s Island.”

I stand still. I can’t move.

“Oh, Towner,” Beezer says, hugging me again, as much to keep me standing up as to commiserate. “I can’t believe she’s dead.”

“Looks like she drowned,” Rafferty says. “Or went hypothermic. Sadly, it’s not uncommon at her age, even outside the water.” His voice breaks slightly on that last part.

I run up the stairs, doubling over in pain as I reach the first landing, leaving them all standing there looking startled, not knowing what to do. I stumble into Eva’s room, but she’s not there. Her bed is still made, untouched since yesterday.

As quickly as I can, I move through the maze of rooms. Eva is old now, I’m thinking; maybe she doesn’t sleep here anymore. Maybe she’s chosen some other room to sleep in, something smaller. But even as I’m thinking it, I’m starting to freak out. I’m moving frantically from one room to another when Beezer catches up with me. “Towner?” I hear his voice getting closer.

I stop dead in the middle of the hallway.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

Clearly I’m not.

“I just came from identifying the body,” he says.

I can hear their voices, cops’ voices, echoing up the stairs, but I can’t hear what they’re saying.

“May knows,” he says, giving me practical details, trying to ground me. “Detective Rafferty went out there to tell her this morning.”

I am able to nod.

“She and Emma are waiting for us to come out,” Beezer says.

I nod again, following him downstairs. The cops stop talking when they see me.

“I’m so sorry,” Jay-Jay says, and I nod again. It’s all I can do.

Rafferty’s eyes meet mine, but he doesn’t say anything. I notice a quick reach of his hand, comforting, automatic. Then he catches himself and pulls it back. He puts it in his jacket pocket as if he doesn’t know what else to do with it.

“I should have stopped her,” Beezer says, his guilt overtaking him now. “I mean, I would have if I’d known. She told me she had given up swimming. Last year sometime.”

Because they were imported from England, pins were costly. The fewer pins used, the simpler the pattern, and the faster the lace maker could work. The thread was imported, because although the New England spinners were very good, they could not achieve the delicacy of the fine European linen or Chinese silk thread. Still, on average, each of the Ipswich lace makers produced upwards of seven inches of lace per day, a higher rate than the Circle produces today, and the Circle has the luxury of its own spinners and all the pins they could ever want.

—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE

Chapter 6 (#u2cec2ff7-5348-5e61-9122-f33e1f04f3bc)

RAFFERTY IS A NICE MAN. He gives us a ride to Derby Wharf so we can pick up the Whaler. He circles the block looking for a space, then finally pulls onto the public walkway, getting us as close as possible to Eva’s boathouse. “I’d have one of the guys in the police boat take you all the way out,” he said, “but the last time they went out there, May shot at them.”

You’ve probably heard of my mother, May Whitney. Everyone else has. I’m sure you remember the UPI picture a few years back, the one with May leveling a six-gauge at about twenty cops who had come to her women’s shelter on Yellow Dog Island with a warrant to take back one of her girls. That picture was everywhere. It was even on the cover of Newsweek. What made the photo so compelling was that my mother looked uncannily like Maureen O’Hara in some fifties western. Cowering behind May in the photo was a terrified-looking girl who couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, with a large white bandage on her neck, rescued from a husband who’d gotten drunk and tried to slit her throat. Her two little children sat behind her playing with a litter of golden retriever puppies. It was quite a scene. If you saw it, you’d remember.

In fact, it was that picture, coupled with a flair for public relations—both seemingly out of character for May—that revived the entire Ipswich lace industry. In a series of well-chosen interviews, she condescended to speak to the press, not about the newly rescued girl, which was the story they came out there to get, but about the bobbin lace that the other women, or “island girls” (as the locals called them), created. They called themselves “the Circle,” after the old-time ladies’ sewing circles, and that was the name that appeared on their labels.

May took the press on a tour of the cottage industry that she and her island girls were re-creating. First she took them to the spinning room, which was located in the old stone kennel. It had been built by my grandfather, G. G. Whitney, in an effort to breed and domesticate the island dogs, but he could never get them to go near the place, so it had stood empty until May’s girls took it over. Once inside the stone kennel (if you ignored the anachronism of jeans and other modern garb), you could have been in a medieval castle. The women sat at the old spinning wheels and at the bobbin winders, silent except for the whirring and occasional creaking and clicking. This spinning room was where the new girls came, the newly rescued, those who were still too skittish to join the others. May often spun with them. They wove flax mostly, to make linen thread, and sometimes May wove yarns from the yellow dog hair, but that was rare. Although some stayed in the spinning room, most of these abused women went on to join the circle of lace makers in the old red schoolhouse as soon as they felt strong enough to be with people again.

May ended her tours at the schoolhouse, where the women sat with their pillows on their laps, making lace and chatting softly or listening to a reader (often my mother herself, who had a beautiful speaking voice and loved to read poetry aloud). Enchanted by the world May had created and the spell-like web of lace May spun around them, the reporters ended up forgetting the story they came out to get. Instead they went back to their papers and wrote about the Circle. The story resonated with their female readers, and women all over the country began sending money to purchase this new Ipswich lace.

Beezer lets me drive the Whaler. When we get to the island, the tide is dead low and the ramp is up. We could land at the float, but we’d have no way to get onto the island with the ramp up like this. For just a minute, I consider trying to land at Back Beach, which is impossible at low tide and hardly possible at any other time. The tide would have to be turning high and the sea dead calm to even attempt such a landing. So I figure I’ll just have to land at the float and sit there waiting until someone notices us and lowers the ramp.

People who live on islands like their solitude. I don’t mean islands like the Vineyard or Nantucket. People on those islands are so far from shore that they need to attract tourists just to survive. But people on these border islands generally like to be left alone, and they pull up their ramps because they are vulnerable. An island is a landing point for anyone who happens by. People assume that islands are public property: They picnic, they litter. They walk up to your front door and ask to use the phone, never considering for a moment that you probably have neither phone nor electricity. And so island people learn to pull up their ramps. Usually it’s only a few feet, but it makes all the difference. At high tide the difference between the float and the ramp may be only five or six feet. Most people could make it, if they are willing to take that leap of faith, but few will. When the tide is dead low, the ramp is another ten feet down, and that’s when you really feel your privacy.

Yellow Dog Island is more private than most. The whole square-mile figure eight of it is set high on a granite plateau with spires of rock shooting up from the surrounding water, giving the impression of an ancient fortress. Unless you know about Back Beach, the island is impenetrable. Because of the sheer drop of the cliffs, the dock was built about forty feet in the air, which makes the distance from the ramp down to the float even longer. It takes a hydraulic winch to lower the ramp, and this is one of the only spots on the island that has a generator, which also runs the saltwater pump to the houses for the plumbing, such as it is. When we still attended school on the island and my mother would give us a reading assignment, I would sit in the pump house and read by the one lightbulb on the island until the generator ran out of gas or I fell asleep. That one bulb represented all of civilization for me, and I took good care of it.

There are several outbuildings on the island, but only two real houses, one on each end, belonging to May and to my Auntie Emma Boynton, who is Eva’s daughter, May’s half sister, and my sister Lyndley’s legal mother. My aunt’s house is the larger of the two Victorians, but May’s is the only one that is winterized. Until Emma’s “accident,” while she and Cal were still married, Auntie Emma and her “daughter,” Lyndley, were summer people, and I guess my Uncle Cal was, too, if you want to count him, which I don’t.

These days the women of the Circle all live at May’s house. They catch rainwater in cisterns for drinking. They grow vegetables for food and flax for the lace, and they even have a cow, which, according to Eva, had to be airlifted onto the island by the coast guard. They tried for a while to keep sheep on what used to be a makeshift baseball diamond, but the dogs kept running the sheep, so they had to give that up. Now they get by on vegetables and the occasional rabbit, and, of course, fish and lobsters. I don’t know what they do in the winter. I’ve never asked. I know as much as I do only because Eva has written me letters about it.

Beezer and I have been sitting on the float for about twenty minutes before anyone comes to lower the ramp. Finally it is my Auntie Emma, and not my mother, who shows up. She walks with her head bent forward, moving more slowly than I remember, partly from her infirmity and partly from age. She is much older than the last time I saw her, almost fifteen years older, come August. My heart catches when I see her; and though she cannot see me, she suddenly realizes I am there. It’s like the take Melanie does in Gone with the Wind when she sees Ashley come back from the Civil War and suddenly recognizes that beaten-down man as her beloved husband. My aunt doesn’t rush to me—she cannot do that—but her feelings rush forward, and they knock the breath right out of me.

By the time we reach her, she is crying. We stand there for a long time, hugging each other. She is crying and saying things like, “I knew you’d come,” and “I told her so.”

My heart sinks for a moment. She is so happy to see me that I wonder if she thinks I am her daughter, Lyndley. In a way it would be more likely. Because even though I know the physical laws of this strange planet and the impossibility of such a thing, I also know that it would be less of a miracle for my sister, Lyndley, dead more than fifteen years now, to come back here than it was for me.

We walk together up the ramp in slow motion, frame by frame. She’s too weak to walk fast anymore, and I’m having so much trouble catching my breath that I can’t even speak. But that’s okay, because I wouldn’t know what to say if I could. Ahead of us, at the top of the ramp, some gulls knock over one of the garbage cans. It rolls several feet, then stops just before reaching the edge of the cliff.

“May is waiting for you,” Auntie Emma says, pointing to the old schoolhouse at the crest of the hill. She starts to walk with me, then takes Beezer’s arm. She rests her head on his shoulder and cries softly.

“I’m so sorry about Eva,” Beezer says.

I am surprised to realize that she knows and understands what has just happened to Eva. The “accident” that blinded her also left my aunt with brain damage.

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.