Читать книгу The Lace Reader - Brunonia Barry - Страница 17

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 Foe.”

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 like 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.

“Tea?” I offer.

“God no,” he says, horrified, and we both laugh.

Beezer figures I’ve got it covered and turns back to Anya and Jay-Jay.

Rafferty is looking for something to say to me. His eyes scan the room. Finally he settles on the obvious. “I’m sorry about your grandmother,” he says. “She was a nice lady.”

“She was my great-aunt, actually,” I say, and I can tell he doesn’t know what to say to that, “but thank you.”

We stand there awkwardly, neither knowing what to say next.

“How did you two know each other?” I finally ask.

“I used to come here for lunch,” he said.

I think of the lunch fare on Eva’s menu: finger sandwiches, cucumber and dill on dainty white crustless bread, date-nut bread with cream cheese. It seems unlikely.

“I’m a big fan of the fancy sandwich,” he explains.

It’s the last thing I’d expect him to say, and it makes me smile.

I seem to remember Eva mentioning that she was good friends with a cop. For some reason I had pictured her friend as much older.

Rafferty is trying to figure out what I’m thinking. He looks at me strangely.

I’m searching my Eva training for something to say when I notice that he still has nothing to drink. “How about a soda?” I offer. “I think I saw some in the pantry. I don’t know how old it is, though.”

“Any vintage after 1972 is okay with me.”

I go to the kitchen and get some ice, coming back with both glass and soda. Jay-Jay has started pulling boxes of old photographs out of the bottom drawer of the buffet. He and Beezer have them spread out on every available surface, and there’s no place to pour. I hand the glass to Rafferty and unscrew the cap of the soda. It snaps when the seal breaks, so I know it’s still good—too good, actually. When I start to pour, it fizzes up and over the side of the glass. I don’t know if it’s because it is so hot in the pantry or because I’ve put too much ice in the glass, but before I reach the halfway point, it’s fizzing up and over the rim of the glass and is about to land on the Aubusson when Rafferty sticks a finger in the glass to stop it.

We stand there stupidly, Rafferty with his index finger in the glass up to the second knuckle, me looking around frantically for something to put under it. “It’s okay,” he says. “It stopped.”

“Sorry,” I say to him. Then, looking at his finger, I comment, “Nice trick.”

“I used to be a beer drinker,” he says, “in my last life.”

Beezer and Anya take a pile of the old photos to the window seat, begin shuffling through them. Jay-Jay, who’s invasive by nature, walks around the room, opening up cabinets and picking out objects he remembers from childhood. He spent a lot of time in this room when he was younger. He and Beezer played board games and poker in here when Beezer was home on vacation. They’d clear off one of the bigger tables and spread their stuff out, and I remember that it would drive Eva crazy. They would get rid of all the lace in the room, hiding it in drawers and under cushions, and she would still be looking for pieces for weeks after Beezer had gone back to boarding school.

“Remember this?” Jay-Jay says, holding up a teapot in the shape of a bird.

“I remember when you broke it,” Beezer says, looking it over, pointing out the crack.

“She made us work off the debt serving high tea.” Jay-Jay goes back into the cabinet, digging deeper.

“You got a search warrant to do that?” Rafferty says to him.

“Oh, Towner doesn’t mind,” Jay-Jay says.

Rafferty looks at me, checking. I shrug.

“Curiosity killed the cat,” Rafferty says, then smiles.

“And satisfaction brought it back,” Jay-Jay retorts.

Rafferty shakes his head.

“It probably makes him a good cop, though,” I say to Rafferty.

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” It’s so genuine and unfiltered that I can’t help but laugh. He looks immediately sorry. The doorbell rings.

“Saved by the bell,” he says, and rolls his eyes again. It’s as if Eva were in the room, channeling clichés through us.

It’s the woman who forgot her hat. I grab it, head to the door. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry? I think, but I don’t say it out loud this time.

“Sorry,” the woman says. “I got all the way to Beverly before I realized I’d left it here.” I walk her across the porch. “Eva would have been so happy you came back,” she says. “I hope you don’t mind me saying so.” She doesn’t wait for an answer.

It is finally cooling. Somewhere in the park, someone is playing a violin.

They’re telling stories about Eva when I return. Prompted by the photos. Every picture is a story. They’re one-upping each other, Beezer and Jay-Jay, playing to Anya or to Rafferty or to anyone else who will listen.

“It’s starting to sound like an Irish wake.” Rafferty hands me the empty soda glass, not wanting to put it down amid all the photos.

“More?” I ask, surprised that he’s finished it so fast. He holds up a hand—he’s had enough. “Eva was part Irish,” I say.

“You’re kidding,” he says, and I can tell he is surprised.

“On her mother’s side.” I remember that Eva used to tell us that our Irish blood is what made all of us good “readers,” that all Irish people have the gift of blind sight, or at least all Irishwomen do. But I don’t have any Irish in me. My grandmother was G.G.’s first wife, Elizabeth, who died giving birth to my mother. May is quite psychic as well, though she goes out of her way to deny it. So the gift must come from both sides of the family.

The stories from the other end of the room are getting too loud for us to carry on any other conversation.

“Remember the time she told the Republican candidate for governor not to run?” Jay-Jay says, and Beezer does a spit take. “What was it she said to him?”

“No good could come of it,” Beezer says.

“Yeah, that’s it.” Jay-Jay turns to Anya. “The guy had a ton of money. People thought he actually had a shot at winning. A week before the election, he slipped on one of his glossy four-color campaign flyers and ended up spending six weeks on his back in some Podunk hospital out in East Cupcake that he didn’t dare leave because he was afraid he would, quote, ‘alienate his constituents.’”

“Who voted straight Democrat anyway,” Beezer tells Anya.

“So he lost?” Anya asks in disbelief.

“A Republican? In Massachusetts? Of course he lost. Doesn’t take a psychic to predict that one.” Jay-Jay is laughing his ass off.

“You think we should tell him about our recent run of Republican governors?” Rafferty asks, then decides against it. Anya and Beezer are laughing so hard they can’t tell him either.

“What?” Jay-Jay says, but Beezer’s got his whoop laugh going now, and no one is immune to it.

Rafferty looks at me. The whole party is laughing now. Beezer laughs silently, his face in a grimace that looks like something out of a horror film. The only noise he makes is on the intake, a big whooping wheeze that sounds like he’s kidding, but he’s not. People start to calm down, and then he whoops, and they are off again, weak with laughter and release.

Jay-Jay’s girlfriend, Irene something-or-other, comes running up to us.

“Where’s the bathroom,” she says urgently. “I think I’m gonna pee my pants.”

“Great,” I say, pointing to the hall, and I follow to make sure she gets there.

Rafferty follows me out into the hall.

“The last door,” I point, and she goes in.

Rafferty and I are in the hallway then, where it is slightly quieter, the voices muffled. He seems grateful for the quiet. He looks relieved, then awkward, searching for words.

“This was a hard case,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“This case. Eva’s. Usually when somebody disappears without a trace, it’s Eva I go to.”

“Really?”

“She’s helped us more than once, actually.”

I remember Eva talking about her friend the cop. How she had done a reading that helped him find a missing boy. So I was right; the friend she’d talked about was Rafferty.

“She was a hell of a lady.”

“I’m glad you knew her.”

“She talked about you all the time.”

I hate the thought of Eva talking about me, and he can tell. I try to cover, but it’s too late.

“All nice things,” he said, but I can tell he knows more than all nice things. Everyone in this town knows more than nice things about me; they’re public knowledge. I can’t imagine the discussions he might have had about me with Eva—about my hospitalization. God, if he got curious and looked up my police records, he’d have enough material to talk about me for the next year.

“I need to sit down,” I say, realizing it’s true only as I say it. I feel a little sick. It’s been a long day, and I’m not supposed to be having long days. My head is reeling with the noise of everything in this room that isn’t being said. I have no more strength to push away people’s thoughts. I can hear all their unspoken questions: Why the hell did she come back? How crazy is she, do you think? Before Rafferty has a chance to protest, I escape back inside.

I cross the room, putting distance between us, going to a table in the bay window. Rafferty comes in a minute later. He scans the crowd until he sees me, then walks over and leans down.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “That was another poor attempt at small talk.”

I don’t have it in me to smile.

“Eva kept telling me over and over how bad I was at this kind of thing.”

I feel some compassion for him. He is trying. I look at him and realize that his secret thoughts, whatever they might be, are probably the only ones in this room that I’m not reading tonight.

“She kept telling me she’d give me a discount on one of her manners classes,” he says.

There is a long pause. He shifts awkwardly. “I guess I should have taken her up on it.”

I’m still trying to think of something to say back to him, something polite but not personal. Finally I get it. I speak to him in Aunt Eva’s own words. “I like soup. Do you like soup?”

It is a test. To see how much he knows. If he has talked to Eva as much as I suspect he has, he will know the expression. It was one of her favorites. Especially if they were talking about the skill of making small talk or his lack thereof. Learning to talk about soup was the first lesson Eva taught.

He looks at me curiously. I’m watching his eyes, waiting for signs of recognition. He shows nothing. “Excuse me?” he says slowly, deliberately.

I’m staring at him now, trying to read his thoughts. His mind is either intentionally blank or unreadable. His eyes are steady. He might be telling the truth, or he might be just a hell of a good cop. I can’t decide which.

Irene comes back into the room then, fluffing her skirts down as she goes. “What’d I miss?”

“Tell her about the statue,” Jay-Jay says to Beezer. “Hey, Reenie, you gotta hear this one.”

“I was telling Anya about the time Cal tried to get the statue of Roger Conant removed,” Beezer explains.

Irene smiles, remembering.

“Because it looks like a witch?” Anya asks.

“Because it looks like it’s masturbating,” says Irene.

“What?” Anya says, peering out the window at the statue of Salem’s founding father, which is right across the square. “Oh, please, it does not.”

“Swear to God.” Jay-Jay crosses his heart.

Irene goes to the window and tries to point it out to Anya, who’s squinting into the gathering darkness, trying to make herself see it.

“Where?” Anya says.

“Right there. The way he’s holding his staff.”

“More like his rod,” Jay-Jay says, and even Irene thinks he’s gone too far.

“I’ve gotta get back to work,” Rafferty says then. I start to get up to walk him to the door. “You want me to take him with me?” He gestures to Jay-Jay.

“He’s okay,” I say.

Rafferty shrugs.

“Thank you for coming,” I say.

“We’ll see each other again.”

“Yes,” I say.

I walk him to the door, watch as he walks down the steps to the black unmarked car. He sits there for a minute, then starts the engine and does an illegal U-turn on the square, barely missing a parked car.

Ann Chase is cleaning up, gathering dishes off the tables, taking them to the kitchen. I follow her.

“See? There? It really does look like he’s jerking off.”

“Does not,” Anya says, but she’s laughing now, a hearty Norwegian sort of laugh.

“Does too,” Lyndley’s voice says in my mind, flashing a random memory. It was the summer before Lyndley died that she discovered the statue of Roger Conant. I don’t mean she literally discovered it—we’d been looking at that statue all our lives. But that summer when she looked at it, she saw something completely different. She was laughing so hard she almost couldn’t tell us what she was laughing at. She stood on the curb directing us, making us walk around and around the statue, looking at it from all angles until we saw what she had seen. It was Beezer who saw it first, and his face turned bright red. He was so embarrassed he actually went back inside the house, although I’m sure he wouldn’t remember that now. It took me a lot longer. By the time I saw it, cars were stopped, tooting their horns at me, and Lyndley was laughing, yelling back at the cars, telling them not to “get their panties in a wad,” a southern expression she’d picked up over the winter and one she used for everything. Finally a driver laid on the horn; and Lyndley gave him the finger. It was then that I caught the right angle on old Roger Conant, and I just started laughing hysterically. I don’t know if it was the expression on the driver’s face or on Lyndley’s or the sight of our distinguished founding father all robed and holding a staff that from the back right angle looked like an erect penis. I don’t know which thing set me off, but I didn’t stop laughing until Eva came and got me off the sidewalk and made me come back to the house. She didn’t ask me what I was laughing at. I had the impression that she didn’t want to know.

“I’m not seeing it,” Anya says.

“You can’t see it so well from here,” Beezer says to Anya. “It’s better from outside.” Then he tells her the story about how Eva single-handedly saved that statue and how it pissed Cal off royally but made Eva a town heroine from that moment on.

I grab some more dishes and follow Ann Chase to the kitchen. She is standing at the sink, carefully peeling off a piece of lace that has gotten itself stuck to the bottom of a saucer.