Читать книгу The Lace Reader - Brunonia Barry - Страница 8

THE SALEM NEWS HAS ALREADY picked up the story about Eva’s disappearance: “Elderly Woman Missing Ten Days” and “Lace Reader of Salem Vanishes.” Eva used to send me the Salem paper. It was around the time that May started making the headlines. For a while I actually read them. My mother’s clashes with the police over her tactics for saving abused women were becoming famous and made for good copy. Eventually I stopped reading the papers and would leave them on the porch in their wrappers until my landlord would get fed up and take them to Santa Monica for recycling or, if it was winter, roll them up tightly and burn them in her fireplace like logs.

The paper speculates that Eva just wandered away. A woman interviewed from the Salem Council on Aging suggests tagging the elderly residents of Salem. It evokes an interesting image—cops with ear tags and tranquilizer guns rounding up old people. Realizing she’s gone too far with her suggestion, the woman goes on to say: “This kind of thing happens all the time. Salem is a small city. I’m sure she couldn’t have gotten far.”

The woman clearly didn’t know my aunt.

The ferry from Boston lets me off on Derby Street, a few blocks from the House of the Seven Gables, where Nathaniel Hawthorne’s cousin grew up. I am named after Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia Peabody, although the spelling is different; my name is spelled Sophya. I was brought up to believe that Ms. Peabody was a distant relative, but I found out from Eva that we weren’t related to the Peabodys at all, that May simply found Sophia interesting, and appropriated her as our own. (So now you see which side of the family the lying thing comes from.) By the time it would have bothered me, May and I were hardly speaking anyway. I had already moved in with Aunt Eva. I had changed my name to Towner and wouldn’t answer to anything else. So it didn’t matter all that much.

I’m walking for a long time. The estrogen patch on my arm begins to itch. I have a rash from it, but I don’t know what to do about that, short of ripping the damned thing off. I figure the rash is probably from the heat. I’d forgotten how hot it can get in New England in the summer, and how humid. Ahead of me tourists swarm. Buses line the lot at the Gables, jamming the side streets. People move in groups, snapping photos, stuffing souvenirs into bags that are already far too full.

Around every corner of Salem lurks a history lesson. Dead ahead as I walk is the Custom House with its gold roof. This is where Hawthorne worked his day job, an appointed position as clerk. Using the locals as subject matter, revealing their secrets, Hawthorne basically wrote his way out of this town, escaping west to Concord before the townspeople remembered their talent with the old tar and feathers. Still, now they celebrate Hawthorne as their own. The same way they celebrate the witches, who never existed at all in the days of the witch trials but who thrive here in great numbers now.

A kid steps in front of me, asking directions to the common. There are three kids actually, two girls and a boy. All in black. Goths, is my first thought, but no, definitely young witches. What gives it away finally is the BLESSED BE T-shirt worn by one of the girls.

I point. “Follow the yellow brick road,” I say. Actually it’s a tour line painted on the street, and it’s red, not yellow, but they get the idea. A man in a huge Frankenstein head walks by, handing out flyers. I want to call for the continuity person, but this isn’t a movie set. A cruiser slows, the cop looks at the kids, then at me. The boy spots the witch logo on the side of the police car, gives the cop a big thumbs-up. Frankenstein hands each of us a Freaky Tours flyer and sneezes inside his big hollow head. “Universal tours without the budget” is what Beezer calls this place. I heard from my brother that Salem is trying to shed its image as Witch City. He told me last year that they were attempting to pass an ordinance to limit the number of haunted houses that can be erected within one city block. From the look of things, the ordinance didn’t pass.

The second girl, the shorter of the two, grabs the side of her head, pulling it slowly until her neck cracks. Celtic-knot tattoo on the nape of her neck, hair way too dark for her pale skin. “Come on, let’s go,” she says to the guy, and grabs his arm, leading him away from me. “Thanks,” he says. Our eyes meet, and he flashes a quick smile. She steps between us then, turning him wide like a big ship she’s trying to keep on course. I follow them, walking in the same direction toward Eva’s house but leaving a safe distance so she won’t think I’m after him.

It’s a long walk toward the common. I hear the music before I see the crowd—it’s nature music, New Age. We could be back in Woodstock except for the preponderance of black clothing. I’m wondering what holiday it is, what Pagan celebration. I count the days and realize that it’s some kind of summer-solstice thing, though it’s about a week too late. Living in L.A. has made me forget the seasons. Here the arrival of summer is something for everyone to celebrate, Pagan or not.

Salem Common, with its huge oaks and maples and the Gothic cast-iron fence, triggers a lost school memory. There used to be tunnels under the common, sometime after the witches but before the Revolution. The shipping merchants probably used the tunnels to hide trade bounty from their English tax collectors; that was the theory anyway. After the war for independence finally started, the tunnels were used by the privateers, who were the same thing as pirates, really, but with the government’s permission. Not England’s permission—it was the British ships they were stealing—but permission of the new government. I’m told they also hid ammunition there, and saltpeter. Beezer and I used to search for the tunnels when we were little, but Eva told us that they’re all filled in now.

I turn the corner by the Hawthorne Hotel and see the low blue flame from the old glassed-in popcorn machine, which is still on the corner across from the hotel, as it has been every year since my mother was a little girl. There’s also a makeshift stand selling wands and crystals, but that’s new. Across the street stands the imposing statue of Roger Conant, who, after failing to realize his original goal in Cape Ann, ended up founding the city that would become Salem. I’m reminded of the cliché Eva used to repeat at least ten times a week: There are no accidents. And the one that inevitably followed. Everything happens for a reason.

The cops are everywhere: on bicycles, talking to people, asking for fire permits. “You can’t do that here,” I hear one of them say. “If you want to have a bonfire, you have to go up to Gallows Hill, or to the beach.”

I cross the street. I open the gate to Eva’s house, catching a whiff of flowers, peonies, coming from her gardens. There are hundreds of them now, tree peonies on small bushes that die back every winter. Eva has done well with her gardens. She used to leave a key for me in a peony blossom when she knew I was coming. Or she would place it in one of the daylilies if it was later in the season and the peonies were no longer blooming. I’d forgotten that. But there are too many flowers now. I could never find a key here, and of course she hasn’t left a key this time, because she wasn’t expecting me.

The brick house is much larger than I remember. More imposing and older. Huge chimneys list to windward. Off the back, away from the crowds of Salem Common, is the coach house, which is connected to the main house by the winter porch. The coach house is more damaged than the main house—probably from the weather or from neglect—and it seems to be leaning on the porch, which is showing its age and sagging under the weight. Still, its windows with their wavy old glass are sparkling, not spotted with salt from the sea air, which means that Eva washed them not too long ago, as she does with all the windows she can reach (eighty-five years old or not), the same way she washes them every April when she does her spring cleaning. She gets to all the first-floor windows and the insides of all the upper floors. The outside windows of those upper floors remain filmy and salted, because Eva has the frugality of an old Yankee and refuses to pay anyone for services she thinks she should be able to perform herself. When Beezer and I lived in town with Eva, we offered to wash the windows, but she wouldn’t buy a ladder and said she didn’t want us climbing up on ladders anyway, so Beezer and I got used to distortion and haze. If you wanted to see clearly, you had to either look out the first-floor windows or climb all the way up to the widow’s walk.

The perfect line of first-floor windows gleams back at me from the winter porch. I catch my reflection in the wavy glass, and I’m surprised by it. When I left here, I was seventeen. I haven’t been back for fifteen years. I knew my reflection in the glass when I was seventeen, but today I don’t recognize the woman I see there.

The hours of Eva’s tearoom are posted on the front door. A sign that reads SORRY WE ARE CLOSED leans against one of the side panes.

A young girl sees me walking to the house. “There’s no one there,” the girl says, assuming I’m one of the witches. “I already checked.”

I nod and walk down the stairs. When she’s out of sight, I walk around to the back of the house, figuring I’m going to have to break in and not wanting to be seen.

When we were kids, my sister, Lyndley, and I could break into any house. I was a master at picking locks. We used to break into people’s houses just to sit in them—“like Goldilocks tasting porridge and sampling beds,” Lyndley used to say. For the most part, we limited our break-ins to the summerhouses. Down at the Willows one time, we broke into a house and actually cleaned it. That’s the kind of thing only a girl would do. Outlaw certainly, but homemaker, too.

I walk around the back of the coach house to a less visible spot half hidden by the garden. There is a small pane in the door, bull’s-eye glass, already cracked. Once I’m inside the coach house, getting into the main house is a snap. I pick up a rock, wrapping the sleeve of my shirt over it. A quick tap and the crack spreads. I pull the glass fragments out carefully and wedge my hand through the small space, twisting the dead bolt that has been the only thing holding the door in alignment. Either because the lock is so rusty or because I am, I don’t anticipate the way the door heaves as it opens. It pulls my arm with it, cutting through my cotton shirt, drawing blood. I watch the blood pool. It’s not too bad; there’s not very much of it, not after what I’ve gotten used to anyway. “Just a flesh wound, Copper,” I say aloud in my best Jimmy Cagney. Then, ridiculously on cue, a police cruiser actually pulls up, and, even more ridiculously, the father of my first boyfriend, Jack, climbs out of the car and walks toward the house. This is strange, since Jack’s father is not a cop, he’s a lobsterman. I’m having one of those moments when you’re pretty sure you’re dreaming but you don’t want to count on it. I regard Jack’s father as he approaches me, his face screwed up into half concern, half joy, looking stranger than anything in my dream life ever did.

“You should have called the station,” he says. “We have a key.” It is not Jack’s father’s voice but his younger brother’s that I finally recognize.

“Hi, Jay-Jay,” I say, getting it, remembering now that Beezer had told me Jay-Jay was a cop.

He hugs me. “Been a while,” he says, thinking, I’m sure, how bad I look and running through a list of possibilities in his head. I fight the urge to tell him I’ve just had my uterus cut out, that I almost bled to death before the emergency surgery.

“You’re bleeding,” he says, reaching out for my arm. The cops here aren’t as scared by blood as the cops in L.A. are.

“Just a flesh wound, Copper,” I say too loud. He leads me inside and makes me sit down at the kitchen table. I’m bare-armed now, holding a paper towel to my forearm.

“You need stitches,” Jay-Jay says.

“It’s fine.”

“At least get some Neosporin on it. Or some of that herbal crap Eva sells.”

“I’m fine, Jay-Jay,” I say, just a little too sharply.

A long silence. “I’m sorry about Eva,” he says finally. “I wish I had something new I could tell you.”

“Me, too.”

“That Alzheimer’s stuff is all crap. I saw her a week before she disappeared. She was still sharp as a tack.” He thinks a minute. “You need to talk to Rafferty.”

“Who?”

“Detective Rafferty. He’s your man. He’s the one who’s handling the case.”

He looks around the room as if there’s something here, something he wants to say, but then he changes his mind.

“What?”

“Nothing…. I’ll tell Rafferty you’re here. He’ll want to talk to you. He’s in court today, though. Traffic court. Whatever you do, don’t drive with him. He’s the worst driver in the world.”

“Okay,” I say, wondering why Jay-Jay thought driving with Rafferty was even a possibility. We stand there awkwardly, neither of us knowing how to follow that last thread of conversation.

“You look good,” he says finally. “For an old lady of…what? Thirty-one?”

“Thirty-two.”

“For thirty-two you look great,” he says, and laughs.

I don’t go into the main part of the house until Jay-Jay leaves. As soon as I open the door, I realize that everyone has made a big mistake.

Eva’s right here in this house. I can feel her. Her presence is so strong that I almost run after Jay-Jay to tell him to call off the search, that she has come back, but the cruiser has already turned the corner, so I’ll have to call the station.

But first I have to see my Aunt Eva. She must have gone on a trip and not told anyone. She probably doesn’t even know the whole town’s looking for her.

“Eva?” I call to her. She doesn’t answer. Her ears aren’t very good, not anymore. I call again, louder. Still no answer, but I know she’s here. She’s up on the widow’s walk or down in the root cellar mixing up a new kind of tea, something with bergamot and kumquat essence. Or maybe she never left, is what I’m thinking, though I know that’s not possible. They must have searched the house. At least I assume they did. Didn’t anyone come in here, for God’s sake? Didn’t May? No, she wouldn’t, damn her. But the cops would. Or my brother. Of course Beezer would have looked. Of course that’s the first thing they would have done. Eva wouldn’t have been reported missing unless she actually was missing, right? But now she’s back. It’s as plain as the nose on your face, I think, laughing out loud because I’m still channeling Eva’s clichés.

“Hey, Eva,” I call to her, knowing how deaf she’s gotten, but giving it a try anyway. “Eva, it’s me.”

I’m not sure where to start looking. I stand there, in the foyer. Ahead are two matching parlors with black marble fireplaces facing each other from the ends of the long rooms. One of the rooms is closed off; that’s the one Eva uses as her tearoom. I enter the other one. It’s more like a ballroom than a parlor. The fireplaces look empty with neither flames nor Eva’s usual arrangements of flowers in them. Chairs are placed symmetrically and strategically, like pieces on a chessboard. I look at the huge suspended staircase. I know that my next move should be up, but I decide to check the tearoom first, then the other kitchen, and the root cellar, where she blends the teas. I’m calling to her, talking as I go, speaking loudly so that she’ll hear me. I don’t want to sneak up and scare her into having a heart attack or something.

She’s probably upstairs. I’m not supposed to be climbing stairs yet, but I’m yelling to her now, and I realize I’m going to have to get up there. I use the railing to pull myself, but it’s easier to climb now than it was a few days ago, even though I can still feel the pull of the stitches with each step. When I reach the second-floor landing, I’m dizzy and have to sit down on a bench and wait until everything stops spinning. Finally I make my way to Eva’s room. Old canopy bed in the corner, fireplace, armoire. The bed is made, the pillows fluffed. I pick up a pillow and smell it, expecting Eva’s scent. Instead it smells of orange water, which is what Eva uses to rinse her linens. She must have changed the sheets recently. I check the walk-in closet. Everything hangs perfectly on the hangers. There is no laundry in the bins, which means that she has already washed the old sheets.

I spent a lot of time in this room when Eva took me in, a lot of time in this closet, actually, which Eva probably found odd but which she never mentioned. Eva is not my blood relation; she was my grandfather G.G.’s second wife, and no relation at all. Still, she understands me in the way a mother should and my own mother never has.

There are six other bedrooms on the second floor. She keeps all but one of them closed up for the winter. Actually, she rarely opens any of them now unless she’s expecting company, which happens more and more infrequently—or so she tells me every week, when she calls. Slowly I move through each of the rooms, looking for her, talking as I go. The ghost furniture stands pale, covered in sheets against the dust.

Exhausted, I climb to the third floor. Even now, at eighty-five, my aunt has more energy than I do. Somehow I know she is up here on the third floor. “Eva,” I say again. “It’s me, Towner.” I ascend the narrowing stairs heavily, holding both railings. I’m so tired.

This third floor is my floor. Eva gave it to me the winter I moved in with her, partly to appease me for having to move off Yellow Dog Island, which I loved so much, and partly because the third floor had the widow’s walk, and she knew I could use it to keep an eye on things, like May still alone out there on the island, refusing to come in. Except for an occasional climb to the widow’s walk, Eva doesn’t use these rooms at all now, and, as she tells me often, she hasn’t changed them since I moved. “They’ll be ready when you are,” she always says, and follows with some other zinger such as, “There’s no place like home.”

I climb the widow’s walk first, because I know it’s the only place Eva would go if she came up here. But there’s no sign of her. The only thing up here is a gull’s nest; I can’t tell whether it’s a new one or something left behind. I stand alone at the top of what was once my world. How many nights have I sat up here, checking on May, making sure her kerosene lamp went on in early evening, then off again when she finally went to bed? Every night of that one winter I spent here.

Salem Harbor has changed. There are a lot more boats than there used to be, and more houses around the perimeter on the Marble-head side, but Yellow Dog Island looks the same. If I squint my eyes and look past the harbor, I can imagine that I am a kid again and that at any minute I’ll see the sail from Lyndley’s yacht as it rounds Peach’s Point and heads toward our island for the summer.

I go back down to the third floor, where my rooms are. This is the only place I haven’t yet looked for Eva and the only place left where she could be. There are four rooms on this floor, which is gabled and smaller than the second floor, but the furniture up here is not covered with sheets, which seems odd, since Eva didn’t know I was coming. One room is a small library filled with all my school things: my desk, cotillion invitations, report cards. There were books required for school, and books that Eva required me to read when she didn’t think the school curriculum went far enough, old leather-bound books from the big library on the first floor: Dickens, Chaucer, Proust. Across the hall is the room that Beezer slept in on Christmas and during his winter vacations from boarding school. The last two rooms were my private suite, a sitting room with two fluffy couches and a little Chinese table between them. At the far end of the room, through French doors, is my bedroom. Since I’ve looked everywhere else, and since I know she’s got to be in the house somewhere, I figure this is where Eva has to be.

I push open the door, scanning the floor first, suddenly afraid. Maybe she didn’t come back. Maybe she’s been here all along, and they just didn’t check well enough. Maybe she has fallen somewhere up here and she’s just been lying here in horrible pain the whole time. “Eva,” I say again, dreading what I’m going to find as I open the door to what is the last room in the house, the last place she could be. “Eva, answer me.”

I’m afraid I’ll see her sprawled on the floor with broken bones, or worse. I close my eyes against the thought. But when I open them, there is nothing. Just the room as I left it the year I turned seventeen: the same Indian-print bedspread that Lyndley bought me in Harvard Square, one of Eva’s patchwork quilts folded into a triangle at the bottom of the bed. On the wall across from the bed is a painting that Lyndley did for me the year before she died, all shades of blues and blacks with a golden path leading into deep water. It is a painting of the dream we shared, entitled Swimming to the Moon.

I walk over and stare at the painting, and I remember a lot of other things then, like the time Lyndley stole a huge bunch of flowers from Eva’s gardens and got in trouble for it, too, because she almost wiped out Eva’s annuals. She had my whole room on Yellow Dog Island completely decorated with those flowers when I got home that day, and she’d really overdone it; they were everywhere. May said it was too much, that it smelled like a funeral parlor. It made her sick to her stomach, she said. Lyndley thought that was an accomplishment in itself, making anyone sick with her artistic renderings. For some reason she found that very funny. It gave her an idea. She made me put on a dress and actually lie down on the bed like a corpse holding flowers on my belly, like Millais’s painting of Ophelia, and she said I looked beautiful as a dead person, and she started sketching me, but I ruined it because I couldn’t stop laughing, which made the flowers shake too much to draw.

I am jolted back to present time by the sound of footsteps on the stairway.

“Well, there you are,” Eva says, not even winded. I reel around. She’s wearing an old flowered housedress, one I remember, and she doesn’t look a day older than the last time I saw her, the year she came to L.A. with some garden-club group to see how the Rose Bowl floats were made.

I start to cry, I am so relieved to see her. I take a step toward her, but I’m dizzy from turning so quickly.

“You’d better sit down before you fall down,” Eva says, smiling, reaching out a hand to steady me, leading me toward the bed. “You look like something the cat dragged in.”

“I’m so glad you’re all right,” I say, collapsing onto the bed.

“Of course I’m all right,” she says, as if not a thing has happened.

She covers me with the quilt. Though it is far too hot, I do not protest. This is a ritual of comfort; she has done this more than once.

“I thought you were dead,” I say, sobbing now, with relief and with exhaustion. There’s so much to say, but she’s shushing me, telling me she’s “right as rain” and that I should get some rest now, that “things will look better in the morning.” I know I should tell her to call Jay-Jay and also Beezer and let them know that she’s okay, but her voice is hypnotic, and I’m starting to fall asleep.

“Rest your weary bones,” she says, reading my mind the same way she’s always been able to read my mind, pulling the concerns right out of it, putting peaceful images in their place. “Things will look better in the morning,” she says again.

She starts toward the door, then turns back. “Thank you for coming,” she says. “I know this must have been difficult for you.” Then she takes something out of the pocket of her dress and lays it down on the bedside table. “I meant to send this with the pillow,” she says. “But I am old, and memory isn’t what it once was.”

I struggle to see what she put on the table, but my eyes are heavy with sleep. “Pleasant dreams,” she says as she walks out the door.

On her command I begin to dream, drifting up the stairs and out the widow’s walk, then out over the harbor where the party boat is coming back from its cruise to nowhere, carrying a load of sunburned tourists. The sun is going down, and a new moon is rising behind Yellow Dog Island, our island, and I can see some women there on the dock, though I don’t recognize them. Then I hear the blast from the party boat as it makes its turn, and I’m grounded back in the bed again, sleeping there. Two blasts as it heads into port. You can set your watch by those horns. Three times a day, you hear the horns as the boat comes back to Salem after each run—at noon and six, and again at midnight, on its last run of the night.