Town of Masks Read online

  “No. I don’t think it’s foolish,” the girl said. She reached for her coffee, her hand slipping naturally away from Hannah’s touch.

  Hannah folded her hands tightly. “You pray for the dead, don’t you? It must be a great comfort.”

  The sarcasm she intended was lost, or ignored.

  Elizabeth smiled. “No greater than your conviction that heaven is there and waiting for those of us who behave ourselves.”

  “And yet we don’t know, either of us,” Hannah mused aloud.

  “Your garden is lovely this year, Miss Blake.”

  “Isn’t it? I have a new gardener—the Keogh boy.”

  “I know.”

  “Oh, do you know him?”

  “He’s at the library a lot.”

  “I believe he told me he came from downstate,” Hannah said. “Actually, I hired him without recommendation.”

  “A tribute to his charm,” Elizabeth said, rather lightly.

  “Charm” was not the quality with which she had been taken certainly, Hannah thought. She tried to remember what it was about him that decided her. “Some day I’m going to ask him for references as a matter of principle,” she said.

  “His father is a minister.”

  That was news to Hannah. Most interesting. “Do you like poetry?” She kept her eyes on Elizabeth as she put the question. The girl apparently made no association between Keogh and the subject.

  “Some poetry,” she said easily.

  “It’s rather a lost art in our times, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not sure that it is.”

  “It’s either being written or it’s not, wouldn’t you say?” Hannah demanded.

  “Perhaps it’s not being published. Sometimes when an art seems dormant, artists are off working night and day at it. When it comes out, perhaps we’ll have another golden age starting.”

  And that was the hesitancy with which she was impatient, Hannah thought. “What a lovely thought,” she said. “How wonderfully optimistic you are, Elizabeth. It’s exactly what I hoped for when the project I want to discuss took shape in my mind.”

  “I dare say I read it somewhere, Miss Blake.”

  “How characteristic of you, Elizabeth. If I had said it, I should certainly claim it for my own. Well. Has it ever occurred to you that precisely the sort of poet you describe might be hiding away here in the Cove?”

  “I don’t suppose I ever thought of it before. But why not?”

  “Why not indeed!” Hannah said. “I’ve no notion whether we have poets or dunderheads, of course. But don’t you think it might be interesting to try to find out?”

  “Very.”

  “I’ve had this in mind for a long time. My father was something of a poet, though few people were aware of it.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Elizabeth said. She was remembering the quiet, white-haired man as he walked to and from the bank every day, Hannah thought, and his way of pausing at a bird’s song, of stopping anyone who chanced to pass. “That’s a wren you hear,” he would say even to a stranger. “That’s a scarlet tanager—rare this time of year.” Indeed he might have been a poet.

  “I should like to set up a modest sum,” she continued, “by way of drawing any poets we might have in the Cove out of hiding, so to speak.”

  Elizabeth thought about it for a few seconds. “You were devoted to your father, Miss Blake,” she said tentatively.

  “He was the only man—I ever really knew.” Hannah ended it flatly, for it was not what she had meant to say at all. Suddenly she felt tears rising to her eyes. She wanted very much not to be ashamed of them, and one word from the younger woman would have saved her, even the kindness of meeting her eyes at this moment, but she could draw nothing from her, and she felt helplessly mawkish as she plunged on, saying things she wanted to say even while she knew they called forth no response.

  “He was devoted to me, too, in his fashion. The Lord knows why. In the way men love ugly things, I suppose, an old chair they are forever barking their shins on. I always wanted to help him, to surprise him. My help was a hindrance. My surprises made him nervous. Have you ever known anyone like that, Elizabeth?”

  “I’ve known people who thought it of themselves,” she said quietly. “They weren’t always right.”

  “You’re very kind,” she said, and it was as kind as the girl could be from the distance she chose to keep.

  “May I have a drop more coffee, please, Miss Blake? It’s very good.”

  More noncommittal kindness, Hannah thought, pouring the coffee. “Thank you,” she murmured. “I wish you would call me Hannah—at moments like this at least.”

  Elizabeth smiled, but the smile was an effort. “I’m afraid I was reared in the tradition of ‘Miss Blake,’” she said. “I remember when my mother came here as a seamstress.”

  The rejection hurt, couched in any terms Elizabeth chose. The desire to strike back was irresistible. “I remember when your father brought her up from Front Street to your nice little house on Pilgrim.”

  “She came from a nice little house,” Elizabeth said, lifting her chin.

  “I’m sure,” Hannah murmured. “It’s only in the last thirty years that Front Street has gone to ruin.”

  “Have you ever been in any of the houses there, Miss Blake?”

  “No. I’ve not had the occasion.” Nor had she wanted it, raucous and loud as they were, overrun with children, their only discipline the hard hand of the priest on them.

  “They’re starched and proud,” Elizabeth said.

  “And full of ignorance and prejudice,” Hannah added.

  “No more than the rest of this town in its attitude toward them.”

  “Don’t you like Campbell’s Cove, Elizabeth?”

  “It’s my home,” the girl said. “That gives me the right of criticism.”

  “Of course. Isn’t it a shame more of us don’t exercise it? But then, we have you—and Mrs. Verlaine. She has a taste for criticism, too.”

  “The poetry fund,” Elizabeth said gently. “How do you plan to set it up?”

  That closed the matter. Like dirt in a hole in the ground. “Nothing so pretentious as a fund,” she said. “That is something to be arranged when I’m dead and gone. My idea was to promote interest by way of a contest for the present. However, should we discover some destitute genius, it might well be that a fund should be started—by the community, to which I should subscribe, naturally.”

  “I see,” Elizabeth said with small enthusiasm.

  She was looking for the motive, Hannah thought, perhaps calculating it as a move to steal some of Verlaine’s fire.

  “The reason I’m approaching you at all, Elizabeth, is that I want to do it anonymously.”

  “I see,” Elizabeth said again, this time to cover some confusion of her own.

  “My father was a modest man, Elizabeth. In my mind I shall do it as a memorial to him—if the arrangements can be made. You are hesitant. May I ask why?”

  “My first reaction was that you might find yourself with a collection of jingles,” the girl replied promptly.

  A nice escape.

  Hannah smiled. “You are a snob, my dear, which is not unpardonable. I, too, foresaw that possibility, and decided to chance it. If we get nothing but jingles, well, we shall have a jingle contest.”

  “You would like it sponsored by the library?” Elizabeth asked presently.

  “Yes. I realize it must go before the board, and I should like you to present it—the donor anonymous. And forever, Elizabeth. I do not expect to be called to the platform after the award is made.”

  Elizabeth colored.

  “A fool may know his own folly,” Hannah pursued in her self-abuse. “He’s the greater fool for persisting in it—There goes Sophie.” She waved in acknowledgment of the girl’s shouted farewell.

  Elizabeth also waved. Sophie skipped and ran down the driveway.

  “Such a sweet girl,” Hannah said, “but so young and foolish. D
o you know where she’s off to?” She leaned forward, anxious to see her visitor’s response, knowing her to be uncomfortable. “To the wharves. She has such a crush on young Keogh, and you know when he leaves me, he putters the rest of his time about the boats. Comes back to his room at all hours.”

  “Does he?” Elizabeth murmured. Not a question, certainly.

  Hannah rocked back in her chair. “There should be moonlight tonight. I dare say he’ll take her out to the point and back if he can borrow a boat.”

  “I dare say,” Elizabeth repeated. She took a cigarette from the tray. Hannah had never seen her smoke.

  “I have some brandy, too, my dear. I’m a teetotaler myself, but I’m not narrow where others are concerned.”

  “Thank you, no.”

  “I’ve annoyed you with my gossip. You know the boy, don’t you?”

  “And I know Sophie,” Elizabeth said. Of course. She was a Catholic, too, Hannah thought. A clan of all classes. “Forgive me, Elizabeth. But then, it’s natural for him, isn’t it?”

  “What’s natural?”

  “To take what pleasure he can with the girl, I suppose.”

  “And it’s not natural for the girl,” Elizabeth said tartly.

  “Well, I was brought up to a sense of modesty, but then, I’m out of date. Men, it seems, must go to sewing bees and women make love—to be in touch with the times. I had not thought you were so modern in your ideas, Elizabeth.

  “I’ve never thought myself especially modern. Maybe I’m not the right person to be the intermediary on your poetry project, Miss Blake.”

  Far enough with the taunting, Hannah thought. “Nonsense. I only wish that you were to be the judge of the contest. But we must leave that to the board. I think a thousand dollars award would make it worth the effort, don’t you?”

  Elizabeth was impressed by the sum, she knew.

  “Into what prizes would you break it down?”

  “I should not want it broken down at all. One prize. I have never seen the value of consolation prizes, having won a good many of them in my life.”

  “I suppose that will be at your discretion,” Elizabeth said, getting up.

  Arrogance, that, in someone other than Elizabeth. “I should think I’m deserving that,” Hannah said. “Let me drive you home.”

  “Thank you, but I like to walk and, as you say, the moon will be up soon.”

  Hannah went to the portico with her. “I’ll be in touch with you about the presentation.”

  Elizabeth turned and accepted the hand she offered. “Dinner was lovely. Thank you, Miss Blake.”

  “You’re very kind,” Hannah said.

  She could feel a stinging pain in the back of her throat as she watched the girl’s quick retreat down the long driveway. Why don’t you sing, Elizabeth? You’re near to dancing. Why don’t you sing, when you’re so happy to be off and free of Hannah Blake?

  5

  SHE CARRIED THE COFFEE tray to the kitchen, the clacking of her heels echoing through the house as she moved from one carpet to the next. She washed the china and put it away. It was dark now beyond the kitchen casements, and the crickets had set up their long night’s crying. Some people called them friendly, Hannah mused. But she always thought them unwilling prisoners—on the hearth or beyond it, and found in their melancholy noise the sound of pain, as though they moaned night after night, I hurt, I hurt, I hurt.

  Restless, she got her suede jacket and went outdoors. An extra set of keys to the car jangled in the pocket. She stilled them with her hand and heard the motor of the night mail plane to Chicago approaching and then going on. The quarter moon was rising, lying on its back, rolling in silent, derisive laughter, she thought.

  She got the car out then and drove away from town, charging the road. Abruptly at the first intersection she braked and circled back, coming on the Cove by the shore road, Front Street, within the town limits. The smell of fish grew heavier near the wharves. At the docks she slowed down, and peering along them she finally caught sight of Sophie’s yellow blouse in one of the boats moored there. It was difficult to be certain, for the only light fell from the string of naked bulbs hanging along the pier. But it was Sophie, all right, her hair like a white mop she was shaking out in the wind. Hannah provided her with a hair net, but she tore it off the minute she set foot outside the Blake door. The boy in the boat with her was Keogh, as she had expected. He was working at something, always working at something—a fisherman’s net, by the long, steady pull of his arm. Between that and Sophie he was well occupied for the evening.

  She returned home, and having put her car away, went directly to the tool shed. The notebook lay as she had last seen it in the bottom drawer. She took it to the workbench beneath the wired light bulb and climbed up on the iron stool. She reread first the piece she had scanned on her discovery of the book. He was really a poet, she thought, and certainly there was a woman somewhere whom he worshiped, and certainly it was not Sophie.

  How strange that he should take Sophie for a companion here—poor, bland, giggling little Sophie. The minister’s son and the farm girl—the eagle and the sparrow. But Sophie would be as easy with her kisses as she was with laughter, and she was very clean—scrubbed-looking, scrubbed raw, in fact. Perhaps that was enough for him; no questions from her, nothing but faith and adoration, leaving him the dark sanctuary of his own thoughts unentered upon. And Hannah had come to believe these last few days, watching him from the window late afternoons and early mornings, that the dourness was sincere, that he cared not whether one found it interesting or dull—that, in truth, he was unaware of it entirely—even as her father had always seemed careless of the impression he made on people. Only Hannah Blake went around without a world of her own.

  She turned a page and read further until she came to the phrase:

  Your breasts are pale moons, stung each with a kiss

  She grew almost sick with the shock, with revulsion really, and yet she could not take her eyes from the line, reading it and rereading it, even to the study of the hand in which it was written, the rounded block figures, the tall strokes of the high letters, and the strong, bold lines tearing through the t’s. She read on, one page after another, lingering over, savoring the sensuous passages, a gnawing growing inside her like hunger, ripping through her then, catching at her very bowels, twisting and turning her until the iron edges of the stool on her legs where she pressed them against it was pleasure.

  Her mouth was dry, for she had been breathing through it, deep, shuddering breaths. For how long she did not know. She swallowed hard and coaxed up the saliva against the bitterness. Calmly then, with the almost detached feeling of someone coming out of a high fever, she closed the book, returned it to its hiding-place, and went outdoors.

  “God, You are my witness,” she whispered, walking through the silver quiet of her garden. “I never intended this.”

  But even in this she knew that she was asking false witness. She had indeed been seeking what she found.

  6

  “YOU HAVE THE FIGURE of a girl of twenty, Miss Blake,” the masseuse remarked, kneading away at the flesh about Hannah’s waist.

  Hannah pretended not to hear her. She had not come several hundred miles to listen to callow chatter. At twenty she had not had much of a figure, and while she had been coming to Sulphur Springs twice a year for a long time, the baths had not improved it. They had merely helped to keep it within an eighteen dress size.

  More than that, however, they imposed on her a disciplined relaxation. She often confided to the health mistress the strains and anxieties her work placed her under, getting some satisfaction out of the fantasy she wove for her. Sometimes she even managed to carry a sense of it about within herself, having nothing to do between baths but sit quietly, blanketed, on the sun porch. She would conjure up her dreams of industry and acclaim, wave after wave of them until they carried her beyond Campbell’s Cove, beyond Odenah County, to the very threshold of the governor’s mansion. T
here she let them wash away, knowing that if they were real indeed, she would have no need of this disciplined relaxation.

  But these days she permitted herself none of the dream—or at least no more of it than what she conceived to be the incidental pleasures to its fulfillment—the visiting of bookshops in Chicago on her way home, the arrangement of the books themselves and the banishment of the trashy bric-a-brac collected now on the bookshelves. Most of it had been her mother’s, and had been unnoticed, unmoved except by a dozen Sophies through the years who somehow managed to break glasses by the set, but not to so much as chip the nose from a mountainware maiden at the pump.

  The things cherished, and the things abandoned, she mused. To be a pioneer at twenty was easy, at thirty not so easy, at forty difficult, and at fifty unimportant, making it impossible. But she was not yet fifty. What a mortal combat she had chosen for herself in her decision to champion Dennis Keogh’s poetry at all costs! The Covites would be up in arms—the Copithornes, the Wilkses, the Shanes, all except perchance Verlaine, who years ago had championed a poet, Andrew Sykes, and won his devotion. It was a crabbed devotion, but one Maria was well qualified to return.

  Just this once Maria might be with her, but all the rest would cry, “Shame! Shame!” And they would say of her, “Hannah Blake, of all people, Hannah, warden of the Presbyterian church, co-founder of the Decency in Books and Entertainment League.” In the end, a few of them might realize how much of sacrifice to taste and training this crusade had cost her. And when Dennis Keogh was acclaimed the poet she believed him to be—But that was part of the dream she forbade herself.

  For the moment her high purpose was to gather again all the scattered strands of poetry in her own life that one by one had slipped away for want of a pattern. That itself was a poetic thought, she mused—the scattered strands—a little maudlin, but creative. Creative. The years that word cut through! Creativeness. Almost thirty years ago at the University, her roommates talking one night after lights were out about creativeness: she could close her eyes now and recall the whole gray atmosphere, the reflection of the street lamp on the ceiling, shadows, the whispers, giggles, the silence at the sound of approaching and retreating footsteps and the noise of flushing water, muffled laughter—the house mistress and her kidney trouble.