Town of Masks Read online

“A thousand dollars—” she said, almost pleading.

  “He advised me against entering the contest, Miss Blake. I feel that I must be guided by him.”

  “Oh, you must, by all means. What is God without a worshiper?”

  “He’s a great poet, Miss Blake.”

  “Of course he’s a great poet. So was Sappho. Good night, Dennis. Thank you for coming.”

  13

  HANNAH FELT THAT SHE was going to be ill. She thought that she had a high fever and yet she was cold. She pulled herself up from the table presently, and wondered, the room seeming a little off balance to her, if she were about to die. If that were so, she thought, it was as good a time as any. Still there were a good many things to be put in order, although at the moment she could not think of what they were.

  She reached the sink, putting one foot carefully after the other, and turned on the water. For once she was not displeased that Sophie had left a cup in the sink. She filled it with water and drank a mouthful. Then she studied the cup in her hand—solid, hard, pure, pure white. As she tightened her fingers about it, it slipped from them and clattered into the sink where it broke into two pieces, one of them rocking beneath the drip from the faucet. When there was no other sound, the water’s dripping plucked at the silence—a hollow music. “Requiem on a broken cup,” she said aloud.

  There was really a great deal to do, Hannah thought, if there were not much time left to her. In a way, it was like going on a trip. For one thing, there was a library book to return. She glanced at the kitchen clock. Ten minutes to nine. How fortunate.

  With her having a purpose, all her numbed faculties responded as suddenly as they had failed her. She got her jacket, the keys to the car, and the book, and going out the side door, she knew that the worst was over—that the weakness with which she had been inflicted had passed. Death was not to be like this. Death was some way off yet for Hannah Blake.

  Once behind the wheel of the car, the motor racing to the pressure of her foot, she felt that she had escaped from a bad dream. Nor would she let it overtake her. She was almost happy. So Mr. Sykes, the eminent Mr. Sykes, was sabotaging the contest. There was the thing to be nailed down. He came, a stranger, to Campbell’s Cove, year after year, welcomed and hurrahed by all the simple folk, as he described them. He lampooned their festivals and scoffed at their religion, and the only council he held with them was in the company of a harpy. There would be no contest, she decided, no ditties from the simple folk for him and Maria to set the tune to.

  She trod harder on the accelerator. She should have called Elizabeth before leaving the house and told her to wait. Elizabeth would understand. She, too, had encouraged Dennis Keogh—

  Something seemed to slip inside her again with that thought, only for an instant, but, as though it might be safer, too, she slowed the car down to a cruise. Well it was that she had done it. Had she spun into the library parking lot at that clip, she would have missed the departure of the librarian in the company of Dennis Keogh.

  Hannah did not want to follow them, but her will was not strong enough to break the trance the sight of them cast upon her. She dimmed her lights and kept a block’s distance between herself and their hurrying silhouettes. She could have driven directly to the water front and waited for them, so sure she was of where they were going. She parked within sight of the wharves. Taking the flashlight from the glove compartment of the car, she followed them on foot as they passed the Cove diner and set out across the sand. No boats, moored beneath the glare of the dock lights, for them. The dunes, the rolling dunes. Image after image of Keogh’s poetry wove through her mind as she trudged over the long slopes of sand in the wake of their shadows. How he must crave Elizabeth Merritt!

  Hannah stopped, having moved on them too quickly. For an instant Elizabeth was a black vision as she climbed the crest of the next dune, a lovely, clear, dark shape against the screen of sand. The boy, it seemed, was before her—waiting, his arms open to her; for she leaped, and the cry of their merging tore through the stillness, searing Hannah’s mind, scalding her heart. She stood where she was for a long time. Then she moved upon them slowly, the sand sifting in and out of her toeless shoes, leadening her feet. The wash of water on the shore broke rhythm with the surging of her heartbeat and made a whorl of sound in her head that had no beginning and no end. She must go slowly until some sound outside herself might break it, for it spoiled her sense of space as well as her sense of time. The sound came, rippling laughter and the boy’s crooning voice.

  “Oh, my darling, darling, darling—”

  Hannah stopped. She emptied the sand from one shoe and then the other. She scanned the ridges she had followed, but there was no outline of them for some dis-stance, the shadow of the rising bluff cloaking them, even as it would cloak her retreat. She moved on, and, holding the flashlight arm’s length ahead of her, shot its blinding glare upon them.

  Elizabeth lay crescent-shaped as though she were nested in a womb of the sand. The boy’s body trailed from her, his head pillowed between her breasts. Hannah saw it all in the instant before they spun away, Elizabeth’s face a grimace. She released the button, returning them to darkness, and fled herself toward its greatest reaches.

  Behind her she heard Elizabeth’s voice. “Tom?”

  Tom, she thought, Tom Merritt.

  “Come back! Tom!”

  “God damn your prying soul!”

  And that was from Dennis, she thought, dear gentle, kindly Dennis.

  “Let him go, Dennis! Come back and let him go.”

  Let him go, Hannah thought, let him go, do not tarry, let him go.

  14

  OF ALL THE THROBBING, mesmeric emotions, shame was uppermost, thrusting constantly to the surface; shame in the dream she had cherished, in the moments the boy had spent with her, in giving her hand to him for the final derision of his kiss upon it. And Elizabeth Merritt, queen of the jest! Where but in a queen’s court was the fool so much at home!

  She lunged through the darkness, tearing her dress and hose on the wild berry bramble that matted the ridges beneath the bluff. She had come inland too directly. Time and again she pounded her way into a graveled cavern from which there was no escape except as she came in, and no guide out except her groping hands. This was hell, she thought, one circle of it—part of the torture the delusion that lightning bugs were stars, so that she was surrounded by sky, and the sky full of jagged rocks.

  The dock lights saved her. Catching her first sight of them all in a row, she stopped and counted, and counting distinguished them as light bulbs. Then only did she see the Cove diner, Molly’s Diner, the lights said, and cars were parked beyond it, and men lounging on the fender of one of them. Hers she remembered was some distance above them. Without care except to reach it quickly, she turned on her flashlight, and played it along the sand until it found a path for her.

  There was nothing left in this experience to be endured alone, she knew, and nothing could hurt her now, not enough. Pulsing with pain, she wanted only more of it. Even as she crashed the car door behind her and drove her foot down on the starter and then on the accelerator, it seemed that to plunge the car through the trees and rock until it smashed in over her would be a satisfaction. But she swung it around, grinding the gears, and let it seem to find its own way.

  She was not aware of planning to go to Maria Verlaine’s; but stopping there and leaving the key in the ignition, she sensed that she was fulfilling a routine almost as old as herself.

  From the sidewalk she could see Maria in the living-room, reading, the perpetual cigarette in her mouth. Hannah crossed the lawn and lingered at the window. How many times she had done this very thing! Since first she was able to drive a car, she had parked it just beyond the driveway, and crossed the lawn, pausing at this window to see what was going on inside before she called out. Once she had surprised Maria and John Copithorne. She had not thought of that for years. He might have married Maria if she had not gone off to France. Maria got
up from the chair and poured herself some wine from a cruet—the measure of her allowance for the night, no doubt. She always needed to measure things beforehand so that she would not go too far.

  “Maria! It’s Hannah. May I come in?”

  The question was no more than gesture. She was already inside the door.

  “It’s past your bedtime, isn’t it?” Maria said over her shoulder. Hannah’s penchant for sleep always amused her.

  “But early for yours,” she said, “and I wanted terribly to talk to someone.”

  Maria was slowing down. She got up slowly, but the small sharp eyes were quick. They took in everything in one dart and returned to a fresh cigarette which she lighted. “Sit down, Hannah. Make an exception tonight. Take some wine.”

  “No, thank you. I don’t need stimulants.” Hannah lowered herself into a chair, by habit testing its strength by her weight on the arms. She looked about the room. It seemed a long time since she had been in it. “I feel almost at home here.”

  “You should. You came here first in diapers.”

  Hannah stretched her feet out ahead of her. She must have turned her ankle. It was beginning to swell. A little spot of blood shone in the round hole in her hose. “I’m disheveled, aren’t I?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “Well, I always looked that way—here.”

  Maria shot a spiral of smoke between them. “Out with it. What happened?”

  “I fell from a high mountain,” she said, feeling infinitely, unearthly calm now.

  “You were never good at allegory, Hannah, and you look as though you’d fallen into a cement mixer.”

  Hannah smiled. “The cement mixer becomes me better in your mind’s eye than the high mountain, doesn’t it, Maria?”

  Maria watched her over the film of smoke that lay between them like a sheet out of which their heads were poking. “Hannah, I don’t know what sort of thing you’ve gotten yourself into now. But if you’ve come here to belittle yourself again, maybe we can both have a try at it. There’s just a chance we can straighten you out.”

  “I’ve been straightened out, but it’s very kind of you,” she said. In her mind she thought she had made a discovery. Maria Verlaine was not so wise as she had always thought her. She wore her scorn for the commonplace to cover something very commonplace in herself. She courted poets because she had no song of her own. Why else should she have spent a lifetime in Campbell’s Cove, having tasted the wonders of the world? “How did they keep you down on the farm after you’d seen Paree?”

  “What?”

  “Do you know what I was thinking of outside there? The night I looked in on you and Johnny Copithorne. I could see the two of you just as clear tonight. This is where the old horsehair sofa was.”

  “I never knew a more uncomfortable piece of furniture,” Maria said.

  Hannah giggled. “It didn’t look uncomfortable that night.”

  “It was. There’s nothing so unpleasant as to have to scratch when someone’s making love to you.”

  Hannah’s mind slid away from the picture. “It feels good to scratch when you’re itchy,” she mused.

  “And to drink when you’re thirsty and eat when you’re hungry. What did you come to tell me?”

  What went ye out to see? asked Jesus, Hannah thought. “It’s been a long time, Maria, since you came to church, the church we were reared in.”

  “My God,” Maria said, throwing her head back in a laugh. “Don’t tell me you’ve been to a revival meeting! Are the Presbyterians in such straits these days?”

  “Shut up,” Hannah cried. “Just shut up!”

  Maria squashed out the cigarette she had just started. “I shall do what I damned well please, Hannah. And if you would take a look at yourself, you might get a laugh out of it, too. The best thing in the world for you would be to have a good laugh at your own expense.”

  Hannah lumbered out of the chair. Her weight on the sore ankle shot a pain through her that fanned the quieted flames. “You had a good laugh the other night with your Andrew Sykes and his new protégé, didn’t you? The house must have rocked with it. Was Elizabeth Merritt here, too?”

  “So that’s it,” Maria said.

  “Yes, that’s it! That boy was mine until you and your wretched poet made love to him. I planned the world for him, and he was the world to me.”

  “Hannah, sit down a moment,” Maria said.

  “I will not sit down. You told me to look at myself and I’m going to do it.” She stood where she was, however, enjoying the surge of pain with every pressure on her foot.

  “You’re misunderstanding purposely, Hannah. You’re trying to hurt yourself again.”

  “Ha! There’s nothing can hurt me. Nothing can hurt Hannah Blake. There’s nothing there to hurt.”

  “Hannah—have you any idea what some of us have gone through not to hurt you?”

  “What?”

  “Your poetry contest—it’s all set up and working, isn’t it?”

  “So she told you. I didn’t think Elizabeth could be that deceitful, that dishonest.”

  “She told no one. Not once that night when she and Keogh were here to meet Andy, was your name mentioned.”

  “I can believe that.”

  “You can believe whatever you want to, which is what you’ve always done anyway. But I can assure you, Hannah, that although not one word of it was mentioned, I, for one member of the library board, was never in doubt of the contest’s origin.”

  That was a lie, she thought, part of Maria’s cruel game. But Hannah had trouble trying to focus on its many implications—that night here after the meeting, Katherine Shane’s “I must says,” Ed Baker’s snide “You’re kind of keen on this contest, Hannah.” Were they playing the game all the time? Pin the tail on the donkey, the poor blindfolded donkey?

  “Elizabeth could have told me,” Hannah said, forgetting for the moment the scene she had seen on the beach.

  Maria lit another cigarette. “Not to tell you was the greatest kindness. Besides, I think Elizabeth is in love with Keogh. A thousand dollars is a lot of money when you’re in love, and that was before Andy had seen his poetry.”

  Hannah heard only the words of love. “Oh, she’s in love with him, all right,” she cried. “They’re rolling in it down on the beach right now.”

  Maria’s mouth hung open, the smoke dribbling out of it. “You followed them?” she said finally.

  “Do you know he carried on like that first with my Sophie—my servant?”

  “Hannah, I don’t care. I shouldn’t even care if he slept with you.”

  Hannah squared her shoulders and trod stiff-legged toward the mantel. The very sight of Maria was offensive. Her kind was a plague on a decent world.

  “You are a witch, Maria, an evil-minded witch, and I shall not think about what you have just said.”

  The sight of Maria was not to be escaped. Maria’s eyes followed her in the mirror, the small, ferreting eyes of a preying animal.

  “Do think about it, Hannah. On your life, think about it. What would you do with the boy? Make a eunuch of him?”

  Everything to this moment had been planned, Hannah realized, everything in her life built toward it from Maria’s childish taunt, “Hannah’s pulling the chain” to their last meeting here. So, she thought, Maria Verlaine has never been hurt by Hannah Blake—never, never hurt!

  With one great swipe she tore the bell cord from where it had hung for a generation beside the mantel, and to no use except in Hannah’s fantasy. Maria sat quite still, half-smiling as though she were enchanted, as though the cord were something alive in the big woman’s hand. Nor could she pull away as Hannah came toward her except at the last moment when it was too late. She twisted in the chair like a child hiding its face in the cushion, but the cord was looped there before her and it caught her beneath the chin. Only a gurgle of sound came from her as it sawed her throat.

  Hannah thought the cord was very strong to be so old. Silk. The Adamse
s always bought the best.

  When there was no movement beneath her, Hannah got up. She could not even remember having flung herself on Maria. It had not been necessary, Maria had so little fight. On the floor at the side of the chair the cigarette was still burning. She ground it out beneath her toe.

  Without looking at the chair again, she got her purse and left the house almost as she had found it.

  15

  A NEAR PARALYSIS OVERTOOK Hannah when she was once more behind the wheel of the car. She had thought that could she get that far she would be all right. But sitting there, her hands numb on the wheel, she seemed to have forgotten how to drive, to have lost the reflexes responsive to that old habit. Her chin bumped on the wheel. She stared into the empty street, musing on how dimly lit it was, the glow from the converted gas lamps too weak to raise a shadow. A great truck surged out of the gloom its headlights flashing dim to bright, to dim to bright. She groped over the dashboard and plucked on her own lights as it passed.

  She was able then to start the motor, but she sawed at the gear shift, unable to decide whether to turn around or to drive through the town. In the end she drove forward, the task of reversing the car too difficult. She drove very slowly, her knees beginning to tremble as soon as the numbness left them. Soon she was shaking all over, even her teeth jarring together as she parted them that she might breathe more deeply. Her lungs ached for more air, the car was stifling hot to her; but she dared not take her hand from the wheel to roll the window down. By the time she turned into her own driveway, her clothes were soaked with sweat, and she was aware of a sour, acrid smell about herself.

  She saw no light but the fan of her own headlights, narrowing at last into two moons on the wall of the garage. Darkness then. She sat, the car door open, listening. Nothing but the spasmodic creak of the car settling, its motor cooling. Dennis had not returned. How long ago it was that she had first seen him that night, or last seen him for that matter. What was the use of clocks when time had no dimension beyond experience? What a kindness on the part of time it would be if she could climb the garage stairs now and find no trace of Dennis, if she could discover that he was part of something that happened here long ago, that he was a boy her father had hired, one of the many he always had to discharge because of her mother’s apprehensions. “I don’t trust him around with Hannah—”