A Town of Masks

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Sometime when you’re talking to Franklin Wilks and the rest of the big shots, you can tell ’em how important their vote of confidence was that night. But maybe they know it already.”

  “Don’t be bitter, Matt.”

  “I am bitter. I’m as bitter as gall.” He pulled himself up. “I won’t detain you, Miss Blake. You’ll be wanting to get ready for the funeral.”

  29

  HANNAH DRESSED SLOWLY, THE ordeal of the funeral ahead of her. Downstairs, Sophie was singing at her work, her joy of finding Miss Blake well recovered irrepressible. The song of innocence, Hannah thought. Even at Sophie’s age, she had not had it. She seemed to remember a sense of guilt clouding every bright day of her life, petty guilt for petty sins, and yet always beyond her the vision of holy innocence. Had she been born a Catholic, Hannah thought, she might have known some joy, confession and the firm belief that one went forth from it with a scrubbed soul.

  How high that morning to have fallen so low in the afternoon. She was prepared to grieve, surely, but for the living, not the dead.

  The last heat of summer beat down upon the town as she drove through it. Farmers’ wives were marketing, their husbands standing on the curbs curling the sweat from their foreheads and marking every car that passed if its passengers were well-dressed, as a funeral car, and they exchanged, no doubt, all there was to tell of murder—here or in the Sunday paper supplement.

  What a bounty of flowers, Hannah thought, approaching the parlor, the wreaths spilling out onto the lawn. Flowers were easier than tears. And a great deal prettier. She started as though she had heard those words. Maria might have said them, and for the instant, standing on the sidewalk, her car driven off by an attendant, she had an illusion of disembodiment—as though Maria Verlaine were there and she herself, in body, lying inside. The casket would be black marble, the bands steel, not the customary bronze. She moved into the parlor, speaking to no one until she was within view of the coffin. Gray, deep gray. She shuddered in relief at the break of the illusion. Her imagination—all in her mind. Someone took her arm and held it tight to bring a measure of comfort to her.

  She glanced up. It was John Copithorne, his eyes filling as she looked at him, as though what he took to be her show of grief had primed his own. The dead can’t see, John, she thought, and fortunate, should the seeing dead see more than the living.

  Copithorne led her gently forward to a final homage to their once beloved. How apt they should go up together. Hannah did not gaze directly upon the face, only upon the stockpile lace that built up and around it, and then upon the whiteness beyond until the time for turning away should come. She would not stay less than John. A murmur and flow of conversation and weeping behind and about her—the weeping from Annie, she saw at a glimpse, Annie and Mrs. O’Gorman, and other women bade up from Front Street by their menfolk to bring the tribute of family mourning, and Katherine Shane at home with them now in the keening.

  Copithorne blew his nose, and as though that were a signal to end their grief, they moved back.

  “Lovely, isn’t she?” he said.

  Hannah merely nodded.

  “Wonderful what they can do—and after an autopsy.”

  “Wonderful. Where’s Ruth?”

  “She’ll be at the cemetery. Can’t stand these places in the summer. I don’t blame her. The smell of flowers—It’s like getting perfume sprayed in your face. Want to sign the book?”

  “I think not.”

  They had come abreast of Andrew Sykes. He was gnarled and wild-looking, as though he hated everyone in the room, Hannah thought. She stood beside him, with neither of them acknowledging one another’s presence. Every few seconds, he made a noise through his nose that she took to be token of his disgust. He would go now, and not come back to Campbell’s Cove. He might be content with his discontented wife, with no more warrants and no more wanderings.

  Copithorne was talking with Wilks and Mrs. Wilks, and they were joined by their bridge partners of the evening when Maria died. They would go over again their wonder at how they came to miss it all. And Sykes, hearing it, would snort disdain.

  And two others were here together, she knew. She had sensed their presence from the moment she had turned from the coffin, but she would try not to look upon them until she could see one and then the other, separate, not side by side. They were bold now, made bold by desperation. Even as Hannah thought about them, Elizabeth came across the room. She’s coming to Sykes, not to me, Hannah thought. And the girl did put her hand on the old man’s arm, but she spoke to Hannah, though merely a greeting.

  “Where’s your mother, Elizabeth?” she asked, wanting to detain the girl if for only a moment, to keep her that long from him at least.

  “Tom is being married today.”

  And you prefer a funeral, Hannah thought. Between friends, between brother and sister he had insinuated himself. She looked across the room then to where Dennis stood, a head above most people in the room, bowed and hunted-looking without Elizabeth. The day off without a may-I or a by-your-leave. What was he here to mourn? Not Maria surely. Better for him had she died sooner.

  Elizabeth had caught Sykes up and led him across the room, and Dennis extended his hand to pull him in. No, she thought, it was Elizabeth pulled in. Blinded by her own dreams of the beautiful and pulled into the mire by the two of them.

  Hutchins and an assistant approached the casket and began moving the floral pieces away. In that instant Annie Tully broke from the row of keeners, and Hannah remembered her threats in the car that morning.

  “You’ll not close it yet,” she said, her tear-swollen face turned up into his.

  Hutchins tried to maneuver her gently away. Annie pulled free of him. A strand of gray hair had strayed from beneath her hat and swept over her eyes unnoticed. Was she drunk, Hannah wondered. She had always suspected Maria and her of tippling together.

  “You’re in a hurry to put her away to be soon forgot, aren’t you?”

  “Sh-sh.”

  “I will not shush,” Annie cried. “You’re all nodding and purring how nice she looks as though she went off in her sleep. They’ve cut her to ribbons and put her back together again, and nobody the wiser as to what she died for. A parcel of jewels? She’d of flung them in the street to any beggar—”

  This Hannah thought, was what came of Walker’s scheme, sending Annie to do his work for him. She might not have found the precious cache, but she found suspicion, and the tongue to loosen it on all of them.

  “Annie, Annie, Annie.” Mrs. O’Gorman thumped across the room and tried to pull the distraught woman away. Annie would not be moved.

  Elizabeth Merritt went to her and put her arm around her gently. “Mrs. Tully, don’t—” she started.

  Annie flung her arm away. “Mrs. Tully, don’t!” she mimicked. “Oh, you’re the one to tell me don’t, Elizabeth. Bringing him here as bold as brass.” She jerked her head at Dennis. “Like you brought him there till she told you. Like your own brother told you, but you wouldn’t be told. Have you no shame?”

  “I am not ashamed,” Elizabeth said, standing very still, and pale as the white flowers, Hannah thought.

  “That’s enough of your abuse, Mrs. Tully.” It was Sykes who spoke up, his voice shaking.

  She turned on him. “Enough from you is more than enough—”

  “I’m telling you enough and I intend to be heard. Maria was many things, but she was not infallible. And as you know, she worshiped me.”

  Annie made a noise between her teeth.

  “You’re entitled to your opinion of me,” Sykes said coldly. “So are you all, as I am to mine of you. But you will not persecute this girl and boy because of the prejudices of a woman against him.”

  “She didn’t have prejudices.”

  Sykes showed his teeth. Almost a snarl, Hannah thought. “She had them where I was concerned. As God made man, in her eyes I made poetry, and woe to the creature who would say he was my equal. In her abuse o
f this boy, her words were not well meaning.”

  “So that’s your story,” Annie said, swinging her face near his. “She worshiped you—oh, she did that all right—the poor, blind woman, and God forgive her for it. Twenty-five years of it, a lifetime making a whore of herself for you. A decent woman like her!”

  “Stop it,” Sykes hissed.

  “I’ll not till I’m heard. You’d not leave her alone with your promising and craving when you were away. And she’d live the long, lone winters waiting for a bit of sun with your coming, trying to warm herself on your poems. And you nesting home with a wife in season. She was caught, trapped like in a harem, and she knew it the last years of her life.” She flung around on Elizabeth. “Could you doubt the warning she put out to you? A life philandered away from her? Have you the promise of more from that one than she had of him?” She jerked her head at Sykes.

  “See it, Elizabeth! See it!” Hannah called out. The words flew from her, pleading, while she scarcely knew herself to be speaking.

  Heads bowed in the room as though shame as well as grief covered the mourners.

  Hutchins, the funeral director, pushed among them and parted one and another of the people crowding to the front. He put one hand on Sykes and the other on Annie as though to spread them. His words he directed at Annie.

  “This is a memorial, not a wake. Go back to your place.”

  It was Elizabeth who first caught the slur in his words. The tears came to her eyes, but still she stood, her head high, her mouth a taut line. The cur, Hannah thought, making Elizabeth hate him and the town and friends and now at the moment she needed them most.

  Annie Tully was no more than an instant behind Elizabeth in catching the insult. “It isn’t a wake, isn’t it? A wake’d be out of place in your marble palace here. Honest grief’s a disgrace in the eyes of hypocrites.”

  They were all to be aired now, all the old hates and prejudices, Hannah thought, her work with O’Gorman undone, and Maria’s work, the best work of her life.

  “This town is alive with hypocrisy,” Sykes joined the hate chant, “and you don’t know your enemies from your friends, Mrs. Tully, any more than Maria did.”

  Adding fuel, Hannah thought, the cauldron belching fire.

  “We’ll know them when you’re gone, Mr. Sykes,” Hannah said aloud. “If there’s any kindness left in you, you’ll leave us alone. Maria worked for peace in the Cove. We should be able to bury her in peace.”

  “We should, we should,” Annie sobbed.

  “Nothing said here in love or hate will bring Maria back,” Hannah finished.

  “Nothing, nothing,” Annie moaned.

  Hannah drew a long breath, watching Hutchins line people up for their last look on the departed. She aged, she thought of herself, every time she met a crisis, and what she had always thought would give her youth and life, that special power to confront the world with Hannah Blake, took something away instead, and left her a little sadder, a little emptier. Now she joined the line and paused her moment before the coffin. She looked at Maria’s face. How could they say that this was lovely? They hadn’t known Maria to say that. The lines were smoothed out, the character removed as surely as the soul. And I did not do that, she thought.

  Almost as though she were reassuring her of her right to that belief, Annie Tully came up to her and put her hand to Hannah’s, a hard, rough hand worn in years of service to Maria.

  “Poor Miss Blake,” the woman said hoarsely. “You’ve been hurted, too.”

  They wept together.

  30

  DENNIS RETURNED AS HANNAH was about to sit down to dinner. She saw him from the window changing the sprinklers in the garden. Cherishing the job, she thought, and well he might. He was not likely to find another these days in Campbell’s Cove. She wondered if, jobless, he would take flight. Not soon enough. There were those on Front Street who would give him shelter in spite of Annie. In fact, there were some who would do it to spite her. That was their nature, perverse and quarrelsome, with no restraint on their emotions, and no power of reason to guide them. She had tried to understand them, and she would still try—and make a show of succeeding at it—for Maria’s sake.

  She finished her tomato juice, and Sophie brought the lamb chops. Never had the child prepared them so well—broiled just to where the pink had faded, the fat crisp. She sighed thinking of training another girl when Sophie left her, and that day would come soon. Sophie had no doubt forgotten Dennis already and found herself another young man. She had reached that age, that season. She was ready and she would marry soon, getting a few acres of land from her father if the boy had none, a cow perhaps from a brother, dishes and pots and pans, sheets and blankets—a shower of them. They would be married in the church and there would be a wedding feast in the field next to the house they would build through the years, one room of it up for the start. And for every room there would be a child, and every child would be brought on a Sunday afternoon to see Miss Blake and go home with a bank account started. And one of them might be called Hannah. She turned the cut-glass goblet and saw her face in its many facets. There were already three Hannahs, the children of three “country girls,” aged—she tried to remember—five, three, and eleven.

  She took her coffee to the veranda, and saw Sophie leave presently, and with Dennis. They walked down the drive in easy company of each other. Sophie was well over her crush when she was with him. She turned and waved her familiar wild, jerky farewell. She carried a paper bag, and in it, no doubt, the faded polka-dot pajamas.

  Hannah bowed her head, feeling profoundly sad. Dennis was off to a rendezvous with Elizabeth, likely, to get his own wounds healed. Quick-healing, especially if there were sand rubbed in them.

  What a world of quiet. The last birds’ song. She had heard the first that morning. The stars were coming out again, exactly where she had seen them fade. The whirr of night wings, the thud of June bugs, June bugs in September. The distant cry of the train whistle of the eight-fifty out of Campbell’s Cove. It would be at least nine-ten by now. What a lorn cry it was, as though it were carrying farther and farther away a burden of grief. And it might, she thought. Andrew Sykes might well be on it, for he had announced his intention of leaving the Cove and not returning. No more ferreting among the yellow pages for yellow purposes. No more saints of witches and heroes scratched from their graves for mockery. No more “affair” in Campbell’s Cove. Dennis and Elizabeth had seen him off, no doubt, Dennis catching from him the bundle of dry sticks he called wisdom.

  When her own thoughts were dry, she got the car out and drove into the town. Saturday night and full of laughter, juke boxes, and the Sunday comics, a dance at the Legion hall, confessions at St. Cecilia’s, the Salvation Army at the corner of High Street and Orchard, Canasta on the Bakers’ front porch, horseshoes under a spotlight in the Watts’ back yard, and a barbecue and a barrel of beer, television at the Shanes’, and at the Merritts’ one low light in the living-room behind drawn blinds, the door open but the screen door locked, no doubt. The wedding feast might be at Jefferson City, but the love-making was in Campbell’s Cove. On Cherry Street the Wilkses had guests again, but the only company in the house across the street was one sheriff’s deputy.

  She picked up all the Sunday papers and drove home.

  In the study, she tried to read them. There was an item in the county journal which held her for a moment—a release on the simulated air raid to be staged at Campbell’s Cove—word for word as she had given it. Everything was easy now for Hannah Blake. Word for word. The papers were full of lust and crime, dope addiction in the cities, arson in the villages, volunteer firemen starting the flames they returned to quell—and Americans still making fools of themselves over royalty.

  She read occasionally, but her eyes were as often on the window as they were on the paper, and her mind when she permitted it to leave the explicit before her eyes, conjured up a scene at the Merritt house—the faded couch where she had sat with Mrs. Merritt
, to what fine purpose now? She went to the telephone finally, and dialed Elizabeth’s number. She could imagine them starting at the sound of the bell, uncoiling from an embrace. One ring, two, three, four—She could see everything that might be happening in the Merritt house vivid against the wall of her own mind. Elizabeth answered then, a timorous, ashamed “hello.” Hannah hung up without answering and returned to her chair. Something inside her responded violently, and she rocked with the pain and the pleasure of it. She waited fifteen minutes, measuring the time by the columns she meted out for herself to read—words, a jumble of words, but each of them to be articulated, a measure of time and heartbeat, the surge and swell of her lifeblood. Once more then she dialed the number. The “hello” came faster, and with an edge on it. Hannah pulled her lips tight across her teeth, and waited. Elizabeth, too, waited. Then: “Who is this?” Hannah hung up.

  Next time it would be Dennis who came, she thought, with another of his “God damn your prying soul”—if he had the courage to take the phone in his hand.

  Her measure of time was more difficult, and she paced the room marking each cold minute by her watch. On the third call, the phone was caught up almost before the bell rang, and the voice jarred against her expectation, a breezy, male “hello” and a medley of laughter behind and about it. Tom Merritt was home with his bride. Hannah could not suppress a giggle. She clamped the phone down on it. What right had he to such gaiety? To be so pleased with a wife he had taken so unlovingly?

  She stood a long time at the desk, limp and exhausted. Gradually a sickness came over her in the contemplation of what she had been doing. She lumbered to the window then, and one hip on the wide sill, sat for some moments breathing the damp coolness, deeply, deeply that she might be relieved of the reek of her own mind.

  Dennis’s footsteps scuffed up the driveway presently. She had never known hatred before, she thought. He had destroyed all decency in her.