Town of Masks

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “I won’t detain you now, Mr. O’Gorman. But later tonight I should like to visit you. It’s on civil defense work.”

  “You can come now and neither of us will be detained,” he said, the frown disappearing. He touched his fingers to her elbow to turn her around with him and guide her down the wharf. There was more strength in his fingers, she thought, than some men had in their backs. Another strong thing about him was the smell of fish. His face crinkled in a smile, the lines as deep as the smile itself. “Civil defense. I’m the boy for you, with two lads in the army and one graduated in the last war—and one lost to it.”

  To it, she thought, not in it; a peculiar phrasing. “Mrs. O’Gorman might prefer that I come later,” she said, seeing that he was leading her toward the houses.

  “Her preference is always in what she gets. She’s a marvelous woman that way.”

  If she would rather have seen her husband alone, Hannah saw no sign of it, for Mrs. O’Gorman’s face lighted up on recognition of her, and Hannah was greeted like an old friend or like the lady of the manor being welcomed to the house of an Irish tenant.

  “Bring us a pot of tea, Norah,” the woman said to a girl of fourteen or so.

  Hannah, taking the one upholstered chair in the room when it was nudged up for her, watched the girl go into the kitchen, where more time was spent by the family than in here, obviously. Her father gave her a slap on the buttocks from where he was pulling off his boots at the kitchen door. The whole house seemed full of the smell of fish and bread and laundry.

  “Dan likes a cup of tea at his ease before his supper,” Mrs. O’Gorman explained. “In that he’s unusual. Most of them coming off the water are looking for a nip out of the bottle, and they’ve no patience if you haven’t the supper on the table. Isn’t it a lovely summer, Miss Blake?”

  “Lovely,” Hannah agreed.

  A noise like thunder rolled overhead.

  “That’s the little ones up over us. I’ve been going to take the casters off the bed, but I haven’t the heart for it. It gives them such pleasure—they’re playing streetcar like they saw in Jefferson City last week.”

  “They’ll have tracks through the ceiling if you don’t take them off,” O’Gorman said, coming in in his slippers. “They’ll have the bed down on our heads.”

  “Children are the same forever,” Hannah said. “When I was a child I played at the same game. In a friend’s house there was a bell on a cord for the maid. Like a streetcar conductor’s.”

  “Childer’ have the devil’s own imagination,” Mrs. O’Gorman said.

  “Miss Blake wants to see me on civil defense,” O’Gorman said. “She’s the head of it.”

  “Sometimes I think I’m only the tail of it,” Hannah said, and they laughed. “All I really want to do tonight is speak with you on a good place for an air-raid shelter in the area.” She described the needs.

  “The only place I know of that depth is the basement of the church,” O’Gorman said. He went to the hall and bellowed up to the children to be quiet upstairs or come down and sit in the parlor.

  “Would the priest consent to it?” Hannah asked.

  “He’d consent easier if there was a compensation,” O’Gorman said.

  “Father Daley would give it for nothing,” said his wife. “He’s not out to make money on the country.”

  “Only on his parishioners, and he could always pass the corn for a game of bingle during the practice.”

  “Dan!” Mrs. O’Gorman turned to Hannah and explained. “It’s a poor parish.”

  “I know,” Hannah said. The children of the convent school were forever on the street with chance books. “All the same, I think it would be advisable to offer it without charge. It’s all volunteer work, you know.”

  “Dan was just talking, Miss Blake. He never misses a chance to rib the clergy.”

  “And damn little chance they miss of returning the favor,” he said. “What would you have me do, Miss Blake?”

  “If you can get Father Daley’s consent, that would be helpful, and then when we arrange a meeting in the neighborhood, if you will speak at it. Your support, I think, would get us off to a good start.”

  “Aye, it would in this neighborhood. I’m with you.”

  “Thank you,” Hannah said. She decided to test an idea. “Do you think it would be possible on Campbell’s Cove Day to stage a mock invasion of the town?”

  O’Gorman took an empty pipe from his shirt pocket and sucked on it noisily. “Who’d do the invading and who the defending?”

  He was a canny man, Hannah thought, foreseeing the natural setup—those who could man the boats attacking, and the town defending itself. Front Street against the Cove.

  She revised her own thinking quickly. “I should think the attack might come from the air, and we might have a portion of the town evacuated by water.”

  O’Gorman nodded, apparently going along with her on that. His daughter brought the tea and his wife poured it.

  “Maybe fifty boats we could muster, and with luck, fifty pilots—” he mused aloud.

  There was a job for Dennis, Hannah thought, if it didn’t offend his pacifism. She could even see him in the lead boat, herself beside him perhaps. “I should think there’s an odd pilot here and there about the town not working at it,” she said. “I have one working for me in fact, Dennis Keogh.”

  Mrs. O’Gorman was bringing her tea. “What a lovely boy. He was courting my neighbor’s niece and we saw him. Do you take sugar, Miss Blake?”

  Hannah looked at the tea. She could not see the bottom of the cup. “Please,” she said.

  “You’ve the queer notion of courting,” O’Gorman said, stirring his tea with a racket. He had been served first, guest or none.

  “Calling on a girl is courting,” his wife said.

  “All right, all right, you’re interrupting our thinking.”

  Indeed she was, Hannah thought. To claim he had written about a woman he had not known, Dennis certainly made a practice of knowing enough women to write about. “Anyway, I should think he could manage a boat,” she said.

  O’Gorman’s eyes met hers. “Aye, he knows more about boats than he does about women.”

  A strange remark for him to make to her, Hannah thought. She kept her eyes on his and strove for the words to distract him. She felt certain that he was on the verge, if not over it, of discovering why she was here, and almost before she admitted it to herself. “How many people in a boat?” she demanded.

  “It depends on the size of the people, and the accouterments they’re bringing with them.”

  The house was close and the tea bitter.

  “All these things are for discussion at headquarters,” she said. “I don’t need to keep you from your supper. But you do think it can be managed?”

  “If there was an air raid, it would have to be managed, mightn’t it?” He thrust the words home at her as though to test her sincerity.

  “Of course. That’s what we’re working on—a plan for survival.” She took a long swallow of the bitter tea and set the cup on the table, getting up. “I’ll see that you’re notified of the next meeting, Mr. O’Gorman. Will you come?”

  “I will if it’s not past my bedtime,” he said, rising from the chair wearily.

  “Air raids, they say, are most frequent in the night.”

  “Aye, and rescues in the dawn,” he said ignoring her sarcasm. “We’ll put on a fine show for you, Miss Blake.”

  “I’m not looking for a fine show,” she said.

  He cocked his head insolently. “Then what are you looking for, ma’am?”

  Even the “ma’am” didn’t take the sting from it.

  “I told you—a plan for survival.”

  “An elegant phrase, Miss Blake,” he said, the words rolling off his tongue. “But those of us engaged in it for so long aren’t as apt to be stirred by it.”

  “Then you will manage something to stir them?”

  “Aye, if there�
��s stir left in them.”

  It was Mrs. O’Gorman who took her to the door. “And I’ll see that he goes tonight to Father Daley, Miss Blake. They’re good friends, you know, for all the ribbing. There’s a lovely dress you’re wearing tonight.”

  Coddling and cooing, Hannah thought, lest she go away with a worse opinion than that with which she came.

  “Thank you. Good night.”

  Glancing at the window from the half-dark street, Hannah saw the children, a horde of them it seemed, charging into the room and mauling their father. They were unleashed at her departure. Front Street itself was deserted, but its houses were all a-glitter, full of noise and laughter. Beyond it, lakeward, the docks were busy, and to the north and south, the dunes were still except for the slow sifting of sand, as though the lake itself swelled and thickened there beneath the rocky crags, and turned the color of taffy. Walking down to where she had parked the car, she passed one of the few Negroes in the Cove. He was pulling a child’s wagon up the hill, a basin of fish in it, humming a deep-throated song, one phrase of it over and over in accent to his long, slow strides. Hannah put the words to it, “Got no home … I got no home.”

  12

  WITHIN THE WEEK DENNIS had finished or put away the work. At least he no longer worked in his room. Hannah decided that he might have been polishing up a poem for the contest, and, finishing it, had taken again to his old haunts along the water front—to old courtships, perhaps. And much of his diffidence was gone now when she accosted him in the garden. There was something in his attitude that was almost patronizing. This, too, she took into the house with her and thought about. These days she thought of little except Dennis Keogh. She managed the routine of her bank work, her church activities, and she had contacted the armed service commands, getting their promise of every co-operation for Campbell’s Cove Day. The job of selling it to the town council was still before her. It should have been a challenge, she told herself, and it would be, if she were not a coward.

  It occurred to her, watching for the light to come on in Dennis’s room one night, that she had no right to expect him to come to the door and announce himself as a visitor. Her invitation had been sincere and specific only in her own knowledge of herself. To him, an employee, and so young, it must have seemed casual, a nice way of dismissing him for the evening. Without her following up on it, he must have been confirmed in that suspicion. Had he not waited, night after night, in his room? Had he not announced his presence, coming and going, with the whistled tune he sent before him? It was the most she could have done, in his place, certainly. Small wonder he could no longer endure the four walls of his room, waiting for an invitation that never came.

  Of this she convinced herself. Still, she must take precautions in case it were not so. Asking him to come again, she must have something real with which to intrigue him. No more sham. No gifts. No offer of a purchase price. Something to give them an honest affinity. The one thing that laid the greatest hold on her imagination was to try her own hand at writing verse.

  In the fervor of the idea, she was sure that this in itself was something to which she had long apprenticed. But the words as she put them down were leaden blocks; the ink was tar. Poets, she decided then, leaned on other poets. Dennis turned no doubt to Yeats. She tried to find a woman whose spirit was akin to her own, and in the end she turned to Sappho, her old friend from ancient Lesbos. She borrowed a collection from the library, and carrying it out, smiled up at the strong woman in the panel. The very fact of the translations being only fragments appealed to her, who was equal to no more than fragmentary endeavor herself. Poor Sappho. For all that artists and encyclopedists chronicled her among the great, her little part of the thumb-smudged collection was virgin print. It was a kindness to her, Hannah thought, aware of more than a little sentimentality about it, to recall her songs of passion. Nor would the splendid, generous-mouthed poet begrudge the use of one of her long disused lyrics to someone who so revered her.

  With careful deliberation she selected one and then another of the fragments, copying them in the long delicate slope of her hand. She had always thought her handwriting became her personality more than any physical attribute, and now the writing became the poems, and the poems became Hannah Blake very well indeed.

  “I’m afraid this is something of an imposition, Dennis,” she said when he came the next night.

  “Not at all, Miss Blake,” he murmured.

  He was standing in the kitchen, his feet spread, and she was afraid, somehow, to venture the further invitation into the study. Everything was out of joint. She was miserable within herself, having hoped to lead him through the house with ease, to pick up from their last instant in the house together when his lips had brushed her hand. No star had seemed distant that night. Now, she thought, she could not kindle a match.

  “I wanted to show you some poor things I’ve written. Just to get an opinion.”

  “I’m not much of a critic,” he said.

  “But you do know what you like?”

  “Yes. I know that.”

  “I’m not compelling you to like them. Your job doesn’t hang on it, if that concerns you.”

  “But you are compelling me to read them,” he said.

  She lilted her head. “By that you assume that I have no talent?”

  “I think you have a great deal of talent,” he said. “I think it’s a crying shame—”

  “What is a crying shame?” she demanded while he groped for the words.

  “That so much of it gets wasted,” he blurted out.

  “Dennis, I don’t want your pity.”

  “I don’t pity you, Miss Blake,” he said desperately. “I pity the loss to someone else, somewhere.”

  “Oh,” Hannah said, a knot of pain pulling cords of it tight in her throat, her eyes, her nose. “You are a very dear person, Dennis.” She leaned on the kitchen table and eased herself down on a chair. “I’m keeping you from—something.”

  “I’d like to see what you were going to show me,” he said.

  “No. I’ve changed my mind. I suppose—I guess I was a little lonesome. That’s all.”

  “I didn’t mean that you were compelling me to read them—not the way it sounded, Miss Blake. It was you who used the word first. Oh, hell, I don’t know what I mean. I didn’t intend to hurt you.”

  “I hurt myself,” she said. “I always do. I have the most beautiful visions, but I always have to examine the back side of them.”

  “May I see the poems?” The words were spoken gently, but there was command in them. There was no retreat, no refuge in the truth now. The lie must be exalted.

  “I’ll bring them,” she said, thinking there was less shame in it were it done at the kitchen table.

  She watched his face while he read one piece and then another. If only he had read Sappho, she thought, if only he would snatch the grotesque mask from her, and throw the word “fraud” in her teeth. And all this was a repetition of something that had happened before. She was going around again, and she would keep on going around, and around and around—

  “I don’t know,” he said at last, shuffling the pages together in the order she had given them to him. “Honest to God, I don’t know.” He clenched his fist. “I just don’t seem to get anything whole. It’s remote.” He shook his head. It’s me, I’m sure it’s me. I’m not the right person to show this to, Miss Blake.”

  “They were written a very long time ago,” she said, and the irony of that confused her more. And she was confused, all sorts of things seeming to come loose inside her, streaking off in all directions, bursting now and then into the familiar—her father throwing back his head to look skyward, Elizabeth Merritt coming to ask a recommendation, the pleading eyes of the little pug-face—It’s a crying shame—If she could but hang onto one of them, one image, with nothing before it and nothing since, and this very moment itself vanished.

  She fastened her eyes on him, seeking an anchorage. “You’ve been at work,
too, haven’t you, Dennis?” The sound of her own voice steadied her. “I’ve watched the light in your room.”

  “I’ve had wonderful encouragement,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “Do you know Andrew Sykes?”

  “Indeed I do. Now isn’t that a coincidence?” She plunged on. “I’ve just this evening written him an invitation to dinner here—he and others.” It would be done, she told herself. It was half-done now. “I think it would be very nice if you would join us, also.”

  “Thank you,” he murmured.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I interrupted you.”

  “It isn’t so much. Mr. Sykes read my work. He’s kind of excited about it.”

  “Kind of excited!” Hannah said. “I should think he would be. He’s been to his own pump so many times, the well’s dry and he doesn’t know it. He’s bringing up muck these days, and he can’t tell it from the pure waters.” As she spoke, she felt the heat rising in her, bursting, and the words were none she contemplated, just the loose sparks of her mind flying out in all directions. She fought to stem the panic. “I’m jealous of someone else’s discovery of you, someone like him.” The truth was cooling. She leaned across the table and caught at the boy’s hand, hard, rough, and strong. “You can understand that, Dennis?”

  He squeezed her hand fiercely and then sprang his fingers open as though he had burst a trap. “Sure. I just thought you’d like to know, that’s all.”

  “I do. And I’m pleased you came to tell me. He was a great poet. He should be able to recognize another one. You have met him?”

  He nodded. “At dinner—at Mrs. Verlaine’s the other night.”

  “How nice,” Hannah said. She shivered, turning as cold then as the porcelain-topped table beneath her spread hands. She pushed down on the table, expecting to rise, but her legs would not respond. “Well. He’s the judge of the contest, you know.”

  Dennis nodded, his eyes on her hands. They seemed to fascinate him.

  She spoke his name and paused. Still he did not look at her. He apparently could not bear the sight of her face.