“But what happens? I’m in love with the girl. I couldn’t have gone through with it if I wasn’t. I just needed that push. And Phyllis knew it all the time. That’s the wonderful thing about it.” He spread his hands. “That’s it. You got my life story. Am I a dependable risk for the bank? I know my own mind in business.”
Copithorne, Wilks, Baker—the next generation of them before her, Hannah thought. Good, they must be good, or they would not so repeat themselves. Good for them, but not for her? Not for Hannah Blake? Oh, God, to be one of them. Not to be here alone waving a wand over their perpetuity, without a shred of her own. To hate them in the mornings and to yearn endlessly after their firesides at night. To despise their petty sins and envy the innocence they acquired by default. Marriages by default, and happy marriages! Lord God, to be so split asunder. To what end?
“I’m sure it’s a dependable risk for the bank,” she said. “Do you know Jeremiah Tobin?”
He nodded.
“He has a good location. He hasn’t much initiative, but he has a marvelous conscience, and I think I could persuade him to a partnership if that would interest you.”
“It might if it would interest Tobin. He’s been there a long time on his own, and he’s got kids—”
She interrupted. “Aren’t you confusing your position with mine, Tom?”
He flushed. “Excuse me, Miss Blake.”
“I think I can persuade him,” she said. She summoned her secretary to bring the file on Tobin’s application for a loan. “I take it, then, Tom, your only objections to Keogh were his occupation and youth?”
“He’s going to be a kid till he’s a grandfather. And a queer one. He won’t ever grow up.”
Hannah smiled. “Isn’t it strange—I had the notion he was born old. He’s gone from my place, you know.”
“No,” Tom said. “I didn’t know.”
“He was gone bag and baggage this morning. I shouldn’t be surprised if he’s left the Cove altogether.”
Tom’s face had lost its flush. He frowned. “May I use your phone, Miss Blake?”
She nodded, pushing it toward him. “Dial nine for an outside line.”
She watched him strike the number of the library. His face relaxed, Elizabeth herself answering. But the sweat had come to his forehead. “Hi, Liz. Just checking up on you,” he said. Too heartily, Hannah thought. He had more than casual objections to Dennis. He had been in mortal fear that Elizabeth was gone. A few words of banter and he hung up. “Do you mind if I smoke, Miss Blake?”
“I don’t mind.”
“So he’s gone. Without even a word to her. She doesn’t know it yet.” He lit the cigarette. “Sweet heaven, I’m glad—that he’s gone, I mean.”
“Let’s not count on it,” Hannah said, “until we’re sure. But if he is gone, this way might be kinder. I’m sorry now I ever gave him a job.”
Tom watched the smoke from his cigarette, glancing then at her and away again. “He made quite a play for you, too, didn’t he?”
“What?”
“Sorry. That’s none of my business.”
Hannah composed herself. “I’m interested. Where did you get that idea?”
He was more uncomfortable than she was. “The poetry contest—something like that, I guess. It just happened to run through my mind, and kept on running. I got no sense. I don’t know. I always thought he was a little off, up here.” He touched his forehead. Then the color flooded his face. “I don’t mean because of his attentions to you—”
“Isn’t it strange,” Hannah cut in, completely composed in his confusion, “I haven’t thought of the poetry contest for days.” She looked at the calendar. “It closed Saturday.”
“Saturday was quite a day,” Tom said.
35
SO, SHE THOUGHT, MARIA was right. There was never a moment’s doubt among the library board as to the sponsor of the poetry contest. And Dennis Keogh revealed as a poet, what a wagging of heads and wriggle of tongues there must have been. What a thing of pity she must have been to the town when his love tryst with Elizabeth came out to alibi him. Not Walker’s genius, but the gossip he picked up from the Bakers and the Shanes and all accounted for his horrible wisdom, his ruthless quiz that day. Thus was Dennis suddenly despised in the town and heads bowed in the funeral parlor when she chorused her plea with Annie’s warning to Elizabeth. He was despised and Hannah Blake was pitied. Pitied by one and all, of high and low degree, even to Annie Tully, Maria’s maid. “Poor Miss Blake—you’ve been hurted, too!”
Throughout the day the shame of it tore through her like a hot, jagged knife. No wonder they answered her call whatever she proposed these days! Civil defense! Let’s gather for civil defense. Let’s rally round Hannah Blake and cover her nakedness! To the honor of Campbell’s Cove. To the rescue of the old and venerable name of Blake.
And Elizabeth had known all along, more than the shame she knew, for she could go back to that first night—to remember the high witness Hannah called upon to share the honor of the contest. “I should like to do it as a memorial to my father … He was something of a poet.” And Elizabeth could remember her lustful account of Sophie and Dennis—
Hannah drove her knuckles down on the desk remembering as she could see Elizabeth remembering. She looked about her. How apt that the bank was divided by glass partitions! No place to hide. And no use of hiding, really. The worst to be known of her was known. There was nothing left to do but to walk proudly through the shame, and out of it. To be bold.
Before leaving the office she called Elizabeth about the contest.
“Mr. Sykes left me an envelope with the entries,” Elizabeth said.
“Did he judge them?”
“Yes.”
“An envelope,” Hannah said. “How many entries were there, Elizabeth?”
“Five, Miss Blake.”
“Five out of the whole of Campbell’s Cove? With a prize of a thousand dollars?”
“That’s all. They came within a week of the contest’s announcement. Nothing since.”
“We shall have a board meeting,” Hannah said. “I’ll call Ed Baker. I’ve something to say on this. A great deal to say. Can you attend at my house tomorrow night?”
“I’m sure I can attend,” Elizabeth said flatly. Miss Blake—”
“Yes,” Hannah said when she hesitated.
“Is Dennis Keogh still with you?”
“No. Apparently he went off in the night. Sophie discovered he was gone this morning.”
“I see,” Elizabeth said, and Hannah wondered what she saw.
“If you should hear from him, Elizabeth, I owe him a week’s salary. You might forward it. I don’t want his money.”
“I don’t expect to hear from him,” the girl said, and hung up without a good-by or a thank you.
Hannah went down to Front Street that night to call on O’Gorman. He had a fine militant organization behind him. Their plans were already set for the evacuation of the town, and done with a flare for the dramatic. He suggested capsizing a boat and a rescue of its occupants.
“It makes a good picture,” Hannah said, “but we may have accidents without staging them. I don’t want panic, Dan.”
“In the real thing you might have it,” he said.
“We’re rehearsing against it. Not for it.”
He shrugged. “You’re the boss.”
That I am, she thought. “Dan, I have an acre full of vegetables ready to harvest—onions, potatoes, carrots, eggplants—I don’t know what all is in it myself. You may send some of your people up. If they’ll put by a quarter of what they take for my use, they’re welcome to the rest.”
“That’s very decent of you, Miss Blake. I’m tempted to go digging myself. I’ve always thought I’d love to have a bit of land with something growing on it. ’Tis the dream of all sailors. I’ve a couple of lads could go through it in a day.”
“They’re not to go through it with a plow,” Hannah said. “I want it harvested, not
devastated.”
“You’ve a bad opinion of us still,” he said.
“I’ve neither good nor bad. But what difference does opinion make, mine or anyone else’s?”
“None, unless it’s bad,” he said slyly. “We’ll go through your garden as gentle as the mist, and thank you for your generosity.”
About to turn up from Front Street a few minutes later, she passed a lonely figure walking in the semidarkness toward the docks. Elizabeth. The girl did not see her, but had she been driving a fire engine, Elizabeth would not have seen her, she thought. For a while Elizabeth would see no one except a phantom figure she conjured up out of a memory to meet her. The figure would fade with each recall and then, one day, be gone entirely. Well Hannah knew how ill-nurtured were those who fed on dreams. When Elizabeth’s was gone, she would be completely exorcized, and God willing, her demon thoughts of Hannah would be gone, too. But if they were not, it was Elizabeth’s loss, not hers. Really, she thought, she cared very little.
The lethargy in which she drove home, a sort of melancholy detachment wherein it would have been easy to cry should tears seem to comfort—this spell was broken as she approached her drive. A flashlight was playing over the garage. She had never been afraid in all the years she had lived alone. A thief, a burglar would not be so brazen as to use a light. Nor would he be at the garage. She drove on past the house, dark except for the night light she always left in the hall. She would almost welcome a thief, she thought. She parked off the highway and walked back across the lawn. The light was moving in the room over the garage now, but she had the key to it in her pocket. He would not come back, she told herself. He could not come back. And if it were he, she should go into the house and to bed with the quick hope that he would be gone again before she awakened.
She stopped in the added darkness of a tree’s shadow a few feet from the garage. She could see the play of the flashlight, but not its bearer. Nothing in the room escaped scrutiny from closet to dresser. There was nothing to be found or missed, she thought, although her search had not been this thorough. Her heartbeat seemed to make the noise of a frog as she grew aware of it in the still darkness. They were keeping company, her heart and a frog, beating time together, the fearsome throb of waiting. She remembered taking the heart from a frog in biology class—the living heart—
The light was gone from the room then. She strained for the sound of footsteps. Only the light was loud, streaking out from the open garage door into the treetop over her, then down within inches of her and narrowed to a circle as the searcher closed the door and tested it with his hand. The reflection of the light on the white door defined him. Matheson.
She waited until he was abreast of her on the drive. “Did you find what you were looking for, Matt?”
The light jerked in his hand, but his voice was easy. “No, I didn’t find anything, Miss Blake. I was looking for the boy, as a matter of fact.”
“Equipped with keys and flashlight?”
“I generally carry skeletons,” he said.
“And a warrant to use them?”
“No. But since it was his room I was visiting, I didn’t see much harm in using them. When did he take off, Miss Blake?”
“I have no idea. He was gone this morning.”
Matheson came over to where she was standing. “You aren’t holding a gun on me, are you?” he asked, playing the light up to her hands.
“I don’t own one.”
“It mightn’t be a bad idea, you living alone and all—and what happened to Mrs. Verlaine.”
“I have no such valuables,” Hannah said. “And you can be grateful I don’t own a gun. If I’d had one, standing here, I think I’d have used it.”
“Your feet’s going to get wet standing there in the grass. Did you think it was the kid come back?”
Testing, Hannah thought, in his own sly manner. To have asked what he wanted to know he would have said: “If it was the boy, would you have shot him?”
“No. I didn’t think it was he. I have the key to his room.”
“So,” Matheson said. “Any idea why he quit without giving you notice?”
“No. He was a tramp when he came and he probably went on the tramp again.” She put one word after another warily. It was Elizabeth, she thought, who put him onto it. From where else the sure information he had left without notice?
“But you was so sure he wasn’t coming back you took the key,” Matheson said.
“When someone takes his clothes, it’s a fair assumption that he will not return, isn’t it?”
“And when a door’s locked, that he won’t get in. Good night, Miss Blake. I’m sorry if I gave you a start.”
“Where’s your car, Matt?”
“Why, I left it over on Cherry Street, Miss Blake. It isn’t such a long walk through the fields. I wanted to see how long it took me.”
She could not take alarm at that, certainly. Dennis was his prey under those circumstances.
“It will be a longer one back that way. I’ll drive you if you like.”
“No, thanks. I’m going to walk it from a different angle going back.”
She returned to the highway for her car, and driving into the garage, sat there for a long time wondering if Matheson was watching her. Finally she got the key to Dennis’s room and went up to it. She followed what she believed to be Matheson’s footsteps, and by examining the windowframes and baseboards, she saw the markings of the policeman’s search. He had been prying for a loose board, a hiding-place where, according to his conjecture, the boy might have concealed the jewels until he took off with them.
36
THE MEMBERS OF THE library board not away on vacation convened at Hannah’s at nine o’clock. A sufficient number to the task, she thought. Without preliminaries, Baker turned the meeting over to her.
“I have learned,” she started, “that Campbell’s Cove is not the place to do something anonymously. I suppose you are all aware that I am the donor of the prize for the poetry contest.”
“I must say I’m not surprised,” Katherine Shane exclaimed.
Surprised or not, she must say, Hannah thought. Elizabeth was leaning back in the chair, her head resting. Tired and pale, she looked, and surely she was not surprised at the meeting or its disclosure. She had anticipated from hearing the plan that Hannah could not stand the strain of remaining anonymous.
“Elizabeth did a beautiful job of the presentation,” she continued. “It’s much too bad the response was not commensurate with her efforts. If it had been, I should not feel compelled to ask for this meeting. Friends, we have five entries to the contest. Five.”
No one seemed surprised at that, either. Baker, in fact, murmured his expectancy of it.
“Speak out, Ed,” Hannah said. “You’re satisfied with the response?”
“Well,” he hedged, “I can understand your disappointment—”
“My disappointment!” Her voice was shrill with the demand. Now was the time for him to say it out—for anyone there to ask the truth: “To what purpose the contest, Hannah, that we should share your disappointment?”
Baker merely squirmed in his chair. “It’s true the library sponsored it, and got up the ballyhoo. Getting nothing but this out of it is discouraging—”
While he groped for words Elizabeth looked up. She pointed to the Manila envelope she had laid on Hannah’s desk. “Miss Blake, how do you know you haven’t brought a poet out of hiding in Campbell’s Cove? Five of them perhaps. That, I recall, was your purpose? Five is a goodly number of poets, don’t you think?”
“Plenty,” Baker muttered.
But all the others in the room grew busy in their embarrassment.
“For every poet,” Hannah said evenly, “there are at least a hundred who think that they are poets. To make a contest we need contributions from all of them.”
The embarrassed ones wagged their heads in approval. They would run out any chute of escape, Hannah thought—and apparently Elizabeth a
fter them, for she made no answer.
But Baker had to take it up, seeing nothing of the issue. “I just don’t see it as a calamity. I’ll tell you the truth, Hannah, after all that’s happened this last week, I can’t get into much of a froth over this.”
“I can,” Hannah said, “and I intend to. Do you remember the meeting last spring when Maria said our men were afraid of culture? They’re not afraid of it. They despise it. This contest was organized to add distinction to our celebration of Campbell’s Cove Day.” She glanced at Elizabeth. There was no protest in her face, nor in any face in the room. They were all on her side, eager to follow the easy way, the contest for the Cove’s Day now, not for poets at all.
“We shall have the governor here and Senator Cravens. There will be a nation-wide broadcast of what happens here. We are setting ourselves up as a model community.”
Gradually, calling on the depth of her resources, Hannah pumped enthusiasm into them. “Does a soldier lie down on the battlefield when his friend is killed?” she demanded. “He fights the harder for it. I refuse to believe that all of Campbell’s Cove is dead. And I refuse to have it proclaimed to the country. I want us to have a secret here among us of the library board.” She lowered her voice. “We shall pretend that we have a hundred entries, a hundred and five in fact. Call it priming the pump if you will, making a hundred others wish they, too, had given their talents, making them resolve to join the next contest, and I pledge you here another contest, an annual one. We shall have a dynamic community if we kindle the spark. What do you say? Ruth?” She turned to Mrs. Copithorne.
“Well, Joanne, our oldest girl, entered a poem, I think. Perhaps I shouldn’t say anything.”
“All the more reason to say something,” Hannah insisted.
“There’s nothing we’d have to do except keep still about it, I mean about the number of poems?”
“That is all.”
“I must say I don’t see any harm in that,” Katherine Shane said. “And I see what Hannah means. You can’t call it off now very well and we all want to hold our heads up on Cove Day.”
Town of Masks Page 18
