“Elizabeth?” Hannah challenged.
“There’s to be a sham invasion of the Cove, isn’t there?” the girl said after a moment, making a point of the word “sham.”
“That’s right. A simulated air attack.” Hannah addressed herself to all of them quickly. “You should see the preparations O’Gorman has made to evacuate the Cove. A fleet of fifty boats to take half the town out to the point. Those east of High Street will make a cavalcade into the hills.”
“I know,” Baker said. “The block captain’s lined up my family. It’s going to take a lot of doing, Hannah.”
“We’ll be working night and day on it. That’s why I want to get this contest business settled tonight. I suggest we put it to a vote—a silent vote for silence.” She risked a smile.
“Fair enough,” Ruth Copithorne said.
“It’s the democratic way,” Elizabeth said, rather airily.
“That’s right,” Hannah said.
Elizabeth looked from one of them to another. “Doesn’t it frighten you to do an undemocratic thing in a democratic way?”
“It frightens me much more,” Hannah said, “to admit that we are without hope, without confidence.”
“Another vote of confidence?” said Elizabeth. “Fred Matheson got one last week.”
“And he deserved it,” Hannah said, using the tactic she had learned from Wilks. “I don’t remember that you were there, Elizabeth, but if you had been, you would know what might have happened that night if I hadn’t made peace in the chamber.”
“That’s right,” Baker said. “You did a swell job.”
“It was an uneasy peace. That’s why I’m determined to weld it permanently on Campbell’s Cove Day.”
“All the talk of peace in the world,” Elizabeth said, “and there is no peace anywhere.”
Hannah plunged over the remark. “Katherine, will you make the motion for us to present the contest winner to the anniversary committee without reference to the number of entries?”
“I so move,” Mrs. Shane said proudly.
Ruth Copithorne seconded it, and Hannah called for a show of hands in favor. All but Elizabeth’s were raised. But she did not vote against it, and Hannah called it unanimous.
37
WHEN THEY WERE GONE and she had stacked the coffee things in the kitchen sink, Hannah returned to the study. Elizabeth had not stayed for coffee, and going she had stood a long moment in the drive as though she were trying to draw something to herself out of the very atmosphere. Hannah had watched from the vestibule, the simple ones chattering away inside. There was something pleasant about locking in combat with someone whom you cared about. But to have won was no great pleasure. Not to have raised and seen this issue through, however, was impossible. Katherine Shane would have gone giggling through the crowd on Cove’s Day, whispering on the five entries, on Hannah Blake’s contest for the boy who wasn’t there. Now she had forced them into a conspiracy of silence. She had dared to say “poetry contest” to them, and dared them in return to say “Dennis Keogh” to her. And they were silent, a loyal silence for which she vowed gratitude. She had inflicted a faith upon them. Really, she thought, to have doubted Hannah Blake at that moment they would have had to doubt themselves. None of them was capable of that.
Elizabeth, without a word of reference to it, had left the Manila envelope on her desk. She opened it now, the five sealed entries inside, plain white envelopes and one marked No. 1. A note from Andrew Sykes to Elizabeth was attached by a paper clip. Hannah read:
My dear Elizabeth:
A paltry lot. Here is one with less rhyme than reason. A poem still. What is a poem? I asked myself that consenting to be your judge. A poem is a little truth, or maybe a little love. And poetry is the most of it of which one is capable.
Adieu and thanks for many kindnesses and long patience. A virtue, patience. But do not believe for an instant that it is its own reward.
It was signed with Sykes’s initials, and its contents, Hannah thought, recalled something of him that he himself had forgotten. A little truth—a little love! From him the words were mockery. She took a piece of notepaper from her desk and wrote to Elizabeth: Since this is addressed to you, you may want to keep it, your only souvenir of the contest. Believe me, I understand your abhorrence of it. I wonder if you have any intimation of mine, Sincerely …
She got up and walked to the window and back. That was not the truth at all. She did not abhor the contest. Not now. It was purged clean, five or a hundred and five, the contestants were sincere and innocent. And so was she, the honest benefactress of the Cove. They were all with her tonight and Elizabeth was not against her. Their faith had made her whole again!
In truth, there was no mark left against her, Hannah thought in high elation, except perhaps Sykes’s word on the contest. And Elizabeth, too, was glad to be shed of him; otherwise she would have cherished that note from one so eminent—a note of commendation. False praise from a false prophet.
Thus reasoning, she took the note and her note to Elizabeth and put a match to them. False praise, false prophet, false judge, she thought. The contest entries were in plain white envelopes, a penny apiece in any dime store, a dozen of them in her desk drawer now. She took a paper knife to the entries and opened the five of them with clean, sharp strokes. She read first the one marked No. 1, and its opening line showed her judgment of Sykes accurate:
The winged horse of war vermined with greed.
A perverse joke he had almost perpetrated on the Cove—his parting venomous arrow. Here was a poem to read aloud on Campbell’s Cove Day, to celebrate preparedness, unity, a day for patriots! What a climax he had planned to their mock invasion.
And written by Kenneth Tobin. The conscientious son of a conscientious father!
She read the others. A paltry lot he had called them because each one sang a song of simple pleasure. What did he know of a little truth, a little love except as he perverted it to an epic distortion? One among the entries was quite suited to the occasion, extolling love and dove and Campbell’s Cove—childish, eager words, perhaps, but to be childlike and eager was a most wonderful thing. Certainly in this age of cynicism.
She sat a long time thinking about it, and in the end she decided that Mr. Sykes should bless love and dove and Campbell’s Cove in spite of himself. And coincidental to the happy irony, Doctor Copithorne should discover himself the father of a budding poet.
38
IT WAS A WEEK of high and glorious accomplishment for Hannah. The town had roused itself from its show of mourning, and under her direction, the citizens prepared themselves for the annual festival—a festival despite its serious overtones, she reminded them. Her enthusiasm was infectious, and there seemed to be no bottom to her store of it. In her own heart she was sure that she would take no more plunges down the dark morass from which sleep gave the only respite.
Night after night she went to bed in contented weariness. Morning after morning she awakened to see the laborers in her garden, two or three of them, different ones every morning sharing the harvest. Sometimes there were women among them, their calico aprons billowing up behind them as they stooped to pick up their diggings. The garden would soon be bare now. The grapes were full on the vines, the orchard heavy with fruit. They should share that, also, she thought, and perhaps the plowing, and spring planting, and next year’s harvest. Now and then, their laughter or a phrase of a song came up as a part of their blessings on her beneficence. There was an atmosphere of old-world about it, another time when people took their needs from the earth or the water, their pleasure from the songs they made and the company of one another, when the wise wrote books instead of keeping them, when wealth was measured in the granaries and not in the coupons of preferred stock. To perpetuate this scene, this show of mutuality, how happy she should be to convert all her fortune into land!
Idle speculation. And no time for it the last day before the festival. She took her coffee to the study where a map of the
Cove had been hung on the wall, marked with pins of varicolored heads, the routes of escape by land and water. She had been over it so many times she could close her eyes and visualize every marking. Strange, to close her eyes and see the heads of pins, and not a face among them—and to find it so marvelously pleasant—to be concerned with people in the abstract. How right that she should be in politics. And to have discovered it so late. No, not late. Such discoveries came when the heart and mind were ready for them, equal to their demands.
The doorbell roused her. Sunday should be her own, with no callers, certainly not unannounced.
She saw Elizabeth through the window. Once she would have quickened to the sight. Now it added nothing to her pleasure, except in that she was pleased at this new self-sufficiency. She resolved not to be tempted back to old affections.
“How nice to see you, Elizabeth.”
“Forgive my intrusion, Miss Blake.”
She had intruded, certainly, but she could not be sent away. Hannah opened the screen door to her.
“Could we stay out here, Miss Blake? It’s so pleasant.”
And my house so grim to you, Hannah thought. “Of course,” she murmured. “How is your mother?”
“Quite well, and so are Tom and Phyllis. Miss Blake, I want to know why Dennis left. I am asking it very humbly of you, but I want to know.”
She was always humble where Dennis was concerned, Hannah thought. “Sit down, Elizabeth. You don’t need to attack me on it.”
The girl half sat on the railing. It always annoyed Hannah to see anyone do it. “I know he wouldn’t leave without giving you notice.”
“If you want to talk with me, Elizabeth, take a chair, I don’t like to see a person balancing like a pumpkin on a fence. You’re quite sure you know Dennis well enough to anticipate his behavior?”
“I think I do.”
“I should think if you were that well acquainted with him, you might have heard from him by now. He’s been gone a week.”
Elizabeth sat where she was, her face cold and hard. “Why did he leave?”
“I discharged him, Elizabeth. For the good of all of us, I thought it time he left the Cove.”
“What do you know of the good of all of us? What do you know of good?”
“Perhaps my values are different than yours,” she said, smiling.
“I don’t think you have any values, Miss Blake.”
Hannah could feel the languor vanishing like foam. “Elizabeth, why didn’t you fight me on the contest the other night?”
“What did you say to Dennis?”
“Are we to have nothing but questions?” Hannah said. “No answers?”
“I don’t give a damn about your contest, Miss Blake.”
“And I don’t give a damn about Dennis. He has ingratiated himself with more women than you or I could count. He has played on their loneliness and denied them—”
Elizabeth shook her head. “No, no, no.”
“Then you tell me.” Hannah folded her hands.
Elizabeth’s eyes bore down on her. “In their loneliness or whatever, they have preyed on him. Yes, you, and your likes, and God help me, even I. We’ve been starved for the spirit of a man as well as his body. We are the craven lot, not him! Hannah Blake, see it, admit it! Look at me. I was twenty-nine years old yesterday, and this spring for the first time in my life I met someone with whom I felt exalted, someone I wanted so desperately—”
No more, no more, Hannah thought. Not even for you, Elizabeth, will I be dragged through hope into the slime again. “Stop it, Elizabeth!”
Her hands were on the girl’s shoulders, shaking her, and she could not remember getting up or putting them there. Elizabeth wrenched free of her, and stood, her hand on a pillar to steady herself.
“Don’t you see what he’s done to you?” Hannah pleaded. “He’s brought out everything shameless. Didn’t Maria warn you?”
Elizabeth’s eyes were terrible, dry, cold, without tears to warm them. “Did she warn you, Miss Blake?”
“No. Nobody warned me. I didn’t need warning. Who in the name of God would warn Hannah Blake?”
“Did you say these things to Dennis? Did you tell him he defiled people?”
“Yes, I said them! And Maria said them before me—”
“Maria did not say them—not those things. Maria Verlaine chose her own life. It may not have been the best life, not even a good one. And maybe she hoped to save me the heartache she had gone through, because she believed that’s what I was headed for. But never—not for a minute—did she regret her love for Andrew Sykes.”
“And you, Elizabeth?” Hannah said, cold as the frosted earth at the word “love.” “You have no regrets?”
“None. If I never see Dennis again, I shall be glad for what I’ve had of him, of his love.”
“A dream,” Hannah said, feeling that she was giving all the wisdom her experience had won. “It will fade, crumble to dust with handling. You’ll learn that.”
“Then it was a good dream of a good person, and if I’m stuck with it—but I won’t be. I promise you that, Miss Blake.”
Hannah smiled. “Don’t promise me, Elizabeth. What is it to me?”
“Please God, it’s nothing,” Elizabeth said.
Nothing comes of nothing, Hannah thought, content in the distraction of words—speak again! But she said, “So you’ve forgiven Maria?”
“Yes! She tried to destroy my confidence in him. But you! You tried to destroy him, his faith in himself as a human being—”
“Maria was forgiven,” she interrupted, “but I’m not to be. Is that it, Elizabeth?”
“If you succeeded, until I die, I won’t forgive you.”
Oh, but you will, Elizabeth, she thought, watching the girl plunge down the steps and across to the driveway, stiff-backed and long-striding. With your head in the air like that, you will walk through your shame as I did, and out of it, and forgive me as I forgive you.
She was about to turn back into the house when a car on the highway slowed down approaching Elizabeth and stopped. For only a moment. It came on then, and even from the portico Hannah recognized it and its driver, Sheriff Walker.
39
“SO TOMORROW’S THE BIG day,” he said, tossing his hat on the chaise longue. “It’s going to be quite a thing, Governor Michaels and the senator. That takes a lot of influence—a big show.”
“I have a good deal of work to do, Mr. Walker.”
He nodded sympathetically. “And interruptions all morning.” His eyes indicated the way of Elizabeth’s departure. “I’m one of Cravens’ boys, you know.”
“I might have suspected it,” Hannah said. “You did go in on the strength of his vote, didn’t you?”
“It’s funny how the same guy can break and put you together again. He took his first big step after that case I got busted on. State’s attorney. He cleaned house. Then he went through the dust bin and there I was shining like a diamond, like a little, lost diamond. Poetic, isn’t it?”
“Very.”
“And I think he’s got another setting all picked out for me. Not while Michaels is governor, of course. But in the temper of the times, as they say, I think Cravens is the safe bet.” He took a cigarette out and tapped it on the railing. “That’s information I thought you might like to have, by the way.”
“What?”
“The safest bet. I’m sort of a recruiting officer for Cravens. After tomorrow you should be in a good position to join us. See the world, as they say in the posters. Plenty of room for advancement.”
“And my qualifications?” Hannah said.
Walker smiled. “You got ’em. From both sides of the track. Uptown, downtown. That’s a beautiful sight in your garden. The peasants at work, voting peasants, of course. And you’re a woman of property, an old and pious family—”
“They’re taking the surplus vegetables,” Hannah interrupted.
“Of course. Don’t you want to hear more of your recommend
ations?”
“There are more?”
“One important one. The word at headquarters is that you’ve got a good sponsor.”
She thought about it for a moment. “Franklin Wilks?”
He nodded. “A word from him goes a long way down-state. He’s a national committeeman.”
“I know,” Hannah said.
“Of course you know.” He lit the cigarette, flipping the match to her lawn. It was in need of mowing, she thought. That idea struck him also apparently. “You got rid of the boy?”
“I did.”
“And without any favors. That’s smart. It’s a good idea in politics not to take anything you can get along without. But I’m sorry not to have you in my debt. I can give you a few pointers on Cravens, by the way.”
“I think not, Mr. Walker. I don’t like machines.”
“Only if you can run them,” he said. “Don’t be naïve. You’ve got to learn how it works before you can run it. Remember in my office? You said you could go to school to me. How about it? I’m at your service. Look, it’s a sure bet for both of us. You haven’t even started, so you’ve got nothing to lose. And I’m betting you’ll go the whole way.”
“Obviously, you’re a gambler,” Hannah said. “And the friend of gamblers from what I’ve heard. But not of grand juries. I don’t want any part of your help, Mr. Walker.”
He clamped his lips on the cigarette, inhaling. Even his eyes were like leeches. He watched her through the smoke he funneled in her direction. “You can’t have it both ways, Miss Blake. If you don’t like mud, you should stay out of the gutter. We’ve got a pact, you and I, whether you know it or not. I think you do. Do you want to explain that grand-jury crack of yours?”
“No. I was repeating hearsay.”
He drove over her words. “Because I was on an important job at the time, and with no trouble at all, I can repeat a lot of hearsay without saying a word. It’s all in the testimony, Miss Blake. I’ve gathered it all up and filed it away. It could have been filed in the newspapers. They were begging for it.”
Town of Masks Page 19
