Town of Masks

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Wilks would take the governor directly to the water front. The senator would be driven there in a private car. In fact, she thought, looking up at the clock, they were both there by now. Getting acquainted with their constituents. The voting peasants, as Walker called them. He, too, was there, no doubt, confounding the simple O’Gormans, Fitzgeralds and all with his devotion to Senator Cravens. They might be confounded, but they would not be convinced that the association made Cravens less worthy of their devout vote. They could not believe a man blessed by their priesthood, confessed and shriven on a Saturday night, in the front pew on Sunday, could devote the rest of the week to hypocrisy. The senator was their champion, an American for Americans whatever their origin—so long as they stayed at home.

  Strange, that she should be on his side. So often, it seemed, she had fought for the side she did not want to be on, and fought the harder for being on it.

  The siren sounded—eerie, fearsome, despite their expectancy of it. In that first instant of its wail there was no one with so little imagination that he was not stung with terror at what such a sound might indeed signify.

  Keys were turned in drawers, the vault eased closed, and one employee after another moved to the door as they had been rehearsed. Hannah led the procession down High Street, store clerks, barbers, watchmakers, brokers, and scrubwomen falling in line. Those rehearsed to take their cars, soon proved the theory of folly in it, jamming the alleys, honking out blasts of confusion into the steady, nerve-rending cry of the sirens. Those on the left of High Street followed Hannah down the ravine lane, those on the right turned to the country. Below the ravines, a pounding drum of sound came from the boat whistles. Along Front Street, women and children came from the houses, baskets and bundles, pets on leashes, which must be surrendered on the docks—and left tied, helpless to seek their own safety in a raid. People should not have pets, she thought. She had never had one in the house.

  She caught sight of the governor and the senator, side by side in O’Gorman’s boat. She was to be in the pilot boat with Matheson, first to the point, to minister to the needs of the refugees. She lifted the first-aid kit and looked at it. She would carry it high and dangle it from her wrist. Its bottom was weighted with gravel to carry it soon and surely down.

  An ambulance roared by them, its brakes shrieking at the docks. Hannah pointed ahead. “Look!” she shouted. From across the lake like a flight of wild geese the formation of planes came on.

  She felt a surge of fear within her, a need to hurry, and behind her the infection caught with the fierce haste of wildfire, the townspeople pounding, pushing, crushing down the hill.

  Don’t they know it’s make-believe? she thought. Can’t they tell? They were rehearsed. So were the planes. They would drop flares on the town, sulphurous, harmless flares. But the moans and screams were real. The closer the planes came, the wilder the panic.

  God in heaven, she thought. They don’t trust their own air force! At the dock as she reached it, O’Gorman and young O’Gorman, and men whose faces she couldn’t see, and then the sheriff’s men had joined arms to hold back the surging crowd. Hannah beat her way to the sound truck, and threshed through the wires to the side of the radio network announcer. His eyes were bulging, his voice hoarse as he poured the hysteria of the town into the microphone.

  An engineer thrust a megaphone in her hand. She turned her back to the announcer, and took a long breath. “No hurry at all,” she said very slowly. “We’ve got all day—all day.” She picked one name and another out of the pushers. “Stop pushing, Sam Macken. Mrs. Nolan, you dropped your pocketbook—You’re going to lose your mother-in-law, Gerry Pace—Or maybe that’s what you’re trying to do. Shame on you, Gertrude Petty. You pushed an old lady—”

  The planes, tuned in to the broadcast by the good Lord’s grace, broke formation to the north, going away from the town and circling it, forming again in the east, almost out of sight. The panic was stemmed, O’Gorman and his lieutenants funneling people into the boat. Hannah cajoled them on, making bad jokes, she thought, but good jokes to a bad situation, anything, any words of calm. She gave the megaphone back to the engineer, and glanced at the announcer. His face was red, his eyes as moist as his forehead—

  “… Ladies and gentlemen, the demonstration here at Campbell’s Cove … even to the panic that might take over in a real raid … I repeat … this is a simulated air raid … a mock invasion of a typical …”

  Hannah could scarcely open her fingers. She had not realized it, but she had squeezed the leather thongs of the first-aid bag so deeply into her flesh they had almost drawn blood.

  She made her way to the lead boat, but Matheson was not there. Like him, she thought, to be late at a time like this. She searched for his face among the crowd at the dock, and then gave the embarkation signal herself. As well, she thought, that he should not be at her side when it came time to drop the jewels.

  Even as the loaded boats moved into the Cove, the planes soared out of the east, high, high up over the town and there, one by one broke from the formation and whistled down, dropping their flares, their fireworks, yellowing the air and going on then …over the heads of their make-believe refugees. A salute from their motors and they were gone. When everyone was watching the last plane’s departure, Hannah opened her fingers over the side of the boat and lost her first-aid kit.

  When they had docked at the Point, Hannah met Cravens and Governor Michaels. Cravens, a short and hearty man, was effusive with his praise. Michaels was silent, except to nod and smile a bit. He was slow, awkward, given more, she thought, to watching and contemplation than volatility. On the whole, she felt more praise in his silence. They got into a police-driven car, the three of them and John Copithorne. As chairman of the town council, he was official host. He looked as grim as though it were the real thing. She noticed that at Front Street the sheriff was waiting in his car, and drove up the ravine lane behind them.

  Michaels turned to her. “Did you plan it even to that detail, Miss Blake?”

  “Not quite.” There was something about him that compelled honesty—of honest people, she thought. It was ridiculous to let herself be swayed by him. They were poles apart politically. She was a Cravens girl, as Walker would have put it.

  “You just can’t predict what people are going to do, can you, Governor?” Cravens said.

  Michaels smiled slowly. “You’ve done it pretty well.”

  He didn’t predict, Hannah thought. He directed, as surely as if he did it with a whip. The senate whip. She could understand what it meant now, having seen his minion at work.

  In the town as they drove through it, their siren open to make way for them, the fire trucks of the Cove, and neighboring towns were at work, putting out imaginary fires, mending broken water mains. Hannah caught sight of Katherine Shane, working furiously in her white nurse’s uniform. Nor was it a make-believe injury she was fixing. The blood from the man’s hand stained the bandage as fast as she unrolled it.

  The last of the evacuees, taking to the countryside, had put a mile’s distance between them and the town. A whole line of them trailed up the hill.

  “To think this is going on in earnest some place in the world,” Michaels said. “Night and day, it goes on.”

  Cravens was looking out the other window. “You can bet they don’t have hot-dog stands on the way.”

  Hannah glanced at the improvised shack, open for a good day’s business. She asked the driver to stop.

  “Close that up,” she called out the window. “You can do business when the evacuation’s over.”

  In so brief a time as the pause had taken, Walker was beside the car window. “I’ll close him up.”

  “Do,” she said. Then she called Walker back for a moment. “Where’s Matheson?”

  “He resigned,” Walker said. “Is that all, Miss Blake?”

  She nodded, and he stepped back and saluted the car.

  “A good man, Walker,” Cravens said.

 
Good for what? Hannah thought. She looked at Copithorne. “Is it true about Matheson?”

  Copithorne hesitated as though it were something he could not remember. “I guess it is if Walker says so.”

  “Why?”

  Copithorne did not quite manage to conceal his irritation. “I just haven’t had time to read the letter.”

  She settled back in the car and thought about Matheson’s word before their parting the night before. Apparently the night was not long enough for his purposes.

  44

  THE TOWNSPEOPLE GATHERED SLOWLY about the speakers’ platform for the climax of the day’s activity. How they had rallied to her support! They could be forgiven for lagging now. And yet she needed from them one more effort. Speeches without applause would tell nothing of Campbell’s Cove over the radio network. The announcer held his arm up to her and pointed to his wrist watch. She bounded down from the stand and bade the high school band strike up some music, martial, patriotic music.

  And they came hurrying. She watched from the stand as the citizens quickened their steps. Cravens gave her a sharp nod of approval, and Michaels smiled a little—his compliment of the day.

  “Senator!” The radio man waved to the roster. The cameras as well as the microphone awaited him. The band stopped playing halfway through a tune, but one trombone trailed off like the cry of a wounded moose. Everyone laughed. They hushed at the rising of the engineer’s hand.

  “Fellow Americans,” Cravens started. The loud-speakers on the field twanged to the vibrancy of his voice and were adjusted.

  Hannah heard little of the speech. At every pause, Walker and his men in the forefront of the crowd sparked the cheering. Small cheers, she thought, for words he used so often they became small words in his mouth. But cheers there were and a microphone could make a marvelous sound of them. The senator talked on, gorgeous rhetoric, and Hannah picked one familiar face and then another out of the audience: Sophie, the child’s face lit up with Hannah’s eyes upon it; Katherine Shane in her nurse’s uniform, nodding and smiling-proud in her acquaintance—she should be well rewarded for such loyalty; Franklin Wilks. He had put her up. Now he was watching her with a strange intensity, she thought—measuring her power to withstand his gaze, the eyes of the multitude. He always saw himself as the eyes of the world, a camera to himself. O’Gorman. Dour, he looked, dragged out from the day’s effort, his hands in his pockets. Give a cheer, man! Cravens is after your own heart! You broke your party allegiance to vote for him. A good church man! A patriot! Tobin, Jeremiah Tobin, happy doing right by himself—and his partner-to-be, the salvation of both of them, Tom Merritt; and beside Tom his newly beloved wife, with a pretty and loving face; and Mrs. Merritt, leaning on her son, with no daughter apparently to lean on. Where are you hiding, Elizabeth? Baker and wife, Ruth Copithorne and daughter—and a thousand dollars coming for a little rhyme on love and Campbell’s Cove. Father in the speakers’ stand making lots of money!

  The senator was done. The applause fervent, perhaps because he was done, she thought. Copithorne was introducing Michaels, governor of the state—poor John on the microphone, as strange a thing to him as a shepherd’s crook. And Cravens checking his watch. Hannah glanced at Walker. He, too, was checking his. Should she check hers? Not if she were never to tell time on it again.

  “Friends,” Michael began, his voice so high it almost cracked, a tax on the microphone after Cravens. “We are defending a way of life which we have found good. To it we must persuade our friends, and even our enemies …”

  The better to persuade, Hannah thought, with a persuasive voice. Cravens could persuade the devil into paradise. What had happened to her? This was to be her day of days, and she was all hollow inside. She was to have no more darknesses and her mind was as somber as a mired pit. A little stir, the sound of wonder, surprise, drew hers and other eyes to the Merritts.

  Mrs. Merritt had started moving, twisting through the crowd. Hannah’s eyes pursued her but an instant, darting ahead of the old woman to her objective. Elizabeth Merritt was standing at the edge of the crowd. Besides her was Dennis Keogh, and with him, Matheson.

  Their presence should be frightening me, she thought. But I am secure. In what? God knows. The jewels’ disposal? Of course, of course, she tried to convince herself. But they were nothing. Nothing to Maria, therefore nothing to Hannah. No logic there. There was never any logic to her “therefores.”

  She shuddered and fastened her eyes on Michaels. One person, at least should hear him.

  “… Freedom is not something to be dispensed like charity …” How right, how right, she thought.

  “It is something to be won—like innocence, like the grace of God!”

  Words, words, words. She closed her ears to all sounds but her own thought for the instant. Words, and not for her. She was Cravens’s girl! Cheers then, the announcer cutting in to take them off the air at the height of it.

  Copithorne had the microphone and only the air of Campbell’s Cove, as much of it as he could reach through the loud-speakers. “The last, but not the least honor of the day—” Cravens got up, saluted Copithorne from the edge of the stand. He saluted Hannah, also, and the audience, and got a personal cheer in return. Like a prize fighter leaving the ring, she thought. Copithorne described his departure on the microphone, as though it were not self-evident. But what could he say to hold the crowd? Michaels was on the edge of his chair, split with the desire to go and the impulse to stay. Knowing the final honor of the day, she wished fervently that he would go. Really, it was Cravens who should stay for it, and the poem would delight his heart. But Walker bore him off.

  Copithorne wiped the sweat from his face. “Governor Michaels, friends, and neighbors,” he started again, holding a limp piece of paper in a trembling hand. “It is my honor to conclude the day’s celebration with the presentation of an award—”

  Not your honor, you fool, Hannah thought. Yours is to introduce Franklin Wilks. Quickly that we may be done quickly. You can’t make an award to your own daughter! Hannah looked at Wilks. It had all been arranged. He carried the prize-winning poem in his pocket. Still he stood, rocking back on his heels, a grim smile on his mouth. He knew Copithorne’s inadequacy to a public appearance. Still he made no move to help him, to save him.

  “This is to be an annual award for an annual poetry contest—” His voice quivered as much as his hand. “It will be sponsored by the Campbell’s Cove Library—” His voice seemed to fail entirely. Hannah saw Wilks raise his fist as though to stick courage into him. Her own heart was throbbing fearfully. Copithorne thrust his head upward. “It will be called the Nathan Blake Memorial. And this year’s winner is Kenneth Tobin. Congratulations, Kenneth!”

  The last cheer of the day went up for Kenneth Tobin.

  45

  HANNAH ROCKED BACK AND forth on the chair, trying to find a position at which it might be steady. The whole sea of faces bobbed together before her and seemed to congeal in a mass of flesh. She drew one deep breath after another. The platform was empty, except for her. Below her the Shanes, the Bakers, and a few others were clamoring up their congratulations.

  Hypocrites, she thought—no, they didn’t know. The conspiracy was not theirs, not yet. Copithorne, Wilks, and Elizabeth. Sykes, too, of course. But Elizabeth’s revenge on her, the full, fearful revenge, even to the witness of Nathan Blake.

  She got up, helped by the hands extended to her, making no response to the congratulations, the commiserations on her weariness and her right to be weary. Passing among them, she tried to gain some composure, a moment’s estimate of what the disclosure meant. She could not measure it, not now. She stopped. She had done right! Doing it, she was sure she had one right, saving the town from Sykes’s scorn, his cynical abandon of it, his prank—

  But where, then, were the friends to congratulate her on that? The friends who knew and would congratulate her for it? Copithorne and Wilks conspired with Elizabeth. Not they! They preferred his prank to hers. She s
earched for O’Gorman. Gone. And what did he know of poetry? She moved in frantic pursuit of the retreating crowd. Sophie, if she could find her, she thought. Sophie would take her home and comfort her.

  “Miss Blake!”

  She turned to see Tobin and his son. Tobin caught her hand and pumped it violently. “That award’s going to start Kenneth in college.”

  “If the army doesn’t get me,” the boy said. “But I’m real grateful, Miss Blake.”

  His young, freckled face was so earnest, so sincere she could have struck her fist at it. A town half-friend, half-foe—with smiles on foes and scowls on friends, a town of masks.

  She caught at Tobin’s sleeve. “Will you take me home? I don’t feel well.”

  “I’ll take you home, Miss Blake.”

  Matheson put his hand beneath her elbow and guided her forward. At his car Elizabeth and Dennis were waiting. Hannah tried to focus her attention. Her mind was brittle, crumbling, the sounds in it like the sounds in Maria’s house.

  Elizabeth looked away as she drew near, as though the very sight of her was more than the girl could stand.

  “So, Dennis,” Hannah said, casually, she thought, “you’ve come back.”

  “Chief Matheson brought me, Miss Blake. But I’m going to stay now.”

  “That’s nice,” she said. “I hope you’ll be very happy here. Now, Matt, I should like to go home. It’s been a trying day. It must have been a difficult one for you, too. I understand you have resigned.”

  “I don’t like to be told not to bring a man in,” Matheson said, “even if it’s to prove he’s the wrong one. At least, I did that.”

  “I’m going to recommend to the council that you get your pension,” she said.

  There was an involuntary exchange of glances between Elizabeth and the policeman. It was more than she could endure.