The Mask and Other Stories

by Nesta Tuomey

  ‘Okay,’ she agreed. ‘Just as soon as I get dressed.’ And with a sigh, put down the telephone.

  In a small crowded room in Greenwich Village the crew sat at two tables placed end to end, while a vocalist in a white tuxedo sang, ‘Fly me to the Moon.’ He was backed by a piano and a saxophone; a few couples danced close on the tiny floor.

  Mary sipped her beer and silently calculated what this night out with the crew was going to cost her. She peeped a glance at her watch. The hands now stood at twenty past three. She thought longingly of her room back at the hotel and wished she had ordered something stronger than beer. At least then she would have got some ice in it. She was sick of economising all the time, she thought. Ordering cottage cheese salad when she really wanted spaghetti bolognaise and why, all because the salad cost eighty cents cheaper. Eighty cents, for God’s sake. And it was the same reason she had opted for beer, because it wasn’t anything so costly as spirits while, of course, cocktails were the priciest of all.

  She glanced glumly about her. No one else was being abstemious that she could see. The captain was drinking Bourbon, and the navigator was already on his fourth Tom Collins; Jill was on Manhattans, she never drank anything else, and Irene, who had just joined them at the club, was already started on her second gin and lemon fizz. Mary sighed and hoped her sacrifice would not be in vain. Though really, as she well knew, it would all depend when the check was brought whether separate tabs had been kept or the total evenly split. Probably the latter.

  ‘Ready for another?’ Captain Martelli leaned across to check her glass. His white silk polo-neck seemed oddly at variance with his drooping moustaches.

  ‘No thanks.’ Mary summoned a smile. ‘No, really.’

  Surely they wouldn’t stay much longer, she thought. At her other side Ted was nodding off. Having gained a head-start on everyone else, alcohol and jet-lag had combined to send him to sleep. Why did they all have to behave as though it were really only half-past ten and not five hours later? Mary wondered. At this rate they were putting in a twenty hour day. No wonder people said that jet-flying was ageing.

  A young man, casually dressed in a tartan shirt and saffron coloured tie, approached the captain. Hands on hips, he respectfully made some request. Captain Devlin chuckled and leaned across the table to tap Jill’s wrist. She got to her feet with a pleased smile.

  The navigator stared at the swaying couple with heightened colour. ‘Bloody nerve!’ he muttered. ‘Bloody bad form!’ He was quite drunk, Mary realised. He began talking about some woman, she supposed it was his wife.

  ‘Bloody silly woman. Wait till you hear. Got a fortune teller to the house to tell her fortune.’ He snorted in derision. ‘At her age! Silly bitch.’

  Mary shifted uncomfortably, feeling trapped in the beam of his ill-humour. An image of Niall came to her, at home in their wedding bed, almost a night’s sleep behind him. He was always saying how much he envied her the chance to travel and see the world. If he could only see her now!

  When the check was brought Captain Devlin made a swift calculation and dropped a green-backed bill on the plate. Mary’s heart sank. So it was to be split seven ways. She kissed her floral bed linen goodbye as she added her green back to the growing pile. They went out to wait for a taxi.

  Back at their hotel the crew stood about on the sidewalk, blinking sleepily.

  ‘Anyone for breakfast?’ Irene asked brightly. She had renewed her lipstick in the cab and looked the freshest of the three.

  ‘Count me out,’ Captain Devlin began walking away, Ted and the navigator stumbled after him. Captain Martelli hesitated, with his foot on the hotel step, and smiled apologetically. ‘It has been a long day,’ he said, looking at Mary. ‘Don’t stay up too late,’ he called when the girls turned away.

  Mary, her thoughts still intent on salvaging some of her allowance, decided she would confine herself to a cup of coffee. That wouldn’t cost much, she thought. Only a few cents. Funny to think that the tip cost more than the actual beverage!

  On the street corner a coloured man stood bawling his wares, his eyes rolling in his night face. ‘Come and get yuh real life-size poodle dawgs,’ he was calling. ‘They one dawg guaranteed never to need no poop-scoop.’

  Jill and Irene quickened their steps, their tiredness forgotten, and reached out in delight. ‘Oh, aren’t they beautiful! sinking beringed fingers into the curly fur.

  ‘How much?’ Jill waited breathlessly.

  ‘Only seven dollars, Ma’am, and they’s a bargain,’ he answered solemnly.

  ‘What do you think?’ she turned impulsively to Irene.

  ‘Oh yes!’ She didn’t hesitate. ‘Most definitely!’

  ‘Seven dollars for you?’ Jill tapped the poodle’s black snout reflectively, then her expression brightened. ‘Okay!’ she said with a dazzling smile. Clutching their toys, the girls fumbled for money. They were a dollar short.

  ‘Mary!’ they cried, turning to her.

  Mary sighed and let the floral pillowcases go. Maybe this trip she would do better to concentrate on some very small guest towels. She couldn’t afford anything more if she was to bring home any of her allowance.

  The man looked hopefully at her. ‘How about you, lady?’ he chivvied. ‘Don’t you want a little dawg to keep you company? Looks kinda lonesome on his own.’

  The others, secure in their possessions, encouraged her. ‘Go on, Mary, why don’t you? Your first trip back. Look how gorgeous he is.’

  ‘I’m saving,’ Mary said weakly, knowing it sounded ridiculous. Only a few dollars, she read in their amazed eyes. Pin money, barely two pounds! She didn’t blame them. She had been just the same herself before marriage, squandering as much on a manicure. What, after all, was seven or even ten dollars? Why, she had once seen a passenger tipping a hostess with a twenty dollar bill.

  She hesitated in brooding indecision. The poodle was decorative and useless and wildly impractical, she knew. Just the sort of frivolous thing she had bought unthinkingly in the past. But that had been before the crippling expense of a new house had overshadowed her every purchase. Sometimes she found herself comparing the heavy commitment she and her husband had taken on to the burden of caring for a fond, but wearisome, relative whose incessant demands were wearing away their youth and spirit.

  Illogically now, the toy became for Mary a symbol of those carefree pre-nuptial days when she had returned from every Atlantic trip giggling, ‘A couple of us stayed up late last night in Boston or New York or Chicago and just guess the crazy things we did?’

  ‘I’ll take it,’ she whispered. The girls let out a rousing cheer and Mary found her arms filled to overflowing with fluffy white poodle.

  ‘Alleluia!’ intoned the coloured man, folding the trestle table under his arm. He swaggered away, hollering catch calls into the night. The girls looked at each other and laughed a little sheepishly.

  ‘Bang goes my breakfast,’ said Jill ruefully. She slung her bag on her shoulder and turned back towards the hotel.

  ‘Wait,’ Mary said impulsively. ‘I’ve still got some money left.’ The others regarded her hopefully. ‘All I want is coffee,’ Irene murmured abstemiously.

  ‘And maybe a pastry,’ breathed Jill. ‘But only if you have enough,’ she hastened to add.

  The girls swung along clutching the toy poodles to their breasts, their sparkling engagement rings rivalling the animals’ diamante collars in brilliance, and crossed the threshold of an all-night food bar. Heads turned as they stepped inside.

  ‘Let’s have waffles,’ Mary suggested with reckless generosity, her eyes glowing like twin stars in her tired face as she pulled out her last few dollars and placed them on the counter. ‘And a double scoop of chocolate ice-cream all round!’

  The House

  ‘Only two thousand pounds for a house like that,’ my mother would say, casting a vengeful look at Father lost to the world in a book. ‘But we couldn’t afford it, so your father said. It’s all I’ve ever heard
since the day I married him.’

  And my father, wincing as the familiar words cut through to his subconscious, would slink lower in his armchair and fix his eyes more determinedly on the printed page. With a sigh, I would take up a book myself in defence although I knew the gesture to be futile. Once mother was in the toils of her house demon it was impossible for anyone to remain uninvolved for long.

  Ever since I could remember the house had been a bone of contention between my parents. As a small child, hearing mother’s continual references to this house, it seemed to me it was the house she never had, the house of her dreams, the one that was almost in her grasp and in which we would all be living now ‘if it wasn’t for your father!’

  Over the years we became all too familiar with this refrain. Father, she insisted, had held her back just as he had done on so many other occasions in the past when she had tried to make something better of their lives. From her we got the impression that life in those far-off days had been a series of wonderful missed opportunities because of him. ‘He had no vision,’ she told us often, ‘God bless the man, but he could never see beyond the nose on his face.’ She, on the other hand, she claimed, had an innate ability to recognise the vast potential of any given situation and the courage to follow through. The house was a once-in-a-lifetime chance the pair of them had missed.

  All of us knew the story by heart.

  The house had belonged to an old school friend of mother’s, Nan Morrissey, who finding herself suddenly widowed was forced to sell and offered it out of friendship to mother for a mere two thousand pounds. ‘Only two thousand!’ mother would cry despairingly, and her disappointment, keen as ever after all this time, became ours, for although none of us could have been very old at the time and had no recollection of ever actually being in the house, she painted such a vivid, heart-stirring image of what might have been that we experienced the same sense of loss every time. I have often thought since that no children of our first parents could have felt more cheated on learning about the Garden of Eden than we did in those days on hearing about that house.

  ‘Oh, to think if I had only followed my instincts at the time and borrowed the money,’ she would conclude regretfully, ‘I’d have my lovely house today and we’d not be stuck in this place.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with this place?’ Father would lower his book to counter-attack, but it was merely a token resistance. He could never argue with mother’s instincts and he knew it. On the strength of them she had achieved uncanny success over the years in the various rash schemes she had embarked upon. Having posed the question, however, he would gaze about him with an air of simple wonder, which only served to further increase her irritation, never seeming to notice the hideous orange and blue tiled fireplace out of which black smoke belched fitfully, or the shoddy ill-fitting doors which trembled as though gripped by ague whenever the wind blew. ‘It may not be a palace,’ he would say genially, ‘but it’s not a bad little house. I see nothing wrong with it.’

  I wondered how he could so easily discount the scullery – mother’s glory-hole where she had to wash and cook for eight of us in a space no bigger than a hotel lift. Or the narrow crepuscular hallway where the electric light was kept burning all day.

  ‘Nothing wrong!’ exclaimed mother in disgust. ‘It’s little better than the soldiers’ houses.’

  I was the youngest of the family and knew nothing of these houses mother scorned. I would shudder fearful that our fortunes might descend even lower and we would suffer the stigma of moving to one of them.

  ‘There’s worse things.’ Father shook his head knowingly. He often said he’d rather starve than resort to moneylenders.

  ‘Ah, sure what do you care so long as you have a book in your hand,’ cried mother, losing patience. ‘The whole place could collapse around us for all you’d notice.’

  And so the war raged on, Mother always the attacker, father the accused. It was an argument which cropped up like a tropical storm, suddenly and without warning, destroying the happiest of Sunday lunches or upsetting the calm of bedtime when the sound of mother’s fury could be heard battering itself out at the far side of the bedroom wall long after we had all settled down for the night.

  As I reached my teens I couldn’t help noticing that while mother’s resentment remained as strong as ever now the house of her grievance was no longer her lost dreamhouse – the one that got away – but became instead the house we had lived in since I was born, which was poky and spidery and ill-designed, and totally without attraction, despite all her efforts to improve it.

  For years mother had tried to ‘make’ something of the sow’s ear that was her portion. It was no easy task. At times she almost despaired. ‘Only a fool would take on such a hopeless task’ she would moan whenever some more ambitious scheme failed to turn out as she had envisaged. Lack of funds to buy the best of materials and labour was usually at the root of the trouble. The fact that the architect who designed the house had no real talent or imagination did not help either, Mother often said he should have been certified, whoever he was.

  But, notwithstanding the difficulties she encountered, mother kept on trying. Always there was some work in progress. Nothing remained the same. In time even the ugly old fireplace was replaced by a low modern mantel, although mother could do nothing about the fire which still smoked. It was a fault in the chimney flue which meant she was continually rinsing out the net curtains, and father had to go on a ladder twice a year to redo the ceiling. ‘One more nail in my cross,’ sighed mother.

  When there was no money to spare for renovations she contented herself with merely moving around the furniture. There was an air of restlessness about her in those days, a constant desire for change. It was as though she had some finished picture in her mind of the way the house could be, some vision of House Beautiful that only she could see and was forever striving to achieve.

  Helping her transform our house at this time was a team of carpenters and plumbers, would-be electricians, local Jacks of all trade, handymen third class. They came at odd hours of the day, abandoning their regular work in response to her call. If it was around a mealtime, and even if it was not, she fed them well. Generous slices of wholemeal bread, cinnamon buns fresh out of the oven, liberally spread with home-made jam made from the berries father grew in the garden. ‘It pays to look after them,’ mother would say, having a trusting belief that once they sat at table with her they would do a better job of work and be less inclined to overcharge her. This may have been the case. It was hard to tell.

  Improving the look of the house became increasingly important to my mother as her hopes of ever moving to a better house faded. So too did her desire to actually own a house, any house, even that miserable terraced building, although it fell far short of her dreams.

  ‘I suppose having lived all my life in a rented house I can expect to die in it,’ became her plaintive cry whenever she returned from an evening spent with friends, whose house was not only superior to ours but which they had the good fortune to own. ‘Well, you can’t take it with you,’ was Dad’s answering quip. Not the way to deal with mother when she was in her house-owning blues but sometimes he grew tired of humouring her.

  ‘Thank God for that!’ she countered dryly. Mother often claimed that without a sense of humour she would have been dead long ago.

  Between my mother and our landlady there existed a natural antipathy since the first days of renting. The fact that Mrs. Dillon could not read or write and yet was the possessor of several houses was gall to mother. She with all her wit and vigour did not even own one.

  Whenever illness prevented Father calling with the rent he sent along my older brother with strict injunctions to ensure that Mrs. Dillon marked the rent book. He was not giving her an excuse to say he had defaulted on payments.

  On the day my father went to pay the rent my mother worked herself into a rage. ‘Can’t wait to give it to her,’ she’d jeer as he was about to set off. Anyone would h
ave imagined father was romantically inclined to the woman. ‘The very minute you get paid you’re off at once.’

  ‘She’s entitled to her rent,’ was father’s reasonable reply.

  ‘Only adding to her bank balance and she with more than she knows what to do with.’ Mother could not hide her resentment. ‘I’d let her whistle for it. She can’t put us out. We’ve paid for that house ten times over.’

  Sometimes my father took me along with him for the walk and I would stand on my toes behind him in the tiny hallway of a house even uglier than our own, while beyond the beaded curtain Mrs. Dillon wheezed her way ponderously about her sitting-room, opening drawers crammed with oddments in her eternal search for a ‘hansel’ to mark the rent book.

  ‘How is your mudder? I suppose she’s as hale and hearty as ever.’ Mrs. Dillon’s tone was regretful. She did not impress me as healthy herself, snuffling perpetually in a piece of grey, all-purpose cloth she carried everywhere like a baby’s do-do. ‘Me ould feet has me kilt.’ Her elephantine legs under the flowing black dress moved slowly in outsize slippers, more suited to a man that a woman. The smell of some vegetable, long since cooked and forgotten, hung disturbingly in the already close atmosphere, making me restless to escape. I was very glad when father did not engage overlong in small talk.

  Every so often at mother’s instigation father sounded out Mrs. Dillon to see if she was interested in selling us the house, but she always made some excuse. She was keeping it for Richie, her only son (that good-for-nothing, said mother) so he’d have a place to live when he stopped his jaunts and settled down. Sometimes she said she was thinking of moving into it herself. ‘Dat ould house I’m in is plagued wid damp.’ Her chins wobbled pitifully, her glaucous eyes bulging and perennially moist, begged father’s sympathy. ‘Me ould chest’s giving me hell.’