Town of Masks (3 page)

Mrs. Copithorne tapped the gavel for order. “Miss Blake has the floor.”

“I am merely suggesting to this meeting that Wallington be alerted to responsibility as the complement of privilege, and I know of nothing to alert a citizenry faster than taxes.”

“Hear! Hear!” someone called.

Hannah’s point won the discussion.

“You’d make a good administrator, Miss Blake,” Katherine Shane remarked, leaning across the table toward her.

“I am a good administrator,” Hannah said rather louder than she intended, but she did not want the Shane comment to be lost. Nor was it, she decided, and the fact that Katherine made it was a good sign. She remembered her compliment on her dress earlier that evening. There was no better sign of a rising star in Campbell’s Cove than Katherine Shane’s running after it with her wagon.

The meeting drew to the business of the nominations at last. Then Maria Verlaine raised her hand. “I’ve got a few remarks I’d like to make before we proceed. May I, Ruth?”

Mrs. Copithorne recognized her.

“Tonight is nomination of officers, and next meeting will be the last until fall, I presume—” She paused to squash out a cigarette.

Hannah wondered if she were going to mention that Miss Blake suggested meeting all summer. It would be like Maria, telling all of them that Hannah Blake loved meetings so well.

“Between now and next meeting,” Maria resumed, “we have the problem of bludgeoning two citizens of the Cove into serving on the library board next year.”

“No-o-o,” someone murmured.

Maria glanced in the direction of the protest. “Then we shall have if what I am about to propose is followed. I have a question for you, ladies and Mr. Baker. What is wrong with the men of Campbell’s Cove? And is the disease common throughout the country?”

Her voice had a thin stridency which commanded attention. A shiver of wind through the trees beyond the veranda was the only sound.

“I ask it in all seriousness: is the comic strip ‘Bringing Up Father’ a true picture of American life? Are Maggie and Jiggs archetypes of our culture?”

She might have waited for this sort of thing until Ed Baker was not among them, Hannah thought. He was studying the backs of his hands, miserable. No need to say of a man in his presence that he was out of step. But like Maria. No tact.

Maria at that instant turned to him. “Ed, I make no apologies to you. We’re all adults here, or as close to it as we are likely to be in our lifetimes. You must have thought about this yourself. I’m sure you’re not on the board because you enjoy being the only man amongst us. I’m sick to death of jokes about it, and I’m sure you are of having to make them. You’re not an oddity. Or if you are, I belong in the same coop.”

She’s off on her white horse,
Hannah thought as Mrs. Verlaine paused to light another cigarette,
off to a new crusade.
But for all her
savoir-faire,
she, too, was nervous, speaking in public. Chain-smoking. But how she could make a point, and how she selected her points to make. As sharp as an arrow. Hannah could see the head on the item in the
Campbell’s Cove Gazette: Mrs. Verlaine Castigates Cove Men.
It would be the one issue of the meeting to pique the editor’s interest. The new officers would be lucky to get their names listed, and the Wallington business which she had carried would be lost entirely. She glanced at the secretary of the meeting. Little fat obsequious Nellie Home was scribbling as fast as her stubby fingers could manage the pencil.

Maria looked at the president. “John Copithorne was asked to serve last year, Ruth. Have you any idea why he refused?”

Mrs. Copithorne shrugged. “He just leaves these things to me, I guess.”

“And Franklin Wilkes,” Maria turned to Hannah. “He reads occasionally, doesn’t he?”

The question caught Hannah like a twinge of pain. Maria had gone to work on her in this devious fashion. It was her way of discrediting her before the nominations were in order, of calling attention to the fact that Hannah Blake did not actually belong on the board at all, that she was there by the tolerance of the members who had actually invited Franklin Wilks. She strove desperately to clutch something with a point out of her fragmented thoughts.

“Only Dun and Bradstreet,” she said tightly.

Maria’s only acknowledgment was the flicker of a sardonic smile. There was a discussion then of the proportion of men to women among the borrowers. Gradually, Hannah got control over her temper and put on a smile to further hide the disappointment she sensed coming to her. Maria worried the argument to its last drama, announcing that she would resign from the board if the new members did not make for a better representation. But she would not resign. She would be there next year, Hannah thought. She would be there with her bobbed locks flying and her wits as edged as sharks’ teeth.

In the wake of Maria’s coup, Edward Baker was nominated. It was unanimous, no other name being put forward. But Hannah knew her defeat lay with Maria Verlaine. She made a fine gesture of congratulating Baker. He bowed lower than ever, already puffed up with his sense of importance. For a second Hannah pitied him: a plumber president of the library board—a haberdasher in the White House. He would no doubt take to music, to reading poetry and philosophy.

Poetry.

“Elizabeth.” She laid her hand on the librarian’s arm, as she was taking her papers inside at the end of the meeting.

“Yes, Miss Blake?”

“Will you have dinner with me one night soon? I have a project in mind and I think you might find it interesting.”

H
ANNAH SUGGESTED THAT THEY
take their coffee on the veranda to be beyond the clatter of Sophie’s clearing up. Moving through the house, Elizabeth remarked on one piece and another of its fine old furnishings. It was strange, Hannah thought, that she had not been here oftener these past few years, at least, since Elizabeth had made her own mark in the community.

“And the house itself,” Elizabeth said as they reached the veranda, “it has such a lived-in atmosphere.”

Intended as a compliment, Hannah thought. “Illusion would be the better word for it,” she said. She could say things to her that she would not admit to others. Not that the girl was receptive. Hannah’s feeling was more that Elizabeth had somehow seen her at her worst and was here, nevertheless. “Still, in its day it has been lived in abundantly. My great-great-grandfather built it, you know, except for the south wing and the portico. They’re Victorian, and ugly. But I’m reluctant to tear them down.”

“I can understand that,” Elizabeth murmured.

Can you?
Hannah wondered. She said, “There seems to be something here I should preserve. I don’t know what. But all my life I’ve been carrying it around. Every once in a while I wonder if perhaps it isn’t an empty box.” She sighed. “I shouldn’t dare to look.”

“Why not?”

Hannah poured the coffee. Only someone very safe and happy could ask that. “Empty boxes are sometimes useful,” she said. “I hear your brother’s doing very well these days, Elizabeth.”

“He’s district manager now,” the girl said. “And he started at the Temple Market, a clerk.”

“A delivery boy,” Elizabeth amended.

“Your mother must be very proud of you both. I’m very glad for her. I’ve always had a great affection for her.”

“And she for you, Miss Blake. She asks for you after every meeting.”

“I must visit her. Or perhaps you’ll bring her here to tea some Saturday?”

“Mother would like that.”

And you, Elizabeth,
she thought.
Would it be a trial, a charity for her sake?
“Tom’s still a bachelor?”

“Still.”

“Not for want of girls, I dare say.” It was well known in the town how wide his choice.

“Probably not,” Elizabeth said. “Isn’t that a starling?” She fled to the edge of the porch as though the bird were waiting there to greet her.

What a turn that little flight gave Hannah. When Elizabeth was a child Hannah had often called at her house to bring Mrs. Merritt here to sew. It was shortly after John Merritt’s death and his wife was left to support two children. Hannah was in her late twenties then, and Elizabeth seven or eight, a beautiful child with great solemn eyes. No other child had ever affected her so, and she remembered now the impulses that drove her to touch the girl, to smooth her hair and run her fingers over the golden skin. And once, when Elizabeth had drawn away from her, she had pinched her. Why, God only knew. So, then, had Elizabeth fled from her to the farthest corner of the room. Nor had she ever been persuaded to go for a ride in the Packard touring car Hannah drove in those days. She could remember coaxing, begging the child. Elizabeth had forgotten it, please God. Would that she herself could forget it.

“There’s a flock of starlings in the rose arbor,” she said. “They’ve been coming every year since Father gave them their first welcome. Do you remember him?”

“Indeed I do, Miss Blake.” Elizabeth turned back, all smiling, which was the way with many people when Hannah’s father was mentioned. All she needed to do to escape an awkward situation was to mention him.

“I remember him coming to our zoology class in high school to speak to us,” Elizabeth mused aloud. “I can even remember how he started—something like: ‘I have finally convinced your teachers that a live bird may contribute as much to man’s knowledge as a dead one.’”

“How typical of him,” Hannah said. “He had such a nice sense of humor.” Which was not part of her inheritance, she thought. She got very little from him, and all the things she wanted that were denied to her had seemed to be his by virtue of his nature and not by his wish at all.

“Do you know,” she continued, “he used to keep those windows on the garden—that’s the study—he kept them open from early March to hear the first robin until the wild geese went south in November. He died in winter. I’ve always thought it sad that there were no birds singing for him those last days.” She laid her hand on Elizabeth’s, hoping to persuade her to an understanding of what she told, or of what she felt even more than of what she told. “I suppose it’s foolish of me, but I keep a little vial of bird seed near his grave.”

“No. I don’t think it’s foolish,” the girl said. She reached for her coffee, her hand slipping naturally away from Hannah’s touch.

Hannah folded her hands tightly. “You pray for the dead, don’t you? It must be a great comfort.”

The sarcasm she intended was lost, or ignored.

Elizabeth smiled. “No greater than your conviction that heaven is there and waiting for those of us who behave ourselves.”

“And yet we don’t know, either of us,” Hannah mused aloud.

“Your garden is lovely this year, Miss Blake.”

“Isn’t it? I have a new gardener—the Keogh boy.”

“I know.”

“Oh, do you know him?”

“He’s at the library a lot.”

“I believe he told me he came from downstate,” Hannah said. “Actually, I hired him without recommendation.”

“A tribute to his charm,” Elizabeth said, rather lightly.

“Charm” was not the quality with which she had been taken certainly, Hannah thought. She tried to remember what it was about him that decided her. “Some day I’m going to ask him for references as a matter of principle,” she said.

“His father is a minister.”

That was news to Hannah. Most interesting. “Do you like poetry?” She kept her eyes on Elizabeth as she put the question. The girl apparently made no association between Keogh and the subject.

“Some poetry,” she said easily.

“It’s rather a lost art in our times, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure that it is.”

“It’s either being written or it’s not, wouldn’t you say?” Hannah demanded.

“Perhaps it’s not being published. Sometimes when an art seems dormant, artists are off working night and day at it. When it comes out, perhaps we’ll have another golden age starting.”

And that was the hesitancy with which she was impatient, Hannah thought. “What a lovely thought,” she said. “How wonderfully optimistic you are, Elizabeth. It’s exactly what I hoped for when the project I want to discuss took shape in my mind.”

“I dare say I read it somewhere, Miss Blake.”

“How characteristic of you, Elizabeth. If I had said it, I should certainly claim it for my own. Well. Has it ever occurred to you that precisely the sort of poet you describe might be hiding away here in the Cove?”

“I don’t suppose I ever thought of it before. But why not?”

“Why not indeed!” Hannah said. “I’ve no notion whether we have poets or dunderheads, of course. But don’t you think it might be interesting to try to find out?”

“Very.”

“I’ve had this in mind for a long time. My father was something of a poet, though few people were aware of it.”

“I’m not surprised,” Elizabeth said. She was remembering the quiet, white-haired man as he walked to and from the bank every day, Hannah thought, and his way of pausing at a bird’s song, of stopping anyone who chanced to pass. “That’s a wren you hear,” he would say even to a stranger. “That’s a scarlet tanager—rare this time of year.” Indeed he might have been a poet.

“I should like to set up a modest sum,” she continued, “by way of drawing any poets we might have in the Cove out of hiding, so to speak.”

Elizabeth thought about it for a few seconds. “You were devoted to your father, Miss Blake,” she said tentatively.

“He was the only man—I ever really knew.” Hannah ended it flatly, for it was not what she had meant to say at all. Suddenly she felt tears rising to her eyes. She wanted very much not to be ashamed of them, and one word from the younger woman would have saved her, even the kindness of meeting her eyes at this moment, but she could draw nothing from her, and she felt helplessly mawkish as she plunged on, saying things she wanted to say even while she knew they called forth no response.

“He was devoted to me, too, in his fashion. The Lord knows why. In the way men love ugly things, I suppose, an old chair they are forever barking their shins on. I always wanted to help him, to surprise him. My help was a hindrance. My surprises made him nervous. Have you ever known anyone like that, Elizabeth?”