Town of Masks (11 page)

Hannah thought the cord was very strong to be so old. Silk. The Adamses always bought the best.

When there was no movement beneath her, Hannah got up. She could not even remember having flung herself on Maria. It had not been necessary, Maria had so little fight. On the floor at the side of the chair the cigarette was still burning. She ground it out beneath her toe.

Without looking at the chair again, she got her purse and left the house almost as she had found it.

A
NEAR PARALYSIS OVERTOOK
Hannah when she was once more behind the wheel of the car. She had thought that could she get that far she would be all right. But sitting there, her hands numb on the wheel, she seemed to have forgotten how to drive, to have lost the reflexes responsive to that old habit. Her chin bumped on the wheel. She stared into the empty street, musing on how dimly lit it was, the glow from the converted gas lamps too weak to raise a shadow. A great truck surged out of the gloom its headlights flashing dim to bright, to dim to bright. She groped over the dashboard and plucked on her own lights as it passed.

She was able then to start the motor, but she sawed at the gear shift, unable to decide whether to turn around or to drive through the town. In the end she drove forward, the task of reversing the car too difficult. She drove very slowly, her knees beginning to tremble as soon as the numbness left them. Soon she was shaking all over, even her teeth jarring together as she parted them that she might breathe more deeply. Her lungs ached for more air, the car was stifling hot to her; but she dared not take her hand from the wheel to roll the window down. By the time she turned into her own driveway, her clothes were soaked with sweat, and she was aware of a sour, acrid smell about herself.

She saw no light but the fan of her own headlights, narrowing at last into two moons on the wall of the garage. Darkness then. She sat, the car door open, listening. Nothing but the spasmodic creak of the car settling, its motor cooling. Dennis had not returned. How long ago it was that she had first seen him that night, or last seen him for that matter. What was the use of clocks when time had no dimension beyond experience? What a kindness on the part of time it would be if she could climb the garage stairs now and find no trace of Dennis, if she could discover that he was part of something that happened here long ago, that he was a boy her father had hired, one of the many he always had to discharge because of her mother’s apprehensions. “I don’t trust him around with Hannah—”

She got out of the car and rolled the garage door closed, and then limped across the lawn to the back door of the house.

In the kitchen, she remembered the cup in the sink, and carefully gathered the two pieces.
I should keep these,
she thought,
a remembrance.
No. No remembrance. No requiem. She flung the pieces in the trash box.
I shall go up and down, up and down, forward, but not back.

She paused at the study door on her way through the house. She went in then and looked about the room. The temple. The pages of her careful plagiarism lay, fan-shaped on the desk. She caught them up and took them to the fireplace where the logs and kindling were laid for a chilly night. And this was a chilly night, she thought, touching a match to them.
I shall never know a colder one.
When the blaze was high she fired one and then another of Sappho’s lyrics.

She sat a long time, numbly rubbing the swollen ankle, and watching the flakes of paper ash rise in the draft, quiver an instant, and then vanish like gulls in a stormy sky.

Presently she replaced the screen before the log embers and went to the windows overlooking the garden. She opened them all and left them that way. Before she turned away, the light appeared in the room over the garage.

Turn it out, Dennis,
she thought.
The night should be all darkness now.
Nor did she light her own way up the stairs.

H
ANNAH WAKENED IN THE
morning from a sleep so profound it seemed that she had been in it a long time; and then it seemed that the waking was the sleep, the dreams a dear reality; she had been laboring with an aching weariness in a great, golden wheatfield. The field, rolling from one hillock to the next, had no beginning and no end except morning and night, and she was binding shock after shock of the quick-fallen grain, always weary, always on the point of exhaustion, yet always equal to one more bundle. Her hands were stiff and blistered with the cord—in the dream.

Tentatively, she brought her hands before her to examine them. There was indeed a blister on the outside of her left forefinger.

“You awake, Miss Blake?”

She turned her eyes toward the voice. Sophie was shaking out the clothes she had heaped on the floor in the darkness. She wanted to drive the girl from the room, for a sickening recollection had come over her while she was trying to understand the blister. Instead, she startled the girl with her calmness.

“What are you doing, Sophie?”

“Just picking up, Miss Blake.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s after eight. I didn’t know if I should wake you—”

“You may get breakfast. I’ll pick up.”

“Yes ma’am.” The girl dropped the slip on the floor.

“I must have knocked them off the chair,” Hannah said. “I was up in the night. Sophie, is there something you wanted to say to me?”

The girl turned at the door. “No, ma’am. Just what time it was.”

“Thank you. I’ll be down in ten minutes.”

There was an enchanted sameness about everything as she arose and got her robe from the closet. Beneath her window the lawn had been freshly mowed. Dennis was bending over the power mower with an oil can near the main road. He looked up and waved as someone drove by and touched a car horn in greeting to him. The Carson boy bicycled up the drive, halloing to Dennis, and flung the county daily on the porch. She heard the thud of it. Sophie evidently was in sight of the boy, for he whistled, and then, going away, grinned at her over his shoulder and waved.

Her breakfast, too, was as usual, the bacon limp—characteristic of Sophie, either brittle or limp, and today was limp day. She looked at her ankle beneath the table. With an elastic bandage she could walk almost normally.

There was nothing out of the ordinary in the
Odenah County Journal
: baseball and taxes—Senator Cravens demanding an investigation of the United States consulships—the grass roots of our foreign relations. She had voted for Cravens, the need of a change in the Senate being obvious, but there had always been something about him which did not sit well with her ideals of good government. It was not, she told herself, that he had risen from the slums of an industrial town, but rather that he had done it too quickly, and coming from where he did, aligned himself with the wrong party. She found it disconcerting, too, that he had taken the whole of the Campbell’s Cove vote, including Front Street. A split ballot on Front Street!

Strange, she mused, turning the paper to the local news, that she could sit here at a normal breakfast, thinking about politics. But from the moment of rising, she had felt the power to go on and on, even as she had done in the dream. She would meet each exigency as it arose, and go on from it. She would tell what the moment demanded telling, no more, no less.

The name Merritt was in the social column. She had almost missed it in her distractions. Thomas Merritt was to be married that week to Miss Phyllis Sorenson of Jefferson City at the bride’s home. A sudden decision, certainly, and not at church. Sorenson, an unlikely name to be of the Merritt’s faith. Things were happening in that house surely. It had been a long time, she thought, since she had called on Mrs. Merritt. It was time for a visit—if the day went well.

She stopped the car beside Dennis on her way to work, and spoke to him from the window.

“Is it too late to prune the currant bushes, Dennis?”

Such easy words. So easy an answer while he wiped the sweat from his face, the clean sweat of sunlight. “I’ll find out, Miss Blake.”

“Do. The berries are very small this year.”

“They are all over.”

“Are they? You were working again last night.” She added the words as though they were an afterthought. “I woke up toward midnight. Your light was still on.”

He merely nodded, a little smile at the corners of his mouth.
“God damn your prying soul,”
she remembered. She laughed mirthlessly and drove on.

The book she had intended to return last night was on the seat beside her. One mission had been completed. Why not another? A test of strength, and just time to test it, for she was not in the habit of being late to the office, and this was no day to break routines.

She had not expected to see Elizabeth Merritt at the charge desk when she had worked until nine the night before. But fresh and pert she looked, the Happy Girl. She was doing her hair differently these days, a silly lock flapping down on her forehead. Presumed to be youthful, no doubt.

Hannah laid the anthology of women poets before her. “Congratulations, Elizabeth.”

“Hello, Miss Blake. Congratulations?”

Shrewd she was. “On Tom’s betrothal. It’s in the paper today.”

“Thank you,” Elizabeth murmured, her eyes on the card she was stamping.

“I must call on your mother and congratulate her,” Hannah said. “She must have been waiting a long time for this day.”

Elizabeth looked at her, and Hannah searched her eyes for what there might be behind them—some pain? Some secret pain, Elizabeth?

“Mother will appreciate your calling on her.”

The words were frank, honest, Hannah thought, and the girl was beautiful, as fair as morning. Who would dare call her a hypocrite? Hannah tried a smile, picked up her card, and retreated. It was she herself who had been the hypocrite. The truth had been implicit in every move Elizabeth had made, her strained exactitude on the contest, her silencing of Tom that night at Verlaine’s supper. Hannah’s own infatuation with the boy had blinded her.

She tried to concentrate on the day’s work ahead of her as she parked the car. The bank guard’s greeting was the same as always as he tipped his hat and held the door for her. How marvelously normal everything seemed, too normal. That thought struck her when Franklin Wilks passed her in the aisle, his eyes never lifting from the report in his hand, and his greeting the usual command: “Good day, Hannah.” There was in his manner of saying it something which conveyed the meaning: This will be a good day if you make it so. See that you do.

It would be ironic, she thought, removing her hat before the mirror in the washroom—it would be quite ironic if she were to be trapped by normalcy. Her finger trembled as she moistened it and dipped it in her compact to smooth a bit of make-up over a scratch on her face. She could not remember getting it. Bramble, no doubt.

“What happened to your ankle, Miss Blake?” the inside guard asked as she passed on her way to her office.

“Twisted it getting out of the car.”

“That’s a shame.”

That’s a shame, she thought, a shame that a man with a wife and three children didn’t miss the ankles of a woman who came into the bank, clerk or customer.

“Hi, Miss Blake.”

“Hi yourself, Nancy.”

Her secretary placed a sheaf of correspondence before her, finished too late for her approval the day before. She had put her logic, her style, her experience into those letters, and the signature, as was the rule he had initiated, was to be Franklin Wilks. The practice had long irked her. Now it was intolerable. She returned them to her secretary.

“Nancy, please retype these—with my name instead of Mr. Wilks’s. You will sign it ‘cashier,’ of course.”

“Yes, Miss Blake.”

Shackled or free, Hannah thought, but until shackled, entirely free.

I
T WAS A SLOW
morning at the bank, with almost all the traffic to the tellers’ cages.

Hannah had before her the applications for loans to be submitted to the next directors’ meeting. No one, it seemed, could afford the cash for the necessities or the luxuries to which his income entitled him. Her approval was no more than a credit rating, she thought—the poor man’s Dun and Bradstreet. Nine-tenths of the applications would be approved, from the money to calk three fishing boats to the purchase price of a television set for the Grundys. Sam Grundy came to the bank as the fisherman in the fairy tale went to the enchanted fish, bidden by his wife on each mission to ask a larger favor. And every month, Grundy added a few more hours’ overtime at the box factory. In Hannah’s father’s time, Grundy would have been told long since to tell his wife that she had gone too far, for Nathan Blake had compassion on the Grundys of the Cove.

Hannah initialed the applications. Ten o’clock. Ten-ten. The wall clock marked vigil with her. The sun rose higher, one awning after another coming down on High Street.

Where was Maria’s maid, the faithful Irish biddy to whom Maria was so devoted? The milkman? The paper boy? The mailman? Had none of them eyes? Had none of them tongues? She laid her hand on the telephone, so strong was her urge to know if there were anyone stirring at all in the house on Cherry Street. But instead of Maria’s number she gave the operator John Copithorne’s, prompted by a subconscious that apparently took over from her mind and will at such moments. Doctor Copithorne had a patient in the chair. He would call her back.

It then occurred to her that Maria might not be dead at all, and, in her mind’s view, she saw the scrawny little woman untwisting herself from the grotesque position in which Hannah had left her. She saw it happening, even to Maria’s lifting her hand to her throat, and her eyes to Hannah’s face in the same naïve stare as when last their eyes met. Hannah clamped her lips over a moan, and looked desperately for something to distract herself. Ten-fifteen.

At ten-fifteen Jeremiah Tobin had an appointment with her. Where was he? Small wonder his business was on the rocks. What were a few minutes to him? So what a few dollars?

Her phone rang. She clenched her fist against catching it up until it had rung again. It was John Copithorne.