Town of Masks (7 page)

His eyes never wavered. “What did she confess?”

He was driving her to the wall with his insolent ease. “That you have been taking advantage of her.”

What would he understand by that? The instant the words were out she quailed at them herself. Only his hands tightened over the arms of the chair.

“It may be, of course, that the girl exaggerates.” She tried to qualify. “But if this sort of thing gets about town, well, it might make for a nasty situation.”

She waited as long as she could endure his silence. “Well?”

“It might,” he said.

“I must say, you’re an arrogant young man.”

“If I denied it, Miss Blake, would you believe me?”

By which he meant “would you want to believe me?” she thought.

“I should certainly listen to your account of it,” she said.

“And I don’t want to give any account of it.”

“Then you leave me to believe Sophie’s story.” And he was thinking that it was Sophie’s story she wanted to believe, she decided. “Apparently you’ve had similar experiences before, Dennis.”

“I had one reminiscent of it, Miss Blake. It will do me a lifetime.”

“I see,” she said, wild to see, but determined that he should not have that insight into her. “In which case Sophie was fabricating. Young girls often do. Certainly having escaped one situation, you would not invite another. She’s only a child, you know, at least here.” She lifted a finger to her head. “Otherwise, she’s quite developed. Which may be the trouble. I should suggest, Dennis, that you discourage her more actively.” She studied the letter folder on her desk.

“Would you suggest that I drown her, Miss Blake?”

Hannah glanced up, startled, and caught a flicker of mirth at the corners of his mouth. The impulse to laugh rose inside her, a tingling provocative urge responding to what she took to be his sly exposure of the hoax in the situation. It was as though he had said, “You faker, let’s come to the heart of the matter.”

She threw back her head and burst the high, rich music of her laughter to the walls. The young man laughed also with a fine heartiness. When the spasm left her, its relaxation lingered, a lazy, delicious ease rolling out the constrictions. “Oh, Dennis, I haven’t laughed like that in such a long time.”

“An eggcup full of it is worth a bucketful of tears,” he said.

“That’s a lot of wisdom to pick up at twenty-four,” she said. “When I was young I much preferred the tears.”

“So did I,” he said, “when I was young.”

“Right now you’re very young to say that. Or to think I’d be in sympathy with it. What have you been through to get that sober look you wear all the time?”

“I was born with a caul,” he said.

“You were born with a fine, glib tongue at any rate,” she said, aware of the evasion but not hurt by it, finding an easy retort herself. “They say it’s part of an Irish inheritance, and you do have an affinity for them here, don’t you?”

“I’m at home down there, Miss Blake.”

“And you a minister’s son?”

“My father would not be at home there,” he said, “though he’d go through all the motions of being comfortable.”

Whatever they might be, Hannah thought. She got up from her desk and sat in an upholstered chair, turning the lamp to where it would not shine in her face. “That is an element of the Cove which I have never understood. Sometimes I’d like to. I just can’t make it. It puts me in awe of people like yourself who can break away from their inheritance.”

“If you can just get far enough away to take a good look at it, Miss Blake—that’s all it takes.”

She smiled. He had said it in such an earnest, boyish manner, much as though he were trying to teach her how to ice-skate.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all if you want to. You have to want to. I don’t know what happens if you’re afraid to do it. It’s probably like quitting church. You have to dare yourself not to go once, twice. Then suddenly it’s easy.”

“Is that how you quit church?”

“No. I quit in one fell stroke. I didn’t have any trouble, but some people do.”

“Sometimes it’s easier to quit than it is to stay,” she murmured.

“It was for me,” he said bluntly.

She watched him for a few seconds. “Dennis, I know something of you that I have no right to know.” She had to move away then from the intentness of his eyes. She went to the window, her back to him. “I’m a snooper, an idle snooper,” she began, and even as she spoke she found that the truth she had not intended to tell seemed almost a fable as she admitted it. “I must say in my own defense, I didn’t intend to snoop. I was plowing through that exquisite order in which you keep the tool shed. I think I was looking for a trowel and I was annoyed to find the bench drawers locked. I was going to leave them open. Then I found your notebook. I read only a few lines the first time. But I could not resist the temptation to go back and finish them. Actually, that’s what I wanted to tell you tonight.”

She waited at the window, honestly not wanting to see his reaction.

“May I smoke?” he asked after a few seconds.

“Of course.”

“Is that why you were afraid for Sophie?” he asked, the cigarette lighted. “Because of what you read there?”

She was glad then that her back was to him. He had not seen the hoax at all. His laughter with her had been no more than contagion. How little she knew really of the estimate others put on her, how frightfully small it was in her calculations.

“Perhaps it was,” she said, falling back on the lie helplessly.

“You shouldn’t have been. But then I guess it was natural when you didn’t know me very well.”

“Natural?” she murmured, trying to concentrate on what he was saying.

“I mean that you shouldn’t understand it. You see, the things I put down on paper aren’t meant to be taken literally.”

“You don’t need to explain that to me, Dennis. I’m not without some adequacy to poetry.”

“Excuse me. I didn’t mean that either,” he said. “All I’m trying to tell you now is that sometimes I write the things when I can’t have the experience.”

“You write of the dream,” she said away from him that he might not see the color his frankness had brought to her face.

“Exactly.”

“I believe they call it sublimation,” she murmured.

“Call it whatever they like, it’s my own business what I do with it.”

She returned to the armchair, “Dennis, I’m not criticizing you. My own life has been filled with dreams, sublimations, and I’ve rarely managed to do anything with them—as you have.”

Again he apologized, this time for his belligerency. How young he was, really. And now, sitting at ease in his discomfort, she felt a maturity beyond what she thought she deserved from her experience.

“Are you afraid of the truth?” she asked, more to her own thoughts than his.

“I don’t think so, but I guess I am sometimes. I suppose everybody is. Are you?”

“Mortally.”

He grinned a little, studying the ash on the end of his cigarette. “I’d never have guessed it.”

How she would have liked to pursue that, to ask him what he had thought of her, with that beginning. But not yet, not until she had managed to communicate something of her hopes for him, of her own dreams of giving.

“Use the vase there as an ash tray,” she said.

“It’s too nice for that,” he said, looking about for something else.

“It’s as ugly as sin and you know it.”

He glanced at her and away in some confusion. “I thought maybe it was an heirloom.”

“What mortal worth if it’s put to no use?” she said, feeling some familiarity in the conversation, as though she had been over the self-same words before. Recognition of them burst upon her—Maria Verlaine commenting on her inheritance. She thrust it from her mind. “Am I to be pardoned for my snooping?”

“Did you like what you read?”

“I found it—very exciting.”

He smiled, his eyes alive with glee. “Funny, I’d have thought it would shock hell out of you—Excuse me, Miss Blake.”

She lifted her head. “It did shock hell out of me. All my Presbyterian qualms—qualmed. I have no doubt you will find the same response in other provincials, and some of them may not care for excitement. Personally, I love it. And as long as I live, I shall take it where I find it.” The words escaped rather more melodramatic than she intended. “You will give something to the library contest?” she added quickly.

“I don’t know, Miss Blake.”

It had not occurred to her that he might hesitate. Well it was that she had brought on this occasion. “You have heard about it?”

“Yes. Miss Merritt told me.”

“And encouraged you to enter something?”

“Yes.”

“Did you show them to Miss Merritt?”

“I haven’t shown them to anyone,” he said.

“If they were mine,” said Hannah, “I should soon make the world aware of them. This should be a good start. Nor, I dare say, would you object to a thousand dollars?”

“No. But then I might not win it.”

She got up and went over to him, putting her hand lightly on his shoulder. “Do you believe that, Dennis?”

“No.”

“Good. There are enough things to be timid about, but not your heart’s work. I’m going to make a pot of coffee. Will you have some with me?”

“Thank you,” he said.

“There are books enough here to distract you, I think. I won’t be long.”

What a difference to her this walk from the study to the kitchen from that which she had taken when he was at the door! Oh, that it should not again be a tunnel of clacking heels and the sound of her own fears—that a stranger at the door might indeed be a stranger, and a friend someone to whom she might say, “Welcome home.”

When she returned with the coffee tray, he was sitting on the arm of a chair beneath the book shelves near her father’s desk. He brought a book with him, coming to help her. Her pleasure in that little gesture, his bringing the book and speaking of it presently, was consummate.

“Yeats,” he said. “There’s something here I love, this image: ‘How love fled, and paced upon the mountains overhead, and hid his face amid a crowd of stars.’”

“Lovely,” she murmured.

“May I read you the whole poem?”

“I should like that,” she said. She sat quite still and very erect and tried to listen. Certain of the words did break through her own heart’s song. When he was done, she said, “Thank you,” and poured the coffee, feeling a measure of dignity about her in this little work of hospitality.

He was watching her, she knew, the book now closed in his hand. Finally he said, “Thank you,” the emphasis on “you,” and fled with the book to its place on the shelf.

And glad she was to have the moment, for she could not have met his eyes without tears in her own. It was too much, she thought, to place on him the burden of her need, the knowledge of her hunger. Nor did she want to place them, having a quick courage sufficient to their containment. And she was desperately grateful now that he had not understood the ruse she had made of Sophie’s dotage on him. God was sometimes good in His limiting of one man’s knowledge of another’s mind and heart.

“The tea cakes are Sophie’s,” she said when he returned. It was the best of retribution she could make at the moment. “She cooks and bakes so well. What a little housekeeper she will make one day.”

He took the cup she handed him, and sipped. “The coffee, I presume, is yours. It’s delicious.”

“You’re very kind,” she said.

He told her then of why he had come to Campbell’s Cove, his love of boats, especially sailing boats and why he was most content among the rough and hardy Irish fishermen. “I know the feeling about them in the rest of the town, Miss Blake, that if they’d bring themselves up to date, they’d have a going business, a good living. But what’s a good living? A fancy car? A television set?”

“To some people.”

“Did you ever hear them talk?”

“Sometimes. They’re not an island down there. They come into the bank now and then.”

“I mean really talk—of where they came from, of storms, catches of fish, heroes. They’ve a language of their own and it’s like singing.”

And telling of it, his was like singing, she thought.

“And I don’t blame them at all for sticking with their old-fashioned boats and shaking their fists at the hot rods on water. Everybody seems to have a hot rod inside of him today. I say to hell with them. Let them go and shoot up the world and to hell with them.”

“And if a part of the world shows every intention of shooting them up, what then, Dennis?”

He looked at her. “I say you can’t die any faster at home.”

She studied the residue in her cup, a dark crescent. “I’m afraid that’s more poetry than truth.”

“So many people have died for truth. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if they could live for poetry?”

“You are a pacifist,” she mused.

“I guess I am now.”

“Interesting for an Irishman.”

“The Irish is far back in me,” he said. “It’s just—you called it an affinity, I think. I’ve got an affinity for a lot of things, Miss Blake.” He set his cup on the tray and leaned back in the chair, his legs stretched the length of the coffee table. He told her then of the boats he had sailed, of one which he had rescued from the bottom of a sound in Florida, of his travels and his hopes as a poet, but nothing of himself before she had known him. And she did not really care about that now.

“I’m staying too long,” he said finally.

“You are always welcome,” she said, getting up with him, wishing that he would stay on, but content, too, in his going that she might contemplate all that had passed between them. She led the way to the side door. “This is an old house and it has many charms—but none equal of its guests. Next time you will come as such, Dennis.”

“Thank you, Miss Blake.”

She extended her hand as was her custom on the departure of guests. He took it and lifted it briefly to his lips.

T
HESE WERE SINGING DAYS
. No amount of work was too much for Hannah, and no amount of leisure more than she could bear of it. Dennis had not come again, and when she passed him in the garden, he was as remote as ever, perhaps even a bit more formal. But that was shyness, she knew, self-consciousness that might have come over him on rereading his poetry with a view to what she had taken from it—from his tortured dreams of a woman whom, he had said in effect, he had never known that intimately.