Town of Masks (8 page)

At home evenings, Hannah kept a sort of vigil, pleasant enough in itself, for she had found, much to her satisfaction, that she did indeed like poetry, whether it was Keogh or Yeats, Byron, or even the early works of Andrew Sykes. And she had made a fine selection considering the random way she had gone about it in Chicago. Even the arrangement on the shelves pleased her. She had crowded her father’s bird books with the poets she thought he might have liked—Burns and Donnie, Blake, and too much of Tennyson. She herself had had enough of him with the first Idyl in high school, and yet there was a phrase of his she had memorized to some purpose once, and which often since had run through her mind:
His honor rooted in dishonor stood, and faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.
Learned, no doubt in the throes of self-recrimination over a deception practiced on some love of the moment. She had had many loves in those days, many heartaches, which, as she thought back on the mood of them now, seemed to have had deeper pleasure in the ache than in the promise.

She had observed, sitting evenings in the study, that Dennis took his supper early and returned to his room by six-thirty most nights. He would be working, she decided, for as the twilight deepened, his light went on, and sometimes, watching from a darkened window, she could see him move about, pacing in thought. At nine or thereabouts, his light would go out, and he would stride down the path, often whistling a tune. At other times, his muse faring poorly, he walked slowly, silent, his head thrust ahead of him. She was a well of sympathy if he would not stop at it. But he was sufficient to his own distress, as she thought great minds must be.

Within an hour he would return, and his light would burn until well after midnight. That he would come to her with this new work was a hope she tried not to cherish, having no defense against its failure. Only the actual did she now permit herself to dwell upon. She tried to remember how his room looked. She had been frugal in furnishing it, bed, table, two chairs and a dresser, with one floor lamp. He should have a desk lamp. How she would do that room were she given the chance now! That kind of favor she must not try to bestow! She thumped her hand on the table in determination against the constant, nagging impulse. Never again was she to try the purchase of affection. Her life was strewn with such purchases. She could see them lying about, abandoned, a shattered nursery in the wake of spoiled children.

She paged the volume of Andrew Sykes in her hand and read an occasional passage. His early things, she had to admit, were heroic, with a fine sweep and a rich sense of pageantry. But of late, he had taken to belittling as though he were ashamed of his first bold songs. No one sang bold songs any more, she thought. Poets were constricted with introspection, self-fears, disillusion. A whole section of the book in her hand was devoted to a hymnist Sykes had discovered to have been a slave trader. What earthly matter, Hannah thought, two hundred years later? Were his hymns less of a prayer as sung today? What possessed such men that they must bedevil legendary heroes? Fear to bedevil the leaders of their own time? Sykes had no right to that fear, his fame secure, his pocketbook ample. And Dennis Keogh had no authority.

One day she would like to take issue with the excellent Mr. Sykes and she could do it, too, she thought, if Dennis were beside her. And it was not beyond propriety for Hannah Blake to invite the master poet to her house—in the company perhaps of Mrs. Verlaine. Nor could Maria refuse, with Sykes coming. And this is Dennis Keogh, Mr. Sykes. Some day he will wear your crown—She got a pencil and composed a tentative invitation to dinner.

In the morning, on the way to the bank, she stopped at the library. Elizabeth Merritt was at the desk, the sun shining down on her from the domed skylight.

“You’re wearing a halo,” Hannah said aloud, seeing no one in the reading rooms. “The sunlight.” She nodded upward.

“And carrying a pitchfork,” said Elizabeth. “I’ve got Mr. Sykes in the study room.”

Hannah leaned across the desk. “I have the distinct impression that he mistakes himself for George Bernard Shaw.”

Elizabeth smiled. “He gets more devastating every year. That’s certain. I have a new mystery for you, Miss Blake.”

“I’m not sure I’ll have time for it. Did he consent to judge the contest?”

“He did. I wrote you last night on it.”

“What did he say?”

“That he expected sooner or later to be kicked out of the Cove, and that this year was as good as the next.”

“I was just thinking last night, someone should take him down a notch. That’s going to happen, you know. He’s not the only poet in the country.”

“He might surprise us and be very generous. He enjoys his own venom, perhaps for want of criticism.”

“Obviously,” Hannah said. “Has anything come in?”

“A couple of things.”

“Did you read them?”

“I don’t feel that I should read the entries, Miss Blake.”

“You’re right, of course. I still feel that you would be the better judge, Andrew Sykes or no.”

“I’d get all wrapped up emotionally,” Elizabeth said. “Besides, librarians aren’t supposed to read books—just titles and jacket blurbs.”

“Why emotionally?” Hannah demanded.

Elizabeth looked at her. “I know most everyone in the Cove.”

“Oh,” Hannah said. “I must get on to work. I hope—” Her sentence was lost in the appearance of Sykes, his white hair tossing like scud, as he charged into the room. She retreated to the rack of new books.

“A monkey couldn’t find a louse by the light in that room, Miss Merritt.”

“Miss Blake, there’s a complaint for the next board meeting,” Elizabeth said, throwing the words at Hannah. “You know Miss Blake, Mr. Sykes?”

Oh, what a piece of mischief,
Hannah thought, and yet she was pleased.

“We met at the Christians’ festival last year,” Sykes said after a moment’s scrutiny so intense that Hannah squared her shoulders should there be insult in it. “You wore a silvery cloud thing, several of them in fact.” He gestured grotesquely with his hands as though he were describing an explosion. “I think you remarked that you felt like Brunhilde.”

“I said I felt that I looked like Brunhilde,” Hannah said, proving to herself by the amendment that she would not be cowed by the old wasp.

“Mmm,” he agreed. “How terrible to feel like her among the Christians. Nice to see you, Miss Blake.” He returned to Elizabeth. “Am I to hold a candle in there until the next board meeting?”

“No, but you can hold the ladder for me while I go up with a larger bulb, if you want it now.”

“Under those circumstances, I certainly want it now.” He winked at Hannah as she departed.

The old reprobate, Hannah thought. No wonder he had a way with Maria. For all her wish to do it, however, she could not bring herself by word or letter to extend the invitation. She would just have to wait on the contest, that was all. She was forever overrunning the goal.

The unfortunate thing was that having permitted herself the distraction of the plan to entertain Andrew Sykes, she was no longer content in leisure. She turned her energies toward civil defense work, which, in the Cove, lagged or accelerated with her interest. John Copithorne, as president of the town council, was nominal head of it, but Hannah the working power. During the school year, she had not failed once a week to inspect the preparedness drills. Now she studied the map of the town, but even as she ran her fingers over the designated shelters, she knew that the map was only a ritual, a pretense in fact. A hitherto neglected area of the Cove was about to get her attention: Front Street.

H
ANNAH WATCHED THE PREPARATIONS
on the dock, the rolling of barrels, each to an appointed mooring, the names or initials lettered on them in black paint:
Mulroy, O’G., Fitz, Shean.
The hands waiting here for the fishermen’s return were for the most part old men no longer equal to the long day’s work or boys who might stray from their fathers’ trade in the daytime, so long as they were on the docks at night to make fast the boats, to weigh in the catch with the commissionmen, to stretch and repair the nets, to clean the boats.

There was poetry here, she thought, watching the curls of smoke from the old men’s pipes, as they sat hunched and almost immobile, their faces to the sun, their eyes trained to it near to blindness, the poetry of a way of life that was dying slowly. Strange that so few people in the Cove saw it that way. But, she realized, it had taken a poet’s association to bring it home to her.

“O’Gorman, ho!” the cry went up.

Looking to the mouth of the Cove, she saw one and then another of the laden boats humping slowly across the gold-rippled water. Even the sound of their motors was like phlegm in an old man’s throat. A flight of gulls pursued them, whooping and scolding.

O’Gorman was first out in the morning, and signaled the time of return. Nicknamed “the mayor” of Front Street, he was the arbitrator of disputes, the judge of weather, and the father of eleven children, one of whom was on the dock to catch the rope which the big man flung to him.

O’Gorman climbed from the boat and rocked a moment on his feet as though he were steadier on water. His greeting to his son, the boy his height if not his bulk, was a sound thump on the forearm with his doubled fist. Hannah thrilled to the show of strength in it and to something more that she no doubt brought to it in her romantic fashion—a defiance of a new order which dared to say men like him were obsolete. She left the car where she had parked it next to a refrigerated truck and waited for O’Gorman at the end of the dock.

He frowned when he first saw her, knowing her from the bank where last year for the first time in his life he had been obliged to go for a loan. His greeting was friendly, but without enthusiasm.

“I won’t detain you now, Mr. O’Gorman. But later tonight I should like to visit you. It’s on civil defense work.”

“You can come now and neither of us will be detained,” he said, the frown disappearing. He touched his fingers to her elbow to turn her around with him and guide her down the wharf. There was more strength in his fingers, she thought, than some men had in their backs. Another strong thing about him was the smell of fish. His face crinkled in a smile, the lines as deep as the smile itself. “Civil defense. I’m the boy for you, with two lads in the army and one graduated in the last war—and one lost to it.”

To it,
she thought,
not in it; a peculiar phrasing.
“Mrs. O’Gorman might prefer that I come later,” she said, seeing that he was leading her toward the houses.

“Her preference is always in what she gets. She’s a marvelous woman that way.”

If she would rather have seen her husband alone, Hannah saw no sign of it, for Mrs. O’Gorman’s face lighted up on recognition of her, and Hannah was greeted like an old friend or like the lady of the manor being welcomed to the house of an Irish tenant.

“Bring us a pot of tea, Norah,” the woman said to a girl of fourteen or so.

Hannah, taking the one upholstered chair in the room when it was nudged up for her, watched the girl go into the kitchen, where more time was spent by the family than in here, obviously. Her father gave her a slap on the buttocks from where he was pulling off his boots at the kitchen door. The whole house seemed full of the smell of fish and bread and laundry.

“Dan likes a cup of tea at his ease before his supper,” Mrs. O’Gorman explained. “In that he’s unusual. Most of them coming off the water are looking for a nip out of the bottle, and they’ve no patience if you haven’t the supper on the table. Isn’t it a lovely summer, Miss Blake?”

“Lovely,” Hannah agreed.

A noise like thunder rolled overhead.

“That’s the little ones up over us. I’ve been going to take the casters off the bed, but I haven’t the heart for it. It gives them such pleasure—they’re playing streetcar like they saw in Jefferson City last week.”

“They’ll have tracks through the ceiling if you don’t take them off,” O’Gorman said, coming in in his slippers. “They’ll have the bed down on our heads.”

“Children are the same forever,” Hannah said. “When I was a child I played at the same game. In a friend’s house there was a bell on a cord for the maid. Like a streetcar conductor’s.”

“Childer’ have the devil’s own imagination,” Mrs. O’Gorman said.

“Miss Blake wants to see me on civil defense,” O’Gorman said. “She’s the head of it.”

“Sometimes I think I’m only the tail of it,” Hannah said, and they laughed. “All I really want to do tonight is speak with you on a good place for an air-raid shelter in the area.” She described the needs.

“The only place I know of that depth is the basement of the church,” O’Gorman said. He went to the hall and bellowed up to the children to be quiet upstairs or come down and sit in the parlor.

“Would the priest consent to it?” Hannah asked.

“He’d consent easier if there was a compensation,” O’Gorman said.

“Father Daley would give it for nothing,” said his wife. “He’s not out to make money on the country.”

“Only on his parishioners, and he could always pass the corn for a game of bingle during the practice.”

“Dan!” Mrs. O’Gorman turned to Hannah and explained. “It’s a poor parish.”

“I know,” Hannah said. The children of the convent school were forever on the street with chance books. “All the same, I think it would be advisable to offer it without charge. It’s all volunteer work, you know.”

“Dan was just talking, Miss Blake. He never misses a chance to rib the clergy.”

“And damn little chance they miss of returning the favor,” he said. “What would you have me do, Miss Blake?”

“If you can get Father Daley’s consent, that would be helpful, and then when we arrange a meeting in the neighborhood, if you will speak at it. Your support, I think, would get us off to a good start.”

“Aye, it would in this neighborhood. I’m with you.”

“Thank you,” Hannah said. She decided to test an idea. “Do you think it would be possible on Campbell’s Cove Day to stage a mock invasion of the town?”

O’Gorman took an empty pipe from his shirt pocket and sucked on it noisily. “Who’d do the invading and who the defending?”