Town of Masks by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

routine almost as old as herself.
    From the sidewalk she could see Maria in the living-room, reading, the perpetual cigarette in her mouth. Hannah crossed the lawn and lingered at the window. How many times she had done this very thing! Since first she was able to drive a car, she had parked it just beyond the driveway, and crossed the lawn, pausing at this window to see what was going on inside before she called out. Once she had surprised Maria and John Copithorne. She had not thought of that for years. He might have married Maria if she had not gone off to France. Maria got up from the chair and poured herself some wine from a cruet—the measure of her allowance for the night, no doubt. She always needed to measure things beforehand so that she would not go too far.
    “Maria! It’s Hannah. May I come in?”
    The question was no more than gesture. She was already inside the door.
    “It’s past your bedtime, isn’t it?” Maria said over her shoulder. Hannah’s penchant for sleep always amused her.
    “But early for yours,” she said, “and I wanted terribly to talk to someone.”
    Maria was slowing down. She got up slowly, but the small sharp eyes were quick. They took in everything in one dart and returned to a fresh cigarette which she lighted. “Sit down, Hannah. Make an exception tonight. Take some wine.”
    “No, thank you. I don’t need stimulants.” Hannah lowered herself into a chair, by habit testing its strength by her weight on the arms. She looked about the room. It seemed a long time since she had been in it. “I feel almost at home here.”
    “You should. You came here first in diapers.”
    Hannah stretched her feet out ahead of her. She must have turned her ankle. It was beginning to swell. A little spot of blood shone in the round hole in her hose. “I’m disheveled, aren’t I?”
    “Somewhat.”
    “Well, I always looked that way—here.”
    Maria shot a spiral of smoke between them. “Out with it. What happened?”
    “I fell from a high mountain,” she said, feeling infinitely, unearthly calm now.
    “You were never good at allegory, Hannah, and you look as though you’d fallen into a cement mixer.”
    Hannah smiled. “The cement mixer becomes me better in your mind’s eye than the high mountain, doesn’t it, Maria?”
    Maria watched her over the film of smoke that lay between them like a sheet out of which their heads were poking. “Hannah, I don’t know what sort of thing you’ve gotten yourself into now. But if you’ve come here to belittle yourself again, maybe we can both have a try at it. There’s just a chance we can straighten you out.”
    “I’ve been straightened out, but it’s very kind of you,” she said. In her mind she thought she had made a discovery. Maria Verlaine was not so wise as she had always thought her. She wore her scorn for the commonplace to cover something very commonplace in herself. She courted poets because she had no song of her own. Why else should she have spent a lifetime in Campbell’s Cove, having tasted the wonders of the world? “How did they keep you down on the farm after you’d seen Paree?”
    “What?”
    “Do you know what I was thinking of outside there? The night I looked in on you and Johnny Copithorne. I could see the two of you just as clear tonight. This is where the old horsehair sofa was.”
    “I never knew a more uncomfortable piece of furniture,” Maria said.
    Hannah giggled. “It didn’t look uncomfortable that night.”
    “It was. There’s nothing so unpleasant as to have to scratch when someone’s making love to you.”
    Hannah’s mind slid away from the picture. “It feels good to scratch when you’re itchy,” she mused.
    “And to drink when you’re thirsty and eat when you’re hungry. What did you come to tell me?”
    What went ye out to see? asked Jesus, Hannah thought. “It’s been a long time, Maria, since you came to church, the church we were reared in.”
    “My God,” Maria said,