Masks

Elspeth

The Sable Court has not changed in eight years, and that is the first thing that frightens me.

I see it from the back of the car as we come up Fifth Avenue at a quarter to nine on the fifth of January, in a thin hard snow that has begun again out of a clear black sky: the black granite face, the gold-leaf cornice, the long canopy of green and gold light spilling across the pavement. A red carpet has been laid under it, wet and shining. Photographers stand behind a velvet rope in their stamped-down boots, stamping, blowing on their hands. A doorman in a greatcoat the color of old brass opens each car door as though he were lifting a lid from a dish.

There is a banner across the front of the building.

THE MARROW FOUNDATION PRESENTS THE EIGHTH ANNUAL EVERGREEN MASQUERADE. IN SUPPORT OF THE LARKSPUR FUND FOR MENTAL HEALTH.

I read it twice.

I am wearing a gown the color of the underside of a leaf and a mask of beaten silver, and I have in my glove a folded paper with the names of fifty-two people on it. Beside me in the dark of the car, in a black tailcoat and white tie, with a half-mask of black lacquer pushed up on his forehead, Ambrose Kestrel sits with his hands on his knees.

"You are counting," he says.

"Yes."

"What?"

"The photographers." I do not turn. "Nineteen. Four with long lenses. Two on the roof of the van, with a rig. That's the live stream."

"Thirteen thousand, at the last count."

"Fourteen, now."

"Elspeth."

"I'm all right."

"Your left hand."

I look down.

It is lying in my lap on the green silk, palm down, and under my glove the forefinger is tapping. Once. Twice. Three times. I watch it with a kind of remote interest, as I'd watch a stranger's hand on a train.

I turn the hand over, and lay it palm up on the silk, and he puts his own on top of it, covering it entirely, warm and dry and steady.

"Zurich," I say.

"Yes?"

"It's the word. If I say it. I want you to know I might."

"Then I shall stop the evening."

"You'll do no such thing."

"I shall stop the evening," says Kestrel, with great gentleness, "and take you home, and you may be as angry with me as you please."

I almost laugh.

The car stops. The door opens on a gust of cold and a flare of light, and the doorman bends, and says in the deep warm voice of the profession: "Good evening, madam. Welcome to the Sable Court."

I step out into the snow.

…

You must understand what a masquerade is.

It is not a disguise. A disguise is for the person wearing it. A mask at a place like this is a courtesy extended to everyone else: it says, I shall not be held to what I do tonight. Three hundred of the richest people in New York pass under the canopy in velvet and fur and white tie, in feathers and gilt and black lace, with their faces tucked behind a thin curve of papier-mâché, and every one of them is a little less accountable than yesterday. The women laugh at a different pitch. The men stand a little closer. Somewhere in the forty seconds between the street and the ballroom, a great many careful people put down their characters like umbrellas.

I have walked this stair before.

It's the same stair. Marble, white, forty-two steps, with a gilt rail and a runner the color of wine. The same coffered ceiling above, the same hundred chandeliers, tier on tier, a glittering inverted forest of crystal. The same smell: gardenias, hot wax, French perfume, money. A string quartet is playing somewhere above the din, thin and sweet and civilized, and a crowd of masks is moving up the steps in a slow eddy, and I am in it, with my hand on a stranger's sleeve.

Eight winters ago.

A green velvet dress. A pen in my glove.

A man in a gold mask at the top of the stairs.

I climb.

I count the steps as I climb them. Eleven, twelve. A woman in peacock feathers glances at me and away. Twenty. A man in a clown's ruff says to his companion, "Who's that?" Thirty. "I don't know. Someone's secretary." Thirty-five.

At the top, a footman in gray gloves holds out a silver tray of masks, spare ones, for the unprepared; and beside him, with a clipboard, a young woman in a black dress asks my name.

"Elspeth," I say.

"I'm sorry?"

"Dr. Kestrel's guest."

"Ah." She runs a pencil down the list. "Dr. Kestrel plus one. Table one." She glances up, at the silver mask, and her face does a small polite flicker. "He's already been seated, madam. I'm to show you the way."

"Thank you."

She turns.

I follow her through a pair of gilded doors into the ballroom, and the whole enormous glittering hall opens before me like the inside of a jewel.

…

I will not describe it all.

I will say that it is three hundred and forty feet long. That the ceiling is a hundred and ten feet at the dome, painted with a sky. That the floor is a polished sea of black and white marble over which a thousand lights are reflected upside down. That the long tables, set in rows across the room, are white-clothed and laid with gold, each with its tall centerpiece of white roses and dark green ivy and tiny frosted pinecones. That on a raised dais at the far end, under a banner of green silk, there is a head table of twenty places, and a podium, and a bank of microphones, and a great white screen on which, in letters six feet high, the word EVERGREEN turns slowly in a wreath of holly.

I will say that the string quartet is on the left of the dais, four small figures in black on gilt chairs.

I will say that I look at the second violin.

She is a girl of about thirty with a pale narrow face and a bun. She plays with her eyes closed. And as I pass, with the young woman in black ahead of me and the crowd streaming on every side, she opens them and looks at me, once, directly, and lowers her bow a quarter of an inch.

It is the whole of what passes between us.

Paid, I think.

Good.

…

"Madam."

The voice is at my elbow.

It is soft, courteous, and a little too close. I turn my head. A man is standing at my shoulder, in a tailcoat and a mask of black velvet that covers the upper half of his face: a lean man with silver-gray hair, a thin mouth, and a pair of pale eyes which, through the slits, are looking at me with an expression of polite and impersonal appreciation.

I know the mouth.

I would know it at the bottom of a river. It is the mouth of a man at a long table in a wood-paneled room, eating a poached turbot and not looking at his brother. It is the mouth I watched move in a dream on the night of the fourteenth of October, saying, to the dark: Take it from him.

"Good evening," says Warren Marrow.

I do not breathe.

"You're one of Dr. Kestrel's, I believe." He inclines his head. "I am Warren Marrow. One of the family. I wondered if I might have the honor."

"Of what?"

"A dance."

"There's no music."

"There will be," says Warren. "Presently. It is a masquerade; one dances before supper. It is the custom." His eyes move over the silver mask, the line of my jaw, the throat, the small cold hand in its glove. "I should so like to have the first. It is a great occasion for my mother."

He doesn't know.

The thought comes in a cold clear line, like a figure at the bottom of a column.

He doesn't know it's me. He's looking at a stranger. A tall thin woman in green, with a mask, and a doctor's arm. He's looking at someone who was dead.

He has never once looked at my face.

"I'm afraid I'm promised," I say.

I use a voice I have never used. It's lower than Dahlia's, and slower than mine. It has a trace of something foreign in it, a roll to the r, a lengthening of the vowels. It is the voice of a Dublin grandmother, taken down from a shelf in my head and dusted.

"Ah." His smile does not change. "To whom?"

"To the doctor."

"The doctor does not dance."

"He may make an exception."

"I doubt it." Warren lifts his chin. "You are Irish."

"My grandmother was."

"I thought so. There is a particular way with the r." His eyes narrow, a hair. "Forgive me. I am a collector of voices. It's a small vice." A pause. "Where did you say you were from, madam?"

Not yet.

I smile.

I do it slowly, behind the mask, with the whole of my face, and I let him see it through the slits: a small, warm, regretful, entirely sincere smile, the smile of a woman who has been paid a compliment and cannot quite accept it.

"I didn't," I say.

And I put my hand on his sleeve, lightly, with the gloved fingers resting on the black wool, and look up into his eyes; and I say, in my grandmother's voice, as kindly as I have ever said anything:

"But you're very good to ask."

His mouth opens a fraction.

A trumpet sounds.

It is a thin bright fanfare, from somewhere above, and a hush runs through the room like a wind across wheat. Warren's head turns. A hundred chandeliers dim. The doors at the far end of the dais open, and a procession of footmen enters carrying silver trays, and behind them, small and upright and black-silked, with her silver hair swept up and a cameo at her throat and her hand on the arm of a tall man in a gold mask, comes Cordelia Marrow.

I take my hand from Warren's sleeve.

"Excuse me," I say. "I think they are calling us."

…

I find Kestrel at the head table.

He is on the left of an empty chair. He is sitting with his shoulders back and his hands on his knees and his black half-mask lowered, and his face, in the glow of the candles, is a mask beneath the mask: smooth, grave, reserved. He rises as I come. He draws out a chair. In the whole vast hall, in the sea of laughing masks, nobody is looking at us.

"You were stopped," he says, under the din.

"By Warren."

"And?"

"He asked me to dance."

His fingers tighten on the chair-back. "What did you say?"

"I said no, in a Dublin accent."

"He believed it?"

"He believes everything," I say, "that he has already decided."

I sit.

The chair on my right is empty. A card stands before it in a silver holder, lettered in copperplate. I turn it with a finger.

Mr. Anders Pryce. Executive Director.

"He is late," I say.

"He is on his way. I had word at six. He is being driven in from Marrow Hall with Pruett." Kestrel's eyes are on the room. "Cordelia has kept him in his rooms all day. She does not trust him in public."

"With reason."

"With very good reason."

I fold my napkin.

On the dais, Cordelia Marrow has taken her place at the center of the head table, with the tall gold mask at her left and an empty chair on her right where her husband should be. She does not look round. She sits quite straight, with her small hands on the cloth, and surveys her kingdom through the slits of a mask the color of old ivory. Three hundred people turn their faces to her like flowers.

"Ladies and gentlemen," says a smooth voice through the loudspeakers. "The Marrow Foundation welcomes you to the Eighth Annual Evergreen Masquerade."

Applause. A ripple of laughter.

"Please be seated for dinner."

…

It takes two hours.

I eat.

I do not know what. A consommé, a fish, a roast of something pale, in a sauce; a salad of bitter leaves; a sorbet in a silver cup. I put each forkful in my mouth and swallow it. I speak when I am spoken to. I discuss, with a stout banker on my left, the unseasonable cold; I discuss, with his wife, the new wing of the Whitney. I am charming. I am quiet. I am a Dublin woman of no importance, visiting from abroad, the guest of a physician.

And at nine minutes past ten, from the doors at the end of the room, a man in a gold mask comes in.

I know him before I see his face.

I know him by the walk. I know him by the way the left foot comes down a fraction late, the old limp from a boyhood fall, disguised now into a kind of languid swing. I know him by the set of the shoulders. I know him by the hand which, as he threads between the tables, trails along the back of each chair he passes, lightly, idly, as a man trails his fingers in a stream.

He is in white tie and a mask of gilt leather. He has been given a different face, and a different name, and a seat at the head table. But he walks as he walked into the restaurant on East Seventy-Ninth Street on the night he asked me to marry him, and I put my fork down on my plate very carefully, and fold my hands in my lap.

"He's here," says Kestrel.

"Yes."

"Breathe."

"I am."

"Elspeth."

"I know."

He mounts the dais.

He bows to his mother. She does not turn her head. He crosses behind the chairs, slowly, nodding to a bishop, to a senator's wife; and then he is at the empty seat on my right, and he puts a gloved hand on the back of it, and bends, and says in a pleasant, light, tired baritone:

"I hope I'm not intruding."

I look up.

I look through the slits of a silver mask into a pair of warm brown eyes.

They are three feet from mine. They are the eyes I knew. They are tired, and bright, and a little bloodshot, and they are looking at me with a kind of vague, civil, social interest. They are looking at a guest. A stranger. A woman in green.

Say nothing, I tell myself. Say nothing. Say nothing.

"Not at all," I say, in my grandmother's voice.

"Anders Pryce."

"A pleasure."

"You're with the doctor?"

"I'm a friend."

"Ah." He sits. He picks up his napkin, and shakes it out, and lays it on his knee; and as he does so I see his left hand tremble, very slightly, and I see him see it, and put the hand under the cloth. "Forgive me. I've been traveling. I'm afraid I'm rather poor company."

"I am sure you are not."

"You're very kind."

He turns his head.

For a moment, a quarter of a second, he looks directly into the eyes behind the mask. I see something move in the brown depths. A flicker. A hesitation. A faint, puzzled crease between the brows, as of a man who has heard a sound he cannot place.

Then it is gone, and he smiles, and the smile is warm, and a little sad, and perfectly empty.

"Have we met?" says Conrad.

I hold his gaze.

I hold it for the length of three heartbeats. I count them. One. Two.

"I don't think so," I say.

Three.

"No," says Conrad, slowly. "I don't suppose we have."

He looks away.

And beside me, under the table, in the dark, I feel a warm dry hand close over my left one; and it holds it, hard, until the tapping stops.