“The drama of cutting off a face,” she said.
“I don’t make that connection.”
From the shallow dish she took a cherry.
“The theater is deception,” she said. “No actor plays himself.”
Billy could only say, “All right,” and wait.
She said, “In every role, an actor wears a false identity.”
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She put the cherry in her mouth. A moment later, she spit the pit into the palm of her hand, and swallowed the fruit.
Whether she meant to imply that the pit was the ultimate reality of the cherry, that was what he inferred.
Again, Ivy met his eyes. “He didn’t want the face because it was a face. He wanted it because it was a mask.”
Her eyes were more beautiful than readable, but he did not think that her insight chilled her as it did him. Maybe when you spent your life listening for the voices of the dead, you didn’t chill easily.
He said, “Do you mean sometimes, when he’s alone and in the mood, he takes it out of the jar and wears it?”
“Maybe he does. Or maybe he just wanted it because it reminded him of an important drama in his life, a favorite performance.” Performance. That word had been impressed upon him by Ralph Cottle. Ivy might have repeated it knowingly, or in all innocence. He could not tell. She continued to meet his eyes. “Do you think every face is a mask, Billy?”
“Do you?”
“My deaf grandmother, as gentle and kind as any saint, still had her secrets. They were innocent, even charming secrets. Her mask was almost as transparent as glass—but she still wore one.”
He didn’t know what she was telling him, what she meant for him to infer from what she had said. He did not believe that asking her directly would result in a more straightforward answer.
Not that she necessarily meant to deceive. Her conversation was frequently more allusive than straightforward, not by intention but because of her nature. Everything she said sounded as limpid as a bell note to the ear—yet was sometimes Semi opaque to interpretation.
Often her silences seemed to say more than the words she spoke, as might make sense for a girl raised by the loving deaf.
If he read her half well, Ivy was not deceiving him in any way. But then why had she just suggested that every face, her own included, was a mask?
If Ivy visited Barbara only because Barbara had once been kind to her, and if she took photographs of dead things to Whispering Pines only because she took them everywhere, the photo of the mantis had no relationship to the trap in which Billy found himself, and she had no knowledge of the freak.
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In which case, he could get up, go, and do what urgently needed to be done. Yet he remained at the table.
Her eyes had lowered once more to the pistachios, and her hands had returned to the quiet, useful work of shelling.
“My grandmother was deaf from birth,” Ivy said. “She’d never heard a word spoken and didn’t know how to form them.”
Watching her nimble fingers, Billy suspected that Ivy’s days were filled with useful work—tending to her garden, maintaining this fine house in its current state of spotless perfection, cooking—and that she avoided idleness at all costs.
“She’d never heard anyone laugh, either, but she knew how to do that, all right. She had a beautiful and infectious laugh. I never heard her cry until I was eight.”
Billy understood Ivy’s compulsive industry as a reflection of his own, and sympathized. Quite apart from the question of whether or not he could trust her, he liked her.
“When I was much younger,” Ivy said, “I didn’t fully understand what it meant that my mother had died in childbirth. I used to think that somehow I had killed her and was responsible.”
In the window, the raven stretched its wings again, as silently as it had done before.
“I was eight when I realized I had no guilt,” Ivy said. “When I signed my realization to my grandmother, I saw her cry for the first time. This sounds funny, but I had assumed when she cried, it would be the weeping of a perfect mute, nothing but tears and wrenching spasms of silence. But her sobs were as normal as her laugh. As far as those two sounds were concerned, she was not a woman apart from those who could hear and speak; she was one of their community.”
Billy had thought that Ivy mesmerized men with her beauty and sexuality, but the spell she cast had a deeper source.
He knew what he intended to reveal only as he heard the words come forth: “When I was fourteen, I shot my mother and father.”
Without looking up, she said, “I know.”
“Dead.”
