Peyton Place (19 page)

“I just hate boys,” she told her friend Kathy, but she began to practice sultry looks in her mirror, and all day long, at school, she was aware of Rodney in the seat next to hers.

“Did a boy ever kiss you?” she asked Kathy.

“Oh, yes,” replied Kathy calmly. “Several of them. I liked it.”

“You didn't!” cried Allison.

“Yes, I did,” said Kathy, who, Allison had discovered, would not lie, or even be tactful if it occasioned a slight coloring of the truth. “Yes,” repeated Kathy, “I liked it very much. A boy even screwed me once.”

“Oh, my goodness!” said Allison. “How did he do that?”

“Oh, you know. Put his tongue in my mouth when he kissed me.”

“Oh,” said Allison.

Kathy and Allison changed their reading habits radically that winter. They began to haunt the library in search of books reputed to be “sexy,” and they read them aloud to one another.

“I wish I had breasts like marble,” said Kathy sadly, closing a book. “Mine have blue veins in them that show through the skin. I think I'll draw a picture of a girl with marble breasts.”

“Kathy is just wonderful,” said Allison to Constance. “She's so talented, and imaginative and everything.”

Dear God, thought Constance, first the daughter of a shackowner and now the daughter of an itinerant mill hand. Allison's taste is all in her mouth!

Constance had not much time to spend with her daughter these days. She had bought the vacant store next door to the Thrifty Corner and was now busily engaged in enlarging her shop. She put in a line of men's socks and shirts and another of infants’ wear, and by the first of March she had hired Selena Cross to work for her part time, after school. She also hired Nellie Cross to come in three days a week to clean house for her, and it was at this time that Allison noticed Nellie's newly developed habit of talking to herself under her breath.

“Sonsofbitches, all of ’em,” she would mumble, attacking the woodwork viciously. “Every last one of ’em.”

And Allison would remember the day she had stood on a packing crate and looked into the Cross kitchen.

“Booze and wimmin. Wimmin and booze,” muttered Nellie, and Allison shivered, remembering Selena's scream ripping at the cold November afternoon. She had never been able to bring herself to tell that story to anyone, and she had never mentioned to Selena that she had seen, but soon afterward she saw a book with a paper jacket showing a slave girl with her wrists bound over her head, naked from the waist up, while a brutal-looking man beat her with a cruel-looking whip. That, she concluded, was what had been in Lucas Cross's mind on the afternoon that she had stared through his kitchen window. Lucas must have beaten Nellie until the woman's mind was gone.

“Sonsofbitches,” said Nellie. “Oh, hello, Allison. Come in here and sit down, and I'll tell you a story.”

“No,” said Allison quickly. “No, thank you.”

“O.K.,” said Nellie cheerfully. “You tell me one.”

It was a cold snowy afternoon and Nellie was ironing in the MacKenzie kitchen. Allison sat down on the rocking chair beside the stove.

“Once upon a time,” said Allison, “in a land far across the sea, there lived a beautiful princess–”

Nellie Cross ironed on, her small eyes shining and her slack mouth half open. After that, whenever Allison was in the house, Nellie would smile and say, “Tell me a story,” and each one had to be different, for Nellie would interrupt at once. “Nah. Don't tell that one. You told me that one already.”

“Nellie Cross may look like a pig herself,” said Constance, “but she certainly keeps this house shining.”

One morning in March, Nellie came to the MacKenzies’ before Constance had left for work.

“Guess you ain't heard about Mr. Firth, have you?” she asked.

Nellie had a disconcerting habit of cackling, and she cackled now.

“Dropped dead, he did,” she told Constance and Allison. “Shovelin’ snow in his driveway, and fell down dead. I always knew he'd get his someday. Sonofabitch, he was. Just like all of ’em. Sonsofbitches.”

“For Heaven's sake, Nellie!” remonstrated Constance. “Watch your tongue.”

Mr. Abner Firth was the principal of the Peyton Place schools, and he had dropped dead of a heart attack, that morning.

“Isn't that a shame,” said Constance absent-mindedly.

“Are you sure, Mrs. Cross?” asked Allison.

“You bet I'm sure. One sonofabitch less in this sad world.”

At school, Miss Elsie Thornton was white faced but dry eyed. She asked that every boy and girl bring a dime to school the next day for flowers for Mr. Firth.

“We'll have a bitch of a time replacing old Firth at this time of the year,” said Leslie Harrington, who was the chairman of the school board. “Christ, why couldn't he have waited until spring to have his goddamned heart attack.”

Roberta Carter, Ted's mother, who was also on the school board said, “There is no need to be profane, Leslie.”

“Come off it, Bobbie,” said Harrington.

Theodore Janowski, a mill hand and the third member of the board, nodded his head impartially to both Leslie and Mrs. Carter. Janowski was supposed to fill out the Peyton Place School Board and make it truly representative of the town's population, but in his two years of service he had never once voted on an issue. Leslie Harrington decided policy, he and Mrs. Carter argued for a while, and then the two of them declared what was to be done. Occasionally they would turn to Janowski and ask, “Don't you agree, Mr. Janowski?”

“Yes,” was always Janowski's answer.

“We'll get in touch with one of those teachers’ agencies down to Boston,” decided Harrington. “They should be able to come up with someone. Now, I suppose, we'd better all dig down and send old Abner a wreath, goddamn his soul.”

It was nearly April, with no sign of a break in the cold weather, before the Boston Teachers’ Agency came up with the name of a man qualified to be principal of the Peyton Place schools. His name was Tomas Makris and he was a native of the city of New York.

“Makris!” roared Leslie Harrington. “What the hell kind of name is that!”

“Grecian, I think,” said Mrs. Carter.

“I dunno, Mr. Harrington,” said Janowski.

“His qualifications are excellent,” said Mrs. Carter. “Although I imagine that he is a little unstable. Look at what he gives as a reason for leaving his last job. ‘To go to work in Pittsburgh steel mill for more money.’ Really, Leslie, I don't think we want anyone like that up here.”

“A goddamned Greek, for Christ's sake, and a lousy millworker at that. This Boston agency must be run by screwballs.”

Theodore Janowski said nothing, but for the first time he felt a powerful urge to slam his fist into Leslie Harrington's mouth.

“What about Elsie Thornton,” suggested Mrs. Carter. “Goodness knows she's been teaching long enough to know our schools inside out.”

“She's too old,” said Harrington. “She's practically ready to retire. Besides, being principal is no job for a woman.”

“Well, then,” said Mrs. Carter acidly, “it looks like either this Makris person or no one.”

“Take your time, for Christ's sake,” said Harrington.

The school board procrastinated until the middle of April. Then they received a curt note from the State Department of Education informing them that a school could not be run without an administrator, and that therefore the Peyton Place School Board would please remedy the situation in their town at once. The fact that Abner Firth had also taught three classes of English, a required subject on all levels, and that these classes had not been held since his death made it imperative, in the eyes of the state department, that a replacement be hired immediately. That same evening, Leslie Harrington attempted to telephone Tomas Makris, long-distance collect, at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

“Will you accept a collect call from Mr. Leslie Harrington?” asked the operator.

“Like hell I will,” said the full voice of Makris. “Who is Leslie Harrington?”

“One moment, please,” sang the operator.

When she put Makris’ question to Harrington, Leslie roared back that he was the chairman of the Peyton Place School Board, that was who, and if Makris was interested in a job there, he had damned well better accept a collect call. Unfortunately, the operator left the line open while Harrington was speaking, and before she could relay his message, in more courteous words, Makris began to roar himself.

“To hell with you, Mr. Harrington,” he shouted into the telephone. “If you can't afford to pay for a long-distance call, you can't afford to hire me,” and he banged the receiver into place.

Two minutes later his telephone rang and the operator informed him that Mr. Harrington was on the line, prepaid from Peyton Place.

“Well?” demanded Makris.

“Now listen here, Mr. Makris,” said Leslie Harrington. “Let's discuss this thing sensibly.”

“It's your money,” said Makris. “Go ahead.”

The next day the whole town buzzed with talk that Leslie Harrington had gone and hired a Greek to come be principal of the schools.

“A Greek?” demanded Peyton Place incredulously. “For God's sake, isn't it enough that we've got a whole colony of Polacks and Canucks working in the mills without letting the Greeks in?”

“Good grief!” said Marion Partridge. “I don't know what Roberta Carter could have been thinking of. The next thing you know, we'll have an all-night fruit store on Elm Street!”

“It's a lucky thing for me that he'll be the only one in town,” said Corey Hyde, who owned the largest eating place in town. “You know what they say happens when Greek meets Greek? They take one look at each other and open up a restaurant!”

“You put your foot in it that time, Leslie,” said Jared Clarke. “Hiring a Greek, for God's sake. What got into you?”

“Nothing got into me,” said Harrington angrily. “He was the only man we could get with decent qualifications. He's got a Master's from Columbia and all that sort of thing. He's a good man.”

Leslie Harrington did not admit then, or ever, that he had been unable to keep from hiring Tomas Makris. He never told anyone that he had almost begged Makris to come to Peyton Place, and he could not explain to himself why he had done so.

“What'll you pay?” Makris had demanded. And, when Leslie told him, “Are you kidding? Keep your crummy job.”

Leslie had upped the offer by four hundred dollars per year, and had offered to pay for transportation to Peyton Place. Makris had demanded a three-room apartment, steam heated, in a decent neighborhood, and an ironclad contract, not for one year but for three.

“That will be entirely satisfactory with the school board, I am sure,” Leslie Harrington had said, and when he hung up he had been sweating and feeling ridiculously weak and ineffectual.

I'll fix your wagon, Mr. Independent Greek Makris, thought Harrington. But for the first time in his life he was afraid, and he could not have said why.

“Qualified or not,” said Jared Clarke, “you've put your foot in it this time, Leslie.”

Jared's opinion was shared by the whole town with the exception of Dr. Matthew Swain and Miss Elsie Thornton.

“Do the kids good to have a young fellow like that in charge,” said Dr. Swain. “Shake ’em up a little.”

A Master's from Columbia, thought Miss Thornton. A young man, well educated and unafraid. She sent the dean of Smith College a swift thought. I'll show you yet, exulted Miss Thornton. You'll see!

The old men in Tuttle's to whom the schools had never been of the remotest interest, now talked volubly about the new headmaster.

“A New York feller, you say?”

“Yep. A Greek feller from down to New York.”

“Well, I'll be damned!”

“Don't seem right, somehow, what with all the teachers who've been here so long to go givin’ the best job to some Greek feller from out of town.”

“Oh, I don't know,” said Clayton Frazier. “Do us good to see some new faces around.”

Allison MacKenzie made a special trip to the Thrifty Corner to tell her mother about the new principal who was coming to town.

“Makris?” asked Constance. “What an odd name. Where is he from?”

“New York,” said Allison.

Constance's heart began to knock painfully against her side.

“New York City?” she asked.

“That's what the kids were saying.”

Constance busied herself with hanging up a new shipment of skirts, and Allison did not notice that her mother seemed suddenly nervous. She was too nervous herself to notice much of anything, because the real reason she had come into the shop was not to pass on the news about the new principal.

“I'd like to have a new dress,” she blurted.

“Oh?” asked Constance, surprised. “Did you have anything special in mind?”

“A party dress,” said Allison. “I have a date for the spring dance next month.”

“A
date!”
said Constance incredulously, and dropped the two skirts she was holding. “With whom?”

“Rodney Harrington,” said Allison calmly. “He asked me this afternoon.”

She did not feel calm. She was remembering the night of her birthday party when Rodney had kissed her because she was too big to spank.

A few days later, Tomas Makris stepped off the train in front of the Peyton Place railroad station. No other passenger got off with him. He paused on the empty platform and looked around thoroughly, for it was a habit with him to fix a firm picture of a new place in his mind so that it could never be erased nor forgotten. He stood still, feeling the two heavy suitcases that he carried pulling at his arm muscles, and reflected that there wasn't much to see, nor to hear, for that matter. It was shortly after seven o'clock in the evening, but it might have been midnight or four in the morning, for all the activity going on. Behind him, there was nothing but the two curving railroad tracks and from a distance came the long-drawn-out wail of the train as it made the pull across the wide Connecticut River. And it was cold.

For April, thought Makris, shrugging uncomfortably under his topcoat, it was damned cold.

Straight ahead of him stood the railroad station, a shabby wooden building with a severely pitched roof and several thin, Gothic-looking windows that gave it the air of a broken-down church. Nailed to the front of the building, at the far left of the front door, was a blue and white enameled sign. PEYTON PLACE, it read. POP. 3675.

Thirty-six seventy-five, thought Makris, pushing open the railroad station's narrow door. Sounds like the price of a cheap suit.

The inside of the building was lit by several dim electric light bulbs suspended from fixtures which obviously had once burned gas, and there were rows of benches constructed of the most hideous wood obtainable, golden oak. No one was sitting on them. The brown, roughly plastered walls were trimmed with the same yellow wood and the floor was made of black and white marble. There was an iron-barred cage set into one wall and from behind this a straight, thin man with a pinched-looking nose, steel-rimmed glasses and a string tie stared at Makris.

“Is there a place where I can check these?” asked the new principal, indicating the two bags at his feet.

“Next room,” said the man in the cage.

“Thank you,” said Makris and made his way through a narrow archway into another, smaller room. It was a replica of the main room, complete with golden oak, marble and converted gas fixtures, but with the addition of two more doors. These were clearly labeled. MEN, said one. WOMEN, said the other. Against one wall there was a row of pale gray metal lockers, and to Makris, these looked almost friendly. They were the only things in the station even faintly resembling anything he had ever seen in his life.

“Ah,” he murmured, “shades of Grand Central,” and bent to push his suitcases into one of the lockers. He deposited his dime, withdrew his key and noticed that his was the only locker in use.

Busy town, he thought, and walked back to the main room. His footsteps rang disquietingly on the scrubbed marble floor.

Leslie Harrington had instructed Makris to call him at his home as soon as he got off the train, but Makris by-passed the solitary telephone booth in the railroad station. He wanted to look at the town alone first, to see it through no one's eyes but his own. Besides, he had decided the night that Harrington had called long-distance that the chairman of the Peyton Place School Board sounded like a man puffed up with his own importance, and must therefore be a pain in the ass.

“Say, Dad,” began Makris, addressing the man in the cage.

“Name's Rhodes,” said the old man.

“Mr. Rhodes,” began Makris again, “could you tell me how I can get into town from here? I noticed a distressing lack of taxi-cabs outside.”

“Be damned peculiar if I couldn't.”

“If you couldn't what?”

“Tell you how to get uptown. Been living here for over sixty years.”

“That's interesting.”

“You're Mr. Makris, eh?”

“Admitted.”

“Ain't you goin’ to call up Leslie Harrington?”

“Later. I'd like to get a cup of coffee first. Listen, isn't there a cab to be had anywhere around here?”

“No.”

Tomas Makris controlled a laugh. It was beginning to look as if everything he had ever heard about these sullen New Englanders was true. The old man in the cage gave the impression that he had been sucking lemons for years. Certainly, sourness had not been one of the traits in that little Pittsburgh secretary who claimed to be from Boston, but she said herself that she was East Boston Irish, and therefore not reliably representative of New England.

“Do you mind, then, telling me how I can walk into town from here, Mr. Rhodes?” asked Makris.

“Not at all,” said the stationmaster, and Makris noticed that he pronounced the three words as one: Notatall. “Just go out this front door, walk around the depot to the street and keep on walking for two blocks. That will bring you to Elm Street.”

“Elm Street? Is that the main street?”

“Yes.”

“I had the idea that the main streets of all small New England towns were named Main Street.”

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Rhodes, who prided himself, when annoyed, on enunciating his syllables, “it is true that the main streets of all
other
small towns are named Main Street. Not, however, in Peyton Place. Here the main street is called Elm Street.”

Period. Paragraph, thought Makris. Next question. “Peyton Place is an odd name,” he said. “How did anyone come to pick that one?”

Mr. Rhodes drew back his hand and started to close the wooden panel that backed the iron bars of his cage.

“I am closing now, Mr. Makris,” he said. “And I suggest that you be on your way if you want to obtain a cup of coffee. Hyde's Diner closes in half an hour.”

“Thank you,” said Makris to the wooden panel which was suddenly between him and Mr. Rhodes.

Friendly bastard, he thought, as he left the station and began to walk up the street labeled Depot.

Tomas Makris was a massively boned man with muscles that seemed to quiver every time he moved. In the steel mills of Pittsburgh he had looked, so one smitten secretary had told him, like a color illustration of a steelworker. His arms, beneath sleeves rolled above the elbow, were knotted powerfully, and the buttons of his work shirts always seemed about to pop off under the strain of trying to cover his chest. He was six feet four inches tall, weighed two hundred and twelve pounds, stripped, and looked like anything but a schoolteacher. In fact, the friendly secretary in Pittsburgh had told him that in his dark blue suit, white shirt and dark tie, he looked like a steelworker disguised as a schoolteacher, a fact which would not inspire trust in the heart of any New Englander.

Tomas Makris was a handsome man, in a dark-skinned, black-haired, obviously sexual way, and both men and women were apt to credit him more with attractiveness than intellect. This was a mistake, for Makris had a mind as analytical as a mathematician's and as curious as a philosopher's. It was his curiosity which had prompted him to give up teaching for a year to go to work in Pittsburgh. He had learned more about economics, labor and capital in that one year than he had learned in ten years of reading books. He was thirty-six years old and totally lacking in regret over the fact that he had never stayed in one job long enough to “get ahead,” as the Pittsburgh secretary put it. He was honest, completely lacking in diplomacy, and the victim of a vicious temper which tended to loosen a tongue that had learned to speak on the lower East Side of New York City.

Makris was halfway through the second block on Depot Street, leading to Elm, when Parker Rhodes, at the wheel of an old sedan, passed him. The stationmaster looked out of the window on the driver's side of his car and looked straight through Peyton Place's new headmaster.

Sonofabitch, thought Makris. Real friendly sonofabitch to offer me a lift in his junk heap of a car.

Then he smiled and wondered why Mr. Rhodes had been so sensitive on the subject of his town's name. He would ask around and see if everyone in this godforsaken place reacted the same way to his question. He had reached the corner of Elm Street and paused to look about him. On the corner stood a white, cupola-topped house with stiff lace curtains at the windows. Silhouetted against the light inside, he could see two women sitting at a table with what was obviously a checkerboard between them. The women were big, saggy bosomed and white haired, and Makris thought that they looked like a pair who had worked too long at the same girls’ school.

I wonder who they are? he asked himself, as he looked in at the Page Girls. Maybe they're the town's two Lizzies.

Reluctantly, he turned away from the white house and made his way west on Elm Street. When he had walked three blocks, he came to a small, clean-looking and well-lighted restaurant. “Hyde's Diner” said a polite neon sign, and Makris opened the door and went in. The place was empty except for one old man sitting at the far end of the counter, and another man who came out of the kitchen at the sound of the door opening.

“Good evening, sir,” said Corey Hyde.

“Good evening,” said Makris. “Coffee, please, and a piece of pie. Any kind.”

“Apple, sir?”

“Any kind is O.K.”

“Well, we have pumpkin, too.”

“Apple is fine.”

“I think there's a piece of cherry left, also.”

“Apple,” said Makris, “will be fine.”

“You're Mr. Makris, aren't you?”

“Yes.”

“Glad to meet you, Mr. Makris. My name is Hyde. Corey Hyde.”

“How do you do?”

“Quite well, as a rule,” said Corey Hyde. “I'll keep on doing quite well, as long as no one starts up another restaurant.”

“Look, could I have my coffee now?”

“Certainly. Certainly, Mr. Makris.”

The old man at the end of the counter sipped his coffee from a spoon and looked surreptitiously at the newcomer to town. Makris wondered if the old man could be the village idiot.

“Here you are, Mr. Makris,” said Corey Hyde. “The best apple pie in Peyton Place.”

“Thank you.”

Makris stirred sugar into his coffee and sampled the pie. It was excellent.

“Peyton Place,” he said to Corey Hyde, “is the oddest name for a town I've ever heard. Who is it named for?”

“Oh, I don't know,” said Corey, making unnecessary circular motions with a cloth on his immaculate counter. “There's plenty of towns have funny names. Take that Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I had a kid took French over to the high school. Told me Baton Rouge means Red Stick. Now ain't that a helluva name for a town? Red Stick, Louisiana. And what about that Des Moines, Iowa? What a crazy name that is.”

“True,” said Makris. “But for whom is Peyton Place named, or for what?”

“Some feller that built a castle up here, back before the Civil War. Feller by the name of Samuel Peyton,” said Corey reluctantly.

“A castle!” exclaimed Makris.

“Yep. A real, true, honest-to-God castle, transported over here from England, every stick and stone of it.”

“Who was this Peyton?” asked Makris. “An exiled duke?”

“Nah,” said Corey Hyde. “Just a feller with money to burn. Excuse me, Mr. Makris. I got things to do in the kitchen.”

The old man at the end of the counter chuckled. “Fact of the matter, Mr. Makris,” said Clayton Frazier in a loud voice, “is that this town was named for a friggin’ nigger. That's what ails Corey. He's delicate like, and just don't want to spit it right out.”

While Tomas Makris sipped his coffee and enjoyed his pie and conversation with Clayton Frazier, Parker Rhodes arrived at his home on Laurel Street. He parked his ancient sedan and entered the house where, without first removing his coat and hat, he went directly to the telephone.

“Hello,” he said, as soon as the party he had called answered. “That you, Leslie? Well, he's here, Leslie. Got off the seven o'clock, checked his suitcases and walked uptown. He's sitting down at Hyde's right now. What's that? No, he can't get his bags out of the depot until morning, you know that. What? Well, goddamn it, he didn't ask me, that's why. He didn't ask for information about when he could get them out. He just wanted to know where he could check his bags, so I told him. What'd you say, Leslie? No, I did not tell him that no one has used those lockers since they were installed five years ago. What? Well, goddamn it, he didn't ask me, that's why. Yes. Yes, he is, Leslie.
Real
dark, and big. Sweet Jesus, he's as big as the side of a barn. Yes. Down at Hyde's. Said he wanted a cup of coffee.”

If Tomas Makris had overheard this conversation, he would have noticed again that Rhodes pronounced his last three words as one: Kupakawfee. But at the moment, Makris was looking at the tall, silver-haired man who had just walked through Hyde's front door.

My God! thought Makris, awed. This guy looks like a walking ad for a Planter's Punch. A goddamned Kentucky colonel in this place!

“Evenin’, Doc,” said Corey Hyde, who had put his head out of the kitchen at the sound of the door, looking, thought Makris, rather like a tired Tuttle poking his head out of his shell.

“Evenin’, Corey,” and Makris knew, as soon as the man spoke, that this was no fugitive Kentucky colonel but a native.

“Welcome to Peyton Place, Mr. Makris,” said the white haired native. “It's nice to have you with us. My name is Swain. Matthew Swain.”

“Evenin’, Doc,” said Clayton Frazier. “I just been tellin’ Mr. Makris here some of our local legends.”

“Make you want to jump on the next train out, Mr. Makris?” asked the doctor.

“No, sir,” said Makris, thinking that there was, after all, one goddamned face in this godforsaken town that looked human.

“I hope you'll enjoy living here,” said the doctor. “Maybe you'll let me show you the town after you get settled a little.”

“Thank you, sir. I'd enjoy that,” said Makris.

“Here comes Leslie Harrington,” said Clayton Frazier.

The figure outside the glass door of the restaurant was clearly visible to those inside. The doctor turned to look.

“It's Leslie, all right,” he said. “Come to fetch you home, Mr. Makris.”

Harrington strode into the restaurant, a smile like one made of molded ice cream on his face.

“Ah, Mr. Makris,” he cried jovially, extending his hand. “It is indeed a pleasure to welcome you to Peyton Place.”