Peyton Place (23 page)

If he says one thing—thought Allison desperately. If he says one word I shall be sick right here in front of everyone.

“I saw Rodney go outside with Betty,” said Norman, “so I thought I'd ask you to dance. You were sitting next to Miss Thornton for an awfully long time.”

Allison was not sick in front of everyone. “Thank you, Norman,” she said. “It was nice of you to ask me.”

“I don't know what's the matter with Rodney,” continued Norman. “You're much prettier than that fat old Betty Anderson.”

Oh, God, prayed Allison, make him shut up.

“Betty came with John Pillsbury.” Norman pronounced it Pillsbree. “He drinks and takes girls riding in his car. He got stopped by the state police once, for speeding and drunken driving, and the police told his father. Do you like Rodney?”

I love him! screamed Allison silently. I love him and he is breaking my heart!

“No,” she said, “not particularly. He was just someone to come with.”

Norman whirled her around inexpertly. “Just the same,” he said, “it's a dirty trick for him to leave you sitting with Miss Thornton and go off with Betty like that.”

Please, God. Please, God, thought Allison.

But the orchestra continued to play, and Norman's hand was sticky in hers, and Allison thought of the girl in the fairy tale about the red shoes, and the electric lights glared down at her until her temples began to pound.

Outside, Betty Anderson was leading Rodney by the hand across the dark field that served as a parking lot for the high school. John Pillsbury's car was parked a short distance away from the others, under a tree, and when Betty and Rodney reached it, she opened the back door and got in.

“Hurry up,” she whispered, and Rodney climbed in behind her.

Swiftly, she pressed down the buttons on the four doors that locked them, and then she collapsed into the back seat, laughing.

“Here we are,” she said. “Snug as peas in a pod.”

“Come on, Betty,” whispered Rodney. “Come on.”

“No,” she said petulantly, “I won't. I'm mad at you.”

“Aw, come on, Betty. Don't be like that. Kiss me.”

“No,” said Betty, tossing her head. “Go get skinny Allison MacKenzie to kiss you. She's the one you brought to the dance.”

“Don't be mad, Betty,” pleaded Rodney. “I couldn't help it. I didn't want to. My father made me do it.”

“Would you rather be with me?” asked Betty in a slightly mollified tone.

“Would
I?” breathed Rodney, and it was not a question.

Betty leaned her head against his shoulder and ran one finger up and down on his coat lapel.

“Just the same,” she said, “I think it was mean of you to ask Allison to the dance.”

“Aw, come on, Betty. Don't be like that. Kiss me a little.”

Betty lifted her head and Rodney quickly covered her mouth with his. She could kiss, thought Rodney, like no one else in the world. She didn't kiss with just her lips, but with her teeth and her tongue, and all the while she made noises deep in her throat, and her fingernails dug into his shoulders.

“Oh, honey, honey,” whispered Rodney, and that was all he could say before Betty's tongue went between his teeth again.

Her whole body twisted and moved when he kissed her, and when his hands found their way to her breasts, she moaned as if she were hurt. She writhed on the seat until she was lying down, with only her legs and feet not touching him, and Rodney fitted his body to her without taking his mouth from hers.

“Is it up, Rod?” she panted, undulating her body under his. “Is it up good and hard?”

“Oh, yes,” he whispered, almost unable to speak. “Oh, yes.”

Without another word, Betty jacknifed her knees, pushed Rodney away from her, clicked the lock on the door and was outside of the car.

“Now go shove it into Allison MacKenzie,” she screamed at him. “Go get the girl you brought to the dance and get rid of it with her!”

Before Rodney could catch his breath to utter one word, she had whirled and was on her way back to the gymnasium. He tried to get out of the car to run after her, but his legs were like sawdust under him, and he could only cling to the open door and curse under his breath.

“Bitch,” he said hoarsely, using one of his father's favorite words. “Goddamned bitch!”

He hung onto the open car door and retched helplessly, and the sweat poured down his face.

“Bitch!” he said, but it did not help.

At last, he straightened up and wiped his face with his handkerchief, and fumbled in his pockets for a comb. He still had to go back into the gymnasium to get that goddamned Allison MacKenzie. His father would drive up at eleven-thirty and expect to find him waiting with her.

“Oh, you rotten bitch,” he said under his breath to the absent Betty. “Oh, you stinking, rotten, goddamned bitchy sonofabitch!”

He racked his brain to think of new swear words to direct at her, but he could think of nothing. He began to comb his hair, almost in tears.

Over Norman's shoulder, Allison saw Betty Anderson come back into the gymnasium, alone.

Dear God, she thought, maybe he's gone home alone! What shall I do?

“There's Betty,” said Norman. “I wonder what happened to Rodney?”

“He's probably in the Men's,” said Allison who could not seem to keep her voice steady. “Please, Norman. Couldn't we sit down. My feet hurt.”

And my head, she thought. And my stomach. And my arms, and hands, and legs, and the back of my neck.

It was eleven-fifteen when she saw Rodney walk through the door. She was so overwhelmed with relief that she could not be angry. He had saved her face by returning to her and not leaving her to go home alone. He looked sick. His face was red and swollen looking.

“You almost ready to go?” he asked Allison.

“Any time you are,” she said nonchalantly.

“My father's outside, so we might as well go.”

“We might just as well.”

“I'll get your coat.”

“All right.”

“Do you want to dance one more first?”

“No. No, thank you. I've been dancing so much all evening that my feet are ready to fall off.”

“Well, I'll get your coat”

And that, thought Miss Elsie Thornton, is that. Valiant is the word for Allison.

“Good night, Miss Thornton. I had a lovely time.”

“Good night, dear,” said Miss Thornton.

To Miss Elsie Thornton, the twentieth of June was the most trying day of the year. It was graduation day, and it always left her with an uncomfortable mixture of feelings comprised of happiness, regret and the peculiar weariness that comes with the relaxation of effort. She sat alone in the empty auditorium after the exercises, enjoying these few minutes by herself now that the crowd had gone. In a little while, Kenny Stearns would come in, with his mops and pails, to begin the work of cleaning up, but for these few moments everything was still, and Miss Thornton looked around tiredly.

The hastily constructed wooden benches, built in graduated rows like bleachers at a football stadium, still stood on the empty stage. A short while before, their nakedness had been hidden by the white skirts of thirty-two girls and the dark trousers of forty boys who comprised the graduating classes of the grade and high schools, but all that was left now to show that the youngsters had been there at all was one lost white glove and three crumpled programs. There were tall letters, made of gilt cardboard, pinned to the black velvet curtain behind the benches: ONWARD!— CLASSES OF 1937. Sometime during the evening, the nine in 1937 had been pulled loose so that it hung now at a tipsy angle, giving a comic look to something that had been arranged with utmost seriousness.

Perhaps, thought Miss Thornton defensively, the entire evening's performance would be comical to an outsider. Certainly, the scratchiness of the Peyton Place High School band attempting to play a composition as pretentious as “Pomp and Circumstance” had its comical aspects. And Jared Clarke, while he had not actually remarked that the graduates were “standing with reluctant feet” had most certainly implied it.

Yes, Miss Thornton imagined, there were many people, especially the dean of Smith College, who would find these things laughable.

But Miss Thornton had not been amused. When seventy-two children, among them the forty-odd whom she had taught all year, rose in a body to sing, “Hail, Alma Mater fair, our song to thee we raise,” Miss Thornton had been filled with emotion which some might have called “sentimentality” and others, of a younger, more tactless generation, perhaps would label as “corny.” Graduation, to Miss Thornton, was a time of sadness and a time of joy, but most of all it was a time of change. On graduation night, the change meant more to Miss Thornton than a simple transition from one school to another. She regarded it as the end of an era. Too many of her boys and girls had ceased to be children this night. They had all looked so grown up and different from where she sat in her front-row seat in the auditorium. Many of them had only the summer ahead in which to enjoy the last days of childhood. In the fall they would be “high schoolers,” and already they regarded themselves as adults. She had heard Rodney Harrington speak of “going down to New Hampton” as if he were going off to Dartmouth rather than to a prep school, and she had heard several girls complain of parents who would not allow them to go to “coed” summer camps.

It's all too fast, thought Miss Thornton, realizing that she was not thinking a new thought. She seemed to be full of clichés this evening, the way she was after every graduation, and her mind persisted in framing phrases like, The best years of their lives, and, What a pity that youth is wasted on the young.

Kenny Stearns came limping into the auditorium, the two pails he carried clanking together. Miss Thornton sat up and gathered her gloves together.

“Good evening, Kenny,” she said.

“Evenin’, Miss Thornton. I thought everybody was gone.”

“I was just leaving, Kenny. The auditorium looked lovely tonight, didn't it?”

“It sure did. I'm the one built them benches. Held up good, didn't they?”

“They were perfect, Kenny.”

“I pinned them letters up for the seniors, too. Had a helluva time gettin’ ’em on straight. That nine wa'nt crooked when I got done, like it is now.”

“No, it wasn't, Kenny. That happened during the exercises.”

“Well, I gotta get started. Those benches gotta come down tonight. I got a coupla kids comin’ in to help me later.”

Miss Thornton took the hint. “Good night, Kenny,” she said.

“’Night, Miss Thornton.”

Outside, the night sky was black. There was no moon and Miss Thornton reflected that there would not have been room for one, for all the available sky space was taken up with stars. She looked up and breathed deeply of the faintly scented June air, and suddenly her depression was gone. There would be another group of children in the fall, perhaps one more promising and rewarding than the last.

Two years had passed since that graduation night. They had passed quickly for Allison. The work was much harder in high school and this provided a mental stimulation for her that had been lacking in the grades. Somehow, too, she had come to accept herself and the world around her more calmly, and while she still had periods of fear and resentment, they were fewer and less wretchedly painful than before. She had also developed a new, insatiable curiosity. Two years earlier she had been content to let books answer her questions, but now she tried to learn from people. She asked questions of everyone whom she dared to approach, and the most sympathetic of these was Nellie Cross.

“How did you ever come to marry Lucas, anyway?” she asked Nellie one day. “You're always cussing him and talking as if you hated him. How come you married him at all?”

Nellie looked up from the brass candlestick that she was polishing, and she was quiet for so long that to anyone but Allison it might have seemed that she had not heard or that she was ignoring the question. But Allison knew that neither of these was true. If Nellie was sympathetic to Allison's questions, Allison had learned to be patient with Nellie's inarticulateness.

“I dunno that I ever did come to it, like you say,” said Nellie finally. “Marryin’ Lucas wa'nt nothin’ I ever come to. It was just one of those things that happened.”

“Nothing,” said Allison positively, “ever just happens. There is a law of cause and effect that applies to everything and everybody.”

Nellie smiled and put the candlestick down on the mantelpiece in the MacKenzie living room.

“You talk good, honey,” she said. “Mighty good, with them big words and all. It's like music, listenin’ to you.”

Allison tried not to look pleased, but she felt the way she often did at school when she received an
A
in composition from Mr. Makris. Nellie's wholehearted and absolute appreciation of Allison was the basis of their friendship, but Allison never admitted that this was so. She said, instead, that she “just loved” Nellie Cross.

“Now that I think of it,” said Nellie, “there most likely was a reason why I married Lucas. I had Selena. Tiny, she was then. Just barely six weeks old. My first husband, Curtis Chamberlain he was, got himself killed by a mess of falling logs. Fell off a truck, the logs did, and killed old Curt deader than hell. Well, there I was, out to there carryin’ Selena, and right after she was born I met Lucas. He was alone, too. His wife died havin’ Paul. It seemed like a good idea at the time, my marryin’ Lucas, I mean. He was alone with Paul, and I was alone with Selena. Don't do for a woman to be alone, or a man either. Besides, what could I do? I wa'nt in no shape to work right then, bein’ as how I just had a baby, and Lucas was after me.”

She began to cackle, and for a moment Allison was afraid that Nellie would begin to get vague and go off on a conversational tangent the way she often did these days, but Nellie stopped her weird laughter and went on talking.

“More fool was I,” she said. “I went from the fryin’ pan right straight into hell. Lucas always drank, and fought, and chased the wimmin. And I was worse off than before.”

“But didn't you love him?” asked Allison. “Just at first?”

“Well, Lucas and me wa'nt married too damned long before I got pregnant the first time. Lost that one. Miscarriage, The Doc said. Lucas went out and got drunker than hell. Said I was still grievin’ for Curtis, Lucas did, but that wa'nt true. Anyways, I got in the family way again and then I had Joey, and after that Lucas didn't seem to feel so bad over Curtis no more. There's some say you gotta love a man to get a child by him. I dunno. Maybe this love you're talkin’ about is what kept me by Lucas all these years. I coulda left him. I always worked anyway, and he always drunk up most of his pay, so it wouldn't have made no difference.”

“But how could you stay with him?” asked Allison. “How come you didn't run away when he beat you, and beat your children?”

“Why, honey, beatin's don't mean nothin’.” Nellie cackled again, and this time her eyes did turn vague. “It's everythin’ else. The booze and the wimmin. Even the booze ain't so bad, if he'd just leave the wimmin alone. I could tell you some stories, honey–” Nellie folded her arms together, and her voice took on a singsong quality–“I could tell you some stories, honey, that ain't nothin’ like the stories you tell me.”

“Like what, then?” whispered Allison. “Tell me. Like what?”

“Oh, he'll get his someday,” whispered Nellie, matching her voice to Allison's. “He'll get his, the sonofabitch. They all get it, in the end, the sonsofbitches. All of ’em.”

Allison sighed and stood up. When Nellie began to croon and curse, it was futile to try to talk sense to her. She would go on for the rest of the day, swearing under her breath, unaware of all questions put to her. It was this trait in Nellie that caused Constance MacKenzie to remark frequently that something would have to be done about her. But somehow Constance never got around to doing anything, for Nellie, eccentric or not, was still the best house worker in Peyton Place. But it was not Nellie's vagueness or her language which bothered Allison. It was the frustrating way in which Nellie threw out veiled insinuations, like a fisherman casting out line, only to withdraw the bait as soon as Allison nibbled. In times past, Allison had attempted to batter against this wall of things left unsaid, but trying to pin Nellie down to words, Allison had discovered, was a hopeless business.

“What could you tell me, Nellie?” she would ask, and Nellie would cradle her arms and cackle.

“Oh, the stories I could tell you, honey–” but she never did, and Allison was still too young to pity the incapability of an individual to share his grief. She merely shrugged and said crossly, “Well, all right, if you don't
want
to tell me–”

‘Well, all right, if you don't
want
to tell me,” said Allison on this particular day, “I'll go for a walk and leave you by yourself.”

“Heh, heh, heh,” said Nellie. “The sonsofbitches.”

Allison sighed impatiently and left the house.

In two years Peyton Place had not changed at all. The same stores still fronted on Elm Street, and the same people owned and operated them. A stranger, revisiting the town after two years, would have the feeling that he had been here only yesterday. Now that it was July the benches in front of the courthouse were well filled by the old men who regarded them as their private property, and a stranger might look at them and say, “Why, those old men have been sitting there all this time.”

Allison walked down Elm Street in the hot summer sun and the old men in front of the courthouse followed her with heavy, summer-lidded eyes.

“There goes Allison MacKenzie.”

“Yep. Growed some lately, ain't she?”

“Got some growin’ to do, ’fore she catches up with that mother of hers.”

The men snickered. It was the consensus of town opinion that Constance MacKenzie was built like a brick shithouse, a sentiment that was given voice every time that Constance walked past the courthouse.

“Good-lookin’ woman, though, Constance MacKenzie is. Always was.”

“Oh, I dunno,” said Clayton Frazier. “Kinda fine drawn for my taste. I never was much taken with wimmin whose cheekbones stick out.”

“For Christ's sake. Who the hell looks at her cheekbones?”

The men laughed, and Clayton Frazier leaned back against the hot stone of the courthouse wall.

“There's some men,” he said, “who occasionally got their minds fixed on other things in a woman besides her tits and her ass.”

“That right, Clayton? Name one.”

“Tomas Makris,” said Clayton Frazier without a second's hesitation.

The men laughed again.

“Jesus, yes!” they said. “That horny Greek never noticed nothin’ about Connie MacKenzie ‘cept her brains!”

“Them two got nothin’ to talk over these hot nights ‘cept literchoor and paintin’,” they said.

“Why, that big, black Greek never even notices that Connie MacKenzie's a well-built blonde!”

Clayton Frazier tipped his old felt hat down over his eyes.

“Don't make no difference what none of you say,” he said. “I'd bet my next six months’ pension that Tomas Makris never laid a finger on Connie MacKenzie.”

“I'll side with Clayton,” said one man with mock sobriety. “I'll bet Tom never laid a finger on Connie MacKenzie, either. But I wouldn't take no bets that he's laid everything else on her!”

The men roared and turned to watch Allison walk out of sight on Elm Street.

Memorial Park was patchy with grass burnt pale brown by the sun that had shone daily for six weeks of drought. The wide-branched trees stood as if paralyzed in the windless air, their leafy tops dusty green and cicada filled, and they waited for rain with the patience of a hundred years. Allison walked listlessly, feeling over-clothed in spite of the brief shorts and sleeveless blouse that she wore, and loneliness weighed heavily on her as she climbed the sloping hill behind the park. Hers was not a loneliness to be alleviated by people, for she could have gone swimming at Meadow Pond with Kathy Ellsworth and had refused. She had thought of a crowd of young people, a splashing, yelling, playful crowd, and the thought had repelled her. She had thought also of sun reflecting itself on motionless water, and had told Kathy no, she did not want to go swimming. Now she was sorry, for the July heat was like a weight on her bare head as she climbed the hill toward Road's End. But for the sizzling of the cicadas and the scrape of her own feet against the rocky ground, there was no sound and Allison had a feeling of being the only inhabitant in a dry, burnt-out world. It was almost a physical shock to see another figure, standing motionless before the board with the red letters printed on its side, as she turned from the path to approach the place called Road's End.

The figure turned as she came near, not disturbed by sound, for Allison made none, but by a sense of no longer being alone.

“Hi, Allison,” said Norman Page.

“Hi, Norman.”

He was wearing a pair of the khaki pants known as “tennis shorts” and his knees, like his elbows and cheekbones, were sharp and angular. Norman was the only boy in Peyton Place who wore shorts in the summertime. The others wore dungarees and uncovered their legs only when they donned bathing trunks.

“What are you doing up here?” asked Norman vaguely, as if he had just been awakened.

“Same thing you are,” replied Allison unpleasantly. “Looking for a place to cool off and be by myself.”

“The river looks as if it were made of glass from here.”

Allison leaned against the board that barred the drop-off at Road's End.

“It doesn't seem to be moving at all,” she said.

“Nothing in the whole town seems to be moving.”

“It looks like a toy village, with everything made out of cardboard.”

“That's what I was thinking just before you came. I was thinking that everybody else in the world was dead, and I was the only one left.”

“Why, so was I!” exclaimed Allison, turning her head to look up at him.

Norman was staring straight ahead, a lock of dark hair curling damply on his forehead; the skin at his temples was almost translucent. His finely made lips were parted slightly, and his lashes, over half-closed eyes, made tiny shadows on his thin, white cheeks.

“So was I,” repeated Allison, and this time Norman turned his head and looked at her.

“I used to think,” he said, “that no one ever thought the same things as I. But that's not always true, is it?”

“No,” said Allison, and looked down. Their hands rested close together on the board that had the red letters printed on its side, and there was a companionable sort of intimacy in the sight of them. “No, that isn't always true,” said Allison. “I used to think the same thing, and it bothered me. It made me feel queer and different from everyone else.”

“I used to think that I was the only kid in town who ever came up here,” said Norman. “It was a kind of secret place with me, and I never told anyone.”

“I thought that once,” said Allison. “I'll never forget the day that someone told me it wasn't so. I felt mad and sick, as if I'd caught someone looking in my window.”

“Outraged is a good word,” said Norman. “That's the way I felt. I saw Rodney Harrington and Betty Anderson up here one afternoon, and I ran all the way home, crying.”

“There's one place I'll bet no one knows about. Not even you.”

“Tell me.”

“Come on. I'll show you.”

Indian file, with Allison leading, they made their way through the woods at the side of the road. The branches of low bushes scratched at their legs and they paused every few feet to pick some of the blueberries that grew there. Norman took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and knotted the four corners to make a sort of pouch, and together they filled it with fruit. At last they came to the open field, hidden deep in the woods, and the buttercups and brown-eyed Susans were a sea of brown-dotted gold. Allison and Norman stood close together in the cicada-slivered stillness, not speaking, and ate from the handkerchief basket of berries. After a long time, Norman bent and picked a handful of buttercups.

“Hold up your chin, Allison,” he laughed. “If the flowers reflect gold on your skin it means that you like butter and are going to get fat.”

Allison laughed and tipped her head back. Her pale brown hair, pulled back now and tied into a tail, moved against her back, and the nape of her neck was damp.

“All right, Norman,” she said. “You just look and see if I'm going to get fat!”

He put two fingers under her chin and bent to see if the buttercups he held shed a reflection.

“No,” he said, “I guess not, Allison. It doesn't look as if you'll be fat.”

They were both laughing, and Norman's fingers were still under her face. For a long moment, with the laughter still thick in their throats, they looked at one another, and Norman moved his fingers so that his whole hand rested gently on the side of her face.

“Your lips are all blue from those berries,” he said.

“So are yours,” said Allison, not moving away from his touch.