Peyton Place (24 page)

When he kissed her it was softly, without touching her except for raising his other hand to her cheek. The buttercups he still held were like velvet on their faces.

Dr. Matthew Swain and Seth Buswell sat in Seth's office in the building that housed the
Peyton Place Times.
The doctor fanned himself with his white straw hat and sipped at Seth's special summertime concoction of gin and iced grapefruit juice.

“Like the man said,” remarked Seth, “ninety-nine degrees in the shade, and there ain't no shade.”

“For Christ's sake, don't talk about the weather,” said the doctor. “I was just being thankful that very few have picked this month to be sick.”

“Nobody's got the energy to get sick,” said Seth. “It's too goddamned hot to think about layin’ on a rubber sheet over in your hospital.”

“Jesus!” exclaimed the doctor, half rising to his feet as a car raced past on Elm Street. “Don't push my luck talking about it, or we'll be scraping young Harrington off a road somewhere.”

“It'll be Leslie's fault if you do. Damned foolishness, buyin’ a sixteen-year-old kid three thousand dollars’ worth of convertible coupé.”

“Especially Rodney Harrington,” said the doctor. “That kid's got as much sense as a flea. Maybe it's a good thing he got kicked out of New Hampton. Leslie can have him here in town where he can keep an eye on him, which isn't worth much, I'll grant.”

“Didn't you know?” asked Seth. “Leslie's got Proctor to take him. How he worked getting Rodney into that school, I don't know, but the kid is going there in the fall.”

“I don't imagine he'll be there too long,” said the doctor. “I saw him over to White River last week. He had that convertible piled full of kids, and they were all drinking. Leslie about bit my head off when I told him about it. Told me to mind my own business and let the kid sow a few wild oats. Wild oats at sixteen. As I remember it, I was considerably older when I started planting mine.”

“I don't like that kid,” said Seth. “I don't like him one bit better than I ever liked Leslie.”

Two figures passed in front of the plate glass window in Seth's office. The girl raised her head and glanced in, waving her hand at the two men inside, but the boy was preoccupied in watching the girl, and he did not look up. He carried a handful of buttercups as if he had forgotten that he held them.

“There goes Allison MacKenzie with the Page boy,” said the doctor. “I wonder if his mother knows he's out.”

“She went to White River this afternoon,” said Seth. “I passed her going in just as I was leaving.”

“That accounts for Norman walking on the street with a girl then,” said the doctor. “I imagine that Evelyn went to White River to consult John Bixby. She hasn't come near me to be treated since I told her there was nothing the matter with her but selfishness and bad temper. Odd,” he continued after a pause, “how hatred manifests itself in different ways. Look at the Page Girls, healthy as plow horses, both of ’em, and then look at Evelyn, always suffering with an ache or a pain somewhere.”

“But look at what hatred did for Leslie Harrington,” said Seth. “He hated the whole world and set out to lick it. And he did.”

“I'd like to see the boy get free of her before it's too late,” said the doctor, still thinking of Norman Page. “Maybe if he got himself a nice girl, like Allison MacKenzie, it would counteract Evelyn's influence.”

“You're worse than an old woman, Matt,” said Seth, laughing. “An old woman and a matchmaker to boot. Have another drink.”

“Have you no shame?” demanded the doctor, extending his glass. “Sitting around soaking up gin all day?”

“Nope,” said Seth unhesitatingly. “None at all. Here's to little Norman Page. A long life and a merry one, providing Evelyn doesn't eat him alive first.”

“I don't think that he's strong enough to fight her,” said the doctor. “She expects too much from him—love, admiration, eventual financial support, unquestioning loyalty, even sex.”

“Oh, come now,” said Seth. “The weather's got you. Don't go tellin’ me that Evelyn Page is sleepin’ with her son.”

“The trouble with you, Seth,” said the doctor with mock severity, “is that you think of all sex in terms of men sleeping with women. It's not always so. Let me tell you about a case I saw once, a young boy with the worst case of dehydration I ever saw. It came from getting too many enemas that he didn't need. Sex, with a capital S-E-X.”

“Jesus, Matt!” exclaimed Seth, making his eyes bulge with exaggerated horror. “Do you think that's what put old Oakleigh in his grave? Enemas?”

“Don't be a conclusion jumper,” protested the doctor. “I didn't say that what I was talking about had anything to do with Evelyn Page and Norman. And, no, Oakleigh didn't die of enemas. He was lashed to death, by the tongues of Caroline and Charlotte and Evelyn Page.”

“I'm goin’ to stop feedin’ you gin,” said Seth. “It makes you too goddamned morose, and today it's too hot to be morose or anything else.”

“Except drunk,” said Dr. Swain, standing up, “which I have no intention of getting at four o'clock on a Friday afternoon. I have to go.”

“See you tonight?” asked Seth. “The whole gang is comin’ tonight, which makes for good poker.”

“I'll be there,” said the doctor. “And bring your checkbook, Seth. I feel lucky.”

Selena Cross, standing in front of the window in the Thrifty Corner, saw Dr. Matthew Swain go by. At once, her heart began to pump more heavily as fear gripped her and spread itself through her body. She stared in horror at the tall, white-suited figure that had never shown her anything but kindness.

Help me, Doc, she rehearsed silently. You've got to help me.

“Matt Swain is the only man I ever saw who can wear a white suit successfully,” said Constance MacKenzie at Selena's elbow. “He may look unpressed, but he never looks sweaty.”

Selena's fingers clenched around the middle of the curved-in Coke bottle she held.

I'll wait one more day, she thought. One more day, and if nothing happens, I'll go see The Doc. Help me, Doc, I'll say. You've got to help me.

“Selena?”

“Yes, Mrs. MacKenzie?”

“Don't you feel well?”

“Sure, Mrs. MacKenzie, I feel fine. It's just the heat.”

“You're so pale looking. It's not like you.”

“It's just the heat, Mrs. MacKenzie. I'm fine.”

“Things are so slow today. Why don't you take the rest of the afternoon off?”

“Thanks anyway, but Ted's meeting me at six.”

“Well, go on out back and sit down for a while, then. Honestly, I never saw you looking so white.”

“All right. I'll go sit down. Call me if you need me.”

“I will, dear,” said Constance MacKenzie, and at the kindness of her tone, Selena almost wept.

If you knew, she thought. If you knew what the matter is, you wouldn't talk so gently to me. You'd tell me to get out of your sight. Oh, Doc, help me. What if Ted found out, or his folks, or anybody?

Selena had never been one to let the opinions of Peyton Place bother her in any way.

“Let ’em talk,” she had said. “They'll talk anyway.”

But now, with this terrible thing that had happened to her, she was afraid. She knew her town, and its many voices.

“A girl in trouble.”

“She got in Dutch.”

“She's knocked up.”

“The tramp. The dirty little tramp.”

“Well, that's the shack dwellers for you.”

If it had not been for Ted Carter, Selena would have stuck her chin out at the world and demanded: “So what?” But she loved Ted. At sixteen, Selena had a maturity which some women never achieve. She knew her own mind, and she knew her own heart. She loved Ted Carter and knew that she always would, and to imagine him looking at her with his heart breaking for all to see was more than she could bear. Ted, with a sense of honor that he had inherited from somewhere, with a rigid self-control that he would not let break. Ted, holding her and saying, “I won't, darling. I won't hurt you.” Ted, pulling away from her when he did not want to, saying that in addition to love and respect, he had patience. They had laughed about it.

“We girls from the backwoods are all hot blooded,” she had said.

“It's not too much longer,” Ted had told her. “Two years. We're only sixteen, and we have our whole lives. We'll get married before I go to college.”

“I love you. I love you. I never loved anybody in the world except Joey, and I love you more.”

“I want you, baby. How I want you! Don't touch me. What if I ever got you in trouble? It happens, you know. No matter how careful people are, it happens. You know what this town is like. You know how they treat a girl that gets in trouble. Remember when it happened to the Anderson girl, Betty's sister? She had to move away. She couldn't even get a job in town.”

Oh, Doc, prayed Selena, putting her head down between her knees against the faintness she felt. Oh, Doc, help me.

“Selena?”

“Yes, Mrs. MacKenzie?”

“Telephone.”

Selena stood up and ran shaking fingers over her cheeks and hair, then she went to the front of the store.

“Hello?” she said into the receiver.

“Oh, honey,” said Ted Carter, “I'm afraid I won't be able to meet you at six o'clock. Mr. Shapiro has three thousand more chickens coming in, and I have to stay and help.”

“That's all right, Ted,” said Selena. “Mrs. MacKenzie offered me the rest of the afternoon off. As long as you can't get away, I'll take her up on it.”

The rest of the afternoon. The rest of the afternoon. I'll go see The Doc during the rest of the afternoon.

Selena hardly heard Ted's plan to meet her later. She hung up on his telephoned kiss, and stood staring down at the whiteness of her hand on the black receiver.

“Mrs. MacKenzie,” she said, a few minutes later, “is it all right if I take the rest of the afternoon after all?”

“Of course, dear. Go home and get some rest. You look all tired out.”

“Thank you,” said Selena. “That's just what I'll do. I'll go home and take a nap.”

Constance MacKenzie watched Selena walk out of sight on Elm Street. It was odd, she mused, that Selena refused to confide in her.

In the last two years they had become so friendly that there were very few things that they had not discussed. Selena was the only person who knew that Constance was planning to marry Tomas Makris. Constance had told her, in her first flush of joy, over a year ago. Selena understood how it was with Constance. She knew how careful she had to be, because of Allison. Selena had even offered advice.

“The longer you wait, Mrs. MacKenzie, the worse it's going to be,” Selena had said. “Allison always had strong feelings about her father. She'll have them next year, and the year after that. I don't see how waiting until she graduates from high school is going to solve anything.”

Constance sighed. Tom didn't see how waiting for Allison to graduate from high school was going to solve anything, either. She had a date with him this evening, and she knew that the subject would come up. It always did. If she could only get up enough courage to tell him the way it had been with Allison's father, if she only dared to tell him everything. But she loved him in the only way a woman of thirty-five can love a man when she has never loved before—wholeheartedly, with all her mind and body, but also with fear. Constance regarded Tomas Makris as the embodiment of everything she wanted and had never had, and she was afraid of losing him. What made the situation even more difficult was the fact that he loved her. He loved, she told herself fearfully, the woman she appeared to be: Widow, devoted mother, respected member of the community. How well would he love a woman who had taken a lover and been stupid enough to bear him a bastard child? Constance, who had despised herself for sixteen years, could not believe that any man could love her once he knew the truth. She had many reasons for not marrying Tom without first telling him the facts, and all her reasons had to do with honor and nobility and truth. The fact of the matter was that she was tired of carrying a burden alone and wanted, at all costs, to share its weight with someone. More than anything, she wanted to be with someone with whom she need not forever be painstakingly, frighteningly careful. Constance MacKenzie, almost as unhappy as she had been two years before, went into the small room at the back of her store and made herself a tall glass of iced tea.

Selena Cross hurried in the late afternoon sun. When she reached Chestnut Street, she felt as though every window held a pair of eyes that stared at her and knew her secret at once.

A girl in trouble, said every pair of eyes. A girl in Dutch. Not a nice girl, a bad girl. No kind of girl for young Ted Carter.

Selena hurried up the flagstone walk, wet now with the spray from two lawn sprinklers that were making lazy circles, and ran up the front steps between two of the pillars of the doctor's “Southern-looking” house. Matthew Swain answered her urgent ring.

“For God's sake, Selena,” he said, looking only once at her white face, “come in out of that beastly heat.”

But inside, in the wide, cool hall, Selena's teeth began to chatter, and the doctor looked at her sharply.

“Come into the office,” he said.

A visiting colleague had once said that Matt Swain's office looked less like a doctor's office than any other anywhere. It was true, for the doctor had used part of what had once been a drawing room for his place of business. Half of the drawing room was shut off with folding doors, and on the other side Matthew Swain had his examining rooms. The floors in both the office and the examining rooms were the same hardwood floors that had been put down when the house was built, and next to the doctor's untidiness the floors were Isobel Crosby's greatest source of complaint.

‘It's bad enough,” Isobel would say, “that The Doc has all kinds of folks trackin’ into the house when he could well afford an office downtown, but hardwood floors! Imagine it. Hardwood floors that you can't run over with a wet mop!”

Selena Cross sat down carefully on the straight chair next to the doctor's desk.

“Relax, Selena,” said the doctor. “No matter what it is, it's nothing that won't feel a little better for telling me about it.”