Peyton Place (25 page)

“I'm pregnant,” said Selena, and immediately bit her lip. She had not meant to blurt it out like that.

“What makes you think so?” asked the doctor.

“Two and a half months and no period makes me think so,” said Selena, and this time she twisted her hands, for she had not meant to say that, either.

“Come on in the other room,” said Dr. Swain. “Let's see what we can see.”

His hands were cool against her hot skin, and once again her mind set up its prayerful refrain.

Help me, Doc. You've got to help me.

“Whose is it?” he asked when they had returned to the office.

Now came the worst part, the part she had rehearsed so carefully in her mind so that she could phrase it in a way that would not antagonize the doctor.

“I am not at liberty to say,” said Selena.

“Nonsense!” roared the doctor, and she knew that she had failed. “What kind of rot is that? You're not the first girl in the world who has to get married, nor in this town, for that matter. Whose is it now, and no more foolishness. Young Carter's?”

“No,” said Selena, and when she bent her head forward her dark hair swung softly on either side of her face.

“Don't you lie to me!” shouted Dr. Swain. “I've seen the way that boy looks at you. What gave you the idea he was inhuman? Come on now, don't lie to me, Selena.”

“I'm not lying,” said the girl, and in the next moment she lost control of herself and began to shout at him. “I'm not lying. If it were Ted's I'd be the happiest girl in the world. But it's
not
his! Doc, help me,” her voice went to a whisper. “Doc, once you told me that if I ever needed you, to come and you'd help me. Well, I'm here now, Doc, and I need help. You've got to help me.”

“What do you mean by help, Selena?” he asked, his voice almost as soft as her own. “How can I help you?”

“Give me something,” she said. “Something to get rid of it.”

“There is nothing I can give you to take, Selena, that would help you now. Tell me who is responsible. Maybe I could help you that way. You could get married only until after the baby is born.”

Selena's lips went tight. “He's already married,” she said.

“Selena,” said Dr. Swain as gently as he knew how, “Selena, there is nothing I can give you at this point that will make you miscarry. The only thing now is an abortion, and that's against the law. I've done a lot of things in my time, Selena, but I have never broken the law. Selena,” he said, leaning forward and taking both her cold hands in his, “Selena, tell me who this man is, and I will see that he is held responsible. He'll have to take care of you and provide for the baby. I could work it so no one would know. You could go away for a little while, until after the baby comes. Whoever did this thing to you would have to pay for that, and for your hospitalization, and for you to look after yourself until you get back on your feet. Just tell me who it is, Selena, and I'll do everything I can to help you.”

‘It's my father,” said Selena Cross. She raised her head and looked Matthew Swain straight in the eyes. “My stepfather,” she said, and tore her hands away from him. She fell forward onto the doctor's hardwood floor and beat her fists against it. “It's Lucas,” she screamed. “It's Lucas. It's Lucas.”

Early that same evening, Dr. Swain telephoned to Seth Buswell that he would be unable to join with the other men of Chestnut Street to play poker.

“What's the matter, Matt?” asked the newspaper editor. “Did we push your luck too far? Somebody go and get sick?”

“No,” said the doctor. “But some things at the hospital need straightening out and I should attend to them this evening.”

“Nothing in the accounting department, I hope,” said Seth laughing. “I hear that those guys from the state auditor's office are bastards.”

“No, Seth. Nothing in the accounting department,” said the doctor, and his hearty laugh was strained. “But I'd better watch my step or the Feds'll be on my tail.”

“Sure, Matt,” laughed Seth. “Well, sorry you can't make the game. See you tomorrow.”

“See you, Seth,” said Dr. Swain and hung up gently.

Selena Cross had not left the doctor's house. She lay in a darkened upstairs bedroom with a cool cloth on her forehead.

“Stay here,” the doctor had told her. “Stay right here on the bed, and when you feel a little better we'll talk over what we can do.”

“There's nothing to do,” said Selena and retched violently while the doctor held a basin for her.

“Lie quietly,” he said. “I have to go downstairs for a while.”

In his dining room, Matthew Swain went at once to the sideboard where he poured himself a large drink of Scotch whisky.

Gin, Scotch, young girls in bed upstairs, I'd better watch out, he thought wryly. If I'm not careful, I'll be getting a reputation as a drunken old reprobate who is no longer the doctor he once was.

He carried the second drink into his living room and sat down on a brocaded sofa in front of the empty fireplace.

What are you going to do, Matthew Swain? he asked himself. Here you've been shooting your mouth off for years. What will you do now, when it is time to put your fancy theories to the test? Nothing dearer than life, eh, Matthew? What is this thing you are thinking of doing if it isn't the destruction of what you have always termed so dear?

Dr. Swain drank his second drink. He was honest enough to realize that the struggle he fought with himself now would leave its mark on him for the rest of his life, and he knew that no matter what his decision, he would always wonder if he had made the right one. It was true that he had never broken any of the laws of the land before, unless a weekly game of five-and-ten poker with friends in a state that prohibited gambling could be looked upon as breaking the law.

No exceptions now, Matthew, he cautioned himself. Poker at Seth's is against the laws of this state, so you
have
broken the law before.

But not in my work, protested another part of his mind. Never in my work.

No, not in your work. Rules are rules and you have always abided by them. Certainly, you are not going to start breaking them now, at your age, and that's the end of it. Rules are rules.

But what about the exceptions to the rules?

There aren't any exceptions in your business, Doctor. You report syphilis, you tell the police if a man with a bullet wound approaches you, and you isolate the sick over protest. No exceptions, Matthew.

But if this child of Selena's is born, it will ruin the rest of her life.

That's none of your affair, Matthew. Go to the police. See that this man Lucas is brought to justice. But keep your hands off Selena Cross.

She is only sixteen years old. She has the beginnings of a pretty good life mapped out for herself. This would ruin her.

You might kill her.

Nonsense. I'd do it in the hospital with all sterile precautions.

Are you mad? In the hospital? Have you gone stark, raving mad?

I could do it. I could do it so no one would know. I could do it tonight. The hospital is practically empty. People just haven't been sick this month.

In the hospital? Are you mad? Are you really mad?

Yes, goddamn it, I am! Whose hospital is it, anyway? Who built the goddamn place, and nursed it, and made it go if it wasn't me?

What do you mean,
your
hospital? That hospital belongs to the people of this community whom you are solemnly bound to serve to the best of your ability. The state says so, and this country says so, and that oath you stood up and took more years ago than you care to remember says so.
Your
hospital. Humph. You must be mad.

Matthew Swain threw his empty whisky glass against the hearth of the empty fireplace. It shattered noisily and crystal slivers flew out in a circle.

“Yes, goddamn it, I'm mad!” said the doctor aloud, and stamped out of his living room and up the stairs that led to the second floor.

But all the while the silent voice pursued him.

You've lost, Matthew Swain, it said. You've lost. Death, venereal disease and organized religion, in that order, eh? Don't you ever let me hear you open your mouth again. You are setting out deliberately this night to inflict death, rather than to protect life as you are sworn to do.

“Feeling better, Selena?” asked the doctor, stepping into the darkened bedroom.

“Oh, Doc,” she said, staring at him with violet-circled eyes. “Oh, Doc. I wish I were dead.”

“Come on, now,” he said cheerfully. “We'll take care of everything and fix you up as good as new.”

And to hell with you, he told the silent voice. I
am
protecting life,
this
life, the one already being lived by Selena Cross.

“Listen to me, Selena,” said Dr. Swain. “Listen to me carefully. This is what we are going to do.”

An hour later, Constance MacKenzie, riding past the Peyton Place hospital with Tomas Makris in the car that he had bought the previous spring, saw the lights showing through the huge square of opaque glass that she knew screened the hospital's operating room.

“Something must have happened,” she said. “The operating room lights are on. I wonder who's sick.”

“That's one of the things I love about Peyton Place,” said Tom, smiling. “A man can't have so much as a gas pain without the whole town wondering who, why, when, where and what he's going to do about it.”

Constance made a face at him. “Big-time city slicker,” she said.

“Taking advantage of the farmer's daughter,” he added, taking her hand and kissing the finger tips.

Constance relaxed against the seat cushions with a contented sigh. She didn't have to open the store in the morning, for Selena Cross had promised to do it for her. Allison was spending the week end with Kathy Ellsworth, and Constance was on her way to dinner in a town eighteen miles away, far from the prying eyes of her neighbors, with the man she loved.

“Why the happy sigh?” asked Tom.

“My cup runneth over,” said Constance, and leaned her cheek against his shoulder.

“Cigarette?”

“Please.”

He lit two, one after the other, and passed one to her. In the quick flare of his lighter, she saw the pointed arch of one eyebrow and the perfect, Grecian line of his nose. His lips, over the narrow tube of his cigarette, were full without being loose, and the line of his chin was pleasantly pronounced.

“Altogether,” she said, “a head from an old Greek coin.”

“I like it when you talk like a smitten lady,” he said.

“That, I am,” she conceded.

There was an easiness to being with him that she had never before experienced with a man. It had been a long time in coming, this easiness, but now was it a part of her and she could almost forget that once she had been fearful of him almost to sickness.

‘What is it?” he asked with the peculiar way he had of knowing when she was thinking of something that concerned either him or both of them.

“I was thinking,” she said, “of the first time you ever came to my house. It was over two years ago, on the night of Allison's spring dance.”

Tom laughed and put her hand to his lips again. “Oh, that,” he said. “Listen, forget about that. Start thinking of what you want to eat when we get to the restaurant. Today is Friday, so they'll have all kinds of fish. It always takes you forever to make up your mind, and we're nearly there now.”

“All right,” she said, “I'll concentrate on haddock, clams and lobster and see what happens.”

She linked her hand through his arm, and at once the remembrance of another, later, time with him came to her.

It must have been three months after the first time that he had come to her house, for it had been August, and Allison had been away at summer camp down at Lake Winnipesaukee. It was a Saturday night, she remembered, and hot. She was working on her store ledger, and although every window in the house was open no breeze stirred. When the doorbell rang she was so startled that she dropped her pen, and it made an ugly blot on the white ledger page.

“Damn,” she muttered, belting her housecoat more tightly around her. “Damn it all.”

She pulled open the front door and Tomas Makris said, “Hi. Let's go for a swim.”

In the weeks following the spring dance in May, he had come to call on her perhaps half a dozen times, and once during that time she had gone out to dinner with him. He had made her feel uncomfortable in a way she could not explain, and she did not want to see him.

“Well, of all the nerve!” she said angrily. “What do you mean by ringing my doorbell at eleven thirty at night with some such insane suggestion as that!”

“If you're going to give me hell,” he said comfortably, “at least ask me in. What will your neighbors think?”

“Heaven only knows what they think already,” she said furiously. The way you're always barging in here, uninvited, any time you feel like it”

“‘Always’?” he asked incredulously. “Six times in the last three months. Does Peyton Place regard that as ‘always’?”

She had to laugh. “No, I guess not,” she admitted. “It's just that you startled me, and I dropped my pen and it made a blot on the ledger.”

“We can't have that,” he said. “Blots on the ledger, I mean.”

She felt herself stiffening, and he seemed to feel it, too, for he spoke quickly.

“Get your bathing suit,” he said, “and we'll go for a swim.”

“You're crazy,” she told him. “In the first place, there is no place to go around here except Meadow Pond, and that's always full of necking teen-agers.”

“Heaven forbid,” he said, “that we should go where the neckers go. I have a car outside that I'm thinking of buying, and there is a lake not eight miles away from here. Let's go try out my prospective car.”

“Mr. Makris–”

“Tom,” he said, patiently.

“Tom,” she said, “I have no intention of going anywhere with you at this hour of the night. I have work to do, it's late, it's after eleven-thirty–”

“It's scandalous,” interrupted Tom, clucking his tongue and shaking his head. “Listen, you've worked all day. Tomorrow is Sunday, so you don't have to get up early. Your daughter is away at camp, so you needn't stay home for her. You have no other excuse that you can possibly offer except that you hate my guts, and you aren't going to say that. Get your bathing suit and come on.”