Peyton Place (30 page)

If it was wrong to be this happy, thought Selena, she wanted to be wrong all the rest of her life. When Ted talked, she could close her eyes and see her future stretching out before her as smooth as satin ribbon and as calm as the wide Connecticut River in summer. She had thought carefully about the other, the ugliness of a week ago, and she had expected to feel horror or shame. All she had felt was an overwhelming, grateful sense of relief. Her practical mind decided to forget it, to think no more about it than one would think of a cut suffered long ago, during childhood. It was over and done with, and she would not even be able to find a scar unless she looked hard for it.

“Oh, Ted,” she said, shiny eyed. “I can go home tomorrow.”

I can go home, she thought, and only Joey and my mother will be there.

“I think I'll buy that Ford I was looking at,” said Ted. “I'll buy it tomorrow and come to fetch you home in style.”

“How much are they asking for it?” asked Selena.

Ted told her, and they began to discuss the advisability of investing so much capital in a used car. They realized that they sounded like old, married people when they talked this way, and it gave each of them a sense of warmth that nothing else could. They held hands and decided that the Ford wasn't a bad buy, providing that Jinks, the garageowner, guaranteed them a good price if they should want to trade next year.

Ted kissed Selena good night at nine o'clock and walked out of the Peyton Place hospital with a silent whistle on his lips. When he was halfway to town his happiness would no longer let him be still. He uttered a loud war whoop, without caring if anyone heard and thought him crazy, and ran all the way to Elm Street.

“Evening, sir,” he said to the man he met just before he turned the corner into Maple Street.

Reverend Fitzgerald, of the Congregational church, started as if someone had put a gun against his ribs.

“Oh!” he said. “Oh, Ted. You startled me for a minute. How are you?”

“Very well, sir,” said Ted, and waited for the minister's next question. It came, as it always did.

“Er, Carter,” said Reverend Fitzgerald. “Carter, I didn't see you in church last Sunday. Will we see you this Sunday?”

“Yes, sir,” said Ted.

It was odd, thought Ted a few minutes later as he approached his house, that no matter whom Reverend Fitzgerald talked to, he always asked that same question. Every Sunday, the Congregational church was jammed to the doors, but every time Reverend Fitzgerald met a Congregationalist, he always asked the same question. Will we see you next Sunday?

Ted shrugged. It was, he supposed, just one of the eccentricities that people had. The minister asked his question; the old men in front of the courthouse swore and talked dirty; his father hated Jews and shack dwellers. Everyone had an eccentricity of some kind, Ted imagined, and went into his house. His parents were sitting in the living room. Harmon was reading and Roberta was knitting. No one spoke.

Reverend Fitzgerald glanced up at the second-story windows of the parsonage before he went into the house. The lights upstairs were burning, which meant that Tomas Makris was at home.

Perhaps, Reverend Fitzgerald hoped, he could persuade Tom to come down to sit on the porch and talk for a while.

The Congregationalist minister smiled to himself in the darkened, first-floor hall. Two years ago, he would not have approached Tom with a ten-foot pole, let alone invite him down for a conversation. Reverend Fitzgerald had been furious when Leslie Harrington had asked about renting the apartment over the parsonage. He had refused good-naturedly, and Leslie Harrington had been just as good-naturedly insistent. A second-floor apartment had been installed in the house next to the Congregational church long before the church had bought it for a parsonage. The apartment had been built to accommodate the married son of the man who had first owned the house, and it had stood idle ever since the place had been purchased by the church. Certainly, as Reverend Fitzgerald had pointed out to Leslie Harrington, the millowner could not expect his minister to take kindly to the idea of having someone live up over his head after all his years of privacy. Harrington, though, could not remain good natured for long when he thought that he was being balked. He had a streak of vulgarity in him. He had ended up, over two years ago, by telling the minister that he was lucky to have a roof over his head at all, and that it was people like Leslie Harrington, regular, openhanded churchgoers, who made it possible for Reverend Fitzgerald to be maintained in such style.

“We've been decent to you, Fitzgerald,” Harrington had said. “We've seen to it that you had this house, and heat, and a car and a salary. The least you can do is to not make things unpleasant for yourself. I want that upstairs apartment for the new headmaster, and I want it now.”

Well, thought Reverend Fitzgerald, that was Leslie Harrington for you. What he could not get by fair means, he obtained by the foul expedient of threats. It was typical of Leslie Harrington to point out bluntly the reality of his regular and generous contributions to the church. And what defense did a dependent minister have against such tactics? How could the minister tell Harrington that he was afraid to have anyone in such close proximity as the upstairs apartment? A minister was supposed to spend his life in close proximity to others. How would it sound if he told Harrington, the Peyton Place Congregational Church's largest supporter, that he, Reverend Fitzgerald, was terrified of having people near him? No, it would not do at all. As the minister put it to himself, his hands were tied and his lips were sealed. He had laughed and clapped Leslie Harrington on the shoulder and told the busy millowner not to worry himself with such petty details. He, Reverend Fitzgerald, would get Nellie Cross to clean the upstairs apartment and get it in shape for Mr. Makris, who was due to arrive in town in three days.

When Tom arrived, Reverend Fitzgerald waited until Leslie Harrington was gone to put his foot down.

“See here, Mr. Makris,” he said, “I don't want any smoking or drinking or loud radio playing going on upstairs.”

Tom laughed. “You stay downstairs, padre,” he said, unpleasantly, “and I'll stay upstairs. That way, you won't know if I drink myself senseless every night, and I won't know whether or not you worship idols in secret.”

Reverend Fitzgerald gasped. What Tom said was not the truth, but it was a little
too close to it
for
comfort.

“Fitzgerald?” Tom had inquired on that night over two years ago. “Irish, isn't it?”

“Yes”

“Orangeman, eh?”

“No”

That had put an end to that particular conversation, but the Congregationalist minister had spent a few anxious weeks wondering what Tom was thinking.

Francis Joseph Fitzgerald was an Irishman, born and bred a Catholic and raised in a tenement in East Boston. When he was in his late teens, it had pleased him to say that he had remained a Catholic until he was old enough to read. At that time, he used to say, he had discovered too many holes in Catholicism to satisfy an intelligent, intellectual man. He had renounced the Holy Roman Church and become a Protestant. His new religion had so satisfied his questioning that he decided to become a minister. It had not been easy. Protestant theological schools, he had found, were not overly eager to accept former Catholic Irishmen by the name of Fitzgerald. In the end, however, he had succeeded. Not only was he accepted by a good school, he graduated at the head of his class, and when he was ordained and sent out into the field, it had been with many high hopes and good wishes on the part of his teachers.

Thinking it over now, Francis Joseph Fitzgerald could not remember when, exactly, he had begun to wonder about the Catholic faith which he had shed so easily in his youth. He knew that it had been since coming to Peyton Place, twelve years before, but he could not recall the exact moment when Protestantism had begun to be less than enough. If he could recall the moment, he reasoned, he would be able to recall an incident, and if he could do that he would know the reason for his torturing, unending questions. For there must have been an incident, he was sure, some happening so trivial at the time that he had paid it no attention, and it had festered in his mind, producing, at last, the pus-filled, running sore that was his diseased faith. Fitzgerald's mind grew weary with his constant searching, and his tongue ached with the desire to speak, but he could not, of course, discuss his questions with his wife. Margaret Fitzgerald, who had been born Margaret Bunker, the only daughter of a Congregationalist minister from White River, hated Catholicism with a violent, un-Christianlike hatred. Francis Joseph Fitzgerald had discovered that shortly after he married her. He had, in fact, discovered it after they had been married only one week, and while they had still been honeymooning in the White Mountains.

“Peggy Fitzgerald,” he had said, laughing in what he later remembered as his one and only attempt at humor with her. “Peggy Fitzgerald,” he said, in his easily remembered brogue. “Puts me in mind of me mither, an Irish lass from County Galway.”

Margaret Bunker Fitzgerald had not been amused. “You'll never get over it, will you?” she had spit at him furiously. “You'll never get over being an Irishman, a black Irish Catholic from a Boston slum. Don't you ever dare call me Peggy again. My name is Margaret, and don't you forget it!”

He had been shocked. “My mother's name was Margaret,” he said defensively, the brogue completely gone now from his speech. “And my father always called her Peggy.”

“Your mother,” said Margaret, succeeding in making Mrs. Fitzgerald the elder sound like a werewolf. “Your
mother!”

So, of course, when Reverend Fitzgerald began to wonder, and to be frightened by his thoughts, he could not go to his wife for the comfort that discussion might have brought. He had carried on his work, torturedly asking and trying to find replies to his own questions, until Tomas Makris had come to live in the apartment upstairs over the parsonage.

Reverend Fitzgerald climbed the stairs to the second floor, taking care to avoid every loose board on the way, in the hope of not waking Margaret who slept, snoring softly, in the rear bedroom of the parsonage. Margaret did not like Tom. She said that he was too loud, too brash, too dark, too big and too much lacking in respect for the Congregational church. The real reason that she disliked him was that she could not intimidate him. When she used tactics on him, which would have reduced her husband to an acquiescent lump, Tom merely laughed—at
her.

The headmaster of the Peyton Place schools was sprawled out in an easy chair in the living room of his apartment. He was naked except for a pair of athletic shorts, and he held a tall, frosted glass in one hand.

“Join me,” he said to Fitzgerald, after the minister had knocked and entered.

“I thought you might like to come down and sit on the porch for a while,” said Fitzgerald shyly. Nakedness always made him shy, and he kept his eyes turned away from Tom when he spoke.

“We can't talk down on the porch,” said Tom. “We might wake Mrs. Fitzgerald, who has been snoring cozily for the last hour. Sit down and have a drink. It's as cool here as it is outside anyway.”

“Thank you,” said Fitzgerald, sitting down. “But I don't drink.”

“What?” demanded Tom. “An Irishman who doesn't drink? Never heard of one.”

Fitzgerald laughed uneasily. Tom did not speak softly, by any means, and Fitzgerald was afraid that Margaret might wake. She hated to have anyone refer to her husband as an Irishman. If she heard Tom she would, undoubtedly, come upstairs and drag Fitzgerald off to bed.

“All right,” he said. “I'll have one. Just a little one, though.”

Tom went to the small kitchen and returned carrying a glass as tall and as full as his own.

“Here,” he said. “This will do you good.”

Fitzgerald fascinated Tom. The minister was a perfect study of a man at war with his environment and himself. Often, Tom looked at Fitzgerald and wondered how the older man had survived as long as he had without either running away physically, or taking refuge in a mental breakdown. He had asked Connie MacKenzie about the minister, but she had not agreed with him that something was radically wrong with Fitzgerald. He was all right, she said. Not as gifted as some preachers, maybe, but a good man, conscientious and faithful. But when Tom looked at Fitzgerald, he wondered at the powerful, destructive tendency in humanity which drives a man to painful extremes in order to maintain the picture of himself which he has manufactured for the rest of the world to look upon.

As a very young man, Tom had realized that there were two kinds of people: Those who manufactured and maintained tedious, expensive shells, and those who did not. Those who did, lived in constant terror lest the shells of their own making crack open to display the weakness that was underneath, and those who did not were either crushed or toughened. After much thought, Tom happening so trivial at the time that he had paid it no attention, and it had festered in his mind, producing, at last, the pus-filled, running sore that was his diseased faith. Fitzgerald's mind grew weary with his constant searching, and his tongue ached with the desire to speak, but he could not, of course, discuss his questions with his wife. Margaret Fitzgerald, who had been born Margaret Bunker, the only daughter of a Congregationalist minister from White River, hated Catholicism with a violent, un-Christianlike hatred. Francis Joseph Fitzgerald had discovered that shortly after he married her. He had, in fact, discovered it after they had been married only one week, and while they had still been honeymooning in the White Mountains.

“Peggy Fitzgerald,” he had said, laughing in what he later remembered as his one and only attempt at humor with her. “Peggy Fitzgerald,” he said, in his easily remembered brogue. “Puts me in mind of me mither, an Irish lass from County Galway.”

Margaret Bunker Fitzgerald had not been amused. “You'll never get over it, will you?” she had spit at him furiously. “You'll never get over being an Irishman, a black Irish Catholic from a Boston slum. Don't you ever dare call me Peggy again. My name is Margaret, and don't you forget it!”