Peyton Place (31 page)

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 had been able to put the souls of humanity on the simple, uncomplicated plane with bare feet. Some people could walk without shoes with the result that their feet grew tough and calloused, while others could not take a step without the bad luck of stepping on a broken bottle. But the majority, thought Tom with a smile, like Leslie Harrington and Fitzgerald and Connie MacKenzie, would never think of taking off their shoes in the first place. Leslie Harrington played the hardheaded, successful businessman to hide the mediocre mind and fear of impotency that tortured him, while Constance MacKenzie covered the passionate, love-demanding woman that she really was with the respectable garments of the ice maiden. And here was Francis Joseph Fitzgerald, playing the nondrinking Congregational minister when he really longed for the tight white collar and the daily ecclesiastical wine of the Irish priest. Tom longed to put his fist through Harrington's false front, and with Constance he wanted to destroy completely the need for protection, but for Fitzgerald he felt only pity.

Why doesn't the poor bastard chuck what he has, thought Tom, and run as fast as he can to the nearest priest to make his confession?

“We didn't see you at church last Sunday,” Fitzgerald was saying. “I'm afraid all my talk has done you no good, Mr. Makris. You are an impossible man to convert.”

Fitzgerald prided himself on the fact that he kept his conversations on religion with Tom on a depersonalized, intellectual plane.

“Of course,” continued Fitzgerald, “we Protestants are at a disadvantage when it comes to getting the crowds into the churches. We don't have the whip that the Catholics have to hold over our members. If a Catholic misses Mass, he has committed a sin and has hurt only himself, but if a Protestant does not come to church, all we can do is to hope that we see him next Sunday.”

“That's one way of looking at it,” said Tom. “On the other hand, I don't think much of a religion that holds a whip over anybody for any reason.”

Fitzgerald was shocked. “Oh,” he said, shaking his head, “I think that your reasoning is faulty, Mr. Makris. I really do. In fact, having a powerful hold over the people is the one point in which I am in complete sympathy with our Catholic friends.”

Fitzgerald always claimed that he was in sympathy with only one point of the Catholic philosophy but, Tom knew, before the night was over he would have named a dozen points with which he was in sympathy, and they would run the gamut from birth control to the refusal to bury suicides in consecrated ground.

Just how much, wondered Tom bitterly, was religion, any religion, worth when it could do to a man what it had done to Fitzgerald?

Somewhere, Fitzgerald had lost sight of his larger purpose in life. He had lost it in a welter of man-made contradictions, and now he was fighting with his sanity to find it again. He enumerated for Tom all the rules involved in what he called “serving God.” He pointed out carefully the differences between the Catholic rules and the Protestant rules.

“Now I ask you, Mr. Makris, how do the Protestants expect to keep the church strong, if they refuse to outlaw birth control? The Catholics have it on us there, I'm afraid. Watch the number of children who go into St. Joseph's every Sunday. There are twice as many as I get. You have to get plenty of them—and catch them while they are young—for lasting results.”

Give me a child until he is seven, thought Tom, and he is forever after mine. When the Fascists say it, they're bums and kidnapers, but when the Church says it, it is known as putting a kid on the right track.

“Listen, Reverend,” said Tom when the minister had run down for a moment. “Why do you make such a big thing out of all these differences in ceremony, and this matter of rules? It's ridiculous, isn't it? If I got you and Father O'Brien in here and tried to start up a discussion about the number of angels that can dance on a needle's point, you'd both think I'd gone off my head. Isn't it, then, just as foolish to argue about whether a child will be baptized by total immersion or by a few drops of water sprinkled on the head? Or whether eating meat on Friday constitutes a sin or not?”

Reverend Fitzgerald had gone white. He had heard no more of Tom's sentence after the words Father O'Brien.

They are in league with one another, thought Fitzgerald's sick, tired mind. If they weren't, Makris would never have mentioned his name.

Fitzgerald stood up abruptly, upsetting what was left of his drink. He ran from the room before Tom could look at him with
that
look, Father O'Brien's look. It was a look that recognized a sinner on sight.

You have fallen away, said the look. You have sinned, you have transgressed, you are doomed.

“Is that you, Fran?” Margaret Fitzgerald's voice called.

Tom went to his door to listen for Fitzgerald's answer, but no voice spoke. All he could hear was a panting sound, which came from a figure crouched at the foot of the stairs.

The next morning, when Tom left his apartment to go out, Reverend Fitzgerald was nowhere to be seen. This was unusual because it was Saturday, and every Saturday morning found the minister hard at work in his small flower garden at the side of the house. Tom stood on the front porch and listened curiously. The town was full of summer morning sounds. Somewhere a lawn mower was being pushed, and from farther away came the scrape of roller skates against cement. Very faintly, from perhaps as far as Depot Street, there came an echo of someone practicing the chromatic scales on the piano, and from behind Tom, coming from Reverend Fitzgerald's quarters, there was the uneven chatter of typewriter keys. All together, thought Tom, a very normal Saturday morning. But where was Fitzgerald? The sound that was missing was the clip of the minister's garden shears, as he cut and snipped and pruned. Tom shrugged and swung down the front steps of the house. It was nothing that concerned him. If the Congregationalist minister was spending the morning in cutting out paper dolls that had the shape of a robed Pope, it was no business of Tom's.

At any other time, in any other place, Tom could and would have gone to someone in a position of authority and said: “Your minister is ill. He is in no condition to lead a flock of searching souls, for he has lost his way. He is ill and needs help,” but in Peyton Place, on a sunny Saturday morning in July, Tom shrugged and walked off down Elm Street. He had learned the hard way, the wisdom of minding his own business, at the first town meeting he had attended the year after his arrival in Peyton Place. At that time, he had attempted to state his opinion on town zoning. When he had finished speaking, a man had stood up and looked him up and down.

“You on the voting check list in this town, Mr.–?”

The inquirer had asked his question in a slow drawl, and had let the end of his question peter out, as if he had forgotten Tom's name.

Then Tom had understood. He had seen that the privilege of outspoken criticism, the privilege of rectifying a faulty condition, were privileges allowed only to the older residents, and that by “Older Residents,” Peyton Place meant people whose grandparents had been born in the town. Tom had laughed at the fact that this was so, but he had not attempted to criticize or correct again. He contented himself with observation, and with the realization that he had made two friends at his first town meeting, Seth Buswell and Matthew Swain.

Now as he passed the building that housed the
Peyton Place Times,
Tom glanced in through the glass window that was between Seth's office and the street. Seth was sitting at his desk and sitting next to Seth, in the visitor's chair, was Allison MacKenzie. She was dressed in a polished, starched cotton dress, and she was wearing a pair of white gloves. Wondering, Tom managed a casual wave of his hand to the two in Seth's office, and continued on his way to the Thrifty Corner.

It would be difficult, he thought, for many people in New York, and quite a few in Pittsburgh, to believe that Tomas Makris was in love at last. Not only in love, but kept dangling impossibly by a widow of thirty-five who had a fifteen-year-old daughter, and who had done him the favor, in over two years, of sleeping with him perhaps a dozen times. A widow, moreover, whom he wanted to marry, but who would not marry him for another two years, if then. Tom smiled. There were men who would wait forever for the woman of their choice, but he had never been one of them. There were also men who preferred to wait to claim their women physically until they were legally married. He had never been one of those, either. Tom admitted cheerfully, in the idiom of Peyton Place, that he was hog-tied and completely swozzled. He would wait for Connie MacKenzie if it took her fifty years to make up her mind.

“That's what I am,” he said as he entered the Thrifty Corner.

“What?” laughed Constance MacKenzie, putting down her newspaper and coming to greet him.

“Hog-tied and completely swozzled,” said Tom, and bent down to kiss the inside of her wrist.

Constance caressed the back of his head with her free hand.

“Nice goings on in a place of business in broad daylight,” she whispered to him.

He could do little things like kissing her finger tips or the inside of her wrist with a complete naturalness and sincerity that kept them from seeming planned or contrived. Once, he had kissed the sole of her bare foot and she had been aroused to the point of powerful and immediate sexual desire. At first, she had been embarrassed by his unorthodox expressions of tenderness, for they had reminded her of love scenes in rather effete novels. They seemed incongruous coming, as they did, from a man of Tom's size and temperament.

“The trouble with you,” he had told her, “is that you got all your ideas of virile love-making from paper-backed books and Hollywood.”

She had laughed and dismissed herself as a fool for being affected by such gestures as wrist-kissing. She did not laugh now. Her voice grew husky and she trailed her finger tips over the short, tough hairs at the back of his neck.

“So am I,” she said.

“What?”

“Hog-tied and completely swozzled,” she said.

“Enough,” he said, releasing her, “or I'll forget that it is the morning of a business day, and that I am in the women's department of the Thrifty Corner Apparel Shoppe. Shoppe, that is, with two
P'
s and an
E.
Where's the coffee?”

“All made,” she said. “I'll get it.”

She carried cups and saucers to an empty place on one of the counters, and Tom went to the room at the back of the store for the coffeepot. They leaned against the counter and drank coffee and ate doughnuts.

“I saw Allison in Seth's office,” said Tom. “What in the world is she doing there?”

“Don't you remember what you told her months ago?” asked Constance. “You told her that the best place for a writer to get started was on a newspaper. She's gone to ask Seth for a job.”

Tom laughed. “Well,” he said, “the
Peyton Place Times
wasn't exactly what I had in mind when I spoke with Allison, but it would do nicely for a beginning. She has more imagination than I, to even think of going to Seth. I hope she can talk him into something.”

“I don't,” said Constance. “Writing social notes for a small-town weekly wasn't what I had in mind for Allison.”

“What did you have in mind, then?”

“Oh,” said Constance vaguely, “college, then a good job for a while, then marriage to a successful man.”

“Maybe Allison doesn't want that,” said Tom. “I think she has a talent with words, and I am a firm believer in anyone with a talent working it for all it's worth.”

“It doesn't take much talent to write that Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So visited Mr. and Mrs. Somebody-or-Other for the week end. That about covers what Seth puts in his paper.”

“It is a beginning,” said Tom. “As I said before, Seth's paper wasn't exactly what I had in mind when I suggested newspaper work to Allison. But it will do for now.”

“I shan't worry about it,” said Constance. “She has two years of high school left. That ought to be enough time for her to get over this foolishness about writing for a living.”

Tom smiled, refraining from telling Constance of a few people he knew to whom writing for a living was anything but foolishness. “It's Saturday,” he said. “How about driving down to Manchester for dinner tonight?”

“All right,” said Constance. “I won't be able to leave until late, though. I'll be glad when Selena is well and can come back to work.”

“The pleasures of a teacher's life, also those of a teacher's wife, include a long summer vacation every year. If we were married and you had given up business, you could come down to Mudgett's Hardware with me now and feast your eyes on the fishing equipment. I might even buy you a rod and reel.”

“Beat it, laziness,” laughed Constance, “before you talk yourself into something you'll be sorry for.”

“I'll pick you up here, at six,” he said.