Peyton Place (37 page)

“Do you actually mean to sit there and tell me that if we got married and Allison did anything, got into trouble, or even if she was lucky and didn't get caught–” she stopped, unable to find words to conclude her thought.

“If Allison, or any kid for that matter, goes around, quote doing things unquote, I cannot say that I think it is something as terrible as you want me to say it is,” said Tom and folded his arms and leaned back in his chair.

“For heaven's sake, Tom. It's abnormal in a child that age. There's something wrong with a kid who thinks overmuch of sex.”

“What do you mean by overmuch?”

One of the few things about Tom which annoyed Constance was his habit of questioning every questionable word in her arguments. More often than not, she had discovered, he could render her opinions utterly senseless and baseless by making her say exactly what she meant, word for word.

“By overmuch,” she said crossly, “I mean just what I say. It is thinking overmuch of sex when a fifteen-year-old girl lets some boy like Harrington take her out and do whatever he wants with her. If Betty hadn't been thinking too much about sex for years, she wouldn't even know enough to realize that a boy wanted to take her out for what he could get. The idea would never enter her head.”

“Wow,” said Tom, lighting a cigarette. “Are you confused!”

“I am not! It's abnormal for a girl of fifteen to be as wise as Betty is. Well, she wasn't quite wise enough, apparently.”

“I'd be inclined to think that if Betty, at fifteen, didn't think about sex she was abnormal. Much more so than because she obviously has thought about it. I think that any normal kid,” he said, pointing his cigarette at her–” ‘normal’ being your word, not mine-has thought plenty about sex.”

“All right!” conceded Constance unwillingly. “But thinking and doing are two different things. And nothing you can say is going to make me believe that it's perfectly all right for kids like Betty Anderson and Rodney Harrington to go around having—things to do with each other.”

Tom raised an eyebrow. “What the hell have you got against the word intercourse?” he asked. “It's a good, serviceable word. Yet you'd rather rack your brain for fifteen minutes to find a substitute rather than use it.”

“Whatever you want to call it, I still don't think it is all right for children.”

“In the last few minutes,” said Tom, “you've gone from calling what happened between Betty and Rodney ‘awful’ to ‘abnormal’ and now to ‘not all right.’ I'm not going around advocating fornication on every street corner and an illegitimate child in every home, and for those reasons I'll admit that I don't think that it is ‘all right.’ But since I know that a kid at fifteen or sixteen, and oftentimes younger, is physically ready for sex, I can't agree that I think Betty and Rodney are ‘abnormal.’ And since I also know that in addition to a child being physically ready for sex at fifteen or sixteen, his mind has been educated and conditioned to sex and he feels a tremendous, basic drive for sex, I cannot agree with you when you say that you think Betty and Rodney are ‘awful.’”

“Tremendous, basic drive,” scoffed Constance. “Now you're going to go all Freudian on me and tell me that sex is on a par with eating, drinking and defecating.”

“In the first place, Freud never said any such thing, but we'll let that pass. And in the second place, I certainly do not put sex on a par with the things you mentioned. I put it next to the urge for self-preservation, where it belongs.”

“Oh,” said Constance, with an impatient gesture, “you men make me sick. I suppose you were being driven by this tremendous, basic urge at the age of fifteen or sixteen.”

“Fourteen,” said Tom, and laughed at the look on her face. “Fourteen, I was. She was a kid who lived in a tenement on the same floor as I, and I caught her in the toilet at the end of the hall. I took her standing up, with the stink of potatoes boiled too long in too much water, and filth and urine all around us, and I loved it. I may even say that I wallowed in it, and I couldn't wait to get back for more.”

“And that's the second thing about you that annoys me,” said Constance. “The first one is the way you always rip my arguments into pieces, and the second one is the way you seem to try to be deliberately crude. You don't care what you say, nor to whom. Sometimes I think that you lie awake nights thinking up things to say for their shock value.”

“Faulty reasoning,” said Tom. “What am I to do with you?”

“Don't say things like you do,” she said. “It's not necessary or even nice.”

“God!” exclaimed Tom. “Nice, yet! Some of the things I say may not be particularly ‘nice,’ but they are true. It was, perhaps, not nice of me to have intercourse with little Sadie, or whatever the hell her name was, in a hallway toilet, but it is true. It happened, and it happened exactly as I told you. Also, my reaction was just what I said it was. What about you? I suppose you never thought of sex at all until you were married, and then you went to your new husband all sweetness and virginity, with never a thought of eagerness.”

For a moment Constance hesitated. Here was a perfect opening. She could smile right back at Tom and say: “As a matter of fact, he wasn't my husband.” Tonight would be a good time to say it, before she talked to Allison. She glanced up into his waiting face and the moment was gone.

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “that's just the way it was. It never changed, either. Sex was always something I allowed him as a sort of favor.”

“What a liar you are,” said Tom.

She felt her hands grow cold as she waited fearfully for his next words. Now it was coming. Now he would look at her with disgust and say, “He was never your husband. What a liar you are. He was your lover and you bore him a child. Yours was the same situation as Betty and Rodney's, except you were old enough to have known better.”

“What a liar you are,” said Tom. “Would you have me believe that when you give yourself to me it is as a favor?”

“Not with you,” said Constance, and hurriedly finished her drink. “But just the same,” she said, laughing a trifle nervously, “you will never make me believe that it is the right thing for children to be doing. Why, if Allison ever did anything like that, I'd kill her.”

“There is a shaggy dog story in that vein,” said Tom as he stood up and put down a bill on the check the waiter had left. “It has to do with a woman who put a new dress on her little girl. She told the little girl that if the little girl went out and fell into the mud, she'd kill her. So the little girl went out and fell in the mud and her mother killed her.”

“This is a joke?” asked Constance, taking his arm as they walked to the car.

“I don't think so,” said Tom.

Constance leaned back comfortably in the front seat of the car. “I may have put it a little strongly,” she said. “But I mean it when I say that I wouldn't put up with Allison behaving the way Betty Anderson has for years. Luckily, I don't have to worry about putting up with it. Allison isn't like that. I doubt if she ever thinks about it. She always has her nose in a book and her head in the clouds.”

“Then you had best watch what she reads,” said Tom. “As one fourteen-year-old who developed a crush on me once said, ‘After all, Mr. Makris, Juliet was only fourteen.’ Watch out that Allison doesn't begin to think of herself in terms of Juliet. Or worse, in terms of Mademoiselle de Maupin.”

“What's that?” asked Constance. “That French name?”

“It is the name of a very famous novel by a Frenchman named Gautier,” said Tom and burst out laughing.

“Now you are making fun of me because my literary education was sadly neglected. I don't care. I don't have to worry about Allison. At sixteen she still loves to read fairy tales.”

“I thought she was only fifteen.”

“Well, she will be sixteen in the fall,” said Constance and bit
her
lip against the slip she had made. “And it won't be too long until fall.”

“No, it won't,” said Tom. “School will be opening in a little over two weeks.”

“I'll talk to her tomorrow, about us,” said Constance. “Maybe by next summer–”

“Sure,” said Tom, and pressed his foot down on the accelerator. The car sped smoothly on the road to Peyton Place.

The next day was Saturday and it began what Seth Buswell, without his tongue in his cheek for once, later referred to as “the bad time in ’39.” The drought was still upon Peyton Place. The land lay burnt and fruitless under the August sun, and there was that peculiar, waiting quietness in the air which comes when every man, woman and child watches the hills which encircle his town.

A stranger passed through Peyton Place early on that Saturday morning. He parked his car on Elm Street and made his way into Hyde's Diner. Corey Hyde stood with his fists on his hips and stared out of a window at the back of the diner, and Clayton Frazier who stood next to Corey, holding a coffee cup, also stared. The stranger craned his neck to look over the heads of Corey and Clayton, but there was nothing to see from the window but a ridge of hills topped with yellowed, unmoving trees.

“Coffee,” said the stranger, and for a moment Corey's shoulders tensed before he turned around.

“Yes, sir. Right away,” said Corey.

Clayton Frazier shuffled to a seat at the end of the counter but a seat, the stranger noticed, from which the old man could look out the
window to the
ridge of hills in the distance. Corey put a cup, saucer and spoon down on the counter in front of the stranger.

“Will that be all, sir?” asked Corey.

“Yes,” the stranger replied, and Corey left him to take up his post by the window.

This particular stranger was different from the majority of those who pass through northern New England, or from those who come to stay for a while in the summer, in that he was a sensitive man. He was an author's representative on his way to Canada to vacation with his number one client, a prolific but alcoholic writer, and he sensed something of the waiting tension which gripped this town in which he found himself early on a Saturday morning. He slapped his hand down against Corey Hyde's counter.

“What's the matter with everyone around here?” he demanded. “Everyone acts as if he were waiting for doomsday. Not five minutes ago I stopped at a gas station, and the man there was so busy watching and waiting for something that I had a struggle to find out what I owed him. What is everyone waiting for?”

Corey and Clayton, who had started almost fearfully at the sound of the stranger's hand against the counter, were, nevertheless, not so startled that they forgot themselves to the point of answering the stranger with a direct reply.

“Where you headed?” asked Clayton Frazier.

“Canada,” replied the stranger, almost mollified now that he had managed to get some response from someone about something in this weary and apprehensive place.

“Drivin'?” asked Clayton, who by now had noticed the gray Cadillac parked outside.

“Yes,” said the stranger. “I have two weeks so I thought the drive up would be enjoyably slow and peaceful. I wish now that I had taken a train. It's been wretchedly hot all the way from New York.

“Humph,” grunted Clayton. “New York, eh? New York City?”

“Yes,” said the stranger.

“Long ways away.”

“At least the worst is over now,” said the stranger, sipping his coffee. “The Canadian line can't be more than a three-hour drive from here.”

“Nope,” said Clayton, “it ain't. You should make it easy in three hours. If you go fast, mister, you could make it in less than three hours.”

The stranger smiled into the lined, stubbly face of the not-too-clean old man. “Why should I hurry?” he asked pleasantly, and he was thinking what an amusing ancedote this would make to tell his friends when he returned to New York. He would practice that nasal twang, and when he returned home he would tell of the picturesque old native whom he had met and conversed with up in northern New England. “Why should I hurry, old-timer?” he asked jocularly.

Clayton Frazier set his coffee cup down with a little click, and then he looked hard at the stranger for a moment.

“Go fast, mister,” he said. “Get over that line of hills as fast as you can go. Mebbe they got rain up to Canada.”

The stranger laughed. By God, this was like some story by an impossibly bad writer. Git over that line of hills, stranger, else yore a dead dog.

“What do you mean?” he asked, swallowing his laughter with the rest of his coffee. “What does rain in Canada have to do with my getting there quickly?”

“We ain't got rain here,” said Clayton Frazier, turning to look out the window. “Aint had none since June.”

“Oh,” said the stranger, feeling rather disappointed. “Is that what everyone is waiting for? Rain?”

Clayton Frazier did not look at him again. “Fire,” he said. “Everyone's waitin’ for the fires to start, mister. If you're smart you'll go fast. You'll get past the hills before the fires start.”

A few minutes later, the stranger paused with his hand on the door of his car. He squinted up at the ridge of hills beyond Peyton Place. The hills were topped with trees of a peculiar yellowish color. It was an unhealthy shade, the stranger thought. Ugly. But because he was a sensitive man, he felt a finger of apprehension prod at his mind. He could look at the unmoving, yellow hills and imagine a single, quick-moving, red streak. He could picture the way the red streak would move, eagerly, hungrily, almost gaily, through all the dry, dry quietness that surrounded Peyton Place. The stranger climbed into his car and drove away, and when he noticed later that his speedometer indicated seventy-five, he laughed at himself, but he did not slow down.

The waiting and watching were everywhere, but other than that, this particular Saturday started off in the way of countless other summer Saturdays gone by.

Allison MacKenzie and Kathy Ellsworth, having spent the night together, breakfasted in the MacKenzie kitchen after Contance had left for her shop. They ate eggs and toast and drank coffee, and there was sunshine all over the yellow tablecloth. Nellie Cross rattled dishes in the sink as a hint for the girls to be finished and gone, but they paid no attention to her.

“I've lived in Peyton Place longer than I've ever lived anywhere,” said Kathy, chewing absent-mindedly at a piece of toast. She was looking out the window at the vivid pattern made by hollyhocks against a white picket fence. The MacKenzies’ lawn and flowers were the most colorful on Beech Street, kept that way through the weeks of drought by the assiduous hand watering of Joey Cross whom Constance hired for that purpose. “I never want to move away,” continued Kathy. “We won't, either. My mother told my father that we wouldn't.”

“I'm going to move away,” said Allison, “as fast as ever I can after I finish high school. I'm going to go to Barnard College. That's in New York City.”

“Not me,” said Kathy ungrammatically. “I'm never going away from here. I'm going to marry Lew and live in Peyton Place forever and have a huge family. You know what?”

“No. What?”

“Lew and I are going to
buy
a house after we get married.”

“What's so extra about that? All married people buy houses eventually. It's all part of the whole stultifying, stupid pattern.”

“We never owned a house. We've lived in nineteen different houses since I was born, and we never owned a one. My mother wants to buy the house that we're renting now, but my father's credit is no good. Mr. Humphrey said so, down at the bank. I guess he'd have let Daddy have the money anyway, but Mr. Harrington wouldn't let him. Mr. Harrington says my father is a poor risk.”

“Buy a house like Nellie's shack,” said Allison, raising her voice cruelly so that Nellie would be sure to hear. She had not forgiven Nellie for the remarks which Nellie had made about Norman and Evelyn Page.

“How much would a house like that cost?” asked Kathy seriously.

Nellie did not answer, nor did she look at Allison. She looked down into the dishwater in the sink and rubbed the vein in her left arm.

“Oh, practically nothing,” said Allison in the same unnecessarily loud tone. “My goodness,
anybody
can own a shack. Lew could be a drunken bum and leave you, and you could be a crazy old woman with pus in your veins, but you could still own a shack.
Anybody
can own a shack, even crazy, insane people who have the crazy, insane idea that they're better than other people.”

At last, Kathy realized that friction surrounded her. She turned first to look at Nellie, then she turned to Allison.

“You're mean, Allison,” she said soberly. “And cruel.”

“So are a lot of other people,” cried Allison, ashamed at being caught so obviously in an act of unkindness, but unable to back down now. “People who call other people names, for instance, and tell filthy lies about them. I suppose that's not mean and cruel!”

“You are supposed to turn the other cheek,” said Kathy virtuously, enjoying this feeling of righteousness at someone else's expense. “I've heard Reverend Fitzgerald say so a thousand times, and so have you.”

“Maybe so,” cried Allison furiously. “But I've read about plucking out the eye that offends you. That goes for people whom you consider your friends but who go around sticking up for others.”

“If you mean me, Allison MacKenzie, come right out and say so. Don't be such a little sneak.”

“Oh!” gasped Allison, outraged. “Now I'm a sneak, am I? Well, I do mean you, Kathy Ellsworth. There. I think that you're silly and stupid with your rented house and your dumb boy friend Lewis Welles, and your eternal talk about getting married and having babies, babies, babies!”

“Well!”
said Kathy, standing up and maintaining what she was pleased to refer to as “an icy calm,”
“Well!
I'm certainly glad that I found out what you think of me before it was too late! Good-by!”

Kathy walked majestically out of the kitchen door, twitching her flat hips indignantly. She did not explain what she meant about finding out what Allison thought of her “before it was too late.” Nor did Allison stop to wonder. It was a beautiful exit line, and both girls accepted it as such without question. Kathy walked down Beech Street with her nose in the air, hoping desperately that Allison was watching, and Allison burst into tears.

“Now see what you've done!” she said to Nellie Cross. “If it weren't for you, my best friend wouldn't be mad at me. If it weren't for you, I wouldn't be crying and making my eyes all red. I'm supposed to pack a lunch and meet Norman in an hour. What will he do when he sees me all disheveled and red-eyed? Answer me that.”

“Humph,” said Nellie. “He'll prob'ly take one look at you and run home to his ma. The minute Evelyn sees him comin', she'll start right in unbuttonin’ her dress.” To Nellie, also, there were things which were unforgivable. Primarily, she could not forgive Allison for the way the girl seemed to look constantly for opportunities to criticize Lucas who had, since leaving town, become a paragon of virtue in Nellie's eyes. The second reason for Nellie's unwillingness to forgive was because of something Allison had said. She could not rightly remember what it was, but whenever she thought of it, the pus-filled lump in her head began to throb. It was throbbing now, and Nellie turned to Allison and cackled. “You can bet your life on that, honey,” she said. “Evelyn don't need to no more than see that snot-nose kid of hers comin’ near but what she gets ready to feed him.”

“I hate, loathe and despise you, Nellie Cross,” cried Allison hysterically. “You're crazy as a loon. Crazier than Miss Hester Goodale, and I'm going to tell my mother not to let you come here to work any more.”

Then Nellie remembered the second reason that she was unable to forgive Allison. Allison had said she was crazy. That was it, thought Nellie. She had known it was something wicked like that.

“You're so crazy that you should be locked up in the asylum down at Concord,” Allison shouted, her voice high and rough with anger, and hurt, and tears. “I don't blame Lucas for running off and leaving you. He knew that you'd end up in a padded cell down at Concord. And I hope you do. It would serve you just exactly right!”

Allison ran sobbing out of the kitchen and up the stairs to her room. Nellie stood and gazed sightlessly out of the window over the sink.

“That ain't true,” she said at last. “Ain't a bit of truth in it. That ain't why Lucas done like he done.”

But her head throbbed violently, and the soapsuds in the sink were suddenly thick and slimy, like pus.

Allison stood motionless in the middle of her bedroom floor. Deliberately, she inhaled and exhaled in deep breaths until the pain of anger in her chest and throat was eased, then she went into the bathroom and held a wet washcloth over her eyes. She would not, she decided, allow
anyone
to spoil her day. Back in her bedroom, she powdered her face carefully and applied the small amount of lipstick which Constance permitted, then she went back down to the kitchen. Silently, without even looking at Nellie who still stood in front of the sink, Allison began to make sandwiches. When she had finished packing the picnic hamper, she sat and gazed sullenly out of the window, waiting for Norman. When finally she heard the jangling ring of his bicycle bell, she picked up the hamper and walked out the door without a word. Nellie did not raise her head, not even when Allison took her bicycle off the back porch as noisily as possible, letting the vehicle clatter against each step.

Allison and Norman divided the burdens of picnicking evenly between their two bicycle baskets and pedaled off.

“I hope you didn't get up on the wrong side of the bed,” said Allison crossly. “Everyone else seems to have done so.”

“Not I,” said Norman and grinned. “Who's everybody?”

“Oh, Kathy and Nellie. My mother, too, I suppose. And even if she didn't she'll probably be as cranky as the others by suppertime. It's so hot.”

“And dry,” added Norman as they pedaled down Elm Street and turned into the highway. “I heard Mr. Frazier say that the state militia has been alerted in case of a forest fire. Look.”

He pointed to the hills toward the east, and Allison's eyes followed his direction.

“I know it,” she sighed. “Everyone's been waiting for days and days. Maybe it'll rain tomorrow.”

The sky was a bright blue, as polished and hard looking as enamel, and it held an enormous sun which was persistent and impossible to look upon because of its hurtful brightness. In all this blue and yellow harshness, no cloud could survive, and not a trace or a wisp of whiteness was to be seen.