Peyton Place (40 page)

“This was the only place Ma was s'posed to come today,” Joey Cross was saying to Constance. “Selena sent me to look for her. Ma's been awful forgetful this past coupla weeks. Selena thought maybe Ma'd gone and lost her way again.”

“It was as if there was an evil and insatiable spirit loose in our town,” said Seth Buswell later. “An insatiable spirit bent on wreaking havoc and destruction.”

Seth said these words once when he was very drunk. As a matter of fact, he pronounced the words as “inshayshabul shpirut,” but Dr. Matthew Swain, for once as drunk as Seth on this particular occasion, found no quarrel with the words of his friend.

“Precisely,” said Dr. Swain precisely. He prided himself on the fact that his own speech never became slurred when he drank.

Others, who had not been directly concerned with Nellie Cross, or with anything that happened later, were inclined to agree with Seth and the doctor nonetheless. It had indeed, everyone agreed, been a bad time back in the late summer of ’39.

Clayton Frazier, walking down Elm Street toward his home on Pine Street on the night of the last Saturday in August, 1939, had seen the sheriff Buck McCracken driving quickly in the opposite direction with Doc Swain sitting next to him. The fact that The Doc was sitting next to Buck in the sheriff’s car was an oddity, for The Doc always drove his own car. Clayton wondered what The Doc was doing, sitting next to Buck in Peyton Place's official police car, but as he put it to himself, he didn't intend to worry about it none. He was too tired, and whatever the reason for The Doc and Buck ridin’ together was, it'd be all over town by mornin’, and he'd hear all about it then.

Clayton Frazier turned at his door for a last look around as was his nightly habit, and it was then that he saw it—a red finger, probing toward the sky on the ridge that was called Marsh Hill.

It was an insidious, evil-looking finger, glimpsed for only a fraction of a second before it disappeared, but Clayton knew that he had seen it. He waited only a moment more before it appeared again, and then Clayton waited no longer.

“Fire!” he shouted, running into the street, for he had no telephone in his house. “Marsh Hill's afire!”

A passing motorist stopped to pick up Clayton, and together the two men sped to the firehouse. In the very few minutes that this consumed, the red finger had touched half of Marsh Hill and set it ablaze.

“Fire!” cried Clayton, and the vast machinery which the state and the town maintained for the fighting of forest fires groaned and moved quickly into operation.

It was the local custom for the sheriff and the doctor to go at once to a forest fire area. The sheriff because he was a volunteer fireman, and Dr. Swain because he always anticipated the possibility of injury to the men. On the walk leading to the MacKenzies’ front door, both the doctor and sheriff paused and turned as soon as they heard the wail of the town's two fire engines, to search the hills which surrounded Peyton Place. Marsh Hill was completely ablaze now, and the flames had begun their swift climb up the slope of the next ridge which was known as Windmill Hill.

Buck McCracken sighed. “It'll be bad,” he said.

“Yes,” said the doctor, and the two men continued on their way to the MacKenzies’ front door. They had come in response to Tomas Makris’ telephone call.

“Come at once, Matt,” Tom had said. “And bring Buck with you. Nellie Cross has hanged herself in a bedroom closet at the MacKenzies’.”

“And this ain't gonna be no choir rehearsal, either,” said Buck as he rang the doorbell a few minutes later.

At first glance, things did not seem to be as bad as Buck had feared they would be. In the MacKenzie living room, everyone was under a sort of tight control and seemed to remain under it by the force of Tomas Makris’ will. Allison MacKenzie lay unconscious on the sofa with Constance perched on the edge, next to Allison's feet. Joey Cross, who had run to fetch his sister as Tom had told him to do, sat in an easy chair at one side of the fireplace while Selena sat in a matching chair at the opposite end of the hearth. Only Tom was standing, and he stood still as if afraid that his control over the group would break if he moved. Matthew Swain went at once to Allison.

“She faint?” asked Buck of Tom. Tom nodded. “Prob'ly be just as well if she stays that way ’til we get done–” Buck hesitated and glanced at Selena and Joey. “With what we have to do,” he concluded.

At that moment, Allison opened her eyes. She did not cry out or look about in bewilderment. She merely opened her eyes, looked at her surroundings and then closed her eyes again.

“I'll want her in the hospital for a couple of days,” said Dr. Swain to Constance. “I'll send for the ambulance.”

After the doctor had telephoned, the three men went upstairs to Allison's room. A few minutes later, after the arrival of two more men from Buck's office, the doctor did what he had to do and Buck and his men prepared to take Nellie Cross's body away. Matthew Swain closed his eyes in an effort to shut out the thumping sounds which came from the hall as Buck and his men attempted to move the now stiff corpse that was Nellie down the narrow stairway of the MacKenzie cottage.

Is there no end? he wondered. First Selena's child, then Lucas and now Nellie. Will it never be over? I have destroyed them all. Even with Lucas alive, he is as good as destroyed. I have made him an exile.

The doctor shuffled wearily down the stairs. Selena, dry eyed, her face carved into the features of self-control, was waiting for him in the hall.

“Doc,” she said. “Was it because Ma knew? Is that why she killed herself?”

Dr. Swain looked straight into Selena's eyes. “No,” he said evenly. “She had cancer, but she wouldn't let me tell anyone.”

Selena, also, looked straight into the doctor's eyes. Without knowing how he knew, Matthew Swain knew that she knew that he lied.

“Thanks, Doc,” she said, her voice as even as his. She turned to the living room. “Come on, Joey,” she said. “It's time we went home.”

Dr. Swain watched the two figures move down the walk and turn into Beech Street.

What will she think about, all during this long, long night? he wondered. What will she say to herself as she lies on her back in her bed and looks at the ceiling?

Dr. Swain shrugged and turned to Tom. “Will you give me a lift to my house in your car?” he asked. “I want to get mine so that I can go over to the hospital.”

A short while later, as the doctor drove toward the hospital with Constance and Tom following close behind him, he turned to look at the ridge of hills where the fire raged. The entire sky line, to the east of Peyton Place, was a mass of flame. For a moment, the doctor entertained the fanciful thought that perhaps the fire was a symbol. The purging of evil by fire, he thought, and laughed at himself.

Scandalous occurrences, of a public nature that is, do not often take place in small towns. Therefore, although the closets of small-town folk are filled with such a number of skeletons that if all the bony remains of small-town shame were to begin rattling at once they would cause a commotion that could be heard on the moon, people are apt to say that nothing much goes on in towns like Peyton Place. While it is true, no doubt, that the closets of city dwellers are in as sad disorder as those of small-town residents, the difference is that the city dweller is not as apt to be on as intimate terms with the contents of his neighbor's closet as is the inhabitant of a smaller community. The difference between a closet skeleton and a scandal, in a small town, is that the former is examined behind barns by small groups who converse over it in whispers, while the latter is looked upon by everyone, on the main street, and discussed in shouts from rooftops.

In Peyton Place there were three sources of scandal: suicide, murder and the impregnation of an unmarried girl. There had not been a suicide in the town since Old Doc Quimby had put his gun to his head and shot himself many years before. By killing herself, Nellie Cross caused more of a sensation in the town than she had ever done in her life. The town buzzed with talk, and when it came out the day after she killed herself that Nellie had been a baptized Catholic, the talk went from a buzz to a roar. Everyone speculated about what Father O'Brien would say and do, but the time of speculation was short, for the Catholic priest did what he had to do and he did it quickly. He refused to bury Nellie in the consecrated ground of the Catholic cemetery. The Catholic members of the local population nodded to each other and said that Father O'Brien was a man of principle, a man with the courage of his convictions. While it was true that the Church had rules to keep priests in line, Father O'Brien had not shilly-shallyed when it came time to do his duty. He had not hemmed and hawed as some men might have done.

“Certainly not,” said Father O'Brien to Selena Cross.

The Protestants smirked. What kind of man of God was it, they asked one another loudly enough for the Catholics to hear, who would refuse to bury the dead? Protestants, especially Congregationalists, were certainly more Christian minded in their attitude than that. Reverend Fitzgerald would never refuse a decent burial to anyone, not even a Catholic.

And for the second time in less than twenty-four hours, Peyton Place was rocked to its foundations.

“Certainly not!” said Reverend Fitzgerald, when Selena asked him to bury her mother.

Now it was the Catholics who smirked, and the Congregationalists who fumed with rage. United we stand, declared the Catholics, divided they fall. In a body, several of the more influential Congregationalists, among them Roberta and Harmon Carter, which surprised everyone, the Page Girls, and every member of the Ladies’ Aid Society went to call on their minister. Margaret Fitzgerald, who had escaped from her house through the back door, joined her friends on the sidewalk in front of the parsonage.

“I don't know what ails him,” she replied to the many questions put her. “I just don't know what got into him to make him act like this.”

Margaret uttered these words in a puzzled and martyred tone, but her mind seethed with hate and outrage. To her friends, Margaret proclaimed her husband overworked, tired, weary, exhausted and ill. In her mind she called him the vilest of traitors, a bastard of a black Irishman, a Pope lover and a weakling.

Reverend Fitzgerald met the members of his congregation, who had more the aspect of an angry mob at this point than of a flock come to consult with its leader, at the door and kept them at bay on the porch.

“What do you want?” he demanded truculently.

Roberta Carter, who had appointed herself as spokesman for the task at hand, said: “We came to ask you about burying Nellie Cross.”

“Well? What is it you want to know?” asked the minister in the same fists-cocked-and-ready-for-a-fight tone. “I have made my answer directly to the party concerned.”

“You can't do that!” said a voice in the crowd, and in seconds several others had taken up the chant.

“You got to bury Nellie if her kin want you to bury her!”

“It's one of your jobs to bury the dead!”

“What are you? A Catholic?”

Reverend Fitzgerald did not speak as long as the crowd continued to ramble. At last, everyone fell quiet, each feeling that his words must have made an impression, for the minister kept silent so long.

“Has everyone had his say?” shouted Reverend Fitzgerald.

The mob was so still that even Seth Buswell, standing with Tomas Makris at the edge of the street, was surprised. The moment when the minister waited for an answer seemed eternally long, but at last he spoke.

“I've had my say, too,” shouted Reverend Fitzgerald. “I am not going to bury a Catholic who has committed suicide. Killing is a sin, and whether a human kills another or himself, it is all the same in the eyes of the Church. I cannot and I will not bury a Catholic who has killed herself.”

Although the minister did not preface the word Church with the words, Holy Roman, there was not a man, woman or child in the crowd who did not realize at once that Reverend Fitzgerald had meant to imply them. At once, shouts went up, but they rained against the closed door of the parsonage, for the minister had retired to the inside of his house. The cries ranged from “Papist” to “Money-changer,” and they were of such violence, and uttered with such hatred, that even Seth Buswell, one of the most tolerant of all men, was sickened.

Seth, who had joked in his newspaper about the opposing religious factions in his town, who had called them book ends and mountains, turned away from the crowd in disgust.

“Christ, Tom,” he said to Makris. “I need a drink.”

“We'll get in touch with the proper authorities,” Roberta Carter was telling the crowd. “We'll have this man dismissed from our church and replace him with someone who knows his place!”

But there was no organization to channel the crowd's anger. By the time the Congregationalists could have agreed on a committee to contact the proper authorities, the remains of Nellie Cross would have begun to putrefy, and there was not a Protestant in the entire mob who did not realize this fact. In the end, it was a man named Oliver Rank who buried Nellie. He was the preacher for a religion so new to Peyton Place that it was still referred to as “A Sect.” The denomination of which Mr. Rank was the head was called The Peyton Place Pentecostal Full Gospel Church. It was referred to by those who did not attend its services as “That Bunch of Holy Rollers Down on Mill Street.” Oliver Rank went to Selena Cross and relieved her of all the involved details which are part of the ritual called The Burying of the Dead. Two days after she had hanged herself, Nellie was laid to rest on a knoll of land behind the building which Mr. Rank's congregation used as a church. Not much grass grew on this land, for it was too close to the factories. Smoke and soot hovered over it continually and the ground was hard and bare.

The next day, Francis Joseph Fitzgerald was seen emerging from the rectory of the Catholic church where he had gone to make his confession to Father O'Brien. That same afternoon Fitzgerald presented his resignation to the deacons of the Congregational church, and in the parsonage on Elm Street, Margaret Fitzgerald began to pack her belongings for her return to her father and White River. In White River, so Margaret said, everyone knew exactly where he stood on religious matters.