Peyton Place (58 page)

“I don't care,” said Kathy. “If I ever saw a back fence, I see one when I look at his column. At least, we don't put our dirty wash into the newspapers in Peyton Place.”

Allison shrugged. “The papers confine themselves to big names anyway,” she said. “In Peyton Place, anybody is fair game.”

“Selena Cross is a sort of celebrity up here,” said Kathy shrewdly. “And Selena in relation to Peyton Place is what is bothering you, isn't it?”

“Yes,” admitted Allison. “I think Selena was a fool to stay here. She could have gone out to Los Angeles with Joey and lived with Gladys, where no one knew about her. She's behaving like an ostrich by staying here, as if nothing had happened. Right or wrong, it happened, and it was only a matter of time before people would start to talk. All the fine friends who didn't want to see her hang for murder are hanging her themselves with their vicious talk.”

“And this too shall pass away,” quoted Kathy. “It always does, Allison.”

“After about a hundred years of being talked about and hashed over,” said Allison, and rose to leave. “You'll see. In the end, Selena will have to leave.”

“She doesn't act as if she is going to run away,” said Kathy. “I was in your mother's store yesterday and Selena was having a very friendly talk with Peter Drake. She won't leave.”

“You always were one to see a prospective love match in every casual conversation,” said Allison crossly. “Don't worry. Drake isn't about to jeopardize himself by taking up with Selena. Ted Carter didn't do it and neither will Drake. Men are all alike.”

“For Heaven's sake,” exclaimed Kathy. “What ever happened to you in New York? You never used to have such an attitude as that before you went away.”

“I got smart,” said Allison.

“Nuts,” said Kathy. “What you need to do is to find a nice fellow and get married and settle down.”

“No thanks,” said Allison. “Love and I don't mix well.”

She said this flippantly, but too often, during that long summer and she not only thought about the words but believed them. For love had caused the pain which had not come before she left New York but had waited until she reached Peyton Place to overwhelm her. And when it had finally come to her she had thought she would die of it. It was pain of such power that it left her gasping, and pain of such sharpness that it stripped her nerves bare and left them rawly exposed to more pain.

She relived every childhood experience of rejection and wept in an ecstasy of sorrow for herself:
I lost Rodney Harrington to Betty Anderson, and Norman Page to his mother, and my mother to Tomas Makris. But I thought it would be different in New York. Where did I go wrong? What's the matter with me?

It had been September, three months to the day after her graduation from high school, when she had arrived in New York. Constance had insisted that she stay in one of those depressing hotels for women, but Allison had wasted no time in asserting her newfound independence and had set about scanning the want ads in the
New York Times
within fifteen minutes of stepping off the train at Grand Central. She had seen one notice which attracted her at once.

G
IRL WHO LIKES TO MIND HER OWN BUSINESS INTERESTED IN SHARING STUDIO APARTMENT WITH CONGENIAL FEMALE WHO ENJOYS DOING SAME.

Allison made a careful note of the address and within the hour she had met, decided she liked, and moved in with a girl of twenty who called herself Steve Wallace.

“Don't call me Stephanie,” Steve had said. “I don't know why it should, but being called Stephanie always makes me feel like something pale and dull out of Jane Austen.”

Steve was wearing a pair of leopard-spotted slacks and a bright yellow shirt. Her hair was a rich auburn-brown and she wore a pair of enormous gold hoops in her ears.

“Are you an actress?” Allison asked.

“Not yet,” said Steve in her husky voice. “Not yet. All I do now is run around to the casting offices, but I model to pay the rent and feed myself. What do you do?”

“Write,” Allison said, not without fear for she had been laughed at too many times in Peyton Place to say the word now without a quiver.

“But that's wonderful!” cried Steve, and Allison began to be very fond of her in that moment.

But writing stories and selling them were two very different things, as Allison soon discovered. She began to realize that she had been unbelievably lucky to sell her first story at all, and that the road to her next sale was going to be a rocky one indeed.

“Oh, for an editor like the one who bought ‘Lisa's Cat,’” she said often and fervently, particularly on the day of every week when she received a generous check from Constance.

Allison had hung the full-page color illustration which the magazine had run with “Lisa's Cat” on the wall of Steve's living room. During that first year in New York she had glanced at the picture often and had even drawn encouragement from it, for there had been times when she was afraid that she would never be able to support herself with her writing. But then she met Bradley Holmes, an author's agent, and new doors began to swing open for her. She would never have begun to be successful without Holmes, but the thought of him as she sat in her bedroom in Peyton Place on this hot summer afternoon was so painful that she turned her face into her pillow and wept.

Oh, I love you, I love you, she wept, and then she remembered the touch of his hands on her and shame added itself to her grief. The more tightly she closed her eyes, the sharper his image became behind her clenched lids.

Bradley Holmes was forty years old, dark haired and powerfully built although he was not much taller than Allison. He had a sharp, discerning eye and a tongue which could be both cruel and kind.

“It's easier to sell directly to a publisher,” a friend of Steve's had told Allison, “than it is to sell a good agent on your work.”

And after a series of rebuffs from agents’ secretaries and agents’ receptionists, Allison thought that this was probably true. It was after one particularly crushing experience, when she had almost decided that it was not so much a matter of selling an agent on her work as it was a problem of getting past the desk in his reception room, that Allison had sought refuge in the New York Public Library. The book she chose was a current best seller and the author had dedicated it to his “friend and agent, Bradley Holmes” who, according to the author, was a true friend, a genius with the soul of Christ and the patience of Job in addition to being the finest agent in New York.

Allison went directly to a pay station where she looked up the address of Bradley Holmes in a telephone directory. He had an office on Fifth Avenue and late that same afternoon she sat down at her typewriter and wrote a long hysterical letter to Mr. Bradley Holmes. She wrote that she had been laboring under a misapprehension, for she had always thought that the function of a literary agent was to read manuscripts brought to him by authors. If she was right, how was it that she, a prize-winning writer, was unable to meet an agent face to face? And if she was wrong, what on earth were literary agents for anyway? There were eight pages more, in the same vein, and Allison had mailed them to the Fifth Avenue address without rereading them, for she was afraid that she might change her mind if she paused to think about what she had written.

A few days later, she had received a note from Bradley Holmes. It was typewritten on exquisitely heavy, cream-colored paper, and his name was engraved in black at the top of the sheet. The note was short and invited Miss MacKenzie to his office to meet him and to leave her manuscripts which Mr. Holmes would read.

Bradley Holmes's office was full of light and warmth the morning when Allison went there for the first time, and it smelled of expensive carpeting, and crushed cigarette ends, and of books in leather bindings.

“Sit down, Miss MacKenzie,” said Bradley Holmes. “I must confess that I am rather surprised. I hadn't expected someone so young.”

Young was a word which Brad used often, in one form or another, in all his conversations with Allison.

“I am so much older,” he would say.

Or: “I've lived so much longer.”

Or: “You have a surprisingly discerning eye, for one so young.”

And many, many times, he said: “Here is a charming young man whom I think you will enjoy.”

Allison had spent perhaps fifteen minutes with him, and then he had led her politely to the elevator in the hall.

“I'll read your stories as soon as I can,” he told her. “I'll get in touch with you.”

“Humph,” said Steve Wallace later. “The old casting director's line. Don't call us, we'll call you. Fortunately, I've never run into it in modeling, but the theatrical offices I've been ushered out of with those words! Nothing will come of Mr. Bradley Holmes, though. You'd better try someone else.”

Three days later, Bradley Holmes had telephoned Allison.

“There are a few things I'd like to discuss with you,” he said. “Could you come down to the office today?”

“You have a great deal of talent with words,” he told her, and in that moment, Allison would have died for him. “Also,” he said, “you have a clever little knack with the slick type of short story. I think we ought to concentrate on that for the time being. Save the real talent for later, for a novel perhaps. Unfortunately, I don't know of a place where your best short stories would fit. The slick magazines, the only ones which pay enough for you to five on, aren't particularly partial to stories full of old maids, and cats, and sex. Here.”

He handed Allison a stack of manuscripts which represented her better stories.

“We'll work on these others,” he said.

Within two weeks, Allison had come to regard Bradley Holmes as a genius of the highest order. Within a month he had sold two of her stories and she had begun to think of doing a novel.

“You have plenty of time,” he told her. “You are so young. But still, once you begin to make a respectable amount of money with the magazines you may never decide to try a book. Go ahead, if you like, and see what you can do.”

“Yes, Brad,” Allison had said. If he had told her that it was all right for her to step into a whirling propeller blade she would have said, “Yes, Brad.”

They were having dinner together in one of the good restaurants on the East Side which Brad patronized.

“I don't have to travel ‘way downtown to meet characters and perverts,” he said. “I can see more of those than I care to at a variety of so-called literary teas.”

After that, Allison began to shy away from the Village, but it was a long time before Bradley Holmes began to realize the influence he wielded over his youngest client.

“Think for yourself,” he told her sharply. “This is not a Trilby-Svengali relationship which we have. Don't go thinking that it is.”

But Allison had formed the habit of dependence. She had telephoned him and run to him for advice on a multitude of details which she could easily have resolved for herself.

“Don't start thinking of me as your father,” he warned her.

Allison didn't. She thought of him as God.

Then Brad had started introducing Allison to a variety of young men. The most interesting was a tall, thin young man named David Noyes who wrote what she referred to as “Novels of Social Significance.”

“I wish that Allison would look at me just once the way she looks at Brad Holmes all the time,” David told Steve Wallace. “It is almost embarrassing to watch her look at him. Such love, such worship. I wouldn't be able to stand it. I wonder how he does?”

Allison enjoyed David. He opened a whole new realm of thoughts and ideas to her, and he helped over the bad stages when she began work on her novel. She told him the legend of Samuel Peyton's castle and he listened attentively.

“Sounds good,” he told her. “Of course, it may prove a little difficult to handle. You're going to have to work like hell to make Samuel a sympathetic character. If you goof, he turns into a villain.”

“Brad thinks it's a wonderful story,” Allison said. “He thinks it will be a big best seller.”

“Smeller,” amended David.

“Well, everyone can't be a boy genius,” said Allison.

David was twenty-five and had been hailed as a brilliant new talent by the critics on the publication of his first novel. He wanted to reform the world and he had a difficult time understanding people like Allison who wanted to write for either fame or money. David saw a world free from war, poverty, crime and penal institutions and he was constantly trying to make others see what he saw. Brad Holmes called David a “dedicated young man” so, of course, Allison saw him that way, too.

“Brad is dedicated himself,” said David when Allison told him what the agent had said. “He is like the city of New York. Hard, bright and dedicated to the race after the dollar.

“Brad and New York have everything in common, and the criterion of both is cash.”

“Oh, what a terrible thing to say!” Allison exclaimed, angry almost to tears. “Why Brad is the sweetest, most gentle man I've ever known.”

“Brad is a goddamned good agent,” said David, “and I have seldom, if ever, seen money and gentleness go hand in hand.”

“Sometimes,” said Allison viciously, “in fact, most of the time, you sicken me. Brad is the best friend I ever had.”

“Oh?” asked David sarcastically. “What about this Makris fellow whom you told me about? The one who stood by your side when your friend Kathy was hurt. Isn't he your friend? When he stood up with you, he was jeopardizing his job, his hard-won position in that charming snake pit you call Peyton Place, and just about anything else you can name. What of Makris? He sounds like your best friend to me.”

“Oh, him,” said Allison with a shrug. “He's different. He's my mother's husband.”

“Sometimes,” said David slowly, “I think that one would have to put your soul under a powerful microscope before it became at all obvious that you have one.”

“David, let's not argue. Just for one evening, let's not parry words. Let's just be friends.”

David had looked at her for a silent moment. “I don't want to be your goddamned friend,” he said.