“It made me feel neat,” said Allison, trying to find the perfect word, the word that would describe it most exactly. “It was as if all the loose ends of my life were nicely tied up in a bundle and then I didn't even have to worry about the bundle.”
“What about changes?”
“Nothing that really amounts to anything. Brad says he thinks Jackman will publish in the spring.”
“Rewriting is the lousiest job of all,” said David. “It makes you feel as if you're being forced to travel back through a place you never wanted to visit to begin with, where everything is shabby and frayed at the edges and the ground is littered with torn newspapers.”
“Not I,” said Allison, laughing. “It makes you feel like that because you're a genius. I'm not. I'm a hack and very pleased with myself.”
“Stop belittling yourself,” said David. “You're no hack, and if you were, you'd never have to say it yourself. The critics would say it.”
Allison put down her glass and stared at the candle's wavering orange flame. The high elation had begun to leave her, but she had known it could not last. As her happiness dissipated itself—it was as if it were seeping out of her pores, she thought—doubts began to enter.
“Sometimes I get scared, David.”
“We all do.”
“What if nobody buys my book? What if nobody likes it if they do buy it?”
“Then there is nothing to do but try again.” He poured more wine. “Come on. Drink up and stop worrying. This is supposed to be a celebration. Do you want to go to a movie or something?”
“No,” said Allison. “Let's just sit here and talk.”
“I'm an obliging soul. What do you want to talk about?”
“I don't care,” said Allison. “Anything. Everything.”
“Are you over Bradley Holmes?” asked David.
Allison picked up a cigarette. “I guess there was never really anything to get over,” she said. “I didn't love him to begin with.” But she could tell by the way her heart raced that she wasn't over him yet. The memory of herself and Brad still had the power to move her.
“Is that what he told you?”
“No. He said that I did love him, a little, and that he loved me a little, too.”
“Crap,” said David. “That guy may be good at contracts but he's the biggest crap artist in New York.”
“Because he said what he did about love?”
“Love, my can,” said David. “Maybe he wants to sleep with you again, but that's the extent of his love.”
“Stop it,” said Allison, snapping the cigarette between her fingers. “I don't want to talk about it.”
“Why?” demanded David. “Does it still scare you? Shame you? Make you want to run?”
“No,” cried Allison. “Now, stop it, David.”
“I can't stop it,” said David with quiet desperation. “I have to know about me, you see.” He moved the ashtray and then stared into it, as if he might find the answer there. “I've been waiting a long time, Allison. I have to know.”
“Not now, David. Let's go.” I'm not ready yet, Allison thought. Brad's like a poison in my system. I have to get rid of him completely, before I can be good for anyone else.
“No,” said David. “Let's get it over with.”
“Get what over with?”
“Us. You and me.”
“David, for Heaven's sake, can't we leave things the way they are? Can't we be friends without this everlasting talk of turning it into something else?”
“I told you before, Allison. I told you two years ago and it's still true. I don't want to be your goddamned friend. I want you, and I want you any way I can get you. I'd like to marry you, but if you don't want that, I want to be your lover. I want to live with you if I can, but if I can't, I want you anyway.”
“Oh, David,” she sighed. “I'm so tired I can't think now. Let's go home.”
They sat close together on the sofa in Steve's apartment. Allison's head rested on David's shoulder and he stroked her hair.
“David?”
“Yes?”
“Kiss me.”
He turned her face toward his and kissed her gently, as if he were afraid to hurt or startle her, and Allison put her arms around him. He began to seek her tongue with his and his hand rested gently on the underslope of her breast, and very quickly Allison began to kiss him harder. Her mouth opened and she moved against him and he pressed her back gently, so that she was lying down. His hand touched the skin under her sweater and he stroked her.
“But not here, darling,” he said against her cheek. “And not today. Not until you're sure.”
“I'm sure,” Allison lied. She wanted him to take her; she wanted David to drive Brad out and claim her for himself.
“You're sorry for me,” David said. “I don't want that.”
She sat up and tugged at the bottom of her sweater.
“Damn it,” she cried. “Don't always be telling me what I am and what I'm not!”
“I'm playing for big stakes, Allison,” said David. “I want all of you, or I don't want you at all. I want you whole and unafraid and I don't want you haunted by the ghost of Bradley Holmes.”
Allison burst into tears. “Please, David,” she sobbed. “Please wait. Just a little longer.”
“I'll wait,” said David. “It's a habit I seem to have acquired.” He put his arms around her. “Come on, darling. Stop crying. Everything's going to be all right. I'm here.”
Allison fell asleep with her head in his lap. Steve Wallace found him holding her when she came home at one o'clock in the morning.
11
THE WINTER PASSED with agonizing slowness. It seemed to Allison as if not only every stream and inch of ground, but time itself was frozen by winter's iron, unyielding grip.
Allison MacKenzie had finished the revisions on her manuscript before Christmas and had mailed them to Lewis Jackman. She had worked with a craftsman's skill, with the coolness of a surgeon. She got a two-word telegram in return.
“Well done.”
In January, Bradley Holmes telephoned and told her that Jackman was ready to publish and that he planned to release the book on April tenth.
“Did you have a good Christmas?” asked Brad.
“Very nice,” said Allison. “Steve Wallace and David Noyes came up for the holidays.”
“David again?” asked Brad. “Every time I see or talk to you, I seem to trip over David Noyes.”
“Does that annoy you, Brad?” asked Allison stiffly.
“Not particularly.”
“Well, it doesn't annoy me, either. I enjoy having David around.”
“Why not get a French poodle?” asked Brad. “At least you wouldn't have to listen to him chatter.”
Allison slammed down the receiver.
David's and Stephanie's visit had been a joyful interlude for Allison, breaking the monotonous ritual of her days. She took long walks with David and talked to him about her work. They held hands as they walked, they drew closer together; but it was, Allison felt, the closeness of friendship, nothing more.
She invited Seth Buswell and Matt Swain to come on Christmas Day. Allison wanted these old friends to meet the two people who meant so much to her now. It was her attempt to tie together her old life and the new. It bothered her that there should be such a high wall separating the two parts of her life. She wanted it not to be so, she wanted to be able to move easily from Peyton Place to New York City without being assailed by a sense of strangeness.
The old friends and the new took to each other well. Seth talked literature to David for hours, talked as if he might never have the chance again. To Allison's amazed delight, Matt Swain sat on the sofa beside Stephanie and listened for hours to her stories of life among the TV actors. He never took his eyes from Stephanie's bright young face.
When they had gone back to New York, Allison met Matt Swain on Elm Street coming out of the pharmacy.
“Allison,” he said, “I liked
those friends of yours.”
“Especially Stephanie,” said Allison, smiling at him.
Doc Swain looked over Allison's head to the bleak, wintry hills that ringed the town. “There's something about her face, Allison—I don't know what it is—there's something about her face that breaks my heart. When I look at her I feel young again—and, at the same time, I feel very old. I guess she makes me remember my youth, and that gives me a greater awareness of my age.” He smiled at Allison, almost apologetically.
“You're not old, Doc.”
“I wish I thought so,” he said. “Dear God, how I wish I thought so.”
Now, having just hung up on Brad, Allison pushed the phone away from her and turned unseeing eyes toward the window. She knew without really looking that gray, gaunt winter stood just outside the window.
By now, everyone was tired of the winter; it had lost the charm of newness. But everyone continued to talk about the weather, because there was very little else to talk about that winter in Peyton Place.
“Got us a real, old-fashioned winter this time.”
“Ayeh. Ain't been this much snow in fifty years.”
“That's what everybody says every winter,” said Clayton Frazier. “Every damned year it's the most snow in fifty years.”
“Well, it's true this year. Them fellers up to Mount Washington got it all figured out. When the thaw comes there's gonna be two hundred and sixty inches of snow that's gotta melt. Gonna be floods all over the place.”
“There won't be no flood,” said Clayton.
“The hell there won't. With all that snow meltin’, the river'll go over its banks sure.”
“The Connecticut ain't a floodin’ river,” said Clayton Frazier. “And that's the end of it.”
“You'll see, you pigheaded old bastard. You'll see.”
But Clayton Frazier was right. There was no flood. An early thaw set in at the end of January, and the snow began to melt gradually. In February nearly all the snow was gone, and by the end of the month the ice in the river had begun to loosen around the edges. When March was half gone, people began to look around and think that spring would come again after all. But this time it would come gently, like a well-mannered maiden, and not like a roaring, screaming harlot barging her way into northern New England.
On the twenty-fifth of March, Allison received the six advance copies of her novel, and immediately burst into tears.
Now she knew what David had meant when he spoke of the thrill that came with holding one's first book. She stroked the paper jacket and studied the photograph of herself on the back. Then she removed the jacket and looked at the smooth, black binding.
Samuel's Castle she read, and under the title on the spine, MacKenzie. She gazed at it with eyes that slowly filled with tears. Here was the end result of years of work, this compact thing she could hold in her hands.
“It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen,” said Constance, and she, too, began to cry.
“Here we go again,” said Mike. “This is costing me a fortune in handkerchiefs.”
“But it is,” wept Constance. “I never saw a more beautiful book in my life.”
“Neither have I,” agreed Mike, putting his arm around her.
“And it's mine,” cried Allison. “Mine. There's no one between these two covers but me. Nobody did it for me, nobody told me what to say. I did it myself.”
“If this keeps up,” said Mike, “we're going to go broke buying champagne.”
Allison did not pay much attention to the note Lewis Jackman had sent her along with the books.
“I have taken the liberty,” he wrote, “of sending individual copies of Samuel's Castle to various people in Peyton Place. I think their reactions to the novel may be of some publicity value to us in our advertising.”
Who cares about advertising? thought Allison. Let Lewis Jackman sell books. All I ever want to do is write them.
She began to inscribe the six copies she had received. For David, with all my love, Allison. For my Mother and Mike, with love and gratitude. For Selena Cross, with love, Allison. For Dr. Matthew Swain, who remembers poems about Eternity, with love from Allison. For Seth Buswell, who paid me the first money I ever earned for writing, with best wishes, Allison MacKenzie. And the sixth copy she kept for herself. She propped it up on her dresser so that she could see it when she first awoke in the morning.
At eleven o'clock that night, Seth Buswell called Matthew Swain.
“Have you read it?” he demanded, his voice harsh with excitement.
“Read what, for God's sake?” asked Matt.
“Allison's book!”
“No, I haven't,” said Matt patiently. “I work for a living, remember? I've got more to do than sit around reading books all day.”
“Matt, all hell is going to break loose.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She's got everybody in town in it!”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“I mean thinly disguised portraits of every single person in Peyton Place,” said Seth.
“Oh, stop it,” said Matt. “Allison wouldn't do a thing like that.”
“I don't say it was intentional,” said Seth, “but by God, Matt, people are going to take it that way. She's got rape, incest, murder, suicide, and a dozen different kinds of screwing around in that book!”
“So? Sin isn't at home only in Peyton Place, you know. It dwells in other places, too.”
“Matt, don't argue. Sit down and read it. That's all I can tell you. Oh, yes. Marion Partridge got a copy from the publishers. They want her to sit down and list her reactions to the book and let them know. She called me an hour ago, sore as a boil, and she wants Allison MacKenzie run out of town on a rail.”
“Marion's always been a troublemaker,” said Matthew Swain. “Born that way, Marion was. Well, I'll get busy and start reading right now.”
“Matt?”
“What?”
“Call me back when you finish. No matter what time it is. I want to hear what you have to say.”
Matthew Swain built a fire in the fireplace of his living room. He made himself a tall drink, and when he had changed to his robe and slippers, he sat down and began to read.
“There is a little town in northern New England,” he read, “and all year long the hills that roll gently away from it are green, for they are topped with pine. On the highest hill of all, like a jewel in the center of a crown, sits Samuel's castle.”
Matthew Swain read until three-fifteen in the morning, and when he had finished Allison's novel, he picked up the telephone and called Seth Buswell.
“I still say it could have happened anywhere,” he said. “It doesn't have to be here.”
“Matt, you've lived in this part of the country all your life. Do you know of any other New England town with a castle right in its own back yard?”
“Well, no,” said Matt. “But it could happen. There's no law says that castles are limited to Peyton Place.”
“Tell that to Marion Partridge and every other woman in town like her,” said Seth. “Wait and see, Matt. Just wait and see.”
“I know,” said Matthew Swain. “I know. I guess I was just trying to convince myself that nothing is going to come of this.”
“Stargazer,” said Seth.
“I'm afraid so, Seth,” said the doctor. “I'm afraid so. There's no doubt of it, Seth. All hell's going to break loose here when that book is published.”
PART TWO
1
ALLISON WAITED. Now that her novel was scheduled for publication, there was nothing to do but wait. She could not work. She had planned on beginning her second novel, but soon gave up all thought of it. She found it impossible to plunge into something new before knowing how the critics and public would accept her first effort. She did not worry, but waited with a quiet resignation that only occasionally broke down. At those times, impatience and a terrible sense of urgency assailed her and she wanted to strike
the walls of her room with her fists, as if the walls themselves were a barrier to immediate publication.
While she was writing her novel, it had seemed an endless task; she could not imagine that a day would come when the pile of manuscript on her desk would be gone. She felt like a convalescent, at ease with herself, quietly grateful that she had come through. She sat at the window and gazed out at Peyton Place, the part of the world she knew best. She felt that for two years she had, in a sense, been cut off from life; she had not participated in it actively, with her whole being, but only as an observer, clinically detached. Sometimes she was afraid that this had become too much a way of life for her, and she wondered if her rejection of David had not been motivated by a fear of entering passionately into life again.
Every day she picked up her copy of Samuel's Castle and wondered what its fate was to be. Obscurity, she thought. That was the fate of most first novels. She did not know that in New York certain wheels had been set in motion and that the novel was no longer altogether hers, or that its fate was not to be left to chance. Fate had an accomplice, a man she had never heard of, named Paul Morris.
Paul Morris was a small, compact man with a crew haircut, soft brown eyes and a smile which, people said, would charm the pants off a nun. He was thirty years old and for the last ten of those years had worked in New York at the nebulous trade known as public relations.
At the age of eighteen, Paul had managed to get himself hired by a small advertising agency by tacking five years on his age and claiming that he was a graduate of Columbia University. As he said later, the closest he had ever come to Columbia was riding down Morningside Drive on a bus, for his formal education had ended after two years at a high school in the Bronx.
By the time he was twenty, Paul felt that he had learned everything about the advertising business that could be useful to him later and he went, with excellent references, to a job in the publicity department of one of the largest radio stations in New York. It was there, he said later, that he really found himself. He rose quickly in his chosen field. Within three years he was head of his department, married a girl singer who gave up her budding career for him and moved into an apartment at a good address in the East Sixties.
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