Through half-closed eyes, Clarence had watched the car with the out-of-state plates draw to a halt. As soon as it had, he had taken a pocket knife and a piece of wood from a trouser pocket and begun to whittle.
“There's a pair of beauties for ya,” he said to his neighbor.
“Fifty if they're a day and got themselves rigged up to look sixteen.”
“Reckon they're wearin’ iron brazeers under them shirts?” asked Clarence speculatively.
“Must be. Their tits'd hang down to their belly button if they didn't.”
“Pardon me,” said the first woman to Clarence, “my name is Mrs. James Delafield and this is Mrs. William Cameron.” She paused, but when Clarence kept right on with his whittling she went on. “We want to find the house where Allison MacKenzie lives. Could you please direct us?”
Clarence glanced up. “Who?” he asked.
“Allison MacKenzie,” repeated Mrs. James Delafield.
Clarence assumed a puzzled air. “Never heard of no MacKenzies around here,” he said. “You, John?”
John Barton pushed his hat up over his eyes and looked at the woman.
“Nope,” he said. “Nobody around here named that, that I know of.”
“But you must know her,” protested Mrs. William Cameron. “She's very famous. She wrote a best seller.”
“Best-selling what?” asked Clarence.
“Why, a book,” said Mrs. James Delafield. “A best-selling book. Everybody's talking about it. Samuel's Castle.”
“Don't get much time for readin’, myself,” said Clarence and went back to his whittling.
The women stood by indecisively for another moment, and then Clayton Frazier, who had remained silent until now, spoke up.
“Why don't you try the telephone book,” he said. “Seems as though if there's anybody named MacKenzie livin’ here they'd be in the telephone book.”
The faces of the two women cleared. “Why, yes!” said Mrs. James Delafield. “Now why didn't we think of that, Elaine?”
Mrs. William Cameron smiled at Clayton Frazier. “Why, of course,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”
An almost inaudible chuckle traveled the length of the benches as the two women went into the courthouse and then back to the car. There was no MacKenzie listed in the Peyton Place telephone directory. Disappointed, the two women drove away.
“Well, at least they wasn't from the newspapers,” said Clarence. “Always askin’ questions and wantin’ to take your picture. That's somethin’ in their favor.”
“Yep. Twice in one lifetime is twice too many for anybody. Or any town, for that matter.”
“Yep. They was worse this last time, though, than they was about Lucas Cross.”
“Yep. But this time it didn't last so long.”
“You got no call to say anythin’, Clayton. The way you was so friendly with that newspaper feller from Boston the first time.”
“Friendly with him this time, too,” said Clayton. “Nice feller, Tom Delaney. Always was.”
“You'd fit in good down to New Yawk or some place like that, Clayton. Always gettin’ your picture in the paper.”
“That,” said Clayton smugly, as he put his hat back down over his eyes, “is because I am a quaint but typical New England type with a face hewn of the granite of my native land. Said so, right in the Daily Record.”
The men laughed again and settled back to rest in the sun and watch the traffic on Elm Street.
The tumult and the shouting engendered by the publication of Samuel's Castle and the careful fostering of publicity by Paul Morris was short-lived but decisive. Within seven weeks of publication, Allison's novel had reached the number-one spot on best-seller lists all over the country, and at the end of the second week in June, Bradley Holmes telephoned the biggest news of all.
“Allison?”
“Yes, Brad.”
“I've sold it to Hollywood!”
Allison sat down abruptly. “Hollywood?” she cried. “But, Brad, that's marvelous! I can't see how they'll ever make a movie from it, but it's still marvelous.”
“Aren't you going to ask me what I got for it?” asked Brad.
“Oh,” said Allison, with a quick laugh, “I forgot!”
“Two hundred thousand dollars,” said Brad with the same reverence he would have used for “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.”
Allison gasped. “Brad, for Heaven's sake. I can't believe it!”
“It's true, though Jackman gets 10 per cent and I get 10 per cent. That leaves you with one hundred and sixty thousand dollars.”
“It's unbelievable. It's almost indecent.”
“Never mind, darling,” said Brad. “After taxes the only thing that will seem indecent is the government. Can you come down to New York on Friday to sign the movie contract?”
“I suppose so, if I must.”
“How are things in Peyton Place?”
“The same. People still aren't speaking to me, for the most part and Mike hasn't a job.”
“Is your family planning to move?”
“No. They feel the same about things as I. Mike is trying to get a job in one of the towns around here but, so far, nobody'll have him.”
“Don't be sad, Allison,” said Brad. “We are selling books.”
“I know,” said Allison, and knew before she had hung up that if she had asked Brad, At what price? he would have given her the practical answer.
“At three ninety-five a copy,” he would have said.
Allison sat down wearily at her desk where a stack of mail waited. In the beginning it had been exciting to receive fan letters. Where one word of praise for Samuel's Castle was enough to make her happy, Allison now opened letter after letter containing nothing but admiration for her work. From all over the United States people wrote to praise her talent and the courage she had shown in exposing ingrown small towns for what they are.
But there were unfavorable letters, too, many of them anonymous, telling Allison that her work was trash and filth not even fit for burning. Men wrote her notes filled with obscenities while others proposed marriage and a few offered to come to Peyton Place to “take her away from all that.” Allison and Constance separated the letters into what they called “good” and “bad” stacks, and in the evening Mike read all the bad ones aloud, acting out the part of the writer with such hamminess that Allison and Constance were reduced to helpless laughter.
But although Allison laughed, the unfavorable letters were like the cavity in a tooth to which her mind, like a probing tongue, returned again and again. At times, she was depressed to the point of tears and overwhelmed with the idea that the world was made up entirely of women who had read Samuel's Castle and hated her. Constance's rage was like that of a tigress whose young was threatened.
“Of all the goddamned nerve!” Constance shouted. “Some rotten-minded bitch whose husband is probably sleeping with the village whore has the nerve to write like this to Allison!”
“Allison,” said Mike calmly, “women who write letters like this are sick. Sick with envy and greed and jealousy. Don't cry. It may sound trite, but try to be a little sorry for her.”
“But why does she hate me?” wailed Allison, sounding for all the world like a grade-school child who hasn't been invited to a party. “What did I ever do to her?”
“You wrote a good book and got paid for it and became famous,” said Mike flatly. “And this is the way the world turns.”
Allison had been back in Peyton Place for over a month, sharing with Mike and Constance their involuntary exile. She spent restless nights prowling about the house, unable to sleep, unable to read. Invariably, dawn found her at the kitchen table writing long letters to Lewis. Her body ached for him; in loneliness, her love for him grew. She lived for his letters, and they came nearly every day, full of a gentle, enveloping love.
Both Mike and Constance told her to leave, assured her there was no reason for her to stay. But she
could not leave them. She had brought this trouble upon them and she knew that her staying with them was an act of devotion they needed so badly now.
She had not told them about Lewis. That was a secret she shared with no one. She held it close to herself with a superstitious fear, as if she were afraid that spoken aloud it would disappear into thin air.
6
PEYTON PLACE HAD BECOME a solidly divided camp. People were either for or against Allison MacKenzie, and there was no middle ground. The majority was almost frighteningly against her. People who had done things far worse than those described in Samuel's Castle were the first ones to stand up and attack Allison.
“How does she know about all them dirty things in the book unless she done them herself?”
“She never saw or heard anything like that in Peyton Place!”
“I always thought that Rossi feller was too good lookin’ and slick for his own good.”
“You wouldn't think Constance would stand for such goings on.”
“Always was uppity, Allison was. And a liar.”
“The whole kit and kaboodle of them oughta be made to leave town.”
“Well, Rossi won't be teaching here any more, I'll guarantee you that,” said Roberta Carter. “Marion Partridge and I took care of him.”
And that much was true. Charles Partridge had been elected to the school board when Leslie Harrington had decided not to run again, but when it came to the question of Rossi and his contract to teach for the coming year, old Charlie had been no match for his wife and Roberta.
“He's not going to teach here, Charles,” said Marion, “and that's the end of it. Roberta and I are voting against him and there is nothing you can do.”
“This has always been a decent town,” said Roberta, “with a decent high school. Allison MacKenzie did not learn filthy language at the Peyton Place High School, nor did she gain her knowledge of filth and perversion in this town. Young people learn things like that in the home.”
Except Ted, thought Roberta with the sickening coldness in her stomach that was always there whenever she thought of Ted and his wife, Jennifer. He was always a good, decent boy until he married. He never learned anything else but decency and goodness in his home. It was Jennifer that had taught him all those bad things.
“You're absolutely right, Roberta,” agreed Marion. “Believe me, I know people and I'm not often wrong. I always told Charles that Constance MacKenzie was no better than she should be. I'll never set foot in that store of hers again, I can tell you. It was bad enough when she hired Selena Cross, a confessed murderess, to work for her, but when she led her own flesh and blood into the paths of wickedness that was the bitter end.”
“Oh, for Christ's sake,” said Charles Partridge in disgust.
“Charles,” said Marion icily, “there is no need to curse. You sound like a character out of that filthy book.”
“I've been saying ‘Oh, for Christ's sake’ ever since I learned to talk,” said Charles.
“Well,” said Roberta, “I'd certainly never stand for that kind of talk from Harmon.”
“I'll bet,” said Charles in a rare burst of spirit. “You probably had all that kind of talk you could take from old Doc Quimby.”
“Charles!” said Marion in a cold voice, “that's enough!”
“Don't feel badly, Marion,” said Roberta. “Charles knows that it's wicked to speak badly of the dead.”
“Oh, for Christ's sake,” said Charles.
It as at that moment that Doc Swain entered the school board office and said, “As soon as the prayer meeting's over, I'd like to say a few words about the reappointment of Mike Rossi.”
“You're too late,” said Roberta.
“It's already been put to the vote,” Marion told him. “The school board is now on record, as of this date, against the renewal of the contract of Mike Rossi.”
Charles Partridge shrugged his shoulders, indicating to Matt that he had tried and failed.
“Now that I'm here,” Matt said, “I think I'll say my piece anyway.”
“If you have anything to say, you can say it at town meeting, Matt,” Roberta told him.
Matt ignored her. “Mr. Chairman,” he said, and Charles quickly said, “The chair recognizes Dr. Matt Swain.”
Matt stood at the long board table, across from Roberta and Marion. “It seems we aren't content with pillorying Allison MacKenzie because she had the courage to hold up a mirror and make us look at ourselves, we have to attack her through her stepfather and punish an innocent man because he has the courage to stand by his child.”
Doc Swain put his hands in his pockets, bent his body forward and looked down at the table. “It's a sad day for all of us,” he said in a low voice. “We've come a long way from our early days in this land when our grandparents, those misguided fools, thought that courage was a virtue.” He raised his voice. “I ask you this, ladies. I ask you this. Will we now reward cowardice? Since courage has become a punishable offense in your eyes, I propose we set up statues to the men who beat their wives and abandon their children.”
Roberta stirred restlessly in her chair, her mouth drawn to a tight line. It was as if she thought that by keeping her mouth closed tight she would not be able to hear Matt's words.
“Years ago,” Matt continued, “years ago I was afraid that Peyton Place was too much isolated from the world. Now I have the opposite fear. I'm afraid we have come all too close to the foolishness—and worse than foolishness—that's raging through our land today. Radio and television is a mixed blessing. It looks to me like we're trying to get into the act—and in the worst possible way.”
Roberta cleared her throat, and Marion tried to catch Charles Partridge's eye, but Doc Swain would not wait for them.
“We've joined the rest of the country with a vengeance. We're setting back the clocks and imitating the witch hunters who are a shame on the pages of our history. We who prided ourselves above all else on our individualism are now demanding that everyone conform. Be like us, think like us—or into exile you go.”
He turned to Charles and in a tired voice said, “I think that's about it, Charlie. The only hope I have left is that one day—and I trust it will be sooner rather than later—we'll look back on what we have done and have the decency to feel ashamed of ourselves. I thank you, ladies, for your kind indulgence.”
And he turned and walked out of the room, leaving Roberta and Marion speechless.
“Do I hear a motion for adjournment?” Charles asked.
Marion and Roberta were not the only women in Peyton Place who stopped shopping at Constance's Thrifty Corner Apparel Shoppe. Dozens of women who had bought exclusively from her now made shopping expeditions to Concord and Manchester and they saw to it that their daughters did the same. Occasionally a husband, with all the furtiveness of an amateur about to hold up a bank, sneaked into the store to buy a pair of socks, but for the most part the men too kept away.
“It'll blow over,” said Constance, determined to keep her shop open. “In a little while they'll have something else to stew about and they'll be back. To give me the newest gossip if nothing else.”
Matthew Swain roared his outrage to anyone who would listen to him. Those who would not listen voluntarily had an arm gripped in the doctor's firm grasp and were forced to stand still while Matthew talked, and he pulled no punches in his words.
“What the hell are you looking so outraged for?” he demanded of several of his patients. “Maybe you can fool the town, but you can't fool me.”
And then the doctor was liable to drag up some bit of scandal or gossip about the patient himself, and when the patient left Matt's office he was apt to keep his mouth shut about Samuel's Castle in the future.
Seth Buswell, as had always been his policy in the Peyton Place Times, took neither side. But he reprinted only favorable reviews of Samuel's Castle and only the favorable letters which came to him for doing so. He kept it up in the face of diminishing advertising and cancele
d subscriptions, and Allison would never have known of this if Norman Page had not told her.
“Fifteen people canceled yesterday,” he told Allison. “I don't know how much longer he'll be able to keep going.”
Allison went at once to Seth. “I appreciate everything you've done, Seth,” she said, “but please don't hurt yourself like this any more. Print the bad reviews. Heaven knows there are plenty of them. And as for unfavorable letters, I can bring them down to you by the bushel basket.”
Seth smiled at her. “Remember, Allison,” he said, “what you said to me once, a long time ago, about men standing up to be counted?”
“Yes,” she said, “I remember.”
“Well, I'm standing up. Count me.” He picked up his jacket. “Now that's enough of the long faces and the noble talk. Come on over to Hyde's. I'll buy you a cup of coffee.”
“Thank you, Seth,” said Allison very humbly.
“Chin up, Allison. Summer's coming. There'll be plenty of things happening then, and plenty for people to talk about.”
“I hope so,” said Allison, and took Seth's arm as they crossed Elm Street.
And as the weeks went by, flowing as gently as melting butter from spring into summer, Seth's words of prophecy began to turn into words of truth.
7
ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, when he was six years old, Timothy Randlett did an impersonation of Al Jolson singing “Mammy.” This one performance had been enough to convince not only his mother, Peg Randlett, but also the assorted aunts, uncles and cousins who were relaxing in the Randlett living room, passively digesting a heavy dinner, that Timothy was born to be an actor.
“I always knew he was different,” said Peg Randlett to her husband Sam. “He was born with a gift.”
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