Sam Randlett was one of six brothers and four sisters and he was the first one of his family to “Make Good.” Sam was a foreman in a brewery in Newark, New Jersey, and he made what was described, in the idiom of his family, as a Good Week's Pay. But when Peg began to spend money in a fashion referred to by her sisters and brothers-inlaw as Hand Over Fist for dancing and elocution lessons for Timothy, Sam rebelled.
“Money don't come that easy, Peg,” he said. “I work plenty hard for my week's pay. Too hard for you to be throwing it away on foolishness.”
“Sam, I should think you'd be ashamed of yourself. A man in your position denying his son the advantages.”
“Suffering God! Is it an advantage to spend money so that you can dress the boy up in a velvet suit and make him show off in front of the family every Sunday? I don't mind telling you my sister Helene thinks there's something the matter with Tim. The way he's always off in a dream world some place and won't play with his cousins like all the other kids.”
“Helene has no soul,” said Peg. “She's got those three stupid children of hers and a husband that'll never amount to anything and she's just jealous of you and Tim.”
“Peg, that's enough!” roared Sam. “She's my sister and she's a good woman.”
“Then tell her to keep her nose out of our business,” retorted Peg. “If she's so good, she'll do that much.”
“I won't stand for any more,” said Sam. “You're turning the boy into a sissy and a pantywaist.”
“Timmy is going to be a great actor when he grows up,” said Peg, “and neither you nor any of your brothers and sisters are going to stand in his way. You wait and see, Sam Randlett. Someday you'll be sorry.”
By the time Tim was nine years old, Peg Randlett's plans had been a long time made. One day, after Sam had left for the brewery, she hauled her suitcases and her son into a waiting taxicab, made a stop at the bank where she withdrew all the money from a joint savings account she had shared with Sam, and she and Tim boarded a train for Hollywood, California.
Timmy Randlett had a mop of blue-black curly hair, enormous blue-green eyes and the pallor and mien of a choirboy. Although he was of only average intelligence, he had a remarkable amount of poise for a child his age and he had learned early in life to take orders and direction. Besides, as one Hollywood producer put it, Timmy could cry good. One of the major Hollywood studios cast him in a picture as a woebegone orphan who is taken in, befriended, taught and loved by an aging, crusty sea captain, only to have the welfare society step in and attempt to remove the child from this unconventional, unsanitary environment. But the social worker that the welfare society sends to investigate is young and pretty, and the sailor who helps the old sea captain around the lighthouse is young and handsome, and together the two of them unearth the fact that the sea captain is, in reality, the father of the orphan child's mother who ran away from home at the age of sixteen to marry a carnival barker. The smash ending of the film showed the orphan child sitting in the lap of the man he now knew to be his Grampy, with his little, thin arms encircling the social worker and the sailor, tears of gratitude running down his pale cheeks. The picture was called The Littlest Sea Captain and it made Timmy Randlett a star who shone brightly in the Hollywood firmament until he was fifteen years old. Then he was a has been, with stringy legs, a hollow chest and pimples.
Peg returned to the East with her son. She took an apartment in New York and saw to it that Timmy finished his education. But it wasn't easy. Twenty-room mansions with swimming pools and fifteen servants are expensive in Hollywood, to say nothing of chauffeured limousines and furs and jewelry and handmade suits. By the time Timmy, who was now called Tim, was sixteen years old there was very little money left. Producers and directors who had wooed Peg Randlett with money and attention and offers during Tim's short career now refused even to speak to her on the telephone, and people nagged her about things like the rent, the gas bill and the unpaid balances on her checking accounts. She died when Tim was nineteen, hating her son for giving her everything and then, when she had just begun to get used to it, snatching it all away with his awkwardness and his acne. Peg Randlett should have clung to life with a little more determination for by the time he was twenty, Tim Randlett had begun the long, laborious trip known as the comeback.
During the next fifteen years, Tim Randlett worked hard at every acting job he could get. He acted in soap operas and played VooDoo the Magician in a radio serial. He took small parts in Broadway productions and slightly larger ones with road companies. With the advent of television he found himself almost constantly employed, but he left New York every summer just the same to act with various stock companies. In barns, tents and old theaters made of broken clapboards, in small-town auditoriums and small-city music halls, Tim Randlett was a star.
He was thirty-six years old the summer he signed with the Barrows Company to play stock at the Barn Theater at Silver Lake, eight miles north of Peyton Place. He had been at the lake only three days when Seth Buswell drove up and asked to interview him.
“I'm with the Peyton Place Times,” Seth said. “We're not much of a paper, by big-city standards, but we get around. It'll be free advertising for your play, if nothing else.”
Tim had just finished with a late afternoon swim and was standing on the beach, drying himself with a white towel. He was a shade over six feet tall with a slender, wedge-shaped body that appealed to women and was the envy of older, paunchier men. His blue-black hair was dusted with white at the sides of his head, but his deeply tanned face was youthful and unlined. Seth Buswell patted his wide belly and sighed.
“Sure,” Tim was saying. “And I have heard of Peyton Place. I guess everyone has since Samuel's Castle came out. Do you know the girl who wrote it?”
“Known her since she was a baby,” said Seth.
“Wonderful!” said Tim. “I'd love to meet her. Think you could fix it?”
“Might,” said Seth. “Want to take a ride over to Peyton Place? We can talk on the way.”
“Give me ten minutes to dress,” said Tim.
Seth sat down on a tree stump and watched the actor run swiftly away from him, toward a building at the other end of the beach. Seth glanced at his watch and sighed again.
“Nothing like a man like that to make a man like me feel old, fat and foolish,” he thought woefully.
Later, on the same afternoon, Selena Cross locked the front door of the Thrifty Corner behind her and crossed the street to Hyde's Diner for a solitary dinner. On this particular evening, Joey was attending a class party and would not return home until nine-thirty. Selena did not like to eat alone in the Cross house.
“Evenin’, Selena,” said Corey Hyde, as she sat down in a booth. “Joey out gallivantin’?”
“His class is having a clambake down at Meadow Pond,” said Selena.
“Oh. Things pretty slow over at the Thrifty Corner, ain't they?”
“We're getting along,” said Selena, a little edge of annoyance to her voice.
It had been a long, hot day, and in almost nine hours Selena had sold only one blouse, two pairs of socks and one pony-tail clip.
“Rotten shame, I say,” said Corey. “All that fuss over one little book. Mess of foolishness, I call it.”
“What's good for dinner, Mr. Hyde?” said Selena. “I'm starved.”
“Pot roast,” said Corey, a little put out at Selena's lack of sociability.
“Is that all?”
“Nope. Got some pork chops, if you want, but they're no good. Mostly fat. Summer folks'll eat ’em, though. Got some fish chowder, too, but that's canned.”
Selena sighed and lifted her heavy, dark hair away from her neck.
“Can you make me a salad?” she asked. “Something cold, with a lot of cucumbers in it.”
“Sure,” said Corey. “Put some crabmeat in it too, if you want. But that ain't no kind of meal for a girl's been workin’ hard all day.”
Selena let the remark about working ha
rd pass. “I'll have the salad, Mr. Hyde,” she said. “With crabmeat and a tall glass of iced tea.” She opened a book and began to read.
“Humph,” muttered Corey, heading for the kitchen. “Ain't like Selena to be so touchy.”
And it wasn't. But lately, Selena herself had to admit that she was quite often what Corey called “touchy” and what she referred to as “cranky.” At times, she was even short with Joey.
“You've got spring fever or something,” said Joey.
“Spring fever in summer?” asked Selena.
“Don't split hairs,” said Joey. “There's something ailing you, and I'm trying to find a polite term for it.”
It took Selena a long time before she admitted to herself that she was bored. Not only with the shop and its slackened business, but with herself and her life. Boredom, with a little thread of fear running through and under it. Occasionally she went out to dinner with one of the salesmen who came to the Thrifty Corner, but the word had circulated quickly through their clubby circle. Selena Cross doesn't sleep around. So it was, for the most part, the older, more settled men who asked her out. She saw more of Peter Drake, the young attorney who had defended her at her trial, than she did of any other man. Peter took her dancing and sometimes to the theater, down in Boston. They ate dinner together frequently, either at restaurants at White River or at Selena's house, and most important of all to Selena, Peter and Joey got along well together. Every time Peter took her out, he asked her to marry him, and every time her answer was the same.
“I can't, Peter.”
“You're not in love with anyone else, are you, Selena?”
“You know better than that.”
“You're not still thinking about Ted Carter, are you?”
“I don't think anything about Ted any more. I don't even dislike him.”
“Selena, I'm in love with you.”
“I know,” she said. “I'm sorry, Peter.”
“It's not all that business about Lucas, is it? You're not afraid of me because I'm a man or anything like that?”
“Peter, will you please stop with the two-bit, street corner psychiatry? Lucas wasn't a man, he was an animal. I never thought of him as a man and what I remember of him certainly hasn't turned me into a couch case. Now will you please leave me alone?”
“Selena, what are you waiting for? What do you want?”
“I don't know, I tell you. I don't know what ails me.”
“I love you, Selena. I'm not asking you to love me back all at once. Marry me. Maybe with time—”
“I can't, Peter. I wish I could, but I can't.”
But all the same, there were times when Peter Drake was a comfort. She could rest her head on his shoulder and give him her troubles to carry for her. If I married him, he'd be good to me. And good to Joey. But at other times, when her boredom was like a prickly sweater, making her itch with impatience and annoyance, she thought, Peter is such a bore. All that love is like too much ice cream. He's tiresome and I wish he'd find himself a nice girl and settle down and leave me alone.
I'm a pig, she thought in self-flagellation. Peter is good and kind and I should either marry him or let him go.
But time went by, and Peter still courted her, and Selena kept on saying No.
Sometimes she would wake in the night, covered with perspiration and feeling the hard, hurtful beating of her heart.
“What's happening to me?” she asked silently, in panic. “Where am I going? Is this all there is to life?”
Often, she caught herself in an attitude of waiting, but she could not think of what it was she was waiting for, nor for whom, nor why.
“There you are,” said Corey Hyde, putting a plate down in front of her. “Crabmeat salad. That enough mayonnaise for you?”
“That's fine, Mr. Hyde,” said Selena. “Thank you.”
“Eat it up,” said Corey. “Make you feel better.”
At the same moment that Selena dipped her fork into her salad, Seth Buswell stopped his car in front of Hyde's diner.
“Don't know about where you come from,” he said to Tim Randlett, “but in Peyton Place it's suppertime. We can't go calling on Allison MacKenzie for another hour or so. Come on. I'll buy you a sandwich.”
“Good,” said Tim, smiling. “This will be my wild night on the town.”
Selena Cross lifted her head when she heard the door to the diner open.
“Well, if this isn't luck!” said Seth. “Now we can eat with you, Selena.”
Selena barely saw Seth at all. Her eyes stared into those of the man with him, and she could not look away. Usually, she noticed everything about a person she was seeing for the first time. Her glance took in every detail of coloring, structure and clothing, but with this stranger she saw nothing but eyes. They were a blue-green color, the kind to which Selena had always referred privately as “lucky eyes,” for she had noticed the same coloring in photographs of handsome, talented people, the ones upon whom the gods had showered extra gifts, leaving the blue-green eyes behind as the only external sign of their generosity.
“Selena,” Seth was saying, “this is Tim Randlett. Tim, Selena Cross.”
It was as if Seth had pulled a lever, releasing her, so that she could move again, and speak.
“How do you do, Mr. Randlett?” she said. “Hello, Seth. Please sit down.”
“Tim, here, is with the summer theater up at Silver Lake,” said Seth. “He's an actor.”
“Yes, I know,” said Selena. “I've seen you in movies, Mr. Randlett.”
Tim laughed. “You must have been a very little girl. That was a long time ago.”
“Not so very,” said Selena. “My friend, Allison MacKenzie, and I used to go to the movies every Saturday.”
“And, speaking of Allison—” began Seth, glancing at his watch, “we'd better eat and—”
“Yes,” interrupted Tim Randlett quickly. “If you have to see her, Mr. Buswell, I imagine you'd better run along.” He turned to Selena. “May I have dinner with you?” he asked.
Selena closed her book, not remembering to mark her place, and looked up at him.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I'd like that very much.”
As Seth Buswell said to Matthew Swain later that night over a drink, “And that was when I knew that I was de trop, as they say.”
“As who says?” demanded Matthew, through the beginnings of a small alcoholic glow.
“A bunch of fairies I went to college with,” said Seth with Scotchand-water dignity. “Not that I consorted with them, mind you, but I sometimes overheard their conversations.”
“Seth,” said Matthew Swain, “you are one of the few remaining members of a species commonly known as bullshit artists. If you ever got anywhere near a fairy, you'd run like hell the other way, worried pissless over your virtue.”
“And you, sir, are a vile-tongued old man.”
“Maybe vile-tongued and old, but I'd never be so goddamned dumb as to leave Selena with some actor I'd picked up. How do you know what kind of fellow he is?”
Seth swirled ice around in his glass. “Seemed like a decent enough sort,” he said.
“What d'you mean by that? Decent enough sort.”
“Well, you know. Polite and well spoken.”
“On the outside,” said Matthew Swain. “How do you know what he's like on the inside?”
“I wasn't with him long enough to know,” said Seth, “and even if I had been, and he turned out to be a son-of-a-bitch, there wouldn't have been a thing I could have done. The two of them just looked at each other, and the air between them was enough to give anyone an electric shock.”
“You're full of shit and talking like a teen-age poet,” roared Matthew. “Things like that don't happen.”
Seth Buswell finished his drink and poured himself another.
“Yes, they do, Matt,” he said finally. “Yes, they do, I was there, and I saw it happen.”
8
IN PEYTON PLACE, the black-tarred sidew
alks softened in the summer sun and were scarred with U-shaped heel marks that would show forever. Green Meadow Pond was filled with screaming, splashing children, and all day long the cicadas hummed in the trees. But it was a good summer, with rain in proportion to sunlight, so that the northern countryside had an almost tropical lushness. There was a heavy, ripe greenness to everything that stunned the granite-spined farmers, who were too used to either drought or the puny growth caused by no sunshine at all.
“There's somethin’ almost indecent about it,” said Kenny Stearns aloud, snipping still another red rose from one of his heavily laden bushes. He looked at the thick green of his lawn and saw his apple tree with its burden of swelling fruit so heavy that the branches hung almost to the ground. “Yep,” he said. “Almost indecent. Like a whore with big breasts and honey between her legs.”
It was easy, that year, to blame the unheard-of, green summer for just about everything. At the Harrington Mills, workers shirked their jobs and gazed out the factory windows while Leslie screamed in impotent rage and blamed the weather. Young girls who had clung to their virginity with leechlike tenacity now surrendered, with little squeals of anguished joy, to the erect demands of their teen-aged lovers. They returned home with their behinds covered with poison ivy, their arms dotted with mosquito bites and their hair full of pine needles.
As Matthew Swain said to Seth Buswell, “If all the maidenheads lost in the woods this summer were laid end to end, they'd reach clear from here to the planet Saturn.”
Fathers blamed mothers, mothers blamed boys, boys blamed girls, girls blamed themselves and everybody blamed the weather for everything except the behavior of Selena Cross. For Selena there was no excuse in the eyes of Peyton Place.
“Who is he?”
“Actor feller from over to Silver Lake.”
“Come up here from down to New Yawk.”
“Usta be in the movin’ pitchers.”
“Hmph. Think a girl like Selena'd know better. After all, it ain't as if she was born yesterday and didn't know no better.”
“Ayeh. There's one girl learned whatcha call the facts of life early. And the hard way.”
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