“We all have. It doesn't help.”
“What does Peter say?”
“He's waiting for her to stop, the same as the rest of us. What else can he do?”
“Hey, you two!” said Selena from the kitchen doorway. “What's all the whispering about?”
“You,” said Allison and turned to her with a smile. “We were wondering how much longer you're going to keep poor Peter hanging fire.”
Selena sat down on a kitchen chair. “Let's have a drink, shall we? Just the three of us.”
“Sure,” said Connie. “Let me take the coffee in for the men and I'll be right back. Allison, get some ice, will you, dear? There's a bottle of bourbon in the cabinet behind you.”
“Yes,” said Selena, when she had the fresh drink in her hand, “poor, poor Peter. He loves me, you know. You know that, Allison, don't you?”
“Yes, I do,” said Allison. “He has for a long time.”
Selena began to cry. “Poor Peter. Poor, poor Peter.”
“Don't cry, darling,” said Connie. “Everything's going to be all right.”
“Nothing is all right,” cried Selena, her voice rising. “Nothing is all right at all, and it's never going to be!”
“Sh-h,” warned Connie. “You don't want the men to hear you.”
Selena calmed down. “No,” she said. “No, I don't want them to hear me.”
Then she put her head down on her arms and sobbed as if her heart would break. Allison went to her at once and put her arm across Selena's bent shoulders. She and Connie looked at each other and both of them knew that there was nothing to be done.
Later that same evening, Joey went to meet some friends with whom he was going to the movies, and Peter Drake drove Selena home. The wind was stronger now; he felt it tugging at the car and tightened his grip on the wheel.
“Make me a fire, Peter,” said Selena, when they went into her living room. “A big, beautiful, bright fire to chase the dark out of all the corners.” She dropped her coat carelessly over the back of a chair. “I'll make us a drink,” she said.
Peter almost said, Don't you think you've had enough? But he stopped himself and began to build the fire.
“No, I haven't had enough,” said Selena into the silence. “There isn't enough in the whole, wide world.”
Now the fire was burning brightly and Peter sat down. He reached for the glass that Selena extended to him.
“I can't lick you,” he told her, “so I might just as well join you.”
“Don't you ever stop playing the heavy?” asked Selena. “Any time you don't feel like joining me you don't have to. Just put on your coat. You know where the door is.”
“Don't try to pick a fight with me, Selena,” said Peter. “I won't let you.”
“Who wants to fight?” asked Selena. “I've had a bellyful of fights. Enough fights to last me a lifetime.”
“Do you want to talk?” asked Peter.
Selena smiled humorlessly at him. “You remind me of someone I used to know,” she said. “Always prying. Always poking his nose in where it wasn't wanted.” She gulped thirstily at her drink. “Tell me about it, Selena,” she mimicked. “What's troubling you, Selena? Tell me, Selena. You'll feel better for it.” She refilled her glass. “I'm sick of talking,” she said.
“I wasn't trying to pry,” said Peter.
“Yes, you were!” she said angrily. “Everybody in the world is a goddamned prying busybody. Well, what do you want from me, Peter? Do you want to know if I've slept with him? Yes, I did. Are you wondering if I loved him? Yes, I did.” Her voice rose until she was almost screaming. “Are you wondering if I've forgotten him? No, I haven't.”
Peter watched her, appalled, as the tears streamed down her face and her voice rose higher and higher.
“Are you wondering why I left him?” she cried. “Are you wondering what went sour, and why and how?”
In that moment, the front door blew open. Apparently, Peter had not closed it securely when they had come in, and now the wind took it and sent it smashing back against the wall with a crash.
Selena jumped to her feet, her drink spilling all over the front of her and the glass smashing at her feet.
In one motion, she had turned and her fingers had closed around the fire tongs on the hearth.
“Don't!” she screamed. “Don't come a step nearer! I'll kill you!”
Peter grabbed her from behind, and for a long moment Selena stared at the empty black square at the door, that door which on a night like this had once framed the dark bulk of Lucas Cross.
“There's nobobdy there, darling,” said Peter. “Nobody.”
The tongs fell from Selena's nerveless fingers and she began to sob. Peter turned her to him and pressed her face against his shoulder.
“I tried to kill him,” she cried. “He was just like Lucas and he came at me and I tried to kill him.”
Peter held her very tightly against him while she sobbed.
“He wanted to tear my clothes off,” she wept. “He said I wanted to be raped and he was just like Lucas and I picked up the fire tongs and wanted to kill him.”
“It's all right, darling,” soothed Peter. “Don't cry any more. It's all right.”
“What's wrong with me, Peter?” Selena cried. “Why did it happen? What do I do that makes men like that?”
Peter kissed her soft hair. “It's not you, darling. You've just had bad luck, that's all. It's not you.”
Selena's whole body trembled. “I drank and drank,” she said, gasping for breath, “and it didn't do any good. I couldn't forget that I tried to kill him.”
Peter gave her a gentle shake. “But you didn't, darling. It's over now. You didn't.”
He led her gently to the sofa and held her cradled in his arms.
“Peter, I'm so scared. There's something wrong with me. I know there's something wrong with me,” she sobbed.
“There's nothing wrong with you, darling,” said Peter. He began to mop gently at her face with his handkerchief. “There's nothing wrong. Come on, now. Stop crying.”
Huge, dry sobs shook her as she put her head against his shoulder.
“You react to violence with violence,” said Peter. “Some people do, you know.” He tipped her head up and looked down at her. “I'll have to remember that,” he smiled, “whenever I get the mistaken idea that I can get rough around you.”
“You're so good, Peter,” she said, and a sigh went through her whole body as she relaxed against him. “I don't deserve anyone like you.”
Peter smiled against her hair. “You deserve the best of everything,” he said. He began to stroke her.
This is what I need, Selena thought, this is what I've always needed, Peter's gentle strength. It will protect me from all harm.
His hand continued to stroke her hair and back. It was as if his fingers were drawing out of her all the pain of the past and the agony of memory.
“When we get married,” Peter whispered, “it will be the true beginning of our lives. You'll see, Selena—what's happened up till now has nothing to do with us. We were other people then. And it all took place in another world.”
He had a profound understanding of Selena's needs. She wanted to be able to shuck off the past as cleanly as a farmer rips the corn from the stalk. With Peter, she wanted to be newborn and washed clean of the taint of the past. Her arms moved around him and held him tightly. She lifted her head and he bent to kiss her tear-stained face.
This will be the first time, Selena thought, this will be the first time.
She drew Peter down with her until they were lying side by side on the sofa; she moved and adjusted her body to the length of his. Hesitantly, his hand caressed her thigh, moved up until it gently touched her breast. Her lips parted, he kissed her; she moaned softly when he pushed up her sweater. She clasped her hands behind his head and held him.
“Oh, Selena, darling,” he whispered, and she heard the breathlessness in his voice.
He began to undress her. Sele
na felt faint, felt as if the world were slipping away from her. She covered her face with her hands, and in the darkness under her hands the world held still.
“Oh,” she said, “oh, I want you.” And she raised her hands to him as if imploring him and drew him to her.
3
WITH THE COMING OF AUTUMN and its electric air, Roberta Carter always felt brisk. It was as if she were sweeping up the sloth and indecision of the past year along with the dried, fallen leaves of her front yard trees. She rubbed her hands together mentally and thought, Now that all the summer nonsense is over with, let's get down to business. Roberta looked around her now spotless living room and should have felt completely satisfied with her housewifely accomplishment, but her pleasure was tainted. Even though Ted and Jennifer had returned to Cambridge early in September, Roberta could still feel the presence of that horrible girl in her house.
I've got to get rid of her, thought Roberta, and refused to feel futile.
She had been trying to get rid of Jennifer for over a year now, and nothing had worked. Ted turned a deaf ear to any remarks about his wife, and Harmon, who had been so diabolically clever when Roberta's problem had been old Doc Quimby, was next to useless where Jennifer was concerned.
“She seems to be a nice enough sort,” said Harmon.
“So was Dr. Quimby,” snapped Roberta, “but you managed to see that he didn't remain on our scene too long.”
“That was something else entirely,” replied Harmon.
Dr. Quimby, who had been the only physician in Peyton Place until Matthew Swain came home to practice, had been old and rich when Roberta had started to work for him as a combination housekeeper, secretary and companion. Roberta and Harmon, the children of mill hands, were engaged to be married, but, with the money Harmon earned as one of Leslie Harrington's bookkeepers, marriage was impossible. Until Harmon Carter came up with his plan.
It was a clever, simple plan which, if it worked, would set Roberta and Harmon up for life. Roberta had not needed much persuasion to put Harmon's idea to work. She married Dr. Quimby and he rewrote his will in her favor, and then she and Harmon settled back and waited for the old man to die. They didn't have long to wait. Peyton Place made life intolerable for Dr. Quimby. The town rocked with laughter, and people who had always gone to him with their ailments now assumed that he had turned senile and refused to consult him.
Roberta and Harmon cuckolded him openly, and in the end the old man put his revolver into his mouth and blew his head off. Within a year, Roberta and Harmon were married and had begun the long fight to become accepted by Peyton Place. With time and newfound respectability they had won to a degree. Of course, there were those who remembered and talked, but with every passing year the story grew less and less interesting and there were always new people in new situations to be gossiped about.
It helped a great deal, too, when Roberta and Harmon's son, Ted, turned out to be such a nice guy. So the scandal died and was almost buried, and people forgot. But Roberta Carter did not forget. She remembered very vividly how she had fought to become someone who was looked up to in town as a good wife and mother and an asset to the community. Now there was Jennifer, who threatened to turn Roberta's son from the paths of righteousness with her insane, abnormal sexuality.
I've got to get rid of her, thought Roberta.
But during the past year she had thought up and discarded hundreds of plans. Nothing worked. Ted was as much a prisoner in his marriage to Jennifer as he would have been in a maximum security cell at Alcatraz. Jennifer was crazy and she would make Ted crazy, and in the eyes of most of Peyton Place it was a far greater crime to be insane than it was to be a thief or a rapist.
I've got to get rid of her, thought Roberta.
But it was not until the end of summer that Roberta decided on a course of action that she had previously discarded as foolhardy and dangerous. Roberta burned leaves and vacuumed her rugs and began to plan her strategy.
Jennifer would be back in Peyton Place for the Thanksgiving holidays. I've got to kill her, she thought, and I have to do it well enough so that no one ever suspects a thing.
Roberta Carter began to read murder mysteries, but she did not borrow these from the Peyton Place public library nor did she buy them at the local bookstore. She traveled eighty miles to a city to shop, and she bought paper-backed novels in a large drugstore where she was not known, and she read secretly, behind the locked door of her bathroom.
During the day, when Harmon was at work, she wrote down the plot of each novel and listed the clues that had finally landed each murderer in the nets of the police. In this way, she discarded murder by shooting, stabbing, strangling and poison; and since Jennifer was not the type to commit suicide, Roberta realized that her daughterin-law's death would have to be made to look like an accident.
Although Jennifer drove a car, Roberta could never hope to tamper with an automobile to the extent of causing a fatal accident. Household mishaps were out, too, for whenever Jennifer visited in Peyton Place or Roberta went to Cambridge, Harmon was always around, or Ted, or both of them. No. It had to be something that happened when Roberta was not with Jennifer and when Ted, also, was away from his wife so that no breath of suspicion fell on him.
Roberta closed the cover of still another murder mystery and sighed deeply. It wasn't going to be easy, but then, she hadn't expected that it would be. In the meantime, there was plenty to do. She must begin to fabricate a fiction of her relationship with Jennifer. Peyton Place must be impressed with Roberta's magnanimity. When it was over and Jennifer was dead, people had to be able to say, “What a pity. And that this should happen to Roberta Carter, of all people. Why, she is the soul of goodness and she and Jennifer were so close.”
Roberta was, as she had always been, clever about sounding out people and when, within two weeks after the reopening of school in September, she discovered that the town was more than displeased with the man who now acted as headmaster of the Peyton Place school, she began to agitate for the return of Mike Rossi to his rightful position. Behind the back of her best friend, Marion Partridge, she let Charles know that when the school board considered the contracts for the next year she, Roberta, would be behind Charles one thousand per cent in his campaign to rehire Mike.
“The whole thing has given this town a terrible black eye,” she confided in Charles. “I mean, firing Mike just because of Allison's book. I was never really for it in the first place.”
And Charles Partridge, the town pacifist, forgot that Roberta had been one of Mike's sworn enemies and accepted her new attitude gratefully.
“It'll take a while for people to get over the way we acted about Mike,” said Roberta. “We've managed to make ourselves a laughingstock in educational circles. But it's nothing that can't be patched up.”
“And the sooner the better,” amended Charles Partridge.
Roberta began to make frequent visits to the Thrifty Corner where she not only made purchases, but became very friendly with Connie and Selena.
“I'm so very glad for you and Peter,” said Roberta to Selena. “He's certainly a lucky man.”
“I wonder what ails her,” said Selena when Roberta had gone. “I've never known her to be so sweet. It's almost sickening.”
But Connie, the incurable optimist, said, “Perhaps she's mellowing. After all, Roberta's no teen-ager any more. She's getting on.”
“I still don't believe that the leopard changes its spots,” said Selena.
But, as the weeks went by, even Selena had to admit that Roberta Carter had changed. In October, Mike Rossi was offered, and accepted, on terms he had made clear to the school board, his old job as principal of the Peyton Place school. The whole town with a few diehard exceptions, had been overwhelmingly on Mike's side of the fence. One of the exceptions was Marion Partridge, and in the interests of, as she put it, doing the right thing, Roberta Carter broke with her lifelong friend.
To various women in town Roberta said, “I'm
sorry that Marion feels as she does, but I wanted to do what was best for the school.”
The women carried the word into their homes and practically everyone agreed that Roberta Carter was the soul of unselfishness. They sympathized with Roberta, too, for Roberta let it be known that what she wanted more than anything was a grandchild, but Jennifer, so far, had not conceived.
“It's a shame,” said the women of Peyton Place. “It isn't as if Ted and Jennifer had to worry about money or anything. Heaven knows Roberta and Harmon are more than generous.”
Then Roberta let it be known that her son, Ted, wanted to come back to Peyton Place to practice law when he graduated from Harvard, and if there had been any doubt at all in the minds of the town, it was now assuaged. Peyton Place loved a local boy who went away and obtained the best education money could buy and then returned home to put what he had learned to use.
“Ted always had a good head on his shoulders,” said the town. “A good boy, Ted. And a smart one.”
“Old Charlie Partridge ain't gonna last forever. We'll need somebody like young Carter to take over when Charlie goes.”
Roberta counted heavily on the quality in her son that kept him from hurting anyone if he could possibly refrain from doing so. When anyone in Peyton Place mentioned Ted's eventual local practice, rather than answering flatly that he had no intention whatsoever of coming home to set up an office, Ted merely smiled and said modestly, “I've got to get through school first, and that's not going to be easy for a dull fellow like me.”
By the end of the summer, Roberta knew that the time had come to act. Jennifer's parents had begun to talk of a trip to Europe for “the children,” and Ted was obviously enthused at the prospect.
I've got to find a way, Roberta thought, with the beginning of panic.
Day after day she stayed in her house with her murder mysteries and her notebook. She worked out all the drawbacks to her plan, the risks, the clues she must not leave behind; and she planned a meticulous timetable of the day when it would happen. At last, she locked her notebook away in her desk and breathed a sigh of relief.
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