Peyton Place
Page 20
Kenny Stearns came limping into the auditorium, the two pails he carried clanking together. Miss Thornton sat up and gathered her gloves together.
“Good evening, Kenny,” she said.
“Evenin’, Miss Thornton. I thought everybody was gone.”
“I was just leaving, Kenny. The auditorium looked lovely tonight, didn't it?”
“It sure did. I'm the one built them benches. Held up good, didn't they?”
“They were perfect, Kenny.”
“I pinned them letters up for the seniors, too. Had a helluva time gettin’ ’em on straight. That nine wa'nt crooked when I got done, like it is now.”
“No, it wasn't, Kenny. That happened during the exercises.”
“Well, I gotta get started. Those benches gotta come down tonight. I got a coupla kids comin’ in to help me later.”
Miss Thornton took the hint. “Good night, Kenny,” she said.
“’Night, Miss Thornton.”
Outside, the night sky was black. There was no moon and Miss Thornton reflected that there would not have been room for one, for all the available sky space was taken up with stars. She looked up and breathed deeply of the faintly scented June air, and suddenly her depression was gone. There would be another group of children in the fall, perhaps one more promising and rewarding than the last.
BOOK TWO
♦ 1 ♦
Two years had passed since that graduation night. They had passed quickly for Allison. The work was much harder in high school and this provided a mental stimulation for her that had been lacking in the grades. Somehow, too, she had come to accept herself and the world around her more calmly, and while she still had periods of fear and resentment, they were fewer and less wretchedly painful than before. She had also developed a new, insatiable curiosity. Two years earlier she had been content to let books answer her questions, but now she tried to learn from people. She asked questions of everyone whom she dared to approach, and the most sympathetic of these was Nellie Cross.
“How did you ever come to marry Lucas, anyway?” she asked Nellie one day. “You're always cussing him and talking as if you hated him. How come you married him at all?”
Nellie looked up from the brass candlestick that she was polishing, and she was quiet for so long that to anyone but Allison it might have seemed that she had not heard or that she was ignoring the question. But Allison knew that neither of these was true. If Nellie was sympathetic to Allison's questions, Allison had learned to be patient with Nellie's inarticulateness.
“I dunno that I ever did come to it, like you say,” said Nellie finally. “Marryin’ Lucas wa'nt nothin’ I ever come to. It was just one of those things that happened.”
“Nothing,” said Allison positively, “ever just happens. There is a law of cause and effect that applies to everything and everybody.”
Nellie smiled and put the candlestick down on the mantelpiece in the MacKenzie living room.
“You talk good, honey,” she said. “Mighty good, with them big words and all. It's like music, listenin’ to you.”
Allison tried not to look pleased, but she felt the way she often did at school when she received an A in composition from Mr. Makris. Nellie's wholehearted and absolute appreciation of Allison was the basis of their friendship, but Allison never admitted that this was so. She said, instead, that she “just loved” Nellie Cross.
“Now that I think of it,” said Nellie, “there most likely was a reason why I married Lucas. I had Selena. Tiny, she was then. Just barely six weeks old. My first husband, Curtis Chamberlain he was, got himself killed by a mess of falling logs. Fell off a truck, the logs did, and killed old Curt deader than hell. Well, there I was, out to there carryin’ Selena, and right after she was born I met Lucas. He was alone, too. His wife died havin’ Paul. It seemed like a good idea at the time, my marryin’ Lucas, I mean. He was alone with Paul, and I was alone with Selena. Don't do for a woman to be alone, or a man either. Besides, what could I do? I wa'nt in no shape to work right then, bein’ as how I just had a baby, and Lucas was after me.”
She began to cackle, and for a moment Allison was afraid that Nellie would begin to get vague and go off on a conversational tangent the way she often did these days, but Nellie stopped her weird laughter and went on talking.
“More fool was I,” she said. “I went from the fryin’ pan right straight into hell. Lucas always drank, and fought, and chased the wimmin. And I was worse off than before.”
“But didn't you love him?” asked Allison. “Just at first?”
“Well, Lucas and me wa'nt married too damned long before I got pregnant the first time. Lost that one. Miscarriage, The Doc said. Lucas went out and got drunker than hell. Said I was still grievin’ for Curtis, Lucas did, but that wa'nt true. Anyways, I got in the family way again and then I had Joey, and after that Lucas didn't seem to feel so bad over Curtis no more. There's some say you gotta love a man to get a child by him. I dunno. Maybe this love you're talkin’ about is what kept me by Lucas all these years. I coulda left him. I always worked anyway, and he always drunk up most of his pay, so it wouldn't have made no difference.”
“But how could you stay with him?” asked Allison. “How come you didn't run away when he beat you, and beat your children?”
“Why, honey, beatin's don't mean nothin’.” Nellie cackled again, and this time her eyes did turn vague. “It's everythin’ else. The booze and the wimmin. Even the booze ain't so bad, if he'd just leave the wimmin alone. I could tell you some stories, honey–” Nellie folded her arms together, and her voice took on a singsong quality–“I could tell you some stories, honey, that ain't nothin’ like the stories you tell me.”
“Like what, then?” whispered Allison. “Tell me. Like what?”
“Oh, he'll get his someday,” whispered Nellie, matching her voice to Allison's. “He'll get his, the sonofabitch. They all get it, in the end, the sonsofbitches. All of ’em.”
Allison sighed and stood up. When Nellie began to croon and curse, it was futile to try to talk sense to her. She would go on for the rest of the day, swearing under her breath, unaware of all questions put to her. It was this trait in Nellie that caused Constance MacKenzie to remark frequently that something would have to be done about her. But somehow Constance never got around to doing anything, for Nellie, eccentric or not, was still the best house worker in Peyton Place. But it was not Nellie's vagueness or her language which bothered Allison. It was the frustrating way in which Nellie threw out veiled insinuations, like a fisherman casting out line, only to withdraw the bait as soon as Allison nibbled. In times past, Allison had attempted to batter against this wall of things left unsaid, but trying to pin Nellie down to words, Allison had discovered, was a hopeless business.
“What could you tell me, Nellie?” she would ask, and Nellie would cradle her arms and cackle.
“Oh, the stories I could tell you, honey–” but she never did, and Allison was still too young to pity the incapability of an individual to share his grief. She merely shrugged and said crossly, “Well, all right, if you don't want to tell me–”
‘Well, all right, if you don't want to tell me,” said Allison on this particular day, “I'll go for a walk and leave you by yourself.”
“Heh, heh, heh,” said Nellie. “The sonsofbitches.”
Allison sighed impatiently and left the house.
In two years Peyton Place had not changed at all. The same stores still fronted on Elm Street, and the same people owned and operated them. A stranger, revisiting the town after two years, would have the feeling that he had been here only yesterday. Now that it was July the benches in front of the courthouse were well filled by the old men who regarded them as their private property, and a stranger might look at them and say, “Why, those old men have been sitting there all this time.”
Allison walked down Elm Street in the hot summer sun and the old men in front of the courthouse followed her with heavy, summer-lidded eyes.
; “There goes Allison MacKenzie.”
“Yep. Growed some lately, ain't she?”
“Got some growin’ to do, ’fore she catches up with that mother of hers.”
The men snickered. It was the consensus of town opinion that Constance MacKenzie was built like a brick shithouse, a sentiment that was given voice every time that Constance walked past the courthouse.
“Good-lookin’ woman, though, Constance MacKenzie is. Always was.”
“Oh, I dunno,” said Clayton Frazier. “Kinda fine drawn for my taste. I never was much taken with wimmin whose cheekbones stick out.”
“For Christ's sake. Who the hell looks at her cheekbones?”
The men laughed, and Clayton Frazier leaned back against the hot stone of the courthouse wall.
“There's some men,” he said, “who occasionally got their minds fixed on other things in a woman besides her tits and her ass.”
“That right, Clayton? Name one.”
“Tomas Makris,” said Clayton Frazier without a second's hesitation.
The men laughed again.
“Jesus, yes!” they said. “That horny Greek never noticed nothin’ about Connie MacKenzie ‘cept her brains!”
“Them two got nothin’ to talk over these hot nights ‘cept literchoor and paintin’,” they said.
“Why, that big, black Greek never even notices that Connie MacKenzie's a well-built blonde!”
Clayton Frazier tipped his old felt hat down over his eyes.
“Don't make no difference what none of you say,” he said. “I'd bet my next six months’ pension that Tomas Makris never laid a finger on Connie MacKenzie.”
“I'll side with Clayton,” said one man with mock sobriety. “I'll bet Tom never laid a finger on Connie MacKenzie, either. But I wouldn't take no bets that he's laid everything else on her!”
The men roared and turned to watch Allison walk out of sight on Elm Street.
Memorial Park was patchy with grass burnt pale brown by the sun that had shone daily for six weeks of drought. The wide-branched trees stood as if paralyzed in the windless air, their leafy tops dusty green and cicada filled, and they waited for rain with the patience of a hundred years. Allison walked listlessly, feeling over-clothed in spite of the brief shorts and sleeveless blouse that she wore, and loneliness weighed heavily on her as she climbed the sloping hill behind the park. Hers was not a loneliness to be alleviated by people, for she could have gone swimming at Meadow Pond with Kathy Ellsworth and had refused. She had thought of a crowd of young people, a splashing, yelling, playful crowd, and the thought had repelled her. She had thought also of sun reflecting itself on motionless water, and had told Kathy no, she did not want to go swimming. Now she was sorry, for the July heat was like a weight on her bare head as she climbed the hill toward Road's End. But for the sizzling of the cicadas and the scrape of her own feet against the rocky ground, there was no sound and Allison had a feeling of being the only inhabitant in a dry, burnt-out world. It was almost a physical shock to see another figure, standing motionless before the board with the red letters printed on its side, as she turned from the path to approach the place called Road's End.
The figure turned as she came near, not disturbed by sound, for Allison made none, but by a sense of no longer being alone.
“Hi, Allison,” said Norman Page.
“Hi, Norman.”
He was wearing a pair of the khaki pants known as “tennis shorts” and his knees, like his elbows and cheekbones, were sharp and angular. Norman was the only boy in Peyton Place who wore shorts in the summertime. The others wore dungarees and uncovered their legs only when they donned bathing trunks.
“What are you doing up here?” asked Norman vaguely, as if he had just been awakened.
“Same thing you are,” replied Allison unpleasantly. “Looking for a place to cool off and be by myself.”
“The river looks as if it were made of glass from here.”
Allison leaned against the board that barred the drop-off at Road's End.
“It doesn't seem to be moving at all,” she said.
“Nothing in the whole town seems to be moving.”
“It looks like a toy village, with everything made out of cardboard.”
“That's what I was thinking just before you came. I was thinking that everybody else in the world was dead, and I was the only one left.”
“Why, so was I!” exclaimed Allison, turning her head to look up at him.
Norman was staring straight ahead, a lock of dark hair curling damply on his forehead; the skin at his temples was almost translucent. His finely made lips were parted slightly, and his lashes, over half-closed eyes, made tiny shadows on his thin, white cheeks.
“So was I,” repeated Allison, and this time Norman turned his head and looked at her.
“I used to think,” he said, “that no one ever thought the same things as I. But that's not always true, is it?”
“No,” said Allison, and looked down. Their hands rested close together on the board that had the red letters printed on its side, and there was a companionable sort of intimacy in the sight of them. “No, that isn't always true,” said Allison. “I used to think the same thing, and it bothered me. It made me feel queer and different from everyone else.”
“I used to think that I was the only kid in town who ever came up here,” said Norman. “It was a kind of secret place with me, and I never told anyone.”
“I thought that once,” said Allison. “I'll never forget the day that someone told me it wasn't so. I felt mad and sick, as if I'd caught someone looking in my window.”
“Outraged is a good word,” said Norman. “That's the way I felt. I saw Rodney Harrington and Betty Anderson up here one afternoon, and I ran all the way home, crying.”
“There's one place I'll bet no one knows about. Not even you.”
“Tell me.”
“Come on. I'll show you.”
Indian file, with Allison leading, they made their way through the woods at the side of the road. The branches of low bushes scratched at their legs and they paused every few feet to pick some of the blueberries that grew there. Norman took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and knotted the four corners to make a sort of pouch, and together they filled it with fruit. At last they came to the open field, hidden deep in the woods, and the buttercups and brown-eyed Susans were a sea of brown-dotted gold. Allison and Norman stood close together in the cicada-slivered stillness, not speaking, and ate from the handkerchief basket of berries. After a long time, Norman bent and picked a handful of buttercups.
“Hold up your chin, Allison,” he laughed. “If the flowers reflect gold on your skin it means that you like butter and are going to get fat.”
Allison laughed and tipped her head back. Her pale brown hair, pulled back now and tied into a tail, moved against her back, and the nape of her neck was damp.
“All right, Norman,” she said. “You just look and see if I'm going to get fat!”
He put two fingers under her chin and bent to see if the buttercups he held shed a reflection.
“No,” he said, “I guess not, Allison. It doesn't look as if you'll be fat.”
They were both laughing, and Norman's fingers were still under her face. For a long moment, with the laughter still thick in their throats, they looked at one another, and Norman moved his fingers so that his whole hand rested gently on the side of her face.
“Your lips are all blue from those berries,” he said.
“So are yours,” said Allison, not moving away from his touch.
When he kissed her it was softly, without touching her except for raising his other hand to her cheek. The buttercups he still held were like velvet on their faces.
♦ 2 ♦
Dr. Matthew Swain and Seth Buswell sat in Seth's office in the building that housed the Peyton Place Times. The doctor fanned himself with his white straw hat and sipped at Seth's special summertime concoction of gin and iced grapefruit juice.
“For Christ's sake, don't talk about the weather,” said the doctor. “I was just being thankful that very few have picked this month to be sick.”
“Nobody's got the energy to get sick,” said Seth. “It's too goddamned hot to think about layin’ on a rubber sheet over in your hospital.”
“Jesus!” exclaimed the doctor, half rising to his feet as a car raced past on Elm Street. “Don't push my luck talking about it, or we'll be scraping young Harrington off a road somewhere.”
“It'll be Leslie's fault if you do. Damned foolishness, buyin’ a sixteen-year-old kid three thousand dollars’ worth of convertible coupé.”
“Especially Rodney Harrington,” said the doctor. “That kid's got as much sense as a flea. Maybe it's a good thing he got kicked out of New Hampton. Leslie can have him here in town where he can keep an eye on him, which isn't worth much, I'll grant.”
“Didn't you know?” asked Seth. “Leslie's got Proctor to take him. How he worked getting Rodney into that school, I don't know, but the kid is going there in the fall.”
“I don't imagine he'll be there too long,” said the doctor. “I saw him over to White River last week. He had that convertible piled full of kids, and they were all drinking. Leslie about bit my head off when I told him about it. Told me to mind my own business and let the kid sow a few wild oats. Wild oats at sixteen. As I remember it, I was considerably older when I started planting mine.”
“I don't like that kid,” said Seth. “I don't like him one bit better than I ever liked Leslie.”
Two figures passed in front of the plate glass window in Seth's office. The girl raised her head and glanced in, waving her hand at the two men inside, but the boy was preoccupied in watching the girl, and he did not look up. He carried a handful of buttercups as if he had forgotten that he held them.