“There goes Allison MacKenzie with the Page boy,” said the doctor. “I wonder if his mother knows he's out.”
“She went to White River this afternoon,” said Seth. “I passed her going in just as I was leaving.”
“That accounts for Norman walking on the street with a girl then,” said the doctor. “I imagine that Evelyn went to White River to consult John Bixby. She hasn't come near me to be treated since I told her there was nothing the matter with her but selfishness and bad temper. Odd,” he continued after a pause, “how hatred manifests itself in different ways. Look at the Page Girls, healthy as plow horses, both of ’em, and then look at Evelyn, always suffering with an ache or a pain somewhere.”
“But look at what hatred did for Leslie Harrington,” said Seth. “He hated the whole world and set out to lick it. And he did.”
“I'd like to see the boy get free of her before it's too late,” said the doctor, still thinking of Norman Page. “Maybe if he got himself a nice girl, like Allison MacKenzie, it would counteract Evelyn's influence.”
“You're worse than an old woman, Matt,” said Seth, laughing. “An old woman and a matchmaker to boot. Have another drink.”
“Have you no shame?” demanded the doctor, extending his glass. “Sitting around soaking up gin all day?”
“Nope,” said Seth unhesitatingly. “None at all. Here's to little Norman Page. A long life and a merry one, providing Evelyn doesn't eat him alive first.”
“I don't think that he's strong enough to fight her,” said the doctor. “She expects too much from him—love, admiration, eventual financial support, unquestioning loyalty, even sex.”
“Oh, come now,” said Seth. “The weather's got you. Don't go tellin’ me that Evelyn Page is sleepin’ with her son.”
“The trouble with you, Seth,” said the doctor with mock severity, “is that you think of all sex in terms of men sleeping with women. It's not always so. Let me tell you about a case I saw once, a young boy with the worst case of dehydration I ever saw. It came from getting too many enemas that he didn't need. Sex, with a capital S-E-X.”
“Jesus, Matt!” exclaimed Seth, making his eyes bulge with exaggerated horror. “Do you think that's what put old Oakleigh in his grave? Enemas?”
“Don't be a conclusion jumper,” protested the doctor. “I didn't say that what I was talking about had anything to do with Evelyn Page and Norman. And, no, Oakleigh didn't die of enemas. He was lashed to death, by the tongues of Caroline and Charlotte and Evelyn Page.”
“I'm goin’ to stop feedin’ you gin,” said Seth. “It makes you too goddamned morose, and today it's too hot to be morose or anything else.”
“Except drunk,” said Dr. Swain, standing up, “which I have no intention of getting at four o'clock on a Friday afternoon. I have to go.”
“See you tonight?” asked Seth. “The whole gang is comin’ tonight, which makes for good poker.”
“I'll be there,” said the doctor. “And bring your checkbook, Seth. I feel lucky.”
♦ 3 ♦
Selena Cross, standing in front of the window in the Thrifty Corner, saw Dr. Matthew Swain go by. At once, her heart began to pump more heavily as fear gripped her and spread itself through her body. She stared in horror at the tall, white-suited figure that had never shown her anything but kindness.
Help me, Doc, she rehearsed silently. You've got to help me.
“Matt Swain is the only man I ever saw who can wear a white suit successfully,” said Constance MacKenzie at Selena's elbow. “He may look unpressed, but he never looks sweaty.”
Selena's fingers clenched around the middle of the curved-in Coke bottle she held.
I'll wait one more day, she thought. One more day, and if nothing happens, I'll go see The Doc. Help me, Doc, I'll say. You've got to help me.
“Selena?”
“Yes, Mrs. MacKenzie?”
“Don't you feel well?”
“Sure, Mrs. MacKenzie, I feel fine. It's just the heat.”
“You're so pale looking. It's not like you.”
“It's just the heat, Mrs. MacKenzie. I'm fine.”
“Things are so slow today. Why don't you take the rest of the afternoon off?”
“Thanks anyway, but Ted's meeting me at six.”
“Well, go on out back and sit down for a while, then. Honestly, I never saw you looking so white.”
“All right. I'll go sit down. Call me if you need me.”
“I will, dear,” said Constance MacKenzie, and at the kindness of her tone, Selena almost wept.
If you knew, she thought. If you knew what the matter is, you wouldn't talk so gently to me. You'd tell me to get out of your sight. Oh, Doc, help me. What if Ted found out, or his folks, or anybody?
Selena had never been one to let the opinions of Peyton Place bother her in any way.
“Let ’em talk,” she had said. “They'll talk anyway.”
But now, with this terrible thing that had happened to her, she was afraid. She knew her town, and its many voices.
“A girl in trouble.”
“She got in Dutch.”
“She's knocked up.”
“The tramp. The dirty little tramp.”
“Well, that's the shack dwellers for you.”
If it had not been for Ted Carter, Selena would have stuck her chin out at the world and demanded: “So what?” But she loved Ted. At sixteen, Selena had a maturity which some women never achieve. She knew her own mind, and she knew her own heart. She loved Ted Carter and knew that she always would, and to imagine him looking at her with his heart breaking for all to see was more than she could bear. Ted, with a sense of honor that he had inherited from somewhere, with a rigid self-control that he would not let break. Ted, holding her and saying, “I won't, darling. I won't hurt you.” Ted, pulling away from her when he did not want to, saying that in addition to love and respect, he had patience. They had laughed about it.
“We girls from the backwoods are all hot blooded,” she had said.
“It's not too much longer,” Ted had told her. “Two years. We're only sixteen, and we have our whole lives. We'll get married before I go to college.”
“I love you. I love you. I never loved anybody in the world except Joey, and I love you more.”
“I want you, baby. How I want you! Don't touch me. What if I ever got you in trouble? It happens, you know. No matter how careful people are, it happens. You know what this town is like. You know how they treat a girl that gets in trouble. Remember when it happened to the Anderson girl, Betty's sister? She had to move away. She couldn't even get a job in town.”
Oh, Doc, prayed Selena, putting her head down between her knees against the faintness she felt. Oh, Doc, help me.
“Selena?”
“Yes, Mrs. MacKenzie?”
“Telephone.”
Selena stood up and ran shaking fingers over her cheeks and hair, then she went to the front of the store.
“Hello?” she said into the receiver.
“Oh, honey,” said Ted Carter, “I'm afraid I won't be able to meet you at six o'clock. Mr. Shapiro has three thousand more chickens coming in, and I have to stay and help.”
“That's all right, Ted,” said Selena. “Mrs. MacKenzie offered me the rest of the afternoon off. As long as you can't get away, I'll take her up on it.”
The rest of the afternoon. The rest of the afternoon. I'll go see The Doc during the rest of the afternoon.
Selena hardly heard Ted's plan to meet her later. She hung up on his telephoned kiss, and stood staring down at the whiteness of her hand on the black receiver.
“Mrs. MacKenzie,” she said, a few minutes later, “is it all right if I take the rest of the afternoon after all?”
“Of course, dear. Go home and get some rest. You look all tired out.”
“Thank you,” said Selena. “That's just what I'll do. I'll go home and take a nap.”
Constance MacKenzie watched Selena walk out of sight on Elm S
treet. It was odd, she mused, that Selena refused to confide in her.
In the last two years they had become so friendly that there were very few things that they had not discussed. Selena was the only person who knew that Constance was planning to marry Tomas Makris. Constance had told her, in her first flush of joy, over a year ago. Selena understood how it was with Constance. She knew how careful she had to be, because of Allison. Selena had even offered advice.
“The longer you wait, Mrs. MacKenzie, the worse it's going to be,” Selena had said. “Allison always had strong feelings about her father. She'll have them next year, and the year after that. I don't see how waiting until she graduates from high school is going to solve anything.”
Constance sighed. Tom didn't see how waiting for Allison to graduate from high school was going to solve anything, either. She had a date with him this evening, and she knew that the subject would come up. It always did. If she could only get up enough courage to tell him the way it had been with Allison's father, if she only dared to tell him everything. But she loved him in the only way a woman of thirty-five can love a man when she has never loved before—wholeheartedly, with all her mind and body, but also with fear. Constance regarded Tomas Makris as the embodiment of everything she wanted and had never had, and she was afraid of losing him. What made the situation even more difficult was the fact that he loved her. He loved, she told herself fearfully, the woman she appeared to be: Widow, devoted mother, respected member of the community. How well would he love a woman who had taken a lover and been stupid enough to bear him a bastard child? Constance, who had despised herself for sixteen years, could not believe that any man could love her once he knew the truth. She had many reasons for not marrying Tom without first telling him the facts, and all her reasons had to do with honor and nobility and truth. The fact of the matter was that she was tired of carrying a burden alone and wanted, at all costs, to share its weight with someone. More than anything, she wanted to be with someone with whom she need not forever be painstakingly, frighteningly careful. Constance MacKenzie, almost as unhappy as she had been two years before, went into the small room at the back of her store and made herself a tall glass of iced tea.
Selena Cross hurried in the late afternoon sun. When she reached Chestnut Street, she felt as though every window held a pair of eyes that stared at her and knew her secret at once.
A girl in trouble, said every pair of eyes. A girl in Dutch. Not a nice girl, a bad girl. No kind of girl for young Ted Carter.
Selena hurried up the flagstone walk, wet now with the spray from two lawn sprinklers that were making lazy circles, and ran up the front steps between two of the pillars of the doctor's “Southern-looking” house. Matthew Swain answered her urgent ring.
“For God's sake, Selena,” he said, looking only once at her white face, “come in out of that beastly heat.”
But inside, in the wide, cool hall, Selena's teeth began to chatter, and the doctor looked at her sharply.
“Come into the office,” he said.
A visiting colleague had once said that Matt Swain's office looked less like a doctor's office than any other anywhere. It was true, for the doctor had used part of what had once been a drawing room for his place of business. Half of the drawing room was shut off with folding doors, and on the other side Matthew Swain had his examining rooms. The floors in both the office and the examining rooms were the same hardwood floors that had been put down when the house was built, and next to the doctor's untidiness the floors were Isobel Crosby's greatest source of complaint.
‘It's bad enough,” Isobel would say, “that The Doc has all kinds of folks trackin’ into the house when he could well afford an office downtown, but hardwood floors! Imagine it. Hardwood floors that you can't run over with a wet mop!”
Selena Cross sat down carefully on the straight chair next to the doctor's desk.
“Relax, Selena,” said the doctor. “No matter what it is, it's nothing that won't feel a little better for telling me about it.”
“I'm pregnant,” said Selena, and immediately bit her lip. She had not meant to blurt it out like that.
“What makes you think so?” asked the doctor.
“Two and a half months and no period makes me think so,” said Selena, and this time she twisted her hands, for she had not meant to say that, either.
“Come on in the other room,” said Dr. Swain. “Let's see what we can see.”
His hands were cool against her hot skin, and once again her mind set up its prayerful refrain.
Help me, Doc. You've got to help me.
“Whose is it?” he asked when they had returned to the office.
Now came the worst part, the part she had rehearsed so carefully in her mind so that she could phrase it in a way that would not antagonize the doctor.
“I am not at liberty to say,” said Selena.
“Nonsense!” roared the doctor, and she knew that she had failed. “What kind of rot is that? You're not the first girl in the world who has to get married, nor in this town, for that matter. Whose is it now, and no more foolishness. Young Carter's?”
“No,” said Selena, and when she bent her head forward her dark hair swung softly on either side of her face.
“Don't you lie to me!” shouted Dr. Swain. “I've seen the way that boy looks at you. What gave you the idea he was inhuman? Come on now, don't lie to me, Selena.”
“I'm not lying,” said the girl, and in the next moment she lost control of herself and began to shout at him. “I'm not lying. If it were Ted's I'd be the happiest girl in the world. But it's not his! Doc, help me,” her voice went to a whisper. “Doc, once you told me that if I ever needed you, to come and you'd help me. Well, I'm here now, Doc, and I need help. You've got to help me.”
“What do you mean by help, Selena?” he asked, his voice almost as soft as her own. “How can I help you?”
“Give me something,” she said. “Something to get rid of it.”
“There is nothing I can give you to take, Selena, that would help you now. Tell me who is responsible. Maybe I could help you that way. You could get married only until after the baby is born.”
Selena's lips went tight. “He's already married,” she said.
“Selena,” said Dr. Swain as gently as he knew how, “Selena, there is nothing I can give you at this point that will make you miscarry. The only thing now is an abortion, and that's against the law. I've done a lot of things in my time, Selena, but I have never broken the law. Selena,” he said, leaning forward and taking both her cold hands in his, “Selena, tell me who this man is, and I will see that he is held responsible. He'll have to take care of you and provide for the baby. I could work it so no one would know. You could go away for a little while, until after the baby comes. Whoever did this thing to you would have to pay for that, and for your hospitalization, and for you to look after yourself until you get back on your feet. Just tell me who it is, Selena, and I'll do everything I can to help you.”
‘It's my father,” said Selena Cross. She raised her head and looked Matthew Swain straight in the eyes. “My stepfather,” she said, and tore her hands away from him. She fell forward onto the doctor's hardwood floor and beat her fists against it. “It's Lucas,” she screamed. “It's Lucas. It's Lucas.”
♦ 4 ♦
Early that same evening, Dr. Swain telephoned to Seth Buswell that he would be unable to join with the other men of Chestnut Street to play poker.
“What's the matter, Matt?” asked the newspaper editor. “Did we push your luck too far? Somebody go and get sick?”
“No,” said the doctor. “But some things at the hospital need straightening out and I should attend to them this evening.”
“Nothing in the accounting department, I hope,” said Seth laughing. “I hear that those guys from the state auditor's office are bastards.”
“No, Seth. Nothing in the accounting department,” said the doctor, and his hearty laugh was strained. “But I'd better wat
ch my step or the Feds'll be on my tail.”
“Sure, Matt,” laughed Seth. “Well, sorry you can't make the game. See you tomorrow.”
“See you, Seth,” said Dr. Swain and hung up gently.
Selena Cross had not left the doctor's house. She lay in a darkened upstairs bedroom with a cool cloth on her forehead.
“Stay here,” the doctor had told her. “Stay right here on the bed, and when you feel a little better we'll talk over what we can do.”
“There's nothing to do,” said Selena and retched violently while the doctor held a basin for her.
“Lie quietly,” he said. “I have to go downstairs for a while.”
In his dining room, Matthew Swain went at once to the sideboard where he poured himself a large drink of Scotch whisky.
Gin, Scotch, young girls in bed upstairs, I'd better watch out, he thought wryly. If I'm not careful, I'll be getting a reputation as a drunken old reprobate who is no longer the doctor he once was.
He carried the second drink into his living room and sat down on a brocaded sofa in front of the empty fireplace.
What are you going to do, Matthew Swain? he asked himself. Here you've been shooting your mouth off for years. What will you do now, when it is time to put your fancy theories to the test? Nothing dearer than life, eh, Matthew? What is this thing you are thinking of doing if it isn't the destruction of what you have always termed so dear?
Dr. Swain drank his second drink. He was honest enough to realize that the struggle he fought with himself now would leave its mark on him for the rest of his life, and he knew that no matter what his decision, he would always wonder if he had made the right one. It was true that he had never broken any of the laws of the land before, unless a weekly game of five-and-ten poker with friends in a state that prohibited gambling could be looked upon as breaking the law.
No exceptions now, Matthew, he cautioned himself. Poker at Seth's is against the laws of this state, so you have broken the law before.
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