But not in my work, protested another part of his mind. Never in my work.
No, not in your work. Rules are rules and you have always abided by them. Certainly, you are not going to start breaking them now, at your age, and that's the end of it. Rules are rules.
But what about the exceptions to the rules?
There aren't any exceptions in your business, Doctor. You report syphilis, you tell the police if a man with a bullet wound approaches you, and you isolate the sick over protest. No exceptions, Matthew.
But if this child of Selena's is born, it will ruin the rest of her life.
That's none of your affair, Matthew. Go to the police. See that this man Lucas is brought to justice. But keep your hands off Selena Cross.
She is only sixteen years old. She has the beginnings of a pretty good life mapped out for herself. This would ruin her.
You might kill her.
Nonsense. I'd do it in the hospital with all sterile precautions.
Are you mad? In the hospital? Have you gone stark, raving mad?
I could do it. I could do it so no one would know. I could do it tonight. The hospital is practically empty. People just haven't been sick this month.
In the hospital? Are you mad? Are you really mad?
Yes, goddamn it, I am! Whose hospital is it, anyway? Who built the goddamn place, and nursed it, and made it go if it wasn't me?
What do you mean, your hospital? That hospital belongs to the people of this community whom you are solemnly bound to serve to the best of your ability. The state says so, and this country says so, and that oath you stood up and took more years ago than you care to remember says so. Your hospital. Humph. You must be mad.
Matthew Swain threw his empty whisky glass against the hearth of the empty fireplace. It shattered noisily and crystal slivers flew out in a circle.
“Yes, goddamn it, I'm mad!” said the doctor aloud, and stamped out of his living room and up the stairs that led to the second floor.
But all the while the silent voice pursued him.
You've lost, Matthew Swain, it said. You've lost. Death, venereal disease and organized religion, in that order, eh? Don't you ever let me hear you open your mouth again. You are setting out deliberately this night to inflict death, rather than to protect life as you are sworn to do.
“Feeling better, Selena?” asked the doctor, stepping into the darkened bedroom.
“Oh, Doc,” she said, staring at him with violet-circled eyes. “Oh, Doc. I wish I were dead.”
“Come on, now,” he said cheerfully. “We'll take care of everything and fix you up as good as new.”
And to hell with you, he told the silent voice. I am protecting life, this life, the one already being lived by Selena Cross.
“Listen to me, Selena,” said Dr. Swain. “Listen to me carefully. This is what we are going to do.”
An hour later, Constance MacKenzie, riding past the Peyton Place hospital with Tomas Makris in the car that he had bought the previous spring, saw the lights showing through the huge square of opaque glass that she knew screened the hospital's operating room.
“Something must have happened,” she said. “The operating room lights are on. I wonder who's sick.”
“That's one of the things I love about Peyton Place,” said Tom, smiling. “A man can't have so much as a gas pain without the whole town wondering who, why, when, where and what he's going to do about it.”
Constance made a face at him. “Big-time city slicker,” she said.
“Taking advantage of the farmer's daughter,” he added, taking her hand and kissing the finger tips.
Constance relaxed against the seat cushions with a contented sigh. She didn't have to open the store in the morning, for Selena Cross had promised to do it for her. Allison was spending the week end with Kathy Ellsworth, and Constance was on her way to dinner in a town eighteen miles away, far from the prying eyes of her neighbors, with the man she loved.
“Why the happy sigh?” asked Tom.
“My cup runneth over,” said Constance, and leaned her cheek against his shoulder.
“Cigarette?”
“Please.”
He lit two, one after the other, and passed one to her. In the quick flare of his lighter, she saw the pointed arch of one eyebrow and the perfect, Grecian line of his nose. His lips, over the narrow tube of his cigarette, were full without being loose, and the line of his chin was pleasantly pronounced.
“Altogether,” she said, “a head from an old Greek coin.”
“I like it when you talk like a smitten lady,” he said.
“That, I am,” she conceded.
There was an easiness to being with him that she had never before experienced with a man. It had been a long time in coming, this easiness, but now was it a part of her and she could almost forget that once she had been fearful of him almost to sickness.
‘What is it?” he asked with the peculiar way he had of knowing when she was thinking of something that concerned either him or both of them.
“I was thinking,” she said, “of the first time you ever came to my house. It was over two years ago, on the night of Allison's spring dance.”
Tom laughed and put her hand to his lips again. “Oh, that,” he said. “Listen, forget about that. Start thinking of what you want to eat when we get to the restaurant. Today is Friday, so they'll have all kinds of fish. It always takes you forever to make up your mind, and we're nearly there now.”
“All right,” she said, “I'll concentrate on haddock, clams and lobster and see what happens.”
She linked her hand through his arm, and at once the remembrance of another, later, time with him came to her.
It must have been three months after the first time that he had come to her house, for it had been August, and Allison had been away at summer camp down at Lake Winnipesaukee. It was a Saturday night, she remembered, and hot. She was working on her store ledger, and although every window in the house was open no breeze stirred. When the doorbell rang she was so startled that she dropped her pen, and it made an ugly blot on the white ledger page.
“Damn,” she muttered, belting her housecoat more tightly around her. “Damn it all.”
She pulled open the front door and Tomas Makris said, “Hi. Let's go for a swim.”
In the weeks following the spring dance in May, he had come to call on her perhaps half a dozen times, and once during that time she had gone out to dinner with him. He had made her feel uncomfortable in a way she could not explain, and she did not want to see him.
“Well, of all the nerve!” she said angrily. “What do you mean by ringing my doorbell at eleven thirty at night with some such insane suggestion as that!”
“If you're going to give me hell,” he said comfortably, “at least ask me in. What will your neighbors think?”
“Heaven only knows what they think already,” she said furiously. The way you're always barging in here, uninvited, any time you feel like it”
“‘Always’?” he asked incredulously. “Six times in the last three months. Does Peyton Place regard that as ‘always’?”
She had to laugh. “No, I guess not,” she admitted. “It's just that you startled me, and I dropped my pen and it made a blot on the ledger.”
“We can't have that,” he said. “Blots on the ledger, I mean.”
She felt herself stiffening, and he seemed to feel it, too, for he spoke quickly.
“Get your bathing suit,” he said, “and we'll go for a swim.”
“You're crazy,” she told him. “In the first place, there is no place to go around here except Meadow Pond, and that's always full of necking teen-agers.”
“Heaven forbid,” he said, “that we should go where the neckers go. I have a car outside that I'm thinking of buying, and there is a lake not eight miles away from here. Let's go try out my prospective car.”
“Mr. Makris–”
“Tom,” he said, patiently.
“Tom,” she said,
“I have no intention of going anywhere with you at this hour of the night. I have work to do, it's late, it's after eleven-thirty–”
“It's scandalous,” interrupted Tom, clucking his tongue and shaking his head. “Listen, you've worked all day. Tomorrow is Sunday, so you don't have to get up early. Your daughter is away at camp, so you needn't stay home for her. You have no other excuse that you can possibly offer except that you hate my guts, and you aren't going to say that. Get your bathing suit and come on.”
The surprising thing, thought Constance as she leaned against Tom's shoulder two years later, was not that he had spoken as he had, but that she had obeyed him.
“All right,” she had said, exasperated with his persistence. “All right!”
She had put on her bathing suit in her bedroom and only for a moment, when she caught her reflection in the mirror of her dressing table, did she pause.
What am I doing? she had asked herself.
Something I want to do, for a change, she had answered the face in the mirror.
Resolutely, she fastened the straps of her bathing suit into place, slipped on a cotton dress and a pair of sandals, and ran down the stairs to where Tomas Makris stood waiting in the hall.
“Did you lock your door?” he asked when they were outside.
“That's another thing you'll have to learn about small-town living,” she told him. “If you take to locking your door in Peyton Place, people will begin to think that you have something to hide.”
“I see,” he said. “I should have realized. It must be for this same reason that people here never draw the curtains in their living room windows when the lights are on inside. How do you like the car?”
“Not bad,” she said. “It's certainly not new though, is it?”
“Chevvies,” he said, “like good wines, are supposed to improve with age. Honest. That's what the used car salesman told me.”
He drove to the lake he had spoken of, eight miles from town, and whether the fact that the place was deserted was due to the hour or, as Tom said later, to their almost miraculous good luck, Constance did not know. She knew only that when he had turned off the car lights and cut the motor, the darkness and quiet of the place were unearthly.
“How are we supposed to see to get down to the beach?” she whispered.
“What are you whispering about?” he asked in a normal tone, startling her. “I have a flashlight.”
“Oh.” Constance cleared her throat and wondered if the first few minutes in a dark, parked car were as awkward for everyone as they were for her.
“Come on,” he said, and took her hand to lead her.
It was the first time he had ever touched her, and she felt his grip in her hand, in her wrist, through her whole arm. They dropped the clothes they had worn over their bathing suits on the beach and went into the water together. Now that Constance's eyes had become accustomed to the dark, she could see almost plainly, and what she saw was Tomas Makris standing at her side, massive, naked from the waist up, and evil looking. With a silent cry of fright, she dived into the water and swam away from him.
Oh, God, she thought, why did I ever come? How am I going to get home? Why didn't I stay home in the first place?
She swam until she was exhausted. Her body quivered with fear and chill, and when she swam close enough to the shore to stand, she saw that he was already on the beach, waiting for her. He did not move toward her as she came out of the water toward him, nor did he offer her the towel which he held in his hand. Nervously, she took off her bathing cap and shook her head to loosen her hair.
“My,” she said, with a strained little laugh. “It was cold, wasn't it?”
“Untie the top of your bathing suit,” he said harshly. “I want to feel your breasts against me when I kiss you.”
Two years later, sitting in a car at Tomas Makris’ side, Constance MacKenzie shivered again as uncontrollably as she had shivered that night.
“Don't think about it,” said Tom gently. “That part is all over with now. Now we are us, and we understand one another. Don't, baby,” he said, as she shuddered again. “Don't think about it.”
She shook her head and gripped his arm, but she could not help but think about it. Not five minutes before, they had passed the place where it had happened, and Constance could recall it in every detail.
She had stood like a statue, one hand on the back of her neck where she had put it to fluff out her hair, when he spoke. He did not speak again, but when she did not move he stepped in front of her and untied the top strap of her bathing suit. With one motion of his hand, she was naked to the waist, and he pulled her against him without even looking at her. He kissed her brutally, torturously, as if he hoped to awaken a response in her with pain that gentleness could not arouse. His hands were in her hair, but his thumbs were under her jawbone, at either side of her face, so that she could not twist her head from side to side. She felt her knees beginning to give under her, and still he kissed her, holding her upright with his hands tangled in her hair. When he lifted his bruising, hurtful mouth at last, he picked her up, carried her to the car and slammed the door behind her. She was still crumpled, half naked, on the front seat, when he drove up in front of her house. Without a word, he carried her out of the car, and she could not utter a sound. He carried her into the living room where the lights still blazed in front of the open, uncurtained windows and dropped her onto the chintz-covered couch.
“The lights,” she gasped finally. “Turn off the lights.”
When the room was dark he came to her. “Which room is yours?” he asked coldly.
“The one at the end of the hall,” she said, through her chattering teeth. “But it doesn't matter, because you'll never see the inside of it. Get out of my house. Get away from me–”
He carried her, struggling, up the dark stairway, and when he reached the second floor, he kicked open the door of her room with his foot.
“I'll have you arrested,” she stammered. “I'll have you arrested and put in jail for breaking and entering and rape–”
He stood her on the floor beside the bed and slapped her a stunning blow across the mouth with the back of his hand.
“Don't open your mouth again,” he said quietly. “Just keep your mouth shut.”
He bent over her and ripped the still wet bathing suit from her body, and in the dark, she heard the sound of his zipper opening as he took off his trunks.
“Now,” he said. “Now.”
It was like a nightmare from which she could not wake until, at last, when the blackness at her window began to thin to pale gray, she felt the first red gush of shamed pleasure that lifted her, lifted her, lifted her and then dropped her down into unconsciousness.
It depressed Constance MacKenzie to relive this memory, and it shamed her to remember that she had uttered only one desperate question during that whole, long night.
“Did you lock the door?” she had cried.
And Tom, laughing deep in his throat, had replied against her breasts, “Yes. Don't worry. I locked it.”
Looking at him now, as he drove quickly along the road that led away from Peyton Place, Constance wondered again at this man whom she had not yet begun to know.
“What?” he inquired, again reading her mind.
“I was thinking,” she said, “that after two years, I really don't know you very well.”
Tom laughed and turned into the graveled drive in front of the restaurant they had come to visit. As he helped her out of the car he lifted her chin and kissed her gently.
“I love you,” he said. “What else is there to know?”
Constance smiled. “Nothing else that really matters,” she said.
Much later, as they returned to Peyton Place, she did not even glance at the dimly lit hospital. It was only when Tom parked the car in front of her house and she saw Anita Titus waiting for her that she felt an uneasy foreshadowing of disaster.
‘Your phone's been ringing all evening,” said A
nita, who was Constance's next door neighbor and on the same telephone party line. “The hospital's been trying to reach you.”
“Allison!” cried Constance. “Something has happened to Allison!”
She ran from the car and up her front walk, forgetting her gloves and purse, and leaving Tom to cope with Anita. For a long moment he stood and gazed after this woman who hurried into her own house in order to listen in on Constance's telephone call.
Christ, he thought angrily, I haven't met ten people in this goddamned town who don't need to spend the next year douching out their goddamned souls.
When he went into the house, Constance was already in contact with the hospital.
“Oh, thank you, thank you,” she was saying relievedly. “Oh, yes. Thank you for calling me.”
“What is it?” he asked, lighting two cigarettes.
“Selena Cross,” said Constance. “Dr. Swain performed an emergency appendectomy on her this evening. She had the hospital call me to say that she wouldn't be able to open the store in the morning. Imagine her thinking of the store at a time like that.”
♦ 5 ♦
Nurse Mary Kelley closed the door on a sleeping Selena Cross and went quietly, on large, white-shod feet that looked incapable of such quietness, to the desk in the first floor hall. She sat down, adjusting her cap nervously, and sighed as she molded her hips to the straight chair. Once her legs were hidden by the kneehole desk, she spread her thighs cautiously. In the summer, when it was very hot, the insides of her thighs were always chafed. Nothing seemed to help her at these times, neither powder, nor dry cornstarch, nor zinc oxide ointment. She just suffered, and her temper grew short. Now, in addition to night duty and the July humidity and the thighs that hurt as if they had been burned by fire every time she took a step, she was being forced to put a code of medical ethics to the test for the first time in her career. Mary Kelley had been a serious student. She knew all about the ethics that were meat for so many novels and motion pictures and bull sessions in student nurses’ quarters.
“What would you do,” the students had been fond of asking one another in the long hours after the lights had been put out, “if you saw a doctor make a mistake in the O.R.? A mistake that resulted in the death of a patient?”
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