Peyton Place

by Grace Metalious

  “I'd never tell,” they assured each other. “After all, everyone makes mistakes. If a carpenter or a plumber makes a mistake, no one is going to ruin him for it. A doctor can make mistakes. Why should he be ruined, or disgraced, or sued?”

  “Nurses never tell,” they said. “And they see mistakes every day. They keeps their mouths shut. It's ethics.”

  Mary Kelley, sitting spread-legged at the first floor desk, stared down at her hands which were large, square and naked looking in the night dimness of the Peyton Place hospital.

  It never stopped there, she remembered, the noble-sounding talk about medical ethics.

  “But what if it wasn't a mistake?” they asked one another. “What if a doctor was drunk, or did something deliberately?”

  “What if it was your own mother and he killed her to put her out of her misery if she was suffering from some incurable disease?”

  “Supposing the doctor had a daughter and his daughter had an illegitimate child and he let the baby die during delivery?”

  “I'd never tell,” they said solemnly. “You just don't tell on doctors. That's ethics.”

  Mary Kelley stirred in her chair and spread her legs as far apart as the kneehole in the desk would allow. It all sounded so fine in theory, she thought. It had always sounded fine and beautiful during the bull sessions in the nurses’ quarters. Talk was cheap. It cost nothing to give voice to what you wanted people to think you believed. Mary wondered if medical ethics could be compared to the question of tolerance. When you talked you said that Negroes were as good as anybody. You said that Negroes should never be discriminated against, and that if you ever fell in love with one, you'd marry him proudly. But all the while you were talking, you wondered what you would really do if some big, black, handsome nigger came up and asked you for a date. When you talked you declared that if you fell in love with a Protestant who refused to change his religion for you, that you would marry him anyway and love him for having the courage of his convictions. You would marry him over parental objections and the objections of the Church, and you would cope intelligently with the problem of a mixed marriage. You knew that you were safe in saying these things, for there hadn't been a nigger living in Peyton Place for over a hundred years, and you didn't date boys who were not Catholics. You said that you knew what you would do if confronted with an unethical doctor, but what, wondered Mary Kelley, putting her face in her large, square hands, did you really do when it happened?

  For a moment, she pondered the advisability of going straight to Father O'Brien and confessing to him the sin in which she had taken part this night. She pictured the big, blue-jowled face of the priest, and the narrow, black eyes that could pierce like knives. What if she told him and he refused to give her absolution? What if he said, “Deliver this doctor into the hands of the law, for only in this way can I wash the sin from your soul”? Mary Kelley pictured the face of Doc Swain, his good, kind face, and the hands that she had regarded as next to those of Christ in their gentleness. She had, really, not been able to help herself, for The Doc had not offered her a choice.

  “Prep her,” he had said, indicating Selena Cross. “I've got to yank her appendix.”

  Mary's thighs were hurting, her temper was short and she had been annoyed, as always, by The Doc's unprofessional language. He never used the more polished, mysterious words of medicine if he could help it. She had been full of protests.

  What about an assistant? she had queried. An anesthetist? An extra nurse? She was alone on night duty in the almost empty hospital. What if there were only three patients in bed at the time? It wasn't right to leave those three unattended while she helped The Doc! What if the telephone rang now that it was evening and the daytime secretary gone? What if someone called up and no one answered the phone? It wouldn't look right, she had told The Doc, if there should be an emergency and there was no one on duty at the desk.

  “Goddamn it!” roared The Doc. “Stop your jaw-flapping and do as I say!”

  Mary didn't mind when The Doc roared. It was just his way, and a good nurse never interfered with a doctor's way any more than she tried to tell him what to do in the O.R. She had tried, though, later, with Selena Cross unconscious on the table.

  “Doc,” she had whispered. “Doc, what're you doing?”

  He had straightened up and looked at her, his eyes blazing, blue and furious, over his mask.

  “I'm removing her appendix,” he said coldly. “Do you understand that, Mary? I am removing an appendix so diseased that it might easily have ruptured had I waited until tomorrow morning to remove it. Do you understand that, Mary?”

  She had lowered her eyes, unable to look at the pain in his which he tried to cover with rage. Later, she supposed that this had been The Doc's way of offering her a choice. She could have said no, she didn't understand, and run out of the O.R. and called Buck McCracken, the sheriff, right then. But she had, of course, done nothing of the kind.

  “Yes, Doctor,” she had said, “I understand.”

  “Make sure you never forget it then,” he told her. “Make goddamned sure.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” she said, and wondered why she had always thought that it was only Catholics who were against abortion. It couldn't be so, for here was The Doc, a Protestant, with his eyes full of pain as his hands expertly performed an alien task.

  At least, thought Mary later, she supposed that The Doc was a Protestant. He followed no religion at all, and Father O'Brien had always led her to believe that it was only Protestants who fell away and wound up with no religion at all. A Catholic, she told herself, would never have performed this shocking, horrifying, repulsive act, and she had been shocked, horrified and repulsed, as any good Catholic girl would have been. But underneath all that, like a poisonous snake slithering through deep jungle grass, ran a thread of sinful pride. The Doc had chosen her. Of all the nurses he might have picked—Lucy Ellsworth, or Geraldine Dunbar, or any of the nurses who came over from White River to help out when the hospital was loaded—he had chosen Mary Kelley. He could have left her on floor duty and called in someone else, but he had chosen her, and, wrong or not, there was an area of dark happiness in her.

  The Doc might make her his accomplice in the most serious of all crimes, but he was not a liar, nor did he make one of her. In the end, when he had finished with the other, he had removed Selena Cross's appendix. While it might be the prettiest, healthiest looking appendix that Mary Kelley had ever seen come out of anyone, The Doc had removed it.

  “Messiest appendectomy I ever performed,” he told Mary when he had finished. “Cean it up, Mary. Clean it up real good.”

  She had, too. While the patients slept peacefully, she had given thanks, like a seasoned criminal, for the phenomenal good luck that the Fates had bestowed upon The Doc and her, and she had cleaned up the O.R. real good as The Doc had told her to do. She had cleaned up real good, like The Doc said, and she had disposed of everything very carefully and conscientiously.

  Mary Kelley twisted in her chair and put her hand under her skirt. She pushed the extra material in the skirt of her slip down between her sweaty, chafed thighs and relaxed.

  There, she thought, as the fabric absorbed some of the moisture, that was better.

  When the telephone rang, she was almost cheerful again.

  “Oh, yes, Mrs. MacKenzie,” she said into the receiver. “Yes, I've called you a couple of times. Anita told me you'd gone out, so I told her to have you call me. Oh, dear no, Mrs. MacKenzie. It's not Allison. It's Selena Cross. Emergency appendectomy. Oh, yes indeed. It was about to rupture. She's fine now, though. Sleeping like a baby.”

  It was only after she had hung up that Mary Kelley realized that she had taken the irrevocable step in the question of ethics. She had made her choice with this first handing out of false information. Resolutely, she picked up the detective novel that she had started the night before. She forced her eyes to concentrate on the printed page, hoping that her mind would absorb what her eyes pi
cked up. There would be plenty of times in the future, when she couldn't read, to think of sin and God and Father O'Brien.

  ♦ 6 ♦

  Dr. Matthew Swain parked his car at the side of the dirt road in front of the Cross shack and then went quickly to the door of the house. He pounded against the flimsy door with both fists, as if to find a physical outlet for the rage that was in him.

  “Come in, for Christ's sake,” bawled Lucas from inside. “Don't break the goddam door down.”

  Matthew Swain stood in the open doorway, tall, white suited, looking larger than he really was. Lucas was sitting at the kitchen table, dressed only in a pair of greasy dungarees. The black mattress of hair on his bare chest looked as if it might be a hiding place for lice, and his skin was shiny with sweat. There was a game of solitaire spread out on the table, and a quart bottle of beer, half empty. Lucas looked up at Dr. Swain and smiled. His forehead and lips moved at the same time, but his eyes remained flat and still with suspicion.

  “Lost your way, Doc?” he asked. “Nobody here sent for you.”

  At these words, the doctor felt the sweat break out on his own body. It wet his shirt through in seconds and trickled down his sides. Nobody sent for you, Doc. The words brought back a picture of Selena, huddled outside in the night, to protect her little brother Joey against the fists of the man whom the doctor faced now.

  “I've got Selena in the hospital,” he said hoarsely, as soon as he could control his rage.

  “Selena?” asked Lucas. He pronounced it S'lena, and the doctor knew that Lucas had been drinking all day. “What you got Selena in the hospital for, Doc?”

  “She was pregnant,” said the doctor. “She had a miscarriage this afternoon.”

  For only a moment, Lucas’ smile wavered.

  “Pregnant?” he asked. “Pregnant?” he repeated, and tried to put outrage into his voice. “Pregnant, eh? The goddamn little tramp. I'll fix her. I'll give her a beatin’ she won't forget in a hurry. I told her she'd get in a mess of trouble, always lettin’ that Carter feller rassle around with her. I told her, but she wouldn't listen to her pa. Well, I'll fix her, the little tramp. When I get done with her, she'll listen good.”

  “You miserable bastard,” said Dr. Swain in a voice that shook. “You miserable, lying sonofabitch.”

  “Now, just you hold on a minute, Doc,” said Lucas, pushing away from the table and rising to his feet. “There's no man calls Lucas Cross a sonofabitch in his own house. Not even a high mucky muck doctor like you.”

  Matthew Swain advanced toward Lucas. “You hold on a minute,” he said. “You do the holding on, you sonofabitch. That was your child that Selena carried, and we both know it.”

  Lucas sat down abruptly on his chair. “I can prove it, Lucas,” continued the doctor, lying and knowing it, and not caring. “I can prove it was your child,” he repeated, using his superior knowledge now in a way he had never done before. To intimidate the ignorant. “I have enough proof,” he told Lucas, “to put you in jail for the rest of your life.”

  Sweat dripped from Lucas’ face now, and its odor rose from him in hot waves. “You ain't got nothin’ on me, Doc,” he protested. “I never touched her. Never even laid a hand on her.”

  “I've got plenty on you, Lucas. More than I can use. And just to be on the safe side, I've got a paper here I want you to sign. I wrote it up before I left the hospital. It's a confession, Lucas, and I want you to write your name on it. If you won't do it for me, maybe Buck McCracken can sweat it out of you in the cellar of the courthouse with a rubber hose.”

  “I never touched her,” insisted Lucas harshly. “And I ain't gonna put my name on nothin’ says I did. What you got against me, Doc? I never did nothin’ to you. What you want to come in here and bully me for? Did I ever do a wrong thing against you?”

  The doctor leaned on the table, towering over the man who sat and stared sullenly at his folded arms. Matthew Swain knew that Selena had carried Lucas’ child. He was as sure of it as he had ever been of anything. Just being sure should have been enough, yet some perverseness in him drove him on. He knew that Lucas Cross was guilty of a crime so close to incest that the borderline was invisible. The knowing should have been enough. With the knowing alone, he knew that he could force Lucas to sign a confession, but something made him drive on, made him bully the man until Lucas should admit in his own words that he had fathered the foetus in Selena's womb.

  “Maybe I won't go after Buck,” he said softly. “No, I won't go after Buck. Instead, I'll raise an alarm all over town. I'll go personally and tell every father in Peyton Place what you did, Lucas. I'll tell them that their daughters aren't safe with you around. The fathers will come after you, Lucas, the same way they'd go after a wild and dangerous animal. But they won't shoot you.” He paused and looked at the figure in front of him. “Know how long it's been since we had a lynching in this town, Lucas?”

  The eyes of the man in front of him swiveled around frantically, searching for escape from the merciless voice that drummed in his ears.

  “It was so long ago, Lucas, that no one remembers, for sure, just when it was. But lynching seems to be something an outraged man always knows how to do. The fathers will know how to do it, Lucas. Not too good, maybe. Not good enough so's you'd die on the first try, maybe. But they'd get the hang of it after a while.”

  He waited for a moment, but Lucas did not raise his head. He continued to sit, staring at the matted black hair on his forearms, with the smell of sweat rising from skin that was roughened now with the tiny bumps of fear. The doctor turned as if to leave, but Lucas’ moan stopped him before he had taken three steps.

  “For Christ's sake, Doc,” said Lucas. “Hold on a minute.”

  The doctor turned and looked at him.

  “I done it, Doc,” he said. “I'll sign your paper. Give it here.” And this should have been enough. Together with the other, with the knowing beforehand, this final admission, oral and written, should have been enough for Matthew Swain. But it was not enough. He wanted to crush, to crush and grind with his heel; to degrade and humiliate and break. He looked at the pile of broken pieces that more than thirty years of honorable medical practice made when it came tumbling down, and he looked at Mary Kelley's good, Irish Catholic face, overlaid now with a certain hardness made by the cynical knowledge of crime committed. He looked at the gelatinous red mass of Selena's unborn child that would probably have been born and lived a normal number of years, and he looked at Lucas Cross. He wanted to inflict pain on this man of such an acute and exquisite caliber that his own pain would dissolve, and all the while he knew that it was futile. Lucas would feel neither pain nor shame nor regret, for in Lucas’ lexicon he had not committed a crime of such magnitude that it could not be overlooked and forgotten. Lucas Cross paid his bills and minded his own business. All he asked of other men was that they do the same. Before he spoke, Matthew Swain knew that Lucas would first present excuses and then make a bid for sympathy, but he could not keep from speaking, nor from hoping to twist the knife in a wound that he knew Lucas did not possess.

  “When did it start, Lucas?” he asked in a sly voice that was not his. “How many times did you do it, Lucas?”

  The man looked at him out of eyes which held nothing now but fear. “Jesus, Doc,” he said to this man with the crazy blue eyes whom he had never seen before. “Jesus, Doc,” he said. “What do you want from me? I told you I done it, didn't I?”

  “How long, Lucas?” the doctor repeated doggedly. “One year? Two years? Five?”

  “A couple,” said Lucas in a low whisper. “I was drunk, Doc. I didn't know what I was doin’.”

  Automatically the doctor's mind registered the first of Lucas’ excuses. I was drunk. I didn't know what I was doing. It was a standard with men like Lucas, for everything from fighting and stealing to, apparently, the raping of children.

  “She was a virgin when you started, wasn't she, Lucas?” asked the doctor in the same sly voice. “You busted
your daughter's cherry for her, didn't you, Lucas, you big, brave, virile woodchopper?”

  “I was drunk,” repeated Lucas. “Honest, Doc. I was drunk. I didn't know what I was doin’. Besides, it ain't like she was my own. She wa'nt mine. She's Nellie's kid.”

  Dr. Swain grabbed a handful of Lucas’ hair and twisted with his strong fingers until Lucas’ head went back with a snap.

  “Listen, you sonofabitch,” he said, enraged. “This is no job in the woods that you've messed up. This is nothing that I'm going to listen to your weak excuses about being drunk. You knew what you were doing every minute. Stop being a pig for the one and only minute of your stinking, perverted life and admit that you knew.”

  Lucas gasped as the doctor's fingers twisted in his hair. “Yes,” he said. “I knew. I seen her one day, and I seen she was almost grown. I don't know what got into me.”

  When the doctor released Lucas’ hair, he took out a clean handkerchief and wiped his hand carefully. The second standard excuse had now been presented. I don't know what got into me. It was as if men like Lucas expected men like Matthew Swain to believe in the existence of strange devils who lurked, ready and eager to invade the minds and bodies of men like Lucas. The second excuse for misbehavior was always tendered in a wistful, half-apologetic tone, as if the speaker expected the listener to join with him in wonder at this thing which had got into him. I don't know what got into me, but whatever it was, it was none of my doing. Something just got into me, and there was nothing I could do.

  Oh, Christ, prayed Matthew Swain. Oh, Christ, keep me from killing him.

  I dunno how many times it was,” said Lucas thickly. “A couple -maybe three—when I was half drunk and didn't give a shit.” His eyes went blank with remembered lust. “She's a wildcat, Selena is. Always was. I used to hit her ’til she didn't fight no more.”

  Dr. Swain felt the greenness of nausea in his mouth as he listened to Lucas and watched him lick his dry lips.