“If we were married,” said Tom suddenly, “we could go out for a drink and dinner only when we wanted to. On our wedding anniversary, for instance.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Constance admitted. “I'm beginning to feel like a traveling salesman with the nearest bar for my natural habitat.”
“And that,” said Tom, “is the best opening gambit I've been offered for over two years. My next natural line is to say, ‘Well, then?’ so I'll say it. Well then? Or do you want this stylized? Such as, ‘Well, then, darling be mine. Two can live as cheaply as one.’”
“Three,” said Constance.
“Three can live as cheaply as two. With your Cape Cod and my salary.”
“Oh, stop it,” said Constance wearily.
Tom looked down into his glass. “I mean it, Connie,” he said. “What are we waiting for?”
“For Allison to grow up.”
“We've had this same conversation so many times,” said Tom, “that we ought to be able to prompt each other with our lines.”
“Tom,” she said, covering his hand with hers, “I'll begin to mention us to Allison soon. I'll have to step softly. She has no idea that I'd ever consider marriage. But I'll mention it soon, Tom. Just to see how she takes to the idea.”
“I hate to sound insistent,” he said, “but how soon?”
Constance thought for a moment. “Tomorrow evening,” she said. “Come for dinner.”
“Moral support, eh?”
Constance laughed. “Yes,” she said. “Besides, if you're right there where she can see you, I don't see how she will be able to resist the idea of such a handsome stepfather.”
“I hear it, but I don't believe it,” said Tom, raising two fingers in the direction of the waiter. “However, I'm a great one for premature celebration.”
“I'll simply say, ‘Allison, I'm not getting any younger. Soon you will be grown and will leave me. It's time I thought of someone to spend my old age with.’”
“Put it off much longer, and we won't even have much of that left.”
“What?”
“Old age.”
They held hands and smiled into one another's eyes. “We're worse than a couple of kids,” he said, “sitting around holding hands and mooning.”
“Speaking of kids,” said Constance, “isn't it awful about Betty Anderson?”
“All depends on what you mean by ‘awful,’” said Tom, releasing her hand as the waiter put down their drinks. “Awful that she is left with the short end of the stick, yes. Awful that the Harrington boy is getting away with it, yes. Especially awful that Leslie Harrington did what he did, yes. But otherwise, not so awful. Nor unexpected, for that matter.”
“For heaven's sake, Tom,” said Constance. “You can't mean that you don't think it's awful when fifteen- and sixteen-year-old kids go around–” she paused, searching for the right phrase. “Go around doing things,” she finished.
Tom grinned. “That's exactly what I mean,” he said.
“Do you actually mean to sit there and tell me that if we got married and Allison did anything, got into trouble, or even if she was lucky and didn't get caught–” she stopped, unable to find words to conclude her thought.
“If Allison, or any kid for that matter, goes around, quote doing things unquote, I cannot say that I think it is something as terrible as you want me to say it is,” said Tom and folded his arms and leaned back in his chair.
“For heaven's sake, Tom. It's abnormal in a child that age. There's something wrong with a kid who thinks overmuch of sex.”
“What do you mean by overmuch?”
One of the few things about Tom which annoyed Constance was his habit of questioning every questionable word in her arguments. More often than not, she had discovered, he could render her opinions utterly senseless and baseless by making her say exactly what she meant, word for word.
“By overmuch,” she said crossly, “I mean just what I say. It is thinking overmuch of sex when a fifteen-year-old girl lets some boy like Harrington take her out and do whatever he wants with her. If Betty hadn't been thinking too much about sex for years, she wouldn't even know enough to realize that a boy wanted to take her out for what he could get. The idea would never enter her head.”
“Wow,” said Tom, lighting a cigarette. “Are you confused!”
“I am not! It's abnormal for a girl of fifteen to be as wise as Betty is. Well, she wasn't quite wise enough, apparently.”
“I'd be inclined to think that if Betty, at fifteen, didn't think about sex she was abnormal. Much more so than because she obviously has thought about it. I think that any normal kid,” he said, pointing his cigarette at her–” ‘normal’ being your word, not mine-has thought plenty about sex.”
“All right!” conceded Constance unwillingly. “But thinking and doing are two different things. And nothing you can say is going to make me believe that it's perfectly all right for kids like Betty Anderson and Rodney Harrington to go around having—things to do with each other.”
Tom raised an eyebrow. “What the hell have you got against the word intercourse?” he asked. “It's a good, serviceable word. Yet you'd rather rack your brain for fifteen minutes to find a substitute rather than use it.”
“Whatever you want to call it, I still don't think it is all right for children.”
“In the last few minutes,” said Tom, “you've gone from calling what happened between Betty and Rodney ‘awful’ to ‘abnormal’ and now to ‘not all right.’ I'm not going around advocating fornication on every street corner and an illegitimate child in every home, and for those reasons I'll admit that I don't think that it is ‘all right.’ But since I know that a kid at fifteen or sixteen, and oftentimes younger, is physically ready for sex, I can't agree that I think Betty and Rodney are ‘abnormal.’ And since I also know that in addition to a child being physically ready for sex at fifteen or sixteen, his mind has been educated and conditioned to sex and he feels a tremendous, basic drive for sex, I cannot agree with you when you say that you think Betty and Rodney are ‘awful.’”
“Tremendous, basic drive,” scoffed Constance. “Now you're going to go all Freudian on me and tell me that sex is on a par with eating, drinking and defecating.”
“In the first place, Freud never said any such thing, but we'll let that pass. And in the second place, I certainly do not put sex on a par with the things you mentioned. I put it next to the urge for self-preservation, where it belongs.”
“Oh,” said Constance, with an impatient gesture, “you men make me sick. I suppose you were being driven by this tremendous, basic urge at the age of fifteen or sixteen.”
“Fourteen,” said Tom, and laughed at the look on her face. “Fourteen, I was. She was a kid who lived in a tenement on the same floor as I, and I caught her in the toilet at the end of the hall. I took her standing up, with the stink of potatoes boiled too long in too much water, and filth and urine all around us, and I loved it. I may even say that I wallowed in it, and I couldn't wait to get back for more.”
“And that's the second thing about you that annoys me,” said Constance. “The first one is the way you always rip my arguments into pieces, and the second one is the way you seem to try to be deliberately crude. You don't care what you say, nor to whom. Sometimes I think that you lie awake nights thinking up things to say for their shock value.”
“Faulty reasoning,” said Tom. “What am I to do with you?”
“Don't say things like you do,” she said. “It's not necessary or even nice.”
“God!” exclaimed Tom. “Nice, yet! Some of the things I say may not be particularly ‘nice,’ but they are true. It was, perhaps, not nice of me to have intercourse with little Sadie, or whatever the hell her name was, in a hallway toilet, but it is true. It happened, and it happened exactly as I told you. Also, my reaction was just what I said it was. What about you? I suppose you never thought of sex at all until you were married, and then you went to your new husban
d all sweetness and virginity, with never a thought of eagerness.”
For a moment Constance hesitated. Here was a perfect opening. She could smile right back at Tom and say: “As a matter of fact, he wasn't my husband.” Tonight would be a good time to say it, before she talked to Allison. She glanced up into his waiting face and the moment was gone.
“As a matter of fact,” she said, “that's just the way it was. It never changed, either. Sex was always something I allowed him as a sort of favor.”
“What a liar you are,” said Tom.
She felt her hands grow cold as she waited fearfully for his next words. Now it was coming. Now he would look at her with disgust and say, “He was never your husband. What a liar you are. He was your lover and you bore him a child. Yours was the same situation as Betty and Rodney's, except you were old enough to have known better.”
“What a liar you are,” said Tom. “Would you have me believe that when you give yourself to me it is as a favor?”
“Not with you,” said Constance, and hurriedly finished her drink. “But just the same,” she said, laughing a trifle nervously, “you will never make me believe that it is the right thing for children to be doing. Why, if Allison ever did anything like that, I'd kill her.”
“There is a shaggy dog story in that vein,” said Tom as he stood up and put down a bill on the check the waiter had left. “It has to do with a woman who put a new dress on her little girl. She told the little girl that if the little girl went out and fell into the mud, she'd kill her. So the little girl went out and fell in the mud and her mother killed her.”
“This is a joke?” asked Constance, taking his arm as they walked to the car.
“I don't think so,” said Tom.
Constance leaned back comfortably in the front seat of the car. “I may have put it a little strongly,” she said. “But I mean it when I say that I wouldn't put up with Allison behaving the way Betty Anderson has for years. Luckily, I don't have to worry about putting up with it. Allison isn't like that. I doubt if she ever thinks about it. She always has her nose in a book and her head in the clouds.”
“Then you had best watch what she reads,” said Tom. “As one fourteen-year-old who developed a crush on me once said, ‘After all, Mr. Makris, Juliet was only fourteen.’ Watch out that Allison doesn't begin to think of herself in terms of Juliet. Or worse, in terms of Mademoiselle de Maupin.”
“What's that?” asked Constance. “That French name?”
“It is the name of a very famous novel by a Frenchman named Gautier,” said Tom and burst out laughing.
“Now you are making fun of me because my literary education was sadly neglected. I don't care. I don't have to worry about Allison. At sixteen she still loves to read fairy tales.”
“I thought she was only fifteen.”
“Well, she will be sixteen in the fall,” said Constance and bit her lip against the slip she had made. “And it won't be too long until fall.”
“No, it won't,” said Tom. “School will be opening in a little over two weeks.”
“I'll talk to her tomorrow, about us,” said Constance. “Maybe by next summer–”
“Sure,” said Tom, and pressed his foot down on the accelerator. The car sped smoothly on the road to Peyton Place.
♦ 15 ♦
The next day was Saturday and it began what Seth Buswell, without his tongue in his cheek for once, later referred to as “the bad time in ’39.” The drought was still upon Peyton Place. The land lay burnt and fruitless under the August sun, and there was that peculiar, waiting quietness in the air which comes when every man, woman and child watches the hills which encircle his town.
A stranger passed through Peyton Place early on that Saturday morning. He parked his car on Elm Street and made his way into Hyde's Diner. Corey Hyde stood with his fists on his hips and stared out of a window at the back of the diner, and Clayton Frazier who stood next to Corey, holding a coffee cup, also stared. The stranger craned his neck to look over the heads of Corey and Clayton, but there was nothing to see from the window but a ridge of hills topped with yellowed, unmoving trees.
“Coffee,” said the stranger, and for a moment Corey's shoulders tensed before he turned around.
“Yes, sir. Right away,” said Corey.
Clayton Frazier shuffled to a seat at the end of the counter but a seat, the stranger noticed, from which the old man could look out the window to the ridge of hills in the distance. Corey put a cup, saucer and spoon down on the counter in front of the stranger.
“Will that be all, sir?” asked Corey.
“Yes,” the stranger replied, and Corey left him to take up his post by the window.
This particular stranger was different from the majority of those who pass through northern New England, or from those who come to stay for a while in the summer, in that he was a sensitive man. He was an author's representative on his way to Canada to vacation with his number one client, a prolific but alcoholic writer, and he sensed something of the waiting tension which gripped this town in which he found himself early on a Saturday morning. He slapped his hand down against Corey Hyde's counter.
“What's the matter with everyone around here?” he demanded. “Everyone acts as if he were waiting for doomsday. Not five minutes ago I stopped at a gas station, and the man there was so busy watching and waiting for something that I had a struggle to find out what I owed him. What is everyone waiting for?”
Corey and Clayton, who had started almost fearfully at the sound of the stranger's hand against the counter, were, nevertheless, not so startled that they forgot themselves to the point of answering the stranger with a direct reply.
“Where you headed?” asked Clayton Frazier.
“Canada,” replied the stranger, almost mollified now that he had managed to get some response from someone about something in this weary and apprehensive place.
“Drivin'?” asked Clayton, who by now had noticed the gray Cadillac parked outside.
“Yes,” said the stranger. “I have two weeks so I thought the drive up would be enjoyably slow and peaceful. I wish now that I had taken a train. It's been wretchedly hot all the way from New York.
“Humph,” grunted Clayton. “New York, eh? New York City?”
“Yes,” said the stranger.
“Long ways away.”
“At least the worst is over now,” said the stranger, sipping his coffee. “The Canadian line can't be more than a three-hour drive from here.”
“Nope,” said Clayton, “it ain't. You should make it easy in three hours. If you go fast, mister, you could make it in less than three hours.”
The stranger smiled into the lined, stubbly face of the not-too-clean old man. “Why should I hurry?” he asked pleasantly, and he was thinking what an amusing ancedote this would make to tell his friends when he returned to New York. He would practice that nasal twang, and when he returned home he would tell of the picturesque old native whom he had met and conversed with up in northern New England. “Why should I hurry, old-timer?” he asked jocularly.
Clayton Frazier set his coffee cup down with a little click, and then he looked hard at the stranger for a moment.
“Go fast, mister,” he said. “Get over that line of hills as fast as you can go. Mebbe they got rain up to Canada.”
The stranger laughed. By God, this was like some story by an impossibly bad writer. Git over that line of hills, stranger, else yore a dead dog.
“What do you mean?” he asked, swallowing his laughter with the rest of his coffee. “What does rain in Canada have to do with my getting there quickly?”
“We ain't got rain here,” said Clayton Frazier, turning to look out the window. “Aint had none since June.”
“Oh,” said the stranger, feeling rather disappointed. “Is that what everyone is waiting for? Rain?”
Clayton Frazier did not look at him again. “Fire,” he said. “Everyone's waitin’ for the fires to start, mister. If you're smart you'll go fast.
You'll get past the hills before the fires start.”
A few minutes later, the stranger paused with his hand on the door of his car. He squinted up at the ridge of hills beyond Peyton Place. The hills were topped with trees of a peculiar yellowish color. It was an unhealthy shade, the stranger thought. Ugly. But because he was a sensitive man, he felt a finger of apprehension prod at his mind. He could look at the unmoving, yellow hills and imagine a single, quick-moving, red streak. He could picture the way the red streak would move, eagerly, hungrily, almost gaily, through all the dry, dry quietness that surrounded Peyton Place. The stranger climbed into his car and drove away, and when he noticed later that his speedometer indicated seventy-five, he laughed at himself, but he did not slow down.
The waiting and watching were everywhere, but other than that, this particular Saturday started off in the way of countless other summer Saturdays gone by.
Allison MacKenzie and Kathy Ellsworth, having spent the night together, breakfasted in the MacKenzie kitchen after Contance had left for her shop. They ate eggs and toast and drank coffee, and there was sunshine all over the yellow tablecloth. Nellie Cross rattled dishes in the sink as a hint for the girls to be finished and gone, but they paid no attention to her.
“I've lived in Peyton Place longer than I've ever lived anywhere,” said Kathy, chewing absent-mindedly at a piece of toast. She was looking out the window at the vivid pattern made by hollyhocks against a white picket fence. The MacKenzies’ lawn and flowers were the most colorful on Beech Street, kept that way through the weeks of drought by the assiduous hand watering of Joey Cross whom Constance hired for that purpose. “I never want to move away,” continued Kathy. “We won't, either. My mother told my father that we wouldn't.”
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