Looking for Peyton Place

by Barbara Delinsky

  Lead poisoning made sense. The clincher, for me, was that the Meades owned the building, had suggested doing the work, and had hired the man who carried it out. I would like nothing more than to have the Meades found liable for the result.

  Facts were needed, of course. I tried to ask Phoebe whether she and Mom had been in the store while the work was being done, what precautions had been taken, whether the date of the work had preceded Mom’s first symptoms. But my questions confused her.

  Sabina wasn’t confused. She said—unequivocally—that I was making things worse.

  Worse was the operative word. Phoebe wasn’t recovering from Mom’s death, and my imagination wouldn’t let go.

  By the end of July, I made the decision. August promised to be brutal in the nation’s capital—hot, humid, and highly deserted. Most of my friends would be gone through Labor Day. Greg had been given a month’s leave by the network and was bound for Alaska to climb Mount McKinley, which was a three-week trek even without travel to and from. There was little reason for me to hang around in the District and good reason for me to leave. I had done all I could from afar. I had to be with Phoebe again to see if what I imagined seeing in her were really symptoms. I had to talk with people to learn how much of the paint removed had contained lead and how it had been removed. A phone call wouldn’t do it. A dozen phone calls wouldn’t do it.

  I hadn’t spent more than a weekend in Middle River in fifteen years. That I was willing to do so now vouched for my concern.

  By the way, if you’re thinking I never saw my mother and sisters during those years of exile, you’re wrong. I saw them. Every winter, we met somewhere warm. The destination varied, but not the deal. I paid for us all, including Phoebe’s husband while they were married and Sabina’s longer-lasting husband and kids. Same with the summers we met in Bar Harbor. I had the money and was glad to spend it on our annual reunion. Unspoken but understood was my aversion to the tongue-wagging that would take place if I showed up in town.

  I was right to expect it. Sure enough, this August, though I pulled up at the house on Willow Street at night, by noon the next day, word of my arrival had spread. During a quick stop at the post office, I was approached by six—six—people asking if I had come home to write about them.

  I didn’t answer, simply smiled, but the question kept coming. It came with such frequency over the next few days that my imagination went into overdrive. Middle River was nervous. I wondered what dirty little secrets the locals had to hide.

  But dirty little secrets of the personal variety didn’t interest me. I had no intention of being cast in the Grace Metalious role. She and I hadn’t talked in years—as “talking” with a dead person went. I had earned my own name. I had my own life, my own friends, my own career. The only reason I was in Middle River was to find an explanation for my family’s illness. Could be it was lead. Could be it wasn’t. Either way, I had to know.

  Then came the photo. Several days before I left Washington, I was at the kitchen table with my laptop, finishing the revisions of my next book. Morning sun burned across the wood floor with the promise of another scorcher. The central air was off, the windows open. I knew that I had barely an hour before that would have to change, but I loved the sound of birds in our lone backyard tree.

  I wore denim shorts, a skimpy T-shirt, and my barest Mephisto slides. My hair was in a ponytail, my face without makeup. I hadn’t been working fifteen minutes when I kicked off the slides. Even my iced latte was sweating.

  Studying the laptop screen, I sat back, put the heels of my feet on the edge of the seat, braced my elbows on my knees and rested my mouth on my fists.

  Click.

  “The writer at work,” Greg declared with a grin as he approached from the door.

  Greg was usually the handsome face of the news, not a filmer of it. But he was a digital junkie. He had researched for days before deciding which camera to buy for his trip. “That the new one?” I asked.

  “Sure is,” he replied, fiddling with buttons. “Eight megapixels, ten times optical zoom, five-area autofocus. It’s a beauty.” He held out the camera so that I could see the monitor, and the picture he had taken.

  My first thought was that I looked very un-Washington-like, very naive, very much the country girl I didn’t want to be. My second thought was that I looked a lot like Grace Metalious had in her famed photograph.

  Oh, there were differences. I was slim, she was heavier-set. My hair was straight and in a high ponytail, while hers was caught at the nape of her neck and had waves. In the photograph, she wore a plaid flannel shirt, jeans rolled to midcalf, and sneakers; I wore shorts and no shoes. But she sat at her typewriter with her feet up as I did, with her elbows on her knees and her mouth propped on her hands. Eyes dark as mine, she was focused on the words she had written.

  Pandora in Blue Jeans, the shot was called. It was Grace’s official author photo, the one that had appeared on the original edition of Peyton Place and been reproduced thousands of times since. That Greg had inadvertently taken a similar shot of me so soon before my return home struck me as eerie.

  I pushed it out of my mind at the time. Weeks later, though, I would remember. By then, Grace would be driving me nuts.

  Her story had no happy ending. As successful as Peyton Place was, Grace saw only a small part of the money it made, and that she spent largely on hangers-on who were only too eager to take. Distraught over reviews that reduced Peyton Place to trash, she set the bar so high for her subsequent work that she was destined to fail. She turned to booze. She married three times—twice to the same man—and had numerous affairs. Feeling unattractive, untalented, and unloved, she drank herself to death at the age of thirty-nine.

  I had no intention of doing that. I had a home; I had friends. I had a successful career, with a new book coming out the next spring and a contract for more. I didn’t need money or adulation, as Grace had. I wasn’t desperate for a father figure, as she was, and I didn’t have a husband to lose his job or children to be taunted by classmates.

  All I wanted was the truth about why my sister was sick and my mother was dead.

  Chapter 1

  I APPROACHED Middle River at midnight—pure cowardice on my part. Had I chosen to, I might have left Washington at seven in the morning and reached town in time to cruise down Oak Street in broad daylight. But then I would have been seen. My little BMW convertible, bought used but adored, would have stood out among the pickups and vans, and my D.C. plates would have clinched it. Middle River had expected me back in June for the funeral, but it wasn’t expecting me now. For that reason, my face alone would have drawn stares.

  But I wasn’t in the mood to be stared at, much less to be the night’s gossip. As confident as my Washington self was, that confidence had gradually slipped as I had driven north. I drank Evian; I nibbled a grilled salmon wrap from Sutton Place and snacked on milk chocolate Toblerone. I rolled my white jeans into capris, raised the collar of my imported knit shirt, caught my hair up in a careless twist held by bamboo sticks—anything to play up sophistication, to no avail. By the time I reached Middle River, I was feeling like the dorky misfit I had been when I left town fifteen years before.

  Focus, I told myself for the umpteenth time since leaving Washington. You’re not dorky anymore. You’ve found your niche. You’re a successful woman, a talented writer. Critics say it; the reading public says it. The opinion of Middle River doesn’t matter. You’re here for one reason, and one reason alone.

  Indeed, I was. All I had to do was to remember that Mom wouldn’t be at the house when I arrived, and my anger was stoked. I wrapped myself in that anger and in the warm night air when, in an act of defiance just south of town, I lowered the convertible top. When Middle River came into view, I was able to see every sleepy inch.

  To the naive eye, especially under a clear moon, the setting was quaint. In Peyton Place, the main street was Elm. In ours, it was Oak. Running through the center of town, it was wide enough t
o allow for sidewalks, trees, and diagonal parking. Shops on either side were softly lit for the night in a way that gave a brief inner glimpse of the purpose of each: a lineup of lawn mowers in Farnum Hardware, shelves of magazines in News ’n Chews, vitamin displays at The Apothecary. Around the corner was the local pub, the Sheep Pen, dark except for the frothy stein that hung high outside.

  On my left as I crossed the intersection of Oak and Pine, a barbershop pole marked the corner where Jimmy Sacco had cut hair for years before passing his scissors to Jimmy the younger. The pole gleamed in my headlights, tossing an aura of light across the benches on either side of the corner. In good weather those benches were filled, every bit as much the site of gossip-mongering as the nail shop over on Willow. At night they were empty.

  Or usually so. Something moved on one of them now, small and low to the seat, and I was instantly taken back. Barnaby? Could it be? He had been just a kitten when I left town. Cats often lived longer than fifteen years.

  Unable to resist, I pulled over to the curb and shifted into park. Leaving my door open, I went up the single step and, with care now, across the boardwalk to the bench. I used to love Barnaby. More to the point, Barnaby used to love me.

  But this wasn’t Barnaby. Up close, I could see that. This cat, sitting up now, was a tabby. It was orange, not gray, and more fuzzy than Barnaby had been. A child of Barnaby’s? Possibly. The old coot had sired a slew of babies over the years. My mother, who knew of my fondness for Barnaby, had kept me apprised.

  Soothed by the faint whiff of hair tonic that clung to the clap-boards behind the bench, I extended a hand to the new guard. The cat sniffed it front and back, then pushed its head against my thumb. Smiling, I scratched its ears until, with a put-put-putter, it began to purr. There is nothing like a cat’s purr. I had missed this.

  I was straightening when I heard a murmur. Cats have claws, it might have said, but when I looked around, there were no shadows, no human forms.

  The cat continued to purr.

  I listened for a minute, but the only sound here on the barbershop porch was that purr. Again, I looked around. Still, nothing.

  Chalking it up to fatigue, I returned to my car and drove on—and again the town’s charm hit me. Across the street was the bank and, set back from the sidewalk, the town hall. The Catholic church was behind me and the Congregational church ahead, white spires gently lit. Each was surrounded by its woodsy flock, a generous congregation of trees casting moon shadows on the land. It was a poet’s dream.

  But I was no poet. Nor was I naive. I knew the ugly little secrets the darkness concealed, and it went far beyond those men who, like Barnaby, sowed their seed about town. I knew that there was a place on the sign between Farnum and Hardware where and Son had been, until that son was arrested for molesting a nine-year-old neighbor and given a lengthy jail term. I knew that a bitter family feud had erupted when old man Harriman died, resulting in the splitting of Harriman’s General Store into a grocery and a bakery, two separate entities, each with its own door, its own space, and its own sign, and a solid brick wall between. I knew that there were scorch marks, scrubbed and faded but visible nonetheless, on the stone front of the newspaper office, where Gunnar Szlewitchenz, the onetime town drunk, had lit a fire in anger at the editor for misspelling his name in a piece. I knew that there was a patched part of the curb in front of the bank, a reminder of Karl Holt’s attempt to use his truck as a lethal weapon against his cheating wife, who had worked inside.

  These things were legend in Middle River, stories that every native knew but was loathe to share with outsiders. Middle River was insular, its face carefully made up to hide warts.

  Holding this thought, I managed to avoid nostalgia until I passed the roses at Road’s End Inn. Then it hit in a visceral way. Though I couldn’t see the blooms in the dark, the smell was as familiar to me as any childhood memory, as evocative of summer in Middle River as the ripe oak, the pungent hemlock, the moist earth.

  Succumbing for an instant, I was a child returning with chocolate pennies from News ’n Chews, shopping alone for the first time, using those rosebushes as a marker pointing me home. I could taste the chocolate, could feel the excitement of being alone, the sense of being grown-up but just a tad afraid, could smell the roses—unbelievably fragrant and sweet—and know I was on the right path.

  Now as then, I made a left on Cedar, but I had no sooner completed the turn when I stepped on the brake. On the road half a block ahead, spotlit in the dark, was a tangle of bare flesh, one body, no, two bodies entwined a second too long in that telltale way. By the time they were up and streaking for the trees amid gales of laughter, I had my head down, eyes closed, cheeks red. When I looked up, they were gone. My blush lingered.

  “Pulling a backabehind,” it was called by the kids in town, and it had been a daredevil antic for years. Middle River’s answer to the mile-high club, pulling a backabehind entailed making love in the center of town at midnight. This couple would get points off for being on Cedar, rather than on Oak, and points off if the coupling failed to end in, uh, release. Whether they would tell the truth about either was doubtful, but the retelling would perpetuate the rite.

  Growing up here, I had thought pulling a backabehind was the epitome of evil. Now, seeing two people clearly enjoying themselves, doing something they would have done elsewhere anyway, I was amused. Grace would have loved this. She would have written it into one of her books. Heck, she would have done it herself, likely with George, the tall, sexy Greek who was her first and third husband and, often, her partner in rebellion.

  Still smiling, I approached the river. The air was suddenly warmer and more humid, barely moving past my flushed face as I drove. The sound of night frogs and crickets rose above the hum of my engine, but the river flowed silently, seeming this night unwilling to compete. And yet I knew it was there. It was always there, in both name and fact. Easily 70 percent of the town’s workforce drew a weekly paycheck from the Northwood Mill account, and the river was the lifeblood of the mill.

  A short block up, I turned right onto Willow. It wasn’t the fanciest street in town;that would be Birch, where the elite lived in their grand brick-and-ivy Colonials. But what Willow lacked in grandeur it made up for in charm. The houses here were Victorian, no two exactly alike. The moon picked out assorted gables, crossbars, and decorative trim; my headlights bounced off picket fences of various heights and styles. The front yards were nowhere near as meticulously manicured as those on Birch, but they were lush. Maples rose high and spread wide; rhododendron, mountain laurel, lilac, and forsythia, though well past bloom, were all richly leafed. And the street’s namesake willows? They stood on the riverbank, as tall and stately as anything weeping could be, their fountainous forms graceful enough for us to forgive them the mess their leaves made of our lawns.

  Quaint downtown, quintessentially New England homes, historic mill—I understood how a visitor could fall in love with Middle River. Its visual appeal was strong. But I wasn’t being taken in. This rose had a thorn; I had been pricked too many times to forget it. I wasn’t here to be charmed, only to find an answer or two.

  Naturally, I was more diplomatic in the voice message I had left earlier for Phoebe. The few questions I had asked since I’d been here last hadn’t been well received. Phoebe was unsettled and Sabina defensive. I didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot now.

  With Mom gone, Phoebe, who was the oldest of us three, lived alone in the house where we grew up. If I still had a home in Middle River, it was here. I didn’t consider staying anywhere else.

  “Hey, Phoebe,” I had said after the beep, “it’s me. Believe it or not, I’m on my way up there. Mom’s death keeps nagging at me. I think I just need to be with you guys a little. Sabina doesn’t know I’m coming. I’ll surprise her tomorrow. But I didn’t want to frighten you by showing up unannounced in the middle of the night. Don’t wait up. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  The house was the fifth on the
left, yellow with white trim that glowed in my headlights as I turned into the driveway. Pulling around Phoebe’s van, I parked way back by the garage, where my car wouldn’t be seen from the street. I checked the sky; not a cloud. Leaving the top down, I climbed out and took my bags from the trunk. Looping straps over shoulders and juggling the rest, I started up the side stairs, then stopped, burdened not so much by the weight of luggage as by memory. No anger came with it now, only grief. Mom wouldn’t be inside. She would never be inside again.

  And yet I pictured her there, just beyond the kitchen door, sitting at the table waiting for me to come home. Her face would be scrubbed clean, her short, wavy blonde hair tucked behind her ears, and her eyes concerned. Oh, and she would be wearing pajamas. I smiled at the memory of that. She claimed it was about warmth, and perhaps it was, though I do remember her wearing nightgowns when I was young. The change came when I was a teenager. She would have been in her forties then and slimmer than at any time in her life. With less fat to pad her, she might have been chilled. So maybe it really was about warmth.

  I suspect something else, though. My grandmother, who had always worn pajamas, died when I was fourteen. The switch came soon after. Mom became her mother then, and not only in bedtime wear. With Connie gone, Mom became the family’s moral watchdog, waiting up until the last of us was home without incident—without incident, that was key, because incident led to disgrace. Public drunkenness, lewd behavior, unwanted pregnancy—these were the things Middle River talked about in the tonic-scented cloud that hovered over the barbershop benches, through the lacquer smell in the nail shop, over hash at Omie’s. Being the butt of gossip was Mom’s greatest fear.

  Grace Metalious had hit the nail on the head with that one. As frightened as the fictitious Constance MacKenzie was of her secret leaking out in Peyton Place, she was more terrified of being talked about when it did.