Peyton Place Read online

  Caroline dropped the curtain as Norman moved out of sight.

  “You'd think that Evelyn would have had the decency to move out of town after Father left her,” she said.

  “Humph,” said Charlotte. “Show me the whore who knows what decency means.”

  Little Norman Page did not slow his steps or sigh with relief when he had passed the house of his two half sisters. He still had to go by the house of Miss Hester Goodale before he could reach the sanctuary of his own home, and he dreaded Miss Hester every bit as much as he feared the Page girls. Whenever he encountered his half sisters on the street, they merely fixed him with dead looks, as if he were not there at all, but Miss Hester's coal-black eyes seemed to bore right through him, looking right down into his soul and seeing all the sins hidden there. Norman hurried now because it was Friday afternoon and almost four o'clock, and at exactly four on Fridays Miss Hester came out of her house and walked toward town. Although Norman was on the opposite side of the street from the one on which Miss Hester would walk, he was nonetheless afraid, for Miss Hester's eyes, he knew, could see for miles, around corners and everything. She could look right into him as clearly from across the street as she could have if he stood directly in front of her. Norman would have run except that if he arrived home flushed and panting his mother would think he was sick again and put him to bed. She might even give him an enema, and while Norman always got a bittersweet sort of pleasure from that, he had to stay in bed afterward. Today he decided that getting the enema was not worth the hours alone that were sure to follow, so he forced himself to walk. Suddenly he saw a figure ahead of him, and recognizing it as Allison MacKenzie he began to shout.

  “Allison! Hey, Allison. Wait for me!”

  Allison turned and waited.

  “Hi, Norman,” she said when he reached her side. “Are you on your way home?”

  “Yes,” said Norman. “But what are you doing over here? This isn't the way to your house.”

  “I was just taking a walk,” said Allison.

  “Well, let me walk with you,” said Norman. “I hate to walk alone.”

  “Why?” asked Allison. “There's nothing to be afraid of.” She looked hard at the boy beside her. “You're always afraid of something, Norman,” she said jeeringly.

  Norman was a slight child, built on delicate lines. He had a finely chiseled mouth which trembled easily, and enormous brown eyes which were filled with tears more often than not. Norman's eyes were fringed with long, dark lashes. Just like a girl's, thought Allison. She could see the lines of blue veins plainly beneath the thin skin on his temples. Norman was very good looking, thought Allison, but not in the way that people thought of as handsome.

  He was pretty the way a girl is pretty, and his voice, too, was like a girl's, soft and high. The boys at school called Norman “sissy,” a name with which the boy found no quarrel. He was timid and admitted it, easily frightened and knew it, and he wept at nothing and never tried to stop himself.

  ‘I'll bet he still pees the bed,” Rodney Harrington had been heard to say. “That is, if he's got a dink to pee with.”

  “There is too something to be afraid of,” said Norman to Allison. “There's Miss Hester Goodale to be afraid of, that's what.”

  Allison laughed. “Miss Hester won't hurt you.”

  “She might,” quivered Norman. “She's loony, you know. I've heard plenty of folks say so. You never can tell what a loony person will do.”

  The two of them were now standing directly opposite the Goodale house.

  “It is sort of sinister looking,” said Allison musingly, letting her imagination take hold.

  Norman, who had never been afraid of the Goodale house before, now felt his fear spark on the edge of Allison's words. He was no longer looking at a rather small and run down Cape Cod, but at a closed-looking house whose windows stared back at him like half-lidded eyes. Norman began to tremble.

  “Yes,” repeated Allison, “it has a definite sinister look.”

  “Let's run,” suggested Norman, forgetting his mother, the enema, everything, for Miss Hester's house looked suddenly to him as if it were about to sprout arms, ready to engulf children and sweep them through the front door of the brown shingled cottage.

  Allison pretended not to hear him. “What does she do in there all day, all by herself?”

  “How do I know?” asked Norman. “Cleans house and cooks and takes care of her cat, I suppose. Let's run, Allison.”

  “Not if she's loony,” said Allison. “She wouldn't be doing plain, everyday things like that if she's loony. Maybe she stands over her stove cutting up snakes and frogs into a big black kettle.”

  “What for?” asked Norman in a shaking voice.

  “To make witch's brew, silly,” said Allison crossly. “Witch's brew,” she repeated in a weird tone, “to put curses and enchantments on people.”

  “That's foolish,” said Norman, striving to control his voice.

  “How do you know?” demanded Allison. “Did you ever ask anybody?”

  “Of course not. What a question to ask!”

  “Don't you visit Mr. and Mrs. Card next door to Miss Hester's a lot? I thought you said Mrs. Card was going to give you a kitten when her cat has some.”

  “I do and she is,” said Norman. “But I'd certainly never ask Mrs. Card what Miss Hester does. Mrs. Card's not nosy like some people I know. Besides, how would she be able to see anything? That big hedge between the two houses would keep everybody from seeing into Miss Hester's house.”

  “Maybe she hears things,” said Allison in a whisper. “Witches chant something when they stir up a brew. Let's go visit Mrs. Card and ask her if she ever hears anything spooky coming from Miss Hester's.”

  “Here she comes!” exclaimed Norman and tried to hide himself behind Allison.

  Miss Hester Goodale came out of her front door, turned carefully to make sure that it was locked behind her, and walked out her front gate. She wore a black coat and hat of a style fashionable fifty years earlier, and she led a huge tomcat along on a rope leash. The cat walked sedately, neither twisting nor turning in any effort to escape the length of clothesline which was tied on one end to a collar around his neck, and wound several times around Miss Hester's hand at the other end.

  “What's the matter with you, Norman?” asked Allison impatiently as soon as Miss Hester was out of sight. “She's just a harmless old woman.”

  “She's not either. She's loony. I even heard Jared Clarke say so. He told my mother.”

  “Phooey,” said Allison disdainfully. “If I lived on this street like you, I'd sneak around and find out what Miss Hester does when she's alone. That's the real way to find out if people are loony, or witches, or something like that.”

  “I'd be scared,” admitted Norman without hesitation. “I'd be scareder to do that than I would be to go up to Samuel Peyton's castle.”

  “Well, I wouldn't. There's nothing spooky about Miss Hester Goodale. The castle's full of spooks, though. It's haunted.”

  “At least there's nobody loony living in the castle.”

  “Not any more,” said Allison.

  They had arrived at Norman's house and were standing on the sidewalk in front of it when Evelyn Page came to the front door.

  “For Heaven's sake, Norman,” called Mrs. Page. “Don't stand out there in the cold. Do you want to get sick? Come in the house this minute! Oh, hello Allison, dear. Would you like to come in and have a hot chocolate with Norman?”

  “No, thank you, Mrs. Page. I have to get home.”

  Allison walked toward the front door of the house with Norman.

  “Mrs. Page, is Miss Hester Goodale really crazy?” she asked.

  Evelyn Page folded her lips together. “There's some who say so,” she said. “Come in the house, Norman.”

  Allison walked down Depot Street the same way she and Norman had come. Now that she was alone, she walked on the same side of the street as the Goodale house, and she stopped directl
y in front of the gate to look at the small place.

  Yes, she thought, it does have a definite sinister look. If Mr. Edgar Allan Poe were alive, I'll bet he could make up a swell story about Miss Hester and her house.

  She began to walk again, but she had not moved more than a few steps when a brilliant daring thought stopped her in the middle of the sidewalk.

  I could, she thought exultantly. I could write a story about Miss Hester and her house!

  The idea sent cold shivers of excitement crawling up and down her back, and in the next second she felt hot all over.

  I could. I'll bet I could write a story every bit as good as Mr. Edgar Allan Poe ever did. I could make up a real spooky story just like “The Fall of the House of Usher.” I could have Miss Hester be a witch!

  Allison ran all the way home and by the time she reached there the first lines of her story were already framed in her mind.

  “There is this house on Depot Street in Peyton Place,” she would write. “It is a brown shingled Cape Cod house, and it looks out of place on that street because it sits right next to a lovely little white and green Cape Cod owned by some people named Mr. and Mrs. Card. Mr. Card is big and handsome and does not come from around here, but from Boston or somewhere like that. Now he owns the print shop downtown. Miss Hester lives all alone in her brown house with her cat, Tom, and she is as loony as they come.”

  Allison wrote these words that same night. She locked herself in her bedroom and set them down in a notebook on white, blue-lined paper, and when they were written she sat and gazed at them for a long time. She could not think of anything else to say. A new respect for Mr. Edgar Allan Poe and for everyone else who had ever written began to take form within her.

  Maybe being a writer isn't so easy after all, she thought. Perhaps I shall have to work very hard at it.

  She picked up her pencil and made big, impatient x's through the words she had written, then she turned to a fresh page in her notebook. The blank white sheet stared back at her, and Allison began to chew at her left thumbnail.

  I can't write about Miss Hester because I don't know her, thought Allison. I'll have to make up a story about somebody I know about.

  She did not know it then, but she had just taken the first step in her career.

  ♦ 16 ♦

  Jared Clarke could have told Allison all about Miss Hester Goodale for he had cause to remember her well. Miss Hester had been living in Peyton Place when Jared was born, but it was not until he was grown, prosperous and on the board of selectmen that he had encountered her face to face. Miss Hester represented Jared's first big failure, and he resented her bitterly. When the subject of Miss Hester arose, Jared always told the story of his one visit to her home, and he told it, of course, to his own advantage, but he never could rid himself of the feeling that when people laughed they laughed at him, not with him.

  He had gone to Miss Hester's house with Ben Davis and George Caswell, his fellow selectmen, to speak to her about town sewerage. He had knocked at her front door and then stepped back to wait nervously, twisting his doffed hat in his hand until she came to the door.

  “We came to talk about the pipes,” said Jared to Miss Hester after the preliminary greetings had been exchanged.

  “Come in, gentlemen,” she said.

  It had really given Jared quite a turn, he said later, to walk into Miss Hester's front parlor. The place was as neat as a pin with its horsehair furniture and unfaded rug. There was an air of waiting about the room, as if a welcome guest were expected at any moment, and Jared found himself remembering that once Miss Hester had had a lover.

  Of course, he had been only a little shaver back then, but he could remember folks talking about it. Miss Hester's young man used to drive up to the Goodales’ front door in a shiny victoria on Sunday afternoons.

  “A nice young man,” Jared's mother had said. “It's time Hester thought about getting married. She's not getting any younger.”

  “Young or not,” said Jared's father, “She's still a damned fine-looking woman.”

  “She's the kind that thins out to gauntness after a while,” said Jared's mother, ignoring her husband. “She'll have to watch herself before too many more years.”

  The whole town had waited for Hester Goodale to many. When her young man had been calling on her for over six months Jared's father said he could not understand what was holding him up.

  “He's comfortable,” said Jared's father, using the town idiom which described anyone who had a steady job and was free of debt. “And Hester is out of mourning. It's been a year and a half since her mother died.”

  “Oh, she's probably waiting to make sure,” said Jared's mother. “After all, he may be a nice young man, but he doesn't come from around here, and one can never be too careful where marriage is concerned. I'll bet she marries him before June.”

  But one Sunday afternoon it was Mr. Goodale, Hester's father, who answered the young man's knock at the door. They exchanged only a few words and no one had ever found out what was said, and then Mr. Goodale had closed the door in the young man's face. Hester's friend climbed into his victoria and drove away. The next day he quit his job in Jared's father's feed and grain store and left Peyton Place. No one ever saw him again.

  A few months later, Mr. Goodale died and Miss Hester was left alone in the cottage on Depot Street. After that the town never saw much of her. She kept to herself, living carefully on the small amount of money her father had left. Eventually she got herself a cat, and in a few years she was well on her way to becoming a town legend.

  “Miss Hester has a broken heart,” said the town. “She is only waiting to die.”

  The prediction that Jared's mother had made came true. Miss Hester's slenderness thinned to gauntness. Her skin seemed hardly to cover her angular bones, and her eyes gleamed like coal set into a sheet of white paper. Her hands were no longer slim fingered, but clawlike, and even her hair thinned to a sparseness that barely covered her bony skull.

  Jared Clarke had looked around Miss Hester's front parlor and then he looked at Miss Hester, and he wondered if it could be possible that there had been a time when a man had loved this woman. He shifted his feet awkwardly and cleared his throat. Miss Hester did not ask her callers to sit down.

  “Well, Jared?” she asked.

  “It's about the pipes, Miss Hester,” said Jared. “You must know that it has been quite a fight to get everyone to agree on town sewerage. But that's all over now. We voted in the pipes at the last town meeting.”

  “What has all this to do with me?” asked Miss Hester.

  “Well, we are going to run the mains under the streets,” said Jared, “and the town's going to pay for that while everybody has agreed to pay for the sections of pipe used in front of his own house.”

  “Did you not,” said Miss Hester, “just finish saying that the town was going to pay?”

  Jared smiled patiently. “The town is going to pay for laying the pipe. Labor costs.”

  “Am I to understand, Jared,” asked Miss Hester, “that you are asking me to pay for pipes to be laid under a public street?”

  Jared searched his mind for a tactful answer. He had begun to sweat and was actively hating this woman for making his job more difficult than it was.

  “It would benefit you as well as the rest of the town, Miss Hester,” he said. “From the street lines, you would be able to run pipes into your house.”

  “What do I want with pipes in this house?” demanded Miss Hester.

  Jared Clarke's face flushed with the effort of attempting to find a gentlemanly way to tell Miss Hester that it simply would not do for her to have the only outside privy on Depot Street.

  “But Miss Hester—” he began and stopped, unable to go on.

  “Yes, Jared?” Miss Hester's voice asked the question, but her tone gave him no encouragement.

  “Well, it's this way—” began Jared again. “I mean to say—Well, it's like this-”

  Geor
ge Caswell, who was not hindered by feelings of delicacy, finished Jared's sentence for him.

  “It's like this, Hester,” said Caswell. “We don't want no more outhouses in town. They're all right for the folks in the shacks, but outhouses just don't look right in the middle of town.”

  There was an embarrassing moment when no one spoke, and then Miss Hester said, “Good day, gentlemen,” and led the way to her front door.

  “But Miss Hester,” said Jared, and got no further.

  “Good afternoon, Jared,” said Miss Hester and closed the door firmly.

  “Great closers of doors in folk's faces, the Goodales,” said Ben Davis, and he and George Caswell began to laugh.

  But Jared Clarke did not laugh. He was furious. Later, he had been forced to stand up at a meeting of the newly formed Sanitation Committee and admit that he had failed to convince Miss Hester of the advisability of helping to pay for the town's new sewerage system.

  “Well, she don't rightly have to anyway,” said one of the committee members. “We ain't got no zonin’ laws that say anybody's got to do anythin’.”

  “Maybe she don't have the money,” volunteered another member.

  “She's got the money all right,” said Dexter Humphrey, who was president of the bank.

  “She's loony,” cried Jared angrily. “That's all there is to it. Loony as hell!”

  “Reckon property values will go down on Depot Street now,” said Humphrey sadly. “What with Miss Hester's outhouse sittin’ right there in her back yard as plain as the nose on your face. Too bad you couldn't talk her into doin’ different, Jared.”

  “I did all I could,” shouted Jared. “She's just plain crazy. Crazy as a loon.”

  “The house next door to Hester's is for sale,” said Humphrey. “Nobody'll ever buy it now.”

  “Too bad,” said one of the committee members. “You should have talked louder, Jared.”

  “Oh, for Christ's sake,” said Jared bitterly.

  The new sewerage pipes were laid on Depot Street, the town absorbing the cost of those passing in front of the Goodale house, and eventually someone did buy the house next door to Miss Hester.