Peyton Place Page 15

  “Watch out!” he called to the crowd. “They're all covered with slime!”

  The crowd roared and Selena hissed silently between her teeth.

  “I hope you die. I wish you'd fall down dead, you rotten sonofabitch.”

  Joey hid his face and wept.

  Charles Partridge waited until Lucas ran directly in front of him and then grabbed the frightened man in a grotesque bear hug.

  “Come on, Lucas,” said Dr. Swain gently. “Come with me. You'll be all right.”

  At last they managed to put Lucas into the ambulance and slam the door behind him, but even from inside the long car Lucas’ voice was audible to the crowd outside.

  “Watch out! Watch out!”

  The ambulance moved away and Selena shook Joey. “Come on, honey. Let's go tell Ma that we finally saw him.”

  The two started away from the crowd, and many faces turned to watch them as they walked.

  “There go the Cross kids.”

  “It's a shame, a man with a family.”

  “Don't know how his wife stands it.”

  “It's the children I feel sorry for.”

  “Well, that's the shackowners for you.”

  Shut up, Selena wanted to scream. Shut up. I don't need your stinking pity. Just shut up.

  She held her head up, as if she were walking alone, and looked neither left nor right. She made her way toward Elm Street, leading her little brother Joey by the hand.

  “I'll walk with you,” said a voice behind her.

  Selena whirled. “I don't need you, Ted Carter,” she said viciously, taking out her hurt and anger at the crowd on him. “Beat it back to the right side of the tracks. Your people worked hard enough to get there. Don't leave now to come down by the shacks.”

  Ted took her arm and it was stiff and unyielding beneath his fingers.

  Selena jerked away from him. “I don't need you,” she said. “I don't need anybody. Keep your lousy pity for someone who wants it. Take it and shove it.”

  An innate wisdom kept Ted silent now, and moved him to Joey's side. He took the little boy's hand in his, and he and Selena were on opposite sides of the child, each holding one of his hands. Joey felt almost warmed and comforted.

  “Come on, Selena,” said Joey. “Let's go home.”

  The three figures moved down the deserted main street of Peyton Place, and their feet struck sharply on the snowless sidewalks. They walked without speaking to the end of the paved street and onto the dirt road, and when they came to the clearing in front of the Cross shack, Joey broke away from them.

  “I'm goin’ in to tell Ma,” he said, and dashed into the house.

  Selena and Ted stood together, still not speaking, motionless in the middle of the road. Then Ted put both his arms around Selena and drew her close to him. He did not kiss her or touch her in any way except to hold her, and at last Selena began to cry. She wept silently, without moving her body, her burning, wet face the only sign that she wept.

  “I love you, Selena,” Ted whispered in her ear.

  She wept until her whole body ached and she leaned, a dead weight, against Ted, so that if he had moved she would have crumpled and fallen. He took her hand and led her to the side of the road, and she followed him like an idiot or a sleepwalker, uncaring and somnolent. Ted made her sit down on the cold ground and then sat next to her, holding her, pressing her face into the front of his coat, and he stroked her hair with his cold fingers.

  “I love you, Selena.”

  He opened his heavy overcoat and sat closer to her, so that part of his coat covered her, and his hands went under the ragged thinness of the jacket she wore, trying to warm her.

  “I love you, Selena.”

  “Yes,” she muttered, and it was neither a question nor an exclamation of wonder. It was an agreement.

  “I want you to be my girl.”

  “Yes.”

  “For always.”

  “Yes.”

  “We'll get married, after we finish high school. It's only four years and a little bit more.”

  “Yes.”

  “I'm going to be a lawyer, just like old Charlie.”

  “Yes.”

  “But we'll get married before I have to go away to college.”

  “Yes.”

  They sat quietly for a long time. The one small light in the Cross shack went out, and the darkness from the woods reached out to cover them. Selena was limp against Ted, like a rag doll. When he kissed her, her mouth was soft, but neither resistant nor yielding, and her body neither flinched from his touch nor leaned toward it. She was just there, and tractable.

  “I love you, Selena.”

  “Yes.”

  It was snowing. The cold had snapped soundlessly under the strength of the thick, quiet flakes that fell and soon covered the ground.

  ♦ 21 ♦

  Allison lay still and listened to the sounds of winter. The snow against her small-paned bedroom window made a tiny sound, like sugar sprinkled over the surface of hot coffee, and it piled itself up quietly, beautifully, so that it was hard to look at it and think of danger. The memory of giant tree limbs broken off by the sly snow's weight, or the tale of the hunter, taken in by the false warmth of a white blanket, who froze to death, or the story of someone's small dog, lost in a silvery wonderland, who fell at last into a drift over his depth and was suffocated were like pain, easily forgotten. Allison listened to the soft sift of snow against her window and remembered only loveliness. She tried not to hear the wind which frightened her with its persistence and power. The winter winds did not blow over northern New England in blasts and gusts. They were like living things, breathing unceasingly and mightily, with breaths as cold as death. Allison hid her head under the bedcovers and was afraid that spring would never come again.

  In this second week of February winter still had a long time to stay. But Allison had the feeling that when spring came her life would miraculously straighten itself out. She was assailed by a feeling of vague unrest, yet she could not put her finger on the source of her uneasiness.

  “Nothing is the way it used to be any more,” she would say angrily.

  She saw less and less of Selena Cross these days, for Selena was either with Ted Carter, or busy looking for an odd job to do.

  “I'm saving my money,” said Selena one Saturday afternoon when Allison suggested a movie. “I'm saving up to buy that white dress in your mother's store to wear when we graduate. Ted's already asked me to the spring dance. Are you going?”

  “Of course not,” said Allison promptly, preferring to give the impression that she did not choose to go rather than have Selena guess that she had not been invited.

  “Ted and I are going steady,” said Selena.

  “Ted, Ted, Ted!” said Allison crossly. “Is that all you can talk about?”

  “Yes,” said Selena simply.

  “Well, I think it's disgusting, that's what I think,” said Allison.

  But she began to pay a little more attention to her clothes, and Constance no longer had to nag her into washing her hair. She made a secretive trip to the five- and ten-cent store where she bought a brassière with full rubber pads in each cup, and when Constance remarked on the fact that her daughter was filling out nicely and quickly, Allison gave her a withering look.

  “After all, Mother,” she said, “I'm not getting any younger, you know.”

  “Yes, dear, I know,” said Constance, hiding a smile.

  Allison shrugged angrily. It seemed to her that her mother grew more stupid every day, and that she had a positive genius for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

  “How come we never see Selena Cross around here any more?” asked Constance, toward the end of February.

  Allison very nearly shouted that Selena hadn't been inside the MacKenzie house for weeks and weeks, and if it had taken Constance all this time to realize that fact, then she must be blind as well as stupid.

  “I guess I've just sort of outgrown Selena
,” she told her mother.

  But it had been bad, at first, losing Selena. Allison had thought that she would die of loneliness, and she spent many a long Saturday afternoon weeping in her room, rather than go poking about in the shops by herself. Then she had become friendly with Kathy Ellsworth, a new girl in town, and she no longer missed Selena. Kathy loved to read and walk and she painted pictures. It was this last which had prompted Allison to tell Kathy about the stories she had tried to write.

  “I'm sure you'll understand, Kathy,” said Allison. “I mean, one artist to another.”

  Kathy Ellsworth was small and quiet. Allison often had the feeling that if anyone were to strike Kathy, that Kathy's bones would crumble and disintegrate, and she was often so still that Allison could forget that she was there at all.

  “Do you like boys?” Allison asked her new friend.

  “Yes,” said Kathy, and Allison was shocked.

  “I mean, do you really like them?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Kathy. “When I grow up, I'm going to get married, and buy a house, and have a dozen children.”

  “Well, I'm not!” said Allison. “I am going to be a brilliant authoress. Absolutely brilliant. And I shall never marry. I just hate boys!”

  Boys were another question that disturbed Allison that winter. Oftentimes, she lay awake in her bed at night and had the most peculiar sensations. She wanted to rub her hands over her body, but when she did, she always remembered her thirteenth birthday and the way Rodney Harrington had kissed her. Then she would either go hot and prickly all over, or else she would feel cold enough to shiver. She tried to imagine other boys kissing her, but the face that swam beneath her closed lids was always that of Rodney, and she almost wished that she could feel his lips again. She pressed her hands flat against her abdomen, then let them slide up to her small breasts. She rubbed her finger tips over her nipples until they were hard, and this caused an odd tightening somewhere between her legs that puzzled her but was, somehow, very pleasant. One night she began to wonder how it would feel if it were Rodney's hands on her breasts, and her face burned.

  “I just hate boys,” she told her friend Kathy, but she began to practice sultry looks in her mirror, and all day long, at school, she was aware of Rodney in the seat next to hers.

  “Did a boy ever kiss you?” she asked Kathy.

  “Oh, yes,” replied Kathy calmly. “Several of them. I liked it.”

  “You didn't!” cried Allison.

  “Yes, I did,” said Kathy, who, Allison had discovered, would not lie, or even be tactful if it occasioned a slight coloring of the truth. “Yes,” repeated Kathy, “I liked it very much. A boy even screwed me once.”

  “Oh, my goodness!” said Allison. “How did he do that?”

  “Oh, you know. Put his tongue in my mouth when he kissed me.”

  “Oh,” said Allison.

  Kathy and Allison changed their reading habits radically that winter. They began to haunt the library in search of books reputed to be “sexy,” and they read them aloud to one another.

  “I wish I had breasts like marble,” said Kathy sadly, closing a book. “Mine have blue veins in them that show through the skin. I think I'll draw a picture of a girl with marble breasts.”

  “Kathy is just wonderful,” said Allison to Constance. “She's so talented, and imaginative and everything.”

  Dear God, thought Constance, first the daughter of a shackowner and now the daughter of an itinerant mill hand. Allison's taste is all in her mouth!

  Constance had not much time to spend with her daughter these days. She had bought the vacant store next door to the Thrifty Corner and was now busily engaged in enlarging her shop. She put in a line of men's socks and shirts and another of infants’ wear, and by the first of March she had hired Selena Cross to work for her part time, after school. She also hired Nellie Cross to come in three days a week to clean house for her, and it was at this time that Allison noticed Nellie's newly developed habit of talking to herself under her breath.

  “Sonsofbitches, all of ’em,” she would mumble, attacking the woodwork viciously. “Every last one of ’em.”

  And Allison would remember the day she had stood on a packing crate and looked into the Cross kitchen.

  “Booze and wimmin. Wimmin and booze,” muttered Nellie, and Allison shivered, remembering Selena's scream ripping at the cold November afternoon. She had never been able to bring herself to tell that story to anyone, and she had never mentioned to Selena that she had seen, but soon afterward she saw a book with a paper jacket showing a slave girl with her wrists bound over her head, naked from the waist up, while a brutal-looking man beat her with a cruel-looking whip. That, she concluded, was what had been in Lucas Cross's mind on the afternoon that she had stared through his kitchen window. Lucas must have beaten Nellie until the woman's mind was gone.

  “Sonsofbitches,” said Nellie. “Oh, hello, Allison. Come in here and sit down, and I'll tell you a story.”

  “No,” said Allison quickly. “No, thank you.”

  “O.K.,” said Nellie cheerfully. “You tell me one.”

  It was a cold snowy afternoon and Nellie was ironing in the MacKenzie kitchen. Allison sat down on the rocking chair beside the stove.

  “Once upon a time,” said Allison, “in a land far across the sea, there lived a beautiful princess–”

  Nellie Cross ironed on, her small eyes shining and her slack mouth half open. After that, whenever Allison was in the house, Nellie would smile and say, “Tell me a story,” and each one had to be different, for Nellie would interrupt at once. “Nah. Don't tell that one. You told me that one already.”

  “Nellie Cross may look like a pig herself,” said Constance, “but she certainly keeps this house shining.”

  One morning in March, Nellie came to the MacKenzies’ before Constance had left for work.

  “Guess you ain't heard about Mr. Firth, have you?” she asked.

  Nellie had a disconcerting habit of cackling, and she cackled now.

  “Dropped dead, he did,” she told Constance and Allison. “Shovelin’ snow in his driveway, and fell down dead. I always knew he'd get his someday. Sonofabitch, he was. Just like all of ’em. Sonsofbitches.”

  “For Heaven's sake, Nellie!” remonstrated Constance. “Watch your tongue.”

  Mr. Abner Firth was the principal of the Peyton Place schools, and he had dropped dead of a heart attack, that morning.

  “Isn't that a shame,” said Constance absent-mindedly.

  “Are you sure, Mrs. Cross?” asked Allison.

  “You bet I'm sure. One sonofabitch less in this sad world.”

  At school, Miss Elsie Thornton was white faced but dry eyed. She asked that every boy and girl bring a dime to school the next day for flowers for Mr. Firth.

  “We'll have a bitch of a time replacing old Firth at this time of the year,” said Leslie Harrington, who was the chairman of the school board. “Christ, why couldn't he have waited until spring to have his goddamned heart attack.”

  Roberta Carter, Ted's mother, who was also on the school board said, “There is no need to be profane, Leslie.”

  “Come off it, Bobbie,” said Harrington.

  Theodore Janowski, a mill hand and the third member of the board, nodded his head impartially to both Leslie and Mrs. Carter. Janowski was supposed to fill out the Peyton Place School Board and make it truly representative of the town's population, but in his two years of service he had never once voted on an issue. Leslie Harrington decided policy, he and Mrs. Carter argued for a while, and then the two of them declared what was to be done. Occasionally they would turn to Janowski and ask, “Don't you agree, Mr. Janowski?”

  “Yes,” was always Janowski's answer.

  “We'll get in touch with one of those teachers’ agencies down to Boston,” decided Harrington. “They should be able to come up with someone. Now, I suppose, we'd better all dig down and send old Abner a wreath, goddamn his soul.”

  It wa
s nearly April, with no sign of a break in the cold weather, before the Boston Teachers’ Agency came up with the name of a man qualified to be principal of the Peyton Place schools. His name was Tomas Makris and he was a native of the city of New York.

  “Makris!” roared Leslie Harrington. “What the hell kind of name is that!”

  “Grecian, I think,” said Mrs. Carter.

  “I dunno, Mr. Harrington,” said Janowski.

  “His qualifications are excellent,” said Mrs. Carter. “Although I imagine that he is a little unstable. Look at what he gives as a reason for leaving his last job. ‘To go to work in Pittsburgh steel mill for more money.’ Really, Leslie, I don't think we want anyone like that up here.”

  “A goddamned Greek, for Christ's sake, and a lousy millworker at that. This Boston agency must be run by screwballs.”

  Theodore Janowski said nothing, but for the first time he felt a powerful urge to slam his fist into Leslie Harrington's mouth.

  “What about Elsie Thornton,” suggested Mrs. Carter. “Goodness knows she's been teaching long enough to know our schools inside out.”

  “She's too old,” said Harrington. “She's practically ready to retire. Besides, being principal is no job for a woman.”

  “Well, then,” said Mrs. Carter acidly, “it looks like either this Makris person or no one.”

  “Take your time, for Christ's sake,” said Harrington.

  The school board procrastinated until the middle of April. Then they received a curt note from the State Department of Education informing them that a school could not be run without an administrator, and that therefore the Peyton Place School Board would please remedy the situation in their town at once. The fact that Abner Firth had also taught three classes of English, a required subject on all levels, and that these classes had not been held since his death made it imperative, in the eyes of the state department, that a replacement be hired immediately. That same evening, Leslie Harrington attempted to telephone Tomas Makris, long-distance collect, at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

  “Will you accept a collect call from Mr. Leslie Harrington?” asked the operator.