Peyton Place Read online

  She ran to the edge of the field and sat down, resting her back against a wide-trunked tree, and then looked back on the field of goldenrod. Slowly, a wonderful feeling of being the only living person in the whole world filled her. Everything was hers, and there was no one to spoil it for her, no one to make anything less peaceful and true and beautiful than it was right at this moment. She sat for a long time not moving, letting the feeling of happiness settle into a comforting warmth in the pit of her stomach, and when she stood up and began to walk through the woods again, she touched the trees and bushes in her passing as if caressing the hands of old friends. At last she came back to the pavement and the wooden board that said Road's End. She looked down at the town, the feeling of joy beginning to dissolve within her. She whirled around, away from the town, to face the trees again, trying to recapture the sensation that was so warm, so lovely, but it would not come back. She felt heavy, as if she suddenly weighed two hundred pounds, and as tired as if she had been running for hours. She turned and started down the hill toward Peyton Place. When she was halfway down, she lifted the stick that she had been carrying and hurled it far into the woods at the side of the road.

  Allison walked rapidly now, hardly aware of distance, until she was below the park and into the town. A group of boys came toward her, four or five of them, laughing and shoving good-naturedly at one another, and the last wisps of Allison's happiness melted away. She knew these boys; they went to the same school as she did. They walked toward her, clad in bright sweaters, munching on apples and letting the juice run down their chins, and their voices were loud and rough in the October afternoon. Allison crossed the street in the hope of avoiding them, but she saw that they had noticed her and she was once more tense, aware and frightened of the world around her.

  “Hi, Allison,” called one of the boys.

  When she did not answer but continued to walk, he began to mimic her, holding himself stiffly and putting his nose in the air.

  “Oh, Allison,” called another boy in a high falsetto, dragging out the syllables of her name so that it sounded as if he were saying, “Oh, Aa-hal-lissonnn!”

  She made herself go on, not speaking, her hands clenched in the pockets of her light jacket.

  “Aa-hal-lissonnn! Aa-hal-lissonnn!”

  She looked ahead blindly, knowing by instinct that the next street was hers, and that soon she could turn the corner and be out of sight.

  “Allison, Bumballison, teelialigo Allison. Teelegged, toelegged, bowlegged Allison!”

  “Hey, Fat-stuff!”

  Allison turned into Beech Street and ran all the way up the block to her house.

  ♦ 4 ♦

  Allison MacKenzie's father, for whom the child had been named, died when she was three years old. She had no conscious memory of him. Ever since she could remember, she had lived with Constance, her mother, in the house in Peyton Place which had once belonged to her grandmother. Constance and Allison had little in common with one another; the mother was of too cold and practical a mind to understand the sensitive, dreaming child, and Allison, too young and full of hopes and fancies to sympathize with her mother.

  Constance was a beautiful woman who had always prided herself on being hardheaded. At the age of nineteen, she had seen the limitations of Peyton Place, and over the protests of her widowed mother she had gone to New York with the idea of meeting, going to work for and finally marrying a man of wealth and position. She became secretary to Allison MacKenzie, a handsome, good-natured Scot who owned a highly successful shop where he sold imported fabrics. Within three weeks he and Constance became lovers and during the next year a child was born to them whom Constance immediately named for its father. Allison MacKenzie and Constance Standish were never married, for he already had a wife and two children “up in Scarsdale,” as he always put it. He said these words as if he were saying, “up at the North Pole,” but Constance never forgot that Allison's first family was painfully, frighteningly near.

  “What do you intend to do about us?” she asked him.

  “Keep on as we are, I suppose,” he said. “There doesn't seem to be much of anything else we can do, without causing an unearthly stink.”

  Constance, remembering her small-town upbringing, knew well the discomfort of getting oneself talked about.

  “I suppose not,” she said agreeably.

  But from that moment she began to plan for herself and her unborn child. Through her mother she spread a respectable fiction about herself in Peyton Place. Elizabeth Standish went to New York to attend the small, family wedding of her daughter Constance, as far as the town knew. In reality, she went to New York to be with Constance when her daughter returned from the hospital with the baby who had been named for Allison MacKenzie. A few years later it was a simple thing for Constance to use a little ink eradicator and to substitute a different number for the last digit in her daughter's year of birth as shown on her birth certificate. Slowly, by not answering letters hinting broadly for invitations to visit the MacKenzies, Constance Standish cut herself off from the friends of her girlhood. Soon she was forgotten by Peyton Place, remembered by her old friends only when they met Elizabeth Standish on the streets of the town.

  “How's Connie?” they would ask, “And the baby?”

  “Just fine. Everything is just fine,” poor Mrs. Standish would say, in a terror lest she give a hint that everything was not fine.

  From the day Allison was born, Elizabeth Standish lived with fear. She was afraid that she had not played her part well enough, that sooner or later someone would find out about the birth certificate that had been tampered with, or that some sharp-eyed individual would spot the fact that her granddaughter Allison was a year older than Constance said she was. But most of all, she was afraid for herself. In her worst nightmares she heard the voices of Peyton Place.

  “There goes Elizabeth Standish. Her daughter got into trouble with some feller down to New York.”

  “It's all in the way you bring up a child, what they do when they're grown.”

  “Constance had a little girl.”

  “Poor little bastard.”

  “Bastard.”

  “That whore Constance Standish, and her dirty little bastard.”

  When Elizabeth Standish died, Constance allowed the cottage on Beech Street to stand vacant but in readiness for the day when Allison MacKenzie should tire of her, and she should have to return to Peyton Place. But Allison did not abandon Constance and her child. He was a good man, in his fashion, with a strict sense of responsibility. He provided for his two families until the day of his death, and even beyond that. Constance neither knew nor cared about the circumstances in which Allison's wife found herself. It was enough for Constance that her lover had left a substantial amount of money for her in the hands of a discreet lawyer. With this, and what she had managed to save during Allison MacKenzie's lifetime, she returned to Peyton Place and established herself in the Standish house. She did not weep for her dead lover, for she had not loved him.

  Soon after her return to Peyton Place, she opened a small apparel shop on Elm Street and settled down to the business of making a living for herself and her baby daughter. No one ever questioned the fact that Constance was the widow of a man named Allison MacKenzie. She kept a large, framed photograph of him on the mantelpiece in her living room, and the town sympathized with her.

  “It's a shame,” said Peyton Place. “And him so young.”

  “It's hard for a woman alone, especially trying to raise a child.”

  “She's a hard worker, Connie MacKenzie is. Stays in that shop of hers ’til six o'clock every night.”

  At thirty-three, Constance was still beautiful. Her hair still gleamed, sleek and blond, and her face had not yet begun to show the lines of time.

  “Good-lookin’ woman like that,” said the men of the town, “you'd think she'd look to get married again.”

  “Perhaps she's still grieving for her husband,” said the women. “Some widows g
rieve their whole lives long.”

  The truth of the matter was that Constance enjoyed her life alone. She told herself that she had never been highly sexed to begin with, that her affair with Allison had been a thing born of loneliness. She repeated silently, over and over, that life with her daughter Allison was entirely satisfactory and all she wanted. Men were not necessary, for they were unreliable at best, and nothing but creators of trouble. As for love, she knew well the tragic results of not loving a man. What more terrible consequence might come from allowing herself to love another? No, Constance often told herself, she was better off as she was, doing the best she knew how, and waiting for Allison to grow up. If at times she felt a vague restlessness within herself, she told herself sharply that this was not sex, but perhaps a touch of indigestion.

  The Thrifty Corner Apparel Shoppe prospered. Perhaps because it was the only store of its kind in Peyton Place, or perhaps because Constance had a certain flair for style. Whichever it was, the women of the town bought almost exclusively from her. It was the consensus of town opinion that Connie MacKenzie's things were every bit as nice as those in the stores down to Manchester or over to White River, and since they were no more expensive, it was better to trade with somebody local than to take town money elsewhere.

  At six-fifteen in the evening, Constance walked up Beech Street toward her house. She wore a smart black suit, the product of a rather expensive Boston shop, and a small black hat. She looked like a fashion illustration, a fact which always made her daughter Allison vaguely uncomfortable, but was, as Constance frequently pointed out to her, very good for business. As she walked toward home, Constance was thinking of Allison's father, a thing she seldom did, for the thought was an uncomfortable one. She knew that someday she would have to tell the child the truth about her birth. Many times she had wondered why this was so, but she had never found a reasonable answer to her question.

  It is better that she find it out from me than to hear it from a stranger, she often thought.

  But this was not the answer, for no one had ever discovered the truth, and the chances that someone would in the future were very slight.

  All the same, thought Constance, someday Allison will have to be told.

  She pushed open the front door of her house and went into the living room where her daughter waited.

  “Hello, darling,” said Constance.

  “Hello, Mother.”

  Allison was sitting in an overstuffed chair, her legs swung over the wide arm, reading a book.

  “What are you reading now?” asked Constance, standing in front of a mirror and carefully removing her hat.

  “Just a babyish fairy tale,” said Allison defensively. “I like to read them over once in a while. This one is The Sleeping Beauty.”

  “That's nice, dear,” said Constance vaguely. She could not understand a twelve-year-old girl keeping her nose in a book. Other girls her age would have been continually in the shop, examining and exclaiming over the boxes of pretty dresses and underwear which arrived there almost daily.

  “I suppose that we should think of something to eat,” said Constance.

  “I put two potatoes in the oven half an hour ago,” said Allison, putting her book away.

  Together, the two went into the kitchen to prepare what Constance referred to as “dinner.” She was, Allison realized, the only woman in Peyton Place who did this. Outside, Allison was very careful about saying “supper.” To others, she also spoke of “going to church,” never to “services,” and of a dress being “pretty,” but never “smart.” Little things, such as different terminology, had the power to embarrass Allison to a point where, thinking about them in bed at night, she writhed with shame, her face scarlet in the darkness, and hated her mother for her differentness, for making her different.

  “Please, Mother,” she would say, in tears, whenever her mother's conversation irritated her to the exploding point.

  And Constance, the idioms of her people buried under the patina of New York, would say, “But, darling, it is a smart little dress!” or, “But, Allison, the main meal of the day is always called dinner!”

  At nine o'clock that night Allison, clad in pajamas and robe and ready for bed, set her books down on the mantelpiece in the living room. Her eyes fell on the photograph of her father, and she stood still for a moment, studying the dark face that smiled into hers. Her father's hair, she noticed, had grown into a pronounced peak on his forehead, giving him a rather devilish air, and his eyes had been large and dark and deep.

  “He was handsome, wasn't he?” she asked softly.

  “Who, dear?” asked Constance, looking up from the account book in front of her.

  “My father,” said Allison.

  “Oh,” said Constance. “Yes, dear. Yes, he was.”

  Allison was still looking at the photograph. “He looks just like a prince,” she said.

  “What did you say, dear?”

  “Nothing, Mother. Good night.”

  “Good night, dear.”

  Allison lay in her wide, four-poster bed and stared up at the ceiling where the street light outside made weird shadow figures with the room's darkness.

  Just like a prince, she thought, and felt a sudden tightness in her throat.

  For a moment she wondered what her life might have been like if it had been her mother who had died and her father who had lived. At once, she sank her teeth into the edge of the bed sheet in shame at this disloyal thought.

  “Father. Father.” She said the strange word over and over to herself, but the sound of it in her mind meant nothing.

  She thought of the photograph on the mantelpiece downstairs.

  My prince, she said to herself, and immediately the image in her mind seemed to take on life, to breathe, and to smile kindly at her.

  Allison fell asleep.

  ♦ 5 ♦

  Chestnut Street, which ran parallel to Elm Street, one block to the south of the main thoroughfare, was considered to be the “best” street in Peyton Place. On this street were located the homes of the town's élite.

  At the extreme western end of Chestnut Street stood the imposing red brick house of Leslie Harrington. Harrington, who was the owner of the Cumberland Mills and a very rich man, was also on the board of trustees for the Citizens’ National Bank, and the chairman of the Peyton Place school board. The Harrington house, screened from the street by tall trees and wide lawns, was the largest in town.

  On the opposite side of the street was the home of Dr. Matthew Swain. His was a white house, fronted with tall, slim pillars. Most of the townspeople defined it as “southern looking.” The doctor's wife had been dead for many years, and the town often wondered why The Doc, as he was informally known, insisted on keeping his big house.

  “Too big for a man alone,” said Peyton Place. “I'll bet The Doc rattles around in there like a marble in a tin cup.”

  “The Doc's place ain't as big as Leslie Harrington's.”

  “No, but it's different with Harrington. He's got a boy that's going to get married someday. That's why he keeps that big house since his wife died. It's for the boy.”

  “I guess that's so. Too bad The Doc never had kids. Must be lonely for a man with no kids, after his wife goes.”

  Below Dr. Swain, on the same side of the street, lived Charles Partridge, the town's leading attorney. Old Charlie, as the town called him, had a solid, Victorian house which was painted a dark red and trimmed with white, and where he lived with his wife Marion. The Partridges had no children.

  “Seems funny, don't it?” said the townspeople, some of whom lived, with many children, in cramped quarters, “that the biggest houses on Chestnut Street are the emptiest in town.”

  “Well, you know what they say. The rich get richer, and the poor get children.”

  “Reckon that's right enough.”

  Also on Chestnut Street lived Dexter Humphrey, the president of the Citizens’ National Bank; Leighton Philbrook, who owned a sawmill a
nd vast tracts of hardwood forest; Jared Clarke, the owner of a chain of feed and grain stores throughout the northern section of the state, who was also chairman of the board of selectmen; and Seth Buswell, the owner of the Peyton Place Times.

  “Seth's the only man on Chestnut Street who don't have to work for a living,” said the town. “He can just set and scribble to his heart's content and never worry about the bills.”

  This was true. Seth was the only son of the late George Buswell, a shrewd landowner who had eventually become governor of the state. When he died, George Buswell left a healthy fortune to his son, Seth.

  “Hard as nails, old George Buswell was,” said the townspeople who remembered him.

  “Yep. Hard as nails and crooked as a corkscrew.”

  The residents of Chestnut Street regarded themselves as the backbone of Peyton Place. They were of the old families, people whose ancestors remembered when the town had been nothing but wilderness, with Samuel Peyton's castle the only building for miles around. Between them, the men who lived on Chestnut Street provided jobs for Peyton Place. They took care of its aches and pains, straightened out its legal affairs, formed its thinking and spent its money. Between themselves, these men knew more about the town and its people than anyone else.

  “More power on Chestnut Street than in the big Connecticut River,” said Peter Drake, who practiced law in town under a double handicap. He was young, and he had not been born in Peyton Place.