Peyton Place Page 9

  Selena did not like one single feature of Road's End and said so in no uncertain terms when she and Allison had reached the top of the hill.

  “It's just an old drop-off,” said Selena when Allison pointed out the wooden board with the lettering on its side. “Why shouldn't there be a sign there. People might get killed if there wasn't.”

  Allison was ready to cry. She felt as if she had been unjustly slapped in the face. It was like giving someone a mink coat, or a diamond bracelet, or something just as special as that, and having the person say, “Oh, I have more of those than I can use.”

  “They're just woods,” commented Selena a few minutes later, and flatly refused to walk through them with Allison. “What do I want to walk in any old woods for? There's plenty of woods right around our shack. I get a bellyful of woods every day in the week.”

  “You're mean, Selena,” cried Allison. “You're just plain mean and hateful! This is a special, secret place. No one ever comes here but me, and I brought you up because I thought you were my special friend.”

  “Oh, don't be such a baby,” said Selena crossly. “And what do you mean, no one comes here but you? Boys have been bringing girls up here ever since I can remember, at night, in cars.”

  “You're a liar!” shouted Allison.

  “I am not,” said Selena indignantly. “Ask anybody. They'll tell you.”

  “Well, it's just not true,” said Allison. “What would anyone want to come up here at night for? You can't walk in the woods at night.”

  Selena shrugged. “Forget it, kid,” she said, not unkindly. “Don't be mad at me. Come on, let's go downtown.”

  “That makes the hundredth time you've said that,” said Allison angrily. “All right. We'll go downtown.”

  Constance MacKenzie did not wholly approve of Allison's friendship with the stepdaughter of Lucas Cross. Once or twice she had tried, halfheartedly, to put a stop to it, but after a few days of returning home from work to find Allison in tears, vowing that she was totally friendless now that Selena was being kept from her, Constance had relented. She had never been able to answer Allison's questions about Selena satisfactorily.

  “I never said that I didn't like Selena,” she would tell Allison defensively. “It's just—” and here she would always stop to search for just the right words.

  “Just what, Mother?” Allison would prompt her.

  Constance would have to shrug, unable to put her finger on what it was in Selena that disturbed her.

  “With all the nice children in this town,” she had said once, but was stopped by Allison's look, and her question.

  “Why don't you think Selena is nice?”

  “I didn't say that,” said Constance, and then she had hunched her shoulders helplessly. “Never mind.”

  So the friendship between Allison and Selena had continued, full and satisfying, until this Saturday afternoon when each girl had wanted a different something, and neither had been able to understand the other's need.

  Together, they walked up one side of Elm Street and down the other, looking into the shop windows, but unable to play the game that had always amused them.

  “Let's go to your mother's store,” said Selena.

  But Allison refused, feeling cheated at spending the lovely afternoon away from her favorite place.

  “Go in yourself, if you want to go that bad,” said Allison, knowing that Selena would not go into the Thrifty Corner without her.

  In the end, they walked around all the counters in the five-and ten-cent store, fingering strands of false pearls, gazing longingly at the rows upon rows of cosmetics, and listening to the popular tunes that came from the music counter. They sat at the store's soda fountain and each ate a huge, gummy banana split, and Allison felt her good humor beginning to return.

  “We'll go over to Mother's now, if you want,” she offered.

  “No, never mind. Let's walk to your house.”

  “No, really. I know you want to go to the shop. I don't mind. Truly, I don't.”

  “You don't have to go, just on account of me.”

  “But I want to, Selena. Really.”

  “All right, if you really want to go.”

  They wadded their paper napkins into small, round balls and dropped them into the empty sundae dishes, and things were suddenly all right between them again.

  Constance MacKenzie waved to them from behind the hosiery counter as they came into the shop.

  “There are some new party dresses,” she called. “Over there on the second rack.”

  Selena looked, and as if in a trance, moved toward the shining garments that hung displayed on a movable rack. There seemed to be hundreds of dresses, each one prettier than the last. Selena stared, her fingers aching to touch the lovely fabrics.

  Allison stood in front of the shop window and looked out at the traffic on Elm Street. It was always this way. She had to stand around for what seemed hours while Selena looked at every single article in the Thrifty Corner.

  Constance finished with a customer and walked toward Selena with the intention of holding up one of the new dresses to show to Allison, but she was stopped short by the glazed expression on Selena's face. The child's parted lips and half-closed, dreaming eyes wrung a sharp pity in Constance. She could understand a girl looking that way at the sight of a beautiful dress. The only time that Allison ever wore this expression was when she was reading.

  “Here,” said Constance to Selena loudly and suddenly, surprising herself. “This one is your size. Try it on if you like.”

  She held out a white, stiff-skirted dress, and her eyes began to fill foolishly at the look of gratitude on Selena's face.

  “Do you mean it, Mrs. MacKenzie?” whispered Selena. “Can I really touch it?”

  “Well, I hardly see how you can try it on without touching it,” said Constance shortly, and hoped that she had managed to cover the shaking of her voice.

  A few minutes later, when Selena emerged from the dressing room resplendent in the white dress, even Allison caught her breath.

  “Oh, Selena!” she cried. “You look perfectly beautiful. You look just like a fairy princess!”

  No, she doesn't, thought Constance, knowing suddenly what it was that bothered her about Selena Cross.

  She looks like a woman, thought Constance. At thirteen, she has the look of a beautifully sensual, expensively kept woman.

  Later that evening, Selena walked down the dirt road toward her home. She was still warm with the memory of Constance's pancakes which had dripped with butter and maple syrup, and of the coffee which had been served with real cream. She could still see, in her mind, the beautiful MacKenzie living room, with its big chairs and its wrought-iron magazine rack filled with copies of The American Home and The Ladies’ Home Journal. In disgust, Selena thought of her friend Allison, who mooned over a photograph and whispered, “Isn't he handsome? That's my father.”

  “He's dead—and you're better off, kid,” Selena had wanted to say. But she hadn't, because Mrs. MacKenzie might not like it, and Selena never wanted to do anything in the world to offend Allison's mother.

  I'll get out, thought Selena as she stepped into the clearing in front of the Cross shack. Someday, I'll get out, and when I do, I'll always wear beautiful clothes and talk in a soft voice, just like Mrs. MacKenzie.

  As Selena fell asleep, she was thinking of the way the fire in the MacKenzie fireplace had made shining, shimmering lights in Constance's hair. For Ted Carter, she had not a single thought to spare, although in his bed Ted was picturing Selena's face and the way she smiled at him when she said, “Well, then, walk with us.”

  Darned if I wouldn't, thought Ted, turning over on his side, if Miss Prissy Allison hadn't been with her. Ma's groceries could have waited.

  “Selena,” he whispered her name aloud in his darkened room. “Selena,” he said, tasting the word on his tongue.

  His heart lurched within him in an odd way that caused him to feel a peculiar mixture of fea
r and anticipation, and something else that was almost pain.

  ♦ 10 ♦

  Dr. Matthew Swain was a tall, big-boned man with a head of thick and wavy silver hair. The doctor's hair was his best feature, and he was proud of it in an unobtrusive way. He kept it carefully brushed, and every morning he examined it closely to make sure that it held no yellow streaks.

  “A man's entitled to one vanity,” he excused himself, and Isobel Crosby, who kept house for the doctor, said that it was a good thing that the old man was vain about something. He certainly didn't care what the rest of himself looked like. His suits always needed pressing, and he had a terrible habit of eating in the living room. The doctor's coffee cups, strewn all over the house, were Isobel's cross.

  “It ain't a backbreakin’ job to carry a half-empty cup into the kitchen,” she often complained. “It ain't gonna rupture you to lift one little cup.”

  “If I never do anything worse than leave a coffee cup hanging around, Isobel, you can count yourself lucky,” replied the doctor.

  “It ain't just the cups,” said Isobel. “You let your clothes lay wherever they drop, you sprinkle the house with cigar ashes, and your shoes always look like you just came from a long session in somebody's barn.”

  “Count your blessings, Isobel,” said the doctor. “Would you rather keep house for some lecherous old devil? At least I haven't always got a hand up your skirt. Maybe that's what ails you.”

  “And on top of it all,” said Isobel, who had known the doctor for too many years to be shocked at anything he said, “you've got a dirty tongue and an evil mind.”

  “Oh, go starch some antimacassars,” said the doctor crossly.

  Everyone in Peyton Place liked Doc Swain. He had warm, blue eyes of the type which, to his eternal disgust, were termed “twinkling,” and his kindness was legend in the town. Matthew Swain was one of a rapidly disappearing species, the small-town general practitioner. The word “specialist” was anathema to him.

  “Yes, I'm a specialist,” he had once roared at a famous ear, eye, nose and throat man. “I specialize in sick people. What do you do?”

  At sixty, the doctor still went out on calls day or night, summer and winter, and it was his habit to send birthday cards to every child he had ever delivered.

  “You're nothing but a soggy sentimentalist at heart,” Seth Buswell often teased. “Birthday cards, indeed!”

  “Sentimental, hell,” replied the doctor good-naturedly. “It just gives me a continuous feeling of accomplishment to stop every day and realize all the work I've done.”

  “Work, work, work,” said Seth. “That's your favorite word. I think you hope to give me an inferiority complex by impressing my laziness on me all the time, You'll drop dead of a heart attack one of these days, from your goddamned work, work, work. Just like one of those handsome, silver-haired doctors in the movies.”

  “Crap,” said the doctor. “Heart attacks are so commonplace. Give me a nice troublesome ulcer any day.”

  “On second thought,” said Seth, “you'll die of a bashed in skull administered by one of those nurses you're always tickling over at your hospital.”

  The Peyton Place hospital was small, well equipped and Dr. Swain's pride and joy. He ran it efficiently and admired it with all the tenderness of a young lover, and the fact that it was often used by citizens of the surrounding towns in preference to other, larger hospitals was a source of unending satisfaction to him. The hospital belonged to the town, but everybody in Peyton Place referred to it as “Doc Swain's hospital,” and the girls who used its small but excellent training school for nurses referred to themselves as “The Doc's girls.”

  Matthew Swain was a good and upright man, and a lover of life and humanity. If he had a fault, it was his careless, sometimes vitriolic tongue, but the town forgave him this for Matthew Swain was a good doctor, and if he spoke gruffly at times, he also always spoke the truth. He had a sense of humor which was sometimes loud, oftentimes lewd, but never deliberately unkind, and for this, too, the town forgave him, for The Doc could laugh longest and loudest at himself. Everyone loved Dr. Swain, with the possible exception of Charles Partridge's wife Marion, and her only reason for disliking him was that the doctor refused to be impressed with the picture she had created of herself.

  “It don't pay to puff yourself up in front of The Doc,” said the town. “Surer than hell he'll have a pin to stick into you if you do!”

  But Marion Partridge could not and would not believe this. She tried continually to make Matthew Swain see her as she was sure the rest of the town saw her, and because he would not, she often referred to him as “that impossible man.”

  Marion was a medium-sized woman. Seth Buswell, whenever he looked at her, reflected that everything about Marion Partridge was medium.

  “Rien de trop,” said Seth to himself and felt that these words described Marion perfectly, from her medium-brown hair and average figure to her mediocre mind.

  She had been born Marion Saltmarsh, the daughter of an impecunious Baptist minister and his tired wife. She had one brother, John, who had decided early in life to follow in his father's religious footsteps and at the age of twenty one had been ordained as a minister. It was John's ambition to carry religion to “the savage peoples of the earth” and immediately after his ordination, he left America as a missionary. Marion, meanwhile, finished her schooling, graduating with average grades, and settled down to live in the parsonage with her parents, ready with them to offer succor to the poor and troubled, and happily rolling bandages for a local hospital every Wednesday afternoon.

  In later years, Charles Partridge admitted to himself that he had met Marion by accident and married her in a moment of weakness. After passing his bar examinations, he had been taking a long summer vacation in the seaside town where the Reverend Saltmarsh lived with his family. Charles Partridge was a Congregationalist and had attended a Sunday service at the Reverend Salt-marsh's Baptist church more out of curiosity than from a desire for religious comfort, and there he had seen Marion singing in the choir. The girl had been standing in the front row of the group of singers, her face uplifted and shining with a look of ecstasy. Charles Partridge had caught his breath and believed that the girl looked like an angel. In this he was mistaken. It was neither rapture nor exultation which shone from Marion. She had much of this same look whenever she lay in a tub of hot water, or whenever she ate something she particularly liked. Music affected Marion only sensually, lighting her medium face with a sudden pleasure and making it, for a few moments, extraordinary.

  Charles Partridge, young and impressionable, and perhaps with his resistance lowered by the long years of study now behind him, began to court Marion Saltmarsh. In August, five weeks after he had seen her singing in the choir for the first time, they were married, and on the first of September the young couple returned to Charles's home in Peyton Place where he was to begin his career.

  As he grew older, Partridge sometimes wondered if he would have married in such haste had he been able, during his years as a student, to afford to patronize the houses of ill repute so enthusiastically acclaimed by his classmates. He thought not.

  Success had come easily to Charles Partridge, and as the years passed, he accumulated money and a house on Chestnut Street, and Marion became active in club and charity work. She liked her comfortable life, uncomplicated as it was either by children or lack of money. Guiltily, she often realized that she gloated whenever she compared her circumstances now against what they had been during her childhood, but her guilt was short lived and easily forgotten.

  Marion liked things. She surrounded herself with all sorts of small bric-a-brac and odd pieces of furniture. It gave her a thrill of pleasure to open her linen closet and see the piles of extra sheets and towels stored there. The size, purpose or quality of an object was secondary to Marion, coming after her desire to acquire and possess.

  Immediately after her marriage, Marion deserted the Baptists and joined the Cong
regational church, for the latter was considered to be the “best” church in Peyton Place. Marion would have very much liked to instigate some sort of committee, with herself as president, to pass on memberships for her church. She hated to belong to an organization, even a religious one, which allowed “undesirables” to become members, and she had many dark thoughts about persons whom she considered “inferior.”

  “That MacKenzie woman,” she said to her husband. “Don't tell me a young widow like that is any better than she should be. Don't tell me she doesn't do a lot of running around that no one has heard about. Don't tell me she hasn't got an eye on every man in town.”

  “My dear,” said Charles Partridge wearily, “I'd never attempt to tell you anything.”

  But when Marion said the same things to Matthew Swain the doctor would fix her with a straight look and roar, “What the hell do you mean by that, Marion?”

  ‘Well, after all, Matt, a young widow like that, living alone in a house—”

  “Hey, Charlie! Marion feels bad for Connie MacKenzie living all alone. Why don't you pack up and move over there for a while?”

  “Oh, that Matt Swain is impossible, Charles. Impossible.”

  “Now, Marion,” replied Charles Partridge. “Matt is a fine man. He doesn't mean any harm. And he's a good doctor.”

  Shortly after Marion reached the age of forty, she developed symptoms which worried and frightened her, and she called Dr. Swain. He examined her thoroughly and told her she was as healthy as a horse.

  “Listen, Marion, this is nothing to worry about. I can give you shots to keep you fairly comfortable, but beyond that I'm helpless. This is menopause, and there isn't much anyone can do.”

  “Menopause!” cried Marion. “Matt, you're out of your head. I'm a young woman.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-six.”

  “You're a liar, Marion. You're over forty.”