Peyton Place (12 page)

“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.”

Marion went home and raged at her husband. She told him that friend or no friend, lifelong or not, Matthew Swain had stepped through her front door for the last time. Thereafter, she went to a doctor in White River who treated her for a delicate stomach condition.

“What the hell, Matt,” said Seth Buswell, whenever he saw Marion cut the doctor dead on the street, “you didn't want to be beloved by everyone did you?”

“I wouldn't mind,” said the doctor. “Would anyone? Would you?”

“No,” replied Seth.

Indian summer lingered on in Peyton Place for exactly six days and then she was gone as suddenly as she had come. The bright leaves on the trees, beaten loose by cold wind and rain, fell to the ground like tears wept for a remembered past. They lost their colors quickly on the sidewalks and roads. They lay wet and brown and dead, a depressing reminder that winter had come to stay.

Less and less frequently now, Allison walked up to Road's End. Whenever she did she wrapped her raincoat tightly about her and stood, shivering, unable now to see the town clearly from the end of the road. Everything was blurred by a thin, gray mist and the hills, no longer a hot, beautiful purple, loomed black against the horizon. The trees in her woods no longer lifted their arms to shout, “Hello, Allison. Hello!” They hung their tired heads and sighed, “Go home, Allison. Go home.”

It was a sad time, thought Allison, a time of death and decay with everything waiting sorrowfully and subdued for the snows that would come to cover the exposed bones of a dead summer.

But it was not the season which weighed heaviest on Allison. She did not know what it was. She seemed to be filled with a restlessness, a vague unrest, which nothing was able to ease. She began to spend the hours after school in sitting before the fire in the living room, an open book in her hands, but sometimes she forgot to read the page before her eyes and sat idly gazing into the flames on the hearth. At other times, she devoured every word she read and was filled with an insatiable longing for more. She discovered a box of old books in the attic, among them two thin volumes of short stories by Guy de Maupassant. These she read over and over again, unable to understand many of them and weeping at others. She had no sympathy for “Miss Harriet,” but her heart broke for the two old people who worked so long and so hard to buy another “Diamond Necklace.” Allison's reading had no pattern, and she went from De Maupassant to James Hilton without a quiver. She read
Goodbye, Mr. Chips,
and wept in the darkness of her room for an hour while the last line of the story lingered in her mind: “I said goodbye to Chips the night before he died.” Allison began to wonder about God and death.

Why was it that good people like Mr. Chips and the Little Match Girl and Allison's father died as indiscriminately as bad people? Was God really the way Reverend Fitzgerald pictured him for her every Sunday from the pulpit of the Congregational church? Was he really all good, all compassionate, loving everyone and truly listening to prayer?

“God hears every word,” said the Reverend Fitzgerald. “Every prayer sent heavenward is heard.”

But, wondered Allison, if God was so good and powerful, why was it that He sometimes seemed not to hear?

For this question, too, the Reverend Fitzgerald had an answer, and like all his answers it held the ring of truth at first, but as soon as Allison paused to think, another question would occur to her, and sometimes the minister's answers made no sense at all, but seemed empty and contradictory.

“He hears every single word,” assured the Reverend Fitzgerald, but Allison asked silently, If He really hears, why is it that He often does not answer?

“Sometimes,” said the minister, “The Almighty Father must refuse us. Like a loving father on earth, refusing a child for his own good, so must our Heavenly Father sometimes refuse us. But He always acts in our best interests.”

Well, then, thought Allison, why pray at all? If God was going to do what He thought was best anyway, why bother to ask for anything one wanted? If you prayed, and God thought that what you asked should be granted, He would grant it. If you did not pray, and it was true that God always acted in one's best interests, you would receive whatever He wanted you to receive anyway. Prayer, thought Allison, was a dreadfully unfair, rather unsportsmanlike affair, with all the advantages on one side.

When she had been younger, she had prayed and prayed that her father might be returned to her, but nothing had come of that. It had seemed unreasonable to her then that a loving God who could perform miracles any time the urge struck Him should want to see a little girl go without a father. Now that she was twelve, this still seemed unreasonable, and unfair as well.

Allison looked up at the gray skies of October and wondered if it was possible that there was no God at all, just as there were no real fairy princesses, no magic elves.

She roamed the streets of the town with an air of searching, and it left her with a hollow feeling of loss when she pulled herself up short and asked herself what she was looking for. She dreamed vague, half-formed dreams that were easily broken, and every day she waited impatiently for tomorrow.

“I wish it would hurry and be June,” she told her mother. “Then I'd be ready to graduate from grade school.”

“Don't wish time away, Allison,” said Constance. “It goes much too quickly as it is. In a little while, you'll look back on these times as the best years of your life.”

But Allison did not believe her.

“No, don't hurry time, Allison,” repeated Constance, and peered into the mirror on the living room wall, searching the corners of her eyes for small lines. “You'll be thirteen next month,” she said, and wondered, Can it be possible? Thirteen? So soon? Fourteen, actually. I'd almost forgotten. “We'll have a nice little party for you,” she said.

“Oh,
please,
Mother,” protested Allison, “birthday parties are so
childish!”

A few days later Allison said, “Perhaps a party
would
be nice after all,” and Constance rolled her eyes heavenward, wondering if she had ever gone through this phase of never knowing what she wanted.

If I did, she thought sourly, it's no wonder that my poor mother died young!

To Allison, she said, “All right, dear. You go ahead and invite your little friends and I'll take care of everything else.”

Allison almost screamed that she did not want a party after all, if her mother was going to refer to her classmates as “her little friends.” Her mother did not seem to realize that Allison would be thirteen in two more weeks, and on the verge of entering something described in magazine articles as “adolescence.” Allison pronounced this word, which she had read but never heard spoken, as
“a-dole
icents,” and to her it had all the mysterious connotations of hearing someone speak of “entering a nunnery.”

Allison was not unaware of the physical changes in herself, nor did she fail to notice many of these same changes in others. Size, she had decided, was something that one was stuck with, no more alterable than the slant of one's cheekbones. Selena, she realized, had been different from younger girls for quite a while now, for she already wore a brassière all the time, while Allison was sure that she herself would have no need for such a garment for a long time. She locked herself in the bathroom and examined her figure critically. Her waist seemed slimmer, and she was definitely beginning to develop breasts in an unobtrusive way, but her legs were as long and skinny as ever.

Like a spider, she thought resentfully, and hurriedly put on her bathrobe.

Boys were different now, too, she had noticed. Rodney Harrington had a slight shadow above his upper lip and boasted that soon he would have to go to Clement's Barbershop every day to be shaved, just like his father. Allison shivered. She hated the idea of hair growing anywhere on her body. Selena already had hair under her arms which she shaved off once a month.

“I get it over with all at once,” said Selena. “My period and my shave.”

Allison nodded approvingly. “Good idea,” she said sagely.

But as far as she was concerned, “periods” were something that happened to other girls. She decided that she would never tolerate such things in herself.

When Selena heard that, she laughed. “There's not going to be much you can do about it,” she said. “You'll get it the same as everyone else.”

But Allison did not believe her friend. She sent away to a company which advertised a free booklet entitled,
How to Tell Your Daughter,
offering to send it in a plain wrapper, and she read this carefully.

Phooey, she thought disdainfully when she had finished studying the pamphlet. I'll be the only woman in the whole world who won't, and I'll be written up in all the medical books.

She thought of “It” as a large black bat, with wings outspread, and when she woke up on the morning of her thirteenth birthday to discover that “It” was nothing of the kind, she was disappointed, disgusted and more than a little frightened.

But the reason she wept was that she was not, after all, going to be as unique as she had wanted to be.

Constance MacKenzie provided ice cream, cake, fruit punch and assorted hard candies for Allison's birthday party, and then retired to her room before an onslaught of thirty youngsters who entered her house at seven-thirty in the evening.

My God! she thought in horror, listening to thirty voices apparently all raised at once, and to the racket made by thirty pairs of feet all jouncing in unison on her living room floor to the accompaniment of something called “In the Mood” being played on a record by a man to whom Allison referred reverently as Glenn Miller.

My God! thought Constance, and there are still apparently sane people in this world who take up schoolteaching by choice!

She sent up a silent message of sympathy to Miss Elsie Thornton and all others like her who had to put up with many more than thirty children every day, five days a week.

My God! thought Constance, who seemed unable to stop calling on her Maker.

She picked up a book and tried determinedly to shut her mind to the noise that came from the living room. But at nine-thirty things became so quiet that Mr. Glenn Miller's music was clearly audible, and Constance began to wonder what the children were doing. She turned out her bedroom light and moved softly into the hall toward the living room.

Allison's guests were playing post office. For a moment, Constance felt her face stiffen with surprise.

At
this
age? she wondered. So
young?
I'd best go in and put a stop to this right now. I'll have every mother in town down on my neck if this ever gets out.

But she hesitated, with her hand on the door jamb and one foot on the threshold. Perhaps this was the regulation party game these days for thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, and if she burst into the living room mightn't Allison, to quote her daughter, “Simply die of embarrassment”?

Constance stood outside the darkened living room and tried to remember at what age she had begun to participate in kissing games. She concluded that she had been at least sixteen. Could her shy, withdrawn little Allison actually be playing such games at thirteen?

For the first time since Allison's birth, Constance felt the finger of fear which is always ready to prod at the minds of women who have made what they considered to be “A Mistake.”

A quick picture of her daughter Allison, lying in bed with a man, flashed through her mind, and Constance put a shaking hand against the wall to steady herself.

Oh, she'll get hurt! was the first thought that filled her.

Then: Oh, she'll get in trouble!

And finally, worst of all: SHE'LL GET HERSELF TALKED ABOUT!

After all I've done for her! thought Constance in a flush of angry self-pity. After all I've done for her, she acts like a little tramp right under my nose, letting some pimply-faced boy paw her and mush her. After the way I've slaved to give her a decent bringing up!

A frightened anger, which she did not realize was for a dead Allison MacKenzie and a girl named Constance Standish, filled her and was directed at her daughter.

I'll fix her in a hurry, she thought, and took her hand away from the wall.

The voice which came to her then, before she could step over the threshold, filled her with such relief that she began to tremble. Allison was not playing the game; she was on the side lines, calling the numbers.

For a moment Constance could not move, and then, weak with vanishing apprehension, she almost giggled aloud.

The unkissed postmistress, she thought. I should be more careful. I almost made a fool of myself.

When she felt that she could walk, she returned silently to her bedroom. She turned the light back on, stretched out on her chaise and picked up the book she had dropped. Before she had read one sentence on the printed page, the fear came back.

It won't always be like this. Someday Allison won't be content with just calling the numbers. She will want to join in the game. Soon I am going to have to tell her how dangerous it is to be a girl. I'll have to warn her to be careful, now that she is thirteen. No, fourteen. I'll have to tell her that she is a year older than she thinks she is, and I'll have to tell her why, and I'll have to tell her about her father and that she really doesn't have any right to call herself MacKenzie.