Peyton Place (18 page)

Lucy Ellsworth laughed so loud that Henry stirred in his sleep, and Mary put a warning finger to her lips.

“Sh-h,” she said. “I don't see anything so funny in that story anyway. I think it was a cruel thing to do to a young girl.”

She sighed impatiently and put out the light in Henry's room when Lucy dashed for the hall, a handkerchief over her mouth to smother her laughter.

Dr. Matthew Swain drove slowly past Kenny Stearns's house to see if, as he put it to himself, any more bodies had fallen up out of the cellar. He saw Kenny's open cellar window with its black curtain flapping in the cold winter wind, and he pulled his car over to the curb and stopped.

For Christ's sake, he thought, if any of them have gone to sleep with that window open, Mary will have a hospital full of sick drunks on her hands.

He got out of his car and moved slowly toward the cellar window with the idea of glancing in to make sure that everything was well, and of slamming the window shut if none of the drunks were awake to do it for themselves.

That sounds like a noble gesture, he admitted to himself, when the truth of the matter is that I've been panting for a chance to take a look into that cellar. I wonder how they passed the time. He bent to look in the window. And I wonder, he asked himself, how in hell they lived with this stink for six weeks?

“Good God Almighty!” said the doctor aloud.

Kenny Stearns was lying at the foot of the cellar stairs, unconscious and covered with blood.

“He's dead, surer than hell,” said the doctor. “If I ever saw a man who had bled to death, it's Kenny Stearns at this minute.”

He straightened up quickly and went to the house next door to telephone for an ambulance.

Within minutes, the street in front of Kenny's house began to fill with people so that when the hospital ambulance arrived, the driver and his assistant had to fight a path clear to reach the cellar. Telephones rang all through the town, and people who had been in bed, or reading by their firesides, hurried out into the cold to join the crowds who had gathered to watch The Doc “drag the drunks out of Kenny's cellar.”

“It works the same way in prisons,” said Dr. Swain to Seth Buswell a few minutes later. “Some call it a grapevine, but it has always seemed like a pair of giant antennae to me. Nobody admits to having said a word, but the minute anything happens everyone seems to know about it.”

He turned to the group of old men who usually wandered out into the cold only to make their way to and from Tuttle's Grocery Store.

“For Christ's sake,” roared the doctor, “get the hell out of the way!”

The two men who carried the stretcher lifted it gently to the rear of the ambulance, and the crowd began to buzz.

“Poor Kenny.”

“Is he dead?”

“Jesus! Look at the blood!”

“Tried to slash his throat with a razor, I heard.”

“Cut his wrists with a broken bottle.”

“They all got into a fight and went at each other with knives. All of ’em drunk, of course.”

The ambulance made four trips in all, taking Kenny on the first trip and Lucas Cross on the last.

Selena Cross stood on the fringe of the crowd, holding tightly to her little brother Joey's hand. When Lucas was dragged from the cellar, screaming, cursing and fighting off imaginary insects, she felt Joey squirm against her, trying to bury his head in the skirt of her dress. The ambulance driver and his assistant had Lucas by the scruff of the neck and the arms, pulling him across Kenny's front lawn.

“There's Lucas Cross!” shouted someone in the crowd.

“Lookit him! Drunk as a lord!”

“He's got the d.t.'s!”

Lucas screamed, “Let me go! Watch out!”

The crowd laughed at the ridiculous picture he made. He dug his heels into the ground and stiffened his body in protest against the men who dragged him.

“Watch out!” cried Lucas, and tried to hide his face in the white coats of the ambulance attendants.

“It's all right, Lucas,” said Dr. Swain soothingly. “You're going to be all right. Now go with these boys and you'll be all right.”

Lucas looked at the doctor as if he had never seen him before. “Watch out! Don't let them get me! They'll eat me alive!”

Joey Cross began to cry, but Selena did not cry. She watched Lucas with eyes ugly with hate.

Miserable slob, she thought. Crumby bastard. Drunken bum. I hope to hell you die.

“Be careful!” shouted someone in the crowd. “He's getting away!”

Lucas had managed to break away from one of his captors, and now struggled insanely against the other. He kicked at the crotch of the man who still held him, and when the attendant let him go, Lucas began to run drunkenly in wide circles, slapping at his arms and thighs and trying to cover his face at the same time.

“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.

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.