Peyton Place (45 page)

“Are your desks cleared?”

“Yes, Miss Thornton.”

“You may stand.”

“You may stand,” mimicked a voice from the rear.

“Dismissed!” said Miss Thornton.

The thunderous exodus began, and all but one boy made it out the door.

“Everett,” said Miss Thornton. “Sit down, Everett. You may spend the next thirty minutes with me.”

There, she thought, I'm not so old after all, when I can still snap them around like that.

It did not occur to her that a few years ago, no child would have dared to mimic her from the back of the room. But if it had come to her mind, Miss Thornton could have found a place to put the blame.

“The war,” she could have said, as people all over the world were saying in the autumn of 1943. “Nothing is the same since the war started.”

Constance Makris closed the oven door of her stove and straightened up with a startled squeak. Her husband had come up quietly behind her and encircled her with his arms. He tightened his hold on her as she started and at once she relaxed against him.

“Don't sneak up on me like that,” she said, laughing.

“I can't help it,” he said with his lips against the nape of her neck. “When you bend over the way you do when you look into the oven my lust overpowers me. It's the sight of your rear end that does it.”

“For an old man of forty-one you have remarkably young ideas,” she said, moving her head sensuously as he kissed her neck.

He crossed his arms in front of her and cupped her breasts with his hands. “And you,” he said softly, breathing in her ear, “have a remarkably young body for a lady of thirty-nine.”

“Stop it,” she said. “My cake is going to burn if you don't stop it at once and let me go.”

“Cake,” he said, in a derogatory whisper. “Who wants cake?”

“No one,” she said and turned to face him, pressing close to him and raising her lips.

He kissed her in a way he had, first softly and rather seekingly, then hard, then softly again.

“Four years,” he said huskily, “and you still make me feel as if I were about to have you for the first time.”

“The cake,” she said, “is definitely going to burn. I smell it.”

“Do you know that you have the breasts of a virgin?” he asked. “I can't understand it. You should have some of the sexy sag of maturity that the kid stuff never has. Yet here you are, all pointed and tip tilted, as the detective always says just before he seduces the beautiful young suspect in a murder mystery.”

“And do you know that you have no tact at all?” she asked. “And no sense of time fitness? Breasts are not a subject to be discussed just before dinner.”

Tom grinned and leaned the top part of his body away from her to look down into her face. “What shall we discuss, then?” he asked, moving his hips and thighs slowly against hers.

“Cake,” she said with mock severity. “That's what. Also fish, which comes first this evening.”

“Fish!” said Tom and lowered his arms.

“Yes, fish. It's good for you,” said Constance.

“I'll go make us a drink,” he said sorrowfully. “If I have to eat fish I must be well fortified in advance.”

“Light me a cigarette while you're at it, will you?” called Constance as he disappeared into the living room. “The new
McCall's
came today. It has a story by Allison in it.”

“Where?”

“Right there on the end table.”

Tom came back into the kitchen carrying two glasses, two cigarettes and a magazine. He handed Constance her drink and one of the cigarettes and then sat down at the kitchen table, sipping and leafing through the magazine.

“Here it is,” he said. “This is some title. “Watch Out, Girl At Work.’”

“It's all about a girl who works in an advertising agency in New York,” explained Constance. “She is a career girl who wants her boss's job. This boss of hers is young and handsome and the girl can't help herself. She falls in love with him. In the end she marries him, after deciding that she loves him more than her career.”

“Good God,” said Tom and closed the magazine. “I wonder if she has done anything with the novel she was thinking of doing?”

“I don't know. Hand me a pot holder, will you please?” Constance removed a cake from the oven. “Maybe she gave up the idea of writing a novel. The magazines pay very well, you know. And she is still so young. I always thought that novelists had to be middle aged.”

“Not if they have as much talent as Allison. On the other hand, I've always understood that authors have to have some experience with life before they can sit down and write about it successfully.” Tom chuckled. “I wonder if the editor who bought Allison's first short story is still in the business. Also, I wonder if he has any idea of the ramifications of his act.”

Constance laughed. “That was some story. “Lisa's Cat.’ I wonder where Allison ever got the idea for it.”

“Straight out of Somerset Maugham,” said Tom. “Allison really believed that she had burst into the top literary circles when that story won the prize.”

“Well, it certainly finished making up her mind about not going to college anyway.”

“Lisa's Cat” had not been a very good short story. Allison had written it at the age of seventeen as an entry in a contest which a slick magazine was running at the time. The magazine had run a full-page illustration of a black cat against a background consisting of a half-open window, draped with red, and a vase of spring flowers resting on the same table on which the cat sat.

“Write a short story of not more than five thousand words to fit this picture,” the magazine invited its readers, and offered a first prize of two hundred and fifty dollars.

More important to Allison at the time was the fact that the magazine announced that it would publish the prize-winning story in its next issue. Allison had sat down at once and begun to write a cat story. It had to do with an English gentleman in the Foreign Service who gave his faithless wife Lisa a black cat as an anniversary gift. As the English gentleman returned home from his office unexpectedly one afternoon, the cat's sad cries had aroused his attention and he had discovered his faithless Lisa in the arms of her lover.

Perhaps, Tom had often thought, the editor whose job it was to read the contest entries was weary, or perhaps the sad ending of the story, where the English gentleman went to a place designated by Allison as “up country” and caught the plague and died, pleased his fancy. In any case, Allison was declared the winner, received a check for the amount promised, and in the next issue the story appeared.

“Maybe Allison was too lucky too quickly,” Tom said as he sipped his drink. “Perhaps she is too busy working in New York to take time out for experiences.”

Constance began to set the table absently, putting the plates and glasses in their proper places through long habit rather than by conscious thought.

“I never really believed she would stay away from home as long as she has,” she said. “I thought she'd be back inside of six months and now she has been in New York for more than two years. Do you think that we ever made her feel like the third person who makes up a crowd after we were married?”

“No, I don't,” said Tom. “Although Allison and I never came to understand one another as well as I should have liked, I think that she began to think of leaving here right after Nellie Cross killed herself.”

There was an unspoken agreement of a sort between Tom and Constance. Whenever they referred to Peyton Place's bad time back in ’39, they spoke of their own particular unhappiness in terms of Nellie Cross's suicide. They did not speak of this same time as the period when Allison had learned about her father and of the circumstances of her birth.

“But I think her determination took on form,” continued Tom, “after Kathy Ellsworth's accident, during the trial. I don't think that she ever felt the same about Peyton Place after that was over with.”

“If that was her main reason for leaving it was rather foolish,” declared Constance. “The Ellsworths suing Leslie Harrington had nothing to do with Allison. It was none of her affair.”

“It was everyone's affair,” said Tom quietly.

Later, as Constance stood at the sink doing the dinner dishes, she reflected that Tom had probably been right when he had said that the Ellsworths suing Leslie Harrington had been everyone's affair. It was a situation which had split Peyton Place apart and for that reason alone it had become of concern to everyone whether they wished to be concerned or not. But still, Constance remembered, it was not the Ellsworth affair alone which had changed Allison. Allison had begun to change before that. She had never been a child again after Constance had brought her home from the hospital following that unfortunate business with Norman Page and the terrible tragedy of Nellie Cross. And the other, too, thought Constance reluctantly. The truth about her father and me. She must mind terribly although she always pretends not to give a damn. I wonder if it's true what they say about bastards usually being successful in their chosen fields because they feel they have to be to make up for not having had fathers. Constance looked down into the soapy dishwater and the suds were suddenly rainbow colored and shimmering through her tears. She had no right to be so happy, not after the way she had failed Allison. She wiped a tear from her cheek by brushing her face against her shoulder, and she listened to the sound of Tom's tuneless whistle which came from the cellar where he worked at his buzz saw.

I have so much, she thought guiltily. But I should have seen to it that Allison came first.

She had certainly not put Allison first back in ’39. She remembered only too clearly the hot night of Nellie Cross's suicide, with Allison lying in a state of shock at the hospital. The fear uppermost in Constance's mind that night had been that she had lost Tomas Makris. When everything had been taken care of as well as possible that night, Tom had driven away slowly from the parking lot behind the Peyton Place hospital. He did not speak, Constance remembered, and neither did she as she sat in the front seat of the car next to him. He did not ask her to move closer to him as he usually did, or reach for her hand, and Constance sat still, leaning against the door on her side of the car with her fear making a bad taste in her mouth. Silently, Tom drove to a place called Road's End and when he turned off the car lights the whole town lay spread out below, like a patterned carpet. He sat still for a long time, staring down at the town, and Constance did not dare to speak. At last, he flung his cigarette end out into the dark and turned to her. In the thin moonlight his face seemed more sharply etched than she had ever seen it and she began to tremble.

“Tell me about it,” he said, but he did not touch her, not even when she was unable to keep from crying any longer.

“There is nothing to tell,” she said. “I have never been married in my life. That's all there is to it. Allison is an illegitimate child and I've tried very hard to keep it a secret ever since she was born. I've worked hard to protect Allison, Tom. When she was born my mother and I fixed her birth certificate so that no one would ever know. She is a whole year older than she thinks she is. I did everything I could think of to protect her, but I can't change the fact that she is a bastard.”

“That noble-sounding business about protecting your child is a lot of crap,” said Tom brutally. “You finagled around to protect yourself, not her. And as for the fact, did you have to fling it at her the way you did? I have seen cruelty in my time, Constance. Plenty of it. But I have never seen anything to compare with what you did to Allison tonight.”

“What the hell did you expect me to do?” cried Constance, knowing that she sounded like a shrew and not caring, unable suddenly to stop the words which bubbled crudely to her lips. “What the hell should I do with her? Let her run wild? Let her go into the woods to screw every boy she meets up with? Is that what I should do, just so that you would have one mother in the world who would agree with your fancy theories about sex for children?”

“But you don't know that Allison was doing anything with Norman of which you might not approve,” said Tom coldly.

“Like hell I don't! She is just like her father. The more I look at her, the more I can see Allison MacKenzie in her. Sex. That's all he ever thought of and his bastard daughter is the same way. I don't even have to look very hard to see her father in Allison.”

“It is not Allison MacKenzie whom you see in your daughter,” said Tom. “It is yourself, and that is what horrifies you. You are afraid that she will turn out to be like you, that she will wind up with an illegitimate child on her hands, as you did. That is what you saw when you looked at Allison and Norman this evening. It never occurred to you that perhaps she is different from the way you were.”

“That isn't true!” cried Constance. “I was nothing like Allison at that age. I would never have gone into the woods with a boy to do the things that Allison has done.”

“How do you know what Allison has done? You never gave her a chance to tell you before you began to lash out on all sides with your poisonous tongue.”

“I just know, I tell you!”

“From experience?” asked Tom.

“Oh, how I hate you!” she said venomously. “How I hate you!”

“No,” said Tom, “you don't hate me. You hate the truth, but you don't hate me. The difference between us, Constance, is that I don't mind the truth, no matter how sordid it is. But I do hate a liar.”

He started the car and drove swiftly to her house on Beech Street without speaking another word, and Constance knew that she had lost him.

“How could you ever have said that you loved me?” she said as she stepped out of the car. “How could you have loved me and then speak as you have spoken tonight?”

“I said nothing about loving you less, Constance,” said Tom wearily. “I only said that I hate a liar. I've wanted to marry you for two years because I loved you. I still want to marry you because I still love you, but I cannot stand to look at you and know that you lie every time you find the truth too disagreeable to be faced.”

“I suppose you've never lied,” she said childishly.