Peyton Place (48 page)

The case continued for three days, and the only person to support Allison MacKenzie was Tomas Makris, who testified that when he had gone to the fun house operator to tell him to shut off the machinery which ran the place, the operator had stated that he did not know how to comply with this request. Lewis Welles's testimony, according to Peyton Place, did not count, for everyone knew that he and Kathy were “going together” and naturally he'd stick up for the girl, especially when it might mean thirty thousand dollars.

Thirty thousand dollars! Peyton Place never grew weary of saying the words.

“Thirty thousand dollars! Imagine it!”

“Imagine suing Leslie Harrington for thirty thousand dollars!”

“At thirty thousand dollars apiece, I'd let both my arms get ripped off!”

“And who the hell does this Ellsworth think he is anyway? Where does he come from? He's behind it. The girl would never have done it on her own without her father pushing her!”

After three days the jury deliberated, according to Seth's watch, exactly forty-two minutes. They assessed Leslie Harrington the sum of twenty-five hundred dollars, the figure for which he had been heard to say that he would settle. Kathy Ellsworth, who did not appear in court, took the news more calmly than anyone else. Her right arm was gone, and that, as she said, was that. Neither thirty thousand, nor twenty-five hundred was going to alter the fact that she would have to learn to use her left hand.

“Listen, baby,” said Lewis Welles, in his brisk, salesman's voice to which many people objected, “you don't need a right arm to hold a kid. I've seen lotsa women holding babies with their left arm.”

That night, when the men of Chestnut Street, with the exception of Leslie Harrington, gathered at Seth's to play poker, Charles Partridge had been full of excuses.

“Christ,” he had said, “I know it wasn't right. What could I do? I'm Leslie's lawyer. He pays me a yearly retainer for which I agree to take care of his affairs to the best of my ability. Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of money. I had to do what I did.”

“It wasn't as if the sonofabitch couldn't afford it,” said Dexter Humphrey, the president of the bank.

“Leslie has always been a cheap skate,” said Jared Clarke. “I don't think he's ever bought a single thing without trying to beat the price down.”

“For a while,” said Matthew Swain, “I didn't think the girl would live.”

“Someday,” said Seth, “that bastard will get his. In spades. He'll get his comeuppance so good that he'll never forget it. I just hope I'm around to see it.”

All of us, every single, goddamned one of us, hating Leslie Harrington because we haven't the guts to stand up and tell him, and everyone else, where we stand, thought Seth, as he sat and drank in his house, in the fall of 1943. He raised his empty glass and threw it with all his remaining strength against the opposite wall. The glass did not even break. It rolled across the carpet and came to rest against the bookcase.

“My friends!” said Seth thickly. “My good, true blue friends. Screw ’em all!”

“What did you say, Seth?” asked Dr. Swain, coming into the room followed by the poker players who had finished with the cards.

“’Septyou, Matt,” muttered Seth. “Screw ’em all, ’sheptyou, Matt,” he said, and fell asleep, leaning back in his chair, with his mouth open.

The snow came early that year. By the middle of November the fields were white with it and before the first week of December had passed, the streets of Peyton Place were lined on either side with peaked, white piles of snow pushed there, out of the way of traffic and pedestrians, by the town's sharp-nosed plow.

Tuttle's Grocery Store was always more crowded during the winter months, for the farmers who were hard pressed for a moment of rest in the summer found themselves with hours of free time to spend. The majority of them spent it in Tuttle's, talking. It was talk which mattered little, solved nothing and which, in the winter of 1943, was concerned mostly with the war. Yet, the war had changed the face of Peyton Place but little, and the group in Tuttle's not at all. There were very few young men left in town, but then, young men had never congregated around the stove in Tuttle's so that the talkers there were the ones who had been there for years. There were fewer products for sale in the store, but the old men around the stove had never had much money to buy things anyway, so the shortage of civilian goods did not affect them particularly. As for the farmers, food was no more of a problem now than it had ever been. War had not made the soil of northern New England less rocky, more yielding, or the weather more predictable. The wresting of life from the land had always been difficult, and the war made no difference one way or another. The old men in Tuttle's talked and talked, and the farmers did not feel cheated in having spent the hard-earned hours of leisure in these conversations. When local talk faded, there was always the fascinating, unending talk of war. Every battle on every front was refought with more finesse, more brilliant strategy, more courage and more daring, by the old men around the red-hot stove in Tuttle's. The men, including those with sons gone to battle, spoke the words of concern assiduously, for they felt this was expected of men whose country was at war. Yet, there was not one among them who believed even remotely in the possibility of an American defeat, although they discussed the possibilities with infinite care. The idea of an alien foot, whether German or Japanese, trodding the acres first settled by the grandfathers of the old men in Tuttle's was one so farfetched, so impossible to visualize, that it was spoken of—and listened to—with the hushed attitude in which the men might have held a discussion on extrasensory perception. It was all right to talk and to listen, but one simply did not believe it. A stranger, coming to Peyton Place for the first time from a place where the war had passed, might well have been dumfounded by the lack of concern in evidence in the town. The largest, single change which had taken place was in the Cumberland Mills, which had gone into war work more than a year before. The mills worked in three shifts now, operating twenty-four hours a day, and the fact that more people had more money to spend was not particularly obvious, for there was nothing to be bought with this newly acquired prosperity. To the old men in Tuttle's, the war was almost like a game, a conversational game, to be played when other subjects were exhausted. A stranger to Peyton Place might easily have mistaken disbelief of danger for courage, or faith for indifference.

Selena Cross was one of the few in town to be emotionally involved with the war. Her stepbrother Paul was with the Army somewhere in the Pacific, while Gladys was working in an aircraft factory at Los Angeles, California. Selena fought a continual feeling of restlessness and a sense of frustration during the winter of 1943.

“I wish I were a man,” she had told Tomas Makris. “Nothing would hold me back then. I'd join up in a minute.”

Afterward, she was sorry that she had said this, for Tom, she had heard, had tried several times to enlist. None of the branches of the service were eager, it seemed, to accept Tom who was over forty, and who had had both knees fractured in the past.

Restless and frustrated, Selena wrestled also with a sense of guilt. She should, she knew, be grateful that Ted Carter was safe at the state university, studying for his eventual legal career and being kept from active duty by virtue of his good grades and the R.O.T.C. But somehow she was not. She felt that Ted should be fighting side by side with Paul and all others like him, and it irritated her when Ted came home week ends, or wrote enthusiastic letters remarking on his good fortune in “managing to stay in college.”

It was fine, Selena admitted, for a man to have his goal firmly fixed in his mind, and Ted, she knew, was not a coward. He was more than ready and willing to go to war, after his schooling was done.

“If I can stay in for just one more year, including summers, I'll have my Bachelor's. That will leave only law school, and who knows? The war may be over before then,” Ted had told her.

She had been furiously angry. “I should think that you'd
want
to go. After all, the United States is at war.”

“It's not that I don't want to go,” he had replied, hurt at her unreasonableness. “It's just that this way, I won't be losing any time and we can be married that much sooner.”

“Time!” Selena had scoffed. “Let the Germans or the Japs get over here, and see how valuable your time is then!”

“But Selena, we've had this all planned for years—ever since we were kids. What's the matter?”

“Nothing!”

As a matter of fact, Selena could not have told Ted what the matter was. She knew that her feeling was a childish, unreasonable one, so senseless as to be unexplainable, yet it was there. She could not get over the idea that there was something not quite right in a strong, able-bodied man wanting to stay in a sleepy college town while a war raged over the rest of the world.

Since Nellie's death and the advent of Paul and Gladys with its consequence of tidiness and its measure of security, the Carters had relented somewhat in their attitude toward Selena. After all, said the Carters, it took a real smart girl to manage a business all by herself with no help at all from the owner. Connie had scarcely set foot in the shop from the day she had married that Greek fellow. Selena did it alone, and a girl had to be real smart to be able to do that at the age of eighteen. Now that Selena was alone with Joey, Roberta sometimes invited the two of them to Sunday dinner, and she always insisted on sharing her letters from Ted with Selena, in the hope that Selena would reciprocate. Selena never did. She did not like Roberta and Harmon, nor could she bring herself to trust them. She accepted Roberta's invitations warily, for she could see no graceful way to avoid them, but she never spent a comfortable Sunday in the Carter house, and whenever one of these Sundays was over, she and Joey acted like a pair of children let out of school. They ran and laughed all the way to their own house, and when they reached it, Selena made hamburgers and Joey did imitations of Roberta's hyperladylike mannerisms while they ate, Selena's food growing cold while she laughed.

I haven't a thing to kick about, thought Selena, as she walked home one cold December evening after closing the Thrifty Corner. If I had an ounce of gratitude in me, I'd know enough to be grateful for all I have.

Just before she opened the door to enter the house, she paused and looked up at the heavy sky. It's going to snow, she thought, and hurried inside to warmth, where Joey had already started supper and where another letter from Ted awaited her. Joey had started a fire in the fireplace, too, for he knew that Selena loved to watch a fire while she ate. The fireplace had been a needless extravagance, installed with much labor and thought by Paul Cross after he had learned from Gladys that, to Selena, no home was complete without one.

“Fireplaces!” Paul had scoffed good-naturedly when Selena had begun to cry the first time she saw the completed hearth. “They're dirty and old fashioned. Where'd you ever pick up such notions?”

“From Connie MacKenzie,” Selena had answered. “I used to sit in front of hers, with Allison, and think about the day when I'd have one of my own.”

“Well, now you've got it,” Paul had said. “Don't you squawk to me when the wood is wet, or the chimney doesn't draw and fills the house with smoke.”

Selena had laughed. “I used to wish that I had blond hair so that when I had my fireplace I could sit in front of it and let the fire make highlights in my hair, like it does in Connie's. I would have given anything to look like her, to be that beautiful.”

“Nothing could have helped you!” hooted Paul, teasing her. “You've got a shape like a broom handle and a face like a hedgehog. Connie MacKenzie indeed! Not a chance.”

Although Selena did not resemble Allison's mother in the least, as she had wished, she was, nevertheless, beautiful. By the time she was twenty, she had fulfilled all the promises of adolescence. Her eyes held a look of unshared secrets, but they no longer seemed old and out of place as they had when she was a child. People turned to look twice and three times at Selena, no matter where she went, for she had an air of experience suffered, of mystery untold, which was far more entrancing than mere beauty. Sometimes, when Joey Cross looked at her, his love so overwhelmed him that he felt compelled to touch her, or, at the very least, to call her name and force her to look at him.

“Selena!”

She raised her eyes from the book she held and turned to look at him. The firelight highlighted her cheekbones so that the hollows beneath the bones seemed deeper than they actually were.

“Yes, Joey?”

He lowered his eyes to the magazine in front of him. “It must be snowin’ real hard,” he said. “The wind's howlin’ like a sick hound.”

She stood up and went to a window and pressed her face against the glass, making blinders with her hands at the corners of her eyes.

“I guess it's snowing!” she exclaimed. “Blowing up a real blizzard. Did you close up the sheep pen real well?”

“Yep. I knew it was goin’ to blizzard. Clayton Frazier told me. He showed me how he can tell, from lookin’ at the clouds no later than four o'clock in the afternoon.”

Selena laughed. “What happens if the clouds don't blow over until after four?”

“Then it won't blizzard that night,” said Joey positively. “It'll hold off ’til the next day.”

“I see,” said Selena seriously. “Listen, how about a cup of cocoa and a game of checkers?”

“O.K. with me,” said Joey casually, but his heart, and very nearly his eyes, overflowed with love for her.

Selena always made him feel big and important. Like a man, instead of a kid. She depended on him, and liked to have him around. Joey knew boys at school whose older sisters would rather be dead than have their brothers hanging around them. Not Selena, though. Whenever she hadn't seen him for a while, even if it was only a couple of hours, she always acted like he had just come back from a long trip. “Hi, Joey!” she'd say, and her face got all smily and lighted up. She never kissed him or fondled him, the way he had seen some women do to some boys. He'd have died, thought Joey, if she ever did that. But sometimes she gave him a playful poke, or rumpled his hair and told him if he didn't hurry and get a haircut, the barber would soon be chasing him down Elm Street, waving a pair of shears. She rumpled his hair and said that, even when he didn't really need a haircut.