Peyton Place (20 page)

He was thinking, Oh, Christ, he's worse and more of it than I'd feared.

“Hello, Mr. Harrington,” said Makris, barely touching the extended hand. “Made any long-distance calls lately?”

The smile on Harrington's face threatened to melt and run together, but he rescued it just in time.

“Ha, ha, ha,” he laughed. “No, Mr. Makris, I haven't had much time for telephoning these days. I've been too busy looking for a suitable apartment for our new headmaster.”

“I trust you were successful,” said Makris.

“Yes. Yes, I was, as a matter of fact. Well, come along. I'll take you over in my car.”

“As soon as I finish my coffee,” said Makris.

“Certainly, certainly,” said Harrington. “Oh, hello, Matt. ‘Lo, Clayton.”

“Coffee, Mr. Harrington?” asked Corey Hyde.

“No, thanks,” said Harrington.

When Makris had finished, everyone said good night carefully, all the way around, and he and Harrington left the restaurant. As soon as the door had closed behind them, Dr. Swain began to laugh.

“Goddamn it,” he roared, “I'll bet my sweet young arse that Leslie has met his match this time!”

“There's one schoolteacher that Leslie ain't gonna shove around,” observed Clayton Frazier.

Corey Hyde, who owed money at the bank where Leslie Harrington was a trustee, smiled uncertainly.

“The textile racket must be pretty good,” said Makris, as he opened the door of Leslie Harrington's new Packard.

“Can't complain,” said Harrington. “Can't complain,” and the millowner shook himself angrily at this sudden tendency to repeat all his words.

Makris stopped in the act of getting into the car. A woman was walking toward them, and as she stepped under the street light on the corner, Makris got a quick glimpse of blond hair and a swirl of dark coat.

“Who's that?” he demanded.

Leslie Harrington peered through the darkness. As the figure drew nearer, he smiled.

“That's Constance MacKenzie,” he said. “Maybe you two will have a lot in common. She used to live in New York. Nice woman, good looking, too. Widow.”

“Introduce me,” said Makris, drawing himself up to his full height.

“Certainly. Certainly, be glad to. Oh, Connie!”

“Yes, Leslie?”

The woman's voice was rich and husky, and Makris fought down the urge to straighten the knot in his tie.

“Connie,” said Harrington, “I'd like you to meet our new headmaster, Mr. Makris. Mr. Makris, Constance MacKenzie.”

Constance extended her hand and while he held it, she gazed at him full in the eyes.

“How do you do?” she said at last, and Tomas Makris was puzzled, for something very much like relief showed through her voice.

“I'm glad to know you, Mrs. MacKenzie,” said Makris, and he thought, Very glad to know you, baby. I want to know you a lot better, on a bed, for instance, with that blond hair spread out on a pillow.

From the evening of the day when Constance MacKenzie was introduced to Tomas Makris, a new tension began to make itself felt in the MacKenzie household. Where Constance had always tried to be patient and, to the limit of her ability, understand her daughter Allison, she was now snappish and stubborn for no reason at all, and this unfortunate new habit did not confine itself to her home but made itself obvious in her shop as well. To her own dismay, Constance discovered that she had a streak of hatefulness that she had never realized she possessed and, even worse, that it gave her a bitter kind of satisfaction to express thoughts that she had kept buried for years.

“You have too much around the hips to get into an eighteen any more,” she told Charlotte Page one day toward the end of April. “You'd better start thinking of women's half sizes.”

“Why, Constance!” said Charlotte, stunned. “I've worn an eighteen for years, ever since I began buying my clothes from you. I declare, I don't know what's got into you!”

“You have worn an eighteen for years only because I've always torn the size tag out of everything you ever tried on and substituted one that read eighteen,” said Constance bluntly. “Here's a size twenty four and a half that may fit, although to tell you the truth for a change, I doubt it.”

“Well!” said Charlotte Page, picking up her umbrella and gloves. “Well!”

Constance winced at the emphatic banging of the door behind Charlotte which said, more clearly than words, “Good-by! And I won't be back!” Then she pushed tiredly at her hair and went to the small room in the back of the shop where she kept an electric plate and a refrigerator. She made herself a bicarbonate of soda and drank it down quickly, shuddering.

I don't know what's got into me any more than you do, Charlotte, she thought.

In the beginning, Constance had told herself it was an overwhelming sense of relief that had shaken her when she first met Tomas Makris and knew that she had never seen his face before. How ridiculous she had been!

Eight million people in the city of New York, she had thought, laughing shakily. And I was worried about the one who found his way to Peyton Place!

But after that first meeting, when relief should have calmed her and left her soothed, Constance began to be plagued with restless nights and frequent attacks of indigestion. Twice she had glimpsed Tomas Makris on the street, and both times she had run rather than face him, but afterward she could not think of a reasonable explanation for her action. Perhaps she had been more apprehensive than she had first thought when Allison had told her of the new headmaster who was coming to town from New York, and she was suffering now from the after effects of a terrible anxiety.

It would, she admitted, have been a distressing situation if Tomas Makris had turned out to be someone who had known Allison MacKenzie and his family from Scarsdale. But since he was not, it was hard to explain why the image of the town's new headmaster stayed with her so persistently.

Anyone,
she declared to herself, would be impressed with a man that size, with his almost revolting good looks and that smile that belongs in a bedroom.

But nothing she told herself served to make the thought of Tomas Makris fade from her thoughts.

Late one night, Allison was awakened by a vague stirring somewhere in the house. She lay still, in the unreal world between sleep and wakefulness, and heard the sound of water running in the bathroom.

It's only Mother, she thought sleepily.

With the adaptability of the young, she had accepted her mother's new restlessness without question.

Allison turned over and saw the luminous face of her bedside clock shimmering. She opened her eyes wider, and the clock's face no longer wavered. Two o'clock. With the miraculous facility which seems to disappear with childhood, Allison was suddenly thoroughly awake. She sat up in her bed and circled her knees with her arms. It was raining, the way it had been raining for days, and the white curtains at Allison's window turned and twisted in the wind. For a long time she watched them, noticing that the wind caused not one motion that was ungraceful. Her curtains had the same bodilessness that the branches of the trees seemed to have in the face of a high wind. They dipped and swayed and turned, and every motion was liquid.

I wish, thought Allison, that I could dance like something moved by the wind.

Allison got out of bed quietly and turned on the lamp next to her clock; then she went to the closet where her dress for the spring dance hung. She touched the wide tulle skirts and ran her fingers over the slippery softness of the bodice of her first floor-length and therefore grown-up party dress. When she took the dress from its hanger and held it out and away from her, the air moving through her room caught at the pale blue material and made the skirts billow softly.

It dances by itself, she thought, and held the dress against her body. She moved around the room with small, dancing steps, trying to keep her neck relaxed so that her head moved gracefully from side to side, and it was only when she caught a glimpse of herself in the long mirror attached to the inside of her closet door that she stopped. She looked at her sturdy, pajama-clad body and noticed how her hair hung on her shoulders, fine, limp and plain brown.

If I only had more of a shape, she thought sadly, lowering the party dress. If I were very thin and much taller, I could move like a bluebell in the wind, and everyone would say that I was the best dancer in the world. If I were only completely blonde, like Mother, or very dark, like my father. If I just wasn't so awfully
medium!

Her cotton pajamas were printed colorfully with dancing circus figures, and the top was cut full and straight, with a small round collar. The bottom had wide legs and was banded at the waist with elastic, and Allison looked at herself with disgust.

What a babyish outfit for a thirteen-year-old girl! she thought resentfully. I look like a child!

Her fingers pulled impatiently at the buttons of her pajama coat, fumbling in their eagerness to shed a garment that underlined her childishness. The silk bodice of her new dress was cold against her bare skin, but it was smooth, like rich soap lather, and the blue of the material reflected itself in her eyes. The tulle scratched uncomfortably against her bare legs, and Allison, panicky now, saw that her first grown-up dress did not make her look grown up at all.

What if
he
doesn't think I'm pretty, she thought. What if he looks at me and is sorry that he asked me!

She ran to her bureau and took her rubber-padded brassière from a drawer. She held it in front of her, over the dress, and studied herself in the mirror, almost afraid to slip the top of her dress down and put on the undergarment; for if the brassière failed to make her look grown up, there was nothing left to try. At last, with her back to the mirror, she lowered the dress top, fastened the brassière into place and slipped the top of her dress back on. She whirled quickly, trying to capture in her own reflection the impression she would make on Rodney Harrington when he saw her dressed like this for the first time. Her mirror assured her that it would be a favorable one. The top of her new dress swelled magnificently, the fabric straining tautly against her rubber breasts, so that her waist seemed smaller and her hips more curved.

Allison bent forward, hoping that the front of her dress was loose enough, and cut low enough, that the top curves of her bosom would be visible to anyone who cared to look at her from that angle. She and Kathy Ellsworth had finished reading a book the previous afternoon in which the hero had been reduced to a perspiring jelly by the sight of his true love's breasts over the bodice of her silver lamé gown. Allison sighed. Her dress covered her completely, and even if it had not, her rubber-cupped brassière did.

But, she thought, turning to get a side view of her figure, I look
very
mature from this angle, and you can't have everything.

“For Heaven's sake, Allison, it's almost three o'clock in the morning. Take off that dress and get to bed!”

For a moment, Allison was so startled that she felt as if she had been punched in the stomach. She realized, suddenly, that it was cold in the room, and shivered, and without knowing why, she wondered how a canary bird felt when someone poked inquisitive fingers into its cage.

“You might at least knock before you open my door,” she said crossly.

Constance, not realizing that she had broken into a private dream, replied in the same tone.

“Don't be fresh, Allison,” she said. “Take off that dress.”

“Whenever I say anything, it's always fresh,” said Allison furiously. “But no matter what you say, it's always courteous.”

“And give me that stupid rubber bra,” said Constance, ignoring Allison's remark. “You look like an inflated balloon with that thing on.”

Allison burst into tears and let her new dress drop to the floor.

“I can never have a moment of privacy,” she wept. “Not even in my own room!”

Constance picked up the dress and hung it up. “Give,” she ordered, holding out her hand for Allison's brassière.

“You're mean,” cried Allison. “You're mean and hateful and cruel! No matter what I want, you always try to spoil it!”

“Shut up and go to sleep,” said Constance coldly, turning off the light.

The sound of Allison's sobs followed her down the hall and into her own room. Constance lit a cigarette. She was smoking too much lately, and she was too often unfair to Allison. That business with the brassière had been unfair, for Constance had let the child go for months thinking that her mother was taken in by the fact that Allison could sprout a voluptuous figure whenever the occasion for one arose.

I should have put a stop to it in the beginning, she thought. Even if it was only something she did around the house, I should have let her know that no one would be fooled by falsies for very long.

Constance sighed heavily and puffed at her cigarette.

“It's the goddamned season that makes me
so
hard to get along with,” she said, to her own surprise, for she never talked out loud to herself and seldom swore.

It's all this rain that makes everything
so
depressing, she amended silently.

It was easy, that year, to blame the season for anything. Spring had come late and was making up for lost time. She invaded Peyton Place like a whirlwind hurrying, hurrying, hurrying, Allison had thought, like the White Rabbit on his way to the Mad Hatter's tea party. Spring came in a deluge and loosed the ice in the wide Connecticut River so that the river roiled and groaned and overflowed in protest. She washed the snows of winter from the fields and trees, and she battered the earth relentlessly until the thick layers of frost gave way before her and melted into muddy submission. Spring was ungentle that year, so that it was hard to think of her as a time of tender leaves and small, delicate flowers. She was a fury, twisting and beating, a force obsessed with the idea of winning the land in a vicious contest with winter. Only after she had won was she smiling and serene, like a naughty child after a temper tantrum. May was half gone before Spring relaxed and sat back, spreading her green skirts smugly, while the farmers planted their gardens and kept one eye on this capricious maiden who might fly into a rage at any moment. Once Spring had calmed down, the days passed slowly, flowing into one another like the movements of a symphony, and it was only Constance MacKenzie who was left disquieted. Even with the turbulent days of April gone, and with her calendar showing her that it was May and a time of sunshine and silent growth, Constance was as unstill as the river in floodtime. She did not recognize the symptoms in herself as akin to the painful restlessness of adolescence, nor did she admit that the dissatisfied yearning within her could be a sexual one. She blamed the externals of her life; her daughter, the heavier responsibilities of an enlarged business, and the constant effort she had to make toward both.