Peyton Place (22 page)

“Go on outside, Joey. Go on outside and stay there ’til I call for you.”

She did not speak again until the door closed behind her little brother and then she said: “I'm not going anywhere near you, Pa. Just give me my money.”

“Come on over here and get it,” said Lucas hoarsely. “You just come on over here and try to take it away from me.”

Nellie Cross stared at her toes through the holes in her slippers. “Sonsofbitches,” she said softly. “Sonsofbitches, all of ’em.”

Although Nellie spoke softly, Lucas started as if he had just realized that she was in the room. He looked first at his wife and then at Selena, and Selena's eyes were filled with hatred.

“Here,” he said, after another glance at Nellie. “Take your goddamn money.”

He tossed the creased envelope toward Selena and it fell on the floor at her feet.

“Sonsofbitches,” repeated Nellie. “All of ’em. Booze and wimmin. Wimmin and booze.”

Rodney Harrington, wearing a white jacket and with his curly black hair well slicked down with water, sat on the edge of a chair in the MacKenzie living room. Constance had left him there while she went upstairs to see if Allison was ready, and now Rodney sat and stared morosely at the braided rug on the floor.

What, he asked himself, ever prompted him to ask Allison MacKenzie to the biggest dance of the year? Especially to this dance, the very first that he was being allowed to attend. There was Betty Anderson, all eager and hot after him, just waiting for him to ask her to the dance, and he had gone and asked Allison MacKenzie. Ask a nice girl, his father had ordered, and look where Rodney had wound up. On the edge of a chair in the MacKenzie living room, waiting for skinny Allison. He could have had a good time with Betty, damn it all.

Rodney felt himself reddening and looked surreptitiously around the empty room. He did not like to think of the afternoon that he had spent in the woods at Road's End with Betty Anderson, unless he was sure that he was by himself. When he was alone, he could not keep from thinking of it.

That Betty! thought Rodney, letting memory take him. Boy, she was really something. Nothing kiddish about her or what she had shown him that afternoon. She didn't talk like a kid, either, or look like one. By God, she was something, whether her father was a mill hand or not, she was still something!

Rodney closed his eyes and felt his breath coming fast with the memory of Betty Anderson.

No, he shook himself, not here. I'll wait until tonight when I get home.

He looked around the MacKenzie living room and once again his thoughts began to lacerate him.

He could have had a swell time at the dance with Betty, and here he was, waiting for Allison. And if that wasn't bad enough, Betty was mad at him for not asking her. You couldn't blame Betty for that, after all, when a girl shared a secret with you, she had a right to expect you to ask her to the biggest dance of the year. He just hoped she'd be at the dance. Maybe he'd get a chance to talk to her and find out if she was still mad. Damn it, he could have talked his father out of putting his foot down about Betty if he had really tried. And there was skinny Allison, always making cow eyes at him, and his father had said to ask a nice girl.

Fool! said Rodney Harrington to himself. Damn fool!

He could hear a stirring on the stairs in the hall, now, so he supposed that Allison was finally coming down. He just hoped she looked decent and wouldn't make those cow eyes at him at the dance, where some of the boys might see. He couldn't afford to have Betty overhear anyone teasing him about Allison or any other girl.

“Here's Allison, Rodney,” said Constance.

Rodney stood up. “Hi, Allison.”

“Hi.”

“Well, my father's outside in the car.”

“All right.”

“You got a coat or something?”

“I have this. It's an evening coat.”

“Well, let's go.”

“I'm ready.”

“Good night, Mrs. MacKenzie.”

“Good night, Mother.”

“Good night–” Constance caught herself just in time. She had almost said “Children.” “Good night, Allison,” she said. “Good night, Rodney. Have a nice time.”

As soon as they were out the door, Constance sank wearily into a chair. It had been a difficult week, with Allison alternating between moments of unbearable impatience and hours of demoralizing panic. When she awakened on the day of the dance with an angry red pimple on her chin, she wept and demanded that Constance telephone Rodney immediately to tell him that Allison was ill and would not be able to go out that evening. Constance lit a cigarette and looked at the framed photograph on the mantelpiece.

“Well, Allison,” she said aloud, “here we are. Alone at last.”

Your bastard daughter is all bathed, curled, perfumed, manicured and dressed, and here we are, Allison, you and I alone, waiting for her to return from her first formal engagement.

It frightened Constance when she thought in that fashion, with bitterness and self-pity, and it shocked her to realize that lately her bitterness was not only for the position in which Allison MacKenzie had placed her fourteen years before. In recent weeks she had been actively resenting the idea of being left alone to cope with a growing girl, and in her angry reasoning the blame for this fell entirely on the shoulders of her dead lover. Allison's crime, and in Constance's eyes it was a crime, was that he had claimed to love her. That being the case, his first thoughts should have been for her protection, coming ahead of his desire to lead her to bed but, as Constance put it to herself, he had not thought of protection until too late, and Constance had ended up by allowing Allison MacKenzie to become a habit with her. She knew that she had not loved him, for if she had, the relationship between them could never have been what it was. Love, to Constance, was synonymous with marriage, and marriage was something based on a community of tastes and interests, together with a similarity of background and viewpoint. All these were blended together by an emotion called “love,” and sex did not enter into it at all. Therefore, reasoned Constance, she had certainly not loved Allison MacKenzie. Constance's eyes went again to the photograph on the mantelpiece, and she wondered where, eventually, she would find the words to explain the way of things to the daughter of Allison MacKenzie. The ringing of the doorbell cut across her mind, breaking sharply into her thoughts. Constance sighed again, more deeply than before, and rubbed the back of her neck where it ached. Allison, she supposed, had forgotten a handkerchief in her excitement.

Constance opened her front door and saw Tomas Makris standing on the steps. For a moment she was unable to move or speak, overcome not so much by surprise, as by a feeling of unreality.

“Good evening,” said Tom into the silence. “Since you always manage to avoid me on the street and even in your store, I thought I'd come to call formally.”

When Constance did not answer but continued to stand with one hand on the inside doorknob and the other leaning against the jamb, Tom went on in the same conversational tone.

“I realize,” he said, “that it is not the conventional thing to do. I should have waited to call until after you had called on me, but I was afraid that you would never get around to performing your neighborly duty. Mrs. MacKenzie,” he went on, pushing gently at the outside of the door, “I have been standing on the street corner for over half an hour waiting for your daughter to be off with her date, and my feet are damned tired. May I come in?”

“Oh, yes. Please do,” said Constance at last, and her voice sounded breathy to her own ears. “Yes, do. Please come in.”

She stood with her back against the panels of the closed door while Tom walked past her and into the hall.

“Let me take your coat, Mr. Makris,” she said.

Tom took off his coat and folded it over his arm, then he walked to where Constance was standing. He stood close enough to her so that she had to raise her head to look up at him, and when she had done so, he smiled down at her gently.

“Don't be afraid,” he said. “I'm not going to hurt you. I'm going to be around for a long time. There's no hurry.”

The gymnasium of the Peyton Place High School was decorated with pink and green crepe paper. The paper hung in twisted festoons from the ceiling and walls. It was wrapped carefully around the basketball hoops and backboards in a hopeful effort at disguise. Some imaginative senior, discouraged with the limp look of the basketball nets, had cleverly stuffed them with multicolored spring blossoms and someone else had fastened a balloon to every spot that provided a place to tie a string. On the wall, behind where the orchestra sat, huge letters cut of aluminum foil had been pasted.

PEYTON PLACE HIGH SCHOOL WELCOMES YOU
TO ITS ANNUAL SPRING HOP

The seniors who had been on the decorating committee drew sighs of relief and looked at their work with well-earned satisfaction. The gym, they assured one another, had never looked better for a spring dance than it did this year. The annual spring dance, which had become a custom in Peyton Place since the building of the new high school, was an affair given by the graduating seniors as a premature welcome to the grade school children who would be entering high school in the fall, and it had come to represent a number of things to different people. To most eighth grade girls it meant the time of their first formal and their first real date with a boy, while to most boys it meant the official lifting of the nine o'clock curfew which their parents had imposed on them. To Elsie Thornton, dressed in black silk and acting as a chaperon, it seemed to be a time of new awareness in the youngsters whom she had taught that year. She could discern in them the first stirrings of interest toward one another and knew that this interest was the forerunner of the searching and finding that would come later.

Not, thought Miss Thornton, that a few of them hadn't done their searching and finding already.

She watched Selena Cross and Ted Carter circling the floor slowly, their heads close together, and although she was not a believer in the myth of childhood sweethearts who grew up, married and lived happily ever after, she found herself hoping that it could be so in the case of Selena and Ted. Her feelings when she watched Allison MacKenzie and Rodney Harrington were very different. It had been like a blow to her heart to see Allison come in with Rodney. Miss Thornton had put up an involuntary hand, and lowered it quickly, hoping that no one had noticed.

Oh, be careful, my dear, she had thought. You must be very careful, or you'll get hurt.

Miss Thornton saw Betty Anderson, dressed in a red dress that was much too old for her, watching Allison and Rodney. Betty had come to the dance with a boy who was a senior in the high school and who already had a reputation as a fast driver and a hard drinker. But Betty had not taken her eyes off Rodney all evening. It was ten o'clock before Rodney got up the courage to approach Betty. He walked over to her the moment that Allison left him to go to the rest room, and when Allison returned to the gymnasium he was dancing with Betty. Allison went over to the line of straight chairs where the chaperons were sitting and sat down next to Elsie Thornton, but her eyes were fixed on Rodney and Betty.

Don't you care, darling, Miss Thornton wanted to say. Don't pin your dreams on that boy, for he will only shatter them and you.

“You look lovely, Allison,” she said.

“Thank you, Miss Thornton,” replied Allison, wondering if it would be proper to say, So do you, Miss Thornton. It would be a lie if she said it, because Miss Thornton had never looked uglier. Black was definitely not her color. And why was Rodney staying so long with Betty?

Allison kept her head up and her smile on, even when one set of dances ended and another began, and Rodney did not come to claim her. She smiled and waved at Selena, and at Kathy Ellsworth who had come with a boy who was in high school and kissed with his mouth open. She felt a small pang of compassion for little Norman Page who stood leaning against the wall, alone, and stared down at his feet. Norman, Allison knew, had been brought to the dance by his mother, who was going to leave him there until eleven o'clock while she attended a meeting of the Ladies’ Aid at the Congregational church. Allison smiled at Norman when he raised his head, and wiggled her fingers at him, but her stomach had begun to churn and she did not know how much longer she could keep from being sick. Betty's finger tips rested on the back of Rodney's neck, and he was looking down at her with his eyes half closed.

Why is he doing this to me? she wondered sickly. I look nicer than Betty. She looks cheap in that sleazy red dress, and she's wearing gunk on her eyelashes. She's got awfully big breasts for a girl her age, and Kathy said they were real. I don't believe it. I wish Miss Thornton would stop fidgeting in her chair—and there's only one more dance left in this set and I'd better get ready to stand up because Rodney will be coming for me in a few minutes. I'll bet that dress belonged to Betty's big sister, the one who got in Dutch with that man from White River. Selena looks beautiful in that white dress. She looks so old. She looks twenty at least, and Ted does, too. They're in love, you can tell by looking at them. Everybody's looking at me. I'm the only girl sitting down. Rodney's gone!

Allison's heart began to beat in hot, heavy thuds as her eyes circled the dance floor wildly. She glanced at the door just in time to see a flash of red, and she knew then that Rodney had left her here alone while he went somewhere with Betty.

What if he doesn't come back? she thought. What if I have to go home alone? Everyone knows I came with him. EVERYONE IS LAUGHING AT ME!

Miss Thornton's hand was cold and hurtful on her elbow.

“My goodness, Allison,” laughed Miss Thornton. “You
are
off in a dream world. Norman's asked you to dance with him twice, and you haven't even answered him.”

Allison's eyes were so full of tears that she could not see Norman, and her face hurt. It was only when she stood up to dance with him that she realized that she was still smiling. Norman held her awkwardly while the orchestra imported from White River for the occasion played a waltz.