Peyton Place (51 page)

Seth was shocked. “But what about all those medals?” he asked. “The kid's got ribbons from his waist to his shoulder, practically.”

“Ribbons, yes,” said the doctor, “medals, no. Anybody can go into a store near a service base and buy those ribbons by the gross. There's a store like that in Manchester. I noticed it when I was down there last week. I'll bet everything I own that Evelyn went into one of those stores in Boston and bought every single ribbon that Norman has on his tunic.”

“But why? There isn't any sense to a thing like that. Plenty of boys don't come home as heroes. Why should she feel that Norman had to.”

“I don't know, but I'll sure as hell find out. Fella who went to med school with me is one of the big brass down in Washington now. He should be able to tell me.”

The next day, the doctor went to the state house to register his automobile, and while at the state capitol, several miles away from Peyton Place, he telephoned to his friend in Washington.

“Sure, I can find out, Matt,” said the friend. “I'll call you tonight at your home.”

“No, don't do that,” protested the doctor, thinking of Alma Hayes, the town's telephone operator who had a reputation for listening in on everyone's long-distance calls. “Write me a letter,” he said. “I'm in no hurry.”

A few days later, the letter came and Dr. Swain took it at once to Seth. Norman Page, according to the records, had been given a medical discharge on the grounds that he was mentally unfit to handle the duties of a soldier. While Peyton Place had sympathized with Evelyn Page, whose son, according to her, lay wounded in a hospital in Europe, Norman Page had been recovering from a bad case of battle fatigue in a hospital in the United States. Matthew Swain's friend wrote further, that as far as he could learn, Norman had gone PN under fire in France.

“What's that?” asked Seth, pointing to the letters PN.

“Psychoneurotic,” said the doctor, and reached across Seth's desk for the newspaper owner's cigarette lighter. He held the letter over an empty wastebasket and set it afire. “I can see Evelyn's fine hand in this,” he said.

“So can I,” agreed Seth.

Together, the two men decided that since they had discovered a truth which would only hurt Norman in the town and possibly get him into trouble with the Army authorities if it were known, they would forget the matter entirely. Seth destroyed the photograph of Norman, together with the negative, and let the angry talk of Peyton Place buzz over his head while Matthew Swain had only one more comment to make.

“Somebody,” he said, “should teach that boy how to walk properly stiff-legged, and how to handle that crutch a little more realistically.”

Evelyn Page, meanwhile, was totally unaware that anyone had seen through her “little subterfuge” as she referred to her hoax when she spoke of it to Norman. She excused herself on the grounds that she had never meant to carry her deception so far, that it was just one of those unfortunate things which had got out of hand. After all, she told herself privately, one had to make the best of it once the fat was in the fire, and no one but a fool ever wept over spilt milk. She never regretted the decision she had made when the government had notified her that Norman was back in the United States suffering from a mental disorder. She had pondered on what to do for several days before going to the hospital where Norman lay ill. In the end, she had notified her friends that Norman had been wounded, that he lay near death in a foreign hospital, with a terrible leg wound. When Evelyn left town to go down to Connecticut to visit her sister, her friends saw her off with many tears and good wishes. After all, the poor soul was stricken with grief and worry; it was understandable that she did not want to remain alone in her house on Depot Street.

A few months later, when she received word of Norman's impending discharge, she passed the word around town that she was going down to Boston to await the ship which would bring “Norman's poor, broken body home to her.” For two weeks after Norman was medically discharged, she remained in a Boston hotel with her son, coaching him in the role he must play when the two of them returned home.

“Do you want everyone in town to think of you as crazy?” she cried, when Norman protested. “Crazy the way Hester Goodale was crazy?

“Do you want everyone up home to think of you as a coward who ran under fire?

“Do you want to disgrace the both of us so that we can never hold up our heads again?

“Do you want to give the Page Girls something on us that they can really talk about?

“You do what Mother says, dear. Have I ever steered you a false course?”

Norman, weary to death in mind, body, soul and spirit, finally nodded in acquiescence, and Evelyn telephoned the joyous news to Peyton Place that she was bringing Norman home. After the welcoming ceremonies and the banquet, she congratulated him enthusiastically on the fine tone with which he had delivered his speech, and for days afterward, she propped him up in a chair in the living room, with his “bad leg” extended on a matching ottoman, and smiled tearfully at the friends who came to visit him. Even the Page Girls came, with their fat faces neatly powdered and their bulky bodies encased in black silk. Caroline carried a jar of homemade soup and Charlotte held a bottle of homemade dandelion wine.

“We have come to see Oakleigh's boy,” they told Evelyn.

The house was empty at the time, except for Norman, so that Evelyn finally had a chance to taunt her dead husband's daughters.

“Afraid of what Peyton Place would say, weren't you, if you hesitated to come to see your war-wounded brother?”

Since this was the truth, the Page Girls had no ready answer. They withstood another five minutes of Evelyn's tongue-lashing without flinching before she let them into the living room where Norman sat. It was the first time that the girls had ever been in Evelyn's house. Their faces, their attitude, their soft voices, when they spoke to the child they had maligned for years, made every speck of effort involved in Evelyn's “little subterfuge” well worth while.

“You see?” she told Norman triumphantly, when the Page Girls had gone. “What did I tell you? Isn't it better this way than if folks went around thinking that you were crazy?”

As for Norman, he felt as if he moved through an unreal world. He continued to suffer from nightmares, not all of them to do with the war. He still dreamed the old, recurrent dream about Miss Hester Goodale and her tomcat. In his dream, Miss Hester always wore the face of his mother, while the two people whom she watched through the gap in the hedge were no longer Mr. and Mrs. Card, but Allison MacKenzie and Norman. In his dream, when he stroked Allison's abdomen he would feel a tight excitement in his genitals but always, just at the moment of release, Allison's abdomen would burst open and spew forth millions of slimy blue worms. The worms were deadly poisonous, and Norman would begin to run. He would run and run, until he could run no longer, while the worms crawled swiftly after him. Sometimes he woke up at this point, covered with sweat and choking with fear, but most of the time he succeeded in reaching the arms of his mother before he awoke. It was always at that moment, when he reached his mother, that Norman reached a climax in the excitement engendered by Allison. At such times, Norman awoke to warmth and wetness and a sense that his mother had saved him from a terrible danger.

In time, the “stiffness” disappeared from Norman's “bad leg,” and he began to look around for something to do. Finally, Seth Buswell offered him a job as a combination bookkeeper and circulation manager on the
Times,
and Norman went to work. He worked faithfully every day and carried his pay check home to his mother, uncashed, at the end of every week.

It was Norman's circumspect behavior which really “showed up” Rodney Harrington in the town's eyes, for Rodney had not gone to war. As soon as the draft had become a reality, Leslie Harrington had found a job for his son in the Cumberland Mills of enough importance so that Rodney was classified as “essential” to the war effort as a civilian. There was a lot of ugly talk in Peyton Place about that. There were some who said that the three men on the local draft board lived in houses with mortgages held by Leslie Harrington, and, furthermore, that the sons of these men worked in jobs also considered as “essential” in the mills.

The position which Leslie Harrington had enjoyed for years, and which had begun to be undermined in 1939, was seriously in danger by the spring of 1944. People who had considered it folly, and worse, for the Ellsworths to sue Leslie back in ’39, began to change their minds soon afterward. With quiet courage, Kathy had harmed Leslie far more than she could have done with words. She had married Lewis Welles shortly before his induction into the Army, and she had become pregnant at once. During the war, there were a good many people in town who felt a thick shame whenever they watched Kathy Welles walk down Elm Street, pushing a baby buggy with her one hand. They looked at Kathy, who awaited the return of Lewis with a hope that never faltered, not even during the dark days of Bataan and Corregidor, and they began to wonder about Leslie Harrington, who could well have afforded to make things a little easier for Kathy.

“Twenty-five hundred dollars,” said Peyton Place. “Don't seem like much, even if he did take care of her medical bills besides.”

“Leslie Harrington would sooner sell his soul than part with a dollar.”

“Don't seem right, somehow. Her with her husband gone off to the war, and Leslie with his son right at home.”

“Kathy Welles got the short end of that stick, all right. Even thirty thousand dollars wouldn't've put her arm back on, but it would've made things a mite easier. She coulda hired someone to help her around the house, and to take care of her baby. I hear she whips around that house of hers so good and so fast that she don't really need two arms.”

“It's a shame though, the way Leslie Harrington got away with it so cheap. His son is a great hand for gettin’ away with things, too. Look at the way he's stayed out of the war, and the way he always seems to have plenty of gas to hell around in his car. Gas is rationed to everybody else.”

“Rodney was always a great hand for gettin’ away with things. Remember Betty Anderson?”

“I hear tell he's got some girl down to Concord now. Goes to see her every night, I hear.”

“He'll get his, one of these day. So will Leslie. The Harringtons have been due for their comeuppance for a long time.”

Yet, Leslie Harrington was never able to put his finger on the moment when he had begun to lose his grip on Peyton Place. He was inclined to believe that it had been when the AF of L succeeded in unionizing the mills, a thing unheard of, even undreamed of, in Peyton Place. Leslie had roared and threatened to close down the mills and put everyone out of work forever, but he had, unfortunately for him, signed contracts with the government which precluded his doing so, and the mill hands knew it. Everything, according to Leslie, had begun to fall apart with the unionizing of the mills. Business at the bank had fallen off, as people began to transfer their mortgages to a bank in a town ten miles to the south. Once, Leslie would have fired a man for doing this, but with the union in command, he was unable to do as he would have liked. It had been Tomas Makris, or so Leslie had heard, who had informed the mill hands of the bank in another town which was eager for new business, and even against this perfidy, Leslie was helpless. He had been defeated when he had run for the school board that spring, a fact which had left him dazed for weeks, and the school board in control now thought that Tom was the best headmaster Peyton Place had ever had. In the spring of 1944, Leslie Harrington lived with fear, and his only comfort was his son, whom he had managed to save from the war.

“I'll get even,” he raved to Rodney. “Just you wait ’til this goddamned war is over with. Wait and see how long the goddamned union lasts in my mills then. I'll fire every sonofabitch who works for me now, and I'll import a whole new population to Peyton Place.”

But Peter Drake, the young attorney who had fought Leslie in the case of Ellsworth
vs.
Harrington, took another view.

“The backbone of Chestnut Street is broken,” said Drake. “When one vertebra is out of kilter, the whole spine ceases to function efficiently.”

Rodney Harrington, however, was not concerned with either the mills, the backbone of Chestnut Street or the changes in Peyton Place. He was, as always, concerned primarily with himself. He had two sets of attitudes, each completely separate and distinct from the other. The first set was comprised of the attitudes which he knew it was politic for him to hold, and the second of those which he actually did hold. It was an attitude of the first set which often prompted him to say, “There is nothing more frustrating than an essential war job. I feel so utterly useless, safe here in America, while our boys are fighting for their lives overseas.” He usually said this to some pretty girl who consoled him eagerly by telling him that he was most essential to her.

“Oh, yeah?” Rodney would generally reply. “How essential? Show me, baby!”

There were not many girls, in the man-lean spring of 1944, who refused to comply with this request.

But one particular attitude in Rodney's second set would not be denied. He was, as he admitted privately, damned glad to be out of the war. The thought of filth, lack of good food, cramped quarters, bad clothes and, above all, regimentation, was an abhorrent one to him. Every man, Rodney was sure, who had a grain of honesty in him would agree with this attitude. Nobody
wanted
to go off to war any more than he did. He just happened to be luckier than most, and was damned grateful for the fact.

And what good could a fellow do himself? Rodney wondered. Just supposing that a fellow could overlook all the disadvantages of being in the service, just what was in it for him? Look at that half-assed Norman Page. Back home from the war to a piddling little job on the paper, with nothing to show for his effort but a few tin medals and a gimpy leg. No sir, that wasn't for Rodney Harrington, not by a long shot.