Peyton Place (15 page)

“What's the matter with you, Norman?” asked Allison impatiently as soon as Miss Hester was out of sight. “She's just a harmless old woman.”

“She's not either. She's loony. I even heard Jared Clarke say so. He told my mother.”

“Phooey,” said Allison disdainfully. “If I lived on this street like you, I'd sneak around and find out what Miss Hester does when she's alone. That's the real way to find out if people are loony, or witches, or something like that.”

“I'd be scared,” admitted Norman without hesitation. “I'd be scareder to do that than I would be to go up to Samuel Peyton's castle.”

“Well, I wouldn't. There's nothing spooky about Miss Hester Goodale. The castle's full of spooks, though. It's haunted.”

“At least there's nobody loony living in the castle.”

“Not any more,” said Allison.

They had arrived at Norman's house and were standing on the sidewalk in front of it when Evelyn Page came to the front door.

“For Heaven's sake, Norman,” called Mrs. Page. “Don't stand out there in the cold. Do you want to get sick? Come in the house this minute! Oh, hello Allison, dear. Would you like to come in and have a hot chocolate with Norman?”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Page. I have to get home.”

Allison walked toward the front door of the house with Norman.

“Mrs. Page, is Miss Hester Goodale really crazy?” she asked.

Evelyn Page folded her lips together. “There's some who say so,” she said. “Come in the house, Norman.”

Allison walked down Depot Street the same way she and Norman had come. Now that she was alone, she walked on the same side of the street as the Goodale house, and she stopped directly in front of the gate to look at the small place.

Yes, she thought, it does have a
definite
sinister look. If Mr. Edgar Allan Poe were alive, I'll bet he could make up a swell story about Miss Hester and her house.

She began to walk again, but she had not moved more than a few steps when a brilliant daring thought stopped her in the middle of the sidewalk.

I could, she thought exultantly.
I
could write a story about Miss Hester and her house!

The idea sent cold shivers of excitement crawling up and down her back, and in the next second she felt hot all over.

I
could. I'll bet I could write a story every bit as good as Mr. Edgar Allan Poe ever did. I could make up a real spooky story just like “The Fall of the House of Usher.” I could have Miss Hester be a witch!

Allison ran all the way home and by the time she reached there the first lines of her story were already framed in her mind.

“There is this house on Depot Street in Peyton Place,” she would write. “It is a brown shingled Cape Cod house, and it looks out of place on that street because it sits right next to a lovely little white and green Cape Cod owned by some people named Mr. and Mrs. Card. Mr. Card is big and handsome and does not come from around here, but from Boston or somewhere like that. Now he owns the print shop downtown. Miss Hester lives all alone in her brown house with her cat, Tom, and she is as loony as they come.”

Allison wrote these words that same night. She locked herself in her bedroom and set them down in a notebook on white, blue-lined paper, and when they were written she sat and gazed at them for a long time. She could not think of anything else to say. A new respect for Mr. Edgar Allan Poe and for everyone else who had ever written began to take form within her.

Maybe being a writer isn't so easy after all, she thought. Perhaps I shall have to work very hard at it.

She picked up her pencil and made big, impatient
x'
s through the words she had written, then she turned to a fresh page in her notebook. The blank white sheet stared back at her, and Allison began to chew at her left thumbnail.

I can't write about Miss Hester because I don't know her, thought Allison. I'll have to make up a story about somebody I know about.

She did not know it then, but she had just taken the first step in her career.

Jared Clarke could have told Allison all about Miss Hester Goodale for he had cause to remember her well. Miss Hester had been living in Peyton Place when Jared was born, but it was not until he was grown, prosperous and on the board of selectmen that he had encountered her face to face. Miss Hester represented Jared's first big failure, and he resented her bitterly. When the subject of Miss Hester arose, Jared always told the story of his one visit to her home, and he told it, of course, to his own advantage, but he never could rid himself of the feeling that when people laughed they laughed at him, not with him.

He had gone to Miss Hester's house with Ben Davis and George Caswell, his fellow selectmen, to speak to her about town sewerage. He had knocked at her front door and then stepped back to wait nervously, twisting his doffed hat in his hand until she came to the door.

“We came to talk about the pipes,” said Jared to Miss Hester after the preliminary greetings had been exchanged.

“Come in, gentlemen,” she said.

It had really given Jared quite a turn, he said later, to walk into Miss Hester's front parlor. The place was as neat as a pin with its horsehair furniture and unfaded rug. There was an air of waiting about the room, as if a welcome guest were expected at any moment, and Jared found himself remembering that once Miss Hester had had a lover.

Of course, he had been only a little shaver back then, but he could remember folks talking about it. Miss Hester's young man used to drive up to the Goodales’ front door in a shiny victoria on Sunday afternoons.

“A nice young man,” Jared's mother had said. “It's time Hester thought about getting married. She's not getting any younger.”

“Young or not,” said Jared's father, “She's still a damned fine-looking woman.”

“She's the kind that thins out to gauntness after a while,” said Jared's mother, ignoring her husband. “She'll have to watch herself before too many more years.”

The whole town had waited for Hester Goodale to many. When her young man had been calling on her for over six months Jared's father said he could not understand what was holding him up.

“He's comfortable,” said Jared's father, using the town idiom which described anyone who had a steady job and was free of debt. “And Hester is out of mourning. It's been a year and a half since her mother died.”

“Oh, she's probably waiting to make sure,” said Jared's mother. “After all, he may be a nice young man, but he doesn't come from around here, and one can never be too careful where marriage is concerned. I'll bet she marries him before June.”

But one Sunday afternoon it was Mr. Goodale, Hester's father, who answered the young man's knock at the door. They exchanged only a few words and no one had ever found out what was said, and then Mr. Goodale had closed the door in the young man's face. Hester's friend climbed into his victoria and drove away. The next day he quit his job in Jared's father's feed and grain store and left Peyton Place. No one ever saw him again.

A few months later, Mr. Goodale died and Miss Hester was left alone in the cottage on Depot Street. After that the town never saw much of her. She kept to herself, living carefully on the small amount of money her father had left. Eventually she got herself a cat, and in a few years she was well on her way to becoming a town legend.

“Miss Hester has a broken heart,” said the town. “She is only waiting to die.”

The prediction that Jared's mother had made came true. Miss Hester's slenderness thinned to gauntness. Her skin seemed hardly to cover her angular bones, and her eyes gleamed like coal set into a sheet of white paper. Her hands were no longer slim fingered, but clawlike, and even her hair thinned to a sparseness that barely covered her bony skull.

Jared Clarke had looked around Miss Hester's front parlor and then he looked at Miss Hester, and he wondered if it could be possible that there had been a time when a man had loved this woman. He shifted his feet awkwardly and cleared his throat. Miss Hester did not ask her callers to sit down.

“Well, Jared?” she asked.

“It's about the pipes, Miss Hester,” said Jared. “You must know that it has been quite a fight to get everyone to agree on town sewerage. But that's all over now. We voted in the pipes at the last town meeting.”

“What has all this to do with me?” asked Miss Hester.

“Well, we are going to run the mains under the streets,” said Jared, “and the town's going to pay for that while everybody has agreed to pay for the sections of pipe used in front of his own house.”

“Did you not,” said Miss Hester, “just finish saying that the town was going to pay?”

Jared smiled patiently. “The town is going to pay for
laying
the pipe. Labor costs.”

“Am I to understand, Jared,” asked Miss Hester, “that you are asking me to pay for pipes to be laid under a public street?”

Jared searched his mind for a tactful answer. He had begun to sweat and was actively hating this woman for making his job more difficult than it was.

“It would benefit you as well as the rest of the town, Miss Hester,” he said. “From the street lines, you would be able to run pipes into your house.”

“What do I want with pipes in this house?” demanded Miss Hester.

Jared Clarke's face flushed with the effort of attempting to find a gentlemanly way to tell Miss Hester that it simply would not do for her to have the only outside privy on Depot Street.

“But Miss Hester—” he began and stopped, unable to go on.

“Yes, Jared?” Miss Hester's voice asked the question, but her tone gave him no encouragement.

“Well, it's this way—” began Jared again. “I mean to say—Well, it's like this-”

George Caswell, who was not hindered by feelings of delicacy, finished Jared's sentence for him.

“It's like this, Hester,” said Caswell. “We don't want no more outhouses in town. They're all right for the folks in the shacks, but outhouses just don't look right in the middle of town.”

There was an embarrassing moment when no one spoke, and then Miss Hester said, “Good day, gentlemen,” and led the way to her front door.

“But Miss Hester,” said Jared, and got no further.

“Good afternoon, Jared,” said Miss Hester and closed the door firmly.

“Great closers of doors in folk's faces, the Goodales,” said Ben Davis, and he and George Caswell began to laugh.

But Jared Clarke did not laugh. He was furious. Later, he had been forced to stand up at a meeting of the newly formed Sanitation Committee and admit that he had failed to convince Miss Hester of the advisability of helping to pay for the town's new sewerage system.

“Well, she don't rightly have to anyway,” said one of the committee members. “We ain't got no zonin’ laws that say anybody's got to do anythin’.”

“Maybe she don't have the money,” volunteered another member.

“She's got the money all right,” said Dexter Humphrey, who was president of the bank.

“She's loony,” cried Jared angrily. “That's all there is to it. Loony as hell!”

“Reckon property values will go down on Depot Street now,” said Humphrey sadly. “What with Miss Hester's outhouse sittin’ right there in her back yard as plain as the nose on your face. Too bad you couldn't talk her into doin’ different, Jared.”

“I did all I could,” shouted Jared. “She's just plain crazy. Crazy as a loon.”

“The house next door to Hester's is for sale,” said Humphrey. “Nobody'll ever buy it now.”

“Too bad,” said one of the committee members. “You should have talked louder, Jared.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” said Jared bitterly.

The new sewerage pipes were laid on Depot Street, the town absorbing the cost of those passing in front of the Goodale house, and eventually someone did buy the house next door to Miss Hester.

When the man who had been the town printer died, his family sold his business to a young man named Albert Card, a printer from Boston, and Mr. and Mrs. Card bought the house on Depot Street next door to Hester Goodale's.

“Nice young couple,” said Peyton Place about the Cards.

“Yep. A real go-getter, that young feller.”

The young Cards joined the Congregational church and the Pine Hill Grange.

“Real nice young man, Card,” said Jared Clarke. “Takes an interest. He and his wife are just pitching right in. We need more like them in this town. Real assets to the community.”

“Say, listen,” said Albert Card one day shortly after he had bought his house. “Who's the old crone lives next door to me?”

“That,” said Jared Clarke, pursing his lips, “is Miss Hester Goodale. She's loony as they come.”

“Are you telling me? I don't see much of her, that hedge between her place and ours screens the property pretty well, but I hear her roaming around in her back yard. Well, not her exactly, but I hear that goddamn cat of hers. I can hear him meowing over there fit to raise the dead sometimes. She's loony all right.”

“No doubt you also hear Miss Hester herself,” said Jared sourly, “as she goes back and forth to her outhouse.”

“Well, I hear her cat anyway.”

“Well, that torn is never anywhere that Miss Hester isn't. Oh, she's loony all right. Never goes out of that house except to go downtown for groceries once a week, and nobody ever goes to visit her, either. I'll bet no one's been inside her house since the time I went there with Ben and George to tell her about the pipes. Now there's a story for you. It was quite a while back, before we had town sewerage, and I was elected to go see Miss Hester about paying for the pipes to run in front of her house. Well I walked up on her front porch, bold as brass, and knocked on her door. ‘Look here, Hester,’ I said, ‘there's no two ways about it, but you're going to have to pay for your share of the pipes. Come on now, let's have no nonsense. Just write me out a check and I'll be on my way.’ Well, she began to cry and scream and carry on something terrible, so I told Ben and George right then that she was crazy, and the best thing for us to do was to just leave the poor old soul alone.”

Later, after Albert Card had told this story to his wife Mary, she said, “This certainly must be quite a town for characters, what with the story about Samuel Peyton and now this one about Miss Hester Goodale.”