Peyton Place (28 page)

The excuses which would not satisfy Matthew Swain had been exhausted, and now Lucas had begun his bid for sympathy. Couldn't hardly work I was so sore. Lucas uttered these words in a sick whine, as if he expected the doctor to commiserate with him. What a shame, Dr. Swain was expected to say. What a helluva shame, Lucas, that you could hardly work for two weeks after the first time you raped your virgin stepdaughter.

Oh, Christ, thought the doctor, clenching his fists and feeling the sour sweat on himself again. Oh, Christ, keep me from killing him.

“Pretty, Selena is,” said Lucas.

Matthew Swain could hear his own breath, rising and falling, when Lucas finished speaking. It was quiet for a long time in the Cross shack while the doctor fought down his desire to put his hands around Lucas’ neck and choke him. It took a long time for the sickness and the rage that come to a man when he realizes how thin the layers of civilization on another man can be, to abate in Dr. Swain.

When he could speak, he said, “Lucas, I'll give you until tomorrow noon to clear out of here. Get out of town. I don't want to see you around tomorrow.”

“Whaddya mean, get out of town, Doc?” cried Lucas, horror stricken at the vindictiveness of this man to whom he had never done a wrong thing. “Whaddya mean, get out of town? I ain't got nowheres to go, Doc. This is my home. Always was. Where am I gonna go, Doc?”

“Straight to hell,” said the doctor. “But failing that, anywhere you've a mind to go. Just get out of Peyton Place.”

“But I ain't of a mind to go nowheres, Doc,” whined Lucas. “There ain't nowheres for me to go.”

“If I see you around tomorrow, Lucas, I'll have the whole town on your tail. Get out and stay out, and don't try to come back. Not next week nor next year. Not even after I'm dead, Lucas, because I'm going to leave that proof I was talking about in a good safe place. Folks in town will know what to do if you ever come back.”

Lucas Cross began to cry. He put his head down on his arms and sobbed at the injustice of this persecution.

“What did I ever do to you, Doc?” he cried. “I never done nothin’ to you. How'm I gonna get out of town when I ain't got nowheres to go?”

“Selena had nowhere to go to get away from you,” said the doctor. “That made you happy enough. Now the shoe is on the other foot, and if it pinches, that's too bad. I mean it, Lucas. Don't let the noon sun shine on your head tomorrow.”

Matthew Swain felt old, as old as time and as weary, as he walked, stoop shouldered now, toward the door of the Cross shack. Lucas’ confession weighed heavy in his suit coat pocket, and the words of Lucas were a sore on his soul. There was a tiredness in him such as he had never known and his mouth was filled with the taste of tarnished silver.

If I can make it home, he thought. If I can just get home and into a hot, hot bath. If I can just scrub this filth off myself and get to my dining room sideboard and pour myself a drink. If I could go to sleep tonight and wake up in the morning to find Peyton Place as clean and beautiful as it was yesterday. If I can just make it home.

He had the shack door half open before a high, keening wail behind him stopped him with his hand still on the knob. He turned, horror struck, knowing before he turned that he had committed another act of destruction. His eyes searched the gloom beyond the circle of light shed by the shack's one electric light bulb, and found the sagging double bed against the rear wall of the room. Nellie Cross was lying on it, wailing a high sustained wail, and her body writhed and twisted as if she were in the agonized labor of childbirth.

Ted Carter put the end of his tongue between his teeth. Painstakingly, he tried again to fold the ends of a sheet of white tissue paper smoothly around the corners of a candy box which he wanted to wrap. No matter how many times he started over, the corners always seemed to bunch up so that the package looked clumsy, and as if it had been wrapped by a child. Ted's mother had glanced over at him several times, but she did not offer to help. She went on washing dishes and staring, when she was not looking at her son, out the small window over the kitchen sink. Ted's father sat in the living room and shook out the pages of his newspaper at frequent intervals, but he, also, kept silent.

Since Ted had started dating Selena Cross, over two years before, there had been an unfriendly tension in the Carter house, and it did not lessen with time. Roberta and Harmon Carter, Ted's parents, had not met the problem of Selena with the smiling tolerance which most parents employ when confronted with an offspring who is sure he is in love. “Puppy love,” with its connotations of childishness, was not a term easily applied to Ted Carter's emotion for Selena Cross.

Roberta Carter swished her hands around in the soapy dishwater and reflected that nothing about Ted had ever been childish. Once, this fact had pleased her. It had made her happy when Ted talked and walked earlier and better than other babies. It had pleased her when his teachers commented on how smart he was, how easily he learned, how mature he was for his age. She had been filled with pride when he could swim at six, ski at seven and hit a baseball at eight. She had looked upon her big, strapping son with wonder, for both she and Harmon were thin, small people, and she had had the satisfaction of a job well done. And she had done a good job with Ted, she knew. He was not only tall and solidly built, but healthy. His teeth were innocent of fillings, his skin never broke out, and he was blessed with twenty-twenty vision. He was kind, considerate and courteous, never raised his voice and seldom lost his temper, and he went at any task with an energy and a conscientiousness seldom seen in sixteen-year-old boys. Even Mr. Shapiro, who owned the huge chicken farm where Ted worked summers and had a reputation of being hard to please, had commented on Ted's steadfastness and industry.

“Nice boy, Teddy,” he had told Roberta. “A good boy. He works like a man already, at his age.”

It had pleased her to hear that, until she remembered that with Ted's lack of childishness went her comfort in thinking that the boy's love for Selena Cross was a passing, childish love.

When Roberta and Harmon Carter realized that the question of Selena was no longer a question but an established fact, they had been unable to face it with resignation. Had they been able to do so, there might have been a relaxation of the tension in their home and a semblance of friendliness in their lives. They wanted him to be the child he had never been, with a child's swiftly changing moods and easily broken attachments. They regarded as a failure a son who could allow himself to become involved with a girl from the shacks. The stepdaughter of a drunken woodchopping father and the flesh and blood of a slatternly, half-crazy mother.

“What are you doing, Ted?” Roberta asked her son, although she and Harmon both knew very well what he was doing.

“Trying to wrap a box of candy for Selena,” he replied.

“Oh?” Roberta spoke only the one word, on a rising inflection, yet she managed to convey biting sarcasm and mocking laughter in that one syllable.

“Oh?” she repeated, but Ted would not enlarge on his original remark, and Roberta felt anger mount in her and redden her throat.

“She is still in the hospital, I presume,” she said, managing to make known her low opinion of people who remained in the hospital longer than a week for an operation as simple as an appendectomy.

“Yes,” said Ted.

In the living room, Harmon Carter shook out his newspaper.

“Well,” said Roberta, “how long is she planning to stay there, taking up a bed which could be used for a really sick person?”

“Until Doc Swain says she can leave, I imagine,” replied Ted shortly.

‘Theodore!”

“Yes, Dad?”

“Keep a civil tongue in your head when you speak to your mother.”

“I wasn't uncivil,” said Ted. “I answered her question.”

“It's your tone, Ted,” said his mother. “I don't think I particularly care for your tone.”

“Foolishness,” said Harmon from the living room. “Running out every night to go see that little chippy.”

“Selena's no chippy,” said Ted calmly, “and you know it.”

It was true that Harmon knew it, but it enraged him to have Ted tell him that he knew it.

“Goddamn it,” he shouted, coming to stand in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. “I told you to keep a civil tongue in your head. Go to your room until you learn to control your remarks.”

Ted finished wrapping his package and did not answer his father.

“Didn't you hear your father, Ted?” asked Roberta. “He told you to go to your room. Your little friend will have to survive without seeing you tonight.”

Ted stood up, unzipped his trousers, and stuffed his shirt down into them. He did not speak.

“Did you hear me?” shouted Harmon.

“Yes, Dad,” said Ted, picking up the wrapped candy box. “I heard you.”

“Well?” Harmon uttered this word in a heavily underlined, threatening tone. “Well?” he demanded, dragging the word out.

Ted opened the door that led out into the back yard. “Good night, Dad,” he said. “‘Night, Mother.”

For a moment after the door had closed softly behind their son, Roberta and Harmon merely stood and looked at one another. Then Roberta took her hands out of the dishwater and, without drying them, sat down on a kitchen chair and began to cry. Harmon threw his newspaper down on the floor and pounded the fist of one hand into the palm of the other.

“Insolent,” he said. “That's what he is. Insolent.”

“After all we've done for him,” cried Roberta, echoing the remark of untold millions of mothers. “After all we've given him. Everything. A good, decent bringing up and a nice home and everything.”

“A prospective college education,” said Harmon, taking up the litany. “A chance any boy would jump at.”

Harmon Carter had graduated from the eighth grade and had attended high school for two years before quitting to go to work at the Cumberland Mills. To him, a chance at a college education was on a par with a chance at the True Cross.

“I'm not going to sweat blood at the mill to send him to college if this is the way he is going to behave,” said Harmon.

Harmon Carter did not sweat blood at the Cumberland Mills. He was a bookkeeper in the office, and the only time he ever broke cut in a mild perspiration was when one of the young secretaries there bent over his desk to ask him a question. Nor did Harmon have to worry about the money for Ted's college education. The money had been in the Citizens’ National Bank since before Ted was born. It had, in fact, been there since before Harmon married Roberta.

“He's had everything,” cried Roberta, wiping her still wet hands on her apron.

This was true, in a way. While the Carters did not live on Chestnut Street, believing that it would be ostentatious for a bookkeeper at the mill to live on the same street as Leslie Harrington, they nevertheless lived in a very good house in a very decent neighborhood. They lived on Maple Street, two blocks away from the schools, a street that was considered as the “second best” in Peyton Place. The Carter house was large, well furnished, well heated in winter, well shaded in summer and well kept. It was given a coat of paint every three years, and Kenny Stearns took good care of the grounds that surrounded it. In addition to the “nice” home which Ted Carter's parents provided for him, he also had the social advantages of good clothes and expensive sports equipment. He had the promise of college and the security of knowing that funds existed to provide against the time when he graduated from college and set up a law office of his own. And in return for all these things, Ted Carter's parents asked nothing of him but his undivided devotion, unquestioning loyalty and immediate obedience.

“I never asked him for a thing,” said Roberta, blowing her nose. “I wouldn't even take board money when he worked and practically insisted on giving me part of his wages. I never asked him for a single thing, except to leave Selena Cross alone, and he won't even do that much. After all we've done for him.”

All the things that Roberta and Harmon did for Ted had been done for themselves long before Ted was born. For a long time Peyton Place had rocked with the talk of what Roberta and Harmon had done for themselves, and even now, after so many years, there were still those who remembered, and talked.

It had been a long, uphill struggle for Roberta and Harmon to lift themselves out of the ranks of the mill hands. It had taken time and sacrifice to attain a house on Maple Street, a bank account, a good car, a fur coat for Roberta and a solid gold pocket watch for Harmon. Some mill hands worked all their lives to succeed in getting just a few of the things that Roberta and Harmon obtained for themselves before they were thirty.

Roberta Carter had been seventeen years old and her name had been “Bobbie” Welch the year that Harmon Carter, aged eighteen, had conceived his great plan. Harmon was employed at that time as an office boy in the Cumberland Mills, a position he had held since leaving high school at the age of fifteen. Bobbie was employed as a part-time secretary and cleaning woman by Dr. Jerrold Quimby. This was during the same year that young Matt Swain was serving his interneship in the Mary Hitchcock Hospital at Hanover. Young Swain, as he was then called, was supposed to go into Old Doc Quimby's office when he finished at Hanover, for that was the year that Old Doc Quimby was seventy-four years old, and much in need of a younger man to help him.

Bobbie and Harmon were keeping steady company at that time, and it was understood that they would get married as soon as Harmon was promoted from office boy to office clerk at the Cumberland Mills. The two young people either went for walks or sat on the vine-covered Welch porch on their date nights, for Harmon did not have the money for more expensive amusement. They discussed their jobs with one another, and Harmon often laughed at the way Old Doc Quimby depended on Bobbie for everything. One night he did not laugh, for that day he had conceived his great plan. He unfolded it to Bobbie carefully, so as not to startle her with its unorthodox daring. He began by making her dissatisfied with the bleak future that loomed ahead for both of them. He accented, particularly, the constant and continual lack of funds which was sure to plague them as it always had, and as it had plagued their parents and grandparents.