Peyton Place (29 page)

“It takes money to make money,” he told her.

And: “The best way to get money is to have a rich relative die and leave you a packet.”

And: “Hand to mouth, one payday to the next. That's the life of an office worker's family.”

And: “You are so beautiful. You should have everything. Furs and jewels and gorgeous clothes. I can't get things like that for you, and I never will be able to—with my job.”

In the end, the seed was planted and began to sprout. Bobbie, who was a fair and buxom creature and had always had a certain cowlike contentment about her, began to see herself as tall and sylphlike, a woman who needed furs and Paris trips to bring out the best in her. Her contentment was replaced by an active dissatisfaction, a feeling of being put-upon by her lot of poverty. Harmon then began to unfold the second step of his great plan.

“Old Doc Quimby's got plenty,” he told her.

And: “Old Doc Quimby's got more money than anyone could ever use.”

And: “Old Doc Quimby's an old man. A woman smart enough to land him wouldn't have to wait long for his money.”

And: “Old Doc Quimby depends on you for everything. He needs you. If you wanted to go ahead and marry him, I'd wait for you.”

At first, of course, Bobbie had been shocked. She loved Harmon, she said, and always would, through riches and in poverty, in sickness and in health. Harmon immediately pointed out to her that if she loved him that much, her great love for him would not desert her while she was married to Old Doc Quimby, not even if the Damned Old Fool lived for another five years. “Bobbie” saw the reasonableness of this after a while, and the program of leading Old Doc Quimby to the trough and making him drink was begun. As they often said to each other later, it had been a long, uphill struggle. Old Doc Quimby had been a widower for twenty years, and did not mind it a bit as long as he could hire someone to come in to look after him. There was the hook, and Bobbie, under Harmon's tutelage, sunk it deep. She threatened to quit her job; she refused to cook the old man's meals; she left his dirty clothes where he dropped them; she spread the word around town that he was a vile, old lecher and an impossible man to work for. Old Doc Quimby, unable to find a replacement for Bobbie who would come into his house and look after him, had succumbed wearily. Bobbie married Old Doc Quimby, and Peyton Place rocked with shock and, later, laughter. The town called Old Doc Quimby a senile old man, an old fool of the kind there is no other like, an old fool who did not know enough to see that he was being cuckolded regularly by young Harmon Carter, and into this sorry state of affairs walked Young Doc Swain. Bobbie, still under Harmon's tutelage, refused to let the young doctor into the house. After all, as Harmon pointed out to her, Old Doc Quimby might have plenty, but there was no need to pay any of it out to Matthew Swain. The young doctor turned away angrily from the front door of the big house on Maple Street, where he had expected to have his first office, and went to the home of his parents. He put out his shingle in front of their large, “Southern-looking” house on Chestnut Street and never had cause to regret that he had done so. Peyton Place had laughed harder than ever, when sick people began going to Young Doc Swain. In the end, Peyton Place laughed Old Doc Quimby to death. Two weeks before the date of the first anniversary of his marriage to Bobbie Welch, Old Doc Quimby put his revolver to his head and shot himself.

Small towns are notorious for their long memories and their sharp tongues, and Peyton Place did not spare Bobbie Quimby and Harmon Carter. It was years before the words hurled at them began to soften, and the epithets hurled by Peyton Place ran the gamut from “Whore” and “Pimp” to “Harlot” and “White Slaver.” It was many years before the house on Maple Street was forgotten as “The Quimby Place” and called by its now correct name of “The Carter House,” and it was as many years before Mrs. Carter succeeded in making Peyton Place call her “Roberta” instead of the frivolous and, to her, harlotish-sounding name of “Bobbie.” Even now, when she was over fifty, and had been married to Harmon for more than thirty years, and had a son sixteen years old, there were still those who remembered. It was because of these that Roberta and Harmon Carter were hard pressed for sympathetic listeners whenever they spoke of “all they had done” for their son Ted. It was because of the old-timers, the ones with the long, long memories who had the habit of passing on scandalous stories to their young, that Peyton Place cheered for Ted Carter. When the boy insisted on working part time after school and during the summer vacations, Peyton Place approved.

“Young Carter ain't goin’ to live on Old Doc Quimby's money,” said the town, “the way his folks always did.”

When Peyton Place noticed young Ted Carter walking down Elm Street on a hot July night with a box of candy under his arm, bound for the hospital where his sweetheart lay sick, they approved and cheered him on.

“Nice boy, young Carter is,” said the town. “Like to see him make a go of it with Selena Cross. She's a nice enough girl, for a shack girl.”

But it was the humiliation to Roberta and Harmon that Peyton Place loved. To see young Carter take up with a shack girl, after his people had worked so hard to escape the same environment that had spawned Selena, had a certain beauty, a poetic justice.

A comeuppance, the town called it. Roberta and Harmon Carter were getting their comeuppance at long last.

Ted Carter hurried down Elm Street and eventually came to the broad, three-lane highway which was called Route 406 and which was the main road between Peyton Place and White River. It was on this highway, a mile from the center of town, that the Peyton Place hospital was located. Ted walked rapidly, with the wrapped box of candy for Selena under one arm, and his other arm swinging back and forth in rhythm with his stride. In two years, he had fulfilled the promise of size that had been his at fourteen. Now he was only a scant inch under six feet tall, and he weighed close to a hundred and seventy pounds. Although his chest and shoulders were as broad as those of a man much older, he gave the impression of leanness, for years of sports and outdoor work had kept fat to a minimum and made his body hard and muscular.

Ted Carter's Was the kind of body that older people look upon with satisfaction. Things can't be so bad, they said, when this country can produce young men like that. In the summer of 1939, when the stage whispers of war in Europe were already audible to the pessimists in America, those who believed that world conflict was inevitable could look at Ted Carter and be comforted. Things won't be so bad, they said, as long as we have big, healthy boys like that to send to war. Because Ted Carter's body had none of the loose-jointedness, the clumsily put together look of many sixteen-year-olds, his was the envy of every adolescent in Peyton Place. Because of it, and also because of his outstanding talent at sports, other, less fortunate, sixteen-year-olds forgave him his good marks in school, his charm, his easy way of making friends, and the good manners which many mothers flung constantly into the faces of sloppy talking, often discourteous sons.

With all his blessings, including everything his parents did for him, Ted Carter should have had the happy, open-faced look of a carefree youngster, but there was none of the child in his face as he walked rapidly toward the Peyton Place hospital. There was a suggestion of shadow on his cheeks and chin, although he had shaved carefully before supper, and there were two diagonal lines in the skin between his eyebrows. He frowned, not because he was upset or angry as he remembered the scene of a short time before with his parents, but because he was perplexed. As he put it to himself, walking along, he just didn't understand his folks. Ever since he could remember, he had been making his own decisions. His folks had said that they were proud of his common sense, and they had never had cause to interfere with him. It was only in the last two years that they had begun to find fault and to criticize. Yet all they ever criticized was his going with Selena, while everything else remained as it always had been. When he had wanted to go to work for Mr. Shapiro, his folks had not interfered. They had told him to go ahead, if he wanted, although the work on a chicken farm was hard and tedious, and Mr. Shapiro was Jewish and hard to work for. They had not tried to influence him when he had started looking around for a used car to buy, and he knew that they would approve his choice if he found one he wanted. Everything he had always wanted to do had always been all right with his folks, so why, he wondered, were they so unyielding, so downright mean and stupid, about Selena? Certainly, since they had always trusted his common sense before, they should do so now. They should be able to realize that he was no dumb kid out for what he could get from a girl. He was planning a career in the law—and his plans included Selena—remaining in his home town to go into practice with Old Charlie, and eventual success in his chosen field. Certainly, his folks should realize that a plan such as his had no room in it for foolishness. He had discussed his hopes in detail and at length with old Charlie Partridge, and the laywer had no fault to find with them.

“It's good to know what you want,” Charles Partridge had said. “You go right ahead, boy. When you get done at law school, you come on back here to Peyton Place. I'll need a bright young feller to help me out by then.”

“You couldn't do better than Selena Cross,” Charles Partridge had said. “Not for looks and not for brains. You go ahead, boy. It's good to know what you want in this world.”

Since Ted truly loved Selena Cross and had told his parents so, they should realize that he had enough sense and self-control to keep his hands off her until after they were married. Not that it wasn't difficult, at times, but his folks should realize that Ted's plan had no room in it for foolish mistakes. He had explained all this to Selena long ago, and she had seen the common sense in it. Why, then, couldn't he convince his folks of this, after two years of trying?

The Carters seldom fought between themselves; the swearing and shouting of this evening's scene had been the rare exception rather than the rule. Instead, they argued sensibly, rationally and continually, but it always ended with Ted on one side of the fence and his parents on the other.

It was perplexing, thought Ted, as he walked along the gravel edge of the highway. The only thing he could do was to stick by what he thought was right for him, and hope that his folks would come to see his way of thinking. It would be different, he thought, if they could present one sensible argument against Selena. He was willing, just as he had always been, to listen to reason. But they could say nothing against Selena except that she lived in a shack and that she was the daughter of a drunkard. Ted couldn't see what that had to do with anything. As he pointed out to his folks, both of them had lived in shacks not much better than Selena's when they had been young, and it hadn't harmed them any. As for drinking, old man Welch, Roberta's father, had been one of the most notorious drunkards in town, and that hadn't left any taint on either Ted or his mother. The only other argument his folks had was that people were bound to talk if he kept on with Selena. People were bound to talk anyway, Ted had told them. Look at the way some people still talked about his mother's first husband. People always talked, and they always would. As long as a man worked hard, did not steal or get a girl in trouble, there was nothing that people could say that could harm him much. Ted pointed out carefully, and in detail, the stories he had heard about his mother and father and Old Doc Quimby. He did this to illustrate to them how little talk mattered. Talk, he said, had not harmed his parents, in the long run. They had everything they wanted. His father was head bookkeeper at the mill, and they lived in a nice house in a good neighborhood. They could see, couldn't they, how little talk really amounted to, in the long run?

It was always at this point that an argument between the Carters fell apart. Ted's parents either fell silent altogether so that the tension in their house was almost as palpable as fog, or else they began to talk disjointedly, foolishly. He just didn't know, they said. He was too young. He just did not realize.

Ted Carter walked into the Peyton Place hospital with his head up and a smile on his face. He realized, all right. He realized that he loved Selena Cross so much that the thought of life without her was the same as thinking about being dead.

Selena was sitting up in a chair in the private room to which Dr. Swain had assigned her. She was wearing the bright red robe that Constance MacKenzie had brought her the day after the operation, and her dark hair was brushed out loosely around her shoulders. Ted's heart lifted as he entered the room and looked at her. She looked like herself again. For the first time in the whole, long week since the operation, she looked like the Selena of before, who had never had a sick day in her life. Her lips were red again, and the shine was back in her eyes. Ted bent over her chair and kissed her gently.

“Really kiss me,” she said, laughing up at him, and he did.

“I guess you're all better,” he said. “Nothing wrong with a girl who can kiss like that.”

It was wrong, thought Selena, for her to be this happy. But she could not help it. Her room was full of flowers, from friends she did not even know she had, and Mrs. MacKenzie had come to see her every day. Allison had come, too, and Miss Elsie Thornton, carrying a book and a little plant of African violets. There was an enormous, formal bouquet of glads and roses from Mr. and Mrs. Partridge, which had surprised Selena, for she had not been in Marion's house for over two years, since the time when she used to go on Tuesdays to do Mrs. Partridge's ironing. But best of all, creating her happiness and sustaining it, was the news that Dr. Swain had brought her that morning. Lucas was gone. Lucas had left town in the night, a week ago, and he was never coming back. Selena felt as if she had put down a load that she had carried for years. She had actually twitched her shoulders several times during the day, after The Doc had told her the news, and she believed that she could feel a lightness there that she had not known it was possible to feel.